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  • If the graduate premium is falling, supply-side tinkering won’t bring it back

    If the graduate premium is falling, supply-side tinkering won’t bring it back

    It’s not hard to find arguments that suggest that the UK has too many graduates.

    And underneath articles of that ilk, we’re usually treated to laments about the decline of polytechnics, the idea that students should learn a trade, and (at best) the lack of investment in skills.

    The Sunday Times spent the weekend declaring the graduate salary premium “a myth.” The Conservatives responded with a plan to cut 100,000 university places.

    Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch says that New Labour’s 50 per cent target for school leavers was achieved by “creating loads of useless courses”, and shadow education secretary Laura Trott refuses “to keep funding degree courses which are not delivering for young people.”

    Badenoch blames Britain’s “low-growth” economy on “the Blairite settlement” while proposing to fix it entirely by tinkering with the supply of graduates.

    She treats the student loans crisis as a supply-side problem. Too many graduates, too many courses, not enough quality control. The prescription is familiar – restrict entry, close programmes, steer people elsewhere.

    But cross-national evidence tells a very different story. The decline of the UK graduate premium isn’t an inevitable consequence of mass higher education. It’s a peculiarly British problem – and it’s rooted in what happens after graduation, not before it.

    Occasionally, pieces like this from the FT’s John Burn-Murdoch offer up a counterpoint.

    Just us, then

    In 1999, the average UK graduate salary was 80 per cent more than their non-graduate counterparts. In the latest data that’s down to 45 per cent – and that’s before factoring in student loans. The obvious response is to blame oversupply – expand participation, dilute the pool, and watch the premium fall.

    Even the Sunday Times’ more conservative measure – a premium of 30 per cent in 2007, down to 22 per cent by 2024, shrinking to 16 per cent after tax and loan repayments – points in the same direction.

    But the problem with that argument is it hasn’t happened elsewhere. In the US, the graduate premium has risen from 80 per cent to 92 per cent even as degree-holding has climbed from 27 to 40 per cent. Premiums have held up or increased in Canada, France, Spain and the Netherlands too.

    And in the US, a performing arts graduate earns around a third more than their British counterpart after adjusting for purchasing power – rising to 60 per cent more across all subjects.

    The travails of Italy’s graduates in the 1990s and 2000s were more a comment on the country’s stagnant economy than its higher education system – the same is true of the UK today.

    So the decline in the UK graduate premium isn’t an inevitable consequence of mass higher education – it’s a peculiarly British problem. The question is whether the answer lies in a weak labour market, weak graduates and courses (and their location), or something else entirely.

    Use it or lose it

    Much of the literature frames the UK issue not as “too many graduates” but as weak skills utilisation – the economy doesn’t generate enough roles, workplaces and progression structures that actually deploy higher-level skills.

    A decent chunk of cross-national comparative work comes from Francis Green and Golo Henseke at UCL’s Institute of Education. Their 2016 study in the Oxford Review of Economic Policy used a validated index of graduate jobs across 21 OECD countries and found that graduate underemployment correlates with the aggregate supply-demand imbalance – but not with indicators of labour market flexibility.

    You can’t deregulate your way out of this. You need to actually create the jobs.

    Their cross-national OECD working paper found that in most countries between 70 and 80 per cent of graduates worked in graduate jobs – but the UK sat at the bottom of the table alongside Japan and Spain, with among the highest proportion of graduates outside graduate-level roles.

    Their most recent task-based analysis in Oxford Economic Papers (2024/25) found that the growth of graduate skills requirements in the British workforce slowed markedly after 2006 – the demand side stalling while supply kept expanding. And they make the crucial point that for higher education to deliver “value for money”, employers need to demand distinctly graduate skills. For graduate skills to be rewarded, jobs need to make productive use of them.

    There’s the “low-skills equilibrium” tradition, developed through Ewart Keep’s work at SKOPE in Oxford and going back to the Snower/Wilson analysis. That treats weak skills demand as self-reinforcing – large segments of the UK economy compete on cost and standardisation, leading to limited training, limited job redesign, limited internal progression, and a tendency to use credentials for screening rather than redesigning roles to exploit skills.

    It produces a stable but low-productivity equilibrium that sticks around even when the education system expands.

    The OECD’s own recent work on adult skills reinforces that. Its 2026 report on how workers use (or don’t use) their skills in the workplace separates skills proficiency from skills use at work – and explicitly highlights that high proficiency doesn’t automatically translate into high workplace use. The UK pattern is one where people have the skills but jobs don’t let them use them.

    Geography doesn’t help. IFS research found that employment in high-paying occupations grew by 240 per cent in Inner London since 1993 but just 41 per cent in Cheshire. The new high-skilled jobs in IT, business and finance clustered overwhelmingly in London while low-paid service work grew everywhere else.

    And the CIPD’s comparative work found that the UK has 58.8 per cent of graduates in non-graduate jobs – exceeded only by Greece and Estonia – while countries like Germany, the Netherlands and Slovenia with strong vocational training traditions have 10 per cent or less.

    The usual suspects

    None of this means we should ignore what universities do. But the evidence suggests the supply-side story is weaker than the policy debate assumes.

    This “wage premium puzzle” paper for the IFS asked how the UK maintained a large education wage premium despite massive graduate expansion – and found that for a long time, endogenous organisational change (firms restructuring because graduates were available) kept pace with supply. The premium held up.

    It’s only more recently, as the post-crisis productivity stagnation has bitten and the minimum wage has risen, that the squeeze has become visible.

    The Productivity Institute’s work on graduate mismatch adds another idea – it’s not only the number of skilled jobs that matters but the sectoral composition of employment and the pathways into better matches. Graduates can be in the “wrong job” or the “wrong industry”, and the wage penalties for mismatch point to structural issues in how the UK allocates graduate labour, particularly after shocks.

    This matters because much of the coverage frames the problem as one of institutional quality – Russell Group graduates earn well, post-92 graduates don’t. But the IFS data on geography tells a different story. If high-paying graduate jobs grew by 240 per cent in Inner London but just 41 per cent in Cheshire, the earnings gap between a London-based Russell Group graduate and a post-92 graduate in the Midlands is substantially a story about where the jobs are, not where the degree came from.

    And management matters as well. Research on management practices shows that management capability varies hugely across UK firms and sectors, and that it directly affects task allocation, training, autonomy and whether skilled workers are set up to use their skills. The UK has a particularly long tail of poorly managed firms compared with the US and Germany.

    Free riders

    Hat tip to the drum that Johnny Rich regularly beats here – employers are probably underinvesting. UK employer investment in training per employee has fallen by 36 per cent in real terms since 2005, according to the Learning and Work Institute – a decline that has not been observed to the same extent in most other European countries.

    The IFS confirmed in its 2023 study that participation in adult education and training has declined across every measure – the fraction of workers participating, the average number of hours, and the intensity of training.

