Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott gave more multimillion donations out to colleges.
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Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott is at it again with another round of gifts.
Robeson Community College in North Carolina announced a $24 million gift from Scott on Thursday, the single largest contribution in the rural college’s history.
Robeson’s president, Melissa Singler, called the gift “a profound affirmation of our students, our faculty and staff, and the limitless potential of Robeson County.”
“Never before have we been given a gift of this magnitude that affords our team the time, space and freedom to think, dream and plan boldly,” Singler said in a news release.
Scott also gifted Carl Albert State College in Oklahoma $23 million. The college is working on a strategic plan for how to use the funds, focused on “sustainability, academic and career success, innovation, and community engagement,” according to an announcement last week. Connors State College, also in Oklahoma, celebrated a $15 million contribution from Scott, its largest gift ever.
Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College also announced a “multi-million dollar gift” last week, the largest unrestricted gift in its history, but didn’t specify the amount. The tribal college plans to use Scott’s funding to support scholarships and grants for native and non-native students.
We live in uncertain and unstable times. The job market is contracting due to economic uncertainty, political instability and the increase of AI-driven automation. In my role as a career adviser, I talk to many students and recent graduates who have faced a long and difficult job search. The words and phrases I hear most often in these conversations are “dejected,” “soul-crushing,” or “I feel like I am screaming into the void.” International students face an added challenge, with H-1B visas seeming out of reach as they become more difficult and expensive for employers to process.
All of this uncertainty can lead to feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. What I hear from students, and in particular our international community at Columbia University, is, “What is the point of applying to jobs if no one will hire me?” Such self-defeating thoughts can lead to inaction and feelings of despair. Yet hope is essential to the success of any job search. Having hope or optimism that something willwork out is central to achieving one’s goals.
It is likewise essential that a career coach or adviser have a hopeful, positive attitude. A recent article published by the IZA Institute of Labor Economics describes how when people who were unemployed for a long period of time worked with caseworkers who had “strong confidence in the potential of their clients to find employment,” the relationship led to an increase in the client’s motivation and resilience, and to improved earnings and employment outcomes over time. Thus, our outlook as advisers can impact the students we are working with, so we must manage our own feelings of hopelessness. I find myself returning to Jane Goodall’s The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times for inspiration.
Another source of inspiration I return to is a framework called Career Flow: A Hope-Centered Approach to Career Development, developed in 2011 by Spencer G. Niles, Norman E. Amundson and Roberta A. Neault. In the remainder of this article, I plan to provide career development professionals with an overview of this hope-based career development model and suggestions on how they can implement it to assist their students and graduates.
In the theory, “Career Flow” is an analogy that compares different types of experiences in one’s career to the flow of water. Anyone who has felt “underwater” at work can understand this metaphor. Finding “optimal” flow in a professional setting means that your skills and personality match the tasks and requirements of your role. Below, I outline suggested steps based on the model to help you implement a hope-based approach to career advising.
Step 1: Assessing and Establishing Hope
Start by letting the advisee tell their story and share the challenges that they face. Listen and reflect back what you are hearing. But also start to consider the person’s outlook and demeanor. Many of the people I talk to, including federal workers who were laid off or furloughed, exhibit signs of hope even though they understand the current challenges they are facing and express frustration and sometimes fear. I have been surprised and impressed by people’s resilience and willingness to pivot, which I make sure to point out. That helps them see the strength they are exhibiting even in a moment of crisis.
However, some people will present as mostly frustrated, with little hope. If you are talking to someone who seems particularly hopeless about their situation, it could be helpful to reflect that back to them. You might say, “What you just described to me seems like a very tough situation. I wonder if you might feel a sense of hopelessness?” Sometimes it just takes awareness for someone to realize that they need to shift their mindset. Validate their struggle, then help them reframe their point of view toward one that is more hopeful. For example, you could mention the Career Flow model that shows the positive benefits of having hope in a career search. If a student seems unwilling to shift, you might want to suggest that they seek extra support through family, friends or counseling services.
Step 2: Self-Reflection and Self-Clarity
Self-reflection and self-clarity are essential to any job search, including when it comes to establishing a hopeful approach. If someone is not clear about their own needs and values or has a lack of understanding of their situation and challenges, that person can struggle to succeed in their goals. Therefore, help them gain a greater sense of self-clarity by reflecting any key interests, skills and values you hear them describe in your conversation. At the same time, it is important to ask about possible challenges or obstacles to fully understand their situation and address hurdles standing in the way of their goals.
If a student seems hopeless about succeeding in their goals, advisers can bolster hope by asking about areas of strength or asking them to describe a time they felt they succeeded when faced with a difficult task. Reminding students of past successes and helping to celebrate these wins can increase their sense of agency and help them believe they can overcome future challenges.
Step 3: Visioning
An inherently hopeful exercise, visioning is the ability to brainstorm future possibilities and identify desired outcomes. Sometimes, I talk to a student who is so focused on one goal, such as finding an academic job or postdoc position, that they forget to consider other opportunities where they can apply their skills and expertise. When starting the visioning process, encourage advises to imagine multiple ways of reaching their desired goal. This is also known as “pathways thinking” and, in the Career Flow model, quantity is more important than quality. When an extensive list of possible career paths is identified, the advisee should use self-reflection and self-clarity to narrow their options by selecting a few paths that best align with their interests, skills and values. Pathways thinking also supports advisees in being both flexible and adaptable, traits that are incredibly important in any job search.
However, people who feel hopeless can sometimes lack the capability to consider other options. Help connect them to resources, such as career assessments like ImaginePhD, myIDP or O*Net, where they can gather information to explore different types of employment. Also, help them consider ways they can gain skills or experience through online courses, volunteering, on-campus work or internships.
Step 4: Goal Setting and Planning
Once a student has selected a few possible paths, then focus on setting specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound (SMART) goals. Students often set lofty or poorly defined goals such as, “I want to find a job.” Help them identify small, realistic steps they can take to achieve their main goal of employment. For example, suggest that they find a job they want to apply to and create a tailored résumé and cover letter for the role and then schedule another career advising session in two weeks to review the documents. Again, consider possible barriers to their goals and how they can overcome them.
Step 5: Implementing and Adapting
As students start to reach their incremental goals they will encounter either positive feedback (e.g. a request for an interview) or a lack of success (silence or rejection emails). As they gather more data, help them revise or relinquish possible paths that are no longer relevant or serving them. Sometimes, you will need to help them accept the fact that a goal might not be achieved. This process is known as radical acceptance, or giving in to your current reality. Help them see that finding employment during a period of uncertainty is difficult and can cause pain, but life can still be hopeful and joyful.
Another approach is to help students see what they have control over. We might not be able to control the economy, but we can control our actions and our outlook, and we can seek out help when we need it or find support in community with others. Overall, be there as a source of support, guidance and encouragement.
In conclusion, it can take substantial effort to choose to be hopeful in periods of uncertainty, but we must maintain hope even in the darkest of times. To quote C. R. Snyder, who writes about the psychology of hope, “in studying hope …, I observed the spectrum of human strength. This reminds me of the rainbow that frequently is used as a symbol of hope. A rainbow is a prism that sends shards of multicolored light in various directions. It lifts our spirits and makes us think of what is possible. Hope is the same—a personal rainbow of the mind.”
So, let us be a rainbow for those we work with and help them to let hope, rather than despair, lead the way.
Francesca Fanelli has 10 years of experience working with graduate-level students and is a licensed mental health counselor in the state of New York. She currently serves as senior associate director of graduate career development at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where she specializes in career advising and event management.
Under repeated threats to their funding, higher ed institutions began to rebrand or shut down cultural centers, Black student resource centers and LGBTQ+ and women’s programs. Many campus diversity officers lost their jobs or were shuffled off to other offices, barred from doing much of the work they were hired for. Some institutions scrapped celebrated traditions such as affinity graduations and campus residential communities geared toward students of certain racial or ethnic backgrounds. Some student groups, like Esperanza, lost university funding because of their identity-based missions.
