Tag: Career

  • Guide Outlines Change Management for College Course Scheduling

    Guide Outlines Change Management for College Course Scheduling

    Timely college completion has benefits for both the student and the institution. Learners who graduate on time—within two or four years, depending on the degree program—hold less debt and have greater earnings potential because they’re able to enter the workforce sooner.

    National data reveals that only 17 percent of students at public two-year colleges complete a degree in two years, and 40 percent of students at public four-year institutions graduate on time. While a variety of personal challenges can limit students’ timely completion, institutional processes can also have an impact. According to the course scheduling software provider Ad Astra’s 2024 Benchmark Report, which included data from 1.3 million students, 26 percent of program requirement courses were not offered during the terms indicated in pathway guidance, leaving students without a clear road map to completion.

    A new resource from Ad Astra and Complete College America identifies ways institutions can reconsider class scheduling to maximize opportunities for student completion.

    What’s the need: Students report a need for additional support in scheduling and charting academic pathways; a 2024 Student Voice survey by Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab found that 26 percent of respondents want their college to create or clarify academic program pathways. An additional 28 percent want their institution to introduce online platforms to help them plan out degree progress.

    Nontraditional students, including adult learners, parenting students and working students, are more likely to face scheduling challenges that can also impede their progress. A 2024 survey of online learners (who are primarily older, working and caregiving students) found that 68 percent of respondents considered time to degree completion a top factor in selecting their program and institution.

    But making the switch to a better system isn’t exactly a cakewalk for higher ed institutions, and establishing strong top-down policies can create its own hurdles. “Because leadership changes in organizations and institutions, because we get more and more students enrolling and registering, we still have to continue to reiterate this message about how important academic scheduling is,” said Complete College America president Yolanda Watson Spiva. “But we’re happy to do it because it still remains one of the best levers for helping students to persist and complete college.”

    Becoming a student-centered institution with predictable and flexible scheduling also benefits the institution because it means continuous enrollment, Watson Spiva said

    “Whether it’s Uber or Amazon, all these things are meant to make life easier, and yet for some reason, in higher ed, we haven’t caught up to that, that convenience is a major factor” in improving student enrollment and retention, Watson Spiva said. “Until we change our mindset in terms of embracing students as agents of change and having agency in and of themselves, I think we’re going to continue to grapple with this pervasive issue.”

    The new report is a playbook of sorts to help institutions prepare to make change, said Ad Astra’s president, Sarah Collins. “This is one of the next big things that institutions really need to get their arms around, I think, because it’s so culturally difficult and very big, very hairy and scary,” Collins said.

    How to make change: For institutions that want to do better and overhaul current practices, Ad Astra’s report provides starting points that administrators can consider, including:

    • Assessing the institution’s readiness for change, including current scheduling practices, faculty concerns and priorities, as well as the institution’s context, such as previous efforts and resource constraints. Administrators should identify existing inefficiencies, as well as resources and staff capacity, to implement and sustain change.
    • Being aware that making adjustments requires more than technical training; it also demands capabilities to engage in change leadership practices and sustained support to ensure changes are embedded into the institutional culture.
    • Celebrating and recognizing positive changes. Data and storytelling can measure impact as well as affirm how practices make a difference in student success.

    Evaluating the organizational structure of the institution is one key piece, Collins said, because colleges tend to be designed around a strategy rather than a student. Institutions should also prioritize data collection and distribution, because that’s a frequent sticking point in change-management practices.

    “Making sure that the data tells a story, convincing people to believe the data, making sure that the things you’re trying to measure are the things that actually matter and they actually map to the bigger thing you’re trying to accomplish,” Collins explained.

    Additionally, prioritizing the student voice in conversations about course scheduling can ensure that the institution is centered on learners’ needs. “It should not just be the traditional-age student,” Watson Spiva said. “It should also include post-traditional students—working learners, parenting learners—because their scheduling needs are going to be very, very diverse.”

    We bet your colleague would like this article, too. Send them this link to subscribe to our newsletter on Student Success.

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  • AI Companies Roll Out Educational Tools

    AI Companies Roll Out Educational Tools

    Fall semesters are just beginning, and the companies offering three leading AI models—Gemini by Google, Claude by Anthropic and ChatGPT by OpenAI—have rolled out tools to facilitate AI-enhanced learning. Here’s a comparison and how to get them.

    Each of the three leading AI providers has taken a somewhat different approach to providing an array of educational tools and support for students, faculty and administrators. We can expect these tools to improve, proliferate and become a competitive battleground among the three. At stake is, at least in part, the future marketplace for their products. To the extent educators utilize, administrators support and students become comfortable with one of the proprietary products, that provider will be at an advantage when those students rise to positions that allow them to specify use of a provider in educational institutions, companies and corporations across the country.

    Anthropic, the company that makes the series of Claude applications, announced on Aug. 21 “two initiatives for AI in education to help navigate these critical decisions: a Higher Education Advisory Board to guide Claude’s development for education, and three AI Fluency courses co-created with educators that can help teachers and students build practical, responsible AI skills.”

    The board is chaired by Rick Levin, former president of Yale and more recently at Coursera. Anthropic notes in the announcement, “At Coursera, he built one of the world’s largest platforms for online learning, bringing high-quality education to millions worldwide.” The board itself is populated with former and current leading administrators at Rice University, the University of Michigan, the University of Texas at Austin and Stanford, as well as Yolanda Watson Spiva, who is president of Complete College America. Anthropic says the board will “help guide how Claude serves teaching, learning, and research in higher education.”

