Tag: Education

Capstone Course Helps Students Launch Ventures

Students often learn about entrepreneurship without a clear path to turn their ideas into a viable business. The University of Dayton’s capstone course gives them that path.

Launched in fall 2024, Flyer Nest guides students to develop scalable business ideas they can continue after graduation.

Housed in UD’s School of Business Administration, Flyer Nest is part of the university’s entrepreneurship program and teaches students not just how to launch companies but also how to design ventures that solve real problems and benefit their communities.

To date, Flyer Nest has served 12 teams totaling about 70 students, with each team developing a single business venture. Two teams have continued their ventures beyond the course, and six new teams began this semester.

Vince Lewis, associate vice president for entrepreneurial initiatives at UD, said all students in the capstone course end the semester not just with a classroom project but with a proposal they can submit for funding.

“There is a bigger learning outcome than just the start-up,” Lewis said. “Students gain better confidence in actually being able to execute an entrepreneurial venture.”

He added that two students from a continuing team raised about $400,000 to fund their venture aimed at improving helmet safety for football players.

“That’s a valuable, real-world opportunity,” Lewis said. “Students build a business case and then present it to business owners, investors and entrepreneurs at the end of the semester to get feedback.”

“It really does provide a win for students actively pursuing start-ups,” he added.

The approach: The capstone course partners with the Ohio Entrepreneurial Services Provider program and the Ohio Third Frontier Technology Validation and Start-Up Fund (TVSF) to provide critical resources to Flyer Nest teams, including mentorship and connections to potential investors.

Lewis said students build their projects around technologies they find in a database of innovations available for licensing from research labs.

“Scientists and engineers develop [the technologies], but they aren’t focused on commercializing them,” said Lewis. He added that Flyer Nest teams work together to turn these technologies into solutions for real-world problems, from disease detection to health literacy for Black Americans.

Lewis said the team from Flyer Nest’s inaugural cohort focused on helmet safety secured $200,000 in state funding through TVSF, then secured the rest from new-venture competitions and grants.

The project leveraged the students’ football backgrounds and technology originally designed for hazmat suits to create a sensor embedded in helmet chin straps, he said.

“If you integrate Bluetooth and communications already being added into helmets, it can alert coaches or someone on the sideline that a chin strap isn’t tight, potentially preventing head injuries,” said Lewis.

He added that another team from the capstone course is using technology originally designed to detect fatigued pilots to assist truck drivers. The students are currently partnering with three local trucking companies interested in pursuing the venture with them.

What’s next: Lewis said next steps involve expanding Flyer Nest beyond business and entrepreneurship majors, particularly pulling students from engineering, design, communications and other disciplines.

He also said he wants to create a year-round venture studio where students can continue developing their ideas after the semester ends.

For other institutions interested in creating an experiential course like Flyer Nest, Lewis said it’s essential that they have strong institutional commitment and an engaged community partner embedded in the local entrepreneurial ecosystem.

“The community partners are what makes it work,” Lewis said. “Because they have this vast network of people they can bring in and integrate into the course to help us execute.”

Ultimately, Lewis said, running a capstone course like Flyer Nest requires dedication and a willingness to navigate the uncertainty that comes with real-world learning.

“It’s a significant lift in terms of effort, because there’s a little ambiguity when you’re going into it,” he said. “This experiential, real-world opportunity for students is a really big commitment.”

Get more content like this directly to your inbox. Subscribe here.

Source link

January 16, 2026
Appeals Court Reverses Order to Release Khalil

Protesters gathered in Houston in June to oppose President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.

Reginald Mathalone/NurPhoto via Getty Images

An appeals court has reversed the decision to release from custody Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate and pro-Palestinian activist who was detained by immigration officials for several months last year, The Guardian and other outlets reported Thursday.

The court dismissed the lawsuit challenging his arrest in a 2-to-1 ruling, on the grounds that the lower court that ordered his release did not have the jurisdiction to do so. Circuit judges Thomas Hardiman, a George W. Bush appointee, and Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee, argued that the petition for his release should have been handled in his eventual immigration hearing.

“The scheme Congress enacted governing immigration proceedings provides Khalil a meaningful forum in which to raise his claims later on—in a petition for review of a final order of removal,” they wrote.

In a dissenting opinion, however, Judge Arianna J. Freeman, a Biden appointee, argued that it was appropriate for Khalil to seek faster relief in federal court, as his detainment was causing “irreparable injury.”

