Tag: Career

The Fight Over Community College Bachelor’s Degrees

Last month, state lawmakers in Iowa introduced a bill that would allow community colleges to offer four-year degrees—and unwittingly triggered a turf war.

While community college advocates argued the lower-cost degrees would benefit students in a state with vast rural expanses and education deserts, private universities countered that community colleges are stepping out of bounds and infringing on their territory. Greg Steinke, the president of the Iowa Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, even went so far as to say the move could put some institutions out of business, telling lawmakers a few weeks ago that “without any question and without any doubt,” if the bill passed, “some of our private colleges will close.”

Legislators got the message. On Jan. 28, the Iowa House higher education committee amended the bill to impose some limits. Community college baccalaureate degrees would be introduced as a pilot program: Two-year institutions would be allowed to offer no more than three baccalaureate degrees, and only if they are at least 50 miles away from a university offering a similar option.

Emily Shields, executive director of Community Colleges for Iowa, said she was surprised by the level of resistance from universities. State lawmakers tasked her organization with producing a report on the feasibility of bringing community college baccalaureate degrees to Iowa, which found “a pretty clear need” for more bachelor’s degree options in the state, she said—especially for students who are place-bound or concerned about costs.

“We don’t see this as an existential threat to any of [the universities], and that certainly isn’t the goal,” said Shields. “I really don’t think there’s evidence from other states to back up that fear.”

Steinke said the evidence lies in how the free market works.

“Students and consumers will go to the cheapest place,” he said. “It will be a struggle, and there are some of our institutions that won’t be able to tolerate the struggle. Some of the presidents of my association … don’t like me to say that, because they don’t want the word out there that they could close,” he added. “But how can there be any other outcome?”

Similar negotiations—and tensions—are playing out across the country as community college baccalaureate degrees expand and pique the interest of state lawmakers. More than 200 community colleges in 24 states now offer a total of at least 767 bachelor’s degrees, according to the Community College Baccalaureate Association (CCBA). And that number is bound to grow as a handful of new states consider introducing these options.

Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker threw his support behind community college baccalaureate degrees last year, and two-year colleges in the state continue to advocate for legislation to make them happen. Massachusetts already has one community college offering four-year degrees, but college leaders hope to expand the opportunity to more, said Angela Kersenbrock, president of the CCBA. And other states—including Maryland and Nebraska—are exploring the possibility or considering expansions.

Kersenbrock described the moment as a near “tipping point” for the community college baccalaureate movement, with almost half of states now embracing these degrees.

Lawmakers are drawn to the option because “it’s the right thing to do,” she said. When states need more trained workers—and universities are at capacity or don’t offer certain workforce-oriented bachelor’s degree programs—community college baccalaureate degrees are a way to “really leverage what community colleges do best, and that is responding to labor market needs.”

Bipartisan Support

Such programs enjoy rare bipartisan support, cropping up in Democratic-led states like California and Washington, as well as in Republican strongholds such as Texas and Florida.

“Community college baccalaureates are not red and they’re not blue,” Kersenbrock said. “They sit right in the middle … We need more talent, and we have people in our communities who can do this job. Why not give people the opportunity?”

She noted that the programs have become especially popular in states with large rural areas to prevent students from moving away to attend universities. Many lead to applied baccalaureate degrees in specific workforce-oriented fields—such as respiratory therapy or dental hygiene—which appeal to states or regions seeking to address worker shortages.

For example, Feather River College, a small rural institution in California, has graduated 99 students from its ecosystem restoration and applied fire management as well as equine and ranch management programs, “high-need fields in a region facing extreme fire risk and economic vulnerability,” James Todd, vice chancellor of academic affairs for the California Community Colleges system, wrote in an email.

“For many students in that region, pursuing a bachelor’s degree elsewhere simply is not feasible,” Todd said. The nearest public four-year university is more than 80 miles away.

An intentional fire was set at Feather River College to ensure the health of its forested campus. The campus now has an ecosystem restoration and applied fire management bachelor’s degree to train students in such practices.

Feather River College

Over the last decade, California community colleges got approval for more than 50 bachelor’s degree programs, offered by roughly 40 colleges across the state. The number of students admitted to the 11 bachelor’s degree programs offered by Maricopa Community Colleges in Arizona has grown 15 percent year over year. The system expects to hit 10,000 enrolled students this year and plans to more than double its number of baccalaureate programs by 2032. Currently, 61 percent of those enrolled are first-generation college students, and 78.4 percent are continuing or former students within the community college system.

“In just two years, we have seen extraordinary growth with our bachelor’s degree programs, which is undoubtedly associated with the lower per-credit-hour cost,” Steven R. Gonzales, chancellor of Maricopa Community Colleges, said in a news release. A bachelor’s degree at Arizona State University for an in-state student can cost up to $47,000. At Maricopa Community Colleges, students from the county can earn a bachelor’s for $14,550.

Simon Kaminski, who is earning a bachelor of applied science in data analytics and programming at Mesa Community College, said thanks to a scholarship, his degree is going to cost him roughly $3,000.

“I pretty much paid nothing for a bachelor’s degree, which is always amazing,” he said.

Kaminski found out Mesa offered bachelor’s degrees after he earned his associate degree there, and said he was “shocked” that was even an option. The low-cost opportunity to continue on at a campus that was already familiar felt too good to pass up. And he’s glad he did, he said, both because of the price and the program’s focus on hands-on projects.

