I am curious about your take on the amount of money that institutions are spending on marketing …
According to this story, those four schools spent $676 million on marketing in one fiscal year.
If private companies like Coke and Pepsi want to engage in an advertising arms race (a.k.a. the Cola Wars), that is fine because it is private money. If the shareholders don’t like it, they can vote out the board. However, a lot of this marketing money is from public dollars like Pell Grants, federal loans, GI Bill, etc. Public dollars should not be spent on an advertising arms race. Elizabeth Warren was looking into this in the context of OPMs.
It seems like a huge transfer of wealth from taxpayers to Big Tech. The fact that adjuncts who teach online get paid so little is what really gets me upset about this.
No one can unilaterally disarm in an arms race, but it seems like a condition of receiving federal aid could be that no more than X percent of your budget is marketing. This would mean some type of audits by government agencies, which are never fun, and the definition of “marketing” could be disputed. Schools might try to get around it with “content marketing” and other shenanigans, but it still seems like it’s worth a shot.
So many thoughts …
For obvious reasons, I’ve been reflecting a lot lately on my old constitutional law coursework. As long as the Supreme Court holds that money is speech—and the Supreme Court retains enough legitimacy to be taken seriously—I foresee major free speech issues around restricting advertising. If I were a betting man, I’d bet that the court’s legitimacy will have a shorter shelf life than its view on the “marketplace of ideas,” given how aggressively it’s shedding any pretense of respect for precedent.
In the ’90s, a book called The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model (affectionately nicknamed SCAM) by Jeffrey Siegel and Harold Spaeth made some waves in political science circles for its claim that justices reasoned backward from the outcome they wanted. At the time, that was considered a shocking claim to make. Now it’s almost banal.
And advertising generally isn’t what it used to be. Growing up, in the age of the media monoculture, ads tended to be corny. The best ones were either disarmingly sweet (Mean Joe Greene’s Coke ad, for example) or funny. They had to be, because they were expensive to air and the three networks had broad audiences. That led to inanity—anyone else remember the talking loaves of bread?—but the range of things that got advertised was relatively narrow and mostly inoffensive.
Now it’s normal to see medicines advertised with machine-gun fire recitations of alarming side effects (“may cause fatal events”) and legal or legal-ish sports betting apps during games. In that context, ads for colleges are almost a relief, even if they sometimes seem excessive. At the last minor league baseball game I attended, three of the outfield billboards were for local colleges. I don’t remember that from earlier years.
While we’re at it, separating institutional marketing from sports budgets at the Division I level would be a real challenge. How many students learn about universities from football? I’m guessing more than most of us would like to admit.
That said, marketing isn’t cheap, and the money comes from somewhere.
In the context of higher ed, separating public money from private money isn’t always clean. When I was at DeVry, the leadership there used to distinguish the taxpaying sector (meaning themselves) from the tax-consuming sector, which included private institutions. That was a bit convenient, as it left out the enormous reliance of most for-profits on federal and state financial aid, but there was a grain of truth to it. Nonprofit private colleges and universities benefit from tax exemptions and student financial aid, as well as (sometimes) research funding. In some states, they even receive direct operating aid. Higher ed is an ecosystem, rather than a system, but the entire ecosystem relies on public money in one form or another. In other words, assuming any actual respect for the law, it’s conceptually possible to attach limits on marketing expenses to the receipt of federal dollars.
The underlying issue the correspondent raises is a serious one. Why do we force public or publicly funded institutions to compete with each other? Why do we underfund them to the point that they have to treat students as means rather than ends? The need for tuition dollars is behind the marketing; what if tuition were less relevant?
Colleges have relatively fixed costs and relatively variable ones. In my more perfect world, public funding would cover the fixed costs and tuition could cover the variable ones. Instead, public funding falls well short of fixed costs, so they have to use variable revenues to cover fixed costs. That means scrambling to appease both prospective students and prospective funders, whether philanthropic or public. Advertising is part of that scrambling. When it works, it benefits the individual institution, but it’s likely negative for the ecosystem as a whole.
