Tag: Career

Three questions for JHU’s Ira Gooding

Ira Gooding is well-known and highly respected within our digital and online learning community. At Johns Hopkins University, Ira serves in the provost’s office as a special adviser for digital initiatives, and he is the assistant director for open education at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Q: Tell us about your roles at the provost’s office and the Bloomberg School. What does your work at Hopkins entail and how do your leadership positions interact?

A: My work in the provost’s office is focused on three goals: fostering teaching innovation through digital technology, facilitating collaboration and connection across divisional lines, and managing our engagement with Coursera.

A major project that incorporates all three goals is our Digital Education and Learning Technology Acceleration (DELTA) initiative. Each year, we use a portion of our Coursera royalty revenue to award internal grants of up to $75,000 to develop, implement and evaluate an innovative application of technology intended to enhance teaching and learning. To date, we’ve awarded more than $2.6 million to 41 different project teams focused on a wide array of innovative approaches, including VR/AR, generative AI, learning at scale, faculty development programming and clinical simulation, among others.

We also hold an annual Provost’s DELTA Teaching Forum that brings together faculty and teaching and learning staff from across Johns Hopkins to provoke conversation, spark new thinking and advance the ongoing pursuit of teaching excellence. The next forum will be held on May 1.

In the Bloomberg School of Public Health, I lead a small team within the Center for Teaching and Learning. We focus our attention on developing open learning experiences and open educational resources for independent learners and public health educators beyond the boundaries of our master’s and doctoral programs. We’ve supported the development of more than 80 MOOC courses, specializations and teach-outs, and we’re in the process of developing a new OER repository for JHU.

The repository project is a good example of the interaction between my two roles. The Bloomberg School’s Center for Teaching and Learning is developing the platform, but it will serve as a repository for OER from across the entire university, and publishing authority will be distributed in order to reduce bottlenecks.

Q: Looking forward to 2025, what challenges, trends and opportunities related to online and digital learning are at the top of your mind?

A: I hope it’s OK that my answers go beyond 2025.

I’m curious to see how higher education will be affected in the years ahead by the arrival of students whose early primary school years were disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic and the switch to emergency remote teaching. The oldest members of that cohort are hitting high school this year, and it won’t be long before they arrive (or not) on our campuses. What expectations will they have for digital learning? Will they value in-person experiences differently from today’s students? What learning habits will they bring with them? So, I see an opportunity to start designing that cohort’s learning experiences now. How might we prepare ourselves to offer them a higher education experience that meets their needs and helps them thrive?

Also, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about David Wiley’s recent argument about generative AI’s impact on open educational resources. In September, he gave a talk titled “Why Open Education Will Become Generative AI” for the University of Regina. In it, he argues pretty persuasively that generative AI has the potential to become a more effective tool than OER for increasing educational access due to its profound impact on the process of authoring, revising and remixing instructional materials.

That’s a provocative position, and I don’t know whether things will play out as he predicts. Regardless, I’m curious to see the interplay of generative AI and OER in the years ahead.

Q: What advice would you give an early or midcareer colleague interested in working toward a digital/online learning leadership role?

A: I’d encourage them to look for opportunities to reduce institutional friction and to develop a reputation for clearing paths instead of erecting obstacles. A certain amount of friction is necessary for managing risk and encouraging high-quality work, but a lot of friction in higher ed comes from simple inertia.

People who aspire to lead can make a lot of progress by understanding the constraints that hinder innovation and then actively working to mitigate them on behalf of the innovators within their institutions.

Of course, people run the risk of becoming gatekeepers as they advance into leadership positions, so it’s important to question one’s own assumptions and the value of yesterday’s solutions and to look for new solutions instead of continuing to rely on the old ones.

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January 28, 2025
Skipping remedial courses impacts students’ completion

Developmental education has come under scrutiny for delaying students’ academic attainment and overall degree progression. While the purpose of remedial courses is to prepare learners to succeed in more difficult courses, it can produce the opposite effect, discouraging learners from pursuing more advanced courses or pushing them to drop out.

A December report from the Center for the Analysis of Postsecondary Readiness (CAPR)—a partnership of MDRC and the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College—identified the benefits of placing students into college-level math and English classes and how it can impact their credit attainment and completion.

“This research finds evidence that colleges should consider increasing the total number of students referred directly to college-level courses, whether by lowering their requirements for direct placement into college-level courses or by implementing other policies with the same effect,” according to the report.

Methodology: Around three-quarters of colleges use multiple measures assessment (MMA) systems to place learners in remedial education, relying on standardized tests and high school GPA, among other factors, according to the CAPR report.

This study evaluates data from 12 community colleges across Minnesota, New York and Wisconsin and 29,999 students to see how effective MMA systems are compared to traditional test-only placement methods on dictating students’ long-term success.

Incoming students who took a placement test were randomly assigned to one of two groups: test-only referral or MMA placement. Researchers collected data on how students would have been placed under both systems to analyze different outcomes and gauge long-term outcomes.

The findings: For most students, there was no material difference in their placement; 81 percent of the math sample and 68 percent of the English sample referred students to the same level of coursework, which researchers classified as “always college level” or “always developmental.”

Around 44 percent of students from the New York sample were “bumped up” into a college-level English course, and 16 percent were bumped up into a college-level math class due to being assigned to the MMA group, whereas the test-only system would have sorted them into developmental education. Seven percent of learners were “bumped down” into developmental ed for English.

