Tag: Education

Judge Halts UT’s Comprehensive Ban on Student Speech

SB 2972 was passed after students at several public Texas universities protested the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Jon Shapley/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images

A Texas district court judge on Tuesday ordered the University of Texas system to hold off on enforcing new, sweeping limits on student expression that would prohibit any “expressive activity” protected by the First Amendment between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m.

“The First Amendment does not have a bedtime of 10 p.m.,” wrote U.S. district court judge David Alan Ezra in his order granting the plaintiff’s request for a preliminary injunction. “Giving administrators discretion to decide what is prohibited ‘disruptive’ speech gives the school the ability to weaponize the policy against speech it disagrees with. As an example, the Overnight Expression Ban would, by its terms, prohibit a sunrise Easter service. While the university may not find this disruptive, the story may change if it’s a Muslim or Jewish sunrise ceremony. The songs and prayer of the Muslim and Jewish ceremonies, while entirely harmless, may be considered ‘disruptive’ by some.”

A coalition of student groups—including the student-run Retrograde Newspaper, the Fellowship of Christian University Students at the University of Texas at Dallas and the student music group Strings Attached—sued to challenge the restrictions, which, in addition to prohibiting expression overnight, also sought to ban campus public speakers, the use of drums and amplified noise during the last two weeks of the semester. The restrictive policies align with Texas Senate Bill 2972, called the Campus Protection Act, which requires public universities to adopt restrictions on student speech and expression. The bill took effect on Sept. 1.

“Texas’ law is so overbroad that any public university student chatting in the dorms past 10 p.m. would have been in violation,” said Adam Steinbaugh, a senior attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, in a press release. “We’re thankful that the court stepped in and halted a speech ban that inevitably would’ve been weaponized to censor speech that administrators disagreed with.”

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October 16, 2025
Report Cards, Reshuffles, and Resilience: What Ofsted’s new model could mean for higher education
This blog was kindly authored by Dr. Ismini Vasileiou, Associate Professor at De Montfort University.

The UK Higher Education sector is at a crossroads. With the government’s skills agenda being reshaped, institutions under growing financial pressure, and the first-ever merger between two English universities announced, the landscape is shifting faster than many had anticipated. Into this mix comes Ofsted’s new Report Card for Further Education & Skills (September 2025), which introduces a sharper accountability framework for further education providers.

The report card grades institutions across areas such as Leadership & Governance, Inclusion, Safeguarding, and Contribution to Meeting Skills Needs. At programme level, it assesses Curriculum, Teaching & Training, Achievement, and Participation & Development against a tiered scale ranging from Exceptional to Urgent Improvement.

While this is designed for further education and skills providers, its arrival raises an uncomfortable but necessary question for universities: what if higher education were graded in the same way?

The case for simplicity and transparency

Universities are already subject to layers of oversight through the Office for Students (OfS), the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), the National Student Survey (NSS), and graduate outcomes data. Yet, as I noted in the recent Cyber Workforce of the Future white paper, these mechanisms often appear fragmented to policymakers and incomprehensible to the public.

By contrast, the further education report card is direct. A parent, student, or employer can understand at a glance whether a provider is exceptional, strong, or in urgent need of improvement. Were higher education to adopt a similar model, judgments might cover:
- Leadership & Governance: financial resilience, strategic direction, governance quality.
- Inclusion: widening participation, closing attainment gaps, embedding equity strategies.
- Safeguarding/Wellbeing: provision for student welfare, mental health, harassment and misconduct.
- Skills Contribution: alignment with regional economic needs, national priorities in AI and cybersecurity, and graduate employment outcomes.
At the programme level, Achievement and Participation could map onto retention, progression, and graduate success, offering students and employers a clear view of performance.

Risks and rewards for higher education

Of course, importing a schools-style accountability regime into higher education carries risks. Universities are not homogeneous, and reducing their diverse missions to a traffic-light system risks oversimplification. A specialist arts institution and a research-intensive university might both be rated ‘Needs Attention’ on skills contribution, despite playing very different roles in the national ecosystem.

There is also the danger of gaming the system: universities optimising for ratings rather than long-term innovation. And autonomy, long a cornerstone of higher education, would be at stake.

Yet there are potential rewards. Public trust in higher education has been under strain, with questions over value for money and financial viability dominating the narrative. Transparent, comprehensible reporting could rebuild confidence and demonstrate sector-wide commitment to accountability. It could also strengthen alignment with further education at a time when government is explicitly seeking a joined-up skills system.

A shifting policy landscape

The September 2025 government reshuffle underscores why this debate matters. The resignation of Angela Rayner triggered a wide Cabinet reorganisation, with skills responsibilities moving out of the Department for Education and into a new ‘growth’ portfolio under the Department for Work and Pensions, led by Pat McFadden. This shift signals that some elements of skills policy are now seen primarily through an economic and labour market lens.

For Higher Education, this presents both challenges and opportunities. As argued in Bridging the Skills Divide: Higher Education’s Role in Delivering the UK’s Plan for Change, universities must demonstrate that they are not just centres of academic excellence but engines of workforce development, innovation, and regional growth. A report-card style framework could make these contributions more visible, but only if universities are part of its design.

