Tag: Events

  • College and University Closing Indicators

    College and University Closing Indicators

    The sectorwide concern about the future of many colleges and universities stays top of mind in 2026. The struggle to keep institutions open sometimes plays out publicly through rallies to alumni for contributions (Limestone University), pleas to government entities for a bailout (Birmingham Southern College), negotiations over mergers and closures (Pennsylvania State System), or the sale of an art collection (Randolph College). Other times, the signs stay hidden to most and closure comes as a swift, shockingly coldcock to the face for constituents (University of the Arts).  All instances raise the question “How does one know if a shutdown or merger is imminent?”

    The following checklist with 11 categories and 58 signs represents possible warnings that closure may be on the horizon. Words of caution: It really isn’t one or even several things from this list that predict a closure. It is the number, gravity and severity of the issues, along with whether the measures save enough money and whether revenue-generation measures have been enacted simultaneously. For example, are costs cut or assets liquidated to pay monthly operational costs, or are funds used to invest in revenue generation? Are actions ethical, legal and standard best practices, or do they cross the line? Do actions lead to reputational loss or lack of constituent (internal and external) and government and lender/investor confidence?

    ‘They Aren’t Buying What You’re Selling’ (Revenue Generation)

    Indicators: Can’t attract and keep students. Apathetic alumni. Donor disinterest. Auxiliary revenue generators are failing.

    • Enrollment decline (demographic cliff)
    • Lack of investment in new programs
    • Hiring consultants
    • Lack of branding and marketing
    • Declining (or poor) persistence/retention/graduation rates
    • Increased discount rate (above peer and national averages)
    • Increased cost to attend (above CPI and peer averages)
    • Decrease in alumni giving
    • Decrease in the annual fund
    • Auxiliary efforts not achieving financial goals (housing, ticket sales, etc.)

    ‘The Reorg’ (Institutional Structure)

    Indicator: Employing numerous cost-saving measures.

    • Positions combined or eliminated
    • Departments or divisions consolidated
    • Programs eliminated or put on hiatus

    ‘Past-Due Notices’ (Services)

    Indicator: Trying to hold off creditors.

    • Not paying invoices within 30 days
    • Spending freezes

    ‘Throwing Out the Baby with the Bathwater’ (Personnel: Part 1)

    Indicator: Trying hard not to let people go.

    • Hiring freezes
    • Furloughs
    • Lack of annual raises
    • Lack of retirement plans
    • Increased costs to employees for health care
    • Not filling open positions
    • Elimination of tenure

    ‘Not With a 10-Foot Pole’ (Personnel: Part 2)

    Indicator: Numerous employees with behind-the-scenes knowledge leave the institution because they see the writing on the wall. The institution can’t find or adequately compensate qualified employees.

    • Increased administrative turnover
    • Increased internal promotions for unqualified staff
    • Six to 12 months or more to fill a position

    ‘The Fire Sale’ (Assets)

    Indicator: Liquidating or trying to monetize noncash assets. Selling donated or purchased personal property (art, rare books, vehicles, equipment); real property (buildings, land); intellectual property (copyrights to music, books, art and patents); and debt.

    • Auctioning off art collection (whole or part)
    • Selling real estate
    • Making deals with land developers
    • Selling debt to debt collectors

    ‘Desperate Times Call for Desperate Measures’ (Endowment Management)

    Indicators: Changing policies, endowment value decreases significantly, hiring estate/trust attorneys to find loopholes in agreements, opaque actions with endowment funds, asking donors or the state attorney general’s office to change or negate gift agreements, and dissolving individual endowments.

    • Significant decreased fair-market value
    • Increasing percentage spent from investment earnings (above 5 percent best practice)
    • Spending corpus
    • Releasing funds from quasi-endowment
    • Sweeping or reallocating available earnings at end of fiscal year
    • Using restricted funds for unrestricted purposes

    ‘The Neighborhood Went to Hell’ (Deferred Maintenance)

    Indicator: Unable to maintain or improve physical plant.

    • Not budgeting for deferred maintenance
    • Unclean buildings
    • Broken equipment or fixtures
    • Waiting “until next fiscal year” to fix equipment
    • Taking buildings off-line
    • Long periods between trash removal, mowing, panting, pruning, etc.

    ‘The Moral Compass Doesn’t Point North’ (External Audits and Legal Action)

    Indicators: Questions arise about financial controls, noncompliance with accounting practices and other actionable legal issues.

    • Audit findings
    • Lawsuits increase

    ‘Bad Financial Risk’ (Financial Ratings and Rankings)

    Indicators: External monitoring agencies (such as accreditors, professional and affiliate organizations, lenders, credit rating agencies, Department of Education) raise red flags. National rankings decline.

    • Accreditation warning, probation or loss
    • High debt ratios
    • Deficit budgets over multiple years
    • Can’t secure loans
    • Loans called by creditors
    • Less than 60 days’ cash on hand
    • No cash reserves
    • National rankings falling

    ‘The Smell of Fear’ (Board of Trustees’ Behaviors)

    Indicators: Major changes in board behavior signaling dissatisfaction, alarm and crossing the lines between governance and management of the institution.

    • Board giving declines
    • Board members making major contributions to other institutions
    • Board members serving as president or senior administrators
    • Increased conflicts of interest
    • Making management decisions
    • Board member resignations
    • Board members making decisions based on political affiliations

    This list offers a broad brushstroke on the matter of closures, and some categories and indicators are more telling and serious than others. Ultimately, and perhaps somewhat obviously, whether a closure happens boils down to several basic questions to be answered:

    • Is there enough revenue to meet expenses? Is revenue growing to meet increases in the cost to do business? Are forecast models accurate?
    • Is there enough cash on hand to address emergencies, revenue shortfalls and/or times of the year when revenue lags expenses?
    • Is the institution managing finances, funds and resources ethically, legally and according to national standards?
    • Are there action-oriented, realistic plans to stay relevant in the future? Are administrative decisions reactive or proactive?

    Kathy Johnson Bowles is the founder and CEO of Gordian Knot Consulting.

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  • How Colleges Hope to Approach International Higher Ed in 2026

    How Colleges Hope to Approach International Higher Ed in 2026

    Colleges and universities are deep in the first admissions cycle since the Trump administration dramatically disrupted the landscape for international students in the United States, and experts say that the past year has altered how they’re recruiting this year—and perhaps beyond.

    Amid uncertainty about what the future may bring for international higher education, institutions are investing in new recruitment strategies or looking at new ways to reach international students, according to international education experts. That may involve recruiting more from countries that weren’t as affected by visa delays, forging new partnerships with international recruiting agencies or launching new branch campuses to reach international students in their home countries.

    Anthony C. Ogden, founder and managing director at Gateway International Group, an international higher education firm, said he’s heard from a swath of institutions in recent months that are considering shaking up their international recruitment strategies as a result of the tumult of the past year.

