Tag: Events

Admissions Offices Brace for Federal Scrutiny

Last month the government cut $400 million in federal funding for Columbia University and sent a list of demands the university would have to meet to get it back. Among them: “deliver a plan for comprehensive admission reform.”

The administration sent a similar letter earlier this month to Harvard University after freezing $9 billion in funding, demanding that the university “adopt and implement merit-based admissions policies” and “cease all preferences based on race, color, ethnicity or national origin in admissions.”

And in March the Department of Justice launched investigations into admissions practices at Stanford University and three University of California campuses, accusing them of defying the Supreme Court’s decision banning affirmative action in June 2023’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

Exactly what the Trump administration believes is going on behind closed doors in highly selective college admissions offices remains unclear. The University of California system has been prohibited from considering race in admissions since the state outlawed the practice in 1996, and both Harvard and Columbia have publicly documented changes to their admissions policies post-SFFA, including barring admissions officers from accessing the applicant pool’s demographic data.

Regardless, given the DOJ investigations and demands of Columbia and Harvard—not to mention potential demands at newly targeted institutions like Princeton, Northwestern and Brown—the federal government appears set to launch a crusade against admissions offices.

A spokesperson for the Education Department did not respond to multiple questions from Inside Higher Ed, including a request to clarify what “comprehensive admission reform” means and what evidence the administration has that admissions decisions at Columbia and Harvard are not merit-based, or that they continue to consider race even after the SFFA ruling.

Columbia acquiesced to many of the Trump administration’s demands, but it’s not clear if admissions reform is one of those concessions. When asked, a Columbia spokesperson said that “at this moment” the university had nothing to add beyond the university’s March 21 letter to the administration.

In that letter, Columbia officials wrote that they would “review our admissions procedures to ensure they reflect best practices,” adding that they’d “established an advisory group to analyze recent trends in enrollment and report to the President” on “concerns over discrimination against a particular group.”

Interestingly, Columbia officials also wrote that they would investigate “a recent downturn in both Jewish and African American enrollment.”

A Harvard spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed that the university’s “admissions practices comply with all applicable laws,” but they declined to answer additional questions about potential changes to admission policies or whether they’d received clarification from the Trump administration.

Angel Pérez, president of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, said the vague demands on college admissions offices are intentional, and that the administration is “setting institutions up for failure.”

“Institutions are certainly going to defend their process, but it’s going to be chaotic and it’s going to be noisy … it’s almost like we are seeing SFFA play itself out all over again,” he said. “Is there the potential that it could change some things about the [admissions] process? Absolutely. We just don’t know what that would look like.”

Orwell in the Reading Room

If the Trump administration’s specific grievances with selective admissions are murky, then its plan to enforce “reform” is downright opaque. However, officials have offered some hints.

In a December op-ed in The Washington Examiner, which outlined a plan that so far reflects the Trump administration’s higher education agenda with uncanny accuracy, American Enterprise Institute fellow Max Eden suggested “a never-ending compliance review” targeting Harvard and others to enforce the SFFA ruling. In his view, admissions officers should not discuss applicants or make decisions without a federal agent present to ensure they don’t even obliquely discuss race.

“[They] should assign Office of [sic] Civil Rights employees to the Harvard admissions office and direct the university to hold no admissions meeting without their physical presence,” Eden wrote. “The Office of Civil Rights should be copied on every email correspondence, and Harvard should be forced to provide a written rationale for every admissions decision to ensure nondiscrimination.”

Eden now works for the Trump administration, though it’s not clear in what capacity. Inside Higher Ed located a White House email address for him, but he did not respond to several interview requests in time for publication.

Edward Blum, the president of Students for Fair Admissions and the architect of the affirmative action ban, told Inside Higher Ed he thinks rigorous federal oversight of admissions offices is sorely needed.

“Requiring competitive colleges and universities to disclose in granular detail their admissions practices to various federal agencies is an important and wise decision,” he wrote in an email.

Pérez said that level of intrusion on a college admissions office’s process would effectively destroy the profession.

“If that were to happen, I can unequivocally tell you that we are not going to have people who want to do this work,” he said. “We know how critically important it is. But how many more headwinds can they face before they begin to ask themselves, is this really worth it?”

Crusade in Search of a Problem

Test-optional admissions policies are likely to become a magnet for federal scrutiny. In a February Dear Colleague letter instructing colleges to eliminate all race-conscious programming, the Education Department wrote that test-optional policies could be “proxies for race” to help colleges “give preference” to certain racial groups.

Columbia is one of the few Ivy League institutions to retain the test-optional policy it put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic; Harvard reinstated testing requirements this past application cycle.

Personal essays may also fall under the Trump administration’s microscope. Hard-line affirmative action critics have suggested that colleges may be effectively circumventing the Supreme Court’s ban by imputing an applicant’s race from their essays. Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion said that practice should be tolerated as long as an applicant’s identity is considered in the context of their personal journey. But his vaguely self-contradictory language—he added a caveat that said essays should not be used as a “proxy” for racial consideration—has engendered fierce debate over the role of the essay in applicant reviews.