In one recent example, the University of Alabama ended two student publications, one focused on women and the other on Black students, citing federal policy concerns. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga shuttered its Women’s and Gender Equity Center, an LGBTQ center, its Office of Multicultural Affairs, and the Office of Student & Family Engagement, replacing them with a Center for Student Leadership, Engagement and Community. The changes have affected faculty and staff as well as students; earlier this fall, the University of Illinois System banned consideration of race, sex or country of origin not only in financial aid decisions but in hiring, tenure and promotion as well.
“It’s very sad to see a lot of universities fall to their knees,” Luna said. Higher ed institutions “are supposed to be the places where the exchange of ideas happen, where leaders are developed and where you’re just taught about how the world objectively is … It’s a very dangerous sign for the future.”
A Double Attack
State-level anti-DEI laws have proliferated for several years now, but diversity-related programs and services were dealt a double blow this year when Trump took office.
On Feb. 14, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights issued a Dear Colleague letter declaring race-conscious student programming and resources illegal, based on an expansive interpretation of the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision against considering race in admissions in Students for Fair Admissions vs. Harvard. It gave colleges and universities 14 days to eliminate such offerings or risk losing their federal funding. A month later, ED launched investigations into 51 colleges for ongoing DEI activity. Federal judges struck down the department’s anti-DEI guidance in April, pausing enforcement, but colleges nonetheless scrambled to review and scrub DEI language from their programs and offices or shutter them altogether.
Over the summer, the Department of Justice came out with a sweeping guidance memo declaring an even wider set of practices off-limits, including those that use “potentially unlawful proxies” for race, such as recruiting students from majority-minority geographic areas. In a series of contentious legal battles, the federal government pressured some universities to agree to settlements that included anti-DEI provisions, including bans on race-conscious programs and transgender athletes. For example, the University of Virginia, which the DOJ targeted for DEI practices, recently agreed to quash all DEI programming to maintain federal funding.
I am a person who still believes, and I will forever believe, that it is important to call it diversity, equity, inclusion, anti-racism.”
Shaun Harper, founder and chief research scientist at USC’s Race and Equity Center
All the while, federal agencies have slashed, frozen and stalled billions of dollars in research grants to universities, often for perceived ties to DEI concepts. More than 120 TRIO programs, which support disadvantaged students, also lost their federal funds over alleged DEI connections. And in September, the Education Department abruptly ended grants for many minority-serving institutions, calling such programs—used to fund supports like extra peer mentoring or streamlined STEM programming at colleges with burgeoning minority student populations—“discriminatory” and “unconstitutional.”
States, meanwhile, enacted an unprecedented number of new laws cracking down on DEI: 14 in 12 states, including Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, New Hampshire, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia and Wyoming. That’s double the number of states that passed anti-DEI laws last year.
A higher education consultant and lawyer in the Washington D.C. area, who asked to remain anonymous, said campus leaders are increasingly asking, “How do we keep ourselves off the radar? How do we avoid scrutiny from the federal government?” At the same time, they face “increasingly disgruntled and disappointed communities within who are saying, ‘We thought you cared about this issue’,” the source said. University leaders have come under “very real pressure.”
A ‘Loss of Momentum’
Diversity officers and scholars fear that this year’s seismic policy shifts and campus crackdowns on DEI will have ripple effects across academe and beyond.
Kaleb L. Briscoe, associate professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Oklahoma, is concerned that some institutions have responded to DEI bans by limiting what’s taught in the classroom.
For example, Florida colleges removed hundreds of courses related to race, sex and gender from their general education requirement options. Classes at Texas A&M University that “advocate race or gender ideology, sexual orientation, or gender identity” now require approval from the university president. And other Texas universities have undertaken reviews of course syllabi and curricula for anything that runs afoul of state or federal DEI bans.
Curriculum changes that would normally “take years’ worth of processes” are sometimes happening quickly and without appropriate faculty input, Briscoe said. While proponents of DEI bans often call for viewpoint diversity, “by implementing these bans, you are taking away voices and taking away knowledge … which really counters what they are hoping to do.”
She also fears a “blue, red, purple divide of education,” where students have different levels of access to certain subject areas or perspectives depending on where they go to college.
“We are now going to see different people in different states learning and getting access to different things,” she said. “That is horrible because, knowledge-wise, we should be preparing our students to be productive citizens across difference.”
What we’re doing is reducing opportunities.”
Paulette Granberry Russell, president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education
Shaun Harper, founder and chief research scientist at the University of Southern California’s Race and Equity Center, said he’s mourning a “loss of momentum” in improving the experiences and outcomes of underrepresented students, a movement that stretches back to the 1960s.
He recently visited a campus where “the Black cultural center still exists in name, but it has no staff. It has no programming. It’s just an empty room,” he said. Harper, who also serves as USC’s Clifford and Betty Allen Chair in Urban Leadership and Provost Professor of Education, Business and Public Policy, said he found a smattering of students still trying to use the space, sitting in the dark and talking. He remembers when the same center was “a light, bright, vibrant space that was rich with culture that had employees … who helped to make it a home away from home.”
To him, the darkened space was a symbol of what’s been lost.
DEI Professionals Under Fire
Harper said he’s been especially disheartened to see DEI professionals lose their jobs.
Institutions dismissed “good, innocent, hard-working people who were expert at bringing campus communities together across racial, religious, ideological and other important divides,” and who pushed for some widely-cared-about issues like pay equity for women and access for students with disabilities, he said. “The loss of those people has been catastrophic to higher education, to the students that they were serving and to those people’s careers.”
A former diversity professional at a public higher ed institution in the South told Inside Higher Ed that DEI officers were wrestling with the “trauma,” “shame” and “humiliation” of suffering such a forceful, nationwide rejection.
The ex-diversity officer, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of career repercussions, spent years working to make their institution a more welcoming place for students of color—and it worked, they said. Over their tenure, faculty diversity increased and the percentage of underrepresented students in the university’s entering class more than doubled.
But you wouldn’t know it from looking at the institution’s website, the former diversity officer said. It makes no mention of the diversity office, which was dissolved. The university stripped any evidence of its work, including videos of events and educational programs, data reports and online community platforms. Unlike many of their co-workers, the former diversity officer retained an unrelated position at the institution, but their former role feels like a “scarlet letter” on campus and in the job market, they said.
They worry not only for their colleagues but also for students and faculty members left unserved.
“I can tell you that students of color who had community, don’t,” they said. “They’re spitting on Black kids, they’re calling them the N-word, and kids don’t know where to go. They don’t know what office is going to support them.”
The former diversity professional believes DEI is officially “dead,” at least as a label.
But “the underlying work of creating welcoming, diverse, inclusive, supportive cultures on campus and communities is not dead,” they said. The “benefits of diversity, of inclusion, those are still there. It just can’t be called that.”
Students in Ann Arbor protested the University of Michigan’s decision last spring to close its DEI offices, putting up posters criticizing President Donald Trump and former UM President Santa Ono.
Bill Pugliano/Getty Images
DEI’s Murky Future
Harper argued that the work can’t really go on without using the term “DEI.” He believes replacement terms like “culture” and ”community” lack specificity in a way that makes them meaningless.
“It’s giving weak sauce,” he said. “I am a person who still believes, and I will forever believe, that it is important to call it diversity, equity, inclusion, anti-racism.” The same goes for “antisemitism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia. It’s important to call those things by their names.”
Whether DEI will continue in some form is an open question currently under debate by current and former DEI officers and researchers. Some retain their optimism; others argue it’s going to take years, even decades, for campus infrastructure to recover from the full extent of this year’s losses—if a comeback is even possible.
