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Half of Colleges Don’t Grant Students Access to Gen AI Tools
Transformative. Disruptive. Game-changing. That’s how many experts continue to refer, without hyperbole, to generative AI’s impact on higher education. Yet more than two years after generative AI went mainstream, half of chief technology officers report that their college or university isn’t granting students institutional access to generative AI tools, which are often gratis and more sophisticated and secure than what’s otherwise available to students. That’s according to Inside Higher Ed’s forthcoming annual Survey of Campus Chief Technology/Information Officers with Hanover Research.
There remains some significant—and important—skepticism in academe about generative AI’s potential for pedagogical (and societal) good. But with a growing number of institutions launching key AI initiatives underpinned by student access to generative AI tools, and increasing student and employer expectations around AI literacy, student generative AI access has mounting implications for digital equity and workforce readiness. And according to Inside Higher Ed’s survey, cost is the No. 1 barrier to granting access, ahead of lack of need and even ethical concerns.
Ravi Pendse, who reviewed the findings for Inside Higher Ed and serves as vice president for information technology and chief information officer at the University of Michigan, a leader in granting students access to generative AI tools, wasn’t surprised by the results. But he noted that AI prompting costs, typically measured in units called tokens, have fallen sharply over time. Generative AI models, including open-source large language models, have proliferated over the same period, meaning that institutions have increasing—and increasingly less expensive—options for providing students access to tools.
‘Paralyzed’ by Costs
“Sometimes we get paralyzed by, ‘I don’t have resources, or there’s no way I can do this,’ and that’s where people need to just lean in,” Pendse said. “I want to implore all leaders and colleagues to step up and focus on what’s possible, and let human creativity get us there.”
According to the survey—which asked 108 CTOs at two- and four-year colleges, public and private nonprofit, much more about AI, digital transformation, online learning and other key topics—institutional approaches to student generative AI access vary. (The full survey findings will be released next month.)
Some 27 percent of CTOs said their college or university offers students generative AI access through an institutionwide license, with CTOs at public nonprofit institutions especially likely to say this. Another 13 percent of all CTOs reported student access to generative AI tools is limited to specific programs or departments, with this subgroup made up entirely of private nonprofit CTOs. And 5 percent of the sample reported that students at their institution have access to a custom-built generative AI tool.
Among community college CTOs specifically (n=22), 36 percent said that students have access to generative AI tools, all through an institutionwide license.
Roughly half of institutions represented do not offer student access to generative AI tools. Some 36 percent of CTOs reported that their college doesn’t offer access but is considering doing so, while 15 percent said that their institution doesn’t offer access and is not considering it.
Of those CTOs who reported some kind of student access to generative AI and answered a corresponding question about how they pay for it (n=45), half said associated costs are covered by their central IT budget; most of these are public institution CTOs. Another quarter said there are no associated costs. Most of the rest of this group indicated that funding comes from individual departments. Almost no one said costs are passed on to students, such as through fees.
Among CTOs from institutions that don’t provide student access who responded to a corresponding question about why not (n=51), the top-cited barrier from a list of possibilities was costs. Ethical concerns, such as those around potential misuse and academic integrity, factored in, as well, followed by concerns about data privacy and/or security. Fewer said there is no need or insufficient technical expertise to manage implementation.
“I very, very strongly feel that every student that graduates from any institution of higher education must have at least one core course in AI, or significant exposure to these tools. And if we’re not doing that, I believe that we are doing a disservice to our students,” Pendse said. “As a nation we need to be prepared, which means we as educators have a responsibility. We need to step up and not get bogged down by cost, because there are always solutions available. Michigan welcomes the opportunity to partner with any institution out there and provide them guidance, all our lessons learned.”
The Case for Institutional Access
But do students really need their institutions to provide access to generative AI tools, given that rapid advances in AI technology also have led to fewer limitations on free, individual-level access to products such as ChatGPT, which many students have and can continue to use on their own?
Experts such as Sidney Fernandes, vice president and CIO of the University of South Florida, which offers all students, faculty and staff access to Microsoft Copilot, say yes. One reason: privacy and security concerns. USF users of Copilot Chat use the tool in a secure, encrypted environment to maintain data privacy. And the data users share within USF’s Copilot enterprise functions—which support workflows and innovation—also remains within the institution and is not used to train AI models.
There’s no guarantee, of course, that students with secure, institutional generative AI accounts will use only them. But at USF and beyond, account rollouts are typically accompanied by basic training efforts—another plus for AI literacy and engagement.
“When we offer guidance on how to use the profiles, we’ve said, ‘If you’re using the commercially available chat bots, those are the equivalent of being on social media. Anything you post there could be used for whatever reason, so be very careful,” Fernandes told Inside Higher Ed.
In Inside Higher Ed’s survey, CTOs who reported student access to generative AI tools by some means were no more likely than the group over all to feel highly confident in their institution’s cybersecurity practices—although CTOs as a group may have reason to worry about students and cybersecurity generally: Just 26 percent reported their institution requires student training in cybersecurity.
Colleges can also grant students access to tools that are much more powerful than freely available and otherwise prompt-limited chat bots, as well as tools that are more integrated into other university platforms and resources. Michigan, for instance, offers students access to an AI assistant and another conversational AI tool, plus a separate tool that can be trained on a custom dataset. Access to a more advanced and flexible tool kit for those who require full control over their AI environments and models is available by request.
Responsive AI and the Role of Big Tech
Another reason for institutions to lead on student access to generative AI tools is cultural responsiveness, as AI tools reflect the data they’re trained on, and human biases often are baked into that data. Muhsinah Morris, director of Metaverse programs at Morehouse College, which has various culturally responsive AI initiatives—such as those involving AI tutors that look like professors—said it “makes a lot of sense to not put your eggs in one basket and say that basket is going to be the one that you carry … But at the end of the day, it’s all about student wellness, 24-7, personalized support, making sure that students feel seen and heard in this landscape and developing skills in real time that are going to make them better.”
