More colleges and universities are investing in support service offerings to increase student retention and graduation outcomes, but these interventions and offices come at a cost—one that is often subsidized by students.
A recently published analysis from Studocu of data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System finds that among four-year colleges and universities, most spent nearly $2,933 on academic supports and $4,828 on student services during the 2022–23 academic year. Across all institutions, the average expense per full-time equivalent student was $3,334 for student services and $4,198 for academic supports.
The group analyzed over 1,000 degree-granting institutions across the U.S. that enroll at least 101 undergraduates. Institutions ranged from large, primarily online institutions to small liberal arts colleges. Community colleges and technical colleges were not included in the study.
Academic support offerings were categorized as classroom-focused interventions, including tutoring centers, writing labs, academic advising and technology-enhanced learning tools. Student services included mental health counseling, career services, housing assistance and extracurricular programs, according to Studocu.
The biggest spenders on academic supports were, not surprisingly, wealthy Ivy League institutions. Yale University spent the most on academic supports ($1.8 billion) in the 2023 fiscal year, followed by the University of Pennsylvania ($1.1 billion) and Harvard University ($1 billion), each of which has an undergraduate population of less than 10,000.
Per student, Yale invested $225,000, Harvard spent $132,000 and Penn spent $105,707 on academic interventions.
Next in line were two public institutions: the University of Washington at Seattle, which spent $844 million for 30,000 undergraduates, or $28,133 per student, and the University of California, San Diego, which spent $844 million for 32,800 undergraduates, or roughly $25,732 per student.
Looking at student services, some of the institutions that spent the most were those with substantial online student bodies, including Grand Canyon University ($504 million), Southern New Hampshire University ($435 million), Liberty University ($289 million) and Arizona State University ($243 million).
But Yale spent the most per capita, investing $53,000 per student in nonacademic programs, followed by the California Institute of Technology and the U.S. Naval Academy, which spent $41,000 and $36,000 per student, respectively.
The analysis also revealed a positive correlation between dollars spent per student and graduation rates, which researchers said suggest well-funded support services provide meaningful benefits, particularly for students who might otherwise be at risk. However, the data does not capture the privileges of socioeconomic advantage that may supplement on-campus offerings, nor the likelihood of students to graduate regardless of support offerings due to selective admissions processes.
Students foot the bill: The high level of investment in student supports contrasts with the revenue the average student produces. The average public college received about $8,720 net revenue in tuition and fees per full-time-equivalent student in 2021, and the average private nonprofit received $23,900, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
A growing number of colleges and universities are embedding student service fees into tuition costs to fund support offerings, particularly health and wellness resources.
James Madison University, which spends around $1,620 per student on support services and $3,220 on academic resources, charges $5,662 in student fees, among the highest in the nation, according to a Sportico analysis. Nearly half ($2,362) of that fee goes directly to athletics funding, Sportico reported.
Harvard charges $3,676 annually for student services as part of the cost of attendance, a fraction of its total spend per student ($163,000). The Massachusetts Institute of Technology bills students $420 annually for student clubs and organization funding, as well as fitness activities—about 2 percent of the total dollars invested in student supports. Caltech charges $2,586 in fees, while the Naval Academy does not charge tuition.
The University of Pennsylvania lists $8,032 in fees in its estimated costs of attendance, but it’s unclear which expenses students are paying for with those fees.
Yale does not differentiate student fees in tuition prices, grouping lab, library and gymnasium costs into a student’s tuition package. Similarly, UCSD and UW do not have additional fees associated with the cost of attendance.
This is the latest of a series of contract cuts for the Institute of Education Sciences.
Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call Inc./Getty Images
The Trump administration terminated a key contract to train college officials on how to report data to the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, a move that could further hamper the Education Department’s data infrastructure.
Used to track trends in higher education enrollment, completion, financial aid usage and other institutional characteristics, IPEDS survey data has long been critical to higher education research. But in order to access and utilize the data, institutions need to know how to properly complete the survey and researchers need to know how to navigate the database.
That’s where the Association of Institutional Research and its IPEDS training programs came in—or at least they used to.
In a social media post Thursday, AIR’s executive director, Christine Keller, announced that the organization’s subcontract with IPEDS and the National Center for Education Statistics would not be renewed for the upcoming academic year. This means that updated self-paced courses and video tutorials on how to report and use data, as well as in-person workshops on topics like how to set data-informed benchmarks and improvement plans for an institution, will no longer be available.