    “And that’s not unique to a certain section of higher ed,” he said. “It’s from the Big Tens to smaller institutions. Everybody’s considering different partners.”

    In the year since President Donald Trump took office, his administration has, among other things, revoked students’ SEVIS records, implemented travel bans, advocated for institutions to cap the number of international students they admit, attempted to disallow Harvard University from hosting international students and frozen visa interviews for about three weeks, creating a backlog that has made it incredibly difficult to secure an appointment in many countries once interviews resumed. Further restrictions are expected on how long international students can stay in the United States and on Optional Practical Training, which allows international students to work in the country for up to three years after completing their schooling.

    The number of new international students enrolled college in the U.S. this past fall dipped 17 percent as compared to the year before. Although surveys show international students still want to study in the U.S., they worry that they could have their visas revoked or face discrimination here.

    Those fears, as well as concerns about securing a visa, have also influenced how students and their families are approaching the admissions process this year, international education leaders say. Many are still applying to U.S. universities, but an increasing number of students and families are developing backup plans, applying to institutions in other countries like the United Kingdom or Australia, said Samira Pardanani, associate vice president for international education and global engagement at Shoreline Community College.

    “I think students are interested in more flexibility, and universities that used to not be very flexible, I’m seeing more flexibility,” she said. “What we’re seeing is students are looking for that low-risk start.”

    International Innovations

    But this precariousness and demand for flexibility could lead to new innovations in how institutions engage with international students, Ogden said.

    “If we can’t bring students here, should we go to them, either on-site in-country or remotely in some ways? I think there’s some optimism there and when new modalities and new approaches—what we saw in the pandemic—comes out, some of that moves from the periphery to the mainstream,” he said. “Is that a Pollyannaish way of looking into January 2026?”

    The University of Cincinnati, for one, is leaning in to new strategies to attract international students to its campus, according to Jack Miner, UC’s vice provost for enrollment management. The institution is exploring partnerships with schools in other nations—both high schools, which can funnel applicants to UC, and colleges where students can start a degree before transferring to the Ohio university.

    Partnering with institutions rather than recruiting broadly across an entire country, Miner said, gives UC access to students who are already aware of and interested in studying in the U.S., removing a hurdle in the recruitment process. UC already has such partnerships in China and Vietnam but is planning to expand.

    “What these partnerships has done for us is essentially streamline those conversations, because the students always end up knowing peers who have come to the U.S. or come to the University of Cincinnati. You know 20 students in the grade before you … or you have an older brother or sister that came to the university,” he said. “So that conversation about what it’s like to study in the United States, what it’s like to be at the University of Cincinnati, is a much easier conversation because it’s in context.”

    It’s not just the Trump administration that has changed the international education landscape, said Liz Nino, executive director of international enrollment at Augustana College, a private Lutheran college in Illinois that began recruiting large numbers of international students in 2013. She said that visa appointment delays this year did seem to impact Augustana—the college’s first-year international cohort declined about 16 percent this fall from fall 2024—but that problems with visa interviews stretch back to COVID-19.

    In recent years, she said, the “flood” of students who are interested in studying in the U.S. is more than U.S. embassies can handle, leading to interview wait times as long as a year and a half in certain countries. Currently, she said, she’s working with about 10 students from Ghana who were hoping to enroll in fall 2025 but had to defer to spring 2026; now it appears they may not be able to secure visas until October.

    Such issues have influenced how Augustana recruits international students.

    “This has been a huge challenge for U.S. universities because, as you can imagine, we’ve invested so much. I used to travel to Ghana once, sometimes twice a year, and now we’ve had to pull back because we cannot be putting so many resources into a market where we know that students simply cannot enroll,” Nino said.

    The unpredictability can also be reflected in university budgets, said George F. Kacenga, vice president for enrollment management at William Paterson University in New Jersey.

    “One of the most important things we can do, as enrollment managers, from my perspective, is give a forecast that is reliable so that a sound budget can be built,” Kacenga said. “In certain times, I might be aspirational about what I think that incoming number [of international students] looks like or share certain stretch goals. But right now, at least for myself and I think most of my colleagues, we are being very conservative in those international enrollment numbers.”

    Deferred Students

    The ultimate fates of students who were unable to secure visas in time for the fall 2025 semester appear to vary by institution.

    Cornell University ended up having only a small number of students—primarily in graduate programs—who weren’t able to make it for the fall. Of that number, almost all will arrive for the spring semester.

    “We feel like students were able to get to campus and were really relieved about the visa pressures not being as bad as we thought,” said Wendy Wolford, vice provost for international affairs at Cornell.

    William Paterson had dozens of deferrals from fall 2025 to spring 2026 due to visa issues, Kacenga said. It’s not yet clear how many of those students will make it by the start of classes later this month, he said, but there has been “a lot of continued interest from those students.”

    William Paterson also offered those students the opportunity to begin their coursework online until they’re able to secure visas, but Kacenga said students were generally uninterested in that option.

    “There was too much uncertainty about actually being able to get here for the spring that people didn’t want to have a lost semester or an investment, and I’ve heard that story from institution types located all over the country,” he said. “So, a valiant effort to rally and support the students, but because of the uncertainty principle, it just wasn’t a smart choice for many folks.”

    Fanta Aw, CEO and executive director of NAFSA, said in an email to Inside Higher Ed that visa delays have persisted, especially in China and India, the two largest suppliers of international students in the U.S. As a result, she wrote, it’s likely that most students who didn’t get visas in time to come in the fall opted to begin their studies elsewhere.

    “The losses seen this past fall will continue to be felt for the foreseeable future as a decline in enrollments is not a one-term issue, but will have a compounding effect,” she wrote. “It is vitally important for the administration to reverse course if it wishes for a stronger, safer and more prosperous America.”

    Aw and other experts expect visa delays to continue, but they say that, because there is so little new enrollment in the spring semester, those numbers won’t indicate much about the state of visa processing. Instead, the fall 2026 numbers will offer more insights into whether these delays were just a blip or if they’ll have a longer-term impact on international higher education.

    As institutions begin to dole out acceptances this year, Kacenga said, he has been emphasizing to prospective and admitted students the importance of starting the college application and visa processes early.

    “We’re helping students understand the urgency to complete your process to get admitted early—it’s not just about getting your class selection that you want or the housing arrangements that you’re most interested in,” he said. “It’s about doing it early so that you have the runway that you need for the immigration process.”

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  • How One Calif. College Helped Rebuild Child Care After the Eaton Fire

    How One Calif. College Helped Rebuild Child Care After the Eaton Fire

    Last January, Alana Lewis felt an all-too-familiar dread as the Santa Ana winds tore through the tents above the playground at her home-based day care.

    Little did she know, those winds weren’t just a harbinger of fire—they marked the beginning of a crisis that would leave lasting scars on her Altadena community.

    She watched in disbelief as the Eaton Fire raged through California’s San Gabriel Mountains, creeping close to the outdoor slide and toys in her yard, which she would later find melted into the artificial grass.