The stakes of generative AI in education, for digital equity and beyond, also implicate big tech companies whose generative AI models and bottom lines benefit from the knowledge flowing from colleges and universities. Big tech could therefore be doing much more to partner on free generative AI access with colleges and universities, and not just on the “2.0” and “3.0” models, Morris said.
“They have a responsibility to also pour back into the world,” she added. “They are not off the hook. As a matter of fact, I’m calling them to the carpet.”
Jenay Robert, senior researcher at Educause, noted that the organization’s 2025 AI Landscape Study: Into the Digital AI Divide found that more institutions are licensing AI tools than creating their own, across a variety of capabilities. She said digital equity is “certainly one of the biggest concerns when it comes to students’ access to generative AI tools.” Some 83 percent of respondents in that study said they were concerned about widening the digital divide as an AI-related risk. Yet most respondents were also optimistic about AI improving access to and accessibility of educational materials.
Of course, Robert added, “AI tools won’t contribute to any of these improvements if students can’t access the tools.” Respondents to the Educause landscape study from larger institutions were more likely those from smaller ones to report that their AI-related strategic planning includes increasing access to AI tools.
Inside Higher Ed’s survey also reveals a link between institution size and access, with student access to generative AI tools through an institutionwide license, especially, increasing with student population. But just 11 percent of CTOs reported that their institution has a comprehensive AI strategy.
Still, Robert cautioned that “access is only part of the equation here. If we want to avoid widening the digital equity divide, we also have to help students learn how to use the tools they have access to.”
In a telling data point from Educause’s 2025 Students and Technology Report, more than half of students reported that most or all of their instructors prohibit the use of generative AI.
Arizona State University, like Michigan, collaborated early on with OpenAI, but it has multiple vendor partners and grants student access to generative AI tools through an institutionwide license, through certain programs and custom-built tools. ASU closely follows generative AI consumption in a way that allows it to meet varied needs across the university in a cost-effective manner, as “the cost of one [generative AI] model versus another can vary dramatically,” said Kyle Bowen, deputy CIO.
“A large percentage of students make use of a moderate level of capability, but some students and faculty make use of more advanced capability,” he said. “So everybody having everything may not make sense. It may not be very cost-sustainable. Part of what we have to look at is what we would describe as consumption-based modeling—meaning we are putting in place the things that people need and will consume, not trying to speculate what the future will look like.”
That’s what even institutions with established student access are “wrestling with,” Bowen continued. “How do we provide that universal level of AI capability today while recognizing that that will evolve and change, and we have to be ready to have technology for the future, as well, right?”
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What to Know About Trump’s Funding Threats to Colleges
Over the course of just 13 weeks, President Donald Trump has made it clear that he’ll use billions of dollars in federal grants and contracts, primarily for research, as a lever to force colleges and universities to bow to his agenda and increase the representation of conservative ideology on their campuses.
The cuts don’t follow any typical investigative process and sometimes lack clear explanations or legal justifications. And such an aggressive ad hoc strategy is one that that many higher education lawyers, policy analysts and administrators say could reshape postsecondary education for years to come.
“It’s certainly unprecedented and deeply disturbing,” said John King Jr., former secretary of education under President Obama and current chancellor of the State University of New York system. Trump’s actions “really threaten the long-standing partnership between the federal government and higher education in the pursuit of both innovation and economic mobility.”
Trump and his advisers have signaled their intent to crack down on “woke” higher education but haven’t said how they will do so. Instead, a cadre of conservative policy analysts plotted how to leverage other agencies and sources of funding, beyond access to the $130 billion distributed annually in federal student loans and Pell Grants.
“At the beginning it felt like I was the only one fighting,” Chris Rufo, an influential anti-DEI advocate and a member of the Board of Trustees at New College of Florida, said on The Daily, a New York Times podcast last week. “Now, fast-forward five years, [and] some of the ideas that I had cobbled together have suddenly become reality, they’ve become policy, they affect billions of dollars in the flow of funds.”
But efforts to send colleges and universities into “an existential terror,” as Rufo put it, have required the Trump administration to move at a dizzying pace and leverage multiple mechanisms that most higher education lawyers, policy analysts and officials say are incredibly novel.
To catch up, here are four things you should know about Trump’s funding threats to colleges and universities.
Broad Scope of Attack
A large part of what makes the Trump administration’s current push to crack down on colleges and align their actions with his agenda so unprecedented, experts say, is its sheer magnitude, from the amount of money at risk to the number of investigations involving various agencies.
The Education Department has historically taken the lead on holding colleges accountable, leveraging institutions’ eligibility for student aid programs to force compliance. But this time around, it’s an all-hands-on-deck effort with a magazine of federal programs used as ammunition.
At least four departments beyond Education—Justice, Defense, Energy and Health and Human Services—have also been involved, cutting off scientific research grants, which are typically considered immune from political attacks.
James Nussbaum, who leads the higher education practice at the Indiana law firm Church Church Hittle + Antrim, said that as Trump took office he often warned clients to be aware of any contracts they held with the Department of Education. But some of the cuts caught even him by surprise.
“People had their focus on one ball in the air and hadn’t seen that these others might be affected,” he said.
To review federal funding for colleges that it believes have violated students’ civil rights, the Trump administration launched a federal antisemitism task force that spanned several agencies and has led some of the most public actions against colleges so far.
