Tag: Colleges

Why Are So Many Smaller Independent Colleges and Universities So Similar and What Does This Mean for Their Futures? – Edu Alliance Journal
September 8, 2025, by Dr. Chet Haskell: It is well known that many small American private non-profit academic institutions face serious financial pressures. Typically defined as having 3000 or fewer students, more than 170 of these have been forced to close in the past two decades. Numerous others have entered into various mergers or acquisitions, often with well-documented negative impacts on students, faculty, staff, alumni and local communities. Of the more than 1100 such institutions, at least 900 continue to be a risk.

The basic problems responsible for this trend are also well-known. Most institutions lack significant endowments and are thus almost totally dependent on tuition and fee revenues from enrolled students. Only 60 such small institutions have per student endowments in excess of $200,000. The remainder have far less.

The only additional potential source of revenue – gifts and donations –is generally neither large nor consistent enough to offset enrollment-related declines. While the occasional donation or bequest in the millions of dollars garners attention, most institutions raise much smaller amounts regularly.

Enrollment declines are the existential threat to many of these smaller colleges and universities. These declines are also well-documented. There simply will be fewer high school graduates in the US in the coming decade or more. This reality creates a highly competitive environment, especially in regions with many of these institutions.

Demographic worries are augmented by broad concerns about the cost of higher education and the imputed return on such an investment by students and families. Governmental policies such as limitations on international students or restrictions on immigration further add to the problem. Also, these institutions not only compete with each other for students, but they also compete with colleges and universities of the public sector and a growing number of for-profit entities.

Most of these 900 or so institutions have high quality programs, often described under the term “liberal arts”. Many are differentiated by a specialization or an emphasis. However, at their core they are very similar. The basic concept of a personal scale four-year undergraduate educational experience provided in a residential campus setting has a long history and is highly valued by many students and faculty alike. These institutions have lengthy, strong histories, loyal alumni and important roles in their local communities.

The fact is that it is difficult to differentiate among many of these institutions. Not only their scale or their general model of personalized undergraduate education are similar, but many of their basic messages sound the same. A review of the websites of these schools results in striking consistencies of stated “unique” missions, programs, facilities, faculty and even marketing materials.

Their approaches to financial challenges are also similar. There is considerable competition on price. Most of these institutions discount their formal tuition rates by 50% or more. Initiatives to grow enrollments support an industry of educational consultants whose recommended initiatives are themselves similar and, even if successful, are quickly copied, thus reducing advantages.

Some have tried to compete by raising money for new, attractive facilities through dipping into limited endowments, borrowing or securing external major gifts. These shiny new buildings – athletic facilities, science centers, student centers – are assumed to provide an edge in student recruitment. In some cases, this works. However, in many others the new facilities do not come with long term maintenance and eventually add to increased on-going institutional expense. The end result is often another demonstration of similarity.

Some institutions have tried to branch out into selected graduate programs, perhaps based on a strong group of undergraduate faculty. Success is often limited for multiple reasons. Graduate students in commonly introduced professional fields such as business or nursing do not naturally align with an undergraduate in-person academic calendar. Older students, especially those in careers, are reluctant to come to a campus for class twice a week. Even if there is sufficient interest in such a program, it is difficult to increase in scale because of the limits of distance and geography. And most of these institutions lack significant expertise and technology do conduct effective on-line operations.

Their institutional similarities extend to their governance. Typically, there is a Board of Trustees, all of whom are volunteers, often with heavy alumni representation. These boards generally lack expertise or perspective on the challenges of higher education and thus are dependent on the appointed executive leadership. They often take a short-term perspective and lack strategic foresight that may be most valuable in times of uncertainty and external changes.

Even when trustees have financial experience from other fields, their common approach to small institutions is to bemoan any lack of enrollments. Most do not make significant personal financial contributions, particularly if they think the institution is struggling to survive. The assumed budget goal is basically a balanced budget and when one does not control revenues, one focuses on the more controllable expense side, trying to balance budgets solely on cuts. Board members serve because they want to support the institution, but many are risk adverse. For example, a fear of being associated with an institution that might generate possible legal liability for the board member means a first concern usually involves whether there is sufficient insurance.

While every institution is indeed different in its own way, they also are very similar. What explains this?

One possible way of explanation is provided by the organizational theorists Walter Powell and Paul DiMaggio who in 1983 (updated in 1991) published a seminal piece on what they called ”institutional isomorphism and collective rationality.” [1]They argued that ”institutions in the same field become more homogenous over time without become more efficient or more successful” and identified three basic reasons for such a tendency.

Coercive isomorphism – similarities imposed externally on the institutions. In higher education, good examples would be Federal government policies around student financial aid or the requirements of both regional and specialized accreditors. Every institution operates within a web of regulation and financial incentives that impose requirements on all and work to limit innovation.

Mimetic processes – similarities that arise because of standard responses to uncertainty. Prime examples in higher education are the increasingly common responses to the quest for enrollment growth. As noted, numerous consultants purport to improve enrollments, but the gains typically are limited, as other institutions mimic the same approach. In another example, recent surveys show that almost all institutions expect to be users of artificial intelligence models to promote marketing in the service of admissions, as if this is a “magic wand”. If one institution makes strides in this area, others will follow. The result will be more similarity, not less. It is a bit like the Ukrainian-Russian war, where Ukraine originally had clear advantages using drone technology until that technology was matched by the Russians, leading to a form of stalemate. As DiMaggio and Powell note, ”organizations tend to model themselves after similar organizations in their field that they perceive as more legitimate or successful.”[2]

Normative pressures – similarities that arise from common “professional” expectations. The authors identify two important aspects of professionalization: the common basis of higher education credentials and the legitimation produced by these credentials and “the growth and elaboration of professional networks.” Examples include common faculty and senior administrator qualification requirements. Another would be so-called “best practices” in support areas like student affairs. “Such mechanisms create a pool of almost interchangeable individuals who occupy similar positions.”[3] Recently, Hollis Robbins pointed out the commonalities in paths to academic leadership positions, likening these to the Soviet nomenklatura process through which a leader progresses in one’s career.[4] Evidence of this is obvious through a cursory review of the qualifications and desired qualities posted in searches for college and university presidents or other senior administrators. Most searches end up looking for and hiring individuals with very similar qualifications and experience.

