Tag: college

Experts knock new Trump plan to collect college admissions data

President Donald Trump wants to collect more admissions data from colleges and universities to make sure they’re complying with a 2023 Supreme Court decision that ended race-conscious affirmative action. And he wants that data now.

But data experts and higher education scholars warn that any new admissions data is likely to be inaccurate, impossible to interpret and ultimately misused by policymakers. That’s because Trump’s own policies have left the statistics agency inside the Education Department with a skeleton staff and not enough money, expertise or time to create this new dataset.

The department already collects data on enrollment from every institution of higher education that participates in the federal student loan program. The results are reported through the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). But in an Aug. 7 memorandum, Trump directed the Education Department, which he sought to close in March, to expand that task and provide “transparency” into how some 1,700 colleges that do not admit everyone are making their admissions decisions. And he gave Education Secretary Linda McMahon just 120 days to get it done.

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Expanding data collection on applicants is not a new idea. The Biden administration had already ordered colleges to start reporting race and ethnicity data to the department this fall in order to track changes in diversity in postsecondary education. But in a separate memorandum to the head of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), McMahon asked for even more information, including high school grades and college entrance exam scores, all broken down by race and gender.

Bryan Cook, director of higher education policy at the Urban Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C., called the 120-day timeline “preposterous” because of the enormous technical challenges. For example, IPEDS has never collected high school GPAs. Some schools use a weighted 5.0 scale, giving extra points for advanced classes, and others use an unweighted 4.0 scale, which makes comparisons messy. Other issues are equally thorny. Many schools no longer require applicants to report standardized test scores and some no longer ask them about race so the data that Trump wants doesn’t exist for those colleges.

“You’ve got this effort to add these elements without a mechanism with which to vet the new variables, as well as a system for ensuring their proper implementation,” said Cook. “You would almost think that whoever implemented this didn’t know what they were doing.”

Cook has helped advise the Education Department on the IPEDS data collection for 20 years and served on technical review panels, which are normally convened first to recommend changes to the data collection. Those panels were disbanded earlier this year, and there isn’t one set up to vet Trump’s new admissions data proposal.

Cook and other data experts can’t figure out how a decimated education statistics agency could take on this task. All six NCES employees who were involved in IPEDS data collection were fired in March, and there are only three employees left out of 100 at NCES, which is run by an acting commissioner who also has several other jobs.

An Education Department official, who did not want to be named, denied that no one left inside the Education Department has IPEDS experience. The official said that staff inside the office of the chief data officer, which is separate from the statistics agency, have a “deep familiarity with IPEDS data, its collection and use.” Former Education Department employees told me that some of these employees have experience in analyzing the data, but not in collecting it.

In the past, there were as many as a dozen employees who worked closely with RTI International, a scientific research institute, which handles most of the IPEDS data collection work.

Technical review eliminated

Of particular concern is that RTI’s $10 million annual contract to conduct the data collection had been slashed approximately in half by the Department of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE, according to two former employees, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation. Those severe budget cuts eliminated the technical review panels that vet proposed changes to IPEDS, and ended training for colleges and universities to submit data properly, which helped with data quality. RTI did not respond to my request to confirm the cuts or answer questions about the challenges it will face in expanding its work on a reduced budget and staffing.

The Education Department did not deny that the IPEDS budget had been cut in half. “The RTI contract is focused on the most mission-critical IPEDS activities,” the Education Department official said. “The contract continues to include at least one task under which a technical review panel can be convened.”

Additional elements of the IPEDS data collection have also been reduced, including a contract to check data quality.

Last week, the scope of the new task became more apparent. On Aug. 13, the administration released more details about the new admissions data it wants, describing how the Education Department is attempting to add a whole new survey to IPEDS, called the Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement (ACTS), which will disaggregate all admissions data and most student outcome and financial aid data by race and gender. College will have to report on both undergraduate and graduate school admissions. The public has 60 days to comment, and the administration wants colleges to start reporting this data this fall.

Complex collection

Christine Keller, executive director of the Association for Institutional Research, a trade group of higher education officials who collect and analyze data, called the new survey “one of the most complex IPEDS collections ever attempted.”

Traditionally, it has taken years to make much smaller changes to IPEDS, and universities are given a year to start collecting the new data before they are required to submit it. (Roughly 6,000 colleges, universities and vocational schools are required to submit data to IPEDS as a condition for their students to take out federal student loans or receive federal Pell Grants. Failure to comply results in fines and the threat of losing access to federal student aid.)

Normally, the Education Department would reveal screenshots of data fields, showing what colleges would need to enter into the IPEDS computer system. But the department has not done that, and several of the data descriptions are ambiguous. For example, colleges will have to report test scores and GPA by quintile, broken down by race and ethnicity and gender. One interpretation is that a college would have to say how many Black male applicants, for example, scored above the 80th percentile on the SAT or the ACT. Another interpretation is that colleges would need to report the average SAT or ACT score of the top 20 percent of Black male applicants.

The Association for Institutional Research used to train college administrators on how to collect and submit data correctly and sort through confusing details — until DOGE eliminated that training. “The absence of comprehensive, federally funded training will only increase institutional burden and risk to data quality,” Keller said. Keller’s organization is now dipping into its own budget to offer a small amount of free IPEDS training to universities.

The Education Department is also requiring colleges to report five years of historical admissions data, broken down into numerous subcategories. Institutions have never been asked to keep data on applicants who didn’t enroll.

“It’s incredible they’re asking for five years of prior data,” said Jordan Matsudaira, an economist at American University who worked on education policy in the Biden and Obama administrations. “That will be square in the pandemic years when no one was reporting test scores.”

‘Misleading results’

Matsudaira explained that IPEDS had considered asking colleges for more academic data by race and ethnicity in the past and the Education Department ultimately rejected the proposal. One concern is that slicing and dicing the data into smaller and smaller buckets would mean that there would be too few students and the data would have to be suppressed to protect student privacy. For example, if there were two Native American men in the top 20 percent of SAT scores at one college, many people might be able to guess who they were. And a large amount of suppressed data would make the whole collection less useful.

Also, small numbers can lead to wacky results. For example, a small college could have only two Hispanic male applicants with very high SAT scores. If both were accepted, that’s a 100 percent admittance rate. If only 200 white women out of 400 with the same test scores were accepted, that would be only a 50 percent admittance rate. On the surface, that can look like both racial and gender discrimination. But it could have been a fluke. Perhaps both of those Hispanic men were athletes and musicians. The following year, the school might reject two different Hispanic male applicants with high test scores but without such impressive extracurriculars. The admissions rate for Hispanic males with high test scores would drop to zero. “You end up with misleading results,” said Matsudaira.

