Tag: Broken

  • The Spell is Broken, But Credentials Remain

    The Spell is Broken, But Credentials Remain

    For decades, America was gripped by college mania, a culturally and structurally manufactured frenzy that elevated higher education to near-mythical importance. Students, families, and society were swept up in the belief that a college degree guaranteed status, financial security, and social validation. This was no mere aspiration; it was a fevered obsession, fueled by marketing, rankings, policy incentives, and social pressure. Today, the spell is breaking, but the demand for credentials persists.

    Historically, the term “college mania” dates to the 19th century, when historian Frederick Rudolph used it to describe the fervent founding of colleges in the United States, driven by religious zeal and civic ambition. Over time, the mania evolved. Postwar expansion of higher education through the GI Bill normalized college attendance as a societal expectation. Rankings, elite admissions, and media coverage transformed selective schools into symbols of prestige. By the early 2000s, for-profit colleges exploited the frenzy, aggressively marketing to students while federal and state policy incentivized enrollment growth over meaningful outcomes.

    The early 2010s revealed the fragility of this system in what I have described as the College Meltdown: structural dysfunction, declining returns on investment, predatory practices, and neoliberal policy failures exposed the weaknesses behind the hype. At its height, college mania spun students and families into a cycle of aspiration, anxiety, and debt.

    Now, even students at the most elite institutions are disengaging. Many do not attend classes, treating lectures as optional, prioritizing networking, internships, or social signaling over actual learning. This demonstrates that the spell of college mania is unraveling: prestige alone no longer guarantees engagement or meaningful educational outcomes. Families are questioning the value of expensive degrees, underemployment is rising, and alternative pathways, including vocational training, apprenticeships, and nontraditional credentials, are gaining recognition.

    Yet the paradox remains: for many jobs, credentials are still required. Nursing, engineering, teaching, accounting, and countless professional roles cannot be accessed without degrees. The waning mania does not erase the need for qualifications; it simply exposes how much of the cultural obsession — the anxiety, overpaying, and overworking — was socially manufactured rather than inherently necessary for employment. Students are now forced to navigate this tension: pursuing credentials while seeking value, purpose, and meaningful learning beyond the symbol of the degree itself.

    The breaking of the spell is not unique to higher education. History demonstrates that manias — economic, social, or cultural — rise and fall. College mania, once fueled by collective belief and systemic reinforcement, is now unraveling under the weight of its contradictions. Institutions must adapt by emphasizing authentic education rather than prestige, while policymakers can prioritize affordability, accountability, and outcomes. Students, in turn, may pursue paths aligned with practical skills, personal growth, and career readiness rather than chasing symbolic credentials alone.

    The era of college mania may be ending, but with the spell broken comes an opportunity. Higher education can be reimagined as a system that serves public good, intellectual development, and genuine opportunity, balancing the need for credentials with the pursuit of meaningful education.

    Sources:

    Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History (1962).

    Frank Bruni, Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania (2015).

    Dahn Shaulis, Higher Education Inquirer, “College Meltdown and the Manufactured Frenzy” (2011–2025).

    Stanford Law Review, Private Universities in the Public Interest (2025).

    Higher Education Handbook of Theory & Research, Volume 29 (2024).

    Recent reporting on student engagement, class attendance, and labor-market requirements for degrees, 2023–2025.

    Source link

  • How Lawyers Shield a Broken Industry

    How Lawyers Shield a Broken Industry

    In the long decline of American higher education, a certain class of professionals has quietly prospered—lawyers who specialize in defending institutions from the consequences of their own behavior. These attorneys rarely appear in public debates over student debt, predatory recruitment, or collapsing regional colleges. Yet their fingerprints are everywhere: in courtroom strategies designed to run out the clock, in motions that narrow the rights of borrowers, in settlement agreements that mask wrongdoing without forcing structural reform. They are the legal custodians of an industry that has spent decades avoiding accountability.

    These lawyers often frame their role as neutral, simply providing representation to clients who need it. But the nature of the representation matters. When institutions mislead students, inflate job-placement claims, push them into unaffordable debt, or fire whistleblowers who object to unethical practices, these firms defend the institution—not the student, not the truth, and certainly not the public interest. Litigation summaries and public communications frequently present a parallel universe in which colleges are the victims, regulators are overreaching meddlers, and students who seek restitution are opportunists or pawns of political forces.

    The legal work is highly lucrative. In many cases, struggling institutions spend more on their attorneys than they do on direct student support. Colleges on the brink of closure still find six-figure retainers to fight state attorney general investigations or borrower defense claims. Public institutions use taxpayer dollars to shield themselves from transparency, all while students—particularly first-generation, low-income, and working-class students—absorb the losses. Attorneys in this sector are acutely aware of the harms their clients may have caused, yet their work consistently prioritizes institutional preservation over student restitution.

