Tag: Education

  • Alliance for Higher Education in Prison Responds

    Alliance for Higher Education in Prison Responds

    Dear Editor,

    As the national organization for higher education in prison in the United States, we at the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison feel it our responsibility to challenge the framing and conclusions of the Jan. 12 article “Prison Education May Raise Risk of Reincarceration for Technical Violations,” as well as the study it references. The article uses a misleading and sensationalist headline, elevates an unpublished study relying on limited data, and omits crucial context, all of which have very real implications for incarcerated learners and the field.

    Despite the claim made in the article title, the cited study by Romaine Campbell and Logan Lee—“A Second Chance at Schooling? Unintended Consequences of Prison Education” (July 1, 2025), which is an unpublished working paper—does not find that prison education causes an increase in reincarceration. In fact, as stated in the study’s abstract, there is “no relationship between education and reincarceration after we control for release type.” Instead, the observed increase in reincarceration in the study is related to work-release and technical violations. 

    The study authors themselves caution against interpreting the findings as evidence that education is harmful (p. 20, Campbell & Lee, 2025), and identify systemic supervision and release practices as the key drivers of observed outcomes. They also find evidence that education may improve postrelease employment outcomes (p. 31, Campbell & Lee, 2025).

    The underlying framework of the study around the “unintended consequences” of prison education is nevertheless problematic. The study’s findings do not demonstrate “unintended consequences” of higher education in prison. Rather, they reflect outcomes of release placement and supervision level that are associated with increased risk of technical violations and reincarceration. These outcomes are not caused by participation in educational programming; they result from the structuring of re-entry and supervision systems. 

    Connecting the findings in this working paper to outcomes of higher education programs is misleading. Doing so perpetuates negative public narratives that many within the field (including students and alumni) work hard to combat and fails to capture the potential policy implications of the study. The study authors themselves emphasize that the policy focus should be around how education is considered in release decisions and how supervision intensity increases risk of recidivism (p. 5, Campbell & Lee, 2025). The study does raise important questions about how education affects release placement, supervision level and technical violation risk. Thus, the appropriate provocation of the study is to rethink technical violations as well as supervision and release decision-making, which so often sets people who are re-entering society up for failure rather than success. 

    The editorial decision to elevate unpublished research in such a way that it contradicts an established body of evidence is additionally concerning. Decades of research across multiple states have demonstrated that participation in higher education–in–prison programming is associated with improved outcomes. It is noteworthy that the study uses administrative data from a single state (Iowa) to draw its broad conclusions. Presenting early-stage research without thorough evidentiary framing has the potential to distort public understanding with misleading conclusions.

    Indeed, a large body of research has consistently shown that participation in higher education while incarcerated is directly correlated with positive outcomes, including significantly lower recidivism rates. It is also important to note that recidivism alone is a flawed and incomplete metric for evaluating the success of higher education in prison programs. Recidivism is often shaped by supervision level, conditions of release and enforcement practices that vary from region to region. Overreliance on recidivism as a performance metric can obscure other, potentially more important outcomes (and also, critical gaps in service) such as employment, educational attainment, civic engagement, family reunification and financial stability. Higher education in prison can and should be evaluated using a broad dataset to reflect the real landscape of opportunity and well-being possible after people have access to these opportunities. The article omits all of this context, which is crucial to understanding the body of research and the study’s place within it. 

    How research findings are framed matters, especially when research enters public discourse. Headlines circulate widely and are often consumed without context. The framing of this article could very well have unintended consequences of its own. This article reinforces the problematic narrative that educational opportunities for people in prison are risky and that system-impacted people are to blame rather than overly punitive supervision and release practices. Sensationalist articles with misleading headlines like this one prioritize clicks and undermine decades of hard-won progress expanding access to college in prison. 

    Alliance for Higher Education in Prison

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  • International education sector reacts to new UK strategy

    International education sector reacts to new UK strategy

    Earlier this week, the UK government released its refreshed international education strategy (IES). While some stakeholders have welcomed its ambitions to grow education exports to £40 billion per year by 2030, others have dubbed it an export strategy rather than a roadmap for international education and raised important questions about the plan’s purpose and long-term direction.

    “The strategy puts sustainable international student recruitment at its heart, and we look forward to continuing to take a lead on working with the government to deliver this,” said Andrew Bird, chair of the British Universities International Association (BUILA).

    Unlike the 2019 international education strategy, the UK government’s latest iteration removes explicit targets for international student numbers. This marks a notable shift from the earlier strategy, which aimed for a 30% increase in international student enrolments by 2030.

    Bird said the strategy recognises the power of international education to “enhance the UK’s global standing and drive growth” and was pleased to see the government’s recognition of the Agent Quality Framework to drive improved standards in international student recruitment.

    Rob Grimshaw, CEO at StudyIn also welcomed the government’s strong support for the AQF noting that “high standards in student recruitment are vital to the long-term success of the UK’s higher education sector.”

    “For the UK to remain globally competitive, we must continue to make a compelling case for studying here – not just in terms of quality, but also trust, outcomes and student experience,” said Grimshaw.

    Mark Bennett, VP of research and insight at Keystone Education Group lauded the government’s strategy in its ability to articulate “an evolving vision for UK international education that, if successful, genuinely could see more people around the world benefit from the courses and resources offered by UK universities”.

    The strategy states the £40bn aim will be achieved across the “full breadth of the sector”, including TNE, English language training (ELT), and edtech, while broadly referencing existing trade missions, soft power networks and boosting financial support mechanisms.  

    The IES sets out an intention to grow the government’s leadership in TNE, as well as using the joint government-sector forum, the Education Sector Action Group (ESAG), to champion partnership opportunities and educating providers on the technical risks of operating overseas.

    The government’s new international education strategy sets out that each ESAG representative will lead on an action plan, published within the first 100 days of appointment to ESAG, outlining how their members will support delivery.

    Bennett highlighted the ways in which TNE expands access to international education, particularly for students unable to afford travel and study abroad. He also noted its appeal to countries seeking to retain more of their students – and graduates – at home.

    “And, of course, it appeals to anyone who would like international students to show up in figures for enrolments, but not immigration,” he added.

    However, Bennett raised that for some universities not already operating in the TNE space, what does it mean to have a strategy that refuses to give a target for traditional onshore enrolment?

    “if you ask me, it means the strategy can be called a success whether those enrolments rise by one or fall by 100,000 – and that’s important. Not everyone does TNE and TNE is not so easy to start doing,” he said.

    The new international education strategy is, in reality, an education export strategy
    Vincenzo Raimo, international higher education consultant

    Meanwhile, Vincenzo Raimo, international higher education consultant, puts it bluntly: “The new international education strategy is, in reality, an education export strategy.

    “There’s nothing wrong with that, but calling it an international education strategy risks obscuring what’s missing: a serious commitment to languages, outward mobility and the development of the UK’s own international capabilities in a way that equips people to understand the world, work across cultures, and thrive within it.”

    The PIE News’s own Nicholas Cuthbert notes in his analysis that the Home Office features only minimally in the strategy. He argues that excluding the Home Office from the ESAG risks repeating a familiar mistake: a disconnect between immigration policy and the UK’s education export ambitions.

    Elsewhere, Universites UK International director Jamie Arrowsmith described the strategy as an “important moment” for the sector and welcomed the “renewed commitment to fostering the global reach, reputation and impact of UK universities”.

    “The strategy reflects many of the priorities we set out in our Blueprint for Change, and represents a positive and holistic vision of the role universities play in the UK’s global success,” he said.

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  • What Does It Mean to Use an LLM for a “Personal Statement”?

    What Does It Mean to Use an LLM for a “Personal Statement”?

    Here’s a question that I think lots of people in higher education may be confronting over the next few weeks: What should we do with the personal statement for graduate admissions?

    I’ve now seen multiple anecdotal reports on social media (and also in my email inbox) of faculty on graduate admission committees across different subjects remarking that they think students are making significant use of large language models in drafting their personal statements.