    If we compare that with Germany, companies invest around €18,000 per apprentice per year and the system generates a positive return on investment when longer-term benefits like lower recruitment costs and reduced turnover are factored in. The CIPD’s evidence to the Industrial Strategy Committee made the connection directly – a “significant part” of the UK’s low productivity compared with Germany can be attributed to poor workforce skills development, linked to business strategies that rely on cheap labour rather than investment.

    So when the CIPD says that “the assumption that we will transition to a more productive, higher value, higher skilled economy just by increasing the conveyor belt of graduates is proven to be flawed”, it’s not making a case against higher education.

    It’s making a case against the idea that supply alone creates demand. Simply increasing the qualification level of individuals going into a job does not typically result in the skill required to do the job being enhanced. That requires job redesign, management capability and employer investment. And the countries that maintain strong graduate premia during expansion are the ones that pair education growth with skilled job creation and occupational upgrading.

    Johnny Rich’s long-held proposal for a graduate employer contribution gets the diagnosis right – the current system doesn’t incentivise the outcomes it needs, and employers are free-riding on public investment in human capital.

    But his proposed solution – a 3 per cent levy on employers hiring graduates, paid back to universities – never seems right for the political moment, especially now.

    After the employer NICs increase, the Employment Rights Bill costs and rising minimum wage obligations, another percentage-based charge on graduate employment would almost certainly reduce graduate hiring at the margin.

    Worse, it gives employers a direct financial incentive to recruit non-graduates or international graduates to avoid the charge. The stronger version of the employer contribution argument would look more like the French model of a legal obligation to invest in workforce training – something that changes what employers do with their workforce rather than what universities charge them for producing it.

    Not off the hook

    So if the core problem is demand-side, there are limits to what universities can fix. If nothing else, tinkering with course closures based on earnings data that is really measuring the weakness of the economy rather than the quality of the course is addressing the wrong end of the problem entirely.

    The Conservative proposal to cut 100,000 places and redirect savings into apprenticeships is exactly this error with a price tag attached – and as I’ve explored elsewhere, the maths doesn’t survive contact with reality either.

    But that doesn’t mean universities have nothing to do. And it’s not OK to simply rely on “graduateness” or a resistance to instrumentalism in a mass system where the economy is on its knees. An accommodation is required – and it isn’t always “skills in the module.”

    The comparative evidence on work experience is remarkable. Cross-national data from the REFLEX survey of European graduates found that British graduates gathered much less work experience during higher education than their counterparts in the Netherlands or Germany. Credit-bearing, structured work placements and co-op models – not just “employability modules” bolted onto existing courses – seem to matter for how quickly graduates transition into skilled work.

    There’s a structural problem with how we do this in England. A sandwich year typically means an extra year of debt. At Manchester Met, the RISE programme enables students to “over-credit” their degrees with additional units based on engagement with employment-enhancing extra-curricular experience, building skills recognition on top of rather than instead of academic credit. It won a Guardian Award for course design and now involves over 3,000 students a year.

    But even RISE sits on top of the degree rather than within it – which creates a question about whether “skills” in our system will always mean either extra time (and debt) or extra workload on top of what’s already a compressed experience.

    It all connects directly to the evidence on student regret. The Bristol/HEPI/Advance HE “Benefits of Hindsight” research found that while only 2-3 per cent of respondents thought higher education was the wrong path altogether, 52 per cent of graduates said with hindsight they would have done things differently.

    Among graduates who wanted to change, the most common reason was that different choices would have led to more career options. Four in ten expressed the need for different or better careers advice. For those employed in highly skilled occupations, satisfaction with their choices was markedly higher than for those in less skilled positions.

    The regret isn’t about having gone to university. It’s about what happened – or didn’t happen – within the experience and afterwards. And that’s a gap universities can address, not by turning every course into vocational training, but by ensuring that structured engagement with skills and work is embedded in the credit system (not necessarily the curriculum) rather than offered as an expensive optional extra or a bolt-on employability week.

    Credit where it’s due

    One of the UK’s open secrets is that across our universities, there is an enormous volume of higher technical provision that the public and policymakers struggle to see. It’s there, but it’s invisible behind university branding and a policy debate that treats all degrees as if they’re the same thing.

    On Kuenssberg, even Laura Trott had to concede that:

    …universities are often involved in apprenticeships, which is something that we are going to expand quite dramatically for 18 to 21.

    When we visited Técnico in Lisbon, taxi drivers knew exactly what the university’s faculty of engineering and technology does. In England, the equivalent provision is buried inside institutions whose names no longer signal what they offer.

    But Europe has a complementary secret that is arguably more important. In systems across the continent, enthusiastic Bologna compliance and the credit structure itself does the work that UK degrees try to bolt on.

    Technical students take humanities and social science credits. Purely academic students pick up formal credit for internships, work experience, volunteering and skills development. Students gain recognition for learning acquired through employment, service or positions of trust. And all of it sits within the standard 180 ECTS rather than on top of them – no extra year of fees, no optional bolt-on that time-poor students skip.

    In other words, countries can maintain stronger graduate premia via systems where technical students do humanities, purely academic students pick up credit for skills and work experience, both have graduateness experiences we call “extra” curricular rewarded, and none of it requires an extra year of fees. A Chemistry student does less Chemistry – but they’re a more rounded graduate, and in a mass system, that trade-off looks increasingly sensible.

    Some tell me that the UK’s compressed three-year, 360-credit model makes this harder but not impossible. But the real obstacle isn’t credit volume – it’s programme design philosophy. Our system tends to treat the subject as sacrosanct and everything else as an add-on, whereas the systems sustaining better graduate outcomes build breadth, skills and work into the core credit structure from the start.

    Green and Henseke’s cross-national work suggests the mechanism matters. It’s not about ticking an “employability” box – it’s about work-based learning with clear outcomes and assessment that captures problem-solving and responsibility, making skills legible to employers and reducing the risk of graduates starting in low-skill trajectories from which they may never recover. Early mismatch can persist – which means what happens in the transition matters as much as what happens in the classroom.

    And even when skills are developed – whether through the curriculum, work experience, or the kinds of extracurricular activity that European systems formally record on the Diploma Supplement – there remains a surfacing problem. As I’ve argued on the site elsewhere, students develop skills but struggle to name and evidence them, employers report attributes as missing that may actually be present but invisible, and the UK’s patchwork of documentation infrastructure fails to record what students have gained.

    See also the desperate need for PSRBs to engage with all of this, and the policy disaster that is the Lifelong Learning Entitlement, which ought to make earning while learning a doddle, but in fact is almost as inflexible for full-time students on mixing and matching as the system it’s designed to replace.

    Wrong end of the telescope

    As well as all of that, across employers, government and universities, there is clearly a coordination failure. If employers don’t redesign work and invest in training, universities can’t “teach” their way out of underutilisation. If government focuses mainly on supply-side reforms, it can expand qualification rates while leaving the job structure unchanged.

    And if universities treat skills as someone else’s problem – or as something that can only be addressed by bolting optional extras onto already overloaded students – then the accommodation the economy needs won’t happen either.

