Tag: Education

  • 6 higher education trends to watch in 2026

    6 higher education trends to watch in 2026

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    The first year of President Donald Trump’s return to office brought unprecedented and far-reaching changes to the higher education sector, and 2026 is poised to continue the trend.

    The conservative-led spending and tax bill, dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, is set to go into effect in July. But effects of the forthcoming policy changes, including how certain students can finance their college educations, are still in flux.

    The Trump administration also looks poised to continue opening investigations into colleges as a means of gaining influence over the sector, putting higher ed leaders in a tight spot. And federal officials are likely to further restrict the ability of certain international students to study in the U.S.

    All that comes as analysts predict a tough financial year ahead.

    To help higher education leaders prepare for the year ahead, we’ve rounded up six trends we expect to shape the sector in 2026.

    Enforcement actions against universities may escalate

    The federal government under President Donald Trump last year launched a flurry of investigations into colleges, often suspending or canceling their federal research funding to pressure them into implementing vast policy changes. If the final days of 2025 offer any clue, the Trump administration doesn’t plan to slow down this tactic. 

    On Dec. 22, the U.S. Department of Education opened a Clery Act investigation into Brown University over the shooting on its campus earlier that month that left two dead and nine injured. The Clery Act requires federally funded colleges to warn their campuses of emergencies in a timely manner and provide support to victims of sexual assault, domestic and dating violence, and stalking. 

    “After two students were horrifically murdered at Brown University when a shooter opened fire in a campus building, the Department is initiating a review of Brown to determine if it has upheld its obligation under the law to vigilantly maintain campus security,” U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement. 

    The new investigation capped a year in which the Trump administration pursued probes against dozens of colleges over potential civil rights violations. 

    Notably, Brown is one of a handful of institutions that struck formal agreements with the administration to settle these investigations in 2025. But its July deal did not prevent the Education Department from opening a probe into Brown over its actions that occurred after the deal — and does not preclude more such activity from the Trump administration in the future.

    And in its ongoing battle with Harvard University, the Trump administration has even threatened to take over patents for inventions made with the help of government research funding. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security also revoked Harvard’s ability to enroll international students, but a federal judge blocked the move.

    James Finkelstein, professor emeritus of public policy at George Mason University, said he expects federal enforcement actions to ramp up in 2026. 

    “They’re going to weaponize almost every available tool, whether it’s Title VI investigations, adding new conditions to federal grants and contracts, reviewing tax exempt status, putting pressure on accreditors, [or] going after individual presidents,” Finkelstein said. 

    Will college boards stand up for their leaders?

    In the latter half of 2025, the Trump administration tried a new tactic in its quest to reshape the higher education sector — pressuring college presidents to step down. 

    The U.S. Department of Justice successfully deployed this strategy in June, when then-University of Virginia President Jim Ryan abruptly resigned. He said he was leaving to avoid endangering federal funding for the university, which faced a Trump administration investigation into institutional diversity efforts pursued under his tenure.

    Ryan was not alone. Following a short investigation, the U.S. Department of Education found George Mason University in violation of civil rights law and called out its president, Gregory Washington, for what it has described as illegal diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. 

    Washington has pushed back on the Trump administration, calling the allegations a “legal fiction” through his attorney. 

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  • Oregon Higher Ed Body Endorses “Integration,” Up to Mergers

    Oregon Higher Ed Body Endorses “Integration,” Up to Mergers

    Oregon’s Higher Education Coordinating Commission recommends “institutional integration.”

    Oregon’s Higher Education Coordinating Commission is recommending that the state’s public colleges and universities pursue “institutional integration”—everything from sharing services and programs to full mergers. It is also seeking the power to renew, or terminate, academic programs.

    The commissioners approved a document Tuesday with five recommendations, and integration and program review were listed first. Ben Cannon, the commission’s executive director, said the vote was 13 to 2.

    The report says public universities will run out of money in a few years if they don’t continue to reduce costs. It cites “slowing growth forecasts for state revenue” and insufficient expected enrollment growth, adding that “especially given Oregon universities’ unusually high dependence on tuition for revenue, this creates an unsustainable dynamic.”

    “On the current path universities will be forced to continue to make substantial cuts annually or, in aggregate, fund balances will be completely exhausted within an estimated three to five years,” the report says.

    While the report doesn’t recommend recreating a statewide university system, it endorses “increasing systemness,” saying, “Only a few high-growth states can still afford a system of higher education built on the ‘every campus for itself’ model.”

    The commission’s integration recommendation goes beyond just the universities—it says the State Legislature should direct the commission, “in consultation with all of Oregon’s public higher education institutions, including community colleges,” to come up with one or more proposals for integration by next January. It suggests, in one non–full merger example, “combining services provided to the same region by a community college and a public university.”

    The commission also said lawmakers should require it to periodically review and renew universities’ degree programs, adding that the law could require programs to “demonstrate that they produce value for students and communities, don’t unnecessarily duplicate other institutional offerings” and meet “financial sustainability requirements.” It said the review should consider “impacts on underrepresented students” and not “ideological preferences” or “strictly financial returns to the individual.”

    Oregon Public Broadcasting previously reported on the recommendations. It wrote that Southern Oregon University president Rick Bailey laid part of the blame for university cutbacks on stagnant state funding.

    “In four years, I’ve made decisions that have eliminated 25 percent of our workforce. Imagine that happening at any other state entity,” Bailey said, according to OPB. “Our colleagues are all doing similar painful work, and so we have to ask, how much more efficient should our seven universities be?”

