A federal judge rejected an effort to overturn the gainful-employment rule, which was put in place during the Biden administration.
In an opinion issued Thursday, Judge Reed O’Connor from the Northern District of Texas sided with the Education Department on every point. One of the plaintiffs, a trade association representing cosmetology schools, had argued in its lawsuit that the regulations jeopardized the “very existence” of cosmetology schools and used flawed measures to determine whether graduates of career education programs are gainfully employed.
Under the rules, for-profit and nondegree programs have to prove that their graduates can afford their loan payments and earn more than a high school graduate. Those that fail the tests in two consecutive years could lose access to federal financial aid. The regulations also included new reporting requirements for all colleges under the financial value transparency framework.
The lawsuit started under the Biden administration, and Trump officials opted to defend the regulations in court and urged the judge to keep the rules in place.
Similar gainful-employment rules survived a legal challenge in 2014 but were ultimately scrapped by the first Trump administration. However, in recent years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have become more interested in finding ways to hold colleges accountable for their students’ career outcomes. Under legislation that Congress passed this summer, most college programs will have to pass a similar earnings test. How the Education Department carries out that test will be subject to a rule-making process set to kick off later this year.
Jason Altmire, president and chief executive officer of Career Education Colleges and Universities, which represents the for-profit sector and opposed the Biden rule, said in a statement that he looks forward to revisiting the issue during the rule-making process.
“We are confident the Biden Gainful Employment Rule will be revised to incorporate a fairer accountability measure that will apply equally to all schools, ensuring all students can benefit,” he said. “We look forward to a full consideration of these issues during the months ahead.”
Dan Zibel, vice president of the legal advocacy group Student Defense, applauded the court ruling in a statement.
“Higher education is supposed to offer students a path to a better life, not a debt-filled dead end,” he said. “The 2023 Gainful Employment Rule reflects a common-sense policy to ensure that students are not wasting time and money on career programs that provide little value.”
One of the chief pleasures of traveling to schools and campuses to talk about More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI and my approaches to how we should approach the teaching of writing is getting the chance to see what other places are doing with the challenge of working in a world of generative AI technology.
My travels so far this semester have been very encouraging. It seems clear that we are in a new phase of reasoned consideration following on an earlier period of worry and uncertainty. I never saw outright panic, but there was a whiff of doom in the air.
There may be a selection bias in terms of the institutions that would invite someone like me to come work with them, but there is a clear impulse to figure out how to move forward according to institutional values, rather than being stuck in a defensive posture.
I want to share some impressions of what I think is working well at the institutions that are moving forward, so others may consider how they might want to do this work on their own campuses.
Going on Offense by Living Your Values
One clear commonality for successfully addressing the current challenges is by identifying the core institutional values and then making them central to the ongoing discussions about how instruction and institutional operations must evolve.
As one example, at my recent visit to Iona University, I was introduced to their framework of agency, expression and responsibility.
“Agency” is one of my favorite words when talking about learning, period, and in this case it means communicating to students that it is ultimately the students themselves who must choose the path of their own educations, including the use of AI technology. I’ve recently been speaking more and more about AI in education as a demand-side issue, where students need to see the pitfalls of outsourcing their learning. Agency puts the responsibility where it belongs: on students themselves.
Expression represents a belief that the ultimate goal of one’s education is to develop our unique voice as part of the larger world in which we work and live. Writing isn’t just producing text but using the tools of expression—including text—to convey our points of view to the world. Where LLMs use substitutes for or obscure our personal expression, they should be avoided.
Responsibility is related to agency in the “with great power comes great responsibility” sense. Students are encouraged to consider the practical and ethical dimensions of using the technology.
At other stops I’ve seen similar orientations, though often with wrinkles unique to local contexts. One common value is rather than retreating to assessments that can be monitored in order to prevent cheating, the goal is to figure out how to give life to the kinds of educational experiences we know to be meaningful to learning.
If you start with the values, things like policy can be evaluated against something meaningful and enduring. The conversations become more productive because everyone is working from a shared base.
I know this can be done, because I’ve been visiting institutions working on this problem for more than 18 months, and the progress is real.
Collective Spirit and Collaborative Action
Another common sign of progress is institutional leadership that communicates a desire to take a collective approach to tackle the issues and then puts specific, tangible resources behind this call to make collaborative action more possible and effective.
Several institutions I’ve visited have carved out spots for some version of AI faculty fellows, where these fellows are given freedom to explore the technology and its specific implications to their disciplines, before coming back to a group and institutional setting where this learning is shared.
To work, these must be more than groups tasked to figure out how to integrate AI technology into the university. I have not visited any institution that has done this—they are unlikely to invite someone like me—but I have been corresponding with people whose institutions are doing this who are looking for advice, and it seems like a sure route to a divided institution.
At my Iona visit, they took this approach to the next level by putting on a one-day conference and inviting community educators from all walks to hear not just yours truly, but also the AI fellows and other faculty discuss a variety of issues.
These conferences don’t solve every problem in a day, but simply demonstrating to the broader public that you’re working the problem is deeply encouraging.
Room and Respect for Difference
One of my favorite parts of my visits is the chance to talk with the faculty on a campus who have been wrestling with the same challenges I’m spending my time on. At the base level, we share the same values when it comes to what learning looks like and the importance of things like agency and transparency to achieving those things.
But when it comes to the application and use of generative AI technology to achieve these outcomes, there are often significant differences. I share my perspective, they share theirs, and while I don’t think we necessarily change each other’s minds, a great appreciation for a different perspective is achieved.
