Tag: Education

Working with our places will help us to spread the benefits of higher education more widely
In the North East of England, fewer than one in three 18 year olds enter higher education, compared to a national average of 37 per cent.

For higher education institutions, including my own, this is more than a regrettable statistic. It must be a call to action. The Sutton Trust’s Opportunity Index highlights that the North East ranks lowest of all English regions for social mobility prospects, with the poorest students in the region facing some of the most limited chances for progression into higher education and good employment.

As a country we have undoubtedly made progress in widening participation, but as someone who spends their days thinking about such things, I worry: are we measuring that progress in the right ways? It’s not just about the gateway to university, it’s about the university journey and beyond. Or, to put it in more human terms: are people who previously wouldn’t have gone to university not only getting in, but thriving once they’re in?

If we carry on measuring widening participation purely by entry stats and graduate salaries, we’ll miss the bigger picture, and what many of us went into higher education to try to achieve: deeper, transformative impact. A university education does more than prepare someone for a job. There is good evidence that links it to longer life expectancy, better health, and greater stability.

The benefits of university go beyond the individual. Children of university graduates are much more likely to attend university and perform better once there. When a young person from a disadvantaged background earns a degree, it can spark a ripple effect that changes their family’s trajectory for good.

There’s also a clear economic case for seeing success more broadly. Graduates typically pay more in tax, rely less on welfare services, and are more likely to engage in civic life. In regions like ours, where economic renewal and social mobility are deeply connected, that impact is amplified. A university education doesn’t just boost an individual’s prospects – it helps build stronger, more resilient communities.

Whole-journey approach

If we are truly serious about transforming lives and levelling up opportunity, especially in so-called “cold spots” like County Durham, then we need to dig deeper, beyond continuation rates and into attainment and the feeling of belonging. Financial strains, cultural barriers, wellbeing concerns, and more must be recognised and overcome. These are challenges not just for admissions, but across the entire student journey.

Attainment gaps have a substantial impact, and disadvantaged students can be up to 22.7 months behind advantaged peers by the time they take their GCSEs. GCSE performance is strongly correlated with later life outcomes, including university attendance and employment quality. Early outreach is therefore pivotal in closing these long-standing gaps.

It’s a challenge we take seriously. We’re not just widening the door – we’re reshaping the whole experience: investing nearly £1.5m in programmes for Key Stage 4 and 5 students, strengthening our foundation programme, and working with Sunderland AFC’s Foundation of Light to create a new health hub in one of our most deprived communities.

One of the clearest messages of our new access and participation plan is how deeply place and perception are intertwined. Many young people in North East England don’t just lack opportunities – they’re not even sure those opportunities are meant for them. And, sadly, some still perceive Durham to be a place where they wouldn’t belong. Multiple studies show a strong link between a sense of belonging and academic success, particularly for underrepresented groups. So we’re investing in transition support and the Brilliant Club’s Join the Dots programme, which connects incoming students with peer coaches from results day onward.

What we’re trying to achieve with our strategy cannot and should not be measured solely in continuation rates and degree classifications. Our evaluation strategy includes:
- Sense of belonging as a core outcome: Building on Durham-led research, we are embedding a validated survey tool into our access and participation work. This tool captures students’ sense of belonging across multiple domains — from college life to academic confidence. These survey findings will help us identify and support groups at higher risk of exclusion.
- Quasi-experimental design: Where sample sizes allow, we will use matched control groups and multiple regression analysis to compare outcomes between intervention participants and non-participants, tracking progress from outreach through to graduation. Intermediate metrics include not only continuation and attainment but also self-efficacy and engagement.
- Pre/post measures: Our use of TASO’s validated access and success questionnaire enables pre- and post-intervention analysis of psychosocial outcomes such as academic self-efficacy and expectations of higher education.
- Theory of change models: These have been developed for each intervention strand and will be regularly updated to ensure our work is aligned with evidence and outcomes over time.
While our approach is rigorous, we anticipate several challenges. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds face cost-related pressures that may impact belonging and continuation. And persistent concerns about whether students from working-class or Northern backgrounds “belong” at Durham risk undermining recruitment and retention. We aim to confront this through co-designed interventions, but change in perception takes time.

Co-development is key

We believe that we can only succeed for the North East by working with others: through Universities for North East England – which includes Durham, Newcastle, Northumbria, Sunderland, and Teesside; and the new Durham Learning Alliance partnership with four local colleges – we must expand educational opportunities and drive economic growth.

When people see that their goals and dreams are genuinely realisable, they’re far more likely to engage. After all, who are we to define what success should look like for someone else?