“When you’ve done meaningful work with committed partners for more than two decades, it’s difficult to acknowledge that it’s coming to an end,” Keller wrote. “While this chapter is closing, AIR’s commitment to supporting data-informed decision-making remains strong. We are actively exploring ways to continue offering select IPEDS training under the AIR brand to meet the needs of our community.”
But while AIR intends to continue similar training models, Keller was sure to clarify that any future coaching will come at a cost. Past resources were subsidized by the contract and therefore available for free.
The end of this subcontract will not, however, terminate other components of the IPEDS contract managed through RTI International—such as aiding in data collection, maintaining the IPEDS website and managing the help desk. (This paragraph has been corrected to reflect that RTI International contract for IPEDS.)
An Education Department spokesperson wrote in an email that the decision reflected its commitment to supporting “useful and relevant research” while “respecting the American taxpayer’s wallet.”
“Multiple federal contractors were collecting 50 percent or more in overhead costs, which is neither sustainable nor reasonable,” the spokesperson said. “We believe in the value of training users to make best use of federally funded databases. Thus, we are in [the] process of reexamining how that training might be more efficiently and effectively delivered in the future.”
College staff members and policy experts who focus on using institutional data to improve student outcomes, however, say the discontinuation of free AIR training programs will be devastating.
Henry Zheng, vice provost for institutional effectiveness and planning at Carnegie Mellon University, wrote on LinkedIn that this abrupt ending was “sobering” and that he is “pray[ing] that this program will continue on another day.”
Wesley Whistle, a project director on student success and affordability at New America, a left-leaning think tank, also took to LinkedIn to comment on the news, saying, “These trainings are vital for institutional researchers as they fulfill their reporting obligations.”
And this is not the first blow for IPEDS and NCES under the Trump administration. In February, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency announced that it had canceled nearly $900 million in contracts across the statistics center and its larger parent agency, the Institute of Education Sciences.
At the time, a DOGE official said 89 IES contracts were canceled, while other organizations put the total at closer to 170. (Previous Inside Higher Ed reporting has shown that the data being published by DOGE regarding the scope and effect of its cuts is likely inaccurate.)
Additionally, the department fired more than 80 percent of IES’s 120 employees. The Education Department said in recent budget documents that it is planning to reimagine “a more efficient, effective, and useful IES to improve support for evidence-based accountability, data-driven decision making, and education research for use in the classroom.”
Collectively, IPEDS, NCES and IES serve as the Education Department’s research and development arm, funding research on how to improve equity in education access and outcomes in the future as well as providing data on how students in K–12 and college fare in programs. So to discontinue the services that bolstered college staff members’ professional development could hurt their ability to report congressionally mandated statistics accurately, higher ed experts say.
In the end, some fear that losing the training could lead to less data-informed decision-making.
“We need to collect data both at the national level and at the institutional level. Without measuring the problem, we risk pretending it doesn’t exist,” wrote James Orlick, director of grant writing and innovation for inclusive excellence at the University of Louisville. “The belief that ‘if you don’t measure it, it isn’t a problem’ reinforces inaction and won’t solve the systemic issues we face.”
The University of Michigan hired dozens of private investigators to go undercover on campus and surveil pro-Palestinian student protesters,The Guardian reported Friday.
Some of the investigators, who work for a Detroit-based security firm, were caught on camera trailing, recording and harassing students; one reportedly drove a car at one student, who had to jump out of the way.
“It’s so insane that they have spent millions of dollars to hire some goons to follow campus activists around,” one student who’d been followed by agents told The Guardian. “It’s just such a waste of money and time.”
A spokesperson for the university did not deny hiring the investigators in responses to The Guardian’s questions and defended “security measures” as essential to “maintaining a safe and secure campus environment.”
Grant House, the plaintiff in a now settled antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA, swam for Arizona State University.
Michael Reaves/Getty Images
Federal district judge Claudia Wilken granted final approval to a multi-billion-dollar settlement in the yearslong House v. NCAA lawsuit late Friday evening, effectively transforming college sports: Starting July 1, institutions will be allowed to pay student athletes directly.
