Tag: Education
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The Right-Wing Takeover of K-12 Education (Second Thought Staging)
Higher Education Inquirer : Slop School Is Here: The Right-Wing Takeover of K-12 Education (Second Thought Staging)
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Higher Education Inquirer : The Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity: Rethinking—and Challenging—America’s Economic Narrative
In a political moment defined by economic confusion, precarity, and widening inequality, the
has positioned itself as one of the most forceful critics of how the U.S. government measures economic well-being. Founded in 2019 by Eugene “Gene” Ludwig—banking regulator, financier, and longtime critic of official labor statistics—the institute argues that the traditional indicators used by policymakers, economists, and the media no longer reflect the lived experience of most working and middle-class Americans.
LISEP’s core mission is straightforward: to replace or supplement conventional economic indicators with metrics that measure whether ordinary people can live decent, stable, self-supporting lives. In place of headline unemployment levels that minimize underemployment and wage suppression, LISEP developed the True Rate of Unemployment (TRU). Instead of accepting the Consumer Price Index as an indicator of affordability, it created the True Living Cost (TLC). And to evaluate whether households can achieve a baseline level of dignity, the institute introduced its Minimal Quality of Life Index (MQL).Taken together, these indicators paint a sobering picture. LISEP’s most recent TRU data suggests that nearly one in four Americans—far more than the official unemployment rate—remains functionally unemployed or trapped in low-wage, unstable work. Its analysis of living costs shows that basic necessities such as housing, childcare, food, healthcare, and digital access are rising at rates that far outpace reported inflation. Its income distribution research finds that the bottom 60% of households fall severely short of the after-tax income required to meet even minimal quality-of-life thresholds.
In a time when both parties often claim economic success—pointing to record stock markets, low headline unemployment, and steady GDP growth—LISEP argues that these triumphal narratives obscure the steady erosion of working-class security.
But LISEP’s work does more than diagnose hardship; it challenges the legitimacy of the economic story that the United States tells about itself. That is precisely why its metrics have garnered attention—and controversy.
Methodological Innovations and the Pushback They AttractEconomists, policymakers, labor advocates, and academics have responded to LISEP’s work with a mixture of praise and skepticism. Some see LISEP as filling a critical gap—offering metrics that better capture the realities of gig workers, part-time workers, workers with unpredictable hours, and families priced out of life’s essentials. Others argue that LISEP’s approach risks injecting subjectivity into economic measurement and complicating long-established statistical frameworks.
One major point of debate centers on LISEP’s definition of unemployment. Traditional unemployment statistics only count individuals actively seeking work. LISEP’s TRU metric, by contrast, includes the underemployed, part-time workers who want full-time jobs, and discouraged workers who have given up looking. Critics argue that combining these groups creates a metric that resembles a policy argument more than a neutral measurement. Supporters counter that ignoring these groups produces an artificially rosy portrait of economic health and undervalues persistent structural inequality.
LISEP’s True Living Cost and Minimal Quality of Life indices face a different critique: they define “necessities” more broadly than some economists are comfortable with. Including internet access, basic technology, early childhood education, and modern transportation standards is, according to LISEP, essential to functioning in the 21st-century economy. Critics contend that because these standards go beyond subsistence, the metrics risk shifting from measuring need to measuring aspiration. The institute responds that “subsistence” is not an acceptable measure of human dignity in a wealthy nation.
Other scholars raise questions about transparency. While LISEP publishes summaries and explanations of its methodologies, some economists argue that its approaches would require broader independent replication and peer review to become standard tools. Yet others note that the Bureau of Labor Statistics itself has long used imperfect methods that were never designed to measure well-being—only labor market participation.
Where supporters and skeptics agree is on one point: LISEP has forced a deeply needed conversation about what economic dignity means in the United States today.
Why LISEP Matters for Higher Education and Public PolicyFor institutions of higher learning—especially those that produce the economists, policymakers, and journalists who shape public discourse—LISEP’s challenge to economic orthodoxy is a call to scrutiny and humility. Universities continue to rely on traditional metrics in research, teaching, and policy labs, even when these metrics fail to capture the economic and social pressures facing students and their families.