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  • “Profound Political Change” Needed to Revive Venezuelan Higher Ed

    “Profound Political Change” Needed to Revive Venezuelan Higher Ed

    Venezuelan academics are pessimistic that a change in leadership will improve the fortunes of the country’s downtrodden universities, even after the shock ousting of leader Nicolás Maduro.

    Delcy Rodríguez has been sworn in as the country’s interim president following the dramatic seizure of Maduro by U.S. forces.  

    Despite Rodríguez’s past as a professor at the Central University of Venezuela, academics are doubtful that her ascension will be beneficial to the country’s higher education system and have warned that “profound” political change is needed if universities are to recover from years of attacks.

    Venezuelan universities suffered under Maduro’s reign, with economic decline leading to severe budget cuts. Hyperinflation means salaries have dipped to meager amounts, with reports suggesting that pay for professors averaged $15 per month in 2020, while student numbers have fallen dramatically.

    Meanwhile, the deposed leader’s administration was known for jailing scholars it saw as critical of the government and has been accused of installing those with pro-Maduro views in leadership positions at universities. 

    These attacks, combined with the economic crisis, have driven many scientists and academics out of the country. A 2020 study found that Venezuela has lost 16 percent of its scientific research workforce as a result of emigration.

    Benjamin Scharifker, emeritus professor at Simón Bolívar University in the capital, Caracas, said the country’s university system and scientific institutions “absolutely collapsed” under Maduro, with attacks on universities seen as a way to maintain power. 

    “If you collapse the universities, then you also collapse the possibility of students going to the street and protesting against the government,” he said. 

    While they might not be grieving Maduro’s departure, academics said Rodríguez, who has been vice president since 2018, was not seen as any better. “We are only changing a face,” said Scharifker, with many of those who ruled under Maduro remaining in power despite his departure.

    For example, Jorge Rodríguez, the interim leader’s brother, was reappointed president of Venezuela’s National Assembly days after the U.S. attack. He previously held academic posts at universities in the country and was a prominent student leader.

    But, despite their links with the higher education sector, the Rodríguez family is not thought to be interested in helping universities recover from years of damage.

    “I don’t think that somebody that in 25 years has done [nothing] for the university will start doing it now,” said Jaime Requena, a member of the Academy of Physical, Mathematical and Natural Sciences of Venezuela and a researcher on brain drain. “I would be extremely surprised.”

    “It is a tremendous task to rebuild,” he added.

    Although the U.S. might influence the country’s future policy direction, academics were doubtful that President Donald Trump would be interested in prioritizing the university sector. In the U.S., Trump’s second presidency has been characterized by a crackdown on higher education, including funding cuts.

    And while new ties with the U.S. could make travel into and out of the country easier after a period of international isolation, many academics are unlikely to return without economic and political reform, Requena said. “You cannot have a research system working in a place where there is no freedom.”

    He added that international cooperation and partnerships, including loans, will be crucial to the future recovery of the sector. 

    “If you don’t have political freedoms, then you cannot really be a university professor,” Scharifker agreed.

    “If we really want science to recover to … the level that we once had many years back, we need a profound political change in Venezuela—not only the change of who is sitting in the presidential palace, but really what are the policies, and I think that is not going on in Venezuela at the moment.”

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  • Transfer and Learning Mobility in 2026 and Beyond

    Transfer and Learning Mobility in 2026 and Beyond

    Nearly four in 10 adult Americans have tried to transfer credit toward a college degree or credential. Of those, 58 percent lost credits in the process. For some, the consequences were severe: using up financial aid and repeating classes they’d already passed. Sixteen percent reported giving up on higher education altogether because the transfer process was simply too difficult.

    These aren’t just statistics. They represent learners and workers who lost time, money and faith in a system that promised them opportunity.

    Many have been trying to address these issues, and great work is underway. But the effort to transform transfer and learning mobility still lacks a coordinated and sustained focus at scale. Transfer and learning mobility are still treated as niche issues affecting a small percentage of students, rather than an increasingly common reality for today’s learners that should compel higher education to evolve. We have not yet achieved the fundamental mindset shifts, or built the supportive infrastructure, that are needed to treat all learning fairly, but the pressure is on. And with pressure comes opportunity.

    Year 5 of Connecting With You on ‘Beyond Transfer’

    Welcome to year five of the “Beyond Transfer” column on Inside Higher Ed—a column that seeks to elevate the voices of expert practitioners, researchers, advocates, policymakers, students and others who are seeking to overhaul not just the transfer experience, but the entire ecosystem related to ensuring that all Americans benefit from their hard-earned and hard-learned skills and competencies and receive the economic mobility they deserve.

    Each year, we kick off the column with some reflections on what we’ve learned through listening to and collaborating with all of you. At Sova, we’ve had the privilege of working at multiple levels of the transfer and learning mobility ecosystem (hereafter “transfer”): facilitating national expert groups such as the Beyond Transfer Policy Advisory Board and the Learning Evaluation and Recognition for the Next Generation (LEARN) Commission (co-convened with the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers); advancing state-level work from California’s AB 928 Associate Degree for Transfer Intersegmental Implementation Committee to the Texas Transfer Alliance led by Educate Texas; supporting institutional collaborations such as the Acceleration to Credits Working Group and the CCC-CSU Transfer Collaborative; leveraging AI to transform the learning mobility experience through the AI Transfer and Articulation Infrastructure Network (ATAIN); and elevating student voice through our social media platforms.