    The history of this defense strategy is well documented. In 2011, federal courts began seeing cases from former students challenging institutions for misleading claims, untransferable credits, and failure to provide promised training. Courts often compelled arbitration, effectively removing class action rights and leaving individual students to pursue costly and complex proceedings alone. This pattern set a precedent: institutional defense relied on procedural tools rather than addressing substantive misconduct. Between 2012 and 2013, state supreme courts upheld arbitration clauses that stripped students of collective redress, signaling to institutions that strategic legal defenses could block accountability. Students’ claims of misrepresentation, fraud, and breaches of enrollment agreements were repeatedly forced into private arbitration. The courts emphasized procedural enforcement over consideration of the underlying harms, allowing institutions to continue operating without public scrutiny.

    From 2015 to 2018, the Department of Education’s Inspector General documented widespread mismanagement of federal Title IV funds, showing that hundreds of millions in federal loans were issued to students at institutions that were later found to have misrepresented outcomes or violated federal regulations. Lawsuits brought by former students during this period, including allegations under the False Claims Act, were often dismissed or compelled to arbitration. Institutions were shielded, while borrowers were left with debt and limited recourse.

    In 2018 and 2019, state attorneys general filed enforcement actions against multiple institutions for fraudulent recruitment practices and misrepresentation of accreditation status. In almost every case, institutions relied on their legal teams to secure procedural victories: dismissal of class action claims, enforcement of arbitration clauses, and delays in settlements. While regulators attempted to intervene, the structural power of corporate legal defense delayed, diluted, or obscured accountability. During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020–2021, students sued institutions for failure to provide adequate online instruction and for abrupt changes in course delivery. Defense attorneys successfully argued that enrollment agreements allowed these operational changes, resulting in widespread dismissal of student claims. Again, institutional defense won the day while students absorbed the financial and educational consequences.

    From 2022 to 2025, the Borrower Defense to Repayment program and the SAVE Plan promised relief for students harmed by mismanaged institutions. Yet litigation and regulatory challenges have slowed implementation. Institutions and their attorneys have repeatedly used procedural maneuvers to contest forgiveness, compel arbitration, or delay repayments, leaving thousands of students in limbo while debt accumulates. Throughout this period, legal strategy has consistently prioritized institutional survival over student restitution. Arbitration clauses, procedural dismissals, and regulatory delay have allowed colleges and universities to maintain access to federal funds, complete mergers, or restructure under bankruptcy protection, all while leaving harmed students with debt, disrupted education, and minimal legal recourse.

    These attorneys also help shape the narratives consumed by policymakers, journalists, and college trustees. Public-facing summaries often downplay institutional misconduct and amplify court decisions that limit student rights. They rarely acknowledge the emotional and financial devastation suffered by borrowers or the systemic risks created when institutions know their lawyers can absorb most of the blow. Instead, they champion a legal environment that treats higher education primarily as a business subject to claims risk, not as a public trust.

    Justice, in this ecosystem, becomes a matter of resources. Students and former employees face a wall of corporate legal expertise, while institutions with long records of abuse continue to operate behind settlements and sealed agreements. Attorneys who could use their considerable skills to protect the most vulnerable instead use them to reinforce a system that extracts value from students and leaves them to fend for themselves once the promises fall apart.

    The Higher Education Inquirer has long documented the College Meltdown: the closures, the debt, the failed oversight, and the human cost. But the meltdown is not only a story about administrators, investors, or federal agencies. It is also a story about the lawyers who defend the indefensible and who help maintain a higher education marketplace where accountability is optional and harm is routine. They may sleep well, but only because the consequences of their work are borne by others.

    The question is not how they sleep at night. The question is how many more students will lose before the legal strategies that protect institutions are no longer enough to protect the industry itself.

    Sources:

    U.S. Department of Education, Borrower Defense to Repayment decision data, 2022–2025

    Government Accountability Office (GAO), “For-Profit Colleges: Student Outcomes and Federal Oversight,” 2021

    Department of Education Office of Federal Student Aid, Borrower Defense decisions, 2020–2025

    State Attorneys General filings and enforcement actions against higher education institutions, 2018–2023

    U.S. Department of Education Office of Inspector General, audits and reports on Title IV program compliance, 2015–2022

    GAO report on arbitration clauses in for-profit colleges, 2018

    Source link

  • Is Higher Ed Broken?

