Colorado State University’s current chancellor, Tony Frank, will retire at the end of June 2027.
Faculty groups are pushing back against Colorado State University’s decision to consider only internal candidates in its search to replace outgoing chancellor Tony Frank, The Coloradoan reported.
“An internal search, for a position of this magnitude, is not only misaligned with institutional peers, [it] limits our ability to identify the best candidate. Furthermore, it fosters an impression that the slate of potential candidates is already determined,” the letter stated. “It is exceptionally concerning that the current Chancellor appears to be soliciting applications for the position, superseding the Evaluation Committee Chair or Board Chair. As the current Chancellor would have affiliations with any internal candidates, this represents a direct conflict of interest.”
A letter from the CSU chapter of the American Association of University Professors raised similar concerns. The group also denounced the tight six-week timeline between the initial search announcement and the application deadline. The board announced Frank’s June 2027 retirement on Dec. 18, and applications for the chancellorship were due to Frank by Jan. 26.
“From our perspective, it looks like the search is being conducted by a committee of one—the current chancellor,” Brian Munsky, a representative of the School of Biomedical and Chemical Engineering, said at a faculty council meeting, according to The Coloradoan.
In the same Dec. 18 announcement, the board shared its plans for the internal search.
“Today, we voted to conduct an internal search for Chancellor, launching in January 2026, that will be open to anyone currently employed within the CSU System who meets the application criteria,” the board wrote. The application criteria include a terminal degree, “strong experience with government affairs” and “a record of significant accomplishment as a senior leader in a complex organization, in higher education, business, public service, government, or the non-profit sector.”
Last month, state lawmakers in Iowa introduced a bill that would allow community colleges to offer four-year degrees—and unwittingly triggered a turf war.
While community college advocates argued the lower-cost degrees would benefit students in a state with vast rural expanses and education deserts, private universities countered that community colleges are stepping out of bounds and infringing on their territory. Greg Steinke, the president of the Iowa Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, even went so far as to say the move could put some institutions out of business, telling lawmakers a few weeks ago that “without any question and without any doubt,” if the bill passed, “some of our private colleges will close.”
Legislators got the message. On Jan. 28, the Iowa House higher education committee amended the bill to impose some limits. Community college baccalaureate degrees would be introduced as a pilot program: Two-year institutions would be allowed to offer no more than three baccalaureate degrees, and only if they are at least 50 miles away from a university offering a similar option.
Emily Shields, executive director of Community Colleges for Iowa, said she was surprised by the level of resistance from universities. State lawmakers tasked her organization with producing a report on the feasibility of bringing community college baccalaureate degrees to Iowa, which found “a pretty clear need” for more bachelor’s degree options in the state, she said—especially for students who are place-bound or concerned about costs.
“We don’t see this as an existential threat to any of [the universities], and that certainly isn’t the goal,” said Shields. “I really don’t think there’s evidence from other states to back up that fear.”
Steinke said the evidence lies in how the free market works.
“Students and consumers will go to the cheapest place,” he said. “It will be a struggle, and there are some of our institutions that won’t be able to tolerate the struggle. Some of the presidents of my association … don’t like me to say that, because they don’t want the word out there that they could close,” he added. “But how can there be any other outcome?”
Similar negotiations—and tensions—are playing out across the country as community college baccalaureate degrees expand and pique the interest of state lawmakers. More than 200 community colleges in 24 states now offer a total of at least 767 bachelor’s degrees, according to the Community College Baccalaureate Association (CCBA). And that number is bound to grow as a handful of new states consider introducing these options.
Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker threw his support behind community college baccalaureate degrees last year, and two-year colleges in the state continue to advocate for legislation to make them happen. Massachusetts already has one community college offering four-year degrees, but college leaders hope to expand the opportunity to more, said Angela Kersenbrock, president of the CCBA. And other states—including Maryland and Nebraska—are exploring the possibility or considering expansions.
Kersenbrock described the moment as a near “tipping point” for the community college baccalaureate movement, with almost half of states now embracing these degrees.
Lawmakers are drawn to the option because “it’s the right thing to do,” she said. When states need more trained workers—and universities are at capacity or don’t offer certain workforce-oriented bachelor’s degree programs—community college baccalaureate degrees are a way to “really leverage what community colleges do best, and that is responding to labor market needs.”
Bipartisan Support
Such programs enjoy rare bipartisan support, cropping up in Democratic-led states like California and Washington, as well as in Republican strongholds such as Texas and Florida.
“Community college baccalaureates are not red and they’re not blue,” Kersenbrock said. “They sit right in the middle … We need more talent, and we have people in our communities who can do this job. Why not give people the opportunity?”
She noted that the programs have become especially popular in states with large rural areas to prevent students from moving away to attend universities. Many lead to applied baccalaureate degrees in specific workforce-oriented fields—such as respiratory therapy or dental hygiene—which appeal to states or regions seeking to address worker shortages.
For example, Feather River College, a small rural institution in California, has graduated 99 students from its ecosystem restoration and applied fire management as well as equine and ranch management programs, “high-need fields in a region facing extreme fire risk and economic vulnerability,” James Todd, vice chancellor of academic affairs for the California Community Colleges system, wrote in an email.
“For many students in that region, pursuing a bachelor’s degree elsewhere simply is not feasible,” Todd said. The nearest public four-year university is more than 80 miles away.
An intentional fire was set at Feather River College to ensure the health of its forested campus. The campus now has an ecosystem restoration and applied fire management bachelor’s degree to train students in such practices.