The implications of such pressures and processes are several. With common values and similar personnel, “best practices” do not lead to essential changes. Innovation is quickly copied. Indeed, it becomes increasing difficult to differentiate an institution from competitors. Common regulatory structures, declining student pools, increased competition and a lack of resources for investment all combine to enhance similarity over difference. In some sense, it is almost a form of commodification where price does in fact matter, but the “product” basically the same, especially in the minds of the larger population of potential students and families.

What is to be done?

Leadership Must Confront Their Institution’s Reality

Confronting reality has many aspects, but the leaders of every institution must be clear-eyed and unsentimental about where it stands and where it is headed. This is an essential role for boards and executive leadership.

First and foremost, the mission of the institution must be understood in realistic and practical ways. What is the institution’s purpose and what is required to fulfill that purpose? Institutional mission is central as it should drive an appreciation for the current situation of the institution, provide clarity regarding longer term goals and bringing into focus the necessary means to move forward.

With clarity of mission must come a full understanding the of institution’s financial situation, its opportunities and the longer term needs required to achieve mission goals. Building multi-year mission-oriented budgets based on surpluses (positive margins) is key. Sometimes restructuring and cuts are necessary and thus leadership must make sure all faculty and staff have a clear understanding of reality and the strategy for addressing it.

A clear understanding by all of the marginal results (positive and negative) of major components is also critical. Some elements or units return significant positive margins. Others less so. And some return negative margins, often year after year. Yet, some of these less financially productive elements may be essential to mission and must be balanced or subsidized by other elements. At the end of the day, it is the margin of the entire institution that matters. And, as the saying goes, “no margin, no mission.” However, the opposite is also true. Institutions that are unclear about their mission will be challenged to attract and motivate students, faculty, staff or major donations.

Every institution must worry about enrollments as the largest source of revenue. Declining enrollments force expense restraints. Every institution must also be concerned about growing enrollments as a key prerequisite of financial stability. Institutions operating on thin or negative margins cannot hope to achieve their mission goals without some form of growth, including having the resources to invest in growth. Without some forms of growth, an institution will either be at risk or will have to make sometimes radical changes in order to continue to pursue mission goals. The only real alternative is to amend the mission and the definition of its success.

The other important point is that all institutions are subject to unexpected external pressures that they cannot control. Examples would be 9/11, the 2008-09 Great Recession, the COVID pandemic or the advent new government policies, such as those confronting all institutions today. Coping with such events requires having some financial resiliency, strong leadership and creativity.

Yet, the combination of external pressures and the realities of small-scale institutions operating on thin margins in the face of extensive competition may mean that even the best managed and led organizations will confront existential risk.

For many institutions, merging or partnering with another institution may be the only realistic path. While there often is reluctance to cede independence to another institution, mergers are hardly new, as consolidation in US higher education is hardly a new phenomenon. There are several hundred examples of mergers, many going back a century or more. Washington and Jefferson College in Pennsylvania in 1865 is the result of such an arrangement, as is Case Western Reserve University in Ohio a century later. In addition to these mergers, hundreds of other institutions have simply closed, including at least 170 in the past twenty years.

Additionally, may institutions may be placed to take advantage of consortium relationships with other institutions. Again, there are numerous examples of institutions seeking to improve their situations through this form of collaboration. Participating institutions collaborate on such things as sharing costs or providing a wider range of student options, while remaining independent. However, this model, while valuable in many ways, rarely provides major financial advantages except at the margins. And successful consortia require a certain degree of independent sustainability for each member.

Still others may be able find opportunity in growth through symbiosis. The recent Coalition for the Common Good begun by Antioch and Otterbein universities is an example. Other variants are possible. However, again such middle ground models also assume a basic stability of the members. As stated by Coalition president, John Comerford, “we are looking for a sweet spot of resources. This is not a way to save a school on death’s door. It’s also probably not useful to a school with billions in their endowment. Institutions in the big middle ground both need to look at new business models and likely have some flexibility to invest in them.” This type of model will not work in many cases.

The point is that many of these small college will continue to be at risk as long as they are tuition dependent within a shrinking pool of potential students and insufficient external support. Fewer and fewer small institutions will be able to survive independently simply because of the financial challenges inherent in their small-scale model.

Small undergraduate institutions represent the highest ideals of higher education. They are a key source for graduate students and future professors. They are central to their communities. Their strengthening and preservation as a class is an essential element of the American higher education ecosystem with its wide range of institutional models and opportunities. But this does not mean all can survive.

The leaders of every institution need to have a clear and practical plan for the maintenance of their independence, while also being open to careful consideration of alternatives, exploring potential alternatives well before they face a crisis.

Notes:
1. DiMaggio, Paul and Powell, Walter, The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields in DiMaggio and Powell, The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, University of Chicago Press, 1991. (pp.63-82)
2. Ibid. p. 70
3. Ibid. p. 71
4. Hollis Robbins, The Higher Ed Nomenklatura? Inside Higher Education, May 12, 2025
The next essay in this series will examine in some detail the steps in a process that begins with acknowledging the possible need for a partner and hopefully results in an agreement that is implemented.

Dr. Chet Haskell is Senior Consultant and Higher Education Strategist at Edu Alliance Group. He brings over four decades of leadership and consulting experience in higher education, with a career spanning the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Asia. He has held senior roles, including President of the Monterey Institute of International Studies and Cogswell Polytechnical College, Dean and de facto Provost at Simmons College, and 13 years of leadership positions at Harvard University and five years in senior administrative roles at the University of Southern California.

As Provost and Chief Academic Officer of Antioch University, he helped lead the creation of the Coalition for the Common Good, a groundbreaking alliance with Otterbein University. Internationally, Dr. Haskell has advised universities in Mexico, Spain, Holland, and Brazil and served as a consultant to the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA), the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) and the Council on International Quality Group.
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A respected accreditation expert, he has served as a WSCUC peer reviewer and as an international advisor to ANECA (Spain) and ACAP (Madrid). He is a frequent speaker at global conferences and meetings.
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September 8, 2025
Colleges Shouldn’t Hike Tuition After May 1 (opinion)

For students and their families, a university education is a massive investment of time and, often, money. To make a wise and informed decision about that investment, prospective students need full and timely financial transparency about that cost. The state of Florida has made that impossible for this year’s new out-of-state students.