Preston Cooper, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, pointed out in a blog post last week that even as they grow, two-year-college baccalaureate programs remain relatively small. In 2021–22, out of the more than two million bachelor’s degrees awarded nationally, community colleges accounted for just over 15,000 four-year degrees.

Nonetheless, he believes that allowing community colleges “to apply their low-cost model to bachelor’s degrees” is a net positive because it can drive “competition that could force the rest of the higher education system to reduce costs, too.”

Ongoing Tensions

But in Iowa and elsewhere, not everyone is eager for more competition.

Four-year colleges and universities have long tried to prevent their two-year counterparts from introducing bachelor’s programs, worried that community colleges are encroaching on their signature offerings. Their leaders argue that two-year institutions should be investing in better transfer processes to bachelor’s degree–granting institutions, not standing up their own.

Sometimes it seems like a losing argument.

In 2021, after years of advocacy, Arizona passed legislation permitting community college baccalaureate degrees, despite staunch opposition from the Arizona Board of Regents, which represents the University of Arizona, Arizona State University and Northern Arizona University. (The programs aren’t allowed to replicate university offerings, but four-year institutions don’t have veto power over which programs are approved.) A similar conflict broke out in Idaho last year when four-year colleges opposed a proposal for a bachelor of applied science in business administration at the College of Western Idaho, partly over concerns it duplicated their programs.

Students earning a bachelor’s degree in artificial intelligence at Chandler-Gilbert Community College attend class.

Maricopa Community Colleges

Now the California State University system and California Community Colleges are battling over a set of proposed baccalaureate programs that CSU flagged as duplicative. Sixteen proposed degrees are at issue, including seven first proposed in 2023.

For some of the programs, only one CSU campus has objected, whereas for others, “seven or eight CSUs have said, ‘When we look at the courses, the curriculum and the outcomes and what types of roles these are filling, these are absolutely duplicative of programs that we have,’” said Nathan Evans, associate vice chancellor of academic affairs for the CSU system.

But he also stressed that the two systems are trying to “work toward the same objective of creating access to postsecondary opportunities in California.”

Todd, of the California community college system, stands behind community colleges’ process for determining duplication, noting that colleges must submit “extensive documentation” demonstrating unmet workforce need and an analysis of how the proposed program compares to existing CSU and University of California offerings.

“Deliberative conversations” are underway with CSU representatives about the proposals in limbo, Todd said. “It would be premature to comment on the next steps until those conversations have concluded.”

This is a familiar pattern. In California, the community college and four-year systems have repeatedly duked it out over such proposals since a 2021 California law first allowed community colleges to stand up new baccalaureate degree programs. Under the law, community colleges can apply to offer up to 30 new four-year programs annually if the programs don’t replicate existing programs at state universities. That is evaluated in a review process with representatives of the California State University system and the University of California system, followed by approval from the California Community College system chancellor’s office.

Those reviews have grown so contentious that the community college system contracted the nonprofit WestEd last year to analyze possible duplication issues and ways to improve the review process with the CSU system. WestEd’s report, released last summer, concluded that the systems seem to be working with different definitions of “unnecessary duplication,” and while there is overlap between proposed and existing programs, CSU’s objections can be overly broad. Evans said CSU’s faculty concerns, and ways of defining duplication, weren’t appropriately factored into the WestEd study.

Legislation to introduce new types of community college baccalaureate degrees have also been a recent source of contention in the state. Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill in 2024 that would have allowed community colleges to offer a bachelor of science in nursing, arguing that systems should be collaborating on nursing education and the bill could “inadvertently hurt” partnerships. More recent legislation that would allow Southwestern College to offer up to four more bachelor’s degrees—in applied forensic science, allied health education and leadership, teaching English to non-English speakers, and web design—has advanced to the California Senate, despite opposition from the CSU and UC systems.

The programs proposed in the bill are “designed to complement, not compete with, the four-year universities,” Todd said.

But Evans sees such bills as “problematic because they’re not thinking big picture,” he argued. “These are just sort of nibbling around the edges, creating friction” versus taking a more “wholesale” approach to student access and sorting out differences over community colleges’ four-year degrees.

Reaching Agreements

Despite these squabbles, some potential models for collaboration are emerging.

Brian Durham, executive director of the Illinois Community College Board, said he’s “hopeful” his state will adopt community college baccalaureate degrees soon, in part because the colleges “negotiated pretty extensively” with universities, which pushed back on legislation proposed last year.

A new agreed-upon version, which the board expects to see introduced this year, offers the universities multiple opportunities for input on new baccalaureate programs and puts limits on the number of nursing programs per region to avoid “too much competition,” Durham said. As a result, Illinois university leaders have since adopted a more neutral stance.

A statement from a coalition of public and private university leaders last year said that the group “will take no position on the merits” but acknowledged that “the shifting landscape of higher education, heightened uncertainty, and our commitment to our institutions and the students of Illinois require us to be vigilant and monitor the implementation of this proposal.”

Steinke, of the Iowa Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, said the guardrails put in place matter. He contended that the conversation in his state might have gone differently if Iowa community colleges and universities initially worked together to develop a set of unique programs that universities don’t cover.

Evans, of the CSU system, agreed there are ways to improve tensions between the two sectors. For example, representatives from both the CSU and California Community Colleges are exploring ways to communicate earlier about possible program duplications, rather than hash it out after colleges have already gone through the labor of drafting intensive proposals. Newsom’s administration is also working to set up a California Education Intersegmental Council to ensure better coordination between the state’s two-year and four-year higher ed systems.