Students at community colleges, regional publics, and underfunded institutions live the realities LISEP describes: multiple jobs, unpredictable hours, rising food and housing insecurity, and persistent underemployment after graduation. Yet their struggles are too often minimized by conventional indicators that suggest a thriving labor market.
If academia takes LISEP’s work seriously, it could shift research priorities, reshape debates on student debt, influence regional economic development strategies, guide labor-market forecasting, and elevate the experiences of the most economically vulnerable students.
For policymakers, LISEP’s metrics offer a different foundation for assessing whether economic growth is reaching ordinary people. They provide tools for evaluating whether wages are livable, whether childcare is accessible, whether housing is affordable, and whether the economy produces stable, family-supporting jobs. If adopted or even partially embraced, LISEP’s indicators could inform legislation on minimum wage, labor protections, social services, tax reform, cost-of-living adjustments, and more.
The institute’s broader message is simple: the United States cannot address inequality if it continues to celebrate misleading statistics.
A New Economic NarrativeWhether LISEP becomes a permanent influence or a dissenting voice will depend on how policymakers, journalists, and academic economists respond. If its metrics remain on the margins, they will serve as a moral indictment of traditional measures that ignore the reality of economic insecurity. If they are adopted, they could trigger a profound reevaluation of American economic policy—one grounded not in aggregate success but in shared prosperity.
LISEP insists that a healthy economy is not one that grows on paper but one that allows ordinary people to live decently. That premise alone places the institute on the front lines of the battle over how the United States understands its own economic health.
SourcesLudwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity, “True Rate of Unemployment (TRU),” 2025, lisep.org.
Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity, “True Living Cost (TLC),” 2025, lisep.org.
Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity, “Shared Economic Prosperity (SEP) Measure,” 2025, lisep.org.
PR Newswire, “Majority of Americans Can’t Achieve a Minimal Quality of Life, According to New Ludwig Institute Research,” May 12, 2025.
Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity, “Wage Inequality Grows With Low-Income Workers Losing Ground,” Press Release, April 16, 2025. -
Purdue Professor Declines MLA Prize Due to Policies on Gaza
She had been awarded the prize for her book Ghostly Pasts, Capitalist Presence: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal, published in August 2024.
Tithi Bhattacharya, a history professor at Purdue University, formally declined the Modern Language Association’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for South Asian Studies in protest of decisions by the MLA regarding Israel’s attacks on Gaza.
“This decision is not a reflection of the committee’s rigorous work or the value of the prize itself, but a stand taken in light of the institutional silence and policy decisions made by the Modern Language Association regarding the ongoing genocide in Palestine, including the MLA leadership’s appalling suppression of the Delegate Assembly’s right to vote on a proposed resolution to boycott, sanction, and divest from Israel,” Bhattacharya wrote Wednesday in a blog post about her decision.
She had been awarded the 2025 prize for her book Ghostly Pasts, Capitalist Presence: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal, published in August 2024.
“I also hope that by declining, I can contribute to the urgent conversation about the ethical responsibilities of professional academic organizations when facing colonialism, brutal state violence, and genocide,” Bhattacharya wrote. “My book, which my generous colleagues on the committee have recognized, is about how colonial capitalism does not even spare ghosts. Against such power, I still believe our weapon remains solidarity.”
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On-the-Job Training on Offer at Campus Opening Retirement Home
The “intergenerational retirement living community” about to sprout on an Australian university’s suburban campus will generate clinical training opportunities for students while it “strengthens the social fabric” of the city, its advocates claim.
The University of Canberra plans to convert unused land—currently occupied by gum trees, grassland, dilapidated fencing and the odd hungry kangaroo—into a mini village complete with 230 “independent living units,” a 180-bed care facility, a retail center and health services on tap.
The project is designed to ease housing shortages and help older Australians in “downsizing” while promoting intergenerational mingling.