As a married academic couple, we were excited for our oldest daughter to begin her college journey. Starting her sophomore year of high school, she carefully analyzed her options along many dimensions, from location and program offerings to student life and academic rigor. After she developed a short list of about 20 universities, we created a spreadsheet that categorized colleges on anything that could be quantified. As offers and acceptance letters began rolling in, yet another spreadsheet carefully tracked tuition, room and board, and scholarships.

After this careful analytic work, 13 on-campus visits and countless hours of conversation, our daughter chose the University of Florida. It was a tough decision; she had offers from other good colleges, including in- and out-of-state options that were more financially competitive. In the end, she valued UF’s high academic rigor and reputation combined with a relatively affordable cost. She made her choice about two weeks before the national May 1 decision deadline, and we began to prepare for her move to Gainesville. Of course, that planning included how we would pay for it. Based on numbers provided publicly on the university’s website, we thought we had that figured out.

Then the state of Florida changed the financial picture.

On June 18, the state of Florida’s Board of Governors permitted public universities to increase out-of-state student fees by 10 percent for the 2025–26 academic year (though called “fees,” this is in effect Florida’s term for the differential tuition costs paid by out-of-staters). And on July 23—more than two months after the national decision deadline, and less than a month before the start of the fall semester—the University of Florida’s Board of Trustees unanimously decided to do just that, hiking the per-credit cost for an out-of-state undergraduate by about $70 per credit, or about $2,000 for a full-time course load for the year. According to The Gainesville Sun, this decision was “in response to a budget shortfall of about $130 million due to a loss in state appropriations.”

Both of us lead university units with tight budgets. Therefore, we have empathy for the tough fiscal decisions that higher education professionals sometimes must make. Perhaps the hardest financial decision university leaders face is when and by how much to increase tuition—in other words, when to pass the financial burden on to the students that we serve. That decision also increases young adults’ student loan debt, a matter of national concern addressed in many higher education articles, books and podcasts.

But because of timing, what the state of Florida has done is different and much worse than a simple tuition/fee increase. If the university had announced the 2025–26 increase in fall 2024, we could have planned for that increase ahead of time. I do not think that would have changed our daughter’s decision, but it might have. Instead, by raising tuition so late in the game, Florida has created a classic example of a bait-and-switch: lure students in with the low cost, then dramatically increase it after their other options are gone.

We remain excited about our daughter’s future at the University of Florida—and, most importantly, our daughter remains excited, too, despite this financial bump in the road. However, this last-minute change in price generated additional stress and uncertainty around her transition to college. When we spoke with one of the university’s financial aid advisers in late July, he was empathetic. He pointed us to the university’s scholarship portal—but of course, those scholarship deadlines passed long ago, serving as further evidence that Florida’s tuition increase came much too late.

We have little doubt that this tuition approach has created stress for other students, too. With widespread concern for student mental health, increasing tuition costs just weeks before classes begin may add to students’ anxiety before they even set foot on campus. Student affairs professionals could see more requests for basic needs assistance, as students make tough choices between paying the higher tuition costs and other bills. University counseling centers are often already running at or above capacity and do not need such additional caseload.

Ultimately, this pricing practice fails the test of scalability. If every university increased tuition well after the decision deadline, it would be chaos. Students and their families would have no way to plan. Particularly given significant public concern about the high cost of higher education and burgeoning student loan debt, this is unacceptable.

Despite much debate within and beyond academia, the financial burden faced by young college students is a problem with no obvious solution in sight. But perhaps we can all agree on this: In order to make a wise financial decision, incoming students need complete and accurate information about the cost of college at least a few weeks ahead of the national decision deadline. Federal policy should preclude universities from making changes to their tuition and fees for the upcoming year after a certain point (say, two weeks prior to the decision deadline). Such a policy would provide transparency for students and fiscal accountability for higher education institutions.

Andrew M. Ledbetter is a professor and chair in the Department of Communication Studies at Texas Christian University.

Jessica L. Ledbetter is assistant dean of students at the University of Texas at Arlington.

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September 8, 2025
Education Department wants to streamline process for pulling federal funds from colleges
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Dive Brief:
- The U.S. Department of Education plans to propose regulations for “streamlining” the process for pulling federal funding from the colleges it determines have violated civil rights law.
- The notice of the forthcoming proposal was published in the Trump administration’s Spring 2025 Unified Agenda, which provides a glimpse of the federal government’s regulatory priorities and schedule for releasing new rules.
- The new proposal — which could be released this month — is intended to simplify the process for the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights to seek “termination of Federal financial assistance to institutions that intentionally violate Federal civil rights laws and refuse to voluntarily come into compliance,” the notice says.
Dive Insight:

Under the Trump administration, the Education Department and other agencies have opened a flurry of civil rights investigations into colleges and K-12 schools. Some have targeted their diversity efforts and policies that allow transgender students to play on teams and use bathrooms aligning with their gender identities. Others have accused colleges of failing to address antisemitism.

Amid these investigations, the Trump administration has pressured colleges to strike deals with the federal government by freezing or pulling vast sums of federal research funding.

The University of Pennsylvania, for instance, resolved an Education Department investigation in July by agreeing to bar transgender women from competing on women’s sports teams. Penn also agreed to give Division I titles and records to cisgender women who had lost against Lia Thomas, a transgender woman who last competed on the university’s swim team in 2022.

The deal came after the Trump administration had pulled $175 million in federal contracts from Penn. Similarly, Columbia University and Brown University — which were both accused of failing to address campus antisemitism — have paid lofty sums to settle the administration’s allegations after the federal government froze hundreds of millions of dollars of their research grants.

The notice in the Unified Agenda says the Education Department plans to align civil rights enforcement procedures better with statutory requirements. The agency’s new regulations would pertain to enforcement of Title IX and Title VI. Title IX bars discrimination based on sex, while Title VI prohibits discrimination based on race, color or national origin.

The department did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.

Not every college targeted by the administration has been pressured into striking a deal.

The Trump administration froze $2.2 billion from Harvard University after the Ivy League institution refused to yield to demands to make sweeping changes to its admissions, hiring and campus policies. Harvard took the administration to court over the frozen funds, with a federal judge ruling in the university’s favor this week.