    The three AI Fluency courses that Anthropic co-created with educators are designed to help create thoughtful practical frameworks for AI integration:

    “AI Fluency for Educators helps faculty integrate AI into their teaching practice, from creating materials and assessments to enhancing classroom discussions. Built on experience from early adopters, it shows what works in real classrooms. AI Fluency for Students teaches responsible AI collaboration for coursework and career planning. Students learn to work with AI while developing their own critical thinking skills, and write their own personal commitment to responsible AI use. Teaching AI Fluency supports educators who want to bring AI literacy to their campuses and classrooms. It includes frameworks for instruction and assessment, plus curriculum considerations for preparing students for a more AI-enhanced world.”

    The courses and more are freely available at the Anthropic Learning Academy.

    Earlier last month, Google unveiled Guided Learning in Gemini: From Answers to Understanding: “Guided Learning encourages participation through probing and open-ended questions that spark a discussion and provide an opportunity to dive deeper into a subject. The aim is to help you build a deep understanding instead of just getting answers. Guided Learning breaks down problems step-by-step and adapts explanations to your needs—all to help you build knowledge and skills.”

    The Google Guided Learning project offers additional support to faculty. “We worked with educators to design Guided Learning to be a partner in their teaching, built on the core principle that real learning is an active, constructive process. It encourages students to move beyond answers and develop their own thinking by guiding them with questions that foster critical thought. To make it simple to bring this approach into their classrooms, we created a dedicated link that educators can post directly in Google Classroom or share with students.”

    Google announced an array of additional tools for the coming year:

    “We’re offering students in the U.S. as well as Japan, Indonesia, Korea and Brazil a free one-year subscription to Google’s AI Pro plan to help make the most of AI’s power for their studies. Sign-up for the free AI Pro Plan offer.

    Try new learning features in Gemini including Guided Learning, Flashcards and Study Guides. And students and universities around the world can get a free one-year subscription to a Google AI Pro plan.

    AI Mode in Google Search now features tools like Canvas, Search Live with video and PDF uploads.

    NotebookLM is introducing Featured Notebooks, Video Overviews and a new study panel; it’s also now available to users under 18.

    And to help students get the most out of all these new features, we’ve announced Google AI for Education Accelerator, an initiative to offer free AI training and Google Career Certificates to every college student in America. Over 100 public universities have already signed up. We’re also committing $1 billion in new funding to education in the United States over the next three years.”

    That brings us to OpenAI, which announced ChatGPT Study Mode on July 29, 2025. Noting ChatGPT’s overall leadership and success, OpenAI added, “But its use in education has also raised an important question: how do we ensure it is used to support real learning, and doesn’t just offer solutions without helping students make sense of them? We’ve built study mode to help answer this question. When students engage with study mode, they’re met with guiding questions that calibrate responses to their objective and skill level to help them build deeper understanding. Study mode is designed to be engaging and interactive, and to help students learn something—not just finish something.”

    The Study Mode function is available now in the Free, Plus, Pro and Team versions of GPT products providing an array of features:

    “Interactive prompts: Combines Socratic questioning, hints, and self-reflection prompts to guide understanding and promote active learning, instead of providing answers outright. Scaffolded responses: Information is organized into easy-to-follow sections that highlight the key connections between topics, keeping information engaging with just the right amount of context and reducing overwhelm for complex topics. Personalized support: Lessons are tailored to the right level for the user, based on questions that assess skill level and memory from previous chats. Knowledge checks: Quizzes and open-ended questions, along with personalized feedback to track progress, support knowledge retention and the ability to apply that knowledge in new contexts. Flexibility: Easily toggle study mode on and off during a conversation, giving you the flexibility to adapt to your learning goals in each conversation.”

    I encourage readers to visit each of the sites linked above to become familiar with the different ways Anthropic, Google and OpenAI are approaching providing support to educational institutions and individual instructors and learners. This is an opportunity to become more familiar with each of the leading AI providers and their apps. Now is the time to become experienced in using these tools that collectively have become the foundation of innovation and efficiency in 2025.

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  • Is Your Idea Op-Ed Ready? Here’s a Test to Find Out

    Is Your Idea Op-Ed Ready? Here’s a Test to Find Out

    You have expert insights—plenty of them. You give impromptu lectures in office hours, debate podcast guests midrun and readily join boisterous debates over dinner. Maybe you’re even drafting a book that builds a careful case from your expert point of view. But when it comes time to write your own op-ed? That sharp idea can start to feel too complex, too niche or—let’s be honest—too wordy for 800 words aimed at a general audience.

    That’s not a failing; it’s a feature of your training. Academics are trained to distill ideas for their peers, not for nonspecialists. You argue carefully, if not compactly. You cite meticulously, not conversationally. But public writing demands something different—skills to illuminate complex concepts in a way that an intelligent lay reader can follow, feel and act on.

    Before you spend an afternoon translating your expert insight into an 800-word article you pitch to a newspaper or magazine, run your idea through this op-ed readiness test. It won’t replace compelling writing, but it may help determine whether your idea is ready to leave the seminar room and live, persuasively, on the opinion page.

    1. Who cares? It’s a tough question, but not a cynical one. Just because something fascinates you doesn’t mean that it matters to the broader public. That’s not a judgment of your topic. It’s a reminder to find the resonance. What’s at stake beyond your personal experience or corner of the discipline? You don’t have to write about what’s already dominating headlines. In fact, if your idea surfaces something overlooked or offers a fresh lens, it may be exactly what public discourse needs. Urgency is not always about volume; it’s often about insight.

    So ask yourself: Who, beyond academia, might find your idea clarifying, challenging or useful? Who might see their own experience differently—or see someone else’s for the first time? Who, if they read what you have to say, might think differently about something that affects their life, work, vote or values? If your answer is, “Well, maybe more people should care,” you might be onto something. But part of your task is to show them why.

