Tag: Build

  • We Must Build Structures That Make Collaboration the Default

    We Must Build Structures That Make Collaboration the Default

    During National Transfer Student Week, I had the opportunity to present my dissertation findings. I was eager to share insights and connect with others doing similar work. Yet my excitement quickly gave way to disappointment: Multiple organizations were hosting overlapping events. Would anyone attend my session if there were other opportunities?

    That moment clarified, for me, a larger truth about the transfer ecosystem. Despite our shared commitment to improving outcomes for transfer students, we often work in parallel rather than in partnership. True, sustained collaboration remains one of the missing links in creating a more coherent and equitable transfer experience.

    Some Context 

    Collaboration should be the connective tissue of the transfer ecosystem. No single institution, system or organization can solve the challenges of transfer alone. When institutions, state agencies, employers and organizations work together, they have a better chance of building workable and successful pathways. The literature has increasingly suggested this point. Aspen et al.’s Tackling Transfer initiative implies that isolated campus reforms will not be entirely successful. 

    It emphasizes strengthening partnerships and using shared data and goals to make improvements. Similarly, both versions of the Transfer Playbook advocate success via intentional, ongoing partnerships.

    Professional associations echo this message. For example, the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers’ new conference, called The Assembly, is rooted in collaboration across sectors and institutions to solve transfer and mobility problems. This shift positions the association as a platform for collaboration, not just a publisher of best practices. Likewise, the National Association of Higher Education Systems is spearheading initiatives in the transfer and mobility space because it understands the need to have system-level collaboration.

    These references send a clear message: Collaboration is an important strategy to improve the learner’s experience. This is a fundamental shift in our focus. When we center collaboration on the learner experience, rather than on the institution, it shifts the focus and the opportunities. Rather than designing projects around the interests of a single campus, foundation, or consulting contract, collaboration gives us the opportunity to ask, “What happens to the student through the educational journey that prevents successful transfer, and how do we solve that together?”

    Challenges and Opportunities

    As essential as it is, collaboration seems to be a challenge. To truly accomplish a collaborative network, institutions and agencies will need to look beyond their own boundaries. They need to be willing to pause their own goals to complement, support or provide an opportunity to another group. This has influential and financial implications, but it may end up being a better use of limited and shrinking dollars.

    Changing the nature of how we collaborate could afford more opportunities and have a big impact. Collaboration can be complicated for organizations whose funding depends on producing value through exposure, engagement or consulting revenue. Partnerships may overshadow individual organizational accomplishments and lead to future financial growth.

    For institutions, grant dollars for improving transfer are so highly competitive that they are sometimes impossible to obtain. More likely than not, funders are looking for the largest impact for their dollar, and that often translates into large-scale system- or statewide initiatives that will affect the most students or provide a large enough data set. That goal immediately eliminates small colleges from opportunities, further reducing the chance for improvement at the institutions that often need it the most.

    On campuses, the need for collaboration is just as clear. Advocating for transfer is not the job of a single person with “transfer” in their title. It requires coordinated action across admissions, advising, faculty governance, financial aid, registrar, student life and employer partnerships. AACRAO’s task force on transfer and the award of credit, for instance, highlights the importance of cross-functional teams in redesigning policies and communication so students experience a coherent—not conflicting—set of messages about how their credits move.

    Interestingly, the very reports we rely on for guidance point toward a different path. The Tackling Transfer work, for example, is grounded in multistate, cross-sector collaboration and explicitly calls for understanding the incentives and disincentives that shape institutional behavior around transfer. Lumina’s guidance on building local talent ecosystems emphasizes that durable change comes from coalitions willing to redesign systems together, not from one-off pilot projects.

    What If We …

    So, what might it look like to take collaboration seriously across the transfer ecosystem? Consider these collaborations:

    • Build shared agendas and calendars. National, regional and virtual events could be coordinated through a master calendar or hub so that transfer professionals aren’t forced to choose between overlapping webinars and conferences hosted by organizations that share the same goals.
    • Co-create tools and publications. Instead of each group producing its own tool kits and reports, organizations might collaborate on cross-branded resources that show how their frameworks align. Treat multiple opportunities as complements, not competitors.
    • Align state and regional efforts with institutional partnerships. The literature on national transfer reform emphasizes that systems and regions are critical units of change. State agencies, coordinating boards and foundations can use this insight to convene partnerships that bring institutions, employers and community organizations to the same table.
    • Elevate practitioners as collaborators, not just implementers. The most effective transfer-focused reports and research draw heavily on the expertise of people doing the day-to-day work of advising, curriculum design and transcript evaluation. Our collaborations should be built with, not just for, these practitioners.
    • Expand professional development and knowledge. Ideas could be to offer membership deals across organizations that support transfer students to engage more people in professional development opportunities amid decreasing budgets. Or, create a centralized repository or organization that can serve as a single source of information, rather than the plethora of sites, agencies, organizations and companies offering current professional development and resources.