Reporting average test scores by race is another big worry. “It feels like a trap to me,” said Matsudaira. “That is mechanically going to give the administration the pretense of claiming that there’s lower standards of admission for Black students relative to white students when you know that’s not at all a correct inference.”

The statistical issue is that there are more Asian and white students at the very high end of the SAT score distribution, and all those perfect 1600s will pull the average up for these racial groups. (Just like a very tall person will skew the average height of a group.) Even if a college has a high test score threshold that it applies to all racial groups and no one below a 1400 is admitted, the average SAT score for Black students will still be lower than that of white students. (See graphic below.) The only way to avoid this is to purely admit by test score and take only the students with the highest scores. At some highly selective universities, there are enough applicants with a 1600 SAT to fill the entire class. But no institution fills its student body by test scores alone. That could mean overlooking applicants with the potential to be concert pianists, star soccer players or great writers.

The Average Score Trap

This graphic by Kirabo Jackson, an economist at Northwestern University, depicts the problem of measuring racial discrimination though average test scores. Even for a university that admits all students above a certain cut score, the average score of one racial group (red) will be higher than the average score of the other group (blue). Source: graphic posted on Bluesky Social by Josh Goodman

Admissions data is a highly charged political issue. The Biden administration originally spearheaded the collection of college admissions data by race and ethnicity. Democrats wanted to collect this data to show how the nation’s colleges and universities were becoming less diverse with the end of affirmative action. This data is slated to start this fall, following a full technical and procedural review.

Now the Trump administration is demanding what was already in the works, and adding a host of new data requirements — without following normal processes. And instead of tracking the declining diversity in higher education, Trump wants to use admissions data to threaten colleges and universities. If the new directive produces bad data that is easy to misinterpret, he may get his wish.

Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or [email protected].

This story about college admissions data was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

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August 18, 2025
Higher Education Inquirer : College Prospects, College Targets
In the old American dreambook, a “college prospect” was a young person with ambition and promise—a student looking for a campus where they could grow intellectually, socially, and economically. But in today’s reality, “prospect” is an industry term, a sales category. In enrollment management suites across the country, prospective students aren’t just applicants; they’re targets.
[Image from Brown University, August 2025)

Higher education—whether elite, public, or for-profit—now runs on sophisticated marketing pipelines. The same predictive analytics used by corporations, political campaigns, and even law enforcement are deployed to track, segment, and convert students into paying customers. Colleges buy and sell student data from standardized test companies, online lead generators, and high school surveys. They follow “prospects” through their clicks, their campus visits, their FAFSA submissions—nudging them toward a deposit with personalized emails, algorithmically timed text messages, and calculated financial aid offers.

This is not about education first. It’s about yield rates, tuition revenue, and net tuition per student. For working-class families, first-generation students, and those from marginalized backgrounds, this targeting can be especially dangerous. The glossy brochures and “student success” slogans conceal the hard realities: inflated tuition, debt burdens that can last decades, and career outcomes far less rosy than advertised.

The for-profit sector perfected this playbook. Schools like Corinthian Colleges, ITT Tech, and the Art Institutes honed high-pressure recruiting scripts, built massive lead databases, and saturated social media feeds with ads promising quick career training and big paydays. When many of these institutions collapsed under federal scrutiny, their tactics didn’t disappear—they spread. Today, public universities and elite private schools use their own version of the same system, dressed up in more respectable branding.

At the top end of the prestige ladder, “targets” have a different profile. Elite schools scout “development prospects”—wealthy families whose applications are accompanied by the potential for multimillion-dollar gifts. The student is both a potential enrollee and a future donor pipeline. Recruitment here is less about financial aid and more about legacy admissions, networking dinners, and quiet tours with the president.

What all this targeting has in common is an imbalance of information. Colleges know almost everything about their prospects—income bands, likely majors, ability to pay—while students and families often have only the marketing copy and a sticker price. In this environment, independent, transparent information is a rare form of defense.

That’s where tools like TuitionFit and the CollegeViability app come in—not as recruitment aids, but as counterintelligence for families.

TuitionFit collects and shares real financial aid offers from students across the country. This allows families to see what schools are actually charging students with similar academic and financial profiles—not just the “average” cost schools advertise. By revealing the hidden discounting game, TuitionFit helps families avoid overpaying and resist the psychological pressure of “limited-time offers” from admissions officers.

The CollegeViability app compiles public financial data from the U.S. Department of Education and other sources to create an at-a-glance picture of an institution’s fiscal health. It tracks enrollment trends, tuition dependency, debt loads, and other risk factors—warning signs that a college might be on the verge of closing or slashing programs. Families who use it can see trouble coming long before the next headline about a sudden campus shutdown.

These are not small benefits. Every year, thousands of students are lured into institutions that overpromise and underdeliver. Some are blindsided by mid-program closures. Others graduate into underemployment with six figures of debt. Without tools like TuitionFit and CollegeViability, many would walk into these situations blind.

The troubling truth is that higher education’s recruitment machine treats students the same way a corporate sales funnel treats customers—and sometimes the way a military intelligence operation treats enemy assets. Prospects are acquired, qualified, engaged, and converted. They are ranked by “propensity to enroll,” courted by carefully timed contact, and celebrated in quarterly revenue reports.

The people making the targeting decisions rarely bear the costs of a bad outcome. If a student drops out with debt and no degree, it’s a personal tragedy, not a liability on the college’s balance sheet. If a school shutters with no warning, students and their families are left scrambling while administrators move on to new posts elsewhere.

College should be more than a precision-marketed capture. It should be a transparent, good-faith exchange where both sides have access to the same essential facts. Right now, that balance doesn’t exist—and the gap is being exploited.

Families who want to survive the recruitment gauntlet must treat it for what it is: a sales process backed by data analytics, designed to maximize institutional revenue, not student outcomes. That means using every independent resource available, asking hard questions, and refusing to be rushed into decisions.

In the end, the difference between being a college prospect and a college target might be whether you’re armed with real information—or just hope.

Sources:

The Century Foundation, College Admissions and the Business of Enrollment Management

U.S. Senate HELP Committee, For Profit Higher Education: The Failure to Safeguard the Federal Investment and Ensure Student Success

The Hechinger Report, How Colleges Use Big Data to Target Students

TuitionFit, About

CollegeViability, Institutional Health Indicators
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August 17, 2025
Despite Skepticism, Parents Still Prioritize Four-Year College for Their Kids – The 74

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Six out of 10 parents hope their child will attend college, according to a new survey by Gallup and the Lumina Foundation.