Last month the University of Austin, an unaccredited new college in Texas with ideologically conservative roots, announced it would consider only standardized test scores when admitting applicants, disregarding essays, GPA and recommendation letters.

“Admissions at elite colleges now come down to who you know, your identity group or how well you play the game,” a university official wrote in announcing the policy. “This system rewards manipulation, not merit.”

Blum suspects many selective colleges of disregarding the affirmative action ban and said he was especially skeptical of those that reported higher or stable enrollments of racial minorities this fall, including Yale, Duke and Princeton. In an interview with Inside Higher Ed in February, he said he expects those institutions to invoke scrutiny from the courts and the Trump administration.

But both Columbia and Harvard reported declines in underrepresented minority enrollment last fall, especially Black students. At Harvard, Black enrollment fell by 4 percentage points, from 18 percent for the Class of 2027 to 14 percent of the Class of 2028; at Columbia Black enrollment fell by 12 points, from 20 percent to 8 percent. (This paragraph has been updated to correct Harvard’s Black enrollment figures.)

Pérez said that colleges that reported higher underrepresented minority enrollment have a simple explanation: demographic trends.

“The truth is that the majority of students applying to institutions right now are incredibly diverse and will only get more diverse,” he said. “You’re putting colleges in an impossible position if you’re penalizing them for having a more diverse applicant pool.”

Eric Staab, vice president of admissions and financial aid at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore., said his institution isn’t concerned about drawing the Trump administration’s ire, despite going test-blind this year and maintaining a stable level of racial diversity.

For one, he said, he’s not sure the Office for Civil Rights will be staffed well enough to take on more than a handful of target institutions after the Education Department’s mass layoffs last month. Even if it is, Staab said he’s confident that post-SFFA, investigators wouldn’t find anything illegal or even objectionable at Lewis & Clark.

“Admissions has always been a merit-based process … with the [SFFA decision], pretty much all of us needed to do some tweaking or major overhaul of our admissions and financial aid policies, and we did that,” he said. “I’m not worried about them sending people into reading sessions, because we have nothing to cover up.”

But Pérez said there could be a broader chilling effect across admissions offices if the Trump administration pursues a more aggressive approach to its “admissions reform” agenda.

“Institutions are asking questions of the DOJ and other departments to try to get clarity, but therein lies the challenge: They have not been given clarity, so they don’t know how to prepare,” he said. “That lack of clarity is causing chaos.”

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April 14, 2025
UNC Chapel Hill Provost Stepping Down Amid Civic Life Strife

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s provost is stepping down next month to return to the faculty there, a development that news articles last week suggested is tied to his disagreement with hiring practices at the School of Civic Life and Leadership, or SCiLL.

In a statement Friday to Inside Higher Ed, Chris Clemens, the outgoing provost, said, “I made the decision to step down as provost. During my time as provost, I’ve been able to address challenges I care deeply about and make meaningful progress. However, the issues that have arisen in recent days are not ones I can solve, and I don’t feel the same passion for them.”

His statement didn’t explain what these recent issues are, and Chapel Hill spokespeople didn’t provide further information beyond campus chancellor Lee Roberts’s April 3 announcement that Clemens had decided to step down.

Clemens will return May 16 to being the Jaroslav Folda Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Roberts said in that announcement. Clemens has been provost since early 2022, starting under former chancellor Kevin M. Guskiewicz, who’s now president of Michigan State University. Roberts credited Clemens with, among other things, helping establish the School of Data Science and Society, the Program for Public Discourse, and SCiLL.

SCiLL was established after Chapel Hill’s Board of Trustees passed a resolution in January 2023 asking the campus administration to “accelerate its development” of this new school. The then–board chair called SCiLL an effort to “remedy” a shortage of “right-of-center views” on campus. Controversy quickly ensued. Faculty said they didn’t know a whole school was in development.

The Republican-controlled State Legislature then passed a law requiring Chapel Hill to establish the school and hire 10 to 20 faculty from outside the university, plus make them eligible for tenure. It became one of many civics or civil discourse centers—critics have called them conservative centers—that Republican lawmakers and higher education leaders have established at public universities in recent years.

In January 2025, Clemens canceled the latest SCiLL tenure-track faculty searches before reversing course days later. Articles in The Assembly and the conservative Real Clear Investigations have now implied that Clemens’s departure was connected to his involvement in the disagreements over hiring within SCiLL.

Clemens, a self-described conservative, had been an advocate for SCiLL. The Real Clear Investigations article was titled, before the headline was changed, “In North Carolina, Academic Conservatives Have Met the Enemy and It Is … Them.”

In his Friday statement, Clemens said, “I look forward to returning to the faculty to resume work on optical design technology, with a particular focus on applications for the SOAR telescope and astronomy. This will allow me to spend more time in the classroom—an aspect of academic life I have greatly missed.”

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April 14, 2025
Fewer Students Engage in College Activities After COVID
Higher education professionals have noted that today’s students are less engaged than previous classes. Many experts attribute this shift to the lack of socialization caused by COVID-19 stay-at-home orders. But according to a recently published study, students’ participation rates have been declining for the past decade.