Unfortunately, the ideology that assumes the market is always right has become common sense among one and a half of our two political parties. Markets are tools, not gods; regulating them is not heresy. But at this point in our political culture, anything that displeases markets is punished, often with an unnerving sense of righteousness among the punishers. We’ve even developed a new twist on Calvinism—the “prosperity gospel”—to sanctify wealth and to cast the nonwealthy as undeserving. I almost expect the mascot of the next for-profit educational behemoth to be the golden calf.
Yes, I’d very much prefer to spend educational dollars on education, just as I’d rather spend medical dollars on medical care. Under the system we have, though, institutions can either compete or die. Changing that would require a political sea change.
It’s almost enough to make me miss the talking loaves of bread.
The University of Virginia and Dartmouth College have become the latest higher ed institutions to publicly reject the Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” Now just three of the nine institutions that the federal government originally presented with the document have yet to announce whether they will sign.
UVA announced Friday that it opposes the offer of yet-unrevealed special funding benefits in exchange for signing the compact. The statement came the day of an on-campus demonstration urging university leaders not to sign. Dartmouth unveiled its response Saturday morning. Both rejections came despite the universities attending a meeting Friday with White House officials about the deal.
“As I shared on the call, I do not believe that the involvement of the government through a compact—whether it is a Republican- or Democratic-led White House—is the right way to focus America’s leading colleges and universities on their teaching and research mission,” Dartmouth president Sian Leah Beilock wrote in a message to Education Secretary Linda McMahon, which the president also shared with her community.
“Our universities have a responsibility to set our own academic and institutional policies, guided by our mission and values, our commitment to free expression, and our obligations under the law,” Beilock wrote. “Staying true to this responsibility is what will help American higher education build bipartisan public trust and continue to uphold its place as the envy of the world.”
Beilock hasn’t been a publicly outspoken opponent of Trump; at a Heterodox Academy conference in June, she said, “It’s really a problem to say just because the administration, with many things that we all object to, is suggesting something inherently means it’s wrong.” But she also said back then that “we shouldn’t have the government telling us what to do.”
In a message Friday to McMahon, also shared with the community, UVA interim president Paul Mahoney wrote that “the integrity of science and other academic work requires merit-based assessment of research and scholarship. A contractual arrangement predicating assessment on anything other than merit will undermine the integrity of vital, sometimes lifesaving, research and further erode confidence in American higher education.”
The compact asks colleges to agree to overhaul or abolish departments “that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas,” without further defining what those terms mean. It also asks universities, among other things, to commit to not considering transgender women to be women; reject foreign applicants “who demonstrate hostility to the United States, its allies, or its values”; and freeze “effective tuition rates charged to American students for the next five years.”
In exchange for these agreements, the White House has said signatories would “be given [funding] priority when possible as well as invitations to collaborate with the White House.” But the administration hasn’t revealed how much extra funding universities would be eligible for, and the nine-page compact doesn’t detail the potential benefits. The compact, as well as a Thursday statement from the White House, can also be read as threatening colleges’ current federal funding if they don’t sign.
Mahoney told McMahon that his university agrees “with many of the principles outlined in the Compact, including a fair and unbiased admissions process, an affordable and academically rigorous education, a thriving marketplace of ideas, institutional neutrality, and equal treatment of students, faculty, and staff in all aspects of university operations.”
“Indeed,” Mahoney wrote, “the University of Virginia leads in several of these areas and is committed to continuous improvement in all of them. We seek no special treatment in exchange for our pursuit of those foundational goals.”
The decisions make UVA the fifth and Dartmouth the sixth of the nine initial institutions presented with the deal to publicly turn it down. UVA is also the first public university and first Southern institution to reject it. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was the first of the nine to turn it down, on Oct. 10, followed by Brown University and the Universities of Pennsylvania and Southern California.
UVA’s rejection of the compact comes after the Trump administration successfully pressured then–UVA president James Ryan to step down in June. The Justice Department had demanded he step down. The UVA Board of Visitors voted to dissolve the university’s diversity, equity and inclusion office in March, but multiple conservative alumni groups and legal entities complained that Ryan failed to eliminate DEI from all corners of campus.