The survey, conducted in June, comes out at a time when the value of a college degree is the subject of public debate.

“We hear all this skepticism of higher education,” said Courtney Brown, vice president of impact and planning for the Lumina Foundation, which advocates for opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. “We hear the narrative that people don’t value it.”

Just last month, the results of a Gallup poll showed that confidence in higher education among Americans has been falling over the last decade.

But the results of actually asking what parents want for their own children, Brown said, are striking. This is the first survey that Gallup has specifically asked parents for their views on the topic.

“When it comes down to it, it’s pretty clear that parents hope their children get a college degree,” Brown said.

Brown has found that parents’ biggest concerns about higher education tend to be the cost, whether it leads to a job, or increasingly, whether it is political.

This may explain why community colleges were a popular option among parents who responded. Community colleges tend to have a much lower sticker price than four-year colleges, and there is a greater emphasis on job credentials. Roughly 1 out of 5 parents of varying backgrounds said that they would like to see their child enroll at a community college.

But there were some notable differences in the survey among parents, depending on their own level of education, but especially their political orientation.

The strongest narratives against higher education come from the Republican Party. That is reflected in the responses, Brown noted.

Greater differences emerged around whether students should enroll in a four-year college immediately after high school; 58% of college graduates and 53% of Democrats preferred sending their children straight to a four-year college, compared to 27% of Republicans and 30% of parents without a college degree.

Republicans are more likely to say that their children should go straight into the workforce or job training or certification, followed by independents and those without a college degree. Other options include taking time off or joining the military.

But overall, 4 out of 10 parents want to see their child attend a four-year college or university, making it the most popular option by far. This is something that comes up repeatedly in surveys about higher education.

“We see that people value four-year [degrees],” Brown said. “We see that people have trouble accessing it and have some concerns about the system, but they do greatly value it.”

The survey also measured the preferences of non-parents. It asked respondents to think about a child in their life, whether a nephew or niece, grandchild or family friend under 18 who has not graduated from high school. Responses were remarkably similar: 55% said they wanted this child to attend either a four-year or two-year college, compared to 59% of parents.

This story was originally published by EdSource.

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August 15, 2025
BPP Education Group expands portfolio with acquisition of Sprott Shaw College

BPP Education Group’s growth plan has been backed by the private equity firm TDR Capital, with a view to expand geographically into various sites around the world.

The group, which provides education and training in various fields of work like Law and Finance, hopes to increase the variety of ITS portfolio of courses through the acquisition of dynamic education businesses like Sprott Shaw College.

Sprott Shaw College (SSC), founded in 1903, is one of the largest regulated career colleges IN Canada and offers students connections with real-word opportunities to ready them for work in positions such as nursing and business.

Prior to the deal, it was a subsidiary of Global Education Communities Corporation (GECC), which is one of the largest education and student housing investment companies in Canada.

The college also places a large focus on cultural awareness and inclusivity – and its courses are designed with these in mind.

According to Graham Gaddes, CEO of BPP, the acquisition marks an “important milestone into BPP’s internationalisation”.

“The acquisition will support SSC’s plans to continue to be agile in meeting the needs of the domestic and international community, with programmes developed with cultural awareness and inclusivity in mind,” he added. “We admire what Sprott Shaw College has achieved to date and look forward to welcoming the team to the BPP Education Group.”

The college has grown substantially in size with integrity and has gained respect from the global education community
_{^{Toby Chu, GECC}}

This purchase opens doorways for BPP to offer a vast range of professional education programs due to an alignment with other institutions in its portfolio, such as Ascenda School of Management and Arbutus College.

The programs would range from certificates to degree levels, which would aid both domestic and international students.

Toby Chu, president and CEO of GECC, said that he is “confident that Sprott Shaw College will continue to flourish under BPP’s ownership”.

The college had weathered many difficulties in recent years, he said, including the Covid-19 pandemic and more recent study permit caps in Canada.

“Despite these challenges, the college has grown substantially in size with integrity and has gained respect from the global education community. I am confident that Sprott Shaw College will continue to flourish under BPP’s ownership,” he said.

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August 15, 2025
Why high schools should use teaching assistants

Key points:

Exam scores always seem to go up. Whether it’s the SAT when applying for college or an AP score to earn college credit, competitive scores seem to be creeping up. While faculty are invaluable, students who recently completed classes or exams offer insight that bridges the gap between the curriculum and the exam. I believe students who recently excelled in a course should be allowed and encouraged to serve as teaching assistants in high school.

Often, poor preparation contributes to students’ disappointing exam performance. This could be from not understanding content, being unfamiliar with the layout, or preparing the wrong material. Many times, in courses at all levels, educators emphasize information that will not show up on a standardized test or, in some cases, in their own material. This is a massive issue in many schools, as every professor has their own pet project they like to prioritize. For example, a microbiology professor in a medical school may have an entire lecture on a rare microbe because they research it, but nothing about it will be tested on the national board exams, or even their course final exams. This was a common theme in high school, with history teachers loving to share niche facts, or in college, when physics professors loved to ask trick questions. By including these things in your teaching, is it really benefiting the pupil? Are students even being tested correctly over the material if, say, 10 percent of your exam questions are on information that is superfluous?

Universities can get around this issue by employing teaching assistants (TAs) to help with some of the confusion. Largely, their responsibilities are grading papers, presenting the occasional lecture, and holding office hours. The lesser-known benefit of having and speaking with TAs is the ability to tell you how to prioritize your studying. These are often older students who have been previously successful in the course, and as a result, they can give a student a much better idea of what will be included on an exam than the professor.

When I was a TA as an undergrad, we were required to hold exam prep sessions the week of a big test. During these sessions, students answered practice questions about concepts similar to what would show up on the exam. All the students who showed up to my sessions performed extremely well on the tests, and they performed well because they were prepared for the exam and knew the concepts being tested. As a result, they would finish the course with a much higher grade because they knew what they should be studying. It is much more effective to give a student a practice question that uses similar concepts to what will be on their exam than it is for a professor to give a list of topics that are covered on a test. For example, studying for a math test is more impactful when answering 50 practice questions versus a teacher handing you a list of general concepts to study, such as: “Be able to manipulate inequalities and understand the order of operations.”

