It can feel like the rhetoric around AI is shifting as fast as its ability to generate content. In the English language education sector, we only need look to the recent past to recall how searching questions like “will we need humans in the future?” and “is it game over for teachers?” were the focus of every conference agenda, leadership summit and coffee room discussion.
These types of questions resonate in all sectors of industry, and it was no surprise to see a recent episode of Dispatches on Channel 4 ask: “will AI take my job?”
More focus on practical and ethical considerations
But recently, something’s changed. We are becoming more comfortable with the idea that we can meaningfully coexist with this technology. And, with this change, industry leaders and policymakers in English language education are becoming more focussed on the practical and ethical questions around delivering AI in education, such as: how and when AI should be used and, in in some cases, should it even be used at all?
This marks a welcome shift in perspective, one where people accept that this technology is here to stay but are genuinely engaging with how we can take sensible steps to get the best out of it. It’s critical to remember that ethical considerations for AI shouldn’t just be a simple box ticking exercise, as pointed out by UNESCO UK in their 2025 anthology – which says ethical AI in education is about building fair, human-centred systems that truly support meaningful learning.
‘Why’ is the biggest question of all!
When it comes to AI in education, ‘why’ is perhaps the biggest question we need to ask ourselves. The short answer to this is: ‘if it adds value.’ We also need to ask: ‘does it make sense’. Ethical concerns come in many shapes and sizes, but one we cannot ignore is the sustainability challenges surrounding this energy hungry technology.
Whether you’re using AI to teach or assess English, at the heart of this must be a human in control
So, before embarking on any AI related project in our sector, it’s critical to ask whether we in fact need it, or if there are more sustainable options available. In other words: do we need to build a new large language model (LLM), or does an existing method, or simpler alternative, work just as well and have a far smaller carbon footprint?
How should we use AI?
In terms of how we should use AI, again there are lots of practical and ethical considerations. Whether you’re using AI to teach or assess English, at the heart of this must be a human in control. The need for maintaining a ‘human in the loop’ is for several reasons, but mainly because learning a language is a very human-centred process and, while AI can bring enormous benefits, it cannot replicate the uniquely human experience of acquiring and using language. And, of course, there are practical reasons too – especially when it comes to quality control in assessment, where we need humans to sometimes step in and offer oversight and clarity.
What about high stakes assessment?
This need for a ‘human in the loop’ is particularly pertinent in high-stakes assessment. It’s essential that in these cases, we do not prioritise convenience over quality, and we continue to develop robust solutions. If we use the technology to cut corners, this ultimately does a disservice to students and runs the risk of them not developing the English skills they need for success.
The ingredients for trustworthy AI
If we are serious about delivering ethical AI, another area to consider is fairness and ensuring that systems are free from bias. To achieve this, it’s critical that AI-based language learning and assessment systems are trained on diverse and inclusive data and are constantly monitored for bias. And of course, we have to consider data privacy and consent which in practice means all parties must be clearly informed about what data is collected, how it’s stored, and how it is going to be used.
A week is a long time in AI!
The extraordinary pace of change when it comes to AI reminds me of the famous quote about how a week is a long time in politics. One thing is certain: we’re at a significant moment for language education. As we continue to shift towards a future where human-led AI can deliver high quality education, it is more critical than ever to ensure that ethical use matters. Fairness, transparency, and sustainability must remain non‑negotiable. Without this, AI will fast lose credibility in English language learning and assessment – to the detriment of both innovation and our students.
Ultimately, our collective goal as education leaders is simple: to deliver meaningful AI that meets robust ethical standards and adds true value for learners.
Higher education has always prided itself on staying ahead of change. Yet, the last few years have reshaped how people learn, work, and define ‘engagement’ much faster than most institutions anticipated. Engagement is no longer a hand raised in a lecture hall. It may be a late night discussion board post, or a student quietly rewatching a lecture at 1.25x – 1.5x speed – whatever their personal sweet spot for learning may be.
Today’s learners expect to engage on their own terms – and the universities that do not adapt risk falling behind.
Walk onto almost any campus today and you’ll meet an eclectic mix of learners: international students juggling multiple time zones, those studying around work or family commitments, neurodivergent learners who thrive with asynchronous participation, and mature learners returning after long professional careers. All of them, probably looking at their phones.
Learning needs and expectations have rapidly outpaced many traditional institutional models, and they will continue to evolve just as quickly as AI reshapes our world.
Yet, teaching and assessment often still assume a ‘standard student’ – someone who lives nearby, has no dependants, thrives in three hour seminars, loves group work, and apparently doesn’t need sleep. That student certainly exists – but it doesn’t apply to every student, and they are not even the norm anymore. The new classrooms are multigenerational and, like it or not, include learners who will use AI as a tutor, a translator, an assistant, or to whisper the correct answers to them.
Flexibility matters as much as program quality
Flexibility is now just as important to students as program quality. Students aren’t just looking for online resources, they want learning experiences that bend around the complexities of their lives and unlock value for their future employment.
The rise of hybrid and remote work has played a part. Today’s students – many of whom are working alongside their studies – are already accustomed to flexibility, asynchronous communication and digital collaboration. It’s no surprise they expect the same from their learning environments.
Meeting learners where they are
Flexibility does not mean universities must add more tools or redesign their entire curricula overnight. Instead, it means making intentional choices that give every learner meaningful ways to participate.
This can include:
Multiple modes of engagement
A student who is quiet in seminars might contribute confidently in written discussions. Another might absorb information better through video than text. Some need transcripts, captions, or additional time. All are legitimate learning preferences that institutions should plan for.
Assessment choice
Offering varied and new assessment formats broadens the ways students can demonstrate their learning, whether it’s through a written essay, a recorded presentation, a reflective piece, or another method.
Consistent and modern digital spaces
A well organised virtual learning environment should support students, not turn them into detectives hunting for course materials. When resources are always accessible, connected with their favourite apps and easy to find, students can focus their energy on learning rather than navigating platforms.
Accessibility from the outset
Designing with accessibility in mind benefits all learners and reduces barriers. It also spares lecturers from having to re-engineer materials when a student requests accommodations.
Technology won’t solve everything, but it can reduce friction
Debates about technology in higher education are familiar: concerns about pace, complexity, distraction or cost. But technology is not the goal itself. The goal is to remove the barriers that prevent students from engaging fully.
Effective and data-driven digital environments help educators see who is engaging, who may be struggling, and who might need adjustments or support. They offer students personalised pathways through their learning and allow institutions to respond when circumstances change, whether due to shifting demographics or external events.
Good teaching does not depend on technology, but scalable, equitable, mobile and flexible learning does. That’s where technology earns its keep – and maybe even saves a few lecturers from endless email chains.
The risk of doing nothing
Universities that do not adapt to the changing needs of learners are at risk of losing prospective students – and current ones – to institutions that can offer more modern, responsive, flexible experiences.
Students live according to real-time logic: they expect confirmation, follow-up, and immediate responses, just as they do when they shop online, but the answer cannot be to indiscriminately flood classrooms with tools; it is about personalising and adapting to the different generations that now make up the educational landscape.
In a world of multicultural and multigenerational classrooms, engagement now means allowing students to participate in ways that genuinely suit them – not in ways dictated by inherited habits at an institution.
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In 2025, school districts grappled with a wave of federal policy changes — on top of looming budget challenges — that impacted their approaches to staffing.
Sweeping student enrollment declines in public schools nationwide led some districts to initiate mass layoffs to help offset budget shortfalls. Those layoffs raised questions about whether widespread teacher shortages will continue to plague schools or if districts will have to reckon with the swath of uncertified teachers who were hired during the COVID-19 pandemic to address staffing needs.
The second Trump administration has also set federal policies that exacerbated staffing disruptions for some districts that rely on grow-your-own programs, hire international teachers through H-1B visa programs, or promote broader efforts to improve teacher diversity.
But while the way schools navigate staffing challenges at large may have shifted this year, some aspects of the issue remain the same — for instance, the hiring and retaining of enough special education teachers.
Here are three K-12 staffing trends that emerged or persisted for district leaders in 2025.