A coalition of groups opposed to the compact, including the UVA chapter of the American Association of University Professors, praised the rejection in a Friday news release.
“Today’s events demonstrate the power of collective organizing and action to defeat tyranny,” the statement said. “We hope that we serve as an example to the other public universities that received the ‘Compact’—the University of Texas, Austin, and the University of Arizona—giving them the courage and clarity not to buckle.”
UVA faculty groups had overwhelmingly urged university leaders to reject the compact. And hundreds of demonstrators showed up to the anticompact rally Friday on the UVA campus in Charlottesville, Cville Right Now reported.
Alongside Arizona and UT Austin, Vanderbilt University also hasn’t revealed its decision. But after MIT announced its refusal of the compact, Trump offered it to all U.S. colleges and universities to sign.
White House officials met Friday with some universities about the proposal. The Wall Street Journal reported that UVA, Dartmouth, Arizona, UT Austin and Vanderbilt were invited, along with universities that weren’t part of the original nine: Arizona State University, the University of Kansas and Washington University in St. Louis.
White House spokesperson Liz Huston compared the compact in a statement to efforts from former presidents George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, who she said “called on our universities to be of greater service to the nation.”
“President Trump has called on universities to do their part in returning America to its economic and diplomatic successes of the past: a nation of full employment, pioneering innovations that change the world, and committed to merit and hard work as the ingredients to success,” she said, adding the administration hosted “a productive call” with several universities.
A White House official said UVA and the other seven invited universities participated in the call.
“They now have the baton to consider, discuss, and propose meaningful reforms, including their form and implementation, to ensure college campuses serve as laboratories of American greatness,” Huston said.
UVA officials told the Trump administration that they seek no special treatment.
Daxia Rojas/AFP via Getty Images
On a day of campus demonstrations urging officials to reject the Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” the University of Virginia announced Friday that it opposes the president’s offer of yet-unrevealed special funding benefits in exchange for signing.
“The integrity of science and other academic work requires merit-based assessment of research and scholarship,” interim president Paul Mahoney wrote in a message Friday to Education Secretary Linda McMahon, which he shared with the university community. “A contractual arrangement predicating assessment on anything other than merit will undermine the integrity of vital, sometimes lifesaving, research and further erode confidence in American higher education.”
The compact asks colleges to agree to overhaul or abolish departments “that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas,” without further defining what those terms mean. It also asks universities, among other things, to commit to not considering transgender women to be women; reject foreign applicants “who demonstrate hostility to the United States, its allies, or its values”; and freeze “effective tuition rates charged to American students for the next five years.”
In exchange for these agreements, the White House has said signatories would “be given [funding] priority when possible as well as invitations to collaborate with the White House.” But the administration hasn’t revealed how much extra funding universities would be eligible for, and the nine-page compact doesn’t detail the potential benefits. The compact, as well as a Thursday statement from the White House, can also be read as threatening colleges’ current federal funding if they don’t sign.
Mahoney told McMahon that his university agrees “with many of the principles outlined in the Compact, including a fair and unbiased admissions process, an affordable and academically rigorous education, a thriving marketplace of ideas, institutional neutrality, and equal treatment of students, faculty, and staff in all aspects of university operations.”
“Indeed,” Mahoney wrote, “the University of Virginia leads in several of these areas and is committed to continuous improvement in all of them. We seek no special treatment in exchange for our pursuit of those foundational goals.”
The decision makes UVA the fifth of the nine initial institutions presented with the deal to publicly turn it down. It’s also the first public university and first Southern institution to reject it. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was the first of the nine to turn it down, on Oct. 10, followed by Brown University and the Universities of Pennsylvania and Southern California.
UVA’s rejection of the compact comes after the Trump administration successfully pressured then–UVA president James Ryan to step down in June. The Justice Department had demanded he step down. The UVA Board of Visitors voted to dissolve the university’s diversity, equity and inclusion office in March, but multiple conservative alumni groups and legal entities complained that Ryan failed to eliminate DEI from all corners of campus.
A coalition of groups opposed to the compact, including the UVA chapter of the American Association of University Professors, praised the rejection in a Friday news release.
