Tag: Colleges

  • L.A. Community Colleges Boost Work-Based Learning

    L.A. Community Colleges Boost Work-Based Learning

    Deysi Perez was still in high school when she completed a college dental assisting program, earning an industry-recognized certificate and securing a job in the field—a pathway made possible through the workforce-development efforts at West L.A. College.

    Today, Perez, who first enrolled through the institution’s concurrent enrollment program—which allows high school students to take free classes on a community college campus—is continuing her studies toward becoming a dental hygienist.

    Andrea Rodriguez-Blanco, career center director at West L.A. College, said Perez is one of many students who have benefited from the college’s focus on work-based learning and career readiness.

    “We have students like [Perez] who are a testament to our work and who have really taken advantage of our services and support systems,” Rodriguez-Blanco said.

    Despite California’s significant investments in K–12, higher education and workforce development, Rodriguez-Blanco said the lack of coordination among them can leave students struggling.

    To address this, West L.A. College works in partnership with Compton College, El Camino College and Los Angeles Southwest College to create a regional, cross-sector strategy that expands career opportunities for community college students in Los Angeles County’s Second District.

    Matthew Jordan, interim president at West L.A. College, said the initiative originated during the pandemic.

    “The colleges had a large amount of both federal and state funds coming in to help us deal with the challenges of COVID,” Jordan said, noting that Keith Curry, president of Compton College, contacted California Competes to brainstorm ways to use the funds to benefit students and improve career-readiness programs.

    As a result of that conversation, Curry and California Competes, a nonpartisan organization focused on research and policy to improve the state’s higher education and workforce-development systems, brought other neighboring colleges into the discussion.

    “What surfaced was working on pathways to better the lives of residents in our community,” Jordan said. “How do we make career readiness transparent? How do we make it a campuswide responsibility?”

    The strategy: Since the partnership began in 2021, Rodriguez-Blanco said the four colleges have met quarterly to compare approaches to work-based learning and identify ways to collaborate.

    A key focus has been mapping the industries and employers each college works with. When programs overlap, the colleges coordinate outreach so employers don’t have to repeat the same conversation with multiple institutions.

    “By really looking at what we have in common and what our strengths are as a region, we can scale and have a bigger impact on our programs,” Rodriguez-Blanco said. “We’ve shared how each campus uses work-based training, how it’s integrated into our college … and found common ground so that whatever we do at [West L.A. College] can be easily replicated across other programs.”

    Jordan said this approach is important because “employers don’t necessarily want to be contacted separately by five colleges to have the same conversation five times.”

    “If we all have a similar program, we can approach the employer and build out the pipeline and work-based learning opportunities together in one process,” Jordan said.

    He added that the colleges have found it particularly useful to collaborate in fields such as biotechnology, artificial intelligence, child development and information technology.

    The stakes: Rodriguez-Blanco said the partnership helps amplify each college’s work-based learning programs while making it easier for students across all the campuses to access career opportunities.

    “The reason why these colleges came together is because we found that we had a really strong work-based learning support system,” Rodriguez-Blanco said. “We’ve already been bringing employers to the table, but how do we triple the effect?”

    Jordan said the partnership is important because students at their community colleges often face barriers to academic success, from food insecurity to long commutes to balancing family responsibilities. The initiative provides more pathways for students to participate in work-based learning and career programs while still in school, making it easier to gain practical experience while managing their schedules.

    “This program really seeks to address that issue of access to work-based learning,” Jordan said, noting that a specific goal of the partnership is to increase the number of paid internship opportunities, since community college students often don’t have the ability to take on unpaid internships.

    “If we can structure the work-based learning experience as part of their coursework, or ensure that it’s a paid internship, I think that really helps address one of the multiple barriers that students are facing,” he added.

    Ultimately, Jordan said, there is a lot of value for institutions in sharing practices when it comes to work-based learning.

    “Sometimes there’s a tendency to be elbowing each other, like we’re all fighting for the same opportunities,” Jordan said. “I would encourage colleges to abandon that attitude and really think about how they can work together to leverage the limited resources we have and benefit the communities we serve.”

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  • New Bill Would Consolidate Mississippi Community Colleges

    New Bill Would Consolidate Mississippi Community Colleges

    Legislation introduced by Mississippi representative Trey Lamar, chairman of the state’s House Ways and Means Committee, proposes consolidating six Mississippi community colleges, Magnolia Tribune reported. The bill has been referred to the House Universities and Colleges Committee for review.

    If signed into law, the bill would merge the Mississippi Delta and Coahoma community college districts, the East Mississippi and Meridian community college districts, and the Copiah-Lincoln and Southwest Mississippi community college districts by July 2027. The move would reduce the number of community colleges in the state from 15 to 12.

    College facilities wouldn’t have to close, “unless the facility is an unneeded administrative office located within a community college district which has been abolished,” according to the legislation.

    Lamar argued consolidating the community colleges will mean more money to go around.  

    “At a time where the community college system is asking the taxpayers of Mississippi to fund tens of millions in new investment into the system, the savings realized from administrative consolidation at our smaller schools could be immediately rolled into the 12 remaining community colleges for significant staff and faculty pay raises,” he told the Magnolia Tribune.

    Kell Smith, executive director of the Mississippi Community College Board, told Inside Higher Ed, “The proposal to consolidate several Mississippi community college districts raises important questions worth careful consideration. Any potential administrative efficiencies should be weighed alongside the impact on students, faculty, staff, and the communities these colleges serve. Clear communication, transparency, and input from stakeholders will be essential as discussions move forward.”

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  • Cassidy Probes Math Course Placements at Selective Colleges

    Cassidy Probes Math Course Placements at Selective Colleges

    Cassidy sent information requests to 35 universities.

    Bill Clark/CQ–Roll Call Inc./Getty Images

    A Senate committee chair has launched an investigation into what he says is a decline in how prepared freshmen accepted into selective institutions are for math courses there.

    Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican who chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, announced Friday that he’s sent letters to 35 institutions, including Ivy League universities, the Georgia Institute of Technology, Rice University and more.