    Right now, almost everything government is causing in HE policy and regulation – closing courses based on earnings data, restricting international recruitment, tightening loan terms – addresses the supply side of a demand-side problem. And now opposition parties are competing to do the same thing faster.

    The countries that don’t have this problem are the ones that paired graduate expansion with skilled job creation, employer investment, and regional economic development.

    The government’s own Skills and Productivity Board material is explicit that skills and productivity are connected but mediated by employer strategy, investment, management and local economic structure.

    So place-based policy can’t just fund provision – it has to target adoption and diffusion of technology and management practices in lagging sectors and regions, use procurement and regulation to raise job quality in the large low-wage service markets where the state is a major purchaser, and align industrial strategy with occupational upgrading so that growth sectors translate into more skilled roles rather than just more headcount.

    If Britain is “short of graduate jobs”, the policy lever isn’t restricting graduate supply. It’s increasing the number and quality of roles that genuinely require and reward higher skills, and accepting that skills do have a place in undergraduate credit.

    Universities have a part to play – particularly in how they credit experiential learning, surface what students have gained, and in how they design degrees. Letting students design their own would be a great start.

    But they also have a distinctive contribution to make on the demand side itself – surfacing and generating the policy research that government needs to understand why the UK is an outlier, what levers would shift employer behaviour, and what regional economic conditions would turn graduate capability into productive work.

    Until that lands with ministers (or maybe, in the future, Mayors), the debate will remain stuck on supply-side tinkering while the real problem goes unaddressed – a surefire way to become the next Italy.

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  • I Asked Students Whether They’d Want to be Teachers? They Responded, ‘Why Would I?’ – The 74

    I Asked Students Whether They’d Want to be Teachers? They Responded, ‘Why Would I?’ – The 74

    I spoke in January 2026 with 150 high school students about career options. After explaining my own career as a professor of education, health and behavior, I asked the students a simple question: Would you want to be a teacher?

    “Why in the world would I want to be a teacher?” one female student said.

    “My aunt is a teacher and she works all the time … no thanks,” a male student added.

    Several students said it felt like teachers were doing everything: from teaching lessons and helping students through personal struggles to managing class disruptions and constantly adjusting to whatever else the day brought. Students also mentioned hearing teachers talk openly about low pay or feeling a lack of respect from students and others.

    These students’ observations align with national trends. While nearly 20% of college freshmen said in 1970 that they were interested in a teaching career, less than 5% said the same in 2020, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.

    Many teachers report low levels of job satisfaction, and 52% polled by Pew in 2024 said they would not advise young adults to become teachers.

    A teacher works with first grade students at Rosita Elementary School in Santa Ana, Calif., on Feb. 12, 2026. (Paul Bersebach/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images)

    Teacher pay penalty

    Education researchers and labor analysts have documented that teachers earn less than other people who also have college degrees.

    This difference in pay is sometimes called the teacher pay penalty. This gap has widened over the past few decades.

    In 2024 the teacher pay penalty reached its highest recorded level, with teachers earning roughly 73 cents for every dollar earned by other college graduates.

    Average annual public teacher salaries recently have ranged from about US$53,507 in Mississippi and $53,098 in Florida to more than $95,160 in California and $95,615 in New York.

    Nationwide, teachers on average earn about $72,030 per year.

    National analyses show that teaching has steadily lost ground in wage competitiveness compared with other college-educated professionals over the past few decades.

    Even as some states have enacted modest teacher salary increases year over year, these wide disparities persist.

    Expanding expectations, rising strain

    Teaching once centered primarily on academic instruction. Particularly through much of the 20th century, teachers’ roles were largely defined by planning lessons, instructing on different subjects and assessing student learning.

    In addition to teaching core subjects, many teachers are now often expected to help support students’ social and emotional development, address complex behavioral challenges, respond to crises that spill into classrooms, such as students physically fighting, and manage substantial paperwork and administrative tasks.

    The COVID-19 pandemic intensified many of these responsibilities, as teachers navigated remote instruction and students’ heightened mental health needs.

    At the same time, concerns about school safety, including the reality of school shootings and other kinds of violence, have added another layer to teachers’ emotional strain and required vigilance.

    Teachers are far more likely than other college-educated professionals to report frequent job-related stress and burnout.

    Job available

    Approximately 50% of all public school leaders reported in October 2024 that they feel their school is understaffed. And 20% of public school leaders reported teacher vacancies during that same time period.

    In January 2022, shortly after the pandemic, more than 20% of public schools reported at least 5% of their teaching positions were vacant that month. Approximately 51% of schools reported that resignations were the cause of these vacancies.

    A 2025 national teacher shortage overview estimates that roughly 1 in 8 teaching positions nationwide are either unfilled or staffed by someone not fully certified for the assignment, meaning a teacher working outside their licensed subject area or grade level, for example.

    When positions are filled this way, the classroom will still have a teacher present, but not necessarily one formally prepared to teach a specific subject or group of students. This can result in greater reliance on substitutes or increased class sizes for remaining staff.

    A black and white photo shows children dressed formally and standing around a table and a chalkboard with a woman standing near them.
    Students and their teacher are seen in 1899 in a Washington, D.C., public school classroom. (Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images)

    When teaching became women’s work

    History helps explain why teaching looks – and pays – the way it does today.

    In the early 1800s, teaching was a predominantly male profession.

    But as the U.S. industrialized in the late 1800s and early 1900s, higher-paying jobs in business and manufacturing drew many men away from classrooms.

    For many women at the time, teaching offered one of the few respectable professional careers available. It provided steady income and a measure of independence when many other professions were closed to them.

    Labor force participation for women expanded significantly during the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, as legal and social barriers began to fall. Yet the pay and public standing of teaching does not seem to have risen at the same pace.

    By the early 1900s, women made up about 70% of teachers. In 2024, 77% of teachers were women.

    Nationwide, the gender wage gap has narrowed in the past few decades. Still, women in the U.S. earn an average 85% of what men make.

    Who will teach the next generation?

    Each year, more than 80,000 new teachers step into classrooms. But the overall pipeline has narrowed since the early 2010s, with enrollment at teacher preparation programs declining sharply and only partially rebounding in recent years.

    Today’s students are coming of age in a landscape where teaching competes with many other college-degree professions that may offer higher pay, more predictable hours or clearer career advancement.

    College students are often weighing financial security, mental health and long-term sustainability as they imagine their future.

    Research consistently shows that compensation, working conditions and professional support play a central role in job retention. When those elements erode, so too does workforce stability.

    Stability is the key as students are evaluating teaching – not as a calling, but as a potential career within a competitive labor market.The Conversation

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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  • WEEKEND READING: Prioritising quality is the only way to grow transnational education safely

    WEEKEND READING: Prioritising quality is the only way to grow transnational education safely

    This blog was kindly authored by Shannon Stowers, Director of International Policy & Engagement at the Quality Assurance Agency.