It’s a model of what I always based my courses in, the academic conversation, where the goal of writing and speaking is to gradually increase the amount of illumination on the subject at hand. We’re having a discussion, not a “debate.”
I am far more skeptical and circumspect about the utility of generative AI when it comes to teaching and learning than many. I often point out that anyone who is using the technology productively today established a whole host of capacities (or what I call a “practice”) in the absence of this technology, so it stands to reason that we should still be educated primarily without interacting with or using the technology.
But I’ve also seen tangible demonstrations of integrating the capacities of generative AI tools in ways that seem to genuinely open potential new avenues. These people need to keep experimenting, just as those of us who want to find ways to do our work in the absence of AI should be empowered to do so.
Do More Than ‘Doing School’
Maybe this belongs as part of the first point of “going on offense,” but the successes I’ve seen have come from a willingness to fundamentally question the system of schooling that has resulted in students primarily viewing their educations through a transactional lens.
In many cases, generative AI outputs satisfy the transaction of school in ways that mean students learn literally nothing. We’ve all read the viral articles about students using AI for everything they do.
But I can report from my visits to many different institutions and talking to people working at many more that this is not universally true. Many students are eager to engage in activities that help them learn. It then becomes the responsibility of schools and instructors to give students something worth doing.
Retreating to analog forms because they can be policed is a missed opportunity to rethink and redo things we know were not working particularly well.
There is not endpoint to this rethinking. Frankly, I find this energizing, and it’s clear lots of others do, too. This energy is something we can use to help students.
The new $100,000 fee for H-1B visas could prove to be the final straw for Indian students’ plans to study in the U.S., with other destinations set to benefit as a result.
The move by the Trump administration—the latest in a long list of restrictions affecting international students—is set to impact Indians the most, given they account for more than 70 percent of H-1B recipients.
Many students enroll in courses with a view to progressing on to the visa, working in industries such as Silicon Valley.
“The sentiment among prospective … students is pretty dismal after this announcement,” said Sonya Singh, founder of SIEC, an education consultancy.
“The queries and applications for U.S. universities have seen a significant drop, and students are considering alternatives. Destinations such as the U.K., Germany and Australia are being explored, and Canada is proposing a dedicated work permit for current and potential U.S. H-1B holders. All these initiatives and policy changes are sure to bring about a massive shift in demand for the U.S. as a destination.”
Sagar Bahadur, executive director for Asia at international education consultancy Acumen, said the debate has created “a lot of talk, anxiety and perception-building” among prospective students.
He noted that students are increasingly deferring study plans, exploring alternative destinations or considering “transnational pathways” that allow them to start degrees elsewhere before moving to the U.S. if conditions improve.
With uncertain job prospects and shifting policies, she argued, parents may no longer be willing to pay high tuition fees.
“Countries like Germany, Canada, Australia, U.K., Singapore and Malaysia may gain traction due to stable policies, work opportunities and affordability,” Mittal said, highlighting Germany’s free or low-cost tuition and work allowances as a growing draw for Indian students.
She also warned of wider repercussions for international collaboration. “This decision may impact partnerships with U.S. institutions as Indian universities explore alternatives and strengthen ties with European, Canadian or Australian institutions. STEM and health-care sectors may be particularly affected due to high H-1B dependency.”
Early signs of a shift are already emerging. Narender Thakur of the University of Delhi noted declining interest in short U.S. master’s courses in computing and engineering, fields closely tied to H-1B pathways.
He suggested that students may increasingly consider other global destinations or branch campuses in India, while research partnerships with U.S. institutions could slow. Opportunities in entrepreneurship and remote work may also appeal to students deterred from U.S. employment.
Andrew Morran, head of politics and international relations at London Metropolitan University, said the policy would “particularly hit Indian students, who last year made up 71 percent of international student applications, according to U.S. government statistics.”
He described the move as part of a broader trend restricting access to U.S. universities and warned it could make study in the U.S. “even more the preserve of the elite and the wealthy” while undermining classroom diversity.
“It will also impact the student experience, as diversity is undermined and the shared experience of a global classroom is weakened further,” Morran said. Universities might seek students elsewhere, he added, but the hostile political climate and attacks on immigration could blunt recruitment.
“Talent gaps cannot be filled overnight. Meanwhile, the rest of the world will take every opportunity it has to steal these students,” he said.
We’ve seen before how the University of Southampton was founded by a bequest from Henry Robinson Hartley. Today we’re going to look at a college which grew out of the university, and then became part of another one.
Hartley died in 1850, but his bequest was not finally clear of the courts until 1858, and the town could then think how to create the institution he had suggested. The advice of the government was sought, and in April 1859 Professor Lyon Playfair – secretary to the Department of Science – proposed that the new institution should include a school of trade and navigation. His argument was reported in the Hampshire Advertiser on 15 May 1858:
Did the council listen to this advice? They did not. And so the Hartley Institute – the nascent University of Southampton – did not have a school of navigation.
Or not yet anyway. In 1909 Captain Gilchrist opened the South of England Navigation School to prepare students for the Board of Trade’s maritime examinations. And in 1932, the school – now known as Gilchrist’s Navigation School – was incorporated into University College Southampton as the Department of Nautical Training. At a celebratory luncheon with the Southampton Master Mariners’ Club, the university college principal Kenneth Vickers said that “it was preposterous to think that a university was going to teach a man his practical job when he got to it.”