    These aren’t small shifts. They require seeing ourselves not as competitors in the transfer space, but as collaborators of its progress.

    And So …

    If we truly want to strengthen the ecosystem, we must build structures that make collaboration the default and not the exception. Many of the publications we rely on and reference already pointing us there. The question is whether we will follow their lead, not just in language but in practice. By working together, we can move beyond fragmented efforts toward a shared vision of mobility, equity and opportunity for every learner who dares to transfer.

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  • 6 Effective Ways to Build Attention and Boost Student Participation – Faculty Focus

    6 Effective Ways to Build Attention and Boost Student Participation – Faculty Focus

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  • The AI Teammate: Three Roles to Build Student AI Fluency – Faculty Focus

    The AI Teammate: Three Roles to Build Student AI Fluency – Faculty Focus

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  • The AI Teammate: Three Roles to Build Student AI Fluency – Faculty Focus

    The AI Teammate: Three Roles to Build Student AI Fluency – Faculty Focus

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  • Efforts to build belonging may get the problem the wrong way around

    Efforts to build belonging may get the problem the wrong way around

    Back in January 2024, John Blake, the now-departing Office for Students’ Director for Fair Access and Participation, was talking about the future of access and participation plans.

    Alongside announcing additional groups of students who might be at risk – service children, young carers, prisoners, commuter students, parents, and Jewish students – noted that “sense of belonging” had appeared in lots of evidence reviews as relevant to many of the risks.

    I’d urge providers to think hard about practical, enduringly impactful work they might do around that idea as part of new APPs.

    Now that all the approved APPs are in, I’ve had a look at what providers are actually proposing.

    I’ve reviewed approved access and participation plans from across the sector in England, extracting every mention of belonging as a strategic priority, every identification of belonging deficits as a risk, and every intervention designed to address them.

    The result is a picture of how the sector understands and responds to belonging challenges. The pattern I’ve found is so consistent across provider types, mission groups, and geographical locations that it ought to amount to a sector-wide consensus about how to “do” belonging.

    The problem is that that consensus appears to be fundamentally at odds with what research tells us about how belonging actually works.

    The deficit model at scale

    Nearly every university identifies that specific disadvantaged groups – Black students, mature students, care-experienced students, disabled students, commuter students, students from IMD Quintile 1 – report lower belonging scores than their peers.

    They then design targeted interventions to address this deficit – peer mentoring schemes for Black students, mature student networks and “mingles”, care-experienced student buddy schemes, disability-specific student groups, commuter-specific transition support.

    The interventions are pretty homogeneous. Birkbeck is running “sustained programmes of Black Unity Events” to “provide a space for Black students to authentically be themselves, form connections and friendships”. Leeds Arts has created “My/Your/Our Space” – a “safer space and community relevant to background” specifically for students of minoritised ethnicities. Northampton has developed a “Black Excellence Programme” designed “to empower Black undergraduate students early on in their transition to level 4 courses with the confidence, sense of belonging and mattering to become resilient leaders and role models”.

    Greenwich has implemented the “Living Black at University Project to support BAME students develop a sense of belonging and community outside of the classroom”. Liverpool John Moores is “developing a Black students peer network via JMSU, focusing on creating a black student community”.

    It’s not just ethnicity. For mature students, East Anglia will “continue specific co-created sense of belonging opportunities for groups of students to meet socially” through a mature student network. Leeds is expanding a “middle ground network pilot” – “co-creating spaces (virtual, physical) for mature and ‘younger mature’ students to help develop a greater sense of belonging”. Bristol is implementing “enhanced mature student community building through mingles, student advocate-led events, and an extended mature student welcome and transition programme”.

    The pattern is almost identical across every characteristic. Care-experienced students get targeted belonging interventions at York (“Achieve HE program aims for increased sense of belonging socially and academically”), Durham (“dedicated mature learners coordinator” aims for “increased sense of belonging”), and Portsmouth (specialist support for “enhanced sense of belonging”). Disabled students get belonging-focused societies and groups. Commuter students get special spaces. And so on.

    Nearly every institution frames belonging as something that specific groups lack, and that requires special intervention to remedy. The language is consistent – students from disadvantaged backgrounds “may struggle to feel they fit in”, “can lack a sense of belonging at university”, “feel disconnected from their academics/tutors and/or fellow students”, and “feel isolated or unsupported from the moment they arrived at University”.

    The Wisconsin problem

    I’ve talked about this before here, but about a decade ago, there was a problem at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Across a collection of STEM courses, there was a significant achievement gap between marginalised groups (all religious minorities and non-White students) and privileged students.