Public school systems nationwide have seen decreases in enrollment in recent years due to declining birthrates and increased competition from school choice initiatives, among other factors. Some districts, however, were able to delay the associated financial hurdles in the short term as school leaders were buoyed by a historic, one-time influx of federal pandemic relief funding to hire more teachers even as their enrollment dipped.
But now that the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief dollars have dried up, district leaders in the past year have had to take a hard look at their staffing through mass staff layoffs and reassignments or by eliminating a large number of open positions.
In October, for instance, Houston Independent School District laid off 160 uncertified teachers and 54 staff members “to align teachers with student enrollment.” The Texas district also reassigned 232 teachers to unfilled roles.
Florida’s Orange County Public Schools announced in September that the district was reassigning 116 teachers to new positions due to declining enrollment.
And ahead of the 2025-26 school year, the California Teachers Association reported that school districts across the state had laid off more than 1,200 staff members amid declining enrollment and the end of federal pandemic funds.
K-12 researchers have suggested that enrollment trends have led to a reversal in widespread teacher shortages.
But that “doesn’t mean that every spot has been filled. It’s still hard to recruit and fill positions in rural districts. High-poverty schools have always had a hard time. Math positions and special ed have always been more scarce,” Marguerite Roza, a research professor and director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, told K-12 Dive in August.
Special education shortages have yet to dissipate
Focus has remained steady on addressing educator shortages in consistently hard-to-staff areas like special education, science and math.
According to a July analysis by the Learning Policy Institute, 45 states reported teacher shortages in special education during the 2024-25 school year.
In September, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights released the findings of its yearlong investigation into the national special educator shortage. The federal civil rights panel found that the widespread shortage is leading to a lack of supports and services that are needed to help the growing population of students with disabilities thrive in schools.
The findings were released just a couple of months before the 50th anniversary of the landmark federal law, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The historic legislation, signed into law on Nov. 29, 1975, guaranteed that students with disabilities have the right to a free and appropriate public education nationwide.
Reflecting on IDEA’s big anniversary, educators and researchers said they’re still hopeful about several evolving and innovative approaches to recruiting and retaining more special education teachers. Those solutions include:
Paying special educators more than general education teachers.
Offering targeted training and professional development for paraprofessionals, school administrators and prospective special educators.
Developing special education teacher pipelines through grow-your-own programs.
At the same time, teacher preparation experts have expressed concerns about the Trump administration’s goal to downsize and eventually eliminate the U.S. Department of Education — especially when it comes to ongoing special educator shortages.
President Donald Trump, for instance, proposed in his fiscal year 2026 budget that IDEA Part D personnel development grants be zeroed out and that newly allocated funds go to IDEA Part B programs through a single state block grant program.
Trump’s attempt to drastically reduce the number of staff in the Education Department’s Office of Special Education Programs during the recent federal government shutdown also raised red flags among advocates. Their chief concern: that it would become very difficult to administer and oversee federal grants like IDEA Part D that help address special educator shortages.
The state block grant consolidation proposal, though unpopular among Congressional lawmakers, would particularly harm the ability of teacher prep programs to train high-quality special education teachers, said advocates and experts.
Trump policies target several K-12 staffing approaches
Beyond efforts to dismantle the Education Department, the Trump administration targeted other aspects of K-12 staffing solutions through legal challenges, policy changes and even sudden grant cancellations.
Initiatives formed or embraced by school districts in recent years to improve teacher diversity are among those that found themselves under fire from the federal government. For instance, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Minneapolis Public Schools on Dec. 9 over its teacher union agreement, which includes initiatives to recruit and retain Black male educators.
In February, the Education Department announced it had slashed $600 million in “divisive” teacher training grants, specifically through the Teacher Quality Partnership Program and the Supporting Effective Educator Development Grant Program. The department said at the time that those cuts were made to grant programs that “included teacher and staff recruiting strategies implicitly and explicitly based on race.”
Advocates for the programs said initiatives looking to boost teacher diversity were hit particularly hard by the cuts.
The shifting anti-DEI policy and legal landscape has also led some experts to warn districts and states to be more cautious when promoting teacher diversity efforts.
School districts relying on the ability to hire international teachers through the H-1B visa program for hard-to-fill roles are also on shaky ground after Trump announced in September that there will be a $100,000 fee for employers looking to hire new H-1B employees. That includes schools.
During fiscal year 2025, the National Education Association found that over 500 K-12 public school districts employed about 2,300 H-1B visa holders.
The H-1B visa proclamation has led to several lawsuits claiming that the $100,000 fee is unlawful and would consequently harm public schools.
Ask just about any federally funded researcher to describe 2025, and they use words like chaotic, demoralizing, confusing, destabilizing and transformational.
“It’s been a very destabilizing year [that’s made] people question the nation’s commitment to research,” Heather Pierce, senior director for science policy at the Association of American Medical Colleges, told Inside Higher Ed.
She expects 2026 to be a year of rebuilding and standard setting.
Speaking of the National Institutes of Health, which calls itself the world’s largest public biomedical research funder, Pierce said the research community is expecting more major regulation and written policy changes in 2026, which will shed more light on how grants will be funded, how much the federal government will invest in the research enterprise and what priorities will emerge from this administration.
If the administration’s attacks on federally funded research in 2025 are any indication, the federal government of 2026 will likely be just as willing to advance its conservative ideological agenda by controlling universities through the nation’s research enterprise. And while the administration may not let up in the new year, courts stymied some of its most sweeping changes in 2025 and may continue to be an obstacle in the new year.
Soon after President Donald Trump started his second term in January, the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Department of Education and numerous other federal agencies that collectively send billions in research dollars to universities, began freezing and terminating hundreds of grants. Many of the targeted grants—including projects focused on vaccines, climate change, and health and education disparities among women, LGBTQ+ and minority communities—were caught in the crossfire of Trump’s war against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and so-called woke gender ideology.
Not only would the terminations lead to the loss of jobs, staff and income, a lawsuit filed by a group of NIH-funded researchers in April predicted that “scientific advancement will be delayed, treatments will go undiscovered, human health will be compromised, and lives will be lost.”
The true damage comes from the betrayal, the sense of uncertainty and the loss of trust researchers have—or had—vis-à-vis with the federal government. That’s really hard to quantify.”
Scott Delaney, cofounder of Grant Witness
Terminated federal grants encompassed a wide range of research projects. Some of the casualties included funding to study the erosion of democracy, the effectiveness of work study, dementia, COVID-19, cancer and misinformation. Others supported teacher-training programs and initiatives designed to attract more underrepresented students into STEM fields.
“The premise of this award is incompatible with agency priorities,” read a letter the NIH sent to numerous researchers back in March, terminating their active grants. “[R]esearch programs based primarily on artificial and nonscientific categories, including amorphous equity objectives, are antithetical to the scientific inquiry, do nothing to expand our knowledge of living systems, provide low returns on investment, and ultimately do not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness.”
But it didn’t stop there.
The Trump administration also temporarily froze billions more dollars in federal research grants at a handful of the nation’s wealthiest, most selective institutions, including Harvard University, Columbia University and the University of California at Los Angeles, for allegedly failing to address antisemitism on campus and ignoring the Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action, among other allegations. (Most of the universities got their money back after cutting deals with the administration or via court orders.)
Faculty in the University of California system successfully fought the administration’s funding cuts, winning court orders to restore the money.
Justin Sullivan/AFP/Getty Images
And because the NIH, NSF, ED and several other federal agencies also laid off thousands of workers, researchers with questions had far fewer resources to help them navigate changes to application and award processes.
By some estimates, the government disrupted upward of $17 billion in NIH grants alone this year, according to Scott Delaney, a former lawyer and Harvard University epidemiologist who the university laid off as a result of grant terminations.
Earlier this year, he cofounded Grant Witness, a website that has been tracking grant cancellations at the NIH, NSF and the Environmental Protection Agency. While both the NIH and NSF have since restored thousands of grants, Delaney said those and other restorations won’t be enough to repair the now-fractured relationship between faculty and federal funding agencies.