The department taught the theoretical foundations of navigation and seamanship, enabling its students to progress to apprenticeships on merchant vessels and, in due course, to take the exams to become qualified second mates.
In the second world war the school continued to train sailors for the merchant marine, but also taught for the navies of the allied countries. It moved in 1942 to Warsash, a site further down the Solent, which was shared with a Royal Navy training site teaching the use of landing craft. (Fun fact: Royal Navy land bases are called HMS – HMS being His Majesty’s Ship. In this case the base was called HMS Tormentor.)
After the war HMS Tormentor was decommissioned, but its site and buildings were added to the school of navigation. And by the late 1950s new accommodation was built at the school, to replace the WW2 pre-fabs. And it is the design for this that you can see on the card.
In 1970 the school ceased to be part of the University of Southampton. My guess is that this was related to how technical education was funded: this would have been a move into local authority control. And in 1984 the school merged with the Southampton College of Technology, forming the Southampton Institute of Higher Education. And this in time became what is now Southampton Solent University, but more of that another time.
The school is now known as the Warsash Maritime Academy, and operates both from a city centre site and, I think, in part still from the waterside site at Warsash. There’s a fabulous site maintained by alumni which includes memories from former students – well worth a browse when you have a little time to spare.
The card was written and posted on Wednesday 18 May 1966. Very unusually, it is a typed message. A busy senior staff member, perhaps, who had access to secretarial support?
The department is largely closed due to the government shutdown. In the meantime, the Trump administration is using furloughed workers’ emails to make a political statement.
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Tierney L. Cross/Getty Images | nevodka/iStock/Getty Images
Wednesday morning, as the government shutdown began, chief officers at the Department of Education distributed a standard out-of-the-office statement to all furloughed staff members and instructed them to copy and paste it into their email. So that’s what they did.
But just hours later, those same nonpartisan staffers began to hear that the message they’d pasted into their email account was not the message being received by the public.
“On Wednesday evening, my supervisor reached out to me on my personal equipment and said, ‘You’re going to want to log in and change your out-of-office status,’” one department staffer told Inside Higher Ed on the condition of anonymity out of fear of losing her job.
When she followed her supervisor’s direction and logged in, the automatic message she saw was not the one she had saved earlier that morning.
Rather than the original note, which had said, “There is a temporary shutdown … due to a lapse in appropriations,” the new message said, “Unfortunately, Democrat Senators are blocking passage of [a bill] … which has led to a lapse in appropriations.”
This is one of the more than 10 emails Inside Higher Ed received as automatic responses including the same political message. Although Keast was appointed by Trump, most of the staffers we contacted were not.
The outgoing message had been changed internally without her consent. And this staffer was not alone. Inside Higher Ed emailed 10 separate Education Department staffers Thursday, all of whom had been placed on furlough, and each one bounced back with identical responses. One senior leader from the department, who also spoke anonymously, said that to his knowledge the politically charged message was set as the out-of-office notification for all furloughed employees.
(The Department of Education did not immediately provide comment. In fact, the emails sent to both deputy press secretary Ellen Keast and the general press team account were met with the same automatic response.)
The first staffer said that while she was caught off guard by the override at first, it made sense the more she thought about it. Similar messages blaming Democratic senators for the shutdown had already been put at the top of HUD.gov, the landing page for all things Department of Housing and Urban Development, and other federal websites.
As of Thursday evening, the HUD website noted, “The Radical Left in Congress shut down the government. HUD will use available resources to help Americans in need.”
Republicans control the White House, the House and the Senate. In the Senate, they need the votes of at least seven Democratic senators to reach the 60-vote threshold necessary to overcome a filibuster.
“I was really surprised, because we had gotten such explicit instructions on what to use for our out-of-office message,” the staffer said. But “when I saw that message from my supervisor, I assumed it had been changed to something more political than the original neutral one.”
She has already logged back in multiple times to change the automatic response back to the neutral language. But each time, within hours, the department has overridden her changes.
“It’s what [is being sent] to people who contact me, and they could reasonably misunderstand it as coming from me, and I don’t feel comfortable as a federal employee communicating a political message like that,” she said.
A second staffer told Inside Higher Ed that he has worked through multiple shutdowns prior but not experienced anything like this.
“It’s just wild to see your name attached to a message that you had nothing to do with,” he said. “It feels like a violation … You know that you don’t have any expectation of privacy when you’re working for the federal government. But it’s a different thing to say that you don’t have autonomy over your own words.”
The second staffer noted that in his view, not only did this seem to be a violation of his personal rights, but also a violation of federal law.
The Hatch Act, passed in 1939, was intended to ensure that nonpartisan federal workers who worked across administrations remained just that—nonpartisan. And according to documents from the Office of Special Counsel website, the Hatch Act “limits certain political activities of federal employees,” like using official authority for political purposes, soliciting political donations, wearing partisan political gear at work and posting or sharing partisan content on government systems.
“It’s crazy to see the law violated on your behalf,” the second staffer said.
None of the department employees Inside Higher Ed spoke with intended to file an individual lawsuit, nor had they heard anything from their union about a collective legal response. But one shared that Democracy Forward, a nonprofit legal organization that has sued the Trump administration several times this year, will be going to court over the matter as soon as Friday.
The Trump administration has asked nine universities to sign on to a proposed compact, mandating certain changes in exchange for preferential treatment on federal funding.
First reported by The Washington Post and confirmed, with additional details, by The Wall Street Journal, the proposal seeks an agreement with nine institutions that are being asked to commit to a 10-point memo referred to as the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.”
