This blog was kindly authored by Professor Abigail Marks, Associate Dean of Research, Newcastle University Business School, and member of the Chartered Association of Business Schools Policy Committee.
From January 2026, public funding for the vast majority of Level 7 apprenticeships in England will be withdrawn for learners aged 22 and over. Funding will remain for those aged 16 to 21, alongside narrow exceptions for care leavers and learners with Education, Health and Care Plans. Current apprentices will continue to be supported. Ministers present the change as a rebalancing of spending toward younger learners and lower levels, where they argue returns are higher and budgets are more constrained.
At first sight, this decision looks like a simple trade-off: concentrating scarce resources on school-leavers and early career entrants, while expecting employers to bear the costs of advanced, Master’s-level training. For business schools, however, particularly those that have invested in Level 7 pathways, such as the Senior Leader Apprenticeship, the implications for widening participation are likely to be profound. The Senior Leader Apprenticeship is often integrated with an MBA or Executive MBA. Alongside this, many institutions align Level 7 apprenticeships with specialist MSc degrees, often with embedded professional accreditation. In essence, Level 7 apprenticeships in business schools provide structured, work-based routes into advanced leadership and management education, usually culminating in an MBA or MSc.
Why Level 7 apprenticeships matter for widening participation
Since the apprenticeship levy was introduced in 2017, Level 7 programmes have provided business schools with a powerful route to widen participation, particularly among groups that have been historically excluded from postgraduate education. According to the Department for Education’s 2023 Apprenticeship Evaluation, almost half (48 per cent) of Level 7 apprentices are first-generation students, with neither parent having attended university, and around one in five live in the most deprived areas of the country. Analysis by the Chartered Association of Business Schools shows that in 2022/23, a quarter of business and management Level 7 apprentices held no prior degree qualification before starting, with a small minority having no formal qualifications at all. The age profile further underscores the differences between these learners and conventional Master’s students, with 88 per cent of business and management Level 7 apprentices aged over 31, indicating that these programmes primarily serve mature learners and career changers rather than recent graduates.
This picture contrasts sharply with the traditional MBA market, both in the UK and internationally. Research on MBA demographics from the Association of MBAs in 2023 highlights that students are typically in their late twenties to early thirties, often already possessing a strong undergraduate degree and professional background, and participation is skewed toward those with access to significant financial resources. An Office for Students analysis of Higher Education Statistics Agency data shows that conventional graduate business and management entrants are disproportionately from higher socio-economic backgrounds, with lower representation from disadvantaged areas compared to undergraduate cohorts. In practice, this means that the subsidised Level 7 apprenticeship route has been one of the few mechanisms allowing those without financial capital, prior academic credentials, or family background in higher education to gain access to advanced management education in business schools.
The economic and societal cost of defunding Level 7
Employer behaviour is likely to shift in predictable ways once the subsidy is removed. Some large levy-paying firms may continue to sponsor a limited number of Level 7 places, but many smaller employers, as well as organisations in the public and third sectors, will struggle to justify the full cost. Data from the Chartered Management Institute suggests that 60 per cent of Level 7 management apprentices are in public services such as the NHS, social care, and local government. Less than 10 per cent are in FTSE 350 companies. Consequently, there is a risk of further narrowing provision to those already in advantaged positions.
The progression ladder is also threatened. Level 7 apprenticeships have been a natural progression for people who began at Levels 3 to 5, building their qualifications as they moved into supervisory roles. Closing the door at this point reinforces the glass ceiling for those seeking to rise from technical or frontline work into leadership. With data from the Department for Education reported in FE Week reporting that 89 per cent of Level 7 apprentices are currently aged over 22, the vast majority of those who have benefited from these opportunities will be excluded from January 2026.
The consequences extend beyond widening participation metrics. Leadership and management skills are consistently linked to firm-level productivity and the diffusion of innovation. Studies such as the World Management Survey have shown that effective management correlates strongly with higher productivity and competitiveness. Restricting adult access to advanced apprenticeships risks slowing the spread of these practices across the economy. For business schools, it reduces their ability to act as engines of regional development and knowledge transfer. At a national level, the UK’s prospects for growth depend not only on new entrants but also on upskilling the existing workforce. Apprenticeships have been one of the few proven ways of achieving this. If opportunities narrow, it is possible that firms may struggle to adopt new technologies, deliver green transitions, or address regional productivity gaps. The effects may also be felt in export performance, scale-up survival, and international competitiveness.
The removal of public funding for adults over 21 threatens to dismantle a pathway that has enabled business schools to transform the profile of their postgraduate cohorts. Where once mature students, first-generation graduates, and learners from deprived regions could progress into Master’s-level management education, the policy shift risks returning provision in England to a preserve of the already advantaged. In contrast, our European counterparts, where degree and higher-level apprenticeships retain open access for adults, will continue to allow business schools to deliver on widening participation commitments across the life course.
Lessons from Europe
Germany’s dual study system has expanded, with degree-apprenticeship style programmes now making up almost five per cent of higher education enrolments. Data from the OECD shows that the proportion of young adults aged 25–34 with a tertiary degree in Germany has risen to around 40 per cent, driven partly by these integrated vocational–academic routes. Switzerland shows even more dramatic results: between 2000 and 2021, the share of 25–34-year-olds with a tertiary qualification rose from 26 to 52 per cent. Crucially, Switzerland also leads Europe in lifelong learning, with around 67.5 per cent of adults aged 25–65 participating in continuing education and training. For Swiss business schools, this creates a mature, diverse learner base and allows firms to continually upgrade leadership and management capacity. Both countries demonstrate how keeping lifelong pathways open is central to sustaining firm-level productivity, innovation, and international competitiveness.
Conclusion
The decision to defund most adult participation at Level 7 thus represents more than a budgetary tweak. It narrows opportunities in advanced management education and risks reversing progress in widening participation. Unless English business schools, employers, and policymakers act swiftly to design new pathways, the effect will be a return to elite provision. More worryingly, England risks falling behind international counterparts in building the leadership capacity that underpins innovation, productivity, and growth.
The government’s post-16 education and skills white paper is jointly fronted by the Department for Education, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, and Department for Work and Pensions – and is accordingly ambitious in scope.
Spanning proposals to address the number of NEET young people to widening access to postgraduate study, the plans break down into three key areas: joining up skills and employment throughout the system including through Skills England and funding reform; reforms in the further education/college sector; and reforms in the higher education sector. It’s the last of these we are concerned with here.
The headlines
Introducing the white paper in the House of Commons, Secretary of State for Education Bridget Phillipson announced the critical information many have been waiting for: a commitment to increase tuition fees and maintenance loans by predicted inflation for the next two years, and to legislate to make the fee increase automatic in future.
The white paper arrives against the backdrop of the government’s new target for two-thirds under-25 participation in higher-level learning, but that target itself is fundamentally about the stuff the government has been talking about from the beginning: tackling skills shortages to support growth; and offering more, and broader, opportunities for post-16 education and training.
Within all of that higher education emerges as a critical “strategic asset” – but nevertheless in need of reform, summed up as follows:
Our ambition is to have a more sustainable, more specialised and more efficient sector, better aligned with the needs of the economy.
In practice, if the government were to have its way (and that’s a big if) the outcome would be a fair bit of sector consolidation, with a more stratified sector incorporating fewer highly research-active institutions, operating within a regional ecosystem in which different types of institutions coordinate around an education offer that remains competitive in terms of subject and qualification choice, but attentive to regional skills needs.
What’s missing, arguably, is the heavy policy lifting to make that real. As the text of the white paper suggests:
The changes outlined here mark the beginning of a journey. We want to continue working with the sector to consider how best we can support greater specialisation in the future.
Critically, what is not included here is anything on the pointier end of financial sustainability ie management of institutional insolvency or a special administration regime – the working assumption is that autonomous institutions will be able to identify opportunities to innovate, whether individually or in collaboration. That may be true, but while the risks of specialisation outweigh the prospective rewards, the government can encourage all it wants, but institutions will most likely continue to recruit to the courses that they believe there is a market for.
What there does appear to be is a generalised vote of confidence in the Office for Students (OfS) – no proposals to tear up the Higher Education and Research Act here. In fact, when the parliamentary schedule allows, OfS is set to get more powers, particularly to crack down on low quality – and will now become the regulator for all provision at level 4 and above. Critically, OfS’ definition of quality will be given teeth both in the form of permission – or otherwise – to increase fees or issue restrictions on growth in student numbers.
All together now
In terms of strategic ambition, there are five objectives for the sector: economic growth, a high quality experience, national capability via specific research and skills development, regional impact, and an increase in international standing. International, these translate into global standing, nationally to government goals on growth, security and skills, regionally to meeting skills needs through collaboration, and at provider level, to specialisation and efficiency.
Providers are challenged to:
specialise in areas of strength within a more collaborative system, with clearer roles for teaching- and research-intensive institutions with areas of specialist advantage, and stronger access and participation.
The argument is that too many providers are trying to sustain too broad a base of offering to the same student demographics rather than focusing on their core strengths. From the outset, however, it is clarified that higher education providers are autonomous and “it is not for government to impose these changes.” So institutions will be encouraged to innovate, to specialise and to collaborate rather than obliged to, with OfS tasked with working out what might help.