In accordance with the settlement, the National Collegiate Athletic Association and colleges in Division I conferences will distribute nearly $2.8 billion in back damages over the next 10 years to athletes who competed any time since 2016, as well as to their lawyers. The case also allows each college that opted in to pay their athletes collectively up to $20.5 million per year, in addition to scholarships. That figure will increase incrementally over time.
The ruling, which technically resolves three antitrust lawsuits against the NCAA, essentially turns student-athletes from amateurs into professionals. But experts say this isn’t likely to end court battles over athletics. The creation of the revenue-sharing model (where schools distribute money earned from areas such as media rights or merchandise), combined with existing turmoil over the regulation of name, image and likeness (NIL) deals, will only invite more lawsuits, they say.
“The judge said, in essence, this is not a perfect settlement that solves everyone’s concerns, but it makes progress towards ‘righting the wrongs’ of higher education’s desire to maintain amateurism status for the players but no one else,” Karen Weaver, adjunct assistant professor in the graduate school of education at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed.
Although many colleges began making changes to their programs in anticipation of the settlement’s approval, the timing of the ruling could present logistical challenges as they move to start revenue-sharing with students from the July 1 deadline set out in the suit.
Current and former athletes have celebrated the ruling.
“It’s historic,” former college basketball star Sedona Prince, a co-lead plaintiff in one of the lawsuits, told ESPN. “It seemed like this crazy, outlandish idea at the time of what college athletics could and should be like. It was a difficult process at times … but it’s going to change millions of lives for the better.”
Wild West Yet to be Tamed
Judge Wilken’s ruling comes nearly two months after both parties presented arguments in early April for approving the settlement, and nearly five years after the suit was first filed in 2020. But contentious debates over how to manage paying student athletes really erupted in 2021, when NIL deals were first legalized.
Since then, collectives made up of alumni and boosters have paid athletes millions of dollars to play at schools through unregulated NIL partnerships. Top football and basketball players have earned the most.
College leaders have argued that the collectives could give wealthier institutions an unfair recruiting advantage. The House settlement, which not only allows colleges to pay athletes directly but also gives conferences the power to regulate booster influence, could help solve that problem.
“For several years, Division I members crafted well-intentioned rules and systems to govern financial benefits from schools and name, image and likeness opportunities, but the NCAA could not easily enforce these for several reasons,” NCAA president Charlie Baker wrote in a statement Friday. “The result was a sense of chaos: instability for schools, confusion for student-athletes and too often litigation.”
“The settlement opens a pathway to begin stabilizing college sports,” Baker said. “This new framework that enables schools to provide direct financial benefits to student-athletes and establishes clear and specific rules to regulate third-party NIL agreements marks a huge step forward for college sports.”
The settlement alsoestablishes a new clearinghouse, run by Deloitte, that will vet any endorsement deal between a booster and an athlete worth more than $600, with the goal of ensuring it is for a “valid business purpose.”
Still, doubts remain about how the watchdog will work; one commenter on X noted that all it takes for boosters to create an NIL regulatory loophole is to pay athletes in multiple $599 payments rather than one mass sum
Despite the efforts to regulate NIL payments through the clearinghouse, Weaver said the settlement will create “a feeding frenzy of agents and dealmakers capitalizing on a few athletes wealth while schools scramble to lock down players who could bolt for a better offer at any moment.”
“I expect to see the first Title IX lawsuits, and requests for an immediate stay, filed as soon as this week,” she said. “It’s important for higher education leaders to understand the far-reaching impact on our industry—it’s only just begun.”
Last month, Peter Hans, president of the University of North Carolina system, casually dropped a bombshell announcement that the system and others were in talks to launch a new accreditor.
“We’ve been having a number of discussions with several other major public university systems, where we’re exploring the idea of creating an accreditor that would offer sound oversight,” Hans said at a UNC system Board of Governors meeting last month, The News & Observer reported.
Since then, no additional details have emerged, though Hans teased an update to come in July.
But public records obtained by Inside Higher Ed show UNC system officials have been quietly engaged in conversations about launching a new accreditor for at least a year, including discussions with unnamed collaborators in Florida, where the effort could be headquartered. UNC officials have also spoken with officials at the U.S. Department of Education, even getting a heads-up on what an April 23 executive order from the Trump administration on accreditation would entail.
Here’s what those documents show.