Structural Change: The Kent–Greenwich merger

The announcement that the Universities of Kent and Greenwich will merge in autumn 2026 to form the London and South East University Group is a watershed moment for the sector. It is the first merger of its kind in England, driven by financial pressures from declining international student enrolments, static domestic fees, and mounting operational costs.

The merged entity will serve around 28,000 undergraduates, retain the identities of both institutions, and be led by Greenwich Vice-Chancellor Professor Jane Harrington. Yet concerns remain. The University and College Union (UCU) has warned that ‘this isn’t a merger; it is a takeover’ and called for urgent reassurance on staff jobs and student provision.

In a system with Ofsted-style ratings, such a merger would be scrutinised not just for its financial logic but also for its impact on governance, inclusion, and skills contribution. A transparent rating system might reassure stakeholders that the merged institution is not only viable but also delivering quality and meeting regional needs.

Building on skills agendas

National initiatives like Skills England, the Digital Skills Partnership, and programmes such as CyberLocal demonstrate how higher education can contribute to workforce resilience at scale. The Ofsted report card reinforces this agenda. Its emphasis on contribution to meeting skills needs aligns directly with the notion that higher education must play a central role in the UK’s skills ecosystem, not only through degree provision but through continuous upskilling, regional collaboration, and adaptive curricula.

Shaping the framework before it shapes us

Ofsted’s further education report card is not just an accountability mechanism; it is a signal of where education policy is heading, toward clarity, comparability, and alignment with skills needs.

For higher education, the choice is stark. Resist the model and risk having it imposed in ways that do not fit the sector’s diversity. Or lead the design, shaping a framework that balances accountability with autonomy, and skills with scholarship.

As Universities confront financial pressures, policy reshuffles, and structural change, one thing is clear: the sector cannot afford to sit this debate out. The real question is not whether Higher Education should be graded, but what kind of grading system we would design if given the chance.
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October 16, 2025
‘Right here, right now’: New report on how AI is transforming higher education

Author:

Edited by Dr Giles Carden and Josh Freeman

Published:

16 October 2025

A new collection of essays, AI and the Future of Universities published by HEPI and the University of Southampton, edited by Dr Giles Carden and Josh Freeman, brings together leading voices from universities, industry and policy. The collection comes at a point when Artificial Intelligence (AI) is projected to have a profound and transformative impact on virtually every sector of society and the economy, driving changes that are both beneficial and challenging. The various pieces look at how AI is reshaping higher education – from strategy, teaching and assessment to research and professional services.

You can read the press release and access the full report here.

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October 15, 2025
Trump’s Latest Layoffs Gut the Office of Postsecondary Ed

The Department of Education’s second round of layoffs affected nearly 500 employees and left several offices with a few or no staffers.

Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Tierney L. Cross/Getty Images | Matveev_Aleksandr/iStock/Getty Images

Education Secretary Linda McMahon has essentially gutted the postsecondary student services division of her department, leaving TRIO grant recipients and leaders of other college preparation programs with no one to turn to.

Prior to the latest round of layoffs, executed on Friday and now paused by a federal judge, the Student Services division in the Office of Postsecondary Education had about 40 staffers, one former OPE employee told Inside Higher Ed. Now, he and others say it’s down to just two or three.

The consequence, college-access advocates say, is that institutions might not be able to offer the same level of support to thousands of low-income and first-generation prospective students.

“It’s enormously disruptive to the students who are reliant on these services to answer questions and get the information they need about college enrollment and financial aid as they apply and student supports once they enroll,” said Antoinette Flores, a former department official during the Biden administration who now works at New America, a left-leaning think tank. “This [reduction in force] puts all of those services at stake.”

The layoffs are another blow to the federal TRIO programs, which help underrepresented and low-income students get to and through college. President Trump unsuccessfully proposed defunding the programs earlier this year, and the administration has canceled dozens of TRIO grants. Now, those that did get funding likely will have a difficult time connecting with the department for guidance.

In a statement Wednesday, McMahon described the government shutdown and the RIF as an opportunity for agencies to “evaluate what federal responsibilities are truly critical for the American people.”

“Two weeks in, millions of American students are still going to school, teachers are getting paid and schools are operating as normal. It confirms what the president has said: the federal Department of Education is unnecessary,” she wrote on social media.

This is the second round of layoffs at the Education Department since Trump took office. The first, which took place in March, slashed the department’s staff nearly in half, from about 4,200 to just over 2,400, affecting almost every realm of the agency, including Student Services and the Office of Federal Student Aid.

Nearly 500 employees lost their jobs in this most recent round, which the administration blamed on the government shutdown that began Oct. 1. No employees in FSA were affected, but the Office of Postsecondary Education was hit hard.

Jason Cottrell, a former data coordinator for OPE who worked in student and institution services for more than nine years, lost his job in March but stayed in close contact with his colleagues who remained. The majority of them were let go on Friday, leaving just the senior directors and a few front-office administrators for each of the two divisions. That’s down from about 60 employees total in September and about 100 at the beginning of the year, he said.

At the beginning of the year, OPE included five offices but now is down to the Office of Policy, Planning and Innovation, which includes oversight of accreditation, and the group working to update new policies and regulations.

Cottrell said the layoffs at OPE will leave grantees who relied on these officers for guidance without a clear point of contact at the department. Further, he said there won’t be nonpartisan staffers to oversee how taxpayer dollars are spent.