The sting in the tail, however, is that the government intends to use research funding to drive some of this differentiation in the form of a “more strategic distribution of research activity,” which essentially means concentrating research funding which will have the knock-on impact that those who lose out will be obliged to revise their business models.
In theory this could mean greater efficiency in the research system with better cost recovery, and more sharing of grants, facilities, and equipment. The idea here is because of the close relationship between research and teaching specialisation in one will drive specialisation in the other. And, just to be sure, providers are asked to align incentives for academics for research excellence and teaching excellence and to diversify recognition for research performance to include mentoring, peer review, commercialisation activities and public engagement.
Sustainable footing
That commitment to inflationary fee and maintenance loan rises – baked in for the first two years, with the intent to make it automatic in the longer term via legislation when parliamentary time allows – covers all provision with the exception of classroom-based foundation years – these will stick at £5,670 through 2026–27 and 2027–28 at least.
There’s a big caveat – future fee uplifts will be conditional on providers achieving a “higher quality threshold” via the OfS’ quality regime. This isn’t spelled out, but it is reasonable to assume given the recent consultation that this might be new TEF silver and gold.
The long-standing debate on full cost recovery appears to be tilting in support of costs, which the paper recognises “may result in funding a lower volume of research but at a more sustainable level.” The ask for providers here is effective collaboration and shared resources (again), and a commitment to to cost grants accurately. There’s a wider interest in improving research grant cost recovery alongside this – mostly stuff we already know about (equipment funded at 80 per cent of costs, a higher capital equipment threshold, confirmation that matched funding from providers is not required for UKRI) but there’s also wider research into costs (including on the sustainability of PhD programmes) underway.
Dual support will remain (QR funding will stay), but there will be a modification of what the government expects in return – the idea for research generally is to stick to three priorities: curiosity-driven, delivering government priorities (missions, the industrial strategy), and targeted commercialisation and scale up support. There’s more on streamlining bureaucracy, including improvements to the way the Transparent Approach to Costing (TRAC) is used for assurance.
A single line says the government will seek to “better understand concerns” about the Teacher’s Pension Scheme, which is used in providers formerly in local government control and where costs are rising well beyond the capacity of institutions to address them (which the government already knows).
But again, there’s pro for the quid, in the form of expectations of higher education institutions to deliver efficiency.
We knew that government was worried about HE governance and its general capability to deliver strategic change and sustainable operating models, and so the white paper confirms, with signals that OfS will consult on strengthening its condition of registration on governance, and endorsement of the current Committee of University Chairs governance review, which will strengthen its (voluntary) Code of Governance.
There’s a note of thanks to the UUK Efficiency and Transformation Taskforce, endorsement of plans to develop an efficiency maturity model, and a wish to see more visibility for good collaboration practice (hats off to N8 and the Midlands Innovation partnership).
In turn, the government will help make the Student Loans Company more efficient, foster closer relationships between OfS and UKRI on regulation and the delivery of the broader strategic aims of government, and strengthen OfS financial monitoring of the sector. OfS will be delivering a reformed regulatory framework that is focused on “driving out pockets of poor performance.”
Access and student experience
Much of the section on access and participation is taken up with reiterating student finance arrangement – LLE, targeted grants – but there is also a basket of other ideas and proposals, including reform to OfS’ approach to access and participation to be (even) more risk-based, consideration of patterns of PhD participation and access to postgraduate study, and notes on student accommodation, harassment, the extension of the mental health taskforce for another year with a new student support champion, and the existing funding to tackle antisemitism.
Higher education cold spots and contextual admissions will be the main topics of conversation at a task and finish group to be chaired by University of Derby vice chancellor Kathryn Mitchell bringing together sector experts, charities, OfS, and UCAS.
There is a recap of the details of the Lifelong Learning Entitlement, with an emphasis that available provision will expand beyond the priority areas in future. As has been widely acknowledged, this removes the distinction between full and part-time study – it will be possible to study multiple courses and modules at the same time. And there is a reminder that even if you have used up your (four year full-time) allocation, there will still be money available for priority courses.
On that, there are some indications about the relationship between the LLE and the Growth and Skills Levy – the former will allow students to draw down loans to take modular courses at level 4 or above, particularly in FE colleges, while the latter will allow employer funding for “short courses.” Curiously, the only mention of apprenticeships is in relation to a new form of short course provision dubbed “apprenticeship units” designed to tackle critical skills shortages, tacit confirmation, perhaps, that the apprenticeship model may be too unwieldy and too challenging to scale to deliver on those critical areas at the pace required.
Finally – first announced in 2010 – there is movement on creating an Alternative Student Finance scheme for those who are unable or unwilling to participate in the main scheme (primarily those individuals who consider themselves subject to Sharia law), which will launch “as soon as possible” after the introduction of the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE) in January 2027.
About growth
The strategic priorities grant (which is the bits of OfS funding that currently include the stuff on high-cost subjects) will be reformed – as highlighted in the last grant letter to OfS, and with the groundwork on data collection achieved via the reforms to HESES.
Those of a certain vintage will recall the ability for students to leave their degree with a certificate (L4) after year one and a diploma (L5) after year two – there’s a consultation pending on making student support for traditional (level 6) degrees conditional on doing something similar. A part of the hope here is allowing transferability between providers, though there is nothing on facilitating this kind of transfer (something that English higher education has traditionally struggled with). This comes alongside the established focus on levels 4 and 5 in higher technical qualifications (HTQs) – the twist here is that OfS will be able to bestow HTQ awarding powers in the same way it does degree awarding powers (or, cynically, foundation degree awarding powers) – with the designation process for HTQ courses becoming more flexible.
Providers get “clearer expectations” around involvement in Local Skills Improvement Plans (LSIPs), which will cover technical skills needs between levels 4 and 8. This will be supported by a market-monitoring function within Skills England which will spot gaps between supply and demand nationally and locally.
There’s a restatement of some research announcements in this bit – the protection of overall funding, access to horizon europe, and the protection of curiosity-driven research (UKRI gets a strategic objective year), work with public sector research establishments, and the increase to the maximum stipend.
On commercialisation and scale-up, some UKRI funding will pivot towards government priorities (as in the industrial strategy) and a rethink of the way innovation funding is used to drive growth. And universities are encouraged to develop civic plans that align with their strengths and priorities.
Finally in this section we get some lines on international standing – again this is mostly restatement of stuff like the Global Talent Visa reforms, but adding a hint of a refresh to the International Education Strategy. Recruitment must be sustainable and not put providers at undue risk, and there will be tighter enforcement of visa approvals via strengthening requirements on universities.
Quality
Teaching quality remains a core agenda, with the paper noting that:
Among students who found their university experience worse than they had expected, teaching quality was among the most commonly cited reasons. Improving transparency about course quality is essential.
The government will “consider options” to increase the capacity of OfS to conduct quality investigations, with the hoped-for outcome being that it can respond more rapidly to identified risks. Again, when parliamentary time allows, OfS will gain additional powers to intervene in cases of low quality, including imposing limitations on student numbers.
The plans consulted on last year, which would make larger franchise providers register with OfS in order to access funding, will go ahead – while OfS will prioritise franchise investigations ahead of getting strengthened statutory powers to intervene “decisively” on this issue including stronger powers of entry, and the ability to make interim sanctions. And there’s more to come on tackling abuse of the system by recruitment agents – sharpening up access to student finance, and reinforced investigative powers for OfS.
White papers traditionally include a section on improving applicant information, and this one is no different: the government welcomes the offer rates and historic grades on UCAS, and wants to add graduate outcomes information and completion rates from Discover Uni to what is on offer there.
The time-honoured system of external examiners – where academics from elsewhere assure the quality and standards of provision at a provider – is up for debate, with an evidence base being built on the “effectiveness or otherwise” of this approach to feed into an OfS programme of reform that will also include employer views as part of a wider look at degree awarding powers.
And there’s a progress 8 style measure (basically something akin to learning gain) in the offing, with the government and OfS working together on this.
Finally in this section, a section on freedom of speech on campus summarises the changes made to the measures in the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, adding a note on the tension between these duties and a right not to be threatened, harassed, or intimidated.
What happens now
There’s a lot to digest in this white paper, with a lot of the proposals themselves requiring extensive action and further development – and we’ve not even covered the broader post-16 skills plans here, such as the new V levels. What’s missing though is a defined legislative agenda or timescale – indeed, this is not a traditional white paper in that it is not presented for public consultation at all. In that sense it is closer to what the Labour manifesto originally promised, which was a comprehensive post-16 education strategy, and it’s probably in that vein it should be read.
With that in mind, it’s probably best to view the overall direction of travel as locked in – assuming this government can stick around long enough to realise some of its ambitions in practice. But there is still a great deal of work to be done to put flesh on the bones of these various proposals – and while some of these plans may go against the traditional sector grain, figuring out how to make them work in practice offers an opportunity to look again at what bits of higher education are critical to preserve – and what hitherto sacred cows can safely be allowed to slide into obscurity.
Join the authors and the rest of Team Wonkhe at the Festival of Higher Education on 11-12 November in London where we’ll be digesting the government’s agenda for HE alongside a multitude of sector experts and commentators. Find out more and book your ticket here.