    The 2026 International Education Strategy is here, and transnational education is the game in town. But if the Government want a true success story that protects the UK’s deserved reputation for higher education internationally, planned growth must be paired with a relentless focus on quality.

    The UK Government’s new International Education Strategy (IES) has been most noted in press coverage for its move away from international student recruitment and a renewed push towards expanding transnational education (TNE).  

    The previous iteration of the IES, published in 2019, set ambitious targets for the recruitment of international students – targets which the higher education sector was keen and quick to meet. What followed, however, was a political climate increasingly shaped by concerns about net migration. The result has been a set of policy headwinds strong enough to reverse the tide of international student recruitment, leaving universities caught in a boom-and-bust cycle where they are penalised for achieving the very goals the government once set for them.

    In terms of incoming students, the focus in the 2026 IES is on the ‘sustainable recruitment of high-quality international higher education students’ – a marked change from the growth narrative of 2019. But what’s particularly interesting here is that we are now witnessing 2019-style ambitious growth for TNE in the form of a £40 billion a year export target. However, without foregrounding quality, sustainability and equity in our approach to TNE now, we risk recreating a similar cycle all over again. We must be clear that the sustainability of TNE is dependent upon the quality of its provision.

    While the Government’s strategy has indeed acknowledged the importance of maintaining the UK’s reputation for high-quality provision, there remains a great deal left unsaid about what quality assurance and enhancement should look like in a TNE context.  

    In our work at QAA, we regularly engage with a network of partner quality agencies and regulators around the world. We work closely together on a number of key topics, including TNE barriers and assuring TNE quality across borders – like the Robust Quality Assurance of TNE (ROQA-TNE) project on which we are working with our European partners. We’ve often heard concerns about the UK’s approach to TNE, with some worrying that we’re doing it for the ‘wrong reasons’, especially given the well-publicised financial imperatives that our sector has been driven to. The new strategy, with its export framing, may do little to ease those anxieties – especially when partners see UK TNE expanding in their countries while we simultaneously tighten the rules on their students coming to ours (despite the IES stressing the positive point that TNE can help to mitigate overseas nation’s ‘brain drain’ by widening local access to high‑quality UK provision).

    The UK’s mechanisms to underpin and enhance that quality are of course complicated by the divergence of regulatory systems across its four nations. In our overseas engagement, we see how stakeholders rarely distinguish between the nations: they see ‘UK higher education’ as a unified brand. This means that a failure in one part of the system risks undermining the reputation of all. It can sometimes be a challenge to explain our system as a coherent whole that can, and should, be trusted. This is made harder as the divergences of regulatory systems increase over time.

    As the Government begins to implement its vision set out in the Post-16 Education & Training White Paper, it will be important for policymakers and the English sector to keep half an eye on this angle of UK-ness, keeping our international stakeholders in mind as a key audience of that policy work. Any unintended consequences of work that further extricates the English system from the standards and expectations of the rest of the UK – and indeed of the rest of the world – would be a hindrance to the TNE growth the Government desires.

    Ultimately, our TNE students expect and deserve a high-quality experience of higher education, one comparable to that which they would experience on the home campus of their UK provider..

    Set to be launched on 26th February, QAA’s UK TNE Quality Scheme will be the refreshed iteration of our Quality Evaluation and Enhancement of UK TNE (QE-TNE) Scheme. First commissioned by Universities UK and GuildHE in 2021, the scheme has already brought together more than 70 UK TNE providers to share insights, identify common challenges, and highlight effective practice. The updated version – developed through extensive consultation – has been designed to remain relevant to the opportunities and challenges of a rapidly shifting global environment. Alongside our work with the British Council and the Department for Business and Trade, it aims to strengthen the quality of UK provision and support the sustainable realisation of the vision set out in the IES, reflecting the shared ambitions of all four nations.

    The risks are clear. We don’t want the next iteration of the Government’s international strategy to be mopping up the mess of an ambition for TNE growth gone wrong – if overseas governments are burned by UK TNE that had inadequate oversight, quality problems, and ultimately let down the students they claimed to serve.

    The focus must be on sustainable, equitable partnerships that have quality at their heart. If we get it right, it’ll be one of the UK’s biggest success stories for strengthening global partnerships in an increasingly unstable world.

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  • Ohio Receives Federal Child Care Grant as Sector Continues to Search for Funding Answers – The 74

    Ohio Receives Federal Child Care Grant as Sector Continues to Search for Funding Answers – The 74


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    Ohio received a bump in funding for child care last week, a small win in a sector that is still facing uncertainty and an affordability crisis.

    Analysis by advocacy group Groundwork Ohio shows average child care costs in Ohio as of 2023 at more than $9,500 per year for preschool-age care, more than $11,000 per year for toddler care, and more than $12,000 a year for infant care.

    The Ohio Department of Children and Youth was awarded $14.7 million in federal grants “to support access to early care and education services,” according to a press release from Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine.

    The federal funding comes from the Preschool Development Grant – Birth to Five, distributed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

    “This funding will help Ohio better support families and make sure young children have access to quality care and learning opportunities during their most important years,” DeWine said in a statement.

    The state said the money will be used to upgrade technology and research, help early childhood education workers with curriculum development, professional learning opportunities, and “business support resources.”

    A total of $250 million was distributed through the federal grant program, and Ohio’s director of the Department of Children and Youth, Kara Wente, said the grant would allow the state “to build on the work already happening in communities across the state.”

    “By improving coordination and planning, we can make it easier for families to find the services they need and ensure young children get a strong start,” she said in a statement.

    The state General Assembly approved funding for child care through its most recent budget, with funding going to the Child Care Choice voucher program and a pilot cost-sharing child care model.

    But advocates were disappointed when eligibility for Publicly Funded Child care was left at 145% of the federal poverty level, despite pushes to raise the level to 160% or 200%.

    Programs to provide state grant funding for recruitment and child care provider mentorship went down from previous budget drafts, ending up with $2.85 million in funds over the two years of the budget, passed in 2025.

    Lynanne Gutierrez, president and CEO of child advocacy group Groundwork Ohio, has said Ohio faces a budgetary shortfall of $600 million after one-time federal dollars fade away for good in 2028.

    State child care advocates have been pushing the federal government to bring current and further funding to the sector.

    They have signed on to a letter with dozens of other child care organizations around the country to urge the government to continue funding the Child Care Development Block Grant, along with $10 billion in funding that was frozen in certain states after fraud allegations about Minnesota child care facilities were circulated by a right-wing YouTuber earlier this year.

    The funding freeze for Minnesota and other states was blocked temporarily by a federal judge in January, but the lawsuit in which the ruling was made continues.

    As funding comes and goes, the cost of child care continues to balloon, and a lack of access and affordability is costing the country billions, according to a new analysis by ReadyNation, a research group partnered with the Institute for Child Success.

    The study, released this week, showed insufficient child care for children younger than 5 costs the U.S. economy $172 billion per year in “lost earnings, productivity, and economic activity.”

    It showed a $5.3 billion economic impact for Ohio alone.

