51,000 alumni weigh in on giving priorities, engagement preferences, and more.
This blog features an excerpt from Howard Heevner, fundraising industry leader and co-author of the 2025 RNL National Alumni Survey.
RNL’s 2025 National Alumni Survey was just released and, while the insights gleaned from this report are always valuable, one could argue that this data is worth its weight in gold during times of extreme uncertainty like we are currently facing in our sector. After all, there are a few universal truths that strategic fundraisers understand, regardless of differing priorities, levels of experience, or overall philosophy:
“Hope”‘” is not a strategy.
Stewardship matters.
You will never regret confirming your flight departure time ahead of an important donor visit…
When in doubt, go straight to the source: your donors.
RNL’s National Alumni Survey gives fundraisers a valuable opportunity to refine their engagement strategies by focusing on what truly matters—understanding donor expectations. By analyzing responses from more than 51,000 alumni across generations and institutions of all types, this report sheds light on alumni sentiments toward their alma maters, their giving priorities, generational volunteer trends, and the motivations behind their contributions of time, talent, and financial support.
Facilitated by RNL’s Sarah Kleeberger, this report also benefits from the expertise of longtime RNL partner and industry leader Howard Heevner. Howard provides both a foreword and conclusion to the report, offering insightful commentary, practical applications, and a forward-looking perspective on the future of donor engagement.
Excerpt from the 2025 RNL National Alumni Survey Report, written by Howard Heevner:
Howard Heevner
As part of RNL’s second annual research study, we are again sharing the collective wisdom of 51,000 alumni representing a broad spectrum of higher education. The opportunity to provide a conduit for these voices to be heard is an honor, and along with the team at RNL, we are excited to share the feedback alumni from 21 institutions.
In higher education, we often spend our time looking inward or looking at other institutions instead of turning to those we wish to connect, engage, and inspire to be in a closer relationship with our institutions. For decades, we have been able to rely on an expectation of loyalty from our alumni because that’s how it’s always been. However, so many factors have changed the nature of that relationship and those expectations. Among them are the rising costs of education, the implied and often explicit promise that degree achievement will provide you with a pass to greater opportunity, and the increasing mistrust of institutions and higher education.
There is a growing concern for our pipeline of donors. We have seen a dramatic decrease in alumni donor counts across the United States over the past three decades. These trends pre-date the pandemic but seem to be exacerbated post-pandemic. Many schools are struggling to acquire new donors and are searching for new methodologies to do so. However, it seems most often we are taking the fractured giving structures that brought us here and bringing those into these new strategies. Maybe the issue isn’t our tools or strategies, but our ability to authentically connect with our alumni.
As campus workers and citizens, educators and researchers, staff, students, and university community members, we exercise a powerful collective voice in advancing the democratic mission of our colleges and universities. It is our labor and our ideas which sustain higher education as a project that preserves and extends social equality and the common good—as a project of social emancipation.
On
April 17, 2025, we will hold a one-day action on and around our
campuses to renew this vision of higher education as an autonomous
public good, and university workers as its most important resource.
Free Higher Ed Now!will
demand FIRST that public higher education in the U.S. be fully funded,
politically independent, and FREE to all students and SECOND that higher
ed be FREE of political interference that reduces the rights and
autonomy of campus workers and students to teach, study, learn, speak,
organize, and dissent. Read and endorse our agenda here.
The AI Opportunities Action Plan, led by Matt Clifford CBE and announced in January, documents recommendations for the government to grow the UK’s AI sector to ‘position the UK to be an AI maker, not an AI taker’ in the field and help achieve economic growth.
The UK’s AI Action Plan highlights the critical need to harness international talent and expand the workforce with AI expertise. However, this ambition is at odds with recent moves by the British government to limit international student numbers through stricter visa regulations, leading universities to make difficult decisions—cutting courses, slashing budgets, and exploring alternative strategies to maintain financial stability and global relevance.
The AI Action Plan: A policy contradiction
Despite a well-documented skills gap in the UK’s AI sector, the Government’s actions have forced universities to pivot toward establishing global campuses in a bid to preserve financial stability and maintain and promote international collaboration in general. This trend is exemplified by universities like Coventry University, which opened a campus in Delhi last year, and the University of Lancaster’s partnership with Deakin University in Indonesia. Today, UK universities operate 38 campuses across 18 countries, educating more than 67,750 students abroad.