A March report from the Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) Consortium found that while student engagement in various on-campus activities—including academic, civic, career, extracurricular and research work—has trended upward since 2020, rates are still lower than they were in 2019.

“The pandemic brought great disruption to [engagement] … and the narrative around is that, ‘Oh, things are back to normal. We’re operating normally.’ And it looks like, you know, on campuses, the pandemic has been forgotten … but in the data, in fact, we don’t see that,” said Igor Chirikov, senior researcher and SERU Consortium director.

Methodology

The report includes 10 years’ worth of survey and institutional data by the SERU Consortium, including 1.1 million student survey responses from 22 major research universities. The consortium is based at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley, and research was done in partnership with the University of Minnesota and the evaluation firm Etio.

“Pre-pandemic” data is categorized as responses collected between 2016 and 2019, and “post-pandemic” data reaches 2023. Survey respondents were all students at R-1 residential universities with high retention and graduation rates (ranging from 82 to 94 percent).

Overall declines: Researchers used the engagement indicators from 2018–19 as the reference point to mark the distinction between pre- and post-pandemic testing. All charts are focused on change, so they do not signify a decline in units (such as hours spent studying) but they do present an opportunity for comparison between indicators, Chirikov said.

Most indicators of campus involvement have declined since the onset of COVID-19, with few recovering to pre-pandemic levels as of 2023.

Academically, students reported significant differences in the amount of time studying in and outside of class, as well as in interacting with faculty members. Studying with peers also took a dip during the pandemic, but a relatively small one, which researchers said could be due to the shift to online and hybrid formats that created virtual study groups and other digital interactions.

During the 2020–21 academic year, the share of students who indicated that their professor knew or had learned their name declined, as did their confidence that they knew a professor well enough to ask for a letter of recommendation for a job or graduate school. Both factors made slight improvement during the 2022–23 academic year, but they remain below pre-pandemic levels.

The question about recommendation letters is one that interests Chirikov, particularly as universities are growing their enrollment and the student-faculty ratio increases. “I think that shows to what extent students have a person on campus, like a faculty member that knows them, that knows their work and can put in a good word for them,” he said.

Participation in faculty-led research also dropped, from 25 percent of students in 2018–19 to 20 percent in 2022–23. Wealthy students were 50 percent more likely to assist in faculty research, compared to their low-income peers.

“These are research universities, so part of their mission is to engage students in research and work in the lab, and we see, again, both declines and equity gaps in all this,” Chirikov said. “A lot of these opportunities are unpaid, and students coming from low-income families, they just cannot afford it. It’s becoming a luxury for rich kids.”

Involvement in extracurricular activities, interestingly, increased during the 2020–21 academic year, which researchers theorize could be due to students seeking new ways to connect with their peers amid social distancing measures.

“This indicator relies less on university infrastructure and opportunities; students worked themselves to restore that, to extend and create a different environment and spaces for communication and development friendship,” Chirikov said.

The following year, extracurricular involvement declined to below pre-pandemic levels. Students committed fewer hours to student groups and were less likely to hold a leadership role.

Since the pandemic, students have spent less time performing community service or volunteering and are less likely to have academic service-learning or community-based learning experiences.

On-campus employment also took a hit—fewer students indicated they worked on campus during 2022–23 compared to 2018–19, and employed students reported working one fewer hour per week. In addition, a smaller number of students said they completed an internship, practicum or field experience, which aligns with national trends that show that students are having more difficulty securing internships. Conversely, off-campus employment rates increased after the pandemic, though the number of hours students work has dropped.
Sowing Success

Noting barriers to access or confusion among students over how to get plugged in on campus, some colleges and universities have created new programming to address participation gaps.

Goucher College created micro-experiences in service learning to allow learners to participate in small-scale or one-day projects, opening doors for students who are engaged in other spaces on campus.

The University of Miami offers a precollege webinar series to support incoming students who receive Federal Work-Study dollars in identifying and securing on-campus employment opportunities.

San Francisco State University, part of the California State University system, established an online hub for students to identify research and creative activities that may interest them, removing informational barriers to participation.

Virginia Commonwealth University encourages faculty members to hold open office hours that meet across disciplines to facilitate greater interaction between learners and professors.
Across various engagement opportunities, college juniors and seniors were more likely to report participation, which could be tied to previous involvement before the COVID-19 pandemic, or an increased personal investment in achieving postgraduate success.

All demographic factors were controlled, so a changing student population has no effect on the overall trends, Chirikov said.

So what? Based on their findings, researchers recommend higher education revitalize engagement opportunities for students, particularly in the fields of research, community connections, student organization and career development programs.

Federal cuts to research may further disrupt this trend, which Chirikov hypothesizes will differ according to discipline and funding losses.

Additionally, institutions should address gaps in participation among different demographics, such as low-income and working-class students, who may experience financial and time deficits, Chirikov and his co-authors wrote.

Researchers are currently unpacking 2024 data to see which of these trends have continued or if there were new changes, Chirikov said.

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April 11, 2025
Embattled University of West Florida Trustee Resigns

Scott Yenor, chair of the Board of Trustees at the University of West Florida, resigned Wednesday ahead of a looming fight with lawmakers, The Pensacola News Journal reported.