Kersenbrock emphasized that universities are “a major resource for this country” and community college baccalaureate advocates “don’t want them to get hurt at all.”

Creating community college baccalaureate degrees “takes real, intentional work. It takes trust on everybody’s side. It takes assurances,” she said.

At the same time, she believes smaller, private four-year universities that attract out-of-state students may need to reckon with whether their programs serve the same state needs that community college programs do.

“I think you have to just ask those questions,” she said.

Durham said the growth of community college baccalaureates represents a broader blurring of the lines between higher education sectors right now. For example, dual-enrollment classes for high school students have rapidly expanded at community colleges, and four-year institutions are starting to offer more short-term programs.

“It reflects the changing landscape of education,” he said. “We are going to have to recognize that there’s some blend happening … and that’s a good thing. Ultimately, it’s about students.”

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February 9, 2026
Congress, Courts Stymie Trump’s Effort to Cap Research Costs

Capping indirect costs would’ve led to cuts or reduced research, college leaders warned.

The National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies can’t make any changes to how universities are reimbursed for costs indirectly related to research until at least Sept. 30, under the recently passed budget bills that President Trump signed into law.

The legislation ends a yearlong effort from the Trump administration to cap reimbursements for indirect research costs at 15 percent. The average reimbursement rate for institutions is 27 to 28 percent, though some colleges have negotiated reimbursement rates greater than 50 percent.

When the NIH announced Feb. 7, 2025, that it would cap the rates, colleges and universities warned they would have to cut costs or research operations to make up the difference. The funding for indirect costs helps to pay for hazardous waste disposal, utilities and patient safety. The rate cap would’ve saved about $4 billion, the NIH said.

But lawsuits quickly led to court orders that blocked the NIH from capping the rates. And then the National Science Foundation as well as the Energy and Defense Departments also sought to put a 15 percent cap in place—policies that federal judges also blocked. The Trump administration has appealed the decisions, so litigation continues.

Now, Congress has weighed in as well, blocking any changes to the reimbursement rates for fiscal year 2026, which ends Sept. 30. That legislation led the Energy Department to formally announce that its policy changes related to indirect research costs were no longer in effect. Likewise, a Pentagon official told Inside Higher Ed that “the department is not presently working toward changes to indirect cost rates.” The NIH and NSF didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Cost Cuts Still Loom

But the conversation about funding indirect research costs likely isn’t over. The legislation also directed the agencies to work with universities on ways to improve the funding model for research. Lawmakers say there’s room for improvement in the current system, “particularly with respect to the need for greater transparency into these costs.”

The legislation specifically mentions the proposal from 10 higher education associations that would overhaul how the government funds research. That proposal, the Financial Accountability in Research (FAIR) model, would break up research costs into three buckets: research performance costs (the current direct costs), essential research performance support (current indirect costs) and general research operations (institutionwide services that are necessary for research that are currently lumped into the indirect cost category).

The 10 associations, collectively known as the Joint Associations Group, came together to rethink the research funding model because they realized that something was going to change with or without the input of universities. The FAIR model is aimed at increasing accountability and clarity in how federal research funding is spent, according to JAG.

Nearly 300 national organizations, including scientific societies, patient advocacy groups and funding foundations, wrote to Congress last fall in support of JAG’s plan and asked for a two-year transition period to any new funding model.

“We believe that the recommendations put forward by the JAG would enhance transparency and accountability associated with federally funded research without undermining overall support critical to American science,” the letter stated. “While granular details of the model will need to continue to be refined through its implementation process, we believe the core of the model addresses the themes that lawmakers and policymakers have prioritized while also ensuring American leadership in science and innovation continues.”

As for JAG, it applauded Congress for supporting indirect research costs.

“We thank Congress—and particularly the leadership and appropriators in each chamber—for ensuring continued support for all the costs associated with advancing American science, and for continuing to engage with the JAG on the FAIR model.”

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February 9, 2026
Faculty Rebuke Colorado State’s Internal Chancellor Search

Colorado State University’s current chancellor, Tony Frank, will retire at the end of June 2027.

Faculty groups are pushing back against Colorado State University’s decision to consider only internal candidates in its search to replace outgoing chancellor Tony Frank, The Coloradoan reported.

The CSU Faculty Council voted to endorse a Feb. 3 letter from its executive committee to the system’s Board of Governors, which is conducting the search.

“An internal search, for a position of this magnitude, is not only misaligned with institutional peers, [it] limits our ability to identify the best candidate. Furthermore, it fosters an impression that the slate of potential candidates is already determined,” the letter stated. “It is exceptionally concerning that the current Chancellor appears to be soliciting applications for the position, superseding the Evaluation Committee Chair or Board Chair. As the current Chancellor would have affiliations with any internal candidates, this represents a direct conflict of interest.”

A letter from the CSU chapter of the American Association of University Professors raised similar concerns. The group also denounced the tight six-week timeline between the initial search announcement and the application deadline. The board announced Frank’s June 2027 retirement on Dec. 18, and applications for the chancellorship were due to Frank by Jan. 26.

“From our perspective, it looks like the search is being conducted by a committee of one—the current chancellor,” Brian Munsky, a representative of the School of Biomedical and Chemical Engineering, said at a faculty council meeting, according to The Coloradoan.

In the same Dec. 18 announcement, the board shared its plans for the internal search.