    “The United States faces a crisis in student achievement at the K–12 level that has begun to spill over into higher education, especially in math,” Cassidy wrote in the letters.

    He cited the widely discussed November report from the University of California, San Diego, in which a university working group said that one in 12 first-year students in the fall placed into math below a middle school level, despite having a solid math grade point average from high school.

    “This state of affairs is unacceptable and demands immediate corrective action,” Cassidy said.

    He’s asking each of these institutions to provide data on freshman placement into math courses, explanations of how placements are decided, information on math classes that include precollege content, descriptions of universitywide math graduation requirements and info on whether they require the SAT, ACT or other math tests for admission. The due date is Feb. 5.

    A Cassidy spokesperson didn’t respond to requests for comment Friday on why he’s only investigating selective institutions.

    The UC San Diego report provided some reasons for its first-year students’ math deficits.

    “This deterioration coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on education, the elimination of standardized testing, grade inflation, and the expansion of admissions from under-resourced high schools,” the report said. “The combination of these factors has produced an incoming class increasingly unprepared.”

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  • OPINION: Colleges need to recruit more men, but Trump’s policies are making it difficult

    OPINION: Colleges need to recruit more men, but Trump’s policies are making it difficult

    by Catharine Hill, The Hechinger Report
    January 20, 2026

    While attending a gathering of Ivy League women years ago, I upset the audience by commenting that a real challenge for U.S. higher education was the declining participation of men in higher education, not just the glass ceiling and unequal pay faced by women.  

    At the time, I was president of Vassar College (which did not become co-ed until 1969). We surveyed newly admitted students as well as first-year students and learned that the majority expressed a preference for a gender-balanced student body, with as co-educational an environment as possible.  

    With fewer men applying, that meant admitting them at a higher rate, something some other selective colleges and universities were already doing. While, historically, men were much more likely to attain a college degree than women, that changed by 1980. For more than four decades now, the number of women on campuses has surpassed the number of men.  

    Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter. 

    These days, 27 percent more women than men age 25 to 34 have earned a bachelor’s degree, according to the Pew Research Center. Aiming for greater gender balance, some colleges and universities have put a “thumb on the scale” to admit and matriculate more men.  

    But the end of affirmative action, along with the Trump administration’s statements warning schools against considering gender identity (or race, ethnicity, nationality, political views, sexual orientation and religious associations) in admissions, could end this preference. 

    To be clear, I believe that the goal of admissions preferences, including for men, should be to increase overall educational attainment, not to advantage one group over another. Economic and workforce development should be a top higher education priority, because many high-demand and well-paying jobs require a college degree. America should therefore be focused on increasing educational attainment because it is important to our global competitiveness. And the selective schools that have high graduation rates should give a preference to students who are underrepresented in higher education — including men — because it will get more Americans to and through college and benefit our economy and society.  

    Preferencing students from groups with lower overall educational attainment also helps colleges meet their own goals.  

    For schools that admit just about all comers, attracting more men — through changes in recruitment strategies, adjustments in curricula and programs to support retention — is part of a strategy to sustain enrollment in the face of the demographic cliff (the declining number of American 18-year-olds resulting from the drop in the birth rate during the Great Recession) and declining international applicants due to the administration’s policies.  

    Colleges that don’t admit nearly all applicants have a different goal: balancing the share of men and women because it helps them compete for students.  

    Selective schools don’t really try to admit more men to serve the public good of increasing overall educational attainment. They believe the students they are trying to attract prefer a co-educational experience. 

    We are living in a global economy that rewards talent. When selective colleges take more veterans, lower-income students and students from rural areas and underrepresented groups, the chance of these students graduating increases. That increases the talent pool, helping to meet employer demand for workers with bachelor’s degrees.  

    The U.S. has been slipping backward in education compared to our peers for several decades. To reverse this trend, we need to get more of our population through college. The best way to do this is by targeting populations with lower educational attainment, including men. But by adding gender to the list of characteristics that should not be considered in admissions decisions, the Trump administration is telling colleges and universities to take the thumb off the scale for men.  

    I suspect this was unintended or resulted from a misunderstanding of who has actually been getting a preference in the admissions process, and in assuming incorrectly that women and/or nonbinary applicants have benefited.  

    Over the last 15 years or more, some attributes, including academic performance, have likely been traded off in order to admit more men. How big these trade-offs have been has differed from college to college and will be hard to calculate, given all the student characteristics that are considered in making admissions decisions.  

    I’m in favor of making these trade-offs to contribute to improved overall educational attainment in America.  

    But given the Trump administration’s lumping of gender with race, college and university policies intended to attract men will now face the same legal challenges that affirmative action policies aimed at improving educational attainment and fairness face.  

    Differential admit rates will be scrutinized. Even if the administration doesn’t challenge these trade-offs, rejected women applicants may seek changes through the courts and otherwise, just as happened with regard to race.  

    Related: Trump’s attacks on DEI may hurt men in college admission  

    Admitting male athletes could also unintentionally be at risk. If low-income has become a “proxy” for race, then athletic admits could become “proxies” for men. (Some schools have publicly stated that they were primarily introducing football to attract male applicants.) 

    Colleges and universities, including selective ones, are heavily subsidized by federal, state and local governments because they have historically been perceived as serving the public good, contributing to equal opportunity and strengthening our economy.  

    Admissions decisions should be evaluated on these grounds, with seats at the selective schools allocated according to what will most contribute to the public good, including improving our nation’s talent pool.  

    Targeting populations with lower-than-average college-going rates will help accomplish this. That includes improving access and success for all underserved groups, including men.  

    Unfortunately, the current administration’s policies are working directly against this and are likely to worsen educational attainment in America and our global competitiveness.  

    Catharine “Cappy” Hill is the former managing director of Ithaka S+R and former president of Vassar College. 

    Contact the opinion editor at [email protected]. 

    This story about men and college was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter. 