Universities seem to know that professors might not provide the best advice, or at the least, they have used TAs as a decent solution to the problem. It is my opinion that having this style of assistance in high school would be beneficial to student outcomes. Having, say, a senior help in a junior-level class may work wonders. Teachers would have a decrease in their responsibilities based on what they trust their TA to do. They could help grade, run review sessions, and make and provide exam prep materials. In essence, all the unseen work in teaching that great teachers do could be done more efficiently with a TA. Every student has had an amazing teacher who provides an excellent study guide that is almost identical to the test, making them confident going into test day. In my experience, those guides are not completed for a grade or a course outcome, and effectively become extra work for the educator, all to help the students who are willing to use them effectively. Having a TA would ease that burden–it would encourage students to consider teaching as a profession in a time when there is a shortage of educators.

There are many ways to teach and learn, but by far the best way to be prepared for a test is by talking to someone who has recently taken it. Universities understand that courses are easier for students when they can talk to someone who has taken it. It is my opinion that high schools would be able to adopt this practice and reduce teacher workload while increasing the student outcomes.

Samuel M. Baule, U.S. Army & Marian University

Sam Baule is a third-year medical student at Marian University and a lieutenant in the U.S. Army. He graduated in May 2023 with a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering from the University of Iowa.

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August 15, 2025
Dallas Mavericks Partner with Paul Quinn College for Groundbreaking Sports Management Program

Cynt Marshall The Dallas Mavericks and Paul Quinn College have announced a partnership that establishes the nation’s first NBA team-sponsored sports management major at a historically Black college or university. The innovative “Mavs Sports Management Major” officially launched Friday with an opening convocation featuring former Mavericks CEO Cynt Marshall as the keynote speaker.

The program, formally titled “Leadership, Innovation, Sports Management, Technology, Entrepreneurship, and Networking” (LISTEN), represents a significant investment in diversifying the sports industry pipeline while addressing educational equity in higher education.

Paul Quinn College, Dallas’s only HBCU, will integrate the new major into its existing curriculum structure, with students receiving comprehensive support that includes Target-sponsored care packages containing dorm essentials and other student necessities.

The program distinguishes itself through extensive real-world application opportunities. Students will engage with Mavericks executives through weekly guest lectures and participate in hands-on projects addressing actual business challenges facing the organization. The curriculum includes case study analysis, creative brief development, and student-led presentations proposing solutions to current Mavericks business scenarios.

Beyond classroom learning, the partnership includes campus engagement initiatives with sponsored events throughout the academic year, entrepreneurship support through integration into the Mavs Business Assist program, and a planned residence hall renovation featuring custom Mavericks-designed murals.

The collaboration aligns with the Mavericks’ “Take ACTION!” initiative, which specifically targets racial inequities and promotes sustainable change in North Texas. Sports management and administration have long struggled with representation issues, particularly in executive and leadership positions.

According to industry data, while Black athletes comprise significant portions of professional sports rosters, representation drops dramatically in front office and management roles. This program aims to address that pipeline gap by providing structured pathways from education to industry entry.

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August 15, 2025
Autistic College Students Face Dramatically Higher Rates of Mental Health Challenges, New Research Shows

Autistic college students are experiencing anxiety and depression at significantly higher rates than their non-autistic peers, according to new research from Binghamton University that analyzed data from nearly 150,000 undergraduate students across 342 institutions nationwide.

The study, published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, represents one of the most comprehensive examinations to date of mental health challenges facing autistic students in higher education—a population that researchers say has been historically underrepresented in academic research despite growing enrollment numbers.

“What we found is really staggering—autistic individuals endorse much higher rates of anxiety and depression compared to their non-autistic peers,” said Diego Aragon-Guevara, the study’s lead author and a PhD student in psychology at Binghamton University.

The research team analyzed data from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), which in 2021 became the first year that autism was included as an endorsable category in the survey. This milestone allowed researchers to conduct the first large-scale comparison of mental health outcomes between autistic and non-autistic college students.

“We were really excited to see what the data would tell us. It was a big opportunity to be able to do this,” said Dr. Jennifer Gillis Mattson, professor of psychology and co-director of the Institute for Child Development at Binghamton University, who co-authored the study.

The findings come at a critical time for higher education institutions as autism diagnoses continue to rise nationwide and more autistic students pursue college degrees. The research highlights a significant gap in support services that could impact student success and retention.

“We know the number of autistic college students continues to increase every single year,” Gillis-Mattson noted. “We really do have an obligation to support these students, and to know how best to support these students, we need to look beyond just autism.”

The study reveals that campus support systems may be inadvertently overlooking mental health needs while focusing primarily on autism-specific accommodations. Aragon-Guevara, whose research focuses on improving quality of life for autistic adults, said this represents a critical oversight in student services.

“Support personnel might address an individual’s autism and, in the process, overlook their mental health issues,” he explained. “More care needs to be put into addressing that nuance.”

The research underscores the need for institutions to develop more comprehensive support frameworks that address both autism-related needs and concurrent mental health challenges. The findings suggest that traditional disability services approaches may need significant enhancement to serve this population effectively.

“We want to provide the best support for them and to make sure that they have a college experience where they get a lot out of it, but also feel comfortable,” Aragon-Guevara said.

Dr. Hyejung Kim, an assistant professor in Binghamton’s Department of Teaching, Learning and Educational Leadership, noted that the complexity of factors affecting autistic students requires deeper investigation.

“This population often skews male, and interactions between personal factors and conditions such as anxiety and depression may shape overall well-being in college,” she said.

Kim also pointed to additional considerations that institutions should examine.

“Autistic students are also more likely to pursue STEM fields, and many report different experiences with faculty and staff across institutional settings,” she said. “We still have much to learn about how these and other contextual factors relate to mental well-being.”

The Binghamton team views this study as foundational research that confirms the scope of mental health challenges among autistic college students. Their next phase will investigate specific contributing factors, including social dynamics, faculty support, campus accessibility, and other environmental elements that influence student well-being.

“There are so many elements that go into being comfortable in the new environment that is college,” Aragon-Guevara explained. “We want to look into that and see if there are any deficits in those areas that autistic college students are experiencing, so that we know where we can help support them, or create institutional things to help improve quality of life as a whole.”

The research is part of a broader effort at Binghamton to better understand and support autistic students in higher education, with plans to collaborate with campus partners to develop targeted interventions based on their findings.

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August 15, 2025
How America’s top tribal arts college silenced a student — and made him homeless

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David John Baer McNicholas sleeps every night next to a bomb.

The worst thing about being homeless is the weather, he says. Santa Fe gets so cold that sometimes diesel fuel turns to gel. At those temperatures, frostbite hits in minutes.