Yenor, a political science professor at Boise State University, made national headlines in 2021 when he made misogynistic remarks at the National Conservatism Conference, taking aim at feminism and arguing that women should not pursue certain career fields, such as engineering.

He also described “independent women” as “medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome.”

Yenor and other conservative trustees appointed at UWF in January faced protests from the community. But it was ultimately pressure from state lawmakers over other remarks that seemed to push Yenor out. In a series of social media posts in February, Yenor seemed to imply that only straight white men should be in political leadership posts. Some critics, including Randy Fine, a Republican state senator at the time of the post, read his remarks as exclusionary of Jewish men. (Fine recently won a special election to represent Florida’s First Congressional District.)

Fine, who is Jewish, subsequently called Yenor a “bigot” and “misogynist.”

Under Florida law, a trustee appointed by the governor can begin serving immediately, before confirmation by the State Legislature. With the confirmation process underway, Yenor stepped aside amid speculation that lawmakers could refuse to sign off on his appointment.

“Gov. Ron DeSantis’ higher education reforms are models for the country,” Yenor wrote in a resignation email obtained by The Pensacola News Journal. “I was looking forward to bringing the Governor’s positive vision for higher education to the University of West Florida (UWF) as a member of the Board of Trustees. Opposition to my nomination among a group within Florida’s senate, however, leads me to resign from UWF’s Board of Trustees effectively immediately.”

The potential rejection would mark a rare break between DeSantis and Florida’s Republican-dominated Legislature, which has largely supported the governor’s agenda during his time in office. Earlier this year, the Senate Appropriations Committee did not confirm Adam Kissel, another UWF board appointee, though there is still a path for him to be confirmed anyway. In 2023, the Florida Senate rejected another DeSantis pick and bumped Eddie Speir from the New College of Florida board simply by not taking action on the confirmation rather than rejecting it.

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April 11, 2025
Penn to Lose Security Clearance in Trump Attack

President Donald Trump signed a directive Wednesday removing the security clearances of University of Pennsylvania community members, the latest government action to pummel the president’s alma mater.

In the directive, Trump, a 1968 Wharton School of Business graduate, ordered the Department of Justice to investigate Miles Taylor, a former senior Department of Homeland Security official who has criticized the president, including in a 2018 New York Times op-ed and in a book in which he alleges presidential misconduct during Trump’s first term.

Taylor taught an undergraduate course at Penn in fall 2023 called The Future of Conservatism and the GOP, according to The Daily Pennsylvanian, and it’s this tie that has put Penn in the crosshairs.

Trump’s memo asks the attorney general, the director of national intelligence and other relevant department and agency heads to suspend the security clearances held by Taylor “and any individuals at entities associated with Taylor, including the University of Pennsylvania.”

According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, Penn does not conduct classified research and has no security clearance.

“The University does not possess a government security clearance and cannot as a corporate entity possess classified material,” the website states. “It is the policy of the university not to accept agreements which require access to classified data, require university employees to obtain security clearances, or restrict the dissemination of the results.”

Penn is also currently facing a $175 million funding freeze from the federal government, announced in March, related to participation of a transgender athlete on the women’s swimming team in 2022. The university was further affected by visa revocations of international students and scholars earlier this week.

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April 11, 2025
Committee Withdraws Request for Northwestern Docs

The House Education and the Workforce Committee is no longer seeking records related to legal clinics at Northwestern University after a group of law professors sued over the request.

The committee took issue with the university’s Community Justice and Civil Rights Clinic representing pro-Palestinian activists and sought information about the budget and funding sources for the Bluhm Legal Clinic and its more than 20 clinics and 12 centers. Two professors—one of them is Sheila Bedi, the director of the offending clinic—argued that the congressional probe violated their rights and the rights of their clients.

“The Committee’s demands exceed its authority and have no valid legislative purpose; they are an attempt to investigate, intimidate, and punish institutions and individuals that the Committee has deemed ‘left-wing;’ and they violate the federal Constitution,” the complaint reads. “Immediate relief is necessary to prevent irreparable harm.”

The committee withdrew the request during an emergency hearing in federal court in Chicago in response to the lawsuit, according to a news release Thursday from the plaintiffs.

“I filed this suit to defend my clients’ rights to representation, my students’ rights to learn, and my right to teach,” Bedi said in the release. “But today’s decision won’t stop the federal government’s attacks on universities and the legal profession. Educators and institutions must stand united to protect our students, our communities, and each other.”

Rep. Tim Walberg, a Michigan Republican and chair of the committee, said in a statement that the decision to withdraw the request doesn’t mean “our foot [is] off the gas.”

“The failures of schools across the country to follow their own rules and federal law to ensure a safe environment for Jewish students and faculty is unacceptable,” Walberg said. “Discussions with Northwestern about our concerns will continue. We seek answers that are critical to informing legislation that will address this national problem, and all tools are on the table, including compulsory measures.”

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April 11, 2025
ED and USDA Should Do More to Close the SNAP Gap

The Government Accountability Office is urging the Education and Agriculture Departments to better coordinate their efforts to connect students with SNAP benefits.