In Wisconsin, 15 percent of students in the MMA group were bumped up in English, and 14 percent were bumped up in math placement.

Students who were assigned to the MMA group and were placed into a higher-level course were more likely to have completed a college-level math or English course, compared to their peers in the test-only placement group with similar GPAs and scores.

This bump-up group, across samples, was eight percentage points more likely to pass a college-level course and earned 2.0 credits more on average. These learners were also more likely to earn a degree or transfer to a four-year institution within nine semesters by 1.5 percentage points.

Inversely, students who were recommended by MMA placement to take developmental ed, but not according to the test-only system, were less likely to succeed.

So what? The evidence shows that referring more students into college-level courses is a better predictor of success than the placement system.

Implementing an MMA is a small cost to the institution, around $60 per student, but it can result in students saving money because they take fewer developmental courses over all, and maybe earn more credits entirely.

“Overall, this report concludes that MMA, when it allows more students to be directly placed in college-level coursework, is a cost-effective way to increase student educational achievement,” researchers wrote.

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January 28, 2025
Thoughts on 20 years of college teaching (opinion)

I have now been teaching at Duke University for 20 years. I have been through all kinds of teaching fads—active learning, team-based learning, alternative grading, service learning, etc. You might assume that I have become a better teacher over these many years. Yet I am noticing a curious trend in my course evaluations: Some of my students like me and my courses less and less.

As a teaching faculty member, this matters greatly to my own career trajectory, and so I’ve wondered and worried about what to do. Why am I struggling to teach well and why are my students struggling to learn?

Looking back on the past two decades of my teaching and reaching further back into my own college experience, I see six clear differences between now and then.

Difference No. 1: Access to Information

When I took my first college environmental science class, way back in 1992, I was mesmerized. This was before the days of Advanced Placement Environmental Science, so I came into the class knowing almost nothing about the topic, motivated by my naïve idea to be part of “saving the world.” To learn, I had a textbook (that I still have, all highlighted and marked up) and the lectures (for which I still have my notes). Sure, I could go to the library and find books and articles to learn more, but mostly I stuck to my textbook and my notes. I showed up to the lecture-based class to learn, to listen, to ask questions.

Today, my students show up in my course often having taken AP Environmental Science, with access to unlimited information about the course topics, and with AI assistants that will help them organize their notes, write their essays and prepare for exams. I have had to shift from expert to curator, spending hours sifting through online articles, podcasts (SO many podcasts) and videos, instead of relying on a single textbook. I look for content that will engage students, knowing that some may also spend their class period fact-checking my lectures, which brings me to …

Difference No. 2: Attention

When I lecture, I look out to a sea of stickered laptops, with students shifting their attention between me, my slides and their screens. I remind them that I can tell when they are watching TikTok or texting, because the class material probably isn’t causing their amused facial expressions.

Honestly, I am finding myself more distracted, too. While lecturing I am not only thinking about the lecture material and what’s on the next slide—I am also wondering how I can get my students’ attention. I often default to telling a personal anecdote, but even as they briefly look up to laugh, they just as quickly return their eyes to their screens.

The obvious advice would be to have more engaging activities than lecturing but …

Difference No. 3: More Lectures, Please

After 2020, one comment showed up over and over on my course evaluations: lecture more. My students seemed not to see the value of small-group activities, gallery walks, interactive data exercises and discussions. They felt that they were not learning as much, and some of them assumed that meant that I didn’t know as much, which leads me to …

Difference No. 4: Sense of Entitlement

While I teach at a private elite university, my colleagues across a range of institutions have backed this up: Some students seem to not have much respect for faculty. The most common way this shows up is at the end of the semester, when students send me emails about why my course policies resulted in a grade they think is unfair, or after an exam, when they argue that I did not grade them fairly, which leads me to …

Difference No. 5: Assessment Confusion

When I was in college, I took midterms and finals. I rewrote my notes, made flash cards, created potential exam questions, asked friends for old exams and studied a lot. I took multiple-choice exams and essay exams, in-class exams and take-home exams. When I first started teaching my lecture-based class, I assigned two midterms and a final. I took the business of writing exams seriously, often using short-answer and essay exams that took a whole lot of time to grade. I wanted the experience of taking the exam to help students feel like they had learned something, and the experience of studying to actually entice them to learn.

Then, two things happened. We faculty got all excited about alternative assessments, trying to make our classes more inclusive for more learning styles. And the students started rebelling about their exam grades, nitpicking our grading for a point here and there, angry that, as one student put it, I was “ruthless” in my grading. Students didn’t show up at my office hours eager to understand the concepts—they wanted more points.

So, I threw out exams in favor of shorter papers, discussions and activities. In fall 2024, I had 74 students and I gave a whopping 67 of them A’s. To do well in my class now, you don’t really have to learn anything. You just need to show up. Except the problem with grading for attendance is …

Difference No. 6: Our Students Are Struggling

We all know that our students are struggling with more mental and emotional health issues, perhaps due to COVID-related learning loss, the state of the world and so many other things. Many of us include mental health resources in our syllabus, but we know that’s not enough. Students are much more open about their struggles with us, but we aren’t trained therapists and often don’t know the right thing to say. Who am I to determine whether or not one student’s excuse for missing a class is valid while another’s is not? How can I keep extending the deadlines for a struggling student while keeping the deadline firm for the rest? Sure, there are suggestions for this (e.g., offer everyone a “late assignment” ticket to use), but I still spend a lot of time sifting through student email requests for extensions and understanding. How can we be fair to all of our students while maintaining the rhythm of course expectations?