In The Martian, Matt Damon’s character Mark Watney uses a radioactive isotope to keep his rover warm. In the Martian landscape of New Mexico’s Chihuahuan Desert, McNicholas keeps his van warm with a rusty five-gallon propane tank hissing beside his bed.

It’s not just the cold of the desert at night, either. Santa Fe is also the highest state capital in America, at 7,000 feet above sea level. That’s higher than the base lodge at most ski resorts. To stay warm, he keeps a pile of old covers and shirts in his van. A top from TJ Maxx. A blanket from a friend. An oversized green-and-black fleece from his sister who died of cancer.

But in the thick of winter, it’s nowhere near enough. So he fires up the heater hooked to the propane tank beside his bed. Burning an open flame inside a flammable structure filled with combustible fuel isn’t exactly safe, so he keeps a carbon-monoxide detector on his pillow. It’s a thin safeguard since these alarms can, and do, fail. But it’s better than nothing. To avoid freezing to death, he has to risk burning alive.

Summer brings no relief either. “The average temperature in the van during summer is about 110 degrees,” he says. “There’s only so much shade in Santa Fe, especially considering most people don’t want you parking near them.”

And if the weather doesn’t get you, there are a hundred other little things about being homeless that surely will. For one, his van is tiny, and he’s tall. Cooking involves a camp stove that makes his clothes stink of grease, increasing the risk of fire, and turning his van into a dripping sweatbox. Not to mention, the constant anxiety of knowing his belongings are not safe. Or that his home could be towed. Or having to move multiple times a day to avoid such an outcome. Or having to pee into a plastic bottle every night. Or having to find a place to dump the bottles every morning.

“I go to bed every night thinking, this could be it,” he says, reflecting on how his propane tank might blow up and kill him in his sleep. “I might not wake up.”

He adds, after a pause, “All my troubles would be over.”

The moment of truth

McNicholas is a student journalist who studies creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, and he is on track to graduate this spring with a 4.0 GPA. He often writes about life on the road. His poem “Flatbed,” which earned the 2022 Betty and Norman Lockwood Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, captures a cross-country adventure he took with his father when he was 15.

In New Mexico, over half of students face food insecurity. When a whistleblower at IAIA uncovered evidence that school officials might have misused a $50,000 grant meant to support campus food pantries, McNicholas thought it was clearly newsworthy. When students claimed school officials retaliated against the whistleblower who raised the alarm, he published their allegations.

This was groundbreaking journalism. Food scarcity in Native American communities is a dire problem, so a food-pantry scandal at the nation’s top indigenous arts college is a five-alarm fire. Native Americans are twice as likely to face food insecurity compared to white Americans, and sometimes three times higher. In fact, the entire Navajo Nation, which overlaps New Mexico, is considered a food desert.

But instead of being celebrated for such journalistic work, David McNicholas was fired. Put on probation. Evicted. Homeless.

One of the two anonymous student submissions published in The Young Warrior

McNicholas’s clash with IAIA leadership began in 2024, after he published two anonymous submissions in his student-run zine The Young Warrior. One piece accused school officials of bullying a beloved student advisor, Karen Redeye, out of her job. Redeye herself later confirmed this, writing:

I resigned from IAIA due to repeated lack of support from my superiors, maltreatment and bullying from my direct supervisors. It elevated to the point of affecting me physically and my workspace did not provide me emotional safety … I loved my job but it became a hostile workplace and I could not continue on with my position.

The second piece accused Dean of Students Nena Martinez of misappropriating the $50,000 food-security grant. After publishing, McNicholas says he received a flood of thanks and support from his fellow students. Many of them, like McNicholas, depended on the food pantry for survival.

But the administration was not so grateful. They hit back hard, claiming McNicholas was “bullying” university staff. They opened a formal investigation with consequences sure to follow.

“Oh shit,” McNicholas remembers thinking at the time. “They’re going to throw everything at me.”

Learning to hide

“Wonder” by McNicholas’ mother Mary Alice Baer, depicting her son

I grew up in the 1980s near the poverty line, raised by a single mom. The McNicholas residence was a one-car garage with a few rooms tacked on the back in Newington, New Hampshire. Mom was an artist who scraped by doing cleaning jobs. She struggled with alcoholism. Dad was absent until I was 12, but sent $150 a month in child support. Mom didn’t really cook, but she could make a pot of beans. Most nights, we ate TV dinners. It was more than some folks had.

I had undiagnosed autism as a kid, so as you can imagine, school was hell. I learned to keep my mouth shut or get beaten up. Most of the torment from my peers was psychological. I was terrified and lonely. But work was different. In high school, I worked part-time at Market Basket, on the front end. Got hired as a bagger, promoted to keyholder within a day. I found it easier to talk to the cashiers and baggers my age because there, our roles were clearly defined.

Life at school was harder. Blending in became its own kind of hobby. I spent years studying people like an anthropologist, trying to fit in. And I spent years ostracized and harassed for being different. But every year, I got better at hiding myself.

I had traditional hobbies too, you know. I liked computers. I even thought I might study computer science. But I changed my mind at the close of senior year because I knew I had to study people more if I was ever going to have a normal life.

I could only take so much. I started drinking and ended up living in parking lots, storage closets, and couch-surfed for over a decade. But eventually I got sober, bought a house, even started a business. The startup life was too stressful, though. I lost everything — except my sobriety. I entered IAIA to study creative writing. I did my first two years at IAIA while living in my van. In my third year, I moved into the dorms. It was a chance at more stability. And life began to make sense.

I entered at 42, while my peers were mostly 19, so there wasn’t the same pressure to make friends. I contextualize my social life at IAIA as work. Most of my peers are half my age and I am a trusted mentor. These clearly defined roles make me comfortable. Around this time, I was diagnosed with autism, and that helped make sense of things. I also started The Young Warrior, and people liked it. I was part of a community.

When I got into trouble for publishing those pieces, I did what I always do. I tried to study my way out of the problem. I went to the archives and read about old IAIA publications. I read Dean Spade’s “Mutual Aid” and FIRE’s “Guide to Free Speech on Campus.” I studied other undergrad publications and wrote an official proposal and operations manual for what I hoped would be the new Young Warrior.

But overall, life was going well. I haven’t had a drink or drug in 13 years. IAIA has been a huge part of my continued sobriety. And my creative studies have given me the space to unpack the person I hid away so long ago.

Going public

Anticipating housing sanctions barring him from his dorm room, McNicholas left campus before they were formally applied and started living out of his van. But the school’s vicious overreaction in moving to evict him only convinced him it was trying to cover something up. In addition, McNicholas says when Dean of Students Martinez heard the allegations about school officials robbing the food pantry, she simply dismissed the need for food pantries to begin with. According to him, she said, “Students have meal plans. They don’t need food pantries.”