“Long-term, I’m thinking about the next round of grant applications that are going to be coming in … some of [the grant programs] receive 1,100 to 1,200 applications,” he explained. “Who is going to be there to actually organize and set up those grant-application processes to ensure that the regulations and statutes are being followed accurately?”

Flores has similar concerns.

“These [cuts] are the staff within the department that provide funding and technical assistance to institutions that are underresourced and serve some of the most vulnerable students within the higher education system,” she said. “Going forward, it creates uncertainty about funding, and these are institutions that are heavily reliant on funding.”

Other parts of the department affected by the layoffs include the Offices of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services, Communications and Outreach, Formula Grants, and Program and Grantee Support Services.

Although the remaining TRIO programs and other grant recipients that report to OPE likely already received a large chunk of their funding for the year, Cottrell noted that they often have to check in with their grant officer throughout the year to access the remainder of the award. Without those staff members in place, colleges could have a difficult time taking full advantage of their grants.

“It’s going to harm the institutions, and most importantly, it’s going to harm the students who are supposed to be beneficiaries of these programs,” he said. “These programs are really reserved for underresourced institutions and underserved students. When I look at the overall picture of what has been happening at the department and across higher education, I see this as a strategic use of an opportunity that this administration has created.”

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October 15, 2025
Brown University Rejects Trump’s Higher Ed Compact

Brown settled with the Trump administration earlier this year, but the compact doesn’t offer the same protections, the university president wrote in her rejection of the deal.

Wolterk/iStock/Getty Images

Citing multiple concerns, Brown University on Wednesday rejected an invitation to join the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” that the Trump administration proposed.

The compact, initially sent to nine institutions, would require universities to make a number of far-reaching changes, including suppressing criticism of conservatives on campus. Of the original nine, Brown is now the second to reject the deal after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The administration has promised preferential treatment on federal funding for those that sign on, though the document itself doesn’t detail those benefits. Higher ed experts and observers have warned against signing, arguing that it threatens institutional independence and give the federal government much more power over universities.

Following MIT’s rejection, the Trump administration said the compact was open to all colleges. But of the original nine invitees, there are no takers so far, though officials at the University of Texas system have indicated they view the proposal favorably. The system’s flagship in Austin was part of the nine.

“President Trump is committed to restoring academic excellence and common sense at our higher education institutions,” White House spokesperson Liz Huston said in a statement. “Any university that joins this historic effort will help to positively shape America’s future.”

Brown president Christina Paxson released her response to federal officials Wednesday, arguing that while Brown agreed with some of the aims of the proposal—such as keeping tuition costs down and maintaining a vibrant exchange of ideas across the ideological spectrum—other issues, including academic freedom concerns, prompted the university to reject the compact.

She also pointed to the settlement Brown and the Trump administration reached in July to restore more than $500 million in frozen federal research funding amid an investigation into alleged campus antisemitism. She noted that the agreement “reflects similar principles” to the compact. But while the settlement did not wade into campus curriculum or programs, the compact would impose much greater restrictions on academic offerings for signatories.

“In return for Brown signing the July agreement, the federal government restored the University’s research funding and permanently closed three pending investigations into shared ancestry discrimination and race discrimination. But most important, Brown’s existing agreement with the federal government expressly affirms the government’s lack of authority to dictate our curriculum or the content of academic speech—a principle that is not reflected in the Compact,” Paxson wrote.

A White House official said that the settlement was aimed at “rectifying past harm and discrimination,” whereas the compact is more “forward looking.”

Paxson also echoed concerns raised by MIT president Sally Kornbluth—who wrote in her letter to the Education Department that “scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone”—and other higher ed groups such as the Association of American Universities, of which Brown is a member.

Paxson wrote, “A fundamental part of academic excellence is awarding research funding on the merits of the research being proposed.”

”The cover letter describing the compact contemplates funding research on criteria other than the soundness and likely impact of research, which would ultimately damage the health and prosperity of Americans,” she added. “Our current agreement with the federal government—beyond restoring Brown’s research funding from the National Institutes of Health—affirms the University’s ability to compete fairly for new research grants in the future, a doctrine of fairness and a commitment to excellence that aligns with our values.”

The Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment.

Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors, celebrated the decision on social media and in a statement, highlighting efforts by Brown employees to push back against the compact, including a campus protest last week that called on administrators to reject the deal.

Both the national AAUP and Brown’s AAUP chapter have spoken out against the compact, and faculty at other universities along with students have also urged their leaders to reject the compact.

“By declining to compromise its core mission, Brown University has affirmed that no amount of federal inducement is worth surrendering the freedom to question, explore, and dissent,” Wolfson said in the statement. “In rejecting the Compact, Brown stands as a bulwark for higher education’s sacred commitment to academic freedom and institutional self-governance.”

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October 15, 2025
The Meta-Lessons of College (opinion)
What we learn in school comes in part, and perhaps the smaller part, through the manifest curriculum. We first learn skills—how to read and write and do arithmetic—and then we begin the long process of learning subject matter. This is what school is intended to impart to us. We are taught, in all manner of visible ways, how to do things and what we ought to know.

From the start, we learn other things as well: how to follow rules, how organizational hierarchies work and how we can be held accountable for misbehavior. We learn, too, what matters to other members of our tribe—individual achievement, success in competition—and what makes some people more important than others. These are elements of the hidden curriculum, or what might be called the meta-lessons of school.