Alex Potemkin/E+/Getty Images

A new Government Accountability Office report concludes that the Education and Agriculture Departments should be doing more to ensure college students receive federal food assistance. Despite reforms, too few students are notified they could be eligible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

For instance, the GAO found that the Education Department’s plan to notify students about food assistance programs misses about 40 percent of those eligible for the aid.

The report, released Thursday, partly blames faulty communication and data sharing between the Education Department, the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service, colleges, and state agencies.

“It’s crucial that ED and USDA collaborate effectively, so that all eligible students can access the resources they need to thrive,” Rep. Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat and ranking member of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, said in a statement. (He also emphasized that for the Education Department to help students, it has to remain intact.)

To reach its conclusions, the GAO interviewed officials at both federal agencies and at colleges and SNAP offices in California, Massachusetts and Washington, states actively working on student outreach, to learn more about students’ access to SNAP benefits. The report also based its findings on interviews with members of multiple higher education associations and an analysis of data from the Education Department’s 2020 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study. The audit took place between May 2023 and February 2025.

‘Gaps in Planning and Execution’

The report pointed out that the Education Department and USDA have new legal avenues to help students obtain SNAP benefits.

The FAFSA Simplification Act, which passed in 2020 and included provisions related to student outreach that took effect last summer, requires the Education Department to notify low-income students of federal benefits, like SNAP, based on their Free Application for Federal Student Aid. The law also allows the Education Department to share FAFSA data with the USDA and state SNAP agencies to reach out to potentially eligible students and streamline their enrollment in the program.

The report commended the two federal agencies for taking steps to connect students with SNAP benefits, including a memorandum of understanding in September 2024 with commitments from both agencies to take action on student access to SNAP. Notably, the Department of Education agreed to send out annual emails with information about SNAP to colleges and potentially eligible low-income students, sending emails to approximately eight million students in November 2024.

“But gaps in planning and execution remain,” according to the report.

The GAO accused the Education Department of initially offering insufficient guidance as to how data sharing would work, leaving colleges and state higher ed agencies in the dark.

In a December 2023 survey, 11 out of 19 state higher ed agency officials said it was unclear to them whether organizations could use student data for SNAP outreach, 15 out of 19 weren’t sure if they needed students’ consent to use certain data, and 12 out of 19 didn’t know which rules applied to which data sources. A 2023 survey of colleges by the Higher Learning Advocates and the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators similarly found that fewer than a quarter of 182 colleges did outreach to students about federal benefits because of worries they’d incorrectly use FAFSA data. The department later provided more clear guidance.

The GAO also found that there still isn’t a clear, written process in place for data sharing between the Education Department and other federal and state SNAP agencies. The process involves obtaining student consent and establishing individual data-sharing agreements with each agency that administers benefits, according to department officials, but the details remain hazy.

“While officials told us they intend to move forward with sharing FAFSA data with other agencies, Education does not have a formal plan in place for how it would implement this effort, nor has the agency estimated a timeframe for when it would begin sharing data,” the report noted. “This could lead to delays in vulnerable college students getting information that could help them access food and benefits they are eligible for.”

The GAO also identified flaws in the Education Department’s system for notifying students about SNAP benefits.

As of November 2024, students eligible for Pell Grants who report their households receive at least one federal benefit automatically get a notification on their FAFSA submission page about other federal benefit programs with a link to more information. But the GAO’s analysis of Education Department data found that an estimated 40 percent of students who could be eligible for SNAP don’t meet both criteria. For example, some Pell-eligible students don’t apply for federal benefits, and graduate students may be eligible for SNAP but can’t receive Pell Grants. The GAO critiqued the department for not consulting with the USDA or other agencies on its approach.

The report also doesn’t let the USDA off the hook. The GAO argued that the USDA urged state SNAP agencies to target outreach to students but, like the Education Department, left out key details in its guidance, creating “areas of ambiguity.” College and state SNAP agency officials reported to the GAO that they weren’t sure if or when they could access or use students’ SNAP data and had trouble getting their questions answered at the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service regional offices.

“Without clear guidance on using and sharing SNAP data for student outreach and application assistance, states and colleges could inconsistently and inaccurately interpret what is allowable,” the report stated. “This could lead to missed opportunities for informing outreach and application efforts or some unintentionally engaging in noncompliance.”

What’s Next

The report offered a series of recommendations to the Education Department and the USDA to improve their work on behalf of students.

Notably, the GAO urged the education secretary to write up a formal plan for sharing FAFSA data with SNAP administrators, consult with the USDA to evaluate its system for notifying potentially SNAP-eligible students and better inform colleges and state SNAP agencies about the notification system. The USDA was also tasked with issuing better, more updated guidance to state SNAP agencies, in partnership with the Education Department, to clarify how student data can be used in outreach.

The GAO asserted that the stakes are high if these processes don’t improve.

“In fiscal year 2023, the U.S. Department of Education spent approximately $31.4 billion dollars [sic] on Pell Grants to help over 6 million students with financial need attend college,” the report read. “This substantial federal investment in higher education is at risk of not serving its intended purpose if college students drop out because of limited or uncertain access to food.”