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  • Nevada public colleges eye tuition hikes to spare some 300 jobs

    Nevada public colleges eye tuition hikes to spare some 300 jobs

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    Dive Brief:

    • Nevada higher education officials are considering raising tuition and fees by 12% for public four-year institutions and 9% for two-year colleges amid cost increases and the pending loss of millions in state funding. 
    • The hikes would save the equivalent of 317 full-time jobs, according to a proposal from Nevada System of Higher Education Chancellor Matt McNair and presidents of the system’s colleges.
    • More modest tuition and fee hikes could lessen student impact but lead institutions to cut 100 to 200 jobs systemwide. NSHE’s board of regents plans to consider the proposals at a Jan. 23 meeting.

    Dive Insight:

    NSHE is looking to fill a funding gap amounting to tens of millions of dollars across its seven institutions in the coming years. 

    The proposal before the regents cited, in part, general cost increases in higher ed. That includes a 20.4% cumulative increase in the Higher Education Price Index — a sector-specific measure of inflation calculated every year by the Commonfund Institute — from fiscal 2021 through 2025. 

    The Nevada higher ed system has specific costs it is trying to fund as well. A briefing from McNair and NSHE presidents pointed to a “significant deferred maintenance backlog,” as well other expenses such as student support services, technology infrastructure, cybersecurity, and a 1% merit increase for faculty salaries. 

    In 2025, the Legislature passed a more than $57 million bridge funding package to help the system absorb cost increases, but that money will run out in July 2027. The expiration will leave NSHE with a $27.1 million hole in fiscal 2028, including an $11.8 million shortfall at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and an $11.2 million gap at University of Nevada, Reno. 

    That loss, plus salary increases in coming years, adds up to a roughly $41.4 million shortfall for the system in fiscal 2029. Officials tied that funding gap to the 317 positions that they may eliminate without more revenue. Most of those losses — 238 jobs — would come from various faculty and academic advisor positions, the rest from classified staff. 

    The heaviest proposed tuition and fee increases would cover the gap, and then some, by raising an estimated $49.3 million in revenue. 

    A lower hike of 8% for four-year college tuition and fees and 6% for community colleges would still leave a $9.3 million hole, potentially leading to 102 job cuts. An even lower price increase of 4% at four-year colleges and 3% at two-years would leave a $25.5 million shortfall and might mean 206 job reductions.

    Those numbers are representations of the funding gap in terms of jobs. NSHE’s institution leaders described a wider range of measures they may have to take absent tuition increases. Those include program eliminations and consolidation, hiring freezes, larger class sizes, reduced student services and other budget actions. 

    The briefing said that even the largest tuition spikes would still leave Nevada’s public universities cheaper by thousands of dollars annually compared to the average among their peers in the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. Meanwhile, staffing at NSHE colleges remains generally below peer levels, according to a board presentation. 

    “Affordability compared to peers does not negate the reality of individual hardship that may result as cost of attendance rises,” the briefing from McNair and the colleges’ leaders stated. “The Institutions recognize that even comparatively small increases can have meaningful impacts for some students and families.”

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  • Former Emporia State Pres. to “Find Waste” at Kansas Colleges

    Former Emporia State Pres. to “Find Waste” at Kansas Colleges

    Last week, Kansas legislative leaders met in a Statehouse committee room with a broad agenda item—to approve a higher ed budget consultant.

    Neither the name nor proposed pay for this consultant was listed. The person Republican leaders were planning to hire didn’t become clear until House Speaker Dan Hawkins began talking at the meeting.

    “We have an opportunity,” Hawkins told fellow members of the Legislative Coordinating Council, according to a video the Legislature posted. “One of the presidents of a university has retired. He has intimate insight into the higher ed budget arena. And, certainly, as everybody knows, we have to be very careful and prudent with the dollars in our budget.”

    “We really need to cut $200 million from our budget,” Hawkins said, adding that the consultant would help “find efficiencies—find any waste that we can find.”

    Within eight minutes—including brief objections from Democratic leaders in the room, one of whom said he was relying on “context clues” to guess whom the hiree would be—the lawmakers voted 5 to 2 to give Hawkins the power to hire this consultant. And, as The Kansas Reflector confirmed after the meeting, Hawkins is indeed planning to hire Ken Hush, who retired as president of Emporia State University last month, at a rate of $10,000 per month. Hush’s leadership of his own institution was controversial, including budget problems, tenured faculty layoffs and enrollment declines.

    Tom Day, Kansas’s director of legislative administrative services, told Inside Higher Ed in an email, “We are currently in communication with Mr. Hush putting a contract together,” and there are no documents showing what his “scope of work” will be. But Day said the payment will be “$50,000, over a 5-month period.” Hawkins gets to sign off on the final contract.

    Republicans’ hiring of Hush, who the Reflector noted is Hawkins’s former fraternity brother, to give advice on cutting other universities’ budgets has elicited criticism from those who say he wasn’t good at running one institution and suggest he’s benefiting from his political connection.

    “Ken Hush’s hiring was a sole-source backroom deal to give an old frat brother—who has a proven track record of being unable to run a university—a job,” Dinah Sykes, leader of the Senate Democrats, said in a statement.

    Under Hush’s leadership, Emporia State garnered national controversy after it laid off tenured faculty, saw a 12.5 percent enrollment plunge the next academic year and then defended its general counsel for writing a bill to eliminate tenure protections across public institutions statewide. The top administrator of the Kansas Board of Regents accused the university of breaking the board’s policy requiring preapproval of legislative proposals.

    (Emporia State spokesperson Gwen Larson said last year that its top lawyer’s “submission of this bill” was “a surprise to the university,” but defended his right to submit it to lawmakers. Hush had appeared to ask legislators to support such legislation a week before it appeared. The bill failed.)

    A lawsuit filed against Emporia State officials during Hush’s presidency also continues, despite his departure.

    In 2022, Emporia State abruptly told 33 employees—30 of whom were faculty members, 23 of them tenured professors—they were losing their jobs. The Board of Regents approved these layoffs under a policy that cited “extreme financial pressures” and declared, “Any state university employee, including a tenured faculty member, may be suspended, dismissed, or terminated.” Eleven tenured professors sued, saying they weren’t given due process.