It will also provide practical educational opportunities across multiple disciplines. “Our students here, from allied health through to the built environment … nursing and many other vocations, will be able to get on-the-job training whilst they are at the university,” said Vice Chancellor Bill Shorten.
“University education makes a lot more sense when … you’re practicing what you’re learning. Nothing beats that real-world experience.”
Under a deal signed with property developers Pariter and residential aged care provider Opal, the university will lease the 2.2-hectare site—nestled between UC’s hospital and health hub—for 100 years. The two companies will bankroll the project’s capital costs, estimated at about 150 million Australian dollars ($99.2 million).
The university will pocket “lease receipts and revenue share,” although it declined to say how much. The deal will facilitate collaborative employment and “co-designed” learning programs, along with joint research projects and student placements on campus and elsewhere.
The older residents will be encouraged to engage with each other and their younger neighbors, including the more than 2,000 students who live on campus. Pedestrian links will connect them to cafés, the library, medical services and nearby bushland.
Shorten said the construction still requires final approval, but he expects it to begin within about two years and finish within four. He insisted that the project, which had been the subject of long-standing negotiations with various partners, would have gone ahead irrespective of the university’s financial position.
“It just makes sense,” he told reporters. “This is an idea [whose] time has come. I think this is what modern universities should be doing. At the end of the day, trying to suppress a good idea is like trying to keep a ball below the surface of the water.”
UC is among a throng of Australian universities that are converting parts of their considerable landholdings into revenue-earning opportunities matched to their educational and community support missions. The University of Wollongong is seeking final development approval for an “intergenerational university community” that features health services, integrated research and education spaces, an early-learning center and accommodation for more than 400 older residents on its seaside campus.
La Trobe and Flinders Universities have also flagged the possible establishment of aged care facilities as part of multibillion-dollar developments of their campuses in suburban Melbourne and Adelaide.
Opal’s director of communications and sustainability, Rosanne Cartwright, said similar precincts were springing up in countries with aging demographics including Germany, Japan and the Netherlands. “The aging population is a global issue that needs to be solved locally,” Cartwright said.
“Australians across every generation are dealing with loneliness as a real issue,” she added. “Younger people need to look after older people and older people need to look after younger people.”
Commercial redevelopments on campus have sparked criticism that vice chancellors are diverging from their educational mission into property speculation—grievances that run strong if universities invest in capital projects while reducing staff to save costs.
The National Tertiary Education Union said it was comfortable with the UC project “so long as it contributes to rather than detracts from” teaching and research.
“From time to time there are some objections to using university land in that way, but it’s not really in short supply at the University of Canberra,” said the union’s divisional secretary, Lachlan Clohesy. “If there’s revenue … supplementing the university and therefore able to contribute to the core mission, that’s a good thing.”
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Facilitating Deliberative Dialogue in College Classrooms
Academic inquiry and exploring new opinions are cornerstones of higher education, but some students say they’re not encouraged to engage in new ideas on campus. According to 2025 data from Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab, approximately one in eight Student Voice respondents (13 percent) said they felt “not very” or “not at all” supported in their efforts to explore different perspectives at their college; 7 percent said they were unsure.
More colleges and universities are seeking to establish ways to advance civil discourse and allow students to disagree respectfully, but creating productive classroom dialogue remains a challenge for many professors.
A November webinar hosted by the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE) offered practical insights for instructors looking to build a supportive and thoughtful environment for exchanging ideas.
What’s the need: Constructive dialogue activities help students thrive in and outside the classroom.
“We need to have our students, whether they’re 40 and going back to school or just starting out in higher ed, we need to have adults in this world who are able to have meaningful conversations with others, to solve problems and to understand the viewpoints of others,” said Laurie Pendleton, executive director of faculty success at ACUE, during the webinar.
Such skills can also help students in their careers. “There are critiques of Gen Z [that] they don’t know how to work with each other in the workspace,” Zack Ritter, associate director of strategic initiatives at UCLA’s Center for Community Engagement, said during the webinar. “We’re providing a skill of, how do you listen to someone deeply at the workplace? How do you collaborate and find consensus among a bunch of different people?”
