Tag: Career

Families Spending More on College

Families reportedly spent an average of $30,837 for college last year.

Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Getty Images | Rawpixel

Families are spending about 9 percent more on college compared to last year, according to a recently released survey from Sallie Mae and Ipsos.

The results of the survey, released earlier this week, are part of the annual “How America Pays for College” report. Ipsos surveyed about 1,000 undergraduate students and the same number of parents of undergrads from April 8 to May 8. The online survey delved into a range of topics from how they were paying for college to their views on the federal student loan program.

On average, families spent $30,837 on college, which is similar to pre-pandemic spending—in the 2019–20 academic year, families spent $30,017 on average. In line with previous years, families are typically using their own money to pay for college, with income and savings adding up to 48 percent of the pie, and scholarships and grants accounted for a 27 percent slice.

But 40 percent of the families surveyed didn’t seek scholarships to help pay for college because they either didn’t know about the available opportunities or didn’t think they could win one. About three-quarters of respondents who received a scholarship credited that aid with making college possible.

Similar to other recent surveys, while a majority of families see college as worth the money, cost is still a key factor. About 79 percent reported that they eliminated at least one institution based on the price tag. Still, about 47 percent of respondents said they ended up paying less than the sticker price. That number is higher for families with students at private four-year universities. About 54 percent said they paid less compared to 45 percent of respondents at public four-year institutions.

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August 8, 2025
Trump Political Appointees in Charge of Grant Decisions
The NIH is one of several agencies where a political appointee will have to sign off on grant awards.

Wesley Lapointe/The Washington Post via Getty Images
President Donald Trump is now requiring grant-making agencies to appoint senior officials who will review new funding opportunity announcements and grants to ensure that “they are consistent with agency priorities and the national interest,” according to an executive order issued Thursday. And until those political appointees are in place, agencies won’t be able to make announcements about new funding opportunities.

The changes are aimed at both improving the process of federal grant making and “ending offensive waste of tax dollars,” according to the order, which detailed multiple perceived issues with how grant-making bodies operate.

The Trump administration said some of those offenses have included agencies granting funding for the development of “transgender-sexual-education” programs and “free services to illegal immigrants” that it claims worsened the “border crisis.” The order also claimed that the government has “paid insufficient attention” to the efficacy of research projects—noting instances of data falsification—and that a “substantial portion” of grants that fund university-led research “goes not to scientific project applicants or groundbreaking research, but to university facilities and administrative costs,” which are commonly referred to as indirect costs.

It’s the latest move by the Trump administration to take control of federally funded research supported by agencies such as the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy. Since taking office in January, those and other agencies have terminated thousands of grants that no longer align with their priorities, including projects focused on vaccine hesitancy, combating misinformation, LGBTQ+ health and promoting diversity, equity and inclusion.

Federal judges have since ruled some of those terminations unlawful. Despite those rulings, Thursday’s executive order forbids new funding for some of the same research topics the administration has already targeted.

It instructs the new political appointees of grant-making agencies to “use their independent judgment” when deciding which projects get funded so long as they “demonstrably advance the president’s policy priorities.”

Those priorities include not awarding grants to “fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate” the following:
“Racial preferences or other forms of racial discrimination by the grant recipient, including activities where race or intentional proxies for race will be used as a selection criterion for employment or program participation;

“Denial by the grant recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic;

“Illegal immigration; or

“Any other initiatives that compromise public safety or promote anti-American values.”
The order also instructs senior appointees to give preference to applications from institutions with lower indirect cost rates. (Numerous agencies have also moved to cap indirect research cost rates for universities at 15 percent, but federal courts have blocked those efforts for now.)
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August 8, 2025
Trump Orders Colleges to Supply Data on Race in Admissions

President Donald Trump issued an executive action Thursday directing colleges to prove they are not considering race in admissions.

Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

President Donald Trump issued an executive action Thursday afternoon mandating colleges and universities submit data to verify that they are not unlawfully considering race in admissions decisions.