The DEI rollbacks mark a retreat from “60-plus years of effort to broaden access and address inequities,” said Paulette Granberry Russell, who’s stepping down as president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education in January after five years at the helm. “So, do I see this work coming back? Bouncing back? No.”
Regardless of who wins the next election, she believes federal funding cuts and stymied DEI-related research will cause long-lasting damage. She’s spoken with scholars studying issues related to race and gender who have been doxed and threatened, and who fear continuing the work they’ve done for years.
“What we’re doing is reducing opportunities,” Granberry Russell said. “You’re not going to make that up in two, three, four years.”
But she’s not without hope. She emphasized that a “systems approach” to improving academic outcomes for students—making such work the entire university’s responsibility—could be the next phase of these efforts as diversity offices fade. Doing so would require leaders to express “their commitment, which at least at this point, requires a certain amount of courage, given the very heavy-handed … taking away of resources to bring colleges and universities into line,” she said.
A chief diversity officer who lost their job in a state with a DEI ban but now works in the same role at an east coast institution, said they’re doing a “post-mortem” on where DEI went wrong. They believe the DEI movement might have tried to accomplish too much too fast, without explaining the research behind the practices developed to boost student outcomes.
Practitioners introduced concepts “really new to people” and sometimes “began to cancel people quickly” who didn’t get it, said the CDO, who asked to remain anonymous. But “you can’t run a marathon with people who are not fit. You have to bring them up to where you want them to be. And that requires teaching. It requires patience.”
They noted that the field of DEI grew rapidly in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Scholarship on improving campus climate flourished, and diversity professionals enjoyed a wide berth to try new strategies to close equity gaps. But it was short-lived. Less than a year into the CDO’s role at their previous institution, the anti-DEI movement gained traction in the state. An anti-DEI law ultimately passed, and the diversity office later closed for good.
“That great rebirth or Renaissance” was “like a star that just had its last final flash of wonder—and then the death began,” they said. “We didn’t know at the time that the star was shining brightly to die.”
They believe DEI could be on the brink of a new era, one that rectifies some of its past mistakes and garners more support. “My fear is that we won’t be given the opportunity to do so,” they said. But they’re confident diversity professionals won’t give up on the programs, practices and strategies they believe students need.
“Fear not. Rest up, my friends,” they said. “We will be back.”
The D.C.-based higher education consultant and lawyer believes DEI isn’t dead; it’s just shifting. Campus DEI work has never been unlawful, they argued, so colleges and universities simply need to emphasize that fact, not scale back their work. They encourage campus leaders to state explicitly that cultural centers and programs are open to all, and to train everyone on campus, including student group leaders, how to frame their programming that way—even though the programs didn’t discriminate in the first place.
“Many times, I’m just trying to remove language that I know is going to draw scrutiny and then trying to offer them a way to continue to live out their values,” they said. “There may be ways to thematically describe the intended purpose of a program without using an identity marker that really just is a lightning rod in this moment.”
They acknowledged that “this transition has been really painful” for all invested in diversity, equity and inclusion work.
“But I think people are resilient,” they said. “They’re evolving, and they’re trying to figure out a pathway to make the work of universal access and opportunity evergreen.”
Imagine you are the parent of an incoming college student who wants to study theology, ranked among the lowest-paid majors after graduation. You’re proud of their conviction, but also anxious because friends and family keep reminding you that theology is a major for which career prospects are uncertain at best. Then, in the thick of college decision season, you learn that the college your child is considering offers something called “degree insurance”: If your graduate doesn’t earn above a set threshold, the program will step in to cover part of the gap.
Across the country, colleges and universities are rolling out a new suite of financial products targeting undergraduates, marketed as “loan” and “degree” insurance. Loan repayment assistant programs (LRAPs), sometimes also called loan repayment guarantees, are a form of loan insurance that protect students against default: If a graduate doesn’t earn above a certain threshold, their student loan payments are reimbursed to a certain amount. Degree insurance is a mechanism akin to public “wage insurance” programs, where if a graduate makes less than the average income in their field adjusted for regional differences, the insurance would “top up” the difference in wages for a period of time.
These two tools have distinct origins and underlying rationales. Loan Repayment Assistance Programs (LRAPs) originated in Yale Law School in the 1980s, and spread to other law schools, as the rising cost of legal education began to deter graduates from pursuing lower-paying public interest careers. While they began as internal sources of funding, the privatization of LRAP offerings and search for profit have pushed the industry to expand into new markets, namely undergraduate education. Indeed, Ardeo Education Solutions, an early and prominent player in this sector, was founded by Yale Law graduate Peter Samuelson, who himself benefited from Yale’s loan assistance program. Ardeo positions itself as reassuring families about the risks of taking on debt in order to pay for undergraduate education, “increasing access to the life-changing impact of higher education,” and freeing students from having to choose “between their passions and a paycheck.”
Degree insurance products take a different approach. Degree Insurance, which counts Augustana College in Illinois as a client, draws on the cultural cachet of the American dream to market itself as an income equalizer; its flagship product, “American Dream Insurance,” guarantees “equal pay for equal study,” where “no graduate will have to earn less than their peers, regardless of race or gender, because everyone will have the same safety net.” This is insurance against the uncertainties and inequalities of the labor market as well as against individual weaknesses of any particular candidate.
While the current scope and reach of this sector is challenging to assess, Ardeo Education advertises that it’s provided LRAPs to more than 30,000 students at more than 200 American colleges and universities. Participating institutions range from a number of small, faith-based colleges like Lyon College and MidAmerica Nazarene University to a public research university like Eastern Michigan University. Eligibility for repayment assistance usually requires graduation from the offering institution, full-time work (30+ hours/week), and staying below the income cap.
The extension of LRAPs and degree insurance into undergraduate programs represents a new dimension of risk management in higher education, which has gone through several phases since it began in earnest in the late 20th century when colleges and universities started responding to increased personal injury and campus safety litigation. These risk management programs, tailored to protect institutions, eventually expanded to include Title IX, Occupational Safety and Health Administration requirements, environmental regulations, reputation management, crisis communications, cybersecurity and, most relevantly for this topic, financial sustainability. Loan and degree insurance represent the latest iteration of such efforts.
For now, colleges typically pay for these programs, though it is unclear how much of the cost is passed on to students through tuition. How students are selected for inclusion in these programs is also opaque. Institutions are free to determine which students and majors are offered the program. Augustana College’s website, for example, says that it offers degree insurance at no direct cost to the student, but participation is on an invitation-only basis.
There are, of course, reasons to defend these programs. Scrutiny of the student loan system, which has resulted in a student debt crisis, has intensified across the political spectrum, as policymakers from both parties recognize the harm it has caused (even as they disagree on the solutions). LRAPs and degree insurance may decrease the rate of loan default and reassure low-income families who were unable to save for college and are averse to taking on loans to pay for college.
In an environment marked by increasing competition for students, admissions professionals see offering LRAPs and degree insurance as a competitive advantage. Loan repayment and degree insurance plans also encourage students not only to enroll in college in general but to pursue degrees with more challenging career prospects, which are also often the ones at risk of being cut due to low enrollment. This is increasingly relevant given the almost daily news of program closures.
The arrival of these financial instruments is perhaps an understandable response to the rising cost of a college education, increased competition for students, overall wage stagnation and shifting public views about the purpose, value and outcomes of higher education. The adoption of these tools, however, is not simply driven by the current circulation of the idea of college education as a risk; it also further reinforces that view.