The University of Arizona is the latest institution to reject an offer to sign on to the Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” issuing its response on the same day feedback on the proposal was due.
While some universities have rejected the compact outright, Arizona president Suresh Garimella announced the decision in a message to the campus community that sent mixed signals. “The university has not agreed to the terms outlined in the draft proposal,” Garimella wrote. He emphasized the need to preserve “principles like academic freedom, merit-based research funding, and institutional independence.”
At the same time, he said that some of the compact’s provisions “deserve thoughtful consideration as our national higher education system could benefit from reforms that have been much too slow to develop,” noting that many were already in place at Arizona. He added that the federal government said it was “seeking constructive dialogue rather than a definitive written response.”
Indeed, in a letter to Education Secretary Linda McMahon, Garimella indicated an openness to further engagement. “We have much common ground with the ideas your administration is advancing on changes that would benefit American higher education and our nation at large,” he wrote.
Still, he took issue with the administration’s promise of giving signatories preferential treatment in research funding. “A federal research funding system based on anything other than merit would weaken the world’s preeminent engine for innovation, advancement of technology, and solutions to many of our nation’s most profound challenges,” he wrote to McMahon. “We seek no special treatment and believe in our ability to compete for federally funded research strictly on merit.”
Arizona was one of nine universities the Trump administration reached out to on Oct. 1 offering preferential treatment for federal research funding if they agreed to a compact that would overhaul admissions and hiring, cap international enrollment at 15 percent, revise academic offerings, suppress criticism of conservatives, freeze tuition for five years, and more.
Amid some rejections from the original nine, the federal government sent additional invitations earlier this month.
Institutions initially invited to join were Brown University, Dartmouth College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Arizona, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, University of Texas at Austin, the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University. Invitations were later sent to Arizona State University, the University of Kansas and Washington University in St. Louis.
Six of the original invitees have declined to sign: MIT was the first to reject the compact, followed by Brown, Dartmouth, Penn, USC and Virginia.
The Trump administration has since opened the compact to any institution that wishes to join.
As of Monday, none of the invited institutions had agreed to the deal, despite a recent push from the White House, which included a meeting with several universities last week. Institutions have until Nov. 21 to make a final decision about whether to sign, according to a letter McMahon sent with the proposal.
Washington University in St. Louis officials indicated Monday they remain open to the idea.
Chancellor Andrew Martin announced that the university would provide feedback, or, as he put it, “participate in a conversation about the future of higher education” with the Trump administration. Martin emphasized the importance of having “a seat at the table” for such discussions but said those talks did not equate to signing the compact.
“It’s important for you to know that our participation in this dialogue does not mean we have endorsed or signed on to the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education presented to us for feedback by the federal administration. We have not done that. In addition, this decision was not made to advantage ourselves or gain any type of preferential benefit,” Martin wrote. “We firmly believe meaningful progress will best be achieved through open, ongoing dialogue.”
An Arizona State spokesperson also left open the option to join the compact, writing to Inside Higher Ed by email, “ASU has long been a voice for change in higher education and as President Trump’s team seeks new and innovative approaches to serve the needs of the country, ASU has engaged in dialogue and offered ideas about how to do so.”
Vanderbilt chancellor Daniel Diermeier noted in an email to the campus community that the university intended to offer feedback on the proposal.
“Despite reporting to the contrary, we have not been asked to accept or reject the draft compact,” Diermeier wrote. “Rather, we have been asked to provide feedback and comments as part of an ongoing dialogue, and that is our intention.”
But other universities stayed silent on the day of the initial deadline.
University of Texas system officials initially announced they were “honored” that the flagship was invited to join, but Austin officials did not have an update on where that invitation stands. Kansas did not respond to requests for comment.
In recent years, hundreds of community colleges have embraced the guided pathways model, a sweeping set of large-scale reforms to better steer students through academic programs and boost completion rates at community colleges.
Researchers at the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College first introduced plans for the reform movement in 2015 in a book called Redesigning America’s Community Colleges: A Clearer Path to Student Success. They called on colleges to adopt a wide range of practices to help students devise and follow academic plans through graduation, including mandatory academic and career planning for all students; programs organized by “meta-majors,” or fields of interest; and extra supports for students in college-level math and English courses.
A decade later, CCRC researchers have come out with a follow-up, More Essential Than Ever: Community College Pathways to Educational and Career Success (Harvard Education Press, 2025), whichrecounts their 10 years of research on the progress and outcomes of guided pathways. The book also explores areas where they believe the model could grow, including looking beyond graduation rates to focus on students’ job outcomes, adopting more engaging recruitment and onboarding practices, and ensuring students leave college with specialized knowledge in their fields but also versatile skills that apply todifferent industries.
Davis Jenkins, senior research scholar at CCRC and a co-author of More Essential Than Ever, spoke with Inside Higher Ed about the book’s prescription to community colleges for taking guided pathways to the next level.
The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: This book is the culmination of 10 years of research on guided pathways. What have been the most important lessons learned in that decade?
A: The 10 years were really a learning experience, because the model for whole-college reform that Tom Bailey, Shanna Jaggars and I presented in Redesigning America’s Community Colleges in 2015 was very much theoretical. A lot of the ideas came out of four-year institutions, and maybe with the exception of Guttman Community College and others, no community college really had implemented these ideas. So, we’ve been learning along with the field. And you know, we’re impressed and humbled by the efforts by colleges in a very tough time, fiscally and otherwise, to really work on these efforts.
And what we saw in the initial phase was it takes a long time to not just implement discrete interventions but to redesign whole parts of the student experience, from the start all the way through. But we saw that colleges that did focus on redesigning, not just one piece of the student experience but across the student experience, were able to achieve improvements in student early momentum and then, over the longer term, in completion rates.
On one hand, it was important that colleges not just focus on one aspect, that they sort of changed the student experience throughout. But when we looked at particular practices, especially important was organizing advising, at least for continuing students, by career or academic field and then case managing those students’ progress based on students’ plans. It’s very important to have a plan for students, and students really want that plan.
During this time, the environment changed, and community college enrollments, especially post–high school enrollments, continued to decline. There was a rise in focus on the value of a college degree, and while this was focused very much on four-year institutions—especially elite institutions—people were [also] questioning community colleges. Enrollment by older students is at historic lows. And even though community colleges have seen a huge increase in high school dual-enrollment students, they have been losing market share to public four-years for students right out of high school. So, there was this big focus on value. And we were able to observe and work with colleges as they adapted these completion-focused reforms to focus more on value.
And the main part of the book is five chapters devoted to what we see as the frontiers for further improving community college student outcomes, which are focused on values.
Q: Tell me more about that. In the book, you looked at how far this movement has come. How do you hope the guided pathways model continues to evolve?
A: There are five areas where we see colleges now working to improve. First of all, they’ve got to make sure that their programs lead to jobs that pay at least a living wage—otherwise, it’s not going to be worth students enrolling in them—or [allow] transfer with no excess credits in the student’s major field of interest. Related to that, though, it’s not enough just to work with universities and employers to ensure your programs have value for employment and further education after completion. You’ve got to make sure that students are learning the kinds of skills that they’ll need in the workplace and for their education. And frankly, that was probably the area of least progress in the earlier work in guided pathways.
Particularly important is making sure that students have a rich learning experience in their program foundation courses, the hard 101 courses. In the book, we profile both very large and small colleges that have really built in experiential learning for all students. So that’s No. 2.
No. 3 is focusing on onboarding. Community colleges lose many students early on because they don’t engage them. And so, in the later part of our work on guided pathways, the more recent part, we focus very much on this onboarding process to ensure students are engaged about what they want to do and help them connect to people and have this inspiring learning experience, and then very, very importantly, help them develop a plan that will at least give them direction.
No. 4 is building on that plan. There have been efforts around compressed courses and scheduling, but in the book, we say that colleges need to look at this very systematically. The canonical completion [rate] for community college is two years. They’re called two-year colleges. But in fact, hardly any students complete in two years, and it’s not reasonable to expect all students, even the majority of students, to [take] 15 credits. In the book, we’re seeing colleges take three years as a template. And we know that if you include summer courses, if you include J terms, if you compress your terms, students even attending part-time can complete their programs. And community college students have very little margin for error. It’s very important that they be able to take the courses they need when they need them.
Then, finally, as you know, dual enrollment has become huge. And colleges have taken, in the past, a very laissez-faire approach to it, such as the students who participate are students who are already likely going to college. And that’s a good thing because that makes dual enrollment very popular among middle-class families, and that gives it political power. But it’s also been sort of random courses, gen eds, without much advising. For students already going to college who have good advising from their families or from their better-resourced schools, that’s fine. But we have created this idea of applying the guided pathways practices to dual-enrollment students, to build an on-ramp, to motivate students to want to continue their postsecondary education.
Q: It seems like, in the book, there’s a tension between, on one hand, striving to set students on a clear career path, a career ladder, while also trying not to box them into a track or a skill set that’s too narrow. How do you think colleges can balance both?
A: This has always been the tension with guided pathways. Early on, there was a lot of emphasis on structured pathways, making things much more like a technical program, like an occupational certificate program. Not knocking it; those kinds of programs are important. But you’ll notice throughout, we’re focused on broad learning, skills, communication [and] problem-solving, and that can only be done through active, contextualized learning.