While these international campuses help extend the UK’s academic reach, the UK’s immigration policies are creating significant barriers to attracting top-tier AI talent to work domestically. Many international graduates, trained to UK standards, are struggling to secure postgraduate visas for themselves and their families, preventing them from contributing their skills to the UK economy.
Visa barriers for graduates
One of the main visa routes intended to help international talent integrate into the UK workforce is the High Potential Individual (HPI) visa. The HPI visa is a UK immigration pathway designed for recent graduates from 40 top global universities, allowing them to live and work in the UK for several years. However, this scheme remains restrictive. To qualify, applicants must have a qualification from one of the eligible global universities in the last five years. Of the universities included, 47.62% are from the US, and there is just one institution from the entire southern hemisphere on the list.
The AI action plan recommended the government consider reforming the HPI pathway with ‘graduates from some leading AI institutions, such as the Indian Institutes of Technology and (since 2020) Carnegie Mellon University in the US, are not currently included in the High Potential Individual visa eligibility list’.
The AI Action Plan itself highlights the need for a rethink of the UK’s immigration system to attract graduates from top AI institutions worldwide. However, the government has only ‘partially agreed‘ with this recommendation, pointing to existing visa schemes that they believe meet the needs of skilled workers, including AI graduates. However, it can be argued that the UK visa process is often expensive, and Global Talent Visas require employer sponsorship while failing to account for the challenges that international graduates face when trying to secure long-term employment, especially in industries with rapidly evolving skills like AI. Even if the HPI eligibility list was expanded, our existing visa pathways are too restrictive to support a rapid influx of skilled graduates.
Government and university collaboration
The AI Action Plan calls on the government to ‘support Higher Education institutions in increasing the number of AI graduates and teaching industry-relevant skills.’ The reality is that many UK universities have already adjusted their strategies to cope with both domestic financial pressures and the measures introduced to quell international students through restricted immigration pathways.
The question remains whether universities will be expected to reverse course, intensify efforts to recruit domestically and retain AI talent to meet the government’s urgent targets. Without a targeted and affordable visa system to support these efforts, the AI Action Plan’s goals risk falling short of their potential.
This is not about asking Universities to ensure that their international students have clear career pathways post-graduation or providing AI-specific courses. The government must create an AI-specific visa that allows graduates from top global institutions to work in the UK.
The real need lies in fostering closer collaboration between higher education institutions and government policymakers, particularly when it comes to visas. The government must take responsibility for creating a new visa pathway if it wants to meet the aims of the AI action plan. Universities cannot be expected to U-turn- develop new courses in the face of financial constraints and restrictive visa policies.
Mauve Group is a global HR, Employer of Record and business consultancy provider. Mauve specialises in supporting organisations of all sizes to expand overseas, helping companies navigate the complexities of employing workers across borders.
It’s International Women’s Day. Today on the site, Professor Lisa-Dionne Morris explores the critical role of Black women in academia and industry leadership, particularly in Engineering and STEM, highlighting their groundbreaking contributions and the systemic barriers that persist. Read that piece here.
Below, HEPI’s own Rose Stephenson challenges us to look at ‘the other side of the coin’ in the fight for gender equality – you can read that piece below.
Firstly, Happy International Women’s Day 2025.
The theme this year is ‘Accelerate Action.’ It’s a great theme, and to accelerate action in terms of gender equality, we have got to focus more on ‘the other side of the coin’. Let me explain three examples:
1. We should do more to ensure that parenting is supportive and inclusive of fathers.
Joeli Brearly, outgoing CEO of Pregnant then Screwed, recently gave evidence on Shared Parental Leave in parliament. She stated:
‘It’s time we asked ourselves a fundamental question about what sort of society we want this to be. Do we want to continue to perpetuate outdated and harmful gender stereotypes that tell us it is women who do the nurturing and the caring and the childrearing and are the homemakers and that men just need to pull their socks up and get back to work? They are strong, stoic breadwinners and don’t need this time [parental leave] to nurture and care for their family. The mental health of men in this country is in crisis. Boys are saying they feel lost and disconnected, and it’s no wonder when our laws are literally telling them: “you don’t need time to nurture and connect with your family.”’