The order also requires the Department of Education to update the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System to make its data more legible to students and parents and to “increase accuracy checks for data submitted by institutions through IPEDS,” penalizing them for late, incomplete or inaccurate data.

Opponents of race-conscious admissions have hailed the mandate as a victory for transparency in college admissions, but others in the sector have criticized its vague language and question who at the department is left to collect and analyze the data.

“American students and taxpayers deserve confidence in the fairness and integrity of our Nation’s institutions of higher education, including confidence that they are recruiting and training capable future doctors, engineers, scientists, and other critical workers vital to the next generations of American prosperity,” the order reads. “Race-based admissions practices are not only unfair, but also threaten our national security and well-being.”

It’s now up to the secretary of education, Linda McMahon, to determine what new admissions data institutions will be required to report. The administration’s demands of Columbia and Brown Universities in their negotiations to reinstate federal funding could indicate what the requirements will be. In its agreement with Brown, the government ordered the university to submit annual data “showing applicants, admitted students, and enrolled students broken down by race, color, grade point average, and performance on standardized tests.” Colleges will be expected to submit their admissions data for the 2025–26 academic year, according to the order.

What resources are in place to enforce the new requirements remains to be seen. Earlier this year the administration razed the staff at the Department of Education who historically collected and analyzed institutional data. Only three staff members remain in the National Center for Education Statistics, which operates IPEDS.

‘It’s Not Just as Easy as Collecting Data’

Since taking office, the Trump administration has launched a crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education, often using the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against race-conscious admissions as a weapon in the attacks.

Students for Fair Admissions, the anti–affirmative action advocacy group that was the plaintiff in the 2023 cases, called the action a “landmark step” toward transparency and accountability for students, parents and taxpayers.

“For too long, American colleges and universities have hidden behind opaque admissions practices that often rely on racial preferences to shape their incoming classes,” Edward Blum, SFFA president and longtime opponent of race-conscious admissions, said in a press release.

But college-equity advocates sounded the alarm, arguing that the order—which also claims that colleges have been using diversity and other “overt and hidden racial proxies” to continue race-conscious admissions post-SFFA—aims to intimidate colleges into recruiting fewer students of color.

“I will say something that my members in the higher education community cannot say. What the Trump administration is really saying is that you will be punished if you do not admit enough white students to your institution,” Angel B. Pérez, CEO of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, told Inside Higher Ed.

Like many of Trump’s other orders targeting DEI, that mandate relies on unclear terms and instructions. It does not define “racial proxies”—although a memo by the Department of Justice released last week provides examples—nor does it outline what data would prove an institution is or is not considering race in its admissions process.

In an interview with Inside Higher Ed, Paul Schroeder, the executive director of the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics, questioned the government’s capacity to carry out the president’s order.

“Without NCES, who’s going to actually look at this data? Who’s going to understand this data? Are we going to have uniform reporting or is it going to be just a mess coming in from all these different colleges?” Schroeder said.

“It’s not just as easy as collecting data. It’s not just asking a couple questions about the race and ethnicity of those who were admitted versus those who applied. It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of hours. It’s not going to be fast.”

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August 7, 2025
Most Parents Still Want Their Kids to Go to College

Forty percent of parents prefer their child attend a four-year college after high school.

Despite public skepticism about the value of a college degree, the majority of parents still want their kids to pursue more education after high school, according to a report from Gallup and the Lumina Foundation published today.

During the first two weeks of June, researchers surveyed more than 2,000 adults—including 554 parents of children under 18—about what they thought their own children or the children in their lives should do after high school. Though there was some variation depending on political party affiliation and level of educational attainment, three-quarters of parents over all say they want their children to continue their education.

“Even in this moment of skepticism around higher ed, the pull of college is still powerful for families,” Courtney Brown, Lumina’s vice president of impact and planning, told Inside Higher Ed. “The distinction is between their critiques of the system and their personal aspirations. They see there are some cracks in the system—that it’s not always affordable—and they want to make sure that if they’re going to pay for college that their child is going to see a return on investment.”

