Tag: Education

  • Education Dept. Agrees to Send Career Ed Programs to Labor

    Education Dept. Agrees to Send Career Ed Programs to Labor

    Before a federal judge blocked its plans, the Education Department reached a deal with the Department of Labor to hand over some of its career, technical and adult education grants, according to court records.

    Under the agreement, reached May 21, the Labor Department would administer about $2.7 billion in grants, including the Perkins Grant program, which funds career and technical education at K–12 schools and community colleges, Politico first reported. But that plan is now on hold, as is an agreement with the Treasury Department regarding student loan collections, according to a status update in New York’s lawsuit challenging mass layoffs at the agency and President Donald Trump’s executive order to dismantle the department.

    The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to overturn the lower court’s injunction so officials can proceed with the layoffs and other plans. 

    The department didn’t publicly announce the handover, which appears to be a first step toward Trump’s endgame of shutting down the agency. Education Secretary Linda McMahon has acknowledged repeatedly that only Congress can legally shutter the department, but she’s also made clear that she can transfer some responsibilities to other agencies. In addition to administering the funds, Labor officials agreed to oversee the implementation of career education programs and to monitor grant recipients for compliance. 

    Advance CTE and the Association for Career and Technical Education criticized the plan, saying the agreement “directly circumvents existing statutory requirements” related to the Perkins program and would cause confusion.

    “We strongly oppose any efforts to move CTE administration away from the U.S. Department of Education given the disruption this would cause to the legislation’s implementation and services to students in schools across the country,” they said in a statement released Wednesday evening.

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  • The Role of Apprenticeships: Cultivating an Entrepreneurial Mindset in UK Higher Education

    The Role of Apprenticeships: Cultivating an Entrepreneurial Mindset in UK Higher Education

    • Gary Gillon is a lecturer in business and management at the University of the West of Scotland. Alan Martin is a lecturer in enterprise at the University of the West of Scotland. Dr Robert Crammond is a senior lecturer in enterprise at the University of the West of Scotland.

    In its competitive market, the UK’s universities face growing pressure to be enterprising and produce graduates with real-world skills and innovative thinking. Employers frequently voice concerns about graduates lacking practical skills required in today’s workplace. At the same time, a new generation of students is more entrepreneurial and digitally agile than ever.

    A 2023 survey published by the Association of Accounting Technicians found 64% of Generation Z (aged 16 – 25) have started or plan to start their own business, in addition to nearly 5,000 start-ups that were established in UK universities during the 2022-2023 academic session.

    With regards to university students specifically, around 27% are managing a business (around 14.4% amongst graduates) or intend to do so. A good figure, but it represents a fraction of the overall student population: so what are universities missing?

    Bridging this gap between academic learning and enterprise-ready skills is critical. One promising solution, which links universities and industry, lies in apprenticeships. Called Graduate Apprenticeships (GAs) in Scotland or Degree Apprenticeships (DAs) in England, these programmes combine university study with paid and relevant work experience.

    By design, GAs or DAs place students in work-based projects from day one, nurturing an entrepreneurial mindset through hands-on problem-solving, collaboration with industry, and continuous skills development. Through this comprehensive work-integrated learning model, students simultaneously acquire practical expertise while pursuing a degree qualification.

    Bridging Theory and Practice through Apprenticeships

    Admired by politicians and desired by university management wishing to bolster their institutional offering, apprenticeships have become an integral policy instrument for addressing skills shortages in fields from STEM to digital technology.

    Introduced in 2016, they have been central to Scotland’s efforts to reduce youth unemployment. The appeal of the GA pathway is clear: apprentices earn a wage, gain a degree, and directly apply academic theory to workplace projects. Government and industry bodies recognise the value of GAs for building a skilled, innovative workforce.

    The Scottish Government’s Future Skills Action Plan (2019) highlights the role of work-based learning in addressing skills gaps and promoting economic growth. Similarly, the UK Innovation Strategy (2021) identifies apprenticeships as essential for creating an “innovation-ready workforce”.

    In short, apprenticeships effectively bridge the gap between knowing and doing and naturally encourage an entrepreneurial way of thinking far better than traditional lecture-based university programmes, producing graduates who are work-ready and adept at translating theory into practice. In addition, they reward lifelong learning and lead to the gaining of new knowledge, experiencing varied modes of learning, and the acquisition of relevant skills development for today’s organisations and markets.

    However, forms of apprenticeships have their critics. Equitable, structured accessibility and supportive routes towards the degree award, amidst low completion rates and arguable bureaucracy, remain particular challenges.

    Therefore, drastic reform on regulation and administration, as well as an image change to increase the desirability of apprenticeships to meet demand, are needed.

    This can be achieved through universities highlighting enterprising and business growth benefits as key outcomes of the apprenticeship programme.

    Entrepreneurship in Action, Not Just in Theory

    A common criticism of higher education, often expressed in media outlets, is that it teaches ‘about’ entrepreneurship rather than providing opportunities ‘for’ entrepreneurship. Apprenticeships flip this script. By spending most of their time on industry projects, apprenticeship students learn entrepreneurship by doing: identifying opportunities, testing ideas, implementing solutions and seeing results. This ‘learning by doing’ approach is far more effective than studying entrepreneurship only in theory, and apprenticeships exemplify its success.

    Hands-on work-based learning projects allow students to generate original solutions to real needs and act on them even as conditions change. This is the essence of the entrepreneurial mindset. Crucially, the aim of apprenticeships is not to turn every student into a start-up founder, but to instil entrepreneurial thinking that applies in any context, including within established organisations.

    Many apprentices initially see themselves as employees rather than ‘entrepreneurs’, so educators frame entrepreneurship as personal development, taking initiative, adapting to change, and solving problems on the job. By graduation, apprenticeship students may still pursue a conventional career but carry an entrepreneurial mindset that drives them to innovate and add value in any role. In essence, universities are creating intrapreneurs with the initiative and vision to act like entrepreneurs inside established companies.