Feather River College
Over the last decade, California community colleges got approval for more than 50 bachelor’s degree programs, offered by roughly 40 colleges across the state. The number of students admitted to the 11 bachelor’s degree programs offered by Maricopa Community Colleges in Arizona has grown 15 percent year over year. The system expects to hit 10,000 enrolled students this year and plans to more than double its number of baccalaureate programs by 2032. Currently, 61 percent of those enrolled are first-generation college students, and 78.4 percent are continuing or former students within the community college system.
“In just two years, we have seen extraordinary growth with our bachelor’s degree programs, which is undoubtedly associated with the lower per-credit-hour cost,” Steven R. Gonzales, chancellor of Maricopa Community Colleges, said in a news release. A bachelor’s degree at Arizona State University for an in-state student can cost up to $47,000. At Maricopa Community Colleges, students from the county can earn a bachelor’s for $14,550.
Simon Kaminski, who is earning a bachelor of applied science in data analytics and programming at Mesa Community College, said thanks to a scholarship, his degree is going to cost him roughly $3,000.
“I pretty much paid nothing for a bachelor’s degree, which is always amazing,” he said.
Kaminski found out Mesa offered bachelor’s degrees after he earned his associate degree there, and said he was “shocked” that was even an option. The low-cost opportunity to continue on at a campus that was already familiar felt too good to pass up. And he’s glad he did, he said, both because of the price and the program’s focus on hands-on projects.
Preston Cooper, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, pointed out in a blog post last week that even as they grow, two-year-college baccalaureate programs remain relatively small. In 2021–22, out of the more than two million bachelor’s degrees awarded nationally, community colleges accounted for just over 15,000 four-year degrees.
Nonetheless, he believes that allowing community colleges “to apply their low-cost model to bachelor’s degrees” is a net positive because it can drive “competition that could force the rest of the higher education system to reduce costs, too.”
Ongoing Tensions
But in Iowa and elsewhere, not everyone is eager for more competition.
Four-year colleges and universities have long tried to prevent their two-year counterparts from introducing bachelor’s programs, worried that community colleges are encroaching on their signature offerings. Their leaders argue that two-year institutions should be investing in better transfer processes to bachelor’s degree–granting institutions, not standing up their own.
Sometimes it seems like a losing argument.
In 2021, after years of advocacy, Arizona passed legislation permitting community college baccalaureate degrees, despite staunch opposition from the Arizona Board of Regents, which represents the University of Arizona, Arizona State University and Northern Arizona University. (The programs aren’t allowed to replicate university offerings, but four-year institutions don’t have veto power over which programs are approved.) A similar conflict broke out in Idaho last year when four-year colleges opposed a proposal for a bachelor of applied science in business administration at the College of Western Idaho, partly over concerns it duplicated their programs.
Students earning a bachelor’s degree in artificial intelligence at Chandler-Gilbert Community College attend class.
Maricopa Community Colleges
Now the California State University system and California Community Colleges are battling over a set of proposed baccalaureate programs that CSU flagged as duplicative. Sixteen proposed degrees are at issue, including seven first proposed in 2023.
For some of the programs, only one CSU campus has objected, whereas for others, “seven or eight CSUs have said, ‘When we look at the courses, the curriculum and the outcomes and what types of roles these are filling, these are absolutely duplicative of programs that we have,’” said Nathan Evans, associate vice chancellor of academic affairs for the CSU system.
But he also stressed that the two systems are trying to “work toward the same objective of creating access to postsecondary opportunities in California.”
Todd, of the California community college system, stands behind community colleges’ process for determining duplication, noting that colleges must submit “extensive documentation” demonstrating unmet workforce need and an analysis of how the proposed program compares to existing CSU and University of California offerings.
“Deliberative conversations” are underway with CSU representatives about the proposals in limbo, Todd said. “It would be premature to comment on the next steps until those conversations have concluded.”
This is a familiar pattern. In California, the community college and four-year systems have repeatedly duked it out over such proposals since a 2021 California law first allowed community colleges to stand up new baccalaureate degree programs. Under the law, community colleges can apply to offer up to 30 new four-year programs annually if the programs don’t replicate existing programs at state universities. That is evaluated in a review process with representatives of the California State University system and the University of California system, followed by approval from the California Community College system chancellor’s office.
Those reviews have grown so contentious that the community college system contracted the nonprofit WestEd last year to analyze possible duplication issues and ways to improve the review process with the CSU system. WestEd’s report, released last summer, concluded that the systems seem to be working with different definitions of “unnecessary duplication,” and while there is overlap between proposed and existing programs, CSU’s objections can be overly broad. Evans said CSU’s faculty concerns, and ways of defining duplication, weren’t appropriately factored into the WestEd study.
Legislation to introduce new types of community college baccalaureate degrees have also been a recent source of contention in the state. Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill in 2024 that would have allowed community colleges to offer a bachelor of science in nursing, arguing that systems should be collaborating on nursing education and the bill could “inadvertently hurt” partnerships. More recent legislation that would allow Southwestern College to offer up to four more bachelor’s degrees—in applied forensic science, allied health education and leadership, teaching English to non-English speakers, and web design—has advanced to the California Senate, despite opposition from the CSU and UC systems.
The programs proposed in the bill are “designed to complement, not compete with, the four-year universities,” Todd said.
But Evans sees such bills as “problematic because they’re not thinking big picture,” he argued. “These are just sort of nibbling around the edges, creating friction” versus taking a more “wholesale” approach to student access and sorting out differences over community colleges’ four-year degrees.