    In addition, the American Association of University Professors placed Emporia State’s administration on its censure list and condemned it for “unilaterally terminating the appointments of 30 tenured and tenure-track faculty members.” Matthew Boedy, president of the Georgia Conference of the AAUP, was one of the three investigative committee members who wrote that report.

    “If the Kansas Republican lawmakers want to cut spending and gut higher education, they found their man in Ken Hush,” Boedy said. “He did exactly that at Emporia State by firing many a professor and upending the school in many ways.”

    Boedy added, “The ways in which Mr. Hush went about decimating Emporia State—if that’s to be replicated across the entire state, I would not want to be a student or professor in Kansas anymore.”

    But Larson, the university spokesperson, said this week that Emporia State “began to show material results of its turnaround” last fall. Among other things, she said, it eliminated a $19 million deficit, reduced deferred maintenance by 20 percent, saw enrollment rise 6 percent and went from a negative to a stable Moody’s rating.

    The Reflector reported that the Legislature gave the university $18 million in total “bailouts” in 2023 and 2024 as enrollment declined. Upon his retirement, Hush announced he was donating about $1.4 million, equivalent to the last four years of his salary, to the university.

    It’s unclear what kind of advice Emporia State’s former president will give lawmakers and what Republican lawmakers are looking to cut from universities. But their comments may give a clue.

    ‘Questionable Spending’

    During last week’s meeting, Senate president Ty Masterson expressed a general need to cut costs, partly because of the Legislature’s tax cuts.

    “All the stimulus money that happened through COVID … it’s now all dried up, it’s all gone,” Masterson said. “So we have to manage our budget back down to something that is normal. We’re also in a climate where some of the tax cuts that we were able to get through are being implemented, so I think it would be wise to bring on a consultant in that area.”

    But Blake Carpenter, the House speaker pro tem, said he’s targeting what he referred to as “questionable spending.” The Republican said he and his staff found around $100 million worth of this spending over the legislative interim period.

    Carpenter’s definition of questionable spending includes subjects conservatives have railed against. He listed just three examples: “$75,000 in travel reimbursements to a vanilla bean manufacturing tour guide in Africa,” “$96,000 to a nutritionist guru specializing in vegan cookbooks” and “$111,000 to a social justice headhunting firm specializing in placing executives into leadership positions in nonprofits.”

    “If we’re able to find about $100 million just on our own over the interim, with my staff and I looking through these line items, then I think it makes a lot of sense for us to hire an executive who has run one of these universities,” he said. “They know how they operate … I think the $100 million at this point is scratching the surface and we need to continue to dig.”

    (Carpenter, Masterson and Hawkins didn’t respond to requests for comment this week. Inside Higher Ed was unable to reach Hush.)

    Sykes, the Senate Democratic leader, objected during the meeting to hiring a consultant. “All the talk we have about finding efficiency in government … I think we keep growing government … and to pay $10,000 a month,” she said.

    “The first that I saw of this was when it was on the agenda item last night,” Sykes said.

    She continued her denunciation in a statement following the meeting. “Republicans’ hiring of Ken Hush is a part of a larger problem with the Legislative Coordinating Council of issuing no-bid contracts,” she said, adding that Republicans on that council “have been dealing out sole-source contracts left and right, acting like kids in a candy store.” She said Hush’s Emporia State presidency “was fraught with failures.”

    “If Hush can’t even create a proper plan for the ‘realignment’ of a single university, how could he ever properly identify areas of all of the state’s universities’ budgets to be cut?” Sykes asked.

    Mallory Bishop, past president of the Emporia State Faculty Senate, said Hush’s actions at the university shouldn’t be replicated across the state now because it’s too early to tell whether they turned the institution around.

    “He just ended his tenure a month ago,” said Bishop, a clinical instructor and program director at Emporia State.

    “Was it triage or was it just severing limbs?” she said. “I don’t know.”

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  • Carnegie Recognizes Colleges for Community Engagement

    Carnegie Recognizes Colleges for Community Engagement

    The Carnegie Foundation announced on Monday that more than 230 colleges and universities received its Community Engagement classification.

    The designation from the American Council on Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching highlights institutions that have formed and sustained successful community partnerships. Of the 237 institutions recognized in 2026, 48 received the classification for the first time. The group includes157 public colleges and universities, 80 private institutions and 81 minority-serving institutions.

    “We celebrate each of these institutions, particularly their dedication to partnering with their neighbors—fostering civic engagement, building useable knowledge, and catalyzing real world learning experiences for students,” Timothy F.C. Knowles, president of the Carnegie Foundation, said in a news release.

    Some colleges and universities celebrated making it to the list.

    “This recognition means a great deal to the University of Houston, because it reflects who we are, and how we prepare educated, engaged citizens, while showing up for our community every day,” Diane Z. Chase, the university’s senior vice president for academic affairs and provost, said in a statement.

    ACE and Carnegie also shared the news that the University of San Diego, a Catholic institution in California, will house the Community Engagement classification for the next two cycles.

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  • OPINION: Colleges must start treating immigration-based targeting as a serious threat to student safety and belonging  

    OPINION: Colleges must start treating immigration-based targeting as a serious threat to student safety and belonging  

    by Madison Forde, The Hechinger Report
    January 12, 2026

    Last month, a Boston University junior proudly posted online that he had spent months calling Immigration and Customs Enforcement to report Latino workers at a neighborhood car wash.

    Nine people were detained, including siblings and a 67-year-old man who has lived in the U.S. for decades. The student celebrated the arrests and told ICE to “pump up the numbers.”

    As the daughter of Caribbean immigrants and a researcher who studies immigrant-origin youth, I was shaken but not surprised. This incident, which did have some backlash, revealed a growing problem on college campuses: Many young people are learning to police one another rather than learn alongside one another.

    That means the new border patrol could be your classmate. Our schools are not prepared for this.