Parents had a clear preference for the type of institution their child should attend, with 40 percent of respondents indicating that their first choice would be a four-year university.

That aligns with robust data on the ROI of different degree types showing that people with bachelor’s degrees have far higher lifetime earnings and are half as likely to be unemployed than their peers with only a high school diploma.

However, not every family is convinced that a four-year degree is the best option for their child.

Another 19 percent of the parents surveyed by Gallup and Lumina said they’d prefer a two-year college and 16 percent a job training or certification program. Just 24 percent said they’d prefer their child forgo higher education altogether after high school and instead take a gap year (13 percent) join the military (5 percent) or immediately join the workforce (6 percent).

Differences in party affiliation also shaped which type of institution parents believe their kids should attend after high school. More than half (53 percent) of Democratic parents said they’d prefer their child go to a four-year college, while just a quarter of Republicans said the same; 21 percent of Republican parents said they’d prefer their child enroll at a two-year college after high school, and 22 percent said they’d prefer a job training or certificate program.

“Across the board, everyone believes you need more education after high school. But what we’re seeing now is Republicans wanting a quicker payoff for their education, and often a certification or a two-year degree leads directly to a job where they’re using those skills,” Brown said. “But that can be shortsighted when a job ends and a [worker] needs to get upskilled or reskilled.”

A four-year college education was also the preferred choice for parents with and without a college degree, though there was a considerable gap. While 58 percent of college graduates said a four-year program was their top choice for their child, only 30 percent of non–college graduates said the same.

“Parents still see that a four-year degree is the dream. It’s the degree that opens the most opportunity to getting paid more,” Brown said. “People that have gone to college see that it has paid off, whereas people who haven’t had that opportunity may feel closed out from and are uncertain that it’s going to lead to the money and jobs they’re looking for.”

The survey also asked adults without a child under 18 the same questions about what they would want a child they know—such as a nephew, niece, grandchild or family friend—to pursue after high school.

Similar to the parents surveyed, 32 percent of nonparents said they’d like to see the young people in their lives pursue a four-year degree, while 23 percent favored a two-year program and another 23 percent favored job training or a certificate program.

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August 7, 2025
U of Utah Plans to Ax 81 Offerings, Citing New State Law

The University of Utah is cutting 81 offerings in response to state budget reductions and a new law.

Aaron M. Sprecher/Getty Images

The University of Utah plans to eliminate 81 academic programs and minors—a step that administrators attribute to a new state law that called for “strategic reinvestment” after lawmakers slashed funding to public colleges and universities.

The Republican-controlled Utah Legislature passed House Bill 265 this spring. Lawmakers cut 10 percent of institutions’ state-funded instructional budgets, but the law said they could earn back the money by cutting programs and positions and instead funding “strategic reinvestment.” Institutions’ reinvestment plans must be based on enrollment, completion rates, job placement, wages, program-level costs and local and statewide workforce demands.

Other Utah universities detailed their planned cuts in the spring, but this is the first glimpse at how the state’s flagship will respond to the new law.

The planned cuts at the University of Utah include Ph.D.s in chemical physics, physiology, experimental pathology and in theater; master’s degrees in ballet, modern dance, marketing, audiology and applied mechanics; bachelor’s degrees in chemistry teaching, Russian teaching and German teaching; certificates in public administration, veterans’ studies and computational bioimaging; various minors; and more.

Richard Preiss, president of the university’s Academic Senate, said his body’s Executive Committee reviewed the list of programs. He said that, except for one that the committee persuaded the administration to remove from the list, none had graduated more than one student in the past eight years, according to the university’s data. But a university spokesperson said that “some had zero or one, but some had up to a dozen students. Our threshold to identify inactive or low-enrollment courses was 15.”

Preiss said that while the selection process was accelerated, faculty had enough time to give meaningful input.

“These were relatively easy cuts to make and they were relatively painless,” Preiss said. “I anticipate that more painful ones are on the horizon.”

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August 7, 2025
UC Will “Dialogue” With Feds Over Civil Rights Investigation

The UC system says it will “engage in dialogue with the federal administration” over grant cuts.