Usually, one acknowledges the differences between students now and “back then” at retirement, reflecting on the long arc of a teaching career. But I am not at the end—I have a long way to go (hopefully). I am expected to be good at this in order to get reappointed to my teaching faculty position.

Teaching requires much more agility now as we attempt to adapt to the ever-expanding information sphere, our students’ needs, and the state of the community and world beyond our classrooms. Instead of jumping to solutions (more active learning!), I think it’s reasonable to step back and acknowledge that there is no one change we need to make to be more effective educators in 2025. We also can acknowledge that some of the strategies we are using to make our classes more engaging and inclusive might backfire, and that there still is a time and place for really good, engaging lectures and really hard, useful exams.

There are fads in teaching, and over the past 20 years, I have seen and tried plenty of them. We prize teaching innovation, highlighting new techniques as smashing successes. But sometimes we learn that our best-laid plans don’t work out, that what students really want is to hear from an expert, someone who can help them sort through the overwhelming crush of information to find a narrative that is relevant and meaningful.

The students in our classrooms are not the same students we were, but maybe there is still a way to spark their enthusiasm for our subjects by simply asking them to be present. As debates about the value of higher education swirl around us, maybe caring about our students and their learning means asking them to put away their screens, take out a notebook and be present for our lectures, discussions and occasional gallery walk. For my part, I’m reminding myself that some students aren’t all that different than I was—curious, excited, eager to learn—and that I owe it to them to keep showing up committed to their learning and, maybe, prepared with a few more light-on-text lecture slides.

Rebecca Vidra is a senior lecturer at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University.

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January 28, 2025
The King’s College aims to reopen

When the King’s College in New York shut down in summer 2023, its leadership said the cancellation of fall classes and termination of faculty and staff did not mean permanent closure. Now its Board of Trustees is seeking to revive the evangelical institution, according to a report from Religion Unplugged.

The news outlet obtained a document that detailed a plan “to gift the college, including its charter and intellectual property … to likeminded evangelical Christians who propose the most compelling vision to resume the operations of the college.” The document—reportedly a request for proposals—listed a deadline of Feb. 7 for potential partners.

TKC officials did not respond to a request for comment from Inside Higher Ed.

The King’s College shut down in July 2023 amid severe financial pressures and a failed $2.6 million fundraising effort earlier that year that officials said was necessary to meet immediate needs. However, the emergency fundraising effort only brought in $178,000 by its initial deadline.

The college, which enrolled a few hundred students a year, had faced declining enrollment in its final years and the loss of generous donors who had long buoyed TKC. Richard DeVos—the co-founder of Amway and father-in-law of former education secretary Betsy DeVos—donated millions of dollars to the college before his death in 2018. Another major donor, Bill Hwang, also contributed several million before he was arrested in 2022 on fraud charges.

Facing financial pressures in 2021, the college put its faith in another wealthy entrepreneur, striking a deal with Canadian investment company Primacorp Ventures, owned by Peter Chung, a for-profit education mogul who had also loaned the college $2 million in early 2023. Acting as an online program manager, Primacorp Ventures promised to enroll 10,000 students over three years, sources previously told Inside Higher Ed. The catch, according to one source, was that Primacorp would collect 95 percent of the revenue generated from online enrollment, a deal that struck experts as predatory. The online program—which cost TKC at least $470,00 to launch, according to tax documents—delivered around 150 students its first year and soon folded.

The college had previously tried and failed to find a partner to keep it open in 2023. If it finds one this time, the board will submit a “go-forward plan” to the New York State Education Department by mid-July, according to the RFP obtained by Religion Unplugged.

The King’s College will face a series of obstacles in its reopening effort, including accreditation. The Middle States Commission on Higher Education stripped TKC’s accreditation in May 2023, noting a failure “to demonstrate that it can sustain itself in the short or long term.”

If the King’s College manages to reopen, it would be history repeating itself. Founded in New Jersey in 1941, TKC closed in 1994, only to be revived in 1997 and re-established in New York City.

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January 28, 2025
Biology syllabi lack learner-centered principles

A course syllabus serves as a road map for navigating the upcoming term and content that will be covered, but researchers believe it could support students’ self-directed learning as well.

A November study published in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching, authored by a team of faculty from Auburn University and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, shows few introductory biology syllabi engage students in effective study habits or encourage help-seeking behaviors, instead favoring content.

The research highlights opportunities to address the hidden curriculum of higher education and support success for historically marginalized students.

What’s the need: Some college students lack effective study habits, and these gaps are often a piece of larger equity concerns for marginalized groups, highlighting limited opportunities or resources for underprivileged communities.

Introductory science, technology, engineering and mathematics courses, in particular, often serve as gatekeepers, limiting which students can pursue these degree programs and resulting in less diverse STEM degree attainment.

Today’s college students also demonstrate less college readiness in their academic skills, due in part to remote instruction as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Often, colleges or universities will create co-curricular interventions such as workshops to teach these skills or introduce best practices in a first-year seminar course. While these can be effective, institutions may lack the resources or time to deliver the interventions, which researchers say underscores a need for alternative strategies that reach students.