    As fire sirens blared and acrid smoke filled her home, Lewis evacuated, helplessly watching nearby homes and child-care sites like hers go up in flames.

    “I hate that it happened, but I thank God that it wasn’t in the daytime,” said Lewis, founder of Auntie Lana’s Daycare. “I thank God that when the fire did hit, it was at night when the children were already home safe.”

    Today, on the one-year anniversary of the blaze, it’s clear the fire wasn’t just an environmental disaster; it upended the everyday rhythms of life for Lewis and many other child-care providers across Los Angeles.

    Nearly 60 percent of licensed child-care sites in Altadena were damaged or destroyed, according to data from the Pasadena Community Foundation.

    “Everything outside was completely destroyed, demolished and unrecognizable,” said Lewis, adding that the condition inside her home was no better. “The soot from the fire was so thick that when you walked on the carpet, it would get underneath and inside your tennis shoes.”

    Lewis spent months living in hotels and with family as she repaired her home, discarding furniture and salvaging what little remained from a shed that once housed art materials, bikes, toys and other equipment for her day-care charges.

    Although initial emergency subsidies helped Lewis and other child-care providers for 30 days after the fire, she says she felt abandoned and neglected as she continued to face mounting out-of-pocket costs.

    Relief came when Lewis received a $45,000 grant from Pacific Oaks College, allowing her to reopen her day care in early July.

    The Pasadena-based college, in partnership with the Pasadena Community Foundation and Save the Children, distributed about $2 million to 43 child-care sites affected by the Eaton Fire. Grants ranged from $900 to $45,000, helping providers like Lewis rebuild and continue serving families.

    “It helped a lot of providers who were stressed out,” Lewis said, noting that the loss of income prevented many from paying rent and that some were denied small business loans.

    Breeda McGrath, president of Pacific Oaks College, said she recognized early on that child-care providers were suffering and mobilized to find donors.

    McGrath said the decision to support them came naturally, given the college’s roots as a preschool in the 1940s and its evolution by the late 1950s into a four-year institution known for its work in early childhood education and teacher training.

    “The identity of Pacific Oaks College over the years … has been focused on social justice, equity and diversity,” McGrath said. “So if we are not at the table to help rebuild and sustain early childhood education in our area, then we’re forgetting who we are.”

    She sent a formal proposal to the Pasadena Community Foundation requesting $1.3 million to help child-care providers rebuild or secure new leases, pay staff, replace lost materials, and provide tuition support for families.

    Within two days, the philanthropic organization that funds nonprofits and community initiatives in the greater Pasadena area agreed to support the effort.

    McGrath later secured an additional $800,000 from Save the Children, a nonprofit that provides health, education and emergency aid to support children’s rights and well-being.

    “This is our responsibility as a true community leader,” she said. “If we believe in teacher preparation, if we believe in supporting children, this is part of what you do.”

    Pacific Oaks Steps In: In the immediate aftermath of the fire, Pacific Oaks College served as a hub for local child-care providers seeking air purifiers, diapers and other essentials.

    McGrath said this was critical because, although the Pasadena Convention Center operated as the main coordination and distribution site, it proved difficult for some child-care providers to access the specific supplies they needed.

    Breeda McGrath (first photo, left) joins Pacific Oaks College staff and student workers in helping child-care providers stock up on critical items.

    She said Pacific Oaks College not only served as a hub, but also provided the “human power” of its staff and students—many of whom are training to become early childhood educators themselves.

    McGrath said higher education institutions play a unique role in disaster recovery, particularly in supporting and preparing the next generation of educators.

    “I believe in the long-term investment that higher education makes in a community,” McGrath said, noting that many child-care providers in the area studied at Pacific Oaks College.

    “So educating early childhood providers about the best ways to build strong community relationships, run their businesses, care for children and access opportunities for continued learning—that’s where we can contribute our knowledge,” she said.

    One year later, McGrath said long-term recovery is top of mind as the community works to rebuild its child-care system and support students training to become early childhood educators.

    “If you look at the destruction, the rebuilding process takes a lot of time, effort and energy,” McGrath said. “Not just in terms of the insurance process, but also how long it takes to decide what it means to return—or what it means not to return.”

    Auntie Lana’s Daycare: For more than 13 years, Lewis has run her Altadena-based day care for children from infancy through age 12, many of whom are enrolled in Pasadena Unified elementary schools.

    The district serves about 15,000 students, the majority Black and Latino, with more than 70 percent socioeconomically disadvantaged. During the Eaton Fire, five schools were destroyed or severely damaged, including Eliot Arts Magnet, Edison Elementary, Loma Alta Elementary, Noyes Elementary and Franklin Elementary.

    Alana Lewis, a Black woman, is holding a toddler and surrounded by kids of varying ages on a field trip with children from her Altadena-based daycare.

    Lewis on a field trip with children from her Altadena-based day care.

    Lewis said most of the children she cares for are Black and Latino, come from low-income families, and were directly affected by the fire, including three who lost their homes.

    She added that some of the children had attended elementary schools destroyed by the fire and were displaced to other schools in Pasadena. That grief only deepened when they returned to their beloved day care and saw what had been lost.

    “When the kids came back and saw that the things they played with were gone, you could see the look in their eyes—the disbelief,” Lewis said. “This will be with them forever.”

    In the photo on the left, five young children are gathered around a table with two gingerbread houses decorated with candy. On the right, a small boy is inside a structure made of giant Magnatiles.

    Some of Lewis’s charges work on a group project in her indoor play area.

    McGrath said Altadena’s diverse history makes the loss of child-care providers especially profound.

    “Over the years, families in Altadena have built strength and, across generations, a deep history in the community,” McGrath said. “A history of moving toward justice—a history of being a community that recognizes everyone’s desire to succeed and everyone’s right to earn a living wage.”

    She said child-care providers are deeply woven into that history, often serving multiple generations of the same families and anchoring stability for working parents. That stability, McGrath added, is critical for college students—particularly student parents, who rely on child care to stay enrolled.

    “To lose your day-care provider when you’re in those very vulnerable, sensitive stages of life is really destabilizing,” McGrath said. “That was a powerful loss—not just to families, but to long-held homes and to generational wealth that was deeply affected and destroyed.”

    Lewis agreed, adding that child-care providers are often overlooked in conversations about disaster recovery and economic stability.

    “As child-care providers, the role we play in the economy is extremely important,” Lewis said. “We help people go to work. We help mothers and fathers who are still in school. We have parents and grandparents who need their children cared for in a safe, quality learning environment.”

    Lewis said her experience after the fire underscored just how essential—and vulnerable—the child-care sector is during times of crisis.

    “We’re providing care to children who will run our economy someday,” Lewis said. “If we can come to the table and find a better solution, that would be awesome.”