The group launched reviews of Columbia and Harvard Universities, demanded sweeping changes and froze $400 million and $2.2 billion in grants and contracts, respectively. The funds at risk support a wide range of research at the universities, including on cancer, tuberculosis and the effects of environmental pollution on health. Faculty have warned of dire consequences if the freezes continue.
In addition to Columbia and Harvard, Northwestern, Cornell, Brown and Princeton Universities have had some of their federal funds frozen, though it’s not clear why or who made that decision and under what legal authority. (The Wall Street Journal reported that White House staff were behind the Cornell funding freeze.)
The Trump administration also froze $175 million at the University of Pennsylvania to penalize administrators for allowing a transgender athlete to swim on the women’s team three years ago.
What the Trump administration is doing enters a “whole new territory,” Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber said in a recent interview with The New York Times.
Starting with the freeze at Columbia, “the government was using its tremendous power over research dollars to try to control what a private university was doing in terms of matters that are generally considered part of academic freedom,” Eisgruber added. “There’s a very fundamental threat here right now … to America’s research universities that anybody who cares about the strength of this country, our economy, our prosperity, our security, our health should be worried about.”
Colleges also face other threats from the federal government. The Department of Education has launched or actively pursued at least 97 investigations concerning alleged antisemitism and DEI programs, which could imperil those institutions’ access to federal financial aid. And the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy moved to cap reimbursements for costs indirectly related to research, which, if enacted, could cost colleges billions.
Bypassing Standard Processes
Adding to the difficulty for colleges, the Trump administration is largely ignoring regulatory standards and procedures when it cuts funding.
For instance, cabinet members have broadly used the term “investigation” to describe the ways they are cracking down on colleges. But in most cases, the review process has lasted only a few days and resulted in little to no evidence of the alleged violation. Often, universities have been presented with a list of ultimatums or policy changes they must make in order to avoid a funding freeze or restore their funds.
The stop-work orders that have been issued so far have been “arbitrary” and “often unsupported,” said King of SUNY. If there is rationale, it often “seems disingenuous.”
And some universities have yet to receive a formal notification about a funding freeze. For example, Brown officials have not received any official word of a rumored $510 million cut.
“We have nothing to actually substantiate what’s being reported,” Brian Clark, Brown’s vice president for news, told Inside Higher Ed in an email.
For civil rights investigations, investigations typically begin when the Education Department notifies an institution of the allegations made in thorough detail, experts explained. Then, the Office for Civil Rights conducts an in-depth investigation that includes talking to students, faculty and staff and gathering documents or data regarding the allegations. That process allows colleges to voluntarily resolve the investigation and negotiate a settlement with the department. The resulting agreement usually outlines various changes that colleges must make to comply with federal law. Some conservative critics have said those settlements or resolution agreements were “toothless.”
If the parties cannot agree or a college refuses to comply with the federal law, the department could sue a college. But that’s rare, and the Education Department has never pulled a college’s federal funding over civil rights violations—a move that’s considered a nuclear option.
Brendan Cantwell, a higher education professor at Michigan State University, noted that despite the quick turnaround, the administration’s investigations do, at times, parallel the motivations of traditional reviews. But what makes this approach so unprecedented and unlawful, in his mind, Cantwell said, is its “unmeasured” and “blanketed” nature.
“So while there are precedents and similar examples in the past, beyond very superficial similarities, the similarities fall apart,” he said.
Breaking Contract Law
The means by which Trump is terminating grants and contracts is also novel, a lawyer who specializes in government contracts told Inside Higher Ed.
Generally, the only people who have authority to take contract-based actions on behalf of the United States are contracting officers or agreements officers, said Jayna Marie Rust, a partner at Thompson Coburn LLP. But under the Trump administration, it’s often unclear if this is the case, especially with the Department of Government Efficiency reviewing contracts and grants and touting decisions to cancel millions in agreements.
Rust said she has not seen any of the direct communications between government agencies and universities regarding contract/grant termination that are due to the identity of the institution and therefore can’t say if the notifications come from contracting or agreements officers. But notifications coming from others is something she has seen in other terminations that schools are receiving.
“But to the extent these communications are not coming from the agreements officers or contracting officers, that is unusual,” Rust said.
And much like the procedure for investigating and addressing policy violations, the government is supposed to ensure due process before excluding schools from receiving federal funds, which is effectively what the terminations have done. The Trump administration has seemingly bypassed those steps. (Several faculty groups and associations have sued to restore the canceled funding.)
Even when the administration has completed a process to determine whether an entity can be excluded from receiving federal funds, contracting and agreements officers also often conduct a risk analysis to see if the benefit of letting that entity complete a contract or grant outweighs the benefit of cutting ties (which could result in losing the benefit of work that’s already completed), Rust said. It appears that the Trump administration also hasn’t gone through that review.
More Than Money at Stake
As a result of the sweeping scope of Trump’s attacks and the lack of precedent, the risks for colleges and universities are more than financial, higher ed experts say.
Yes, losing billions of dollars in federal funding is a problem, and not one that elite institutions’ endowments can solve. But more than that, what’s at risk is the core mission and ethos of American higher education, King said.
“From the technology inside of your phone to the treatment you may receive at your doctor—all of that can be traced back to research conducted at America’s higher ed institutions. And it’s under threat,” he said.
And though the dollar amounts of funding pulled from smaller private liberal arts institutions and state universities may be “more modest,” they’re still significant, he added. “For those researchers, it’s heartbreaking, and it will ultimately harm economic development and national security.”
The full impact of these funding freezes is not yet clear. But until the courts weigh in, colleges are stuck between a rock and a hard place, said Nussbaum, of Church Church Hittle + Antrim.