“The true damage comes from the betrayal, the sense of uncertainty and the loss of trust researchers have—or had—vis-à-vis with the federal government. That’s really hard to quantify,” he told Inside Higher Ed this month. “In the years ahead, there will be folks who don’t want to plan long-term research projects because they don’t know if their funds are going to get summarily yanked out from underneath them; folks who don’t want to continue their careers in academic research or train in academic research; trainees who would have had training grant support who don’t now and go do something else. And some researchers will just leave the country.”
In addition, some of the Trump administration’s research funding proposals have stoked worry this year about the long-term sustainability of the nation’s academic research enterprise.
Numerous agencies—including NIH, NSF and Department of Energy—have attempted to cut university reimbursement rates for indirect research costs. Higher education and science advocates characterized such policies as “shortsighted and dangerous,” and said it would hamper university budgets, hurt the economy and stymie scientific progress. Although federal courts have since blocked the rate caps, the mere anticipation of such policy changes led some universities—including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Northwestern University—to freeze hiring and, in some cases, graduate admissions.
But by September, the NIH said it was on track to spend its full $47 billion budget by the end of the fiscal year that month.
However, the NIH awarded 3,500 fewer competitive grants this year with the biggest declines at the Institutes of minority health, nursing, human genome, alcohol abuse and alcoholism and mental health, according to The New York Times. Those changes are part of the White House’s plan to streamline scientific funding by eliminating wasteful spending and cutting “woke programs” that “poison the minds of Americans.”
The cuts to federal agencies and research spurred protests in the spring.
As 2025 fades into 2026, the federal research funding picture isn’t looking as bleak—at least not on the surface.
A flurry of litigation from universities, individual researchers, trade associations and labor unions prompted several federal agencies to reinstate some research grants.
All things considered, 2025 “could have been worse, but it was still awful,” Delaney said, noting that there are still thousands of grants in limbo at the NSF, DOE and numerous other agencies beyond the NIH.
“So many people fought so hard—some of them sacrificed their jobs inside these federal agencies—and they succeeded in many ways. To tell a story that doesn’t include both their sacrifice and their success discredits what was a Herculean and heroic effort for scientists, many who have never spoken up in a political way before this year,” he added. “But it’s also important to emphasize that this fight isn’t over, and we need to keep fighting. It can get worse.”
‘Not Insulated From Politics’
Katie Edwards, a social work professor at the University of Michigan, is one of the researchers who sued the NIH. In March, the agency canceled six grants she was using to research mental health and violence prevention among marginalized young people, including Indigenous and LGBTQ+ youth. Valued at $10 million, the grants supported roughly 50 staff, community collaborators and trainees and put them all at risk of losing their jobs.
“For many trainees—especially those who are LGBTQ+ or people of color—the message they internalized was painful: that research on their communities is ‘ideological’ or expendable,” Edwards wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “The emotional toll of fighting for and protecting staff, reassuring community partners, and trying to navigate a constantly shifting federal landscape has been immense.”
Fighting for Public Health Research
April: A group of NIH researchers, a public health advocacy organization and a union representing more than 120,000 higher education workers sued the NIH for terminating more than $2.4 billion in grants.
August: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled by a vote of 5 to 4 that any legal challenges to the grant terminations should be litigated in the Court of Federal Claims, not the federal district court system they’ve been moving through for months.
Edwards
University of Michigan
Although her grants have since been reinstated—albeit some with reduced dollar amounts, administrative delays and anti-DEI language in the notice of award—and her team has resumed their work, this year has forever changed her perspective on research.
“This year made clear that science is not insulated from politics—and that researchers must be prepared to defend not only their projects, but the people those projects exist to serve,” Edwards said. “Federally funded research with marginalized communities requires constant vigilance, strong partnerships, and collective resistance. We cannot simply adjust our science to political winds when real communities rely on this work.”
But not every researcher who appealed a grant termination got their money back.
In March, the Education Department informed Judith Scott-Clayton, a professor of economics and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, that it was cancelling her six-year grant to examine the impact of receiving federal work-study funding on enrollment and persistence among low-income students four and a half years into the grant.
Teachers College appealed the decision in April, but the government rejected it in September, stating that Education Department grants were specifically excluded from Columbia University’s settlement with the Trump administration. Support from a private foundation allowed Scott-Clayton and her team to resume their research this November, but she told Inside Higher Ed that the disruptions to research have been “extremely unsettling and demoralizing.”
And she’s not certain that 2026 will be any better.
“Even though I believe in the value of what I do, self-doubt can flare up when an authority as significant as the federal government formally declares your work to be a waste of resources,” she said. “I am not sure what the future of our field looks like if our federal government no longer values research evidence. And I am not sure what our society looks like if the federal government can make decisions so arbitrarily without any consequences or constraints.”
New Year, Old Concerns
This year is ending with unresolved questions about what the Trump administration’s research policies will ultimately be, and how much the federal government will fund research. Pierce at the Association of American Medical Colleges said she expects next year will provide answers.
Joanne Padrón Carney, chief government relations officer for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), said “I think the [the Energy Department’s] Genesis mission and the prioritization of artificial intelligence and emerging technologies is going to be a key driver in—I guess you could say—filling in the cracks of the foundation of the research enterprise that has been kind of hit by this earthquake in the past year.”
The National Institutes of Health has cut staff and is eyeing other changes to how it funds research.
Wesley Lapointe/The Washington Post via Getty Images
The continuing resolution that ended the historically long federal government shutdown in November expires Jan. 30, and Congress is leaving town for the holidays without passing funding bills for some major science funding agencies, including the NIH, NSF and Energy.
Trump proposed slashing about $5.2 billion from the NSF. But House appropriators have suggested cutting $2.1 billion, while senators only put forth axing $60 million, according to an appropriations debate tracker from the AAAS. And while the president proposed cutting nearly 40 percent from the NIH—$18.1 billion—the House and Senate have instead suggested increasing its funding by roughly $1 billion, the tracker shows. That pushback from Congress is promising, advocates say.
And colleges and universities are still waiting for federal research funding agencies to set indirect cost reimbursement caps, after litigation blocked their plans to set the limit at 15 percent. The forthcoming OMB guidance setting those caps is also supposed to help agencies implement Trump’s controversial August executive order directing “senior appointees” to take charge of awarding, denying, reviewing and terminating new and already awarded grants. Among other changes, that order also said grants can’t “promote” racial preferences or “the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic,” and that they “should be given to a broad range of recipients rather than to a select group of repeat players.”
Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya took over the National Institutes of Health and has pledged to support what the administration calls “gold standard science.” He’s become a vocal supporter of the Make America Healthy Again agenda, which focuses more on chronic diseases.
Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
Further, the NIH is eyeing ways to reduce how much of its grant dollars researchers can use to pay scientific journals to publish their work. The proposed options ranged from limiting how much could be spent per publication or capping the percentage of a grant that can go toward publishing fees overall, to no longer funding publication costs whatsoever. The NIH said in the summer that it planned to make whatever policy it chose effective early next year, but it only recently released the public comments, and an agency spokesperson said he couldn’t provide a definitive implementation timeline.
Just this week, Science published a memo showing that NSF is scaling back its reviews of grant proposals, citing its “significantly reduced” workforce and a need to expedite approvals and denials to address a “significant backlog of unreviewed proposals and canceled review panels” from the government shutdown. The memo also said NSF program officers are “expected to maximize their use of available automated merit review tools, especially tools that identify proposals that should be returned without review.”
And the NIH ordered staff last Friday to start using a “computational text analysis tool” to scan current and new grants for words and phrases that may mean they’re misaligned with NIH priorities. Staff were told to look out for terms such as “health equity” and “structural racism.” How this and the NSF policy changes will work in practice remains to be seen.
The educational improvement research field also awaits word on the future of the congressionally required Institute of Education Sciences (IES), which the administration gutted early this year amid its ongoing push to dismantle the larger Education Department. IES is the federal government’s central education data collection and research funding agency. Education secretary Linda McMahon hired a special adviser to “re-envision” it, but the plan hasn’t been released.