These programs are not simply a new and neutral financial option for students. By extending the logics of institutional risk management to the economic futures of students, these tools cement the troubling, and potentially self-defeating, idea that a college degree itself is a financial risk requiring protection rather than the most reliable path to upward mobility and a critical component of our continued economic and cultural prosperity. Their adoption by colleges and universities is a reflection of the “short-termism” that has increasingly marked higher education strategy. As more institutions inevitably adopt these programs, it is unclear how long they will remain a competitive advantage. Furthermore, as the trend spreads, we may see the labor market respond, with employers lowering entry-level salaries even further as they take into account insurance payouts. Indeed, like many aspects of higher education today, it feels like a race to the bottom.
Comparisons between insurance products and other forms of income or employment assurances are difficult to make. Should families prioritize colleges with strong outcomes (e.g., graduation rates upward of 70 percent and reassuring post-graduation employment statistics), robust alumni networks, or loan and insurance programs? It is also too early to tell what the consequences of transferring the risk to third parties, a common higher education risk management strategy, might be for students and institutions in the long term. And, it further financializes education, such that in the process of character formation, managing risk, rather than other values or logics, becomes central to identity.
Colleges and universities might want to ask themselves whether treating college degrees as a risk serves their long-term interests. Loan and degree insurance products may deliver short-term enrollment gains, ease families’ anxieties, and even encourage students to pursue majors often viewed as less “marketable.” In the long-term, however, these strategies relieve the pressure to address underlying structural challenges such as rising costs, stagnant wages and a flawed loan system. Ultimately, they undermine our ability to make the case for higher education as a public good, thus putting the future of the entire endeavor at risk.
Margarita Rayzberg is an assistant professor of sociology and criminology at Valparaiso University.
Paulette Granberry Russell is stepping down as president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education (NADOHE) after a dramatic and unpredictable five years at the helm.
She represented campus diversity professionals amid the national racial reckoning that accompanied the Black Lives Matter movement, and then through the dizzying years that followed as anti-DEI laws swept the country. She also spent 22 years as a diversity professional at Michigan State University.
Granberry Russell told Inside Higher Ed she never planned to stay at NADOHE longer than five years, so she’s ready to move on and facilitate a “smooth transition and handoff.”
But what a tenure it’s been.
She spoke with Inside Higher Ed about how she navigated the headwinds facing diversity professionals and the future of diversity, equity and inclusion work on campuses. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Over the course of your term, from 2020 to 2025, the landscape for diversity professionals in higher education radically shifted. What has it been like for you to represent DEI professionals then and now?
A: When I came into the role, my goals were to do a few things, which, not only were intended to build on our past successes, but also [to] develop new initiatives that would enhance a few areas, [including] increasing our membership but also providing our support for them. It included, for example, enhancing our industry influence but also sustainability of the organization.
I came into the role in March of 2020, and what happened in March of 2020? The pandemic, which altered much of what was going on in higher education and how we were doing our work, whether that was remotely, but also with threats in terms of both student experiences but also student support. And then, in May of 2020, the murder of George Floyd, and all of the ways in which our institutions were reacting and responding and certain commitments were made to enhance antiracism efforts on our campuses.
When I think about my first few months, it was something very different than what I anticipated. And I’m certain that’s true for higher education as well. I lived in this state of shifting priorities, having to think about ways to best support members who were having to adjust to significant shifts on their campuses. We were also dealing with significant challenges around freedom of speech and disruption on our campuses prior to these more recent experiences.
And the politics are very different. When you shift from an environment of enhanced commitment built on an understanding that our campuses had to deal with issues around race and expanding opportunities more broadly across identity to now pushback—it was causing quite a shift in equilibrium. And that’s true for our members as well as the organization. And because of the evolution of diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education historically, as painful as a lot of this was, I believe we were better prepared than we understood ourselves to be.
Q: You touched on how you started at NADOHE in this moment in 2020, when campuses made commitments and investments in thinking about race and racial inequities, and now campuses are rolling back so much of those efforts in response to anti-DEI legislation. How did these policy shifts change NADOHE’s work and change your work as its leader? How did you have to pivot?
A: Our successes, I think, resulted in some of the pushback. The pushback was evolving. Expanding on opportunities [created by diversity initiatives] beyond race, so that people understood that diversity was more inclusive than they initially understood it to be—we did not do as good a job as we could have and should have.
But [we] are beginning to do [it] now, in broadening people’s understanding that diversity is and should be interpreted very broadly. I think that the narrative was hijacked, meaning it was easy to unfortunately define diversity narrowly on the basis of race, gender and sexuality. And others used that narrative to create fear and apprehension that somehow others were being advantaged, versus understanding that we all have benefited from the ways in which we were adjusting our efforts on campus to broaden access, to broaden opportunities, to increase equitable outcomes, understanding that [it’s] not one-size-fits-all, and we had to tailor and adjust our efforts to accommodate the broad range of interests and identities that presented on our campuses and have always presented on our campuses. What we failed to do well was messaging both the communities impacted by our work and the work that was being done to expand opportunities as well.
Q: How did the backlash shift your priorities, if at all?
A: When we think about the early challenges, some [opponents] would point to critical race theory. I don’t know that they necessarily understood it very well, and [they] were having a difficult time messaging it. But it was easier to talk about diversity, because for many people, that conjures up issues around race, it harkens back to earlier views of affirmative action and I think it became an easier message to divide higher ed both internally as well as externally.
It was important for NADOHE to emphasize—whether it was around academic freedom, First Amendment rights and freedom of speech and freedom of expression—that diversity, equity and inclusion are embedded in those. Freedom of expression cannot be sanitized. Our research, for example, or our curriculum is going to touch on issues that may impact communities broadly—and diverse, marginalized, underserved communities. And the work that we do in higher education as diversity leaders requires evidence-based research that informs our work. In the absence of that, you’re guessing at strategies and interventions that will support all students.
This work is not going to go away. We’re not going to go back to a time when opportunities were constrained, when fairness did not extend to certain communities. That’s unacceptable.”
—Paulette Granberry Russell
And so, I don’t know that it was as much a shift in our priorities as much as it was helping higher ed internally, as well as audiences outside of higher ed, to understand that access and opportunity are not limited to any one demographic or a few demographics. If there was a shift in priorities, it was hopefully helping broader audiences understand that there’s nothing to fear, especially in the ways that diversity, equity, inclusion was being demonized. This work is not intended to grant preferential treatment to some and deny others opportunities.
Q: So, you found yourself having to do a lot of explaining about what’s actually meant when people say “DEI” in a higher ed context.
A: That’s right. And it’s also saying to folks, don’t use the acronym. Because the acronym, unfortunately, supported a very narrow way of defining efforts.
Diversity is not defined narrowly. Equity is intended to reduce barriers that may result in differential impact, and those differential impacts are not limited to any one category. Inclusion doesn’t happen just naturally. We know individuals feeling included allows them to be themselves but also allows them to be more successful. If I don’t feel like I belong, what do I do? I tend to retreat, or I don’t access the resources that are there, resources that may benefit me, resources that are accessible to all, with an understanding that, again, we’re not monolithic. It is helping people differently understand, and hopefully better understand, that there are no threats here. Diversity on our campuses is a reality, period. And it’s not going to change, certainly not as long as organizations like NADOHE are here to defend access and opportunities.
Changes in nomenclature happen. How we define our work, how we label our work, how we tag our work has always changed. If we think historically, going back 20, 30 years, we talked about affirmative action. We talked about multiculturalism. We talked about diversity. We talked about equal opportunity. We talk about fairness. We talk about equity. We talk about belonging. We talk about inclusion. Terminology evolves over time, given how the work itself evolves.
Q: As campuses close centers associated with DEI and get rid of diversity roles, what do you see as the next phase of the work? How do campus diversity professionals move forward from here? And what does the DEI movement look like now and into the future?
A: At least for this moment in time, we need to more closely scrutinize the systems that have been designed that have resulted in barriers to success. And how do we redesign, or how do we begin to design systems that differently support our campuses?