‘The Florida Project’
In early April, UNC officials appeared ready to tell the world about their plans for a new accreditor that “would be publicly accountable, outcomes-based, and more efficient and effective in its reviews,” according to the draft of a statement that was never publicly released.
“We believe it is past time for the creation of a new accreditor focusedon the unique needs of public colleges and universities,” the statement said. “We have worked collaboratively over the past year to explore and develop such a cross-state partnership.”
Andrew Kelly, a senior adviser to Hans, sent a draft of the statement to other UNC officials. The statement argued that accreditors “wield enormous power, but too often have opaque and counterintuitive governance” and fail to “focus on matters that are significant to students.” He argued in the statement that the current model “creates unnecessary duplication and cost, conflicts with the authority of state governments, and does little to ensure educational quality.”
An unidentified number of state systems of higher education were supposed to sign the statement, according to the draft.
Kelly drafted the statement in response to the Trump administration’s anticipated changes to accreditation, which included streamlining the processes for ED to recognize accreditors and for institutions to switch agencies, among other changes to the system that serves as gatekeeper to federal financial aid.
But the public did not hear about the UNC system’s quiet effort to launch a new accreditor until Hans spoke up at the May board meeting.
Other emails yielded some insights into whom the UNC system might be partnering with.
Daniel Harrison, vice president for academic affairs at the UNC system, sent an email on April 23 to fellow officials recapping a call with the U.S. Department of Education and what could be expected in the coming executive order on accreditation (which was issued shortly after his email).
In that email, Harrison also pointed to potential partners in the accreditation effort.
“An update on the Florida project—we met with the new entities [sic] attorneys and made substantial progress toward determining the legal structure of the new accreditor. It is likely to be a single member Florida nonprofit corp. Florida would be the sole member, but would delegate all delegable powers to a Board of Directors made up of the participating states,” Harrison wrote.
But despite having met with potential partners, UNC considered going its own way.
In a response to Harrison, Hans asked him to convene several system officials involved with the effort to weigh the pros and cons of “joining [a] multi-state coalition” or “forming a NC entity.” Email records obtained by Inside Higher Ed don’t show what the group recommended, but remarks made by Hans at May’s meeting indicate the system opted for the coalition approach.
UNC system officials did not respond to requests for comment from Inside Higher Ed.
System leaders also appear to have discussed the effort with state legislators in private. On May 15, Hans asked senior vice president of government relations Bart Goodson to set up a meeting with Michael Lee, the Senate majority leader in the Republican-dominated Legislature. When Goodson asked about the topic, Hans replied, “accreditation update with good news.”
Lee did not respond to a request for comment from Inside Higher Ed.
Potential Partners?
Like their UNC counterparts, other public systems are staying quiet on the effort.
Inside Higher Ed contacted a dozen public university systems, all in red states, to ask if they are partnering with UNC or others in an effort to launch a new accreditor, or if they participated in such discussions. Only two replied: the Arkansas State University system and the University of Alabama system. Both noted they had not been involved in those accreditation discussions.
The State University System of Florida—which did not reply to media inquiries—is the most likely potential partner, given the details in Harrison’s email and the governor’s recent political fury with accreditors.
In 2022, Florida’s dark-red Legislature passed a law requiring state institutions to switch accreditors regularly. That move came after the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, which accredited all 40 of Florida’s public institutions, inquired about a potential conflict of interest at Florida State University, which was considering Richard Corcoran for its presidency despite his role on the Florida Board of Governors. (He now leads New College of Florida.)
SACS also raised questions about an effort by the University of Florida to prevent professors from testifying against the state in a legal case challenging voting-rights restrictions. (UF later dropped that policy amid a torrent of criticism.) Both incidents occurred in 2021.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis has been a vocal critic of the federal accreditation system.
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Following the 2022 law, some institutions began the process of switching accreditors,though state officials argued that the Biden administration slowed down that effort and Florida tried unsuccessfully to get a federal judge to rule the current system of accreditation unconstitutional.
Outside of Florida, North Carolina is the only other state with a similar law. In 2023, legislators quietly slipped a provision into a state budget bill that required state institutions to change accreditors every cycle. The law was passed with no debate among North Carolina lawmakers. The change came after UNC clashed with SACS in early 2023 over shared governance.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis did not confirm to Inside Higher Ed whether the state is launching a new accreditor, but recent remarks from the GOP firebrand suggest, albeit vaguely, that something is in the works.