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  • The Rise of the Agentic AI University in 2026

    The Rise of the Agentic AI University in 2026

    In a very active and highly competitive environment, AI has grown at breakneck speed. As with so many technologies, business and industry have moved far faster than academe to embrace the cost savings, capability expanding and wholly innovative aspects of AI. Fraught with our own industry-specific challenges such as enrollment downturns, sharp drops in perceived value, the striking “math cliff” in higher ed and a rapidly changing regulatory policy shift in state and federal administration, our field has been cast into a sea of pressing priorities for changes.

    This year is likely to be the one where we begin to implement institutionwide AI-powered solutions to help us move forward with agility and effectiveness in adapting to the changing environment. As Aviva Legatt writes in Forbes’ “7 Decisions That Will Define AI in Higher Education in 2026”,

    “Over the past year, the shift from AI as a tool to AI as institutional infrastructure has become unmistakable. Students have already integrated AI into daily academic workflows, vendors are pushing enterprise deployments, federal and accreditation expectations are rising and labor-market volatility is forcing colleges to rethink how learning connects to opportunity. At the same time, agentic AI is moving from experimentation to execution, reshaping how advising, enrollment, learning support and operations can be delivered. In 2026, these threads converge: institutions that operationalize AI will widen their performance gap, while those that don’t will inherit a shadow system they can’t control.”

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    Yet, where these changes will take place within the field, how these changes will impact our higher education workforce and the extent to which we can change in time to meet our market demand by producing knowledgeable and skilled employees for the economy at large remains in question. For those of us in early and midcareer positions, pressing questions arise: “Will I still have a job? How will my position description change? Will I be prepared? What should I do now to ensure I remain a valuable asset to my university?” It is my purpose in this brief column to identify some of the areas in which changes seem most likely to take place in this new year.

    To date, we have made significant progress in developing chatbot-hosted, transactional generative AI in which the user inputs questions and answers to the bot. One of the many high-quality examples is the Khan Academy’s Khanmigo. These have been effective in hosting tutors, study apps, curricular design and much more.

    The use of generative AI continues to expand in new ways. Meanwhile, the development of AI agents is driving the expansion and efficiency of AI. In the agentic AI models, we have tools that are capable of reasoned assessment of what is needed to accomplish a goal, aligning a series of stacked tasks and completing those tasks without direct supervision in an efficient way, much like a human assistant would perform a series of tasks to achieve desired outcomes. For example, this often includes data collection, analysis of the data, identifying and implementing ways in which to accomplish the goals, documenting the findings, and finding better ways to accomplish the outcomes.

    This opens the possibility that portions of individual position descriptions can be offloaded from humans and integrated into agentic AI duties. This results in fewer overall employees; lower indirect costs such as insurance, vacation and sick leave; and a more cost-efficient operation. Beginning now, institutions are moving from scattered pilots to governed, agentic workflows that will define the next decade of ensuring student success and operational efficiency.

    I asked my virtual digital assistant, Gemini 3 Deep Research, on Dec. 28 to suggest some of the implementations we will most likely see broadly implemented to address the student lifecycle. Gemini suggested that the work will be “personalized, proactive and persistent.” Gemini 3 Thinking mode predicted we will see a wide range of implementations in 2026, including:

    1. The 24/7 Digital Concierge (Recruitment): Beyond simple FAQs, agents now manage the entire “nurturing funnel,” handling complex credit transfer evaluations and scheduling campus tours via multichannel SMS and web interfaces. Source: 2026 Higher Education Digital Marketing Trends (EducationDynamics)
    2. Socratic Tutors for Every Learner: AI tutors that don’t just give answers but engage in Socratic dialogue, scaffolding difficult concepts and generating infinite practice problems based on real-time course performance. Source: AI Tutors and the Human Data Workforce 2026 Guide (HeroHunt)
    3. Mental Health First Responders: AI agents serving as low-barrier triage points, offering immediate coping strategies for anxiety and seamlessly escalating high-risk cases to human counselors. Source: How AI Chatbots Are Transforming Student Services (Boundless Learning)
    4. Predictive Intervention for Gatekeeper Courses: Using “behavioral trace data” from LMS platforms to identify students struggling in high-risk introductory courses (e.g., College Algebra, Gen Chem) before the first midterm. Source: Predictive Analytics in Higher Ed: Promises and Challenges (AIR)
    5. Admissions Document Verification Agents: Autonomous systems that verify international credentials, flag missing forms and check for eligibility in milliseconds, reducing the time to decision from weeks to minutes. Source: AI Agents for Universities: Automating Admissions (Supervity)

    Gemini 3 Thinking mode continued with examples of back-office efficiencies that AI will provide to universities that are early adopters of an agentic AI approach:

    1. Automated University Accounting: AI agents that handle invoice processing, general ledger coding and “smart” expense management, ensuring policy compliance without manual entry. Source: 5 Use Cases for AI Agents in Finance (Centric Consulting)
    2. Grant Management and Writing Assistants: Agents that scan federal databases (Grants.gov) to match faculty research with funding, draft initial narratives and manage postaward financial reporting. Source: AI Grant Management: Driving Efficiency (Fluxx AI)
    3. Dynamic Enrollment Marketing Agents: “Search everywhere optimization” (GEO/AEO) tools that ensure the university appears in AI-generated best-of lists and voice-search results on platforms like TikTok and Reddit. Source: Transitioning to the Agentic University 2026–27 (UPCEA)
    4. Procurement and Spend Analysis: Agents that continuously monitor contract compliance and supplier health, identifying hidden savings that can be reallocated to student scholarships. Source: How AI Agents Change Procurement Work in 2026 (Suplari)
    5. Regulatory Reporting and Audit Agents: Systems that autogenerate audit-ready reports for state and federal compliance, reducing the administrative burden on institutional research offices. Source: FINRA 2026 Oversight Report: The Reckoning for Autonomous AI (Snell & Wilmer)
    6. HR and Benefits Support: 24/7 staff-facing agents that answer complex questions about leave policies, payroll and benefits, freeing HR staff for strategic culture-building work. Source: Agentic AI: Top Tech Trend of 2025/2026 (Gartner/EAB)
    7. The “AI-First” Curriculum Redesign: Moving beyond academic integrity to “AI fluency” as a graduation standard, where agents help faculty redesign assessments to focus on process rather than product. Source: 2026 Predictions for AI in Higher Education (Packback)

    Of course, there will be many comparable efficiencies implemented in other areas of universities. These are examples that demonstrate the cost and time efficiencies that can be realized through thoughtful implementation of agentic AI. In the Nov. 12 issue of this column, “Transitioning to the Agentic University 2026–27,” I detail an approach to begin the administrative agentic AI transition.

    Although there is less mention publicly about direct instruction by AI, this is inevitable in coming years. Most likely AI-led instruction will begin in noncredit offerings, but ultimately no teaching task will be out of reach. It will come at a significantly lower cost, greater personalization and instant updating with every new development in the field as it happens.  How can we best prepare our colleagues in higher education for the changes that are coming this year and each successive year?