    Is Higher Ed Broken?

    During the recent government shutdown, I bravely traveled to Philadelphia for the annual meeting of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities’ annual meeting. Then I hung out at Bryn Mawr College, where Marjorie Hass, president of the Council of Independent Colleges, gave a fantastic talk about curriculum to a big group (that included not that many faculty). Finally, I Amtraked up to a conference at Drew University in New Jersey. In one week, I made the rounds of what most people think of as “college.”

    In my role as creator of Inside Higher Ed’s wacky weekly newsletter The Sandbox, I go to plenty of higher ed conferences. The Drew gathering was a horse of another color. It convened 150 people from various sectors of learning—tech gurus, mentorship experts, K–12 educators, innovators in experiential learning, those who have started new organizations and institutions—to talk about the future of higher ed.

    The Drew convening opened with a talk by Michael Horn of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. As a reminder, in 2013, he and Clayton Christensen predicted in a New York Times op-ed that online education was going to disrupt our sector and that 25 percent of struggling colleges and universities were going to close. He presented new research that shows dozens of brand-name schools in New England could now be in deep financial doo doo.

    One of the questions at Drew was “What is the purpose of higher education?” If you ask faculty, the answers are likely to loftily uphold ideals we all believe: to open minds, spark curiosity, even help build citizens who will maintain our (endangered) democracy. Most will rightly claim that colleges and universities are engines of economic opportunity.

    When I asked my students at a regional public what they wanted out of their education, they parroted these ideas. They came to be challenged, to meet people unlike themselves, to think differently. College, they complained noted, instills discipline and helps them ease into adulthood. Most believed in the value of a traditional liberal arts education.

    This is not surprising because, well, they’re college students and they’ve been chugging the Kool-Aid we serve them. We live these values when they come to our campuses. My old friend Stanley Hauerwas, the potty-mouthed esteemed theologian, used to say in typical fashion, “I don’t want my students to make up their goddamned minds; they don’t have minds worth making up until I’ve taught them.” Coming to college can feel for many the way Dorothy did when she went over the rainbow. Life goes from drab sepia tones to a Technicolor.

    Twenty years ago, when I won the lottery became faculty, things were still pretty Emerald City–esque. I had landed a tenure-track job after a couple different careers as a nine-to-fiver. What a luxurious and privileged position! How many other employees have this kind of flexibility, job security and, well, lack of accountability?

    But boy howdy, we’re back in dusty Kansas.

    Because here’s the thing: As enrollments drop, state and federal support withers, and philanthropic dollars are necessary to keep our citizens safe, fed and healthy, the number of faculty at most institutions has remained mostly unchanged while expenses continue to rise. This is a math problem a fifth grader could solve. We need to adapt if we want to continue to prepare the next generations to keep our country going.

    A handful of elite institutions have turned themselves into high-end brands, with people mistaking exclusivity for excellence and the national media mistaking them for the whole sector, fueling the rankings arms race and copycat syndrome.

    Meanwhile, most of us are stuck in the messy middle, trying to do everything everywhere all at once. Research, workforce training, student life, athletics, DEI, study abroad, mental health—missions layered like geological strata. The result? Silos, identity crisis, bloat and burnout.

    The sad truth is that few people outside academe are convinced we’re doing a good job. That includes not just the disaffected without degrees who were told they were losers if they didn’t go to college, but plenty of professionals who did and are still paying off debt and are not convinced their kids should follow that path. Plus, the children of privilege are dropping out of fancy-pants schools to work at start-ups. For many young people, the choice now is not which college to attend but whether to bother going at all.

    There are still plenty of folks who want access to more education, and we have to remember that most degree seekers aren’t of traditional college age. But that doesn’t mean even they want to buy what we’re currently selling. There are nearly 4,000 institutions of higher learning in this country. Some will survive, others will thrive, and for some, it may end up looking like the Hunger Games.

    At dinner with a dozen presidents this fall, one told a story that captured how resistance to current reality can end. That president had been warning his faculty about the financial cliff ahead. They either didn’t believe him or couldn’t be bothered to figure out how to change. Then he told them the school was closing and handed out pink slips. That’s what happens when you wait for someone else to solve the math problem.

    Those in the group that Michael Horn and Clay Christensen said were going to go belly up—small privates and regional publics—are going to have to do some hard rethinking and find a way to be something other than, in the formulation of Jeff Selingo, “Comprehensive U.”

    We’ve been able to muddle through with tiny ivory towers on each campus: disciplinary niches, departments, divisions, colleges. The world, however, does not follow the ways of our little chessboard pieces that each move in their quirky little ways.