Inclusive parenting is good for dads, it’s great for kids, and it benefits Mums, too. My mantra is, ‘We will never have equality in the workplace until we have equality in the home’. Until we reach a point where an equal number of dads leave work in time for the school run, take time off for holiday care, or work part-time and flexibly, we will never reach parity in the workplace. And why would we want to? If women collectively reach equal pay, equal status and the resulting equal responsibility at work yet continue to shoulder most domestic and childcare duties, we have significantly undermined progress towards equality.
The HEPI report I published last year, Show Me the Money, an exploration of the gender pay gap in higher education, demonstrated the importance of increasing paid paternity leave as a lever for narrowing the gender pay gap. If your institution is monitoring the uptake of senior or professorial roles by gender, are they also monitoring the uptake of post-birth parental leave, shared parental leave and statutory parental leave by the same measure? Is there monitoring and reporting on the genderisation of part-time work applications, flexible working requests and the granting of these requests? That is ‘the other side of the coin’ and we should not underestimate the hurdles fathers may have to overcome to ask – or be granted – the flexibility we more commonly expect for mothers.
2. We should encourage boys and young men to work in teaching and social care roles to the same extent that we encourage women to work in engineering and tech.
When working as a secondary and sixth-form science teacher, I undertook a project at my school that challenged pupils to critically think about the subject choices they were making at GCSE and A-Level and how this might be affected by gender stereotyping. There was plenty of support and encouragement for female pupils in science and maths subjects (as there should be). However, there was a notable vacuum in the equivalent campaigns to open up opportunities for boys.
I witnessed first-hand how the gendering of subjects and occupations suppressed the potential of young men. One boy in my tutor group desperately wanted to complete his work experience at a hair salon. This pupil would have benefitted from a ‘hook’ that could have driven his interest in education and the future world of work. Unfortunately, his family disapproved of his choice, and he spent his work experience on a building site. This did nothing to enhance his motivation towards education or work. This was a valuable opportunity for a disengaged young man to pursue something that genuinely sparked his interest, and I have no doubt he would have excelled at. However, this opportunity was lost because it was not deemed ‘masculine’ enough. This was one example, but the boys I taught were quite open about feeling they couldn’t choose the subjects they wanted. There was an element of ‘acceptable’ choices.
It is tragic that in 2025, UK society is still limiting the possibilities for young men to follow their real interests. As a sector, we should push hard against the narratives perpetuating this. Again, if your institution is monitoring and encouraging the uptake of subjects such as engineering or coding for female students, are they also monitoring the update of nursing courses by male students? Are there considerations of male uptake and completion of courses in your Access and Participation Plans?
3. We should consider developing ‘Men’s Leadership’ courses.
I’ve been lucky enough to partake in various forms of ‘Women’s Leadership training’ run by Advance HE and the Women’s Higher Education Network (WHEN), among others. Of course, non-gender-specific leadership training is available. However, women’s leadership courses have existed due to the historic and ongoing underrepresentation of women in leadership positions. Further, they provide a female-only space for women to develop their leadership skills.
I vividly remember being told by a presenter on the Advance HE Aurora programme to ‘have heft’ and ‘take up space’. (I replay this memory regularly in all the privileged but occasionally intimidating speaking and media events I undertake in my current role.)
But as we move closer towards gender parity – and I know there is more work to do – should we be thinking about the other side of the coin? Women’s leadership courses can often focus on developing traits deemed to be held by traditional, therefore male, leaders. Having more confidence, making your voice heard, etc. Now that most of society accepts that women can also make great leaders – and there are many stand-out examples in the higher education sector – where is the equivalent training for men?
Where are the male leadership courses that teach men the skills of making space for others, speaking inclusively, building relationships, the importance of being a mentor, and using coaching techniques to build confidence in their colleagues? Surely, some male colleagues who wish to become leaders can learn skills that may be (stereotypically) more prevalent in female colleagues, and developing these skills would benefit everyone.
And sure, some men will already possess these skills, just like some women have a natural ability to take up space. My question is, if we accept that women are socialised in a particular way to be missing some leadership or workplace skills, then can we accept that for men? Do we value stereotypically ‘female’ leadership skills enough to offer a platform for developing these skills in male colleagues? Further, should leadership courses for men include panels discussing how to balance leadership roles with childcare responsibilities? (And yes, those panels exist in women-in-leadership courses) Perhaps when we get to this point, we really will be considering the other side of the coin.