Overall, Pierce said 2026 “will continue to be a challenging year, especially for those researchers, institutions and trainees that have seen their grants terminated.” But she noted medical research is marked by passion for improving the nation’s health.
by Maxwell Fjeld, The Hechinger Report December 1, 2025
Earning an associate degree alongside my high school diploma was an ambitious goal that turned into a positive high school experience for me. By taking on the responsibilities of a college student, I further prepared myself for life after high school.
I needed to plan out my own days. I needed to keep myself on task. I needed to learn how to monitor and juggle due dates, lecture times and exams while ensuring that my extracurricular activities did not create conflicts.
All of this was life-changing for a rural Minnesota high school student. Dual enrollment through Minnesota’s PSEO program saved me time and money and helped me explore my interests and narrow my focus to business management. After three years of earning dual credits as a high school student, I graduated from community college and was the student speaker at the commencement earlier this year in May — one month before graduating from high school.
As a student earning college credits while still in high school, I gained exposure to different career fields and developed a passion for civic engagement. At the beginning of my senior year, while taking courses at the local community and technical college, I was elected to serve as that school’s first cross-campus student body president.
While most states have dual-enrollment programs, Minnesota’s support for its PSEO students stands out. As policymakers consider legislative and funding initiatives to strengthen dual enrollment in other states, I believe that three features of our program could provide a blueprint for states that want to do more.
First, the college credits I earned are transferable and meet degree requirements.
Second, the PSEO program permitted me to take enough credits each semester to earn my associate degree. While the number of dual-enrollment credits high school students can earn varies by state and program, when strict limitations are set on those numbers, the program can become a barrier to higher education instead of an alternate pathway.
Third, Minnesota’s PSEO program limits the cost burden placed on students. With rising costs and logistical challenges to pursuing higher education credentials, the head start that students can create for themselves via loosened restrictions on dual-enrollment credits can make a real financial impact, especially for students like me from small towns.
Dual-enrollment costs vary significantly from state to state, with some programs charging for tuition, fees, textbooks and other college costs.In Minnesota, those costs are covered by the Department of Education. In addition, if families meet income requirements, the expenses incurred by students for education-related transportation are also covered.
If I did not have state support, I would not have been able to participate in the program. Financial support is a crucial component to being a successful dual-enrollment student. When the barrier of cost is removed, American families benefit, especially students from low-income, rural and farming backgrounds.
Early exposure to college helped me choose my major by taking college classes to experiment — for free. When I first started, I was interested in computer science as a major. After taking a computer science class and then an economics class the following semester, I chose business as my major.
The ability to explore different fields of study was cost-saving and game-changing for me and is an opportunity that could be just as beneficial for other students.
Targeted investments in programs like this have benefited many students, including my father in the 1990s. His dual-enrollment experience allowed him to get a head start on his education and gain valuable life skills at a young age and is a great example of dual enrollment’s potential generational impact.
When dual-enrollment students receive guidance and support, it can be transformational. Early exposure to college introduced me to college-level opportunities. As student government president, I went to Washington, D.C., to attend a national student summit. I was able to meet with congressional office staffers and advocate for today’s students and for federal investment in dual-enrollment programs, explaining my story and raising awareness.
The daily life of high school is draining for some and can be devastating for others. I had many friends who came to believe that the bullying, peer-pressure and culture they experienced in high school would continue in college, so they deemed higher education “not worth it.”
Through dual enrollment, I saw the difference in culture; students who face burnout from daily high school life can refocus and feel good about their futures again.
Congress can help state legislatures by establishing strong dual-enrollment programs nationwide. With adequate government support, dual-enrollment programs can help students from all walks of life and increase college graduation rates. If all states offer access to the same opportunities that I had in high school, our next generation will be better prepared for the workforce and more successful.
Maxwell Fjeld is pursuing his bachelor’s degree at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities’ Carlson School of Management after earning an associate degree upon high school graduation through dual enrollment. He is also a student ambassador fellow at Today’s Students Coalition.
This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/student-voice-i-earned-my-associate-degree-while-still-in-high-school-and-it-changed-my-life/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>
Is it possible for someone you’ve never met to be a mentor?
I don’t know how else to describe Ken Bain, author of What the Best College Teachers Do, a book that transformed not just my teaching, but my entire life.
Ken Bain passed away on Oct. 10. I first learned this news on LinkedIn from Jim Lang, who did know and was directly mentored by Ken Bain and, like the several dozen folks who offered comments on his passing—and also me—whose life and work were profoundly affected by Ken Bain’s work.
I read an advance copy of What The Best College Teachers Do sometime in early 2004 in a period where I was starting to question the folklore of teaching I had absorbed as a student and graduate assistant, and it immediately changed how I thought about my own work, kicking off a process of consideration and experimentation around teaching writing that continues to this day.
What the Best College Teachers Do reflects more than a decade of study and is entirely based in observations of teaching, teaching materials, student responses and reflections, interviews and other sources, filtered through various lenses (history, literary analysis, sociology, ethnography, investigative journalism) to draw both big conclusions about not just what teachers do, but how they think, how they relate to students, how they view their work and how they evolve their approaches.
The method is relentlessly qualitative rather than quantitative, and it can be straightforwardly adapted to one’s own work.
At least that’s how I used the book. Looking through some of the text for the first time in years, I can see significant strands of What the Best College Teachers Do DNA in my writing about the writer’s practice. The lens of “doing” as the central feature of any work has been part of my personal framework for so long that I almost lost its origin, but there it is.
The book is more than 20 years old, but its framing questions are evergreen and even more relevant in this AI age. The book asks and answers the following questions:
What do the best teachers know and understand?
How do they prepare to teach?
What do they expect of their students?
What do they do when they teach?
How do they treat students?
How do they check their progress and evaluate their efforts?
The book helpfully encapsulates the study’s findings under these categories, and as bullet points of good teaching practice they are spot-on. But I am also here to testify that they are not a substitute for the full experience of reading What the Best College Teachers Do, because the act of reading the specific illustrations and examples that gave rise to these findings allows for the individual to reflect on their own practices relative to others.
The first thing I did after reading and absorbing What the Best College Teachers Do was change my attendance policy to no longer punish students based on a maximum number of absences. I’d engaged in this practice because it had been handed down as conventional wisdom: If you don’t police student attendance, they won’t show up. Bain’s best teachers challenged this conventional wisdom.
The positive effects were immediate. I stepped up my game in terms of making sure class was viewed by students as productive and necessary. My mood improved, as I no longer stewed over students who were pushing their luck in terms of absences, daring me to dock their overall semester grade.
Attendance went up! I asked students about this, and they said that when a class says you “get four absences” they were treating that as a kind of permission (or even encouragement) to go ahead and miss four classes. Student agency and self-responsibility increased. If they missed a class, they knew what they had to do, and it didn’t involve me.
The experiments continued, leading ultimately to the writer’s practice and my embrace of alternative assessment, developments that made me a much more effective instructor and now, improbably, someone invited to colleges and universities to share his expertise on these subjects.
It would not have happened without the work and mentorship of Ken Bain, mentorship I experienced entirely through reading his book.
I worry that mentorship is going to be further eroded by AI, particularly if entry-level jobs with their apprenticeship tasks are now completed through automation, rather than by working with other, more experienced humans. The enthusiasm for letting large language models compress texts into summaries rather than reading the full work of another unique intelligence is also a threat.
My conviction that our way forward through the challenge of AI is rooted in deeply examining the experiences of learning and fostering those experiences for students only grows stronger by the day. What the Best College Teachers Do is experiences all the way down, a book of observations conveyed in such a way that allows us to make use of them, literally, in what we do.
A great man. A great mentor. Ken Bain’s work will live on through the many pedagogues he’s inspired.
The Impact of Social Platforms on Higher Education Marketing
There are currently more than 5.6 billion social media users worldwide, according to Statista. This means that about two-thirds of the world’s population uses some form of social media to communicate.
For many of us, using social media has become second nature. But the digital space has changed drastically since we saw the emergence of social media marketing in the early 2000s and beyond. So, too, should your social media marketing strategy, so that you can effectively reach your institution’s intended audience and make an impact when everyone else is trying to do the same.