There’s no single office or individual that can do this work alone. Certainly, in my own career at an institution that was a large public land-grant with over 40,000 students at that time and 14,000 faculty and staff, there was no way that a person with two staff was going to be able to dramatically impact change. [Change comes from] working with others and understanding that it’s going to take what I would call a whole-institution approach, which means that our leadership, our policies, budget, people, culture have to be aligned. That also means that we have to take a look at the policies, practices, procedures that we have in place that may be having differential impacts, and how do we make adjustments in those? Not to grant preferential treatment, not to discriminate, but to say, can we design systems that work better?
We’re talking about a systems approach for structural change. When I say a systems approach, this is going to be far more extensive than I think many of us are prepared to do, but I think that it’s the future. [In the past], unfortunately, we didn’t [always] look at connections between the needs of our students, the capacity of faculty to meet those needs, the capacity of staff to meet those needs and connecting our students to potential employers. Things were very siloed. Things are still very siloed. We have to think about the life cycle of a student. And we do that, but it’s not that we are always very deliberate in how we do it.
When I grew up as a child, the expectation was that I would go to college, but my family, by all definitions, was very low income. [When] I got to my undergraduate experience, there were no tools in the way that there are now. There were no interventions. There were no programs that I could access that connected me to all of the resources that would allow me to be successful. I was a low-income Black female who arrived on a campus with no prior experience, not knowing how to navigate the space, not knowing where the resources were, not knowing how to fund my education. I was a person with a dream and a family that really wanted me to be successful, but they didn’t have the tools to provide that. It’s a very different world we live in today.
[The goal is] helping that student understand where the resources are, and then helping faculty understand the differences of those students that come into your classroom, ways that you as faculty can support them, connecting those faculty with the advisory services that those students might need. We have to design [systems] in ways that reduce barriers, that acknowledge the differences that exist and with the goal of those individuals being successful [and] reducing the barriers for faculty to be successful.
Q: After leaving NADOHE, what’s next for you?
A: My entire trajectory, my entire life, I have always been this person who believed in fairness. I always believed in opportunities. I’m always that person who fought for not only myself, but for others to be treated fairly, because I grew up in a family where my history included ancestors who were formerly enslaved.
At 16 years old, I decided I wanted to increase participation in voting. In 12th grade, I remember I had a speech class, and I was that person giving speeches on the slaughtering of baby seals. I was the person who was giving speeches on sexuality and treating people differently based on how they identified. I was that person who gave speeches on the Black Power movement, civil rights, Martin Luther King. And as I reflect now, as I transition, I’m not going to be any different than what I have always been. I will find new ways to [apply] my experiences and my advocacy. Because I have no choice. I realized that about myself.
My time with NADOHE has been to build on the successes of my predecessors. I believe that I have done that. I achieved the goals that I set out to achieve, both for myself and for the organization, whether that is increasing our membership, our influence within higher ed [and] beyond higher ed. We’ve done that.
This work is not going to go away. We’re not going to go back to a time when opportunities were constrained, when fairness did not extend to certain communities. We’re not going back to a time when discrimination on the basis of identity was lawful, certainly in the context of race, gender, sexuality, sexual orientation. That’s unacceptable. We’re not going back.
My next move is, I’m going to breathe. I’m going to take a little bit of time for myself. But I know I will always find my way back to what I have always been committed to, that I want people to be treated fairly. I want people to have opportunities.
Q: Whoever takes over your position is going to face significant headwinds. What would be your advice to them?
A: Bring your passion. Bring your commitment. Coming into this role, it’s going to be exhausting, but you have to decide that there’s no other way forward. Too many lives depend on it. This country, our democracy, depends on it.
This blog was kindly authored by Emma Maskell, Head of Student and Academic Services, Norland.
As we all digest the recent Post 16 Education and Skills White Paper and what it means for us, we reflect on what it means to be a ‘specialist’ and how we think about our distinctive roles in the system. Here, we discuss what it means to be a specialist and the implications for the higher education landscape now and in the future.
In the UK and Australia, we are seeing a shift in central government narrative towards achieving impact through specialisation. It was a key feature of the recent Post 16 Education and Skills White Paper and in proposals from the landmark Strategic Examination of Research and Development in Australia. But can we all be specialists, and by whose definition are we being defined?
Specialisms are nothing new. Many universities started off as specialist institutions. The ‘red brick’ universities were set up in response to the regional demand for scientific and technical skills in the 19th century. Nearly a hundred years later, the Robbins report created a new wave of civic universities responding to a need for greater advanced technical skills in the workforce.
However, following the lifting of the student number cap and a prolonged period of below-inflation tuition fee increases, we are in an age where many universities have had to diversify and broaden their provision to survive. This shift has led institutions to adopt a more generalist, one-size-fits-all approach, often at the expense of their specialist identities. This has often meant chasing the same students, the same research grants and so on. So, have we lost sight of what makes us special?
What’s so special about you?
By most people’s definition, Norland College would constitute a specialist higher education institution. For over 130 years, we have been pioneering early years education and care. Indeed, when you ask most people about specialist institutions, it is our subject specialisms which most commonly define us.
But there are other ways providers can and do specialise. This is the type of specialists the white paper appears to refer to – defined by the type of research we do, our civic mission, serving the communities we belong to or our focus on outstanding teaching and learning. Let’s not forget industry; the recent white paper was very clear that institutions should be working in conjunction with industry to deliver the skills needed for the delivery of the industrial strategy.
For Norland, it is not only our subject specialism that sets us apart, but also how we deliver our curriculum. Our unique four-year integrated programme – which combines degree-level academic training with rigorous vocational preparation and hands-on experience – equips our graduates with unparalleled industry-specific knowledge and practical skills. This is Norland’s ‘golden triangle’ of knowledge and understanding, skills development and practical application.
The government is concerned that in the current landscape, providers with similar offerings are chasing the same students, and there has been insufficient focus on each institution’s core purpose. The government’s vision is that providers will be able to leverage specialisms whilst working more closely together to create a compelling regional offer that supports students and drives growth, building on existing good practice across the sector.
Norland is a great example of how specialist providers can and do thrive. Our students see our specialisms as our superpower, enabling them to achieve their life goals now and into the future. We have a unique offering with a strong core purpose through our community activities, student placements and graduate nannying opportunities via our agency, which in turn supports students and drives economic growth that complements the wider regional offer. We work closely with our neighbouring higher education providers. You might say that, under the current proposals, Norland is a model student.
Yet, being a specialist is not without its challenges. As others have pointed out, there is a risk that, rather than resolving cold spots, specialisation risks exacerbating these where providers exit certain subjects or research focus. If specialist providers withdraw from certain regions, some areas could be left without any early years provision. As a result, students unable to relocate may lose access to these subjects, limiting social mobility. Alternatively, less well-funded research that might not be ‘REFable’ is dropped, restricting innovation and knowledge creation in vital subjects like education.
The right funding model will also be crucial for specialists to continue to succeed. Like the majority of the sector, Norland is a not-for-profit higher education provider. In some ways, we are fortunate as an ‘approved’ fee category provider that we can set our own fees, which cover the additional costs associated with our golden triangle, particularly in relation to the resource-heavy nature of our practical course. However, our students are only able to take out the basic student loan, needing to fund the difference themselves. This is a significant barrier to social mobility and equality of opportunity. Becoming an approved (fee cap) provider would not resolve this, as we could no longer charge the higher fees to cover the cost of the very things which make our curriculum specialist and unique. It’s catch-22!
In summary
In recent years, the sector has sought to become more generalist in response to the reduction of specialist subject funding, competition for student numbers and the need to diversify income streams. Up to now, market forces have largely driven this trend of generalisation of the sector. To achieve the aims of the Post 16 Education and Skills White Paper, the Government should work with the sector to ensure that any funding model allows providers to focus on their core purpose and what makes them special, or we risk perpetuating the status quo, undermining the Government’s aims to support the development of the skilled workforce the economy needs. This way, everyone can benefit from the transformative power of high-quality skills and innovation-led practice.