By the time students get to college, they have already absorbed many such lessons, or they wouldn’t be here at all. But college offers a new set of meta-lessons. These are lessons about knowledge itself: how to assess it, how to identify its varieties, how it’s created. To miss out on these lessons, as can happen, is to miss out on what is most valuable about a college education.

The meta-lessons of college come with political implications. As political scientists and others have shown, there is a diploma divide in this country. On one side is the largest and most loyal group of Trump supporters: whites without a college degree. On the other side are those with bachelor’s or advanced degrees, who tend to vote Democratic. Clearly, there is something about a college education that makes a difference in political behavior.

Some analysts have argued that the divide reflects a feeling on the part of non-college-educated whites of being left behind in a high-tech economy. These feelings of disappointment and failure in turn make this group receptive to racist dog whistles—DEI policies are giving undeserving minorities unfair advantages!—used by right-wing politicians. Others have argued that the divide reflects an indoctrination into liberalism that students experience in college.

Analyses of the diploma divide have been going on for nearly a decade, since soon after Trump’s first election in 2016. Sorting out this body of work would require a separate essay. Here I am proposing only that the divide owes in part to the meta-lessons of college, in that these lessons should, in theory, make people less susceptible to political hucksterism, emotionally manipulative rhetoric and the embrace of simple nostrums as solutions to complex social problems.

And so it seems worthwhile for pedagogical and civic reasons to put the meta-lessons of college on the table. I identify seven that strike me as crucial. No doubt others’ lists will vary, as will ideas about how much these lessons matter. Yet it seems to me that these lessons, if taken to heart and applied, are what enable college graduates to sort sense from nonsense, fact from fiction and rational argument from demagoguery. Here, then, are the lessons.
1. Empirical claims are distinct from moral claims. To say, for example, that the death penalty deters capital crimes is to make an empirical claim. It isn’t a matter of opinion. With the right data, we can determine whether this claim is true or not (it’s not). To say the death penalty is wrong is to make a moral claim that must be addressed philosophically. Students who learn how to make this fundamental distinction are less likely to be distracted by philosophical apples when empirical oranges are the issue. Whether revenge feels like justice, they will understand, has no bearing on its practical consequences.
2. Evidence must be weighed. Arguments gain credence when supported by evidence, especially when it comes to empirical matters. But the importance of assessing the quantity and quality of supporting evidence is less widely appreciated. To the extent that college students learn how to do this—and acquire the inclination to do it even when an argument or analysis is emotionally appealing—they are less likely to be misled by anecdotes, atypical examples or cherry-picked studies that employ weak methods.
1. Errors often hide in assumptions. An argument can be persuasive because it sounds good and appears to be backed by evidence. Yet it can still be wrong because it starts from false premises. A key meta-lesson in this regard is that it is important to examine the foundations of an argument for logical or empirical cracks that make it unsound. To always ask, “What does this argument take for granted that might be wrong?” is a valuable habit of mind, a habit nurtured in college classrooms where students are taught, likely at the cost of some discomfort, to interrogate their own beliefs.
2. Logic matters. Poets might want to express the contradictory multitudes they contain, but those who purport to offer serious political analysis must respect logic, the absence of which ought to be discrediting. If your theory of social attraction says birds of a feather flock together, except when opposites attract, you had better find a higher-order principle that reconciles the contradiction or admit that you’re just making stuff up. The meta-lesson that logic matters, again learned through disciplined skepticism, provides at least partial protection against toxic nonsense.
3. Truth can be elusive, but it is not an illusion. Truth has taken a beating in recent decades under the influence of postmodernist social theories. Even so, it remains possible, unless we abandon the idea of evidence altogether, to have confidence that some empirical claims are true, in the ordinary sense of the term. Students learn this in their subject-matter courses; they learn that research can turn up real facts, that some empirical claims warrant more confidence than others and that some claims are demonstrably wrong. This meta-lesson can help ward off the nihilism—the paralyzing feeling that it is impossible to know what to believe—that often arises in the face of a blizzard of lies.
1. Expertise is real. In college, students encounter people who have spent years studying, and possibly creating new knowledge about, some aspect of the natural or social world. These people—scientists, scholars—know more about their subject-matter areas than just about anyone else. The meta-lesson, hopefully one that sticks, is that hard-won expertise exists, and while experts might not always be right, they are more reliable sources of analysis than glib pundits and unctuous politicians.
2. A slogan is not an analysis. Slogans that are useful as rallying cries often deliver no real understanding. “Defund the police” is as useful a guide to crime prevention as “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people” is to addressing the problem of gun violence. Other examples abound. The important meta-lesson is that a useful, sense-making analysis of a complex problem is likely to be complex in itself—and it would be wise, as college students ought to learn, not to forsake complexity in favor of a catchy sound bite.
The suggestion that these meta-lessons inoculate college graduates against irrationality and unreason stumbles against the fact that college graduates can still succumb to these maladies. It’s hard to know whether this occurs because the lessons were not learned, or if circumstances make it expedient to forget them. I suspect that when well-educated people—the JD Vances and Josh Hawleys of the world—appear not to have learned these lessons, what we’re seeing is a cynical performance in the service of self-interest. The lessons were indeed learned, I further suspect, but are applied perversely, as when the physician becomes a skilled poisoner.