    Key Skills Developed on the Job

    Fostering an entrepreneurial mindset requires developing a broad suite of skills and attributes. Apprenticeships are uniquely positioned to strengthen these through on-the-job learning.

    These include:

    1. opportunity recognition (spotting inefficiencies and identifying opportunities for improvement),
    2. creative problem-solving (inventing solutions under real constraints),
    3. comfort with uncertainty (making decisions with incomplete information and learning from failure),
    4. self-direction (taking initiative and managing projects independently),
    5. communication (building professional relationships), and
    6. resilience (maintaining a work-life balance).

    These are qualities employers seek in graduates. A national survey of hiring managers identified such traits as key markers of ‘work-ready’ graduates. By embedding these capabilities, Apprenticeships produce alumni who are not only academically qualified but also primed to drive innovation.

    Developing an Entrepreneurial Culture for All Students

    Maximising the impact of apprenticeships and making them more appealing requires universities to actively build a supportive entrepreneurial culture. This means going beyond isolated modules or one-off initiatives and making enterprise and innovation a core part of the learning experience.

    The University of the West of Scotland (UWS) provides a compelling example. UWS has promoted an ‘entrepreneurial mentality’ across its Business Management portfolio. Initiatives include a Student Innovation Hub where students, staff and industry partners collaborate on projects to expand their knowledge and skills around innovation and entrepreneurship in one space that leads to industry recognition.  

    Other universities are taking similar steps, integrating entrepreneurship into curricula and extracurricular activities, leveraging alumni and partners to provide students with project opportunities. Some universities have set up innovation hubs or incubators accessible to all students, offering resources to help turn ideas into ventures. This inclusive approach ensures that even those who do not identify as ‘entrepreneurs’ can gain entrepreneurial experience – whether by launching a social initiative, improving a workplace process, or starting a side business.

    By normalising entrepreneurial activity as a valued part of education, universities help students see it as a natural extension of their studies rather than a risky deviation. Combining this notion with apprenticeship offerings affirms the university as being at the service of its immediate community, transforming individuals and businesses, and contributing to local and regional economic growth.

    Professional Insights and Recommendations

    To fully realise the potential of apprenticeships in developing entrepreneurial mindsets, universities, employers and policymakers must work together. Here, we outline our recommendations:

    • Integration of entrepreneurship across the curriculum: embed entrepreneurial projects and assessments in all disciplines. National funding initiatives in Scotland already encourage such integration.
    • Empower and mentor educators: academic staff delivering apprenticeship programmes need targeted support and recognition. Well-supported educators can better guide apprentices in recognising opportunities, creating and building resilience.
    • Leverage alumni and industry networks: involve successful entrepreneurs and industry leaders in apprenticeship programmes as in-residence professionals or guest speakers. This gives apprentices expanded networks and firsthand insight into entrepreneurial careers.

    Conclusion: Shaping an Entrepreneurial Generation

    Universities appreciate that an entrepreneurial mindset is increasingly essential for creating value, whether someone is founding a company, driving change within an existing organisation, or thriving within an enterprise ecosystem. Apprenticeships provide a powerful model for contributing to this ecosystem by developing entrepreneurial mindsets and blending academic theory with practical application. This aligns higher education with the needs of a changing economy and with students’ aspirations for self-directed, innovative careers.

    Embedding entrepreneurship in higher education requires a deliberate culture change, supportive structures, and community engagement – it will not happen automatically. Apprenticeships shed light on business and societal realities, which can aid in this endeavour.

    But when achieved, the payoff is significant. Graduates leave university not only with a degree and work experience, but also with the ability to think and act entrepreneurially.

    By championing apprenticeships and entrepreneurial mindsets for all students, UK universities can drive innovation from within and empower the next generation to shape their own futures beyond graduation.

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  • Lifting as We Climb: A Reflection on Mentorship, Growth, and Leadership in Nursing Education – Faculty Focus

    Lifting as We Climb: A Reflection on Mentorship, Growth, and Leadership in Nursing Education – Faculty Focus

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  • Higher education postcard: University of Buckingham

    Higher education postcard: University of Buckingham

    It’s a commonplace that the University of Cambridge was founded by scholars fleeing Oxford. Today’s postcard comes from a university with a similar origin myth, albeit quite a lot less medieval.

    And a lot newer too. We need to start in 1967, in May to be precise, when Dr John Paulley, an inveterate writer of letters to the times, had one published on the subject of university education. This included a call to action:

    Is it not time to examine the possibility of creating at least one new university in this country on the pattern of those great private foundations in the USA, without whose stimulus and freedom of action the many excellent state universities in that country would be so much poorer?

    And the call got a response. Three private conferences were held, two in 1968 and the third in early 1969, with plenty of disaffected Oxford academics attending. Preceding this latter conference was a declaration signed by 46 academics across the UK and Ireland, raising concerns about the influence of the state on university education. To quote from the Belfast Telegraph of Friday 3 January 1969:

    Professor Gibson said today: ‘increasingly the universities are being told, usually very politely and often indirectly, at what rate they shall expand and in what directions, and most recently the relative emphasis that should be placed on teaching and research.’

    He believed that this influence would increase and the power to exercise it, ‘because of the almost total financial dependence of the universities on the state.’

    ‘Furthermore I am convinced that centralised control of university education will in time weaken and perhaps destroy the international reputation of British universities,’ he added.

    (Professor Gibson, by the way, was Norman J Gibson, financial economist and professor at the New University of Ulster – the local angle clearly caught the eye of the Belfast Telegraph.)

    The argument was basically this: if the state pays for higher education, they will call the tune. And this is a bad thing, with deleterious effects for academic autonomy, for research and for quality and standards.