Juliana Yamada/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

The University of California system announced Wednesday that it would negotiate with the federal government. The response comes a day after the Department of Justice’s deadline for the institution to express its interest in finding a “voluntary resolution agreement” to the agency’s investigation into antisemitism on the University of California, Los Angeles, campus.

On the line is—according to a UC estimate—$584 million in funding that at least three different federal agencies announced they were suspending in the week between the DOJ’s July 29 letter to system officials and its Aug. 5 deadline for them to respond.

If the UC system comes to a resolution with the Trump administration, UCLA would become the first public university to openly make a deal with the federal government to restore grant funding. In the past month, Columbia and Brown Universities have agreed to collectively pay hundreds of millions of dollars to get their funding back.

In the two-paragraph statement, UC system president James B. Milliken said, “Our immediate goal is to see the $584 million in suspended and at-risk federal funding restored to the university as soon as possible,” but he argued that the “cuts do nothing to address antisemitism.”

“The extensive work that UCLA and the entire University of California have taken to combat antisemitism has apparently been ignored,” he said. “The announced cuts would be a death knell for innovative work that saves lives, grows our economy, and fortifies our national security. It is in our country’s best interest that funding be restored.”

The DOJ’s July 29 letter to the system said its months-long investigations, which remain ongoing, have so far found that UCLA violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in its response to a protest encampment on its campus in the spring of 2024.

In a press release about the letter, Attorney General Pam Bondi said, “DOJ will force UCLA to pay a heavy price for putting Jewish Americans at risk and continue our ongoing investigations into other campuses in the UC system.” The agency said in the letter that it is prepared to sue by Sept. 2 “unless there is reasonable certainty that we can reach an agreement.”

But the Trump administration still hasn’t made clear what exactly it wants UCLA to do. Unlike with Columbia and Harvard, the federal government hasn’t listed its overarching demands. And the administration doesn’t appear to only be interested in addressing last year’s encampment at UCLA.

In their own letters to UCLA last week, the National Science Foundation and the Energy Department announced funding suspensions, citing UCLA’s failure “to promote a research environment free of antisemitism and bias” and saying it “endangers women by allowing men in women’s sports and private women-only spaces.” Both agencies also accused UCLA of considering race in admissions.

The Health and Human Services agency, which includes the National Institutes of Health, didn’t provide Inside Higher Ed with NIH’s grant suspension letter, and an HHS spokesperson declined to comment Wednesday. A DOJ spokesperson also declined to comment, and the White House didn’t respond to a request for comment. UC system spokespeople didn’t provide interviews or answer written questions.

UCLA chancellor Julio Frenk said in a separate statement that the institution is doing everything it can “to protect the interests of faculty, students and staff—and to defend our values and principles.”

“We will continue to hold town halls, convene office hours and share information with you, particularly those who are in the most directly affected areas,” Frenk told his employees. “This includes departments that rely on funding from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and Department of Energy.”

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August 7, 2025
Georgetown Fellow Detained by ICE May Resume Work for Now

The Georgetown fellow, an Indian citizen, was released from detention in May.

Andrew Thomas/AFP via Getty Images

A Georgetown University researcher who was detained by immigration agents in March will be allowed to resume his work, at least for now, according to a court settlement released Tuesday. Politico first reported the development.

The agreement does not guarantee that the postdoctoral fellow, Badar Khan Suri, will be able to stay in U.S. long term, and it doesn’t resolve his claim that the government violated his First Amendment rights by detaining him because of his pro-Palestinian comments and what the government claims are ties to Hamas. Those aspects of the case will be determined by a later ruling.

That said, as litigation continues, Suri will be protected, maintain his status as a student and remain employed.

Suri was first released from detention in May. His wife is a citizen, but her father has been identified as a former Hamas adviser, which likely was a key factor that influenced Suri’s arrest, Politico reported.

Both parties in the case agreed the settlement was a result of “good faith” negotiations, Politico noted, though the State Department and Department of Homeland Security declined to comment.

