Tag: dont

  • NJ Teachers, Don’t Quit Your Jobs

    NJ Teachers, Don’t Quit Your Jobs

    What is going on in this graph at the bottom that juxtaposes the number of New Jersey educators with the number of students enrolled in NJ school districts?

    This: Over the last decade, staffing is up while enrollment is down, according to data collected by Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab. New Jersey isn’t an outlier here because the trend of increased staffing and decreased student population is happening across the country, fueled by outsized federal grants (called ESSER) to each state after the pandemic. That money was intended to ameliorate learning loss suffered by students locked out of school, a short-term infusion never intended to be baked into district payrolls.

    During 2021-2024, the time period when the federal government distributed that ESSER money (total: about $2.6 billion to NJ), NJ school districts hired about 10,000 additional staff members, represented by the red line on the graph. By 2024 we employed over 249,000 educators.

    But here’s the rub or, rather, two: first, we have what analysts call “the fiscal cliff” because the federal infusions dried up last year, leaving districts cash-strapped. Second, over the last decade enrollment across NJ schools is down by over 100,000 students. Since enrollment factors into our state funding formula, many districts take another budgetary hit.

    Edunomics leaders Marguerite Roza and Katherine Silberstein write in the 74, “districts are paying for more employees than they can afford. ​​To make matters worse, during the same time period, districts have been losing students. That means that state and local dollars (which tend to be driven by enrollment counts) are unlikely to make up the gap.”

    What’s next?

    “Right-sizing,” i.e., districts across the country will be laying off staff members because fewer students need fewer teachers and less money means less to spend on payroll.

    The bad news? Some teachers will lose their jobs and districts will be facing tough math to balance budgets.

    The good news? With the exception of fields STEM, special education, and multilingual learners, the teacher shortage is over.

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  • Colleges Don’t “Over-Accommodate” Disabilities (opinion)

    Colleges Don’t “Over-Accommodate” Disabilities (opinion)

    In the current climate, one might question whether academic accommodations are the most urgent avenue for discourse. Yet a pattern of uncontested opinion pieces in spaces like The Atlantic (the newly published “Accommodation Nation”), The Chronicle of Higher Education (“Are Colleges Getting Disability Accommodations All Wrong?), The Wall Street Journal (“Colleges Bend the Rules for More Students, Give Them Extra Help”) and, indeed, Inside Higher Ed itself (“How Accommodating Can (Should) I Be?”) speaks to the enduring cultural conflict around how the Americans With Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act are actualized in higher education.

    As members of the executive board of the Association on Higher Education and Disability (AHEAD) in Virginia—a professional organization for staff of disability service offices—It is our intention to define and defuse the recurring arguments of this specific “type” of opinion article, which for convenience we will call the “Do Colleges Over-Accommodate?” piece.

    Setting the Table With Statistics

    It is common to see these claims begin from an assumption that disability accommodations “are skyrocketing”—a claim that sensationalizes statistics. One author cites the large volume of accommodation letters sent by a university per semester. Such a claim is rooted in either misunderstanding or deliberate misrepresentation of accommodations. At any institution, the total count of all accommodation letters sent appears disproportionately large, because each student is enrolled in multiple courses.

    A better accounting would come from data on the representation of disabled students within the institution. Recent National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) data shows that among public, 4-year institutions, 10.1 percent of them report that students with disabilities make up 10 percent or more of their student population. This is an increase from the 1.5 percent of institutions in 2010–2011, but why is it shocking that disabled students also want to go to universities that their nondisabled peers attend?

    The NCES data do suggest that disabled students are more likely to enroll in private institutions (more than 23 percent of private nonprofit colleges report that students with disabilities make up 10 percent or more of their student population). While this is supportive of a claim that students from privileged backgrounds have higher access to accommodations (and indeed, research supports this) it is telling that authors who put elite institutions in the spotlight are more focused on reducing accommodations available to these students than on increasing the support available to students at less elite institutions.

    It is also important to view these figures in the context of the post-ADA era. The ADA is only 35 years old, and its amendments passed in 2008. Today’s students come from an environment where they are more likely to expect accessibility, which is reflected in these “skyrocketing”—or “breathtaking”—numbers.

    Categorizing the Case Against Accommodations

    In our review of the “Do Colleges Over-Accommodate” archetype, we saw a clear pattern of essential recurring arguments:

    1. Academic accommodations unfairly advantage disabled students.
    2. Disabled students “game the system.”
    3. More rigid documentation standards are needed to “create equity.”

    In these arguments, we see unfortunate parallels to other attacks on civil rights playing out in our public discourse. Each individual claim requires a full-throated counterargument—which we will provide below.

    Claim: Accommodations Convey Advantage

    This is the most prevalent claim within these articles, and we will spend the greatest effort defusing it. This claim suggests that all accommodations create advantages for students with disabilities—that we should fear for “fairness,” or that accommodations will compromise rigor. In this piece, the author asserts that additional testing time for students with disabilities “is as unfair to other students as a head start would be to other runners.”

    This metaphor reveals a flawed assumption—that education is inherently a place of competition, with a fixed number of winners and losers. A zero-sum game. But universities are not limited in their capacity to provide degrees, nor is there a fixed number of A’s available.

    Still, there is value in ensuring fairness. Disability services officers (DSOs) develop rigorous criteria for assessing and analyzing cases where academic accommodations would “fundamentally alter” key aspects of courses. DSOs also seek to apply a measured approach to approval of accommodations, consistent with professional guidance. The purpose of accommodations—to return to the metaphor—is ensuring that students run in the same race.

    Research such as this 2022 U.K.-based study, which found that accommodations in most cases “worked as intended and helped [with] leveling the playing field,” challenges this narrative further.

    The work of DSOs relies on an interactive process at the individual level. A student who is dyslexic may benefit from a dictation tool for writing essays in a way that another would not. A student who has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder may benefit from a quiet testing environment—but not all students with the same diagnosis would have the same needs. The individualized identification and selection of supports to address disability-specific barriers is the cornerstone of DSO work, and it is work that our offices conduct effectively.

    Claim: Disabled Students ‘Game the System’

    Running through these articles is an implicit—at times explicit—assumption that DSOs are either tricked by students and their medical providers into approving accommodations inappropriately, or that students deliberately misuse even appropriate accommodations. Implicitly, this assumption is communicated to readers through less-than-subtle reliance on words like “claim” for how students communicate their disability, rather than “disclose.” Explicitly, this line of argument appeals to scholarship debating the ways in which individual disabilities are defined.

    Some of the most-cited sources in support of this claim are of questionable reliability. For example, this article from the Canadian Journal Psychological Injury and Law has been held as “sobering” evidence that DSOs are insufficiently rigorous in approving accommodations. In the study, researchers asked DSO staff if they would accommodate a fictitious prospective student based solely on what the researchers deemed insufficient documentation.

    Setting aside gaps in context between Canada and the U.S., what a DSO professional would hypothetically do and what they would do when presented with a live student are different. Our professional guidelines encourage the use of self-report, triangulated with other forms of information. Without following a student through the interactive process, the authors project bias and incorrect assumptions onto the work of DSO professionals—just as asking a doctor to suggest treatment without an exam would likely produce similarly “sobering” results.

    Claim: Rigid Documentation Requirements Create Equity

    The inaccuracy of this claim is likely to be apparent to anyone involved in accommodations review. Moreover, some of the sources cited by proponents of this claim directly contradict it. For example, Ashley Yull’s 2015 article about the intersection of race class, and disability notes:

    “Premising access to accommodations in post-secondary education on receipt of a psychiatric diagnosis magnifies the negative impact of childhood poverty.”

    And Bea Waterfield and Emma Whelan observed in their 2017 article:

    “SES [socioeconomic status] contributes to the experience of disadvantage for learning disabled students when they lack the financial means to obtain required diagnoses.”

    It is no wonder that scholars would dispute that documentation is a lever for equity, given the staggering cost of psychological assessments. There is variance in the pricing of these assessments, but in some areas they can cost between $1,000 and $5,000. While some university-operated assessment centers can be less costly, they typically have very long waiting lists. Meanwhile, 1 in 5 dependent undergraduate students come from families below the poverty line—and nearly half of independent students (those without financial support from family) met this criterion.

    Financial cost is not the only barrier to accessing rigorous documentation. Mental health providers experience significant demand, stretching wait times and disproportionately impacting rural and marginalized communities.

    If DSOs demanded that each student claiming a learning disability or ADHD diagnosis supply such a document, accommodations would be unavailable to poorer students and to many students from rural areas. For all students, the provision of accommodations would be delayed. This is why those working as DSOs are often so willing to work with students when they can articulate an access barrier. To claim otherwise can be understood as either a statement of ignorance about disability services or, perhaps, as reflective of a desire for accommodation requests to diminish.

    Conclusion

    As we noted, our goal is to present a measured response to these opinion essays. Having done so, we will do our readers the service of stating our own view:

    • Disability services professionals are thoughtful and effective in discharging their responsibilities in the interactive process.
    • Disabled students belong on college campuses, and accommodations serve to enable access to higher education.
    • Accommodations level the playing field for students within environments that were built without considering their very existence.
    • Rigidity in the interactive process burdens the student, and these burdens disproportionately impact marginalized communities.

    We encourage readers to draw their own conclusions—however, in doing so, we encourage you to listen to the voices of the disabled community, disability services professionals, and those with stakes and experience in navigating the accommodations process.

    In the current climate, where we are asked to consider whether empathy might be a sin, and whether disability might be incongruent with merit in the workplace, it is important to uplift these voices. It is important to stand firm in the knowledge of the expertise and value of those in helping professions. It is important to affirm that all means all, and that includes students with disabilities.

    Chris Parthemos and Martina Svyantek are the president-elect and president, respectively, of the Association on Higher Education and Disability in Virginia.

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  • You must use AI! Don’t use AI!

    You must use AI! Don’t use AI!

    But even when people are encouraged to use AI, that use comes with restrictions and these restrictions will differ from workplace to workplace.

    Rules for use

    At Reuters, Barrett said, there is a set of AI principles that all journalists must follow and a corporate policy that covers the use of AI for all use of data and tools throughout the organization.

    “We have a rule that no visuals may be created or edited using generative AI as news photos must show reality as it happened in front of the camera,” she said. “All the tools we are creating and approving for wider use are based on taking source material, creating content or analysis from that and, crucially, checking the veracity before publishing. Everything must keep to our tone and standards.”

    At Reuters, all reporters and photojournalists are accountable for everything they publish, Barrett said. “If we find that there has been irresponsible use of AI, there is a chain of custody through our editing systems which means we can track back to where the AI was used badly,” she said.

    Reuters is trying to stay ahead of the game in a world that is rapidly incorporating AI into just about everything. But not all organizations have the resources to keep up.

    For many of the people Savannah Jenkins works with, AI is viewed as a direct threat to their business. Jenkins is a communications manager at Onja, a social enterprise in Madagascar that trains underprivileged youth to become software developers. “It’s one of the world’s poorest nations and the jobs these students land after the program allow them to support their families and extricate themselves from poverty,” Jenkins said. “AI is a direct threat to entry-level coders and the enterprise is having to adapt to this threat.”