Defining terms: Deliberative dialogue, also called civil discourse or constructive conversation, is distinct from a casual discussion or engaging in debate, Pendleton said.
“When we think about debate, we’re really thinking more about winners and losers,” Pendleton said. “I’m stating my opinion or my facts. You’re stating your opinions and your facts, and we’re looking at who has the stronger case.”
Deliberative dialogue, however, is comparing different views, looking for mutual appreciation and potentially leading to collective action, Pendleton said.
“We’re looking for more shared understanding, things like, ‘I didn’t think about it from that perspective,’ or, ‘That’s interesting evidence; where did it come from?’” she explained.
Setting the stage: One of the common missteps faculty can make when establishing deliberative dialogue is neglecting to lay the groundwork, Ritter said. “You can’t just jump into the hot topic, because people are going to come with different baggage, different hates, different misunderstandings,” he said.
Instead, faculty should facilitate activities that allow students to share more about themselves and their cultures and to learn about their peers. Even better is when the class can build trust by doing some type of action project to solidify their connections, Ritter said, such as volunteering in the community.
Creating a classroom space that is responsive to discussion can also be key, said Adam A. Smith, founder and senior consultant at Smith Education Associates. Smith arranges his classroom to have “pods” of students grouped at desks or tables to allow them to connect in a more intimate way.
Navigating tensions: The goal of a deliberate discussion is not to make everyone comfortable, said Rosina Bolen, director of solidarity, engagement and success initiatives at Mount Saint Mary’s University.
“If everyone’s comfortable, you’re probably not having the kind of conversation that stretches people’s comfort zones,” Bolen said.
Faculty members should be prepared to make mistakes and for students possibly to get offended, and be equipped to handle “hot” or “cold” moments.
A hot moment is when tensions are high and conflict may erupt in the classroom. A cold moment, on the other hand, is when students don’t feel comfortable speaking out and a silent chill descends on the room.
Establishing community guidelines, ground rules or space agreements can be one way to mitigate or navigate uncomfortable situations by providing a working framework of what is or is not appropriate in the dialogue, Bolen said. Instructors should not assume students know the rules of engagement; it is their responsibility to outline the norms of the setting, Smith said.
It can be helpful to name what is happening in the outside world, including any prominent political or social tensions, and how they might inform individuals’ contributions to the conversation, Ritter said. “Naming the inequalities in society that are cutting across a bunch of different identities is also a way to build solidarity in the classroom.”
Professors should also conduct a self-evaluation of what may trigger their own emotional responses and prepare for how they will navigate such feelings so as to not disrupt the larger classroom goal. Similarly, faculty can give students an opportunity to share any of their own behaviors that might lead to misinterpretation.
“I’ve found it successful where students front-load some of their mannerisms and they say, ‘Hey everybody, sometimes I talk really loud, and it doesn’t mean that I’m mad at you, it’s just when I get excited about something, I just talk really loud and I use my hands,’” Ritter explained. “Having folks be vulnerable about their little mannerisms might result in a lot of pain reduction in the future.”
Continuing the conversation: After the formal discussion, faculty should create an opportunity for the class to reflect, Bolen said. How did the conversation go? How did people react? What did students learn?
“That debrief can go a long way towards ameliorating any negative impact on the rest of the course,” Bolen said. “And if something comes up that impacts individual students, it’s a great idea to go and check in with them afterwards and see how they’re doing.”
Deliberative dialogues should not be one-off events that occur in a vacuum, Pendleton said, but can be woven into the curriculum and connected to disciplinary content.
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More Colleges Celebrate Gifts From Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott
Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott continued her latest giving spree this week, showering millions of dollars on another slew of higher ed institutions.
Scott gave $50 million each to California State University, East Bay, the largest single donation in the university’s history, and to Lehman College, part of the City University of New York system, according to announcements from the institutions on Thursday. (Scott also gifted Lehman College $20 million in 2020 and has given a total of $125 million to campuses across the CUNY system in the last five years.)
Texas A&M University–Kingsville and Seminole State College in Oklahoma also reported Scott gave them their largest gifts ever this week, $38 million and $17 million, respectively.