The government’s opportunity mission gives higher education a rare, and much-needed, moment to pause and reset. Let’s not waste it. We’ve got a chance to rethink what success means – not just for universities, but for the people and places we serve. Let’s broaden the conversation beyond who gets through the door. Let’s put co-development at the heart of everything we do. And above all, let’s keep listening – not just to what students need, but to what they hope for. In the end, the real test of progress isn’t just who gets in. It’s who gets on – and how far they go, with us walking alongside them.
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August 15, 2025
Education Department details plans to collect applicant data by race, sex
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Dive Brief:
- Under a proposed plan from the Trump administration, colleges would have to submit six years worth of application and admissions data — disaggregated by student race and sex — as part of the 2025-26 Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System reporting cycle.
- President Donald Trump last week issued a memo requiring institutions to significantly expand the parameters of the admissions data they report to the National Center for Education Statistics, which oversees IPEDS.
- Colleges would need to submit a multi-year report “to establish a baseline of admissions practices” before the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against race-conscious admissions, according to a notice filed Wednesday in the Federal Register.
Dive Insight:

The Trump administration has repeatedly charged that diversity efforts at colleges and elsewhere violate civil rights law.

“DEI has been used as a pretext to advance overt and insidious racial discrimination,” according to the Federal Register notice, which was signed by Brian Fu, acting chief data officer of the department’s Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development.

The additional student data questions — collectively titled the Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement, or ACTS — are meant to create “greater transparency” and “help to expose unlawful practices” at colleges, the notice said. It added that, with more information, the Education Department can better enforce Title VI laws, which bar discrimination based on race, color or national origin at federally funded institutions.

Under ACTS, colleges would have to report extensive demographic data for applicants, admitted students and those that ultimately enroll. And for the first year, they would have to do so for every academic year dating back to 2020-21.

Colleges would also need to report on their graduation rates from 2019-20 to 2024-25, the notice said.

Officials would be required to disaggregate student demographics by race and sex and cross-reference it with the following data points:
- Admissions test scores.
- GPA.
- Family income.
- Pell Grant eligibility.
- Parents’ educational level.
Previously, the Education Department only required colleges to submit data by race for enrolled students.

Institutions would also have to report the numbers of their admitted student pool that applied via early action, early decision and regular admissions.

Graduate student data would be required to be disaggregated by field of study, as applicants typically apply directly to departments, not to the college overall, the notice said.

The Education Department is gearing ACTS at four-year institutions with selective admissions processes, which its notice said “have an elevated risk of noncompliance with the civil rights laws,” both in admissions and scholarships.

The proposal says open-enrollment institutions like community colleges and trade schools are at low risk for noncompliance with Title IV in admissions.

However, the department on Wednesday requested public comment on open enrollment colleges’ policies for awarding scholarships, an area it flagged as potentially providing “preferential treatment based upon race.” It also asked for feedback about the types of institutions that should be required to submit the additional admissions information.

Public feedback could influence “whether we should narrow or expand the scope of institutions required to complete the ACTS component,” it said.

The Education Department is also seeking feedback on how it could reduce the administrative cost of the increased data collection.

It estimated that, across the higher ed sector, the change will create over 740,000 hours of new work.

U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon fully endorsed Trump’s memo last week, saying the administration would not allow “institutions to blight the dreams of students by presuming that their skin color matters more than their hard work and accomplishments.” But it has yet to be seen how the agency will handle a dramatic increase in college data.

The Education Department’s workforce has been greatly diminished since Trump retook office. The Trump administration laid off half of the department’s employees in March. Although a federal judge temporarily blocked the mass terminations, the Supreme Court lifted that order last month while the litigation proceeds.

Peggy Carr, the ousted former commissioner of NCES, warned last month that the dramatic cuts to the department put it at risk of mishandling data and eroding the public’s trust in its data.

“Accurate, reliable, nonpartisan data are the essential foundations of sound education policy,” the long-time NCES official said in a statement. “Policy that isn’t informed by good data isn’t really policy — it’s guesswork.”

The Trump administration abruptly fired Carr in February. President Joe Biden had appointed her to the post for a six-year term in 2021.
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August 14, 2025
UChicago Freezing Ph.D. Admissions for Multiple Programs
The University of Chicago’s Arts and Humanities Division is reducing how many new Ph.D. students it admits for the 2026–27 academic year across about half of its departments and completely halting Ph.D. admissions elsewhere. Multiple language programs are among those affected.

In a Tuesday email that Inside Higher Ed obtained, Arts and Humanities dean Deborah Nelson told faculty, staff and Ph.D. students, “We will accept a smaller overall Ph.D. cohort across seven departments: Art History, Cinema and Media Studies, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, English Language and Literature, Linguistics, Music (composition), and Philosophy.” The university didn’t tell Inside Higher Ed how many fewer Ph.D. students would be accepted across those departments.

“Other departments will pause admissions,” Nelson wrote.

Andrew Ollett, an associate professor of South Asian languages and civilizations, said that means no new Ph.D. students for these departments: classics, comparative literature, Germanic studies, Middle Eastern studies, Romance languages and literatures, Slavic languages and literatures, and South Asian languages and civilizations, plus the ethnomusicology and history and theory of music programs in the music department.