    Now, to my mind this argument omits the social justice and economic benefits of expanding access to university education, but it is hard to deny the proposition that the current financially-dependent HE sector in the UK is not exactly brim-full with stable and autonomous universities.

    So what happened as a result of the conferences? University College Buckingham, that’s what. It gained corporate form (as a non-profit charity) in 1973, started building works in 1974, and admitted its first students in 1976. Its first vice chancellor was Max Beloff, an Oxford professor.

    Buckingham was different – its undergraduate degrees were offered over two years, not three, students started in January not September, and it sat outside the state’s funding apparatus, and outside the UCCA (the Universities’ Central Council on Admissions – along with its polytechnic counterpart, one of the precursors to UCAS). If my memory is correct, there was an external academic advisory committee, which mentored the new university college through its initial years. It gained university status in 1983, under Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. (Mrs Thatcher, as former education secretary in the 1970–74 government, and then leader of the Conservative Party, had also opened the university in 1976. It is safe to say that she was in favour of the project.)

    Buckingham continued its journey parallel to the mainstream university sector (albeit still with an element of state support – see the below snippet from the Lincolnshire Standard and Boston Guardian in 1976) until 2001, when it subscribed to the QAA and joined in with the sector’s quality assurance system. From 2004 its students were able to access loan funding via the Student Loans Company, which enabled more students to attend: between 2007 and 2012 the university roughly doubled in size, although it was (and is) still relatively small.

    With the coming of the Higher Education and Research Act and the establishment of the OfS in 2018, Buckingham opted to maintain a certain arm’s-length-ness from the state: it is an Approved provider, meaning that it does not get the full £9,250 fee, nor any form of grant support from the OfS; but nor are its fees capped at £9,250. Students can access fee support loans up to £6,000 (or thereabouts) but Buckingham can charge more. And it does, although total fees are comparable with a full-time fee at another English university. Overseas students pay more, but the premium looks to be less, to my eyes, than at other UK universities. So, the principal of autonomy from the state is protected, to some extent.

    But only to some extent: the university still has to comply with the OfS conditions, and it became one of the first cases of a fine being issued for non-compliance: in this case, over late publication of accounts. This caused a certain amount of interest at Wonkhe towers: here in relation to the accounts when published; it’s also worth reading the OfS note on why the fine was as it was.

    In 2015 the university opened the first private medical school in modern UK history, working with the Milton Keynes NHS Foundation Trust to provide clinical placements.

    Buckingham’s alumni include Brandon Lewis, former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland; Pravind Jugnauth, former Mauritian Prime Minister and leader of that country’s Militant Socialist Movement; and Marc Gené, racing driver and winner of the Le Mans 24 hour race.

    Before we finish, it is worth a pause for reflection on the Buckingham story. As an experiment in trying to create a university outside of the normal state apparatus it is, I would argue, an unequivocal success. It is coming up to 50 years since the first students were admitted; there must be at least 50,000 Buckingham graduates; the university has expanded into different subject areas. None of this will have been easy to achieve.

    But perhaps the wider quest – to help create a private university, whose freedom of action would stimulate the other universities to innovate and improve – is at the very best a work in progress. One could point to the two-year degrees now available at some universities, as being a consequence of Buckingham. And this probably has some merit. Equally, the experiment shows that the degrees work for some specific student groups – for example, some mature students on courses with a specific professional orientation – but they’re not a panacea to all cost evils.

    And maybe the quest is a chimera. The recent rows in the US about Harvard, the private university par excellence, show just how much state funding it receives. (The amount under threat is about $2 billion, which is about five per cent of the total turnover of all universities in the UK.) What I think, for what it is worth, is that the UK sector with a Buckingham is better that it would be without.

    The postcard itself is not only of the university, although one of its building is shown top left, by the Great Ouse. The others are Buckingham scenes: the old gaol, the High Street, and the golden swan atop the old Town Hall.

    Here’s a jigsaw of today’s card. Thanks to Harriet Dunbar-Morris, Pro Vice-Chancellor Academic and Provost of the university, and an old pal from 1994 Group days – for suggesting Buckingham. As always, if you have a request, please let me know. If I don’t have a postcard, I might enjoy tracking one down!

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  • Promoting access to higher education worldwide

    Promoting access to higher education worldwide

    by Graeme Atherton

    The shift to the political right in many countries in the world, including it appears the UK now, presents a new set of challenges for equitable access and success to higher education. Not that it needed any new ones. Inequalities in participation in higher education are pervasive, entrenched and low on the list of priorities of most governments. Since the early 2010s we have been working with other organisations across the world including the World Bank and UNESCO to understand the extent and nature of these inequalities but more importantly to initiate activities to address them. In 2016 working with colleagues including the late, great Geoff Whitty I undertook a project to bring together as much secondary data we could on who participates in higher education by social background across the world.

    The Drawing the Global Access Map report found that in all the countries where we could find data (over 90%) higher education participation was unequal. The extent of this inequality differs but it binds together countries and higher education systems of all varieties. Following convening 2 global conferences on higher education access around the time of this report in an attempt to galvanise the global higher education community, we then launched World Access to Higher Education Day (WAHED) in 2018. The aim of WAHED was to create a vehicle that would enable universities to launch activities to address inequalities in access and success on the day in their own place. As the pandemic hit we also started a global online conference and up to 2022 over 1000 organisations from over 100 countries engaged in WAHED. We also produced research to mark the day including the All Around the World – Equity Policies Across the Globe report in 2018 which looked at policies on higher education equity in over 70 countries. The report found that only 32% of the countries surveyed have defined specific participation targets for any equity group and only 11% have formulated a comprehensive equity strategy.