    1. Why now—or why always? Editors love a good news hook. If your idea connects to a breaking story, an upcoming decision or a public debate gaining steam, then run with it. But run fast. In journalism, “timely” means submitting within hours or a day or two, not weeks. If something is happening right now and you have a fresh angle, start writing.

    Of course, not every op-ed needs a news peg. If your idea speaks to an enduring question or a slow-burning issue—and does so with clarity, urgency or surprising insight—it still has a shot. Just know that in an editor’s crowded inbox, a time peg can help your piece stand out. An “evergreen” op-ed may need to work harder and land stronger to compete.

    1. Can you make your case by paragraph two? You don’t have to dumb down your argument, but you do have to speed it up. Public readers and their editors have strong opinions about long, slow windups. Spoiler: They don’t like them.

    Try writing a working headline for your piece that’s under 60 characters. Then distill your argument in one or two crisp, compelling sentences—no acronyms, no jargon and no “hence” or “thus.” (Also, no “as Foucault reminds us.”) These sentences should appear early, ideally by the end of paragraph two. At first, this mandate can feel reductive. But being concise isn’t a betrayal of complexity. It’s a tool for focus. You’re not flattening your idea; you’re making it easy to find. If your piece needs detailed footnotes or a literature review, it’s probably not (yet) an op-ed.

    1. What’s the aha? Your op-ed should offer insight that readers haven’t already heard several times this week. If your takeaway is “what you’ve heard, but with citations,” then it may still need sharpening. Some of the best pieces offer a twist such as an unexpected data point, an odd-but-illuminating comparison or a perspective that flips conventional wisdom on its head. You’re trying to make an intelligent reader think, “I hadn’t thought of that.”
    2. Are you writing to connect—or to impress? You’re not writing to prove you’ve done the reading; you’re writing to help someone else think differently. Your op-ed should feel like an intelligent conversation over coffee, not a cautious explanation in a lecture hall. You don’t have to be breezy or punchy (unless that’s your style), but you should sound like a real person with a distinct voice. This isn’t about being casual for its own sake. It’s about being readable.

    If your draft feels like it could be suitable for peer review, try loosening the syntax. Ask yourself: How would I say this to a smart friend who doesn’t share my training? Readers want active verbs, not hedges. When you write like someone who wants to be understood—not just cited—you don’t dilute your thinking; you make it land.

    1. Will a reader remember it tomorrow? A good op-ed doesn’t just inform, it lingers. It leaves a mark, even a small one, on a reader’s thinking. That might come from a vivid image, a well-turned phrase or a question that unsettles something they thought they knew. If your argument is technically sound but leaves no lasting impression, it’s worth asking: What do I know that will stay with the reader? What might echo later, in a moment of uncertainty, over a dinner-table debate or in a voting booth?

    If your idea for an op-ed makes it through these six questions, chances are it’s ready to leave the seminar room. From there, it’s all about shaping the piece—tightening the structure, sharpening the language and leading with your point. An op-ed doesn’t need to say everything you know on your topic. It just needs to make one point well, in a way that readers will remember.

    Not every idea belongs on the op-ed page—but yours might. Ask the questions, trust your instincts and, when you’re ready, write it, shape it and send it.

    And if you’d like more help along the way, sign up for my monthly newsletter. You’ll get notice of each new article in “The Public Scholar,” plus practical writing tips, behind-the-scenes insights from my work and inspiration from other academics finding their voice in public spaces. Your expertise is hard-won. What might happen if you shared what you know more broadly?

    Susan D’Agostino is a mathematician whose stories have published in The Atlantic, BBC, Scientific American, The Washington Post, Wired, The Financial Times, Quanta and other leading publications. Her next book, How Math Will Save Your Life, will be published by W. W. Norton. Sign up for Susan’s free monthly newsletter here.

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  • Therapy Dogs Boost Graduate Student Well-Being

    Therapy Dogs Boost Graduate Student Well-Being

    Time spent with animals can boost feelings of well-being for students at all levels.

    Laura Fay/iStock/Getty Images Plus

    Therapy dogs are often touted as a way to give students a reprieve from busy academic schedules or remind them of their own pets at home, but a recent study from Chatham University found that engagement with therapy dogs can instill a sense of social connection for students at all levels.

    An occupational therapy student at Chatham who researched how weekly therapy dog interactions could impact graduate students in health science programs found that the encounters produced benefits for students’ social and emotional health.

    The background: Past research shows animal interventions can mitigate homesickness for first-year students who miss their pets and academic stress for nursing students. Students who participate in “dog office hours” also experience increased social connection and comfort. Shelter dogs can also motivate students’ physical well-being, as demonstrated by the University of South Carolina’s canine fitness course.

    Graduate students in health science programs, in particular, report high rates of anxiety, depression and stress, according to the study.

    Regardless of their program of study, graduate students also tend to be removed from general campus services and activities due to physical campus layouts, residing and working off campus, or a misalignment of schedules between resources and their responsibilities. Therefore, identifying services specifically for graduate students can improve their access and uptake.

    How it works: Twenty-five students were recruited to participate in the study, meeting weekly to engage in activities with a group of therapy dogs, including petting, playing with, brushing, holding and walking the animals. Students could interact with the dogs for up to two hours over the course of the seven weeks. Before and after each puppy playdate, participants completed pre- and post-test surveys to gauge their feelings and the effects of the animal intervention.

    Survey results showed students were less likely to report feeling stressed and more likely to say they felt happy after engaging with the dogs.

    “I’ve really enjoyed this experience,” one participant wrote. “I feel like this has positively impacted my mood and well-being overall. I always leave feeling more relaxed and happier.”

    In open-ended questions, students said the dogs made them feel happy, loved, calm, relaxed, motivated and connected. Many said they also appreciated the opportunity to engage with their peers, noting that the regular cadence allowed them to socialize and meet new people, including the therapy dogs’ owners. Students indicated they wanted the visits to continue in some way if possible.