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April 11, 2025
Education Dept. Agrees to Push DEI Compliance Deadline

State education agencies are no longer bound to certify their compliance with President Donald Trump’s executive orders and guidance memos banning diversity, equity and inclusion programs in order to continue receiving federal funds—at least for now.

K-12 school districts were originally required to prove they had met the president’s standard by April 14. But now, as the result of an agreement reached Thursday in a lawsuit, the Department of Education cannot enforce that requirement or enact any penalties until April 24. The move to require school systems to certify their compliance was one of the department’s first actions since releasing the Feb. 14 Dear Colleague letter that declared all race-conscious student programming, resources and financial aid illegal.

The National Education Association challenged that letter in a lawsuit and then moved for a temporary restraining order to block the certification requirement. (The department notified state educational agencies of the deadline April 3.)

In addition to not enforcing the certification requirement, the Education Department also agreed not to take any enforcement action related to the Feb. 14 guidance until April 24, though that doesn’t cover any other investigations based on race discrimination.

The plaintiffs, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, still want to block the Dear Colleague letter entirely. But they see the agreement as a positive step.

“This pause in enforcement provides immediate relief to schools across the country while the broader legal challenge continues,” the plaintiffs said in a news release.

A judge will hold a hearing April 17 to consider the NEA’s motion for a preliminary injunction, which could block the guidance entirely.

For more information on this case and others, check out Inside Higher Ed’s lawsuit tracker here.

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April 11, 2025
How a Drop in Ph.D. Students Could Affect Colleges

Under mounting financial and political pressures, universities have paused or rescinded graduate student admissions on an unprecedented scale, which could create cross-campus ripple effects next fall and beyond.

The extent of the cuts to the graduate student workforce remains unclear and will vary from institution to institution. But if and when those losses come to pass, experts say that employing fewer graduate students—particularly Ph.D. students, who typically hold years-long research and teaching assistantships—will undermine universities’ broader operations, including undergraduate education, faculty support and the future of academic research, which is reliant on training the next generation of scholars.

“First and foremost, a reduction in the number of graduate students may threaten that individualized, close attention for undergraduates,” said Julia Kent, vice president of best practices and strategic initiatives at the Council of Graduate Schools.

That’s because many doctoral students work as teaching assistants, particularly for large introductory undergraduate courses, where they assist with grading, lead discussion sections, help students with assignments and supervise labs.

“While a professor may be doing the lectures for those courses, they may not seem as approachable or accessible to undergraduates. In those cases, the graduate teaching assistant is the first point of contact for that student. They may go to them for questions or feel more comfortable asking for help with assignment,” said Kent, who added that graduate students also support universities’ learning missions in other ways, too. “They may also help staff in the writing center and support undergraduates writing essays for their classes and provide informal mentoring.”

‘Not Sustainable’

Although colleges and universities haven’t felt the effects of losing a number of those roles yet, Kent said the uncertainty surrounding graduate admissions poses a “real risk” to undergraduate learning.

If universities do want to maintain smaller class sizes with fewer graduate students, they may rely even more heavily on low-paid contingent faculty, said Rosemary Perez, an associate professor at the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan.

“That’s not sustainable for those instructors, who may be teaching five or six classes at multiple campuses and still not making enough to live,” she said. And with fewer graduate students in the pipeline, “we’ll also have fewer people who are trained to be faculty. People are going to retire. Who’s going to teach these college classes that have experience working with college students?”

Nothing concrete has to happen for people weighing their futures to decide to take a different path where it seems like there may be more stability. Rational humans may decide that’s not the direction they want to go in anymore, and that’s going to be an immediate loss to the field.”

—Marcel Agüeros, astronomy professor at Columbia University

And with fewer spots available to prospective graduate students, Perez fears students who don’t attend top-ranked institutions will be the first to disappear from the academic pipeline. That’s because when resources are scarce, “the tendency is to rely on markers of prestige or GRE scores as predictors of success,” she said. “But those aren’t great predictors of what people are capable of doing in their careers.”

Fewer graduate students will also likely mean a heavier workload for faculty, who in addition to teaching, also rely on them to help with research by assisting in running labs and research groups and co-authoring papers.

“They help universities’ reputation, but they also help faculty funding prospects by making the faculty more productive, because funding agencies like to see productive faculty. A lot of that labor is happening through graduate students,” said Julie Posselt, a higher education professor at the University of Southern California, which last month revoked outstanding offers for numerous Ph.D. programs, including sociology, chemistry, sociology, molecular biology and religion. “Meanwhile, there’s also plenty of evidence that Ph.D. students are contributing to universities’ research output and are independently advancing knowledge in their respective fields.”

Impact Will Reach All Fields

Already, numerous universities across the country have said they’re reducing the number of Ph.D. students in the biomedical sciences as a result of drastic cuts to the National Institutes of Health, which each year sends universities billions of dollars in grants that indirectly and directly support graduate education.