    “Challenges mount over time: with less training and less experience, these parents face diminished career prospects, reducing their earning potential,” the study stated. “And less parent income, along with parental stress, can have harmful short and long-term impacts on children.”

    National polling also shows bipartisan support for further child care support and changes to the system.

    A poll conducted in the beginning of January on behalf of the national First Five Years Fund showed 80% of voters find the ability to find and afford child care as “either in a state of crisis or a major problem.”

    The polling also showed 75% of participants believe child care funding should be increased or at least kept at current levels, with 75% of Republicans, 97% of Democrats, and 85% of independents giving that opinion.

    A majority in all political parties polled said funding for child care “is an important and good use of tax dollars.”

    Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: [email protected].


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  • WEEKEND READING: Should universities build or buy their online education capability?

    WEEKEND READING: Should universities build or buy their online education capability?

    This blog was kindly authored by Anna Wood, Pro Vice-Chancellor of Online and Lifelong Learning, University of Arts London (UAL).
    The University of the Arts London (UAL) has set out an ambition in its Strategy 2022-2032 to bring a high-quality creative education to more students than ever before. It places online education within its strategic Access and Lifelong Learning Pillar, which focuses on widening participation in creative education for learners at different life stages, from diverse backgrounds, at every point in their learning journey.

    Online education is a key driver of access and scale, with an aim to serve a wider range of students at a reduced overall cost of study for the student. 

    Within its online education strategy, UAL has made the decision to build its provision in-house as an internal startup. The new venture operates somewhat independently but with the backing and resources of the broader institution. The idea is to combine startup agility and innovation with established resources, expertise and stability. At present, where we decide to partner, we will seek to supplement capacity, not baseline capability, with extra resources.

    We have made the upfront investment by building new commercial and production teams, are on the journey to implementing new systems, and we accept that breakeven will not happen immediately. It is a focus on capability-building and offers insights into how universities might approach not just online education, but new product development more broadly. 

    Understanding the Online Programme Management (OPM) partnership model 

    UAL is unusual in taking the decision to build an internal start-up. Many  UK universities have chosen to partner (outsource the bulk of services needed) to launch their online education products. Between 2018 and 2024, Mosley counted that an average of nearly five new UK university-OPM partnerships were formed annually.OPM stands for Online Programme Management. These are companies that partner with universities to help them develop, launch, and manage online degree courses by taking on a full suite of services on the university’s behalf, often under a white label. 

    To understand why these partnerships exist, we need to look beyond online education as a mode of study and recognise how it functions as a commercial product requiring significant upfront investment and specialised capabilities. OPMs provide comprehensive services that include market research and analytics, design and production, academic recruitment and delivery, digital marketing, student recruitment, and student support.  

    The financial arrangement is typically a revenue-share agreement, which ranges depending on the services provided. At a time when the Office for Students report that 124 institutions (45 per cent) in the UK face a deficit in 2025-26, the appeal of developing new revenue streams without additional financial exposure is clear.  

    OPM partnerships have benefits. They demonstrate that universities can broker innovative contracts with the private sector where they lack certain capabilities needed to compete effectively: data-driven performance marketing, speed to market, target-driven recruitment teams, sophisticated CRM systems, and support services operating beyond UK business hours. OPMs are also developing capabilities, particularly in AI, at a faster pace than might be realised in-house, and this may be something in the future that could give us pause for consideration on new initiatives, should this continue to be the case.

    These benefits need to be weighed against certain longer-term disadvantages. When you outsource services, you effectively lose oversight of those areas. When marketing, recruitment and student support are outsourced, you can lose visibility of the addressable audience for your degrees and the retention concerns of your students. Is it acceptable for an organisation to not fully understand its customer base?

    Online as pathfinder for broader change 

    The capabilities required for online education are also those that universities need to become more student-centric and agile across all activities. In a 2025 HEPI blog, Nick Gilbert, Chief Information Officer of the London School of Economics and Political Science, stated:

    We can no longer afford to simply implement new systems or processes. If our investments aren’t vital to the changes that our organisations need to make to survive and thrive now, we really must be questioning why we’re doing them.

    The government’s recent Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper aims to “make lifelong learning a reality with more modular study options,” emphasising that skills are central to the government’s growth mission. Universities that have built internal capability to respond flexibly to this agenda: creating pathways between short courses and degree programmes, enabling credit transfer and supporting modular study, will be better positioned than those with arrangements optimised solely for full degree recruitment. 

    UAL Online’s operational requirements have led to useful insights for the wider institution. The need for rapid course development has resulted in expedited course approval processes. Working in the digital space has required investment in UX and UI that prioritises accessibility, student navigation and high-quality learning experiences even before they have begun studying with us.  

    A different way of working 

    Part of why online education is often perceived differently internally is that it requires different approaches to course development and delivery. Where academics developing face-to-face courses work independently, online education typically encompasses partnerships between them and learning design teams.

    The learning designer role exemplifies this by working with subject experts to structure content, design activities and determine how to deliver learning using various technologies and pedagogical approaches. During challenging moments, there can be creative tension as academics are not used to their content being challenged and learning designers could approach their feedback with a greater level of diplomacy. However, these conversations often lead to better outcomes, encouraging academics to articulate their pedagogical intentions more clearly and consider alternatives they might not have explored independently. 

    Online education is predominantly asynchronous, requiring content to be fully designed before students engage with it. This differs markedly from face-to-face teaching, where academics can adapt in real-time. With multiple specialists involved – video producers, content developers, editors, project managers, visual designers – the result is a collaborative effort that arguably raises quality standards, with each specialist bringing professional standards from their field. 

    What are the considerations when thinking about going it alone? 

    The internal startup approach requires upfront investment and longer-term commitment that not all institutions can make, particularly those already facing significant financial pressures. 

    If universities choose not to partner with an OPM then they need to tolerate an investment timeline of 3-5 years before break-even and an upfront spend that can require a 7-figure sum investment that will vary based on institutional readiness, number of courses launched and student number targets. The cost of digital marketing spend will be between 20 and 40 per cent of revenue for the first intakes. Economies of scale, lower delivery costs, and selective use of AI are what will ultimately bring universities the margin they seek.  

    Online education is a rapidly evolving market and we have limited data and insight to make accurate predictions. It is advisable to hire key staff within the start-up who have previous experience, expertise and relationship-building skills to bring to bear.

    Universities are also not always comfortable giving internal teams freedom to experiment with new business models or technologies. A level of resilience, even stubbornness, is needed if you want to see this through. Reworking new systems and processes is not swift and resources are always limited. Pauses may be required to accommodate other priorities. Strong, close working partnerships with stakeholders across the university are essential to progress.

    We would love to hear from other universities who are embarking on this journey to share successes and challenges and co-solve common issues.

    Are you ready to do this in-house? 