    Still, she acknowledged that overall, it is generally accepted that AI is here to stay and that it can benefit even small organizations. “As a comms professional working in the nonprofit space, there are a lot of tools that can help small, under-resourced teams do more, especially around content development,” she said. “For example, the AI-powered tools in Canva allow smaller outfits to deliver highquality graphics.”

    An AI future in flux

    The bottom line is that we are in an experimental period where a very new technology is still being developed and tried out in different ways that are new and untested.

    This creates all kinds of worries for people like Barrett.

    “I worry that somebody will steal a lead on us,” she said. “Another publisher, a competitor and, most likely, one of the AI companies coming up with a whizz-bang AI-driven news service or product that damages our business, our industry and democracy of well-informed people.”

    She also worries that someone will use a tool that has not properly been tested and inadvertently divulge information from Reuters that shouldn’t go out to the public.

    Her worries aren’t confined to internal use at Reuters. “I also worry about people getting into arguments or obsessive conversations with AI tools,” she said. “There is increasing proof that the sycophancy and attempts to keep users engaged with the chatbots can be very bad for you.”

    Questions to consider:

    1. Why is the use of AI in the work world so inconsistent?

    2. Why is it important for corporations and nonprofits to have policies in place on the use of AI?

    3. Do you feel prepared to use AI in any job you might get?

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  • Why Your Study Systems Don’t Work Anymore

    Why Your Study Systems Don’t Work Anymore

    By Katie Azevedo, M.Ed.

    You spent all of sophomore year perfecting your study system. Organized, color-coded flashcard, easy to review: it worked beautifully. Then junior year hit, and suddenly those same study methods feel completely useless when you’re preparing for exams.

    What happened? Well, here’s what didn’t happen: You didn’t suddenly forget how to study. And you didn’t suddenly get ignorant.

    What did happen is that something leveled up, but your system didn’t level up with it.

    As a study skills expert with 20 years of teaching experience, I see this all the time. Students come to me frustrated because a method that used to work has stopped working. They assume they’re doing something wrong, or that they just need to “try harder.” 

    But the reality is usually much simpler: their system stopped working for a very specific, identifiable reason.

    An important note before we go further: This post assumes you’re starting with a legitimate study system, meaning you’re already using active recall and spaced repetition as your foundation.

    If you’re re-reading notes, highlighting textbooks, or cramming the night before, those aren’t study systems that “stopped working”: they’re passive methods that never worked in the first place. Active recall (testing yourself) and spaced repetition (spreading study sessions over time) are non-negotiables at every level. This post is about what happens when you’re using those evidence-based methods correctly, but they still feel less effective than they used to be.

    In this post, I’m breaking down the five main reasons legitimate study systems fail, and what each signal means. Understanding why your system stopped working is the first step to figuring out what to do next.

    Why Your Study Systems Don’t Work Anymore

    Below are the five primary reasons why your “good” study systems stopped working. You may find that one, two, or all apply to your situation.

    1. Developmental Transitions: You’ve Leveled Up, But Your System Hasn’t

    Academic demands don’t just get “harder” as you progress through school: they fundamentally change. What worked in high school might be perfectly executed active recall, but if you’re still using high school-level active recall in college, you’re bringing the right tool at the wrong intensity.

    As you move to harder courses or higher levels (from high school to college, for example), the following three changes happen:

    1. The cognitive demand increases.

    High school tests often reward memorization and recall. College exams (and especially graduate-level work) require synthesis, application, and critical analysis. 

    In other words, your flashcards might have been perfect for memorizing vocabulary or formulas, but now you need to apply those concepts to novel situations or synthesize information across multiple sources.

    2. The external structure disappears.

    In high school, teachers often build review into class time, tell you exactly what to study, and remind you about deadlines. 

    But in college, professors expect you to figure out what’s important, create your own review schedule, and manage longer-term projects without check-ins. Your study system (and you!) now has to do the work your teacher used to do.

    3. The pace accelerates.

    You might have had a week to prepare for a high school test covering two chapters. In college, you might have three days to prepare for an exam covering six weeks of material across lectures, readings, and discussions.

    What This Signal Means and What to Do:

    Your active recall methods aren’t wrong; they’re just not scaled to match your current demands. Here’s how to level up your study methods:

    1. Extend your spaced repetition timeline.

    If you used to start studying three days before a test, you now need to start a week or two out. If you used to start a week out, now start two weeks out. Spread your active recall sessions over more days to account for the increased volume of material.

    2. Add more complex practice problems.

    Don’t just test yourself on definitions — test yourself on application. Look for practice problems at the end of textbook chapters, old exams from your professor (just ask; they may say no, but it’s worth asking), or create your own “what if” scenarios that force you to apply concepts in new ways.

    3. Create study materials that force higher-order thinking.

    Instead of flashcards that ask “What is X?”, create questions like “How does X relate to Y?” or “What would happen if X changed?” Write practice essay prompts for yourself. Teach the concept out loud as if explaining it to someone who’s never taken the class. Make Venn diagrams.

    2. The Invisible Skill Gap: Your Classes Require Skills You Don’t Have Yet

    Many teachers assume you have certain skills that you were never actually taught, especially executive function skills like planning, prioritizing, and self-monitoring. Or metacognitive skills like knowing how to study effectively or recognizing when you actually understand something versus when you just think you do.

    These invisible skills weren’t required at earlier academic levels, so your study system didn’t need to account for them. But now they’re essential, and their absence is why it feels like your system is failing. (Again, it’s not that your system is failing…it’s just that it needs to scale up.)

    Examples of invisible skill gaps:

    1. Backwards planning (aka reverse engineering). 

    In high school, most assignments were short-term: read chapter 3, answer the questions, done. In college, you have research papers due in six weeks, and you need to break that down into smaller tasks and deadlines yourself. Your planner worked before because you just wrote down what the teacher told you to do. Now you need a system that helps you create your own deadlines.

    2. Managing competing priorities.

    When you had five classes with predictable homework each night, a simple to-do list was often enough. Now you have fewer classes but longer-term projects, exams on completely different schedules, and activities outside of school. You need a system that helps you see the big picture and make strategic decisions about where to focus your time.

    3. Critical reading vs. just reading.

    You could sometimes get away with passive reading in high school because teachers reviewed everything in class. Now you’re expected to extract key concepts, identify arguments, and connect ideas across readings on your own. Your old annotation system captured facts, but didn’t require you to truly think analytically about the material.

    What This Signal Means and What to Do About It:

    You’re simply discovering skills you haven’t developed yet. Here are what skills to focus on:

    1. Build in backwards planning. 

    For any assignment longer than a week, break it into smaller milestones with self-imposed deadlines. Put those milestones in your planner or calendar just like you would “real” deadlines.

    2. Use a priority system, not just a task list. 

    Add a way to mark tasks as high/medium/low priority, or use a system that helps you see what’s due soon versus what’s due later. This helps you make decisions when everything feels urgent.

    3. Add metacognitive check-ins to your study sessions. 

    After each study session, ask yourself: “Could I teach this to someone else right now?” or “What am I still confused about?” This self-awareness helps you catch gaps before the exam does.

    3. Capacity vs. Method: Sometimes It’s More About What You Can Handle, Not How You Handle It

    Sometimes a study system stops “working” not because there’s anything wrong with the method, but because you’re operating beyond your capacity. Maybe you’re maxed out and overloaded and don’t even know it. (Or maybe you do know, but you just know what to do about it.)

    When you’re at capacity, even the most effective active recall methods will feel impossible to execute. You’ll cut corners, skip steps, or give up on the whole thing simply because you don’t have the bandwidth to figure things out.

    Signs you’re at capacity:

    • Everything feels hard, even methods you know should work or that used to work
    • You’re consistently sacrificing sleep to keep up
    • You’re skipping meals or exercise because there’s “no time”
    • You feel anxious or overwhelmed most days
    • You’re behind in multiple classes, not just one
    • Helpful Resource: Are You Doing Too Much? Link

    When you’re in this state of maxed-out capacity, the problem isn’t your study technique. It’s that you can’t execute because you’re exhausted.

    What This Signal Means and What to Do About It:

    Before you overhaul your entire study system, honestly evaluate whether you need to reduce your load or increase your support. Here’s what to consider:

    1. Audit your commitments. 

    List everything you’re doing: classes, work hours, extracurriculars, family obligations. Is anything optional that you could step back from, even temporarily? Sometimes “doing less, better” is the answer. (Inside SchoolHabits University, I have students complete an Activity Inventory, a self-assessment that provides concrete, measurable evidence about whether they’re overcommitted or undercommitted. This kind of objective data can help you see the reality of your schedule instead of just feeling overwhelmed.)

    Look at your course load specifically. Are you taking too many credits? Are you taking multiple high-demand classes in the same semester? Sometimes the best study system is strategic course selection.

    2. Increase support, not just effort. 

    This might mean going to office hours, hiring a tutor, joining a study group, or talking to a counselor about time management or stress. It might also mean having honest conversations with family about what you can realistically handle.

    No study system, no matter how evidence-based, can compensate for chronic overload. If you’re consistently operating at 110% capacity, something has to give.

    4. You Cling to What You Know Because You’re Nervous to Try Something New

    This one is more psychological than practical, but it’s just as important to consider: sometimes students keep using a system they know isn’t working because changing it feels even scarier than failing with it.

    Familiar failure has a strange comfort to it. At least you know what to expect. At least you know it’s the system’s fault and not yours. At least you don’t have to risk trying something new and discovering it doesn’t work either. These are all super uncomfortable realities to accept.

    Below are some mental traps that you might be falling into. Read them with an open mind.

    1. “At least I know what to expect.”

    Even if your current system produces mediocre results, those results are predictable. Changing your system means uncertainty, and uncertainty feels risky when grades are on the line.

    2. The sunk cost fallacy.

    “I spent so much time building this planner system / making these flashcards / organizing my notes this way. I can’t just abandon it now.” Yes, you can. Time already spent is gone, whether you continue or not.

    3. Perfectionism paralysis.

    “If I can’t find the perfect system that will work forever, I might as well stick with what I have.” This is all-or-nothing thinking. Better is better, even if it’s not perfect.

    4. Fear that the problem is you.

    This is the deepest trap. If you change your system and it still doesn’t work, then you have to confront the possibility that maybe you’re the problem. So you don’t change anything, because at least then you can blame the method.

    What This Signal Means and What to Do About It:

    Resistance to changing a system is often emotional, not logical, and that’s completely normal. But here’s how to work through it:

    1. Name the fear.

    Ask yourself honestly: “What am I afraid will happen if I change this?” Sometimes just identifying the fear reduces its power.

    2. Start small.

    You don’t have to overhaul everything at once. Pick one element to modify and try it for a week. Low stakes, low risk.

    3. Separate your worth from your system.

    Your study methods are tools, not reflections of your intelligence or character. If a tool isn’t working, you get a different tool. That’s it.