If you found this blog interesting, you may wish to look back at some of our previous International Women’s Day blogs:
HEPI has also published the report:
HEPI will soon publish an updated report on educational achievement by boys and young men, a significant and long-standing issue that has been largely ignored by policymakers. The report considers the consequences for individuals and societies and proposes several levers that could be used to drive change. This report will be published this month – March 2025. If you haven’t already, sign up for our blog below to get this report hot off the press.
If you wish to write a blog for International Men’s Day on November 19th, submissions are very welcome.
Edward Blum isn’t quite a household name. But at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., he’s a minor celebrity.
The conservative think tank has played host to an array of high-profile politicos, pundits, journalists and businesspeople over the years: Bill Gates, Mike Pence, Jordan Peterson, the Dalai Lama. Blum, who took affirmative action to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2023 and won, spoke at the institute earlier this month about his decades of legal activism.
It was something of a homecoming for the president of Students for Fair Admissions, who lives in Florida but has been a visiting fellow at AEI since 2005. It was also, in many ways, a victory lap.
Since the court ruled in his favor in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and the University of North Carolina, Blum’s vision of what he calls a “colorblind covenant in public policy” has been ascendant, and in the new Trump administration, Blum’s zealous opposition to race-conscious programs has become a domineering force driving education policy.
Over the weekend, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights issued a letter outlining an expansive interpretation of the SFFA ruling and its plans to enforce a ban on all race-conscious programming in higher ed; colleges that don’t comply in 14 days could lose their federal funding. During her confirmation hearing Thursday, Education Secretary nominee Linda McMahon said ending “race-based programming” would be a priority if she were confirmed.
Blum, who spoke with Inside Higher Ed before the OCR letter was published, believes that affirmative action has long been unpopular—winning the public relations battle, he said, was “the easiest part of my job.” Still, he said the political, legal and cultural backlash against affirmative action and DEI over the past few years was affirming. In Trump’s Washington, Blum, who fought the courts unsuccessfully for decades, feels like an insider at last.
“It’s gratifying for those of us who have labored in this movement to see that now, rather than these policies being whispered about as unfair and illegal, there’s a full-throated cry against them,” he said.
The Trump administration’s adoption of Blum’s views on race in higher ed has also prompted another wave of backlash from Blum’s many critics, who say his work is undoing decades of progress toward racial equality and integration.
During his AEI session, Blum was asked about his own views on racial diversity on college campuses, constitutional law notwithstanding. He rejected the premise outright.
“The question implies that someone’s skin color is going to tell me something very fundamental about who they are as an individual. I don’t believe that’s the case,” Blum said. “Your skin color, the shape of your eyes, the texture of your hair tells me nothing about who you are. For some people, being on a campus with racial diversity is important … There are others that don’t seem to care about that.”
From Outsider to Agenda Setter
Blum has railed against race-conscious admissions for two decades. A former businessman in Houston, Blum, who has no law degree, founded the legal defense fund Project on Fair Representation in the mid-2000s. He challenged Texas’s reinstatement of race-based admissions in the second Fisher v. the University of Texas case; the case went to the Supreme Court but was ultimately defeated in 2016 when justices ruled that the university’s admission practices were constitutional.
Now, he’s not alone. A corps of public interest law groups has sprung up to litigate the SFFA decision in higher ed at prestigious law firms, on Wall Street and beyond. This month, a brand-new public interest legal group filed a lawsuit against the University of California system accusing it of secretly using racial preferences in admissions, citing increases in Black and Hispanic enrollment at its most selective colleges.
Blum said SFFA isn’t passing the buck and is committed to challenging universities on their compliance with the law, but a groundswell of efforts has lightened his load.
“The SFFA decision has energized the public interest law apparatus,” Blum said. He predicted that under Trump, the Education Department will also play a bigger role in investigating institutions for their compliance with the affirmative action ban. That forecast appears to be coming true with Friday’s Dear Colleague letter, though the agency still has to enforce the directive, a complicated prospect considering its broad scope.
Edward Blum (left) at the American Enterprise Institute on Feb. 5, with moderator Frederick Hess.
Blum supports the intensifying attacks on DEI and said that with more state laws forbidding spending on diversity and equity programs, there’s room for legal work to ensure colleges aren’t spending on “DEI by another name.”
But despite the high-profile political implications of his work, he doesn’t see himself as a political actor. In the late 1990s, he ran a failed congressional campaign in Houston, but the thought of running for office now evokes “overwhelming negative emotions.” And he’s careful to draw a line between his legal advocacy work and the anti-DEI crusades of conservative lawmakers.