Reaching Agreements
Despite these squabbles, some potential models for collaboration are emerging.
Brian Durham, executive director of the Illinois Community College Board, said he’s “hopeful” his state will adopt community college baccalaureate degrees soon, in part because the colleges “negotiated pretty extensively” with universities, which pushed back on legislation proposed last year.
A new agreed-upon version, which the board expects to see introduced this year, offers the universities multiple opportunities for input on new baccalaureate programs and puts limits on the number of nursing programs per region to avoid “too much competition,” Durham said. As a result, Illinois university leaders have since adopted a more neutral stance.
A statement from a coalition of public and private university leaders last year said that the group “will take no position on the merits” but acknowledged that “the shifting landscape of higher education, heightened uncertainty, and our commitment to our institutions and the students of Illinois require us to be vigilant and monitor the implementation of this proposal.”
Steinke, of the Iowa Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, said the guardrails put in place matter. He contended that the conversation in his state might have gone differently if Iowa community colleges and universities initially worked together to develop a set of unique programs that universities don’t cover.
Evans, of the CSU system, agreed there are ways to improve tensions between the two sectors. For example, representatives from both the CSU and California Community Colleges are exploring ways to communicate earlier about possible program duplications, rather than hash it out after colleges have already gone through the labor of drafting intensive proposals. Newsom’s administration is also working to set up a California Education Intersegmental Council to ensure better coordination between the state’s two-year and four-year higher ed systems.
Kersenbrock emphasized that universities are “a major resource for this country” and community college baccalaureate advocates “don’t want them to get hurt at all.”
Creating community college baccalaureate degrees “takes real, intentional work. It takes trust on everybody’s side. It takes assurances,” she said.
At the same time, she believes smaller, private four-year universities that attract out-of-state students may need to reckon with whether their programs serve the same state needs that community college programs do.
“I think you have to just ask those questions,” she said.
Durham said the growth of community college baccalaureates represents a broader blurring of the lines between higher education sectors right now. For example, dual-enrollment classes for high school students have rapidly expanded at community colleges, and four-year institutions are starting to offer more short-term programs.
“It reflects the changing landscape of education,” he said. “We are going to have to recognize that there’s some blend happening … and that’s a good thing. Ultimately, it’s about students.”
Capping indirect costs would’ve led to cuts or reduced research, college leaders warned.
The National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies can’t make any changes to how universities are reimbursed for costs indirectly related to research until at least Sept. 30, under the recently passed budget bills that President Trump signed into law.
The legislation ends a yearlong effort from the Trump administration to cap reimbursements for indirect research costs at 15 percent. The average reimbursement rate for institutions is 27 to 28 percent, though some colleges have negotiated reimbursement rates greater than 50 percent.
When the NIH announced Feb. 7, 2025, that it would cap the rates, colleges and universities warned they would have to cut costs or research operations to make up the difference. The funding for indirect costs helps to pay for hazardous waste disposal, utilities and patient safety. The rate cap would’ve saved about $4 billion, the NIH said.
But lawsuits quickly led to court orders that blocked the NIH from capping the rates. And then the National Science Foundation as well as the Energy and Defense Departments also sought to put a 15 percent cap in place—policies that federal judges also blocked. The Trump administration has appealed the decisions, so litigation continues.
Now, Congress has weighed in as well, blocking any changes to the reimbursement rates for fiscal year 2026, which ends Sept. 30. That legislation led the Energy Department to formally announce that its policy changes related to indirect research costs were no longer in effect. Likewise, a Pentagon official told Inside Higher Ed that “the department is not presently working toward changes to indirect cost rates.” The NIH and NSF didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Cost Cuts Still Loom
But the conversation about funding indirect research costs likely isn’t over. The legislation also directed the agencies to work with universities on ways to improve the funding model for research. Lawmakers say there’s room for improvement in the current system, “particularly with respect to the need for greater transparency into these costs.”
The legislation specifically mentions the proposal from 10 higher education associations that would overhaul how the government funds research. That proposal, the Financial Accountability in Research (FAIR) model, would break up research costs into three buckets: research performance costs (the current direct costs), essential research performance support (current indirect costs) and general research operations (institutionwide services that are necessary for research that are currently lumped into the indirect cost category).
The 10 associations, collectively known as the Joint Associations Group, came together to rethink the research funding model because they realized that something was going to change with or without the input of universities. The FAIR model is aimed at increasing accountability and clarity in how federal research funding is spent, according to JAG.
Nearly 300 national organizations, including scientific societies, patient advocacy groups and funding foundations, wrote to Congress last fall in support of JAG’s plan and asked for a two-year transition period to any new funding model.
“We believe that the recommendations put forward by the JAG would enhance transparency and accountability associated with federally funded research without undermining overall support critical to American science,” the letter stated. “While granular details of the model will need to continue to be refined through its implementation process, we believe the core of the model addresses the themes that lawmakers and policymakers have prioritized while also ensuring American leadership in science and innovation continues.”
As for JAG, it applauded Congress for supporting indirect research costs.
“We thank Congress—and particularly the leadership and appropriators in each chamber—for ensuring continued support for all the costs associated with advancing American science, and for continuing to engage with the JAG on the FAIR model.”
This blog was kindly authored by Dr. Josh Patel, Senior Education and Policy Researcher, Edge Foundation. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the foundation.