“Schools are trying to make that decision of how can we make decisions consistent with our mission and values in a way that’s not going to get us called out?” Nussbaum said. “I think we’ll have a little bit more certainty on where the means and bounds of the discretion of the executive agency is in the funding. But I think in the meantime, a lot of schools are trying to wait out that clock.”
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How Colleges Can Increase Transfer Student Success
Upward transfer from a community college to a four-year bachelor’s degree–granting institution is a complicated process that leaves many students behind—particularly those from historically underrepresented backgrounds.
Last month, the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College and the Aspen Institute College Excellence Program published the second edition of the Transfer Playbook, a guidebook for colleges and universities seeking to eliminate barriers to transfer and increase the number of students who start at a community college and complete a bachelor’s degree.
The report details how colleges and universities can implement three evidence-based strategies that improve transfer and includes examples of institutions that are successful in this work.
By the numbers: Previous surveys have shown that a majority (80 percent) of community college students aspire to a bachelor’s degree, but only 16 percent earn a bachelor’s degree within six years of starting college.
Transfer rates are even lower for some student groups, including those from low-income backgrounds, adult learners and Black and Hispanic students, according to the report.
With the cost of higher education climbing, many students consider community college an affordable route to a postsecondary credential. However, little progress has been made over the past decade in increasing transfer rates from two-year to four-year institutions, according to the report’s authors.
“Transfer and bachelor’s attainment rates for students who start in community colleges have remained virtually unchanged since we started tracking transfer in 2015,” they write.
The playbook identifies colleges and universities that have achieved better outcomes for various groups using some of the recommended practices. None of the institutions or partnerships exhibited all the practices. “However, we hypothesize that by combining the exemplars’ efforts into a comprehensive, idealized framework, higher education leaders and practitioners can adapt it to meet their students’ needs and achieve strong outcomes for all—and at scale,” the report says.
Put into practice: Researchers identified a few consistent themes that set innovative institutions apart, which include:
- Leveraging proximity. Research shows students are more likely to enroll in college based on proximity, so creating local pathways between community colleges and four-year universities can support students who want to stay in the region.
- Providing empathy in high-stakes decisions. Missteps in course, major or transfer destination selection can have financial and opportunity costs for a student, which can impede their attainment or push them to stop out entirely. Effective colleges offer personalized support through staff or create tools that provide guidance in a timely manner.
- Establishing universal systems and initiatives. Some programs provide strong outcomes for historically underrepresented groups but are not large enough to reach students at scale. Exemplars instead use these programs as pilots to test effective measures and then scale them.
- Achieving support from leaders. Grassroots efforts can help move the needle, but recognition, elevation and investment by senior leadership allow work to scale in sustained ways, regardless of staffing turnover.
According to the report, the most effective strategies for creating sustainable transfer student success at scale are:
- Prioritizing transfer at the executive level. A key driver in systemwide change was community college and four-year presidents who understand the central role of transfer student success in their respective institutional missions and business goals. This top-down approach allows for allocation of resources, division mobilization and partnerships across colleges, which often benefit the local community and workforce. This also allows for end-to-end redesign of the transfer student experience, and establishment of systems and processes.
- Aligning programs and pathways. Colleges that create and regularly update term-by-term, four-year maps for each degree program can promote learning and ensure students are making significant progress toward a bachelor’s degree, such as completing college-level math and English and major-related courses. These maps should also prioritize accessibility and flexibility, understanding that student needs and priorities may shift and the way they complete courses may change. Some students may need exploratory curricula to help them identify their educational and career goals, so embedding this instruction early is also paramount.
- Tailoring advising and nonacademic supports. “Research indicates that about half of the community college students nationally who intend to transfer do not access transfer services,” the report says. Instead, institutions should put in place inevitable advising, engaging transfer students before, during and after their transition to a university. Advisers should receive professional development and training that centers the student experience and equips them to engage with individual students and their respective circumstances. Once students land at their four-year institution, creating systems and supports that uplift the transfer experience and inspire feelings of belonging is also critical.
Researchers call out a variety of campuses for their work, including George Mason University and Northern Virginia Community College’s ADVANCE program, Tallahassee State College’s transfer pathway work, and Arizona Western College and North Arizona University’s strategy to increase bachelor’s attainment in their two-county region.
Seeking stories from campus leaders, faculty members and staff for our Student Success focus. Share here.
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COLUMN: Trump is bullying, blackmailing and threatening colleges, and they are just beginning to fight back
Patricia McGuire has always been an outspoken advocate for her students at Trinity Washington University, a small, Catholic institution that serves largely Black and Hispanic women, just a few miles from the White House. She’s also criticized what she calls “the Trump administration’s wholesale assault on freedom of speech and human rights.”
In her 36 years as president, though, McGuire told me, she has never felt so isolated, a lonely voice challenging an agenda she believes “demands a vigorous and loud response from all of higher education. “
It got a little bit louder this week, after Harvard University President Alan Garber refused to capitulate to Trump’s demands that it overhaul its operations, hiring and admissions. Trump is now calling on the IRS to rescind Harvard’s tax-exempt status.
The epic and unprecedented battle with Harvard is part of Trump’s push to remake higher education and attack elite schools, beginning with his insistence that Harvard address allegations of antisemitism, stemming from campus protests related to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza following attacks by Hamas in October 2023.
Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter featuring the most important stories in education.
Garber responded that “no government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue” — words that Harvard faculty, students and others in higher education had been urging him to say for weeks. Students and faculty at Brown and Yale are asking their presidents to speak out as well.
Many hope it is the beginning of a new resistance in higher education. “Harvard’s move gives others permission to come out on the ice a little,” McGuire said. “This is an answer to the tepid and vacillating presidents who said they don’t want to draw attention to themselves.”
Harvard paved the way for other institutions to stand up to the administration’s demands, Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, noted in an interview with NPR this week.