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  • New Accreditors, Civic Discourse Programs Win FIPSE Grants

    New Accreditors, Civic Discourse Programs Win FIPSE Grants

    The Education Department said late last year that the grant program, which has funded student success initiatives, would support projects related to accreditation reform, civil discourse, artificial intelligence and workforce training.

    Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images | Pete Kiehart for The Washington Post via Getty Images

    More than 70 colleges, universities, nonprofits and other organizations are sharing $169 million to advance a number of the Trump administration’s priorities.

    Those include accreditation reform, promoting civil discourse, short-term workforce training programs and advancing the use of artificial intelligence in higher education. The Education Department announced the grant competition in November and said Monday that it had awarded the funds, which have historically gone to programs that support student success.

    Colleges received funding to switch accreditors, start short-term programs that will be eligible for the new Workforce Pell program, hold workshops on constructive dialogue and support peer-to-peer engagement in civil dialogue.

    Just over $50 million apiece went to the AI, civil discourse and Workforce Pell priorities, while projects related to accreditation received nearly $15 million, according to an Inside Higher Ed analysis of department data. All the grants in this tranche are for four years.

    Two new accreditors planning to seek federal recognition—the Postsecondary Commission and the Commission for Public Higher Education Inc.—each received $1 million. The department also awarded $1 million to the University of Rochester for its plans to establish an accreditor focused on higher education certificate programs that serve students with intellectual disabilities, and another $1 million to Valley Forge Military College, which wants to create a new hybrid accrediting agency for military-aligned associate and certificate programs. (Valley Forge Military College is one of several institutions that have indicated interest in the Trump administration’s compact for higher education.)

    Meanwhile, Davidson College’s Institute for Public Good is getting nearly $4 million to create the Deliberative Citizenship Network across 100 colleges and universities, according to a news release. Among other goals, the network aims to train faculty and staff on how to facilitate forums on difficult topics and create teaching resources that can be widely shared.

    “With this funding, we will reach thousands of students and educators nationwide,” Chris Marsicano, executive director of the institute, said in a statement. “Davidson’s Institute for Public Good will serve as a national hub that connects research, teaching and public engagement around respectful inclusion across political viewpoints—no matter how unpopular on campus—as well as participating in community efforts to examine, talk through and solve big problems.”

    The department’s initial announcement about the awards didn’t provide specific information about the funded projects, but the agency briefly posted documents Monday afternoon outlining which institutions received awards and for how much. Inside Higher Ed captured some of that information before the documents were taken down and compiled the details into a searchable database below. A department spokesperson said the final documents should be posted next week.

    In the meantime, Inside Higher Ed reached out to the identified institutions for more information about how they plan to use the grant funding. The database will be updated as they respond.

    The grant money comes from the Fund for Improvement of Postsecondary Education, which has historically supported programs related to student success. Those include the Basic Needs, Veteran Student Success and Postsecondary Student Success programs. But in November, the Education Department announced plans to send the funds to a different special projects program—a move that Democrats and advocates criticized. Department officials say this round of funding, for which they “received a historic number of applications,” will help to support students through their academic journeys.

    “This historic investment will realign workforce programs with the labor market, break up the accreditation cartel and support institutions who want to change accreditors, and strengthen responsible use of AI in the classroom,” said Ellen Keast, a department spokesperson, in a statement. “These investments will open new, affordable higher education alternatives to American families, and we are very excited to see federal dollars driving change in the sector that is long overdue.”

    Some critics have raised concerns about the truncated grant-review process. Typically, the FIPSE grant competition opens in the spring and awards go out by Dec. 31, one former department official said. They also question who will administer the program moving forward. Like other higher ed grant programs, FIPSE is slated to move to the Labor Department under agreements announced late last year.

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  • Increased Sense of Belonging Boosts Student Graduation Rates

    Increased Sense of Belonging Boosts Student Graduation Rates

    New research from Wake Forest University shows that boosting a student’s sense of belonging in college can significantly increase their likelihood of earning a degree.

    The findings draw on nationally representative survey data from more than 21,000 undergraduates enrolled in two- and four-year colleges across the country.

    The survey measured belonging by asking students to rate their agreement with the statement “I feel that I am a part of [school]” on a five-point scale, where 1 means strongly disagree and 5 means strongly agree.

    Students who rated their sense of belonging in their second year one step higher on the five-point scale than they did in their first year—such as moving from neutral to agree—were 3.4 percentage points more likely to graduate within four years.

    That pattern held over time: Each one-step increase in a student’s reported sense of belonging was linked to a 2.7-percentage-point higher likelihood of earning a degree within six years.

    “What stood out to me was just how consistent the findings were,” said Shannon Brady, a Wake Forest University psychology professor and the study’s author. “We’re seeing this relationship hold across different kinds of students and institutions.”

    Students in the study began college during the 2011–12 academic year, and their graduation outcomes were measured four and six years later. That’s the most recent nationally representative data available, Brady explained.

    She said the findings send a clear message that fostering a sense of belonging is vital on campus, and that its impact on persistence and graduation rivals the effect of thousands of dollars in additional financial aid.

    “One of the things that’s nice about belonging is that it doesn’t have to cost a lot,” Brady said, adding that intentional support—such as structuring first-year seminars or addressing hurdles in registering for classes—can make a meaningful difference in creating a sense of belonging with relatively few resources.

    “It takes attention, and it takes people doing the work to make it happen,” she said.

    The findings: The study identified two statistically significant differences in how belonging related to graduation outcomes for specific student groups.

    The link between belonging and four-year graduation rates was stronger for students whose parents had attended college than for first-generation students. The report suggests this gap may be due to first-generation students being more likely to “face structural and psychological challenges that may, at times, weaken the benefits of belonging.”

    “These challenges can take many forms,” the report said, including limited guidance in navigating college systems, financial pressures that compete with academic engagement and systemic cultural mismatches between institutional and home environments.

    Belonging also had a weaker connection to six-year graduation rates for Asian students compared to non-Asian students. The report attributes this, in part, to the fact that Asian students are more likely to have “alternative supports that promote academic persistence.”

    Those supports can include family expectations that emphasize educational achievement, peer networks with strong academic norms and cultural orientations that prioritize sustained effort over socio-emotional connection to an institution.

    The authors caution that the broad “Asian” category includes considerable diversity across countries and regions of origin, generation status, and socioeconomic background; such diversity shapes both students’ access to support and their experiences of belonging and credential attainment.

    The implications: Brady pointed to the City University of New York’s Accelerated Study in Associate Programs as a “fantastic” model for fostering student belonging.

    The ASAP program works to remove everyday barriers, such as transportation costs, complicated scheduling and limited advising, and has been shown to improve graduation rates while also helping students feel connected to their campus.

    “If you can’t get the classes you need, it’s hard to feel connected to school,” Brady said. “And if transportation is complicated—if you’re dependent on buses or rides from friends because you can’t afford a bus pass—it’s hard to build the relationships you want.”

    Beyond individual programs, Brady recommended institutions adopt a standardized measure of student belonging across campuses.