The Trump administration had said it was pulling the funding because the university had not done enough to address antisemitism on campus. Yet the judge overseeing the case said the evidence does not “reflect that fighting antisemitism was Defendants’ true aim in acting against Harvard.”

The Unified Agenda also provides a look at the agency’s other regulatory priorities, with changes coming down the pike for rules governing accreditation, the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, and colleges’ reporting requirements for foreign gifts and contracts.

The Education Department recently kicked off the process to craft regulations to implement the sweeping changes mandated by the massive domestic policy bill passed by Republicans this summer.

The legislation will phase out Grad PLUS loans, which allow graduate and professional students to borrow up to the cost of attendance. It also creates lifetime federal loan limits, with a cap of $100,000 for most graduate students and $200,000 for professional students. And it will consolidate a handful of federal loan repayment options into just two — one income-based repayment plan and one standard plan with fixed payments.

Additionally, the policy package threatens to cut off federal student loan eligibility to college programs that can’t prove they provide an earnings boost. Undergraduate programs, for example, must show that at least half of their graduates earn more than a typical high school student in their state.

The American Council on Education and over 40 other higher education groups have urged the Education Department to work with Congress to delay implementing these changes until July 1, 2027.

The Education Department is currently on track to issue the rules no earlier than March 2026 — and likely later than that given the complexity of the law, according to the letter. As a result, the regulations would “impose major changes to financial aid and student loan repayment for millions of students and borrowers only months before they take effect,” the organizations said.
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September 5, 2025
College Board Ends Tool to Share Geographic Context With Colleges

Landscape, a College Board tool for providing colleges with information about the educational environment of an applicant’s high school and neighborhood based on publicly available information, has been discontinued, the organization announced this week.

“As federal and state policy continues to evolve around how institutions use demographic and geographic information in admissions, we are making a change to ensure our work continues to effectively serve students and institutions,” College Board wrote in the short announcement.

Geographic recruitment has come under fire from the Trump administration. Attorney General Pamela Bondi, in a memo declaring various diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives unconstitutional, said that recruiting from specific areas or neighborhoods could be unlawful when it’s being done as a proxy for race. Experts have said that doing so is not a standard practice for universities.

Jon Boeckenstedt, a longtime enrollment manager, criticized the decision to discontinue Landscape in a post on LinkedIn.

“I’m no fan of College Board of course … but I thought Landscape was a good and thoughtful product,” he wrote. “Now, it’s going away. You don’t have to be Wile E. Coyote to figure out why. Someone in DC has suggested it’s too close to ‘race based admissions’ (a thing that does not exist) and ‘it’d be a shame if something happened to your company.’ Or their lawyers rolled over voluntarily.”

Edward Blum, the founder of Students for Fair Admissions, the group that successfully challenged affirmative action at the Supreme Court, lauded the decision.

“Since the 2023 Supreme Court opinion in our Harvard and UNC cases, Students for Fair Admissions raised has concerns that Landscape was little more than a disguised proxy for race in the admissions process. We are gratified that this problematic tool will no longer be used to influence who is and who is not admitted to America’s colleges and universities,” he wrote in a statement. “This decision represents another important step toward ensuring that all students are treated as individuals, not as representatives of a racial or ethnic group.”

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September 5, 2025
Agencies Share Guidance on Foreign Threats at U.S. Colleges

Federal agencies say that research at American universities contributes to the country’s national security and colleges need to guard against foreign threats.

Warning American colleges and universities about increasing foreign threats to research, a group of federal intelligence agencies and the Education Department released new guidance this week outlining how the institutions can better protect themselves.

For example, the 40-page “Safeguarding Academia” bulletin in part encourages colleges and researchers to be transparent about who else is involved in a research project, noting that failing to disclose foreign collaborations could lead to sanctions. The agencies urged researchers to do their due diligence on any potential collaborators and outlined other cybersecurity best practices.

“Protecting the integrity of U.S. research—while fostering international collaboration—is critical to maintaining a robust and secure research ecosystem,” the bulletin states. “Striking this balance is essential to preserving academic freedom, safeguarding researchers’ lifework, and ensuring that innovation continues to thrive in a secure and principled manner.”

James Cangialosi, the acting director at the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, added in a statement that while American colleges conduct research key to the country’s global competitiveness and national security, “foreign adversaries are increasingly exploiting the open and collaborative environment of U.S. academic institutions for their own gain.”

“Today’s bulletin highlights this evolving security threat and provides mitigation strategies that academic institutions can implement to better protect their research, their institutions, as well as their staff and students,” Cangialosi said. “With the new school year starting, it’s critical to get these materials in the hands of academic institutions now.”

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August 27, 2025
Colleges struggle to make manufacturing training hot again

ELYRIA, Ohio — Nolan Norman had no idea what microelectronic manufacturing entailed when his adviser at Midview High suggested he take the school’s new class on it last year.

Yet once he started fusing metal to circuit boards, he says he was hooked. “When I was little, I thought that wizards made these things,” the 18-year-old joked of the electronics he’s now able to assemble. Despite long “hating” the idea of college, he was motivated to enroll in the microelectronic manufacturing bachelor’s degree program at nearby Lorain County Community College this fall. He’s spent the summer working in a job in the field that gives him both college credit and pays $18 an hour. Said Norman: “Now I’m seeing the path to get to be one of these wizards.”

Norman’s path wasn’t accidental: Two years ago, Lorain County Community College partnered with Midview High to create the course, one of several ways the college is trying to recruit and train more young people for jobs in manufacturing.

Nationally, more than 400,000 manufacturing jobs are going unfilled, many of them in advanced manufacturing, which requires the sort of high-tech skills and postsecondary credentials that Norman is working toward. President Donald Trump is leveraging tariffs in part, he has said, to grow manufacturing jobs in the United States, including those that involve machinery or robotics and training after high school.

Nolan Norman, 18, an incoming freshman at Lorain County Community College, observes a circuit board under a microscope on Aug. 6 in Elyria, Ohio. Credit: Dustin Franz for The Hechinger Report

Yet as it is, colleges have struggled to add and revise their training based on employer input and prepare students for tomorrow’s jobs, not just today’s. In the area surrounding Lorain County Community College, officials estimate that they’d have to teach four times the number of students to meet today’s unfilled manufacturing jobs.