    This feels dismaying, particularly in disciplines like creative writing and English, where we would expect students to take some interest and pride in their own unique expression.

    The easy narrative around this behavior is to lament over declining standards and student capacities, a lament as long and loud as the existence of organized education, but a lament also that prevents a deeper look at what’s driving the behavior and, in turn, what we could do to incentivize choices that we feel are better aligned with the goals of the institution and program.

    Rather than blaming this on defective students, I think we’re incentivizing this kind of behavior, the same way we retain incentives for students to complete homework with large language model outputs.

    From the beginning I’ve argued that one of the chief benefits of large language models is that their capacity to mimic human outputs gives us an opportunity to consider more closely what we actually want from writing that is supposed to come from humans working as humans.

    Here’s my attempt at a deeper look at this phenomenon.

    First, what are students thinking and experiencing, and how do these things impact their choices?

    1. With the personal statement, students don’t have a firm idea of what they’re being asked to do and what the audience might want in the piece of writing.

    The personal statement is a strange and unfamiliar genre to most of the people tackling them. The desirable end to the transaction—admission—is clear, but the communication that would result in that end is decidedly not clear. I have never been on the receiving end as part of an admission committee, but I have helped dozens of students attempt to draft these letters, and when I asked students what the school might be looking for in the statement, the reasoning becomes circular, orbiting around a general principle of “excellence.”

    This lack of knowing leads to great uncertainty and an impulse to pitch oneself to the committee, often through rather generic presentations of what “excellence” entails, usually descending into abstractions as a defense against the abstraction that is the idea of “excellence.”

    “Prove you’re more excellent than the other excellent people” is not a prompt likely to engender interesting or insightful writing.

    1. Students think the LLM will do a “better” job than they will on producing a text that will find favor with the committee.

    The black-box nature of the committee’s desire, combined with student unfamiliarity with the genre, results in doubt and fear, which can be resolved by turning to the text-production machine, which will, at least, generate something that “sounds good.”

    It will not be a truly meaningful piece of writing, but at least it won’t be outright wrong, or disqualifying. Students are missing key information that would allow them to write clearly and effectively inside the rhetorical situation. The world students are hoping to enter is foreign to them, and the LLM serves as a crude sort of translator to the discourse that they think might be expected of them.

    1. It is difficult to ask for a truly personal personal statement for an occasion and situation with such a high-stakes transaction at the other end and expect anything other than a sales pitch from the student.

    Students applying to these programs know they are competitive. They believe that failure to achieve admission may irreparably damage their future prospects. (Not true, but it’s what they believe.)

    When it comes to these statements, I think admission committees can’t handle the truth (or students, at least, perceive this) and so some portion of BS is going to result. Why not outsource the thing to the BS machine?

    So, what can we do about this?

    After some mutually frustrating experiences in trying to help students with their statements, brainstorming what committees might be looking for, I gave up on trying to help students hit a target that we couldn’t actually define and instead focused on something I do know: using writing as a way to better understand ourselves and then using that understanding to create a piece of writing that is interesting to read.

    I redirected the students to a different question. Rather than trying to convince a faceless committee of their general excellence, I asked them to write to themselves and answer three questions:

    1. Why do you want to do this specific thing?
    2. What makes you prepared to do this specific thing?
    3. How do you know that you’re going to follow through and complete this specific thing?

    The results of this shift were immediate and profound. In at least a third of the cases (maybe more), this exercise resulted in students deciding to not apply for the graduate program. By forcing them into a reflective practice—as opposed to writing a sales pitch as part of a transaction—students had to confront where their desires originated, and in a lot of cases the impulse toward a graduate program was primarily rooted in being “good at school” and not knowing what they should do next.

    For those who determined that a graduate program still fit their desires, this reflection helped on two fronts:

    1. It helped clarify their own motives, giving them specifics they could now explain to someone else (like a committee) about why they desired this path.
    2. It boosted their self-confidence in choosing this path, as they developed a more specific and concrete notion of the capacities they’d developed up to that point and what else they hoped to gain from additional study.

    I don’t know how committees received the writing that resulted from this process in terms of the transactional nature of the exchange, but I know for a fact that as pieces of writing they were far superior to what students had produced previously. I hope that at least made the admission committee’s work more interesting.

    I learned something from this exercise for myself for a different genre that is also transactional at its core, the book proposal.

    The book proposal was once my least favored genre, an exercise engineered for angst and writer’s block as I wrestled over what might be convincing to publishers to give me a shot at their support for a project.

    But then I realized that the first purpose of a book proposal was not to convince a publisher to fund it, but to convince myself that I could actually do it! The exercise became inherently more interesting as I explored what I knew, what I wanted to know and why I thought audiences might be interested in the results. Convincing myself of the viability of the project was, in many ways, harder than convincing a publisher. Multiple times I’ve wisely talked myself out of projects that I maybe could have sold if I treated the proposal solely as a pitch, but that I would’ve struggled to execute, primarily because I wasn’t as interested in the project as I needed to be.

    I’m three for three on the proposals that I’ve completed and taken to market using this method. The books I’ve published from these proposals are also better—and were completed more quickly—because of the process I went through to write these proposals. I metabolized much more of the material that would go into the books in a way that provided great fuel for the writing.

    As to what this means for the personal statement and admission committees, my recommendation is to think deeply about what kind of experience you’re seeking to engender in applicants and how that experience can be used to better inform your choices of whom to admit.

    This joining of students with institutions is a much deeper thing than a mere transaction. Ask applicants to produce something worthy of that fact.

    Or … drop the personal statement entirely. If it’s simply going to be a pro forma part of a larger process, why put everyone through an experience without meaning?

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  • Turning Over Jewish Employees’ Names Unconstitutional

    Turning Over Jewish Employees’ Names Unconstitutional

    The University of Pennsylvania has refused to disclose the names and personal information of Jewish employees to the Trump administration.

    The University of Pennsylvania filed its formal response Tuesday to the Trump administration’s demand that the university disclose the names of Jewish employees without their consent, arguing the request is unconstitutional and that it disregards the “frightening and well-documented history” of governmental cataloging of people with Jewish ancestry. 

    In a July subpoena, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission asked Penn to turn over the names and information of employees with Jewish faith or ancestry, as well as the personal information of employees affiliated with Jewish studies, organizations and community events. Penn has refused to do so and thus entered into a legal battle with the Trump administration, which is now seeking a court order to force Penn to comply.  

    “The government’s demand implicates Penn’s substantial interest in protecting its employees’ privacy, safety, and First Amendment rights,” the filing states. 

    A university spokesperson said the filing is “comprehensive and speaks for itself.” Faculty at Penn and other higher ed groups have backed Penn in its fight to avoid disclosure.

    “The charge does not refer to any employee complaint the agency has received, any allegation made by or concerning employees, or any specific workplace incident(s) contemplated by the EEOC, nor does it even identify any employment practice(s) the EEOC alleges to be unlawful or potentially harmful to Jewish employees,” the filing states.

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  • Empowered Virginia Democrats Move Fast to Reshape Higher Ed

    Empowered Virginia Democrats Move Fast to Reshape Higher Ed

    When Virginia’s new Democratic leaders took control of the governor’s office and attorney general position last week, they wasted no time overhauling higher ed.

    Abigail Spanberger, the new governor, immediately appointed more than two dozen members to the governing boards of the Virginia Military Institute, George Mason University and the University of Virginia, meaning she’s already appointed the majority of members on the George Mason and UVA boards. Her Republican predecessor, Glenn Youngkin, stocked university boards with conservatives who cracked down on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. UVA went through high-profile controversies under its Youngkin-era board, including the resignation of former president Jim Ryan under pressure.

    Now, Spanberger’s appointees—at least 13 of whom donated to her gubernatorial campaign—are expected to lead universities in a different direction. Spanberger also signed an executive order Saturday directing her education secretary to assess the board member appointment process and recommend legislative changes, including possible modifications to term lengths, term starts and reappointments. In the order, Spanberger wrote that the Trump administration’s actions necessitate this review.