Stanford University President Jonathan Levin immediately backed Harvard, noting that “the way to bring about constructive change is not by destroying the nation’s capacity for scientific research, or through the government taking command of a private institution.”
Former President Barack Obama on Monday urged others to follow suit.
A minuscule number of college leaders had spoken out before Harvard’s Garber, including Michael Gavin, president of Delta College, a community college in Michigan; Princeton University’s president, Christopher Eisgruber; Danielle Holley of Mount Holyoke; and SUNY Chancellor John B. King Jr. Of more than 70 prominent higher education leaders who signed a petition circulated Tuesday supporting Garber, only a handful were current college presidents, including Michael Roth of Wesleyan, Susan Poser of Hofstra, Alison Byerly of Carleton, David Fithian of Clark University, Jonathan Holloway of Rutgers University and Laura Walker of Bennington College.
Speaking out and opposing Trump is not without consequences: The president retaliated against Harvard by freezing $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million in contracts to Harvard.
Related: For our republic to survive, education leaders must remain firm in the face of authoritarianism
Many higher ed leaders think it’s going to take a bigger, collective effort fight for everything that U.S. higher education stands for, including those with more influence than Trinity Washington, which has no federal grants and an endowment of just $30 million. It’s also filled with students working their way through school.
About 15 percent are undocumented and live in constant fear of being deported under Trump policies, McGuire told me. “We need the elites out there because they have the clout and the financial strength the rest of us don’t have,” she said. “Trinity is not on anyone’s radar.”
Some schools are pushing back against Trump’s immigration policies, hoping to protect their international and undocumented students. Occidental College President Tom Stritikus is among the college presidents who signed an amicus brief this month detailing concerns about the administration’s revocation of student and faculty visas and the arrest and detention of students based on campus advocacy.
“I think the real concern is the fear and instability that our students are experiencing. It is just heartbreaking to me,” Stritikus told me. He also spoke of the need for “collective action” among colleges and the associations that support them.
Related: Tracking Trump: His actions to abolish the Education Department, and more
The fear is real: More than 210 colleges and universities have identified 1,400-plus international students and recent graduates who have had their legal status changed by the State Department, according to Inside Higher Ed. Stritikus said Occidental is providing resources, training sessions and guidance for student and faculty.
Many students, he said, would like him to do more. “When I’m around students, I’m more optimistic for our future,” Stritikus said. “Our higher education system has been the envy of the world for a very long time. Clearly these threats to institutional autonomy, freedom of expression and the civil rights of our community put all that risk.”
Back at Trinity Washington, McGuire said she will continue to make calls, talk to other college presidents and encourage them to take a stronger stand.
“I tell them, you will never regret doing what is right, but if you allow yourself to be co-opted, you will have regret that you caved to a dictator who doesn’t care about you or your institution.”
Contact Liz Willen at [email protected]
This story about the future of higher education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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How an early alert system raised one college’s FAFSA completion
This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.NASHVILLE — College leaders understand the value of a completed financial aid application, but they often face hurdles helping students navigate the slog of paperwork.
Holyoke Community College, in Massachusetts, encountered this problem in spring 2023. That semester, 47% of attendees at the college’s new-student orientation had not completed their Free Application for Federal Student Aid, institutional leaders said Monday at the American Association of Community Colleges′ annual conference.
Along with low levels of FAFSA completion, they also noted that dozens of students who had otherwise completed their financial aid applications were missing one crucial piece of paperwork — which became the deciding factor between the state completely covering their tuition or not.
Holyoke implemented an early alert system to address challenges among both groups. By proactively reaching out to new students and inviting them to one-on-one advising sessions, officials raised FAFSA completion rates among that cohort by 14% for fall 2023 and got the appropriate state aid to those who were eligible.
Missing paperwork
Enrolling some 3,700 credit-bearing students, Holyoke is located in a college-dense area with about 20 other higher education institutions, according to Lauren LeClair, the community college’s associate director of admissions technology and operations.
“We fight for our students. We wanted to make sure that we were doing right by our students and getting them aid,” she told conference attendees. “New students probably had no idea that they didn’t have paperwork that was needed.”
Many also didn’t know where to go to learn more about financial aid, said Kim Straceski, Holyoke’s associate director of financial aid compliance and customer service.
“They’re getting different information from different offices, and not always coming to meet one of the experts in financial aid,” she said.
In spring 2023, the college lacked a way to alert students or financial aid staff about missing financial aid documents, according to education consultancy EAB. Holyoke employed the group to establish a new customer relationship management system to address these issues.
The new system pinged students to alert them about the missing paperwork and prompted them to schedule an advising appointment to fix the error. An adviser also followed up with a more detailed email, highlighting that they could help students hunt down the needed documents.
“Students do open emails — if it’s important enough,” LeClair said.
On the back end, the system allowed both financial aid staff and academic advisers to see notifications to students and any progress they made completing their forms. Before, the two offices were disconnected from one another in this process.
By fall 2023, 67% of students who received early alerts had completed their outstanding aid requirements.
The early alert system also helped new students learn where to seek help for any potential financial aid issues that arise in the future.
MassReconnect
At Holyoke, almost 600 students are enrolled in MassReconnect, a state-run free community college program for nontraditional students. Since 2023, state residents ages 25 and older who do not have a degree have been eligible to attend community college for free, so long as they complete the FAFSA.
Early results indicate the program has boosted the number of adult learners enrolled at Massachusetts community colleges, especially those from households earning below the state’s median income.
But Holyoke identified a problem for about 40 of its MassReconnect students — they were missing one key document.
“All of these students need to sign an affidavit attesting to the fact that they have not earned a prior degree,” said Straceski.