Nonetheless, the diploma divide is real; a college education, on average, all else being equal, does seem to make people more resistant to misinformation, comforting myths, evidence-free claims about the world, irrational emotional appeals, illogical arguments and outright lies. This is as it should be; it is higher education having the effects it ought to have, effects that can impede authoritarianism. To be sure, college is not the only place where this kind of critical acumen is acquirable. College is just the place best organized to cultivate it.

In the end, the issue is not the diploma divide. For educators, the issue should be how to do a better job of transmitting the meta-lessons of college, presuming a shared belief in the value of these lessons for the intellectual and civic benefits they can yield. Spotlighting these elements of the “hidden curriculum” of course means they are not hidden at all, and so when critics insist that our job is to teach students how to think, we can say, “Yes, look here: That is exactly what we’re doing.”

Michael Schwalbe is professor emeritus of sociology at North Carolina State University.
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October 15, 2025
Supporting Transfer Student Success Through Data

Transfer students often experience a range of challenges transitioning from a community college to a four-year institution, including credit loss and feeling like they don’t belong on campus.

At the University of California, Santa Barbara, 30 percent of incoming students are transfers. More than 90 percent of those transfers come from California community colleges and aspire to complete their degree in two years.

While many have achieved that goal, they often lacked time to explore campus offerings or felt pressured to complete their degree on an expedited timeline, according to institutional data.

“Students feel pressure to complete in two years for financial reasons and because that is the expectation they receive regarding four-year graduation,” said Linda Adler-Kassner, associate vice chancellor of teaching and learning. Transfer students said they don’t want to “give up” part of their two years on campus to study away, she said.

Institutional data also revealed that their academic exploration opportunities were limited, with fewer transfers participating in research or student groups, which are identified as high-impact practices.

As a result, the university created a new initiative to improve transfer student awareness of on-campus opportunities.

Getting data: UCSB’s institutional research planning and assessment division conducts an annual new student survey, which collects information on students’ demographic details, academic progress and outside participation or responsibilities. The fall 2024 survey revealed that 26 percent of transfers work for pay more than 20 hours per week; an additional 40 percent work between 10 and 20 hours per week. Forty-four percent of respondents indicated they do not participate in clubs or student groups.

In 2024, the Office of Teaching and Learning conducted a transfer student climate study to “identify specific areas where the transfer student experience could be more effectively supported,” Adler-Kassner said. The OTL at UCSB houses six units focused on advancing equity and effectively supporting learners.

The study found that while transfers felt welcomed at UCSB, few were engaging in high-impact practices and many had little space in their schedules for academic exploration, “which leads them to feel stress as they work on a quick graduation timeline,” Adler-Kassner said.

Put into practice: Based on the results, OTL launched various initiatives to make campus stakeholders aware of transfer student needs and create effective interventions to support their success.

Among the first was the Transfer Connection Project, which surveys incoming transfer students to identify their interests. OTL team members use that data to match students’ interests with campus resources and generate a personalized letter that outlines where the student can get plugged in on campus. In fall 2025, 558 students received a personal resource guide.

The data also showed that a majority—more than 60 percent—of transfers sought to enroll in four major programs: communications, economics, psychological and brain sciences, and statistics and data science.

In turn, OTL leaders developed training support for faculty and teaching assistants working in these majors to implement transfer-focused pedagogies. Staff also facilitate meet-and-greet events for transfers to meet department faculty.

This work builds on the First Generation and Transfer Scholars Welcome, which UCSB has hosted since 2017. The welcome event includes workshops, a research opportunity fair and facilitated networking to get students engaged early.

The approach is unique because it is broken into various modules that, when combined, create a holistic approach to student support, Adler-Kassner said.

Gauging impact: Early data shows the interventions have improved student success.

Since beginning this work, UCSB transfer retention has grown from 87 percent in 2020 to 94 percent in 2023. Similarly, graduation rates increased 10 percentage points from 2020 to 2024. Adler-Kassner noted that while this data may be correlated with the interventions, it does not necessarily demonstrate causation.

In addition, the Transfer Student Center reaches about 40 percent of the transfer student population each year, and institutional data shows that those who engage with the center have a four-percentage-point higher retention rate and two-point higher graduation rate than those who don’t.

Do you have an intervention that might help others promote student success? Tell us about it.

This article has been updated to correct the share of incoming students that are transfers at UCSB.

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October 15, 2025
NACIQI Meeting Delayed by Government Shutdown

The Department of Education has delayed the semiannual convening of its accreditation advisory committee for the second time this year, according to an email sent to committee members and obtained by Inside Higher Ed.

The meeting of the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, originally slated to take place in July, had already been pushed back to Oct. 21. Now, as a result of the government shutdown, it’s been rescheduled for Dec. 16.

“As many of you know, most department staff, including those supporting NACIQI, have been furloughed and the Department has suspended operations except for specific excepted activities,” Jeffrey Andrade, deputy assistant secretary for policy, planning and innovation, wrote in the email. “The Department will be publishing a notice in the Federal Register shortly announcing this change of meeting date.”

Inside Higher Ed reached out to the department for direct comment on the delay but did not get a response prior to publication.