    The average student spent around 30 minutes with the therapy dogs during the trial, and, if they had the opportunity, a majority said they would participate in therapy animal groups on campus three to four times per month.

    Other Comforting Canines

    Chatham University students aren’t the only graduate students learning to destress from dogs. Here are some other examples of animal-assisted interventions across the country:

    • At Virginia Tech, graduate students at the Innovation Campus receive love and cuddles from Allen, a therapy dog who is co-handled by Barbara Hoopes, the graduate school’s associate dean for the region.
    • The City University of New York’s School of Public Health has hosted a therapy dog visit from the Good Dog Foundation to encourage graduate learners to relax and take a break during their week.
    • The University of Cincinnati featured therapy dogs at their Graduate Student Appreciation Week in April, honoring the hard work students do and helping them break their usual routines.

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  • Instructional Designer at Springfield College

    Instructional Designer at Springfield College

    High-quality educational experiences are best created when professors partner with instructional/learning designers. This is true for in-person, hybrid and fully online courses. If you are searching for an instructional/learning designer, I would like to highlight that opportunity in this Featured Gig series.

    Today, we are talking with Chris Hakala, director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship and professor of psychology at Springfield College, about his instructional designer search.

    Q: What is the university’s mandate behind this role? How does it help align with and advance the university’s strategic priorities?

    A: The College is invested in continuing to grow its online presence. We have recently had a number of our instructional designers leave for positions that offered them different flexibility or that allowed them to move into other positions, and this current position is to backfill that space and to support our faculty both in the online space as well as the in-person teaching as faculty continue to learn how to best leverage their LMS to benefit their students.

    It aligns with our strategic priorities with regard to providing faculty with resources to best leverage our digital resources to align with our pedagogy.

    Q: Where does the role sit within the university structure? How will the person in this role engage with other units and leaders across campus?

    A: The instructional design team sits in the Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship (our teaching center) and reports to the director. In that capacity, the Center engages with faculty in all formats of pedagogy and supports both the face-to-face and online pedagogy as well as the digital resources that engage learners. The new ID will work with the team in the center to align practices but will also engage extensively with faculty as subject-matter experts to best design digital resources for their particular style of pedagogy.

    Q: What would success look like in one year? Three years? Beyond?

    A: Success would be the continued growth of utilization of digital resources such that there is more consistency in what is available for learners in the digital platform. In three years, we’d like to grow our footprint on campus so that we are working alongside faculty in all areas to maximize learning.

    Q: What kinds of future roles would someone who took this position be prepared for?

    A: As a comprehensive teaching center, we encourage our instructional design team to learn about educational development writ large. Thus, we hope that over time our instructional designers engage in all manner of educational development, leaning into digital resources but also aligning pedagogical practice with creating effective assessments and further ensuring that they are appropriate for the learning outcomes of the courses. We expect our IDs to be well-versed in a variety of areas of educational development, including science of learning, so that our center speaks with a common voice.

    Please get in touch if you are conducting a job search at the intersection of learning, technology and organizational change. If your gig is a good fit, featuring your gig on Featured Gigs is free.

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  • A Teaching Mantra for the New Year (opinion)

    A Teaching Mantra for the New Year (opinion)

    As professors, we naturally talk a lot about teaching—and I’ve certainly benefited from public discussions at workshops and panel presentations. But we can also have more intimate moments of instructional insight, private moments we may initially keep to ourselves until over time we come to appreciate more fully their value.

    Here’s my hitherto secret bit of pedagogic wisdom.

    It’s my teaching mantra. For many years before teaching each class, I took a moment and silently repeated to myself: Be clear. Be engaging. Be honest. Be kind.

    As a beginning teacher, it was a simple tactic to calm my nervousness before class. But as philosophers since Aristotle have recognized, daily choices become persistent habits that evolve into enduring character. It worked. As I strove to embody these values, they enabled me to bring the self I hoped to become into the classroom.

    Clarity. Engagement. Honesty. Kindness. Simple teaching virtues, yet I’ve come to believe they have a larger salience in the turbulent academic world of today.

    Be Clear

    Students today are coming to college with their own share of inner turmoil. Unsettled by the disruptions of COVID, facing an uncertain job market, and inundated with social media skepticism about the value of college, there’s a vulnerability to them that’s new.

    With their perceptions of a topsy-turvy world, students are understandably looking for clarity, elusive though it may be. Well-designed syllabi and clear directions help, but the clarity they’re looking for is something more than straightforward course formalities. The clarity they’re looking for is a more deeply rooted certainty that they can count on you.

    Thus, providing the clarity students are hoping for today involves the self you bring to the classroom. It is more a matter of character than of course planning. Are you someone they can depend on, confide in and trust? Demonstrating these personal qualities hinges on the kind of outreach you make to students from the start.

    Be Engaging

    Tentative and uncertain as they often are, I can’t expect students to come to me. Personal outreach today means I have to make the first move. It also means doing so by beginning wherever they are. Only by beginning wherever they are can you hope to take them where you might want them to go.

    While I dearly love my students, I don’t expect them to be like me. In my teaching, it has been important to remind myself of this as effective engagement depends on knowing your audience well. Particularly as I’ve gotten older, I’ve had to ensure my cultural references, case choices and even language use have a resonance for students decades younger than I am. I am regularly grateful to my daughter, a recent college graduate, for exposing me to the current lingo of “crashing out,” the delights of matcha and the talents of Billie Eilish.