    As we look ahead, we are connecting the dots on some insights that, while not new, have been at the forefront of our minds over the last year.

    • Credit loss is prevalent, damaging and unfair. Matt Giani, Lauren Schudde and Tasneem Sultana present a rigorous analysis of credit loss in Texas and describe its damaging consequences. In their study of almost 29,000 community college–to–public university first-time transfers, 83 percent of transfers experienced some credit loss. Perhaps most alarming is that this credit loss was among those who followed the rules and transferred to a discipline-aligned program of study (i.e., maintained the same major after transfer).
    • Transfer of credit is a shared American experience. In these politically divisive times, it’s rare to find a topic where common ground is still possible, but transfer is an issue that resonates across party lines. As referenced earlier, a recent survey of adult Americans conducted by Public Agenda for Sova and the Beyond Transfer Policy Advisory Board illuminates both how prevalent transfer is and how Americans’ experiences with transfer shape their attitudes toward colleges and universities. Not only have four in 10 Americans sought to transfer credit, but it’s also the case that a large majority of Americans across the ideological spectrum agree that colleges and universities should be held accountable for honoring learning and accepting credits.
    • The lack of change in transfer and learning mobility is harming higher ed’s reputation. The survey found that those who tried to transfer credit were more likely to feel that higher education institutions care more about making money than about educating students. At a time of declining public trust in higher ed, this is a dangerous signal. In recent focus groups on public attitudes toward college affordability and value conducted by Sova with support from Lumina Foundation, problems with credit transfer have been raised spontaneously by participants in every focus group conducted thus far (12 focus groups across four states).

    Credit transfer is too often built upon unfair contradictions and expectations. Consider, for example:

    • Students are encouraged and even expected to explore their options and pursue a broad education, and yet they are simultaneously forced to choose a preparatory pathway aligned to a receiving institution’s requirements. Because they cannot know where they will be accepted for transfer, they are forced to bet their credits on a single guess.
    • Learners are expected to accept admissions offers before they know how their prior coursework and other learning experiences will be applied to completion.
    • Courses evaluated for transfer are reviewed to ensure they are equivalent to a receiving institution’s courses, without acknowledgment that a single receiving institution may also have multiple faculty (and graduate students) teaching similar courses in a variety of ways and preparation within the receiving institution is uneven as well.
    • Impressive reform efforts in transfer and learning mobility are underway in many settings, with state policy influencers playing important roles. There is much to celebrate, from the leadership of large transfer-sending institutions such as the Alamo Colleges District and Maricopa Community Colleges, to technology initiatives such as ATAIN and Transfer Explorer, to the individual champions who dedicate their personal time in spaces like Transfer Nation to create knowledge and community.

    The Texas Transfer Alliance, with the generous support of Ascendium Education Philanthropy, is leading statewide work focused on building a single, regional Target Pathway that provides all students—regardless of whether they started in high school dual credit or in community college—with clarity through a 60-credit pathway by program that meets requirements for high school graduation, associate degree and eligibility for transfer to multiple bachelor’s-granting institutions in the region. Texas policies related to funding (e.g., HB 8) and data transparency (e.g., SB 25 and SB 3039) are creating the conditions that urge institutions to initiate reforms such as these.

    • Accreditors are beginning to shift and evolve. Much as most Americans are calling for accountability for credit transfer, accreditors are also calling for change. Writing on behalf of the seven federally recognized accrediting commissions overseeing approximately 3,000 institutions, the Council of Regional Accrediting Commissions (C-RAC) stated:

    “Institutions should commit to a default in learning evaluation that credits are applied to program completion unless there is evidence that the required learning outcomes are not met. Decision-making should not be based upon anecdotes, assumptions about quality, locations where earned, or an unexamined history of ‘how things have always been done.’”

    While this may seem like common sense to a layperson, this represents a significant mindset shift. As the arbiters of quality and gatekeepers for federal financial aid, increased accreditor attention to transfer stands to motivate institutional behavior in meaningful ways.

    • And yet, reform efforts in transfer and learning mobility remain slow and episodic. The field has not yet launched a movement equal in scope and depth to the size of the problem we are facing. Higher ed was built to privilege some learners and types of learning over others. Confronting this bias head-on and committing to a new modus operandi is necessary for higher education to evolve and maintain its relevance with today’s learners.

    The Path Forward

    As we dive headlong into 2026, we’re placing our bets on a few fronts.

    The first front is changing assumptions and mindsets. There are a number of ways we are urging the field to shift the lens on transfer and learning mobility. For example, in vertical transfer, the large majority of students cannot know to which institution they will be accepted and able to transfer. That is how the system is designed. It is therefore no longer acceptable for each receiving institution to consider it fair to impose a slew of differing transfer requirements, as it makes it impossible for a student to choose a 60-credit preparatory pathway that works across potential transfer destinations. The Target Pathways work in Texas is designed to ensure students are eligible for transfer to multiple institutions. That needs to become the gold standard.

    Secondly, we need a mindset shift akin to the goal (not yet fully realized) of developmental education redesign. Traditional prerequisite remediation operates on the assumption that students are not “college-ready” unless they prove they are through placement tests. The corequisite approach—backed by solid evidence of greatly improved student outcomes—begins with the assumption, instead, that the large majority of students are ready to start in college-level courses and institutions have a responsibility to support the success of the students they admit through how they design and teach credit-bearing courses.