Among the various conditions, institutions are reportedly being asked to:
Ban consideration of race or sex in hiring and admissions processes
Freeze tuition for a five-year period
Limit international undergraduate enrollment to 15 percent of the student body
Commit to institutional neutrality
Require applicants to take standardized tests, such as the SAT or ACT
Clamp down on grade inflation
Ensure a “vibrant marketplace of ideas on campus”
Restrict employees from expressing political views on behalf of the institution
Shut down departments that “punish, belittle” or “spark violence against conservative ideas”
Anonymously poll students and employees on compact compliance and publish the results
Another requirement mandates that signatories “deploy their endowments to the public good,” such as by not charging tuition to students “pursuing hard science programs (with exceptions, as desired, for families of substantial means)” for universities with more than $2 million per undergraduate student in endowment assets. Universities would also be required to post more details about graduates’ earnings and refund tuition to those who drop out in their first semester.
After leveraging funding freezes and other tactics to pressure colleges to make changes, the compact reflects a different approach from the administration while still geared toward the same goal—remaking higher education in Trump’s image. May Mailman, a Trump adviser, hinted at the plan in a New York Times interview a week before the proposal emerged, saying it could be a way for universities to affirm they are “doing the right things.”
“The Trump administration does not want to be all Whac-a-Mole or all negative, but these are the principles that universities and the Trump administration and, frankly, private donors can ascribe to to say, ‘This makes a great university,’” she told the Times.
Institutions reportedly invited to join are: 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.
Those that agree will receive “multiple positive benefits,” including “substantial and meaningful federal grants,” according to a copy of the memo published by The Washington Examiner.
But failure to comply with the agreement would come with steep consequences. Noncompliant universities would “lose access to the benefits of this agreement” for a year. Subsequent violations would lead to a two-year punishment. And the federal government could claw back “all monies advanced by the U.S. government during the year of any violation.” Private donations would also be required to be returned, upon request.
The Department of Justice would be tasked to enforce the agreements.
Institutional Responses
Most universities did not respond to requests for comment from Inside Higher Ed. But Texas officials seem eager to sign on, sharing a statement indicating their enthusiasm for the compact.
University of Texas system Board of Regents chairman Kevin P. Eltife wrote in the statement that the flagship was “honored” to be among the institutions “selected by the Trump Administration for potential funding advantages” under the proposed compact, which it is currently reviewing.
“Higher education has been at a crossroads in recent years, and we have worked very closely with Governor [Greg] Abbott, Lt. Gov. [Dan] Patrick and Speaker [Dustin] Burrows to implement sweeping changes for the benefit of our students and to strengthen our our [sic] institutions to best serve the people of Texas,” Eltife wrote. “Today we welcome the new opportunity presented to us and we look forward to working with the Trump Administration on it.”
University of Virginia spokesperson Brian Coy told Inside Higher Ed by email that interim president Paul Mahoney “created a working group under the leadership of Executive Vice President and Provost Brie Gertler and Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer J.J. Davis to advise him” on UVA’s response to the letter but has not yet made a decision to sign or not.
USC simply said in a statement, “We are reviewing the Administration’s letter.”
Both the White House and the Department of Education initially responded to requests for comment with automatic replies because of the federal government shutdown, which began Wednesday. A press office official later responded only to confirm The Wall Street Journal’s reporting.
Outside Perspectives
News of the proposal prompted a flurry of criticism within academic circles.
American Association of University Professors president Todd Wolfson blasted the idea in a Thursday statement and called on governing boards to reject it.
“The Trump administration’s offer to give preferential treatment to colleges and universities that court government favor stinks of favoritism, patronage, and bribery in exchange for allegiance to a partisan ideological agenda. This compact is akin to a loyalty oath. Adherence by university administrations would usher in a new era of thought policing in American higher education,” Wolfson wrote.
The executive committee of Penn’s AAUP chapter also opposed the proposal.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression also criticized it in a post on X, writing that “the compact includes troubling language” specifically pointing to the call to eliminate academic departments critical of conservative ideas, which it cast as undermining free speech.
“A government that can reward colleges and universities for speech it favors today can punish them for speech it dislikes tomorrow. That’s not reform. That’s government-funded orthodoxy,” FIRE officials wrote.
Trinity Washington University president Pat McGuire called the proposal “political extortion.”
Brendan Cantwell, a higher education professor at Michigan State University, told Inside Higher Ed there are multiple issues with the proposal, including vague language about political speech that could allow universities or the federal government to single out faculty members for publicly discussing topics within their expertise. He added that “enforcement is so vague” that it would be easy for the federal government to declare universities out of compliance with the agreement.
Cantwell suggested, “This is probably a bigger deal than the Columbia [settlement] because it’s creating an incentive structure” that spurs universities to go along or opens them up to retaliation from the federal government, making it risky whether a university signs on or not.
(Columbia agreed to far-reaching changes to admissions, hiring, disciplinary processes and more in July, including a $221 million fine, when it reached a deal with the federal government to settle over findings that it failed to properly police antisemitism on campus. Columbia did not admit to wrongdoing, but administrators have acknowledged the need for reforms.)
Brian L. Heuser, a Vanderbilt professor and long-standing member of the university’s Faculty Senate, urged fellow senators and other faculty colleagues to organize against the idea in an email shared with Inside Higher Ed. Heuser called the compact “a dangerous departure from the core values that should underpin our institutions—namely, free inquiry, open debate, and institutional autonomy” and argued that it endangers academic freedom, among other concerns.