“Today’s ruling is deeply disappointing, but it does not break our resolve. The door may have been opened for potential re-detainment down the line, but it has not closed our commitment to Palestine and to justice and accountability,” Khalil said in a statement. ”I will continue to fight, through every legal avenue and with every ounce of determination, until my rights, and the rights of others like me, are fully protected.”

Source link

January 16, 2026
Former Emporia State Pres. to “Find Waste” at Kansas Colleges

Last week, Kansas legislative leaders met in a Statehouse committee room with a broad agenda item—to approve a higher ed budget consultant.

Neither the name nor proposed pay for this consultant was listed. The person Republican leaders were planning to hire didn’t become clear until House Speaker Dan Hawkins began talking at the meeting.

“We have an opportunity,” Hawkins told fellow members of the Legislative Coordinating Council, according to a video the Legislature posted. “One of the presidents of a university has retired. He has intimate insight into the higher ed budget arena. And, certainly, as everybody knows, we have to be very careful and prudent with the dollars in our budget.”

“We really need to cut $200 million from our budget,” Hawkins said, adding that the consultant would help “find efficiencies—find any waste that we can find.”

Within eight minutes—including brief objections from Democratic leaders in the room, one of whom said he was relying on “context clues” to guess whom the hiree would be—the lawmakers voted 5 to 2 to give Hawkins the power to hire this consultant. And, as The Kansas Reflector confirmed after the meeting, Hawkins is indeed planning to hire Ken Hush, who retired as president of Emporia State University last month, at a rate of $10,000 per month. Hush’s leadership of his own institution was controversial, including budget problems, tenured faculty layoffs and enrollment declines.

Tom Day, Kansas’s director of legislative administrative services, told Inside Higher Ed in an email, “We are currently in communication with Mr. Hush putting a contract together,” and there are no documents showing what his “scope of work” will be. But Day said the payment will be “$50,000, over a 5-month period.” Hawkins gets to sign off on the final contract.

Republicans’ hiring of Hush, who the Reflector noted is Hawkins’s former fraternity brother, to give advice on cutting other universities’ budgets has elicited criticism from those who say he wasn’t good at running one institution and suggest he’s benefiting from his political connection.

“Ken Hush’s hiring was a sole-source backroom deal to give an old frat brother—who has a proven track record of being unable to run a university—a job,” Dinah Sykes, leader of the Senate Democrats, said in a statement.

Under Hush’s leadership, Emporia State garnered national controversy after it laid off tenured faculty, saw a 12.5 percent enrollment plunge the next academic year and then defended its general counsel for writing a bill to eliminate tenure protections across public institutions statewide. The top administrator of the Kansas Board of Regents accused the university of breaking the board’s policy requiring preapproval of legislative proposals.

(Emporia State spokesperson Gwen Larson said last year that its top lawyer’s “submission of this bill” was “a surprise to the university,” but defended his right to submit it to lawmakers. Hush had appeared to ask legislators to support such legislation a week before it appeared. The bill failed.)

A lawsuit filed against Emporia State officials during Hush’s presidency also continues, despite his departure.

In 2022, Emporia State abruptly told 33 employees—30 of whom were faculty members, 23 of them tenured professors—they were losing their jobs. The Board of Regents approved these layoffs under a policy that cited “extreme financial pressures” and declared, “Any state university employee, including a tenured faculty member, may be suspended, dismissed, or terminated.” Eleven tenured professors sued, saying they weren’t given due process.

In addition, the American Association of University Professors placed Emporia State’s administration on its censure list and condemned it for “unilaterally terminating the appointments of 30 tenured and tenure-track faculty members.” Matthew Boedy, president of the Georgia Conference of the AAUP, was one of the three investigative committee members who wrote that report.

“If the Kansas Republican lawmakers want to cut spending and gut higher education, they found their man in Ken Hush,” Boedy said. “He did exactly that at Emporia State by firing many a professor and upending the school in many ways.”

Boedy added, “The ways in which Mr. Hush went about decimating Emporia State—if that’s to be replicated across the entire state, I would not want to be a student or professor in Kansas anymore.”

But Larson, the university spokesperson, said this week that Emporia State “began to show material results of its turnaround” last fall. Among other things, she said, it eliminated a $19 million deficit, reduced deferred maintenance by 20 percent, saw enrollment rise 6 percent and went from a negative to a stable Moody’s rating.

The Reflector reported that the Legislature gave the university $18 million in total “bailouts” in 2023 and 2024 as enrollment declined. Upon his retirement, Hush announced he was donating about $1.4 million, equivalent to the last four years of his salary, to the university.

It’s unclear what kind of advice Emporia State’s former president will give lawmakers and what Republican lawmakers are looking to cut from universities. But their comments may give a clue.