    In transfer and learning mobility today, the prevailing mindset sounds a lot like that of traditional prerequisite remediation: Students are assumed to not be “transfer-ready” unless they prove it through a process that interrogates their transfer coursework and other prior learning experiences—often including reviews of textbooks, assignments and other minutiae—to prove similarity to “equivalent” courses at the receiving institution. Similar to the goal of dev ed redesign and aligned to how accreditors are shifting their thinking, what would it look like to shift the mindset to: The large majority of learners have been prepared enough by the sum of their learning experiences to be ready for further education and all institutions have a responsibility to support their success after transfer?

    In addition to work on mindsets, we are focused in a few other key areas:

    • Use tech/AI to leapfrog. AI can’t solve all our problems and we know it comes with many new ones, but learning mobility will be transformed as technology finally allows us to move beyond slow, manual, course-to-course reviews that result in limited credit mobility and confusing and conflicting information for learners. Tech offers opportunities to identify equivalencies at a level that human review will never achieve and provide students with exciting navigation support, blowing open the gates that currently restrict credit transfer, as ATAIN seeks to do.
    • Demand transparency for credential applicability. A combination of policy innovation in states (e.g., SB 3039 in Texas) and advances in technology (e.g., the articulation coverage score) lead us to a moment where we can—and must—focus in on transparency about whether learners and workers are getting credit that accelerates them toward their goals.
    • Give learners real clarity and guarantees. Collaborate across partners to build one Target Pathway for a region (by program) and layer on guaranteed program-level admissions programs with targeted financial aid, dedicated advising and belonging initiatives that create a giant vacuum that pulls students through to completion.
    • Shift incentives through policy. So long as institutions continue to operate in a world that primarily incentivizes enrollment, nothing will change. Policymakers must step in and change the incentive structures that drive institutional behavior—both the financial and reputational incentives. What does it mean to recognize and reward institutions when they not only accept transfer students, but commit to the work of ensuring all credit for prior learning is counted toward credentials so that learners and workers are supported to complete in a timely manner? In its recent report, the LEARN Commission points to the opportunity for policymakers to enhance transparency and create new incentives that accelerate institutional change.

    The question isn’t whether the current transfer credit system is broken. The data makes that clear. The question is whether higher education has the courage to take on this challenge in a coordinated, sustained and scaled way. Too many learners are losing credits, losing money and losing hope. It’s time to do better.

    The authors are members of Sova’s Transfer and Learning Mobility team. Learn more about Beyond Transfer at sova.org/beyond-transfer or follow “Beyond Transfer” on Instagram @beyondtransfer and Transfer Nation California on LinkedIn or Instagram @transfernationca.

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  • Activism Under Attack at Harvard

    Activism Under Attack at Harvard

    Harvard University has just fired a resident dean, Gregory Davis, for his views. Davis was never accused of any wrongdoing in his job. But old social media posts written before his current job at Harvard were denounced by conservatives who objected to his hateful remarks about Donald Trump and the police. The right-wing website Yardreport exposed his posts and declared that his comments “disqualify him from serving in his role at Harvard. They reveal an ideology unbefitting of American society, let alone its most elite institution of higher education. The university must fire him immediately.”

    Davis’s firing bears a strong resemblance to Harvard’s 2019 dismissal of a faculty dean, Ronald Sullivan (and his wife), because he joined the defense team for Harvey Weinstein. The Sullivan purge was a shameful episode condemned by the ACLU, FIRE and many other groups, and often cited as evidence of Harvard’s evil wokeness by the National Review (“Harvard Launches an Attack on the Culture of Liberty”) and many conservatives. Let’s hope there’s similar outrage about what just happened to Davis.

    The Davis firing exposes a problem of repression at Harvard that transcends ideological borders and threatens everyone’s freedom. But while Harvard has silenced both conservatives and liberals in the past, today the target is aimed squarely at leftists accused of the new academic crime: activism.

    Harvard’s newly permanent president, Alan Garber, was recently interviewed on the Identity/Crisis podcast and revealed disturbing views about activism and academic freedom.

    Garber blamed campus censorship on the younger generations: “Students came to us that way, with a set of expectations that they would not hear language or thoughts that would be offensive to them,” he said, which Garber (correctly) called “inimical to the exercise of free speech.” Garber claimed that among faculty, “there has been a generational shift” in “free speech”: “If you were to speak to older faculty, around my generation, the idea that some views should not be expressed, or that certain speakers should get priority because of historical grievances of some kinds … that’s anathema … but that changed with young generations of faculty.”

    Yet it’s not the young faculty and students but the old administrators like Garber who are doing the repression at Harvard. It’s almost laughable to hear Garber say that “I have long been a believer in pretty much unfettered free speech” in the wake of Davis’s firing and so many other examples of repression at Harvard.

    In December, the Garber administration purged Mary T. Bassett, director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, and announced that—despite the literal name of the center—it would no longer be allowed to address human rights and instead will focus solely on the less controversial territory of children’s health. The center’s Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights had drawn attacks, and although Harvard rejected the explicit Trump administration demands for an external audit of the center, Harvard officials on their own went much further than the Trump regime and imposed this ban on controversial ideas at the center.

    This is a warning to all programs and all faculty at Harvard: Engage in activism and advocacy at the risk of your careers.