“Today’s events demonstrate the power of collective organizing and action to defeat tyranny,” the statement said. “We hope that we serve as an example to the other public universities that received the ‘Compact’—the University of Texas, Austin, and the University of Arizona—giving them the courage and clarity not to buckle.”
UVA faculty groups had overwhelmingly urged university leaders to reject the compact. And hundreds of demonstrators showed up to the anti-compact rally Friday on the UVA campus in Charlottesville, Cville Right Nowreported.
Dartmouth College and Vanderbilt University also haven’t revealed their decisions. But after MIT announced its refusal of the compact, Trump offered it to all U.S. colleges and universities to sign.
White House officials met Friday with some universities about the proposal. The Wall Street Journal reported that UVA, Arizona, Dartmouth, UT Austin and Vanderbilt were invited, along with universities that weren’t part of the original nine: Arizona State University, the University of Kansas and Washington University in St. Louis.
White House spokesperson Liz Huston compared the compact in a statement to calls from former Presidents George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, who she said “called on our universities to be of greater service to the nation.”
“President Trump has called on universities to do their part in returning America to its economic and diplomatic successes of the past: a nation of full employment, pioneering innovations that change the world, and committed to merit and hard work as the ingredients to success,” she said, adding the administration hosted “a productive call” with several universities.
A White House official said UVA and the other seven invited universities participated in the call.
“They now have the baton to consider, discuss, and propose meaningful reforms, including their form and implementation, to ensure college campuses serve as laboratories of American greatness,” Huston said.
The Trump administration wants colleges to make a number of changes to their policies in order to get an edge in grant funding.
Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
After four universities rejected the Trump administration’s compact for higher education, the White House is planning to meet Friday afternoon with the remaining five that have yet to respond.
A White House official confirmed plans of the meeting to Inside Higher Ed but didn’t say what the purpose of the gathering was or which universities would attend. Nine universities were asked to give feedback on the wide-ranging proposal by Oct. 20.
The virtual meeting will likely include May Mailman, a White House adviser, and Vincent Haley, director of the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, according to a source with knowledge of the White House’s plans. Mailman, Haley and Education Secretary Linda McMahon signed the letter sent to the initial nine about the compact.
So far, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California have publicly rejected the deal. Dartmouth College, the University of Arizona, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University haven’t said whether they’ll agree to the compact. Trump officials have said that the signatories could get access to more grant funding and threatened the funding of those that don’t agree.
After USC released its letter rejecting the proposal, Liz Huston, a White House spokesperson, told the Los Angeles Times that “as long as they are not begging for federal funding, universities are free to implement any lawful policies they would like.”
Following the first rejection from MIT last Friday, President Trump posted on Truth Social that all colleges could now sign on. The White House has said that some institutions have already reached out to do so.
The source with knowledge of the White House’s plans said that the meeting “appears to be an effort to regain momentum by threatening institutions to sign even though it’s obviously not in the schools’ interest to do so.”
The Wall Street Journal reported that Arizona State University, the University of Kansas and Washington University in St. Louis were also invited. According to the Journal, the goal of the meeting was to answer questions about the proposal and to find common ground with the institutions.
Former senator Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican and trustee at Vanderbilt, wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that the compact was an example of federal overreach akin to previous efforts to impose uniform national standards on K–12 schools.
“Mr. Trump’s proposed higher education compact may provoke some useful dialogue around reform,” he wrote. “But the federal government shouldn’t try to manage the nation’s 6,000 colleges and universities.”
Inside Higher Ed reached out to the remaining five institutions as well as the new invitees, but they haven’t responded to a request for comment or to confirm whether they’ll attend the meeting.
After four universities rejected the Trump administration’s compact for higher education, the White House met Friday with some universities about the proposal.
A White House official confirmed plans of the meeting to Inside Higher Ed but didn’t say what the purpose of the gathering was or which universities would attend. Nine universities were asked to give feedback on the wide-ranging proposal by Oct. 20.
The virtual meeting planned to include May Mailman, a White House adviser, and Vincent Haley, director of the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, according to a source with knowledge of the White House’s plans. Mailman, Haley and Education Secretary Linda McMahon signed the letter sent to the initial nine about the compact.