Gogebic Community College, in rural Michigan, suspended its 22-year-old manufacturing technology program this spring because of low enrollment. “We could not get people into it,” registrar Karen Ball said, speaking in her personal capacity and not on behalf of the institution. “The needs in manufacturing are evolving so quickly, that to stay on top of it is too difficult.”

And then there is the history of manufacturing in communities like Norman’s, where so many factories moved to other countries in recent decades. The manufacturing workforce in the Great Lakes region shrunk by 35 percent between 2000 and 2010, a loss of 1.6 million jobs. But nationwide manufacturing has seen some recovery since then, rising from 11.5 million manufacturing jobs in 2010 to 12.9 million today, according to an analysis by the Economic Innovation Group.

“If your family experienced tumultuous layoffs in steel or automotives, they may see manufacturing as a risky pathway rather than a solid pathway,” said Marisa White, vice president for enrollment management and student services at Lorain County Community College. “Individuals are like, ‘I don’t want my kids to go into something like that.’”

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White and other Lorain officials, though, have been slowly making strides in adding more students in recent years — and in trying to keep up with the needs of companies.

Printed circuit boards before components are attached in a lab at Lorain County Community College in Elyria, Ohio. Credit: Dustin Franz for The Hechinger Report

In addition to partnering with Midview High, staff from the college set up tables at food banks and Boys and Girls Clubs where they answer questions about its manufacturing degree and certificate programs, and even partner with a nearby manufacturing nonprofit that uses holograms and a robot dog to get the attention of high school students. That is paying off, officials say. The college now produces 120 graduates each year in advanced manufacturing — a category that includes industrial engineering tech, mechanical engineering tech, welding, automation and microelectronics — compared to 43, a decade ago.

It has also cultivated a large network of local employers and a system to do market research before launching certificate programs. In some cases, it partners with companies that pay for employees to get training at Lorain college. In a classroom on a recent Wednesday, one of those electrician apprentices, Tyler Tector, 25, had rigged a series of plastic tubes to a small air pump. He hoped it would generate enough suction to keep its grip on his lab partner’s smartphone, which dangled precariously in the air (and already had a cracked screen from some previous misadventure).

The assignment was part of a class in practical applications of fluid power. Tector’s employer, Ford Motor Co., was sending him and a small group of other apprentice electricians to take this class once a week, so they could better work with the growing number of robots at the local engine plant.

Nick Wade, an electrical apprentice for Ford Motor Co., works on a circuitry exercise during professor Brian Iselin’s practical applications of fluid power course at Lorain County Community College in Elyria, Ohio. Credit: Dustin Franz for The Hechinger Report

“Robots are the best co-workers,” joked Tector, who added that he’s not worried about bots putting him out of a job because so many humans are needed to fix them. “They do exactly what you tell them to do. They don’t ask questions. They don’t yell and complain.” They are finicky though, he added. If anything in a robot’s area gets bumped out of place even a fraction of an inch, that could throw the machine off and require reprogramming.

So many employers told college officials they need technicians with basic knowledge across a range of trades that the college is starting a new associate degree program in the fall called Multicraft Industrial Maintenance that will include lessons like the one Tector is doing but in a condensed format.

“Because of the high-tech nature of things, employers don’t want students siloed into trades anymore,” said Brian Iselin, an assistant professor in manufacturing who is leading the effort.

Johnny Vanderford, who leads the college’s microelectronic manufacturing degree program, often spends part of his lunch break scouring LinkedIn for the latest job postings by local employers to see what skills they are looking for. His program’s model involves finding every student a paid internship, and students can take classes two days a week or in the evening to have the rest of the time free for paid work in the field.

Professor Brian Iselin teaches a course to employees of Ford’s Cleveland Engine Plant No. 1 at Lorain County Community College in Elyria, Ohio. Credit: Dustin Franz for The Hechinger Report

Vanderford pointed to a PowerPoint slide showing more than 90 manufacturing companies in the area he said the college has worked with: “We basically tailor our curriculum to meet their workforce needs.” In some cases that means wedging into a class syllabus training on some specialized machine that might be used at only a handful of employers.

Rather than simply having advisory committees with a few large companies that meet occasionally, today Lorain and many other colleges follow a model that involves frequent discussions with company leaders, instructors directly participating in those meetings and a greater focus on the skills employers need.

“Those relationships take time,” said Shalin Jyotishi, managing director of the Future of Work and Innovation Economy Initiative at the think tank New America. He says that it is hard for other community colleges to replicate best practices from Lorain because they are labor-intensive to enact.

Employers also have a tendency to change their plans. For instance, when Tesla pledged to build an electrical vehicle plant in Flint, Michigan, the local Mott Community College started an EV program, said Jyotishi. But the plant never came. “The college still has a Tesla sign,” he said.

Related: After its college closes, a rural community fights to keep a path to education open

The numbers no longer add up at Gogebic Community College, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

When the college suspended its program in manufacturing technology in May, it had just three students.

As with many programs at the college, a single employee was charged with administering and teaching. Doing all that plus staying on top of nearby companies’ workforce needs was “unsustainable,” said Ball, the registrar.

The few small manufacturers in the area all say they have different needs, rather than one clear set of skills, she said, noting that “you can’t be a generalist in manufacturing.” Even when the college does identify a needed skill to teach, it takes at least six months to a year to get the program approved by college leaders and the accreditor. By then, companies might need something different.

And the pay offered by small manufacturers is often low, despite an expectation of training beyond a high school diploma, said Ball.

The Richard Desich SMART Center at Lorain County Community College in Elyria, Ohio, houses the microelectronic manufacturing systems program, which teaches students about the manufacture of semiconductors. Credit: Dustin Franz for The Hechinger Report

Nationwide, automation has reduced the earning power for many manufacturing jobs, said Jyotishi of New America. “For a long time manufacturing was the bedrock of the middle class,” said Jyotishi. “That wage premium for manufacturing has actually gone away.”

And there’s a danger that as colleges aim to please employers, they will create programs that are too narrow, argues Davis Jenkins, senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Community College Research Center. (Editor’s note: The Hechinger Report, which produced this story, is an independent unit of Columbia’s Teachers College.) “You don’t want specific skills training — you don’t want to just train students to work in a fab,” he said, referring to a facility where microchips and other electronics are produced. “Whenever schools buy a lot of specific equipment for training, I worry a lot. What students really need are broader skills.”