The meeting was slated to include Under Secretary Nicholas Kent’s first comments on accreditation since he took office, as well as compliance reports from five different accreditors. Three of those agencies are institutional: the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, the New England Commission of Higher Education, and the Western Association of Schools and Colleges Senior College and University Commission. The other two are programmatic: the Accreditation Commission for Midwifery Education and the Commission on Accreditation in Physical Therapy.

And while it wasn’t formally listed on the committee’s agenda, this meeting also likely would have served as the unveiling of six new Trump-appointed committee members.

When department officials announced the first delay in July, observers noted that by the time the rescheduled meeting took place, the terms of six of the committee’s 18 members would be over. With key decisions about the future of higher education accreditation looming, many policy experts took this as a sign that the Trump administration was trying to stack the panel in its favor.

Now, the new appointees will likely go unnamed for another two months, and the compliance reports will remain unchecked until the next meeting. And though neither of these agenda items is quite as high-stakes as a recognition review—the process by which independent accrediting agencies are granted the power to gate-keep federal student aid—one expert feared it could lead to a backlog in future evaluations.

“While [the accreditation agencies] are coming up before NACIQI on this compliance report, they are also likely in the process of having their regular recognition reviewed again,” said Antoinette Flores, the director of higher education accountability and quality at New America, a left-leaning think tank. “So it adds to the burden and could lead to compounding issues.”

Flores, who served in the same role as Andrade during the Biden administration, is worried that the delay could not only slow down future reviews but also hamper current ones, putting certain agencies and the institutions they serve at risk. When an agency is placed under compliance review, it has 12 months to fix the problem and prove it is meeting the committee’s criteria, she explained. So, if it hasn’t proven it’s meeting those criteria within that period, technically the agency’s authorization could be at stake.

Flores said she’s particularly worried for Middle States Commission and the New England Commission, because they each received letters from the Trump administration earlier this year pressuring them to take action against member institutions’ alleged noncompliance with civil rights laws. Neither accreditor has done so, and they won’t be able to present their compliance reports before the 12-month deadline.

“So is the agency in compliance? Is its recognition going to continue? … That’s kind of the underlying question,” Flores said.

Others are far less concerned.

Kyle Beltramini, a policy research fellow at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a right-leaning policy organization, said that to his knowledge there’s never been a time when NACIQI failed to meet and review an agency’s compliance or recognition before the deadline.

So while it remains unclear what would happen if the meeting never took place or the agencies were unable to present their compliance reports before deadline, Beltramini believes that any consequences of the delay will be minimal.

“I don’t think what we’re going to see is the nuclear option of an accreditor losing their authorization,” he said. “It’s partially because of the fact that even if that’s what the administration wanted to do—which I don’t think that that’s the case—they just don’t have the full majority on the committee.” (Although, technically, the under secretary and secretary of education do not have to follow the committee’s guidance.)

Either way, if and when the meeting occurs, Beltramini anticipates that it will set the tone for how the Trump administration plans to approach accreditation moving forward.

“There is a broad and bipartisan agreement that there needs to be change to the system, and what you’re going to see, more and more often, is NACIQI attempting to hold the accreditors accountable by asking them questions and getting them on the record in ways that may make them uncomfortable,” he said.

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October 14, 2025
4 Ways to Better Grade Team Projects (opinion)
Some professors resist using teamwork in their classes because they mistakenly believe that team projects are too difficult to grade. One issue is that, as educators, we often only evaluate the team presentation, project or paper with a grade based on how well the team has met our learning objectives.

However, a single project evaluation at the end allows some members to potentially free ride on harder-working teammates, or enables one aggressive or dominating member to take over the entire project to ensure the team gets an A. If we simply grade team projects at the end, it is too late for our student teams to adapt or adjust and learn how to be better at working in teams, a key skill that employers look for in our graduates.