‘Questionable Spending’

During last week’s meeting, Senate president Ty Masterson expressed a general need to cut costs, partly because of the Legislature’s tax cuts.

“All the stimulus money that happened through COVID … it’s now all dried up, it’s all gone,” Masterson said. “So we have to manage our budget back down to something that is normal. We’re also in a climate where some of the tax cuts that we were able to get through are being implemented, so I think it would be wise to bring on a consultant in that area.”

But Blake Carpenter, the House speaker pro tem, said he’s targeting what he referred to as “questionable spending.” The Republican said he and his staff found around $100 million worth of this spending over the legislative interim period.

Carpenter’s definition of questionable spending includes subjects conservatives have railed against. He listed just three examples: “$75,000 in travel reimbursements to a vanilla bean manufacturing tour guide in Africa,” “$96,000 to a nutritionist guru specializing in vegan cookbooks” and “$111,000 to a social justice headhunting firm specializing in placing executives into leadership positions in nonprofits.”

“If we’re able to find about $100 million just on our own over the interim, with my staff and I looking through these line items, then I think it makes a lot of sense for us to hire an executive who has run one of these universities,” he said. “They know how they operate … I think the $100 million at this point is scratching the surface and we need to continue to dig.”

(Carpenter, Masterson and Hawkins didn’t respond to requests for comment this week. Inside Higher Ed was unable to reach Hush.)

Sykes, the Senate Democratic leader, objected during the meeting to hiring a consultant. “All the talk we have about finding efficiency in government … I think we keep growing government … and to pay $10,000 a month,” she said.

“The first that I saw of this was when it was on the agenda item last night,” Sykes said.

She continued her denunciation in a statement following the meeting. “Republicans’ hiring of Ken Hush is a part of a larger problem with the Legislative Coordinating Council of issuing no-bid contracts,” she said, adding that Republicans on that council “have been dealing out sole-source contracts left and right, acting like kids in a candy store.” She said Hush’s Emporia State presidency “was fraught with failures.”

“If Hush can’t even create a proper plan for the ‘realignment’ of a single university, how could he ever properly identify areas of all of the state’s universities’ budgets to be cut?” Sykes asked.

Mallory Bishop, past president of the Emporia State Faculty Senate, said Hush’s actions at the university shouldn’t be replicated across the state now because it’s too early to tell whether they turned the institution around.

“He just ended his tenure a month ago,” said Bishop, a clinical instructor and program director at Emporia State.

“Was it triage or was it just severing limbs?” she said. “I don’t know.”

Source link

January 16, 2026
Following Texas, Florida Drops ABA Oversight of Lawyers

Florida is now the second state to drop its requirement that lawyers in the state hold a degree from a law school accredited by the American Bar Association, The Tallahassee Democrat reported Thursday.

The Florida Supreme Court, which sets law-licensure requirements, said the decision is designed to open the door for more law school accreditors.

“The rule changes create the opportunity for additional entities to carry out an accrediting and gatekeeping function on behalf of the Court,” the Jan. 15 opinion read. “The Court’s goal is to promote access to high-quality, affordable legal education in law schools that are committed to the free exchange of ideas and to the principle of nondiscrimination.”

The Texas Supreme Court made a similar decision last week, and Ohio and Tennessee’s high courts are also considering minimizing the ABA’s oversight of lawyers in their states.

Republicans, including Florida attorney general James Uthmeier, who called the ABA “a captured, far-left organization,” have targeted the ABA, which accredits the vast majority of law schools in the country, as part of a broader crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Last year, the ABA suspended its DEI standards in response to conservative criticism.

On Thursday, Gov. Ron DeSantis praised the state Supreme Court’s decision as a “Good move” in a post on X. “The (highly partisan) ABA should not be a gatekeeper for legal education or the legal profession.”

For now, though, a new law school accreditor has yet to emerge. And experts say it’s unlikely most law schools will abandon their ABA accreditation any time soon, because it’s created reliable professional standards that make it easier for lawyers to practice in multiple states.

Justice Jorge Labarga, the only dissenting vote in the Florida opinion and the only justice who wasn’t appointed by DeSantis, cautioned that a new law school accreditor would have a tough time rivaling the ABA.

“[The ABA] has cultivated unmatched proficiency in dealing with Florida law-school-specific issues that would require decades for any successor to develop,” he wrote in his dissent. “Refinements can always be made. However, replacing an established entity with an unknown alternative is detrimental in the context of disputes.”

Source link

January 16, 2026
ED Details Higher Ed Staff to Labor Department

The affected staff work in the higher education division at ED’s Office of Postsecondary Education.