Even Lorain doesn’t always find the right fit. During the pandemic, the college started what it calls fast-track programs, which typically run 16 weeks, across a range of professional fields (not just manufacturing). But because of mixed success attracting students, officials recently slimmed the list from 60 to 13, said Tracy Green, vice president of strategic and institutional development at Lorain County Community College. And the college recently started winding down a program in industrial safety because of a lack of student interest, even though there are still a large number of job postings by local companies for jobs with those skills, said Iselin.

One provision in Trump’s new “one big, beautiful bill” promises a boost to manufacturing education, however. For the first time, the law will allow low-income students to use federal Pell Grants for short-term certificate programs, in what is known as Workforce Pell. It’s a change many community college leaders have been calling for for years as they have created more short-term programs in response to demand by students and employers who want to quickly gain new skills in fast-changing areas, including manufacturing. But that program won’t be up and running until the 2026-27 academic year.

Related: Colleges partnered with an EV battery factory to train students and ignite the economy. Trump’s clean energy war complicates their plans

The promise of a big new employer moving to town can galvanize student interest in manufacturing.

In Ohio, the talk for years has been a $28 billion Intel chip manufacturing plant under construction in Columbus. The facility is expected to bring some 3,000 jobs to the area, and the company has committed $50 million to workforce education in the state, including $2 million to Lorain County Community College, which it used to buy new classroom equipment, support student scholarships, and pay for program development and instructor training.

Chris Dukles, 36, an electrician apprentice for Ford Motor Co., takes notes during a course taught by Brian Iselin at Lorain County Community College. Credit: Dustin Franz for The Hechinger Report

The top graduates in Lorain County Community College’s microelectronic manufacturing program each year typically get internships at Intel’s closest existing plant, which is in Chandler, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix. It’s a motivator to work hard in their classes, some students say.

Lia Douglas, a student in the microelectronic manufacturing program at Lorain, scored one of those slots and headed to Arizona last summer. The experience, though, was sobering.

“My plan really was to make a good impression with my internship, get a job maybe in Arizona even if it was for a year or two, and then try to move back to Ohio when they have an Ohio plant,” she said.

But one day last July, all the employees were unexpectedly summoned to an all-hands call where the company announced a wave of layoffs and reductions in some benefits that had interested Douglas, including a sabbatical program. This year, Intel announced that the opening of the Ohio plant has been delayed until 2030.

“I learned I had a little too much faith in a company and the promises of a company,” she said. “And it reminded me that at the end of the day, the company has to make money.”

She’s still glad she chose Lorain’s program, which has landed her several local internships and opened her eyes to the many small and mid-sized manufacturers in the area.

Lia Douglas is a student in the microelectronic manufacturing program at Lorain County Community College. Credit: Dustin Franz for The Hechinger Report

And she has been hooked on a career in making things ever since she was in middle school and a family friend taught her a bit of welding. Her hero was Adam Savage, co-host of the TV show “MythBusters,” who she even got to meet at a comic book convention in Cleveland.

Douglas complains that students are told in high school that they either have to choose a trade for hands-on work or an academic track to prepare for a career behind a desk that might involve design and project management. She says that as manufacturing changes, there’s plenty of room to do both. In fact, she says, when a group of doctoral students from Kent State University recently visited the college’s clean room, she was amused to see them struggle with some of the tools the students routinely use in the microelectronic manufacturing program.

“It takes as much brainpower to figure out what is the right tool for the right process as getting a Ph.D.,” she said.

Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at [email protected].

This story about manufacturing jobs was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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

Join us today.

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August 27, 2025
Week in review: UCLA and other colleges move to cut costs
Most clicked story of the week:

A federal judge struck down the U.S. Department of Education’s Feb. 14 guidance that threatened to revoke federal funding for colleges and K-12 schools that practiced diversity, equity and inclusion efforts it considers illegal. In her decision, the judge ruled that the guidance unconstitutionally put viewpoint-based restrictions on academic speech and used overly vague language about what was prohibited.

Number of the week: 6,000+

The number of international student visas the U.S. Department of State has revoked so far this year. The agency terminated between 200 and 300 of the visas over allegations of support for terrorism, a spokesperson said.

Staffing and investigations at the Education Department:
- The Education Department will reinstate over 260 laid-off Office for Civil Rights employees in small groups every other week, following a federal judge’s order. The restoration of staff will take place from Sept. 8 through Nov. 3, according to court filings.
- Almost three-quarters of financial aid administrators reported “noticeable changes” in the Federal Student Aid office’s communications and processing speed since the massive Education Department layoffs earlier this year, according to a survey from the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.
- Despite the decrease in staff, the department has continued to open civil rights investigations, announcing one last week at Haverford College. The agency cited allegations that the small Pennsylvania institution hadn’t done enough in response to campus antisemitism. A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit against Haverford over similar allegations earlier this year.
Budget cuts and restructuring:
- The University of California, Los Angeles paused faculty hiring through spring 2026 amid increasing attacks from the Trump administration and preexisting budget shortfalls. The public university is also consolidating its information technology teams, though it did not say if the process will include layoffs.
- The University of Louisiana at Lafayette will cut its operational and auxiliary spending by 5%, a move its interim president cast as proactive rather than reactive, KADN reported. While the university’s revenue is strong, he said, costs exceed it.
- Milligan University, in Tennessee, will cut six academic programs this fall to keep pace with a changing college market, the private institution’s president told WJHL. The affected programs enrolled 28 students.
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August 25, 2025
Federal Judge Rules in Favor of Religious Colleges in Minn.

Religious colleges that require students to sign a faith statement cannot be shut out of a Minnesota program that funds the dual enrollment of high school students in the state’s public and private postsecondary institutions, a federal judge ruled Friday.

U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel’s ruling overturns a Minnesota law prohibiting Christian colleges that participate in the state’s 40-year-old Postsecondary Enrollment Options program from forcing students to pass a religious test. The state Education Department and LGBTQ+ advocates had sought such legislation for years on the grounds that faith statements discriminate against students who are not Christian, straight or cisgender. It finally passed in 2023, under a Democratic State Legislature.