    “Virginia colleges and universities have faced unprecedented challenges from shifts in federal policy to attacks on institutional autonomy and mission,” Spanberger said. “These pressures underscore the urgent need for the Commonwealth to reevaluate how governing boards are appointed, ensuring they are composed of individuals dedicated to upholding the quality, independence, and reputation of our institutions.”

    The new attorney general, Jay Jones, also moved swiftly. He fired GMU’s university counsel K. Anne Gambrill Gentry and associate counsel Eli Schlam, leaving the institution with two remaining in-house lawyers, the university said. Jones also ousted VMI general counsel Patrick O’Leary; a spokesperson for the institution said O’Leary “notified us that he received a letter late last week informing him that his services were no longer required.”

    Furthermore, on Tuesday, Jones’s office withdrew his Republican predecessor’s agreement with the Justice Department to disregard a state law that provides in-state tuition rates to undocumented students. The department sued the state Dec. 29, seeking to invalidate the law, and the next day—on his way out of office—former Virginia attorney general Jason Miyares concurred in a court filing that the law was unconstitutional.

    In a news release on the reversal, Jones said, “On day one, I promised Virginians I would fight back against the Trump Administration’s attacks on our Commonwealth, our institutions of higher education, and most importantly—our students.”

    And Democrat General Assembly members—who control both legislative chambers, including a supermajority in the House for the first time since the 1980s—have already expressed interest in higher ed changes. Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell filed a bill in the current legislative session that would, among other things, lengthen governing board members’ terms from four to six years and add one faculty, one staff and one student voting member to each board.

    Furthermore, House member Dan Helmer filed a resolution to create a task force to determine whether VMI—where the Youngkin-era board last year rejected a contract extension for the university’s top leader—should no longer be a public university that receives public funding. If the resolution passes, the task force will explore “expanding programs at other public institutions of higher education to replace the role of VMI” in training commissioned military officers.

    Among other things, the resolution calls for the group to audit whether the university responded to a report to the 2021 State Council of Higher Education for Virginia detailing discrimination by initiating “any substantial changes” to “reduce acts within their student body that could be perceived or classified as racist, sexist, or misogynistic or as an act of sexual harassment or sexual assault,” and whether the university “possesses the capacity as an institution to end celebration of the Confederacy.”

    In an email to Inside Higher Ed, a VMI spokesperson said, “We are reviewing many pieces of legislation, including Del. Helmer’s, and plan to work with our elected officials to demonstrate VMI’s progress.”

    Altogether, the moves show state Democrats’ willingness to act quickly to counteract the rapid changes to higher ed that Republicans—at both the state and federal level—rushed into place last year. Democratic leaders don’t appear afraid of attracting the ire of the Trump administration after its interventions in 2025, including the Justice Department’s demand that Ryan step down from leading UVA and Justice and Education Department investigations into George Mason that observers feared would oust the president there.

    But Surovell’s bill, and Spanberger’s recent statements to the General Assembly, also suggest that Democrats are seeking more than to bask in their newfound, but likely fleeting, power; they’re aiming to insulate higher ed decision-making from future political turnovers.

    “Virginia has some of the finest colleges and universities in the world,” Spanberger told lawmakers in a Monday address. “And yet, news story after news story isn’t about their successes—it’s about them becoming political battlegrounds.”

    She touted her review of the appointments process but added that she “will also work with this General Assembly to pursue reforms that prevent any future governor—Democrat or Republican—from imposing an ideological agenda on our universities. As governor, I have and will appoint serious, mission-driven individuals to our Boards of Visitors—people whose allegiance is to the institutions they serve, not to any political agenda.”

    The state’s Republican Party didn’t respond to requests for comment Wednesday.

    A Question of Stability

    Walt Heinecke, past president of UVA’s American Association of University Professors chapter and a current member of the Virginia state AAUP conference’s executive committee, opposed Ryan’s ouster from UVA and the Youngkin-era board’s appointment of a new president on their way out the door.

    “This has just been a mess for a year, and it’s important for us to clean house,” Heinecke said.

    He said Democrats “realized that, since last January, there’s been an attempt to basically take over universities with the Trump agenda, and I think they’re sick and tired of the moves that have been made.”

    Jon Becker, a tenured associate professor of educational leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University, said the speed with which Spanberger moved to appoint new board members was “no surprise.” Starting last year, Democrats blocked several of Youngkin’s board appointments, and those boards needed people.

    “At UVA, they were effectively without a board,” Becker said, adding that George Mason’s board similarly lacked the required number of members to conduct business. He said it was “fairly urgent” for Spanberger to appoint members to allow those boards to function again.

    Going forward, Becker said, “I would expect the focus on board reform to continue.”

    “A good, thorough review would show that there are practices in other states that might bring better governance to higher education in Virginia,” he said, such as requiring geographic diversity on boards and other ways of making them more representative of the state. He said, “Board members are mostly … kind of wealthier people, and they really should be more representative of the citizens.”

    But he also sees the Democratic moves as an attempt to tell the federal government to keep its hands off the state’s universities. And he said he thinks Virginia is indicative of what other states will do regarding higher ed when a single party takes control and realizes it needs to move fast to make change.

    Alex Keena, a tenured associate professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth, said, “I think what we’ve seen here in Virginia is a reflection of national trends, where national party politics is starting to influence how things are done at the state level.”

    “You have positions in government that used to be insulated from partisan politics that are now like the latest battlegrounds,” Keena said. In certain cases, he said, Youngkin’s board appointments were “antagonistic to the whole project” of higher ed, or “had very extreme ideas about the future of higher ed.”

    Now, Keena said, Democrats seem to be reacting to what the Youngkin and Trump administrations did last year, “which is this politicization of these boards that we really hadn’t seen in Virginia.” While Democrats will probably offer some stability for universities, he said, “it doesn’t really change the big picture—that you have this very hostile approach from the federal government.”

    Keena said he wonders how Spanberger will respond to attacks from the Trump administration.

    “How will she deal with that friction?” he said. “It’s a lot of uncertainty.”

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  • NYU and SUNY Debut Higher Ed Design Lab

    NYU and SUNY Debut Higher Ed Design Lab

    As colleges roll out a wave of new programs to prepare students for an AI-driven workforce, a new partnership between New York University and the State University of New York is trying to answer an increasingly urgent question: Which of these efforts actually work?

    This month, NYU and SUNY launched the Higher Education Design Lab, a joint effort to evaluate which higher education programs are most effective at preparing students for a workforce reshaped by AI and other technological and cultural changes.

    The lab will study new and established initiatives on NYU’s and SUNY’s own campuses, starting with programs that teach civic engagement, career readiness, first-year programming and innovation to understand their real impact on student learning.

    “We’re bringing together two really significant and very diverse institutions, and it’s a big-scale operation, so we’ll be able to look at a lot of things across a lot of different environments,” said Mindy Tarlow, senior fellow and professor at NYU’s Marron Institute of Urban Management, where the lab will initially be housed.

    The partnership appears timely; Inside Higher Ed’s latest Student Voice survey of more than 5,000 two- and four-year undergraduates found that about 40 percent of respondents think professors could better connect classroom lessons to issues outside class or to students’ career interests.

    A separate Student Voice survey of more than 1,000 two- and four-year undergraduates found that nearly 50 percent of students want their colleges to offer training on how to use AI tools ethically in their careers. By contrast, only 16 percent said preparing them for a future shaped by generative AI should be left to individual professors or departments, and just 5 percent said colleges do not need to take any action at all—underscoring the demand for a coordinated, institutionwide response.

    “This is a research partnership,” said Elise Cappella, vice provost for universitywide initiatives at NYU. “This lab is not about creating a lot of new things. It’s about studying what we already have and making sure we’re reaching the students we need to reach.”

    The approach: The Higher Education Design Lab will examine a broad range of programs and practices designed to strengthen student learning. Its initial focus includes initiatives aimed at fostering dialogue—including university speaker series, co-curricular training and exposure to diverse perspectives—to better understand how these experiences shape engagement, collaboration, critical thinking and confidence in discourse.