J. David Ake/Getty Images

Some staff at the Education Department will next week start working at the Labor Department, which is set to take over running a number of higher ed grant programs.

Under an interagency agreement signed last year, ED agreed to outsource most of its higher education programs, which include grants that support student success and historically Black colleges and universities and other minority-serving institutions. ED officials have said outsourcing the grant programs will help to “streamline bureaucracy.” The agreements with Labor and other federal agencies are also part of a broader effort to shut down ED. Critics have questioned the legality of the agreements and the effectiveness of moving the programs to other agencies.

Labor will now essentially administer the grant programs, while ED will continue to set the budget, criteria and priorities for the grant programs and manage hiring and other HR processes, among other activities. ED said in the news release Thursday that grant recipients in the higher ed programs will transition to Labor’s grant and payment management system, “following the detail.” Both agencies will provide grantees with additional guidance.

“We are proud to begin implementing this historic partnership that will not only create a better coordinated federal approach to postsecondary education and workforce development, but will also ensure that students pursuing higher education pursue programs aligned with their career goals and workforce needs,” Assistant Secretary for Postsecondary Education David Barker said in a statement.

The staff detail announced Thursday affects those who work in the Higher Education Programs Division of ED’s Office of Postsecondary Education.

Rachel Gittleman, president of the union that represents ED employees, said in a statement that moving the federal workers and grant programs was “an unnecessary, unlawful move that will create confusion for grantees and chaos for staff.”

“After gutting the Education Department, the administration is now asking an overworked skeleton crew to manage a risky transfer to an agency with no educational expertise, weakening oversight and increasing the risk of fraud, waste, and abuse,” she added. “This is not efficiency—it’s an insult to the tens of millions of students who rely on the Education Department to protect their access to a quality education and to the taxpayers who rely on federal workers to ensure their money is not wasted.”

Source link

January 16, 2026
Higher education postcard: Teesside University
In August 1856, Joseph Constantine was born in Schleswig-Holstein (then Denmark, later Germany, famously questionable) to British parents: his father, Robert, was an engineer working on the Schleswig-Holstein railway. Joseph went to Newcastle Grammar School and in 1881 moved to Middlesbrough. There he set up in the shopping business, and did very well for himself.

He was obviously imbued with a passion for Middlesbrough. We learn from the Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer on 2 July 1930 that:

Mr Constantine was an active member of the Tees Conservancy Commission, whose work was closely associated with Mr Amos, the general manager. It was to him that Mr. Constantine first broached the idea, in June 1916, of doing something substantial for Middlesbrough. The idea that should connected with higher education was his own, but it was Mr. Amos who suggested that a visit should be made to Armstrong College Newcastle.

Mr Constantine was greatly impressed with the good work of that institution, and made up his mind to provide the youth of his own town with similar educational facilities. It was is the office of the Mayor, then Mr Joseph Calvert, that Mr Constantine disclosed his proposal and the terms of his gift. The prolongation of the war prevented Mr Constantine from seeing the fulfilment of his dream, and the changed conditions made the gift of £40,000 inadequate for the scheme. But the generosity of Mr Constantine’s widow and his family in giving the same amount, enabled the building of the college to be accomplished.

On 6 November 1922 (we read in the next day’s Leeds Mercury) the Middlesbrough Education Committee met, and in order to progress the scheme for a college, constituted itself, with representatives of Joseph Constantine (who may by then have been frail: he died six weeks later), as the governing body of the new college. A site had by then been bought, but commencing the build had run into difficulties. The governing body hence formed a sub-committee to look at other colleges to get ideas for buildings.

In April 1927 the Town Council awarded the building contract – £65,000 – to Messrs Easton, a Newcastle firm (one alderman objected, arguing that the tender should go to a Middlesbrough firm which had bid at only £100 more). Building work was completed in time for the first students to be enrolled in September 1929. Constantine Technical College was born (Joseph Constantine was, apparently, against the college being named for him, but was persuaded by the mayor).