Scott recently made several new contributions to tribal colleges, as well, including $9 million to Bay Mills Community College in Michigan, $8 million to Blackfeet Community College in Montana and $10 million to College of the Menominee Nation in Wisconsin.
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No, It’s Not (Mostly) About Tuition
As a kid, I remember science often being taught through myth busting. It was an engaging way to learn to ask questions, even if some examples worked better than others. (When someone responded to “people thought the earth is flat because it looks flat” with “what would it look like if it were round?” it broke my pre-adolescent brain.) The lesson behind the lesson was that science is a good way to fact-check, even if the facts in question seem obvious.
In that spirit, I loved Joshua Goodman and Joseph Wilkelmann’s new NBER paper about community college enrollments. It takes on several widely held myths, subjects them to empirical scrutiny and shows that they’re mostly false. It should be required reading for anyone discussing higher education policy.
The whole thing is worth reading, but I’ll give a few highlights.
- Most of the college enrollment drop over the last 15 years has occurred at community colleges, which typically have the lowest tuition of any sector. If the “high prices are scaring students away” story were true, the opposite would have happened. In fact, the most expensive four-year schools continue to turn people away. Enrollment decline is not primarily about tuition.
- About 30 percent of the reported drop in community college enrollment is a result of two-year colleges starting to offer four-year degrees. When their enrollments move from one category to the other, it causes a drop in one and an increase in the other. It’s actually closer to a measurement error.
- About 60 percent of the enrollment drop comes from students who were on the cusp of either enrolling or going to work; when the low-end job market picked up, those students either left college or skipped it.
- The “flight to quality” story doesn’t work, either. Community colleges didn’t lose many students to four-year schools; they lost them to paid employment.
- Surprisingly, at least to me, the surge in community college enrollments in 2009–10 didn’t lead to a surge in community college graduates. See the point above. When the low-end job market climbed out of the recession, many students decamped. As overall enrollments have dropped, retention and graduation rates have increased.
Taken together, these points refute several popular narratives. First, the most famous universities are not remotely representative of higher education as a sector. Second, the major driver of decline has been the availability of entry-level jobs, not six-figure tuition. Third, there simply has not been a “flight to quality” as the term is often used. The most compelling argument for free community college isn’t that it would somehow stick it to Harvard; it’s that it would enable more students to complete programs by reducing the need to work for pay while going to school. The primary competition for community college students is low-end employment.
Those narratives need to be discredited because they aren’t just wrong; they’re damaging. They put the blame for macroeconomic conditions on institutions that don’t control them, and they divert discussion from measures that would help to measures that are irrelevant at best and actively harmful at worst.
The story that strikes me as much closer to the truth goes like this: Higher education exists in a larger political economy. The increasingly bifurcated economy we have now—growth on the high end and the low end, with a hollowing-out of the middle—creates a sort of gravitational pull on institutions. Elite institutions are thriving, since they draw on the (anxious) upper classes. Low-end employers are thriving. Institutions built to help create a middle class are struggling. If you have a billion-dollar endowment and the stock market is offering double-digit returns, you’re doing great. If you’re a community or state college with flat or declining public funding, you’re struggling.
It doesn’t have to be this way, of course. The public sector could choose to act as a counterweight, pushing opportunity where we want it to go. That option exists. It has been done before.
But doing that involves first getting the facts right. Kudos to the NBER team for bringing relevant facts to the table. Now we just need to knit them into a compelling narrative.
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Hispanic Scholarship Fund Illegally Discriminates
Edward Blum founded the American Alliance for Equal Rights and Students for Fair Admissions.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
A new lawsuit argues the Hispanic Scholarship Fund—a nonprofit that says it has provided more than $756 million in scholarships over its 50-year history—is illegally restricting its funding to Hispanics and Latinos. The litigation seeks to bar HSF “from knowing or considering ethnicity in any way” in its Scholars Program.
HSF, which didn’t return requests for comment Thursday, says on its website that it provides $500 to $5,000 scholarships, among other benefits, to 10,000 students annually.