    The lab will also study career-readiness programs, evaluating which approaches, such as employer partnerships, provide the strongest outcomes for both students and employers.

    First-year and orientation experiences, including civics and community-building modules, will be analyzed to see how required versus optional participation affects leadership skills, critical discourse and student well-being.

    Teaching and learning innovations, from faculty development programs to instructional tool kits, will be assessed for their impact on classroom and campus learning.

    Finally, the lab will explore experiential and community-based learning, including service learning and study away programs, to determine how high-impact practices cultivate skills for navigating diverse perspectives and preparing students for leadership opportunities.

    Tarlow said the lab will rely on both qualitative and quantitative data to understand not just whether programs work, but under what conditions and for which students.

    The qualitative and quantitative data “often play off each other in really interesting ways,” she said. “We keep coming back to the same core question: What works best, in what conditions and for whom? And depending on what we’re studying, we’ll use the methodology that best helps us answer that, because not everybody responds the same way to the same things.”

    What’s next: The Higher Education Design Lab will have an advisory board of higher education leaders and other institutions, including the City University of New York, and intends to invite additional universities, research centers and government partners to participate over time.

    Tarlow said the lab’s first year will focus on identifying the pilot projects and specific parts of campus life the team wants to study most closely.

    Early work will center on evaluating efforts already underway to foster dialogue and civic engagement, beginning with SUNY’s Civil Discourse and Civic Education & Engagement programming and the Constructive Dialogue Institute’s Perspectives Program.

    “There is already a lot of knowledge and good work happening in all of our institutions,” Cappella said. “What is new and exciting about this particular initiative is that we’re really dedicating time and attention internally and across institutions to doing this more collaboratively and more intentionally.”

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  • ED Drops Appeal of Order Blocking Anti-DEI Guidance

    ED Drops Appeal of Order Blocking Anti-DEI Guidance

    Dropping the appeal ends a yearlong legal battle over the guidance that declared race-based programming illegal.

    Celal Gunes/Anadolu/Getty Images

    Education Secretary Linda McMahon and her legal team have dropped their appeal of a federal court ruling that blocked the department from requiring colleges to eradicate all race-based curriculum, financial aid and student services or lose federal funding.

    The motion to dismiss was jointly approved by both parties in the case Wednesday, ending a nearly yearlong court battle over the department’s Feb. 14 Dear Colleague letter that declared race-based programming and policies illegal. If institutions didn’t comply within two weeks, department officials threatened to open investigations and rescind federal funding.

    In response, colleges closed offices related to diversity, equity and inclusion; scrubbed websites; and cut other programming.

    First Amendment advocacy groups and the DEI leaders who remain in higher ed declared it a major victory for public education. Democracy Forward, the legal group that represented educators in the case, went as far as to say that it marks the “final defeat” of Trump’s effort to censor lessons and scrub student support programs.

    Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward, said it should encourage those affected by the Trump administration’s “unlawful crusade against civil rights” to keep fighting back.

    “Today’s dismissal confirms what the data shows: government attorneys are having an increasingly difficult time defending the lawlessness of the president and his cabinet,” she said in a news release about the court filing. “When people show up and resist, they win.”

    The court filing did not explain why the department chose to abandon the case, and Ellen Keast, a department spokesperson, declined to provide any further comment.

    Trump officials had argued that they were merely enforcing existing federal civil rights laws and the 2023 Supreme Court ruling that struck down affirmative action. They claimed race-based programming constitutes discrimination.

    But 10 days later, a coalition of education unions, a national association and a public school district challenged the letter in court, arguing it violated administrative procedure law and institutions’ First Amendment rights. Then, in August, federal district Judge Stephanie Gallagher struck down the department’s guidance, arguing it “ran afoul” of procedural requirements and that “the regulation of speech cannot be done casually.”

    Colleges and universities aren’t entirely in the clear, though. Just days before the Maryland District Court issued its ruling on the ED letter, the Department of Justice released its own nine-page memo on DEI.

    That guidance, which went even further than ED’s guidance, said that basing services on stand-ins for race—like “lived experience,” “cultural competence” and living in a minority-heavy geographic area—could also violate federal civil rights laws. In response, colleges have closed campus centers and publications cater to certain racial or ethnic groups.

    Still, many educators see this as a significant step forward.

    “When you fight you don’t always win, but you never win without a fight,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the cases’ plaintiffs, in a news release. “We are proud that this case has once again halted the administration’s pattern of using executive fiat to undermine America’s laws that enshrine justice and opportunity for all.”

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  • High-Stakes Policy Talks Shed Light on ED’s Playbook

    High-Stakes Policy Talks Shed Light on ED’s Playbook

    The Department of Education has had a successful few months when it comes to advancing policies that could dramatically reshape federal student aid. But officials’ tactics for doing so have raised concern among many of higher ed’s top leaders and policy analysts.

    Over the course of the last four months, Under Secretary Nicholas Kent and his staff secured unanimous support from a variety of college leaders, state officials and student advocates on plans that cap graduate student loans, expand the Pell Grant to short-term job training programs and establish a new accountability measure for all colleges and universities—an outcome that defied initial expectations and one Kent touted.

    “Here’s the reality: When you come to the table prepared with smart and dedicated people that are focused on a clear goal, you can move quickly and intentionally without sacrificing the thoroughness and the careful deliberation that this process deserves,” he said in December. “We have proven that speed and quality are not mutually exclusive.”

    Kent went on to tell Inside Higher Ed this month that in order to implement the policies under a tight July 1 deadline set by Congress, he needed to finalize his proposals and do it fast. The key to doing so, he said, was using open dialogue and compromise to reach consensus—even as the department held fast to its core principles. He also believed that unanimous agreement could put an end to years of back-and-forth over higher ed policy and provide clarity for the institutions and students it would affect.

    Nicholas Kent

    But some involved in the negotiations as well as outside policy analysts say the department “strong-armed” committee members into agreement by threatening them with what could happen if they voted no—if the committee didn’t reach consensus, department officials could scrap any compromises made and rewrite the proposal as they saw fit.

    Antoinette Flores, a higher ed policy expert who led similar negotiation sessions under the Biden administration and now works at a left-leaning think tank, said the committee members were repeatedly called into private meetings with Kent and department staff in which there was “heavy political pressure” to agree to the department’s proposal.

    “They were leveraging the power of consensus with a little bit of fear,” she said.

    Other observers, however, viewed the department’s tactics as nothing more than part of good dealmaking—a typical aspect of the rule-making process.

    Either way, the talks shed light on how determined department negotiators can control the direction and outcome of the discussion, in part by coming to the table with explicit priorities and refusing to give much ground, according to more than half a dozen committee members and outside experts.

    We were very honest throughout the process that this was a give-and-take. And we reminded people what was at stake and what the regulatory community could gain and lose.”

    —Under Secretary Nicholas Kent.

    Those interviewed cautioned that these talks aren’t necessarily a blueprint for future negotiations because they were largely driven by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which gave the department little wiggle room. Still, the rounds of negotiations revealed more about Kent’s playbook and how this Trump administration is more prepared to leverage the complicated policymaking process and advance the president’s priorities.

    And the department’s policy agenda for 2026 suggests that there are still many negotiations to come as officials plan to rework the rules for accreditation, civil rights investigations and foreign gifts.

    “Everybody should buckle up,” Kent said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do here.”

    Setting the Tone

    Before department staff reached the negotiating table, they knew what a tight timeline they’d be operating under. So with their eyes set on consensus, they worked to be “more prepared than [they] ever had been,” said Kent, who was hands-on during the talks and at one point made the unprecedented move to join the negotiating table.

    The department conducted listening sessions with multiple constituency groups to get a sense of the challenges and opportunities they may face, and officials then released drafts of their proposals ahead of the meetings, coming armed with data presentations to back up their policy changes.

    In two of the three rule-making sessions, Kent opted to condense negotiations that usually took place over the course of months down to one week. Public comment for all three was limited to one session held before any of the discussions began.