The goal of guided pathways is not to set a student on a career. Careers are changing. The goal is to get a student engaged, to feel like the institution cares about their future, connect them with faculty and other students, employers, people they never would have met before that. It’s not just about learning skills or knowledge. It’s about connecting with people, building confidence in taking a really hard course that makes you really work and think. Students don’t like it. They’re not used to it in K–12 education. On the other hand, there’s just so much research showing that that’s really important.
And then the plan is not a plan for life, but a plan is a direction to get you a credential and then to build into that enough experience. We make this case throughout, including at the end, there’s still a need, and it’s well documented, for a broader education—including technical skills, obviously, and content knowledge, but really in engaging students in problem-solving, communication—because those are the human skills that employers are going to pay a premium for and that are needed for further education at the bachelor’s level and in life.
Q: As you’ve been thinking through where you want the guided pathways model to go, what do you think are going to be the biggest obstacles or challenges to colleges getting there?
A: Well, one thing is the rise of online students. On one hand, we’re not against online. But the question is, especially for students in foundation courses and for students in high school, how to do it in a way that is engaging students. We’re very skeptical of asynchronous online instruction. Maybe for older students, career students, that’s OK, but not for students taking a foundation course that really is hard and needs interaction.
The other [challenge] is funding. Community colleges are already always relatively low funded. It varies greatly by state, but nationally, about 40 percent [of their funding] comes from states. The second highest [funding source] is tuition. Asking community colleges to turn out high-value programs and to do all this advising is expensive. Thus far, community colleges have done this by redeploying their existing resources, which is actually a good thing, because they, like every institution, have tended to become too siloed. But there’s a limit to which community colleges can do more with less, and particularly in these high-cost, high-value workforce areas, those are very expensive, and our STEM programs and the like.
So, the cuts in federal funding are concerning because community colleges throughout the country have used them to develop new programs and to focus advising and other supports on students from groups that haven’t done well in higher ed. Over the longer term, we’re concerned, since higher education is the biggest discretionary pot in about every state budget, the cuts to Medicaid and other fiscal pressures on states are likely to put big pressure on funding for higher education, of which community colleges, even compared to public regional four-years, are heavily dependent.
One more thing is that guided pathways is basically asking colleges to take this very successful model that was the marvel of the world, that really helped broad-access education, and to change it—and to do so, by the way, with no money, or not enough money. We do a lot of work with colleges all over the country. We’ve done a lot of work with rural colleges. And in many ways, they have been facing the pressures that all higher ed is facing now for a long time: declining population, the challenge of helping students get living-wage jobs. [But] there’s something about community colleges. They just dig right in. Despite the challenges, I’m optimistic.
It’s been humbling to go all around the country, working in so many different places. I don’t see them giving up on this. Despite all the challenges, I think, especially given their product, the fact that they’re local, the fact that they’re connected to local employers, and especially now, have this opportunity to build a better pipeline from schools, and are doing that. I think community colleges are going to rise to the challenge here.
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Remigiusz Gora/iStock/Getty Images
It was legit: She was a beneficiary of the Colorado Re-Engaged Initiative (CORE), which draws on reverse-transfer policies to allow the state’s four-year institutions to award degrees to stopped-out students who have fulfilled the requirements of an associate of general studies degree.
Created by state legislation in 2021, CORE seeks to reduce the share of the 700,000 plus students in the state who have completed some college credits but don’t hold a degree.
“It has always been problematic for me to think that people could have gone three years, three and a half years to college and the highest credential that they have is a high school diploma,” said Angie Paccione, executive director of Colorado’s Department of Higher Education.
For Varkevisser, getting recognized for her years’ worth of credit accumulation was simple; she just had to say yes to the email. “It came out of nowhere, but I have my college degree now,” Varkevisser said.
Colorado isn’t the only state aiming to reduce the millions of individuals who fall in the some college, no degree population in the U.S. And reverse transfer—awarding an associate degree to students who have met the credit threshold—is a relatively simple way to do it, thanks to new technologies and state initiatives to streamline policies.
But one barrier has tripped up colleges for over a decade: working with students to make them aware so they participate in these programs. In Colorado, for example, fewer than 5 percent of eligible students have opted in to CORE.
“I can’t imagine why” a student wouldn’t opt in, Paccione said. “You’ve already paid money; you don’t have to do anything, all you have to do is call [the institution] up and say, ‘Hey, I understand I might be eligible for an associate degree.’ It takes a phone call, essentially.”
Credits but No Credential
In the 2010s, reverse transfer was a popular student success intervention, allowing students who transferred from a two-year to a four-year institution to pass their credits back to their community college to earn a credential.
Experts say awarding an associate degree for credits acquired before a student hits the four-year degree threshold can support their overall success in and after college, because it provides a benchmark of progress. A 2018 report found that most community colleges students who transferred to another institution left their two-year college without a degree, putting them in limbo between programs with credits but no credential.
Now, reverse-transfer policies are being applied to students who have enrolled at a four-year college and left before earning a degree, who often abandon a significant number of credits.
The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center’s latest report on the some college, no credential (SCNC) population found that 7.2 percent of stopped-out students had achieved at least two years’ worth of full-time-equivalent enrollment over the past decade. In other words, 2.6 million individuals in the U.S. have completed two years’ worth of college credits but don’t hold a credential to prove it.
In addition to Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Oregon and Texas are introducing or modifying policies to award associate degrees to stopped-out students who have earned enough credits. The trend reflects a renewed focus on better serving stopped-out students instead of simply pushing them to re-enroll.
“What’s happening at the national level is that folks are recognizing that we’re still not seeing the completion that we want,” said Wendy Sedlak, the Lumina Foundation’s strategy director for research and evaluation. “It’s taking a long time to make headway, so nationally, people are looking back, and looking into what are those initiatives, what are those policies, what are those practices that have really helped us push ahead?”
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | stphillips/iStock/Getty Images
Obstacles to Implementation
Reverse transfer, while simple on paper, faces a variety of hurdles at the state, institutional and individual levels.
At the highest level, most universities cannot award associate degrees due to state legislation. Before CORE, Colorado universities were limited to being “dual mission” (awarding two- and four-year degrees) or awarding higher degrees, such as master’s or doctorates.
There’s also a stigma around offering two-year degrees to students. Only eight universities are participating in CORE, because “some of the institutions don’t want to be associated with an associate degree,” Paccione said. “They pride themselves on the bachelor’s degree and they want to make sure students complete that.”
Critics of reverse transfer claim that awarding students an associate degree if they fail to complete a bachelor’s gives them an incentive to stop out, but most of these programs require students to have left higher education for at least two years to be eligible for reverse transfer.
Restrictions on student eligibility has further limited the number who can benefit from reverse-transfer programs.
To earn an associate degree retroactively through traditional reverse-transfer processes, students have to begin their college journey at a two-year institution and earn at least one-quarter of their credits there. They are also required to take a certain number (typically 60 or more) and type of credits to fulfill requirements for the degree, whether that’s an associate of arts, science or general studies. So a student who completed 59 credits of primarily electives or upper-level credits in their major would not be able to earn the degree, for example.
While 700,000 students in Colorado have earned some college credit but no degree, only about 30,000 residents have earned the minimum 70 credits at a four-year state university within the past 10 years that makes them eligible for CORE, according to the state.
Most colleges require students to opt in to reverse transfer due to FERPA laws, meaning that students need to advocate for receiving their award and facilitate transcript data exchanges between institutions. This can further disadvantage those who are unfamiliar with their college’s bureaucratic processes or the hidden curriculum of higher education.
In addition, getting up-to-date emails, addresses or phone numbers for students who were enrolled nearly a decade ago can be difficult for the institution.
For some students, the opportunity may seem too good to be true.
Peter Fritz, director of student transitions and degree completion initiatives at the Colorado Department of Higher Education, talked to CORE participants at their graduation ceremony in 2023 who—like Varkevisser’s partner—initially thought the program was a scam. Media attention and support from the governor have helped build trust in CORE. And the state’s Education Department continues to affirm messaging that this isn’t a giveaway or a money grab, but recognition of work already completed.
Thousands of Colorado residents are eligible for CORE, but Varkevisser said she hasn’t heard of anyone in her community who’s taken advantage of it. “Actually, I am the one that’s telling everyone I know, and they go, ‘That’s crazy!’”
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed
Giving Students Degrees
Between CORE’s launch in 2022 and January 2025, 1,032 stopped-out students earned associates degrees, according to Colorado’s education department.
At Metropolitan State University of Denver, one of the Colorado institutions that opted in to CORE, when administrators began combing through institutional data to see which students would be eligible for the associate of general studies degree, they found 4,256 that could earn an A.G.S.
Another few thousand were eligible for a different degree entirely. If students had completed 15 or more credits at the community college system, “you wouldn’t be eligible for us to award you anything,” said Shaun Schafer, associate vice president of curriculum academic effectiveness and policy development. “Guess what? It’s reverse transfer.”
MSU Denver identified nearly 2,000 students who could receive a two-year degree from their community college. “We sent that back to the different institutions saying, ‘Hey, this person is actually eligible to reverse transfer and get an associate’s from you,’” Schafer said. “We can’t really do anything for them.”