    Be Honest

    Honesty is hard as a teacher, particularly when reading students’ less-than-laudatory evaluations. I’ve certainly had my share of such evaluations and they can discourage extending yourself in personal outreach. But I’ve taken heart from an entrepreneur friend who has counseled openness on my part. See such student comments simply as information, he said, just as he does in reflecting upon investor critiques after pitching a business plan.

    Honesty is especially hard when enduring criticism of an unfair or even hostile nature, something that in the classroom can be especially painful. But taking criticism as simply information, as a source for developing my own deeper reflection and critical faculties, enables a self-honesty that I’ve come to realize I need not fear. In teaching law, I am regularly reminded of John Stuart Mill’s insight: “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.”

    Be Kind

    Sometimes, the personal outreach you offer matters more than even the latest teaching strategies you might employ. Kindness toward students can make a decisive difference. Once, while suffering from a bad cold and struggling with a lecture, I noticed that a student coughing in the front row was struggling with her own respiratory ailment. While continuing with the lecture, I offered her a few throat lozenges from the packet that was giving me relief. From the thankful look she gave me, I saw that simple unplanned gesture had a greater impact on her than any of the legal theories I espoused that day.

    The turmoil of students’ inner lives mirrors the unsettled state of professors’ professional lives today. Many external forces are currently upending the established norms of academic life. From politicians who act to defund us to AIs that threaten to replace us to a public that increasingly distrusts us, the traditional foundations of academic culture are at risk. With such larger external threats to these traditional foundations, little tips for strengthening our relationships with students may appear to have negligible relevance or sway.

    But such little ideas do matter, even if only because of the way they contribute to the cultural resilience colleges will need in the coming days. In a deeper sense, we as individual professors are the academy’s foundations, the strength in which its future resides. And the future begins with the values embedded in the teaching choices we make each day.

    Jeffrey Nesteruk is an Emeritus Professor of Legal Studies at Franklin & Marshall College. He has published widely in the areas of law, ethics and liberal education and may be reached at [email protected].

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  • Let’s Talk About Proxies and Admission (opinion)

    Let’s Talk About Proxies and Admission (opinion)

    The Trump administration has stepped up government scrutiny of college admission. Settlements reached with Brown and Columbia Universities each included a requirement that they pursue “merit-based” admission policies. On Aug. 7, President Trump issued a memorandum requiring colleges and universities to submit data to IPEDS (the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) demonstrating that they are not considering race in admission decisions. The Department of Education has since published in the Federal Register details about the planned data collection, with the public having 60 days to comment. And Attorney General Pam Bondi has entered into the fray by publishing a memo outlining what constitutes unlawful discrimination.

    I will leave it to others to rail against the unprecedented federal attack on higher education and the incursion into admission policies at individual institutions. I would prefer to examine some of the issues and underlying assumptions suggested by these documents.

    The Aug. 7 Presidential Memorandum

    Trump’s memorandum calls for increased transparency to expose practices that are “unlawful” and to rid society of “shameful, dangerous racial hierarchies.” For some reason, it doesn’t say that all racial hierarchies are shameful and dangerous. Is that an oversight or a meaningful omission? The memorandum also asserts without explanation that race-based admission policies threaten national security.

    The call to get rid of “shameful, dangerous racial hierarchies” is ironic. It is easy to imagine previous administrations using the same phrase to defend the very race-based admission policies that the executive order now seeks to abolish. “Shameful” and “dangerous” are in the eye of the beholder, and may not be color-blind.

    What is not clear is how the administration intends to collect and analyze the data, given its efforts to gut the Department of Education. As Inside Higher Ed has reported, the National Center for Education Statistics had been decimated, with a staff of more than 100 reduced to a skeleton crew of three employees.

    The Bondi Memo

    Attorney General Bondi’s July 29 memorandum offered guidance to federal agencies about practices that may constitute illegal discrimination at colleges and other entities receiving federal funds. A lot of it is rehashed, targeting popular straw men/persons like DEI programs and transgender athletes (and bathrooms).

    What is interesting is Bondi’s take on what she calls “unlawful proxy discrimination,” defined as the use of “facially neutral criteria” that function as “proxies” for race or other protected characteristics. Per the memo, examples in higher education may include things like requiring diversity statements in hiring or essay questions asking applicants to reflect on their unique identity or to write about obstacles they have overcome.

    On a surface level, Bondi is right that those can become back doors to identify an individual’s race. At the same time, knowing the obstacles an individual has overcome is essential to understanding his or her unique story, and race would seem to be one of the factors that can heavily influence that story.

    Where Bondi goes off the rails is in maintaining that what she calls “geographic targeting” may constitute a potentially unlawful proxy. She is suggesting that recruitment or outreach in schools and communities with high levels of racial minorities may be illegal. That is preposterous. Trying to expand access to education through outreach is in no way comparable to reverse engineering an admission process to arrive at a desired class composition.

    Taken to its logical extreme, Bondi’s guidance would prevent colleges from recruiting not only at inner-city schools with a large percentage of Black students, but also at suburban schools with a large percentage of affluent white students. Both could be examples of what she calls “geographic targeting.” For that matter, colleges might be in violation for asking for an applicant’s address, because ZIP code information can be used as a proxy for determining race and socioeconomic status.

    New Data Collection Requirements

    As for data collection for IPEDS, the administration has proposed a new “Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement,” or ACTS. ACTS will require targeted colleges and universities to report data in the following categories, disaggregated by race and sex:

    • Admissions test score quintile
    • GPA quintile
    • Family income range
    • Pell Grant eligibility
    • Parental education

    It will also ask for information to be broken down for early decision, early action and regular admission as well as institutional need-based and merit aid. What’s missing? Legacy status and athletic recruits, both categories that benefit white applicants. At some of the Ivies, between 10-20 percent of the undergraduates are athletes, many in “country club” sports where most of the competitors are wealthy and white, and the proportion of athletes is even higher at the highly selective liberal arts colleges that make up the New England Small College Athletic Conference. Discovery in SFFA v. Harvard revealed that recruited athletes had an 86 percent admit rate. You don’t have to have had an uncle who taught at MIT to know that is substantially higher than the overall admit rate.