    The threats were not thinly veiled. They were very bold.”

    —Former Biden official

    Noting that the department dealt with some of the topics for many years, Kent said, “There’s no reason that we needed to come and ask people very philosophical questions at the beginning.”

    But coming in with detailed plans to kick off the talks also gave the department an upper hand. It narrowed the scope of debate and placed the burden on committee members to argue why and how any changes should be made, policy experts explained.

    “Twenty years ago when you did neg reg, the department would [merely] have ideas about what it wanted to workshop with the negotiators,” said Aaron Lacey, a higher education lawyer who negotiated the policies for Workforce Pell and new accountability measures. But that’s not the case anymore. “It also puts a much greater burden on the negotiators. You’re just working around the clock, drafting, reviewing and justifying proposals. Whereas in years past, it was four o’clock and you were done until the next day started. It’s just a totally different exercise.”

    To Lacey, the department was essentially working to “orchestrat[e] a consensus vote” on their plans.

    “I don’t know how I feel about that,” he said. “But I have to acknowledge that that’s what they’re doing, and they seem to be doing it very well.”

    Drawing Hard Lines

    Another, more direct way, that the department pushed for unanimous agreement, policy analysts said, was by limiting the changes it would consider and making clear that there would be consequences if consensus wasn’t reached.

    During the first negotiation over student loan caps in early fall, the department publicly dug its heels in over what programs could qualify for higher borrowing limits. And while ED made a few small concessions, multiple sources told Inside Higher Ed that those changes were used as bait to compel them to vote yes, even as they didn’t agree with other key issues in the department’s final proposal.

    They could have just treated neg reg as a formality, failed [to reach consensus] and then written the rule that they wanted to in the first place.”

    —Preston Cooper, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute

    In a series of private caucuses with negotiators, department officials conveyed that if committee members didn’t vote in favor, they would not only drop their small concession on loan caps but void other changes in the loan-repayment regulations, which were also part of the negotiations.

    “The threats were not thinly veiled,” one former Biden appointee said on the condition of anonymity due to conflict with their current job. “They were very bold.”

    Then, in January, as the committee negotiated accountability measures, department officials made a similar move, telling some committee members that they would scrap a rule aimed at holding nondegree programs and for-profit colleges accountable. At the time, the department was seeking to water down the rule known as gainful employment in order to match it with a new one for all other college programs.

    Although the department’s threats once again worked, one negotiator spoke up about the tactics at the meeting.

    In her closing remarks, Tamar Hoffman, a consumer rights attorney who had represented the higher ed legal aid groups on both committees, said she wanted to vote no but was choosing to abstain from the vote—a move that didn’t block consensus.

    The students covered by gainful employment were “just too important for me to take that risk,” she said.

    Lacey, the committee member representing nonprofit institutions, later told Inside Higher Ed that the department suggested to him they could leave gainful employment and its higher standards if the institutional representatives didn’t vote yes.

    A group of Republican members of the House of Representatives, standing in front of a painting of George Washington and behind a podium that says "One Big Beautiful Bill Act."

    Congress passed a slew of higher education policy changes in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

    Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

    To Kent and some negotiators, reminding committee members what was at stake was just the art of the deal.

    “We were very honest throughout the process that this was a give-and-take. And we reminded people what was at stake and what the regulatory community could gain and lose,” Kent said. “The department was very clear in the caucuses that we were not threatening, that we were not strong-arming, but that we were simply reminding people what’s at stake.”

    Preston Cooper, a senior fellow at a right-leaning think tank who represented taxpayers in the negotiation, said the department’s actions were a reasonable use of its upper hand in the rule-making process. Like Hoffman, he wanted to keep gainful employment, but he knew that ED didn’t have to try for consensus at all. In fact, he noted, that’s what previous administrations have done, so, in his eyes, Kent wasn’t twisting negotiators’ arms. Instead, he was invested in creating long-lasting solutions.

    “They could have just treated neg reg as a formality, failed [to reach consensus] and then written the rule that they wanted to in the first place,” he said.

    Will Consensus Last?

    At most, consensus on the policies will last until the department receives public comment. At that point, the department has to review and respond to those comments and can make changes to the regulations.

    “Consensus doesn’t get you that much. The department could, and has in the past, completely backtracked,” a former Biden official said. “So it will be very telling whether the administration is simply trying to stick with its consensus agreements, or whether the administration is trying to be responsive to the comments they get and set in place rules that are legally defensible, politically sustainable and that will let them implement these rules quickly.”

    Beyond the immediate rule-making process, not everyone is as convinced as Kent that these consensus votes are enough to end the game of higher ed policy ping-pong that’s played out over the last 10 years.

    Committee members seated at four rectangular tables arranged in a square, covered with black tablecloths. Most have laptops in front of them.

    The Education Department held three rounds of rule-making sessions over the last four months.

    Jessica Blake/Inside Higher Ed

    Flores, another former Biden appointee who is now at New America, isn’t so sure that the department would have achieved consensus if they hadn’t used such a “fear-based approach.” As a result, she said, it makes the legitimacy of the agreement “somewhat surface level.”

    If these regulations do last, she believes it will be because they are rooted in legislation.

    “It won’t be a consensus, per se, that leads to ending the whiplash. It is that we have big legislative changes and those things are hard to change overnight,” Flores explained.

    But even then, she noted, the legislation was passed on a rushed schedule through an atypical budget bill without bipartisan support. If Democrats win back power on the Hill, there could be future legislation to tweak the reforms. In the meantime, she said, the department’s approach, which included little opportunity or consideration for public feedback, could lead to legal challenges.

    A group of bipartisan lawmakers has already introduced legislation that would adjust the programs eligible for loan caps, following significant pushback from nurses and other health-care professionals who were not deemed professional and placed in the lower bracket.

    “I’d expect a legal challenge on the professional definition as soon as the rule is finalized, which will lead these questions to kind of linger and might delay implementation down the line,” Flores said.

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  • Welsh higher education is running out of wriggle room

    Welsh higher education is running out of wriggle room

    Back in November 2025, Vikki Howells – minister for further and higher education in the Welsh government – delivered an oral statement on “The Future of Tertiary Education in Wales: Sustainability and Participation.”

    What followed was the usual pre-election chamber choreography – the Conservative spokesperson, Natasha Asghar, complained about “warm words about the Welsh government’s achievements, but a little less about immediate action” and demanded to know which institutions were at financial risk, while Plaid’s education spokesman wanted to know what the Welsh government was doing about participation gaps.

    The minister responded with appropriate defensiveness about Diamond-era achievements and appropriate concern about sector challenges. Nobody learned anything they didn’t already know.

    Now Howells’s department has published the actual substance – 60 pages of analysis, data, and, unusually for these things, genuine honesty about the constraints the system is operating under.

    A call for submissions is now open until March, neatly timed to close before the Senedd elections in May – allowing officials to prepare an evidence base for whichever government emerges, while the current administration claims credit for having started the conversation.

    The document – The future of tertiary education in Wales: five challenges and call for submission – is, in many ways, a model of what policy analysis should look like. It is educational in the best sense – reading it carefully teaches you how the Welsh tertiary system works, how its funding flows, where its constraints bind, and why choices that might seem straightforward are anything but.

    This is not a “Now!” album of policy announcements – the kind of thing Westminster tends to produce, heavy on vibes and light on fiscal reality – but a sustained attempt to look at interconnected problems in the round, with appropriate caveats about what is known and what remains uncertain.

    Howells herself wrote a companion piece for Wonkhe late last year setting out her framing of the five challenges. But the real substance is in the document itself – and in particular, in section 2.4 on financial sustainability, which contains some of the most candid analysis of student finance constraints that any UK government has published in recent years.

    The financial trap

    The core problem runs like this. Welsh ministers have formal, devolved powers over student support – maintenance grant levels, total maintenance entitlements, and repayment terms for Welsh-domiciled borrowers.