“We are encouraged that the government agreed to restore Dr. Suri and his children’s status and records,” Eden Heilman, an ACLU lawyer representing Suri, told Politico. “We know Dr. Suri is eager to rejoin the academic community at Georgetown and this will give him the opportunity to do that this fall.”

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August 7, 2025
Antisemitism Is Not a Problem at George Mason (opinion)

Ages ago, in the 1970s Soviet Union, a Jewish stand-up comedian, Mikhail Zhvanetski, remarked in one of his skits that if you want to argue about the taste of coconuts (not available in the Soviet Union at that time), it’s better to talk to those who’ve actually tried them.

If you want to argue about antisemitism in academia, better ask those who have actually experienced it. Ask me.

I was 16 years old when I graduated from high school in Moscow in 1971. My ethnic heritage—Jewish—was written on my state ID by the authorities. I couldn’t change it. I applied to the “Moscow MIT”: Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. I passed the entrance tests with flying colors: 18 points out of 20, higher than 85 percent of those admitted. I was denied entry. I knew why. The unwritten but strict quota was that Jews could make up no more than 2 percent of freshmen.

I did get my education, at another university less closely observed by the party authority. But six years later, looking for a job, I could not find one. In part, this was because institute directors knew they could be disciplined if they hired Jews who then applied to emigrate to Israel. I later learned that I was hired only when my future boss and close friend gave his word of honor that I would never try to emigrate.

Two years later, I applied for Ph.D. study at the renowned Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (home to seven Nobel laureates). It was common knowledge at that time that one of the officials at Lebedev who had to approve admissions was a notorious antisemite. My gentile adviser also knew that, made sure that the official would never see either my characteristically Jewish face or my state ID, and took over all paperwork communications himself under various pretexts. When I was officially admitted and walked into the official’s office, they looked like they were going to have a heart attack. This was antisemitism.

In 1994, 10 years after graduating, I moved to the United States, where, eventually, I devoted more than 20 years of service to the Naval Research Laboratory. Then, in 2019, I joined the faculty at George Mason University, one of the most ethnically diverse universities in the country. In my time here, I have never seen any sign of antisemitism, not a shred. I graduated a Muslim student, who—in his own words—felt honored to have me as his adviser (he even invited me to his sister’s wedding, which was restricted, due to the pandemic, to just 20 guests). I taught several more Muslim students and did research with some others. We openly discussed our religions, and I found these students to be good and compassionate listeners if I chose to share one or another story from my Jewish experience.

Now, however, the U.S. Department of Education is taking seriously a charge of “a pervasive hostile environment for Jewish students and faculty” at George Mason. This is as shocking to me (and to many of my Jewish colleagues at GMU) as hearing that I have broken two legs and never noticed it. In fact, during the trying months after Oct. 7 and amid growing pro-Palestinian protests on campuses, I often praised Mason president Gregory Washington’s handing of this sensitive issue. While paying full respect to respectful protests, freedom of speech and the First Amendment, he fully avoided disruption of the educational process and university business.

To this point, I can again dig into my experience under a totalitarian regime. When I came to America in 1994, I was fascinated by the famous case of Yates v. U.S., in which the Supreme Court issued a decision that offered a powerful contrast to Soviet rule. In that 1957 case, the court reversed the convictions of 14 Communist leaders in California who had been charged with advocating for the overthrow of the U.S. government by force. As Justice Black wrote, they “were tried upon the charge that they believe in and want to foist upon this country a different, and, to us, a despicable, form of authoritarian government in which voices criticizing the existing order are summarily silenced. I fear that the present type of prosecutions are more in line with the philosophy of authoritarian government than with that expressed by our First Amendment.”

To me, this case reflected a quintessential characteristic of American democracy: rephrasing Voltaire, “We may find your view despicable, but will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Though the details of the antisemitism complaint against George Mason have not been made public, it appears that Washington’s leadership is coming under attack based on just two cases involving three students; only one of those cases involved an alleged incident (vandalism) that occurred on campus. In both cases, the university administration, in collaboration with law enforcement, took immediate and harsh steps to resolve the situations: As Washington noted in a recent message to campus, the university was applauded by the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington for “deploying the full weight of the university’s security and disciplinary measures to prevent these students from perpetrating harm on campus.”