    ACTS will apparently apply only to “all four-year institutions who utilize selective college admissions,” which the administration maintains “have an elevated risk of noncompliance with the civil rights laws.” That may at first glance seem to be singling out elite, “name” colleges, and that’s probably the intent, but it also reflects a recognition that the vast majority of institutions couldn’t practice race-based admission even if they wanted to because they are too busy filling the class to worry about crafting the class.

    The focus on selective institutions will both make it easy to score political points and hard to derive meaning from the data. Selectivity, especially at the 5-10 percent level, makes it impossible to know why any individual is or isn’t admitted. Admission deans at the highly-selective (or rejective) universities report that they could fill several additional freshman classes from among those applicants who have been waitlisted or denied.

    Merit-Based Admission

    The real target of the push for “merit-based” admission may be holistic review. A holistic admission process allows colleges to take into consideration nuances in an individual’s background and life experiences. It can also be frustrating for applicants, since different individuals are admitted for different reasons. The government may be pushing consciously or unconsciously for a more formulaic selection process.

    But would that be any better? Even if you focus only on grades and test scores, should you put more weight on a three-hour test or on four years of high school? How do you compare applicants from schools with different grading scales and levels of academic rigor? Should a test score obtained after thousands of dollars in test prep count the same as an identical score without coaching?

    How do we distinguish between merit and privilege? Those who have strong test scores may be more likely to believe that test scores are a measure of merit, and yet test scores are strongly correlated with family income. Those who are born into wealth and privilege may come to believe that their good fortune is a proxy for merit, buying into a perverse and self-serving interpretation of John Calvin’s doctrine of the elect. They may see themselves as deserving rather than lucky.

    Proxies in Admission

    We need a larger discussion about proxies in college admission. Advanced Placement courses are a proxy for a rigorous curriculum. GPA is a proxy for academic accomplishment, and yet means little without understanding context. Similarly, SAT scores are often seen as a proxy for ability, despite the fact that the College Board long ago abandoned the pretense that the SAT measures “aptitude.” The U.S. News & World Report college rankings have always relied on proxies, such as alumni giving as a proxy for alumni satisfaction when it may be more a measure of the effectiveness of the development office. Selectivity is a proxy for academic quality—feeding into the belief that the harder a place is to get in, the better it must be. Are proxies for race any more problematic than these other proxies?

    The larger question here is what should the selective college admission process be a proxy for. Should we seek to reward students for past performance? Predict who will earn the best grades in college? Identify those students who will benefit the most from the college experience? Or predict who will make the greatest contribution to society after college?

    I’m waiting for an executive order or memo or even a discussion among college admission professionals about what the selective admission process should represent and what proxies will support those goals.

    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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  • Top UK unis partner on career initiatives for India and China

    Top UK unis partner on career initiatives for India and China

    The University of Birmingham, home to over 2,000 Indian students, has partnered with the University of Glasgow to create a new in-country role in India employability relationship manager – who will be responsible for building links with employers, career services, and alumni networks to help graduates succeed in the local job market.

    According to a joint statement issued by the institutions, graduates will be offered practical support through pre-entry briefings, skills development programs, and post-graduation engagement.

    The two universities have also launched an exclusive partnership with the Chinese graduate career support organisation, JOBShaigui.

    The career portal, well regarded in China for its links to top employers, will offer a range of bespoke services, including online seminars with the latest job market insights, guidance on recruitment processes, access to an extensive employer network, and in-country networking events with alumni and employers.

    Both Birmingham and Glasgow, ranked among the QS global top 100, see China and India, with their combined 400,000 alumni worldwide, as priority markets.

    Offering enhanced career support is seen as crucial, as recent trends show a majority of students from these countries are choosing to return home after their study abroad journey.

    “More and more students, quite reasonably, are saying: I want to know what my employment prospects are after getting a degree. We do a lot to prepare students for their future careers while they study with us, but it has become increasingly clear that we must also support them after they graduate,” Robin Mason, pro-vice-chancellor (international) at the University of Birmingham, told The PIE News.

    “Our two largest cohorts of international students are from China and India, so we said: for these two really important countries, we’re going to create in-country support for careers and employability career fairs, interview preparation, CV workshops, all those sorts of things.”

    Increasingly, after that period of work in the UK, Indian graduates are looking to come back home to India
    Robin Mason, University of Birmingham

    While both Birmingham and Glasgow already collaborate on joint research, particularly in the medical field, the career support initiative made sense as the cost could be shared between the two universities, according to Mason.

    Moreover, the universities expect the initiative to be particularly successful in India, from where students make up the largest cohort of graduate visa holders.

    “Particularly Indian students, more than Chinese students, want to stay in the UK after graduation. But increasingly, after that period of work in the UK, Indian graduates are looking to come back home to India,” stated Mason.

    According to Mason, while most Indian students prefer fields such as computer science, data science, engineering, business management, finance, economics, and health-related subjects, in principle students of any discipline, “even classics, English, or history”, will be supported equally in their careers back in India.

    The initiatives also come at a time when international students in the UK are being urged to “sharpen their skills” for both the UK and global job markets, as employers increasingly look beyond “textbook skills” to focus on a candidate’s ability to bring innovation to the table.

    Further plans in India for University of Birmingham

    Although the University of Birmingham operates an overseas campus in Dubai, an attractive option for Indian students given its proximity to the UK and large Indian community, the institution has no plans to establish a campus in India anytime soon.