“Today, we voted to conduct an internal search for Chancellor, launching in January 2026, that will be open to anyone currently employed within the CSU System who meets the application criteria,” the board wrote. The application criteria include a terminal degree, “strong experience with government affairs” and “a record of significant accomplishment as a senior leader in a complex organization, in higher education, business, public service, government, or the non-profit sector.”

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February 9, 2026
U.K. Universities Decline New Elsevier Deal

Three more U.K. universities have confirmed they are not taking subscriptions to Elsevier journals, with one Russell Group institution hitting out at the “financially unsustainable” terms of the nationally agreed deal.

In a statement published Jan. 27, the University of Sheffield revealed it was signing up to three-year deals with Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, Wiley and Sage but was walking away from an offer by Elsevier, the world’s biggest academic publisher.

“Unfortunately, the Elsevier deal continues to be financially unsustainable and we will not be in a position to subscribe to this deal,” it explained.

Lancaster University and the University of Surrey have also confirmed they will not sign another deal with Elsevier, joining the universities of Essex, Kent and Sussex among those walking away from direct access to the imprint’s 2,800 journals.

Both institutions added they would take up deals with the four other main publishers.

Sheffield and Surrey were among three U.K. universities to terminate their previous deal with Elsevier at the start of 2025. The third institution— the University of York—has not yet commented publicly on whether it is taking up Elsevier’s revised offer for 2026 onwards, but its library site indicates researchers do not have access to the publisher’s titles.

In December, the sector IT body Jisc, which has been leading talks with the “big five” academic publishers on behalf of the U.K. sector, announced it had concluded negotiations after nine months of talks. While many universities, including the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh and Oxford, have confirmed they are taking up all the deals, some institutions have chosen to reject the offer from Elsevier, which publishes Cell and The Lancet, on cost grounds.

According to Sheffield’s statement, its decision to opt out of the Elsevier deal reflects “proposals agreed with the University Executive Board to significantly reduce library spending on resources over a three-year period in response both to financial pressures and ongoing concerns about the sustainability of the commercial scientific publishing model.”

“The main focus for the start of 2026 has been on the largest ‘big deals’ (including Sage, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley) which expired in December 2025,” it continued, adding it “reviews all subscriptions for value for money on an annual basis.”

A Lancaster University spokesperson said: “While agreements with Sage, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis and Wiley for 2026 onwards are in place following Jisc negotiations, [the university’s] deal with Elsevier has not been renewed.”

Confirming its non-renewal of the Elsevier deal late January, the University of Essex said it was “unhappy with the price increases, and Elsevier’s unwillingness to commit to a shift toward a more sustainable model of open access publishing.”

Universities had been seeking price reductions of between 5 and 15 percent on the $152 million spent annually with these five publishing houses when their deals expired at the end of 2025.

In a statement, Elsevier said it was “delighted to see a high level of participation in our agreement across the sector, while recognizing that financial pressures mean a handful of institutions will need to work with us individually to assess their options.”

“Together with Jisc, we continue to advance open access in ways that are sustainable and equitable, while ensuring U.K. researchers have access to trusted, high-quality content and innovative tools that support discovery and societal impact,” it added.

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February 6, 2026
Houston Faculty Must Pledge Not to “Indoctrinate” Students

Faculty must sign the memo by Feb. 10, but no one will be punished if they decline to do so.

JasonDoiy/iStock/Getty Images

Faculty members in the University of Houston’s College of Liberal Arts and Social Science were asked to sign a three-page memo pledging not to “indoctrinate” their students, the Houston Chronicle reported.

In a November email to faculty, Houston president Renu Khator wrote that the university’s responsibility is to “give [students] the ability to form their own opinions, not to force a particular one on them. Our guiding principle is to teach them, not to indoctrinate them.” The recent memo, sent by college dean Daniel O’Connor, asks faculty to “document compliance” with Khator’s note. It’s a way to ensure all faculty members are compliant with Texas’s Senate Bill 37, O’Conner told associate English professor María González in a meeting. The law mandates regular reviews of core undergraduate curriculum but does not address indoctrination or what material can or cannot be taught.

By Feb. 10, faculty must signal their agreement with the following five statements: “A primary purpose of higher education is to enhance critical thinking;” “Our responsibility is to give students the ability to form their own opinions, not to indoctrinate them;” “I understand the definition and attributes of critical thinking;” “I design my courses and course materials to be consistent with the definition and attributes of critical thinking;” and “I use methods of instruction that are intended to enhance students’ critical thinking.”

Faculty immediately pushed back. The University of Houston American Association of University Professors chapter encouraged faculty members to use proposed “conscientious objector” language in response, which states, in part: “The premise of this assertion is a straw man, and I am concerned that my signing of this letter could serve as some admission of guilt concerning these false accusations. As such, I request that you accept this letter, in which I am asserting that I have never engaged in indoctrination and that I take offense, as a scholar, at such insinuations.”

González said O’Conner told her that “no punitive actions will be directed at anyone” who doesn’t sign the acknowledgement form, but that he will have to review the syllabi of any faculty member who doesn’t sign the form. González refused to sign the acknowledgement or even click the link, she said.

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February 6, 2026
Can Embattled Women’s and Gender Studies Programs Survive?

Texas A&M University’s move last week to close its women’s and gender studies program is highlighting the longstanding vulnerabilities of a field that grew out of the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and ’70s and raising questions about its future.

While faculty and free expression advocates decried the decision as Texas’s latest assault on academic freedom, conservative pundits praised the program’s demise—as well as the elimination of six additional classes—after a course review found them misaligned with a new system board policy limiting classroom discussions of “race or gender ideology.”