In 2025 the discourse of ‘skills’ dominated education policy, from the post-16 white paper to Skills England’s UK Standard Skills Classification. Skills in this context act as bureaucratic proxies for specific human capacities. Precisely defining and ranking skills makes it possible to identify ‘shortages’, ‘gaps’, and ‘deficits’ relative to political and economic priorities, and to frame them as problems requiring action. These may be specific: last March, Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced building 1.5 million homes would require 60,000 more ‘engineers, brickies, sparkies, and chippies’ by 2029. They may also be general: NFER projections for demand for six ‘Essential Employment Skills’ to 2035 aim to align provision with ‘high growth areas’.
Years of this line of criticism have, however, hardly troubled the advance of the skills agenda; indeed, the intensification of criticisms like Barnett’s has coincided with its peak over the last 30 years. This is likely because the historic and ideational mechanisms sustaining skills discourse are not foremost concerned with education or training, or even knowledge, at all. Instead, skills discourse is primarily concerned with public accountability. More specifically, they are a response to questions about what counts as acceptable evidence of accountability, and how learners and university leaders can provide this evidence. I explore these underlying mechanisms in my new book, Universities and the Purpose of Higher Education and here consider how they precipitated the emergence of skills.
Liberal education, skills, and massification
Contemporary skills discourse rests on institutional and conceptual arrangements that took shape during the mass expansion of higher education after the Second World War. At that time, the prevailing governing idea was ‘liberal education’. Social leadership was entrusted to a small cadre of elites bound by a ‘common culture’, based in the study of the virtues of the Classics or literature, and transmitted through a limited number of universities. These elites were revered as possessing the judgement necessary for responsible governance. However, some commentators, like C.P. Snow and later Martin Wiener, were sceptical. They worried that social leaders were afraid of the transformative power of modern technologies as demonstrated by the war. Protective of their own power, they resisted reform, even if this led to national ‘decline’. This was evident in the continued restriction of access to higher education and the denigration of applied studies.
By the early 1960s, massification was underway. The Robbins Report (1963) cited in its appendices public returns from investment in higher education of 9 percent per annum, yet the report itself warned that overreliance on incomplete measures would undervalue higher education. The full impact of higher education was too complex to be fully measured. Any attempt to do so would necessarily fail to capture higher education’s wider, more subtle, but critical benefits to a free and prosperous society, which I examine in the book. If governments relied too heavily on such measures when allocating resources, they risked underinvesting in higher education and overlooking its full value. Robbins (an eminent LSE economist) therefore refused to provide a precise accounting. The financial arrangements proposed were, (as Michael Shattock described them) a ‘fudge’. However, Robbins’ judgement in support of expansion, grounded in elite authority still capable of commanding deference, was sufficient to legitimise growth.
This settlement unravelled as massification continued, and pressure intensified following the social and economic crises of the 1970s. As public finances came under the scrutiny of an expanded political class, universities were seen as failing on several counts: complicit in class and gender inequality (later racial too), and inattentive to national needs (increasingly market-defined). The distribution of national resources could no longer depend on fallible judgment of an elite that was too often self-interested and inefficient.
Remarkably, Robbins’ 1932 redefinition of economics as a science of scarcity and trade-offs offered a tool for his successors. Although Robbins himself insisted on its strict limits, even incomplete calculations of returns based on inexactly but explicitly defined variables proved politically invaluable. They enabled higher education and the state to apparently eschew judgment and mechanically calculate and evidence their contribution to enumerated political objectives. In an economising climate, it was a short step to try and identify which elements of an education’s most relevant constituent capacities could be isolated and measured (though a step the history of which still needs to be fully told). Atomised skills emerged as the preferred idea of governance.
Judgment and accountability
The problem is that this did not eschew judgment – it simply obscured it. It is not that it is wrong to make judgments about what defined variables in education (which skills) can be said to most explicitly serve the social goal we choose. It is also not necessarily the case that we should become bogged down in debates about the technical limits of current metrics. Such measures will always be defended as prudent and necessary in the circumstances.
Instead, it is important to recognise that when judgments are made about what a skill is and how we use it, that this is never the end of the discussion: making a judgment, as Bill Readings argued, is to surrender the capacity to have the final say and open a dialogue to others to evaluate the grounds on that which your judgment was made. Skills discourses generally prioritise narrowly defined and short-term political ends. Audit and accountability cultures have repeatedly struggled to serve the common good.
The deeper deficit lies in a political system that now struggles to produce compelling holistic judgments of long-term public value. The turn to skills is best understood as a consequence of this erosion, rather than as its origin. Higher education is not just subject to these regimes. It is where the intellectual tools of governance are formed. Its responsibility extends beyond tinkering with these models to supporting more credible public judgment about the use of shared resources.
The policy announcements came on January 30 and have been welcomed with cautious optimism by the sector after previous administrations moved to restrict international student flows and cut funding for education and science.
UNL, the leading association of Dutch research universities, said the coalition’s plans were “promising”, hailing its recognition of the importance of investing in education and maintaining the Netherlands’ international outlook.
“We hope this will be a turning point,” UNL spokesperson Ruben Puylaert told The PIE, though he said the damage caused by the previous government’s budget cuts “cannot simply be undone within a year”.
He emphasised the need for stable and predictable research funding, adding it was “crucial to stay the course and continue moving towards the 3% R&D target”.
The change of tack from the government will see €1.5bn invested in education and science, reversing cuts of roughly €1.2bn under Geert Wilders’ far-right party, which prompted widespread protests among students and faculty.
Wilders’ government also sought to restrict the number of international students in the Netherlands by reducing the number of English-taught programs and promoting Dutch as the language of instruction.