    5. Signal vs. Noise: Bad Day or Bad System?

    Not every struggle means your system is awful. Sometimes you just have a bad week. Sometimes the material is genuinely harder. Sometimes life gets in the way.

    The challenge is distinguishing between temporary friction (noise) and systematic failure (signal). 

    Students often abandon perfectly good systems after one rough experience, or they stick with failing systems because they blame external circumstances instead of recognizing a pattern.

    It’s important to know the difference. Here’s how:

    1. One bad week doesn’t mean your whole system is bad.

    If your active recall study method worked great all semester and then you bombed one quiz during a particularly stressful week, that’s noise. Don’t overreact.

    2. Consistent friction over 2-3 weeks means something needs attention.

    If you’ve been struggling to execute your system, feeling frustrated with the results, or dreading your study sessions for multiple weeks in a row, that’s a signal. Pay attention to it.

    3. The “good days/bad days” test.

    Does your system work on your good days? If yes, the system is probably fine. You might just need to work on consistency or capacity (see Section 3). If your system doesn’t work even when you have time, energy, and focus, then your study system itself needs adjustment.

    4. Consider seasonal and cyclical patterns.

    Midterms and finals weeks are brutal for everyone. The week before spring break when you have three papers due is not the time to evaluate whether your planning system works. So look at patterns across normal weeks, not crisis weeks.

    What This Signal Means and What to Do About It:

    Trust patterns over individual instances. Some strategies:

    1. Track your system for at least two weeks before making changes.

    Keep a simple log: Did I follow my system today? How did it feel? What were the results? Patterns will emerge.

    2. Distinguish between execution problems and design problems.

    If you keep forgetting to use your planner, that’s an execution problem (maybe you need reminders or a different location for it). If you’re using your planner consistently but it’s not helping you manage your time, that’s a design problem (the system itself needs work).

    3. Give new systems a fair trial.

    When you do make changes, commit to trying them for at least two weeks before judging whether they work. New systems always feel awkward at first.

    Final Notes: What To Do With This Information

    If your study system stopped working, it’s normal and understandable. It’s just a sign that one or more of the following might be happening.

    1. Your academic demands leveled up, but your system didn’t
    2. You’re missing key skills your classes assume you have
    3. You’re operating beyond capacity
    4. You’re clinging to familiar failure out of fear
    5. You’re reacting to noise instead of recognizing real signals

    Recognizing which of these is happening is the critical first step. Once you know why your system stopped working, you can make informed decisions about what to do next.

    Sometimes you need to tweak your existing system to work better for you. (If that’s where you are, read “How to Personalize Your Study Skills” for a step-by-step process.) Sometimes you need to reduce your commitments or increase support. And sometimes you need to acknowledge that a system that served you well has run its course, and it’s time to build something new.

    Here’s what I want you to remember: no study system lasts forever. As you grow, as your classes change, as your life circumstances shift, your systems need to evolve too. That’s called evolution and adaptation, and it’s not only part of life but it literally is life.

    The students who succeed aren’t the ones who find the perfect system and never change it; they’re the ones who notice when something stops working and have the courage to do something about it.


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  • Don’t Underestimate Value of a Human Network (opinion)

    Don’t Underestimate Value of a Human Network (opinion)

    This week is Thanksgiving in the United States, a time when many of us come together with family and friends to express gratitude for the positive things in our lives. The holiday season can also be a challenging time for those who are far from family and grappling with the prevalent loneliness of our modern era.

    Perhaps worse than missing the company of others over the holidays is being with family who hold different views and beliefs from your own. The fact is, though, that when we come together with a large, diverse group of people at events we are bound to find a variety of viewpoints and personalities in the room.

    People are complex and messy, and engaging with them is often a lot of work. Sometimes it seems easier to just not deal with them at all and “focus on ourselves” instead. Similarly, the vast amount of information available online often leads many graduate students and postdocs to think they can effectively engage in professional development, explore career options and navigate their next step on their own. Indeed, there are many amazing online tools and resources to help with a lot of this but only by engaging other people in conversation can we fully come to understand how various practices, experiences and occupations apply to us as unique beings in the world. Generic advice is fine, but it can only be tailored through genuine dialogue with another person, though some believe they can find it in a machine.

    Generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology has accelerated since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 and now many people lean on AI chatbots for advice and even companionship. The problem with this approach is that AI chatbots are, at least currently, quite sycophantic and don’t, by default, challenge a user’s worldview. Rather, they can reinforce one’s current beliefs and biases. Furthermore, since we as humans have a tendency to anthropomorphize things, we perceive the output of AI chatbots as “human” and think we are getting the type of “social” relationship and advice we need from a bot without all the friction of dealing with another human being in real life. So, while outsourcing your problems to a chatbot may feel easy, it cannot fully support you as you navigate your life and career. Furthermore, generative AI has made the job application, screening and interview process incredibly impersonal and ineffective. One recent piece in The Atlantic put it simply (if harshly): “The Job Market is Hell.”

    What is the solution to this sad state of affairs?

    I am here to remind readers of the importance of engaging with real, human people to help you navigate your professional development, job search and life. Despite the fear of being rejected, making small talk or hearing things that may challenge you, engaging with other people will help you learn about professional roles available to you, discover unexpected opportunities, build critical interpersonal skills and, in the process, understand yourself (and how you relate with others) better.

    For graduate students and postdocs today, it’s easy to feel isolated or spend too much time in your own head focusing on your perceived faults and deficiencies. You need to remember, though, that you are doing hard things, including leading research projects seeking to investigate questions no one else has reported on before. But as you journey through your academic career and into your next step professionally, I encourage you to embrace the fact that true strength and resilience lies in our connections—with colleagues, mentors, friends and the communities we build.

    Networks enrich your perspectives, foster resilience and can help you find not only jobs, but joy and fulfillment along the way. Take intentional steps to build and lean on your community during your time as an academic and beyond. Invest time, gratitude and openness in your relationships. Because when you navigate life’s challenges with others by your side, you don’t just survive—you thrive.

    Practical Tips for Building and Leveraging Networks

    For graduate students and postdocs, here are some action steps to foster meaningful networks to help you professionally and personally:

    Tip 1: Seek Diverse Connections

    Attend seminars, departmental events, professional conferences and interest groups—both within and outside your field.

    Join and engage in online forums, LinkedIn groups and professional organizations that interest you. Create a career advisory group.

    Tip 2: Practice Gratitude and Generosity

    Thank peers and mentors regularly—showing appreciation strengthens relationships, opens doors and creates goodwill.

    Offer help, such as reviewing your peers’ résumés, sharing job leads or simply listening. Reciprocity is foundational to strong networks.

    Tip 3: Be Vulnerable and Authentic

    Share struggles and setbacks. Vulnerability invites others to connect, offer advice and foster mutual support.

    Be honest about your goals; don’t feel pressured to follow predefined paths set by others or by societal norms.

    Tip 4: Leverage Formal Resources

    Enroll in career design workshops or online courses, such as Stanford University’s “Designing Your Career.”

    Utilize university career centers, alumni networks and faculty advisers for information and introductions.

    Tip 5: Make Reflection a Habit

    Set aside time weekly or monthly to review progress, map goals and consider input from your network.

    Use journaling or guided exercises to deepen self-insight and identify what you want from relationships and careers.

    Tip 6: Cultivate Eulogy Virtues

    Focus not just on professional “résumé virtues,” but also on “eulogy virtues”—kindness, honesty, courage and the quality of relationships formed.

    These provide lasting meaning and fuel deep, authentic connections that persist beyond job titles and paychecks.

    Strategies for Overcoming Isolation

    Graduate students and postdocs are at particular risk for isolation and burnout, given the demands of research and the often-solitary nature of scholarship. Community is a proven antidote. Consider forming small groups with fellow students and postdocs to share resources, celebrate milestones and troubleshoot professional challenges together. Regular meetings can foster motivation and accountability. These can be as simple as monthly coffee chats to something more structured such as regular writing or job search support groups. And, while online communities are not a perfect substitute for support, postdocs can leverage Future PI Slack and graduate students can use their own Slack community for help and advice. You can also lean on your networks for emotional support and practical help, especially during stressful periods or setbacks.

    Another practical piece of advice to build your network and connections is volunteer engagement. This could mean volunteering in a professional organization, committees at your institution or in your local community. Working together with others on shared projects in this manner helps build connections without the challenges many have with engaging others at purely social events. In addition, volunteering can help you develop leadership, communication and management skills that can become excellent résumé material.

    Networking to Launch Your Career

    Through the process of engaging with more people through an expanded network you also open yourself up to serendipity and opportunities that could enhance your overall training and career. Career theorists call this “planned happenstance.” The idea is simple: By putting yourself in community with others—attending talks, joining professional groups, volunteering for committees—you increase the odds that unexpected opportunities will cross your path. You meet people who do work you hadn’t considered, learn about opportunities before they’re posted and hear about initiatives that need someone with your skills earlier than most.

    When I was a postdoc at Vanderbilt University, I volunteered for the National Postdoctoral Association (NPA), starting small by writing for their online newsletter (The POSTDOCket), and also became increasingly involved in the Vanderbilt Postdoctoral Association (VPA). These experiences were helpful as I transitioned to working in postdoctoral affairs as a higher education administrator after my postdoc. Writing for The POSTDOCket as a postdoc allowed me to interview administrators and leaders in postdoctoral affairs, in the process learning about working in the space. My leadership in VPA showed I understood some of the needs of the postdoctoral community and could organize programming to support postdocs. I have become increasingly involved in the NPA over the past six years, culminating in being chair of our Board of Directors in 2025. This work has allowed me to increase my national visibility and has resulted in invites to speak to postdocs at different institutions, the opportunity to serve on a National Academies Roundtable, and I believe helped me land my current role at Virginia Tech.

    I share all this to reiterate that in uncertain job markets, it’s tempting to focus on polishing résumés or applying to ever more positions online. Those things can matter—but they’re not enough. Opportunities often come through both expanding your network and engaging with people and activities we care about. They can present themselves to you via your network long before they appear in writing and they often can’t be fully anticipated when you initially engage with these “extracurricular activities.” A good first step to open yourself up to possibilities is to get involved in communities outside your direct school or work responsibilities. Doing so will improve your sense of purpose, help you build key transferrable skills, increase your connections and aid in your transition to your next role.

    Your training and career should not be a solitary climb, but rather a collaborative, evolving process of growth and discovery. A strong community and network are critical to your longterm wellbeing and success. And, in a world where setbacks and uncertainty are inevitable, connection is the constant that turns possibility into progress.

    Chris Smith is Virginia Tech’s postdoctoral affairs program administrator. He serves on the National Postdoctoral Association’s Board of Directors and is a member of the Graduate Career Consortium—an organization providing a national voice for graduate-level career and professional development leaders.

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  • Public Universities Don’t Want to Discuss the Compact

    Public Universities Don’t Want to Discuss the Compact

    As the stated deadline to sign the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” arrived Friday, multiple universities have already rejected the deal while only a few institutions have expressed interest.

    But among the public universities that were either formally invited to sign the compact or that participated in a call with the White House to provide feedback on higher education issues, none are willing to discuss their deliberations about the proposal or interactions with federal officials.