It offered what we would now think of as both further and higher education, including University of London external degrees. By 1931 it was appointing its second Principal: Dr T J Murray was appointed from the Smethwick Municipal College, on an annual salary of £900, rising to £1200. ICI was offering scholarships for degree students and the students’ guild was organising its third charity rag, starting on 2 July and lasting for almost two weeks. The events list (from the South Bank Express, 18 June 1932) looked – mostly – good:
- Saturday: motorized treasure hunt
- Monday: students night at the Gaumont Palace, including a male beauty chorus and a female beauty competition (the latter open to all girls in Teesside over 16 years old)
- Wednesday: opening of the amusement park by the beauty queen
- Thursday: rag dances, three held simultaneously in Middlesbrough, Redcar and Stockton
- Friday: boxing
- Saturday: rag day, street collection, parade and jazz concert
- Monday: mock civic night (presumably some sort of debating competition?)
- Wednesday: sports day
The college continued to develop through the 1950s and 1960s. It expanded, as can be seen by the relocation of its art school. In the 1960s there was some agitation for the creation of a technical university for the north east, for which Constantine College must have been in the frame. But these hopes were dashed in 1967, with the Secretary of State confirming that no funds would be available.

The college renamed itself as Constantine College of Technology before becoming the Teesside Polytechnic in 1969. The local college of education was incorporated in the 1970s, and in 1992 it became the University of Teesside (this is the point where, as I wrote about last week, it was in partnership for a while with Durham University for the creation of University College Stockton). In 2009 it was renamed again, as Teesside University.

Teesside is one of the few universities to have a biological organism named after it. Pseudomonas teessidea is a bacterium which can help to clean contaminated soil, and was discovered by Dr Pattanathu Rahman, then a Teesside University microbiologist.

Here’s a jigsaw of the postcard – unposted but I guess dates from the 1930s, not long after the college was opened. Unposted, but there’s still a message:
Source link
January 16, 2026
Students Should Insure an Investment as Important as College

To the editor:

We appreciate the opportunity to respond to the recent opinion essay “Degrees of Uncertainty” (Dec. 15, 2025). The author raises important questions about rising college costs, institutional incentives and the risks of oversimplifying complex financial challenges facing students and families.  We are pleased that she recognizes Loan Repayment Assistance Programs (LRAPs) help address affordability challenges and provide many benefits for students and colleges.

However, the author questions whether students should benefit from a guarantee that their college degree will be economically valuable.

LRAPs are, at their core, student loan insurance. It can be scary to borrow large student loans to finance an expensive college degree. There is a market failure, however, every time a student does not attend their preferred college, study their preferred major or pursue their preferred career because they are afraid of student loans. Students should be free to pursue their passions—not forced into second-best choices because of the cost of the degree or the prospect of a lower income in the future.

Society also loses out—especially if the lower-income career a student wants to pursue is a human service profession, such as education, where they will invest in improving the lives of others.

Most purchases come with a warranty or guarantee. Why should college be different? Colleges promise to provide value to students. We applaud those colleges and universities that stand behind that promise with a financial guarantee.

As consumers, we routinely insure our biggest risks and largest purchases. We insure our homes, cars, boats and lives—and even our pets. Why shouldn’t we insure an expensive investment in college?

In any class, we can expect some students will earn less than their peers. It is reasonable for students to fear being among that group. An individual student cannot diversify that risk. That is the function of insurance.

LRAPs spread the risk across many students, just as insurance does with other familiar risks. Most drivers can’t protect themselves from the chance of being in a car accident and facing large repair and medical expenses. Insurance spreads that risk, turning a small chance of a very large cost into a small premium that protects against that loss.

LRAPs serve the same function for students—without the cost—because colleges cover the program, giving students peace of mind and the freedom to attend their preferred college and pursue their passions.

By doing this, LRAPs are a tool that can help colleges increase enrollment and revenue. This additional revenue can be invaluable at a time when colleges face many structural challenges—from regulatory changes to the disruption of AI to declining enrollment caused by the demographic cliff.

LRAPs provide meaningful protection to students while maintaining clear incentives to focus on completion, career preparation and postgraduation outcomes.

Peter Samuelson is president and founder at Ardeo Education Solutions, a loan repayment assistance program provider.

Source link

January 15, 2026
Faculty Merit Act Is Meritless (opinion)

A recent op-ed by David Randall, executive director of the Civics Alliance and director of research at the National Association of Scholars, argues that faculty hiring in American universities has become so corrupt that it requires sweeping legislative intervention. NAS’s proposed Faculty Merit Act would require public universities to publish every higher ed standardized test score—SAT, ACT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT and more—of every faculty member and every applicant for that faculty member’s position across different stages of a faculty search. The goal, they claim, is to expose discrimination and restore meritocracy.

Letter to the editor

A letter has been submitted in response to this article. You can read the letter here , and view all of our letters to the editor here.

The proposal’s logic is explicit: If standardized test scores are a reasonable proxy for faculty merit, then a fair search should select someone with a very high score. If average scores decline from round to round, or if the eventual hire scored lower than dozens—or even hundreds—of rejected applicants, the public, Randall argues, should be able to “see that something is wrong.”