But it won’t just be those in the biomedical sciences that feel those cuts, especially as colleges downsize their budgets in light of the NIH’s plan to cap the amount of money it gives institutions for indirect research costs, which covers facilities maintenance, compliance with patient safety protocols and hazardous biowaste removal. Although a federal judge has blocked those cuts for now, the Department of Health and Human Services filed an appeal Monday; if the plan takes effect, it will force universities to find other areas they can cut from their budgets to make up the difference.

“Even if you’re in the humanities, what’s happening right now in federal granting agencies that are far from the humanities has an impact on the humanities, because the overall budget for a university to do things like keep up their infrastructure and keep the lights on will go down,” said Jody Greene, associate campus provost and literature professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “And if we also don’t have international students, that’s also going to be a significant budget hit at institutions like ours.”

International Students at Play

In addition to drastic cuts in grant funding from the NIH, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Department of Education, the government has also revoked scores of international graduate students’ visas and detained several others.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has characterized, with little concrete evidence, those students as “lunatics” who came to the United States “not just to study but to participate in movements that vandalize universities, harass students, take over buildings and cause chaos.” The administration is also considering a travel ban affecting 43 countries. (After Trump issued a travel ban for seven countries during his first term, the number of international applicants to U.S. colleges fell 5.5 percent for graduate students, though applications have been on the rebound post-pandemic.)

But universities worry that targeting international students—who made up nearly one in four incoming graduate students in 2022—will create a chilling effect, cause international student enrollment to plunge and strip institutions of yet another vital revenue source. According to data from the Institute of International Education, 81 percent of international undergraduate students and 61 percent of graduate students completely fund their own tuition.

Would-Be Ph.D.s Wary

All this politically driven chaos and financial uncertainty is making graduate school—and a career as a faculty member—a harder sell for students interested in research careers.

“Up until this year, we’ve been able to tell prospective graduate students that the university will cover the costs of their Ph.D.,” said Marcel Agüeros, an astronomy professor at Columbia University, where the Trump administration has frozen some $650 million in NIH funding. “We want to stay true to that commitment, but we’d be lying if we said that’s going to be 100 percent possible.”

And even though his department is currently only expecting to offer one fewer Ph.D. slot, Agüeros said the uncertainty over the future of federal funding—and even what areas of research academics are allowed to pursue—is enough to push people out of academia.

“Nothing concrete has to happen for people weighing their futures to decide to take a different path where it seems like there may be more stability,” he said. “Rational humans may decide that’s not the direction they want to go in anymore, and that’s going to be an immediate loss to the field.”

And those are the questions would-be graduate students all over the country are asking themselves right now.

“We don’t have any data yet, but anecdotally, I’m hearing that there are a ton of students who are choosing not to even try to go to graduate school this year and next year because they’re perceiving less funding and support,” said Bethany Usher, immediate past president of the Council on Undergraduate Research and provost at Radford University in Virginia.

“Those Ph.D. students are the ones who push the boundaries of research,” she added. “They have the newest ideas, and if we reduce those, it will have a generational impact on higher education, industries and communities.”

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April 11, 2025
Key Takeaways From Higher Ed Free Speech Conference
The University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement held its annual virtual #SpeechMatters conference Thursday amid a speech environment that is vastly different and far more fraught than anyone could have imagined even a few months ago. The Trump administration is simultaneously punishing colleges for their failure to clamp down on pro-Palestinian protesters and detaining international students, in some cases for participating in those same protests.

In her opening remarks, Michelle Deutchman, the center’s executive director, acknowledged as much: “Today we gather at a critical moment for higher education across the nation,” she said. “The role of colleges and universities in our democracy is being questioned. Trust in institutions is shifting. The impact of a historic national election and a year of campus protests continues to unfold.”

The conference, which featured four panels and 15 speakers with expertise in free speech and higher education, covered not only campus speech but also the broader questions of trust in universities and the knowledge they produce. Here are five key takeaways from the event.
1. College administrators can’t prevent the chilling effect President Trump’s actions are having on campuses.
In one session, Deutchman asked Howard Gillman, chancellor at the University of California, Irvine, for 12 years, and Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, how students can exercise their right to free speech despite the Trump administration’s crackdown on institutions and students alike for purported antisemitic speech.

Gillman and Chemerinsky found a consensus—one that contradicts the widely held belief that universities should always be forums for political discussion: As long as Trump appears to be punishing individuals for constitutionally protected speech, now may not be the time to encourage students to speak out.

“When you have an administration that has not yet been constrained by the courts sufficiently, it does create an environment where people might know they have, in theory, legal protections for the activities they engage in, but just because your activity may be protected doesn’t meant that you are not going to be put in a very complicated situation if the government does move forward,” Gillman said. “I don’t want to overstate the amount of reassurance that you can give. A chilling environment is a chilling environment.”

Chemerinsky said it wasn’t tenable to assure students that he could protect them from the federal government. One student had asked him if the law school could prevent Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers from coming onto campus and detaining students, and Chemerinsky said he had to tell the student that wouldn’t be possible. (In February, Trump rolled back protections that stopped immigration enforcement actions from taking place in certain locations, including on college campuses.)