While the university didn’t provide an interview or respond to multiple written questions, a spokesperson did point out that the UChicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy and Practice is also pausing Ph.D. admissions, while the Harris School of Public Policy is pausing admissions for the Harris Ph.D., the political economy Ph.D. and the master of arts in public policy with certificate in research methods.

“A small number of PhD and master’s programs at the University of Chicago will pause admissions for the 2026–2027 academic year while divisions and schools undertake comprehensive reviews of the programs’ missions and structures,” UChicago said in a statement. It said the aim is “ensuring the highest-quality training for the next generation of scholars” and the pauses “will not affect currently enrolled students.”

UChicago, which faces debt issues, has become yet another example of well-known universities freezing or scaling back Ph.D. admissions and programs amid financial pressures and other factors. In November, before Trump retook the presidency, Boston University said it was pausing accepting new Ph.D. students in a dozen humanities and social sciences programs, including philosophy, English and history. In February, the Universities of Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh announced pauses, following other institutions.

But UChicago’s reductions for language programs also reflect a broader trend of universities scaling back foreign language education offerings. In 2023, West Virginia University became infamous in academe for its leaders’ decision to eliminate all foreign language degrees.

“It’s sad and pathetic,” Ollett said of the pause at UChicago, “because it represents the domination of one set of values, which is money, over the values that we say that we are pursuing in our lives as faculty members, as educators and as researchers.”

He argued that the university can’t say it’s committed to the humanities as a field for producing knowledge while turning away from Ph.D. programs.

Nelson’s email said, “This one-time decision applies only to the 2026–2027 academic year.” But Clifford Ando, the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor of Classics, History and the College, questioned whether this is just a pause.

“I see no reason to think that we would resume doctoral education if we are simultaneously dismantling the curricula that sustain undergraduate training in these fields,” Ando wrote in an email sent to a classical studies Listserv. “Why would one have a doctoral program in a discipline that undergraduates can’t even study?”

Ollett also said this comes as Nelson has pushed to consolidate smaller departments. He said a big question for the coming academic year was “Do we do Ph.D. admissions if we’re not sure that our department is going to exist?”

Not Rule by Committee

Ando provided Inside Higher Ed the “charge” UChicago gave to the Arts and Humanities Languages Working Group on June 17.

“UChicago is known as a global leader in the instruction of ancient and modern languages,” the charge begins. “Language instruction and expertise is not simply a valuable object in its own right; it is an important foundation for the larger UChicago College education, for graduate education, and for the research and scholarship of our faculty.”

But it then says, “language instruction at this extraordinary scope is also expensive.” It listed several questions for the committee to explore, including:
- “Should there be a universal or suggested minimum number of students?
- “Do we need to teach every class every year?
- “Are there languages we no longer need to teach?
- “Are there opportunities for partnerships with peer institutions (with similar standards and schedules) to share language instruction?
- “How can we use technology more effectively to support and enhance language instruction?”
Ollett said, “We teach more than 50 languages in the division, which seems to be too much because the committee was asked to find ways of getting that number down.”

Tyler Williams, another associate professor in the South Asian languages and civilizations department and a member of the committee, said the committee members “unanimously declined to endorse any of the suggestions about cutting languages or outsourcing language teaching.” He said Nelson “did not wait for the committee to submit its report,” nor did she “consult with that committee before she made this decision.”

Ando also provided the charge for a separate Ph.D. Working Group, which outlined a number of “existential challenges” for Ph.D. programs. Those include significantly reduced demand for entry-level faculty, increasing costs for the university and long times to degree, which can deter students.

Additionally, the document notes that the programs are facing “heightened public skepticism about the value of what is taught in Arts & Humanities PhD programs, and how it is taught. Yet Ph.D. programs remain a critical part of the research university model, necessary to teaching, research, scholarship, and creativity.”

Among other questions, that committee was asked to explore whether there should be a minimum size for Ph.D. cohorts in order to offer a program.

Williams said that this committee indicated it wasn’t going to endorse an admissions pause, but said it should be divisionwide if it occurred.

Nelson’s email announcing the changes stressed that “this decision is not the recommendation of any committee.”

Williams said the Ph.D. admissions cuts are part of “a crisis manufactured by the university administration itself.” Ollett said he worries for the future of their field.

“We are quite unique in that there’s not a lot of South Asia area studies departments in the United States, and especially ones that train the next generation of scholars,” he said. He said he’s “already turned away prospective Ph.D. students because of this, and that’s just going to keep happening.”

He said he worries that “if we’re not doing it, no one will do it, and the field will wither and die.”
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August 14, 2025
Education Department proposes removing trans, nonbinary student categories from mandated data collection

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The U.S. Department of Education is proposing to abandon data collection on transgender and nonbinary students, including on whether they are victims of harassment and bullying and whether school districts have policies prohibiting those incidents, according to a Federal Register notice published this month.