But for many, that requirement was not made clear in the MassReconnect program’s promotional materials.
“When students are reading about it on the state’s website and they’re hearing about it in the news — nothing about this affidavit was ever mentioned,” Straceski said.
Holyoke couldn’t distribute state funding to cover the students’ costs without this documentation. But thanks to the early alert system, Straceski said the college received all 40 affidavits by deadline.
Beyond that paperwork gap, the system has helped the college engage with more MassReconnect students. About half of them, 294, have since used the software to schedule one-on-one advising sessions to answer financial aid questions. The college attributes this to improving students’ ability to stay enrolled.
It also has helped officials identify students who may be eligible for MassReconnect. Even if students don’t ultimately enroll in the program, Straceski said, communication from the college on the topic has garnered “a lot of FAFSA completions.”
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Cash-Strapped Colleges Opt for Wellness Vending Machines
A wellness vending machine helps increase access to reproductive health products at College of the Redwoods.
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According to a May 2024 Student Voice survey, roughly one in five community college students (19 percent) believe their institution should invest in wellness facilities or services to promote well-being. A recent pilot program across the state of California seeks to remove barriers to accessing health supplies for community college students.
The Wellness Vending Machine Pilot Program, a state-funded program established by Assembly Bill 2482, which passed in 2022, aims to make preventative care products more accessible to college students. The program provides funding for 18 colleges to address students’ physical health and overall academic success in a unique, lower-cost way: through vending machines that dispense everything from Band-Aids to birth control.
For some institutions, like College of the Redwoods, the vending machine is the primary source of personal care products on campus.
Community colleges in particular are often underresourced and limited in their ability to provide students with wraparound support services. A 2024 survey by the Richmond Federal Reserve of 80 community colleges in the District of Columbia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and most of West Virginia found that only 3.8 percent of responding institutions offered on-site health services during the 2022–23 academic year. The greatest obstacle to offering such resources is funding.
Katrina Hanson, manager of retention, basic needs and well-being for the College of the Redwoods community college district in Central California, applied for the vending machine grant in July 2023 to address a service gap on the main campus in Eureka.
The College of the Redwoods closed its Eureka student health center in spring 2023, shifting from having a part-time nurse to instead offering tele–mental health services through TimelyCare. It also purchased three wellness vending machines: two for Eureka and one for one of its other two campuses, on the Hoopa Indian reservation.
“It’s not a complete substitute for in-person care,” Hanson said. “But it is more equitable for our students on our Hoopa [Klamath-Trinity Instructional City] and Crescent City [Del Norte Education Center] campuses, as well as all of our online students.”
How it works: The college set up the three wellness vending machines in August 2023, placing one in Eureka’s library and the other in a residence hall, as well as one on the Hoopa campus. The grant requires participating colleges to place vending machines in a central location that students can access at any time.
The requirements also outline the products that should be sold, including condoms, dental dams, menstrual cups, lubricants, tampons, menstrual pads, pregnancy tests and emergency contraception pills. College staff identify and supply the machines with other popular or needed supplies.
Eureka’s wellness vending machine is located in the library, which has the most hours of availability for students, allowing them to access it when they need various health supplies.
Katrina Hanson/College of the Redwoods
For example, when Eureka’s health center closed, Hanson asked which services were most popular. She learned that pregnancy tests and urinary tract infection tests were most commonly used, so she now ensures that the campus vending machines has those supplies available.
Other popular items are Band-Aids, which are free in the machine, and Benadryl, which is discounted.
The machines themselves are rented from a company that also handles snack machines around campus, so the college does not have to deal with maintenance or money collection. Grant funding will cover the machines for the five years of the pilot, but supplies are budgeted by the institution.
“We are trying to get it to be at least somewhat self-sustaining by trying out different items,” Hanson said. “The sexual health and menstrual health supplies are free or discounted, per our grant agreement. The other items we can offer at regular price to try to make some money to keep the project going.”
Survey Says
Inside Higher Ed’s Student Voice survey of college students found that about two-thirds of respondents (n=5,025) rated the variety and quality of campus health and wellness offerings as good or average; about 5 percent indicated they had poor resources. Numbers were similar for respondents at two- and four-year institutions.
Two birds, one machine: In addition to offering tailored health products for students, the vending machines also work as a resource hub, displaying informational posters in English and Spanish to equip learners with important information.
Poster content includes what to know about emergency contraception, how to use the opioid overdose–reversing drug Narcan/naloxone, sexual wellness education and how to provide feedback to the college about using the machine.
Rightsizing: Since setting up the machines, college staff have noticed that two machines (the one on the reservation campus and the one in the Eureka dorm) weren’t being used often, or students were only buying certain supplies. In the residence hall, for example, students only really wanted condoms. So campus leaders elected to downsize and just keep the one machine in the library, offering free supplies in other places instead.
This academic year, the most purchased items have been condoms, menstrual cups, fentanyl tests, Narcan, tampons and acetaminophen. Students also frequently purchase deodorant, energy gels, LiquidIV, lip balm, ibuprofen, pregnancy tests and cough drops.
So far, the machines haven’t been profitable, but staff pull supplies from the Basic Needs Center or local partners to keep costs low and continue to vary their offerings.
The college is planning to reopen its student health center following construction, so the vending machines will support students in the meantime, Hanson said.
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4 ways community colleges can boost workforce development
This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.SAN DIEGO — How can community colleges deliver economic mobility to their students?
College leaders at this week’s ASU+GSV Summit, an annual education and technology conference, got a glimpse into that answer as they heard how community colleges are building support from business and industry and strengthening workforce development.
These types of initiatives may be helping to boost public perception of the value of community colleges vs. four-year institutions.