    Psychology professor Markus Brauer had an idea based on his previous research on social norms messaging – communicating to people that most of their peers hold certain pro-social attitudes or engage in certain pro-social behaviours.

    He started by trying out posters, then showed two groups of students videos. One saw an off-the-shelf explanation of bias and micro-aggressions. The other saw lots of students describing the day-to-day benefits of diversity – a “social norms” video revealing that 87 per cent of students actively supported diversity and inclusion.

    The latter video had a strong, significant, positive effect on inclusive climate scores for students from marginalised backgrounds. They reported that their peers behaved more inclusively and treated them with more respect.

    But by the end of the semester, the achievement gap was completely eliminated. Not through remedial support for struggling students, not through special programmes for disadvantaged groups, but through changing what everyone believed about what everyone else valued.

    The Wisconsin intervention didn’t create a “Black Student Success Program”, didn’t offer “enhanced support for marginalised students”, and didn’t build “safe spaces” for specific groups or train “allies” to support disadvantaged students. It told all students the truth about what their peers already valued – and behaviour changed dramatically.

    The research found that while most students genuinely valued diversity, they incorrectly believed their peers didn’t share these values, and the misperception created a false social norm that discouraged inclusive behaviour.

    Students who might naturally reach out across cultural boundaries held back, thinking they’d be the odd ones out. When you correct that misperception – when you say “actually, 87 per cent of your peers actively support diversity” – you transform intervention from an exceptional act requiring special training into standard behaviour.

    But most elements of the dominant APP approach do the opposite:

    • Wisconsin said: “Most students already value diversity – here’s proof”. UK universities say: “We need to create spaces where Black students can feel they belong”
    • Wisconsin said: “Inclusive behaviour is normal here”. UK universities say: “We’ll train mature students how to access support networks”
    • Wisconsin said: “Let’s change what everyone thinks everyone else believes”. UK universities say: “Let’s give disadvantaged groups the resources they lack”

    The Wisconsin research explicitly warns against the dominant approach. As the researchers note:

    “…empowering marginalised groups through special initiatives can paradoxically highlight their ‘different’ status, reinforcing the hierarchies we’re trying to dismantle.

    Power and perception

    To understand why the targeted approach fails, we need to examine how power operates in university settings. Brauer’s research identifies several key dynamics.

    Power shapes perception – those with social power tend to stereotype less powerful groups while seeing their own group as diverse individuals. Power also affects behaviour – powerful individuals act more freely, take bigger risks, and break social rules more often. In seminars, confident students dominate discussions while others remain silent – not because they lack ideas, but because power dynamics constrain their behaviour.

    Most importantly, power creates attribution biases. When powerful people succeed, we attribute it to their personal qualities. When less powerful people fail, we blame their circumstances. This creates self-fulfilling prophecies that reinforce existing hierarchies.

    The dynamics explain why traditional EDI initiatives often fail. Telling powerful groups they’re biased can actually reinforce stereotyping by making them defensive. Meanwhile, “empowering” marginalised groups through special initiatives paradoxically highlights their “different” status, reinforcing the hierarchies we’re trying to dismantle.

    For Brauer, the students don’t lack belonging. The institution lacks inclusive structures that make belonging feel normal. There’s a profound difference between “you need help fitting in because you’re different” and “this is how we all do things here – welcome to the crew.”

    Ticking the boxes

    So why are universities doing this? Partly because OfS asked them to think about belonging, partly because APP spend has to be “on” the disadvantaged groups, and partly because “we’re doing a thing” makes sense in a compliance environment.

    It’s easily documented, measurable by group, defensible to regulators, and demonstrably “doing something”. The Wisconsin approach would be much harder to report in an APP. How do you document “we told everyone that most students already value diversity”? Which “target group” got the “intervention”? What’s the “spend per head”? How do you prove that changing perceived social norms reduced the achievement gap when you didn’t target any specific demographic?

    As such, the APP architecture itself pushes providers toward deficit-model interventions. You can’t write “we’re going to make peer support universal and student-led because that’s just how induction works here”, because that doesn’t read as an access and participation intervention.

    You can’t write “we’re going to survey students and publicize that 78 per cent actively welcome international students”. That doesn’t look like you’re spending money on disadvantaged groups, or map onto the OfS risk register.

    The result is targeted compliance theatre that the evidence suggests will entrench the hierarchies it claims to dismantle.

    To be fair, universities are also responding to a genuine perception that students from disadvantaged backgrounds need additional support to succeed. And they’re not wrong about the support needs – they may be wrong about the delivery mechanism.

    When continuation, completion, and attainment gaps persist for Black students, care-experienced students, and students from deprived areas, the institutional instinct is to create support structures for those specific groups – it feels like the responsible, caring response. But in practice, they are initiatives that are characteristic first, student second. You need special help because you’re different.