Alongside other restrictions, such measures saw international enrolments at Dutch universities fall for three consecutive years, with 2024/25 seeing a decline of 5%, according to Studyportals, as forecasters warned of a projected €5bn hit to the economy.
For Studyportals CEO Edwin van Rest, the change in direction acts as an important signal for other study destinations, “showing that populist and anti-immigration narratives (at least for high-skilled talent) can be overcome”.
He highlighted a global capacity imbalance with an excess of educational and job opportunities in the developed world, and young people being born in other areas, adding that international education was the most effective link to resolve this – “stronger than the ebbs and flows of politics”.
International education … is stronger than the ebbs and flows of politics
Edwin van Rest, Studyportals
Under the new coalition – led by the liberal D66 party alongside the centre-right Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA) and the liberal People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) – a new talent strategy will be implemented to guarantee the continued attraction and retainment of international talent.
What’s more, the compulsory Foreign Language Education Test will be abolished and current foreign-language degree programs maintained, meaning psychology, economics and business courses must no longer be converted into Dutch.
While opposing previous governments’ heavy-handed restrictions, many Dutch universities implemented self-regulatory measures in recent years to maintain sustainable international student levels.
“Universities continue to take responsibility for balanced internationalisation, with a targeted intake approach and ongoing focus on language skills and student retention rate,” said UNL president Caspar van de Berg in a statement.
“In that light, we are glad that the need to change the language of instruction ceases to apply under this coalition agreement,” he added.
According to UNL, the investment in education and the reprioritisation of international students mark crucial steps for the Netherlands to remain an innovative knowledge economy and for its strategic autonomy.
“The Netherlands, like almost all developed economies, has a demographic problem and a lot of shortages in high-skilled talent,” said van Rest: “International students are great contributors to our society and soft power around the world, but also have a huge contribution to our competitiveness.”
As per Studyportals data, just under 50% of international graduates stay to work in the Netherlands, with the country offering the third most English-taught programs in Europe.
What’s more, the government’s change of tack comes at a time of shifting international student flows, with interest in European study up by 17.5% in the last five years, compared to demand for traditional destinations which has fallen by 25%, according to Studyportals.
Amid visa restrictions and policy uncertainty across the ‘big four’ global destinations, 68% of global universities in a recent survey said government policies hurt international recruitment in 2025, up from 51% in 2024. In the US, that number jumped to 85%.
A year ago I wrote a blog post inviting the SRHE community to reflect on what it means to be political for today’s students. That piece was a thought experiment exploring political agency beyond traditional notions of student activism or protest. I now want to extend this thinking by considering whether student-as-consumer complaints can also be understood as a form of political agency.
Consumerism has increasingly invaded new sectors of society, including higher education. In the UK, consumer rights and relationships are actively promoted through higher education policy, which frames students as consumers and universities as providers. The Office for Students, the main regulator in England, encourages students to understand their consumer rights with statements such as: ‘Knowing your consumer rights should help you to be protected if things go wrong on your course’. Although the phrase “things going wrong” remains ambiguous, universities must comply with consumer protection law by providing accurate, up-to-date information about their offerings and maintaining internal complaints and appeals processes for students who wish to raise concerns about their experience. These processes are broadly similar across institutions, typically moving from informal resolution to formal complaints, and, if unresolved, escalation to the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA) – the body responsible for reviewing unsettled student complaints in England and Wales.
While it may be a ‘chicken and egg’ question as to whether the rise in complaints or the introduction of formal procedures came first, what is clear is that student complaints have grown significantly. Although university-level complaint data is confidential, we know that the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA) received 3,613 complaints in 2024 – an increase of over 130% compared to 2016. The financial implications are notable: £677,785 was awarded to students following a “Justified” decision, and an additional £1,809,805 was offered as part of settlements in 2024. It is reasonable to assume that university-managed complaints have experienced a similar surge.
This peak in complaints and related institutional procedures raises an important question: should we view complaints not merely as an inconvenience or evidence of institutional shortcomings, but as a process that activates certain forms of agency within the student experience? Specifically, could this agency represent a new form of political agency in a context where students may be reluctant to engage in traditional activism for fear of jeopardising their academic success and financial investment?
Most student complaints originate – at least from the perspective of those making them – in response to perceived institutional failure or wrongdoing. Complaints are therefore generally directed against some form of injustice. While students can raise concerns about a wide range of issues, the OIA statistics indicate that service-related complaints, eg poor teaching quality, undelivered services, or misleading marketing, account for roughly one third of all cases handled by the OIA.
Courage
Like any form of political action, making a complaint requires considerable courage and perseverance. Sara Ahmed’s work highlights how raising a complaint can make the complainant vulnerable, positioning them as the locus of an institutional problem. Similar ideas resonate with Foucault’s notion of parrhesia – truth-telling as a courageous act that is both risky and potentially transformative for the individual.
Social spillovers
Although a student complaint is typically an individual act, it carries an element of publicness. Complaints can create opportunities for students to engage with their broader social context and advocate for fairness in higher education. This ethical stance may ripple outward, influencing others and contributing to wider institutional change; for example, when a single complaint leads to policy or practice reforms.
While we may debate whether student complaints are a ‘necessary evil’ in market-driven higher education, I invite readers to consider whether raising a complaint might also be a courageous and transformative experience for our students. If we allow ourselves to think this way, complaints could become an important lens for understanding how today’s students exercise their political agency.