But some conservatives have lauded the idea and want ED to push harder.
“Secretary [Linda] McMahon deserves credit for working to disincentivize the use of race or sex in college admissions,” U.S. Sen. Todd Young, an Indiana Republican, wrote in a social media post. “We must go further—federally accredited institutions should eliminate ALL preferences grounded in ancestry, such as legacy status, or other factors unrelated to merit.”
Why These 9?
While it is unclear how the federal government landed on the nine schools as candidates for the proposal, one official told The Wall Street Journal the Trump administration believed they would be “good actors.” But contextual clues offer insights into why some may have been picked.
Of the nine, only five presidents signed on to a letter published earlier this year by higher education organizations pushing back on government overreach and political interference, which ultimately gathered 662 signatures. Of those five presidents, one has since resigned: Jim Ryan at UVA, who faced pressure from the Trump administration after it claimed the university failed to fully dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
Two institutions—Brown and Penn—previously struck deals with the federal government.
Others have drawn attention for political reasons. At Vanderbilt, Chancellor Daniel Diermeier has emerged as a leading voice advocating for institutional neutrality and has clashed with other campus leaders, arguing that higher education is in desperate need of reform, agreeing with frequent conservative criticisms of the sector. And Texas—one of three public institutions on the list—has an overwhelmingly conservative board, and both the system and flagship are led by former Republican elected officials.
On Oct. 1, the Wall Street Journal reported that the White House is asking colleges to sign an agreement to secure preferential treatment for government funding. FIRE is working to obtain the full agreement, but initial reporting already indicates it raises threats to free speech and academic freedom.
The following statement can be attributed to Tyler Coward, FIRE lead counsel for government affairs.
Freedom thrives when the people, not bureaucrats, decide which ideas are worthy of discussion, debate, or support.
As FIRE has long argued, campus reform is necessary. But overreaching government coercion that tries to end-run around the First Amendment to impose an official orthodoxy is unacceptable. And the White House’s new Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education raises red flags.
The compact includes troubling language, such as calling on institutions to eliminate departments deemed to “purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.” Let’s be clear: Speech that offends or criticizes political views is not violence. Conflating words with violence undermines both free speech and efforts to combat real threats.
The compact also requires university employees to refrain from “actions or speech related to politics.” If the language merely barred high-ranking employees from engaging in partisan political activity on behalf of the university, it would reflect existing and generally permissible IRS restrictions. But the compact’s reported wording goes further by suggesting a blanket prohibition on all staff engaging in political speech. For public institutions, that is deeply problematic. Public university faculty have the First Amendment right to speak about politics in their teaching and scholarship. Outside of their official duties, faculty and non-faculty university employees retain full First Amendment rights to speak off-the-clock as private citizens on matters of public concern. Banning them from doing so would be flatly unconstitutional.
A government that can reward colleges and universities for speech it favors today can punish them for speech it dislikes tomorrow. That’s not reform. That’s government-funded orthodoxy.
One of the consequences of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has been a vast reconfiguring of Russia’s academic and intellectual life. Universities, thought of as a potential hotbed of opposition since the White Ribbon movement of 2011, came under intense control and its personnel placed under even greater scrutiny.
Many faculty fled. Connections with international partners in the West were severed. And then to top it off, the Russian government announced that it would abandon the three degree bachelor’s, master’s doctoral system introduced when the country joined the Bologna Process 20 years earlier.
All this has combined to create what some have called a slow motion collapse in Russian higher education. But to understand what’s been happening in Russian Universities since February 2022, you really need to go back to the dawn of the Putin era in January 2000, and understand how ideological control of institutions has come to rest squarely inside the Kremlin.
Joining the podcast today is Dmitry Dubrovsky. He’s a scholar at the Institute for International Studies at Charles University in Prague, where he has taught ever since being designated as a foreign agent by the Putin regime in early 2022. And he writes primarily about the politics of academic freedom and civil society in Russia.
He’s with us today to talk about this slow motion collapse, the internal governance of Russian institutions, and how the country might one day be put back on a track to integration with European academia. Over to Dmitry.
The World of Higher Education Podcast Episode 4.5 | Undoing Bologna: Russia’s Conservative Turn in Higher Education with Dmitry Dubrovsky
Transcript
Alex Usher (AU): Dmitry, I want to take us back to the year 2000. Vladimir Putin is the new president of the Russian Federation. What was the state of the higher education sector at the time, and how did Putin approach it? How did he view higher education as an instrument of state policy?
Dmitry Dubrovsky (DD): Well, the legacy of the 1990s left Putin with a serious challenge. The system faced underfunding and fragmentation. At the same time, scholars were eager to join the European system. There had been attempts in the 1990s, but the biggest problems were the lack of financing and the absence of international mechanisms or tools to fully integrate into the European system of higher education and science.
Putin saw higher education and science, first and foremost, as a tool to join Europe—to become part of the European family and a prominent member of the global market of ideas. That’s why Russia joined the Bologna Process in 2003 and actively pushed for internationalization.
AU: So in that sense, it’s probably not that different from most other countries in the former socialist bloc, like Poland or Romania—the idea that internationalization would bring about an improvement in higher education. Is that about right?
DD: It is right, with one very important difference. At first it might seem small, but it became a very serious issue. In higher education and science, everywhere in the world, there are always people who believe that their own system is highly advanced—at the very top.