Researchers theorized that embedding within the syllabus explicit instruction to promote three skills—study behaviors, metacognitive evaluation or academic help-seeking—could impact student success.

Methodology: Researchers evaluated 115 introductory biology syllabi from 94 unique institutions, including 48 percent research-intensive institutions, 29 percent minority-serving institutions, 72 percent publics and 61 percent with enrollment over 10,000 students.

A Deeper Look at STEM Syllabi

A Worcester Polytechnic Institute study found instructors could help create a more inclusive learning environment in STEM courses through tailoring their syllabus to feature elements like materials from diverse scholars and accessibility statements. Read more here.

One engineering professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst redesigned her syllabus as a zine, or miniature magazine, to promote student engagement and build community in the classroom.

Syllabi were categorized by having the presence of study behaviors, academic help-seeking and metacognition suggestions; the type of suggestions of those three factors; and the quality of these recommendations (effective or ineffective).

Further syllabus analysis covered four factors to gauge how learner-centered they were, including having clear and appropriate learning goals and objectives, aligned and define assessment activities, a logically sequenced course schedule, and a positive and organized learning environment. Each syllabus was awarded between zero and 48 points, with higher scores indicating they were more learner-centered.

The findings: Among the 115 syllabi evaluated, only 14 percent earned a score of at least 31 to be considered learner-centered. Around three in 10 syllabi were considered “content-centered,” earning a score of 16 or less. Researchers theorized faculty may lack time or interest when creating their own syllabi, instead relying on templates from the institution or previously generated documents.

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Design by Ashley Mowreader

Only 3.5 percent of syllabi showed evidence of reducing opportunity gaps in STEM courses, which researchers defined as de-emphasizing course rules, encouraging the use of external resources for continued learning outside the classroom and emphasizing the role of students in their own learning.

“Most of the syllabi in our sample provided learning resources but focused primarily on course policies and did not address students as engaged learners,” according to the study.

A majority of syllabi did offer suggestions for study behaviors, metacognition or approaches for academic help-seeking (61 percent), although the greatest share of these only addressed help-seeking (45 percent). When the syllabus did share advice to seek help, many just provided a list of resources, and fewer encouraged students to utilize them.

“Only 17.9 percent of syllabi provided a listing of academic help-seeking resources, encouragement to use those resources, and an explanation on how to use those resources,” researchers wrote, with the explanation piece critical for addressing equity gaps and the hidden curriculum of higher education.

Of the syllabi that provided recommendations for students’ study behaviors, a significant number gave students unhelpful advice or shared practices that are not affirmed with research.

“We found that most biology syllabi endorsed effective study strategies such as self-testing and spacing,” researchers wrote. “However, we also found that syllabi recommended strategies that have been described as ineffective for long-term learning (e.g., re-reading textbooks and re-writing notes).”

Twenty-nine percent of syllabi recommended only effective, evidence-based study habits. A greater share (42 percent) offered both effective and ineffective techniques, and 24 percent only offered ineffective behaviors.

Just because the syllabus was lacking details on how to study or practice metacognition doesn’t mean it was absent from the class entirely, researchers noted, as instructors may discuss these topics in class or provide additional resources with this information. This presents an opportunity for instructors to make themselves more aware of evidence-based practices to close equity gaps and bring the syllabus into better alignment with their pedagogy, according to the study.

Do you have an academic intervention that might help others improve student success? Tell us about it.

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January 27, 2025
Did the Ivy League really break America? (opinion)
Are many of the ills that plague American society caused by Ivy League admission policies?

That is the premise of David Brooks’s cover story for the December issue of The Atlantic, “How the Ivy League Broke America.” Brooks blames the Ivies and “meritocracy” for a host of societal problems, including:
- Overbearing parenting
- Less time for recess (as well as art and shop) in schools
- An economy that doesn’t provide opportunities for those without a college degree
- The death of civic organizations like Elks Lodge and Kiwanis Club
- The high percentage of Ivy League graduates who choose careers in finance and consulting
- The rise of populism based on “crude exaggerations, gross generalizations, and bald-faced lies.”
Brooks somehow left the decline of small-town mom-and-pop businesses and the popularity of reality television off his laundry list.

You may be wondering how the Ivies contributed to or caused all these problems. The essence of Brooks’s argument is that “every coherent society has a social ideal—an image of what the superior person looks like.” His hypothesis is that America’s social ideals reflect and are determined by the qualities that Ivy League universities value in admission.

One hundred years ago, the Ivy League social ideal was what Brooks terms the “Well-Bred Man”—white, male, aristocratic and preppy, athletic, good-looking, and personable. What was not part of the ideal was intellectual brilliance or academic prowess, and in fact those who cared about studying were social outcasts. Applying to the Ivies resembled applying for membership to elite social clubs.

That changed starting in the 1930s when a group of educational leaders, the most prominent being Harvard president James Conant, worried that the United States was not producing leaders capable of dealing with the problems it would face in the future. Their solution was to move to an admission process that rewarded intelligence rather than family lineage. They believed that intelligence was the highest human trait, one that is innate and distributed randomly throughout the population. Conant and his peers believed the change would lead to a nation with greater opportunities for social mobility.