    WAHED played an important role as a catalyst for activism, especially in contexts where individuals or departments felt that they were acting in isolation. However, progress will be limited if efforts are restricted just to an International Day of Action. Hence, in December 2024, working again with the World Bank, UNESCO as well as Equity Practitioners in Higher Education in Australasia (EPHEA), and a number of educational foundations, we launched the World Access to Higher Education Network (WAHEN). The aim of WAHEN is to construct an alliance for global, collective action on higher education equity and more information can be found here. It will focus on:

    •              Capacity Building via the sharing, professionalisation and enhancement of practice in learning, teaching and pre-HE outreach

    •              Collaboration – enabling organisations to formulate and deliver shared goals through a set of global communities of practice.

    •              Convening – bringing together those from across countries and sectors to affect change in higher education through World Access to Higher Education Day.

    •              Campaigning – advocating and working with policymakers and governments around the world producing research and evidence.

    •              Critical thinking – creating an online space where the knowledge based on ‘what works’ in equitable access and success can be developed & shared.

    It was because there was a national organisation that works to tackle inequalities in higher education in the UK, the National Education Opportunities Network (NEON), that I founded and led for 13 years, that WAHED and WAHEN happened. NEON led these efforts to build a global network. There remains a large way to go for WAHEN to be sustainable and impactful. We are working intently on how to position WAHEN and how it should focus its efforts. Inequalities in access and success are locally defined. They can’t be defined from a Euro-centric perspective, and they can also only be tackled through primarily work that is regional or national. The added value of international collaboration in this area needs to be articulated, it can’t be assumed. But at the same time, nor should the default assumption be that such a network or collaboration is less required where equitable access and success is concerned than in other parts of higher education. This assumption encapsulates the very problem at hand, ie the lack of willingness to recognise the extent of these inequalities and make the changes necessary to start to address them.

    The present challenges to higher education presented by the global shift to the right brings into sharp focus the consequences of a failure to deal with these inequalities. Universities and left leaning governments are unable to frame higher education as open and available to all with the potential to enter. The accusations of elitism and the threats to academic freedom etc then become an easier sell to electorates for whom higher education has never mattered, or those in their family/community. It is more important than ever then that something like WAHEN exists. It is essential that we develop the tools that give higher education systems across the world to become more equitable and to resist populist narratives, and that we do this now.

    Professor Graeme Atherton is Director of the World Access to Higher Education Network (WAHEN) and Vice Principal, Ruskin College, Oxford.

    A hybrid conference Access and Geopolitics: Next Steps in Tackling the Equity Crisis in Global Higher Education, was held on 3 June 2025 at the Department of Education in Oxford, jointly organised by WAHEN, The Centre for Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance (SKOPE) and the Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE). There were almost 40 presentations on: the politics – and geopolitics – of widening participation; the challenge of financing access; private provision and higher education as a public good; populism and the equity ‘backlash’; and, the challenge of generating meaningful participation data. Speakers included: John Blake, Director for Fair Access and Participation at the Office for Students, England;  Dr Jamil Salmi, global tertiary education expert; Professor Shamit Saggar, Executive Director of Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success; Professor Rachel Brooks, Professor of Higher Education, Oxford and President of the British Sociological Association; Professor Johanna Waters, Professor of Human Geography, UCL; Dr James Robson, Director of SKOPE and Associate Professor of Tertiary Education Systems, Oxford; Graeme Atherton, Director of the World Access to Higher Education Network (WAHEN) and Vice Principal, Ruskin College, Oxford; and Danielle Watkis, DPhil student, Department of Education, Oxford. A full record of the event will soon be available on the CGHE website.

    Author: SRHE News Blog

    An international learned society, concerned with supporting research and researchers into Higher Education

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  • Existential Questions for Higher Education and the Nation

    Existential Questions for Higher Education and the Nation

    “Who are we? Where are we going? Where do we come from?” These existential questions are not luxuries in times of crisis—they are necessities. And as the storms of political, social, and environmental upheaval grow darker, they demand our full attention.

    For many in the United States, especially younger generations, the future feels bleak. Student loan debt weighs down tens of millions. Meaningless, low-wage, precarious employment—what anthropologist David Graeber called “bullsh*t jobs”—dominates the landscape, even for the college educated. Higher education, once touted as the great equalizer, has increasingly functioned as a sorting mechanism that reinforces class division rather than dismantling it.

    This is not accidental. It is the consequence of more than a half century of growing inequality, fueled by tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, union busting, and the privatization of public goods. Since the 1970s, wages for working people have stagnated, while the top one percent has consolidated unimaginable wealth and power. Higher education has both suffered from and contributed to this shift: as public funding declined, universities increasingly turned to corporate partnerships, tuition hikes, student loans, and contingent labor to survive. In doing so, they have often replicated the very inequalities they claim to challenge.

    Instead of building an informed and empowered citizenry, the modern university too often churns out debt-saddled consumers, precarious workers, and disillusioned graduates. The idea of education as a public good has been replaced by the logic of the market—branding, metrics, debt financing, and labor flexibility.

    Meanwhile, U.S. politics offers little solace. We are caught between the reactionary authoritarianism of Trumpism and the managerial neoliberalism of the Democratic establishment. Both forces have proven inadequate in confronting systemic inequality, environmental collapse, and imperial overreach. Instead, they compete to maintain the illusion of normalcy while conditions deteriorate.

    Internationally, the collapse of moral leadership is most evident in the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Backed by billions in U.S. aid and political cover, the Israeli military has killed tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza and displaced countless more. Hospitals, schools, and entire neighborhoods have been leveled. On college campuses across the U.S., students and faculty who dare to speak out against this atrocity have faced surveillance, censorship, arrests, and administrative repression. At a moment when moral clarity should be the minimum, too many institutions of higher learning have chosen complicity.

    This convergence of global injustice and domestic repression raises urgent questions for academia. What is the role of the university in a world marked by war, inequality, and ecological collapse? What values will guide us through the storm?