One of the unexpected gifts of the pandemic was the clarity it brought. We need to care for ourselves in more substantial and intentional ways if we want to show up fully in the world. For me, that realization sometimes came uncomfortably, as I reflected on just how often I was drained and exhausted. While I supported students through a first-year seminar course called Becoming More Resilient, designed to help students navigate the challenges of the pandemic with a little more ease, I realized I hadn’t yet found a similar framework that resonated with me.
After moving through some challenging seasons of blurred boundaries and little time to focus on my priorities, I found myself drawn to the idea of some kind of daily rhythm that could support my well-being in a more intentional way. Over time, a simple framework began to take shape. It doesn’t solve everything, but it gently reminds me of what helps me feel more whole, more present, and more grounded in my life and work.
When I integrate this structure into my life, I’m not just more productive, I show up more fully for my students, my colleagues, and myself. What follows is the framework I’ve come to rely on: five key pillars of care and support that help me stay grounded and energized.
Emotional Resilience: Boundaries, Self-Compassion, and Self-Awareness
Emotional resilience isn’t about pushing through and bouncing back. For me, it’s about learning how to pause and listen to what I need. I’ve started using a simple journaling practice to reflect on my emotional highs and lows each week, which helps me notice patterns I might otherwise miss. I’ve also learned to be more deliberate with boundaries. I keep email and letter templates for common situations that tend to drain me, and I am generous with my office/student hours, which then allows me to close my door at other times during the week without guilt. When things feel especially hard, I’ve come to rely on a few quiet moments of self-compassion, reminding myself that doing enough is different from doing everything. I have sticky notes of mantras that I shared with students during the pandemic that I appreciate now, like “progress over perfection” and “I am enough.” While I don’t practice these as consistently as I would like, when I do, they’ve helped me show up with less stress and more grace.
How to Get Started:
Practice simple, kind ways to say no like: “It sounds like a wonderful opportunity but I’m at full capacity.”
Physical Well-being: Movement, Nutrition, Sleep
Physical wellbeing was the first thing I let slide when work became overwhelming, but I’ve slowly started to shift that pattern. I’ve learned that even small amounts of movement, like a walk on campus–bonus points for connecting with a colleague while walking–or even standing for online meetings, can reset my energy. I’ve also begun paying more attention to how I nourish myself during the day. I embraced intermittent fasting and rarely ate until 2 pm. This regular practice has many benefits, but it likely spiked my cortisol levels. Now I keep fruit, nuts, and simple salads on hand and a thermos of hot water for tea. And I’m finally protecting my sleep with a bit more intention: shutting down my screens earlier, winding down with a book, and starting my day in the early morning sun to reset my circadian rhythm. I don’t do it perfectly, but when I take care of my body, everything else feels more manageable.
How to Get Started:
Plan and pack some healthy foods to keep you fueled throughout your day. Limit the vending machine to emergencies.
Finding ways to truly relieve stress—rather than just powering through it—has become one of the most important parts of my routine. My partner and I start our day with a morning meditation. This sacred time seems to create more space in my brain for the day ahead. I’ve also started building in short moments of stillness throughout the day, even if it’s just a few deep breaths. These tiny pauses help me reset, especially when the day starts to feel like a blur. I add some rejuvenating activities on my calendar: walking with my son, working in the garden, rolling out my Yoga mat. All are free and simple. Relaxation doesn’t always mean doing nothing; sometimes it’s music, journaling, or simply giving myself permission to stop working before I’m completely depleted. These small choices remind me that I’m allowed to move through my day with more ease.
How to Get Started:
Add a three-minute reset to your morning. Set the timer for three minutes, close your eyes and simply breath, allowing all thoughts to float by like clouds.
Meaningful Living: Joy, Connection, Creativity
I’ve come to realize that for me, meaningful living means making space for the things that fuel me—joy, creativity, and connection. It’s easy to let these fall to the bottom of the list when deadlines pile up, but when I protect them, everything else feels more doable. I carve out small pockets of time to do something creative and joyful like cooking something new, writing for myself, going to a farmers’ market or exploring a new bookstore or town. I try to stay connected to the people who matter, even if it’s just a quick check-in or a shared laugh. I also notice that I enjoy the time that I spend with my students when I am not overwhelmed with other aspects of my job. The classroom can be a joyful, connected space filled with creativity when we allow ourselves to be fully present and engaged. These moments remind me that life is about way more than productivity. These experiences bring me back to what I value.
How to Get Started:
Chart your best moment of the day in a journal. Soon you will have 365 best moments! I love this practice because even the worst days have a best moment.
Time and Energy Protection: Prioritize, Say No with Kindness, Focus
Saying no with kindness has been a practice, one that allows me to be more intentional about where my energy goes. I have many passions so saying no sometimes feels like a missed opportunity. The more I am aligned with my priorities and core values, the more I can empower myself to decline offers. I started a new practice in which I named one focus for the day. For example, I may be teaching a class on Wednesday, but my main focus is to revise an article, grade papers, or attend a complex committee meeting on that day. I give myself a high five for completing the focus and give myself grace if some loose ends remain from the day. One area where I need work is guarding space for creative work, the kind that needs unhurried thinking and a little room to breathe. It’s not always easy, but I recently had an epiphany about how focusing on what matters and saying no to all the rest allows me to bring my best self to my work.
How to Get Started:
Name your focus of the day. Prepare to tackle just that one thing well. Give yourself grace for whatever remains unfinished.
These practices didn’t come to me all at once; they’ve taken shape slowly, over time, through trial and error, losses and wins. What I’ve found is that caring for myself in these intentional ways isn’t separate from my work as a professor, it’s what makes the work sustainable, meaningful, and even joyful. By tending to the five pillars of the framework, I’ve created a rhythm that helps me show up more fully, celebrating small wins along the way. It’s not a perfect system, but the structure that it provides makes my life better. And in this season of my life and career, that feels like enough.
Julie Sochacki is a clinical associate professor who has worn several hats at her university over the past few years including interim director of the university’s teaching center, associate dean of student academic services, and most recently, writing director. Check out her Substack with colleague, Patrick Allen: The Inspired Teaching Podcast.
One of the unexpected gifts of the pandemic was the clarity it brought. We need to care for ourselves in more substantial and intentional ways if we want to show up fully in the world. For me, that realization sometimes came uncomfortably, as I reflected on just how often I was drained and exhausted. While I supported students through a first-year seminar course called Becoming More Resilient, designed to help students navigate the challenges of the pandemic with a little more ease, I realized I hadn’t yet found a similar framework that resonated with me.
After moving through some challenging seasons of blurred boundaries and little time to focus on my priorities, I found myself drawn to the idea of some kind of daily rhythm that could support my well-being in a more intentional way. Over time, a simple framework began to take shape. It doesn’t solve everything, but it gently reminds me of what helps me feel more whole, more present, and more grounded in my life and work.
When I integrate this structure into my life, I’m not just more productive, I show up more fully for my students, my colleagues, and myself. What follows is the framework I’ve come to rely on: five key pillars of care and support that help me stay grounded and energized.
Emotional Resilience: Boundaries, Self-Compassion, and Self-Awareness
Emotional resilience isn’t about pushing through and bouncing back. For me, it’s about learning how to pause and listen to what I need. I’ve started using a simple journaling practice to reflect on my emotional highs and lows each week, which helps me notice patterns I might otherwise miss. I’ve also learned to be more deliberate with boundaries. I keep email and letter templates for common situations that tend to drain me, and I am generous with my office/student hours, which then allows me to close my door at other times during the week without guilt. When things feel especially hard, I’ve come to rely on a few quiet moments of self-compassion, reminding myself that doing enough is different from doing everything. I have sticky notes of mantras that I shared with students during the pandemic that I appreciate now, like “progress over perfection” and “I am enough.” While I don’t practice these as consistently as I would like, when I do, they’ve helped me show up with less stress and more grace.