The changes come as part of the Civil Rights Data Collection for the 2025-26 and 2027-28 school years, a mandated survey of all public school districts that has been administered for almost six decades. The department noted on its website that the CRDC has “captured data on students’ equal access to educational opportunities to understand and inform schools’ compliance with the civil rights laws enforced by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.”

The proposed changes to the upcoming collections also struck transgender students from the department’s definition of “rape” and “sexual assault.”

Whereas previous collections defined rape as something that could be done to “all students, regardless of sex, or sexual orientation, or gender identity,” the proposed collection says, “All students, regardless of sex, or sexual orientation can be victims of rape” — explicitly striking “gender identity” from the older definition.

The change “really sends a frankly terrible message to how schools should be responding to allegations of sexual assault and how they should be documenting that and bringing that data forward,” said Brian Dittmeier, director of LGBTQI+ equality at the National Women’s Law Center.

The department, however, maintained in an email to K-12 Dive that “the definition of rape and sexual assault remains virtually unchanged.”

“All students means all students, period,” said an Education Department spokesperson on Thursday.

The department submitted the proposed changes to the Office of Management and Budget for review on Aug. 7 and is accepting comments on the notice until Sept. 8.

The changes are being proposed to comply with the 2020 Title IX rule, which excludes LGBTQ+ students from sex-based discrimination protections. President Donald Trump’s Education Department told districts in January to follow that rule — published during his first term — as opposed to the 2024 rule finalized under the Biden administration, which protected LGBTQ+ students under the sex discrimination civil rights statute.

The Education Department is also proposing a change in its Civil Rights Data Collection to exclude transgender and nonbinary students in light of Trump’s January 2025 executive order “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” That executive order directed federal agencies to only recognize two sexes, male and female, and said, “These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”

The Education Department has since adopted that stance, and it has attempted to include the definitions “male” and “female” in state policies through its resolution agreements and to exclude transgender students from teams and facilities aligning with their gender identities.

The decision to now strike those students from the CRDC means the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights — under the current administration and future ones — would have less data on how transgender and nonbinary students fared in the 2025-26 and 2027-28 school years.

“OCR uses CRDC data as OCR investigates complaints alleging discrimination to determine whether the federal civil rights laws it enforces have been violated, initiates proactive compliance reviews to identify particularly acute or nationwide civil rights compliance problems, and provides policy guidance and technical assistance to educational institutions, parents/guardians, students, and others,” a July 22 statement from the U.S. Department of Education to the Office of Budget and Management said. Other federal agencies, researchers and policymakers also use CRDC data, the department said.

Transgender and students questioning their gender identity showed higher rates of bullying and poor mental health, as well as the lowest rates of school connectedness, when compared to their cisgender peers, according to the first nationally representative survey data on transgender students released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last year.

An overwhelming majority of LGBTQ+ students also said in 2024 that anti-LGBTQ+ policies had impacted their mental health, according to an annual survey released by The Trevor Project, a nonprofit that provides crisis support services for LGTBQ+ people.

“We’ll have less data to contextualize the problem and provide a clear picture to schools of what the experience of transgender and gender-nonconforming students is in school currently,” Dittmeier said. “And that will unfortunately make it more difficult to implement interventions that are needed to ensure a safe school environment for all.”

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August 14, 2025
PHILIP CAVALIER | Diverse: Issues In Higher Education

Dr. Philip Cavalier Philip Cavalier has been named president of Kutztown University. Cavalier most recently served as provost and senior vice chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of Tennessee at Martin (UTM), a regional public university with more than 7,000 students in northwest Tennessee. He served as interim chancellor for five months in 2023. During his seven years at the university, he led the creation of UTM’s 2025- 30 strategic plan, and two strategic enrollment plans and developed or enhanced eight academic programs aligned with student interests and local workforce needs. Before joining UT Martin, Cavalier held several faculty and senior leadership roles in higher education, including provost at Lyon College, provost and dean of the college at Eureka College, and dean of general education at Catawba College.

Cavalier holds a doctorate in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo, a master’s degree in English from Northeastern University, Boston, Mass., and a bachelor’s degree in economics from Swarthmore College.

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August 14, 2025
Rethinking Pathways for Students in Rural Communities

In rural parts of the U.S., 36 percent of jobs that pay enough for an individual to be self-sufficient require at least a bachelor’s degree, yet only 25 percent of rural workers hold such degrees. Many rural communities do not have a university or four-year college nearby. As a result, students in these communities are likely to start their educational journey to a bachelor’s at a community college. Of the nearly 1,000 community colleges nationwide, more than a quarter are in rural areas and many others are designated as rural-serving.