    In the podcast, Garber reminisced about his time teaching at Stanford: “We had a rule that the faculty … in their teaching, they had to be completely objective.” He added, “That’s what had shifted, and that’s where I think we went wrong.” But complete objectivity is more of a delusion than a dream. Garber declares, “I’m pleased to say that I think there’s real movement to restore balance in teaching and to bring back the idea that you really need to be objective in the classroom.” Garber mentions that as part of Harvard’s fight against antisemitism, “we’re hiring new people”—and it doesn’t take much guessing to figure out which views those new hires are expected to have.

    The irony is that Garber is Harvard’s most powerful political activist. Anti-activists like Garber are the worst kind of activists—the ones who delude themselves into thinking that they are the purveyors of objective truth, purely logical and immune from the evils of having a point of view—because their point of view is simply the facts. When an activist like Garber is unaware of his own biases and imagines himself to be objective and incapable of bias, that sense of superiority makes him feel entitled to silence the “activists.” And his position of power as president gives him the ability to punish his ideological enemies in the name of objectivity.

    Garber makes a cartoonish dismissal of activism, claiming that education “is not about how to sling slogans.” There are reasonable critiques of what some left-wing activists do in the classroom—but claiming that they just “sling slogans” is such a dishonest dismissal that it shows Garber is ignorant of what academic activism looks like, and this helps explain why he’s unable to see his own activist presidency.

    Garber is fond of proclaiming his devotion to institutional neutrality, but a university truly committed to neutrality cannot punish activism (and should not even condemn it). The neutral university must protect the freedom of all scholars and students, whether they engage in activism, oppose activism or try to avoid controversial issues. A neutral university judges scholars based on their scholarly achievement and never presumes that all activists are inherently unscholarly, as Garber believes.

    Garber wants to paint a scarlet A on activists and purge them from the university: “Our mission is not to provide advocacy about an issue,” he says, “it’s to provide scholarship, it’s to provide an accurate view, as objective a view as possible.” But telling the truth in a biased world sometimes requires advocacy and activism. Accuracy often violates the “objective” ideal of telling both sides equally. Even if you personally refrain from advocacy on everything, academic freedom requires a college president to respect and defend faculty who disagree and engage in advocacy.

    Garber is free to reject these principles and argue for his delusions of objectivity. But when he seeks to impose his biased viewpoint on the entire university and violate the academic freedom of those who disagree, then he’s no longer a mere advocate for flawed delusions of objectivity. Garber is an activist president abusing his power to silence those he opposes.

    The Trump regime’s demands of Harvard were so extreme that Garber was forced to reject a settlement. But Garber’s latest words and actions send a clear message to the Trump administration: Trust me. Garber and the Trump regime share a common enemy in left-wing activists. All the government needs to do is back down a little, and Garber will do their bidding. Garber is setting the terms of a settlement where he will implement most of Trump’s demands. It appears Garber will gladly sacrifice the academic freedom of Harvard’s faculty, staff and students as long as Harvard’s autonomy and money are preserved.

    John K. Wilson was a 2019–20 fellow with the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement and is the author of eight books, including Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies (Routledge, 2008), and his forthcoming book The Attack on Academia. He can be reached at [email protected], or letters to the editor can be sent to [email protected].

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  • How a Northwestern Program Tackles Student Stress

    How a Northwestern Program Tackles Student Stress

    The stress of managing her engineering classes at Northwestern University didn’t just weigh on Fiona Letsinger mentally—it began to take a toll on her academic performance.

    In her second year, Letsinger’s dean introduced her to PATH, a peer mentor–led program housed in the engineering school that helps students manage stress, perfectionism and personal growth.

    “From the second he described it, my jaw was on the floor,” said Letsinger, a fourth-year civil engineering major. “I was like, ‘Yep—that’s exactly what I need.’”

    Launched in 2016, PATH—short for Personal Advancement Through Habits—is an eight-week program that guides students through reflection and personal development using a mix of online coursework and small-group discussions.

    During the 2024–25 school year, 88 students completed the program. About 90 percent reported a positive personal change, and more than 60 percent said they experienced growth in self-awareness; roughly half said it improved their motivation and goal-setting skills.

    Letsinger said the program gave her the language to recognize and name the ways stress and perfectionism were shaping her college experience.

    “I thought I couldn’t be a perfectionist because I wasn’t performing highly enough,” Letsinger said. “It wasn’t until PATH when I was able to get the vocabulary to identify how stress showed up in my life.”

    Impact on students: Joe Holtgrieve, assistant dean for undergraduate engineering, said his experience supporting students in both short-term and systemic crises inspired him to start the PATH program nearly 10 years ago.

    At the time, Holtgrieve said, Northwestern was reassessing its withdrawal policies and considering making it easier for students to drop courses later in the term. That prompted him to engage in difficult conversations with students about whether withdrawing was the best option—or whether they were experiencing what he calls an MOI, or “moment of intensity.”

    “How you respond is going to be really important for your future success and resilience,” said Holtgrieve, who remains a PATH faculty member. He added that students would later reach out to thank him because they performed better academically than they thought they would.

    Liz Daly, assistant director of academic advising and PATH faculty, said the program was originally intended for engineering students on academic probation but later expanded to include anyone feeling overwhelmed.

    “We had students who would request to take it again because they appreciated the community and the conversations that weren’t happening elsewhere on campus,” Daly said.

    That emphasis on reflection and peer support continued among students who participated in PATH during the 2024–25 school year.