But the Faculty Merit Act rests on a serious misunderstanding of how measurement and selection actually work. Even if one accepts Randall’s premise that a standardized test score “isn’t a bad proxy for faculty merit,” the conclusions he draws simply do not follow. The supposed red flags the proposed act promises to reveal are not evidence of corruption. They are the expected mathematical consequences of using an imperfect measure in a large applicant pool.

I am a data scientist who works on issues of social justice. What concerns me is not only that NAS’s proposal is statistically unsound, but that it would mislead the public while presenting itself as transparent.

A Statistical Mistake

The proposed act depends on a simple idea: If standardized test scores are a reasonable proxy for faculty merit, then a fair search should select someone with a very high score. If the person hired has a lower score than many rejected applicants, or if average scores decline from round to round, something must be amiss.

This sounds intuitive. It is also wrong.

To see why, imagine the following setup. Every applicant has some level of “true merit” for a faculty job—originality, research judgment, teaching ability, intellectual fit. We cannot observe this truth directly. Instead, we observe a standardized test score, which captures some aspects of ability but misses many others. In other words, the test score contains two parts: a signal (the part related to actual merit) and noise (everything else the test does not measure).

Now suppose a search attracts 300 applicants, as in Randall’s own example. Assume—very generously—that the search committee somehow identifies the single best applicant by true merit and hires that person.

Here is the crucial point: Even if test scores are meaningfully related to true merit, the best applicant will almost never have the highest test score.

Why? Because when many people are competing, even moderate noise overwhelms rank ordering. A noisy measure will always misrank some individuals, and the larger the pool, the more dramatic those misrankings become. This is the same reason that ranking professional athletes by a single skill—free-throw percentage, say—would routinely misidentify the best overall players, especially in a large league.

How Strong Is the Test-Merit Relationship, Really?

Before putting numbers on this, we should ask a basic empirical question: How strongly do standardized tests actually predict the kinds of outcomes that matter in academia?

The most comprehensive recent research on the GRE—the test most relevant to graduate education—finds minimal predictive value. A meta-analysis of more than 200 studies found that GRE scores explain just over 3 percent of the variation in graduate outcomes such as GPA, degree completion and licensing exam performance. For graduate GPA specifically—the outcome the test is explicitly designed to predict—GRE scores explained only about 4 percent of the variance.

These studies assess near-term prediction within the same educational context: GRE scores predicting outcomes for the very students who took the test, measured only a few years later—under conditions maximally favorable to the test’s validity. The NAS proposal extrapolates from evidence that is already weak even under these favorable conditions. It would evaluate faculty hiring using test scores—often SAT scores—taken at age 17, applied to candidates who may now be in their 30s, 40s or older. Direct evidence for that kind of long-term extrapolation is scarce. However, the limited evidence that does exist points towards weak relationships rather than strong ones. For instance, Google’s internal hiring studies famously found “very little correlation” between SAT scores and job performance.

Taken together, the research suggests that any realistic relationship between standardized test scores and faculty merit is weak—certainly well below the levels needed to support NAS’s proposed diagnostics.

What This Means in Practice

The proposed Faculty Merit Act raises an important practical question: Even if standardized test scores contain some information about merit, how useful are they when hundreds of applicants compete for a single job?

Taking the GRE meta-analysis at face value, standardized test scores correlate with relevant academic outcomes at only about 0.18. Treating that number as a proxy for faculty merit is already generous, given the decades that often separate testing from hiring and the profound differences between standardized exams and the actual work of a professor. But let us grant it anyway.

Now, consider a search with 300 applicants. With a correlation of 0.18, I calculate that the single strongest candidate by true merit would typically score only around the 70th percentile on the test—roughly 90th out of 300. In other words, it would be entirely normal for around 90 rejected applicants to have higher test scores than the eventual hire.

Nothing improper has happened. No favoritism or manipulation is required. This outcome follows automatically from combining a weak proxy with a large applicant pool.

Even if we assume a much stronger relationship—say, a correlation of 0.30, which already exceeds what the evidence supports for most academic outcomes—the basic conclusion does not change. Under that assumption, I calculate that the best candidate would typically score only around the 80th percentile, corresponding to a rank near 60 out of 300. Dozens of rejected applicants would still have higher test scores than the person who gets the job.

This is the point the proposal gets exactly backward. The pattern it treats as a red flag—a hire whose test score is lower than that of many rejected applicants—is not evidence of corruption. It is the normal, mathematically expected outcome whenever selection relies on an imperfect measure. Scaling this diagnostic across many searches does not make it informative; it simply reproduces the same expected misrankings at a larger scale.