In 2024, 336 students accepted an A.G.S. from MSU Denver, just under 9 percent of those eligible. An additional 130 or so students had reached 120 credit hours or more, so the university offered to help them re-enroll to finish their degree, and 300 had resumed coursework at other institutions.
National data shows policies like reverse transfer are making a dent in the “some college no degree” population by eliminating the barrier of re-enrollment to attain a credential. In the past year, about one in four SCNC students who earned a credential in the U.S. (15,500 students in total) did so without re-enrolling, according to National Student Clearinghouse data.
In Colorado, a total of 2,100 SCNC students completed a credential during the 2023–24 academic year alone, and 800 of those did not need to re-enroll, NSC data shows.
Some states, including Colorado, Michigan, Missouri and Oregon, require institutions to contact upward transfer students to make them aware of their reverse-transfer eligibility. In Texas, students consent to participating in reverse transfer when they fill out their application; they have to uncheck the box to opt out, giving universities leeway to enroll them in the process when they become eligible.
“Students often don’t do optional,” Sedlak said. “When you create additional barriers, you’re not going to see things get done.”
Alyson McClaran/MSU Denver
The first Summer Ceremony for Associate’s Degrees on June 22, 2024, in the Tivoli Turnhalle.
Leveraging Tech
Some universities have implemented new reverse transfer policies that capture students while they’re still enrolled, utilizing technology to expedite the process.
The University of Nebraska system, which includes the Lincoln, Omaha and Kearney campuses, implemented an automatically triggered reverse-transfer initiative in 2023. All eligible students need to do is respond to an email.
“Rather than putting the responsibility on the students to do that work—most of whom are not going to do that work—the system thought it would be better to create a mechanism that would automatically notify students when the courses that they’ve taken have gotten to that threshold,” said Amy Goodburn, senior associate vice chancellor at UNL.
To be eligible, students must complete at least 15 credits at a community college and then transfer to the University of Nebraska. The registrar’s office monitors a dashboard and, after confirming a student completed the appropriate number and type of credits for an associate degree, notifies the student. If the student responds to the email, the university processes the reverse transfer with the prior institution to confirm the associate degree.
“We’re trying to take the need for students to be proactive off their backs,” Goodburn said.
The process is not a heavy lift, Goodburn said, and it boosts the community college’s completion rate, making it mutually beneficial.
Still, the uptake remains stubbornly low.
At UNL, February 2025 data showed that 2,500 students were eligible to participate in reverse transfer, but only 10 percent have opted in. A reverse-transfer initiative in Tennessee a decade ago saw similar numbers; 7,500 were eligible, but only 1,755 students chose to participate and 347 degrees were awarded.
“I’m curious about the other 90 percent, like, are they not doing it because they don’t want it on their transcript?” Goodburn said. “Or they’re just not reading their emails, which is often the case? Or is there some other reason?”
The University of Montana is in the early stages of building its own process for the reverse transfer of stopped-out students. The institution has offered an associate of arts degree for years as part of Missoula College, an embedded two-year institution within the university. Now, through the Big Sky Finish initiative, officials will be able to retroactively award degrees to former students.
Brian Reed, the University of Montana’s associate vice president for student success, has been leading the project, convening with stakeholders—including the president, the provost, Missoula College leaders and the registrar’s office—to develop the process. The goal, Reed said, is to address the some college, no degree population while also investing in state goals for economic development.
Big Sky Finish hinges on a partnership with the ed-tech provider EAB, which has created a dashboard connecting various institutional data sets to identify which students are eligible for reverse transfer. The system highlights former students who have 60 credits or more that fulfill a general studies associate degree, as well as stop-outs who are mere credits away from meeting the requirement.
So far, Montana staff have identified just 11 students who are eligible to earn an A.A. degree and 150 more who are a class or two short of the needed credits.
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | silverlining56/E+/Getty Images
Putting Degrees to Work
While CORE and similar initiatives are helping students earn a degree of value after leaving higher education, it’s less clear what impact associate degrees are having on students. Is it advancing their careers or getting them re-engaged in college?
About 10 percent of Colorado’s stopped-out students have chosen to re-enroll in higher education to pursue their bachelor’s degree, Fritz said.
For Varkevisser, receiving an A.G.S. degree provided the impetus to re-enroll and work toward a bachelor’s degree. The associate degree also gave her access to a variety of resources for alumni, including discounted tuition rates and career services.
“We recognize that it may not be for everybody to do this as a bachelor’s completion model, but the advantage of having an associate over a high school diploma, I think, helps,” Paccione.
But after students have their degrees, the career benefits and long-term implications for A.G.S. graduates are still murky. Median earnings of full-time, year-round workers with an associate degree are 18 percent higher than those with only a high school diploma, but still 35 percent lower than bachelor’s degree completers, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
In Colorado, the average high school graduate in their mid-20s will earn about $25,000 per year, whereas a graduate with an associate of general studies degree will earn closer to $34,000 per year, according to 2021 data.
“There was an assumption that maybe an A.G.S. wasn’t really worth much, but the data we had on hand locally said there’s not really much difference financially and employment-wise between the different types of associate degrees,” Fritz said.
“I still don’t really know what all [the A.G.S.] can do for me,” Varkevisser said. “I was never not going to go for it once I got the email and found out it was a real thing, but I don’t know what to do with it necessarily.” She’s considered other forms of employment that require an associate degree, such as a laboratory or X-ray technician, while she finishes her bachelor’s degree in mathematics.
In Montana, there’s a slight wage premium for individuals who hold an associate degree compared to those with only a high school diploma, Reed said. An associate degree also opens doors in some career fields, such as bookkeeping.
The University of Montana is hoping to partner with the city of Missoula to identify small businesses looking for credentialed talent so completers can have a career pathway to transition into .
“I don’t think people are going into six-figure jobs after this,” Reed said. “But it’s creating a step toward something else for these folks. They get another job a little higher up, a little higher up, that prepares them for the next thing.”
But an A.G.S. isn’t a great target for workers and it can’t guarantee further education, MSU Denver’s Schafer noted.
“I hate to say it, but it’s a little bit of, it’s a lovely parting gift,” Schafer said. “Here, you have something that you can now show to the world. But how do I [as an administrator] build you on to the next thing when you’ve already stopped out? Maybe that’s the best hope. Even then, maybe it doesn’t work quite as magically as we want it to.”
I am curious about your take on the amount of money that institutions are spending on marketing …
According to this story, those four schools spent $676 million on marketing in one fiscal year.
If private companies like Coke and Pepsi want to engage in an advertising arms race (a.k.a. the Cola Wars), that is fine because it is private money. If the shareholders don’t like it, they can vote out the board. However, a lot of this marketing money is from public dollars like Pell Grants, federal loans, GI Bill, etc. Public dollars should not be spent on an advertising arms race. Elizabeth Warren was looking into this in the context of OPMs.
It seems like a huge transfer of wealth from taxpayers to Big Tech. The fact that adjuncts who teach online get paid so little is what really gets me upset about this.
No one can unilaterally disarm in an arms race, but it seems like a condition of receiving federal aid could be that no more than X percent of your budget is marketing. This would mean some type of audits by government agencies, which are never fun, and the definition of “marketing” could be disputed. Schools might try to get around it with “content marketing” and other shenanigans, but it still seems like it’s worth a shot.
So many thoughts …
For obvious reasons, I’ve been reflecting a lot lately on my old constitutional law coursework. As long as the Supreme Court holds that money is speech—and the Supreme Court retains enough legitimacy to be taken seriously—I foresee major free speech issues around restricting advertising. If I were a betting man, I’d bet that the court’s legitimacy will have a shorter shelf life than its view on the “marketplace of ideas,” given how aggressively it’s shedding any pretense of respect for precedent.
In the ’90s, a book called The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model (affectionately nicknamed SCAM) by Jeffrey Siegel and Harold Spaeth made some waves in political science circles for its claim that justices reasoned backward from the outcome they wanted. At the time, that was considered a shocking claim to make. Now it’s almost banal.
And advertising generally isn’t what it used to be. Growing up, in the age of the media monoculture, ads tended to be corny. The best ones were either disarmingly sweet (Mean Joe Greene’s Coke ad, for example) or funny. They had to be, because they were expensive to air and the three networks had broad audiences. That led to inanity—anyone else remember the talking loaves of bread?—but the range of things that got advertised was relatively narrow and mostly inoffensive.
Now it’s normal to see medicines advertised with machine-gun fire recitations of alarming side effects (“may cause fatal events”) and legal or legal-ish sports betting apps during games. In that context, ads for colleges are almost a relief, even if they sometimes seem excessive. At the last minor league baseball game I attended, three of the outfield billboards were for local colleges. I don’t remember that from earlier years.
While we’re at it, separating institutional marketing from sports budgets at the Division I level would be a real challenge. How many students learn about universities from football? I’m guessing more than most of us would like to admit.
That said, marketing isn’t cheap, and the money comes from somewhere.