Raaper, R (2024). Student Identity and Political Agency. Activism, Representation and Consumer Rights Oxon: Routledge
Professor Rille Raaper is in the School of Education at Durham University. Rille’s research interests lie in the sociology of higher education with a particular focus on student identity, experience and political agency in a variety of higher education settings. Her research is primarily concerned with how universities organise their work in competitive higher education markets, and the implications market forces have on current and future students. The two particular strands of Rille’s research relate to: a) student identity and experience in consumerist higher education; b) student agency, citizenship and political activism. [email protected]
Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which prohibits discrimination against students and other individuals with disabilities, is far less visible than the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in school districts. Largely neglected in comparison to the IDEA, it poses growing problems and hidden costs on the general education side of the ledger. In comparison to students with IEPs under the IDEA, students eligible under only the overlapping coverage of Section 504 are the responsibility of general education.
The problems and costs start with mis-identification under Section 504’s definition of disability, which is broader than that under the IDEA. Not limited to specified classifications, such as specific learning disability, or the need for special education, the requirements for Section 504 eligibility are (1) any physical or mental impairment that limits (2) a major life activity (3) substantially. The students identified under Section 504 rather than the narrow eligibility definition of the IDEA are referred to as “504-only,” and they typically receive accommodations and services under a 504 plan as compared to an IEP.
“504-only” rates
The national rate of students with 504 plans has almost quadrupled in the past 15 years. More specifically, in school year 2009–10, which was one year after Congress expanded the interpretive standards for determining eligibility under Section 504, the national percentage, according to data collected by the U.S. Department of Education, was 1.1 percent. This percentage steadily increased, well beyond the effects of the Congressional amendments. In 2021–22, which was the most recently released data from the Department, the national percentage was 3.9 percent.
This growth is attributable in part to the increase in the identified incidence of not only ADHD, dyslexia, and anxiety but also various physical health issues, such as diabetes and food allergies. However, another major reason is the loose identification practices for “504-only” students.
Revealing not only resulting over- but also under-identification, for the most recent year of 2021–22, the rates varied at the state level from New Hampshire and Texas at almost double the national percentage to New Mexico and Mississippi at less than half that national rate. California’s rate for that year was only 2.1 percent, but its variance was wide. Its districts ranged from 0 percent to 13.9 percent, and schools ranged from 0 percent to 24.2 percent. Districts and schools at the low end are particularly vulnerable to individual child find claim. And one can only imagine what it’s like to be a general education teacher at a school for those at the high end in terms of paperwork, meetings, implementation, and resulting litigation. Thus, both over- and under-identification warrant administrative attention.
Mis-identification costs and consequences
For over-identification, the hidden costs include not only providing related services, such as counseling and transportation, but also the time of teachers and administrators for meetings, forms, and potential complaint investigations, impartial hearings, and court proceedings. Additionally, at a time of teacher shortage, high percentages of students with 504 plans contributes to current recruitment and attrition problems. Yet, unlike the IDEA, Section 504 provides no extra funding from either federal or state governments. Thus, Section 504 implementation is part of the school district’s general education budget. Moreover, along with under-identification, over-identification is a matter of social as well as legal justice, because it allocates limited school resources to students who do not really qualify and, thus, are false positives. This hurts both the true positives (i.e., accurately identified) and the false negatives (i.e., should be identified). The under-identified students pose a hidden cost of exposure to child find violations, which include attorneys’ fees and remedial orders.
Quick tips for district consideration
Make sure that your administration annually collects and examines accurate information as to the percentage of students with 504 plans for the district as a whole and for the elementary, middle, and high school levels. For percentages that are notably high or low in relation to extrapolated current national and state rates, extend the data collection and review to the identified impairments, major life activities, and the basis for the “substantial” connection between the impairment and major life activities
Under the leadership of a designated central administrator, make sure that each school has a carefully selected, officially designated, sufficiently trained, and solidly backed Section 504 coordinator In general, the principal or an assistant principal is the presumptively correct choice; yet, principals too often delegate this key role to a relatively inexperienced school counselor or other staff member who lacks appropriate expertise and authority for proper 504-only identification.
Make sure that the administration has uniform, effective, and legally defensible policies and practices that include:
Child find procedures parallel to those under the IDEA but keyed to the broader, three-part definition of disability under Section 504, which does not require educational impact or the need for special education.
Eligibility decision is by a team that meets the legal criteria of being reasonably knowledgeable about the child, evaluation data, and appropriate services/accommodations.
Regular training for the team, which includes legal updates on the identification procedures and criteria but also the longitudinal § 504-only rates for the district, school, and grade.
Invest general education resources on multi-tiered strategies and supports, differentiated instruction, and responsive accommodations for students that do not clearly qualify for either IEPs or 504 plans. The more that districts meet student needs with such practices on a reliable and reasonable basis, the less that problems of over- and under-identification tend to arise.
Perry A. Zirkel, Retired Professor of Education Law
Perry A. Zirkel is a retired professor of education law who shares his work at perryzirkel.com.
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Faculty must sign the memo by Feb. 10, but no one will be punished if they decline to do so.
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Faculty members in the University of Houston’s College of Liberal Arts and Social Science were asked to sign a three-page memo pledging not to “indoctrinate” their students, the Houston Chronicle reported.
In a November email to faculty, Houston president Renu Khator wrote that the university’s responsibility is to “give [students] the ability to form their own opinions, not to force a particular one on them. Our guiding principle is to teach them, not to indoctrinate them.” The recent memo, sent by college dean Daniel O’Connor, asks faculty to “document compliance” with Khator’s note. It’s a way to ensure all faculty members are compliant with Texas’s Senate Bill 37, O’Conner told associate English professor María González in a meeting. The law mandates regular reviews of core undergraduate curriculum but does not address indoctrination or what material can or cannot be taught.