Why ‘Scores Dropped Each Round’ Proves Nothing

The same logic applies to the claim that average test scores should increase at each stage of a search.

Faculty hiring is not one-dimensional. Early stages might screen for general competence; later stages may emphasize originality, research direction, teaching effectiveness and departmental fit—traits that standardized tests measure poorly or not at all. As a search progresses, committees naturally place less weight on test scores and more weight on other information. When that happens, average test scores among finalists can stay flat or even decline. That pattern does not signal manipulation. It signals that the committee is selecting on dimensions that actually matter for the job.

Transparency, Justice and Bad Diagnostics

Randall’s op-ed, published by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, frames the proposal as a response to injustice. But transparency based on invalid diagnostics does not mitigate injustice; it produces it.

Publishing standardized test scores invites the public to draw conclusions that those numbers cannot support—and those conclusions will not fall evenly. Standardized test scores are strongly shaped by socioeconomic background and access to resources. Treating them as a universal yardstick of merit—especially for faculty careers—will predictably disadvantage scholars from marginalized and nontraditional paths.

From the standpoint of justice, this is deeply concerning. Accountability mechanisms must rest on sound reasoning. Otherwise, they become tools for enforcing hierarchy rather than fairness.

If the goal is genuine academic renewal, it should begin with renewing our understanding of what numbers can—and cannot—tell us. Merit cannot be mandated by publishing the wrong metrics, and justice is not served by statistical arguments that collapse under careful inspection.

Chad M. Topaz is a faculty member at Williams College; co-founder of the Institute for the Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity and Equity; and winner of the Mary and Alfie Gray Award for Social Justice from the Association for Women in Mathematics. He is the author of Unlocking Justice: The Power of Data to Confront Inequity and Create Change, forthcoming from Princeton University Press in May, and can be found on Bluesky at @chadtopaz.

Source link

January 15, 2026
State Lawmakers Enacted 21 Censorship Bills in 2025

Fourteen of last year’s 21 enacted bills contain gag orders, which PEN defines as direct censorship.

Last year was a record-setting one for education censorship; more than half of U.S college and university students now study in a state with at least one law or policy restricting what can be taught or how college campuses can operate, according to a new report from PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for campus free speech and press freedom.

Last year, lawmakers in 32 states introduced a combined 93 bills that censor higher education. Of those, 21 bills were enacted across 15 states: Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.

“Censorship is, sadly, now an intractable reality on college and university campuses, with serious negative impacts for teaching, research, and student life,” Amy Reid, program director of Freedom to Learn at PEN America, said in a news release. “With threats of formal sanctions and political reprisals coming from both state and federal governments, campus leaders and faculty feel they have no choice but to comply, and are increasingly acting preemptively out of fear. Politicians are expanding a sweeping web of political and ideological control over higher education in American campuses, reshaping what can be taught, researched, and debated to fit their own agenda. That’s dangerous for free thought in a democracy.”

The report highlighted Ohio’s Senate Bill 1, a sweeping higher education bill that mandated institutional neutrality on “any controversial belief or policy,” established a post-tenure review policy, banned DEI initiatives and required institutions to demonstrate “intellectual diversity.” It also called out Indiana’s House Bill 1001, Ohio’s House Bill 96 and Texas’s Senate Bill 37, which all curb or eliminate faculty senates’ decision-making power.

Fourteen of last year’s 21 enacted bills contain gag orders, which PEN defines as direct censorship. Seven of those laws apply to higher education (the others apply only to K–12 education). In addition to the enacted laws, PEN documented five gag-order policies set by state or university system boards, including Texas Tech’s rules that effectively ban teaching on transgender topics and Texas A&M’s weaponized ban on teaching race or gender “ideology.”

Most of the proposed bills introduced last year contained some kind of indirect censorship, the PEN report states. It divides such bills into six categories: curricular control; tenure restrictions; institutional neutrality mandates; accreditation restrictions; diversity, equity and inclusion bans; and governance restrictions.

“Our research shows that legislators are more frequently adopting indirect means to achieve their end goal of censoring higher education, effectively expanding their web of control over the sector in numerous directions,” the report states. “Indirect censorship measures exploded in popularity, with state legislators introducing more than twice as many of them as they did educational gag orders (78 vs 33).”