While social media is a commonplace platform for communication today, have you ever considered how significantly social media has changed the way we communicate?
4 Top Social Media Platforms Changing Communication
Let’s take a look at what the most used social platforms have contributed to our new way of communication and how you can utilize them in your higher education marketing campaigns.
1. Facebook
Facebook is seen as the most predominant social media platform, and it has the numbers to back it up, with nearly 3.1 billion monthly users. While Meta’s Facebook still remains one of the top social media platforms since its conception, its audience demographics have shifted with the rise of Instagram and TikTok. With the dominating demographic now being women ages 25 to 34, Facebook is not the higher education marketing platform it once was. Not for traditional prospective and current students, anyway.
However, this platform can be effective for marketing flexible, online degree programs that target adult learners. It’s also a great avenue for communicating with alumni, recent graduates, and even parents of students.
2. YouTube
With nearly 2.6 billion monthly active users, YouTube was launched in 2005 and quickly grew to become one of the top social media platforms by 2010.
YouTube isn’t focused on generating content for short-term attention spans like other platforms. While Instagram, TikTok, and even Facebook primarily host short-form videos averaging 30 seconds to a minute long, YouTube’s premise is to expand on short-form content and host longer videos, such as how-tos, influencer lifestyle content, and vlogs, allowing viewers to form a more intimate connection with the content.
One of the main ways institutions utilize YouTube is with the rise of virtual campus tours, allowing potential students from anywhere to experience a university campus. This allows universities to expand their applicant pool by reaching potential students who may not be able to attend an in-person campus tour.
Take a look at a couple of examples of virtual campus tours from Clemson University and Cornell University, which have received 62,000 and 136,000 views, respectively:
YouTube can also be a great place to highlight student success stories and testimonials.
3. Instagram
This Meta-owned social media platform has about 3 billion monthly users. In 2017, Instagram edged out Snapchat for one of the top spots among the most popular social media platforms. How? Instagram saw a gap in its algorithm where it wasn’t meeting younger audiences’ needs that Snapchat excelled at: catering to short attention spans.
In 2016, Instagram expanded on its platform offerings, including not only the ability to share photos in a timeline, but also launching a Stories feature. Similar to Snapchat, IG Stories gave users the ability to showcase shorter bursts of content that showcased the use of filters, stickers, and more, making the platform more interactive. With the launch of IG Reels in 2020, Instagram rounded out its offerings within the platform, giving users the ability to view and create short-form videos.
Since Instagram is most popular among a large younger demographic of users ages 18 to 34, Instagram is one of the number one tools higher ed marketers should be using to reach a wide variety of their university community, from prospective students to current students and young alumni.
4. TikTok
TikTok has nearly 2 billion users. After its launch in 2018, TikTok quickly grew into one of the most popular social media platforms, surpassing X (formerly Twitter) and Snapchat and creating a new demand for short-form video across all platforms.
Primarily geared towards Gen Z and Millennial audiences, TikTok is a fast-paced, trend-focused app, making it one of the ideal platforms for marketing to university students. The original TikTok algorithm was unique compared to other social media platforms because it continually personalizes content to keep users engaged.
How Did Social Media Change the Way We Communicate?
Social media has changed how we communicate with one another in many ways. It has allowed us to share information in new ways, quickly gain global insights into worldwide news and trends, and forge new online communities of like-minded individuals.
Fostered the Ability to Share
Since its launch in 2004, Facebook, one of the first ever social media platforms, has created a place to share anything from daily thoughts to groundbreaking ideas. This has continued to be the foundation of social media platforms that have followed in Facebook’s footsteps, from Snapchat to Instagram to TikTok.
Each of these platforms has expanded on the original foundation to add features such as stories, short-form video, and interactive filters. This further encouraged immediate, frequent sharing among participants and a sense of urgency around being an active social media user. This illustrates our first point: Social media has given audiences the opportunity to share and collaborate in real-time on a global scale. Over time, we shifted from passive consumers of information to active participants in content creation and distribution.
In higher ed, this has greatly impacted how institutions communicate with prospective and current students, alumni, and other members of their wider community. Institutions have been given the opportunity to share with their communities in real time: Student successes are immediately celebrated, university news can be instantly delivered to a For You page (FYP) or timeline in a matter of seconds, and audiences can immediately communicate back. Social media has fostered this ability to share, allowing institutions to create stronger brand awareness and community engagement.
Provided Global Perspective
This brings us to our second point: Social media has enabled people, brands, institutions, and organizations to come together in one common place, erasing traditional communication boundaries that once hindered our ability to connect.
Students in one part of the world can now explore what campus life looks like in another, simply by watching a TikTok tour, reading Instagram stories, or following a university ambassador on YouTube. These behind-the-scenes glimpses, often created by real students, offer an authentic, unfiltered perspective of life at institutions that might have otherwise been unreachable.
Faculty benefit from this reach too, using platforms like LinkedIn or X to share academic work, engage with global peers, and promote collaborative initiatives. Conferences, lectures, and panels can now be live-streamed or shared widely after the fact, broadening access to educational content for international audiences who may never set foot on campus.
From a marketing standpoint, this global connectivity has changed the way institutions can position themselves and expand their offerings. Nearly two-thirds of institutions are exploring how to bring traditional on-campus programs online, utilizing the global reach driven by social media to appeal to nontraditional learners, including working parents and older adults.
Ultimately, the rise of social media has made it possible for institutions to extend their mission and messaging farther than ever before.
Encouraged Personal Connections
If you’re a social media user, you’ve likely experienced the benefits of how digital platforms have improved our overall communication. One of the most notable benefits is how platforms — from Facebook to LinkedIn and Instagram to TikTok — have given people the ability to connect on a personal level, whether it’s reconnecting with old friends, networking with new professional acquaintances, or sparking life-long friendships through comments, likes, and shares.
As social media has grown over the years, we’ve developed interest-based communities that allow us to communicate with like-minded individuals, sharing ideas and building a sense of belonging that might not be easily found in the “real world.” For nontraditional and online students, this can be life changing.
For institutions working towards appealing to this modern student demographic, utilizing these features can be beneficial in showcasing how nontraditional and online students can be part of the school’s community.
The Challenge: Creating Bite-Size Messaging
With all of the ways social media has improved our communication, there are also some negative effects. One of which is particularly challenging for marketers: shortened attention spans.
The digital world moves quickly, and evidence has shown that the average attention span when looking at a screen has decreased from 2.5 minutes in 2004 to just 47 seconds in recent years. Many audience demographics, particularly younger generations, have become accustomed to “snackable” content.
Think about it: An average TikTok or Reel is 15 to 30 seconds long, Stories on Snapchat and Instagram disappear within 24 hours, and even static image carousels average only 3-5 slides. Because of this, marketers are left with less time to capture interest and low engagement on traditional content formats like text-only posts and longer videos.
With social media being one of the most beneficial marketing tools in higher ed, it’s imperative that marketers learn to work with its fast-paced nature, not against it. We can do this by prioritizing visual content. Social media has made us into visual communicators: memes, gifs, short-form video, graphics, and more have begun to dominate our FYPs and timelines.
Shifting your strategy to prioritize content like eye-catching graphics and short-form video can push your content to the forefront of your audience’s feed and encourage higher engagement activity.
Improve Your Social Media Strategy With Archer
Looking to up your social media marketing game? Archer Education can help. We offer a variety of tech-enabled marketing, enrollment, and retention services, and our enrollment marketing team helps higher ed institutions with social media marketing, content creation, search engine optimization (SEO), academic thought leadership, and more.
Here at Archer, we partner with accredited universities to enable higher-ed leaders and marketers to accelerate their online program growth and enrollment. We believe that education is the great equalizer in our society, and we strive to help institutions make education more accessible for all adult learners.
If you’d like to learn more, contact our team and explore our offerings today.