Brooks seems far from sure that the change was positive for America. He acknowledges that “the amount of bigotry—against women, Black people, the LGBTQ community—has declined” (that might be debatable given the current political climate), but observes that the previous ideal produced the New Deal, victory in World War II, NATO and the postwar world led by America, while the products of the ideal pushed by Conant have produced “quagmires in Vietnam and Afghanistan, needless carnage in Iraq, the 2008 financial crisis, the toxic rise of social media, and our current age of political dysfunction.” Those examples seem cherry-picked.

In the essay, Brooks cites a number of troubling societal problems and trends, all supported with extensive research, but the weakness of his argument is that he tries to find a single cause to explain all of them. That common denominator is what he calls “meritocracy.”

Meritocracy, a society with opportunities based on merit, is an appealing concept in theory, but defining merit is where things get sticky. Merit may be similar to Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart’s description of pornography, in that you know it when you see it. Does merit consist of talent alone? Talent combined with work ethic? Talent, work ethic and character?

Merit is in the eye of the beholder. If I was admitted to an Ivy League university, it was obviously because I had merit. If someone else, especially someone from an underrepresented population, got the acceptance instead of me, factors other than merit must have been at play. If two candidates have identical transcripts but different SAT scores, which one possesses more merit? Complicating the discussion is the fact that many things cited as measures of merit are in fact measures of privilege.

For Brooks, Ivy League meritocracy involves an overreliance on intelligence and academic achievement, to the detriment of noncognitive skills that are more central to success and happiness in life. He argues that “success in school is not the same thing as success in life,” with success in school primarily being individual while success in life is team-based. He quotes Adam Grant’s argument that academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence.

Ultimately, he argues that “meritocracy” has spurred the creation of “an American caste system,” one in which “a chasm divides the educated from the less well-educated,” triggering “a populist backlash that is tearing society apart.” Yet Brooks’s beef is not so much with meritocracy as it is with a mindset that he attributes to Conant and his brethren. He equates meritocracy with a belief in rationalism and social engineering that assumes that anything of value can be measured and counted. What he is criticizing is something different from meritocracy, or at least reflects a narrow definition of meritocracy.

Even if we don’t agree with Brooks’s definitions, or the implication that Ivy League admission policies are responsible for the ills of society, his article raises a number of important questions about the college admission process at elite colleges and universities.

First, is the worship of standardized testing misplaced? The SAT became prominent in college admission at around the same time that Conant and others were changing the Ivy League admission paradigm. They believed that intelligence could be measured and latched onto the SAT as a “pure,” objective measure of aptitude. Today, of course, we recognize that test scores are correlated with family income and that scores can be manipulated through test preparation. And the “A” in SAT no longer stands for aptitude.

Do we measure what we value or do we value what we can measure? Brooks criticizes the Ivies for focusing on academic achievement in school at the expense of “noncognitive skills” that might be more important to success in life after college, things like curiosity, relationship-building skills and work ethic. He’s right, but there are two reasons for the current emphasis. One is that going to college is going to school, so an admission process focused on scholastic academic achievement is defensible. The other is that we haven’t developed a good mechanism for measuring noncognitive skills.

That raises a larger question. What do we want the admission process to accomplish? The SAT is intended to predict freshman year college GPA (in conjunction with high school grades). Is that a satisfactory goal? Shouldn’t we have a larger lens, aiming to identify those who will be most successful at the end of college, or after college? Should we admit those with the greatest potential, those who will grow the most from the college experience, or those who will make the greatest contribution to society after college?

Brooks questions elite colleges’ preferences for “spiky” students over those who are well-rounded. Is a student body full of spiky students really better? An even more important question arises from a distinction Brooks made some years ago between “résumé virtues” and “eulogy virtues.”

Does the elite college admission process as currently constituted reward and encourage students who are good at building résumés? A former student attending an elite university commented that almost every classmate had done independent academic research and started a nonprofit. Do students aspiring to the Ivies choose activities because they really care about them or because they think they will impress admission officers, and can admission officers tell the difference? What is the consequence of having a student body full of those who are good at playing the résumé-building game?

There is one other issue raised by Brooks that I find particularly important. He argues that those who are successful in the elite admission process end up possessing greater “hubris,” in that they believe their success is the product of their talent and hard work rather than privilege and luck. Rather than appreciating their good fortune, they may believe they are entitled to it. That misconception may also fuel the populist backlash to elites that has increased the division within our country.

I don’t buy Brooks’s definition of meritocracy or his contention that the Ivy League “broke” America, but his article nevertheless merits reading and discussion.

Jim Jump recently retired after 33 years as the academic dean and director of college counseling at St. Christopher’s School in Richmond, Va. He previously served as an admissions officer, philosophy instructor and women’s basketball coach at the college level and is a past president of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. He is the 2024 recipient of NACAC’s John B. Muir Excellence in Media Award.
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January 27, 2025
Rutgers cancels HBCU event to align with Trump DEI orders
The virtual mini-conference sponsored by Jobs for the Future was scheduled for Jan. 30.
The Rutgers University Center for Minority Serving Institutions announced Thursday that it has canceled an upcoming virtual conference about registered apprenticeship programs as a result of President Trump’s executive orders targeting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

“We were very excited to bring the HBCUs and Registered Apprenticeship Mini-Conference to you next week,” said the email sent to registered attendees. “Unfortunately, due to President Trump’s Executive Orders … we have been asked to cease all work under the auspices of the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility HUB at Jobs for the Future, which the U.S. Department of Labor funds.”