    When considering whether your university is ready to go it alone in launching online education, you would likely need to answer ‘yes’ to the following five questions:  

    1. Is there full executive support?  
    2. Is launching online education a top 5 strategic priority?  
    3. Is there appetite for significant financial investment? 
    4. Is there a willingness to redesign traditional structures and processes?  
    5. Is there capacity and capability to undertake systems development where required?  

    If these things are not in place, then I would probably suggest reaching out for external support. OPM partnerships have proven valuable for many institutions and have helped expand access to online education. There are many different ways of approaching this – long terms partnerships or fee for service options are all available to the sector in unbundled ways that were not part of the offer ten years ago. 

    For universities able to make this investment, building an in-house function offers something beyond new course launches: it builds the institutional ability and capacity to help navigate and succeed in an uncertain future. 

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  • Whole-of-society defence needs an alliance that universities actually own

    Whole-of-society defence needs an alliance that universities actually own

    “Whole-of-society” has become the sort of phrase that looks great in a strategy document and sounds faintly absurd when you say it out loud in a committee room. But the UK is now using it a lot in defence and security.

    With the government signalling it wants to accelerate defence spending, the question is no longer whether universities will be pulled closer into the defence ecosystem, but how. If the flagship mechanism – the Defence Universities Alliance – is built as something done to universities rather than with them, it will fail on the only metric that really matters: legitimacy.

    On paper, the Defence Universities Alliance sounds sensible: a structured relationship between defence and higher education, rather than a scatter of contracts, one-off announcements, and informal networks. Done well, it could align skills provision, research pathways and national resilience planning in a way that is currently missing.

    But here is the problem. If the alliance is built as something done to universities – a procurement wrapper with a comms strategy – it will fail. If it is built with universities – through consultation, shared governance, and genuine partnership – it could close a serious gap in UK readiness. Too often, the sector is invited to deliver, not to design.

    That gap is simple: we are building a defence skills pipeline at speed, but we still do not have a serious framework for universities in national resilience.

    A fast-moving pipeline

    The government has announced an £80m investment, delivered via the Office for Students, to expand capacity in computing and engineering with “defence-related skills” in mind. The guidance is explicit about additional student places over the next three academic years, alongside capital funding for facilities.

    This is not abstract. In early February the minister chose to make the announcement at the University of Portsmouth, explicitly linking defence industry needs, regional growth, and skills pipelines. That is policy theatre, yes – but it is also policy direction. The government is signalling that higher education is part of the defence industrial base, whether institutions like the framing or not.

    The pace matters because it changes the order of operations. When money is on the table, activity accelerates. Governance, legitimacy, and consent often come second.

    That is exactly why the Defence Universities Alliance cannot be a late-stage branding exercise. It needs to be the place where the awkward questions get answered up front.

    Overlooked resilience assets

    If you stop thinking of universities as lecture theatres with branding, their role in readiness becomes obvious.

    Universities are geographically distributed, often centrally located, and have large estates that can be repurposed quickly. They have laboratories and specialist equipment, expert staff, and deep links into local economies and public services. They host large student populations who, in a crisis, are not just “learners”, but a community with housing, welfare, and safeguarding needs.

    They can also convene. In many towns and cities, universities are among the few institutions able to pull councils, the NHS, police, third sector and employers into the same room quickly. That convening power is a form of resilience – and it is not talked about enough.

    And yet recent commentary on UK wartime readiness planning makes the point bluntly: universities are overlooked. Not because they are irrelevant, but because nobody has properly joined up the policy and governance that would make their role legitimate and workable.

    So we end up in an odd position. Universities are being asked to help deliver “defence-related skills” and defence-adjacent research outputs, while their broader resilience contribution remains largely unplanned. They are treated like a supplier, not a partner.

    The funding context

    This is where the sector context matters. The financial fragility of UK higher education is increasingly being framed as a national resilience, if not security, issue. If providers retrench hard – closing courses, cutting capability, shedding staff – the loss is not simply fewer graduates. It is the thinning-out of skills and institutions that underpin security in the widest sense.

    In that context, defence-linked funding can look like a lifeline. There is an emerging narrative that defence research and defence-aligned skills investment might help universities stay afloat, especially as other income sources wobble.

    But when money is tight and geopolitics is hot, mobilisation tends to happen quickly and unevenly. If institutions are pulled into defence activity through ad hoc pots, quiet partnerships, and hurried decisions, even socially useful work will start to look like stealth militarisation. And that is how you manufacture backlash.

    The uncomfortable truth is that the main constraint on “whole of society” defence in universities is not capacity – it is legitimacy. If universities lose trust, they lose the very qualities that make them useful in a crisis: autonomy, credibility, and convening power. A Defence Universities Alliance that ignores this will not just be unpopular. It will be strategically self-defeating.

    A transparent alliance

    If the Defence Universities Alliance is going to be more than a logo, it needs to answer three questions that are currently being dodged.

    First, define “defence-related”. If the alliance is only about producing more engineers for industry, it will feel like a narrow pipeline project. If it is about national resilience, it must also include cyber resilience, AI assurance, information integrity, languages, logistics, health capability, and the ability to reason under uncertainty. A credible taxonomy matters because it shapes what gets funded, what gets celebrated, and what gets quietly deprioritised.

    Next, share governance. An alliance without shared governance is not an alliance. Universities will not accept – and should not accept – a model that bypasses academic freedom, campus ethics processes, or public accountability. If government wants universities to play a resilience role, it needs to treat them as institutions with their own legitimacy, not as delivery arms.

    Finally, set transparency as the default. Not a press release – a register. Who funds what, to do which kind of work, with what ethical review, and what is withheld on genuine security grounds. Secrecy-by-default is an accelerant: it turns legitimate disagreement into suspicion, and suspicion into mobilisation of a different kind.

    These are not “nice to haves”. They are the operating conditions for stability.

    The alliance should also do something more basic: connect universities into resilience planning properly, without coercion.

    If we want institutions to contribute in a crisis, there should be pre-agreed protocols and relationships, not frantic phone calls and unclear expectations. That means formal integration into local and national resilience structures, with clear boundaries that protect institutional independence. It also means planning for the student population itself: welfare, housing, safeguarding, and communications are not side issues in a national emergency.

    And it means acknowledging that readiness is not just kit and contracts. It is also trust. Universities are one of the few national institutions that still retain a measure of public credibility across diverse communities. If government squanders that credibility by rushing engagement without consultation, it will make readiness harder, not easier.

    The choice we are drifting into

    The UK is moving quickly: money for defence-related skills, a strategy that casts defence as an engine for growth, and an emerging mechanism in the form of the Defence Universities Alliance.

    But “whole of society” cannot just mean “whole of provider”.

    We can build an alliance that treats universities as a convenient subcontractor – and be surprised when legitimacy collapses and campus contestation becomes the story.

    Or we can build a Defence Universities Alliance that universities actually own: consultation up front, shared governance, transparency by default, and a readiness role that protects academic independence rather than undermining it.

    The next steps are not complicated. Before the Office for Students allocates the bulk of the new funding, and before the alliance architecture hardens, publish draft terms of reference, run a time-limited consultation with providers, students and staff, and be explicit about the transparency default. That is how you turn a slogan into a settlement.