In the context of higher ed, separating public money from private money isn’t always clean. When I was at DeVry, the leadership there used to distinguish the taxpaying sector (meaning themselves) from the tax-consuming sector, which included private institutions. That was a bit convenient, as it left out the enormous reliance of most for-profits on federal and state financial aid, but there was a grain of truth to it. Nonprofit private colleges and universities benefit from tax exemptions and student financial aid, as well as (sometimes) research funding. In some states, they even receive direct operating aid. Higher ed is an ecosystem, rather than a system, but the entire ecosystem relies on public money in one form or another. In other words, assuming any actual respect for the law, it’s conceptually possible to attach limits on marketing expenses to the receipt of federal dollars.
The underlying issue the correspondent raises is a serious one. Why do we force public or publicly funded institutions to compete with each other? Why do we underfund them to the point that they have to treat students as means rather than ends? The need for tuition dollars is behind the marketing; what if tuition were less relevant?
Colleges have relatively fixed costs and relatively variable ones. In my more perfect world, public funding would cover the fixed costs and tuition could cover the variable ones. Instead, public funding falls well short of fixed costs, so they have to use variable revenues to cover fixed costs. That means scrambling to appease both prospective students and prospective funders, whether philanthropic or public. Advertising is part of that scrambling. When it works, it benefits the individual institution, but it’s likely negative for the ecosystem as a whole.
Unfortunately, the ideology that assumes the market is always right has become common sense among one and a half of our two political parties. Markets are tools, not gods; regulating them is not heresy. But at this point in our political culture, anything that displeases markets is punished, often with an unnerving sense of righteousness among the punishers. We’ve even developed a new twist on Calvinism—the “prosperity gospel”—to sanctify wealth and to cast the nonwealthy as undeserving. I almost expect the mascot of the next for-profit educational behemoth to be the golden calf.
Yes, I’d very much prefer to spend educational dollars on education, just as I’d rather spend medical dollars on medical care. Under the system we have, though, institutions can either compete or die. Changing that would require a political sea change.
It’s almost enough to make me miss the talking loaves of bread.
We’re two admissions leaders working to reframe how families and institutions think about the gap year. I’m Carol, a former college admissions dean with more than 20 years in higher education, and I’m also a therapist who works with teens. My co-author, Becky Mulholland, is director of first-year admission and operations at the University of Rhode Island. Together, we’re building a new kind of gap year model, one that centers on intention, purpose and career readiness for all.
The gap year concept is overdue for a cultural reset. Most popular options on the market focus on travel, outdoor adventure or service learning, but they rarely emphasize self-exploration in conjunction with career readiness or curiosity about the future of work. The term itself is widely misunderstood and sometimes dismissed. Despite its reputation as a luxury for the privileged, it’s often the families juggling cost, stress and uncertainty who stand to gain the most from a well-supported pause.
For many families, college is the most expensive decision they’ll ever make. Taking time to pause, reflect and plan shouldn’t be seen as risky—it should be seen as wise. At 17 or 18, it’s a lot to ask a young person to know what they want to do with the rest of their life. A 2017 federal data report found that about 30 percent of undergrads who had declared majors changed their major at least once, and about 10 percent changed majors more than once. These shifts often lead to extra courses and sometimes an extra semester or even a year. That’s a lot of wasted money for families who could have benefited from a more intentional pause.
And yet for many parents, the phrase “gap year” still stirs anxiety. They imagine their child lying on a couch for three months, doing nothing, or worse, never learning anything useful and losing all momentum to return to school. The idea feels foreign, risky and hard to explain. They don’t know what to tell their friends or extended family. We push back on that fear and work to normalize the idea of intentional, structured time off. It’s not just for the elite—it needs to be reclaimed as a culturally acceptable norm. That’s why we champion paid, structured earn-while-you-learn pathways such as youth apprenticeships, paid internships, stipend-backed fellowships and employer-sponsored projects that keep income stable while skills grow.
We personally promote the value of intentional pauses when talking with families and prospective students about college, helping them reframe what a year of growth and clarity can mean. We also strongly support programs with built-in pause requirements before graduate school. I’ve read thousands of applications as a dean and witnessed how powerful that year can be when it’s well guided.
Gap years, when framed and supported correctly, can foster self-discovery, emotional growth and direction. But the gap year industry itself also needs to evolve. The industry should move toward models that prioritize intentional career exploration, rooted not only in personal growth and self-awareness but in helping students find a sense of fulfillment in their future careers and lives. If colleges acknowledged the value of these experiences more visibly in their advising models and admissions narratives, they could relieve pressure on families and students and potentially reduce dropout rates and improve long-term outcomes.
We believe it’s time for higher education to actively support and normalize the gap year, not as an elite detour, but as a practical and often necessary path to college and career success. It’s time to give students and their families permission to pause.
Carol Langlois is chief academic officer at ESAI, a generative AI platform for college applicants, and a therapist who specializes in working with teens. She previously served in dean, director and vice provost roles in college admissions.
Becky Mulholland is director of first-year admission and operations at the University of Rhode Island.
Becky and Carol both serve on the Policy Subcommittee of the National Association for College Admission Counseling’s AI in College Admission Special Interest Group.
In Plato’s Phaedrus, King Thamus feared writing would make people forgetful and create the appearance of wisdom without true understanding. His concern was not merely about a new tool, but about a technology that would fundamentally transform how humans think, remember and communicate. Today, we face similar anxieties about generative AI. Like writing before it, generative AI is not just a tool but a transformative technology reshaping how we think, write and work.
This transformation is particularly consequential in graduate education, where students develop professional competencies while managing competing demands, research deadlines, teaching responsibilities, caregiving obligations and often financial pressures. Generative AI’s appeal is clear; it promises to accelerate tasks that compete for limited time and cognitive resources. Graduate students report using ChatGPT and similar tools for professional development tasks, such as drafting cover letters, preparing for interviews and exploring career options, often without institutional guidance on effective and ethical use.
Most AI policies focus on coursework and academic integrity; professional development contexts remain largely unaddressed. Faculty and career advisers need practical strategies for guiding students to use generative AI critically and effectively. This article proposes a four-stage framework—explore, build, connect, refine—for guiding students’ generative AI use in professional development.
These investments reflect recognition that Ph.D. and master’s students pursue diverse career paths, with fewer than half of STEM Ph.D.s entering tenure-track positions immediately after graduation; the figure for humanities and social sciences also remains below 50 percent over all.
We now face a different challenge: integrating a technology that touches every part of the knowledge economy. Generative AI adoption among graduate students has been swift and largely unsupervised: At Ohio State University, 48 percent of graduate students reported using ChatGPT in spring 2024. At the University of Maryland, 77 percent of students report using generative AI, and 35 percent use it routinely for academic work, with graduate students more likely than undergraduates to be routine users; among routine student users, 38 percent said they did so without instructor guidance.
Some subskills, like mechanical formatting, will matter less in this landscape; higher-order capacities—framing problems, tailoring messages to audiences, exercising ethical discernment—will matter more. For example, in a 2025 National Association of Colleges and Employers survey, employers rank communication and critical thinking among the most important competencies for new hires, and in a 2024 LinkedIn report, communication was the most in-demand skill.
Without structured guidance, students face conflicting messages: Some faculty ban AI use entirely, while others assume so-called digital natives will figure it out independently. This leaves students navigating an ethical and practical minefield with high stakes for their careers. A framework offers consistency and clear principles across advising contexts.
We propose a four-stage framework that mirrors how professionals actually learn: explore, build, connect, refine. This approach adapts design thinking principles, the iterative cycle of prototyping and testing, to AI-augmented professional development. Students rapidly generate options with AI support, test them in low-stakes environments and refine based on feedback. While we use writing and communication examples throughout for clarity, this framework applies broadly to professional development.
Explore: Map Possibilities and Surface Gaps
Exploring begins by mapping career paths, fellowship opportunities and professional norms, then identifying gaps in skills or expectations. A graduate student can ask a generative AI chatbot to infer competencies from their lab work or course projects, then compare those skills to current job postings in their target sector to identify skills they need to develop. They can generate a matrix of fellowship opportunities in their field, including eligibility requirements, deadlines and required materials, and then validate every detail on official websites. They can ask AI to describe communication norms in target sectors, comparing the tone and structure of academic versus industry cover letters—not to memorize a script, but to understand audience expectations they will need to meet.
Students should not, however, rely on AI-generated job descriptions or program requirements without verification, as the technology may conflate roles, misrepresent qualifications or cite outdated information and sources.
Build: Learn Through Iterative Practice
Building turns insight into artifacts and habits. With generative AI as a sounding board, students can experiment with different résumé architectures for the same goal, testing chronological versus skills-based formats or tailoring a CV for academic versus industry positions. They can generate detailed outlines for an individual development plan, breaking down abstract goals into concrete, time-bound actions. They can devise practice tasks that address specific growth areas, such as mock interview questions for teaching-intensive positions or practice pitches tailored to different funding audiences. The point is not to paste in AI text; it is to lower the barriers of uncertainty and blank-page intimidation, making it easier to start building while keeping authorship and evidence squarely in the student’s hands.
Connect: Communicate and Network With Purpose
Connecting focuses on communicating with real people. Here, generative AI can lower the stakes for high-pressure interactions. By asking a chatbot to act the part of various audience members, students can rehearse multiple versions of a tailored 60-second elevator pitch, such as for a recruiter at a career fair, a cross-disciplinary faculty member at a poster session or a community partner exploring collaboration. Generative AI can also simulate informational interviews if students prompt the system to ask follow-up questions or even refine user inputs.