Jobs for the Future, an organization focused on helping college and workforce leaders create equitable economic outcomes for students, runs a national innovation hub focused on improving access to registered apprenticeships for women, people of color and other underrepresented groups.

Located in New Jersey, a blue state for more the 30 years, Rutgers has not faced pressure from state legislators to dismantle DEI. But the cancellation demonstrates the leverage and power the federal government can hold over colleges and universities by threatening to pull funding from programs that don’t comply with the president’s demands.

It’s just the kind of reaction higher ed policy experts and DEI advocates predicted as a result of the Republican agenda.

“That wariness and sort of pre-emptive compliance, even absent direct threats from the federal or state government, might be somewhat universal,” Brendan Cantwell, a professor of education at Michigan State University, told Inside Higher Ed.

“These leaders will be worried about losing their federal funding, which is exactly what DEI opponents want,” added Shaun Harper, a professor of education, business and public policy; the founder of the University of Southern California’s Race and Equity Center; and an Inside Higher Ed opinion contributor.

More cancellations are anticipated in the weeks and months to come as the Trump administration continues to issue executive orders. For instance, Trump’s growing team at the Department of Education announced a series of actions Thursday related to eliminating DEI.

“The Department removed or archived hundreds of guidance documents, reports, and training materials that include mentions of DEI from its outward facing communication channels [and] put employees charged with leading DEI initiatives on paid administrative leave,” agency officials said in a news release. “These actions are in line with President Trump’s ongoing commitment to end illegal discrimination and wasteful spending across the federal government. They are the first step in reorienting the agency toward prioritizing meaningful learning ahead of divisive ideology in our schools.”

Other actions the department has taken include:
- Dissolving the department’s Diversity and Inclusion Council.
- Terminating the Employee Engagement Diversity Equity Inclusion Accessibility Council within the Office for Civil Rights.
- Canceling ongoing DEI training and service contracts that total over $2.6 million.
- Withdrawing the department’s Equity Action Plan, which was released in 2023 to align with former president Joe Biden’s executive order to advance racial equity and support for underserved communities.
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January 24, 2025
North Idaho College awaits its fate

After years of scrutiny over governance issues that included violations of open meetings laws and other infractions, North Idaho College will soon learn whether it will keep or lose accreditation.

The Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities will convene Tuesday through Friday for its January meeting. Commissioners will determine whether NIC adequately resolved outstanding concerns driven by a former board majority that emphasized culture war issues at the rural Idaho college, tried to push out its president and hired personnel with political connections to board members.

A decision on the college’s accreditation status will be delivered within 30 days of the meeting.

College officials hope the commissioners see the progress they say NIC has made over the last year, resolving various governance issues raised by NWCCU as it sought to comply with accreditation standards after a flurry of warnings that culminated in a show-cause status in February 2023, meaning the college must “present evidence why its accreditation should not be withdrawn.” The sanction highlighted multiple governance issues driven by an exceptionally erratic board.

Years of Conflict

North Idaho’s clash with its accreditor came as a result of thorny governance issues marked by bitter clashes on its five-member elected Board of Trustees, with meetings that occasionally devolved into name-calling and appeared at times to be fueled by personal and ideological agendas.

The high drama began at the small college in Coeur d’Alene in 2021 with allegations of abuse and aggressive behavior toward employees and others by then-chair Todd Banducci. The firing of former president Rick MacLennan without cause that same year prompted a successful lawsuit against the college, and the resignation of three board members (one amid residency questions) in 2022 prompted the state to temporarily appoint three new trustees who served out the remainder of their predecessors’ terms.

While the reconstituted board managed to hire a new president in 2022, membership was reshuffled after elections that year. Two members who often voted together—Banducci and Greg McKenzie—were joined by Mike Waggoner, all of whom had ties to the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee, a group some considered far-right even for rural Idaho. With a new board majority in place, governance issues at NIC escalated rapidly in 2023.

The new majority seated after Election Day in 2022 began by hiring Art Macomber as the college’s attorney in a surprise move that the board would later admit violated open meetings laws. The college’s prior attorney, Marc Lyons, had resigned after the election, writing that his services were “no longer desired” by the board majority. Macomber, who has since resigned, had political connections to the board majority.

The board’s next act was to sideline President Nick Swayne, placing him on administrative leave in December after he cautioned trustees that they had violated open meetings and procurement law by abruptly picking Macomber without public notice or a bidding process. In Swayne’s place, the board hired an interim president while Macomber conducted a nebulous investigation into Swayne’s hiring by the prior board. (The interim president was given a contract that paid him more than $235,000 a year, $5,000 more than Swayne’s annual salary.) However, Swayne was reinstated in March 2023 after a successful legal challenge to the board’s attempted ouster.

Amid the volatility, NWCCU issued a series of escalating warnings.