The problem in the late Soviet Union and the Russian Federation was that a substantial number of people survived the collapse of the USSR still believing that Russian and Soviet science was the most advanced in the world. In some cases, for certain disciplines, that might have been true. But in most areas—especially the humanities and social sciences—it wasn’t.
By the late 1990s, there was a substantial group of people who were deeply disappointed in the results of democratic reforms and in what democracy had brought, both to the country overall and to higher education and science in particular.
AU: Okay, now, Putin was president until 2008, and then he switched places for four years with Prime Minister Medvedev. He returns to power as president in 2012. And as you say, it’s a different Putin—a much more authoritarian Putin. How did his approach to higher education change? If we think of “Putin 1.0” around 2000, what does “Putin 2.0” look like after 2012? How does he try to exert greater control over the system?
DD: It’s important to note that before Putin came back to power, there was a very significant period of reform in Russian higher education. Especially around 2007–2008, reforms were focused on improving quality and gaining international recognition. This was the era of what we call “managerialist modernization.”
The idea was to select flagship universities that would drive the rest of the system forward into a brighter future.
AU: And eventually that becomes the 5–100 Project.
DD: Yes, the 5–100, or “5–2020” project. The goal was that at least five Russian universities should appear in the world rankings. It was a very interesting period because it marked a serious transformation in the sociocultural landscape of Russian higher education.
For the first time, the so-called “effective managers” entered the system. From the mid-2000s onward, higher education began receiving serious investment from the state, making it appealing to a new managerial class and their approaches. Internationalization advanced, but it went hand in hand with growing managerial control over universities.
Even before Putin returned in 2012, higher education was already being used as a tool to demonstrate the effectiveness of Russian policy and as an instrument of soft power, particularly through supporting Russian universities in former Soviet countries like Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Tajikistan.
When Putin came back, however, the situation changed dramatically. What I call the “conservative shift” began—not just in politics broadly, but within higher education and science.
AU: And some of that has to do with the broader crackdown at the time. I remember there was a lot of pressure on foreign organizations, which made international cooperation more difficult. For example, the government targeted the Open Society Foundations, George Soros’ network that had been active in supporting the social sciences and humanities. There was also a crackdown on things like gender studies and spaces for LGBTQ students.
Masha Gessen wrote about this in her book The Future is History. Why did that happen at that moment? What was it about Putin that made him say, “This is an area I want to control and push in a more conservative direction”?
DD: First and foremost, we have to remember the protests of 2011–2012. That was the time of the so-called “white ribbon” movement. It came very close to a revolution, though in the end it never happened—we failed. I was a member of that movement myself.
The significant participation of scholars and students in those protests put higher education under special scrutiny from the security services and the political apparatus. They believed that control over the education system could restore their legitimacy and symbolic power in society.
And remember, these leaders were, in many ways, Soviet people. They genuinely believed, “This is how the Soviet Union ruled—through control, especially in education and ideology.” And to some extent, that was true. The Soviet Union consolidated its power in part through universities.
Putin believed the same could work for him—that restoring control over higher education would allow him to strengthen his government, which had been undermined by the events of 2011–2012.
AU: We’ve been talking about the relationship between institutions and the government, but the government also changed the way institutions were run a couple of times, right? How has the exercise of power within Russian universities changed? I’m pretty sure there’s been a change in the process of selecting university leaders. How has that affected Putin’s ability to control universities?
DD: The specificity of Russian universities in the 1990s was that there was an enormous amount of democracy. There was absolutely no money in the system, so it was extremely poor—but at the same time, it was a kind of “poor democracy.” There were numerous elections, and the whole system of university governance was very active in self-governance.
There were real political struggles. People fought for the position of dean, they competed for the position of rector. Even department chairs could be elected. Almost every administrative position within a Russian university could be filled through an election.
When Putin consolidated power, especially during the managerial reforms, there was pressure—particularly on the flagship universities in the 5–100 Project—to amend their charters and replace elections with government appointments.
The official explanation was simple: if the state was providing so much budget support, then the state should also assign the rector rather than leave it to an election.
Even now, some Russian rectors are still technically elected. But in Putin’s Russia, an “election” is not an election in the normal sense. The ministry proposes the candidate, people watch the process, and it ends up looking very much like the way Putin himself is “elected.”
AU: Dmitry, in the early days of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, one thing that surprised a lot of people in the West—it seemed to come out of the blue—was a letter in support of the invasion signed by several hundred university rectors. Why did they do that? I mean, presumably they were ordered to by Putin, but why did Putin think that would be legitimizing?
DD: In post-Soviet societies there is a very high level of trust in higher education and science. The leaders of higher education were expected to officially support the so-called “hard decision” about the war.
But it’s important to remember—something some of our colleagues abroad seem to forget—that most of these rectors were never democratically chosen. They do not represent the voices of Russian scholars, lecturers, or faculty members. They mostly represent the vision of the presidential administration. Their role was to collect names for a list of support and then sign this shameful document.
And of course, this didn’t start in 2022. Under the “foreign agent” law of 2015, the government began a long anti-Western campaign—searching for “un-American” groups of influence, cutting connections with international centers, and declaring institutions like Central European University or Bard College in New York to be “undesirable organizations.”
This created a climate of fear and anxiety among the leaders of higher education. And there was direct blackmail: if you decided not to sign, that was your choice—but you had to think about your faculty, your team, your colleagues. They would probably be fired soon.
AU: What changed on university campuses after the invasion? Obviously, if I were in Putin’s position, I’d be worried about student unrest. So what happened in terms of surveillance on campus, and how did faculty react? I mean, you were a faculty member at the time, and you’re one of many who left fairly quickly after the invasion. How big a brain drain was there?