    “Almost no cross-institution conversation happens on this because the measures that schools are using are different,” she said. “You can’t aggregate knowledge as well as we might if we had a more standardized measure.”

    Ultimately, Brady said, colleges have a responsibility to create environments where students feel they belong.

    “I don’t want to suggest that belonging is always inherently a good thing, but we want to create institutions where it is reasonable and positive to build a connection to them,” she said.

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  • McMahon Says She Wants to Shift Away From Higher Ed

    McMahon Says She Wants to Shift Away From Higher Ed

    Education Secretary Linda McMahon told a conservative news outlet she wants to focus less on higher ed this year. The comment comes after the Trump administration’s yearlong use of multiple federal departments to pressure universities and their employees and students to conform to the White House’s desires.

    McMahon discussed her 2026 priorities in an interview with Breitbart before Christmas. As the outlet put it, “McMahon said the new year is a chance to shift a little bit away from higher education and focus on elementary and secondary.” (Education Department spokespeople didn’t respond Monday to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for further information on what she meant.)

    On social media, McMahon posted, “In 2026 we will empower parents, strengthen families, and end Washington’s grip on education by returning it to the states.” She also shared a video touting what she sees as the administration’s many wins. Those included cutting deals with several universities to restore funding the administration froze, changes to the federal student aid application and steps toward dismantling the Education Department.

    She told Breitbart her top three priorities will be literacy, noting poor scores on a national K–12 test; school choice, which usually refers to providing public money for parents to send their children to K–12 charter or private schools or to homeschool them; and “returning education to the states.”

    Regarding that last priority, McMahon told the outlet, “That’s what we’re really going to be working on, and that falls in line with the president’s directive to eventually totally move education to the states and to make sure that the bureaucracy of the Department of Education doesn’t exist in Washington anymore.”

    It remains unclear what “returning education to the states” would look like, even if Congress agrees to sign off on the Trump administration’s push to close the Education Department. Other laws Congress has passed over the decades would still continue to require a significant federal role in education.

    McMahon also touted what Breitbart called her “victories,” with the outlet writing that “one of her favorite accomplishments is the department’s Title IX work protecting women’s sports.” It wrote that McMahon “specifically pointed to an agreement reached with the University of Pennsylvania ordering awards to be taken” from transgender former swimmer Lia Thomas “and given to the [cisgender] female athletes who really deserved them.”

    In April, the department’s Office for Civil Rights found that Penn violated Title IX by allowing a trans woman to compete on a women’s sports team—presumably referring to Thomas, who last competed on the swim team in 2022, in accord with NCAA policies at that time.

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  • 3 Questions for Trey Conatser on CTLs and AI

    3 Questions for Trey Conatser on CTLs and AI

    Trey Conatser’s response on LinkedIn to the IHE guest post “Responding to Disruption? Consult a Center for Teaching and Learning” is getting shared around higher ed CTL and AI communities. As the assistant provost for teaching and learning and director of the Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching (CELT) at the University of Kentucky, Trey is well positioned to think about how AI is changing higher education. I asked if Trey would answer my questions, and he graciously agreed.

    Q: Where do CTLs come into the AI higher ed story? What has been going on with AI at CELT and UK, and what are you seeing nationally?

    A: For some, CTLs might not be the first space that comes to mind when crafting vision and strategy or enhancing knowledge and skill about AI. Yet, for my money, regardless of where you are, you’ll be hard-pressed to find people who are more embedded in the discourse about AI in education, who are more knowledgeable about it in multidimensional ways, who experiment with and use AI tools daily, and who are more expert in both the scholarship and day-to-day realities of education across the institution. Teaching center staff are polymaths; they are scholars, practitioners, educators and curious minds that, every day, have to inhabit a dizzying range of epistemic grounds.

    In response to the question, I’d venture that CTLs come into the story about AI in higher education before ChatGPT altogether. For years, we’ve engaged in critical and scholarly approaches to technology beyond how-to and best practices towards larger inquiries about how digital tools, platforms and infrastructures affect our capacity to learn, grow, connect and act in the world. Those are the waters in which we swim. From that history, CTLs were able to engage generative AI with nuance from the outset.

    At the University of Kentucky, CELT began hosting information sessions, focused workshops, discussion forums and even play sessions starting in the first week of 2023. We were the main central unit to do so at that time, and we quickly became the go-to, trusted hub for faculty, staff and graduate students to make sense of AI as it might impact their scholarly work, student learning and our overall purpose.

    As we begin 2026, CELT continues to make AI a central part of our work. We’ve led 200 AI-related events for thousands of participants and are working with the second faculty cohort of our Teaching Innovation Institute to focus on AI. In partnership with our Center for Computational Sciences, we’ve hosted education tracks for regional summits and an NSF ACCESS regional workshop. We’ve produced resources such as an AI use scale, which has proven popular among instructors and will soon release a comprehensive starter course on AI literacy for faculty, academic staff and graduate students.

    Our work has informed the university advisory group on AI. I co-chair this group, which maintains guidelines on AI in educational, research, clinical and professional contexts. Colleagues have indicated that it has been meaningful for CTL leadership to play a significant role in composing institution-level guidance and contributing to a “post-AI” vision for education, scholarship and service.

    Nationally, I’ve seen some variety in how CTLs are engaging with AI, though many are pursuing a version of what I’ve outlined here. CTLs are remarkably diverse in size, specialties, org charts, cultures and goals. Across higher education, though, I see an opportunity to further capitalize on CTLs in light of recent developments around institution-level requirements, curricular integration, industry partnerships and infrastructure.

    If the first step is recognizing that CTLs are effective partners in making sense of AI as a disruption, the next step is including CTLs in these larger initiatives for implementation as well as assessment. There is a good deal of discussion about how to convincingly assess the impact of AI on student learning, scholarly activity and institutional success. This involves questions that often are oversimplified or shortchanged. What is learning? Where and how does it happen and for whom? What counts as evidence? How do we know that our data means what we say it means? What are the relevant scholarly precedents? What do we need to know about AI? CTLs stand to add a great deal of integrity and insight to these projects.

    Q: You make the case for CTLs being an indispensable resource as universities navigate the AI tsunami. And yet, across the country, CTL budgets, staffing and sometimes even existence are under attack. How can CTL leaders better position their centers for institutional resiliency?

    A: CTLs rarely operate with large budgets outside salary lines, which is to say that we traditionally have strategized for impact with this reality in mind. I don’t mean to dismiss the precarity that some CTLs may be feeling, but I do think there are ways to show our value and build resiliency, especially in the context of AI and when additional resources may not be available.

    Christopher Hakala and Kevin Gannon have offered some great advice on that front. For me, the first step is about aligning CTL work with institutional priorities. Obviously, teaching excellence and student learning are a stated priority for any institution, but there are different ways that those goals resonate locally. Especially if we notice a gap, CTLs are well positioned to jump in and address it. A big part of resiliency is being imagined as a solution when the community is faced with a challenge.