“For too long, academic accreditors have held our colleges and universities hostage,” DeSantis said in an emailed statement. “These accreditation cartels have worked behind the scenes to shape university behavior, embedding ideological concepts like Diversity, Equity, and Exclusion Indoctrination into the accreditation process. If you weren’t meeting politically motivated standards, like enthusiastic participation in DEI, they would hamper your accreditation and access to federal funding. In Florida, we refuse to let academic accreditation cartels hold our colleges and universities hostage to ideology at the expense of academic excellence. Stay tuned.”
Wade Maki, Faculty Assembly chair and a philosophy professor at UNC Greensboro, said he and other faculty members recently met with system officials to share their thoughts on the plan.
“We had a very open conversation with the system office and shared our hopes that we get an accreditor that is independent, that maintains the strong reputation of the UNC system and helps keep the politics out of higher ed and the curriculum, whether that’s from the politicians or the accreditors themselves,” Maki said. “We’ve seen it come from both directions over the years.”
He also thinks the narrow focus of such an accreditor could be a positive.
“My leadership team, the Faculty Assembly Executive Committee and the faculty that we’ve talked to on campuses, we see the potential benefits of trying something like this, of having an accreditor that focuses just on the accrediting of state-supported public institutions,” Maki said.
Outside observers were more critical of the UNC system’s plans.
Accreditation expert Paul Gaston III, an emeritus trustees professor at Kent State University, argued that building an accreditor composed only of public institutions would omit valuable perspectives in review processes. He argued that colleges undergoing accreditation reviews benefit from the diversity of experiences from evaluators working at a broad range of institutions.
“What would be the advantage of, in a sense, separating classes of institutions for accreditation? I think one of the strengths of accreditation has been that it brings a variety of perspectives to the evaluation of a particular institution,” Gaston said.
Then there’s the arduous process of getting a new accrediting agency up and running; gaining federal recognition, which is required, takes years. Although Trump’s executive order on accreditation promised a smoother pathway to recognition for new entrants, it does not supersede federal regulations.
“Becoming federally recognized, typically, is a five-plus-year process,” said Edward Conroy, a senior policy manager at the left-leaning think tank New America. Under current federal regulations, Conroy doesn’t expect the new accreditor to be recognized until 2030 or so.
Conroy also questioned whether the effort to create a new accreditor is about institutional quality assurance or political control.
“Everything Florida has done on accreditation over the past few years appears to be politically and ideologically driven, rather than about what is best for students and ensuring that they go to high-quality institutions and get a good education when they’re paying a lot of money for it and when taxpayers are investing a lot of money in public funding for higher education,” he said.
Conroy worries that state lawmakers in either Florida or North Carolina would require public colleges in their state to be accredited by their new accreditor. That would undermine the current requirement that colleges get to choose their own accreditor.
“It undercuts the principle of the higher education accountability triad, where states, accreditors and the Department of Education are all meant to do different things,” Conroy said. “If you have a state that becomes both, to some degree or another, the accreditor, as well as the state authorizing entity, then we’ve combined two legs of a three-legged stool.”
An estimated 20 percent of college students experience housing insecurity and 14 percent experience homelessness, according to fall 2024 data from Trellis Strategies. Yet many colleges are ill-equipped to address student housing concerns, particularly institutions with nonresidential campuses or those that serve adult learners.
The state of California created an initiative in 2020 to provide housing and short-term support to students who were experiencing housing insecurity while enrolled at one of the three public systems—the California State Universities, California Community Colleges or the University of California.
A recently published analysis of the state’s College Focused Rapid Rehousing (CFRR) program identified promising practices and lessons learned from the pilot. The study—authored by the Center for Equitable Higher Education (CEHE) at California State University, Long Beach—found that students who participated were more likely to remain enrolled and graduate compared to their peers, and a majority had established stable housing one year later.
The background: Passed in July 2019, Assembly Bill 74 allocated funding for college-focused rapid rehousing programs, which give students rental subsidies, moving assistance, wraparound supports, case management and emergency grants. The community college system received $9 million, CSU $6.5 million and UC institutions $3.5 million to invest in long- and short-term initiatives, depending on each system’s unique student needs.