The American Alliance for Equal Rights filed the suit Wednesday against HSF in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, saying it has non-Hispanic members “who are ready and able to apply for HSF’s program but cannot because of their ethnicity.” Two such unnamed members are Asian American and white, the group said.
“The program bans Blacks, Asians, and Native Americans that aren’t Hispanic,” the American Alliance notes. “But it welcomes whites that are.”
To make its case that the ethnic restriction is illegal, the American Alliance is using a law passed during the Reconstruction era that bans racial discrimination in contracts. And it’s alleging that HSF is entering into contracts with scholarship applicants.
“The HSF Scholars Program is a contract that offers applicants a chance at a lucrative scholarship if they agree to HSF’s terms, assent to its privacy policy, draft several essays, and sign a binding pledge,” the suit says. It goes on to allege that HSF’s terms of use, which applicants must agree to, specifically say, “This is a contract between you and HSF.”
Opening up such “contracts” only to Hispanics and Latinos violates the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which prohibits racial discrimination in contracts, the suit argues.
It’s another example of how the campaign against affirmative action and programs that specifically benefit minorities didn’t end with the 2023 Students for Fair Admissions Supreme Court ruling, which rendered affirmative action in college admissions illegal. The American Alliance was founded by the same man, Edward Blum, who created Students for Fair Admissions, the nonprofit that’s the namesake of the 2023 ruling.
It’s also another example of a suit that uses an Asian plaintiff and a Reconstruction-era law to attempt to open up a minority-specific scholarship to all races and ethnicities. Earlier this year, the Pacific Legal Foundation cited the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which Congress passed to protect African Americans, to attack a financial aid program that helped only Black students at the University of California, San Diego.
That conservative nonprofit law firm sued on behalf of the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, which said it had multiple “Asian-American high school members who plan to apply to UCSD” and who could’ve been excluded. Before that case reached a hearing, the nonprofit philanthropy that administered the Black Alumni Scholarship Fund announced the fund was being renamed.
Blum told Inside Higher Ed on Thursday that the American Alliance filed its first suit after his other group’s 2023 victory. He estimated it’s filed about 20 more since then.
“There are tens of thousands of students who are affected by race-exclusive scholarship funds, fellowships, internships, things along those lines,” Blum said. “And so it is the mission of the American Alliance for Equal Rights to challenge these racially exclusive programs and policies.”
In the current case, Blum said, “The race exclusivity of this scholarship fund was brought to our attention by a young Asian American student” of “modest financial background.”
“This nation cannot remedy past discrimination with new discrimination, and I think the vast percentage of Americans agree with that,” Blum said.
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More Negative Projections for Higher Ed in 2026
Three credit rating agencies have issued unfavorable outlooks for higher education in 2026.
Fitch Ratings issued the latest outlook on Thursday, declaring that it anticipates a “deteriorating credit environment for U.S. Public Finance Higher Education in 2026 relative to 2025.” That outlook is based on various pressures, including concerns about declining enrollment, new limits on federal loan programs and obstacles for international students seeking to study in the U.S.
The organization noted state funding is “vulnerable” due to an “uncertain policy trajectory” that will “generally shift more costs previously borne by the federal government on to the states.”
The rating agency also noted public concerns about “the value proposition of a higher education degree” amid declining job-placement rates and rising concerns about affordability. Fitch anticipates limited revenue growth for colleges as they grapple with those challenges and projected consolidation across the sector, from mergers and closures to restructuring and more.
S&P Global Ratings also issued a negative sector outlook on Tuesday. That analysis cited some of the same concerns raised in the Fitch report. S&P Global warned of “intense competition for students” and rising operating costs for the sector in the year ahead.
“Our sector view is negative, as we expect colleges and universities will struggle to navigate through mounting operating pressures and uncertainty that will require budgetary and programmatic adjustments,” officials at S&P Global Ratings noted on their website.
Moody’s Ratings was the first to issue a sector outlook last month, deeming it negative for many of the same reasons cited by other agencies in their 2026 assessments for higher ed.