    If government wants universities in the defence ecosystem, it also has to take responsibility for the governance that makes that ecosystem legitimate.

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  • Ensuring Financial Sustainability for European University Alliances

    Ensuring Financial Sustainability for European University Alliances

    Cover of EUA report

    The European University Association (EUA) released a report “Strategies for the financial sustainability of European Universities alliances” last week. The briefing explores the long-term financial sustainability of European Universities alliances, noting that after six years of implementation, these consortia must move beyond reliance on short-term project grants. While the report proposes a “temple” framework for sustainability; built on institutional purpose, full-cost understanding, income diversification, efficiency, and leadership.It highlights several critical unanswered questions and unresolved tensions:

    Unresolved Funding Responsibilities

    • Public Funding Roles: It remains unclear which level of authority, European or national, should be responsible for the long-term structural and organisational costs of alliances.
    • National Disparities: There is no solution yet for the “unevenness” of national funding, which creates financial capacity gaps between partners in the same alliance.
    • Invisible Contributions: A significant portion of alliance funding comes from institutional block grants, yet this contribution often remains invisible in policy debates and is not systematically quantified.

    Gaps in Cost and Operational Awareness

    • Full-Cost Identification: A majority of institutions (55%) indicate that costs are not fully covered, and many lack a structured model to calculate the substantial indirect costs of participation, such as staff time and digital infrastructure.
    • Diminishing Efficiency: While alliances are expected to generate economies of scale, the report notes that these efficiencies have “not yet materialised at scale” and that activities remain resource-intensive.

    Strategic and Legal Hurdles

    • Research Integration: Most alliances were formed for teaching cooperation; it is still unclear how they can effectively define common research priorities to successfully compete for Horizon Europe funding.
    • Regulatory Barriers: National regulations continue to prevent or complicate critical sustainability efforts, such as joint staff recruitment and the sharing of physical research infrastructures.
    • Future Formats: The report questions whether the current “binary” model (alliance vs. non-alliance) is sufficient, suggesting a need for more flexible, less cost-intensive cooperation formats that have yet to be defined.

    Building on the report’s conceptual framework, these alliances have established specific thematic focus areas to drive their joint research and teaching activities. The following table compares the strategic priorities of a selection of major European University alliances:

    Comparative Strategic Priorities of Selected Alliances

    Alliance Key Thematic Focus Areas
    EuroTech Universities Additive manufacturing; AI for engineering systems; Health & bioengineering; Sustainable society (Space, Circular economy, Smart mobility); Entrepreneurship & innovation.
    Una Europa Cultural heritage; Europe and the World; One Health; Sustainability; Data Science & Artificial Intelligence.
    Aurora Sustainability & Climate change; Digital society & Global citizenship; Health & Well-being; Culture: Diversities & Identities; Social entrepreneurship & Innovation.
    ATHENA Emerging manufacturing technologies; Digital society & Digital arts; Assistive technologies; Artificial Intelligence; Sustainable materials and energy; Health & Food technologies.
    UNITE! Industry 4.0; Entrepreneurship; Artificial Intelligence; Sustainable energy; Biological engineering; Space; Cybersecurity.

    Implementation Challenges for These Priorities

    While these themes are well-defined, the report highlights significant barriers to making them sustainable:

    • Research Alignment: Because many alliances were originally formed for cooperation in learning and teaching, their shared research profiles are often underdeveloped. This makes it difficult to define common priorities for competitive funding.
    • Individual Competition: Member universities often continue to compete against each other for the same European research grants individually or through different consortia.
    • Operational Silos: Competitive funding applications are typically initiated at the laboratory or individual academic level, rather than through central alliance structures.
    • Resource Sharing: Regulatory complexities and a lack of geographical proximity currently make the sharing of physical research infrastructure nearly “unattainable”.

    The report’s conclusion is that to secure the future of European higher education, institutions must transition from short-term project “chasing” to a strategic model of long-term financial resilience. This report provides the essential roadmap for institutional leaders to align alliance participation with their core mission, accurately quantify hidden costs, and navigate the complex funding landscape between national and European authorities. 

    While European University Leaders would benefit from reviewing the report whether or not they are currently part of any of these current networks, other countries (including here in New Zealand Aotearoa) can benefit from taking heed of the challenges and solutions proposed here.

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  • Los Angeles schools to issue RIF notices to 657 staff

    Los Angeles schools to issue RIF notices to 657 staff

    The decision to send RIFs to central office staff comes as the district faces an $877 million budget deficit and sharp enrollment declines.

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  • Florida Hands Down Sociology Curriculum to State Colleges

    Florida Hands Down Sociology Curriculum to State Colleges

    Beginning this summer, professors at Florida’s 28 public colleges must use a state curriculum framework to teach their introduction to sociology courses. Aligned with the state-sanctioned sociology textbook, the framework requires that the courses do not “include a curriculum that teaches identity politics” or one that “is based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, and economic inequities.”

    Jose Arevalo, executive vice chancellor for the Florida State College System, shared information about the framework with representatives from 26 Florida colleges during a call on Jan. 20, according to an email summary of the call provided to Inside Higher Ed. The Florida Department of Education distributed teaching materials, including an instructor’s manual and textbook, and requested that institutions submit their current introduction to sociology syllabi, “including detailed assignment schedules, topic calendars, or modules to show course coverage.”

    “The framework serves as a baseline—institutions can add to it but should avoid subtracting key elements or adding content that risks violating state statutes,” Arevalo wrote in the email. “Much of the framework language can be copied directly into syllabi, with supporting exercises and textbook chapters provided.”

    All state colleges received the written guidance this week, according to Robert Cassanello, an associate professor of history at the University of Central Florida and president of the United Faculty of Florida union.

    “People in the union are really upset,” he said. “They see this as a threat to academic freedom. They see the revised textbook through the Board of Governors’ approval as a censored text.”

    Sociology professors at the state’s public universities have received similar instructions through a game of telephone, with instructions passed verbally from the Board of Governors to provosts, deans, chairs and then to faculty, several Florida faculty members reported.

    “They’re doing their best to avoid creating standing for a lawsuit,” Cassanello said. “This is why everything is verbal with the Board of Governors.”

    The seven-page written framework applies only to general education sociology courses taught at state colleges—not electives. The document bans nine discussion points from course content, including discussions that “state an intent of institutions today to oppress persons of color,” “that argue most variations between men and women are learned traits and behaviors,” and “that describe when, how, or why individuals determine their sexual orientation and/or gender identity.”

    Prohibited Content in Florida’s Introduction to Sociology Courses

    From a Dec. 8 copy of the “SYG 1000 Framework” draft.