“Texas A & M’s re-examination of its core curriculum and degree programs charts the path forward for other universities that want to ensure their degree programs are high-quality, value-neutral, transparent, and cost-efficient,” Sarah Parshall Perry, vice president and legal fellow at the right-wing organization Defending Education, told Fox News Monday. “Others should follow the university’s example.”

But Texas A&M, which also cited low enrollment as a driver of the women’s and gender studies program’s closure, is already following a trend that started years ago. Since 2023, a spate of other universities—including New College of Florida, Wichita State University and Towson University—have also shuttered their women’s and gender studies programs and departments.

All of these closures have left scholars “saddened, frightened, and enraged about the current state of the field,” according to a 2025 statement from the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA), “[W]e must not despair. We must resist.”

But given the intensified financial and political pressures to root out all diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives that universities across the country are under, women’s and gender studies scholars expect the interdisciplinary field—and other affinity studies—to face even more scrutiny and program closures in coming years. However, that pressure likely won’t be enough to entirely dismantle the field, which has influenced many other fields over the past 55-plus years.

“What we are experiencing now is an alarming, but not surprising, escalation of nefarious maneuvers meant to repress our reach and impact such as demonizing our field and our scholar-practitioners, distorting our theories, and banning the use of inclusive language to defund our research,” Jessica N. Pabón, president of NWSA, said in an email to Inside Higher Ed.

Scholars believe much of that backlash stems from the field’s aim to interrogate the gender and sexuality norms that the Trump administration and its allies are trying to mandate through policies that stifle academic research and classroom discussion about women and the LGBTQ+ community.

“Our field poses questions and produces knowledge that directly challenges systems of power that rely on the subjugation and exploitation of some to the benefit of the most privileged in society,” Pabón said. “Our scholarship is meant to inform and empower the populations that those in power (i.e., the ones attacking our field) control, discipline, and punish for questioning the social order, the status quo.”

It’s not possible to put this cat back in the bag. We’re never going to get rid of the study of gender. It’s just too integrated into many things—and women won’t have it.”

Joan Wolf, an associate professor in the sociology department at Texas A&M

A History of Critiques, Attacks

Attacks on scholarship about women, gender and sexuality are nothing new.

In 1933, shortly after Adolf Hitler ascended to power in Germany, the Nazis looted and burned the entire contents of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. In the 21st century, numerous other countries, including Russia, Brazil and Hungary, have taken up the anti-gender studies torch. For instance, in 2018 the Hungarian government withdrew accreditation from gender studies programs, with one official remarking that it “has no business [being taught] in universities,” because it is “an ideology not a science.”

And as American politics has drifted further to the right in recent years, the discipline has become a favorite target of right-wing criticism here.

Even before the second Trump administration issued executive orders broadly banning DEI and “gender ideology” in higher education, Republican lawmakers in Wyoming and Florida had already attempted to defund women’s and gender studies programs, accusing them of indoctrinating students and questioning the degree’s worth. In 2023, New College’s board of trustees voted to eliminate the gender studies program after Christopher Rufo, a New College of Florida trustee and vocal DEI opponent declared, “There is great historical precedent for abolishing programs that stray from their scholarly mission in favor of ideological activism.”

The gender studies program at New College began in 1995.

Independent Picture Service/Universal Images Group/Universal Images Group Editorial/Getty Images

One year later, Florida governor Ron DeSantis ordered the state to study the return on investment of remaining gender studies programs and other majors, such as nursing, computer science and finance, asserting that “It’s not fair [that] the taxpayer,” referencing truck drivers specifically, should pay for student loans “for someone’s degree in gender studies.” (According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, graduates of cultural and gender studies programs earn a median annual income of $63,000 compared to a $66,000 median for all graduates with a bachelor’s degree.)

But skepticism about the value of women’s and gender studies predates the Trump administration.

“We are accustomed to this false idea that studying gender or studying sexuality in an inclusive and intersectional manner is not ‘real’ research,” Pabón said. “We’ve received this critique from many of our academic peers for the entirety of our existence, a sentiment that comes from the eugenicism and biological essentialism that have kept women, gender expansive folks, disabled, and racially minoritized folks outside of the classroom, textbooks, and canons of intellectual work.”

Challenging those sentiments is what spurred the creation of the field more than 50 years ago as more and more women gained access to higher education, entering graduate programs and getting hired as faculty.

“When they got into these positions, they began to ask questions about the history of women,” said Carrie Baker, chair of the women, gender, and sexuality program at Smith College. “They asked ‘Where are the women in literature? Where are the women writers? Where are women in history?’”

So, they developed courses to fill in those gaps across an array of disciplines, such as history, medicine, anthropology and sociology. In 1970 San Diego State University launched the first women’s studies program in the country. More followed, and as of 2023 there were more than 800 such departments and programs, according to data from the NWSA.

“The influence of Women’s Studies has touched almost every traditional academic field,” Baker said. For example, “the fact that we now do medical studies on women at all is due to [those critiques].”

Knowledge is a tricky thing to control. You can refuse to fund certain types of research and can cancel classes, and people will find alternative ways to share and make new knowledge.”

Amy Reid, program director of PEN America’s Freedom to Learn initiative

‘More Necessary Now’

And despite the recent criticism, enrollment in women’s and gender studies courses was on the rise as of 2023, the latest year for which data is available.