“There is a 20-foot wall between the political people in the movement and the public interest groups,” he said.
‘A Forever Endeavor’
Blum is not finished suing colleges over affirmative action, or at least those he believes could be flouting the law. He’s particularly interested in selective colleges that reported similar or higher rates of Black and Hispanic enrollment this year, such as Yale, Duke and Princeton—a sure sign, he believes, that they’ve been “cheating.” SFFA has a “vibrant role to play,” he added, in holding them to account.
“So many of us are befuddled and concerned that in the first admissions cycle post-SFFA, schools that said getting rid of affirmative action would cause their minority admissions to plummet didn’t see that happen,” he said.
When asked if recent expansions to financial aid offerings at these universities could account for the change, Blum was circumspect. He’s not opposed to economically progressive admissions initiatives; he calls Rick Kahlenberg, a liberal proponent of “class-based affirmative action,” a like-minded friend. But he said the onus was on colleges to prove that’s the source of their continued racial diversity. He also said that geographic diversity initiatives would be unconstitutional if they only applied to “Harlem and the South Side of Chicago, and not also rural Missouri and northern Maine.”
Since the Supreme Court ruling, experts, college administrators and lawyers have debated whether the SFFA decision applies to race-conscious scholarships, internships and precollege programs as well as admissions. In the months after the ruling, attorneys general in Ohio and Missouri issued orders saying it did, and some colleges have begun to revise racial eligibility requirements on scholarships. At the same time, scholars and lawyers said implementing changes to nonadmissions programs amounted to overreach from state lawmakers and institutions alike.
Blum doesn’t actually believe the decision itself extends to those programs. He does think they’re illegal—there just hasn’t been a successful case challenging them yet.
“I haven’t really made myself clear on this, which is my fault, but the SFFA opinion didn’t change the law for those policies” in internships and scholarships, he said. “But those policies have always been, in my opinion, outside of the scope of our civil rights law and actionable in court.”
He’s still looking for a case that could enshrine his view in the law—two weeks ago McDonald’s settled a lawsuit he filed against their Latino scholarship program, putting that one out of contention. But he said that for the most part, in the wake of the SFFA decision, colleges have proactively altered or ended those programs themselves.
“Even if the ruling didn’t apply directly, it’s had this cascading effect,” he said.
That effect, Blum said, has spread to cultural and corporate institutions as well as higher ed, contributing to a general chilling effect on what he views as unconstitutional racial preferences in American society. It’s a major turnaround, he acknowledged, from the ubiquity of DEI initiatives and racial reckoning just five years ago after the murder of George Floyd.
While he’s relishing in the legal, political and cultural victory of his crusade, he’s not resting on his laurels.
“There are no permanent victories in politics,” Blum said, loosely quoting Winston Churchill. “The same applies to legal advocacy. This is a forever endeavor.”
I feel for Nan Zhong, a Chinese American who is suing the University of California because they rejected his son, Stanley, a child prodigy hired by Google at age 18.Emil Guillermo
They think we live in a land of meritocracy where affirmative action is dead. Well, it depends on who’s boss. Zhong has accused the UC system and the U.S. Department of Education of discrimination against Asian American applicants, the third of its kind in recent weeks, according to AsAm News.
Earlier this month, the Students Against Racial Discrimination sued the UC system over its holistic approach to admissions. Another group, The Equal Protection Project sued four Pennsylvania state universities for discrimination against Asians. If you thought the Harvard case which used Asians Americans to end affirmative action last year settled things, you’re wrong.
Some Asian Americans apparently will keep suing until their kid gets in. No lawyer would take Zhong’s case, so he used AI to file his suit. It’s worth it to Zhong to press on because as he puts it, he’s “really p—sed off.”
But Zhong’s anger helps exposed how legal discrimination exists and how it’s allowed to happen. And there’s nothing to do about it. Not when it’s dictated from the top.
TRUMP’S PERSONAL “DEI” LANDSCAPE
For example, I don’t know any Asian Americans or Native Hawaiians cheering Tulsi Gabbard’s rise to Director of National Intelligence. Maybe Kash Patel—the guy who wants to run the FBI. Like Gabbard, Patel and let’s include RFK Jr.—the wormhead, former dope addict, and anti-vax mercenary who has now been confirmed to run the Department of Health and Human Services– are all allied. They are three peas in a pod, three objectively unqualified people, who have risen to the top, not because of merit, but because of allegiance to one man, Donald Trump.