    We are in the midst of some serious paradigm shifts, folks. Not just in the last two decades, but in the past two years, since AI began to change every aspect of life as we know it, whether you like it or not (and yes, I know that many do not like it and stick their fingers in their ears saying la la la I can’t hear you).

    This is why the Drew convening felt like going from sepia tones to Oz. If there was a man behind the curtain, it was the visionary president of Drew, Hilary Link, whose scholarship on the Renaissance shows that we already have within us what we need, if we’re only able to see from a different perspective. This perpetual learner has been on an 18-month journey asking questions of all different types of thinkers and trying to figure out where to go next. The convening was a first step in consolidating what she’s learned, backed by a university board that understands the survival challenges and prizes boldness.

    In the final session, President Link asked me to talk about innovations I’ve seen as I talk to presidents around the country. The sad truth is that while there are many creative leaders well aware of the need to change, they face resistance from the usual suspects.

    Boards are often filled with well-meaning and accomplished people who went to college in another era and may not understand much about our current environment.

    And faculty cling to traditions that define their own legitimacy. The Angry Eight (or Furious Five or Irate Individual) on a campus can stop brilliant ideas in two sessions of the Faculty Senate. And while these longtime faculty members try to burn it all down, they rarely come up with realistic and informed solutions to move forward.

    Because of resistance from above or below, institutions are cycling through presidents faster than drug-aided Lance Armstrong could pedal, leaving little time for anything but triage. Finding good examples of meaningful innovation is hard.

    So, I pointed to a quirky example that has caught my attention. The Community Solution Education System consists of six private, previously independent not-for-profit institutions that act as one entity. They share infrastructure and an overarching mission while maintaining their individuality. This approach takes aim at the real obstacles: redundancy, inefficiency, low morale, leadership churn and the isolation that keeps colleges from learning from one another. It smashes the silos.

    Shared services for essential stuff—HR, IT, procurement—free up resources for student services. Networks of presidents and provosts who actually talk to one another about practical, scalable solutions. Small, niche-y colleges get the efficiencies of large ones without losing their soul.

    Collaboration and radical cooperation, not competition, might be higher ed’s best survival strategy. The Community Solution proves that shared purpose doesn’t have to mean sameness. It’s one of the rare higher ed innovations not about shiny tech or brand reinvention but about rebuilding the scorched environment of the ecosystem itself.

    The ground beneath us is shifting faster than ChatGPT could rewrite this essay. One of the speakers at the meeting in New Jersey aptly quoted the boss. Bruce Springsteen sang, “I can’t tell my courage from my desperation.” Yep. As long as it motivates you to get shit done, does it really matter which one it is?

    Rachel Toor is a contributing editor at Inside Higher Ed and the co-founder of The Sandbox, a weekly newsletter that allows presidents and chancellors to write anonymously. She is also a professor of creative writing and the author of books on weirdly diverse subjects. Reach her here with questions, comments and complaints compliments.

    Source link

  • A Broken Pipeline to College and Jobs

    A Broken Pipeline to College and Jobs

    K12 Inc., now rebranded as Stride, is a Wall Street darling—but for students, it’s a nightmare. Critics call it “one of the worst charter schools in America,” with dropout rates soaring above 50% and graduation rates below 30%. Behind the glossy marketing and investor pitches, Stride operates as a pipeline not to opportunity, but to debt, dead-end jobs, and corporate profit.

    Stride presents itself as an innovative online education platform, but the numbers tell a different story. Full-time virtual schools nationally graduate just 54.6% of students, compared to 85% in traditional public schools. K12/Stride’s virtual offerings hover around 56.3%, with blended programs faring slightly better at 80.9%. In some districts, however, the picture is grim: Kansas K12 charters reported graduation rates as low as 26.3%, while local brick-and-mortar schools achieved nearly 90%.

    High student churn compounds the problem. Stride-powered schools report turnover of 50–57%, highlighting systemic disengagement and academic instability. Student-teacher ratios are extreme, sometimes exceeding 40:1, more than double the national average. Only a third of K12 schools met Adequate Yearly Progress under No Child Left Behind, illustrating a chronic failure to deliver even basic accountability.

    K-12 education is meant to be a pipeline—leading students into college, skilled careers, and financial stability. For students leaving Stride underprepared or without diplomas, that pipeline is broken. Many are pushed into low-wage work, forced into remedial college courses, or trapped in a credential system designed to extract debt rather than confer opportunity. In this way, Stride acts less as an educational institution and more as a conveyor belt funneling vulnerable youth into economic precarity.