According to 2023 data included in the report, over half of CSU students and 65 percent of CCC’s who receive financial aid experience housing insecurity. One-quarter of CCC students and 11 percent of CSU students experienced homelessness during the 2022–23 academic year.
The CEHE study evaluated the program over three years at eight CSU campuses and two community colleges. In total, 639 students participated in CFRR across the 10 institutions, and 3,949 received short-term assistance—often in the form of an emergency grant—from spring 2020 to spring 2024. Approximately 540 students fell into both categories, receiving short-term support before enrolling in CFRR.
Some historically underserved populations were more likely to participate in CFRR: Black students and former foster youth were heavily overrepresented relative to the general population, and first-generation, transfer and returning students were also overrepresented to a smaller degree.
Addressing housing insecurity: The program wassuccessful in its goal of mitigating homelessness for enrolled students. After engaging with CFRR, participants experienced substantial housing stability, with an average of nine consecutive months of housing.
In addition, a majority of students who left the program graduated (27 percent) or reached permanent housing (27 percent), while 15 percent failed to meet academic requirements, which is a common barrier to sustaining housing assistance.
The greatest share of students (37 percent) were placed in stable housing in less than six months, though one-third took over 12 months to get housing from a community partner. The breakdown highlights the challenges in placing students in viable housing options, according to the report. However, two-thirds of surveyed students (n=181) said they believe they had been housed relatively quickly.
One year after exiting the program, a majority of participants indicated that they were residing in an apartment or home that they directly leased or owned. Eighteen percent lived with a family member.
Students credited the program with supporting their long-term success; 71 percent of survey respondents agreed or strongly agreed that their current housing situation was better because of the assistance they received.
However, many still struggled with financial insecurity. Sixty-two percent said it was difficult to pay increased rent in the first year after exiting the program, and 25 percent underpaid or missed at least one rent payment during this period. Three in 10 said they had to move more than twice due to financial difficulties, and one-quarter of program graduates reported at least one episode of homelessness.
Impacting student success: In addition to meeting students’ basic needs, the program had a demonstrated effect on persistence and attainment rates.
Participants were more likely to remain enrolled or graduate (56 percent) compared to students receiving short-term housing assistance (47 percent). At CSU, CFRR students graduated within four years at higher rates than the broader CSU population (43 percent versus 35.5 percent), as well.
Data also pointed to the impact housing crises can have on students’ academic performance, with housing-insecure students reporting their lowest GPA the semester they engaged in support interventions and the semester following.
A graph showing the average GPA of CFRR participants compared to their peers who received short-term assistance from their institution.
Twelve months after receiving assistance, CFRR students were significantly less likely to stop out of school compared to their peers who received just a short-term housing subsidy. Survey data showed students were more likely to engage in school activities, but a majority (70 percent) still held jobs to pay for college, working an average of 25 hours per week. Eighty percent of CFRR participants said they had difficulty balancing school and life responsibilities.
Program participants were also more likely to be employed six months after entering housing (70 percent) versus three months before entering the program (56 percent).
Housing insecurity can damage students’ mental health and in turn affect their persistence in higher education. At intake into CFRR, 76 percent of participants said they felt lonely, but that number dropped to 63 percent in follow-up surveys. Just under half of housing-insecure students experienced serious psychological distress at intake, while closer to one-third indicated distress at follow-up. These numbers remain elevated compared to the total student population at CSU, where 20 percent experienced serious psychological distress.
The program also increased students’ emotional and mental resilience. Students rated their ability to handle personal problems higher after securing housing as well, from 33 percent to 52 percent during follow-up.
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You, who made the dreams of your immigrant families come true by earning your college degrees, are what America needs right now.
You, who yourselves are immigrants who came to this country with nothing but have earned a degree or certificate that could transport you out of poverty and into the middle class, are what America needs right now.
You, who survived poverty, food insecurity and homelessness to make it here to your college graduation, are what America needs right now.
You, who know firsthand what it is like to be discriminated against because of where you are from, how you talk, how you look and who you love, but yet, refuse to sit idly by while others suffer injustices, are what America needs right now.
Even those of you who have no firsthand experience with discrimination but yet also refuse to sit idly by while others suffer injustices are what America needs right now.
You, who served your time, turned your lives around, were released from jails and prisons, then ultimately inspired others in your communities by earning college degrees, are what America needs right now.