    To better understand students’ experiences, Holtgrieve and Daly surveyed participants, asking them to reflect on their academic challenges and select three goals from a list of seven. More than half chose “shift mindset to embrace challenges, persist and learn from feedback.”

    Participants also completed surveys at the start and end of the program, rating which behaviors they found most challenging.

    Before starting PATH, more than half said they “dwelled on inadequacy after failure” and were “avoidant and/or withdrawn when things were going poorly.” By the program’s end, that number had dropped to about 15 percent.

    Daly said students often cite Holtgrieve’s “flashlight of attention” lesson as particularly helpful.

    “Our attention is like a flashlight … and whatever is illuminated by that light represents our awareness,” Holtgrieve said. “Where we shine that light represents our intention,” he added, noting that students’ intentions are often “yanked back and forth by crises, breaking news or self-critical narratives.”

    “If we can tune in to what’s present in the moment through our awareness and decide whether something is helpful or productive, then we can step back, understand the intention behind the attention that’s creating this awareness and adjust it,” he said.

    Letsinger agreed with Daly, saying this lesson was a game-changer in how she understood her own thinking.

    “I remember hearing that and immediately being like, ‘Yep, I need and want more of that kind of thinking,’” Letsinger said, adding that she not only enrolled in the program again the following quarter but later became a PATH mentor herself.

    What’s next: Holtgrieve and Daly said the program became so popular that other institutions have adapted it, including Smith College, which launched its own PATH-inspired program in fall 2020.

    Daly noted that in conversations about PATH’s impact, faculty and staff often asked whether they could participate as well. As a result, Holtgrieve and Daly now hold multiple sessions each year for Northwestern employees interested in learning strategies to manage stress in their own lives.

    Holtgrieve said that response suggests that many of the conversations happening among students also resonate with faculty and staff.

    “It’s an empathetic bridge, and it helps them to recognize that they’re struggling with some of the same things that their students are struggling with,” Holtgrieve said.

    Ultimately, Holtgrieve said, PATH is meant to help anyone practice responding to moments of uncertainty instead of trying to make them disappear.

    “When you’re feeling or confronting a moment where it’s not clear what to do, it’s human nature to say, ‘I want that to go away,’” Holtgrieve said. “But being able to practice living through and responding to those moments is how you build the skills to be a better person.”

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  • Brown Mass Shooting Suspect Admits to Crime

    Brown Mass Shooting Suspect Admits to Crime

    Transcripts from the videos in which Claudio Neves Valente admitted to the crimes were released Tuesday.

    Bing Guan/AFP/Getty Images

    The man accused of carrying out last month’s mass shooting at Brown University that left two students dead admitted to the crime in a series of four videos, the transcripts of which were released Tuesday by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts. 

    Claudio Neves Valente, the 48-year-old suspect who previously attended Brown, was found dead by a self-inflicted gunshot wound at a storage facility in New Hampshire just days after the campus attack, preventing investigators from interrogating him. But in the videos, which were pulled from an electronic device at the storage facility and have been translated from Portuguese to English, Valente admitted to the Brown shooting and the subsequent killing of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor near Boston. 

    And while the suspect said that he would not apologize, the motives of the attack remain unclear.

    Throughout the more than 11 minutes’ worth of video, he spoke about how he had planned the shooting for years. In multiple instances, Valente vaguely referenced “the people” his violent actions were made in response to, saying, “I did not like any one of you. I saw all of this shit from the beginning.” 

    He noted that he sent three emails, seemingly to “the people” he’d referenced. But beyond that, he was “not saying anything else.”

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  • What Higher Ed Learned From 12 Months of Trump 2.0

    What Higher Ed Learned From 12 Months of Trump 2.0

    College leaders return to campus this term appearing steady and resolved. After a year of tumult, they remain vigilant about more attacks from Washington but are ready to refocus on the other crises knocking at their doors—million-dollar deficits, declining enrollments and AI’s disruption. And now that higher ed has gone through nearly 12 months of Trump 2.0, it’s learned a few things.

    First, we now know that nothing is sacred. Funding for cancer research? Canceled. Support for colleges serving low-income students? Chopped. Due process? Passed over. The sector was caught off guard by the administration’s creativity in its attacks last year, and colleges should continue to expect the unexpected. But in an interview before Christmas, Education Secretary Linda McMahon told Breitbart that her department would “shift a little bit away from higher education” in 2026 and focus more on K–12 reform.

    The year didn’t just teach colleges what to expect—it also showed them how to respond. And we’ve seen that fighting back works. Harvard is holding firm against the administration’s pressure to strike a deal and has not publicly conceded anything (though rumors abound an agreement is nigh). George Mason University president Gregory Washington came out swinging when the Department of Education accused him of implementing “unlawful DEI policies” on his campus. That’s a sharp contrast to University of Virginia president Jim Ryan, who resigned in June after the Department of Justice’s successful bid to topple him. So far, Washington remains in his post, with unanimous support from his board, campus community and state lawmakers. And in a collective act of defiance, the nine institutions initially invited to sign the White House’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” declined without repercussion.

    Leaders have also woken up to the fact that visibility matters. At the Council for Independent Colleges’ Presidents Institute in Orlando, Fla., this week, presidents seemed ready to play offense. They spoke with a newfound political savviness about recruiting board members and alumni to do advocacy work, hiring in-house government relations professionals and spending more time on the Hill. “We all let our guard down on government relations in the lead-up to 2025,” one president said. “Being able to brand yourself in D.C. is now a necessity, not a luxury.”