How to Get Started:
Practice simple, kind ways to say no like: “It sounds like a wonderful opportunity but I’m at full capacity.”
Physical Well-being: Movement, Nutrition, Sleep
Physical wellbeing was the first thing I let slide when work became overwhelming, but I’ve slowly started to shift that pattern. I’ve learned that even small amounts of movement, like a walk on campus–bonus points for connecting with a colleague while walking–or even standing for online meetings, can reset my energy. I’ve also begun paying more attention to how I nourish myself during the day. I embraced intermittent fasting and rarely ate until 2 pm. This regular practice has many benefits, but it likely spiked my cortisol levels. Now I keep fruit, nuts, and simple salads on hand and a thermos of hot water for tea. And I’m finally protecting my sleep with a bit more intention: shutting down my screens earlier, winding down with a book, and starting my day in the early morning sun to reset my circadian rhythm. I don’t do it perfectly, but when I take care of my body, everything else feels more manageable.
How to Get Started:
Plan and pack some healthy foods to keep you fueled throughout your day. Limit the vending machine to emergencies.
Finding ways to truly relieve stress—rather than just powering through it—has become one of the most important parts of my routine. My partner and I start our day with a morning meditation. This sacred time seems to create more space in my brain for the day ahead. I’ve also started building in short moments of stillness throughout the day, even if it’s just a few deep breaths. These tiny pauses help me reset, especially when the day starts to feel like a blur. I add some rejuvenating activities on my calendar: walking with my son, working in the garden, rolling out my Yoga mat. All are free and simple. Relaxation doesn’t always mean doing nothing; sometimes it’s music, journaling, or simply giving myself permission to stop working before I’m completely depleted. These small choices remind me that I’m allowed to move through my day with more ease.
How to Get Started:
Add a three-minute reset to your morning. Set the timer for three minutes, close your eyes and simply breath, allowing all thoughts to float by like clouds.
Meaningful Living: Joy, Connection, Creativity
I’ve come to realize that for me, meaningful living means making space for the things that fuel me—joy, creativity, and connection. It’s easy to let these fall to the bottom of the list when deadlines pile up, but when I protect them, everything else feels more doable. I carve out small pockets of time to do something creative and joyful like cooking something new, writing for myself, going to a farmers’ market or exploring a new bookstore or town. I try to stay connected to the people who matter, even if it’s just a quick check-in or a shared laugh. I also notice that I enjoy the time that I spend with my students when I am not overwhelmed with other aspects of my job. The classroom can be a joyful, connected space filled with creativity when we allow ourselves to be fully present and engaged. These moments remind me that life is about way more than productivity. These experiences bring me back to what I value.
How to Get Started:
Chart your best moment of the day in a journal. Soon you will have 365 best moments! I love this practice because even the worst days have a best moment.
Time and Energy Protection: Prioritize, Say No with Kindness, Focus
Saying no with kindness has been a practice, one that allows me to be more intentional about where my energy goes. I have many passions so saying no sometimes feels like a missed opportunity. The more I am aligned with my priorities and core values, the more I can empower myself to decline offers. I started a new practice in which I named one focus for the day. For example, I may be teaching a class on Wednesday, but my main focus is to revise an article, grade papers, or attend a complex committee meeting on that day. I give myself a high five for completing the focus and give myself grace if some loose ends remain from the day. One area where I need work is guarding space for creative work, the kind that needs unhurried thinking and a little room to breathe. It’s not always easy, but I recently had an epiphany about how focusing on what matters and saying no to all the rest allows me to bring my best self to my work.
How to Get Started:
Name your focus of the day. Prepare to tackle just that one thing well. Give yourself grace for whatever remains unfinished.
These practices didn’t come to me all at once; they’ve taken shape slowly, over time, through trial and error, losses and wins. What I’ve found is that caring for myself in these intentional ways isn’t separate from my work as a professor, it’s what makes the work sustainable, meaningful, and even joyful. By tending to the five pillars of the framework, I’ve created a rhythm that helps me show up more fully, celebrating small wins along the way. It’s not a perfect system, but the structure that it provides makes my life better. And in this season of my life and career, that feels like enough.
Julie Sochacki is a clinical associate professor who has worn several hats at her university over the past few years including interim director of the university’s teaching center, associate dean of student academic services, and most recently, writing director. Check out her Substack with colleague, Patrick Allen: The Inspired Teaching Podcast.
Last week, Universities UK’s members came together, as we do three times a year, to take stock of the state of the university sector. We were joined by Ted Mitchell, the President of the American Council on Education and a personal hero of mine.
Ted joined us in Tavistock Square, where Universities UK has its headquarters, and where Charles Dickens once lived. Fittingly, he came in the guise of the ghost of Christmas yet to come. He told us about the onslaught of measures which have been taken by the Trump administration in relation to higher education and research: from the restriction of research funding on ideological grounds, to attacks on university autonomy with threats and legal action against universities which don’t comply with the administration’s demands.
Recently, the US federal government proposed a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” – a nine page document offering unspecified rewards in terms of access to federal funding for universities which voluntarily agreed to a set of commitments, covering issues ranging from eliminating the consideration of personal characteristics such as race or sex in admissions, to freezing tuition fees for five years.
It demanded universities prohibit employees from making statements on social or political matters on behalf of the university; screen international students for “anti-American values”; and eliminate departments that are “hostile to conservative ideas.” The compact was initially offered to nine universities. When eight of them refused to sign up, the administration expanded the offer to all 4,000 universities and colleges in the US. So far, two have agreed to sign.
Ted was asked to reflect on a simple question. Knowing what has happened, what would you do differently if you could turn back time by three years? He gave us five pieces of advice, and I think they are worth thinking about very seriously indeed.
Ted talks, we should listen
First: he would have listened more to the critics of the higher education system.
Second: he would have worked to identify the weaknesses in the sector – the things that universities and colleges are rightly criticised for. The sense that the US system is “rigged” against some students, particularly in relation to admissions; that there was a lack of transparency around the costs and financial support packages on offer, such that students often didn’t understand what the deal was; and the fact that about 40 per cent of students who entered higher education dropped out before completing their degree. He would have worked hard to take those issues “off the table”, removing the grounds for criticism by addressing the causes.
Third: he would have talked to those who were critical, especially at the political level, and asked what evidence would be necessary to convince them that “we are not who you think we are.” He would ask “how would you know we are doing better?”
Fourth: he would strive to “move the narrative” by “bringing your case to the people you serve” – focusing strongly on local and community impact, playing to the great strengths of the US university system which is, like ours, often loved locally when it is not thought of so fondly nationally.
Fifth and finally: he would have recognised that this is a 10-year problem which requires a long term solution, which will involve patiently building relationships and allies, but which starts with trying to get the hugely diverse US higher education system pulling in the same direction, allowing different institutions to focus on the things which matter most to them, but with a coherent guiding set of core principles behind them. These, he argued might be based on Justice Felix Frankfurter’s four essential freedoms of a university: freedom to determine who may teach, what may be taught, how it should be taught, and who may be admitted to study.
Here in the UK
What do we do with this advice? Universities UK has been thinking very hard about the reputation of the university sector for some time, and we have been paying close attention to the experience of our US colleagues.
Reading the compact I was doubly horrified, both by the extremity of the measures it proposed, and by the familiarity of the issues on the table. So I believe Ted’s advice is good, and that we need to take it seriously.
Over the next year Universities UK will start to implement a strategy that we have spent much of this year developing. At its heart is a set of simple ideas, which echo all of the points Ted made in his address to us.