The paths to a bachelor’s degree for rural students are not as straightforward as they are for students in urban or suburban areas with higher concentrations of four-year institutions. For rural community college students, there are four primary routes to earning a bachelor’s degree. As described below, the first three, more conventional, paths do not always work well. But there is also a fourth path—the community college bachelor’s degree program. While still relatively rare, this path is growing in popularity because, when well designed, it is effective in enabling place-bound students to earn bachelor’s degrees and secure good jobs in their communities.

Path 1: Transfer to a Four-Year University

The first path is to transfer to a four-year college and either become a residential student there or commute a long distance to get back and forth to campus from home. Laramie County Community College, where one of us is president, has worked with the University of Wyoming, the state’s only university, located in Laramie, to develop guaranteed transfer pathways to UW bachelor’s programs in major fields of economic importance to the region and state.

But only a minority of LCCC students—mostly younger students who have financial support from their families—can realistically afford to become full-time residential students at UW. Most community college students have jobs and families they can’t leave for several months a year, even if they could afford room and board in addition to tuition (which few can). Commuting to UW is difficult even for LCCC students who live in relatively nearby Cheyenne, almost an hour’s drive from Laramie on a road that crosses the highest point on the Continental Divide and is often closed in the winter. For LCCC students who live in outlying areas and for students at other Wyoming community colleges, commuting to UW is not realistic.

Path 2: Pursue a Bachelor’s Degree Online

Theoretically, this should be an effective option for rural, place-bound community college students. In reality, this avenue is not feasible for the many rural students who live in “digital deserts” or face “last-mile” barriers to broadband access.

Even when internet access is not a problem, many students struggle to complete online programs. Only a quarter of community college students who transfer to online universities complete a bachelor’s degree within four years of transferring. This compares to 57 percent of community college starters who transfer to a public four-year institution. In general, undergraduates who take all their courses online are less likely to succeed than those who take just some courses online. And online success rates are especially low for low-income students, those from other underserved groups or those who face other challenges typical in rural areas, such as limited access to transportation and childcare.

Path 3: Complete a Bachelor’s Degree Through a Community College–Based University Center

The third path is for students to take upper-division coursework through a university center arrangement, where the four-year university has a physical presence on the community college campus. These arrangements vary in design but typically involve university faculty teaching courses on the community college campus. While reasonable in concept, university centers are often challenging to operate. Beyond common issues of ownership, oversight and authority associated with programs run by two separate institutions, in rural colleges, such programs also often do not enroll enough students to make it worth the investment by the university and thus are difficult to sustain, financially and politically.

A Fourth Path: The Community College Bachelor’s Degree

That leaves community college bachelor’s degree programs, which are often the best option for rural students. Research indicates that these programs not only provide effective access to bachelor’s programs for older working students with families and others who are place-bound but also enable these students to secure good jobs.

Some question whether community colleges should offer bachelor’s degrees, arguing that they duplicate university offerings and represent a form of mission creep. But community college bachelor’s degrees tend to be unlike conventional bachelor’s degrees from universities. First, they are explicitly designed as applied credentials to meet specific regional workforce needs. In the best cases, community college bachelor’s degrees are reverse-engineered collaboratively with employers to meet these needs.

Second, they are also often designed to help the many applied associate degree graduates of community colleges find a more effective path to completing a bachelor’s degree, in which their applied coursework is built upon, not disregarded. Finally, they are delivered at home so that graduates of community colleges who are tied to their local area can advance into family-supporting jobs. They are offered through institutions that most students are already familiar with and by people with whom students already have relationships.

For example, LCCC offers a bachelor’s of applied science in health-care administration, with accelerated eight-week courses, offered at convenient times and through a combination of online and in-person modalities. The program is designed to provide the many working health-care clinicians with applied associate degrees (e.g., nurses, sonographers, radiology techs, etc.) a path to management jobs. This program was developed collaboratively with numerous health-care employers to address the strong demand for talent in health-care administration and provide their employees with a viable path to a bachelor’s degree, without requiring them to start over or relocate to another community.

The number of bachelor’s degrees awarded by community colleges nationally is still small: fewer than 17,000 annually, compared to more than 1.3 million awarded by public universities. Still, policymakers in a growing number of states are recognizing that rural community colleges are well positioned to meet the needs of students and employers for workforce bachelor’s programs not available from other providers. Currently, community colleges in 24 states are authorized to offer bachelor’s degrees in particular fields, yet the majority (nearly 80 percent) of these colleges are located in just seven states. Thus, there is plenty of room to grow. Bachelor’s programs offered by rural community colleges provide a model for what we hope is becoming a national movement to rethink bachelor’s education for the large number of place-bound students who must work and care for their families but need a bachelor’s degree to advance in their careers.

Joe Schaffer is president of Laramie County Community College. Davis Jenkins is a senior research scholar and Hana Lahr is assistant director of research and director of applied learning at the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

Ascendium Education Group provided funding for this work.