    What would actually work

    What would an alternative approach entail? The research suggests five key departures from current practice.

    First is normalising rather than targeting. Instead of creating programmes that make intervention seem exceptional, universities would need to reveal what’s already normal. The Wisconsin approach costs almost nothing – a video, an email, some posters showing that 87 per cent of students actively support diversity. But it requires actually surveying students to discover (they probably would) that most already hold pro-social attitudes, then making that visible. “We surveyed 2,000 students here – 78 per cent actively welcome international students” changes the perceived norm without targeting anyone.

    Universal design rather than special fixes also matters. This means asking different questions. Not “what enhanced personal tutoring do disadvantaged groups need?” but “what if the default tutorial system worked properly for everyone?” Not “what mature student networks should we create?” but “what if study groups and peer support were structured to include all ages and backgrounds by default?” Not “what transition support do care-experienced students need?” but “what if induction assumed zero prior knowledge and no family support for everyone?”

    This wouldn’t mean removing targeted financial support or specialist services (hardship funds, mental health provision, disability services). Those remain separate. It’s about ensuring the basic architecture of belonging – induction, peer support, community-building – works for everyone by default rather than requiring special programmes for specific groups.

    Student leadership of essential functions matters too. European models show students running welcome week, managing housing cooperatives, delivering careers support, organizing social activities – not as add-ons but as how the institution functions. Belonging becomes structural rather than programmatic.

    The challenge there is that UK universities have spent decades professionalizing student engagement – student experience teams, transition coordinators, wellbeing advisors, residence life programmes, delivered by professionals, for students, rather than by students, for each other. Reversing this requires actually giving functions back to students, with appropriate support structures and (dare we say) compensation for significant roles.

    But most important is working on the advantaged. If you want Black students to feel they belong, the Wisconsin research suggests you work with white students to change what they believe about what their peers value. The achievement gap closed partly because white students changed their behaviour.

    If you want mature students to feel integrated, you create structures where all students work together on meaningful projects, where collaboration across demographics is normal and expected. If you want care-experienced students to feel they matter, you create environments where all students contribute to running their community, where everyone assumes they’ll both need help and provide it to others.

    Little of this appears in approved APPs, which at best read as well-meaning, and at worst like victim blaming. Whether alternatives could appear in a future APP iteration – whether the architecture of the APP process would even recognise these as access and participation interventions – is an open question.

    What happens now

    The challenge both for OfS and for universities is significant. Every APP currently includes detailed commitments to targeted belonging interventions, complete with evaluation frameworks and expected outcomes. Universities have staff, allocated budgets, designed programmes, and set objectives based on the deficit model approach. Rowing back isn’t straightforward.

    But the evidence is increasingly clear that the approach, however well-intentioned, is unlikely to work – and may indeed backfire. More fundamentally, the sector needs to grapple with some uncomfortable questions. If most UK students already hold pro-social and pro-diversity attitudes (and research suggests they probably do), why don’t they act on them? What structural barriers prevent students from forming friendships and study groups across demographic boundaries?

    John Blake asked for “practical, enduringly impactful work” around belonging. What universities have delivered is well-intentioned, carefully designed, and probably counterproductive.

    The good news is that what actually works – changing social norms, creating universal structures, enabling student leadership – is arguably easier and cheaper than what the sector is intending. The bad news is that it requires the sector to admit it’s been thinking about the problem the wrong way around.

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  • How to build smarter partnerships and become digitally mature

    How to build smarter partnerships and become digitally mature

    Across higher education, the conversation about digital transformation has shifted from connection to capability. Most universities are digitally connected, yet few are digitally mature

    The challenge for 2026 and beyond is not whether institutions use technology, but whether their systems and partnerships enable people and processes to work together to strengthen institutional capacity, learner outcomes, and agility.

    Boundless Learning’s 2025 Higher Education Technology and Strategy Survey underscored this transition: 95 per cent of leaders said education management partners are appealing, and one in three described them as extremely so. Yet preferences are changing: modular, fee-for-service models now outpace traditional revenue-sharing arrangements, signalling a desire for flexibility and control.

    Leaders also identified their top digital priorities: innovation enablement (53 per cent), streamlined faculty workflows (52 per cent), and integrated analytics (49 per cent). In other words, universities are no longer chasing the next platform; they want systems that think.

    Why systems thinking matters

    That idea is central to Suha Tamim’s workAnalyzing the Complexities of Online Education Systems: A Systems Thinking Perspective. Tamim frames online education as a dynamic ecosystem in which a change in one area, such as technology, pedagogy, or management, ripples through the whole. She argues that institutions need a “systems-level” view connecting the macro (strategy), meso (infrastructure and management), and micro (teaching and learning) layers.