Like most of my colleagues in art history, English, history, modern languages, musicology, philosophy, rhetoric and adjacent fields, I am concerned about the current crisis in the humanities. Then again, as a student of the history of the modern university, I know that there haven’t been too many decades over the last 150 years during which we humanities scholars have not employed the term “crisis” to portray our place in the academy.
Our Greek forebears, as early as Hippocrates, coined the term “kρίσις” to describe a “turning point”; kρίσις, a word related to the Proto-Indo-European root krei-, is etymologically connected to practices like “sieving,” “discriminating” and “judging.” In fact, the most widely mentioned skill we humanists offer our students, critical thinking, originates from the same practice of deliberate “sieving.” Thus, when we call ourselves critics and write critical theory, we admit that crisis might just be our natural habitat.
What’s Different This Time Around?
A look at the helpful statistics provided by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences indicates that this latest crisis in humanities enrollments and degree completions is not like the previous fluctuations in our history, but more foundational. Things sounded bad enough when a state flagship like West Virginia University slashed modern languages (and math!) two years ago. But when that beacon of humanistic learning, the University of Chicago, pauses Ph.D. admissions across all but two of its humanities programs, we know the crisis is existential. Wasn’t it Chicago’s Kalven report that once stated boldly, and for the entire nation, that the university was “the home and sponsor of critics”?
Cultures of Complaint, and a Pinch of Hubris
Feeling powerless in the face of dwindling enrollment and support for our disciplines, some of us have resorted to digging up conspiracy theories, perhaps because, as Stanley Fish opined, in the psychic economy of academic critics, “oppression is the sign of virtue.” The tenor of such virtue-signaling complaints is that an unholy alliance of tech and business bros and their programs, together with politicians and academic leaders, promote only “useful” disciplines and crowd out interest in the humanities.
I think intellectual honesty would demand we remember that it was the humanities, custodians of high-culture education (Bildung), that once upon a time crowded out the applied arts, crafts and technologies, accusing them of lacking intellectual depth. Humanistic Ivy League and Oxbridge schools championed the classics, philosophy and literary studies as “liberal” and sneered at professional education in the “mechanical arts” (engineering, agriculture, business, etc.) as “servile.” When the humanities (and natural sciences) faculty at these elite colleges refused to open their classist “gentlemen’s education” to larger publics, land-grant universities and technological institutes emerged to increase access and to educate teachers, lawyers and engineers.
Could it be that today’s humanists still retain some of this original hubris toward technical, vocational and applied training, which makes the current inversion of disciplinary hierarchy even tougher to accept? Are warnings against instrumentalizing the humanities for economic gain (Martha C. Nussbaum, Not for Profit) or applying them to support vocational or technical disciplines (Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors) echoes of such hubris? Will this mentality, based on the knowledge economy of the late 19th century, convince today’s students to work with us?
Angsting About Ancillarity
The modernist poet W. H. Auden, in his book-length poem about anxiety, wrote that “We would rather be ruined than changed / We would rather die in our dread / Than climb the cross of the moment / And let our illusions die.” For sure, some among us deny the signs of the time, yearning for the golden days when humanities departments were ever expanding, arguing that an essential third Victorianist (focusing on drama) be added to the colleagues already focusing on fiction and poetry. If these golden days ever existed (in the early 1970s?), they are gone now. Nostalgia for the simulacrum persists.
Closer to reality, many colleagues in the humanities have been “climbing the cross of the moment,” adapting to the inversion of disciplinary hierarchies at our institutions and accepting the mandate to show at least some measurable outcomes instead of our beloved unquantifiable humanistic critique. We have been aligning with the new lead disciplines by creating a vast infrastructure of certificates, degrees, journals, book series and organizations in the medical, health, digital, environmental and energy humanities, in science and technology studies, computational media, and music technology.
However, as Colin Potts observed, when we partner with our colleagues in these better-funded and high-visibility disciplines, we are rarely “co-equal contributors.” We are like alms seekers, condensing our lifelong training and knowledge into an ethics, civics and policy module required for our partners’ accreditation, or infusing technical writing and communication skills into a STEM curriculum to amplify their majors’ impact. These collaborations offer a modicum of recognition and an honorable mention in a holistically minded National Academies consensus report. But they also make us feel dreadfully ancillary.
Institutional strategic plans that exalt the value of the humanities with terms like “cornerstone,” “core” and “heart” only deepen our suspicions, especially when our budgets don’t match the performative strategic grandiloquence. From the medieval through the 18th-century university, the humanities suffered the trauma of being “handmaidens to theology” (ancillae theologiae), then the doctrinal master discipline. Now, technology has taken theology’s place, and we are once again “pleasant (but more or less inconsequential) helpmeets.” Trauma redux.
Hyperbole Won’t Help
In an existential crisis, hyperbole in the defense of our field no longer feels like a vice. Therefore, some of us now claim that the end of the humanities heralds the end of humanity and human civilization. Brenna Gerhardt, for example, warned that, because of the 2025 funding cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities, “we may find that a society that forgets to ask what it means to be human forgets how to be one.”
Similarly, the 2024 World Humanities Report asserts that “the humanities are of critical importance” at a time when the “world and planet [are] under duress” and in dire need of “tools and concepts that will foster change and help us live under these shared, if still uneven, conditions.” These kinds of well-meaning statements, and the desperate daily news item (preferably from Oxbridge) amplifying our relevance and adaptability, burden the academic humanities with a responsibility incommensurate with the cultural and educational work we can perform. Their claim that “either you support the humanities, or inhumanity prevails” scares only us, but nobody else. As the authors of WhatEvery1Says: The Humanities in Public Discourse find, “The humanities appear to the public to be siloed in universities (unlike the sciences).”
This I Believe
If the previous paragraphs didn’t sound resilient and hopeful enough, please remember that my first obligation as a humanist is to be a critic, not a cheerleader. I believe that the humanities do have an important place in the ecosystem of higher education and at each university, that integrating STEM and liberal arts practices increases student success and leads to better research and scholarship, that humanistic considerations contribute to a more just and benign world, and that we need to continue our important work in core education.
However, I don’t think that we academic humanists have sufficient standing to make hyperbolic claims about what we can achieve. Just consider: Have we ever advanced how many majors and faculty positions would be enough to keep the world humane and civilized? Have we, as Roosevelt Montás asks in Rescuing Socrates, ever overcome the “crisis of consensus … about what things are most worth knowing”? And should we lecture our STEM colleagues on ethics and gender equity when, as recently as 2019, fewer than one-third of tenure-track faculty and fewer than one-fourth of non-tenure- track professors in U.S. philosophy departments were women?
We humanists are really good at asking critical questions, “sieving,” “discriminating” and “judging” at the highest levels of abstraction, but we are not so good at offering solutions. When we do, they often come from the same intellectual heights that have alienated us from undergraduate populations and the public. In a recent essay for the Journal of Theoretical Humanities, Wayne Stables takes us beyond hyperbole. He asks us to envision our lives and work “as if the humanities were dead,” thereby (he hopes) freeing us to consider collective action based on the likes of G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Theodor W. Adorno, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Wendy Brown. He believes this kind of “critical orientation” may help us survive “the troubling interregnum” in which we now find ourselves.
While I sympathize with Stables’s call to action (though I would add Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, bell hooks and Judith Butler to his list), I believe it takes us back to the time when the humanities strove to be “all breathing human passion far above.”
I recommend we befriend the idea that our humanistic values and practices may relate to more public-oriented and holistic goals, as exemplified by the University of Arizona’s successful degree in the public and applied humanities, which wants “to translate the personal enrichment of humanities study into public enrichment and the direct and tangible improvement of the human condition” and offers a “fundamentally experimental, entrepreneurial, and transdisciplinary” educational experience that “focuses on public and private opportunities that straddle rather than fall between purviews, or are confined by them.”
Since the introduction of this new kind of humanities program, connected with such fields as business, engineering and medicine, the number of students majoring in the humanities at Arizona has increased by 76 percent. This true kind of integrated partnership, and similar initiatives at St. Anselm College, Virginia Tech and my home institution of Georgia Tech, give me hope for a turning point—kρίσις—for the humanities in higher education.