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August 14, 2025
How to Read a Memo

By now, the memo from the attorney general’s office outlining the administration’s interpretation of civil rights laws as they apply to higher education has made the rounds.

It took me back to my grad school days. I took a seminar in literary theory—the ’90s were a different time—and remember being struck particularly by reader-response theory. As I understood it, it argued that the meaning of a text is determined by the reader rather than the writer. Meanings aren’t as random as that might make it sound; “interpretive communities” take shape around a host of sociological, as well as personal, variables. In other words, we learn how to interpret texts partially by modeling on how people around us do. The same text can be read differently depending on your social location.

I’ve had personal experience of that in rewatching beloved movies or rereading beloved books from my teen years. In high school, Revenge of the Nerds struck me as funny and refreshing. As an adult, I can’t get past its sexism. The movie hasn’t changed, but I have.

The assumptions that different interpretive communities make aren’t always conscious. They don’t work like geometric proofs. In my experience, the most frustrating conflicts happen when different unconscious assumptions (or givens) crash into each other. Having to defend something you take as obviously true feels like either a complete dismissal or a slap in the face; it quickly moves discussion from reasoned disagreement to exasperated incomprehension. (“How can you possibly say that?”)

If you don’t recognize when those assumptions clash, it’s easy to get stuck in cycles of verbal shadowboxing. Is someone arguing against single-payer health insurance because they believe that a regulated market system would be more efficient? If so, a reasoned discussion may be worthwhile. Or are they arguing against it because they believe that poor people deserve to die? In that case, arguments around relative efficiency are pointless. Some folks are skilled at disingenuously using reasonable-sounding arguments to defend horrific assumptions; the tip-off is when they switch from one argument to a contradictory one as soon as they start to lose. The sooner you detect that move, the more time and emotional energy you can save.

The AG’s memo offers a glimpse into the unconscious (or at least unspoken) assumptions animating the administration.

Take, for instance, the assertion that “geographic or institutional targeting” is a proxy for discrimination. The only way that can make sense is if you assume the colleges and universities they had in mind are private ones that draw students from around the country. In the case of community colleges, most have a geographic boundary in their name and/or a defined service district. Monroe Community College, in Rochester, N.Y., is defined by its location in Monroe County. It gives a discount—economists call that price discrimination—to residents of its county. Students from out of county pay more.

And that’s not unique to MCC; it’s the way most community colleges work. Even those that don’t have out-of-county or out-of-district price premiums usually have out-of-state premiums. The same is true of most public universities. I’ve personally had the experience of paying out-of-state tuition for two kids at public universities; it’s not fun. Is that illegal now? If so, I’ll apply for a refund from the Universities of Virginia and Maryland, posthaste.

Of course, the vast majority of colleges and universities draw overwhelmingly from their own state. That’s a direct version of geographic targeting. A national higher ed policy based on the presumption that geographic targeting is the problem simply ignores the vast majority of the sector.

The issues are also more granular than that. The memo ignores scholarships offered by donors for graduates of particular high schools. Are those illegal now? Private donors frequently favor graduates of their own high schools, or people from the towns in which they grew up. Do we have to turn those donors away now? Or only if the towns in which they grew up are too diverse? Are sports scholarships only OK if they don’t draw too diverse a group of students? If so, then sailing is fine and basketball is suspect. Hmm. I think there’s a word for that.

I imagine the answer the attorney general would offer would be something like “as long as geographic preferences aren’t about increasing diversity, they’re OK.” But that presumes a lot. For example, New York City is more diverse than, well, just about anywhere; if a struggling small college on Long Island starts recruiting aggressively in New York City, is that about diversity or about enrollment? And how do you know?

Discerning institutional intent isn’t straightforward. Mixed motives are entirely normal. For example, is the movement to improve graduation rates meant to help students, budgets or institutions’ public images? The answer is all of the above. Is making colleges more inclusive of people of different backgrounds for the benefit of the newly included, the folks already there or institutional budgets? Again, yes.

A serious discussion would look less at intentions and more at incentives. If decades of public disinvestment force public institutions to behave more like private ones, basing more of their budgets on tuition, then we shouldn’t be surprised to see them compete for students. They’ll do what they have to do. If we want colleges to stop competing for students, we should insulate them from the economic need to do so. It has been done before.

The universe assumed in the memo tells us a lot about the people behind it. It presumes a world in which economic issues don’t matter, intentions are obvious, people have only one motive at a time and elite institutions constitute the entire industry. It reflects the kid who thought Revenge of the Nerds was a breath of fresh air. But that kid eventually grew up and learned that there was more to the world than was dreamt of in his philosophy. The word for that process is education.

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August 14, 2025
The Family Business: An Open Letter (satire/opinion)

Dear Presidents, Chancellors and OTHER Temporary Custodians of My Properties:

Greetings from the Family—I mean, the Administration. You’ve been running a nice little operation there: world-class labs, libraries, free-thinking faculty, students from all over the globe who still believe in the marketplace of ideas, all asking dangerous questions like “Why?” and “What is your evidence?”