    Stride is backed by investors and private equity interests that profit from this dysfunction. Its glossy “Graduation Guarantee,” introduced in 2021, promises remediation for students who age out without graduating. But these measures are reactive, not systemic; they don’t address the structural incentives that prioritize profit over learning. Every public dollar flowing into Stride’s coffers is money extracted from communities, while many students exit the system with weak credentials and limited prospects.

    The broader story is clear: billionaire-backed for-profit virtual schools like Stride are part of a national effort to privatize public education, monetize student debt, and commodify learning. They transform education from a public good into a profit center, leaving students and families to bear the real cost. Without accountability, oversight, and a renewed commitment to equitable public education, this pipeline—supposed to carry students toward opportunity—will continue to deliver them into debt, underemployment, and economic marginalization.

    Sources

    Source link

  • Peer review is broken, and pedagogical research has a fix

    Peer review is broken, and pedagogical research has a fix

    An email pings into my inbox: peer reviewer comments on your submission #1234. I take a breath and click.

    Three reviewers have left feedback on my beloved paper. The first reviewer is gentle, constructive, and points out areas where the work could be tightened up. One reviewer simply provides a list of typos and points out where the grammar is not technically correct. The third reviewer is vicious. I stop reading.

    Later that afternoon, I sit in the annual student assessment board for my department. Over a painstaking two hours, we discuss, interrogate, and wrestle with how we, as educators, can improve our feedback practices when we mark student work. We examine the distribution of students marks closely, looking out for outliers, errors, or evidence of an ill-pitched assessment. We reflect upon how we can make our written feedback more useful. We suggest thoughtful and innovative ways to make our practice more consistent and clearer.

    It then strikes me how these conversations happen in parallel – peer review sits in one corner of academia, and educational assessment and feedback sits in another. What would happen, I wonder, if we started approaching peer review as a pedagogical problem?

    Peer review as pedagogy

    Peer review is a high stakes context. We know that we need proper, expert scrutiny of the methodological, theoretical, and analytical claims of research to ensure the quality, credibility, and advancement of what we do and how we do it. However, we also know that there are problems with the current peer review system. As my experience attests to, issues including reviewer biases and conflicts, lack of transparency in editorial decision-making, inconsistencies in the length and depth of reviewer feedback all plague our experiences. Peer reviewers can be sharp, hostile, and unconstructive. They can focus on the wrong things, be unhelpful in their vagueness, or miss the point entirely. These problems threaten the foundations of research.

    The good news is that we do not have to reinvent the wheel. For decades, people in educational research, or the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), have been grappling both theoretically and empirically with the issue of giving and receiving feedback. Educational research has considered best practices in feedback presentation and content, learner and marker feedback literacies, management of socioemotional responses to feedback, and transparency of feedback expectations. The educational feedback literature is vast and innovative.

    However – curiously – efforts to improve the integrity of peer review don’t typically frame this as a pedagogical problem, that can borrow insights from the educational literature. This is, I think, a woefully missed opportunity. There are at least four clear initiatives from the educational scholarship that could be a useful starting point in tightening up the rigour of peer review.

    What is feedback for?

    We would rarely mark student work without a clear assessment rubric and standardised assessment criteria. In other words, as educators we wouldn’t sit down to assess students work without at least first considering what we have asked them to do. What are the goalposts? What are the outcomes? What are we giving feedback for?

    Rubrics and assessment criteria provide transparent guidelines on what is expected of learners, in an effort to demystify the hidden curriculum of assessment and reduce subjectivity in assessment practice. In contrast, peer reviewers are typically provided with scant information about what to assess manuscripts for, which can lead to inconsistencies between journal aims and scope, reviewer comments, and author expectations.

    Imagine if we had structured journal-specific rubrics, based on specific, predefined criteria that aligned tightly with the journal’s mission and requirements. Imagine if these rubrics guided decision-making and clarified the function of feedback, rather than letting reviewers go rogue with their own understanding of what the feedback is for.

    Transparent rubrics and criteria could also bolster the feedback literacy of reviewers and authors. Feedback literacy is an established educational concept, which refers to a student’s capacity to appreciate, make sense of, and act upon their written feedback. Imagine if we approached peer review as an opportunity to develop feedback literacy, and we borrowed from this literature.

    Do we all agree?

    Educational research clearly highlights the importance of moderation and calibration for educators to ensure consistent assessment practices. We would never allow grades to be returned to students without some kind of external scrutiny first.

    Consensus calibration refers to the practice of multiple evaluators working together to ensure consistency in their feedback and to agree upon a shared understanding of relevant standards. There is a clear and robust steer from educational theory that this is a useful exercise to minimise bias and ensure consistency in feedback. This practice is not typically used in peer review.