You, who bravely served in our nation’s military, then came to college and are graduating today with the same enduring commitments to freedom—thank you for your service—you are what America needs right now.
You, who are committed to building and protecting a just and equitable nation that none of us have ever seen, are what America needs right now.
Eighteen states are yet to elect a woman governor—she could be you. The United States needs its first woman president—she could be you. Fortune 500 companies need more indisputably qualified CEOs and executives who reflect our nation’s diversity—that could be you. Higher education will soon need a new generation of professors and administrators to educate and ensure the success of future students—that could be you.
Class of 2025, what our nation needs most at this time is you.
You, who made the dreams of your immigrant families come true by earning your college degrees, are what America needs right now.
You, who yourselves are immigrants who came to this country with nothing but have earned a degree or certificate that could transport you out of poverty and into the middle class, are what America needs right now.
You, who survived poverty, food insecurity and homelessness to make it here to your college graduation, are what America needs right now.
You, who know firsthand what it is like to be discriminated against because of where you are from, how you talk, how you look and who you love, but yet, refuse to sit idly by while others suffer injustices, are what America needs right now.
Even those of you who have no firsthand experience with discrimination but yet also refuse to sit idly by while others suffer injustices are what America needs right now.
You, who served your time, turned your lives around, were released from jails and prisons, then ultimately inspired others in your communities by earning college degrees, are what America needs right now.
You, who bravely served in our nation’s military, then came to college and are graduating today with the same enduring commitments to freedom—thank you for your service—you are what America needs right now.
You, who are committed to building and protecting a just and equitable nation that none of us have ever seen, are what America needs right now.
Eighteen states are yet to elect a woman governor—she could be you. The United States needs its first woman president—she could be you. Fortune 500 companies need more indisputably qualified CEOs and executives who reflect our nation’s diversity—that could be you. Higher education will soon need a new generation of professors and administrators to educate and ensure the success of future students—that could be you.
Class of 2025, what our nation needs most at this time is you.
Kimberly Richey, a Florida education official, made her case Thursday about why she should lead the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, pledging “unwavering” support of the administration’s priorities such as protecting Jewish students.
“Should I be confirmed as assistant secretary for civil rights, I will proudly be joining an administration that will not allow students to be intimidated, harassed, assaulted or excluded from their institutions,” she said in her opening remarks.
But repeatedly throughout the hearing, Democratic senators interrogated her on how she plans to address a massive backlog in complaints—which one senator said has more than doubled since Trump took office, to 25,000—with a reduced staff.
“This administration has fired more than half of the staff at OCR, and President Trump is now asking, in his budget, to slash that by $49 million next year, so explain to me how those firings and that funding cut will help reduce that backlog? I want to understand how you’re going to square that circle,” Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington, asked early on in the hearing.
Richey mostly avoided answering the questions, arguing that she had not yet assumed the role of assistant secretary and, therefore, had no say in the recent changes to OCR.
“As a nominee, I do not have access to information with regard to the decisions that are being made at the department,” Richey responded. “I’m not in communication with OCR leadership or the secretary. One of the reasons why this role is so important to me is because I am always going to advocate for OCR to have the resources it needs to do its job. I think that what it means is I’m going to have to be really strategic, if I’m confirmed, stepping into this role, helping come up with a plan where we can address these challenges.”
Several others doubled down on Murray’s line of questioning, including Sen. Andy Kim, a New Jersey Democrat, who asked Richey if antisemitism was getting worse in America. When she said it was, he questioned how cutting OCR staff is conducive to fighting antisemitism on college campuses. She reiterated her answer to Murray’s question, saying, “I can’t explain or provide information on decisions I wasn’t involved in.”
Richey was one of four people who testified Thursday before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. She and the nominee for deputy secretary of education, Penny Schwinn, fielded the bulk of the committee’s questions as lawmakers pressed for answers about the OCR’s operations and priorities, proposed budget cuts, and the president’s plans to dismantle the Education Department. The senators didn’t vote on whether to advance the nominations to the Senate floor; that step will likely occur at a later meeting.