The key to effectively grading teamwork is to set up the grading process systematically at the start of the project. In this article, we offer four ways that you can grade team projects effectively to meet your learning objectives and help students become better team members.
1. Share your grading rubric at the start of the assignment. Students need to know at the outset of the team project how they will be graded. Many good students tell us they hate team projects because they know they will have to deal with “social loafers” who rely on one or two others to do the work. However, by sharing a rubric that highlights the expectations for each team member and how you will be combining individual and team grading, you can help students make more intentional decisions regarding how they distribute the assignment’s requirements. We not only distribute the rubric at the start of the project, but we post it on our course management system and frequently review it with the class so our expectations are clear.
2. Include peer evaluation as a part of the evaluation process. Students are sometimes asked to rate their fellow team members, but they are seldom taught how to do it well. As a result, they tend to only give positive feedback to avoid conflict or hurting another student’s feelings. Teaching peer feedback takes only a little class time, as few as 15 minutes. It starts with clarifying your expectations about how you will use peer feedback. You can use or create a form that allows students to provide quantitative and qualitative feedback, and then you should use this same form multiple times during the project. The first time you collect peer feedback should be a low-stakes or practice situation early during the project so that students have a psychologically safe opportunity to learn how to use it. Your students should begin with self-evaluation and then evaluate their peers.
  Next, you need to summarize the peer feedback and give results to individual students so they know how they are doing. Finally, have groups reflect on how well the group is doing without naming or shaming others. There are times when students will have to give feedback to a person who is free riding or loafing. When they do, make sure they know to first ask that person for permission before they give feedback, then praise in public, and finally provide any negative feedback in private. Finally, we have a YouTube video that instructors can show during class to help students learn about how to give and receive feedback.
1. Incorporate ongoing feedback from the instructor. We know of faculty who give out a team assignment and never mention it again until the week before the project is due. This is setting up the student teams for failure. Faculty need to check in frequently with their teams to be sure they are making progress on their work and any questions or concerns are answered. Taking just five minutes at the end of class for teams to meet can pay great dividends in a better project product. This instructor feedback can include a way to hold individual team members accountable for the work they are doing. For example, we have set up a separate Google folder for each team with instructor access. Each team member needed to post their contributions to the team project weekly. In this way, we could keep an eye on any social loafers, and provide feedback to those who were working independently instead of with the team. Instructors can also schedule a brief time to sit in on team meetings so that they get a more comprehensive update about the project and who is working toward each of the outcomes.
2. Carefully consider the weight you give to each phase of the project. It is essential to incorporate peer assessments and the instructor evaluation about how well the project met the learning objectives into any final grade; both are important. However, the weight of these different evaluations tells students the importance of each. More weight on the individual peer assessments stresses the individual work, while more weight on the instructor grade of the project shows the team efforts are more important. At a minimum, use the 80/20 rule: At least 20 percent of the student’s grade should be based on each.
  Also, be sure to check the peer evaluations to verify that they result from real behaviors rather than personal biases. We accomplish this by looking for consistency across the times of evaluation, across team members and between peer and self-evaluations. In most cases, we find that the evaluations show consistency in all three areas (though self-evaluations are often inflated). In the rare cases when they don’t align, we always refer to supporting documentation, such as agendas, meeting minutes and information that resulted from our ongoing check-ins to help make sense of the reasons underlying any inconsistencies.
Grading a team project may seem like a daunting challenge, but grading is by no means a reason to avoid giving students the experience of working with a team. By following these four principles for evaluating teamwork, instructors can account for the team’s achievement of the learning objectives as well as provide students with valuable teamwork experiences that they can take to future classes, internships, co-ops and employment.

Lauren Vicker is a communications professor emeritus, and Tim Franz is a professor of psychology, both at St. John Fisher University. They are the authors of Making Team Projects Work: A College Instructor’s Guide to Successful Student Groupwork (Taylor & Francis, 2024).
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October 14, 2025
IVF and the Leadership Gap for Women (opinion)
After a 20-year career in higher education, including roles as a chief academic officer and faculty member, I left to have a child. I was one step away from a presidency on the higher ed career ladder, and in fact I had written my dissertation on what gets in the way of women moving into college presidencies. Yet it was not until I finally met my life partner and had the opportunity, in my 40s, to start a family that I understood how fully the higher ed career deck is still stacked against those seeking to have children, and especially those seeking to have children in nontraditional ways—largely women, LGBTQIA+ folks and anyone facing a difficult pregnancy, in vitro fertilization, adoption or fostering process.

In the United States, 2.6 percent of all births—95,860 babies in 2023—result from IVF, a time-consuming, costly and physically and emotionally challenging process. The percentage for women academics may be even higher, given their relatively high education levels, socioeconomic status and pressure to delay childbearing for academic careers. According to Pew, 56 percent of people with graduate degrees have gone through or know someone who has undergone IVF or other assisted reproduction.

The literature has well documented how the academy has been created by men and is designed to fit their needs and their bodies. Women who have sought professorships or academic leadership positions have, historically, needed to conform to rules written for men’s life cycles. Articles such as Carmen Armenti’s classic “May Babies and Posttenure Babies” speak to women’s attempts to give birth at the end of the academic year and after earning tenure. The tenure clock illustrates this issue well—the usual seven years in which a newly hired assistant professor has time to sufficiently publish and obtain tenure largely coincide with women’s most fertile years. Many forward-thinking institutions such as the University of California system have been addressing this issue by stopping the tenure clock for childbirth and related family formation. It is a step in the right direction that all colleges and universities should consider.

But what happens when the usual challenges of pregnancy and childbirth are compounded by infertility, miscarriage and the sometimes years-long process of IVF?

I met my husband during the pandemic, and we married the next year. Both of us in our 40s and having always wanted a child but neither having met the right partner, we quickly found ourselves going down the IVF route. At the time, I had completed a one-year executive interim role and was on the job hunt and doing part-time remote teaching, and this situation proved fortuitous.

I had no idea how grueling the IVF process would be—multiple rounds of more than a month at a time of hormone pills; nightly self-administered injections for weeks on end; weekly doctor visits, blood draws and ultrasounds—and at the end of each round, a day surgery under anesthesia to retrieve eggs. Several iterations of this, followed by more of a similar process to prepare the body for embryo transfer. The journey is physically and emotionally exhausting, time-consuming, and logistically challenging. It can also be incredibly expensive, with the medications and surgeries costing into the tens of thousands for those whose health insurance does not cover it.

My husband and I had a number of factors helping us on this journey. We had built a supportive network of family and friends. We were fortunate that I was less sick than many women are on these medications. Finally, we were privileged to have insurance (through my husband’s job, which is not in higher ed) that paid for the majority of our treatments. Due to working part-time and remotely, I had the flexibility I needed to take naps, wear comfortable clothes that fit my bloated belly without having to reveal my family-forming status to anyone at work and generally have the privacy I needed during a challenging time.