    At times the administration has appeared sloppy, sending “unauthorized” letters, issuing threats and never following up, or publishing typo-ridden mandates. But beyond the culture-war accusations that colleges are factories of woke indoctrination, it’s clear the government is serious about wanting to effect change in higher ed. Cost transparency, graduate outcomes and greater emphasis on workforce training are all sound policy issues lawmakers are pursuing through legislation.

    Whether or not McMahon follows through on her intention to shift focus away from higher ed, the fallout from 2025 persists. We’ll be looking to see how college budgets weather new loan caps for graduate courses and the loss of international students impacted by stricter visa requirements—or turned off by the country’s hostile environment.

    In December, Education under secretary Nicholas Kent vowed to “fix” accreditation. The administration’s unofficial playbook, Project 2025, suggests that could mean more accreditors, including states authorizing their own accrediting agencies, or ending mandatory accreditation to access federal financial aid. Congress will continue to apply pressure on the sector to lower the cost of college and improve transparency regarding fees and tuition. Meanwhile, negotiated rule making has begun on the accountability measures mandated by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. And will colleges take responsibility for their role in the loss of public trust in their institutions?

    We shouldn’t normalize the lasting harm the Trump administration has done to institutional independence, minoritized students and scientific research in just 12 months. And there is a risk that more is coming. But after surviving a dizzying year of attacks, the sector will face its challenges a little wiser and more informed.

    Sara Custer is editor in chief at Inside Higher Ed.

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  • College Dining Halls Embrace Plant-Forward Menus

    College Dining Halls Embrace Plant-Forward Menus

    Not long ago, chalky tofu and limp lettuce constituted some of the only vegetarian meal options available at campus dining halls. But that’s changed in recent years as more colleges and universities have set broader sustainability goals, which often include pledges to offer more plant-based foods.

    Nowadays, students have access to more adventurous plant-based dishes, such as cauliflower ceviche, japchae and sesame tempeh, to name just a few.

    Over the past decade, dozens of colleges and universities have vowed to provide more plant-based meals, including Smith College, the University of North Texas and the University of California, Los Angeles.

    In November, the University of California, Riverside—where meatless meals already make up about 45 percent of its dining options—became one of the latest universities to commit to expanding its meatless offerings, pledging to make 50 percent of meals plant-based by 2027.

    While such pledges are rooted in sustainability goals, they’ve also led to the creation of more diverse and healthier menu options—both things students have called for. And regardless of students’ motivation for consuming more plant-based food, prioritizing such options at campus dining halls—which feed millions per year—has the power to affect environmental change at scale.

    “Without question, institutional procurement is a massive lever for climate solutions at school and an often-overlooked tool for public health,” said Sophie Egan, co-director of the Menus of Change University Research Collaborative housed at Stanford University. Founded in 2012, the collaborative is a network of 85 colleges and universities that are using campus dining halls as living laboratories to research promotion of plant-forward options, food-waste reduction and increasing food literacy. “The decision-makers at universities who hold the purse strings and design menus are the potential heroes in this story. They can make small tweaks to menu sourcing and operations that can have a huge impact at scale.”

    For colleges, the shift satisfies multiple goals.

    “There are so many things that play into sustainability that are low-hanging fruit, including trying to offer menu items that don’t require a lot of water,” said Lanette Dickerson, director of culinary operations at UC Riverside. At the same time, she’s also focused on creating menus that reflect students’ varied and changing tastes. “UC Riverside is a really diverse campus—more than 40 percent of students are Latino and 34 percent are Asian—which makes it easier for us to offer these items because they’re already deeply rooted in these cultural diets.”

    She added that offering vegetarian foods—which tend to be lower in fat, cholesterol and other ingredients associated with an increased risk of chronic disease—may also help some students adopt healthier overall eating habits.

    Vegan Labels a ‘Turn-Off’

    Reaching the university’s new plant-forward menu goals will require more training for Dickerson’s staff. “Our team needs to know how to prepare these items to make sure they’re palatable,” she said. What won’t work is advertising plant-based menu options as meatless, vegan or vegetarian. “We got such bad feedback on our ‘meatless Mondays,’” she said, noting that students assigned more value to meat-based proteins. “We did still try to do it, but without such heavy marketing behind it.”

    Experts say that kind of reaction to food labeled vegetarian, vegan or meatless is exceedingly common, despite consumers’ increased appetite for plant-based foods and the growing availability of plant-based ingredients.

    “The term ‘vegan’ has a bit of a bad connotation. ‘Plant-based’ seems a lot sexier,” said Scott Zahren, director of culinary development at Aramark, which provides dining and food services to more than 275 U.S. colleges and universities. “Plant-based products these days are much better than they were 10 or 20 years ago. We have such great alternative dairy products now that we can offer a lot more dishes.”

    Vegetarian dining at Smith College

    Jessica Scranton/Smith College

    But Zahren and his team recognized that “vegan” can be a “turn-off,” and Aramark recently updated its marketing content to describe its menu items as “plant-based” instead. “The marketing reads a lot better for the masses.”

    Presenting plant-based foods as a default menu item rather than an alternative also increases the likelihood that students will eat them. According to a 2024 study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, on days that dining halls set up food stations with a vegan default—say, stir fry with tofu—those stations saw a 58 percent increase in plant-based dining, and meat consumption declined anywhere from 21 percent to 57 percent. In short, students don’t run away from plant-based dishes when they’re presented as the norm.