By Feb. 10, faculty must signal their agreement with the following five statements: “A primary purpose of higher education is to enhance critical thinking;” “Our responsibility is to give students the ability to form their own opinions, not to indoctrinate them;” “I understand the definition and attributes of critical thinking;” “I design my courses and course materials to be consistent with the definition and attributes of critical thinking;” and “I use methods of instruction that are intended to enhance students’ critical thinking.”
Faculty immediately pushed back. The University of Houston American Association of University Professors chapter encouraged faculty members to use proposed “conscientious objector” language in response, which states, in part: “The premise of this assertion is a straw man, and I am concerned that my signing of this letter could serve as some admission of guilt concerning these false accusations. As such, I request that you accept this letter, in which I am asserting that I have never engaged in indoctrination and that I take offense, as a scholar, at such insinuations.”
González said O’Conner told her that “no punitive actions will be directed at anyone” who doesn’t sign the acknowledgement form, but that he will have to review the syllabi of any faculty member who doesn’t sign the form. González refused to sign the acknowledgement or even click the link, she said.
Texas A&M University’s move last week to close its women’s and gender studies program is highlighting the longstanding vulnerabilities of a field that grew out of the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and ’70s and raising questions about its future.
While faculty and free expression advocates decried the decision as Texas’s latest assault on academic freedom, conservative pundits praised the program’s demise—as well as the elimination of six additional classes—after a course review found them misaligned with a new system board policy limiting classroom discussions of “race or gender ideology.”
“Texas A & M’s re-examination of its core curriculum and degree programs charts the path forward for other universities that want to ensure their degree programs are high-quality, value-neutral, transparent, and cost-efficient,” Sarah Parshall Perry, vice president and legal fellow at the right-wing organization Defending Education, told Fox News Monday. “Others should follow the university’s example.”
But Texas A&M, which also cited low enrollment as a driver of the women’s and gender studies program’s closure, is already following a trend that started years ago. Since 2023, a spate of other universities—including New College of Florida, Wichita State University and Towson University—have also shuttered their women’s and gender studies programs and departments.
All of these closures have left scholars “saddened, frightened, and enraged about the current state of the field,” according to a 2025 statement from the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA), “[W]e must not despair. We must resist.”
But given the intensified financial and political pressures to root out all diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives that universities across the country are under, women’s and gender studies scholars expect the interdisciplinary field—and other affinity studies—to face even more scrutiny and program closures in coming years. However, that pressure likely won’t be enough to entirely dismantle the field, which has influenced many other fields over the past 55-plus years.
“What we are experiencing now is an alarming, but not surprising, escalation of nefarious maneuvers meant to repress our reach and impact such as demonizing our field and our scholar-practitioners, distorting our theories, and banning the use of inclusive language to defund our research,” Jessica N. Pabón, president of NWSA, said in an email to Inside Higher Ed.
Scholars believe much of that backlash stems from the field’s aim to interrogate the gender and sexuality norms that the Trump administration and its allies are trying to mandate through policies that stifle academic research and classroom discussion about women and the LGBTQ+ community.
“Our field poses questions and produces knowledge that directly challenges systems of power that rely on the subjugation and exploitation of some to the benefit of the most privileged in society,” Pabón said. “Our scholarship is meant to inform and empower the populations that those in power (i.e., the ones attacking our field) control, discipline, and punish for questioning the social order, the status quo.”
It’s not possible to put this cat back in the bag. We’re never going to get rid of the study of gender. It’s just too integrated into many things—and women won’t have it.”
Joan Wolf, an associate professor in the sociology department at Texas A&M
A History of Critiques, Attacks
Attacks on scholarship about women, gender and sexuality are nothing new.
In 1933, shortly after Adolf Hitler ascended to power in Germany, the Nazis looted and burned the entire contents of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. In the 21st century, numerous other countries, including Russia, Brazil and Hungary, have taken up the anti-gender studies torch. For instance, in 2018 the Hungarian government withdrew accreditation from gender studies programs, with one official remarking that it “has no business [being taught] in universities,” because it is “an ideology not a science.”
And as American politics has drifted further to the right in recent years, the discipline has become a favorite target of right-wing criticism here.
Even before the second Trump administration issued executive orders broadly banning DEI and “gender ideology” in higher education, Republican lawmakers in Wyomingand Floridahad already attempted to defund women’s and gender studies programs, accusing them of indoctrinating students and questioning the degree’s worth. In 2023, New College’s board of trustees voted to eliminate the gender studies program after Christopher Rufo, a New College of Florida trustee and vocal DEI opponent declared, “There is great historical precedent for abolishing programs that stray from their scholarly mission in favor of ideological activism.”
The gender studies program at New College began in 1995.
Independent Picture Service/Universal Images Group/Universal Images Group Editorial/Getty Images
One year later, Florida governor Ron DeSantis ordered the state to study the return on investment of remaining gender studies programs and other majors, such as nursing, computer science and finance, asserting that “It’s not fair [that] the taxpayer,” referencing truck drivers specifically, should pay for student loans “for someone’s degree in gender studies.” (According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, graduates of cultural and gender studies programs earn a median annual income of $63,000 compared to a $66,000 median for all graduates with a bachelor’s degree.)
But skepticism about the value of women’s and gender studies predates the Trump administration.