    Last month, Inside Higher Ed sent public records requests to Arizona State University, the University of Arizona, the University of Kansas, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Virginia, seeking emails, text messages, internal presentations and other documents related to how presidents, trustees and other officials discussed the compact.

    As of Friday, none had provided those records. Only the University of Kansas indicated a willingness to do so, but it requested an up-front $100 fee for staff time to conduct the search. However, officials said they could not guarantee the requested records would be provided.

    Texas, meanwhile, has appealed to the state attorney general to avoid releasing the requested records. Now uncertainty abounds about what UT Austin will do on the day of the initial deadline, though conservative media has reported the Trump administration could push that date back (which officials did not confirm Thursday) as it struggles to find signatories.

    Texas

    Some public universities, such as Arizona and Virginia, have rejected the compact outright, but others, like Arizona State, have noted they never received a formal invitation to join and therefore they have nothing to decline. But UT Austin has remained silent about whether it will sign the compact.

    Although University of Texas system Board of Regents chairman Kevin P. Eltife issued an early statement saying that he welcomed the “the new opportunity presented to us and we look forward to working with the Trump Administration on it,” officials have said little since then.

    In response to an Oct. 22 public records request from Inside Higher Ed, UT Austin shared only the initial emails exchanged by federal and university officials inviting the university to consider the compact, a copy of the proposal itself, and Eltife’s statement. The rest it wants to keep private.

    UT system officials argued in a letter sent Tuesday to the attorney general’s office that the requested records are protected by attorney-client privilege and should not be disclosed.

    “In the information at issue, University and UT System attorneys are providing legal counsel, gathering information in order to provide legal counsel, or their clients are seeking legal advice from the attorneys and include the necessary background information so that counsel will be able to render an opinion on a given situation,” UT system attorney Jennifer Burnett wrote in the letter. “From the text of the communications, it is evident that the University and UT System attorneys for were [sic] involved in providing legal counsel to employees of the University.”

    Now the attorney general’s office has 10 business days to make a determination on the request.

    Gunita Singh, a staff attorney for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told Inside Higher Ed by email that the university “is within its rights to argue that the records are privileged but they need to make a particularized showing that that is the case,” proving the requested documents “pertain to the provision of legal advice” and have been confidential at all times.

    Virginia

    The University of Virginia has yet to provide documents requested Oct. 22 in what appears to be a pattern of delayed responses, according to others who sought records from the public university in recent months.

    UVA’s student newspaper, The Cavalier Daily, reported that it has submitted 25 public records requests to the university, but UVA officials have reportedly not provided records since July 1. Other journalists across the commonwealth have taken to social media to note that they have struggled to get information on athletic staffing and internal communications.

    State Senator Creigh Deeds, a Democrat who has represented the Charlottesville area for more than two decades, also struggled to get public records out of the university related to the resignation of former UVA president Jim Ryan, who stepped down in June under federal pressure. Deeds initially reached out to the university Aug. 1 seeking information, which he only obtained after submitting a public records request and paying $4,500 for the documents.

    Chris Seaman, a law professor at Washington and Lee University, requested public records related to costs for outside legal counsel on July 2. But Seaman still has not “received a substantive response from UVA regarding my FOIA request,” he told Inside Higher Ed by email. In an August email exchange shared by Seaman, a UVA official noted a delay in processing his request and wrote that “in the last few weeks, our office has received an unusually large volume of requests with limited staff to process them.” They also promised to “expedite handling” of his request, but more than three months later, Seaman said, he is still awaiting those documents.

    UVA spokesperson Brian Coy did not address the pattern of delays in a response to Inside Higher Ed, writing that the university “has received this request and is processing it in accordance with Virginia law” and is “preparing an estimate of anticipated costs” for review.

    Arizona and Arizona State

    Public records requests at Arizona State and the University of Arizona also remain unfulfilled after 30 days.

    Arizona State spokesperson Jerry Gonzalez said that he would check on the state of the request but noted that ASU was not invited to sign the compact, and so “there is nothing for the university to accept, reject, or negotiate.” (However, President Michael Crow has said he’s had discussions with Education Secretary Linda McMahon and other officials about higher education issues.)

    University of Arizona spokesperson Mitch Zak said that Inside Higher Ed’s public records request “remains in process” and “response time varies.” He noted that factors such as “the specificity of the request, the volume of requests received, and the time required to locate, review, and redact materials subject to disclosure” all shape public records response times.

    Arizona law does not specify how long public entities have to hand over documents but instructs that they do so “promptly.” Singh, the RCFP attorney, pointed to past legal cases in which Arizona courts found that 24 business days “satisfied the promptness standard” but that “a delay of 49 days, or 34 working days, did not meet the promptness standard” outlined in state law.

    Currently, she said, Arizona and Arizona State are “inching toward noncompliance territory.”

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  • Students don’t think anything will change. They’re probably right

    Students don’t think anything will change. They’re probably right

    The standout quote for me from new Office for Students (OfS) commissioned research on student consumer rights comes from a 21-year-old undergrad in a focus group:

    If you were unhappy with your course, I don’t know how you’d actually say to them, ‘I want my money back, this was rubbish,’ basically. I don’t think that they would actually do that. It would just be a long, drawn-out process and they could just probably just argue for their own sake that your experience was your experience, other students didn’t agree, for example, on your course.

    There’s a lot going on in there. It captures the power imbalance between students and institutions, predicts institutional defensiveness, anticipates bureaucratic obstacles, and reveals a kind of learned helplessness – this student hasn’t even tried to complain, and has already concluded it’s futile.

    It’s partly about dissatisfaction with what’s being delivered, and a lack of clarity about their rights. But it’s also about students who don’t believe that raising concerns will achieve anything meaningful.

    Earlier this year, the regulator asked Public First to examine students’ perceptions of their consumer rights, and here we have the results of a nationally representative poll of 2,001 students at providers in England, alongside two focus groups.

    On the surface, things look pretty healthy – 83 per cent of students believe the information they received before enrolment was upfront, clear, timely, accurate, accessible and comprehensive, and the same proportion say their learning experience aligns with what they were promised.

    But scratch a bit and we find a student body that struggles to distinguish between promises and expectations, that has limited awareness of their rights, that doesn’t trust complaints processes to achieve anything meaningful, and that is largely unaware of the external bodies that exist to protect them.

    Whether you see this as a problem of comms, regulatory effectiveness, or student engagement probably depends on where you sit – but it’s hard to argue it represents a protection regime that’s working as intended.

    Learning to be helpless

    Research on complaints tends towards five interlocking barriers that prevent people from holding institutions and service providers to account – and each of them can be found in this data.

    There’s opportunity costs (complaining takes time and energy), conflict aversion (people fear confrontation), confidence and capital (people doubt they have standing to complain), ignorance (people don’t know their rights), and fear of retribution (people worry about consequences). In this research, they combine to create an environment in which students who experience problems just put up with them.

    When they were asked about the biggest barrier to making a complaint, the top answer was doubt that it would make a difference – cited by 36 per cent of respondents. The polling also found that 26 per cent of students said they have “no faith” that something would change if they raised a complaint, and around one in six students (17 per cent) disagreed with the statement “at my university, students have a meaningful say in decisions that affect their education.”

    One postgrad described the experience of repeatedly raising concerns about poor organisation:

    People also just don’t think anything’s going to happen if they make a complaint, like I don’t think it would. With my masters’, it was so badly organised at the start, like we kept turning up for lectures and people just wouldn’t turn up and things like that […] We had this group chat and we were all like, ‘What’s going on? We’re paying so much money for this,’ and […] it just seemed like no one knew what was going on, but we raised it to the rep to raise it to like one of the lecturers and then […] it would just still happen. So it’s like they’re not going to change it.

    That’s someone who tried to work the system, followed the proper channels, raised concerns through the designated representative – and concluded it was futile.

    The second most common barrier captures the opportunity costs thing – lack of time or energy to go through the process, cited by 35 per cent. Combined with doubting it would make a difference, we end up with a decent proportion of students who have cost-benefit analysed complaining and decided it’s not worth the effort. Domestic students were particularly likely to cite futility as a barrier – 41 per cent versus 25 per cent of international students.

    They’ve learned helplessness – and only change their ways when failures impact their marks, only to find that “you should should have complained earlier” is the key response they’ll get when the academic appeal goes in.

    Fear of retribution is also in there. About a quarter of students cited concern that complaining might affect their grades or relationships with staff (25-26 per cent) or said they felt intimidated or worried about possible consequences (23-26 per cent). A postgraduate put it bluntly:

    I think people are scared of getting struck off their course.

    Another student imagined what would happen if they tried to escalate to an external body:

    I think [going to the OIA] would have to be a pretty serious thing to do, and I think that because it’s external to the university, I’d feel a little bit like a snitch. I would have to have a lot of evidence to back up what I’m saying, and I think that it would be a really long, drawn-out process, that I ultimately wouldn’t really trust would get resolved. And so I just wouldn’t really see it as worth it to make that complaint.

    That’s the way it is

    What are students accepting as just how things are? The two things students were most likely to identify as promises from their university were a well-equipped campus, facilities and accommodation (79 per cent) and high quality teaching and resources (78 per cent).

    Over three-quarters of students said the promises made by their university had not been fully met – 59 per cent said they had been mostly met, 14 per cent partially met and 1 per cent not met at all, leaving just 24 per cent who thought promises had been fully met.

    Yet fewer than half of respondents said these were “clear and consistent parts of their university experiences” – 42 per cent for physical resources and just 37 per cent for teaching and resources. In other words, the things students most clearly remember being promised are precisely the things that, for a large minority, show up as patchy, unreliable features of day-to-day university life rather than dependable fixtures.

    There’s also a 41 percentage point gap between what students believe they were promised on teaching quality and what they report actually experiencing – 78 per cent say high quality teaching and resources were promised, but only 37 per cent say that kind of provision is a clear and consistent part of their experience. Public First note that “high quality” wasn’t explicitly defined in the polling, so these are students’ own judgements rather than a technical standard – but the size of the mismatch is still striking.

    About a quarter of students (23 per cent) reported receiving lower quality teaching than expected, rising to 26 per cent among undergraduates. Twenty-two per cent experienced fewer contact hours and more online or hybrid teaching than expected, and twenty-one per cent reported limited access to academic staff.

    One undergraduate described being taught by someone who made clear he didn’t want to be there:

    One of our lecturers, he wasn’t actually a sports journalism lecturer, he’s just off the normal journalism course, and he made it pretty clear that he didn’t like any of us and he didn’t want to be there when he was teaching us. And we basically got told that we had to go and get on with it, pretty much. So there wasn’t any sort of solution of, ‘We’ll change lecturers,’ or anything, it’s just, ‘You’ll get in more trouble if you don’t go, so just get on with it and finish it.

    When presented with a list of possible disruptions and asked which they’d experienced, 70 per cent identified at least one type. The most common was cancellation or postponement of in-person teaching, reported by 35 per cent of undergraduates. Industrial action affecting teaching or marking hit 20 per cent of students overall, and 16 per cent said it had significantly impacted their academic experience.