So far, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California have publicly rejected the deal. Dartmouth College, the University of Arizona, the University of Texas at Austin, and Vanderbilt University haven’t said whether they’ll agree to the compact. UVA said late Friday afternoon that it wouldn’t agree to the proposal.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Arizona State University, the University of Kansas and Washington University in St. Louis were also invited. According to the Journal, the goal of the meeting was to answer questions about the proposal and to find common ground with the institutions.
Inside Higher Ed reached out to the universities, but none confirmed whether they attended the meeting.
The nine-page document would require universities to make a number of far-reaching changes from abolishing academic departments or programs that “purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas” to capping international undergraduate enrollment at 15 percent. Institutions also would have to agree to freeze their tuition and require standardized tests for admissions, among other provisions.
Trump officials have said that the signatories could get access to more grant funding and threatened the funding of those that don’t agree. The Justice Department would enforce the terms of the agreement, which are vague and not all defined.
After USC released its letter rejecting the proposal, Liz Huston, a White House spokesperson, told the Los Angeles Times that “as long as they are not begging for federal funding, universities are free to implement any lawful policies they would like.”
Following the first rejection from MIT last Friday, President Trump posted on Truth Social that all colleges could now sign on. The White House has said that some institutions have already reached out to do so.
The source with knowledge of the White House’s plans said that the meeting “appears to be an effort to regain momentum by threatening institutions to sign even though it’s obviously not in the schools’ interest to do so.”
Former senator Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican and trustee at Vanderbilt, wrote in aJournal op-ed that the compact was an example of federal overreach akin to previous efforts to impose uniform national standards on K–12 schools.
“Mr. Trump’s proposed higher education compact may provoke some useful dialogue around reform,” he wrote. “But the federal government shouldn’t try to manage the nation’s 6,000 colleges and universities.”
A Joint Warning
The American Council on Education and 35 other organizations warned in a joint statement released Friday that “the compact’s prescriptions threaten to undermine the very qualities that make our system exceptional.”
The organizations that signed requested the administration withdraw the compact and noted that “higher education has room for improvement.”
But “the compact is a step in the wrong direction,” the letter states. “The dictates set by it are harmful for higher education and our entire nation, no matter your politics.”
The letter is just the latest sign of a growing resistance in higher ed to the compact. Faculty and students at the initial group of universities rallied Friday to urge their administrators to reject the compact. According to the American Association of University Professors, which organized the national day of action, more than 1,000 people attended the UVA event.
And earlier this month, the American Association of Colleges and Universities released a statement that sharply criticized the compact. The statement said in part that college and university presidents “cannot trade academic freedom for federal funding” and that institutions shouldn’t be subject “to the changing priorities of successive administrations.” Nearly 150 college presidents and associations have endorsed that statement.
The joint statement from ACE and others, including AAC&U, was a way to show that the associations, which the letter says “span the breadth of the American higher education community and the full spectrum of colleges and universities nationwide,” are united in their opposition.
“The compact offers nothing less than government control of a university’s basic and necessary freedoms—the freedoms to decide who we teach, what we teach, and who teaches,” the statement reads. “Now more than ever, we must unite to protect the values and principles that have made American higher education the global standard.”
But not everyone in the sector signed on.
Key groups that were absent from the list of signatories include the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, the Association of American Universities, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, Career Education Colleges and Universities, and the American Association of Community Colleges.
Inside Higher Ed reached out to each of those groups, asking whether they were invited to sign and, if so, why they chose not to do so. Responses varied.
AAU noted that it had already issued its own statement Oct. 10. AASCU said it was also invited to sign on and had “significant concerns” about the compact but decided to choose other ways to speak out.
“We are communicating in multiple ways with our member institutions and policymakers about the administration’s request and any impact it might have on regional public universities,” Charles Welch, the association’s president, said in an email.
Other organizations had not responded by the time this story was published.
Last week I and several colleagues visited a local technical high school to see what kind of dual-enrollment courses we could offer there. The school was leaps and bounds beyond what technical high schools were known for when I was a student: It had an impressive range of programs, new facilities, dedicated staff and some very poised students. I’d be proud to have them here.