The accreditor first contacted North Idaho leadership in April 2021 in response to complaints about alleged noncompliance with nondiscrimination, governing board and academic freedom standards. The accreditor then raised further concerns about governance standards in December 2021 related to MacLennan’s firing. (The Idaho State Board of Education also raised concerns about “the current trajectory” of NIC that same month.) In April 2022, NWCCU officially sanctioned NIC with a warning letter about noncompliance with governance and institutional integrity standards. In December of that year, after Swayne was temporarily sidelined, the accreditor threatened NIC with show-cause status. By February 2023, NWCCU followed through, slapping NIC with a show- cause sanction that was later extended in July of that year.

In a May 2023 report, accreditors wrote that “NIC’s governing board’s actions over the past two years have created risks to institutional quality and integrity.” Among their concerns were “multiple lawsuits resulting from Board actions” and violations of open meetings laws; high leadership turnover, including having two presidents under contract; the hiring process for Macomber; and multiple votes of no confidence in the board by faculty and staff that trustees had not responded to.

When NWCCU extended NIC’s show-cause status in July, it called on the board to address the no-confidence resolutions and “resolve current litigation, governance, and accreditation issues that have had a current and immediate impact” on college finances, among various other issues.

Swayne, in an interview with Inside Higher Ed, noted that the issues fell on the governance side, which is also reflected in NWCCU’s findings. Academics at the college, he said, are strong.

An Optimistic Outlook

As the concerns about the loss of accreditation continued—often becoming a heated focal point in public comments at board meetings—NIC hired outside consultants, such as the Association of Community College Trustees to help develop board policies and interpersonal relationships.

While that process seemed to help, Swayne doesn’t believe a lack of training was the issue.

“I don’t want to discount the value of the consulting, but two years of consulting to try to teach board members, adults—well-educated adults—how to behave properly in a board meeting doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Swayne said. “So there was something else going on. I can’t tell you what that was—I don’t know.”

The notion of something sinister underlying the actions of the former board majority has been a common theme at meetings in recent years, with speakers questioning the trustees’ motives. Local residents often demanded the board majority explain their motivations and offered theories of their own, sometimes tinged with conspiracy, including speculation that the three trustees aimed to shut the college down in order to free up prime real estate for development.

Swayne suggested there was a “hangover from COVID” at play given that opposition to masks and vaccines was a “main issue” for the majority bloc of trustees until the coronavirus pandemic waned. Emboldened trustees, he suspects, were in search of another cause after that fight ended. And some, like Banducci, had alleged the existence of a liberal “deep state” at the community college, particularly among faculty.

After some employees voiced support for the Black Lives Matter movement, Banducci claimed on a podcast that “those agendas are being woven into the curriculum. And, you know, who controls the kids, who controls their minds, who controls the college student, you know, controls the voter of the future and controls the populace.” Banducci also allegedly berated MacLennan’s wife for being a Hillary Clinton support, according to a former trustee who called for Banducci to step down in 2021.

But with increasing accreditor scrutiny, there appeared to be a softening of the board, starting with Waggoner, who often sided with Banducci and McKenzie but later emerged as a swing vote.

Swayne said he noticed the change around May 2024. And once Waggoner’s voting patterns shifted, Banducci and McKenzie fell in behind him. Meetings, which had often stretched on for hours due to heated public comment periods and legal wrangling, became shorter, more cordial and nonconfrontational.

Last fall, Banducci and Waggoner decided not to run for re-election and McKenzie lost his bid for another term, putting an end to the board majority that was behind many of the decisions that prompted scrutiny from accreditors as three new trustees were seated. (McKenzie and Banducci did not respond to requests for comment from Inside Higher Ed. Waggoner could not be reached.)

Swayne said there were “seven months of relatively normalized meetings with the old board.” And now, with a reconfigured board, he believes NIC’s governance issues have been resolved.

If NIC does lose accreditation over governance issues, it would be an anomaly. Typically, accreditation is stripped due to severe financial or academic issues, which NWCCU has not found. Governance concerns are typically met with warnings, which NWCCU issued in multiple cases before taking further action.

NWCCU president Sonny Ramaswamy wrote by email that it would be “inappropriate to speak about any decisions the Board of Commissioners will make [on] North Idaho College, before they have acted” and noted that the process will follow an established accreditation actions policy.

While Swayne declined to predict the outcome, he believes the college has made significant progress on accreditation concerns and “started meeting the standards back in May of 2024.” He’s hopeful that a room full of more than two dozen commissioners will see it the same way.

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January 24, 2025
Carnegie Foundation launches sustainability classification pilot

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the American Council on Education announced Thursday that they have launched a pilot of their new Sustainability Elective Classification, a designation that will recognize institutions of higher education that “embed sustainability and climate action into their core missions,” according to the announcement.

The pilot program will include 21 colleges and universities from across the 50 states and Puerto Rico and will aim to refine the criteria for the classification while working to guarantee that it is attainable to institutions of all sizes and types. The classification is expected to consider “institutional efforts across curriculum, research, operations, community engagement, and workforce development, with an emphasis on preparing students for careers in sustainability fields.”

“The Elective Classification for Sustainability recognizes how institutions of higher education are essential to the future of American innovation and progress, within and beyond their classrooms,” Timothy F. C. Knowles, president of the Carnegie Foundation, said in the announcement. “These pilot institutions are helping to forge the way.”

The Sustainability Elective Classification is scheduled to launch in early 2026. The Carnegie Foundation and ACE are also looking for a university or institution to serve as the classification’s administrative and operational host.