    That is why colleges must start treating immigration-based targeting as a serious threat to student safety and belonging and take immediate steps to prevent it — as they do with racism, antisemitism and homophobia.

    Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter.

    The incident at Boston University is bigger than one student with extreme views. We are living in a moment shaped by online outrage, anonymous tip lines and a culture that encourages reporting anyone who seems “suspicious.”

    In this environment, some young people have started to believe that calling ICE is a form of civic duty.

    That thinking doesn’t stay online. It walks right into classrooms, dorms and group projects. When it does, the impact is not abstract. It is deeply personal for the immigrant-origin youth sitting in those same rooms.

    Many of these students grew up with fear woven into their daily lives. Their neighbors disappeared overnight, they heard stories of parents being detained at work and they began translating legal mail before they were old enough to drive. They know exactly what an ICE call can set into motion. They carry that fear with them to school.

    These are not hypothetical harms. They show up in everyday decisions: where to sit, what to say, whom to trust. I’ve met students who avoid speaking Spanish on campus, refuse to share their address during class activities and sit near the exits because they’re not sure who views their family as “a threat.” It is not possible to learn well in an environment where you do not feel safe.

    There is a strong body of developmental research highlighting belonging and social inclusion as central to healthy development. In her work on migration and acculturation, Carola Suárez-Orozco shows that legal-status-based distinctions among youth intensify exclusion and undermine both social integration and developmental well-being.

    When belonging erodes, colleges begin to function like small border zones, where everyone is quietly assessing who might turn them in. It is nearly impossible for any campus community to thrive under that kind of pressure.

    Quite frankly, nor can America’s democracy.

    If we raise a generation of students who feel compelled to police the nation’s borders from their dorms, the immigrant-origin youth sitting beside them in classrooms will carry the psychological burden of those borders every single day. Yet colleges are almost entirely unprepared for this reality.

    Most universities have clear policies for racial slurs, antisemitic threats, homophobic harassment and other identity-based harms. But very few have policies that address immigration-based targeting, even though the consequences can be just as severe and, in some cases, life-altering.

    Boston University’s president acknowledged the distress caused by that student’s actions. Yet, the university did not classify the behavior as discriminatory, despite the fact that his calls targeted a specific ethnic and immigration-status group. That silence sends a clear message: Harm against immigrant communities is unimportant, incidental or simply “political.” But this harm is neither political nor the price of free expression or civic engagement; it is targeted intimidation, with real and measurable consequences for students’ safety, mental health and academic engagement.

    In my view, colleges need to take three straightforward steps:

    1. Define immigration-based harassment as misconduct. Calling ICE on classmates, doxxing immigrant peers or circulating immigration-related rumors should be classified under the same conduct codes that protect students from other forms of targeted harm. Schools know how to do this; they simply have not applied those same protections to immigrant communities.

    2. Train faculty and staff on how to respond. Professors should have a clear understanding of what to do when immigration rhetoric is weaponized in the classroom, or when students express fear about being reported. Although many professors want to help, they may lack basic guidance.

    3. Teach immigration literacy as part of civic education. Most students do not understand what ICE detention entails, how long legal cases can drag on or what it means to live with daily fear like their immigrant peers. Teaching these realities isn’t “political indoctrination,” it is preparation for a life in a multicultural democracy.

    These three steps are not radical. They are merely the same kinds of protections colleges already provide to students targeted for other aspects of their identity.

    Related: STUDENT VOICES: ‘Dreamers’ like us need our own resource centers on college campuses

    The Boston University case is a warning, not an isolated moment. If campuses fail to respond, more young people will internalize the idea that policing their peers is simply part of student life. Immigrant-origin youth, who have done nothing wrong, will carry the emotional burden alone.

    As students, educators and researchers, we have to decide what kind of learning communities we want to build and sustain. Schools can be places where students understand one another, or they can become places of intense surveillance. That choice will shape not just campus climates, but also the society current students will eventually lead.

    Madison Forde is a doctoral student in the Clinical/Counseling Psychology program at New York University.

    Contact the opinion editor at [email protected].

    This story about immigration-based targeting at colleges was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.

    This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/opinion-colleges-must-start-treating-immigration-based-targeting-as-a-serious-threat-to-student-safety-and-belonging/”>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&amp;ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>

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  • What’s Actually Working for Small Colleges – Edu Alliance Journal

    What’s Actually Working for Small Colleges – Edu Alliance Journal

    Editor’s Note By Dean Hoke: This winter, Small College America completed its most ambitious season yet—13 conversations with presidents, consultants, and association leaders who are navigating the most turbulent period in higher education history. What emerged wasn’t theory or wishful thinking. It was a working playbook of what’s actually succeeding on the ground. This article synthesizes the five insights that matter most.

    When Hope Meets Reality

    Jeff Selingo doesn’t mince words.

    “Hope is not a strategy,” he said bluntly in Season 3 of Small College America.

    Jeff Selingo, a Best Selling Author and higher education advisor, named what every small college leader knows but hates to admit: the old playbook is dead. The demographic cliff isn’t coming—it’s here. Traditional enrollment models are broken. And no amount of wishful thinking about “riding out the storm” will change that.

    But here’s what surprised me across 13 conversations this season: nobody was sugarcoating reality, yet the conversations weren’t depressing.

    They were energizing.

    From Frank Shushok describing how Roanoke College built a K-12 lab school that creates a pipeline from kindergarten forward, to Teresa Parrott explaining why Grinnell took over a failing daycare center instead of issuing a mission statement about community engagement, from Gary Daynes doubling down on Salem College’s women’s mission when conventional wisdom said to go co-ed, to Kristen Soares navigating 2,500 California bills every legislative session—Season 3 captured something rare.

    Leaders who have moved past denial and into action.

    What emerged wasn’t abstract strategy consulting. It was concrete, operational intelligence from people doing the work. Here are the five insights that separate institutions that will thrive from those that won’t.