Last year, 48% of surveyed Americans said they had high confidence in community colleges, compared with just 33% who said the same about four-year colleges, according to a Gallup poll. Moreover, policy analysts often view community colleges as an engine to increase workforce development — though some still say these institutions could do more to help their students.
Below, we’re rounding up four takeaways from community college experts about how these institutions can take steps to boost workforce development.
Bring industry into policy advocacy
In 2023, Texas enacted a new outcomes-based funding formula for the state’s community colleges — a change that came with a $683 million price tag. Rather than basing funding primarily on enrollment, the state now ties the majority of its allocation to performance-based measures, such as how many credentials colleges award in high-demand fields.
As a result of the change, the state’s community colleges saw funding increases in fiscal 2024 ranging from $70,000 to $2.9 million, The Texas Tribune reported last month.
Ray Martinez, president and CEO of the Texas Association of Community Colleges, said unified advocacy from the state’s community college leaders helped the measure gain widespread support from lawmakers.
Community college leaders also drummed up support from businesses to help get the new funding model over the finish line, Martinez said.
“We needed business leaders. We needed K-12 leaders,” Martinez said. “We needed other stakeholders to engage with us and to go to their members, to go to the folks that they knew at the Legislature, and say, ‘This is what we need for economic development and for future economic growth of our state.’”
Look to industry to help create curriculum
It’s not enough for community colleges to merely have business and industry representatives on their advisory councils, Martinez said. Institutions need to forge deeper relationships with these stakeholders, including by having them help craft curriculum for workforce education programs.
Although workforce education programs make up about a quarter of Texas community colleges’ overall offerings, that share is rapidly growing relative to academic programs under the state’s new performance-based funding formula, Martinez noted.
“I’m not sure you can single out an industry that is not changing rapidly because of technology or other reasons,” Martinez said. “If you are not engaging with employers in that constant loop of information, you’re missing out as a college.”
Focus on stackable credentials
At Miami Dade College in Florida, leaders are focused on stackable credentials that can be linked together to form an academic pathway.
Stackable credentials represent the “blurring of credit and noncredit,” said Madeline Pumariega, president of Miami Dade College.
“Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I want to go take a noncredit course,” Pumariega said. Instead, they seek out the quickest training available to land a certain job, she said.
But after students complete that noncredit training, it’s key for community colleges to return to them and say, “‘Great, we got you that training, but you’re now a quarter of the way there for a college credit certificate,’” Pumariega said. When students finish a certificate, college leaders can then offer them an associate degree before suggesting a bachelor’s program, Pumariega said.
Don’t try to be a university
Community college leaders have at times strived for their institutions to be more like their neighboring four-year universities, said Eloy Ortiz Oakley, president and CEO of College Futures Foundation, which aims to boost credential attainment in California.
“When I started out at community colleges, we were always looking to our sister university,” said Oakley, who previously served as chancellor of the California Community Colleges system. “Well guess what, folks? They need to be more like us now. Okay? They need to be opening their doors to regular working class Americans.”
Community colleges were built to generally serve 100% of students that apply, Oakley noted.
“Community colleges were built to be inclusive, to serve the diversity and to raise the equity of the people in those communities,” Oakley told the conference attendees. “I know, for some, those words have become bad words, but you are the epitome of why equity, diversity and inclusion are an economic imperative, not a woke conversation.”
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How a Drop in Ph.D. Students Could Affect Colleges
Under mounting financial and political pressures, universities have paused or rescinded graduate student admissions on an unprecedented scale, which could create cross-campus ripple effects next fall and beyond.
The extent of the cuts to the graduate student workforce remains unclear and will vary from institution to institution. But if and when those losses come to pass, experts say that employing fewer graduate students—particularly Ph.D. students, who typically hold years-long research and teaching assistantships—will undermine universities’ broader operations, including undergraduate education, faculty support and the future of academic research, which is reliant on training the next generation of scholars.
“First and foremost, a reduction in the number of graduate students may threaten that individualized, close attention for undergraduates,” said Julia Kent, vice president of best practices and strategic initiatives at the Council of Graduate Schools.
That’s because many doctoral students work as teaching assistants, particularly for large introductory undergraduate courses, where they assist with grading, lead discussion sections, help students with assignments and supervise labs.
“While a professor may be doing the lectures for those courses, they may not seem as approachable or accessible to undergraduates. In those cases, the graduate teaching assistant is the first point of contact for that student. They may go to them for questions or feel more comfortable asking for help with assignment,” said Kent, who added that graduate students also support universities’ learning missions in other ways, too. “They may also help staff in the writing center and support undergraduates writing essays for their classes and provide informal mentoring.”
‘Not Sustainable’
Although colleges and universities haven’t felt the effects of losing a number of those roles yet, Kent said the uncertainty surrounding graduate admissions poses a “real risk” to undergraduate learning.
If universities do want to maintain smaller class sizes with fewer graduate students, they may rely even more heavily on low-paid contingent faculty, said Rosemary Perez, an associate professor at the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan.
“That’s not sustainable for those instructors, who may be teaching five or six classes at multiple campuses and still not making enough to live,” she said. And with fewer graduate students in the pipeline, “we’ll also have fewer people who are trained to be faculty. People are going to retire. Who’s going to teach these college classes that have experience working with college students?”
Nothing concrete has to happen for people weighing their futures to decide to take a different path where it seems like there may be more stability. Rational humans may decide that’s not the direction they want to go in anymore, and that’s going to be an immediate loss to the field.”
—Marcel Agüeros, astronomy professor at Columbia University
And with fewer spots available to prospective graduate students, Perez fears students who don’t attend top-ranked institutions will be the first to disappear from the academic pipeline. That’s because when resources are scarce, “the tendency is to rely on markers of prestige or GRE scores as predictors of success,” she said. “But those aren’t great predictors of what people are capable of doing in their careers.”