    But the money to fund student loans comes from HM Treasury as Annually Managed Expenditure, and it only flows if Wales offers what the Statement of Funding Policy calls “broadly similar terms” to England. Grants, meanwhile, come from the Welsh government’s own resource budget, where ministers have discretion but limited headroom.

    Since the Diamond reforms took effect in 2018, Wales has operated a more progressive system than England – higher maintenance support, more generous grants for the poorest students, and – until recently – more favourable repayment thresholds. The comparative position is striking.

    According to London Economics analysis cited in the document, Welsh government direct support for the costs of higher education per student is just over double the contribution from the exchequer for students from England – but only half the contribution for students in Scotland.

    The average split of costs for new students entering higher education from Wales is approximately 56 per cent for government and 44 per cent for graduates. In England, costs are overwhelmingly borne by graduates. In Scotland and Northern Ireland, predominantly by the state.

    The fiscal mechanics have been steadily eroding that position. Grant thresholds have been frozen since 2018, meaning fewer students qualify for the most generous support as household incomes rise with inflation.

    The grant-to-loan ratio has shifted from 32:68 in 2020-21 to 23:77 in 2024-25. Grant expenditure has fallen 25 per cent in cash terms. Meanwhile, total maintenance support has increased – first in line with the National Living Wage, then with CPI – pushing up loan outlay substantially.

    The average annual maintenance loan for a full-time undergraduate student from Wales increased by 59 per cent from £5,110 to £8,150 between 2020-21 and 2024-25, exceeding the England average for the first time.”

    The document explains that Welsh government models a counterfactual – what would loan outlay be if UK government policy applied? – to ensure it stays within HMT limits. That modelling has now reached its endpoint.

    The Welsh Government can no longer afford to increase overall student loan outlay at a greater rate than The UK Government.

    This is the end of Diamond-era divergence on loan outlay. Wales can still choose to be more generous on grants from its own budget, but it cannot continue to offer higher total maintenance than England funds for English students. The financial room for manoeuvre has been exhausted.

    One reading of all this is that we are being teed up for a fundamental rethink of how the money gets spent – that Diamond was too generous, hasn’t delivered the participation gains hoped for, and the resource should be redirected toward fixing the Level 3 pipeline instead. The Diamond evaluation, due in Spring 2026, will presumably speak to this. But the picture is messier than a simple “it didn’t work” narrative would suggest.

    The part-time participation numbers show that student finance can drive participation when it’s designed well. The danger is that cutting higher education finance to fix the schools and further education pipeline simply moves the money around without increasing total participation – especially if the graduates Wales does produce continue to leave for London.

    The Plan 2 problem

    Then there is the question of repayment terms – where the document reveals a rather pointed intergovernmental dispute, albeit expressed in the most diplomatic language imaginable.

    In the autumn budget 2025, the Chancellor announced that Plan 2 repayment thresholds would be frozen from 2027 to 2030 “for borrowers in England.” The document notes this carefully – “for borrowers in England” – before immediately asserting that “repayment terms for Welsh borrowers remain within the powers of The Welsh ministers.”

    But Plan 2 is a shared system. Welsh and English borrowers on Plan 2 have, until now, operated under the same terms, administered by the Student Loans Company. The Chancellor’s announcement was made as if it applied only to England, yet the mechanics of the loan book mean Wales will face pressure to follow.

    The Welsh Government is in discussions with HMT and the Department of Education regarding the implications of the Plan 2 threshold freeze decision for Wales.”

    You don’t have “discussions about implications” of a decision you were part of making. You have discussions about implications when someone else made a decision and you’re now trying to work out what it means for you. This feels like the Chancellor changed the terms of a shared system without consulting Cardiff, and Wales is now trying to figure out whether it has any choice but to follow.

    The document notes that the UK government’s decision “demonstrates the increased pressure to ensure that the long-term costs of the student loan book remain sustainable” – which is true, but doesn’t quite capture the constitutional oddity of one government announcing changes to a devolved policy area that the other government is then expected to absorb.

    Combined, these pressures will likely require The Welsh Government to review and amend its ongoing policy on student support outlay, and student loan repayments, to maintain appropriate controls on expenditure and continue a policy that aligns with Welsh Government’s policy aims.

    Translation – Diamond is under review, and not by choice.

    The institutional squeeze

    The student finance constraints exist alongside – and compound – a financial crisis in Welsh universities themselves, with six of eight universities reporting underlying deficits in 2023/24 and total sector income falling 6 per cent in real terms between 2021/22 and 2023/24.

    International recruitment – which had been the growth strategy for many institutions – has been hit by visa restrictions imposed by the Home Office, a reserved matter over which Wales has no say, and six Welsh institutions have over 30 per cent of their fee income from international students, with the highest at 44 per cent.

    Cost pressures are mounting from multiple directions. Universities did not receive any additional public funding to compensate for the increased costs of employers’ National Insurance Contributions in 2025-26 – estimated to cost the Welsh sector £20m.

    Parts of the sector also saw increases in Teachers Pension Contributions totalling an estimated £6m in 2024/25, also unfunded – unlike in colleges and schools, where government has provided support. A decade of real-terms decline in the value of tuition fees has eroded per-student income, and Welsh government direct funding has been squeezed in real terms since 2022/23.

    If we cannot indefinitely expand funding to support all forms of provision and support, choices must be made about where investment will have the greatest impact.

    An uncontrollable market

    The financial squeeze on student support and institutions sits alongside a market competition problem that Welsh universities are losing. Section 2.3 of the document sets out, with admirable clarity, what has happened to UK higher education since student number caps were lifted in 2013-14.

    Elite universities with strong brands and secure finances have aggressively expanded their student recruitment (typically in lower cost subjects) to reinvest in research and facilities, and so further increase their appeal, brand and league table positions.

    The numbers tell the story. Between 2016 and 2025, acceptances to higher-tariff universities increased by 25 per cent, while acceptances to lower-tariff universities declined by 22 per cent. Despite total UK acceptances being only 2 per cent lower in 2025 than in 2016, the lower two-thirds of the sector by entry tariff lost 46,015 students – a 13 per cent decline.

    Wales is disproportionately exposed to this dynamic because it has relatively fewer higher-tariff institutions. Only three Welsh universities grew their domestic undergraduate numbers between 2015/16 and 2023/24. More than half saw contractions ranging from 3 to 34 per cent. The 2025 entry cycle saw acceptances at Welsh providers decline by 4.2 per cent overall – and today’s UCAS data on application patterns suggests the competitive pressure is not easing.

    Despite total acceptances in 2025 being only 2 per cent (8,885 students) lower than in 2016, the ‘lower’ two-thirds of the UK sector by entry tariff have seen a reduction of 13 per cent (46,015 students).

    The document quotes Universities UK’s Transformation and Efficiency Taskforce on the perverse effects of this competition.

    The intensity of competition has resulted in universities pursuing very similar and expensive business and operating models, and less, rather than more, differentiation across the higher education sector… In some cases, this can come at the cost of enhancing an institution’s own unique strengths while inhibiting creative approaches to teaching, research and operations.”

    The Welsh government’s answer – to the extent there is one – is collaboration. The document points to existing models such as the USW Group, the UWTSD Group with Coleg Sir Gâr and Coleg Ceredigion, and the North Wales Tertiary Alliance, and notes that Medr has been asked to map subject provision across Wales to support coordinated planning.

    But the fundamental problem is that Welsh institutions are competing in a UK-wide market they cannot control, against competitors with deeper pockets and stronger brands, while their own funding per student remains squeezed.

    The demographic cliff

    Layered on top of the market and finance problems is a demographic challenge that will hit from 2030 – the number of 16-year-olds in Wales is projected to fall by 12 per cent between 2030 and 2040, with 18-year-olds falling by 13 per cent. HEPI research cited in the document estimates that if UK application rates remain level, demand for higher education could fall by nearly 20 per cent over the same period.

    For Welsh universities, this is especially acute because 39 per cent of their students come from the rest of the UK – and three institutions have half their students from outside Wales. UK-wide demographic decline will affect the pool from which Welsh universities recruit, not just the Welsh population itself.