    Limited support from academic staff affected 20 per cent overall, rising to one in four postgraduate students – and this was the disruption that students were most likely to say had significantly impacted their experience (23 per cent overall, climbing to 32 per cent among international students).

    Telling is how dissatisfied students were with institutional responses to disruptions. Forty-two per cent said they were not that satisfied or not at all satisfied with their institution’s response to cancelled or postponed teaching – 45 per cent said the same about the response to strikes or industrial action. In other words, students experienced disruption, they weren’t happy with how it was handled, and yet most didn’t complain, because (again) they didn’t think it would achieve anything.

    Informal v informant

    Unsurprisingly, most students (65 per cent) had never lodged a formal complaint against their institution. On its face, that could look like satisfaction – if students aren’t complaining, perhaps things are generally fine. But when you dig into the reasons students give for not complaining, about one in four students (24 per cent) who hadn’t complained said they weren’t confident they’d know how to go about it – that’s the ignorance barrier.

    And the bigger obstacles weren’t procedural – they were about believing it was pointless or fearing consequences.

    When students did complain, they were at least twice as likely to have done so through informal channels (such as course representatives or conversations, 23 per cent) than through formal procedures (11 per cent). That’s your conflict aversion in action – you try the informal route first, see if you can get something fixed quietly without escalating to a formal process that might create confrontation.

    But it also means the formal complaints processes that are supposed to provide accountability and redress (and documented institutional learning) are being bypassed by students who’ve concluded they’re not worth engaging with.

    Among those who did complain formally, around half (54 per cent) felt satisfied with their institution’s handling of it – which means nearly half didn’t. So if you’re a student considering whether to raise a complaint, and you believe there’s roughly a 50-50 chance it won’t be handled satisfactorily, if you’ve already concluded there’s a strong likelihood it won’t change anything anyway, why would you bother?

    Especially when you add in the other barriers – concern it might affect grades or relationships with staff, feeling intimidated or worried about consequences, lack of trust in the university to handle it fairly.

    The focus groups reinforce the picture of systematic dismissal. One undergraduate explained the calculation:

    If you were unhappy with your course, I don’t know how you’d actually say to them, ‘I want my money back, this was rubbish,’ basically. I don’t think that they would actually do that. It would just be a long, drawn-out process and they could just probably just argue for their own sake that your experience was your experience, other students didn’t agree, for example, on your course.

    That’s someone that has already mapped out in their head exactly how the institution would respond – they’d argue it’s subjective, other students were happy, your experience doesn’t represent a breach of contract. And, of course, they’re probably right.

    An entitled generation

    If students don’t believe complaining will achieve anything, part of the reason is that they don’t really understand what they’re entitled to expect in the first place. The research found that only 50 per cent of students said they understood and could describe their rights and entitlements as a student – which very much undermines the whole premise of students as empowered consumers able to hold institutions to account.

    When asked how well informed they felt about various rights, the results were even worse. Only 32 per cent of students felt well informed about their right to fair and transparent assessment – the highest figure for any right listed. More than half (52 per cent) said they felt not that well informed or not at all informed about their right to receive compensation. You can’t assert rights you don’t know you have.

    The focus groups then show just how fuzzy students’ understanding of “promises” really is. Participants found it difficult to identify what had been explicitly promised to them, with received ideas about higher education playing a significant role in shaping student expectations.

    They could articulate areas where their experiences fell short – reduced contact hours, poor teaching quality, limited access to careers support – but struggled to identify where these amounted to broken promises.

    One undergraduate captured this confusion as follows:

    I personally think I do get what I was promised when I applied to university. Not like I’m an easy-going person or anything, but I do get what I need in the university, yes.

    Notice the subtle shift from “promised” to “need” – the student can’t quite articulate what was promised, so they fall back on whether they’re getting what they need, which is a much vaguer and more subjective standard.

    This matters a lot, because if you don’t know what you were promised, you can’t confidently assert that a promise has been broken. You might feel disappointed, you might think things should be better, but you can’t point to a specific commitment and say “you told me X and you’ve given me Y.”

    Which means that even when students want to complain, they’re starting from a position of uncertainty about whether they have grounds to do so. It’s the perfect recipe for learned helplessness – you’re dissatisfied, but you’re not sure if you’re entitled to be dissatisfied, so you conclude it’s safer to just accept it.

    The one clear exception? Doctoral students, who were confident they’d been promised the support of a supervisor:

    When I was applying for a PhD, I applied to several universities, so I was selected and accepted in [Institution A] and [Institution B], but I decided to come to [Institution A] for the supervisor – he interviewed me, he sent me the acceptance letter.

    Getting on the escalator

    If the picture so far suggests a system where students lack confidence in internal complaints processes, the findings on external avenues for redress make sense. Only 8 per cent of all students had heard of the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIAHE), and the focus groups confirm there was “little to no awareness of external organisations or avenues of redress for students”.

    More broadly, more than a third (35 per cent) of students said they were unaware of any of the external organisations or routes listed through which students in England can raise complaints about their university – rising to 41 per cent among undergraduates and 38 per cent among domestic students. The list they were shown included the OIA, the OfS, Citizens Advice, solicitors, local MPs, the QAA, and trade unions or SUs like NUS. More than a third couldn’t identify a single one of these as somewhere you might go with a concern about your university.

    As for OfS itself, just 18 per cent of students overall had heard of it, falling to 14 per cent among undergraduates. Let’s go ahead and assume that they’ve not read Condition B2.

    When asked where they would go for information about their rights, the most common answer was the university website (53 per cent) or just searching online (51 per cent). About 42 per cent said they’d look to their SU for information about rights. That’s positive – SUs are meant to provide independent advice and advocacy for students. But the fact that only 42 per cent think to go there, versus 53 per cent who’d go to the university website, suggests SUs aren’t being seen as the first port of call.

    Among postgraduates in the focus groups, there was “limited interest in the use of these avenues for redress”, with the implicit sense that if intra-institutional channels of redress seemed drawn-out, daunting and potentially fruitless, it was unlikely that “resorting to extra-institutional channels would make the situation better”. If students have concluded that internal processes are bureaucratic and ineffective, they’re not going to invest additional time and energy in external ones – especially when they don’t know those external routes exist in the first place.

    Explorations

    It’s an odd little bit of research in many ways. It’s hard to tell if recommendations have been deleted, or just weren’t asked for – either way, they’re missing. It’s also frustratingly divorced from OfS’ wider work on “treating students fairly” – I know from my own work over the decades that students tend initially to be overconfident about their rights knowledge, only to realise they’ve over or undercooked when you give them crunchier statements like these “prohibited behaviours” (which of course only seem to be “prohibited”, for the time being, in providers that will join the register in the future).

    More curious is the extent to which OfS knows all of this already. Six years ago this board paper made clear that consumer protection arrangements were failing students on multiple fronts. It knew that information available to support student choice was inadequate – insufficiently detailed about matters that actually concern students and poorly structured for meaningful comparisons between providers and courses, with disadvantaged students and mature learners particularly affected by lack of accessible support and guidance.

    It knew that the contractual relationship between students and providers remains fundamentally unequal, with ongoing cases of unclear or unfair terms that leave students uncertain about what they’re actually purchasing in terms of quality, contact time, support and costs, while terms systematically favoured providers.

    It also knew that its existing tools weren’t allowing intervention even when it saw evidence that regulatory objectives were being delivered, and questioned whether a model requiring individual students to challenge providers for breaches was realistic or desirable.

    So many things would help – recognition of the role of student advocacy, closer adjudication, better coordination between OfS and the OIA, banning NDAs for more than sexual misconduct are four that spring to mind, all of which should be underpinned by a proper theory of change that assumes that not all power over English HE is held in Westward House in Bristol.

    If students have concluded that complaining is futile, there are really three possible responses. One would be to figure that the promises being made raise expectations too high. But there are so many actors specifically dedicated to not talking down a particular university or the sector in general as to render “tell them reality” fairly futile.

    Another is to try to convince them they’re wrong – better communications about rights, clearer signposting of redress routes, more prominent information about successful complaints. You obviously can’t give that job to universities.

    The third would be to ask what would need to change for complaining to actually be worthwhile. That would require processes that are genuinely quick and accessible, institutional cultures where raising concerns is welcomed rather than seen as troublemaking, meaningful remedies when things go wrong, and external oversight bodies that can intervene quickly and effectively.

    But there’s no sign of any of that. A cynic might conclude that a regulator under pressure to help providers manage their finances might need to keep busy and look the other way while modules are slashed and facilities cut.

    Why this matters more than it might seem

    Over the years, people have asserted to me that students-as-consumers, or even the whole idea of student rights, is antithetical to the partnership between students and educators required to create learning and its outcomes.

    “It’s like going to the gym”, they’ll say. “You don’t get fit just by joining”. Sure. But if the toilets are out of order or the equipment is broken, you’re not a partner then. The odd one will try it on. But most of them are perfectly capable of keeping two analogies in their head at the same time.

    In reality, it’s not rights but resignation, when it becomes systematic, that corrodes the basis on which the student-university relationship is supposed to work. If students don’t believe they can hold institutions to account, then all the partnership talk in the world becomes hollow.

    National bodies can write ever more detailed conditions about complaint processes, information provision, and student engagement. Universities can publish ever more comprehensive policies about policies and redress mechanisms. None of it matters if students have concluded that actually using those mechanisms is futile.

    There’s something profoundly upsetting about a system where three-quarters of students believe promises haven’t been kept, but most conclude there’s no point complaining because nothing will change. It speaks to a deeper breakdown than just poor communications or inadequate complaints processes.

    It’s precisely because students aren’t just consumers purchasing a service that we should worry. They’re participants in an institution that’s supposed to be about more than transactions. Universities ask students to trust them with years of their lives, substantial amounts of money (whether paid upfront by international students or through future loan repayments by domestic students), and significant life decisions about career paths and personal development.

    In return, students are supposed to be able to trust that universities will deliver what they promise, listen when things go wrong, and be held accountable when they fail to meet their end of the deal.

    The parallels with broader social contract failures are hard to miss. Just as students don’t believe complaining will change anything at their university, many young people don’t believe political engagement will change anything in society more broadly. Just as students have concluded that formal institutional processes are unlikely to deliver meaningful redress, many citizens have concluded that formal democratic processes are unlikely to deliver meaningful change.

    The learned helplessness this research documents in higher education mirrors learned helplessness – which later turns to extremism – in civic life.

    I don’t think I’ve ever heard of any uni willing to reimburse or cover if they’ve done a poor job of teaching. That’s never come to me.

    They’re right.

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  • The one where they still don’t have any friends

    The one where they still don’t have any friends

    As I’ve been doomscrolling on TikTok this term, my feed seems to have been dominated by university related videos.

    Either the algorithm thinks I’m a fresher or that I’m a HE policy wonk (it’s probably the latter).

    The videos that keep appearing are either fun trends from universities and students’ unions, or something a bit more worrying. There’s been an influx of students posting that they haven’t found any friends yet and are fearing that they will drop out.