    • Discussions that suggest that unconscious or unintentional institutional discrimination (e.g., systemic racism, institutional sexism, historical discrimination) is a singular cause for patterns of inequality observed today
    • Discussions about unconscious or unintentional discrimination as inherent among American citizens
    • Discussions that state an intent of institutions today to oppress persons of color
    • Discussions that state that heteronormative behaviors are tied to implicit bias, and harmful to children
    • Discussions that argue most variations between men and women are learned traits and behaviors
    • Discussions that argue that modifying opportunities for persons of color to match opportunities afforded to others regardless of merit is necessary to address historical racism
    • Discussions arguing a causal association between institutional sexism and unequal outcomes between men and women
    • Discussions that suggest that an entire racial or ethnic group is biased against another racial or ethnic group
    • Discussions that describe when, how, or why individuals determine their sexual orientation and/or gender identity

    The end of the document includes a “recommended course design,” written like a syllabus, that lays out seven units, suggested reading assignments and lecture topics. The guide to teaching “sociological phenomena” includes several contested theories about race and gender. For example, the framework states that while biological sex chromosomes determine different sex characteristics in men and women, they also determine “how females and males behave. This behavior is also influenced by the social relevance of these traits,” the framework says.

    “So, in teaching this, one might point out that women and men with the same credentials enter different jobs such that certain jobs are occupied primarily by women (i.e., female-dominant) some are occupied primarily by men (i.e., male-dominant) and some have roughly the same number of workers who are female and male (i.e., non-gendersegregated),” the framework says.

    The document also discusses limitations to personal freedoms as a historical phenomenon, not a present one. “Students will study scientific facts, including the demographic characteristics of individuals who lived during previous generations when specific freedoms were restricted” and “how things changed as those restrictions were removed over time,” the framework says.

    The state education department will likely roll out similar curriculum guidance for other areas of study in the future. In his email, Arevalo said the department is working with history professors on a general education curriculum for American history courses that “satisfy civic literacy requirements.” Results of this work could be disclosed as soon as April, he said.

    Unclear Enforcement

    The curriculum thinly veils the social politics of state education officials, said Katie Rainwater, a visiting scholar of global and sociocultural studies at Florida International University who has taught introductory sociology courses. Many top education decision-makers in Florida come from right-wing think tanks and colleges, including Hillsdale College, where Arevalo earned his Ph.D.; the Claremont Institute; and the Heritage Foundation.

    “They’re very intentionally staffing the Department of Education office with these ultraconservative ideologues,” Rainwater said. “What we’re seeing is … people affiliated with this national conservative movement taking away the ideas that they don’t want students to be exposed to.”

    The framework was developed by a “work group of sociologists,” Arevalo said in his email. It’s unclear whether it was the same sociology professors that created the state-approved textbook late last year. That group convened with four Board of Governors members and four faculty members, but Phillip Wisely, a sociology professor at Florida SouthWestern State College, was kicked out of the group by state education commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas for allegedly “advocating for gender ideology” in his sociology class. Wisely remains suspended from his teaching position, Cassanello said.

    Florida Department of Education spokespeople did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for comment Friday.

    It’s unclear how faculty members who don’t follow the written or verbal guidelines will be disciplined, but faculty say they’re certain there would be some kind of blowback for ignoring the rules.

    Zachary Levenson, a sociology professor at Florida International University, said his department requested clarification from the provost on the rules and received no information.

    “We wrote to the provost … and said, ‘Please tell us what we cannot teach, what we must teach, and what the sanction would be for violating this,’” he said. “She wouldn’t specify. She said … ‘There is no individual sanction that I can name’” and referred them to the guidelines in Florida state statute 1007.25, which outlines rules for general education and degree requirements.

    He speculates that the punishment could be sanctions against the institution via the accreditor, or individual discipline. Levenson moved to Florida to teach only two and a half years ago, but he said he wants to stay in the state so that he can fight back.

    “This is happening everywhere, but it’s first happening here,” Levenson said. “It was happening when I was teaching in Texas, in North Carolina, but not like this. So if we don’t nip it in the bud … it’s going to keep spreading around the country.”

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  • German chancellor echoes the frequent — and illiberal — call to end online anonymity

    German chancellor echoes the frequent — and illiberal — call to end online anonymity

    We’ve said it before. We’ll say it again. Ending online anonymity is not some magical cure to “fix” whatever problems you believe plague the internet and its culture. And for whatever ills may exist on social media, this kind of cure would be worse than the disease. But German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said at an event this week that online anonymity is a problem — and he wants it to end.

    “I want to see real names on the internet. I want to know who is speaking,” Merz said on Wednesday in Trier, Germany. “In politics, we engage in debates in our society using our real names and without visors. I expect the same from everyone else who critically examines our country and our society.”

    Merz also expressed concerns about fake news, algorithms, and the prevalence of social media use among minors (German politicians are currently discussing following other nations in adopting a social media ban for teens).

    German Chancellor Friedrich Merz (Shutterstock.com)

    It’s one thing to praise the value and benefits of speaking out under your true identity, but German citizens have reason to be troubled by Merz’s comments. For one, given the extent to which Germany and European nations regulate internet speech, Merz and other officials may indeed push for further rules that require social media users to post under their real names. Second, and most importantly, what you post online can already have consequences in Germany. There are very real risks of telling the world who you are when you tell them what you think.

    German police regularly raid the homes of those accused of hateful speech, or even just insulting speech — sometimes in pre-dawn raids, where the target’s electronics are seized. Prosecutors have said that online insults may be taken more seriously because of the more permanent nature of speech typed rather than spoken. And, believe it or not, insults directed at politicians are treated even more harshly under German law than those about non-public figures.

    Anonymity isn’t some minor issue. For many people, it’s the only way they can express themselves.

    So you can probably see why German citizens (or any nation’s citizens) of all political persuasions might prefer to have at least the initial protection of a pseudonym when they engage in political speech online.

    But Americans should remember that our right to speak anonymously online is under attack here at home, too. Legislation like the Kids Online Safety Act and the growing state-by-state age verification bills present a real risk to the privacy and anonymity of American adults and minors alike.

    Free Speech Dispatch

    The Free Speech Dispatch is a regular series covering new and continuing censorship trends and challenges around the world. Our goal is to help readers better understand the global context of free expression.


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    Perhaps even more urgent for Americans are the reported efforts by the Trump administration to unmask citizens who have done nothing more than exercise their rights to condemn and discuss government acts. A disturbing Washington Post investigation earlier this month detailed how the Department of Homeland Security is abusing oversight-free administrative subpoenas to target protected speech, including a man who sent an email about efforts to deport an Afghan asylum seeker on humanitarian parole.

    The New York Times followed with a report that DHS has issued hundreds of these subpoenas to tech companies, including Google and Meta, to get identifying information for people who have criticized ICE or discussed where and when agents are conducting operations. (This month, FIRE filed a lawsuit against Attorney General Pam Bondi and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem over their efforts to strong-arm Apple and Facebook to take down speech reporting on ICE activity.)

    Anonymity isn’t some minor issue. For many people, it’s the only way they can express themselves. German citizens should speak out to protect the future of anonymous speech in their country. And Americans must, too. 

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