In addition, students can leverage generative AI to draft initial outreach notes to potential mentors that the students then personalize and fact-check. They can explore networking strategies for conferences or professional association events, identifying whom to approach and what questions to ask based on publicly available information about attendees’ work.
Even just five years ago, completing this nonexhaustive list of networking tasks might have seemed an impossibility for graduate students with already crammed agendas. Generative AI, however, affords graduate students the opportunity to become adept networkers without sacrificing much time from research and scholarship. Crucially, generative AI creates a low-risk space to practice, while it is the student who ultimately supplies credibility and authentic voice. Generative AI cannot build genuine relationships, but it can help students prepare for the human interactions where relationships form.
Refine: Test, Adapt and Verify
Refining is where judgment becomes visible. Before submitting a fellowship essay, for example, a student can ask the generative AI chatbot to simulate likely reviewer critiques based on published evaluation criteria, then use that feedback to align revisions to scoring rubrics. They can A/B test two AI-generated narrative approaches from the build stage with trusted readers, advisers or peers to determine which is more compelling. Before a campus talk, they can ask the chatbot to identify jargon, unclear transitions or slides with excessive text, then revise for audience accessibility.
In each case, verification and ownership are nonnegotiable: Students must check references, deadlines and factual claims against primary sources and ensure the final product reflects their authentic voice rather than generic AI prose. A student who submits an AI-refined essay without verification may cite outdated program requirements, misrepresent their own experience or include plausible-sounding but fabricated details, undermining credibility with reviewers and jeopardizing their application.
Cultivate Expert Caution, Not Technical Proficiency
The goal is not to train students as prompt engineers but to help them exercise expert caution. This means teaching students to ask: Does this AI-generated text reflect my actual experience? Can I defend every claim in an interview? Does this output sound like me, or like generic professional-speak? Does this align with my values and the impression I want to create? If someone asked, “Tell me more about that,” could I elaborate with specific details?
Students should view AI as a thought partner for the early stages of professional development work: the brainstorming, the first-draft scaffolding, the low-stakes rehearsal. It cannot replace human judgment, authentic relationships or deep expertise. A generative AI tool can help a student draft three versions of an elevator pitch, but only a trusted adviser can tell them which version sounds most genuine. It can list networking strategies, but only actual humans can become meaningful professional connections.
Conclusion
Each graduate student brings unique aptitudes, challenges and starting points. First-generation students navigating unfamiliar professional cultures may use generative AI to explore networking norms and decode unstated expectations. International students can practice U.S. interview conventions and professional correspondence styles. Part-time students with limited campus access can get preliminary feedback before precious advising appointments. Students managing disabilities or mental health challenges can use generative AI to reduce the cognitive load of initial drafting, preserving energy for higher-order revision and relationship-building.
Used critically and transparently, generative AI can help students at all starting points explore, build, connect and refine their professional paths, alongside faculty advisers and career development professionals—never replacing them, but providing just-in-time feedback and broader access to coaching-style support.
The question is no longer whether generative AI belongs in professional development. The real question is whether we will guide students to use it thoughtfully or leave them to navigate it alone. The explore-build-connect-refine framework offers one path forward: a structured approach that develops both professional competency and critical judgment. We choose guidance.
Ioannis Vasileios Chremos is program manager for professional development at the University of Michigan Medical School Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies.
William A. Repetto is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of English and the research office at the University of Delaware.
The University of California system recently made waves by announcing a commitment “to fully decarbonize no later than 2045.” Unlike many “carbon neutrality” or “net zero” plans that rely heavily on carbon offsets, the UC system plans to cut emissions from campus electricity and fossil fuel use by at least 90 percent from 2019 levels and to balance residual emissions by investing in projects to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
This win for the climate did not come easy: As activists from UC San Diego relate, they spent years building a coalition across campuses. Such success marks the UC system as a leader in American higher education, well ahead of other prestigious research universities with offset-heavy carbon neutrality plans—and well ahead of Purdue University, where we teach, which has no declared plans for decarbonization.
Here, we wish to discuss our experiences advocating for a climate action plan at Purdue, where among our peer institutions we are decidedly a laggard, not a leader, in the climate space. We hope that detailing our frustrating lack of success provides a sober counternarrative to the success story of the UC system. Furthermore, we hope that knowing about our efforts may help others who are similarly involved in advocating for climate action at campuses in red states.
Purdue’s Climate Story So Far
A public, land-grant university in north-central Indiana, Purdue enrolls more than 44,000 undergraduates and almost 14,000 graduate and professional students. Purdue frequently touts itself as a world leader in innovation of all sorts, from artificial intelligence to biomedical research, even highlighting research on sustainability. Due to its size, the energy-intensive nature of its research activities and its location in a climate that sees both cold winters and hot, humid summers, Purdue’s campus emits as much climate pollution as a small city—439,000 metric tons per year of carbon dioxide equivalent as of 2023, the latest year for which official estimates are available.
The Purdue community cares about sustainability: Classes in a wide range of majors feature considerable discussion of sustainability, and researchers across campus study the causes of and potential solutions for climate change. Purdue has won awards and recognition for low-hanging fruit, such as from Tree Campus USA and Bee Campus USA. Purdue also touts being named one of the most sustainable campuses by QS, although when one looks under the hood, such rankings give remarkably little weight to emissions reductions on campus. In the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education’s more rigorous reporting system, Purdue scored zero out of four on clean and renewable energy and 1.08 out of eight on greenhouse gas emissions.
Purdue faces unique decarbonization challenges. Our university’s administration ultimately answers to the Indiana state government, which has recently canceled the state’s climate action planning and enables most counties to restrict renewable energy development. Electricity in Indiana has the highest carbon intensity of any state other than three major coal producers—Kentucky, West Virginia and Wyoming—and entails almost four times higher greenhouse gas emissions per unit of energy than electricity in California. Duke Energy, the utility that serves Purdue, is the fourth largest lobby in Indiana.
While these challenges may seem daunting, progress on climate is possible even in Indiana. In 2023, our colleagues at Indiana University launched a plan promising carbon neutrality by 2040. They aim to get there by modest changes, such as improving energy efficiency in buildings and implementing renewable energy on campus. Purdue has also made progress—which we applaud—mainly by transitioning its combined heat and power plant from coal to natural gas. In 2023, Purdue estimated that its emissions were 27 percent lower than their coal-heavy 2011 level. But this only represents a small start to the actions needed for Purdue to live up to its obligations to students, staff, faculty, the community and, ultimately, the planet.
Community Will and Administrative Inaction
Many Purdue community members want substantial climate action. In 2020, more than 2,000 Purdue students signed a petition calling for Purdue to develop a climate action plan and create a universitywide, stand-alone sustainability office. The university’s president at the time, Mitch Daniels—Indiana’s former Republican governor and a noted climate change skeptic—dismissed the petition.
In the fall of 2022, students and faculty formed the Purdue Climate Action Collective (PCAC), aimed at pressuring the university to develop a climate action plan and to be transparent in reporting emissions. In the spring of 2023, the Purdue Student Government, the Graduate Student Government and the University Senate each passed resolutions calling on the university to commit to a climate action plan. The Senate resolution also called upon Purdue to join the Greater Lafayette Climate Action Plan, developed by the surrounding county and cities. Once again, Purdue ignored these calls.
Since then, PCAC has mounted numerous protests, spoken at student events, peppered campus with signs, reached out to the administration and attended Board of Trustees meetings to express our concerns. Our board is entirely appointed by the governor of Indiana. PCAC has also launched a new petition, now at 1,600 signatures.
Despite the Purdue community’s advocacy for climate action, our new president, Mung Chiang, has authorized no comprehensive, campuswide climate action plan. The nearest thing is the Campus Planning, Architecture and Sustainability office’s Sustainability Master Plan for 2020–25, which aims to reduce Purdue’s emissions from electricity and fossil fuel use 50 percent below 2011 levels by 2025 and to pursue 500 kilowatts of renewable energy. While we applaud these near-term goals, and the incomplete but significant progress toward achieving them, decarbonizing Purdue will require making a long-term plan to outgrow natural gas and Duke Energy’s carbon-intensive electricity.
On this topic, the Purdue administration told the University Senate in 2024 that “Purdue has a climate action plan consisting of two parts,” referring senators to the Sustainability Master Plan and to a joint study with Duke Energy on the feasibility of a small modular nuclear reactor (SMR) for the campus. While nuclear might play a role in Purdue’s energy future, SMRs are an unproven technology and should not be used as an excuse to delay the decarbonization of our campus.
The SMR study’s 2023 report states, “whether SMRs will be an economic option for Duke Energy Indiana’s customers is unknown given current technology, timing and cost uncertainty.” The report cites a likely cost range of $1.1 to $2.25 billion (for context, Purdue’s endowment currently totals $4.1 billion) and discusses design technologies that may only become “commercially viable in 2035–2040.” A responsible climate action plan could certainly include nuclear energy down the road, if it proves successful, but the urgency of the climate crisis demands that institutions address their greenhouse gas emissions now.