    The document’s response to this challenge is one of the more interesting sections. Wales has, for some years, been doing something distinctive on part-time and mature student participation – and it shows.

    In 2023/24, 37 per cent of Welsh students studied part-time, compared to 23 per cent in England, and 43 per cent were aged 25 or over, compared to 36 per cent in England. Entrant enrolments at the Open University in Wales more than doubled between 2017/18 and 2023/24, coinciding with the introduction of part-subsidised fees and pro-rata maintenance support for part-time students.

    Welsh students are more likely to be older and studying part-time than elsewhere in the UK.

    A real policy success that deserves recognition – and one that complicates the “Diamond didn’t work” narrative. Student finance clearly can drive participation when it’s well-designed and targeted, and the part-time numbers are the proof.

    The question is whether the same approach can work for the populations who aren’t currently participating – particularly the Welsh boys who have the lowest higher education participation rates in the UK, and the students from deprived backgrounds who are systematically channelled away from academic pathways.

    On the Lifelong Learning Entitlement, the document is pointedly sceptical. The LLE legislation does not apply to Welsh providers or Welsh student support, and Welsh government has decided not to follow England.

    The Welsh Government has considered that introducing the LLE in Wales would come with significant opportunity cost, with significantly increased complexity required in legislation, regulation, and provision of funding via SLC.

    There’s a pointed dig at England here too:

    It remains unclear whether there will be significant demand for loan-funded modular higher education provision, and pilot modular courses ‘significantly lacked demand’ according to a former DfE minister.

    Wales will “monitor the delivery of the LLE in England through 2026 and 2027” – civil service for “we’ll watch you try this and see if it works before committing ourselves.”

    Wales – with its stronger part-time infrastructure and more mature student population – would be well placed to pilot something innovative on credit recognition and transfer, building on its existing strengths rather than importing English complexity. The document doesn’t go there, but the foundations are present.

    The pipeline problem

    The critical constraint, as in England, is the transition between Level 3 and Level 4 – and here the document reveals how interconnected the challenges really are.

    Welsh 18-year-old UCAS application rates are 32.5 per cent, compared to 41.2 per cent UK-wide – and the gap is growing. The 18-year-old entry rate for Wales in 2025 was 29.2 per cent, the lowest in the UK. The document traces this back to Level 3 attainment – only 68.6 per cent of working-age adults in Wales are qualified to Level 3 or higher, against a target of 75 per cent by 2050, and Wales has a higher proportion of post-16 learners undertaking vocational pathways at Level 2 and below than elsewhere in the UK.

    But the headline figures mask a messier picture. Welsh participation looks lower at 18 partly because more Welsh students enter later – by age 30, the Higher Education Initial Participation measure reaches 55 per cent, which was actually higher than England’s last comparable measure, 54.2 per cent versus 51.9 per cent in 2018/19. The part-time and mature student participation that Wales has successfully expanded doesn’t show up in the 18-year-old statistics that dominate sector discourse.

    What’s feeding this pattern is a structural shift in post-16 education that the document traces in detail. The proportion of learners progressing to FE colleges at age 16 has increased from 48 per cent in 2017/18 to 56 per cent in 2024/25, while the proportion in school sixth forms has declined from 42 per cent to 37 per cent. Overall pupil numbers at school sixth forms have declined by a quarter since 2013/14, and the number of schools with sixth forms has fallen by a fifth over that time.

    This matters because of what happens next. A growing proportion of learners are entering lower-level vocational courses at Level 2 and below, and a declining proportion are undertaking Level 3 courses – especially AS and A levels. Students on lower-level courses are more likely to drop out and less likely to progress to sustained continued education or employment. The Education Policy Institute has highlighted that young people in Wales are less likely to be undertaking AS/A Levels and other Level 3 courses than elsewhere in the UK – and that this is particularly true of Welsh learners from more deprived backgrounds.

    39 per cent of pupils eligible for free school meals in Year 11 enrolled onto Level 3 qualifications, which compared with 72 per cent of Year 11 pupils not eligible for FSM.

    So the pipeline into higher education is constrained before students ever reach the point of applying, and the inequality data is bleak.

    Welsh boys have the lowest levels of higher education participation across all UK nations, and Wales has the widest higher education participation gap between men and women.”

    Tertiary education cannot alone counteract long-established social inequalities, which require a range of responses across education, social and economic policy.

    This is honest – and a useful corrective to the tendency in English policy discourse to load ever more social mobility expectations onto universities while cutting the funding they need to deliver. But it also illustrates the trap.

    If you redirect higher education finance toward fixing the Level 3 pipeline, you may improve progression rates in the long term, but you risk undermining the institutions that are supposed to receive those progressing students – and the part-time, mature student participation that has been Wales’s actual success story.

    The graduate premium

    Section 2.5, on delivering for communities and the economy, contains perhaps the most interesting data in the document – and certainly the finding that most challenges conventional UK policy wisdom.

    The standard narrative, particularly from OfS and the “low value degrees” discourse, is that the UK has produced too many graduates, the premium is eroding, and too many people are going to university for courses that don’t pay off. This framing has driven English policy toward crackdowns on recruitment, minimum outcome thresholds, and defunding of provision deemed “low value.”

    Wales tells a different story:

    In Wales, the supply of graduates has not outpaced demand, as seen in other UK countries and English regions except London. This points to a lack of graduates, not only in STEM degrees but others such as Law, Finance and Management. Overall, this may constitute a binding constraint on economic growth in Wales unlike elsewhere in the UK.

    The graduate wage premium has declined over time in most UK regions as supply increased – but not in London, and not in Wales. In Wales, there aren’t enough graduates. The constraint on economic growth isn’t “too many media studies degrees” but insufficient graduate supply across the board, including in supposedly high-value subjects.

    And then the sting:

    However, the mobility of more highly educated people means that some benefits of increasing education attainment levels might accrue to other regions, particularly London. In 2022/23, 27 per cent of Welsh graduates… worked outside of their original country of permanent address.

    Wales bears the cost of educating graduates. London, primarily, captures the productivity benefit. This creates a difficult policy problem – produce more graduates and hope enough stick around, focus on retention rather than production, accept that a small nation in an integrated UK labour market will always be partly educating for export, or align provision more tightly to specifically Welsh economic needs in the hope of creating stickier employment?

    The document doesn’t resolve this tension, but naming it is more honest than the English debate has been.

    Research and innovation

    On research funding, the picture is one of managed decline and desperate pivoting. EU structural funding has ended – a major loss for Wales – and universities must now compete more effectively for UKRI grants. There has been some success, with research council grants to Welsh universities increasing by £27m, or 42 per cent, between 2019/20 and 2023/24.

    But Wales remains structurally disadvantaged.

    It still receives a disproportionately low amount of UKRI competitive grants, at 3 per cent compared to 4 per cent of research active staff and 5 per cent of the population.

    The proportions are even lower for the largest UKRI councils – EPSRC and BBSRC – where scale matters for competitive bidding. And the underlying economics of research remain broken across the UK:

    UKRI grants are expected to cover only 80 per cent of the full economic cost of activity. However, cost recovery has fallen over the last number of years across the UK to 67 per cent, and research has become increasingly reliant on cross-subsidy from universities’ other income sources – primarily international student fees.

    With international fee income under pressure from visa restrictions, the cross-subsidy model that has propped up UK research is crumbling – and Wales, with fewer research-intensive institutions and less capacity to absorb losses, is especially exposed.

    The limits of devolution

    Reading this carefully, what emerges is a case study in the limits of devolution when you share a labour market, a student market, a research funding system, and a loan book with a much larger neighbour who makes decisions without necessarily consulting you.

    Wales has formal powers over higher education policy, but the constraints are formidable – the money for loans comes with HMT strings, and the biggest funding stream is controlled by Treasury parameters; the uncapped UK student market means Welsh institutions sink or swim based on UK-wide dynamics; immigration policy, which determines international recruitment capacity, is reserved to Westminster; competition law is reserved, shaping what collaboration is possible; research funding is split between devolved QR and UK-wide competitive grants Wales struggles to win; and graduate mobility means Wales educates workers that other regions employ.