    Instead, it is focusing on initiatives such as the in-country employability role and partnerships with local institutions.

    While the University of Birmingham offers dual degrees with Jinan University in China in fields such as maths, economics, statistics, and computing, it is now exploring a partnership with IIT Bombay in India in areas such as quantum technology, energy systems, AI, and healthcare, building on its successful venture with IIT Madras.

    “If you do it properly, campuses are very expensive things. I don’t think you do these things lightly. You have to make the investment and be there for the long term,” said Mason. “Birmingham is 125 years old this year, and you need to be thinking in terms of decades if you’re going to build a campus. It’s a really long-term commitment because it takes so much time and investment to build a high-quality university.”

    As part of its 125-year celebrations, the institution also announced scholarships for Indian students, offering funding of £4,000 to £5,000 for a wide range of postgraduate taught master’s degrees starting in September 2025.

    “As part of our 125th anniversary celebrations, we introduced a special scholarship, offering up to 40% funding for students joining our Dubai campus,” stated Devesh Anand, regional director, South Asia and Middle East, University of Birmingham.

    “This was combined with academic and merit-based scholarships, giving students the opportunity to access multiple forms of support. The response has been fantastic, as students saw it as a real achievement and recognition of their efforts.”

    The number of Indian students studying in the UK remains high, with the Home Office data showing 98,014 study visas granted in the year ending June 2025.

    However, not everything is rosy, as students are increasingly concerned about their future in light of the immigration white paper, which proposes reducing the Graduate Route by six months and imposing a levy on international student fees.

    In such a situation, the aim for institutions like the University of Birmingham is to remain attractive to graduates seeking employment opportunities.

    “What we have to ensure is that University of Birmingham graduates are career-ready and can get the sorts of jobs that allow them to continue working in the UK if they want to, so they can be sponsored by an employer at the required graduate-level salary,” said Mason.

    “To put it delicately, I think the universities that will struggle with the immigration changes are those not paying enough attention to employability. If your graduates are employable, it’s not an issue.”

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  • Making PD meaningful in today’s classrooms

    Making PD meaningful in today’s classrooms

    Key points:

    As a classroom teacher and district leader with over 26 years of experience, I’ve attended countless professional development (PD) sessions. Some were transformative, others forgettable. But one thing has remained constant: the need for PD that inspires, equips, and connects educators. Research shows that effective PD focuses on instructional practice and connects to both classroom materials and real- world contexts.

    I began my teaching career in 1999 through an alternative certification program, eager to learn and grow. That enthusiasm hasn’t waned–I still consider myself a lifelong learner. But over time, I realized that not all PD is created equal. Too often, sessions felt like a checkbox exercise, with educators asking, “Why do I have to be here?” instead of “How can I grow from this?”

    Here are some of my favorite PD resources and experiences:

    edWeb

    edWeb is free to join, and once you’re in, you can dive into as many sessions as you want. The service offers a live calendar of events or on-demand webinars covering a range of topics. Plus, the webinars come with CE certificates, which are approved for teacher re-licensure in states like New York, Massachusetts, Texas, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Utah, and Nevada.

    You can go deeper into the state-specific options with an interactive map. I also love the community aspect of the platform, as you can connect with peers and learn from experts on so many topics for all preK-12 educators.

    Career Connect
    This summer, I attended the Discovery Education Summer of Learning Series at the BMW facility in Spartanburg, South Carolina, for a day-long professional learning event focused on workforce readiness and preparing students for evolving career landscapes. It was an energizing day being surrounded by passionate educators. One standout resource we dove into more deeply is Career Connect by Discovery Education. Career Connect is within Discovery Education Experience and is available to all educators in South Carolina by the Department of Education.

    This is quickly becoming a priority tool in our district. With early access in the spring, we’ve integrated it across grade levels–from elementary STEM classrooms to our Career Center. The platform offers students live interactions with professionals in various fields, making career exploration both engaging and real. I witnessed this firsthand during a virtual visit with an engineer from Charlotte, N.C., whose insights captivated our students and sparked meaningful conversations about future possibilities.

    Professional Development Hub
    The ASCD + ISTE professional learning hub offers sessions on innovative approaches and tools to design and implement standards-aligned curriculum. Each session is led by educators, authors, researchers, and practitioners who are experts in professional learning. Schools and districts receive a needs assessment, so you know the learning is tailored to what educators really need and want.

    Tips for Meaningful PD
    With over 26 years of experience as a classroom teacher and district leader, I have participated in my fair share of professional learning opportunities. I like to joke that my career began in the late 1900s, but professional development sessions from those first few years of teaching now do feel like they were from a century ago compared to the possibilities presented to teachers and leaders today.

    Over these decades I’ve seen a lot of good, and bad, sessions. Here are my top tips to make PD actually engaging:

    • Choose PD that aligns with your goals. Seek out sessions that connect directly to your teaching practice or leadership role.
    • Engage with a community. Learning alongside passionate educators makes a huge difference. The Summer of Learning event reminded me how energizing it is to be surrounded by people who lift you up.
    • Explore tech tools that extend learning. Platforms like Career Connect and others aren’t just add-ons–they’re gateways to deeper engagement and real-world relevance.

    Professional development should be a “want to,” not a “have to.” To get there, though, the PD needs to be thoughtfully designed and purpose-driven. These resources above reignited my passion for learning and reminded me of the power of connection–between educators, students, and the world beyond the classroom.

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  • On Being a Black Anthropologist (opinion)

    On Being a Black Anthropologist (opinion)

    The one week my Yale graduate Anthropology 101 class spent studying Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men felt like a glass of cool water on a hot summer day. Learning about her scholarship and her refusal to accept the way her white colleagues recentered whiteness through their research on nonwhite people reminded me of the anthropologists who first led me to the discipline.