And these incidents are outliers. Just as three thieves who may be GMU students wouldn’t attest to “pervasive thievery” on campus, three students alleged to have violent anti-Israeli agendas do not constitute a “pervasive hostile environment for Jewish students and faculty.” On the contrary, I feel safer and more assured knowing that three miscreants out of a student body of 40,000 were immediately and efficiently dealt with.

What does make me feel uncomfortable—and what I do find antisemitic— is the implicit suggestion that I, an American Jew who does not have Israeli citizenship, must feel offended and defensive in the face of any criticism of any action of the Israeli government. I find such beliefs reprehensible, and they encroach on my freedom to have my own opinion about international affairs.

Gregory Washington is my president, and I am confident that he is doing an excellent job protecting all faculty and students, including Jews, from bigotry and harassment. It is false allegations of antisemitism on campus under the pretext of “defending” Jews like myself that really threatens my well-being as a GMU professor.

Igor Mazin is a professor of physics at George Mason University.

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August 7, 2025
Relinquishing Independence to the Authoritarian Is Bad…Duh

If we are lucky, if we get through this period with our democracy intact rather than sliding into a Hungary-like competitive authoritarianism (or worse), my hope is we will look back on the recent spate of capitulations of elite higher education institutions to the authoritarian regime with some mixture of disbelief and shame. I hope that individuals who I could but will not name, but who are easily identifiable as being central to these capitulations, are viewed harshly as people who failed to hold to important principles at a crucial time.

The alternative, that these people are either viewed as pragmatists or, more likely, forgotten, means we will have fallen so far from our ideals of a free nation built on free inquiry that whatever continues to exist will be unrecognizable as compared to today.

The editorial board for the Penn student paper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, put it plainly in responding to the deal their school struck with Trump, “Penn Descends Into Fascism.” They argue that Penn will be remembered as the school that “welcomed tyranny” “with open arms.”

As bad as it may be for Penn’s reputation, I hope lots of people agree, because if so, it means we have not yet normalized these extortionate practices.

I think these students are correct about what Penn has done. Our only hope is that this welcoming does not turn into a permanent stay. The actions of Penn and other institutions will make achieving this outcome significantly harder. When former Harvard president Larry Summers says, in reacting to Columbia’s capitulation to the authoritarian, that it was “the best day higher ed had in a year,” we should understand Summers is positioning higher ed as something other than an important part of our democratic institutions.

A major institution paying out extortion money in response to a nonmeritorious “investigation” and submitting to government surveillance of its policies is not a good day for higher ed.

The present constantly shapes the future, and even small adjustments now may have large impacts down the road, butterfly-effect style. It is a big problem that so many schools have bent the knee to Trump, but the problem can get bigger if more schools follow suit. Each individual act of resistance continues to matter.

It doesn’t take significant hindsight to see all the factors and choices that have made higher education institutions so vulnerable in this moment. The early 2000s saw a spate of books warning how the values of higher education were being compromised by a “corporate culture,” a problem coming fully home to roost as universities strike “deals” in order to preserve funding.

One of these books, Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education, was written by Derek Bok, who served as Harvard’s president from 1971 to 1991, and then again from 2006 to 2007 as interim president following a faculty vote of no confidence in, wait for it … Larry Summers.

In Universities in the Marketplace, Bok recognizes that it seems as though, for the right price, everything in the modern university is for sale. By contemporary standards, Bok’s book seems a little quaint, as the practices he’s worrying about, such as institutions and professors reaping financial rewards from intersections with the growing knowledge economy—particularly around tech—has gone from a potentially questionable practice to almost de rigueur at elite institutions. But Bok argues, convincingly, that these compromises erode public trust in higher education.