DD: Not as big as you might think, for different reasons. Academics can’t move as easily as other people—they need to be sure they’ll have a way to continue working, and for many there simply wasn’t anywhere to settle quickly.
My personal story was different. By coincidence, I had an invitation for a fellowship. Long story short, I relocated quickly from my home city of St. Petersburg to Prague. But for many others, leaving was far more difficult.
As for institutional surveillance—yes, it was there. It looks like Russia had been preparing for war for about two years beforehand. Around two years before the invasion, they started introducing special vice rectors responsible for “youth” whose actual role was to monitor and control loyalty.
At the same time, they established special departments within Russian universities with very long titles—things like “Promoting Civic Consciousness, Preventing Extremism, and Managing Interethnic Relations.” In practice, these were institutions embedded in higher education to control and discipline students and scholars.
Their real work was searching social networks, looking for so-called “betrayal” behaviors among students and faculty, and reporting them to the security services and police. Today, almost every region of the Russian Federation has one of these departments to oversee and report on improper behavior.
AU: After that rectors’ letter, Russia was suspended from the Bologna Process, and in retaliation Putin announced a return to the pre-Bologna system. So, getting rid of the bachelor’s, master’s, PhD framework and bringing back the old Russian model with the second PhD. How is this process unfolding? How easy is it to undo Bologna?
DD: That’s a good question. I don’t think Russia is really going to undo Bologna. They’re not planning a full reversal or trying to recreate the Soviet path.
From one side, there’s direct pressure on the Ministry of Higher Education and its bureaucrats to dramatically change a system that has been built over twenty years. But this system cannot simply be reversed. Legally, if students have already been admitted to a particular program, the state can’t just stop it midstream. At the very least, it would take four or five years to change. It can’t happen overnight.
Secondly, to me this feels like an exercise in mimicry or emulation from the old Soviet-style bureaucratic circles in higher education. I follow what’s happening closely—the statements from the Minister of Education—and they always try to explain what will be different, but they can’t. They have no clear idea what they’re trying to create.
Officially, they say, “This is not Bologna anymore. It has proved to be ineffective. Now we will collect the best achievements of the Russian system of education.” But what does that even mean? It’s absolutely impossible to understand. From my perspective, they are trying more to sabotage the process than to implement something substantial.
AU: Looking ahead, what do you think a post-Putin higher education system in Russia might look like? Is there a path back into the European higher education space, and what would it take to undo the damage that’s been done since 2012?
DD: That’s a good question. Currently, I would describe the situation as a “fourth deglobalization.” We’ve essentially gone back to the conditions of 2003, before joining the Bologna Process.
That doesn’t mean there’s no capacity—many faculty members still working in Russia earned their degrees in Western institutions. There is still substantial expertise within the system. But the fate of Russian higher education is very difficult to predict because it is so closely tied to the political fate of the Russian Federation itself.
If sanctions were to decrease and the war were to end, perhaps things could return to something like “normalcy.” But even that is debatable—what would “normalcy” mean in this context? At best, it might look like the Cold War era, perhaps similar to the late 1970s.
There are already serious restrictions in place: academic sanctions, boycotts, and bans on cooperation imposed by many institutions and countries. These severely limit Russia’s ability to develop visible academic exchanges with Europe. Instead, Russia is turning elsewhere—towards an “alternative globalization,” aligning more closely with countries like China, Iran, South Africa, and Brazil within the BRICS framework, [a political and economic bloc of major emerging economies that positions itself as an alternative to Western-led alliances].
AU: Dmitry, thank you so much for being with us today. It just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Sam Pufek and Tiffany MacLennan, and you, our listeners, for joining us. If you have any questions or comments on this week’s episode, or suggestions for future ones, please don’t hesitate to get in touch at [email protected].
Join us next week when our guest will be Joshua Travis Brown from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education. He’ll be joining us to talk about his fascinating new book from Oxford University Press, Capitalizing on College: How Higher Education Went from Mission-Driven to Margin Obsessed. Bye for now.
*This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service.Please note, the views and opinions expressed in each episode are those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host and team, or our sponsors.
In today’s rapidly evolving workforce landscape, higher education institutions face mounting pressure to demonstrate value, relevance and return on investment. Amid this challenge lies an underutilized strategy with remarkable potential: credit for prior learning.
We’ve long recognized CPL’s benefits for students. Learners who receive CPL credits are more likely to complete their degrees (49 percent vs. 27 percent for those without) and, on average, they earn 17.6 additional credits, finish nine to 14 months sooner and save between $1,500 and $10,200 in tuition costs (CAEL). But what’s often overlooked is CPL’s power to transform relationships between educational institutions and employers—creating a win-win-win for students, institutions and industry.
Beyond a Student Benefit
The traditional narrative around CPL emphasizes student advantages: increased enrollment, improved completion rates and reduced time to graduation. These metrics matter tremendously, but they tell only part of the story.
CPL can serve as a bridge between academia and industry, creating powerful new partnerships. When colleges and universities embrace robust CPL programs, they send a clear message to employers: We value the training and development you provide. Recognizing corporate training as creditworthy learning demonstrates respect for workplace knowledge and underscores higher education’s commitment to real-world relevance.
Employer and Workforce Gains
For employers, CPL validates that their internal training programs have academic merit. This recognition strengthens recruitment and retention efforts, as workers see clear pathways to advance their education without duplicating learning they’ve already mastered. Companies that invest in employee development also gain educational partners who understand industry needs and value the attributes that drive employee success.