    Seen this way, technology decisions become design choices that shape the culture and operations of the institution. Adopting a new platform is not just an IT project; it influences governance, academic workload, and the student experience. The goal is alignment across those levels so that each reinforces the other.

    Boundless Learning’s Learning Experience Suite (LXS) embodies this approach. Rather than adding another application into an already crowded environment, LXS helps institutions orchestrate existing systems; linking learning management, analytics, and support functions into a cohesive, secure, learner-centred framework. It is a practical application of systems thinking: connecting data flows, surfacing insights, and simplifying faculty and learner experiences within one integrated ecosystem.

    From outsourcing to empowering

    The shift toward integration also reflects how universities engage external partners. Jeffrey Sun, Heather Turner, and Robert Cermak, in the American Journal of Distance Education, describe four main reasons universities outsource online programme management:

    1. Responding quickly to competitive pressures
    2. Accessing upfront capital
    3. Filling capability gaps
    4. Learning and scaling in-house

    Their College Curation Strategy Framework shows that institutions partner with external providers not just to cut costs, but to build strategic capacity. Yet the traditional online programme management (OPM) model anchored in long-term revenue-share contracts has drawn criticism for limited transparency and loss of institutional control.

    Our own data suggest that this critique is reshaping practice. Universities are moving from outsourcing to empowerment: seeking education-management partners who enhance internal capability rather than replace it. This evolution from OPMs to Education Management Partners (EMPs) marks a decisive turn toward collaborative, capacity-building relationships.

    The Learning Experience Suite fits squarely within this new model. It is not an outsourced service but a connective layer that enables institutions to manage their digital ecosystems with greater visibility and confidence, while benefiting from enterprise-grade integration and security. It exemplifies partnership as a mechanism for capability development, a move from vendor management to shared strategic growth.

    From fragmentation to fluency

    Many institutions remain caught in what might be called digital fragmentation. According to our survey, nearly half of leaders cite data silos, disconnected platforms, and inconsistent learner experiences as obstacles to progress. These are not isolated technical issues; they are systemic barriers that affect pedagogy, governance, and institutional trust.

    Tamim’s framework describes such misalignment as a state of “disequilibrium.” Overcoming it requires coordinated action across levels, strategic clarity from leadership, adaptive management structures, and interoperable tools that make integration intuitive. The objective is to move from digital accumulation to digital fluency: an environment where technology amplifies, rather than fragments, institutional purpose.

    Learning Experience Suite was designed precisely to address this. By connecting data across systems, enabling real-time analytics, and ensuring accessibility through a mobile-first design, it allows institutions to build coherence and confidence in their digital operations.

    Building partnerships

    The next phase of higher education technology will be defined not by the tools universities choose but by the quality of their partnerships. As scholars like Sun have cautioned, outsourcing core academic functions without transparency can erode autonomy. Conversely, partnerships grounded in shared governance, open data, and aligned values can strengthen the academic mission.

    For Boundless Learning, this is the central opportunity of the coming decade: to reimagine partnership as co-evolution. Universities, platforms, and providers function best as interconnected actors within a wider learning system, each contributing expertise to advance learner success and institutional resilience.

    When viewed through a systems lens, the key question is no longer whether universities should outsource, but how they orchestrate. The challenge is to combine the right mix of internal capability, external expertise, and interoperable technology to achieve measurable impact.

    That, ultimately, is what digital maturity requires and what the Learning Experience Suite was designed to deliver.

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  • Colleges build environmental lessons into degrees

    Colleges build environmental lessons into degrees

    by Olivia Sanchez, The Hechinger Report
    November 5, 2025

    LA JOLLA, Calif. — On a Thursday this fall, hundreds of students at the University of California, San Diego, were heading to classes that, at least on paper, seemed to have very little to do with their majors. 

    Hannah Jenny, an economics and math major, was on their way to a class on sustainable development. Angelica Pulido, a history major who aspires to work in the museum world, was getting ready for a course on gender and climate justice. Later that evening, others would show up for a lecture on economics of the environment, where they would learn how to calculate the answer to questions such as: “How many cents extra per gallon of gas are people willing to pay to protect seals from oil spills?”

    Although most of these students don’t aspire to careers in climate science or advocacy, the university is betting that it’s just as important for them to understand the science and societal implications of climate change as it is for them to understand literature and history, even if they’re not planning to become writers or historians. UCSD is perhaps the first major public university in the country to require all undergraduate students to take a class on climate change to earn their degree. 

    The requirement, which rolled out with first-year students last fall, came about because UCSD leaders believe students won’t be prepared for the workforce if they don’t understand climate change. Around the globe, global warming is already causing severe droughts, water scarcity, fires, rising sea levels, flooding, storms and declining biodiversity; leaders at UCSD argue every job will be affected. 