    Calibration exercises, where reviewers assess the same manuscript and have opportunity to openly discuss their evaluations, might be a valuable and evidence-based addition to the peer review process. This could be achieved in practice by more open peer review processes, where reviewers can see the comments of others and calibrate accordingly, or through a tighter steer from editors when recruiting new reviewers.

    That is not to say, of course, that reviewers should all agree on the quality of a manuscript. But any effort to consolidate, triangulate, and calibrate feedback can only be useful to authors as they attempt to make sense of it.

    Is this feedback timely?

    Best practice in educational contexts also supports the adoption of opportunities to provide formative feedback. Formative feedback is feedback that helps learners improve as they are learning, as opposed to summative feedback whereby the merit of a final piece of work is evaluated. In educational contexts, this might look like anything from feedback on drafts through to informal check-in conversations with markers.

    Applying the formative/summative distinction to peer review may be useful in helping authors improve their work in dialogue with reviewers and editors, rather than purely summative, which would merely judge whether the manuscript is fit for publication. In practice, adoption of this can be achieved through the formative feedback offered by registered reports, whereby authors receive peer review and editorial direction before data is collected or accessed, at a time where they can actually make use ot it.

    Formative feedback through the adoption of registered reports can provide opportunity for specific and timely suggestions for improving the methodology or research design. By fostering a more developmental and formative approach to peer review, the process can become a tool for advancing knowledge, rather than simply a gatekeeping mechanism.

    Is this feedback useful?

    Finally, the educational concept of feedforward, which focuses on providing guidance for future actions rather than only critiquing past performance, needs to be applied to peer review too. By applying feedforward principles, reviewers can shift their feedback to be more forward-looking, offering tangible, discrete, and actionable suggestions that help the author improve their work in subsequent revisions.

    In peer review, approaching comments with a feedforward framing may transform feedback into a constructive dialogue that motivates people to make their work better by taking actionable steps, rather than a hostile exchange built upon unclear standards and (often) mismatched expectations.

    So the answers to improving some parts of the peer review process are there. We can, if we’re clever, really improve the fairness, consistency, and developmental value of reviewer comments. Structured assessment criteria, calibration, formative feedback mechanisms, and feedforward approaches are just a few strategies that can enhance the integrity of peer review. The answers are intuitive – but they are not yet standard practice in peer review because we typically don’t approach peer review as pedagogy.

    There are some problems that this won’t fix. Peer review relies on the unpaid labour of time-poor academics in an increasingly precarious academia, which adds challenge to efforts to improve the integrity of the process.

    However, there are steps we can take – we need to now think about how these can be achieved in practice. By clarifying the peer review practice, tightening up the rigour of feedback quality, and applying educational interventions to improve the process, this takes an important step in fixing peer review for the future of research.

    Source link

  • Higher Ed’s Broken Promises and the American Student

    Higher Ed’s Broken Promises and the American Student

    “I’m hung up on dreams I’ll never see.”

    That Southern rock refrain from Molly Hatchet captures the bitter reality faced by millions of Americans who invested in higher education only to be left with debt, shattered hopes, and uncertain futures.

    Educator Gary Roth’s The Educated Underclass points to a growing class of credentialed individuals caught in precarious economic and social positions—overqualified yet underpaid, burdened by debt without the stability education promised. Yet it is the borrowers’ own stories that reveal the human toll behind the numbers.

    Over the past month, The Higher Education Inquirer has chronicled the experiences of borrowers misled by predatory institutions—mainly for-profit colleges—through its Borrower Defense Story Series. These narratives shed light on the deeply personal consequences of institutional deception and a federal loan forgiveness process that is often slow, bureaucratic, and uneven.

    In one story, a single mother describes her experience at Chamberlain University School of Nursing. She followed every instruction, met every deadline, and committed herself fully to a career in health care. Yet she never earned her degree. Despite this, she remains burdened with thousands of dollars in student loan debt. Her borrower defense application has yet to yield relief.

    Another borrower shares her journey with Kaplan University Online, where promises of flexible learning and job placement proved empty. After transferring and completing her degree elsewhere, she still faces uncertainty as her borrower defense claim drags on, highlighting the emotional toll of navigating a broken loan forgiveness system.

    A third story critiques the broader system of higher education finance, describing how students—especially those without family wealth or institutional support—become trapped in debt relationships that limit their autonomy and economic mobility. Rather than offering a pathway to security, college becomes a mechanism of financial entrapment.