The families of several high school students seeking to earn credits at two Christian institutions in the state, Crown College and the University of Northwestern, then sued, arguing that the law violated their First Amendment right to religious freedom. The ban on faith statements was suspended while the legal battle played out.

“This dispute requires the court to venture into the delicate constitutional interplay of religion and publicly-funded education,” Judge Brasel said in her 70-page ruling. “In doing so, the court heeds the Supreme Court’s instruction that the First Amendment gives special solicitude to the rights of religious organizations.”

Brasel noted in her ruling that the two Christian colleges have received nearly $40 million to cover the costs of the PSEO program since the 2017–18 academic year; she wrote that the University of Northwestern admits about 70 percent of dual-enrollment applicants. Over all, some 60,000 high school students have benefited from PSEO, The Minneapolis Star Tribune noted.

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represented the plaintiffs, applauded the decision.

“Minnesota tried to cut off educational opportunities to thousands of high schoolers simply for their faith. That’s not just unlawful—it’s shameful,” said Becket senior counsel Diana Thomson, according to the Associated Press. “This ruling is a win for families who won’t be strong-armed into abandoning their beliefs, and a sharp warning to politicians who target them.”

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August 25, 2025
A ‘Great Defection’ threatens to empty universities and colleges of top teaching talent

Paulina Cossette spent six years getting a doctoral degree with the goal of becoming a university professor. But it wasn’t long before she gave up on that path.

With higher education under political assault, and opportunities as well as job security diminished by enrollment declines, Cossette felt burnt out and disillusioned. So she quit her hard-won job as an assistant professor of American government at a small private college in Maryland and used the skills she’d learned to go into business for herself as a freelance copy editor.

Now Cossette is hearing from other newly minted Ph.D.s and tenured faculty who want out — so many, she’s expanded her business to help them leave academia, as she did.

Seemingly relentless attacks and funding cuts since the start of Donald Trump’s second presidential term have been “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said Cossette, who left higher education on the eve of the pandemic, in 2019. “I’m hearing from a lot more people that it’s too much.”

An exodus appears to be under way of Ph.D.s and faculty generally, who are leaving academia in the face of political, financial and enrollment crises. It’s a trend federal data and other sources show began even before Trump returned to the White House.

On top of everything else affecting higher education, this is likely to reduce the quality of education for undergraduates, experts say.

Nearly 70 percent of people receiving doctorates were already leaving higher education for industry, government and other sectors, not including those without job offers or who opted to continue their studies, according to the most recent available figures from the National Science Foundation — up from fewer than 50 percent decades ago.

As for faculty, more than a third of provosts reported higher-than-usual turnover last year, in a survey by Hanover Research and the industry publication Inside Higher Ed. That was before the turmoil of this late winter and spring.

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

“People who can get out will get out,” said L. Maren Wood, director and CEO of the Center for Graduate Career Success, which works with doctoral and other graduate students at 69 colleges and universities to provide career help.

If the spree of general job-switching that followed Covid was dubbed “the Great Resignation,” Wood said, what she’s seeing now in higher education is “the Great Defection.”

Getting a Ph.D. is a traditional pipeline to an academic career. Now some of the brightest candidates — who have spent years doing cutting-edge research in their fields to prepare for faculty jobs — are leaving higher education or signing on with universities abroad, Wood said.

“It’s going to affect the quality of a student’s experience if they don’t get to study with those leading minds, who are going into private industry or to other countries,” she said.

“What’s the joke about those who can’t do, teach? You don’t want to be in a situation where the only people left in your classrooms are the ones who can’t do anything else.”

Related: So much for saving the planet. Climate careers, and many others, evaporate for class of 2025

Parents sending children to college in the fall should know that they’ll be taking classes “with a faculty member who is worried about his or her research funding and who doesn’t have the help of graduate student teaching assistants. And that’s really going to impact the quality of your student’s experience,” said Julia Kent, a vice president at the Council of Graduate Schools, who conducts research about Ph.D. career pathways.

“The quality of undergraduate education is at stake here,” Kent said.

Even Ph.D.s who want to work in academia are being thwarted.

During the Great Recession and the pandemic — two recent periods when there were few available faculty jobs — doctoral candidates could continue their studies until things got better, Wood said. This time, the Trump administration’s cuts to research funding have stripped many of that option.

“This is way worse” than those earlier crises, she said. “Doctoral students are in panic mode.”

Related: How Trump is changing higher education: The view from 4 campuses

The same deep federal cuts mean doctoral candidates in science, technology, engineering, math and other fields can’t complete the research they need to be eligible for what few academic jobs do become available.

“You’re basically knee-capping that younger generation, which undermines the intergenerational dynamism that takes place in higher education. And that trickles down into the classroom,” said Isaac Kamola, an associate professor of political science at Trinity College and head of the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom at the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP.

Doctoral candidates early in their programs are questioning whether they should stay, said Wood. That could reduce the supply of future faculty. So will the fact that some universities have reduced the number of new Ph.D. candidates they will accept or have rescinded admission offers, citing federal budget cuts. Fewer prospective candidates are likely to apply, said Timothy Burke, a professor of history at Swarthmore College who has written about this topic.

“Our graduating students right now are thinking differently about what it means to start a doctorate,” Burke said.

Meanwhile, he said, “all the things that were dismaying to many faculty of long standing just feel worse. People who would have been totally content to stay put, whose prospects were good, who had good positions, who were more or less happy — now they’re thinking hard about whether there’s a future in this.”

That means undergraduates could experience fewer available classroom professors and teaching and graduate assistants or the “only tenuous presence of faculty who are thinking hard about going somewhere else,” he said. “There are going to be programs that are going to be shut. There are going to be departments running on fumes.”

The route to a university faculty job has always been hard. Finishing a doctoral degree takes a median of nearly six years, according to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences — nearly seven in the arts and humanities.

Doctoral students who manage to finish their programs have always had to fight for faculty positions, even before institutions announced cutbacks and hiring freezes.

Universities enroll far more doctoral candidates, to provide cheap labor as teaching and research assistants, than they will ever hire. The number of doctoral degrees awarded rose from 163,827 in 2010 to an estimated 207,000 this year, the National Center for Education Statistics says — a 26 percent increase, during a period in which the number of full-time faculty positions went up at less than half that rate.