It’s over.

As the founder of a MAJOR university, I’m here to say this: We’re gonna do things my way now.

First Order of Business: You Need My Protection

As you know, I’m a SUCESSFUL international businessman. I offer certain countries—let’s call them “friends”—deals: They pay me a modest consideration, or maybe a big, beautiful luxury jet, and I won’t slap them with tariffs to make their economy bleed out. I offer the same generous arrangement to higher ed.

Take Crooked Columbia and Brownnosing Brown—smart enough to come to the table, hand over the dough and watch my charges vanish like magic. Funding? Flowing again … for now.

High and mighty Harvard’s still holding out, though, thinking they can win a staring contest. Let’s just say their next accreditation visit is gonna be … comprehensive.

UCLA? Aka Useless College for Leftist Agendas. Rumor is my friends in D.C. have started looking real close at their books. Would be a shame if we had to start collecting on that billion the hard way.

The rest of you RADICAL LUNATIC LEFT, listen up:

Investigations into your crimes against America, like “allowing students to protest” or “letting faculty disagree with the government,” can disappear overnight … for a price.

Call it a FAVOR from a friendly accreditor.

But remember, what I giveth I can take awayeth.

I don’t do promises; I do BUSINESS. And it’s business time.

Apple, Intel, NVIDIA jump when I say jump. Universities? Child’s play.

Some say I’m an ANTISEMITISM SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIOR on campus and sure, I like the Jews. I’ll take the compliment, right alongside credit for sprucing up big, beautiful Confederate statues.

My war on hate? Let’s just say it has … range. And if a few very fine people happen to be nearby, standing back and standing by, waiting for the signal to help CLARIFY my position, well, that’s just business.

We Don’t Need Stuck-Up Elites Who Think They’re So Smart

That NASTY WOMAN at the Bureau of Labor Statistics? The one who brought me cooked-up job numbers I didn’t like? FIRED.

That Georgia political hack who couldn’t find enough votes? ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!

Judges who cross me? Death threats from my cyber goons have them looking over their shoulders.

Your degree, your Nobel Prize, your teaching awards—SAD! I’ve built towers with my name in gold, hosted the No. 1 reality show on television, and put my face on steaks, sneakers and Bitcoin.

So you publish in that fake Ranger Rick Nature magazine. I don’t care if your lab just cured cancer; if your research questions don’t support my worldview, your grant is pulled and your lab reassigned to our friend of the family on the board, Mikey, who’s very confident about his opinion on quantum biology.

IRB? More like, “I’m Rich, Buddy.”

Loyalty—to ME—is the only credential that matters.

WOKE Faculty Hiring and Student Admissions: GONE-ZO

MARXIST MANIACS who lack American values and good Christian sensibilities have no business shaping our young peoples’ minds. Cover letters with Bible verses or Lee Greenwood lyrics will receive special consideration.

After I cut more big, beautiful deals with my AI buddies, the bots will weed out candidate files with the words “inclusive excellence” or “diversifying the pipeline.”

No more “global citizen” snowflake CRAP. In fact, pretty soon, it’s gonna be all AI at the podium—no critical thinking, no unions, no problem.

International students are allowed, but only RICH ones, with no subversive ideas, like democracy, on their social media feeds. No students from the shithole countries—you know the list. (Come to think of it, I don’t like any country, so being from one of our so-called allies won’t help either.)

NO “underrepresented” anything. ONLY OVERREPRESENTED. Racial disadvantage, adversity, “lived experience” or some “community-based” qualifications? FORGET ABOUT IT.

We’re running a university, not a sob story contest!

You want to admit a Latina who speaks three languages and started her own nonprofit? Great—as long as all three languages are English and she’s truly FEMALE.

And while we’re at it, ban “optional” diversity statements. The only statement that matters is your pledge of allegiance. To me.

Academic Freedom, Suckers!

You thought academic freedom meant hiring the best scholars, encouraging debate and letting a thousand ideas bloom.

HILARIOUS!

From now on, FREEDOM means freedom to offer academic programs that look just like the ones we had in 1952, when America was great (minus the jazz) and McCarthy knew what higher education should look like.

It took Viktor 10 YEARS to bring his universities to heel. I’m doing it in six MONTHS, results like nobody’s ever seen before.

“woMEN’s” studies? GONE.

African American literature course? Replaced with Great Books by Even Greater White Men.

Faculty scholarship on critical race theory, gender equity or, God forbid, climate science, will get an automatic tenure-denial stamp. Come to think of it, tenure? What’s that? More like Permanent Welfare for America-Hating Communists.

Just watch what you publish, pal. I can make tenure go away real fast, the same way I disappeared USAID.