    These videos include text like “day 2 at uni no friends,” “walked 10 miles alone just to not be alone in my room,” “being at uni for a month having made no friends and haven’t been out once” and “freshers please hmu my flatmates don’t leave their rooms.”

    A few weeks ago, one addition to my feed was:

    I genuinely think I’m having the worst experience ever…I wanted to go to the freshers fayre and had no one to go with.

    And it’s not just TikTok – a quick scroll of a few online threads about university (not the most sophisticated social listening, but go with me) speak of students feeling lonely, not knowing how to make friends with responses telling them to stick it out until Christmas and the original author saying “being here just feels so wrong.”

    Over the past few years there’s been a shift towards more inclusive and accessible induction activities, more realistic expectation setting, renaming freshers to welcome and a more non-drinking socials, so it begs the question – what is stopping students from making friends?

    Back to the drawing board

    What’s striking about these TikToks and Reddit threads is that they’re essentially public cries for help – and they get thousands of likes and hundreds of responses.

    The public tries to alleviate some of their anxieties in the comments – “you do make friends, give it time, 2 days is not enough to build connections,” “go to stuff on your own” and “join societies, your friends don’t have to be ur flat mates.” Solid but not groundbreaking advice.

    You hope that students take this advice and run with it – but it’s not the advice that’s particularly interesting, it’s the method of communication. Students are reaching out to the void asking for either help or some validation that they’re not feeling this alone.

    It says something about student confidence levels to engage in social activities, however accessible they are designed. It poses an opportunity to integrate social activities into pedagogy and into the classroom, if they’re less confident in engaging in the extra-curricular. It also reminds us that horizontal communication (student-student) seems to be more effective.

    I’m a people person

    This summer I spent the best part of 12 weeks of training student leaders across the country. In the first exercise I ask officers to draw out each others’ student journey. After presenting back I asked them all:

    …when things were going well for you during your student experience, what was it that made it good?

    After the third or fourth training session I got pretty good at predicting what they would say and 90 per cent of the time the answer was “friends.”

    It was friendships that made the difference – those that were there to support them when things were tough or made the good times even better. It wasn’t the lecture content or that field trip or academic support – although many had ideas on how to make these things better – it was people.

    This year’s student leaders are not naive. They’d go into detail about the different barriers to engagement, for many it’s about increased costs, time poverty (often spent working), increases in commuting but also homesickness and a lack of confidence to engage.

    These are new phenomena but often their biggest reflection was they wished staff understood the realities of the pressures on students, even if they couldn’t adapt their offer.

    They wouldn’t always see the university as having a responsibility to present opportunities for students to make friends – but when presented with B3 data, their access and participation plan and their university’s strategy that said something on belonging, they changed their tune.

    What students say

    But these student leader reflections only tell part of the story. To really understand the scale and texture of student loneliness, you need to read what students are posting when they think university staff aren’t watching.

    We’ve spent some time trawling through Reddit and The Student Room – and the posts are miserable. Not dramatic-devastating, but quietly, persistently crushing in their ordinariness. Student after student describing identical patterns of isolation, often in eerily similar language.

    When halls don’t help

    We design halls around the assumption that proximity creates friendship. Stick students in the same building, give them a shared kitchen, and community will naturally emerge. Except it doesn’t.

    One student writes:

    …my flatmates don’t use the kitchen at all, except for the fridge and the oven occasionally… i’m just terribly lonely and in the past two weeks i haven’t had a single conversation with any of my flatmates.

    Another echoes:

    Who do you eat with? No one. With who do you socialise? No one. My flatmates… eat in their rooms and never hang out in the kitchen.

    The pattern repeats across dozens of posts. En-suite rooms plus food delivery apps equals what students call “dead kitchens” – empty communal spaces that mock the idea of community. One thread about this phenomenon attracted hundreds of responses, with students confirming that the only things living in their kitchens are unopened spice racks.

    The emotional toll is immediate. A first-year Australian student (though the experience mirrors UK students exactly) wrote:

    I am in my first year of uni and basically know no one here and have not made any friends so far. I feel awkward and don’t know what to do in between classes so I usually end up sitting in the library by myself and studying. I’m at the point where I’m even too nervous to go and get food by myself despite being on campus for 8 hours, so I am not eating.

    Students are going hungry because eating alone feels too exposing.

    The commuter trap

    If halls students struggle, commuters face something worse – they’re missing the infrastructure entirely. One student explains:

    It’s isolating because you’re missing out on the little spontaneous moments like going to your friends place at 12am to just talk… I commuted for a year and it made me depressed.

    Another captured the structural impossibility:

    I just feel so left out… i wasn’t able to move out like i wished… i feel im missing out on being with my friends and being able to have the uni experience.

    A 19-year-old architecture student who commutes shared a particularly harrowing story about being excluded from their course group:

    When we all met in person, most of them excluded a few of us. I ended up in a smaller friend group, but I was always the one left out. I wasn’t ‘interesting’ enough, and being a commuter meant I couldn’t stay late or go out spontaneously.

    They added:

    I feel like a failure. I hate that this is upsetting my parents too—I know they’re proud of me, and I really want to make them happy. But I’m just so drained.

    The sense of failure is echoed by another commuter who chose to live at home:

    I decided to live at home during first year since I stayed in my home town but I’ve really struggled to make friends. I joined some sport societies but there were v few 1st years there and the other people already sort of have friends (those in older years) so it’s hard to get integrated in a group. I really don’t know my course mates very well due to everything being mostly online this year so it’s just been hard to meet people and click with them. I guess not being in halls has prevented me from meeting people… I just don’t really know what to do and I’m feeling quite lonely and like a failure for not having friend. Just sort of ruins your mood.

    The practical barriers compound. As one student put it:

    Commuting to uni can be lonely… there aren’t many social spaces, only study spaces… lectures end and ninety-five per cent leave in two minutes.

    No lockers, no warm spaces to linger, no time between the last train home and the evening social. HE has built an offer that excludes by timetable.

    Class, culture and not fitting the script

    Identity matters in ways universities don’t always acknowledge. A student from a deprived area wrote:

    i’m from a deprived area… there’s a lot of drug/drink culture at my uni… sometimes I feel like a weirdo for it.

    Another added:

    The majority of people who attend university are wild and very cliquey… It’s a very lonely experience unless you are into partying.

    For international students, the cultural friction is sharper:

    I moved to england 3 months ago… it’s just starting to hit me that i really am alone… my flatmates… need to drink and party like they need oxygen… lonely isn’t the word to describe how i feel.

    These aren’t just about personal preference – they’re about economic and cultural scripts that determine who feels they belong and who doesn’t.

    “Join societies” doesn’t always work

    The default advice. Can’t make friends? Join a society. And for some students, it works. But scroll through enough posts and you’ll see why it fails for many others.

    One student writes:

    Societies… aren’t what I expected… it feels so awkward… they’re already in groups.

    A third year adds:

    I’m a third year, still have no friends… the societies i tried were cliquey… seeing people with their groups on campus or on instagram stories… it’s so shit.

    The cost barrier is real too. While one student counsels:

    My advice is don’t do anything you don’t wanna do to try and make friends… be you and do what you want to do.

    Another counters the practical reality – joining multiple societies to increase your odds gets expensive fast when you don’t yet know if you’ll click with anyone.

    The timing trap

    Multiple students describe a narrow window for friendship formation, after which groups solidify and become hard to penetrate. A first-year, just a month in, writes:

    Hi everyone I feel so lonely I have been here nealy 4 weeks but havent found people who I click with it feels like I’m so different to everyone else here… everyone has already made their friends circle and I have no friends.

    The summer break breaks weak ties:

    Lonely as a third year… I struggle a lot with friendships… in first year I made some friends… after summer no one talked to me or reached out.

    And by third year, it can feel like starting over without any scaffolding:

    im a third year, still have no friends… the societies i tried were cliquey… seeing people with their groups on campus or on instagram stories… it’s so shit.

    One student captured the arbitrary nature of it:

    A huge part of it is also luck… I happened to be in a flat with really nice people… other flats had antisocial or downright horrible people.

    The mental health spiral

    Loneliness and mental health loop into each other. One student writes:

    I’m struggling with depression… my flatmates don’t talk to each other… everyone has got their own groups… I just feel like an Outsider.

    Another describes the avoidance cycle:

    I haven’t been able to make friends… I live in halls… never went to lectures due to paranoia, anxiety and depression… haven’t gone to society events because I haven’t got anyone to go with.

    A first-year in London shared:

    I have no idea when this happened but clearly I missed the memo lol. I am lagging in my studies, sometime I feel so down and anxious that I spend the entire day in the dark in bed because I have no motivation to attend lectures. I want to go out and club like other first years but I don’t really have anyone to go with.

    A 21-year-old woman in her second year described the visibility of her isolation:

    I’m 21 (female) and have no friends (I know how pathetic that sounds). I’m in my second year at uni and it’s so miserable having to attend lectures and seminars alone, it feels like it must be really obvious to other people how alone I am and it’s embarrassing. I have tried hard to connect with others but I have terrible social anxiety, making it pretty difficult, and the people I have spoken with/met online always seem to get bored with me very quickly.

    A student battling severe anxiety captured the intersection of mental health and neurodivergence:

    I’m lonely, have social anxiety, might have autism, low mood, low confidence & self esteem, no motivation for careers, seeing people live their best lives while I’m at my lowest, and I’m not sure why I’m carrying on anymore, it feels pointless. I feel like I’m invisible, on the sidelines, I don’t even feel like I belong here.

    For neurodivergent students, the executive function required to keep trying when effort isn’t reciprocated becomes an additional barrier. Students explicitly describe what researchers call “avoidance loops” – missing events because they have no one to go with, which means they can’t meet anyone, which means they keep missing events. The spiral tightens.

    The loneliness of having “friends”

    Perhaps most insidious is a different kind of loneliness – the kind where you technically have friends but still feel fundamentally alone. A student described this six months into university:

    I settled into uni well, I made a nice group of friends that I’m living with next year. It’s just 6 months in I’ve realised I’m not really that happy? I feel like I’m not really that similar to my two best friends here – and not in a good way. I just don’t really know what to do because it’s not like I can just drop them and make new friends? I feel like I just rushed into getting close with people so I wouldn’t be alone but I feel lonely anyway because I don’t feel like they really get me?

    This reflects something universities rarely measure – not just whether students have friends, but whether those friendships meet their actual needs. When students settle for proximity over genuine connection because the window for making friends feels so narrow, they end up locked into relationships that don’t sustain them.

    What’s also striking is how students describe the everyday humiliations of trying and failing:

    I even had free cinema tickets at one point and couldn’t even find anyone to go to the cinema with me for free lol. It’s making me feel really bad about myself and Im starting to feel as if there’s something wrong with me.

    Another:

    I came to uni thinking I would find people I could vibe with and chill with… I know I’m partially to blame because I’m also a naturally quiet and shy person but I feel like everyone has found their groups and it’s only November still the first term of uni and I’m just on my own… when I try to talk to people it feels like I’m begging it and not authentic.