Related: These federal programs help low-income students get to an through college. Trump wants to pull the funding

With colleges and universities under stress, still more doctoral candidates now face the prospect of spending years “training for a career that isn’t actually available,” said Ashley Ruba, a Ph.D. who left higher education to work at Meta, where she builds virtual reality systems.

“If you told someone going to law school that they couldn’t get a job as a lawyer, I don’t think they’d do it,” said Ruba, who is also the founder of a career-coaching service for fellow Ph.D.s called After Academia.

People already in faculty jobs appear equally on edge. More than 1 in 3 said in a recent survey that they have less academic freedom than in the past; half said they worry about online harassment.And faculty salaries have been stagnant. Pay declined for the three years starting with the pandemic, when adjusted for inflation, the AAUP reports, and has still not recovered to pre-pandemic levels.

People with Ph.D.s can earn more outside academia — an average of 37 percent more, one study found. Employers value skills including active learning, critical thinking, problem-solving and resilience, which is “everything you learn in a doctoral program,” Ruba said.

The proportion of faculty considering leaving their jobs who are looking for work outside of academia has spiked. Before the pandemic, it was between 1 and 8 percent each year. Since then, it has been between 11 and 16 percent, according to R. Todd Benson, executive director and principal investigator at the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, or COACHE. The figure comes from surveys conducted at 54 major universities and colleges.

Related: More women are landing construction jobs. Trump’s war on DEI could change that

A Facebook group of dissatisfied academics, called The Professor Is Out, has swelled to nearly 35,000 members. It was started by Karen Kelsky, a former anthropology professor who previously helped people get jobs in academia and now coaches them on how to leave it.

“It’s difficult to overcome the stereotype of a university professor, which is that they’re coddled, they’re overprivileged, they’re arrogant and just enjoying total job security that nobody else has,” said Kelsky, who also wrote “The Professor Is In: The Essential Guide to Turning Your Ph.D. Into a Job,” a second edition of which is due out this fall.

Today, “they are overworked. They’re grossly underpaid. They are being called the enemy. And they’re bailing on academia,” she said.

“Every time I talk to a tenured professor, they tell me how miserable they are and how desperate they are to get out,” said Kelsky. “And there’s no way this isn’t having real-life, tangible impacts on the quality of education students are getting.”

Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, [email protected] or jpm.82 on Signal.

This story about faculty and doctoral recipients leaving academia was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

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

Join us today.

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August 20, 2025
Colleges Expect to Reduce Student Support Budgets

College and university staff often bemoan that they’re being asked to do more with less, and a recent survey underscores that sentiment. Thirty percent of institutions surveyed by Tyton Partners expect decreases of greater than 2 percent to their student support budgets over the next three academic years, while fewer than 25 percent expect an increase in budgets.

Financial pressures are tied in part to declining enrollments, as well as to changes in federal structures that reduce access to aid, according to the report.

Eighty percent of institutions expect budgets for support services in enrollment and admissions to shrink, and 50 percent anticipate cuts to student support services. Other student-facing offices expecting declines are academic program delivery and innovation (33 percent), career readiness (29 percent), and research development and funding (20 percent).

Threats to international student enrollment and visa complications could also significantly harm institutional resources and student success efforts; nearly 50 percent of four-year institutions cited international enrollment as critical to sustaining support budgets.

Executive orders and state legislation limiting efforts to support specific racial, ethnic and gender minorities have also reduced institutional investment in identity-based programs. Forty-four percent of public four-year colleges have seen programming for affinity groups decrease over the past 12 months, compared to 28 percent of two-year colleges and 25 percent of private four-year colleges.

While financial threats may hamper institutions’ ability to increase or scale offerings, a majority of student respondents said they’re not using the resources available on campus at this time anyway.

Students say they don’t take advantage of the support offices because they don’t see the relevancy (42 percent), because they doubt the service would be helpful, have not needed the service or want to do things on their own. Thirty percent said the services were offered at inconvenient hours, lacked walk-in appointments or had no flexibility in modality.

Methodology

Tyton Partners’ “Driving Toward a Degree” report includes responses from 468 administrators, 1,100 front-line support staff members, 1,038 four-year students and 403 community college students. The study was fielded in the spring. Those at public four-year colleges made up the greatest share of respondents, followed by private four-year institutions and two-year colleges.

Affordability: When administrators were asked how they’d respond to federal financial aid cuts during a time of financial constraint, 41 percent of public four-year colleges said they plan to expand institutional aid to offset students’ lost funding, compared to 25 percent of two-year colleges and 30 percent of private four-year institutions. Four-year private colleges and universities also reported re-evaluating enrollment strategies based on aid dependency, raising concerns about access for low-income students who may not be able to pay the full price of tuition, according to the report.

Students say financial aid and support are critical to their retention; previous studies point to cost being one of the top reasons why a student leaves higher education. Over half of students (59 percent) in Tyton’s report said financial aid counseling is very important to their decision to re-enroll, compared to 52 percent who indicated academic registration was very important and 49 percent who cited mental health counseling.

Staffing constraints: Retaining support staff is another challenge that institutions reported; over 60 percent say they’re having a hard time filling vacancies or face hiring freezes in support departments.

For many students, academic advising is a cornerstone of success in higher education, but many departments are under stress due to high caseloads (42 percent) and frequent turnover in staff (31 percent), according to the report. Despite these headwinds, 74 percent of public four-year institutions and 72 percent of large institutions (those with more than 10,000 undergraduates) plan to increase the caseloads of staff members to recoup lost revenue.

“Gaps in staffing directly erode advising capacity and quality,” the report authors wrote. “Our survey shows that advisers managing caseloads of 300 or more students are not only less able to engage regularly with those they serve but also more likely to leave their roles. This dynamic fuels a cycle of turnover and declining support quality, undermining institutions’ ability to sustain consistent, high-impact advising.”

Other popular strategies institutions may employ to combat staffing challenges include reassigning duties across departments, reducing or delaying services, or shifting services to peer advisers or part-time staff members.

To combat large caseloads, some institutions are considering implementing structured group advising sessions and developing flexible capacity for peak times, the survey noted.

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August 20, 2025