We will listen and be responsive to others’ views, including those of our strongest critics.
We will seek to identify and address areas where we are vulnerable and will build the strategy around a willingness to be accountable and responsive. But we will do it in an unapologetically positive way, asking ourselves what the country needs of its universities now, in this decade, and the decades to come? How do we need to evolve to serve those needs? This is work we started with the Universities UK Blueprint, which was strongly reflected in the Westminster government’s post-16 white paper. We intend to position universities as a reason to be optimistic about this country’s future, the source of both historic and future success.
We will call on all parts of the political spectrum to back universities because they are one of the things that Great Britain and Northern Ireland are best at, and to work with us to develop a long term plan which will ensure that they can be what the nation needs them to be, for the next generation.
We will be clear that the country needs its universities to step up now, as we have many times in the past, to deliver on our promise as engines of the economy.
We will seek to build support around the idea that we’re at our best as a nation when we are making the most of talented people from all walks of life – just as universities changed in the Victorian era to ensure that working men (for they were predominantly but not exclusively men) could power the industrial revolution, through the creation of a new generation of arts and mechanical institutes which evolved to become some of our great civic universities.
We could do more to ensure that we can’t be accused of political bias as institutions, while defending the right of individuals to express their views, within the law, as guardians of free speech and academic freedom.
But first and most importantly, we owe it to our students to make good on the promises we offer them about the opportunities that a higher education opens up. We recognise that we are in a period of profound disruption to the labour market as a result of a new industrial revolution driven by artificial intelligence. We are on the cusp of a major demographic shift, as the young population starts to shrink. We must show that we can be agile, adapt and prepare students to be resilient and successful as the labour market changes around them, and serve a broader range of students in more diverse ways, at different points in their lives.
Finally, following Ted’s great advice, we will be patient and take a long term approach, and we will use that time to build relationships and allies, not by asking people to advocate for us, but by building a shared sense of vision about how we need to change to give this country the best chance of success.
Over the course of the next year, Universities UK will start to unfold our own strategy under the banner of Future Universities. We don’t want to do this alone, but want to align with anyone who thinks that this country’s success needs its universities in great shape, doing more of the great stuff, and fixing the things that need to be fixed. Come with us.
If you work anywhere near international student recruitment in the UK right now, chances are you’re feeling it: the tension; the uncertainty; the quiet panic behind friendly webinar smiles and networking events where we gather with peers. Is there some comfort in realising it’s not just you? The recruitment landscape really has shifted – and it’s shifted fast.
For years, the UK felt like a safe bet. We’ve dined out on a strong reputation, our many world-class universities and our significant English-language advantage, which has given us a steady flow of students from our key markets. Looking back on the year just gone, it’s not hard to see why it feels like we’ve been living through a crisis.
The international student levy and student demand
The announcement of the international student levy sent shockwaves through the sector. There has been much focus on the potential material impacts to universities, but there is also a significant symbolic effect among prospective international students.
At a time when international students are already facing rising tuition fees, higher living costs, currency volatility, and visa expenses, the levy feels like yet another barrier. Even if institutions absorb the levy cost, the levy has already done time in the court of public opinion, and the “international student tax” perception is out there. The most recent iteration of our student perceptions research, Emerging Futures 8, saw that three of the top five reasons international students decline their offer to study internationally are financially linked: the cost of tuition is beyond their financial reach; the cost of living has become too expensive; and the student visa cost has become too high.
While institutions and the British public are being encouraged to look at it as an investment in other areas of HE, from a student’s perspective, it doesn’t read as investment. It reads as “you’re welcome… but at a price.” We saw a similar proposal come and go in Australia pre-election. The Australian Universities Accord panel considered and ultimately ruled out a levy, on the grounds of both the damage to Australia’s international appeal, and the significant headache in administering it
If we put ourselves in the shoes of a student weighing up studying in the UK versus studying in Germany, the UK option now comes with higher tuition fees to offset domestic fees, the NHS surcharge, an increase in maintenance amounts, a steep visa fee and now, an additional levy. Meanwhile, Germany is saying low or no tuition, post-study work routes and growing English-taught provision. Even if the UK still offers higher prestige, the financial psychology is changing, and we know that matters.
The countries that traditionally send students to the UK are facing shrinking job markets. And while students are still interested in international qualifications, the tone has shifted from aspirational to transactional with a strong emphasis on whether UK study is “really worth it.”
The quiet squeeze of the BCA
The BCA (Basic Compliance Assessment) framework is another pressure point, and it hits universities unevenly. On paper, it’s about quality and credibility, which no one disputes works to safeguard the reputation of the UK. But operationally, it’s becoming a quiet limiter on recruitment ambition. If an institution’s refusal rate climbs, its recruitment strategy tightens. If dependency on a single market becomes too visible, risk tolerance drops. And suddenly, growth opportunities shrink.
That’s not because the demand isn’t there, but because the risk feels too high, with real consequences: fewer bold recruitment experiments; less appetite for new or emerging markets; more conservative agent partnerships and reduced flexibility in offer-making. The result? A recruitment environment that’s more cautious than creative.
Sliding demand for the UK
For a long time, the UK competed largely on reputation. Now, while the UK is still in the conversation, it no longer owns the room. The UK still has world-class education, but these days, so does everyone else. While UK institutions were navigating Brexit fallout, policy uncertainty, immigration messaging shifts and now compliance tightening, our competitors were building momentum. Students are more informed than ever. They compare graduate salaries, post-study work options, cost of living, the political climate, safety, and mental health support as well as prestige and reputation. But the recruitment decision is no longer just academic – it’s deeply geopolitical and financial, with a focus on ROI.
The UK is no longer the automatic first choice destination it once was. Emerging Futures 8 puts Australia out front, with the UK second, ahead of the USA. But this doesn’t mean demand has collapsed. It means it has fragmented.
We’re seeing a softening in traditional high-volume markets, slower conversion from offer to enrollment and more students holding multiple destination options later into the cycle. In fact, the same survey showed that now only 12 per cent of students apply for one destination – meaning 88 per cent of students are considering multiple options and they are holding onto those options much later down the recruitment funnel than in previous years. This also goes some way to explaining why institutional modelling of admissions is not as accurate as it has been in the past.
At the same time, countries like France and Germany are stepping confidently into the spotlight. France has aggressively expanded English-taught programmes, particularly at Masters level. Business schools, engineering schools and public universities are all in the mix. Add lower tuition and growing post-study work routes, and suddenly France is no longer Plan B but a plausible first-choice option.
Germany, meanwhile, has quietly built one of the most attractive international education propositions in the world: minimal or zero tuition, strong industry links, STEM leadership and a welcoming post-study work ecosystem. Layer in concerted campaigns from Poland, Spain, Turkey, Korea, China and Hong Kong to attract international students and you’ve got a busier marketplace than UK HE has ever had to contend with.
What this means in 2026
Despite all of the rather gloomy realities I’ve outlined, I see no reason why the UK should concede its market advantage without a fight – we are looking forward to working with our partners in 2026 to do just that. But winning back market share will mean recognising that the UK is no longer competing from a position of automatic advantage. We’re competing in a truly global marketplace where value matters as much as prestige, policy signals shape perception, compliance restricts agility, and cost sensitivity is rising everywhere.
The institutions that will thrive are the ones that diversify markets meaningfully (not just on paper), invest in authentic student support, build real industry and employability pipelines, strengthen agent relationships as partnerships, and tell clearer, more honest value stories to students. As the government puts the final touches to its international education strategy, there is much opportunity to sustain and even extend international education, but any strategy that depends on “recruit as many as we can” without thinking deeply about how the offer lands in the international student market, is not likely to see long term success.
Because right now, the world isn’t waiting for the UK to catch up. The world has already moved on, and our future students have moved with it.
This article is published in association with IDP Education.