    And even as President Donald Trump dismisses climate change as a hoax and cancels funding for research on it, other colleges are also exploring how to ensure students are knowledgeable about the subject. Arizona State University began requiring that students take a class in sustainability last year, while San Francisco State University added a climate justice class requirement to begin this fall. 

    “You can’t avoid climate change,” said Amy Lerner, a professor in the urban planning department at UCSD. “You can’t escape it in the private sector. You can’t escape it in the public sector. It’s just everywhere.” Students, she said, must be made ready to engage with all of its likely consequences.

    Related: Want to read more about how climate change is shaping education? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

    UCSD, a public university that serves roughly 35,000 undergraduate students, is not demanding that everyone sign up for Climate Change 101. Instead, students can fulfill the requirement by taking any of more than 50 classes in at least 23 disciplines across the university, including sustainable development, the course Jenny is taking. 

    There’s also psychology of the climate crisis, religion and ecology, energy economics, and several classes in the environmental science and oceanography departments, among others. And leaders at the university are working to develop more classes that satisfy the requirement, including one on the life cycle of a computer.

    Bryan Alexander, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and author of a book on higher education and the climate crisis, said that while colleges have long taught about climate change in classes related to ecology, climatology and environmental science, it’s only been in the last decade or so that he’s seen other disciplines tackle the topic. 

    Climate change, Alexander said, “is the new liberal arts” — and colleges should take it seriously. 

    K. Wayne Yang, a UCSD provost who served on the original group that advocated for the requirement, said every industry and career field will experience the effects of climate change in some way. Health care providers need to know how to treat people who have been exposed to extreme heat or wildfire smoke; psychologists need to understand climate anxiety; and café owners need to know how the price of coffee changes in response to droughts or other natural disasters in coffee-growing regions.  

    Jenny, the senior taking a class on sustainable development, is eager to get answers to a question that has, in their three years as an economics and mathematics major, become difficult not to ponder: How can economic growth be the silver bullet of societal change if it has so many negative consequences for the planet?

    “It’s definitely my hope that this is a class that will teach me something new about how to consider humanity’s path forward without destroying this earth, without destroying each other, without sacrificing quality of life for any person on this planet,” Jenny said. 

    Jenny isn’t subject to the requirement because they entered college before it rolled out. But they said they like the idea of encouraging students to step outside their comfort zones and fields of study and, in many cases, consider their future career paths in the context of the changing climate.

    Other students, like junior Pulido, don’t see a specific link between climate change and their future careers. Pulido, who has spent the last few years working in the visitors center at San Diego’s Balboa Park and aspires to work in museums, said she signed up for the gender and climate justice class simply because it sounded interesting to her. She believes climate change is important, and she’s hoping that taking this class will help give her a better idea of how its role in history and might play into her career.

    Related: How colleges can become ‘living labs’ for combating climate change  

    Colleges are taking different approaches to teaching their students about climate change, with some requiring a course in sustainability, a broad discipline that goes beyond the specific scientific phenomenon of climate change.

    At Arizona State, sustainability classes can cover anything about how human, social, economic, political and cultural choices affect human and environmental well-being generally, said Anne Jones, the university’s vice provost for undergraduate education.

    Dickinson and Goucher colleges have had such requirements since 2015 and 2007, respectively. 

    At San Francisco State University, leaders said they instead chose to require climate justice for all students, beginning with the class of 2029, because of the urgency of understanding how climate change affects communities differently. 

    Students need to understand broader systems of oppression and privilege so that they can address the unequal effects of climate change for “communities of color, low-income communities, global south communities and other marginalized communities,” said Autumn Thoyre, co-director of Climate HQ, the university’s center for climate education, research and action.

    Yang and other UCSD leaders believe that, despite the increased politicization of climate change under Trump, they’ve received little pushback on the new requirement because of the university’s reputation as a climate-concerned institution. (It descended from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, initially founded in 1903.) But this model may not work as well on other campuses. 

    In communities where people’s livelihoods depend on activities that contribute to climate change, like coal mining or oil production, educators may have to modify their approach so as to not come off as offensive or threatening, said Jo Tavares, director of the California Center for Climate Change Education at West Los Angeles College. 

    “Messaging is so important, and education cannot be done in a way that just forces facts upon people,” Tavares said. 

    Related: One state mandates teaching about climate change in almost all subjects — even PE

    At UCSD, to meet the graduation requirement, a course must be at least 30 percent about climate change: For example, a class that meets twice a week for a 10-week term must have at least six of its 20 sessions be about climate change. And the course syllabus must address at least two of the following four categories: the scientific aspects; human and social dimensions; project-based learning; or solutions.