    But the fact that Hurston was the sole Black woman anthropologist whose work we studied suggested that she was the only Black woman anthropologist whose work was worthy of the ivory tower. As if she was the only Black person committed to using the tools of anthropology to create knowledge about the people relegated to the Global South in ways that are mutually beneficial to the researcher and their interlocutors. Hurston’s singular inclusion in my graduate training paired with the general exclusion of Black and brown scholars aimed to pacify the problematics of anthropology without upending the infrastructure of a discipline that is in crisis.

    As my graduate school years continued, I grew increasingly disillusioned by the idea of a career in academia. Even though I had come to terms with a definition and practice of anthropology that felt useful, identifying as an anthropologist myself felt wrong. How could I proudly claim affinity to a discipline that knowingly promulgated the othering of Black and brown people around the world and within the discipline itself? The answer would come through my research on Black Capitalists, and through my own experience beyond grad school as a Black entrepreneur and Wall Street professional.

    My experience as a Ghanaian American on Wall Street at Goldman Sachs and JPMorganChase exposed me to the ways in which Black people use the tools of capitalism to create new outcomes centered on collective thriving. They led me to my definition of what it means to be a Black Capitalist: a Black person who is a strategic participant in capitalism with the intention to benefit from the political economy in order to create social good. What they were doing was complicated, contradictory and, for many, oxymoronic.

    To many, to be a Black Capitalist is to be in an identity crisis. Black studies scholars I’ve spoken to have gone so far as to say, “Black Capitalists don’t exist!” or “It’s impossible for any good to come from capitalism!” I’m usually taken aback by such rebuttals. Because if the Black people I spent hours talking to who identified themselves as Black Capitalists don’t actually exist in real life, are they fictions of my imagination? And is my own experience invalid? Black Capitalists are as real as the version of capitalism we experience today that aims to entrap us all. Black Capitalists are merely trying to get free and help others do the same while facets of society attempt to place limits on how they can narrate, and ultimately live, their own lives.

    Surely, one’s ability to disavow capitalism depends on what continent they are on, or come from. For the Black Capitalists I’ve spoken to who are from Africa, for example, it’s neither a matter of loving capitalism nor wanting to dismantle it. Living in and through capitalism is the reality of trying to build a life in countries that imperialist capitalist forces have already destroyed and continue to exploit. If they are to live their later years comfortably in their homeland, leaving it in the meantime is a requirement. And hustling in the Western world to achieve this dream is so often the method. So for them, much like it was for my mother, who emigrated to America from Ghana with the haunting knowledge that her family was counting on her and that “failure was not an option,” the question becomes: For our own collective thriving, how do we game a system that was founded on us as its pawns?

    So how are Black Capitalists using the tools of capitalism to create new outcomes that allow them to secure the bag and the people they care for? Their methods are as diverse as Black people themselves. But the common denominator between all of their practices is a focus on communal uplift.

    Some are strategizing throughout key industries within corporate America to develop sustainable initiatives that subversively promote diversity, equity and inclusion—especially in the wake of its demise. Some are leveraging grassroots approaches to build community-forward real estate clubs that make the dream of homeownership and passive income possible through the resources—money, credit, knowledge and social connections—that are shared among members.

    Others are teaching aspiring entrepreneurs in their community the fundamentals of effective entrepreneurship and shepherding them through the process of collectively buying successful small businesses formerly owned by white entrepreneurs. Some are using the skills they developed during their tenures on Wall Street to create investment firms on the African continent to help grow pan-African businesses focused on health care, technology and agriculture that generate value for the African consumer. Some of the companies these Black Capitalists are building are worth millions of dollars—even billions. Irrespective of the spaces Black Capitalists occupy, their impact in Black communities globally is invaluable in the fight to close the racial wealth gap that has Black people lagging behind across key wealth indicators including homeownership, small business ownership and financial health.

    But their existence is unnerving to both Black and white people alike, for very different reasons. For many Black people, the very idea of a Black Capitalist makes their toes curl, because when you’ve been on the wrong side of capitalism for so long—as its most valued commodity but never its greatest beneficiary—it’s hard to believe that another relationship to capitalism, or a more equitable version of it on our journey to collective liberation, is even possible.

    And for white people invested in upholding the racial hierarchy that shapes social, political and economic life, they worry and wonder what they are set to lose when Black people are organized and move as one unified body in an economic system that nurtures individualism. Both perspectives reveal the underlying truth that money and our obsession with it is a culture of its own. And this revelation presents a growing problem society has created but has yet to solve: What do we do when money becomes the dominant culture in a society wherein most people don’t have enough of it to live?

    In the face of paralyzing social anxiety about the expansiveness of Black life, anthropology’s superpower lies in its ability to use evidence from the human experience to upend our social scripts and create space for us to dream up new ways of being that are both scalable and sustainable. I realized that being a Black Capitalist and being a Black anthropologist were both seen as oxymorons. I now gravitate toward the spirit of Zora Neale Hurston and other exceptional Black anthropologists. I learned that I can be a different kind of anthropologist who uses the tools of anthropology, like ethnography, oral histories and participant observation, to tell new stories about Black life that are restorative, hopeful and reflective of the power Black people carry.

    But even so, my existence as a Black anthropologist is unnerving to “scholars” who benefit from and are invested in perpetuating the harms of traditional anthropology. To raise the standard of knowledge production to ensure it is created in community with those who play a role in developing it threatens the validity of how scholars have traditionally conducted research and the scholarship that is held in high esteem. It’s damning enough that anthropology is like a snake eating its tail. My presence is the proverbial pain in the discipline’s side—a reminder of the work that is needed to transform the discipline, and realize what anthropology can be, but has yet to become.

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