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The NIH Policy Holding Researchers “Hostage”
Rachael Sirianni is one of the thousands of research scientists whose work has been decimated by the Trump administration’s massive cuts to the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies.
“My lab is crumbling,” said the pediatric brain cancer researcher, who works at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. “Over the course of the last eight months, I’ve had to shutter more than half of my research program.”
At the same time, she has a backlog of papers she’s still trying to get published in journals that are the best fit for her research and career, including several that charge thousands in fees to make the paper free to access. And if she wants her work to comply with a new NIH policy to expedite public access to federally funded research—part of the agency’s effort to restore trust in science, it says—she may have to start paying even more.
The 2024 Public Access Policy, which took effect July 1, requires federally funded researchers to deposit their accepted peer-reviewed article manuscript into an open-access repository, such as the NIH-managed PubMed Central, immediately after a journal accepts it for publication. But researchers are reporting that some journals, including at least several high-impact titles owned by Elsevier, Wiley and Springer—are charging authors anywhere from $2,000 to more than $10,000 in article processing charges (APCs) to make their work immediately accessible.
While researchers can use their NIH grants to pay for APCs, that’s hard for some to justify in such a precarious funding environment.
“If I had full access to the institutional dollars that normally support my research program, or if I really believed that that grant that scored well is eventually going to get funded, I could risk my research dollars on these open-access fees,” Sirianni said. “But because of the trauma that the Trump administration is imposing on scientists across the country, we are faced with impossible decisions. Do we dedicate our money to the experiments? Do we maintain our research personnel? Do we comply with open-access fees?”
Open-access advocates and experts say that predicament is exposing the limits of the government’s ability to rein in the $19 billion scholarly publishing industry, which is fueled by academic incentive structures that reward researchers for publishing frequently in widely cited, prestigious journals. Meanwhile, the publishing industry—which has long opposed immediate open access in part because it threatens subscription-dependent business models—says the rollout of the policy gives them no choice but to charge APCs.
Zero Embargo
The 2024 policy replaces the 2008 Public Access Policy, which allowed publishers to embargo new peer-reviewed federally funded research articles for 12 months before making them publicly available. That embargo period allowed publishers to turn a profit from selling academic libraries subscriptions to exclusive content; authors who wanted to make their papers publicly accessible before the embargo was lifted typically paid an APC.
The government’s goal in lifting the embargo was to promote “equity and advance the work of restoring the public’s trust in Government science, and to advance American scientific leadership,” Alondra Nelson, the former acting director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, wrote in a 2022 memo bearing her name. “A federal public access policy consistent with our values of equal opportunity must allow for broad and expeditious sharing of federally funded research—and must allow all Americans to benefit from the returns on our research and development investments without delay.”
Although the Biden administration finalized the policy, the Trump administration is carrying it forward. It was set to take effect across federal agencies on Dec. 31, but NIH director Jay Bhattacharya announced in April that he was implementing it six months ahead of schedule to promote “maximum transparency.”
Although Sirianni supports the spirit of NIH’s new open-access policy, she’s worried that high APCs will deter researchers from submitting their work to influential journals that might otherwise be a good fit, to the detriment of the scientific literature.
“There’s absolutely going to be a lot of work that doesn’t get published or gets published in the wrong journal,” Sirianni said. “This policy is harming scientists. Instead of ensuring that research dollars are invested in providing knowledge to the scientific community and to the public, those dollars will be spent on feeding giant publishing corporations more money.”
‘Not Sustainable’?
However, publishers say the NIH’s zero-embargo policy is forcing them to recoup lost subscription revenue through APCs to sustain operational costs, including article selection, curation, peer and editorial review, publication, archiving, and maintenance.
“We are unable to support approaches that aim to make subscription articles immediately and freely available, which are not sustainable in the long term given they undermine the subscription model on which they depend,” an Elsevier spokesperson said in an email to Inside Higher Ed.