    The first time Lerner, the urban studies professor, applied for her sustainable development course to count toward the requirement, in July 2024, the committee told her she needed to better explain how the class addressed climate change. It wasn’t enough to simply have “sustainable” in the course name, committee members told her; she had to better articulate the role of climate change in sustainable development, a course she’s been teaching some version of for nearly 20 years. 

    Her students helped her go through the syllabus and identify all the points where she was teaching about how development contributes to climate change, even if she wasn’t explicitly putting those words to paper. After Lerner revised the descriptions of the class topics and made a few additions, the class was approved, she said. 

    On that fall Thursday, Lerner walked around her large glass-walled classroom while discussing development and globalization with the 65 undergraduate students in her sustainable development class. They covered how to balance equity, economy and environment in development, as well as various ways to measure the well-being of societies, including gross national income, food security, birthrate and infant mortality, happiness, fertility, education and lifespan. Lerner peppered her lecture with jokes and relatable examples, asking, for example, how many siblings students had before explaining the role of fertility and birth rate in a healthy society. (One student had 12, but the average was closer to two.)

    Lerner, who now chairs the committee that decides which classes meet the requirement, said most of her students come in with the understanding that climate change is caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere, and some have even used an online tool to calculate their own carbon footprints. Often, their education has been focused on the hard science aspect of climate change, but they haven’t learned about what society has experienced as a result of climate change, she said. 

    When she asks them what can be done about climate change, she said, “they’re deer in the headlights.”

    Related: Changing education could change the climate

    Across campus, economics professor Mark Jacobsen teaches a lecture class every Thursday night on the economics of the environment. It meets the climate change requirement, but it also covers a core economics idea, he said: achieving efficiency. 

    Jacobsen is teaching students the formulas and methods they’ll need to answer questions like whether it’s worth it to spend $1 billion now to build renewable energy sources to avoid $10 billion in natural disaster cleanup in 30 years.

    Though Jenny hasn’t taken Jacobsen’s class, this is exactly the type of dilemma they’re worried about. 

    Jenny, a public transit enthusiast so dedicated that they got a commercial driver’s license just to drive for Triton Transit, the campus bus system, said the requirement encourages students to face the climate crisis rather than shy away from it. 

    “It can be easy to kind of put your head down and be like, ‘That is too big for me to think about, and too scary,’” Jenny said. But it’s imperative, they added, that students be “forced to reckon with it and think about it and talk about it, to have that knowledge kind of swirling around in your head.” 

    Contact staff writer Olivia Sanchez at 212-678-8402 or [email protected]. 

    This story about climate literacy was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our climate and education newsletter and for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

    This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/climate-change-is-the-new-liberal-arts-colleges-build-environmental-lessons-into-degrees/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>

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  • [Podcast] Healthy Minds, Bright Futures: How to Navigate Mental Health & Build Support

    [Podcast] Healthy Minds, Bright Futures: How to Navigate Mental Health & Build Support

    Children’s mental health is in the spotlight like never before. Concerning data around anxiety and depression, as well as the increasing prevalence of conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism spectrum disorder, are driving important discussions about supporting kids’ mental health.

    In this three-part series, our expert guests address evidence-based interventions and assessments to equip clinicians with the latest tools and tactics for enhancing a child or adolescent’s well-being. We’ll assess the current landscape of student mental health and dive deeper into ADHD, ASD and co-occurring conditions, and the latest BASCTM family of solutions.

    Check out the podcast episodes!


    ⬆




    1. Ep. 1
      Getting Your Attention: What You Can Do To Support Children and Teens with ADHD



    Ep. 1

    Getting Your Attention: What You Can Do To Support Children and Teens with ADHD

    ADHD diagnosis rates vary widely, and the condition itself presents many complexities. We’ll explore actionable strategies for clinicians to identify children who need additional ADHD support and how to provide the right learning environment for them, with our guest: Tyler Vassar, Ed.S., a licensed school psychologist and assessment consultant at Pearson.







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  • Higher Education must help shape how students learn, lead and build the skills employers want most

    Higher Education must help shape how students learn, lead and build the skills employers want most

    For the first time in more than a decade, confidence in the nation’s colleges and universities is rising. Forty-two percent of Americans now say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, up from 36 percent last year.  

    It’s a welcome shift, but it’s certainly not time for institutions to take a victory lap. 

    For years, persistent concerns about rising tuition, student debt and an uncertain job market have led many to question whether college was still worth the cost. Headlines have routinely spotlighted graduates who are underemployed, overwhelmed or unsure how to translate their degrees into careers.  

    With the rapid rise of AI reshaping entry-level hiring, those doubts are only going to intensify. Politicians, pundits and anxious parents are already asking: Why aren’t students better prepared for the real world?  

    But the conversation is broken, and the framing is far too simplistic. The real question isn’t whether college prepares students for careers. It’s how. And the “how” is more complex, personal and misunderstood than most people realize.  

    Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter. 

    What’s missing from this conversation is a clearer understanding of where career preparation actually happens. It’s not confined to the classroom or the career center. It unfolds in the everyday often overlooked experiences that shape how students learn, lead and build confidence.  

    While earning a degree is important, it’s not enough. Students need a better map for navigating college. They need to know from day one that half the value of their experience will come from what they do outside the classroom.  

    To rebuild America’s trust, colleges must point beyond course catalogs and job placement rates. They need to understand how students actually spend their time in college. And they need to understand what those experiences teach them. 

    Ask someone thriving in their career which part of college most shaped their success, and their answer might surprise you. (I had this experience recently at a dinner with a dozen impressive philanthropic, tech and advocacy leaders.) You might expect them to name a major, a key class or an internship. But they’re more likely to mention running the student newspaper, leading a sorority, conducting undergraduate research, serving in student government or joining the debate team.  

    Such activities aren’t extracurriculars. They are career-curriculars. They’re the proving grounds where students build real-world skills, grow professional networks and gain confidence to navigate complexity. But most people don’t discuss these experiences until they’re asked about them.  

    Over time, institutions have created a false divide. The classroom is seen as the domain of learning, and career services is seen as the domain of workforce preparation. But this overlooks an important part of the undergraduate experience: everything in between.  

    The vast middle of campus life — clubs, competitions, mentorship, leadership roles, part-time jobs and collaborative projects — is where learning becomes doing. It’s where students take risks, test ideas and develop the communication, teamwork and problem-solving skills that employers need.  

    This oversight has made career services a stand-in for something much bigger. Career services should serve as an essential safety net for students who didn’t or couldn’t fully engage in campus life, but not as the launchpad we often imagine it to be. 

    Related: OPINION: College is worth it for most students, but its benefits are not equitable 

    We also need to confront a harder truth: Many students enter college assuming success after college is a given. Students are often told that going to college leads to success. They are rarely told, however, what that journey actually requires. They believe knowledge will be poured into them and that jobs will magically appear once the diploma is in hand. And for good reason, we’ve told them as much. 

    But college isn’t a vending machine. You can’t insert tuition and expect a job to roll out. Instead, it’s a platform, a laboratory and a proving ground. It requires students to extract value through effort, initiative and exploration, especially outside the classroom.  

    The credential matters, but it’s not the whole story. A degree can open doors, but it won’t define a career. It’s the skills students build, the relationships they form and the challenges they take on along the way to graduation that shape their future. 

    As more college leaders rightfully focus on the college-to-career transition, colleges must broadcast that while career services plays a helpful role, students themselves are the primary drivers of their future. But to be clear, colleges bear a grave responsibility here. It’s on us to reinforce the idea that learning occurs everywhere on campus, that the most powerful career preparation comes from doing, not just studying. It’s also on us to address college affordability, so that students have the time to participate in campus life, and to ensure that on-campus jobs are meaningful learning experiences.  

    Higher education can’t afford public confidence to dip again. The value of college isn’t missing. We’re just not looking in the right place. 

    Bridget Burns is the founding CEO of the University Innovation Alliance (UIA), a nationally recognized consortium of 19 public research universities driving student success innovation for nearly 600,000 students. 

    Contact the opinion editor at [email protected]. 

    This story about college experiences was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter. 

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

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  • Trump Wants Harvard to Build Vocational School

    Trump Wants Harvard to Build Vocational School

    Trump reportedly wants Harvard to build vocational schools as part of a $500 million settlement.

    Zhu Ziyu/VCG/Getty Images

    While President Trump has proposed slashing the federal workforce development budget, a potential settlement between Harvard University and the Trump administration could involve the a plan to use $500 million the government is demanding to build vocational schools, Bloomberg reported Thursday. 

    Harvard is one of nine universities the Trump administration has targeted with federal funding freezes. In April, the government froze $2.2 billion in federal grants after the university rejected its demands to overhaul its policies on admissions, governance, hiring and more. In July, Harvard, which also sued the Trump administration over the freeze, was reported as open to paying as much as $500 million to settle with the Trump administration, though leaders said they would be reluctant to pay the government directly. 

    While no deal with Harvard has materialized yet, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CNBC on Thursday that if one does, the $500 million could go toward vocational education. 

    “If Harvard settles with Donald Trump, you know what he’s going to do with the $500 million?” Lutnick said. “He’s going to have Harvard build vocational schools. The Harvard vocational school, because that’s what America needs.” 

    But deal or no deal, the frozen funds may start flowing back to Harvard soon.

    Last week, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration illegally froze Harvard’s federal money, but the government plans to appeal. Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that Harvard researchers were told some grants were being restored, though it’s not clear how widespread those restorations were.

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