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January 24, 2025
Trump’s sex and gender order could create risk for colleges

While running for president, Donald Trump pledged to fight the Biden administration’s efforts to expand protections for transgender students. On day one of his second term in office, he got to work fulfilling that promise.

In an executive order, which is part of a broader effort to restrict the rights of transgender people, Trump declared that there are only two sexes and banned the federal funding of “gender ideology.” His supporters hailed the move as a return to common sense, while LGBTQ+ advocates saw it as an attack seeking to erase the existence of trans people.

For colleges and universities, the order raises more questions than it answers, and its immediate implications are unclear. As with other executive orders, it includes many provisions that require the Education Department to take action and issue guidance about how colleges should comply. But depending on how the department responds, the order could complicate institutions’ efforts to accommodate transgender students and eventually change how the federal government enforces Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.

Susan Friedfel, a higher education attorney at Jackson Lewis, a New York City law firm that works with colleges and other employers, said more information is needed from the Education Department to determine how the order will affect higher ed institutions, especially since other federal and state laws protect LGBTQ+ students.

“We have a lot of questions,” she said. “It’s challenging because we have conflicting laws that apply to the same space.”

In the meantime, she encouraged colleges to revisit their Title IX policies to ensure they are in compliance with the 2020 regulations put in place by the first Trump administration and to think about how best to accommodate everybody.

The order, titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” defines “sex,” “male” and “female,” among other terms, and orders federal agencies to use those definitions when “interpreting or applying statutes, regulations, or guidance and in all other official agency business, documents, and communications.”

The order is likely to face legal challenges, said Cathryn Oakley, senior director of legal policy at the Human Rights Campaign, who argues that it’s unlawful.

“It is important that people not give this executive order more credence than it deserves,” she said.

Other LGBTQ+ advocates echoed Oakley, emphasizing that executive orders don’t create or change laws.

“Discrimination based on sex, including discrimination against transgender, nonbinary, and intersex people, remains illegal, and it cannot be legalized through this executive order,” Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, said in a statement.

But Republican lawmakers, conservative legal organizations and other anti-trans advocates applauded Trump’s order, saying it would protect women and girls from discrimination and ground federal law in “biological fact.”

“Blatant and deliberate attempts to redefine our sons’ and daughters’ identities by questioning biology itself has done significant harm to our children and society,” said Representative Tim Walberg, the Michigan Republican who chairs the House education committee. “[The] action by the Trump administration acknowledges the biological differences between men and women. In doing so, it is protecting women from discrimination and securing the progress women have made over the decades.”

What’s in the Order

In addition to defining “sex” and other terms, the order outlines a plan to combat “gender ideology,” which the Trump administration defines as replacing “the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity, permitting the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa.”

Federal officials were told to remove any internal or external documents that “inculcate gender ideology” and take “any necessary steps to end the federal funding of gender ideology.” Additionally, agencies will now only use the term “sex” instead of “gender” in all applicable federal policies and documents, according to the order. The Biden administration gave people the option on passport applications to mark their gender as X rather than choose male or female. That option is now being eliminated.

On Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the State Department wouldn’t process any passport applications seeking to change the applicant’s gender from male to female or requesting the X option, The Guardian reported.

Agencies are required to give an update on their efforts to implement the order in 120 days.

The Trump administration also directed the attorney general to correct the Biden administration’s “misapplication” of the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, which said that LGBTQ+ individuals were protected from discrimination in the workplace on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The first Trump administration said that Bostock didn’t apply to Title IX, which bars sex-based discrimination in education settings. But the Biden administration reversed that guidance in June 2021.

The Bostock decision was key to the Biden administration’s new Title IX regulations, which clarified that the law also prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. A federal judge ruled earlier this month that the new Title IX rule was unlawful and wiped the regulations off the books.

Trump’s executive order also requires the education secretary to rescind a number of guidance documents related to the now-vacated Title IX regulations, as well as resources for supporting LGBTQ+ students. That includes the Education Department’s June 2021 Dear Colleague letter that said Title IX protects LGBTQ+ students from discrimination based on their sexual orientation or gender identity.

In addition, the Trump administration is rescinding a back-to-school message for transgender students from the Departments of Education, Justice and Health and Human Services that provided resources for students who experience bullying or discrimination.

‘Nothing Radical’

Kim Hermann, the executive director of the Southeastern Legal Foundation, a conservative legal organization that sued the Biden administration over the Title IX regulations, said Trump’s order immediately restores the privacy and physical safety rights of women, so colleges that don’t comply could face federal civil rights investigations or lawsuits.

“There’s nothing radical about this executive order,” she said. “All it does is solidify Congress’s original intent when they passed the laws … Our girls and our women on college campuses are sick of their rights being eroded.”

Friedfel said the current Trump administration will likely investigate complaints from cisgender students who are uncomfortable sharing spaces with transgender students.

“That doesn’t mean that they necessarily have to do anything radically different, but recognize that there’s that risk there,” she said.

Oakley said that guidance from the department is necessary for universities to understand what’s expected of them and how the Office for Civil Rights will enforce Title IX. She doesn’t expect OCR to take discrimination against LGBTQ+ faculty, staff and students seriously.

“It’s also going to be very difficult to understand how to be in compliance when the folks who are enforcing the law are not respecting the actual case law,” she said. “So it is going to create a tremendous amount of confusion.”

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January 24, 2025