Fast-forward to today, when preserving access to federal money no matter the cost to institutional independence is deemed by one of Bok’s successors as the high calling of institutional leaders, a sign of success.

While Bok could not have had the foresight to see his institution contemplating paying extortion money to an aspiring authoritarian president, his book all but predicts this outcome by showing that when money is involved, there is no principle. That this is true even for the wealthiest higher education institution of all time suggests no one is capable of resisting.

Or maybe it’s the opposite: Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. Is it a coincidence that it seems as though corporate America and our most corporatized educational institutions are most vulnerable?

I do not think the battle over preserving some semblance of independent and free higher education is irretrievably lost, but it does seem possible that we already have some permanent casualties.

Columbia has submitted to government monitoring. Penn has altered its record books, and Brown, too, has acceded to an agreement that maintains a mere fig leaf of independence belied by its president protesting too much about criticism of the deal.

As student journalists at The Harvard Crimson report, Harvard, too, has already allowed government pressure to alter its programs, but those same journalists also suggest that, for now, the school is holding firm against paying the—let’s be frank—kind of bribe handed over by their Ivy League compatriots. The Crimson reports that stories about an impending $500 million payment were byproducts of strategic leaks from the Trump administration rather than trial balloons out of Harvard.

This is good news, because any act of resistance is, well … good news. Whatever relief Columbia, Brown and Penn have experienced by paying these tributes is inevitably temporary. Contra David Leonhardt of The New York Times, who decries Trump’s methods but does not wholly lament the changes the extortion schemes have wrought, there is no good way to cede power to Donald Trump.

Those who think there may be accommodations to be made better hope others continue to fight on their behalf, because failure to do will result in a world where Columbia, Brown, Penn and maybe even The New York Times will exist at the pleasure of the executive.

When we win, should I still be around, personally, I’m not going to let them forget this moment.

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August 7, 2025
Understanding Value of Learning Fuels ChatGPT’s Study Mode

Instead of generating answers, Study Mode asks students questions about what they know.

Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | SDI Productions/E+/Getty Images

When classes resume this fall, college students will have access to yet another generative artificial intelligence tool marketed as a learning enhancement.

But instead of generating immediate answers, OpenAI’s new Study Mode for ChatGPT acts more like a tutor, firing off questions, hints, self-reflection prompts and quizzes that are tailored to the user and informed by their past chat history. While traditional large language models have raised academic integrity concerns, Study Mode is intended to provide a more active learning experience. It mimics the type of Socratic dialogue students may expect to encounter in a lecture hall and challenges them to draw on information they already know to form their own nuanced analyses of complex questions.

For example, when Inside Higher Ed asked the traditional version of ChatGPT which factors caused the United States Civil War, it immediately responded that the war had “several major causes, most of which revolved around slavery, states’ rights, and economic differences,” and gave more details about each before producing a five-paragraph essay on the topic. Asking Study Mode the same question, however, prompted it to give a brief overview before asking this question: “Would you say the war was fought because of slavery, or about something else like states’ rights or economics? There’s been debate over this, so I’d love to hear your view first. Then I’ll show you how historians analyze it today.”

Study Mode is similar to the Learning Mode that Anthropic launched for its chat bot Claude for Education back in April and the Guided Learning version of Gemini that Google unveiled Wednesday. OpenAI officials say they hope Study Mode will “support deeper learning” among college students.

While teaching and learning experts don’t believe such tools can replace the value faculty relationships and expertise offer students, Study Mode’s release highlights generative AI’s evolving possibilities—and limitations—as a teaching and learning aid. For students who choose to use it instead of asking a traditional LLM for answers, Study Mode offers an on-demand alternative to a human tutor, unbound by scheduling conflicts, payment or feedback delays.

But in an economy where generative AI’s ability to gather and regurgitate information is threatening the future of entry-level office jobs, students will need to understand what they’re trying to get out of their college coursework if they want Study Mode to deliver on its promise to foster deeper learning.