But that explanation didn’t sit right with McNicholas, who lives below the poverty line and depends on food pantries to survive. The situation escalated, he says, when the administration denied that the grant even existed. On March 21, 2024, after McNicholas, acting as press officer for the Associated Student Government (ASG), re-posted an image on Instagram summarizing the scandal, Provost Felipe Colón emailed ASG officers:

It has come to my attention over the last 24 hours that in response to the resignation of Student Success Adviser, Karen Redeye, several students, including members of ASG, have been involved in bullying, defamation, and possibly legally actionable slander and liable [sic] against members of the IAIA staff.

He then suggested that the ASG officers invite him to discuss “Karen’s departure, and particularly to receive information about the pantry grant fund and re-stocking process which has been repeatedly and grossly misrepresented.”

When McNicholas and other ASG members met to discuss the matter with Colón, McNicholas didn’t come empty-handed. An anonymous source had already given him a photocopy of the grant-award letter for $50,000. But when Colón denied the existence of the grant, and McNicholas brandished the proof, Colón tried to explain it away.

Not only that, but university President Robert Martin later threatened to sue them all.

McNicholas was floored. But given the school’s history, he wasn’t surprised. IAIA has a pattern of silencing critics — especially those trying to improve the school’s performance where it falls glaringly short. During a faculty meeting with the Board of Trustees in February 2022, former sculpture professor Matthew Eaton cited an academic paper by a former IAIA department head that showed a staff turnover rate of 30%. According to McNicholas, “They came down on him hard.”

Colón told Eaton he had embarrassed Martinez and demanded that Eaton write a public apology. Eaton wrote the coerced apology and quit the next day. In it, he said citing the high turnover rate was “disparaging” to Martinez as well as “a direct assault” against her.

But McNicholas’ main concern was for his fellow students. The lack of food, coupled with legal threats and the intense stress of having to deal with an administration that appeared to prey on its students rather than support them, had taken an emotional toll on him and his peers. And that toll was beginning to show.

David McNicholas on IAIA campus

One day, the ASG called yet another meeting to discuss the situation, but this time they only invited ASG members because the students feared they couldn’t trust their own advisors. When the meeting began, the ASG president showed up in tears. She had just come from a one-on-one meeting with President Martin, who had delivered shocking news — the school was seriously considering suing ASG and her over the bad publicity.

“She came to us and said, ‘They told me to fix it,’” McNicholas says. “She was in tears. And that made me mad.”

At the next ASG meeting, now that the existence of the grant was proven, Colón changed his tune. McNicholas says, “He showed up and said, ‘Oh, you know what? I did some looking, I researched it, and I think I found the grant that you guys were talking about. And I’d like to come and explain how it was spent.’”

“I was like, yeah,” says McNicholas, “I bet you do.”

McNicholas was unable to attend the meeting, but he got the sheet Colón handed out, which showed budget-to-actual figures. When pressed to release the ledger, however, Colón claimed bank statements might not go back that far. “We’re talking a year,” says McNicholas, “maybe two at most. I think he thought he could get away with that because he was in a room full of 19-year-olds. If I’d been there, I would’ve pushed back.”

In all this, what got under his skin the most, he says, was how the school treated his fellow students, such as the girl who had posted the original Instagram summary of the scandal. “I can’t stand that they did the same thing [they did to me] to a 19-year-old freshman for making an Instagram post,” he says. “They kicked that person out, kept their money, and made a 19-year-old student homeless. As far as I’m concerned, that’s unconscionable.”

IAIA’s anti-bullying policy

Meanwhile, Colón concluded his investigation, finding McNicholas guilty of violating IAIA’s highly restrictive anti-bullying policy, which broadly bans “unwanted, aggressive behavior” and includes constitutionally-protected expression as examples of prohibited conduct. That is, he accused McNicholas of bullying administrators by publishing claims that those administrators had bullied others. McNicholas later successfully appealed his ban from campus housing and recovered about $2,000 in lost fees, but much of the damage was already done. Given this victory, he could move back into housing this upcoming semester, but continues to live in his van where IAIA can’t kick him out.

The sanctions against him not only sent him back to homelessness, but cost him work too, including a federal work-study opportunity that should have been protected from administrative meddling. “I was hired to be an orientation mentor at the end of last summer,” says McNicholas. “And the day before I was going to start, I got a call from the director of that program who said, ‘Yeah, you can’t participate because you’re on institutional probation.’”

Finding himself ruthlessly targeted by the administration, McNicholas turned to the press. Teaming up with a few peers, they went to the Santa Fe Reporter, and the article that followed made an immediate impact. “When that article came out,” he says, “both the interim director and dean of students were gone within days. Like, they were gone.”

Breaking through

After the Santa Fe Reporter exposé and the ensuing leadership shakeup, the food pantry underwent a striking transformation. The 20-foot-long conference table in the Student Success Center, once a barren surface lined with unused cans of tomatoes, is suddenly overflowing with fresh groceries. McNicholas’s journalistic work, for which he was evicted from campus housing, has not only been vindicated, but has helped make his campus a better place.

As for himself, McNicholas is about to enter his fifth and final year at IAIA. He is applying to MFAs this fall and says he hopes all this doesn’t affect his chances. “But,” he adds, “I chose to stick up for my community — and to incur the costs of doing so.”

That said, he remains shaken by the experience. “The school administration violated my rights and treated me like a criminal, offering no meaningful due process, and protecting themselves over the community at every turn.”

Indeed, IAIA has offered little in the way of accountability. The school has refused FIRE’s demands to clear McNicholas’s disciplinary records or those of any other student punished and threatened for speaking out, including the ASG president. It has also failed to revise its vague and censorial anti-bullying policy, still found in the publicly-available student handbook — leaving open the possibility of IAIA silencing other students the same way they did McNicholas. On top of all this, IAIA leadership has also failed to offer any legal or moral justification for its actions.

Following President Martin’s retirement this July, one can only hope that the newly minted president, Shelly C. Lowe, breaks from his administration’s legacy of censorship and authoritarianism. IAIA’s crackdown on student dissent must be challenged. Oversight from the school’s Board of Trustees and the Bureau of Indian Education is essential to help push IAIA in the right direction. Because no student should ever be left homeless for telling the truth.