“The best method for addressing issues of cost in publication is through a vibrant, competitive, and dynamic publishing marketplace with maximum author choice, including fee-based public access and read-and-publish agreements,” Carl Maxwell, senior vice president of public policy for the Association of American Publishers, who lobbied against the zero-embargo policy, wrote in an email. “We don’t think it’s a good idea to compel researchers to use a one-size-fits-all open access business model that has the potential to require NIH-funded researchers to pay out of pocket to fund the peer review process, in some cases harming their ability to communicate their research results to the scientific community and the general public.”
Caroline Sutton, CEO for the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers, added that researchers’ frustration with the NIH’s new open-access policy “reveals one of the real human impacts of well-intentioned policies that do not fully consider the operational realities of the research ecosystem.”
It also raises long-standing questions about how to sustain that ecosystem.
“Should the responsibility for funding this work lie with the funder? With the research or institutional library? Should publishers not be compensated?” she wrote in an email. “And how can the critical system of checks and balances—which must be resourced—endure if it is not sustainably funded?”
But another sector sustaining the scientific publishing industry is the faculty who produce and peer review research for little to no financial compensation. The most productive are often rewarded instead with tenure, promotion and cachet.
Holding Articles ‘Hostage’
While the NIH policy doesn’t require authors to publish in journals that charge APCs—plenty of reputable, fully open-access journals exist—researchers say where they publish matters to their careers. At most universities, frequently publishing research in prestigious, high-impact journals—including many with hefty APCs—carries more weight with tenure and review committees than publishing in more obscure journals.
But researchers aren’t always clear on a journal’s APC guidelines until they get through the review process and are asked to pay open-access fees to comply with the NIH policy, Rachel Widome, a public health professor at the University of Minnesota, told Inside Higher Ed. She withdrew an article from the Elsevier-owned Sleep Health on how school start times impact adolescents after she realized she’d have to pay a $2,500 fee to upload her accepted manuscript to PubMed Central in compliance with NIH policy.
“When that happens, they’re holding your article hostage,” she said. “Do you start from scratch and submit it to a new journal? It can take six to nine months to go through another review.”
She ended up resubmitting the article to Sleep Health after her NIH grant ended, exempting her from the zero-embargo policy. Although “time has been wasted,” she said the APCs stand to hurt early-career scientists the most. “It’s so critical that they establish a publication record,” Widome said. “If the options of which journals they can submit to are really limited [because of APCs], that hurts their chances of getting her research out and launching her career.”
‘Valuing Prestige’
But those academic incentive structures have also emboldened publishers to levy APCs in response to the NIH’s zero-embargo policy, said Dave Hansen, executive director of the Authors Alliance, a California-based nonprofit that supports authors in disseminating their work.
“So much of the system is wrapped around valuing prestige journals that are published by some of these bigger commercial publishers. That’s really hard for even a big institution like the NIH to nudge researchers away from,” Hansen said, adding that the NIH could de-emphasize prestige factors when evaluating researchers. At the same time, “a lot of publishers recognize that there’s a massive amount of federal funding that they can now demand access to because of this new federal policy.”
The zero-embargo policy isn’t the NIH’s only attempt to regulate the scientific publishing industry. This summer, Bhattacharya proposed capping APCs to weaken the market power of publishers, dilute the scientific elite and “make science accessible not only to the public but also to the broader scientific community, while ending perverse incentives that don’t benefit taxpayers,” he said. But critics say the plan is neither comprehensive enough to dismantle academic incentive structures, nor likely to substantially lower APCs.
And the frustration researchers are experiencing in the early days of the NIH’s new zero-embargo access policy—which was crafted with some of the same goals as the NIH’s proposed APC caps—is already offering support for those predictions.
“The NIH public-access policy applies to a vast amount of research, but it’s also just a percentage of the overall landscape. There are a number of players here, including the funders, researchers, institutions, publishers and libraries,” said Katie Funk, former program manager for PubMed Central, who helped develop the zero-embargo policy.
“Without addressing the whole system, it just causes confusion,” she added. “Larger conversations need to be had about the costs of publishing. It’s not transparent and it’s pervading the whole system.”
(This article has been updated to correct the name of the UMass medical school.)