    Many of the problems are not Welsh specifically – they are UK-wide or English problems that Wales experiences acutely because of its scale and fiscal position. The demographic cliff, the market redistribution toward higher-tariff providers, the research cross-subsidy crisis, the exhaustion of the student loan credit card – all of these are hitting RUK too. Wales has just chosen to say it out loud.

    So what is this, really? It is partly a cry for help – an honest statement that the current settlement is not sustainable and that Wales cannot solve these problems alone. It is partly a beg for more joined-up policymaking with DfE – the repeated references to English policy changes that Wales must “respond to” carry an implicit plea for consultation before decisions are made.

    It is partly a cast around for ideas – the call for submissions is genuine, and officials will presumably welcome evidence they haven’t considered. And it is partly an attempt to inform the Senedd election, giving candidates and voters a more sophisticated picture of the choices ahead than the usual campaign slogans allow.

    The document does make some effort to consider what would make Wales more attractive as a place to study and a place for graduates to remain. The analysis of graduate retention, the attention to Welsh-medium provision, the recognition that local availability of courses matters more as students increasingly live at home – all of this points toward a more place-conscious policy agenda.

    But the analysis is not consistently place-based – there’s relatively little on how these challenges play out differently in Cardiff versus Bangor versus the Valleys, despite the economic contribution arguments that run through the document.

    While student hardship and cost of living pressures are documented in bleak detail, students as agents in the system are largely absent. And while it references Medr’s system-level steering role repeatedly, it’s hard to see how meaningful system shaping happens without either student number controls – which would require agreement with Westminster given the UK-wide market – or substantial new funding to direct toward strategic priorities. Wales has neither.

    The call for submissions closes in March 2026, the Diamond evaluation is due in Spring 2026, Medr’s subject provision mapping will be published in February, and a prospectus for vocational education and training is promised for Spring 2026. The Senedd election follows in May.

    Welsh government has done something valuable here – it has produced an honest, sophisticated, technically detailed analysis of problems that much of UK higher education faces but few governments have been willing to articulate clearly.

    Whether that honesty leads to better policy – in Wales, and perhaps by example in England – remains to be seen. But as a baseline for informed debate about the future of tertiary education, this document sets a standard that other administrations would do well to notice.

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  • Florida’s Syllabus Regulations Will Stunt Learning (opinion)

    Florida’s Syllabus Regulations Will Stunt Learning (opinion)

    Over the past five years, I have adapted to a litany of new policies, procedures and restructurings at both the level of the college and the state: a shift in summer semester length, increased class sizes, a collegewide administrative reorganization, a syllabus review searching for language related to the Israel-Palestine conflict and state rewriting of course outcomes. Throughout all this, I remained radically optimistic, suspending any criticism—and the anticipated upheaval usually subsided. Most changes happen for good reason (they are not, usually, implemented arbitrarily) and are unobtrusive to my activities as a professor. In short, I am noncynical and receptive to change, up to a reasonable threshold.

    Florida’s newly amended regulations for college syllabi, which require professors at public universities to publish their syllabi at least 45 days before the first day of class, crosses the threshold of reason. While there are concerns about the laboriousness of submitting a syllabus 45 days prior to the term, as well as potential political issues of censorship (some faculty argue syllabi are being made public to persecute unfavored views), my objection to this new policy is neither labor-based nor political. What is plainly concerning to me is the stipulation that all “required and recommended” readings must be included on the syllabus before the semester starts. This means that no new readings can be added (since that would violate the binding, prepublished syllabus), making the reading list inflexible and leading to pedagogically stunted classrooms.

    This is not a proxy for a covert political argument. Actually, my criticism of static reading lists has nothing to do with politics, though the policies reflect a partisan political agenda: It is about pedagogy. The problem is not that the readings would be made public, but instead that they would be fixed, circumscribing professors’ creative interventions after a term has begun. Transparency is not what is at stake here; it is agency. Every instructor collates readings for a course before the start date (and, to be charitable, ensuring faculty prepare courses early—when possible—may be a good thing), but losing the ability to substitute readings during a semester is a diminution of effective teaching, which demands perpetual refinement.

    A good class will always evolve, however subtly, from semester to semester—a change in course policy, an additional reading (or omitted reading), a tweaked assignment or a new in-class activity that one discovers at a teaching conference. Occasionally, these changes are made intrasemesterly, spurred by the realization that another approach will better serve student learning. To be clear, an instructor probably should not outright replace their entire reading list midsemester, yet they must retain the ability to make decisions regarding readings as the semester unfolds, rather than be tethered to a static reading list. A college classroom necessitates instructor agency, and anything meaningfully restricting that agency renders the classroom, in turn, less dynamic for students.

    Consider how limiting an instructor’s ability to change readings, as needed, undermines a course’s engagement with the outside world. In the fall, I took a doctoral-level course on AI in the humanities. Although there were set readings each week, the professor provided weekly readings on AI software that was being developed in real time. The static readings, no matter how meticulously chosen, simply could not keep pace with this emergent technology, and the newly added weekly readings were often the most insightful. Florida’s new syllabus policy will preclude a practice like this. It is crucial to note that this was not, in any way, an unprepared instructor lazily adding readings as the term went on, but rather an instructor who was working harder by supplementing an already-robust reading list with freshly published material.

    In my own courses, as an instructor of first-year composition, I walk a continually renegotiated line between challenging students and facilitating discussion and interest. I’m aware that some of the readings may be difficult for students (for instance, when teaching them how to read peer-reviewed academic articles), yet other times, I want more accessible readings, ones that develop arguments that students can become really invested in, frequently on a topic they are already familiar with. That way, students can reflect on how compelling they find an argument (on something they may already have a partially developed position on)—and then, from there, we can dissect the argument together.

    Last semester, I swapped out some in-class readings for two recently published argumentative essays on the Labubu toy trend (a polished, well-researched article from a national publication and an imperfect opinion piece from a smaller publication). In this instance, the readings worked perfectly: The essays generated a lively discussion, not only about their content (Labubus and fleeting collectible trends in general) but also about the structure of the essays and their rhetorical effectiveness. Assigning texts like these demonstrates to students that writing isn’t a practice only occurring in the classroom, but an activity contending with the actual world, whether the subject is as timeless as poverty or as ephemeral as Labubus.

    How would it be possible to assign readings about a passing trend—to capture student interest—when all readings must be fixed before the trend even begins? A course can only be responsive to the world if the instructor has the requisite agency over the readings they assign. To a reasonable degree, reading lists must be adjustable.

    Of course, my example of arguments about Labubus is, in a sense, trivial—it isn’t actually about the content of the essays, but the fact that students could relate to the topical content (my courses teach students writing, argumentation and research—not consumer trends). Consider, though, a course in the hard sciences: If an instructor becomes aware of a new discovery, rendering a previous scientific claim outdated, should they not be permitted to exchange readings about the old claim with those about the new discovery? Or should they remain bound to outdated science in the name of “transparency”?

    I view the new mandate on syllabi and reading lists as an unfortunate precursor to overstandardization (the kind pervasive in the K–12 educational environment), which is explicitly restrictive. Pragmatically, as I’ve argued, there are grounds to avoid this encroachment into the instructor’s classroom since it subdues pedagogical inventiveness. However, we should think not only about the utility of autonomy, but also about the principle. A professor should retain autonomy over the delivery of material—structured around the state- and college-mandated outcomes of the course—because this is what it means for a student to take a course in college. A professor is not a convenient vessel for predetermined content; they are, at their best, an expert curator of material to facilitate student learning.

    Ask anyone, instructor or student, if they are better served by increased standardization and attenuated classroom novelty (whether in the name of transparency or not), and it seems to me beyond doubt that neither will say they prefer rote modes of learning to those that enable improvisation and up-to-the-moment expert curation.

    Teddy Duncan Jr. is an assistant professor of English at Valencia College.

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