Each night, McNicholas returns to his van. On cold nights, the propane tank hisses beside him, threatening him in whispers. On hot nights, he lies there sweating. But he remains unshaken. In one of his poems, McNicholas describes chopping through six feet of ice, the water “fixed like concrete,” his hands burning in the cold “with thin gloves or nothing.” It’s a searing image. McNicholas is nothing if not resilient.

“I want my uncredited legacy to be a small part of the student handbook,” he says, “enshrining the right to free speech that we all fought for.”

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August 14, 2025
Inside a Network of Fake College Websites

At first glance, Southeastern Michigan University’s website looks like it represents a real institution.

Smiling students in graduation regalia embrace, diplomas in hand, in the video on the front page. A chat bot pops up to ask, “How can I help you?” Southeastern Michigan’s website touts the university’s scholarships, array of accredited academic programs, award-winning faculty, 75 percent graduation rate and “vibrant campus life.”

But littered throughout the website are signs that something is off about Southeastern Michigan.

Blurry backgrounds and distorted limbs hint at the use of generative artificial intelligence. Some images seem likely to fool the untrained eye, while others—like a basketball player with veins bulging from his angular arms—could have been ripped from a poorly illustrated comic book. Meanwhile, paragraphs of text contain repetitive, grandiose and nonspecific language, characteristic of a chat bot’s writing.

In reality, the university is as fake as some of the content on its website. And it’s part of a much larger scam fueled in part by the rise of generative AI.

Some of the images on Southeastern Michigan University website appeared to be AI-generated.

“It took me a while to realize it wasn’t an actual institution,” said Aaron Ament, president of the National Student Legal Defense Network and a lawyer who has investigated for-profit colleges that have defrauded students. “For the average person who’s looking for a program, you could easily see how people would think it’s a real institution.”

Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel warned consumers about Southeastern Michigan University in an alert last week, following a complaint from Eastern Michigan University to her office about the fraudulent website using deceptive practices in an effort to scam students.

Southeastern Michigan is one of nearly 40 fake university sites that Inside Higher Ed recently uncovered, which appear to have been developed with or supplemented by AI. The sites seem to be part of a network, based on the use of identical language, the repetition of images and other design similarities. And many of these fake colleges also have a presence on social media sites, including LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook.

An Inside Higher Ed analysis also turned up dozens of websites for nonexistent accreditors and a fake U.S. Department of Education website. They all contain at least some AI-generated images and design templates similar to the college websites’, including many that list those fake accreditors—and link to their websites—to give an air of legitimacy. The Education Department is also investigating the scam.

Fake colleges aren’t new. North Carolina’s attorney general warned about a nonexistent King’s College in North Carolina in 2023, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement set up the fictional University of Farmington several years ago as a sting operation to crack down on student visa fraud. Last year, websites popped up advertising colleges that had been closed for years.

But the network uncovered by Inside Higher Ed reveals how the rise of generative AI is making it faster and easier for scammers to repackage an old ruse and deploy it on a much larger scale.

“This lowers the transaction costs for making a scam site,” said Jose Marichal, a professor of political science at California Lutheran University who studies how algorithms and AI are restructuring social and political institutions. “If I wanted to do this [before generative AI], it would have taken me a week, maybe a month, to put all this together. Now, it would take me a matter of hours.”

AI Increases Scammers’ Reach

The technology is also making it harder for consumers to immediately recognize fraudulent websites like Southeastern Michigan’s and dozens of other similar scam college websites Inside Higher Ed identified.

Large language models—which can immediately generate text and images like those populating the scam college websites—are becoming more sophisticated at mimicking human-created content by the day. For example, last week OpenAI released GPT-5, the latest version of ChatGPT, advertising it as its “smartest, fastest, most useful model yet,” capable of putting “expert-level intelligence in everyone’s hands.”

While suspicious, Marichal couldn’t say for certain if the fraudulent college websites were created using generative AI. But Junfeng Yang, a computer science professor at Columbia University who helped develop a novel tool that can discern whether text was generated by an LLM, had one of his graduate students peruse Southeastern Michigan’s website. “It appears that the [university’s] engineering page is AI generated,” he said in an email.

“A year ago, if you tried to do this, you may have had some bugs to work out,” Marichal said of the scam college websites. “Now, we’re getting to a place where you could keep spitting these out and it doesn’t cost much to host it. If you make 100 of them, you increase your yield. Instead of casting one fishing line, you cast 20, upping your chances of catching fish.”

‘Didn’t Seem Legit’

One prospective student who was looking for a business degree program almost got hooked by Southeastern Michigan’s con, according to Walter Kraft, a spokesperson for Eastern Michigan University, which is a real, accredited institution in Ypsilanti.

The fake Southeastern Michigan University prompted a complaint to the state attorney general from Eastern Michigan University, which has accused it of deceptive practices.

Source: Inside Higher Ed

“He came across an institution named Southeastern Michigan University, and it looked legit to him,” Kraft said. “So he contacted them and received a phone call telling him that his total tuition would be, like, $31,000, but he would receive a 90 percent scholarship and would only have to pay $3,100.”

The fake university asked the would-be student to provide documents for his scholarship application, but he never followed up. Two days later, he got a call from a number spoofing Eastern Michigan’s admissions office number, and the person on the other line told him he got the scholarship, despite never receiving any of his documentation.

After that, he received an admissions offer on letterhead that looked similar to Eastern Michigan’s, which raised his suspicions.

“He could sense that it didn’t seem legit, didn’t seem right, and questioned it,” recalled Kraft, who said two or three other people have reported similar concerns about Southeastern Michigan’s website, though he’s not aware of anyone who has fallen for the scam.

A spokesperson with the Michigan attorney general’s office said the office had “not received complaints from any potential students losing money in connection to these websites” but had contacted officials in two other states about similar schemes and referred concerns to the Federal Trade Commission.

But that doesn’t mean other people haven’t been scammed—or won’t in the future. As of Wednesday, the website was still live.

“That’s problematic, because until somebody finds out who’s responsible and takes that site down, other prospective students could be victimized,” Kraft said. “We certainly don’t want that to happen.”

Universities Push Back

While Eastern Michigan went to the state attorney general, other universities that have encountered similar websites have sought recourse with the World Intellectual Property Organization, a group that mediates domain disputes.

George Washington and New York Universities, as well as the University of Houston system, have all filed successful complaints to challenge websites using their trademarks or a similar name and URL. Those complaints shed more light on the scheme, which appears to date to at least 2021, per archived copies of the websites that were taken down. In its filing, GWU pointed to Kenneth Stone, a person the university believed to be connected to the scheme through a company called Domain Lance, a forwarding service that allows users to redirect URLs.