    The answer begins with honesty. We must recognize that higher education is not separate from society’s failures—it is entangled in them. But that also means it can be part of the solution. Colleges and universities can serve as spaces of resistance, reflection, and regeneration—but only if they reject their alignment with empire, capital, and white supremacy.

    Where do we come from? From resistance: from student uprisings, civil rights sit-ins, anti-apartheid divestment, labor organizing, and community building. From people who believed—and still believe—that education should serve justice, not profit.

    Where are we going? That depends on whether we are willing to confront power, abandon illusions, and build institutions that are democratic, transparent, and rooted in the needs of the many rather than the few.

    The future is uncertain. The storm is here. But history is not finished. A more humane and equitable society remains possible—if we have the courage to demand it.

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  • How Higher Ed Marketers Can Lead With Creativity

    How Higher Ed Marketers Can Lead With Creativity

    Colleges and universities continue to compete for attention across countless platforms; this scattershot approach often comes at the expense of cohesion. But simply adding more content—made easy within the decentralized environment of many campuses—isn’t a solution to deeper strategic and directional challenges. In the famous words of Merry Baskin, “Like a shark, brands must move forward or die.” For colleges and universities, that forward motion begins with centering courageous, strategic creativity as a core operating principle and with higher education marketing leaders creating a system to ensure all are moving in the correct direction.

    I have argued that creativity continues to drive commercial value, however, investing in the intangible up front can be difficult when budgets remain static. So, our focus isn’t on only proving that creativity adds value but also showing how investing in it up front can maximize the value it creates. We need a framework for higher ed marketing leaders to establish a system for defining and embedding a culture of creativity across teams. This will help teams create more effective work and collaborate with agencies in support of institutional goals.

    Modeled loosely on WARC’s creative effectiveness ladder, this three-phase framework should help marketing leaders not only spark creativity but also systematize it as a shared method. First, start by defining what creativity means within our unique institutional contexts instead of a loose collection of ideas. Then, develop the systems, roles and language that bring that definition to life. Finally, diffuse those practices across teams and departments to embed creativity into the fabric of institutional strategy.

    Step 1: Define

    Start by establishing the foundation for creative effectiveness by aligning on what creativity means, how it’s measured and why it matters. This will bring clarity to metrics, principles and strategic outcomes so creative work can be evaluated with purpose.

    Create a shared set of key measures for creative effectiveness

    Marketing leaders must establish clear, institution-specific indicators of what effective creativity looks like. No matter how rigorous the approach, consistent application and ensuring these measures are aligned are most important. Example measures include:

    • Brand recall: Did prospective students or alumni remember the name of the institution after seeing an ad? This indicates a clear connection to the brand.
    • Distinctiveness scores: In focus groups, ask audiences to compare your marketing to peer institutions—does your work stand out or feel generic? No matter the medium, attention is the first barrier to more effective work.

    Determine principles of creative effectiveness

    Determining principles of creative effectiveness means articulating the core beliefs and standards that guide all creative work across the institution. These principles serve as guardrails—ensuring that creativity remains consistent, purposeful and aligned with institutional values. When widely understood and adopted, they help teams evaluate work objectively and make more confident, collaborative decisions. Examples can be directional:

    • Brand prominence: Brand or branding must be present within the first three seconds.
    • Distinctive assets: Consistently use the school’s signature color palette, typeface and photographic style—even on social platforms—to maintain visual recognition. Stay on brand, not on trend.
    • Commit to creativity: Use longer durations, more media channels and consistent storytelling over time to drive cumulative impact.
    • Emotional truth wins: Campaigns should connect emotionally with audiences; stories of real students often outperform statistics.

    Align key measures of effectiveness to marketing KPIs

    Marketing leaders should evaluate creative work using engagement-based metrics—such as time on page, view-through rates, social saves and content shares. These go beyond impressions to signal true resonance and provide a shared set of indicators for what effective creativity looks like in practice.

    Step 2: Develop

    Once effectiveness is clearly defined, leadership should build the internal systems to support and scale it. This phase is about ensuring teams are equipped to execute in practice.

    Identify critical roles within the institution

    First develop a network of collaborators: content producers, enrollment leaders, advancement partners, institutional researchers and/or agency teams. Map out who holds creative influence across the institution and define the roles they play in shaping, supporting and evaluating creative work. Clarity will empower contributors and reinforce accountability.

    Create a shared language for evaluation

    Marketing leaders need a consistent, responsive way to evaluate creative work. By building in intentional check-ins throughout the creative process, teams can replace feelings with shared language that sharpens feedback and improves outcomes.

    Leaders should consider three stages of evaluation:

    • Pretest: Introduce a lightweight, consistent method to test creative ideas before launch. This might include quick student feedback loops, internal scoring rubrics or pilot testing in key markets.
    • Platform: Centralize creative assets, guidelines and effectiveness learnings into a shared, accessible platform.
    • Pulse: Establish a regular cadence for reviewing the performance of creative work both in-market and in internal perception.

    Step 3: Diffuse

    With creativity defined and the right systems in place, the final step is to diffuse that culture across the institution. To drive real institutional value, creative effectiveness must be shared, socialized and scaled across departments, disciplines and decision-makers.

    Identify key working groups to deliver creativity workshops

    Start by identifying key teams or departments—enrollment, advancement, student life, academic units—that shape public-facing messages or student experiences. Bring them into the fold through collaborative workshops that unpack creative principles, show examples of effective work and introduce shared evaluation tools.

    Develop measurement frameworks aligned to department-level KPIs

    Creativity becomes powerful when its effectiveness is measured in context. That means helping individual departments or units tie creative performance to their own goals—whether it’s growing attendance at student events, boosting open rates on fundraising emails or improving reputation scores for a new academic program. By co-creating simple measurement frameworks with each team, marketing leaders position creativity as a strategic asset.