Fewer graduate students will also likely mean a heavier workload for faculty, who in addition to teaching, also rely on them to help with research by assisting in running labs and research groups and co-authoring papers.
“They help universities’ reputation, but they also help faculty funding prospects by making the faculty more productive, because funding agencies like to see productive faculty. A lot of that labor is happening through graduate students,” said Julie Posselt, a higher education professor at the University of Southern California, which last month revoked outstanding offers for numerous Ph.D. programs, including sociology, chemistry, sociology, molecular biology and religion. “Meanwhile, there’s also plenty of evidence that Ph.D. students are contributing to universities’ research output and are independently advancing knowledge in their respective fields.”
Impact Will Reach All Fields
Already, numerous universities across the country have said they’re reducing the number of Ph.D. students in the biomedical sciences as a result of drastic cuts to the National Institutes of Health, which each year sends universities billions of dollars in grants that indirectly and directly support graduate education.
But it won’t just be those in the biomedical sciences that feel those cuts, especially as colleges downsize their budgets in light of the NIH’s plan to cap the amount of money it gives institutions for indirect research costs, which covers facilities maintenance, compliance with patient safety protocols and hazardous biowaste removal. Although a federal judge has blocked those cuts for now, the Department of Health and Human Services filed an appeal Monday; if the plan takes effect, it will force universities to find other areas they can cut from their budgets to make up the difference.
“Even if you’re in the humanities, what’s happening right now in federal granting agencies that are far from the humanities has an impact on the humanities, because the overall budget for a university to do things like keep up their infrastructure and keep the lights on will go down,” said Jody Greene, associate campus provost and literature professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “And if we also don’t have international students, that’s also going to be a significant budget hit at institutions like ours.”
International Students at Play
In addition to drastic cuts in grant funding from the NIH, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Department of Education, the government has also revoked scores of international graduate students’ visas and detained several others.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has characterized, with little concrete evidence, those students as “lunatics” who came to the United States “not just to study but to participate in movements that vandalize universities, harass students, take over buildings and cause chaos.” The administration is also considering a travel ban affecting 43 countries. (After Trump issued a travel ban for seven countries during his first term, the number of international applicants to U.S. colleges fell 5.5 percent for graduate students, though applications have been on the rebound post-pandemic.)
But universities worry that targeting international students—who made up nearly one in four incoming graduate students in 2022—will create a chilling effect, cause international student enrollment to plunge and strip institutions of yet another vital revenue source. According to data from the Institute of International Education, 81 percent of international undergraduate students and 61 percent of graduate students completely fund their own tuition.
Would-Be Ph.D.s Wary
All this politically driven chaos and financial uncertainty is making graduate school—and a career as a faculty member—a harder sell for students interested in research careers.
“Up until this year, we’ve been able to tell prospective graduate students that the university will cover the costs of their Ph.D.,” said Marcel Agüeros, an astronomy professor at Columbia University, where the Trump administration has frozen some $650 million in NIH funding. “We want to stay true to that commitment, but we’d be lying if we said that’s going to be 100 percent possible.”
And even though his department is currently only expecting to offer one fewer Ph.D. slot, Agüeros said the uncertainty over the future of federal funding—and even what areas of research academics are allowed to pursue—is enough to push people out of academia.
“Nothing concrete has to happen for people weighing their futures to decide to take a different path where it seems like there may be more stability,” he said. “Rational humans may decide that’s not the direction they want to go in anymore, and that’s going to be an immediate loss to the field.”
And those are the questions would-be graduate students all over the country are asking themselves right now.
“We don’t have any data yet, but anecdotally, I’m hearing that there are a ton of students who are choosing not to even try to go to graduate school this year and next year because they’re perceiving less funding and support,” said Bethany Usher, immediate past president of the Council on Undergraduate Research and provost at Radford University in Virginia.
“Those Ph.D. students are the ones who push the boundaries of research,” she added. “They have the newest ideas, and if we reduce those, it will have a generational impact on higher education, industries and communities.”
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Most Students Say Colleges Promote Free Speech
While freedom of speech remains a hot-button issue in higher ed, most undergraduates feel like they’re free to speak their minds on campus, according to a new report by the Lumina Foundation and Gallup.
The report, released Tuesday, found that roughly three-quarters of students earning bachelor’s degrees believe their college does an “excellent” or “good” job of fostering free speech, including 73 percent of Republicans and 75 percent of Democrats. More than two-thirds of students of all races, genders and major political parties report feeling like they belong on campus, and at least three-quarters say they feel respected by faculty members.
But some topics are more easily discussed than others. Most students feel like they can freely discuss race (66 percent), gender and sexual orientation (67 percent), and religion (62 percent). Discussing the Israel-Hamas war appears to be more fraught. Half of students report that pro-Israel views are welcome on campus, while 57 percent say the same of pro-Palestinian views. Students are also divided on how campuses have handled protests—a little over half, 54 percent, described their campus as doing an “excellent” or “good” job responding to protests and other disruptions.
The report also showed that students are more likely to believe liberal views are welcome on campus than conservative views, 67 percent and 53 percent respectively. But most Democratic (78 percent), Republican (69 percent) and Independent students (73 percent) individually report that they can discuss their views openly on campus.
“At a time when public discourse often questions whether free speech is still alive on college campuses, students are telling us a more hopeful story,” Courtney Brown, Lumina’s vice president of impact and planning, said in a news release. “It’s a powerful reminder that, despite the national narrative of polarization, many campuses are doing what higher education is meant to do: foster open dialogue, encourage learning and create a sense of belonging.”