    ‘It’s About Good Food’

    In addition to sustainability initiatives, changing food preferences are also driving dining halls to offer more meatless options.

    In 2020, the global market for plant-based foods was valued at $29.4 billion; by 2030, it is expected to grow more than fivefold to $162 billion, according to a report by Bloomberg Intelligence. While data also shows that about 22 percent of Gen Z are actively limiting their meat consumption, what students really want out of campus dining is more options. According to a 2023 Inside Higher Ed Student Voice survey, respondents said that if dining halls want to improve their offerings, they should prioritize variety and quality of flavors, reduce ultra-processed foods and offer a variety of cuisines.

    “Campus dining programs are responding to customer preferences,” said Robert Nelson, president and CEO of the National Association of College and University Food Services. “The focus is on making great-tasting dishes that happen to be plant-forward. What’s important for dining halls as they expand their plant-forward, vegan and vegetarian offerings is to market them with descriptive, flavorful language. It’s not meatless curry, it’s coconut curry; it’s amazing mushroom pasta; it’s crispy cauliflower tacos.”

    That’s the approach Smith College has taken in its quest to offer more plant-based meals.

    A light-skinned man in a black chef's coat, backward baseball cap and black gloves stands in front of a large flattop cooking surface stirring a pile of greens.

    Chef Adam Dubois sauteing local greens at Smith College.

    Jessica Scranton/Smith College

    “We’re showing students that it’s not about the words ‘vegetarian’ or ‘vegan’—it’s about good food. It doesn’t have to have meat to be good,” said German Alvarado, director of culinary services at Smith. “With all of the technology that’s available, students are seeing all the variety of food out there and they want to see it in front of them. What’s trending is variety and healthy choices.”

    In 2015, the college pledged to reduce meat consumption by 5 percent each year, aiming to make 55 percent of its entrées plant-based by 2025. As of December, it was around 51.5 percent, according to Alvarado.

    “We’re not that far off,” he said, adding that the college just needs to add a handful of additional menu items to reach its goal. “We don’t want to do this for the sake of doing it. We want to make sure students are enjoying it and we’re creating good recipes.”

    Choice Is Key

    But Smith, UC Riverside and many other colleges have no plans to stop serving meat entirely. A dustup in the opinion pages of the Williams College student newspaper already showed limited appetite for that: In November, a student wrote an op-ed suggesting the college go vegan to mitigate animal cruelty, prompting blowback.

    “When accepting the invitation to attend the College, students did not sign up for a vegan menu,” Ella Goodman, a freshman at Williams, wrote in response. “Suddenly restricting our meal offerings would be unfair to students for whom a vegan menu could have been a dealbreaker in choosing between colleges.”

    Preserving personal choice is key for institutions undertaking plant-based dining initiatives, said Egan, the co-director of Menus of Change.

    “The word ‘meatless’ really backfires. People tend to not like being told they can’t have something,” she said. “The behavioral science is very clear: Having something taken away or restricting choice is a very good way to make people not excited about what’s left. Plant-forward is really about celebrating what’s in a dish.”

    And those initiatives at campus dining halls can also shape student relationships with food, which has implications that stretch far beyond the campus.

    “A person’s college years are a particular formative time for developing food identity, food preferences and making decisions about food,” Egan said. “Showing students that healthy, sustainable, plant-forward ways of eating can be delicious, comforting, satisfying and help them perform well in sports, academics and their different pursuits—those preferences stay with them long after their college years.”

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  • Doing the “Data Work” in Student Success

    Doing the “Data Work” in Student Success

    The latest episode of The Key, Inside Higher Ed’s news and analysis podcast, features a discussion between higher ed leaders and IHE editor in chief Sara Custer on how colleges can harness data to better support students. 

    Speaking at the Student Success 2025 event in November, Courtney Brown, vice president of strategic impact and planning at the Lumina Foundation; Elliot Felix, higher education advisory practice lead at Buro Happold; and Mark Milliron, president of National University, offered unique perspectives to the question of how institutions can be data-driven and student-centered.

    “You are not going to serve a student population well unless you do your data work,” said Milliron. The “data work” includes establishing good data governance and data mapping, building a data warehouse, and facilitating data integration across support platforms such as a learning management system and student information systems, he said. 

    Putting processes and best practice in place is what allowed National to expand its capacity, he said. “I don’t think we could’ve scaled some of the strategies we’ve done unless we did the plumbing work upfront.”

    On the question of scale, Felix encouraged institutions to combine their resources to serve more students. “How many institutions are creating their own, bespoke AI policy when they can do [it] as a group or borrow from Educause? There are so many ways to work together to go farther, to go faster.”

    While colleges might be teeming with data, Felix encouraged institutions to look at external sources to gain a clearer picture of students’ learning journeys. “I do think more data beyond the walls—employer data, labor market data, employment outcomes—would be really helpful.”

    Meanwhile, Brown argued that the needs of the modern-day student are varied and institutions must adapt to their students, rather than students adapting to colleges. Institutions that use data to understand whom today’s students are will be better placed to support their success, she said. “[Students] are parents, they are working, they are financially independent from their own parents. But most policymakers and others don’t think about that. So we need to understand who they are and then transform the system to better serve [them].”

    Listen to the full episode here. 

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