    Build a best-in-class repository for cross-campus learning

    Finally, celebrate and scale what works. Create a living archive of standout creative work, from bold campaigns to scrappy social posts that have delivered results. Share the backstory: What was the challenge? What was the idea? What impact did it have? This becomes a source of inspiration, a tool for onboarding new team members and a tangible way to reinforce these new values.

    By defining what creativity means, developing the systems to support it and diffusing its value across campus, marketing leaders can turn creativity into a measurable, repeatable driver of effectiveness.

    Christopher Huebner is a director of strategy at SimpsonScarborough.

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  • Could Uncertainty in Higher Ed Be a Catalyst for Change?

    Could Uncertainty in Higher Ed Be a Catalyst for Change?

    As colleges navigate major disruption—from a loss of federal funding to AI advancements—they’re also being forced to grapple with persistent questions around their role in skills training, trust in their institutions and how to keep pace with digital learning innovations.

    At Digital Universities, a convening of more than 150 faculty, teaching and learning administrators, and education-technology experts, attendees came away with a sense of urgency to meet this moment of unpredictability and uncertainty.

    “It’s revealing the tensions between different goals, aspirations and larger challenges that may be implicit but are still there,” said Trey Conatser, assistant provost for teaching and learning at the University of Kentucky and director of UK’s Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching.

    “Some of those things are what it means to adapt to enrollment challenges and how we negotiate our identities as institutions of higher education, as stewards of a storied, scholarly mission in light of changing business models, as well as negotiating our relationships with industry partners, the public and public officials.”

    Glenda Morgan, an education-technology market analyst, told Inside Higher Ed that she was reassured that “people are actually talking about this stuff—this moment of uncertainty” throughout the conference’s programming.

    “AI is making clear some of the issues and fractures and making all of these problems that have probably been there for a long time more apparent, visible and urgent,” she said.

    For example, “AI brings questions about cheating to the forefront, but it really highlights that our assessment systems are so outdated … Testing factual information has never been the point; it’s always been application. But AI is making that more urgent now.”

    Trust in Higher Ed

    In a panel discussion on privacy, AI and cybersecurity, speakers highlighted another long-standing issue that AI is pushing to the surface: trust. Morgan said that while today’s students seem generally comfortable sharing their data with outside entities, they may be increasingly skeptical about how their own institutions are using or even “surveilling” their data.

    Panelist Josh Callahan, chief information security officer for the California State University system, later told Inside Higher Ed that cybersecurity concerns in the era of AI are stoking conversations that should have happened decades ago.

    “We were all busy doing the things, building technology into teaching and learning, and we had a lot of assumptions and really didn’t engage in some of these conversations,” he said. “And now it’s becoming unavoidable, because it’s embedded. And we are at a crisis point in a lot of ways, in terms of our trust in institutions—not just higher ed.”

    Teaching in the Age of AI

    At the two-day event in Salt Lake City organized by Inside Higher Ed and its parent company, Times Higher Education, attendees also considered how to respond to the threat to entry-level white-collar jobs posed by the evolution of AI—a risk articulated by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei last month when he predicted AI could wipe out half of those positions within just five years.

    During a discussion on leveraging workforce partnerships for future skills, Sarah DeMark, vice president of academic portfolio at the fully online Western Governors University, said WGU’s instruction and curriculum model is informed by employment data and focused on helping students both develop and effectively market the skills they learn in college. “It’s not just about degree completion, it’s about getting a job,” she said. “One of the big opportunities [institutions] have is transparency around the skills and competencies students are gaining through the courses and programs they’re taking.”

    Hollis Robbins, special adviser for humanities diplomacy at the University of Utah, offered a different perspective on workforce preparation, saying faculty should be able to do more than teach skills and information in the age of AI, when students no longer need a professor to learn easily accessible, established information.

    “My own view is that AI is going to be teaching general education courses,” she said. With that in mind, “it’s important to reconfigure their business models to double down on faculty expertise and say that’s the value of what [students] are paying for.”

    Meanwhile, in a discussion about getting the most out of teaching with AI, Zawan Al Bulushi, an assistant professor of education at the University of Arizona, said that she sees generative AI as a “friend” that offers shortcuts for professors who may feel overwhelmed by their workloads. She uses it to craft lesson plans that strike the right tone with students and create visually appealing lecture slides that keep students engaged.

    “The best educators won’t be replaced by AI,” she said. “But those who use it well will redefine what’s possible.”

    Bulushi is an outlier among most faculty, however, as many institutions still have no formal AI policy supporting students and faculty in engaging with the technology.

    Recent findings from Inside Higher Ed’s survey of chief information officers showed that more than half of CIOs say their institution hasn’t adopted institutionwide formal policies or guidelines for the use of AI tools for general use. And 31 percent said their institution hasn’t adopted any policy or guidelines in the areas of instruction, administrative tasks, student services or research assistance.

    “If you don’t have a policy, then it’s a little bit like the wild, wild West. Entities like OpenAI, Google and Microsoft are all competing, and they’re all telling you that they’re the answer,” Marvin Krislov, president of Pace University, said in the opening plenary. “But there doesn’t seem to be regulation on the federal level and there doesn’t seem to be consensus in higher education. At least on an institutional level, I hope people will start—if they haven’t already—grappling with [AI].”

    Maricel Lawrence, innovation catalyst at Purdue Global, advised institutions to consider why they want to use new AI technologies before jumping headfirst into adoption.

    “We need a larger conversation about what it means to learn and how to advance student success,” she told Inside Higher Ed. “AI could help us in many ways, but it shouldn’t be that we’re starting the conversation with AI.”

    Sara Custer and Colleen Flaherty contributed to this report.