    AI offers a great example of an institutional exigency in CELT’s case, and we’ve contributed proactively to other priorities such as our quality enhancement plan, our state’s graduate profile and digital accessibility. But we should also make sure to prioritize the academic units within our institution. I regularly collaborate with our colleges and departments. Those leaders and their colleagues often are the most persuasive agents for communicating our value.

    Resiliency is also built through partnerships that lend the CTL’s expertise, imprimatur and labor. AI is precisely the kind of catalyst that normalizes these exchanges even if they’re not typical. Other units may be able to assist with travel funding for a joint project, for example. In some cases, a unit might fund an initiative so long as the CTL coordinates it; our SoTL community is a good example of this. Bandwidth permitting, CTL staff can participate on funded grants that generate income through labor costs.

    Despite the persistent urgency to expand, resiliency also means not losing sight of core services. At CELT, midsemester student feedback has become so popular that I have to shut off our request form early in the semester. Along with support for faculty dossiers and teaching portfolios, this work makes a clear case for our impact on career advancement as well as capitalizing on local data for student success.

    When bandwidth seems scarce, light-lift activities can still offer a high yield. Communities of practice, reading groups, teaching triangles, drop-in hours and other programming that leverages the CTL as a community center can raise visibility and value while leaving gas in the tank. Faculty partners or affiliates allow for more sustainable reach and programming while increasing buy-in.

    All of this, though—alignment, initiative, partnerships, services, reach—rely on relationships and recognition that CTL leadership needs to cultivate and work daily to affirm. We are, fundamentally, a relational enterprise. Our resiliency lies in our relationships.

    Q: What was the career journey that brought you into a CTL and institutional leadership role, and what advice do you have for early or midcareer academics who might want to follow a similar professional path?

    A: Ironically, I never interacted with the CTL at my doctoral institution. I did, however, begin to work in instructional development through unique graduate assistantships that friends had held and encouraged me to pursue. It was also critical that I used teaching assignments as opportunities to experiment and explore broader issues in higher education. Those projects ultimately determined the direction of my graduate work as a whole.

    As I looked beyond my program, I wanted that work to continue as a career. It meant moving away from the traditional faculty role I’d imagined toward a version of what Donna M. Bickford and Anne Mitchell Whisnant have described as the administrator-scholar. Of course, I discovered most of what I know about this sort of work and about higher education on the job. My goal—my backward design—was (and still is) to elevate scholarly teaching, meaningful learning and the significance of a college education.

    To be clear, I don’t mean to imply any sort of self-made myth; I can’t stress enough how much my mentors and colleagues have enabled my career every step of the way. Like many paths, CTL work is collaborative by nature. It’s not a stage for solo acts.

    I’m still learning a lot about leadership. I worked as an educational developer at my CTL before stepping into the associate director and, later, director and assistant provost roles. Looking back, I see some thematic coherence despite the usual noise of life. Those transitional moments typically involved acting upon an opportunity to make our projects, organization or people more successful at a particular inflection point of pressure or change. I’ve also prioritized becoming as familiar as possible with the full complexity of the university and its communities well beyond the immediate operations of the CTL.

    For the curious, I’d recommend getting to know your local CTL if you haven’t already. Attend their events, participate in a program or just set up a time to learn more about the center. Whether you’re in a staff or faculty role, you might discover an opportunity to support or collaborate with the CTL, even in just small ways. I’d also recommend getting to know what it’s like to teach in different disciplines and under different conditions than you normally experience. Getting to know the landscape of CTLs and higher education more broadly helps significantly with clarifying your why as well as what you’d want to see in a new position.

    There are some helpful organizations and resources to get a sense of educational development as a field of work. This is especially helpful if a CTL is not easily accessible. The POD Network is a good place to start, though there are other organizations as well as surveys of the field. If you’re a podcast listener, there’s never been a better time for higher education podcasts: Teaching in Higher Ed, Tea for Teaching, Intentional Teaching, Centering Centers and so on. Becoming conversant about the work and the issues is at least half of the journey.

    Keep in mind that there are many career paths in educational development: some with CTLs, some with other kinds of administrative offices and some outside higher education altogether in both public and private sectors. Depending on your interests and skills, you can go into a variety of meaningful roles.

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  • Taking a Break From 2025

    Taking a Break From 2025

    It has been just over four months since I last wrote for my “Resident Scholar” column. There are two explanations for this. First, I am on a magnificent, hard-earned sabbatical that I delayed multiple times. My last one was 12 years ago. I have protected this sacred time for reflection and renewal.

    Second, the political intensity of 2025 necessitated a break. I am not usually a break-taking kinda guy, but 2025 most certainly was not a usual year. It was disorienting, stressful, devastating and overwhelming. Consequently, I decided to take a much-needed break.

    In 2024, the Inside Higher Ed editors and I chose to name my column “Resident Scholar” because I proudly live among the people—meaning, I try my hardest to not be an out-of-touch, ivory tower academician. I aim to write about realities that are relevant, timely and at times taboo. I know the enormous challenges that confront presidents, provosts, student affairs vice presidents, chief diversity officers, academic deans and other higher education leaders, because I talk with several of them every week.

    I know what is happening on campuses because I spend time on dozens beyond my own year after year. I talk to students to hear and understand their experiences, expectations and appraisals. It feels like I live among policymakers because I often hear their considerations firsthand. Parents and family members of Black prospective and current students tell me what is on their minds. I do not have to guess what is happening at historically Black colleges and universities because informants on those campuses let me know.

    The people told me that 2025 was disorienting, stressful, devastating and overwhelming for them. Consequently, to the greatest possible extent, many of them chose to take breaks.

    At first, I did not think that doing so was an option for me. The vicious attacks on U.S. higher education and the dismantling of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts across all industries (including ours) demanded a fight-like-hell response, I thought.

    I launched the National DEI Defense Coalition. Also, I dropped everything last spring to travel the country to interview students, faculty and staff for a forthcoming documentary film about the impact of the elimination of DEI programs and positions. I testified twice to Congress last summer; one hearing was specifically about DEI in higher education. I felt then and continue to feel a strong sense of urgency.

    But many colleagues with whom I reside at the University of Southern California and elsewhere throughout American higher education modeled something different. Specifically, they showed me how taking breaks is essential to self-care. This break has afforded me space and opportunities to breathe, grieve, process, connect with affected others, consider conservative viewpoints, strategize and reflect on why higher education and our democracy were so easily disrupted in 2025 and the years leading up to it.

    It allowed me to reside with my people and do what many of them wisely elected for themselves: pause, take a break. I now feel ready to resume the fight for our democracy, while savoring the seven months that remain in my sabbatical. I acknowledge that elective break-taking is not a privilege that is available to everyone in U.S. higher education.