Other women who work full-time in-person during this process navigate a daunting gauntlet of frequent doctor appointments, exhaustion and sickness at work, while trying to hide a body that can look pregnant before it is. Not to mention that few people fully understand the process, and telling a little can lead you down an uncomfortable path of revealing a lot. Because everything is timed to the menstrual cycle, seemingly innocent questions inevitably lead to awkward conversations. It’s therefore hard to share what you’re going through or ask for support at work at the time you need it most.

And then there are the chemical pregnancies and miscarriages that can happen, and did for us. Grieving for both parents is exacerbated by the isolation and privacy of the whole process. Some companies and higher ed institutions, such as Tufts University in Massachusetts, now offer bereavement leave for miscarriage, something that happens in 10 to 20 percent of pregnancies but is still rarely talked about. All institutions throughout higher ed should offer similar leave.

During this journey, I was also interviewing for full-time jobs, and I was hired into a senior leadership position. My husband and I were taking a break from the exhausting process at that point and the opportunity was once-in-a-lifetime, and so we picked up and moved two states away. My husband’s job had gone remote, giving us the flexibility we needed for my career. We wagered that if I stayed in a part-time role too much longer, it would be increasingly difficult to climb back into a full-time position. The stigma around a résumé gap is alive and well in higher education, with little understanding that this gap often reflects people’s (frequently women’s) time away for family and other care-taking needs, rather than their work experience or abilities. Yet, even when I’ve tried to explain to search committees that I’ve led how discriminatory it can be to overly focus on résumé gaps, faculty and staff often have looked askance at me. This is something else that needs to change.

My husband and I waited almost a year before doing our next embryo transfer. I settled into the job, we settled into our home, we finally had a post-COVID celebration of our marriage. And then I was pregnant! Sadly, I miscarried again toward the end of my first trimester. I powered through at work, serving as a chief academic officer and supervising 200 people while trying to juggle meds, doctor’s appointments, exhaustion and then loss. I read students’ names at a stadium-sized graduation ceremony soon after a miscarriage.

It became clear to me over the following months that the stress and lack of flexibility of a senior role would not lend itself to a last chance at a healthy pregnancy. It was a difficult decision to leave, but also one that I had no doubts about once made. Within weeks we were pregnant again, this time successfully so with a beautiful baby girl who is now a year old. It was not an easy pregnancy, and our daughter likely would not be here had I stayed in my role and not been able to rest as much as I did.

Since her birth, I have launched a higher ed editing and consulting business, resumed teaching part-time, and otherwise adjusted to life as a new mother. For me, leaving higher ed senior leadership was a deliberate choice. I needed more flexibility and control over my own time to be able to care for myself and my child properly. I may or may not return someday to that leadership pathway, and that door may or may not be open to me if I attempt to do so. I’ve learned, however, that to address the question my dissertation asked—Why don’t we have more women in presidencies?—we need to better understand and respond to the many women (and many men and nonbinary folks) who find themselves going through similar family-formation challenges across higher education.
- First, we need to offer more flexibility—remote work, flexible hours, the option for extended parental leaves for new parents and foster parents.
- Second, we need to consider not only fully paid leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act for childbirth and parental bonding, but also paid medical benefits for IVF as well as similar support for adoption and fostering.
- Third, we need to formalize bereavement leave for miscarriage.
- Fourth, we need to destigmatize the career gap, so that those who leave would have the opportunity to return.
- Fifth, we need to fairly compensate those who assume the work of colleagues who take FMLA for any care-taking reason.
- Lastly, we need to change the higher ed culture to one that understands and supports family formation in all its iterations, not just traditional pregnancy with traditional medical leaves.
I recognize my privilege in being able to leave my job—privilege that enabled me to have a child when so many before me without the same economic resources have not been able to. My situation may seem like an outlier to those who are in their 20s or early 30s or who have had relatively easy and healthy pregnancies. But I’m sure that my story rings true for those who have delayed childbearing for their academic careers and then faced the rigors of IVF, or for people of any age who have faced infertility or more difficult pregnancies. For those LGBTQIA+ and other folks who go through the egg/sperm donation process and IVF and surrogacy. For couples and singles who may adopt or foster and face needs for legal meetings and other child-related time off that institutions do not always provide.

Higher ed has taught me so much about antiracism, feminism, LGBTQIA+ rights and other inclusive practices. However, higher ed writ large doesn’t offer the kinds of paid leave and flexibility needed for all employees to succeed at both parenting and work.

Higher ed is losing women with executive leadership potential. The majority of undergraduate and graduate students are women. Yet only 37 percent of full-time faculty are women. Only 33 percent of college presidents are women. Women melt away for a host of reasons. But this former chief academic officer, one step away from a presidency on the career ladder, left the executive pathway because it was the only way I could do so and have a healthy pregnancy and a healthy child.

As long as higher ed makes having a child versus having an academic career a zero-sum choice for many women, it shouldn’t be a surprise that we still have so few women in senior leadership. When the answer becomes “yes, have both” at institutions across the board is when we might start to see the numbers change.
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October 14, 2025