    1. Stop Marketing, Start Building Pipelines

    The traditional enrollment model—recruit high school seniors, get them to visit campus, send them glossy viewbooks, hope they choose you over 47 other colleges—is dead. Small colleges know this. But most are still acting like better marketing will solve it.

    It won’t.

    As Selingo pointed out, “At some point you have to come up with another segment of students if you’re tuition dependent because there just aren’t enough of those students to go around.”

    Translation: You cannot market your way out of a demographic crisis.

    The institutions seeing results aren’t the ones with slicker viewbooks or better social media strategies. They’re the ones building actual infrastructure for new student populations.

    What does that look like in practice?

    At Roanoke College, President Frank Shushok has approached enrollment not as a marketing problem, but as a pipeline design problem.

    Roanoke’s lab school creates a K–12 pathway while simultaneously solving a community need. Students who attend the lab school encounter the college early, come to trust it, and see it as part of their educational journey long before senior year. That’s not recruitment—that’s ecosystem building.

    The same logic shows up in Roanoke’s employer partnerships. The T-Mite Scholars program flips the traditional internship model: students complete two internships, receive a guaranteed job interview upon graduation, and receive tuition support from the employer. That’s not workforce development with a side of enrollment. That’s workforce development with enrollment as the byproduct.

    This pipeline mindset also appears at scale in California, as described by Kristen Soares, President of the Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities. California’s Associate Degree for Transfer (ADT) program creates guaranteed, transparent pathways from community colleges into four-year institutions—no credit games, no hidden requirements, no “we’ll evaluate your transcript and get back to you.” Just clear bridges that actually work for the students who need them most.

    Notice what these examples have in common: they aren’t marketing campaigns. They are operational partnerships designed to reduce friction and create consistent flows of students.

    As Shushok observed, “I think what you’re starting to see is some incredibly creative, adaptive, and agile institutions—because it requires a level of courage and resilience and tenacity.”

    The bottom line is straightforward: if your enrollment strategy is still primarily marketing-driven, you’re playing the wrong game. Build infrastructure. Create pipelines. Solve real community problems.
    The students will follow.

    2. Is Your Mission Statement Hurting You

    Teresa Parrott, Principal TVP Communications dropped what might be the most important insight of the entire season: small colleges need to shift “from mission to impact.”

    What she means matters right now.

    Most small college websites lead with mission statements like “We develop well-rounded citizens who think critically and serve their communities.”

    It’s lovely. It’s inspiring to people who already work at the college. And it’s entirely unpersuasive to everyone else.

    Legislators don’t care about your mission. Prospective students’ parents don’t care about your mission. Community members wondering why they should support you don’t care about your mission.

    They care about what you actually do.

    Compare generic mission language to Grinnell College’s approach. When their town’s daycare center was failing, Grinnell didn’t release a statement about their commitment to the community. They took over the daycare center. When the community golf course struggled, they stepped in to sustain it.

    As Parrott put it, “They are so embedded in their community that they really are almost a second arm of the government.”

    That’s not rhetoric. That’s concrete, documentable community impact.

    Or take Gary Daynes, President of Salem College insight about resource sharing at Salem: “It makes zero cents to build a football field. Seems like you could share with the local high school.”

    Simple. Obvious. Rarely done.

    But when colleges actually do it—by sharing theaters, athletic facilities, cultural resources, and programming—they become infrastructure their communities can’t imagine losing. They become politically and economically essential.

    The shift is this: Stop leading with what you believe. Start leading with what you do.

    Not “We believe in service.” Try “We trained 45% of the nurses in this region.”

    Not “We value community.” Try “We operate the only daycare center in town.”

    Not “We develop leaders.” Try “Our graduates run 23 local businesses and employ 400 people.”

    The institutions sufficiently community-embedded to make these claims are politically protected. The ones still leading with inspirational language become vulnerable the moment budgets get tight.

    The takeaway: Your communications team shouldn’t be writing mission statements. They should be documenting measurable community impact and leading with it everywhere.

    3. Lean Into What Makes You Different

    Selingo said it most directly: “There is more differentiation in higher education than we care to admit, but the presidents haven’t leaned into that enough.”

    Translation: You’re already different. You’re just afraid to say it loudly.

    Daynes decided to reaffirm its commitment to educating girls and women. That’s not chasing the market—it’s the opposite. But Daynes explained they looked at their data and realized the women’s college identity was a strength, not a liability they needed to downplay.

    Faith-based institutions are deepening their religious identities rather than treating them as mere historical affiliations that make the college vaguely Methodist or nominally Catholic.

    Health-focused campuses are building employer pipelines instead of trying to be liberal arts generalists who happen to have a nursing program.

    The pattern is clear: institutions trying to be less distinctive are struggling. Institutions doubling down on what makes them unique are finding traction.

    But here’s the critical part Daynes emphasized: distinctiveness has to be operational, not just marketing.

    If you’re a “community-engaged college,” you need actual programs embedded in the community—shared facilities, pipeline programs, workforce partnerships—not just a tagline on your website.

    If you’re “career-focused,” you need employer partnerships with real job placement data and students who can point to specific outcomes.

    If you’re faith-based, that identity needs to shape curriculum, student life, residential programs, and institutional decisions in ways students and families can see and experience.

    When distinctiveness is only branding, students and families see through it immediately. When it’s operational, it becomes your competitive advantage.

    The takeaway: Generic positioning is a slow death. Find what makes you genuinely different, operationalize it across your institution, and communicate it relentlessly.

    4. Real Partnerships vs. Press Releases

    Shushok nailed the mindset shift small colleges need to make: “Partnerships are everything in this moment. And once you get past that you’re competing with any of these entities, you start to realize, no, these are partners.”

    K-12 schools. Community colleges. Employers. Local governments. Hospitals. These aren’t competitors or nice-to-haves anymore. They’re essential infrastructure for institutional survival.

    But Daynes offered the crucial warning: “It’s easy to sign MOUs. It’s harder to sustain them.”

    Read that again.

    Translation: Your partnership announcements don’t mean anything.