    I genuinely appreciate this “Resident Scholar” platform, mostly because it is an outlet that enables me to represent and weigh in on topics that are on the hearts and minds of actual people on the actual campuses at which I do research and climate assessments, strategy advising, keynote addresses, professional learning activities, and consultations. Those places and the people who live, learn and work at them gave me permission to take a much-needed break in the final months of 2025. I am grateful for this and ready to resume my important role as our field’s resident scholar in 2026 and beyond.

    Shaun Harper is University Professor and Provost Professor of Education, Business and Public Policy at the University of Southern California, where he holds the Clifford and Betty Allen Chair in Urban Leadership. His most recent book is titled Let’s Talk About DEI: Productive Disagreements About America’s Most Polarizing Topics.

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  • Writing Labs Are an Answer to AI (opinion)

    Writing Labs Are an Answer to AI (opinion)

    Done! Finished!

    One might expect to hear such exclamations from exultant college students, relieved or ready to rejoice upon polishing off their latest essay assignment. Instead, these are the words I hear with increasing frequency from fellow professors who have come to think that the out-of-class essay itself is now done. It’s an antiquated assignment, some say. An outmoded form of pedagogy. A forlorn fossil of the Writing Age, a new coinage that seems all too ready to consign writing instruction to extinction.

    As a new director of my college’s faculty development office, I’m privy to ongoing conversations about the teaching of writing, many of which are marked by frustration, perplexity and pessimism. “I don’t want to read a machine’s writing,” one professor laments. “I don’t want to police student essay writing for AI use,” another asserts.

    Kevin Roose, a tech writer for The New York Times, who recently visited my campus, has suggested that the take-home essay is obsolete, asking, “Why would you assign a take-home exam, or an essay on Jane Eyre, if everyone in class—except, perhaps, the most strait-laced rule followers—will use A.I. to finish it?”

    Whether this situation is entirely new is arguable. For decades, we’ve had online resources that might make independent student reading unnecessary, yet we haven’t stopped assigning out-of-class reading. If I assign a rigorous novel like Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, I’ve long known that students can access an assortment of chapter summaries online—CliffsNotes, SparkNotes, LitCharts and others, all of which might make unnecessary the intellectual work of deciphering Dickens’s 19th-century sentences or wading into the deep waters of his sometimes murky prose. Maybe, as a recent New York Times piece about Harvard University students not doing their reading suggests, students aren’t doing that kind of homework, either.

    Still, being able to create sentences, paragraphs, essays and research papers with a single prompt—or now, having “agentic AI” engineer an entire research process in a matter of minutes—seems different from googling the plot summary for the first chapter of Bleak House.

    Maybe writing via LLMs is different because it’s not just about summarizing someone’s else’s idea; it’s about asking a machine to take the glimmer of one’s own half-hatched idea and turn it into a flawless, finished product. Somehow that process seems a little more magical, like being able to create a novel or a dissertation with a Bewitched-like twitch of the nose.

    Further, the problems with out-of-class writing are different from those linked to out-of-class reading because of how embedded AI has become within the most basic writing tools—from Microsoft’s Copilot to Grammarly. With tools that blur the boundaries between the student and their “copilot,” students will increasingly have difficulty discerning what’s them and what’s the machine—to the chagrin of those who do want to develop autonomous intellectual skills. As high school senior Ashanty Rosario complained in an essay in The Atlantic about how AI is “demolishing my education,” AI tools have become “inescapable” and inescapably seductive, with shortcuts to learning becoming “normalized.”

    In this world of ubiquitous AI shortcuts, how do we encourage students to take the scenic route? How do we help them see, as John Warner reminds us in More Than Words: How To Think About Writing in the Age of AI (Basic Books, 2025), that writing is an act of embodied thinking and a tool for forging human community, linking one human being to another? How do we encourage them, to use the language of Chad Hanson, to see their written assignments as “investments, not just in the creation of something to turn in on a deadline, but rather, investments in your humanity”? In an Inside Higher Ed essay, Hanson describes how he tells students, “When you give yourself time to use your faculties, you end up changing the dimensions of your mind.”

    But there’s the rub. Writing takes time. Teaching writing takes time. The practice of writing takes even more time. If there is still value in the time invested in developing human writing skills, where is the time to be found within the constraints of traditional writing courses? Writing practice used to take place primarily at home, on student PCs and notepads, over hours, days and weeks. Now that student writing is being chronically offloaded to a magical deus ex machina, Roose asks why teachers wouldn’t simply “switch to proctored exams, blue-book essays, and in-class group work”?

    As a writing professor, my answer is: There isn’t time.

    Shifting writing practice from a largely out-of-class endeavor to an in-class one doesn’t provide students with the time needed to develop writerly skills or to use writing as a mode of deep thinking. Nor does it allow for both instruction and sufficient hands-on practice. At my college, courses typically run either three days per week for a short 50 minutes per class or two days per week for 80 minutes. Even in a “pure” writing course, such time periods don’t allow for students to have the sustained practice they would need to develop skill as writers. The problem is even worse in writing-intensive courses for which a significant amount of class time is needed for discussing literary history, philosophy, political theory, religion, art history or sundry other topics.

    The solution I propose is to invest more rather than less in writing instruction: Just as we require labs for science lecture courses, we should provide required “writing labs” as adjuncts to writing classes. Here I don’t mean a writing lab in the sense of a writing center where students can opt to go for peer assistance. By writing lab, I mean a multihour, credit-bearing, required time during which students practice writing on a weekly basis under the supervision of the course’s instructor or another experienced writing teacher. Such labs would be time in which students develop their autonomous critical thinking skills, tackling assignments from conception to completion, “cloister[ed]” away, as Niall Ferguson puts it, from dependency on AI machines. And if writing “lab” sounds unduly scientific for the teaching of a human art, call it a weekly workshop or practicum. (Yet, even the word “laboratory” derives, via medieval Latin, from laborare, which simply means “to work or labor.”) Whatever the name, the need is real: Writing cannot be taught without student labor.

    The problem I am addressing is a critical one, with too few alarms being sounded in higher education circles, despite the plethora of articles about education and AI. Even as colleges tout writing skill as a major outcome of college education, I fear that writing education may quickly fall between the cracks, with out-of-class writing being abandoned out of frustration or despair and insufficient in-class time available for the deep learning writing requires. Quiet quitting, let’s call it, of a long-standing writing pedagogy.

    If colleges still wish to claim writing skill as an important learning outcome, they need to become more deliberate about what it means to educate student writers in the age of AI. Toward that end, colleges must first reassert the importance of learning to write and articulate its abiding value as a human endeavor. Second, colleges must devote professional development resources to prepare faculty to teach writing in the age of AI. And finally—here’s the pith of my argument—colleges need to restructure traditional models of writing instruction so that students have ample time to practice writing in the classroom, with a community of human peers and under the supervision of a writing guide. Only in, with and under those circumstances will students be able to rediscover writing as a true labor of love.

    Carla Arnell is associate dean of the faculty, director of the Office of Faculty Development and professor of English at Lake Forest College.

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