“Over all, it does represent a significant departure from how people are normally encouraged to use generative AI, given that the value proposition of this technology is largely couched in the concept of efficiency, speed and offloading things that are not as important,” said Trey Conatser, assistant provost for teaching and learning at the University of Kentucky and director of UK’s Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning. “But Study Mode actually asks us to stick with it for it to work, take some time to sit with the friction of learning and be patient with the practice and feedback.”

Critical Thinking in Age of AI

The release of Study Mode comes nearly three years after the debut of ChatGPT—and the many other large language models that have followed—set off ongoing concerns among educators that college students’ increased reliance on traditional LLMs to write papers or solve math problems may erode their critical thinking skills.

There’s not yet a consensus on if generative AI helps or hurts critical thinking, but at least two studies published in the last year found that adults, including college students, who use LLMs to research and learn about a subject exhibited weaker reasoning and analytical skills. And those may be the exact types of skills the roughly two-thirds who are already using generative AI tools like ChatGPT will need to make Study Mode reach its full potential.

While ChatGPT’s Study Mode is programmed to query students rather than generate answers, the users themselves also need to be prepared to push the LLM to ask deeper, more nuanced questions. At least, that was Conatser’s experience when he tested out Study Mode over the weekend and asked it to help him study for a hypothetical quiz on Romantic poets from 1780 to 1820.

First, the LLM asked him more about his education level and the focus of the quiz. He told it that he’s a college junior whose quiz will focus on historical context and specified that he wanted help studying William Wordsworth’s poem “The Prelude.”

The following conversation, which Conatser shared with Inside Higher Ed, ensued:

Study Mode: Wordsworth described “The Prelude” as “a poem on the growth of my own mind.” What exact subtitle did he eventually attach to the poem that captures this idea?

(Give it a try, and we’ll check your answer before moving on.)

Conatser: That’s not so much what I will need to answer. It will be open book, but I will be asked to provide some interpretations to historical context and literary traditions.

After some more dialogue asking Study Mode to focus on historical context, it generated the following question:

Study Mode: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive …” Based on that word, “bliss,” what general emotion do you think he felt when he first encountered the early French Revolution—excitement, fear or apathy?

Conatser: That seems like an obvious question

Study Mode: Understood—let’s turn up the difficulty. In “The Prelude” (Book X), Wordsworth writes of “how in my heart a dreary weight / Fell, and I turned away …”—a moment that marks his break with the revolution he once celebrated.

Question (one step): Which single, headline-making event in France during 1793 does this passage point to, and why did that event feel like a betrayal of the revolution’s original ideals for many sympathetic British observers?

Although it took some prodding to get the LLM to ask the type of questions Conatser wanted to see, “I’m still in the driver’s seat with Study Mode,” he said. “That’s where students are going to need to be when they’re using it.”

Knowing when to push back against Study Mode when it’s not asking the types of questions that will help students master material will be key to helping them get the most out of its ability to foster critical thinking, Conatser said.

“If someone is going to be totally passive with Study Mode, it may not drive them to where they need to go and they’ll still need to be thinking about how they’re supposed to be studying, what kind of assessment they’re leading up to and what kinds of skills will be more important for that assessment,” he said. “If you don’t know what you don’t know, then you won’t be very effective at using these tools even if they have the types of guardrails that Study Mode has.”

And if a student isn’t motivated to use Study Mode to its full potential, they can prompt it to generate complete answers, just like a traditional LLM, according to Christian Carmody, a senior researcher at the Research Institute for Learning and Development, who also tested it out this week.

“For a current events assignment, I prompted Study Mode right away and told it, ‘Before we engage, I do not want your help with this or [to] encourage me to think through this. I do this on my own another time. I really just want the answers,’” Carmody recalled. “It did exactly that.”

The ability for students to easily manipulate Study Mode could add more pressure to colleges and universities that are facing growing skepticism from students about the value of degrees in the age of AI.

“Students should be able to think about why learning is valuable to them and why they should be able to engage with material in a way that’s challenging and force deep thinking,” he said. “Until a student has that mindset, I’m not confident that they are going to use this study and learning tool in the way it’s intended to be used.”

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August 7, 2025