“Women’s and gender studies is more necessary now than ever to understand what’s going on,” said Baker, adding that enrollment in her courses doubled after Trump was elected. “The policies of the Trump administration hurt women and those hurt women are going to need us. … Going backward on gender issues is going to put a lot of women in bad situations.”

However, enrollment numbers in most of these programs still look small compared to more mainstream majors. And many universities have cited low enrollment as the reason given for closing women’s and gender studies programs; Texas A&M, for instance, noted that its program has just 25 majors and 31 minors enrolled prior to announcing plans to wind it down last Friday.

“One of the biggest reasons why we have low enrollment is that we have no resources and students don’t even know we exist,” said Joan Wolf, an associate professor in the sociology department at Texas A&M who has taught women’s and gender studies courses there for decades. “We’re not going to have as many majors as something like psychology, but that’s never been the case.”

Often, women’s and gender studies exists as a program, not a department, as is the case at Texas A&M. That typically means faculty have shared appointments in other departments, leaving programs with small budgets and reduced ability to advocate for more resources. Nonetheless, the classes they offer help to round out students’ education.

“The big service women’s and gender studies do is in the minors,” Wolf said. “I’ve had students pursuing careers in marriage counseling, gynecology and business who want to understand the social dimensions of gender.”

The Texas A&M program cuts follow a new policy that restricts the teaching of race and gender.

Jason Fochtman/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images

However, eliminating the women’s and gender studies program at Texas A&M or elsewhere won’t stop students and faculty from considering gender in their scholarly work and beyond.

“It’s not possible to put this cat back in the bag,” Wolf said. “We’re never going to get rid of the study of gender. It’s just too integrated into many things—and women won’t have it.”

But the field’s success in influencing so many other fields, doesn’t justify dismantling it either, said Amy Reid, program director of PEN America’s Freedom to Learn initiative and former director of the now-defunct gender studies program at New College of Florida.

“Gender Studies, women’s and gender studies, have a methodology that is distinct from the methodology of other disciplines,” she said. “It allows people to expand beyond the disciplinary bounds of any one field, and that creative synthetic process is important for students who are trying to learn.”

And that’s also the value-add of other interdisciplinary fields—such as Black studies, Indigenous Studies and Middle Eastern studies—which like women’s and gender studies, sprang from the entry of nonwhite scholars to the professoriate in the mid-20th century after racial segregation was outlawed.

While the professoriate has become more diverse in terms of gender, race and ethnicity, those gains are “connected to the devaluing of higher education as a field,” Reid said. “When higher education was the domain of white men, it was seen as more prestigious; as women and people of color have gotten footholds in higher education, lo and behold, the salaries have gone down and the sector is more vulnerable to attack.”

Reid suspects many of those other affinity fields will also face increased threats and criticisms—if they aren’t already—amid federal and state crackdowns on university curricula. As of last week, the University of Iowa is still reviewing low-enrollment majors, including African American studies and gender, women’s and sexuality studies, for potential elimination or consolidation.

“We are going to see more closures over the next number of years, and we’re going to continue to see our students across the country paying the price,” she said. “But knowledge is a tricky thing to control. You can refuse to fund certain types of research and can cancel classes, and people will find alternative ways to share and make new knowledge.”

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February 6, 2026
Antitrust Lawsuit Against Academic Publishers Dismissed

A federal judge last week dismissed a lawsuit filed by researchers alleging that major corporate publishers colluded to control the publishing market, STAT News reported.

Lucina Uddin, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, filed the lawsuit in 2024 against the six largest for-profit publishers of peer-reviewed academic journals—Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, John Wiley & Sons, Sage Publications, Taylor & Francis and Springer Nature—and their trade association, the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM). The lawsuit argued that the publishers violated the Sherman Act, a federal antitrust law, by having researchers peer review articles for free, forbidding the submission of manuscripts to more than one journal at a time, and preventing authors from freely discussing submitted manuscripts.

To support that argument, plaintiffs pointed to STM’s International Ethical Principles for Scholarly Publication, which references those practices.

But Hector Gonzalez, a United States District Judge for the Eastern District of New York, said that was insufficient evidence of anti-trust violation.

“Plaintiffs fail to plausibly allege that the principles are direct evidence of a conspiracy,” Gonzalez wrote. “To read the principles as anything other than a collection of policies and guidelines concerning best practices for publishers, editors, and authors involved in the scholarly publication process requires a significant inferential leap.”

Gonzalez also declined to allow the plaintiffs to update the suit, writing that “further amendment would not change the result.”

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February 6, 2026
Report Tracks Not Just Degrees—But Payoff

As debates over workforce needs and economic mobility heat up, the Lumina Foundation is tracking which Americans are earning credentials that actually pay off.

This week, the foundation, dedicated to increasing the share of U.S. adults with high-quality degrees, released its annual A Stronger Nation report, which uses its public data tool to measure the value of credentials. For 2024, the report shows that 43.6 percent of U.S. adults ages 25 to 64 in the labor force have a college degree or other credential—such as a certificate or industry-recognized certification—and are earning more than someone with only a high school diploma.

Courtney Brown, vice president of strategic impact and planning at the Lumina Foundation, said the conversation around higher education has shifted from access alone to economic value.

“People began asking not just if I can get a credential but is it actually going to lead to a better job with higher pay,” Brown said. “That shift is what really brings us to where we are today.”