    Most recently, a former fashion student recounts how private loans—unlike federal loans—offered no path for borrower defense relief after she attended a program marketed with glowing career outcomes that never materialized. The result was devastating financial consequences with little recourse.

    These individual stories are not exceptions. As of April 30, 2024, over 974,000 borrowers had received more than $17 billion in loan discharges under borrower defense rules, mostly through group claims tied to scandals involving Corinthian Colleges, ITT Tech, and DeVry. Yet hundreds of thousands still await decisions, and many are excluded entirely due to private loans, school exclusions, or bureaucratic delays.

    The borrower defense rule was meant to shield students from fraud, but political interference, legal challenges, and an overwhelmed bureaucracy have marred its implementation. Behind the statistics are people deceived, indebted, and left behind.

    Meanwhile, elite institutions hoard resources, adjunct faculty struggle to survive, and the promise of higher education rings hollow for many.

    “I’m hung up on dreams I’ll never see.” This lyric is not just poetry but the lived reality for millions. Unless there is radical change—debt cancellation, labor protections, honest admissions, and accountability—the cycle of exploitation will only grow louder.

    Some were sold dreams they could never afford. Many of those dreams are now lost.

    Sources

    Roth, Gary. The Educated Underclass. Pluto Press, 2022

    National Center for Education Statistics. “Debt After College”

    The Institute for College Access and Success (TICAS). “Student Debt and the Class of 2023”

    American Psychological Association. “Mental Health Impacts of Student Debt”

    Bousquet, Marc. How the University Works. NYU Press, 2008

    McMillan Cottom, Tressie. Lower Ed. The New Press, 2017

    https://www.highereducationinquirer.org/2025/07/i-did-everything-right-and-im-still.html

    https://www.highereducationinquirer.org/2025/07/fashion-gone-bad-for-private-student.html

    https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106530

    https://standup4borrowerdefense.com

    https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/student-aid-policy/2023/10/24/colleges-concerned-about-rise-borrower-defense-claims

    Source link

  • Graeme Turner’s ‘broken’ universities – Campus Review

    Graeme Turner’s ‘broken’ universities – Campus Review

    AnalysisCommentary

    Graeme Turner’s new book on the sector surveys the wreckage and offers some solutions

    Susan FordeJuly 14, 2025Last Updated: July 14, 2025

    0

    The Australian university sector has come under considerable pressure in recent years. It is currently in a parlous state.

    Please login below to view content or subscribe now.

    Membership Login

    Source link

  • Can knowledge exchange fix a broken economy?

    Can knowledge exchange fix a broken economy?

    There’s always a challenge in trying to describe knowledge exchange, how it’s funded, why it’s worth worrying about, and what it actually does to the economy.

    Mechanisms

    The default is to talk about its underpinning mechanisms. The way that money goes to universities, their partners and then circulates into the real economy, and then hopefully something good happens. The problem with this approach is that outside of experts and hardy enthusiasts like me this approach is, well, rather dull.

    And knowledge exchange is a less than glamorous name for some of the most important work universities do. ESRC, one of UKRI’s funding councils, has a rather elegant way of describing it:

    The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is committed to encouraging collaboration between researchers and businesses, policymakers, the public and third sector organisations (for example charities and voluntary groups). This can create mutual benefits and contribute to positive economic and social impacts outside academia, for example through changes to policy and practice or new products and services created by commercialising research. Two-way interactions of this type are often collectively referred to as knowledge exchange. This is an umbrella term that covers a wide range of activities researchers might engage in, including policy engagement, public engagement, commercialisation and business engagement.

    A less elegant way is to say that universities working together with other organisations can make the economy and society stronger. It is not a dry technocratic thing but the very way in which the wonderful things that are produced in universities become useful. Great ideas without an audience are interesting but fruitless. An expectant audience with no great ideas are bound for disappointment.

    This means that there must be both the conditions for useful ideas to be produced and the conditions for organisations to make use of them. Research England, another funding body of UKRI, funds knowledge exchange through the Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF) and the Connecting Capability Fund (CCF). While HEIF is a more general knowledge exchange fund the CCF is focussed on the commercialisation of research with business. These funds are small compared to the overall research funding pots. HEIF is a formula based fund of £260m compared to an overall UKRI budget of over £8bn.

    The key question isn’t whether knowledge exchange is a good thing. It self evidently is. But whether the intervention by funders is producing bigger impacts than would naturally happen through universities working with businesses, policy makers, and other groups. After all, universities would still benefit from equity in spin-outs and bask in the warm glow of civic participation even if they weren’t supported to do so.

    Reports

    UKRI has brought out three new reports that look at knowledge exchange funding.