    What matters is actual student flow. What matters is shared staffing. What matters is programs that operate year after year, not photo ops at signing ceremonies where everyone shakes hands and nobody follows through.

    Ask yourself right now: Do you know how many students transferred in from your community college “partners” last year? Do you have dedicated staff managing those relationships, or is it an extra duty for someone already overwhelmed?

    If you don’t know those numbers or don’t have dedicated staff, you don’t have partnerships. You have press releases.

    The partnerships that work have dedicated staffing to manage relationships and smooth student transitions, clear metrics measuring student flow rather than signed agreements, operational integration where partner institutions actually share resources, and financial skin in the game from all parties.

    Roanoke’s “Directed Tech” program with Virginia Tech counts the senior year as both undergraduate completion and the first year of a master’s degree. That’s not a partnership; that’s structural integration that changes the economics and value proposition for students.

    California’s ecosystem, where UC, CSU, community colleges, and independent institutions work together on workforce development, isn’t an inspirational collaboration story. It’s an economic necessity backed by 2,500+ pieces of legislation every two years, as Soares noted.

    When the state is writing hundreds of bills requiring coordination, you can’t fake it with a handshake and a press release.

    The bottom line: Count your partnerships that produce actual student flow and resource sharing. If that number is zero or close to it, stop announcing new partnerships and start making the ones you have actually work.

    5. Liberal Arts is Workforce Development (Stop Being Defensive About It)

    The false choice between liberal arts and workforce preparation came up in nearly every conversation. And every single guest rejected it.

    Shushok’s framing was the clearest: “Technical skills get you the first job. Human capacity skills enable 15 career reinventions.”

    Think about that.

    In a world where AI can write code, analyze data, generate reports, and automate technical tasks, what becomes more valuable—technical skills that become obsolete in five years, or the ability to adapt, think critically, communicate clearly, work across differences, and solve novel problems?

    As Shushok put it, “We might find that the liberal arts, the humanities, the small colleges, if we allow ourselves to be shaped by this moment, are exactly what the doctor ordered for the 21st century.”

    The problem: small colleges are still communicating defensively about the liberal arts instead of offensively.

    Stop saying “The liberal arts are ALSO important for careers.”

    Start saying, “The liberal arts are the ONLY preparation for a 40-year career in an unpredictable economy.”

    Stop apologizing for not being pre-professional.

    Start explaining why pre-professional education is increasingly obsolete in an age of AI and constant technological disruption.

    And most importantly: build the bridges so students can actually see the connection.

    That means boards that understand finance, politics, and operations—not just fundraising. CFO leadership that addresses structural challenges honestly. Political engagement that mobilizes entire institutions, not just government relations staff. And communications teams that function as impact documenters, not mission statement writers.

    Kristen Soares noted that 92% of California’s clinical workforce is trained at private colleges. That’s not despite the liberal arts foundation—it’s because of it.

    Nurses need critical thinking to make life-and-death decisions in ambiguous situations.

    Mental health counselors need empathy and adaptability to serve diverse communities.

    Teachers need communication skills and the ability to think on their feet.

    The liberal arts aren’t tangential to workforce needs. They’re central. But you have to stop defending them and start operationalizing the connection in ways students, families, and employers can see.

    The takeaway: The liberal arts are perfectly suited for workforce needs. Stop defending. Start operationalizing. Build the bridges.

    So what do you actually DO with all this?

    Season 3 didn’t just surface problems—it revealed a working playbook. Here’s what leaders who are successfully navigating this moment have in common:

    • They’re building infrastructure for new student populations instead.
    • They’re documenting measurable community impact and leading with it.
    • They’re deepening what makes them genuinely distinctive.
    • They’re measuring student flow and resource sharing.
    • They’re operationalizing the connection to careers.

    Shushok’s insight about “recalibration versus balance” might be the most critical leadership lesson of the season. As he put it, “Balance is not a destination, but constant recalibration.”

    Small college leadership today isn’t about finding the right strategy and executing it for five years. It’s about continuous adjustment based on what’s actually working.

    That means:

    • Boards that understand finance, politics, and operations—not just fundraising

    • CFO leadership that addresses structural challenges honestly

    • Political engagement that mobilizes entire institutions, not just government relations staff

    • Communications teams that function as impact documenters, not mission statement writers

    As Daynes reflected, “I love small colleges. There are folks of intense gifts amongst the faculty and staff who have chosen to be the places that they are.”

    That’s the source of optimism throughout Season 3.

    Not naive hope that things will get better on their own.

    But grounded confidence in devoted people willing to do hard, creative work.

    Jeff Selingo’s blunt assessment—”Hope is not a strategy”—wasn’t meant to demoralize. It was meant to liberate.

    Small colleges that thrive in the next decade will  be the ones that:

    • Build operational infrastructure for new student populations

    • Document and communicate measurable community impact

    • Operationalize distinctiveness throughout the institution

    • Create partnerships that produce actual student flow

    • Connect liberal arts to career outcomes without defensiveness

    • Recalibrate constantly based on what’s working

    The leaders in Season 3 aren’t waiting for permission or hoping for a miracle. They’re building lab schools. They’re taking over daycare centers. They’re sharing facilities with high schools. They’re creating guaranteed pathways to graduate programs. They’re documenting their impact and leading with it.

    They’re doing the work.

    And they’re proving that hope—real, grounded hope based on action rather than wishful thinking—comes from building things that work.

    Looking Forward: Three Conversations to Start This Week

    If you’re a president, provost, trustee, or senior leader, here are three conversations you can start right now if you haven’t already done so :

    1. With your enrollment team: Ask them to map every actual pipeline you have for new students—not marketing campaigns, but structural pathways that produce consistent student flow. If the list is short or non-existent, that’s your answer. Start building infrastructure, not marketing plans.

    2. With your communications team: Ask them to document your measurable community impact in the last 12 months. Not what you believe or aspire to do—what you actually did. How many jobs did you create? How many nurses did you train? What facilities do you share? What problems did you solve? If the answer is vague or mission-statement-heavy, you have work to do.