(NYU did not name a specific individual in its WIPO complaint, which noted that “little is known of the respondent” and indicated the domain owner provided a contact address in Panama. However, another version of that website—New York University of Business and Technology—with a slightly different URL has already emerged.)

The University of Houston system also named Stone in a complaint filed in December, along with William Morocco and Cole Brad as the people believed to be behind the website. The filing suggests that Stone is in Panama, while the other two are in the U.S. In its second complaint, filed in May, Houston pointed to websites in Panama. Despite winning the domain dispute, another version of the contested website has since emerged.

Houston’s complaints indicated that multiple fake college websites were created last year. Three of the websites flagged by Houston were registered between July and October of 2024, and another followed early this year. The fake accreditor websites mentioned in Houston’s complaint were all registered on May 10 of last year, according to the WIPO filing.

Houston University of Texas is one of nearly 40 fake college websites uncovered by Inside Higher Ed.

Source: Inside Higher Ed

Inside Higher Ed contacted two of the individuals it believed to be the persons referenced in the complaint based on a review of public records and LinkedIn profiles, but neither responded. A review of public records, including website registration information, suggests all three individuals are in the U.S., though the fake university websites are hosted on servers located overseas.

An Inside Higher Ed reporter also had conversations with individuals operating the chat service on three different websites connected to the network. After a reporter requested admissions info through Southeastern Michigan’s chat service, a woman called to talk him through the process.

Over a nearly half-hour conversation, the operator—a woman with a heavy accent—explained the tuition and fees, gave the reporter a password to a demo version of its student portal, and pressed hard for a $300 “registration fee.” When the reporter pushed back on the cost, she offered to lower it to $199 and stressed the importance of signing up while seats were available.

A chat operator at Southeastern Michigan University offered insights into the scheme.

Justin Morrison/Josh Moody

But when the reporter questioned the legitimacy of the operation, telling her it appeared to be a scam, she said, “I will suggest you contact the Department of Education, not me” and hung up.

Contacted by Inside Higher Ed, a Department of Education spokesperson wrote by email that “the department is currently investigating these malign activities and will work with the appropriate authorities to prevent predatory action toward our nation’s students.”

Sector Responses

Universities with similar names to fake college websites encouraged consumers to take steps to protect themselves from scams.

“Students have many affordable, high-quality education options among North Carolina’s public universities. It’s a shame that bad actors are creating fake university websites to prey on students who want to pursue their dreams of a college degree,” Andy Wallace, a spokesperson for the University of North Carolina system, wrote while encouraging people to report the sites.

University of Houston spokesperson Shawn Lindsey wrote by email that UH “continuously monitor[s] for threats, including false or misleading websites and domain names, and use[s] a variety of tools to support this vigilance” and noted UH’s legal team has acted on offending sites.

The Council for Higher Education Accreditation also condemned the rise of fraudulent college and accreditor websites designed to mimic legitimate institutions in an emailed statement.

“Accreditation is meant to assure quality and integrity in higher education—not to be misused as a tool for fraud,” CHEA president Nasser H. Paydar wrote. “These fake accreditors prey on the trust of students and the public, and we are committed to exposing and stopping them.”

But experts warn if these websites aren’t shut down—or similar ones continue to crop up—it could further weaken the public’s trust in higher education in an era marked by politicized attempts to discredit legitimate universities as overpriced and biased.

“People may not know what’s a real university and what isn’t, so they just throw their hands up and say, ‘Universities are too expensive anyway,’” said Marichal, the algorithm expert. “When people don’t know what’s true or false anymore, they’re less inclined to trust any of it.”

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August 14, 2025
College Creates 101 Course on Gen AI for Students, Faculty

As generative artificial intelligence skills have become more in demand among employers, colleges and universities have expanded opportunities for students to engage with the tools.

Indiana University is no exception. It’s developed a free, online course for campus community members to gain a basic understanding of generative AI and how the tools could fit into their daily lives and work. GenAI 101 is available to anyone with a campus login and comes with a certificate of in-demand skills for people who complete it.

Survey says: Artificial intelligence tools have gained a significant foothold on college campuses, especially in teaching and learning.

A 2023 study by Wiley found over half (58 percent) of instructors say they or their students are using generative AI in their classrooms, and a similar number believe AI-based tools, virtual reality or coursework with flexible assignment types will be important in delivering their courses in three years.

Even before entering college, learners have said they’re familiar with generative AI and expect their institutions to help them develop their skills in using it. A 2024 survey found 69 percent of high school seniors planning to attend college have used generative AI tools, and 54 percent anticipate their college will engage in AI usage and education in some way. But exposure to AI is not ubiquitous; a different 2024 study of young people (ages 14 to 22) found nearly half of respondents had never used AI tools or didn’t know what the AI tools were.

AI literacy and safety concerns have presented a growing challenge as well. A February 2025 survey from Microsoft found 73 percent of individuals say spotting AI-generated images is difficult.

How it works: GenAI 101 at Indiana is free to anyone in the university community, including students, instructors and staff members at all campuses. The course is optional and has no academic credits attached, which allowed faculty designers to be flexible and creative with how content is presented.

Brian Williams, faculty chair of the Kelley School of Business’s Virtual Advanced Business Technologies Department, serves as the lead course instructor and he, alongside a team of other faculty members, identified key topics to know about generative AI. The goal is to prepare participants to engage in an AI-influenced world with practical takeaways and insights, Williams said.

The self-paced course has eight modules and 16 lessons that include short, YouTube-style video lectures. Students learn practical examples of how to use generative AI tools, including managing their schedule or planning an event, and content areas range from prompt engineering, data storytelling and fact-checking content to how to use AI ethically. In total, GenAI 101 takes approximately four to five hours to finish.

The course features an AI character, Crimson, that teaches content, and an embedded AI tutor, Crimson Jr., that can address participants’ questions as they come up.

After completing the course, participants earn a certificate they can display on their LinkedIn profile or résumé.

What’s next: The course launches Monday, Aug. 25, and the first person to take it will be IU president Pamela Whitten, according to a university press release. She’ll gain early access to the course on Friday, Aug. 15, Williams said.

Students will be auto-enrolled in GenAI 101, making it easy to access. Some faculty instructors have also said they’ll embed the content into their syllabus or curriculum, according to Williams, in part to reduce gaps in who’s engaging with generative AI resources and education.

How is your college teaching students how to use generative AI? Tell us more.

This article has been updated to correct the date in which the course will launch to the IU community, August 25.

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August 13, 2025