Possible Paths Forward
Preliminary studies of decarbonization at Purdue suggest that climate action is feasible and affordable. Today, Purdue could take a number of proven, cost-effective actions, such as improving the efficiency of its building operations (for example, by using software to avoid heating or cooling unoccupied spaces), or increasing parking fees and investing the proceeds in infrastructure and incentives for buses and electric vehicle charging. In the next five to 10 years, Purdue could electrify its vehicle fleet and arrange power-purchase agreements with clean electricity generators in the area, as has been done successfully at places like the University of Michigan and the University of Minnesota.
Long-term pathways to deep emission reductions remain uncertain, especially when considering Scope 3 emissions (emissions that are indirectly generated by university activities, such as employee commuting and flying), but Purdue has options and plenty of experts eager to investigate them. Inclusive and transparent processes for climate action planning would draw upon Purdue community expertise to identify, evaluate and select climate action pathways. But for any of this to happen, our administration must first acknowledge the need for climate action on campus.
Our experience at Purdue has affirmed that fighting for climate action on public red-state campuses is an uphill battle. We know that change must come from both above and below. Students, faculty and staff concerned about the future of our planet must continue to raise their voices and add to the pressure the university feels. Administrators more inclined toward shared governance—or toward maintaining a livable climate for the future generations that Purdue aims to serve—must also add their voices to the mix. As Purdue begins to act on climate, its passionate community of activists and innovators will be there to support implementation and to celebrate accomplishments along the way.
Although we have much to learn from the success of places like UC, places like Purdue need a different set of tools and approaches. For those at similarly recalcitrant universities, we hope this message reminds them that institutions won’t take these steps without great pressure. But given the dire warnings about the future of our planet, the importance of local climate action as congressional Republicans and the Trump administration have repealed most federal support for climate action, and the important role of universities as thought leaders, we remain convinced that this is a fight worth having.
Kevin Kircher, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and, by courtesy, electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University, studies clean energy technologies and has worked on campus decarbonization projects at Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
We’ve written a lot about subcontractual provision on Wonkhe, and it is fair to say that very little of it has been positive.
What’s repeatedly hit the headlines, here and elsewhere, are the providers that teach large numbers of students in circumstances that have sparked concerns about teaching quality, academic standards, and indeed financial probity or even ethics.
There are a fair number of students that are getting a very bad deal out of subcontractual agreements and, although we’ve been screaming about this for several years, it is good to finally see the beginnings of some action.
Student number tools
The long-awaited release of OfS data is not perfect – there’s lots that we’d love to see that does not appear to have been delivered. One of these is proper student numbers: it should be possible to see data on how many students are studying at each subcontracted provider at the last census point.
Instead, we are scrabbling around with denominators and suppressions trying to build a picture of this part of the sector that is both heavily caveated and three years out of date. This isn’t good enough.
And it is a shame. Because as well as the horror show, the data we do have offers a glimpse of a little known corner of higher education that arguably deserves to be celebrated.
I’ve developed some new visualisations to help you explore the data – these add substantial new features to what I have previously published. Both these dashboards work in broadly the same way – the first allows you to examine relationships at delivery providers, the second at lead providers. You choose your provider of interest at the top left, which shows the various relationships on a map on the left hand side. On the right you can see denominator numbers for each year of data – you can use the filter at the top right to see information about the total number of students who might be continuing, completing, or progressing in a given year.
Each row on the right hand side shows a combination of provider (lead provider on the first dashboard, delivery provider on the second), mode, and level – with denominators and suppression codes available in the coloured squares on the right. The suppression codes are as follows:
[DQ]: information suppressed due to low data quality from the 2022-23 collection
[low]: There are more than 2 but fewer than 23 students in the denominator
[none]: There are 2 students or fewer in the denominator
[DP]: Data redacted for reasons of data protection
[DPL]: Data redacted for reasons of data protection (very low numbers,
[DPH]: Data redacted for reasons of data protection (within 2 of the denominator)
[BK] no benchmarks (the benchmark includes at least 50 per cent of the provider’s students)
You can see available indicators (including upper and lower confidence intervals at 95%), benchmarks, and numeric thresholds by mousing over one of the coloured squares. The filled circle is the indicator, the outline diamond is the benchmark, and the cross is the threshold.
It’s worth noting the range of providers that are subcontracted to deliver higher education for others. There were an astonishing 681 of these between 2014 and 2022.
A third of those active in delivering provision for others (227) are registered with the Office for Students in their own right. Fifty-nine of these are recognisable as universities or other established higher education providers – including 14 in the Russell Group.
Why would that happen? In some cases, a provider may not have had the degree awarding powers necessary for research degrees, so would partner with another university to deliver particular courses. In other cases, the peculiarities of this data mean that apprenticeship arrangements are shown with the university partner. There’s also some examples of two universities working together to deliver a single programme.
We also find many examples of longstanding collaborations between universities and teaching organisations in the arts. Numerous independent schools of dance, drama, and music have offered higher education qualifications with the support of a university – the Bird School’s relationship with the Doreen Bird College of Performing Arts began in 1997. Italia Conti used to have an arrangement with the University of East London, it now works with the University of Chichester.
There are 135 organisations delivering apprenticeships in a relationship with an OfS-registered higher education provider. Universities often offer end point assessment and administrative support to employers and others who offer apprenticeships between level 4 and level 7.
Two large providers – Navitas and QA – offer foundation courses and accredited year one courses for international students at UK universities: QA also offers a range of programmes aimed at home undergraduates. We could also add Into as a smaller example. This dataset probably isn’t the best place to see this (QA is shown as multiple, linked, organisations) but this is a huge area of provision
Seventy-four subcontracted providers are schools, or school centred initial teacher training (SCITT) organisations. As teacher training has gradually moved closer to the classroom and away from the lecture hall, many schools offer opportunities to gain the industry-standard Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE), which is the main route to qualified teacher status. A PGCE is a postgraduate qualification and is thus only awarded by organisations with postgraduate degree awarding powers.
In total there are 144 providers subcontracted to deliver PGCE (initial teacher training) courses, primarily schools, local councils, and further education colleges (FECs). There are 166 FECs involved in subcontracted delivery – and this extends far beyond teacher training. Most large FECs have a university centre or similar, offering a range of foundation and undergraduate courses often (but not always) in vocational subjects. The Newcastle College Group used its experience of delivering postgraduate taught masters courses for Canterbury Christ Church University to successfully apply for postgraduate degree awarding powers – the first FEC to do so.
We find 23 NHS organisations represented within the data. Any provider delivering medical, medical related, or healthcare subjects will have a relationship with one or more NHS foundation trust – as a means to offer student placements, and bring clinical expertise into teaching. This is generally an accreditation requirement. But in many cases, the relationship extends to the university awarding credit or qualifications for the learning and training that NHS staff do. The Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust works with multiple providers (the University of Oxford, Oxford Brookes University, and Buckinghamshire New University), to offer postgraduate apprenticeships in clinical and non-clinical roles.
Nine police organisations (either constabularies or police and crime commissioners) have subcontractual relationships with registered higher education providers. Teesside University works with the Chief Constable of Cleveland to offer an undergraduate apprenticeship for prospective police officers.
All three of the UKs armed forces have subcontractual relationships with higher education providers. The British Army currently works with the University of Reading to offer undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in leadership and strategic studies – in the past it has offered a range of qualifications from Bournemouth University. Kingston University has a relationship with the Royal Navy, currently offering an MSc in Technology (Maritime Operations) undertaken entirely in the workplace.
Ecosystem
When I talk to people about franchise and partnership arrangements, most (perhaps thinking of the examples that make the mainstream press) ask me whether it would not be easier to simply ban such arrangements. After all, it is very difficult to see any benefit from the possibly fraudulent and often low quality behavior that is plastered all over The Times on a regular basis.
As I think the data demonstrates, a straight-ahead ban would be hugely damaging – swathes of national priorities and achievements (from NHS staff development, to offering higher education in “cold spots”, to the quality of performances on London’s West End) would be adversely affected. But the same could be said for increases in regulatory overheads.
There are a handful of very large providers (I’d start with Global Banking School, Elizabeth School of London, Navitas, QA, Into, London School of Science and Technology, and a few others – and from the data you’d have included Oxford Business Colleges) that are, effectively, university-like in size and scope. It is very difficult to understand why these are not registered providers given the scale of their operations (GBS, Into, and Navitas already are) and this does seem to be the right direction of travel.
There are a clutch of medium-sized delivery providers, often in a single long-standing relationship with a higher education institution. Often, these are nano-specialisms, particularly in the creative arts or in locally important industries. In many of these cases oversight on quality and standards from the lead provider has been proven over a number of years to work well – and there seems little benefit to changing this arrangement. I would hope for this group – as is likely to happen for the FECs, SCITTs, NHS, police, and armed forces – that a change to regulatory oversight only happens where there is an issue identified.
There is also a long tail of very small arrangements, often linked to apprenticeships (and regulated accordingly). For others at this end of the scale it is difficult to imagine OfS having the time or the capacity to regulate, so almost by default oversight remains with the lead partners. I know I say this in nearly every article, but at this end it feels like we need some kind of regular review of the way quality processes work for external providers within lead providers – we need to be sure lead providers are able to do what can be a very difficult job and do it well.