    A second-year wrote:

    I have hundreds of acquaintances, but non of those i can call ‘friends’. When im not in uni, i spend the majority of my time alone, do things alone, go shopping alone, go to the cinema alone – all this to try and make me feel better, but just confirms my suspicions of being depressed, lonely and without any friends. I ******* hate it!

    And perhaps most painful – the contrast between the public and private self:

    I could literally cry bc I am so bored and lonely. Completely friendless… I just feel so emotionally alone and non existent when I am in university. Outside of university with my family it is positive attitudes and happy happy. But I don’t want to put up a facade that everything is peaches and cream when in uni because it is not.

    One student who failed their first year explained:

    I flopped, and I flopped bad. I failed 3 modules… The reason I flopped was…and I hate to openly say this but I was in a stage of manic depression; I’d lost all my friends from back home and I didn’t get on with my flatmates. They found me weird and geeky (which I am) I was very lonely throughout most of uni, had no friends… I flopped my exams because I had no motivation at life.

    What all of this adds up to

    Strip away the platitudes and a pattern emerges – in a mass system, students aren’t failing at friendship, the system is failing at social architecture.

    En-suite accommodation means students rarely bump into each other, food delivery apps mean kitchens stay empty, and mismatched timetables mean flatmates never overlap. Mass lectures that empty immediately don’t build connections, and when only one or two academics know a student’s name, academic spaces aren’t doing the social work we assume they are.

    Commuters can’t access evening socials due to travel costs and last trains, and they have nowhere to linger between classes with no warm spaces and no lockers. The default social offer remains alcohol-focused, excluding non-drinkers, international students unfamiliar with UK drinking culture, students from lower-income backgrounds, and those with anxiety or neurodivergence who find the format inaccessible.

    Friendships form early and groups solidify fast – often within the first few weeks. Students arriving late or missing that window describe groups as impenetrable by November, summer breaks dissolve weak ties, and third years start again without halls to facilitate contact. And even when students make friends, they often describe them as superficial, settling for proximity because the window for genuine connection felt too narrow.

    It’s a bit risky

    Over the summer with student leaders, a follow up activity that Jim and I deployed involved some student leaders coming up with a risk register for the student experience and then some mitigations. Some of their interventions about loneliness (modelled without funding or capacity constraints) are insightful and offer some food for thought:

    • More dedicated space for students to “exist” including communal lounges, lockers, microwaves and study space
    • Accessibility guides to rooms and spaces, pictures of what activities, seminar rooms and office hours might look like to set expectations and build confidence
    • Opportunities to chat, talk to other students and build connection built into the curriculum – through seminar activities, assessment or group projects
    • Comprehensive peer mentoring and buddy schemes that support students through their first few weeks
    • Longer processes of induction
    • Deliberately generating groupwork and discussion in the first teaching episodes of a module

    Some of this isn’t new and might be things that already take place on various campuses. But it’s becoming clear that without curated and designated interventions on student loneliness from student unions and their universities, one of the core parts of the student experience risks becoming a luxury good for a select few.

    And as money gets tighter and different parts of the student experience get shaved off, that might look like the social event the department runs with free pizza disappears or it could be bigger class sizes – either way the ability to form connections gets harder. Connection, belonging and mattering don’t always require vast funds, but they do reap huge rewards.

    Each cut makes forming friendships harder. Connection and belonging don’t always require huge budgets, but they do require intention. Notably, few interventions that remain focus specifically on helping students meet each other, despite this cutting across multiple institutional KPIs.

    If accommodation kitchens are dead, they can be made alive through regular subsidised socials and RA-hosted drop-ins. Commuters need staffed spaces with lockers and microwaves, clustered timetables, travel bursaries, and social calendars starting at 12:15 not 19:15. Social contact needs embedding in teaching through discussion, assessed group work, and academics knowing students’ names.

    The societies model needs fixing – month-one free trials to reduce experimentation costs, incentivising daytime and sober formats, normalising Week 5 sign-ups as much as Week 1, running “come alone” events. Addressing class and cultural barriers can be done through multiple entry points that don’t require drinking culture or cultural capital. Neurodivergent students need clear guides and structured formats. International students need mixed-group activities with staff introductions in weeks 2 and 6, not just induction.

    Funding this infrastructure properly isn’t expensive – and anyway, pizza socials and welcome events aren’t frivolous extras, they’re the scaffolding for measured outcomes. Engineer repeated face-to-face contact and friendships follow.

    There’s something else worth paying attention to, and it’s hiding in plain sight across Europe. In most countries we’ve visited on our Study Tours, universities allocate every new student to small groups of 5-15 with trained student mentors before they arrive. It’s universal, not optional or targeted at “at risk” groups. These second or third-year mentors guide groups through first term – campus tours, city exploration, and crucially, turning up to things together.

    When UK students explain why they didn’t engage in extracurricular activities, one answer dominates: “I had nobody to go with.” Universal mentoring solves this by design. Research shows these schemes improve retention, belonging and mental health, particularly for first-generation and international students. Aalto University credits their tutoring system for creating “the world’s best student experience.”

    UK universities run scattered peer mentoring – something for international students, maybe medical school family groups – but lack scale and universality. European universities assume all students need this and design accordingly. These schemes are student-led and union-coordinated, with training and modest payment or academic credit for mentors. Improved retention alone pays for the programme many times over.

    Whose job?

    Some will get this far and ask why universities should be responsible for students making friends. Surely that’s not what academics signed up for – shouldn’t institutions focus on teaching and research rather than playing social coordinator?

    The problem is that Maslow’s hierarchy doesn’t work the way we’d like it to. Students who are lonely, anxious, and socially isolated aren’t engaging with the academic self-actualisation at the top of Maslow’s pyramid – they’re stuck further down, and no amount of excellent lecture content will shift them up.

    The student who posted about being too anxious to get food after eight hours on campus isn’t thinking about their essay – they’re hungry and scared. The one spending entire days in bed in the dark isn’t going to benefit from better seminar slides.

    Universities can either acknowledge that belonging and connection are prerequisites for academic success, or they can keep measuring poor outcomes and wondering why interventions aimed at the top of Maslow’s pyramid aren’t working.

    And given that students are now paying the full cost of their education through a lifetime of additional tax framed as debt, universities can’t simply say “that’s not our problem” when the system they’ve designed produces loneliness at scale.

    Students seem remarkably willing to accept this as a collective responsibility – they generally don’t complain about resources spent on mental health support or on helping others succeed, even when they don’t use those services themselves.

    What breaks that tolerance is visible unfairness and institutional indifference. If universities want to retain that goodwill and actually deliver on the outcomes they’re being measured against, designing for friendship isn’t mission creep – it’s the foundation that makes everything else possible.

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  • When life is bitter, don’t lose hope

    When life is bitter, don’t lose hope

    When life takes away your greatest support, it can feel as if the world is falling apart. For me, losing my father as a child was more than heartbreaking. It was a true test of strength. Yet in a world that often seemed bitter, the kindness of strangers and the power of personal dreams helped me rise above my sorrow and shape a future full of hope.

    My family and I live in the Eastern province of Rwanda. I was only five years old when one morning, my father packed his bag and left the house. He didn’t say where he was going and he never came back. Days turned into weeks, weeks into years, but there was no sign of him. No call. No letter. Nothing. 

    At first, I didn’t understand what was happening. I kept asking my mother, “When is Papa coming back?” But she would just smile sadly and say, “One day, maybe.”

    In her heart, she knew he was not coming back. 

    Life changed quickly after that. Without a father and without money, things became hard for the family. My mother, Catherine, had no job. She had never worked outside the home before. Now, she had to take care of me and my four siblings alone. 

    Struggling with little

    We had no house of our own. We moved from one place to another, staying with kind neighbors or sleeping in small, broken huts. During rainy nights, water would leak through the roof and we had to stay awake holding buckets. Sometimes, we didn’t even have enough food to eat. Many nights, we went to bed hungry. 

    My siblings were in high school at the time, but the family could not afford school fees anymore. One by one, they dropped out and stayed home. It was painful for me to watch them suffer. I loved them deeply and wanted a better life for all of them. 

    Despite everything, I stayed in school. My mother worked hard doing small jobs washing clothes, digging gardens or selling vegetables in the market. She never gave up. “You are our hope,” she would tell me. “Even if your father left, we must move forward.”

    I listened. I promised myself that no matter how hard life became, I would not give up. I wanted to finish school, go to university and one day help my family live a better life. 

    But it was not easy. 

    Help can come from surprising places.

    I often went to school with old shoes. I had no school bag only an old plastic bag to carry my books. I had no lunch and many times, I sat in class with an empty stomach. But still, I worked hard. I listened carefully, asked questions and always completed my homework, even if it meant studying by candlelight or by the dim light of a kerosene lamp. 

    Many teachers began to notice me. They saw that even though I had nothing, I had determination and a kind heart. One teacher gave me exercise books. Another helped pay part of my school fees. A neighbor who owned a small shop gave me a few snacks sometimes. A church group gave my mother food and clothes once in a while. 

    These acts of kindness kept me going. 

    I studied harder than anyone else and soon became the best performer in my class. Every year, I got top marks. My name was always on the honor list. At school, students looked up to me. But at home, things were still hard. My siblings had lost hope, but I kept believing in a better future. 

    After many years of struggle, I finally finished high school. I was the first in my family to do so. On the day I received my final results, my mother cried tears of joy. You did it, my son. You made me proud, she said, hugging me tightly.

    But my journey wasn’t over. 

    I had one more goal: to go to university. That meant more fees, laptop, more books, more challenges, but I didn’t stop. I applied for scholarships and after many rejections, I finally got accepted to a university with some financial support. 

    Now, I’m 22 years old. I’m in university, studying hard every day. I met with a kind person again, who gave me a place to sleep and dinner. Even though I have that support, I’m still facing challenges. I still lack proper shoes, clothes and transport money, but I keep going. My dream is to become a professional, get a good job first, then become self-employed and return home to support my mother and siblings. 

    I remind myself: “My father left us when I was just a child. We had no house, no food and no money. My siblings could not finish school. But I decided to fight. Kind people helped me and I stayed strong. Now I am at university. I will not stop until I help my family rise again.” 

    I hope my story will teach young people that even when life feels bitter and people let you down, you must not give up. Strength is not about having everything. It is about standing tall even when you have nothing. This is the reason why I’m writing my story. 

    Even when life is painful and people walk away from you, never lose hope. With hard work, faith and the help of kind people, you can still rise, succeed and help others do the same. 

    QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER:

    1. What was one thing the author promised himself when things got really hard for his family?

    2. In what ways did people help the author succeed?

    3. When have people helped you when you were having difficulty?

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  • Universities don’t seem to understand how power dynamics on campus are abused

    Universities don’t seem to understand how power dynamics on campus are abused

    I can’t be the only person to have been shocked that 1.5 per cent of respondents to OfS’ NSS extension on harassment and sexual misconduct said they’d been in an intimate personal relationship with a member of university staff in the past year.