Richard Utz is senior associate dean for strategic initiatives in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at Georgia Institute of Technology.
Brazil exited the age of slavery 135 years ago. It remains a multi-racial society today. But for much of the twentieth century, Brazil suffered an enormous bout of amnesia. From being one of the last societies on earth to give up slavery, it immediately began touting itself as a place where colour did not matter, that it was a post-racial society.
But then about 30 years ago, things changed. Race — or more accurately race and inequality — became a much more prominent subject of debate, and various measures were brought in to lessen racial inequality. In higher education, however, Brazil did not however take the path of “affirmative action” as the United States did. Instead: it went the route India did with respect to caste: hard, fixed numerical quotas.
Today we’re going to look at how that this policy has worked out, and joining me to do so is Luiz Augusto Campos: He’s a professor of sociology and Political science at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, and he’s co-editor of a recent book on quotas in Brazilian higher education called O impacto das cotas: Duas decadasde acao affirmativano Ensino superior brasileiro. We had a great discussions about how Brazilian admissions quotas came to be and how they have change higher education. Of particular interest to me is that these quotas were imposed in some of the country’s most elite institutions — and how the arrival of quotas has managed to make policies of free tuition at elite institutions much less regressive.
The World of Higher Education Podcast Episode 4.7 | Access and Aftermath: What Racial Quotas Changed in Brazil’s Universities with Luiz Augusto Campos
Transcript
Alex Usher (AU): Luiz, before we start talking about quotas in higher education, let’s paint a picture of race in Brazil. Like the United States, Brazil was a colonial slave state—one where emancipation didn’t happen until 1888. But for a long time, there was a kind of myth that Brazil had become a post-racial society, one where people didn’t see race. So, what are the politics of race like in Brazil, and what’s changed over, say, the last 50 years?
Luiz Augusto Campos (LAC): That’s true, and I can say that almost everything has changed in recent years. At the beginning, Brazil was portrayed as a racial democracy—the idea that people in Brazil don’t see race and that there’s no racism. It’s complicated to understand how a country that was completely slave-based in the past could create this myth.
The myth was actually quite successful in the sense that most Brazilians used to believe it. It’s connected to how people viewed our history of slavery. In the past, people used to say that Brazilian slavery was a kind of soft slavery compared to other countries. Historians now show that’s not true, but that was how people saw it.
It was also tied to the myth of miscegenation—the idea that every Brazilian was of mixed race. And if everyone was mixed race, there was supposedly no place for racism, because you couldn’t practice racism against someone who was mixed, as everyone was.
But after 50 or 60 years, this national myth started to change—first because of the rise of the Black movement, which began to call out racism in Brazil, and later because of data on racial inequality. We’ve historically had very good data on race in Brazil—it’s a kind of legacy from the 18th century, through censuses and demographic records.
Those numbers began to show that, despite this idea of racial democracy, racial inequality remained deeply entrenched in Brazil, right up until the end of the 1990s. I think those two things—the activism of the Black movement and the hard data—really contributed to changing people’s belief in the myth of racial democracy.
AU: Just to be clear, when you talk about data on race, how is race classified? I don’t think it’s just white and Black, right? How does that work?
LAC: It’s changed over time, but we generally work with five racial categories. Even today, the Brazilian census is quite good. When a census worker comes to your house, they’ll ask you to identify your race using one of five options: Black, Brown, White, Yellow—which refers to Brazilians of Asian descent—and Indigenous.
That last category isn’t meant for people with distant Indigenous ancestry, but rather for those who actually live within Indigenous communities.
AU: Within higher education, how did race historically affect access? How big were the participation gaps between racial groups prior to the introduction of quotas?
LAC: The differences were huge. At the beginning of the 1990s, about 70 percent of students in public higher education were white. And it’s important to note that Brazil has both a public and a private higher education system.
AU: Right—and even though the private system is larger, the public system is the more selective and prestigious one. That’s where people want to go, correct?
LAC: Exactly. The private system is much bigger, but the public system is more selective, higher quality, and more prestigious.
At the start of the 1990s, around 70 percent of enrollments in the public system were white students. That was a real injustice, because the public system is completely tuition-free. So essentially, the government was collecting taxes from the majority of the population—who are largely Brown, Black, and poor—and using that money to fund the education of white students, who mostly came from middle- and upper-class backgrounds.
AU: Let me just ask—if about 70 percent of students in public higher education were white, how did that compare to the population as a whole?
LAC: In Brazil, the population has usually been about half white and half non-white. At the beginning of the 1990s, around 57 percent of people self-identified as white, but they made up about 70 percent of students in public universities.
It’s interesting, though, because racial classification in Brazil has also shifted over time—the proportions of people identifying as white, Black, or Brown have changed. But to answer your question directly, today less than 50 percent of students in public higher education are white. Black and Brown students now make up the majority in the public system.
AU: Let’s think about how we got there. In the 1980s and 1990s, as you said, racial politics started to change across Brazil. People realized this wasn’t really a racial democracy. How did quotas become the tool for achieving racial justice, rather than affirmative action as practiced in the United States at the time?
LAC: It’s a really complex process—and not one that was carefully planned.
First, we had the earliest proposals coming from the Black movement, mostly from an important Black leader in Brazil who was a congressman at the time. He introduced several bills for affirmative action, most of them based on quotas, though they included other ideas as well—such as direct financial support for Black Brazilians and other measures. But the core idea of quotas was already there in the early 1980s.
After that, we saw the rise of a movement creating preparatory courses for university entrance exams. In Brazil, admission to public universities is based on a standardized test, and these prep courses were designed by Black activists to help Black, Brown, and low-income students prepare for it.
The first actual quota policy began at my own university—the State University of Rio de Janeiro—at the beginning of the 2000s. Interestingly, the counselor who approved the quota system was from a right-wing party. He wasn’t necessarily a racial justice advocate; he was just a politician looking for proposals to champion, and this was one he decided to push through.
From that point onward, other universities began to adopt and replicate the model. Today, Brazil likely has the largest racial quota system in the world.
AU: So, how did we go from a situation in the 1980s and 1990s, where a few institutions were experimenting with quotas, to a point where the federal government actually mandated them for all federal universities in 2012? What led up to that decision, and how does the current quota system work?
LAC: It’s a complex story. In the beginning, there was fierce opposition to quotas in Brazil. Even intellectuals and public figures who had long supported anti-racist efforts criticized the quota system when it was first proposed.
At the same time, there were also important groups supporting these policies, but the federal government initially stayed on the sidelines. During Lula’s first two terms, he was personally supportive of such initiatives, but because the topic was so controversial, his government took a cautious approach. They said, “We need to wait—this is a divisive issue,” and chose not to sponsor a national quota bill for higher education at that stage.
However, during Lula’s broader reform of the higher education system, the government did introduce incentives for universities to adopt diversity policies. And for many institutions, quotas were simply the most practical approach—bureaucratically, they’re straightforward to implement. You just reserve a certain percentage of seats, and that’s it.
The Black movement also played a critical role. Activists developed strategies and frameworks to encourage universities to adopt quotas, and because Brazilian universities enjoy a high degree of autonomy, many were able to introduce these policies on their own.
AU: My understanding is that the quota system is actually a kind of two-level structure. The main rule is that 50 percent of students must come from public secondary schools, and then within that, there are race-based quotas that vary depending on the region—since, I assume, the racial makeup of Brazil isn’t homogenous across the country.
LAC: Exactly. First, it’s important to understand that Brazil’s quota system is primarily socioeconomic. The first criterion is that 50 percent of students admitted to public universities must come from public schools. On average, public schools in Brazil are of lower quality than private schools. You don’t pay to attend them, but the quality is generally weaker.
Within that 50 percent, there’s another socioeconomic division: 25 percent of seats are reserved for students from lower-income backgrounds, and 25 percent for students from higher-income backgrounds who still attended public schools.
Then, inside those categories, there are racial quotas. And as you said, the racial proportions vary by state, depending on the local population.
AU: It’s now been a couple of decades since quotas were first introduced, and 13 years since the federal law came into effect. You mentioned earlier that there’s been a significant narrowing of racial access gaps. How substantial has that change been?