The records of Gabbard, Patel and RFK Jr have all been exposed and are not stellar. Gabbard has never worked for an intelligence agency and is considered by some conservative legislators a dupe for how she has dealt with Russia and Syrian leaders. Would you share secrets with the U.S. with Gabbard at the helm of intelligence?
Patel has ties to key Jan. 6 figures. He’s been an original denier that Trump lost the 2020 election. But if you think those are partisan issues, then what about just the idea of managing an agency like the FBI. He doesn’t have a resume to match any of the previous FBI directors.
And then there’s RFK Jr Let’s just say the worm in his brain qualifies him for a disability, mental and physical. If you put aside the controversial issues like vaccinating his kids, but publicly being anti-vax in situations where people have died, just go with his management experience. Has he ever led anything that qualifies him to run an organization with 13 supporting agencies, 80,000 employees, and a budget around $1.7 trillion in mandatory funding, and $130.7 billion in discretionary funding.
Is he the guy you choose on merit? The answer to RFK Jr is no. As it is for Gabbard and Patel. And the fact is they wouldn’t be hires in a traditional DEI world either, because there are way more qualified people of color to fill the positions. But in this era, they are hires in Trump’s made to order “DEI.” Trump’s pets. They get in when congressional decision makers fold fearing losing their elected positions from candidates funded by the richest man in the world, Elon Musk.
And this is the model of meritocracy at the federal level that trickles down to higher ed and in private practice? It essentially says what the boss wants goes. It’s more than “who you know.” You have to get to the top person’s approval and give them your undivided loyalty. To the man, not the constitution. And then your owned. It’s antithetical to diversity, equity and inclusion, AND merit. It works well for Trump, but nobody else.
Look at Pete Hegseth, the former Fox weekend anchor, now Sec. of Defense, now negotiating away Ukraine’s rights as he seeks Trump-Putin’s vision of an end to war. Trump has a younger more telegenic man standing in for him. And the world is a lot worse off. And that’s where we are in these Trump times. It’s sobering. But so is the fact the Harvard case that went all the way to the Supreme Court really didn’t end disputes in higher ed over who gets into the best schools.
The Asian “winners” weren’t winners after all, in their quest for meritocracy. They were used of course, by the anti-affirmative action folks. Duped. They only want want’s fair. Unfortunately, they were betrayed. I join them in bristling at the headlines about Gabbard and RFK Jr. Meritocracy?
And I wish Zhong good luck with his suit against UC. At least his son, Stanley, without a degree, has that great job with Google.
Emil Guillermo is an award-winning journalist, commentator, and adjunct professor.
As social action charity Student Hubs closes on 31 January 2025, we have spent the past six months creating resources, toolkits and a report which advocates for growing student social action within universities: we want to share an overview of our case and legacy to the higher education sector.
Student Hubs was developed by students in 2007, growing across England and Wales to deliver volunteering, events, conferences, training programmes and in-curricular activities. We reached 20,000 students across 10 Hub locations, including engaging 1,200 community organisations and over 16,000 community members. In 2023-24 our activities represented over 8,000 hours contributed to social issues across Bristol, Birmingham, Cambridge, London and Southampton. We are keen for universities to step up to meet the vast gap we will be leaving within the sector.
A Government definition in 2016 framed social action as ‘people coming together to help improve their lives and solve the problems that are important in their communities’. Our ‘Case for Social Action’ looks through the lens of Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson’s call to the sector in November 2024 outlining what the Labour Government expects universities to achieve moving forward. We summarise how social action can meet these agendas in practice.
‘Expanding access and improving outcomes for disadvantaged students’
Through social action there are opportunities to meet both the needs of young people and our current students, which we saw through delivering tutoring, school clubs, Saturday activity days, library and community-based activities and in-school workshops. We have seen first-hand how social action activities meet university agendas on access, student employability and civic engagement.
Speaking about Libraries Plus, where students provided tutoring support in libraries in Southampton, our student coordinator Sahiba from the University of Southampton shared:
Libraries Plus is an extremely rewarding and enriching project. At the start of term, a volunteer who is an international student was wary about their English speaking skills: by the end of term, they let me know how much their confidence and social skills had bloomed … parents constantly let me know how pleased they were with the project and how valuable the tutoring had been for their children, who just needed that little bit of extra help to unlock their full potential.