    Nor, notwithstanding the sampling issues, can I have been the only one to have been alarmed that of those relationships, 68.8 per cent said that the staff member was involved with their education or assessment.

    A few weeks ago now over on LinkedIn, former Durham psychology prof and harassment and sexual misconduct expert Graham Towl triggered a bit of debate.

    Having asserted that, to his knowledge, no university had initiated an outright ban on intimate personal relationships between staff and students, a whole raft of respondents appeared to tell him he was wrong – at least when it came to their university.

    So I checked. And sadly, whatever their perceptions, almost all of said contributors were mistaken. There’s plenty of strong discouragement, a lot of bans where there’s a supervisory relationship, but not a lot of policies that actually respond to what students want – which is for university to be one of the few settings where they’re not pestered for sex.

    Anna Bull’s work on professional boundaries couldn’t be any clearer, really. Two studies surveying students about staff-student relationships show that the vast majority of students – at least 75 per cent – are uncomfortable with teaching staff having sexual or romantic relationships with students.

    The research examined both “sexualized interactions” (such as dating or romantic relationships) and “personal interactions” (like adding students on social media or drinking with them). Notably, there were no differences in attitudes between undergraduate and postgraduate students, suggesting that different policies for different levels of study may not be justified.

    Women students were considerably more uncomfortable than men with both sexualized and personal interactions from staff, no doubt reflecting their heightened awareness of potential sexual harassment and intrusion. Black and Asian students also reported greater discomfort with personal interactions than white students, which researchers linked to preferences for greater professionalism and concerns about culturally inappropriate settings like pub meetings.

    The findings point towards establishing clear professional boundaries in higher education to create a more inclusive and comfortable learning environment for diverse student groups. So why hasn’t that happened?

    Power imbalance

    Since August 1st, the Office for Students (OfS) has required universities to implement one or more steps that could make a “significant and credible difference” in protecting students from conflicts of interest and abuse of power in intimate personal relationships between relevant staff members and students.

    While a complete ban on those relationships is deemed to meet this requirement, it is not mandatory – providers can alternatively adopt other measures such as requiring staff to disclose relationships, managing academic interactions to prevent unfair advantage or disadvantage, ensuring students can report harassment through alternative channels, and providing appropriate training on professional boundaries.

    If providers choose not to ban relationships, they have to actively manage any actual or potential conflicts of interest. Conversely, if they do implement a ban, breaches must result in disciplinary action through usual processes, including the possibility of dismissal.

    The policy must apply to “relevant staff members” – those with direct academic or professional responsibilities for students, including lecturers, supervisors, personal tutors, and pastoral support staff. And OfS expects providers to regularly review their approach based on evidence of prevalence, consultation with students, and the effectiveness of measures in place, adjusting policies as necessary to ensure student protection.

    That’s the bare minimum – but save for that stuff on “training on professional boundaries”, the problem has always been that it partly misses the point. Both OfS’ Condition E6 and several of the policies I’ve read since August 1st seem to suggest that intimate personal relationships between staff and students are somehow inevitable, or will just “happen”.

    But someone has to initiate them. Is it really too much to ask that higher education will be a space where students can get on with their lives without that initiation? Apparently it is.

    And if we’re looking more broadly at the professional boundaries that students think should exist, I can say with some confidence that they’re barely addressed at all in the policies I’ve seen.

    Between August 1st and October 16 this year, I’ve been using the odd break to search for what universities in England have done, or continue to do, in this space via what is supposed to be an easy-to-find “single source of information” on harassment and sexual misconduct. The difficulty in finding information in some cases is a different article, and in some cases searches might have surfaced old policies or rules that have since been updated.

    But having reached York St John University down the alphabetical list, I think I can now say what I can see. And it’s pretty disappointing.

    Ban or regulate?

    A clear minority of English universities now operate we might define as a total “ban” – prohibiting intimate relationships between staff and students, allowing only excluded pre-existing relationships, and making breach subject to disciplinary sanction up to dismissal.

    Those operating a ban between relevant staff members and students have moved decisively beyond the traditional “discourage and disclose” model, recognising that a prohibition sends a clearer message about acceptable professional conduct than a register that implicitly frames relationships as permissible if declared.

    But the vast majority of providers continue to run hybrid disclosure-and-mitigation regimes. These typically prohibit relationships where staff have direct academic, supervisory or pastoral responsibility whilst requiring declaration elsewhere so conflicts can be managed.

    Some variants include mandatory disclosure forms, formal HR records, automatic removal of responsibilities, and explicit disciplinary consequences. Weaker implementations rely on cultural expectations of disclosure with what read like vague enforcement mechanisms.

    Definitional inconsistencies and structural complexities

    Policy complexity and inconsistency remain significant compliance risks. E6’s definition of “relevant staff member” extends beyond academic roles to include pastoral advisers, complaints handlers, and security personnel, yet plenty of policies restrict prohibitions to “teaching” or “supervisory” staff. That narrower scope risks under-compliance, particularly given the condition’s emphasis on addressing “direct professional responsibilities” broadly conceived.

    The challenge is then compounded by the increasingly blurred boundaries of contemporary academic work. Academic casualisation means many staff occupy ambiguous positions – postgraduate students who teach undergraduates, visiting fellows with limited institutional attachment, or part-time lecturers working across multiple institutions. Hybrid roles complicate traditional staff-student distinctions and create enforcement challenges that policies rarely acknowledge explicitly.

    Similarly, institutions vary widely in defining “intimate personal relationship.” Some focus narrowly on romantic and sexual connections, whilst others encompass emotional intimacy or even brief encounters. The definitional variation undermines the sector’s ability to provide consistent protection – and creates real confusion for staff and students moving between institutions.

    Disciplinary frameworks

    E6 explicitly requires that breaches of relationship bans be actionable under disciplinary codes with the possibility of dismissal. Many policies use hedged language – “may be subject to disciplinary processes” – without clearly linking to dismissal procedures. This vagueness reads like a compliance gap, given the condition demands visible enforceability rather than implied consequences.

    More fundamentally, some universities fail to integrate relationship policies with their harassment and sexual misconduct frameworks, treating consensual relationships as a separate administrative matter rather than a safeguarding issue. The siloed approach risks missing the connection between power abuse in relationships and broader patterns of misconduct.

    Meanwhile, even where I found the “single comprehensive source of information”, there were publication gaps. Multiple providers either don’t publish any staff-student relationship policies or fragment them across HR documents, safeguarding procedures, and harassment frameworks. It makes it impossible for students to locate the unified information that E6 demands.

    And even where policies exist, they often read as HR-focused documents with limited student-facing clarity. E6 expects providers to communicate that students can report misconduct within relationships, will not be penalised for participating in permitted relationships, and will be protected from retaliation. Few policies include explicit student-facing assurances on these points – they’re largely staff-facing. Students won’t know what they can and can’t expect.

    Maybe it’s the lack of student engagement. E6 encourages providers to gather evidence, review complaints data, and consult students when setting policy. Very few institutions mention regular review cycles or evidence of student consultation in developing their approach. Over the past two weeks, just two of the 35 SUs I’ve spoken to have been shared the institution-level NSS extension prevalence data. Sigh.

    Transition and review

    The core critique of disclosure regimes – that they prioritise staff honesty over student protection and create implicit permission for advances – remains pretty much unaddressed by the sector. Most universities retain register-based systems that focus on “managing conflicts of interest” once relationships exist, rather than preventing the harm that may occur from approaches themselves.

    Policies typically frame concerns in managerial language around “professional integrity,” “institutional reputation,” and “fairness in assessment.” Staff-centric discourse contrasts sharply with student-centric concerns about discomfort, vulnerability, and psychological harm. The regulatory emphasis on conflict management appears to miss the fundamental critique that the proposition itself, regardless of outcome, can damage students’ academic confidence and sense of safety.

    While many policies acknowledge “power imbalances,” they operationalise the idea narrowly through formal supervisory relationships. Few grapple with the diffuse cultural authority that academic staff wield as gatekeepers to disciplinary knowledge, professional networks, and career opportunities. It suggests that universities don’t know how power operates in their own environments, particularly for students from underrepresented backgrounds who may be more dependent on staff endorsement and support.

    The evidence that women, Black, Asian, and LGBTQ+ students are disproportionately uncomfortable with boundary-crossing receives pretty much no acknowledgement in institutional policies. The absence of intersectional analysis by definition means that universal policies may systematically under-protect the most vulnerable student populations, despite E6’s emphasis on safeguarding.

    Technology and boundaries

    Both academic research and common sense tells us that contemporary academic relationships increasingly develop through digital channels that traditional policies struggle to address. Social media connections, informal messaging platforms, and online collaboration tools blur the boundaries between professional and personal communication in ways that very few of the policies I’ve seen acknowledge explicitly.

    More broadly, the policies on offer are poorly equipped to address subtle forms of grooming and boundary erosion. Most frameworks deal with binary outcomes – either declared relationships to be managed, or clear breaches to be disciplined – but offer little on the grey areas where inappropriate behaviour develops incrementally through seemingly innocent interactions.

    The research evidence on grooming pathways – special attention, informal meetings, personal communications, boundary-testing compliments – finds limited reflection in the material. Where policies do address professional boundaries, they typically focus on practical arrangements (meeting locations, communication channels) rather than the relational dynamics that create vulnerability to exploitation.

    It’s a gap that is particularly significant given evidence that students often recognise exploitation only retrospectively, after the power dynamic becomes clear. Policies designed around consent at the time of relationship formation do nothing to address the temporal aspects of harm recognition.

    Reporting barriers and trust

    Despite E6’s emphasis on accessible reporting, most universities have not fundamentally addressed the structural barriers that deter students from raising concerns. Few policies guarantee independent reporting channels or provide concrete protections against retaliation beyond general misconduct language. The asymmetry of consequences – where students risk academic and career damage whilst staff face at most employment consequences – receives little institutional acknowledgement.

    This trust deficit is compounded by the limited evidence of truly independent support systems, particularly at smaller and specialist institutions. Students in performing arts, agriculture, PGRs in general – all are characterised by intense staff-student interaction often face the thinnest protection frameworks despite arguably facing the highest risks of boundary-crossing.

    And miserably inevitably, to read the policies you’d think that staff in professional placement settings, years abroad, sports coaching, franchised provision and students’ unions don’t exist. Either those developing the policies have a limited understanding of the contemporary student experience, or have thought about the complexities and placed them in the “too difficult” pile for now. Or maybe it’s that the bulk of policies read like HR policies and have been developed with the university’s own employed staff in mind.

    There’s no doubt that the regulatory intervention has successfully prompted some policy development across the sector, but on the evidence I’ve seen so far, the translation from policy text to cultural change remains incomplete.

    Whether E6 delivers meaningful protection for students will depend on how universities implement the frameworks in practice, whether they address the underlying trust, power, and vulnerability dynamics that create risks, and how effectively they navigate the complex economic and cultural pressures that shape contemporary academic life.

    They’ll also depend on universities proving the regulator wrong by actively deciding to do the right thing, rather than deciding that the bare minimum derived from the checklist will do.

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