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  • Higher Ed Should Be Very Cautious About AI “Partnerships”

    Higher Ed Should Be Very Cautious About AI “Partnerships”

    There have been several points during this era of AI availability in education where I’ve been genuinely shocked that something that seems to me to be clearly out of bounds or incredibly rash is viewed by others as quite workable, or even desirable.

    One of these is so-called AI peer review. Granted, academic research is not actually my thing, but I was under the impression that the goal of research and peer review is to deploy the reasoned judgment of subject matter experts in adjudicating whether or not a proposed new contribution is worthy of being heard and disseminated.

    The key words there are “reasoned judgment,” something a large language model may be able to simulate but cannot actually do. I am aware the system of academic peer review has become strained to breaking for all kinds of reasons, but I cannot fathom how taking a system that’s predicated on reasoned judgment and outsourcing it to a simulation is acceptable, and yet I am aware some people believe this is a solution to the peer-review bottleneck.

    Another no-go in my book that is being pursued with some measure of enthusiasm by others is outsourcing grading and response to student writing to generative AI. I do not know how to ask students to write something that is not going to be read, because I think even the most enthusiastic AI folks will admit that large language models do not read or communicate with intention the way humans do. It’s simply a betrayal of the student-instructor compact.

    I had another moment of pause while reading a recent New York Times feature on OpenAI’s push onto college campuses, featuring the California State University system’s partnership, which will make ChatGPT available to its 460,000 students in pursuit of “the nation’s first and largest A.I.-empowered university system.”

    I’ll tell you what gave me pause. For the last, what … 18 months … we’ve been receiving testimonies from many faculty across many disciplines declaring that ChatGPT (and its cousins) are essentially injecting poison into the classroom dynamics around learning, and here is one of the largest university systems in the country saying, “Let’s make sure every student gets a nice healthy dose of the stuff.”

    I can testify firsthand from the talks and faculty development workshops I’ve been giving around preserving the experience of writing to communicate and learn that this worry is very real. While the people I’ve been interacting with are engaged and adaptable, and many of them are actively exploring how generative AI could aid their students in their learning, I have yet to meet the person who thinks they have it all figured out.

    While I try not to be judgmental about these things, I can’t help but read what’s being described in that Times story and think, “That’s nuts.” This is why I’m thankful for reporting like what appears in the Times, because it gives me a chance to better understand the mindset of people who see the world so differently from me.

    While there are several examples of faculty who make use of generative AI tools in their courses and one example of a student who uses ChatGPT as a study aid, the primary voice in the article is Leah Belsky, OpenAI’s vice president of education.

    Formerly at Coursera, an early company that promised and failed to revolutionize education, Belsky has as her charge to create “AI native universities.” How you feel about these initiatives may depend on how you reflexively respond to that phrase. My response is some mix of “ugh” and “yikes.”

    One of the drier paragraphs in the entire article struck me as the most important thing we should be considering about these initiatives:

    “OpenAI’s push to A.I.-ify college education amounts to a national experiment on millions of students. The use of these chatbots in schools is so new that their potential long-term educational benefits, and possible side effects, are not yet established.”

    A national experiment on millions of students. I don’t know—to me, that sounds risky or reckless or heedless. I can’t quite decide which is the best descriptor.

    Belsky says OpenAI is starting to look into these issues. At a conference late last year she remarked, “The challenge is, how do you actually identify what are the use cases for A.I. in the university that are most impactful? And then how do you replicate those best practices across the ecosystem?”

    Good questions. Thank goodness we’re simultaneously experimenting on millions of students. This is a very good way to generate reliable data.

    A large language model would have a hard time detecting the sarcasm in that previous sentence, but I hope it’s clear to my human readers.

    For the privilege of making its 460,000 students available to OpenAI, the Cal State system is paying $17 million over 18 months. In the grand scheme of university budgets this does not sound like much, but for a perpetually strapped system like Cal State, every dollar counts. Martha Lincoln, an anthropology professor at San Francisco State reacting to the announcement, told a SiliconValley.com reporter, “This is so deeply distressing. It’s absolutely shocking. For a while we didn’t even have regular paper in our copier: It was all three-hole punch. We don’t have enough counselors on our campus. When students have mental health concerns, they’re waitlisted for weeks if not months.”

    All this is happening against a backdrop of AI companies that have overtly declared their goal is to subsume the vast majority of economic activity to their technology. Economic activity means jobs, labor, and here is a system that is supposed to empower people heading into the workforce hastening their own obviation by partnering with the company that aims to subsume those jobs to their technology.

    Personally, I think Altman is well over his skis with AI hype, but he isn’t shy about his intentions

    Ohio State apparently looked at Cal State and said, “Hold my beer,” declaring that starting in the fall, using AI in class will be a requirement. Ravi V. Bellamkonda, executive vice president and provost, announced, “Through AI Fluency, Ohio State students will be ‘bilingual’—fluent in both their major field of study and the application of AI in that area.”

    There are two important questions that go betting in this statement:

    1. Is working with AI in a field of study equivalent to learning a new language? And,
    2. If it is like a new language, what does fluency look like?

    We don’t have answers to either of these questions. We don’t even know if they’re the right questions to ask because we don’t know if treating AI competency through the lens of fluency even makes sense!

    Normally, I find the relatively slow pace of change in how higher ed institutions shift orientations frustrating, but in this case, it is the sudden lurch by some schools toward an AI-inevitable future that is baffling. It appears to be a by-product of swallowing AI hype whole. This is Ohio State president Ted Carter: “Artificial intelligence is transforming the way we live, work, teach and learn. In the not-so-distant future, every job, in every industry, is going to be impacted in some way by AI.”

    Where is the evidence of this? For sure, we’ve seen signs of some impacts, particularly around entry-level jobs, but we also may be looking at a scenario where AI is, in the words of Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor (co-authors of AI Snake Oil) “normal technology,” where the diffusion of AI through industry and society is going to follow a similar timeline to other powerful general purpose technologies like electricity and the internet.