Civic roles and economic growth
Students need to play a much bigger part in universities delivering knowledge exchange, research and civic engagement activities. In our 2022-23 impact data, 71% of partners agreed that working with the Hub had positively changed their perceptions of university students, and 86% agreed that working with the Hub had given them a sense of connection to the student community. In a landscape where ‘only 10% of respondents listed more funding for universities as a priority’ in polling conducted by Public First prior to the 2024 general election, universities need to build stronger relationships with the public and share their expertise and resources.
For students, engaging with local organisations and community members enriches the in-curricular experience. In 2020-21, Dina, an International Business student at Kingston University, took part in a module that Student Hubs delivered in partnership with academics as part of our Community Engaged Learning approach, which embedded real-life briefs with socially impactful organisations. Dina consulted for a local organisation on adapting their marketing, programmes and outreach to engage a wider community of users in the Greater London area. She said:
It has been extremely beneficial, mainly because it has given me practical experience in learning more about different cultures. The fact that in this case my team and I were able to deal with issues related to the module whilst being able to communicate with the client directly helped to make a lot of theories and topics come into practice. It has been very inspirational to work directly with a community partner as it allowed me to actually understand the reality behind how some members of society are being integrated and given me insight into details to take into consideration in a professional environment to communicate with clients with confidence and competence.
Through this module, the partner organisation received research and recommendations they could implement in their local activities: an example of free knowledge exchange and capacity which the Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise (VCSE) sector vitally needs right now. Student social action, facilitating staff volunteering for trusteeships and governorships and partnership activities which fill the funding the VCSE sector is struggling to achieve from elsewhere are all ways in which universities can support their regions to make genuine change. Speaking as a charity ourselves that is closing, we urge universities to do more to support these local organisations and integrate them into the university experience.
University reform
Embedding civic activities and social action, alongside the necessity for universities to reform, presents the opportunity to streamline and prioritise what the university experience means. This includes how the community is integrated into teaching, learning and extracurriculars and how graduate skills are embedded into all facets of university life. Social action should be fun, social and engaging, designed to inspire and develop students into individuals with the skills to make change. Our student and graduate cohorts are facing deep systemic social issues which they are desperate to face, but are struggling to know how to do so amidst balancing their commitments for study, work and making connections with their peers and place.
Social action can provide the space to do this and more for students and communities: what is needed is the long-term investment in our cause by universities themselves, now that Student Hubs are no longer there to champion student social action.
Newly confirmed U.S. secretary of defense Pete Hegseth issued a memo Jan. 29 ordering the Department of Defense to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and offices—including race-conscious admissions at military academies.
The memo establishes a task force “charged with overseeing the department’s efforts to abolish DEI offices” and specifically prohibits “sex-based, race-based or ethnicity-based goals for academic admission” within the department, which oversees military academies. Hegseth wrote that he’s enforcing an executive order issued by President Trump instructing military academy leaders to eliminate DEI initiatives.
When the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in 2023’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and UNC Chapel Hill, the justices explicitly made an exception for the military academies. In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts argued that the institutions, which train the military officer corps, may have “potentially distinct interests” when it comes to admissions and that diversity in the armed forces may be a national security prerogative.
Three of those academies—the Military Academy at West Point, the Naval Academy and the Air Force Academy—have since been sued by anti–affirmative action groups seeking to eliminate the exemption. Last February the Supreme Court declined to hear the case against West Point, and in December a federal judge ruled that the Naval Academy can continue to consider race in admissions; the case against the Air Force Academy is ongoing.
It is unclear if Hegseth’s order to eliminate race-based “quotas” in admissions would prohibit military academies from considering race at all when reviewing applications.
Along with several immigration-related executive orders and actions issued on Inauguration Day, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.” The EO sets several directives for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to enforce immigration law against immigrants without permanent legal status in the U.S. and could implicate employers the government deems as “facilitating” the presence of such individuals.
Sections 4 and 5 of the EO establish civil and criminal enforcement priorities for relevant federal agencies. Specifically, the EO directs the secretary of Homeland Security to enable ICE and USCIS to set priorities for their agencies that would ensure successful enforcement of final orders of removal. Additionally, Section 8 of the EO directs increased enforcement action in the form of civil fines and penalties. The EO directs the secretary of Homeland Security to ensure assessment and collection of all fines and penalties from individuals unlawfully present in the U.S. and, notably, those who facilitate such individuals’ presence in the U.S.