The benefits extend further: Organizations with tuition remission or reimbursement programs can reduce costs while enhancing employee motivation and persistence.
Deeper Collaboration Between Higher Ed and Industry
As institutions evaluate workplace training for credit equivalency, they gain invaluable insights into industry practices and skill needs. This exchange allows colleges to refine curricula to better meet market demand, ensuring graduates possess the competencies employers seek—not just those defined within academic silos.
The hard but necessary conversations—between faculty and corporate training leaders—help ensure CPL evaluations are rigorous and relevant. Key questions include: Why include certain topics but not others? How do we know participants can demonstrate knowledge? Does the training align with broader disciplinary or leadership needs, or is it niche? These discussions strengthen both educational and workplace outcomes.
Reimagining CPL
The future of higher education lies in breaking down artificial barriers between academic and workplace learning. By embracing CPL as a cornerstone strategy—not only for student success but also for employer partnerships—institutions can position themselves at the nexus of education and employment.
This approach doesn’t diminish academic rigor; it expands our understanding of where and how meaningful learning occurs. Done well, CPL creates pathways that honor all learning, regardless of where it happens. And for learners, the message is clear: Your hard work counts.
First-generation students are twice as likely to leave college without completing a bachelor’s degree than their peers, even if they come from higher-income backgrounds and come to college academically prepared, according to a new report from the Common App. The findings suggest these factors do make a difference for student success outcomes but don’t erase other barriers first-generation students might face.
The report, released Thursday and the fourth in a series on first-generation students, used data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center to track enrollment, persistence and completion rates for 785,300 Common App applicants in the 2016–17 application cycle. (Students whose parents didn’t complete bachelor’s degrees made up 32 percent of the sample.) The report also took into account how a range of factors could affect student outcomes, including students’ incomes, their levels of academic preparation and how well-resourced their colleges are.
Previous studies have shown that “first-generation students are certainly not a monolith,” said Sarah Nolan, lead author of the report and a research scientist at Common App. “We were hoping to give readers a sense for … which first-generation students might in particular need more support.”
The good news is the report found first-generation applicants enroll in college at rates on par with their peers. Over 90 percent of Common App applicants, first-generation and otherwise, enrolled in college within six years of applying.
But first-generation students were slightly more likely to not enroll immediately (17 percent) or to enroll at a two-year college (12 percent) compared to other applicants (14 percent and 4 percent, respectively). That gap mostly closed when comparing students with strong academic records, defined as having SAT or ACT scores or GPAs in the top quartile. According to the report, that finding may be because a higher share of first-generation students may need extra coursework before enrolling in a four-year institution.
Students might also work to save up for college first or opt for community colleges’ more affordable tuition rates, the report suggested. Lower-income first-generation students, who qualified for application fee waivers, were also less likely to immediately enroll at four-year institutions and more likely to first enroll at a community college compared to similar students not from first-generation backgrounds.
Over all, “we are really heartened to see that there’s really not very strong differences in college enrollment,” Nolan said.
Completion rates, however, are another story. While about 70 percent of first-generation students do complete a bachelor’s degree within six years of enrolling, the report found stark disparities between them and their peers.
About half of first-generation students completed a bachelor’s degree within four years, compared to 68 percent of continuing-generation students, a gap of 18 percentage points. And that disparity persisted when looking at six-year graduation rates. About 69 percent of first-generation students graduated within six years, compared to 86 percent of continuing-generation students, a 17-percentage-point difference.
These gaps shrank but didn’t disappear for first-generation students with strong academic records and higher incomes. Academically prepared first-generation students were twice as likely to disenroll with no degree than their continuing-generation counterparts, 14 percent and 6 percent, respectively. In a similar vein, 24 percent of higher-income first-generation students left college without a degree within six years compared to 12 percent of their continuing-generation counterparts. Even for first-generation students who were both academically prepared and relatively well-off, these gaps remained.
Differences in the institutions first-generation and continuing-generation students attend—and the levels of supports they offer—didn’t account for completion-rate gaps, either.
Even when attending the exact same institutions, first-generation students were 10 percentage points less likely to earn a bachelor’s degree within six years than continuing-generation students.
However, higher per-student expenditures did seem to contribute to better student success outcomes. At institutions that spent at least $20,000 per student, 84 percent of first-generation graduated within six years, compared to 94 percent of continuing-generation students. The gap between first-generation and continuing-generation students’ completion rates widened to 15 percentage points at colleges that spent more moderately, $10,000 to $15,000 per student, and 17 percentage points at colleges with low per-student expenditures, less than $7,500.
These findings suggest that, while first-generation students disproportionately face financial constraints and barriers to college prep, it doesn’t explain away their graduation rate gaps. And students attending less resourced institutions isn’t a full explanation, either. Other obstacles must be at play.
What those barriers are may be “best answered by speaking with first-generation students themselves and unpacking what’s happening at the individual level,” Nolan said. But first-generation students likely struggle with limited access to information about higher ed and its “hidden curriculum” of expectations, regardless of income, high school performance or which college they attend.
“Having the right resources at the right time on the pathway—that’s really critical for student success,” Nolan added.
The stakes of success are high—the report found many first-generation students spent considerable time and money on college with no degree to show for it. Almost a third of first-generation students who didn’t earn a degree were enrolled for at least four years.
But a hopeful finding is that “additional investment can be quite positive for helping these students really actualize their potential,” Nolan said.