When the public data tool was first released in 2009, only about 39 percent of U.S. adults held a degree or workforce credential beyond high school. By 2024, that figure had climbed to nearly 55 percent, reflecting growth in credential attainment overall—even if not all credentials meet the foundation’s benchmark for higher earnings.

“I would say for all intents and purposes it worked,” Brown said regarding the foundation’s goal to increase degree attainment nationwide. “That represents millions more people with post–high school education and training than we actually saw a generation ago.”

This year’s release establishes the national baseline for the foundation’s 2040 goal: 75 percent of adults in the U.S. labor force should have a college degree or credential beyond high school that leads to economic prosperity, which the foundation defines as earning at least 15 percent more than someone with only a high school diploma.

“That [15 percent] benchmark gives us this clear, consistent way to move the conversation away from just opinions … to outcomes and real data,” Brown said, adding that the updated data tool allows the foundation to see “not just who earned a credential but whether that credential is actually delivering on the promise of economic payoff.”

Labor force landscape: Brown said bachelor’s and graduate or professional degrees remain the most reliable pathway to higher earnings. About 70 percent of U.S. adults with a bachelor’s degree earn at least 15 percent more than those with only a high school diploma, and the share rises to roughly 80 percent for those with graduate or professional degrees.

Outcomes for associate degrees and shorter-term credentials vary more widely. About 55 percent of those with a certification and about 54 percent of those with an associate degree earn above the 15 percent benchmark, the report found.

“Those point to real opportunities to strengthen quality and alignment with labor market demand,” Brown said. “We see that many credentials are delivering this value, and we see that others can do better.”

Several states—plus the District of Columbia—exceed the national average share of U.S. adults in the labor force with high-quality degrees, with some already surpassing 50 percent. This includes Colorado with 51.7 percent, Massachusetts with 52.5 percent and the District of Columbia with 67.7 percent.

At the other end of the spectrum, those with the lowest shares include West Virginia with 34.6 percent, Nevada with 33.6 percent and Puerto Rico with 25.7 percent.

“One example that I would say is more striking is Puerto Rico,” Brown said. Despite having the lowest share of adults earning at least 1 percent more than those with only a high school diploma, the territory has a relatively high degree-attainment rate, at 60.1 percent. She noted that Puerto Rico’s lower share is likely due to lower overall income levels.

Signs of progress: Brown said a misconception she often hears is that degrees don’t pay off for students.

“We see, especially for bachelor’s degrees, that they do for the majority of people provide at least that 15 percent,” Brown said. “What it does show me is that some credentials need to do a better job of making sure they align with the economy.”

Ultimately, Brown said the data should push institutions and policymakers to strengthen the connection between education and the labor market.

“I don’t see this as a story about education failing. I see it as a story about progress,” Brown said. “It’s a story about transparency and evolving expectations about what people are looking for and what they want to make sure they get.”

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February 6, 2026
Great Grants Need Far Away Deadlines

As many readers were, I was struck by the IHE story about roughly half of the recent Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) grants earmarked for Workforce Pell programs going to four-year colleges, despite community colleges’ longstanding history of workforce programs.

I had been even more struck by the revelation a few weeks ago that none—zero—of the FIPSE grants around civil discourse went to a community college.

Having been involved in putting together our own application, though, I can attest that one contributing factor may have been the incredibly tight timeline for applications. They often force less-than-optimal decisions.

Applying for grants like these requires ensuring that you can align your promises and goals with the measurable outcomes the funder wants, within a short timeframe, without overtaxing your resources, within confines of federal and state law (“supplement, not supplant”) and collective bargaining agreements, and hiring highly qualified people who don’t mind that the clock is ticking on their jobs.

In other words, they take time. That’s a lot of boxes to check. It’s easier when you have a bevy of full-time, well-practiced grant writers on staff, which most community colleges don’t.

When grant timelines are unreasonably tight, colleges are left with two unappealing options: either slap something together quickly and hope for the best, or skip it. The former doesn’t really lend itself to shared governance, which requires time, and the latter isn’t helpful.

In a more perfect world, of course, public colleges would be sufficiently well-funded, with sufficient autonomy, that they could be more thoughtful about which grants to pursue and which to skip. But when health insurance costs increase by double-digit percentages annually and public funding is flat at best, grants become crucial to enable projects that otherwise wouldn’t happen.

Daniel Greene’s book The Promise of Access is particularly good on this. It came out a few years ago, and it focuses on public libraries, but the dynamics it captures translate easily. When leaders of an institution devoted to a sort of humanist striving are subjected to sustained austerity, they often resort to what he calls “bootstrapping.” That often involves finding grants and other external funders and trying to bridge their interests and ambitions with your institution’s mission. Over time, funders exert a sort of gravitational pull, simply because the organization doesn’t have the resources to function without them.

Increasingly, grants with short deadlines come with “sustainability” requirements. In effect, these are guarantees by the recipient that they’ll keep doing what the grant enabled them to do even after the grant runs out. The theory behind sustainability requirements is understandable, but it’s hard to build long-term sustainability plans in thoughtful ways when you only have a few weeks. Sustainability requirements also assume a universe in which grants aren’t necessary, which I agree would be lovely, but often isn’t the case.

Grants can be great. One way to make it easier for them to be great is to build in deadlines far enough in the future that applicants can actually plan. More thorough planning would increase the chances of finding good fits and avoiding awkward surprises. It seems like that should be easy enough, but somehow …

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February 6, 2026
Counting Vice Presidents Misses the Point (opinion)

I’ve spent much of my career working as a college administrator. I’ve held senior roles, carried expansive portfolios, and had titles that critics of higher education increasingly cite as evidence of “administrative bloat.” I understand why those titles and the organizational charts behind them can feel alienating to faculty. They can reinforce an unhealthy sense of “us versus them” on campus.