    I am a strong believer that we must be AI-aware while carefully and purposefully experimenting with this technology, keeping student learning at the center of the equation. The overwhelming preponderance of evidence rooted in both present and past experience suggests that if (or when) generative AI has a demonstrative positive effect on student learning, this positive effect will be apparent and unambiguous. If (or when) this happens, access to the benefit will not be scarce and institutions can adjust accordingly.

    This leap into a future that does not yet exist and that we have only a limited idea of what it might be like is beyond shortsighted and has the potential to unnecessarily harm students while also delaying the ultimate adjustments that will be necessary for higher ed institutions to survive.

    Partnering with or funneling customers to companies that aim to obviate your existence and exploit your work to develop their applications while paying them for the privilege—I know I said I was trying to not be too judgmental—but, honestly, that’s nuts.

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  • A Call for Moderate Voices on DEI (opinion)

    A Call for Moderate Voices on DEI (opinion)

    In 2020, I was asked to sign a pledge that felt more like an empty confession of guilt than a productive call to action—an admission that my university, and I, were complicit in white supremacy. Signing the pledge, backed by our Faculty Senate, meant acknowledging “the University of Cincinnati is an institution founded on white supremacist values in a country founded on the same … that we have benefitted and continue to benefit from white supremacy through the opportunities, advancements, inclusion, sense of self-worth, and freedom it has allowed us … that in our complicity [with white supremacy] we have likely contributed to emotional suffering in Black people, including UC faculty, staff, and students.” The roster of university employees who signed the pledge would be posted publicly.

    I was told that my discontent was just a symptom of my white privilege and spent ample time exploring whether this was true. I put in the work, a popular phrase at the time, by reading How to Be an Antiracist and White Fragility. Maybe I had missed something and Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo would provide clarity.

    The ideas I found were poorly constructed and dehumanizing. Ideology aside, signing a public loyalty pledge felt dystopian and counterproductive. I imagined myself as a first-year student of color who saw that my white faculty had signed a pledge admitting that the education system was designed for me to fail and that they had actively supported my failure. Why bother trying to succeed when university employees were willfully admitting to violating my civil rights?

    Over the next couple of years, I chose to remain silent whenever these ideas resurfaced out of fear that speaking out could jeopardize my career. I was told that my silence was complicity, and indeed I had been complicit in letting these toxic ideas echo without so much as a whimper. As the 2020s stretched onward, though, I noticed the loudest and most extreme voices that sometimes dominated the conversation were largely ignored, and their demands were not met. Despite calls by a vocal few, there wasn’t much appetite on campus for the “antiracist discrimination” that Kendi called for or the white saviorism promoted by DiAngelo.

    The university held firm in its moderate approach to diversity, equity and inclusion and mostly expanded resources for all students without restricting access by identity group. It is worth noting that most DEI initiatives and offices on campus offer noncontroversial services like tutoring, mental health counseling and accessibility services like sign language interpreters. But the public and politicians were forming their opinions of DEI based on the voices of those with the megaphones and lucrative book contracts.

    Last year, I enrolled in a graduate program in urban educational leadership and dived into the very discussions I had avoided for so long. I read the foundational critical race theory literature, one of the predominant theories in the DEI realm. Although I found many ideas with which I disagreed, I also found a robust field that has much to offer in terms of the ways we think about educating our students, understanding the needs of diverse communities and working together to create better opportunities for everyone. Most importantly, when I actively pushed back on concepts that I found disagreeable, it resulted in great discussions with instructors and in developing more robust ideas. I discovered there is room for debate in the DEI space and my own silence had been self-imposed.

    Many of my classmates are running the very DEI programs under threat by legislation and funding cuts. These programs provide educational resources to the underemployed and mentorship and financial resources to students who desperately need it, and they encourage student civic engagement—the very thing lauded by the Ohio Senate bill banning DEI offices and the use of DEI considerations in hiring, scholarships and trainings. (The bill, signed by the governor in March, goes into effect at the end of this month.)

    Since 2020, I have been slowly forced to confront my own fundamental assumptions that might have once led me to support legislation like Ohio’s Senate Bill 1. Blockbuster voices like Kendi’s and DiAngelo’s are not reflective of the everyday practices within my institution, and the few moments that deterred me from speaking were just moments, likely caused by the same flavor of polarization that impacts the entire country. Polarization is not just a higher ed problem, but a national problem that has been simmering for more than a decade.

    Current legislation targeting DEI upholds the most radical media-amplified voices as representative of the whole, even though these voices have been largely unsuccessful on many public campuses. Our university is not Columbia or Harvard, yet it seems as if legislators are attempting to punish our institution for the sins of its private counterparts. But when there are no loud moderate voices, how can we expect the public to see anything other than the extremes?

    I find myself at a crossroads again. I could stay silent, as I did in 2020, but the silence of moderate voices has gotten us here, and silence will only result in negative outcomes for our students, faculty and staff. The time for silence is over—was over—long ago. The caricature of higher ed that you see in political rhetoric is not reflective of my university. We must be more vocal in challenging the narrative that our institutions are ideologically captured.

    We still have much work to do in higher ed, and it’s not good enough to simply resist legislation without acknowledging the need for a renewed call for moderation. This moderation only comes when those with diverse viewpoints work together to ensure the success of all our students. This means reaffirming our commitment to understanding and addressing the unique needs of our student populations.

    We must also come to terms with emerging research that shows some practices designed to challenge oppression on campus may promote its proliferation and thoroughly analyze the impact of our actions on student success. To quote U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

    We need brave, diverse voices and productive disagreement, not legislation, to bolster higher education’s mission to pursue the truth for the sake of human flourishing.

    Chris Cooper is unit head and professor in the Engineering and Applied Science Co-op Program at the University of Cincinnati.

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