“There’s a limit to what we can do to protect students. I don’t want to ever have students have the illusion that we can do more than we can,” he said.
1. Rebuilding trust in higher ed requires a fundamental shift in culture.
When discussing the lack of trust in higher education, Steven Mintz, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a columnist for Inside Higher Ed, said the distrust exists not just between the government and colleges, or administrators and faculty, but at all levels of higher education. Students erode trust with faculty when they don’t put effort into their courses, he said. Faculty who care more about their own research and success than their students and institutions likewise fail to build trust with their students and peers. And administrators earn the faculty’s distrust by leaving them out of key decision-making processes.

It’s all a result of Americans’ shifting view of higher education from a public good to a private one, he argued, with students as the consumers and administrators as the CEOs.

“It is absolutely imperative that we rebuild trust within our campuses,” he said. “It’s not a matter of policy tweaks; it’s a matter of a fundamental cultural shift.”

He noted that in his own classes at UT Austin, he has made an effort to help students undertake real-world projects, like building an educational webpage for a local museum. Such efforts position the student not as a consumer, but as a “partner and collaborator and creator of knowledge,” he said. And it shows communities that college instills in its students important skills—and isn’t always just an amorphous ivory tower.
1. Fast turnover of college leaders is contributing to the lack of public trust.
In the same panel about trust, multiple speakers touched on the fact that administrative turnover can be a major impediment to trust-building on campus.

University presidents last, on average, just over five years on the job, which means that most students see at least one presidential turnover in their college career. Each new president must rebuild trust not only with the constituents on their own campus, but also with alumni, government officials, the local community and beyond.

Short tenures also make it difficult for students and employees to buy in to key university initiatives, considering it’s not uncommon for a new president to scrap the previous administration’s projects in favor of new priorities.

“Trust is about relationships … and you don’t build trust overnight. You build trust through listening. You build trust through showing up. You build trust through showing proof points. That’s how it happens. So, you can’t build trust when you’re a president that’s been there three months,” said Bobbie Laur, president of Campus Compact, a nonprofit focused on civic and community engagement in higher education. “Some of what we’re facing is the reality of the short tenure of leaders without the necessary support structures to support leaders right now.”

Saanvi Arora, a UC Berkeley student and the executive director of the Youth Power Project, a nonprofit that encourages young people to participate in public policy, agreed, noting that she has met numerous college students who have no idea what their institution’s president looks like.

“That’s a huge problem, if you’re not meeting with students directly, showing up to spaces where it really matters for students to see you there,” she said. “It really makes a difference and moves the needle.”
1. Universities need to do more to stanch the spread of misinformation.
Misinformation is pervasive in the current vitriolic political environment, according to a panel of experts, but so is anger and skepticism toward the very researchers who aim to better understand the phenomenon.

Simone Chambers, chair of political science at UC Irvine, pointed out that research shows misinformation is more likely to circulate in right-wing communities. But that research is then called partisan, sometimes even by politicians themselves; mis- and disinformation experts who studied incorrect information ahead of the 2020 election earned intense ire from congressional Republicans, who accused them of censoring free speech and subpoenaed data about what was being marked as inaccurate information.

That’s compounded by the perennial problem of most, if not all, academic research: Few people see it. Michael Wagner, who leads the Center for Communication and Civic Renewal at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said that universities could make a greater effort to get the work of misinformation researchers into the public’s hands.

Universities must do “a more aggressive job of promoting the work, even when it highlights partisan asymmetries, even when it highlights other kinds of things that might leave universities open to attack from those who don’t like the fact that universities exist,” said Wagner, who noted that his center has been subpoenaed by Congress. “[That] is something they need to do a better job of, to help the researchers who are trying to do this stuff get their work out there to folks so that they can engage with it and decide how they want to incorporate that information into how they live their lives.”
1. More college leaders should stand up for higher education.
Colleges have been capitulating to the Trump administration in everything from rolling back diversity, equity and inclusion programs to, in Columbia’s case, at least, agreeing to a list of the administration’s demands in the hopes of having its federal funding unfrozen.

But a small number of college presidents—including Wesleyan University’s Michael Roth and Princeton University’s Christopher Eisgruber, who were both cited by panelists at the conference—have spoken forcefully against the Trump administration’s attacks on political speech, DEI and free scientific inquiry. In an op-ed in Slate about the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University alumnus and pro-Palestinian activist who was detained a month ago by immigration officials, Roth wrote, “University presidents must speak out against this attempt to control the political culture of our campuses from the White House. Just as we should decry antisemitism and other forms of discrimination, we should insist that students and faculty have the right to make their voices heard about the issues of the day. Neutrality here is a betrayal of our academic mission.”

Kristen Shahverdian, program director of campus free speech at PEN America, a free expression nonprofit, said she is glad she doesn’t have to be a part of any internal conversations about how a university under fire by the Trump administration will react. Still, she said, she wishes more higher education leaders would emulate Roth and Eisgruber and that the higher education sector as a whole could come together as a united front.

“There’s probably multiple reasons why they’re able to speak out and others maybe can’t,” she said. “[But] we really need to push back, to hold on to the values of higher education, which include freedom of expression and academic freedom.”
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April 11, 2025