“We are accustomed to this false idea that studying gender or studying sexuality in an inclusive and intersectional manner is not ‘real’ research,” Pabón said. “We’ve received this critique from many of our academic peers for the entirety of our existence, a sentiment that comes from the eugenicism and biological essentialism that have kept women, gender expansive folks, disabled, and racially minoritized folks outside of the classroom, textbooks, and canons of intellectual work.”
Challenging those sentiments is what spurred the creation of the field more than 50 years ago as more and more women gained access to higher education, entering graduate programs and getting hired as faculty.
“When they got into these positions, they began to ask questions about the history of women,” said Carrie Baker, chair of the women, gender, and sexuality program at Smith College. “They asked ‘Where are the women in literature? Where are the women writers? Where are women in history?’”
“The influence of Women’s Studies has touched almost every traditional academic field,” Baker said. For example, “the fact that we now do medical studies on women at all is due to [those critiques].”
Knowledge is a tricky thing to control. You can refuse to fund certain types of research and can cancel classes, and people will find alternative ways to share and make new knowledge.”
Amy Reid, program director of PEN America’s Freedom to Learn initiative
‘More Necessary Now’
And despite the recent criticism, enrollment in women’s and gender studies courses was on the rise as of 2023, the latest year for which data is available.
“Women’s and gender studies is more necessary now than ever to understand what’s going on,” said Baker, adding that enrollment in her courses doubled after Trump was elected. “The policies of the Trump administration hurt women and those hurt women are going to need us. … Going backward on gender issues is going to put a lot of women in bad situations.”
However, enrollment numbers in most of these programs still look small compared to more mainstream majors. And many universities have cited low enrollment as the reason given for closing women’s and gender studies programs; Texas A&M, for instance, noted that its program has just 25 majors and 31 minors enrolled prior to announcing plans to wind it down last Friday.
“One of the biggest reasons why we have low enrollment is that we have no resources and students don’t even know we exist,” said Joan Wolf, an associate professor in the sociology department at Texas A&M who has taught women’s and gender studies courses there for decades. “We’re not going to have as many majors as something like psychology, but that’s never been the case.”
Often, women’s and gender studies exists as a program, not a department, as is the case at Texas A&M. That typically means faculty have shared appointments in other departments, leaving programs with small budgets and reduced ability to advocate for more resources. Nonetheless, the classes they offer help to round out students’ education.
“The big service women’s and gender studies do is in the minors,” Wolf said. “I’ve had students pursuing careers in marriage counseling, gynecology and business who want to understand the social dimensions of gender.”
The Texas A&M program cuts follow a new policy that restricts the teaching of race and gender.
Jason Fochtman/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images
However, eliminating the women’s and gender studies program at Texas A&M or elsewhere won’t stop students and faculty from considering gender in their scholarly work and beyond.
“It’s not possible to put this cat back in the bag,” Wolf said. “We’re never going to get rid of the study of gender. It’s just too integrated into many things—and women won’t have it.”
But the field’s success in influencing so many other fields, doesn’t justify dismantling it either, said Amy Reid, program director of PEN America’s Freedom to Learn initiative and former director of the now-defunct gender studies program at New College of Florida.
“Gender Studies, women’s and gender studies, have a methodology that is distinct from the methodology of other disciplines,” she said. “It allows people to expand beyond the disciplinary bounds of any one field, and that creative synthetic process is important for students who are trying to learn.”
And that’s also the value-add of other interdisciplinary fields—such as Black studies, Indigenous Studies and Middle Eastern studies—which like women’s and gender studies, sprang from the entry of nonwhite scholars to the professoriate in the mid-20th century after racial segregation was outlawed.
While the professoriate has become more diverse in terms of gender, race and ethnicity, those gains are “connected to the devaluing of higher education as a field,” Reid said. “When higher education was the domain of white men, it was seen as more prestigious; as women and people of color have gotten footholds in higher education, lo and behold, the salaries have gone down and the sector is more vulnerable to attack.”
Reid suspects many of those other affinity fields will also face increased threats and criticisms—if they aren’t already—amid federal and state crackdowns on university curricula. As of last week, the University of Iowa is still reviewing low-enrollment majors, including African American studies and gender, women’s and sexuality studies, for potential elimination or consolidation.
“We are going to see more closures over the next number of years, and we’re going to continue to see our students across the country paying the price,” she said. “But knowledge is a tricky thing to control. You can refuse to fund certain types of research and can cancel classes, and people will find alternative ways to share and make new knowledge.”
A federal judge last week dismissed a lawsuit filed by researchers alleging that major corporate publishers colluded to control the publishing market, STAT News reported.
Lucina Uddin, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, filed the lawsuit in 2024 against the six largest for-profit publishers of peer-reviewed academic journals—Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, John Wiley & Sons, Sage Publications, Taylor & Francis and Springer Nature—and their trade association, the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM). The lawsuit argued that the publishers violated the Sherman Act, a federal antitrust law, by having researchers peer review articles for free, forbidding the submission of manuscripts to more than one journal at a time, and preventing authors from freely discussing submitted manuscripts.
But Hector Gonzalez, a United States District Judge for the Eastern District of New York, said that was insufficient evidence of anti-trust violation.
“Plaintiffs fail to plausibly allege that the principles are direct evidence of a conspiracy,” Gonzalez wrote. “To read the principles as anything other than a collection of policies and guidelines concerning best practices for publishers, editors, and authors involved in the scholarly publication process requires a significant inferential leap.”
Gonzalez also declined to allow the plaintiffs to update the suit, writing that “further amendment would not change the result.”