Richey is currently senior chancellor for the Florida Department of Education and has twice served in OCR before, including a brief stint as acting secretary of civil rights at the end of Trump’s first term and the beginning of Biden’s presidency. Her confirmation hearing comes months after the Trump administration slashed more than half of OCR’s staff, including shuttering seven of the 12 regional offices dedicated to investigating complaints. The office has also reportedly begun prioritizing opening cases regarding trans women athletes and antisemitism since Trump’s second term began, letting other cases pile up and go unaddressed, according to multiplenews reports.
In the confirmation hearing, Richey expressed strong support for those causes, stressing that she led OCR when it investigated one of the federal government’s earliest cases against a school for allowing a trans woman to play on a women’s sports team.
“I’m certainly committed to vigorously enforcing it and continuing to pursue these cases,” she said.
In response to a different question, though, she did say that OCR would investigate certain complaints of discrimination related to gender identity and sexual orientation—an answer that appeared to incense Republican senator Josh Hawley of Missouri.
“I want to be crystal clear on this—I think it’s a very dangerous thing to start allowing this into Title IX, which, as you know, it is a landmark statute, it is vitally important, and it has been under attack for four long years,” he said, asking her to confirm that OCR will “go after” colleges and universities that allow trans women to play women’s sports.
He also warned Richey that she should “rethink” her position that OCR can investigate discrimination based on gender identity.
Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, a Democrat from Maryland, pressed Richey on whether she would continue OCR’s new system of prioritizing cases regarding antisemitism and trans athletes, asking if all forms of discrimination should be treated with equal importance.
Richey told Alsobrooks she does believe “it’s important to vigorously enforce all of the federal laws that OCR is responsible for enforcing.” Later in the hearing, she noted that Education Secretary Linda McMahon is “prioritizing” removing trans women from women’s athletics, and she plans to do the same if confirmed.
Schwinn, who was formerly Tennessee’s commissioner of education, received most of the panel’s questions about the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the education department. In response a question from Sen. Jim Banks, an Indiana Republican, about what steps would be required to dismantle the department, she stated that she “would certainly work, if confirmed, with the secretary and with Congress on any actions related to the role of the department” and that she believes in equipping states with legislation and funding that will help them improve their own educational systems.
“A department or an agency in the federal government is not going to change the outcomes of students—the teacher in the classroom is going to teach the standards that are approved by that state. The parent is the parent of that child. What we need to do is ensure we’ve created a system that is going to drive outcomes,” she said. “That is not going to happen from the federal government, whether there is a Department of Education or not.”
Purdue University has ended a long-standing partnership with its independent student newspaper, The Purdue Exponent, and will no longer distribute papers, give student journalists free parking passes or allow them to use the word “Purdue” for commercial purposes.
The Purdue Student Publishing Foundation board (PSPF), the nonprofit group that oversees The Exponent—the largest collegiate newspaper in Indiana—said the changes came without warning.
On May 30, PSPF received an email from Purdue’s Office of Legal Counsel notifying the group that their contract had expired more than a decade ago and the university would not participate in newspaper distribution or give the students exclusive access to newspaper racks on campus.
In addition, the message said, the university will not enter into a new contract for facility use with the paper to remain consistent with the administration’s stated policy on institutional neutrality.
According to a statement from the university, it is not consistent “with principles of freedom of expression, institutional neutrality and fairness to provide the services and accommodations described in the letter to one media organization but not others.”
The Exponent is the only student newspaper, though Purdue also has two student news channels, FastTrack News and BoilerTV.
Legal counsel also asked The Exponent to keep “Purdue” off the masthead and out of the paper’s URL because “The Foundation should not associate its own speech with the University.” PSPF says it has a trademark on “The Purdue Exponent” until 2029.
PSPF and Purdue have held distribution agreements since 1975, in which Exponent staff would drop papers off at various locations across campus and staff would then place them on newspaper racks.
In 2014, the Exponent delivered the university a new contract to renew the agreement for the next five years, according to paper staff. The contract was never signed, but the terms of the agreement continued until Monday, June 2.
Now, The Exponent is permitted to distribute papers themselves and have nonexclusive access to newspaper stands on campus, according to the university; students said they don’t have early access to many of the buildings the way staff do.
“Purdue’s moves are unacceptable and represent not only a distortion of trademark law but a betrayal of the university’s First Amendment obligations to uphold free expression,” Dominic Coletti, a student press program officer for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told The Exponent. “Breaking long-standing practice to hinder student journalism is not a sign of institutional neutrality; it is a sign of institutional cowardice.”