Depending on how the agencies respond to this order, these three sections of the EO could lead to an uptick in worksite enforcement action. As a result of this EO, agencies could take increased enforcement action for employment-related immigration law, which could lead to agency actions such as Form I-9 audits and potential investigations and worksite visits related to immigration compliance. Employers who are not in compliance with federal immigration laws could be considered as entities that potentially “facilitate” the presence of immigrants without permanent legal status, which could lead to significant fines and other penalties for the employers.
Next Steps for HR Leaders
CUPA-HR has always worked to help you ensure that your institution’s Form I-9 processes are in compliance with federal requirements, and we’ve partnered with USCIS for many years to provide periodic guidance, support and resources. We also understand that it is sometimes a challenge to ensure total compliance for large, sprawling campuses and that some of you have employees at worksites across your state, the country and the globe. Through speeches and actions like this executive order, the Trump administration has made it clear that they intend to focus enforcement efforts on immigrants without permanent legal status and businesses employing them. As noted above, it is possible that there could be I-9 audits and site visits to ensure compliance. Penalties for noncompliance could include very large fines and loss of federal funding.
In light of this EO, it is vital for institutions to review their compliance with immigration laws regarding employment eligibility and work authorization. There are several questions HR leaders should ask themselves when reviewing compliance:
If you were notified tomorrow that your institution’s Form I-9 records were going to be audited in the coming weeks, where would your institution be most vulnerable?
What actions do you need to take today to address any potential vulnerabilities?
Do your presidents, provosts and other campus leaders understand and appreciate the magnitude of this potential challenge?
What changes do you need to make to your institution’s hiring and onboarding practices now to ensure compliance moving forward?
CUPA-HR will continue to monitor for any additional updates related to the Form I-9 and other hiring processes related to work authorization. If you need additional guidance or resources, please review the CUPA-HR I-9/E-Verify Toolkit.
On January 22, President Trump signed an executive order (EO) titled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.” The EO directs all federal agencies to “terminate all discriminatory and illegal preferences, mandates, policies, programs, activities, guidance, regulations, enforcement actions, consent orders, and requirements,” to enforce “longstanding civil rights laws,” and to “combat illegal private-sector DEI preferences, mandates, policies, programs, and activities.” The White House also published a fact sheet to supplement the order.
The EO lists several other executive orders that the Trump administration is revoking. Notably, the Trump EO revokes executive order 11246, titled “Equal Employment Opportunity,” which has required federal contractors to have affirmative action plans since 1965. Additionally, the EO orders the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) at the Department of Labor (DOL) to immediately cease “promoting diversity,” “holding federal contractors and subcontractors responsible for taking ‘affirmative action,’” and “allowing or encouraging federal contractors or subcontractors to engage in workforce balancing based on race, color, sex, sexual preference, religion, or national origin.” Both of these actions are explained by the EO to streamline the federal contracting process “to enhance speed and efficiency, reduce costs, and require federal contractors and subcontractors to comply with our civil rights laws.”
The EO also directs each federal agency to include in every federal contract or grant award a term requiring a contractual counterparty or grant recipient to agree that it is in compliance with all applicable federal anti-discrimination laws and a term requiring the counterparty or recipient to certify that it does not operate “any programs promoting DEI that violate any applicable federal antidiscrimination laws.”
The EO also includes orders to encourage the private sector to cease DEI programs and initiatives. Specifically, the EO directs the attorney general, in consultation with other relevant agencies, to promulgate a report with recommendations to enforce civil rights laws and encourage the private sector to end DEI practices. The report is required to identify “the most egregious and discriminatory DEI practitioners in each sector of concern.” It also requires each agency to identify up to nine potential civil compliance investigations as a way to deter DEI programs or principles. The EO lists institutions of higher education with endowments over $1 billion as potential targets for the civil compliance investigations.
Finally, the EO directs the attorney general and secretary of education to issue guidance to state and local educational agencies and institutions of higher education that receive federal dollars or participate in the Title IV federal student loan assistance program regarding “the measures and practices required to comply with Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.”
The EO will have widespread implications for federal contractors in the higher education community. CUPA-HR will share further developments on this EO as they are released.