LAC: In terms of access, it’s very significant. Today, we can say that Brazilian universities are truly Black and Brown universities. If you visit a campus in Brazil now, you’ll see far more Black and Brown students than in the past.
That said, there are still limits and challenges. While the public higher education system has changed dramatically in both racial and socioeconomic terms, it remains quite small compared to the private sector. In the 1990s, the public system made up almost half of Brazil’s entire higher education system. Today, it accounts for only about 20 percent.
AU: What about graduation rates? It’s one thing to get into university, but as you mentioned, students from public secondary schools might not have had the same preparation. Has the system been able to adjust to ensure that racial minorities are graduating at the same rate as white students?
LAC: In terms of graduation, the rates are quite similar. Black and Brown students now graduate at roughly the same rate as white students. But there are still differences because, even with quotas, access isn’t evenly distributed across all majors.
AU: So, there’s still stratification within the system.
LAC: Yes, exactly. Because racial quotas exist within the broader socioeconomic quota, the share of seats reserved for Black and Brown students ends up being about half of their proportion in the overall Brazilian population.
As a result, in some programs—especially in the less selective ones—you might see 50 or 60 percent of students identifying as Black or Brown. But in the most selective fields, like law or engineering, that number drops to around 20 percent.
It’s also important to note that not all quota seats are filled. Universities sometimes introduce additional requirements or special exams that can limit how these racial quotas are implemented in practice.
AU: Based on your overview of quotas and their results, is there anything you think could be improved in the system?
LAC: Yes, there’s quite a lot that could be improved. We have a new law from 2023 that made some small but important updates to the 2012 legislation. It’s a good law—I think it corrected several issues—but there are still many areas that need attention.
First, data access. In Brazil, getting access to racial data is actually harder today than it used to be. This is partly due to new data protection laws that were meant to regulate big tech companies, but in practice they’ve ended up restricting academic research instead. So, access to race-related data for research is now much worse than before.
Second, the admissions system itself is extremely complicated. Students take a national standardized exam—the ENEM—to apply for higher education. Through this unified system, they can choose from roughly 6,000 different programs across the country.
Within that, there are multiple overlapping quota categories. Besides the main racial and socioeconomic quotas, there are additional ones—like for students with disabilities—which exist inside the broader categories. Altogether, there are around 16 groups, and combining all of them within a single national admissions platform makes it very difficult to fill every quota properly.
So, while the policy framework is strong, the system still has a lot of complexity and operational challenges that need to be addressed.
AU: And what do you think the future holds for quotas in Brazilian higher education? Is there a limit to how far quotas can help narrow the access gap? And can you imagine a future in which quotas wouldn’t be needed anymore?
LAC: I can imagine that future—and I hope for it. I think we’re all working toward a world where quotas are no longer necessary. But for now, they’re still very much needed.
At the moment, the quota system itself isn’t under serious attack. What is under pressure, though, is public higher education—and really the higher education system as a whole. There’s a growing discourse, mostly from the far right, claiming that higher education isn’t necessary, that people should simply “work hard” instead.
Public universities, in particular, have become targets. Critics accuse them of being useless or of being dominated by the far left, which simply isn’t true.
To answer your question directly, I’d say the quota system in Brazil is quite stable right now. But the institutions that sustain it—especially public universities—are facing challenges. Looking ahead, I think the next step is to expand affirmative action beyond higher education, into other areas like the labor market and public institutions, where access for Black and Brown Brazilians remains limited.
AU: Luiz, thank you so much for being with us today.
LAC: Thank you. It’s my pleasure.
AU: And it just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Sam Pufek and Tiffany MacLennan, and you, our readers and listeners, for joining us. If you have any questions about today’s episode or suggestions for future ones, don’t hesitate to contact us at [email protected]. Next week is a break week—but after that, we’ll be back with another fascinating conversation. Bye for now.
*This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service.Please note, the views and opinions expressed in each episode are those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host and team, or our sponsors.
At first, the question seemed simple: “Why do we go to school?”
I had asked it many times before, in many different districts. I’m a planner and designer specializing in K-12 school projects, and as part of a community-driven design process, we invite students to dream with us and help shape the spaces where they’ll learn, grow, and make sense of the world.
In February of 2023, I was leading a visioning workshop with a group of middle schoolers in Southern California. Their energy was vibrant, their curiosity sharp. We began with a simple activity: Students answered a series of prompts, each one building on the last.
“We go to school because …”
“We need to learn because …”
“We want to be successful because …”
As the conversation deepened, so did their responses. One student wrote, “We want to get further in life.” Another added, “We need to help our families.” And then came the line that stopped me in my tracks: “We go to school because we want future generations to look up to us.”
I’ve worked with a lot of middle schoolers. They’re funny, unfiltered, and often far more insightful than adults give them credit for. But this answer felt different. It wasn’t about homework, or college, or even a dream job. It was about legacy. At that moment, I realized I wasn’t just asking kids to talk about school. I was asking them to articulate their hopes for the world and their role in shaping it.
As a designer, I came prepared to talk about flexible furniture, natural light, and outdoor learning spaces. The students approached the conversation through the lens of purpose, identity, and intergenerational impact. They reminded me that school isn’t just a place to pass through — it’s a place to imagine who you might become and how you might leave the world better than you found it.
I’ve now led dozens of school visioning sessions, no two being alike. In most cases, adults are the ones at the table: district leaders, architects, engineers, and community members. Their perspectives are important, of course. But when we exclude students from shaping the environments they spend most days in, we send an implicit message that this place is not really theirs to shape.
However, when we do invite them in, the difference is immediate. Students are not only willing participants, they’re often the most honest and imaginative contributors in the room. They see past the buzzwords like 21st-century learning, flexible furniture, student-centered design, and collaborative zones, and talk about what actually matters: where they feel safe, where they feel seen, where they can be themselves.
During that workshop when the student spoke about legacy, other young participants asked for more flexible learning spaces, places to move around and collaborate, better food, outdoor classrooms, and quiet areas for mental health breaks. One asked for sign language classes to better communicate with her hard-of-hearing best friend. Another asked for furniture that can move from inside to outside. These aren’t requests that tend to show up on state-issued planning checklists, which are more likely to focus on square footage, capacity, and code compliance, but they reflect an extraordinary level of thought about access, well-being, and inclusion.
The lesson: When we take students seriously, we get more than better design. We get better schools.
There’s a popular saying in architecture: Form follows function. But in school design, I’d argue that form should follow voice. If we want to build learning environments that support joy, connection, and growth, we need to start by asking students what those things look and feel like to them — and then believe them.
Listening isn’t a checkbox. It’s a practice. And it has to start early, not once construction drawings are finalized, but when goals and priorities are still being devised. That’s when student input can shift the direction of a plan, not just decorate it.
It’s also not just about asking the right questions, but being open to answers we didn’t expect. When a student says, “Why do the adults always get the rooms with windows?” — as one did in another workshop I led — that’s not a complaint. That’s a lesson in power dynamics, spatial equity, and the unspoken messages our buildings send.
Since that day, about a year and a half ago, when I heard, “We want future generations to look up to us,” I’ve carried that line with me into every planning session. It’s a reminder that students aren’t just users of school space. They’re stewards of something bigger than themselves.
So if you’re a school leader, a planner, a teacher, or a policymaker, invite students in early. Make space for their voices, not just as a formality but as a source of wisdom. Ask questions that go beyond what color the walls should be. And don’t be surprised when the answers you get are deeper than you imagined. Be willing to let their vision shift yours.
Because when we design with students, not just for them, we create schools that don’t just house learning. We create schools that help define what learning is for. And if we do it right, maybe one day, future generations will look up to today’s students not just because of what they learned, but because of the spaces they helped shape.
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.
For more news on district and school management, visit eSN’s Educational Leadership hub.
Enrico Giori, Chalkbeat
Enrico Giori is a California-based planner and designer at Architecture for Education, or A4E, specializing in K-12 educational facilities. He focuses on agency-driven school design that promotes equitable and future-thinking learning environments.
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