But after years inside those roles, I’ve come to believe that title inflation is not the core problem it’s often made out to be. It’s visible. It’s frustrating. And it’s easy to blame. However, focusing solely on titles risks mistaking a symptom for the disease, and in the process, leaving the real cause of administrative overload unexamined.

That’s why Austin Sarat’s recent Inside Higher Ed essay asking, “How Many Vice Presidents Does a College Need?” resonated with me, even as I think it ultimately misdiagnoses the challenge. Sarat is right to be uneasy about what he calls the “vice presidentialization” of higher education. Titles matter. Hierarchies matter. And the proliferation of vice presidents deserves scrutiny.

But the growth of administrative titles is not what is hollowing out institutional capacity or widening the divide between faculty and administrators. It is what happens when leadership repeatedly avoids the more challenging work of setting priorities and enforcing limits.

Criticism of administrative growth in higher education is not new, and it is not entirely unfounded. Colleges and universities have undeniably expanded their administrative functions over time. But the ideas behind many of those roles are sound and, in many cases, essential. Retention matters. Financial aid matters. Student support, compliance and data matter. Investing in these functions improves student success. The problem begins with what happens after those roles are created.

Over time, administrators are assigned work that is only loosely connected or not connected at all to the responsibilities their titles suggest. Priorities proliferate. New initiatives emerge. New reporting requirements arrive from accreditors, legislators, donors and boards. Crises, real and perceived, demand immediate attention. Almost nothing is ever taken away. Each new priority is layered on top of existing work, often without clarity about duration, ownership or trade-offs. Vice presidents effectively become executives’ administrative assistants.

To understand an institution’s true priorities, don’t start with the strategic plan. Look instead at how administrators are actually spending their time. What you’ll often find is that people hired to do one essential job are doing five or six others instead. Much of that work is not merely peripheral; it is squarely outside the scope of the role. This is not a failure of individual administrators. It is a failure of organizational discipline.

I know many of the people filling these roles. I have been one of them. They are not avoiding faculty or students. They would love to spend some time in a classroom. They are not ignoring phone calls and emails out of indifference. Most of them are in it for the right reasons: the students and the national imperative of postsecondary attainment. If they are rarely in their offices at all, it is because they are being pulled into meetings, task forces and crisis response for issues far removed from their core responsibilities. Many work nights and weekends, skip vacations and still fall behind, not because they lack commitment but because the system virtually guarantees overload.

This is where Sarat’s critique falls short. It’s not that administrators take their titles too seriously. It’s that institutions take on too many priorities without making corresponding choices about what not to do. And while many of those initiatives might be “good,” too many of them fall outside the core scope of educating students. The result is not just administrative strain, but less institutional attention devoted to teaching and learning itself.

Our colleges and universities are under greater and more varied pressure than ever. They are being squeezed from every direction: demographic decline, rising costs, declining public investment, growing accountability demands and increasingly diverse student needs have made it impossible to continue operating as if capacity were unlimited. Yet too often, institutional “strategy” still amounts to adding priorities rather than choosing among them. What this moment demands instead is institutional redesign, a deliberate rethinking of structures, roles and work so that colleges and universities can focus on what matters most for today’s students.

Real strategy is not about what initiatives institutions adopt, but what they deliberately decide not to do. In a moment when today’s students need clearer pathways, stronger support and better outcomes, institutions do not have the luxury of letting work continue to creep in unchecked, or of trying to be all things to all people. When leaders avoid making those choices, the pressure doesn’t disappear. They push it downward and outward until adding people and titles becomes the default way to cope.

Eventually, something must give. When a vice president reaches the limit of what one person can reasonably manage, institutions rarely narrow the role or clarify boundaries. Instead, they add another layer: an associate vice president, an assistant vice president. Titles proliferate not because administrators crave status, but because institutions use people and titles as workarounds for unresolved leadership failures.

Ironically, this is precisely what deepens the divide Sarat worries about. When administrators are stretched impossibly thin, they become less present, less responsive and less connected to academic life. Faculty experience this as indifference or bureaucratic arrogance. In truth, it is structural misalignment. The distance is real, but it is produced by overload, not hierarchy.

Which is why the solution cannot simply be fewer vice presidents or humbler titles. It must start with presidents, boards and faculty leaders willing to exercise real leadership discipline. That means distinguishing between core academic work and aspirational initiatives. It means abandoning programs and committees as readily as launching them. And it means acknowledging an essential truth that higher education often avoids: Adding priorities without subtracting others is not strategic ambition—it is organizational debt.

The best administration is often invisible, not because it lacks value, but because it is doing its job so well that teaching and learning can take center stage. Centering students and their education should mean fewer symbolic fights over titles and more honest conversations about priorities, capacity and trade-offs.

Sarat is right to warn against importing corporate hierarchy into higher education. However, to address administrative bloat seriously, we must look beyond the organizational chart. The real question is not how many vice presidents a college needs. It is the number of priorities an institution is willing to abandon to serve its academic mission effectively. This is a test of leadership and discipline. We need to do a better job ensuring that our institutions are designed around teaching our students rather than running an ever-expanding business enterprise.

PJ Woolston is director of strategic insights for Lumina Foundation, an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all.

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February 6, 2026