In total, state lawmakers passed 20 out of 78 bills that contained indirect censorship—some of which also included gag orders. The 26 percent rate of passage is “remarkably strong,” the report states. Among the new laws are Indiana’s aforementioned HB 1001; Idaho’s Senate Bill 1198, which prohibits faculty from making “critical theory” courses a requirement for majors or minors; and Kansas’s Senate Bill 78, which allows institutions to sue their accreditor if punished for following state law—useful primarily because several of Kansas’s state laws violate accreditors’ academic freedom standards.

The PEN report also covers federal pressure to censor colleges and universities. In 2025, the Departments of Justice and Education launched more than 90 investigations into alleged Title VI violations. The Trump administration targeted $3.7 billion in research funding and Trump signed 19 executive orders related to education, including an order to end DEI initiatives at colleges and universities. Also last year, the administration suggested 38 universities should be suspended from federal research partnerships because of their hiring practices.

“The administration frequently justifies its actions in the name of protecting free expression, but the record shows its aim is to censor speech and exert control over the circulation of ideas,” Jonathan Friedman, the Sy Syms managing director of U.S. free expression programs at PEN, said in the news release. “The ‘viewpoint diversity’ they are pushing is not a value-neutral proposition about true debate or diversity of thought, or even free speech. It’s just a coded phrase being used to censor certain progressive ideas, while promoting conservative ones. The apparent aim is to turn colleges and universities into mouthpieces for the government. That’s not what our higher education institutions are supposed to be.”

Source link

January 15, 2026
China Aims for “Quality” Overseas Students With Entry Exam

China’s introduction of a standardized admissions exam for international students shows that efforts to build a world-class university system matter more to the country than increasing enrollments, according to experts.

Beginning with the 2026 intake, most international applicants will be required to take the China Scholastic Competency Assessment (CSCA), a centrally designed test intended to benchmark students from different education systems against a common academic standard.

The exam will be compulsory for recipients of Chinese government scholarships starting this year and later phased in more widely, becoming mandatory for all international undergraduate applicants by 2028.

It will be delivered primarily as an online, remotely proctored test, with some countries also offering off-line test centers.

Richard Coward, CEO at Global Admissions, an agency that helps international students apply to universities, said the policy was “one of the biggest changes” he had seen for international students studying in China.

“This is more about the shift in focus away from quantity to quality, which is happening all over the world. Previously China had the target of 500,000 students; now the target is towards world-class universities by 2050 with the double first-class initiative.”

“There is a great deal of variation in students with different academic backgrounds and it can be challenging to assess,” Coward said. “There are also many countries that don’t have the equivalent level of maths compared with China. This change aims to make all international applicants have the same standard so they’ll be able to follow the education at Chinese universities and so they are at least at the same level as local students.”

Under the new framework, mathematics will be compulsory for all applicants, including those applying for arts and humanities degrees.

Coward said this reflected “the Chinese educational philosophy that quantitative reasoning is a fundamental baseline for any university-level scholar.”

Those applying to Chinese-taught programs must also sit for a “professional Chinese” paper, offered in humanities and STEM versions. Physics and chemistry are optional, depending on program requirements. Mathematics, physics and chemistry can be taken in either Chinese or English.

Gerard Postiglione, professor emeritus at the University of Hong Kong, said the CSCA should be understood as part of a broader shift in China’s approach to internationalization.

“The increasing narrative in China in all areas is to focus on quality,” he said. “That also means in higher education. If China has the plan by 2035 to become an education system that is globally influential, there’s going to be more emphasis on quality.”

Postiglione added that the move also reflected how China approaches admissions locally.

“If you look at how China selects students domestically, there is no back door,” he said, pointing to the importance of the gaokao, China’s national university admissions test taken by local students. “The gaokao is the gaokao, and I don’t think there will be much of a back door for international students, either.”

He cautioned, however, that the framework may favor applicants with certain backgrounds.

“Language proficiency and subject preparation will inevitably advantage some students over others,” he said. “Students who have already studied in Chinese, or who come from systems with stronger mathematics preparation, may find it easier to meet the requirements.”

While the exam framework is centrally set, Postiglione said, individual universities are likely to retain autonomy over admissions decisions.

“The Ministry of Education will provide a framework and guidelines,” he said, “but it would be very difficult for a central agency to make individual admissions decisions across the entire system.”

Pass thresholds have not yet been standardized, and Coward said that in the future, universities may set minimum score requirements, but this is not in place yet.

He added that the additional requirement was unlikely to reduce demand. “Some more casual students may be deterred,” he said. “But for top-tier universities, it reduces administrative burden by filtering for quality early.”

In the longer term, though, “it signals that a Chinese degree is becoming more prestigious, which may actually increase demand from high-caliber students.”

Source link

January 15, 2026