    The first report is an evaluation of HEIF carried out by Tomas Coates Ulrichsen. The part which UKRI will be most proud of, and should definitely cause them to consider whether their funding is enough, is that every £1 invested in HEIF produces £14.8 return on investment if you crowd in actual and estimated external impacts. Perhaps even more impressively the report also suggests that “38% of knowledge exchange outputs and incomes would not have happened in the absence of HEIF.” This isn’t activity that is being paid for twice but activity that is actually being created.

    However, while this makes the case persuasively for the value of HEIF it’s the summary which gives us a bigger clue into what is going on in the economy. The report notes

    The past two decades has seen KE income secured by English HEPs grow significantly in real terms, with KE income 81% higher in 2022/23 than in 2003/04 for HEPs in receipt of HEIF during the period 2017/18 – 2022/23 (the vast majority of HEPs in England). However, what is clear is that this twenty-year period is characterised by two very different decades. While KE income grew strongly – and faster than the economy as a whole – during the first decade, the past ten years has seen this growth largely stagnate. The limited growth in KE income may well reflect the multiple crises and shocks the UK has faced since then, not least with the Covid-19 pandemic, cost of living crisis, and departure from the European Union and the effects of this on R&D with research grants and contracts income to HEPs from European sources declining almost 30% in real terms since the EU referendum in 2016. KE income now appears to track trends in the economy more widely (as measured by the UK’s GDP).

    To read the inverse of this is that the wider economy is a constraining factor on the ability of universities to deploy their research for social and economic benefit.

    There is perhaps a tacit assumption that if universities produce great and useful research it will lead to great and useful things in the economy and society. This is only true as long as the economy has the absorptive capacity to keep the cycle of knowledge exchange investment which leads to knowledge exchange outputs which supports knowledge exchange income churning.

    Help/HEIF

    The evaluation of HEIF carried out by PA Consulting is particularly illuminating within this frame. The key findings are that in a changing policy environment HEIF has anchored the sector to make some significant social and economic impacts. It is the flexibility of the fund which has allowed specialisms to develop, the autonomy of the fund has found favourability in the sector, its stability has allowed for long-term partnerships, and a more permissive approach to accountability has allowed providers to demonstrate their value without drowning under administration.

    The report is full of examples of how HEIF funding has catalysed wider social and economic activity but the examples have two things in common. The first is that allowing flexibility in the fund means it can be deployed in multiple partners in multiple ways. This means that even where there are wider economic challenges the funding can be tailored to suit the challenges of local economies. The second is that the long-term nature of the fund allows for greater stability within partnerships to withstand adverse economic headwinds.

    Together, the two reports point toward HEIF as being successful as it demonstrably supports economic growth but does so through flexibility and provider autonomy linked, to a lesser or greater extent, to national priorities. It’s only a small fund but it is impactful.

    Same old SMEs

    The final report on CCF by Wellspring again demonstrates a positive return on investment. The programme has led to 200 new spin-outs and supported over 1,500 SMEs. The programme has led to the launch of at least 338 products and services and it is expected more will be launched over time, particularly in high-tech spin-outs.

    The obvious albeit incorrect conclusion to draw would be that if each of these interventions induce such strong economic benefits then making the intervention larger would make the economy stronger. In fact, if the economic returns are so strong then the projects could presumably be 10, 100, or 1,000 times bigger, and continue to provide economic return.

    Instead, what these reports highlight is that knowledge exchange funding is a product of the wider economy. There is a natural limit to how much activity can take place as there comes a point where the economy is not large enough or dynamic enough to absorb the benefits of universities’ work. In fact, these reports indirectly demonstrate how economies get stuck into a death spiral. Productivity stalls which prevents the absorption of innovative products and services. Without innovative products and services the economy cannot become more productive. And so on.

    The benefits these schemes are realising would suggest they are not close to meeting the capacity of the economy and could therefore be much larger. It is also a matter of purpose. The funds are designed on a premise that there is capacity to make use of university work. It is a much harder question to imagine how funding should be designed where it is necessary to restart a broken economy.

    The impact of these funds is striking, the reports written about them are convincing, however they open a door to a wider question of whether knowledge exchange funding is big enough, well directed enough, or tooled properly, to fix the UK’s entrenched economic issues including its collapsed productivity.

    Source link

  • Americans Are GIVING UP On Working, And the Job Market Is Broken. (Large Man Abroad)

    Americans Are GIVING UP On Working, And the Job Market Is Broken. (Large Man Abroad)







    Higher Education Inquirer : Americans Are GIVING UP On Working, And the Job Market Is Broken. (Large Man Abroad)




    Source link