My good friend VICE CHANCELLOR Rufo will replace it with rolling one-year contracts, renewable upon click-through loyalty oath training modules.

Also, just a heads-up. Any course material still using the outdated term “Gulf of Mexico” will be flagged in our next surveillance round. My top patriot and loyal adviser, Stephen, suggests: “The Gulf of AMERICA FIRST.” And you so-called political scientists, get your facts right on who won the 2020 election. You’d best update those course materials, nice and clean, and nobody’s sabbatical turns into an extended stay at Alligator Alcatraz.

Capishe? I don’t want to have to slam any more heads together.

It’s time you got the picture, EGGHEADS: Knowledge isn’t power. Power is power.

Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Your Don

P.S. I’ll let you keep your football program. You’re welcome.

Jennifer Lundquist is a professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her satirical observations in this essay are hers alone and not intended to represent the views of her employer.

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August 14, 2025
The Key Podcast: Colleges Are Planning for the Unknown

The Key Podcast: Colleges Are Planning for the Unknown

sara.custer@in…

Thu, 08/14/2025 – 03:00 AM

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IHE Staff

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August 14, 2025
Federal Judge Orders NSF to Reinstate Suspended UCLA Grants

A class action suit led by researchers in the University of California system spurred the ruling.

Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images | US District Court for the Northern District of California

The National Science Foundation restored grants it recently suspended for researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, following a court order late Tuesday, a spokesperson for the agency said.

The NSF and UCLA didn’t tell Inside Higher Ed how much funding had been restored, but the Los Angeles Times reported it’s roughly $81 million.

It’s a blow to the Trump administration, which had multiple agencies cut off more than $500 million in research funds to UCLA earlier this month and, according to the UC system, demanded a $1 billion settlement payment.

UCLA is the latest target of the Trump administration’s use of mass federal research grant suspensions to pressure prominent universities to change policies and pay restitution, ranging from tens of millions of dollars for Brown University to the billion-dollar demand of UCLA. Federal agencies justify cutting off grants by accusing targeted institutions of failing to address pro-Palestine protesters’ alleged antisemitism, and accusing universities of other transgressions, such as letting transgender women compete in women’s sports or promoting racial preferences.

But this is the first known court order blocking one of those blanket funding freezes. Harvard University also challenged the administration’s decision to suspend more than $2.7 billion in funds, but a judge has a yet to rule in that case.

UCLA didn’t sue, though.

Instead, the ruling came from a lawsuit that UC researchers filed in early June against President Trump, the NSF and other federal agencies and officials that challenged previous NSF grant terminations.

On June 23, U.S. District Court judge Rita F. Lin, of the Northern District of California, issued a preliminary injunction restoring grants that the administration terminated en masse via form letters that didn’t provide grant-specific explanations for the terminations. When the NSF recently cut off grants again, specifically to UCLA, the researchers’ attorneys alleged the agency violated the preliminary injunction.

Lin agreed, writing in an opinion Tuesday that the new “suspensions have the same effect, and are based on the same type of deficient explanations, as the original terminations.”

The NSF wrote in a July 30 letter justifying the new suspensions that “NSF understands that [UCLA] continues to engage in race discrimination including in its admissions process, and in other areas of student life, as well as failing to promote a research environment free of antisemitism and bias.” Two days later, the NSF sent a second letter, alleging that UCLA furthermore “engages in racism” and “endangers women by allowing men in women’s sports and private women-only spaces.”

According to Lin, the NSF argued that its recent funding cuts “are not within the scope of the preliminary injunction because it suspended, rather than terminated, the grants.” She said the agency argued that suspensions, unlike terminations, “can be lifted once the grantee takes certain corrective actions.”

However, Lin said the NSF had labeled these “suspensions” as “final agency decision[s] not subject to appeal.”

“There is no listed end date for the suspensions, nor is there any path for researchers to restore funding for their project. If any curative action is actually feasible, it would need to be undertaken by UCLA,” the judge wrote. “In other words, researchers have no guarantee that funding will ever be restored and no way to take action to increase the likelihood of restoration.”

She added that “NSF claims that it could simply turn around the day after the preliminary injunction issued, and halt funding on every grant that had been ordered reinstated, so long as that action was labeled as a ‘suspension’ rather than a ‘termination.’ This is not a reasonable interpretation of the scope of the preliminary injunction.”

Researchers told the court that as a result of the latest suspensions, “projects are already losing talented graduate students, staff will soon be laid off, and years of federally funded work will go to waste,” Lin wrote. Researchers also said the defunded projects include “multi-year research into global heat extremes, a project to address environmental challenges in the Southwestern United States, and another to enhance veteran participation and leadership in STEM fields,” the judge added.

A UC system spokesperson said in an email Wednesday that, “while we have not had an opportunity to review the court’s order and were not party to the suit, restoration of National Science Foundation funds is critical to research the University of California performs on behalf of California and the nation.”

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August 14, 2025