    3. With your board: Present them with a simple question: “If we could only communicate three things about our institution to prospective students, legislators, and community members, what would they be?” If the answers are about mission and values rather than concrete impact and distinctive programs, you need to shift the conversation.

    These aren’t theoretical exercises. They’re diagnostic tools that reveal whether your institution is still operating from the old playbook or building the new one.

    Selingo was right: hope is not a strategy. But action, infrastructure, partnerships, impact, and constant recalibration is a playbook that works.

    —

    Season 3 of Small College America featured conversations with 13 leaders in the field of higher education. Thanks to everyone who participated, and especially my co-host Kent Barnds and my Producer and lovely wife Nancy Hoke.

    • Raj Bellani, Chief of Staff, Denison College
    • Gary Daynes, President, Salem College
    • Josh Hibbard, Vice President of Enrollment Management, Whitworth University
    • Dean McCurdy, President, Colby Sawyer College
    • Jon Nichols, Faculty member and author
    • Teresa Parrott, Principal TVP Communications
    • Karen Petersen, President, Hendrix College
    • Michael Scarlett, Professor of Education, Augustana College
    • Jeff Selingo, Best Selling Author and higher education advisor
    • Frank Shushok, President, Roanoke College
    • Kristen Soares, President, Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities
    • Gregor Thuswaldner, Provost, La Roche University
    • Jeremiah Williams, Professor of Physics, Wittenberg University

    The conversations continue.

    Small College America returns in February with a new season featuring candid discussions with presidents, faculty, and leaders navigating the most consequential moment in higher education.

    Hosted by Dean Hoke and Kent Barnds, the series explores the evolving role of small colleges, their impact on communities, and the strategies leaders are using to adapt and endure.

    Listen or watch past episodes on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and many others, or preview what’s coming next, and follow the series at www.smallcollegeamerica.net.

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  • The boat is leaking: why is the change to admissions at one of the oldest Cambridge colleges a problem?

    The boat is leaking: why is the change to admissions at one of the oldest Cambridge colleges a problem?

    Author:
    Charlotte Gleed

    Published:

    This blog was kindly authored by Charlotte Gleed, former HEPI intern and current MPhil student at the University of Cambridge.

    A Guardian article revealing that Trinity Hall College at the University of Cambridge will target elite private schools for student recruitment has ignited a fierce debate this week. The article reveals how Fellows at one of the oldest Cambridge colleges voted to change their admissions strategy to approach a select group of 50 independent schools. The intention is to improve the ‘quality’ of applicants, following concerns that ‘reverse discrimination’ is the cause of this quality issue.

    But this diagnosis is a problematic one. And more concerning, it is a move which risks not only an interruption of access and widening participation efforts, but a radical setback.

    Why has Trinity Hall, Cambridge made this move?

    Trinity Hall claims that the change to their admissions policy is a ‘targeted recruitment strategy’. Their objective is to encourage students from the selected private schools to apply for undergraduate courses in a select list of subjects including languages, music, and classics. But this puts a – large and potentially destructive – spanner in the works for access to higher education.

    Not only does this strategy support a small minority of a privileged few, given that 7% of the population in the United Kingdom is privately educated. It also focuses on subjects, like music, which state schools have long struggled to maintain at equal levels to their independent counterparts. There has been a 25% drop in pupils studying GCSE Music in England over the last 15 years, and Parliament debated the issue in July 2025 over cuts and underfunding to musical education.

    A HEPI report from July 2025 raised concerns about the language crisis and the decline in uptake of students studying languages at school. So Trinity Hall are valid in their efforts to find ways to increase applications for languages, in particular. But their strategy of targeting the most – economically – selective schools is flawed.

    If this policy is implemented in the 2026 / 2027 admissions cycle and beyond the gap between outcomes for state and privately educated students in higher education will widen. Not only could this decision reverse sustained efforts to widen participation to higher education, but it will ultimately mean that ‘privileged pasts become privileged futures’, as the Dearing Report warned almost thirty years ago in 1997.

    Change to admissions policies is not always a bad thing. Back in 1965, Hertford College, Oxford devised, what is still a little known access programme called ‘The Tanner Scheme’. The programme was the first outreach initiative across Oxford and Cambridge: a revolutionary step for increasing accessibility to the most selective universities in the country – and the world. But its initial motivation was less egalitarian and philanthropic.

    The first version of the scheme was targeted at a select few boys’ grammar schools in the north of England, whose students the college admissions tutors believed were untapped talent. But the hidden goal was neither to widen participation nor improve access for these talented students, but to improve the academic record of the college within Oxford. Having exhausted the pool of privately educated talent, the next best option was academic students with ability and potential, not wealth.

    Sound familiar…? Only now potential and wealth are being combined.

    There is a real concern that a new precedent could be set within Oxbridge colleges, which threatens the long-established practice of widening participation. Colleges at both Oxford and Cambridge have a degree of independence unrivalled compared to most other higher education institutions. The Office for Students requires all higher education institutions to have an Access and Participation Plan (APPs) which identifies access and participation gaps unique to their student cohorts. APPs have not only held these institutions accountable but taken the sector in a positive direction towards increased access.

    But the Trinity Hall revelations show there is a loophole. Despite the Office for Students’ requirement, it appears that colleges can target what is an already overrepresented cohort without regulatory intervention. 29.0% of undergraduates accepted for the 2024/25 admissions cycle were privately educated, even though only 7% of the population is. While the majority of Cambridge acceptances come from ‘maintained’ schools (comprehensive and grammar schools, as well as sixth form and further education colleges) the disproportionate gap between the number of students attending independent schools and their acceptance of a place is troubling for access.

    That loophole needs closing. The ramifications for access to higher education could be catastrophic if a new trend begins. The Guardian reports that one member of staff at Trinity Hall, Cambridge called the policy ‘a slap in the face’ for state-educated undergraduates. But there is an even higher stake than this. It could mean that higher education becomes more inaccessible for those whose life it could transform most.

    The boat is not sinking – yet. But there is a risk it could.

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