That said, I couldn’t help but notice a pattern that hasn’t changed over the decades: gender segregation by field remains robust.
The electronics lab and the computer gaming lab were full of young men. The allied health area was almost entirely young women. When I asked the admins there whether that was typical of what they’ve seen, they responded that it was.
This week I dropped by a continuing-education conference that the college hosts for dental hygienists. I noticed that the attendees were nearly all women. A woman who runs a complementary program and was in attendance told me that over 98 percent of the dental hygienists in our state are women. Strikingly, she noted that the few men in the field have a terrible time getting hired; dentists are afraid that patients will mistake male hygienists for dentists.
This, in 2025.
In each case, the organizers were fully aware of the gender split. They certainly didn’t encourage it and, in some cases, tried actively to counter it. That has been true for years. Yet the patterns persist; if anything, they seem to be strengthening in certain occupational areas.
It’s not news that women have been graduating college at higher rates than men for several decades now. But if you looked only at HVAC and cybersecurity programs, you wouldn’t know it. Conversely, if you looked only at allied health programs, you’d wonder how the percentage of men even hits double digits. The disjuncture between greater integration in certain professional fields and markedly persistent segregation in others is striking.
Honestly, if you had asked me 30 years ago, I would have expected to see much more integration by now. Maybe not parity, but something far closer to it than what we have now. And the fact that the patterns exist among current high school students suggests that it isn’t just a matter of one generation slowly replacing another.
My own bias is that, generally speaking, more integration is better. That means more women in welding and more men in nursing. That’s because defaulting to individual choice as an explanation doesn’t take account of the conditions in which those choices are made. Whether your preferred metaphor is critical mass or a tipping point, there’s often a threshold of representation beneath which folks who might otherwise have wanted to be there will feel unwelcome. That threshold is usually well below absolute parity, but above being the “only.”
Having enough people like you—however defined—in the field can make the option seem more welcoming.
So, no, I don’t believe in trying to engineer absolute parity in all things. People have free will, and an occupational draft isn’t likely to lead anywhere good. But surely we can make headway toward making more choices more welcoming for more types of people. We know that having too much sameness in a group leads to groupthink and that groups with multiple perspectives tend to make better decisions. The same can be said of professions. I didn’t think we’d still be making those points in 2025, but here we are.
While generative artificial intelligence tools have proliferated in education and workplace settings, not all tools are free or accessible to students and staff, which can create equity gaps regarding who is able to participate and learn new skills. To address this gap, San Diego State University leaders created an equitable AI alliance in partnership with the University of California, San Diego, and the San Diego Community College District. Together, the institutions work to address affordability and accessibility concerns for AI solutions, as well as share best practices, resources and expertise.
In the latest episode of Voices of Student Success, host Ashley Mowreader speaks with James Frazee, San Diego State University’s chief information officer, about the alliance and SDSU’s approach to teaching AI skills to students.
An edited version of the podcast appears below.
Q: Can you give us the high-level overview: What is the Equitable AI Alliance? What does it mean to be equitable in AI spaces?
James Frazee, chief information officer at San Diego State University
A: Our goal is simple but ambitious: to make AI literacy and access available as opportunities to all of our students, and I mean every student, whether they started at a community college, a California State University like ours or at a University of California school. We want to make sure they all have that same foundation to understand and apply AI responsibly in their lives, in their careers and during their academic journey.
Through this alliance, we’re trying to align resources and expand access to institutionally supported AI tools. So when people are using the free tools, they’re not free, right? They’re paying for them with their privacy, with their intellectual property. We want to make sure that they have access, not only to the training they need to use these tools responsibly, but also to the high-quality tools that are more accurate and that have commercial data protection so that they can rest assured that their intellectual property isn’t being used to train the underlying large language models.
Q: The alliance strives to work across institutions, which is atypical in many cases in higher ed. Can you talk about that partnership and why this is important for your students?
A: The Equitable AI Alliance emerged from survey results. We have this listening infrastructure we’ve created here at San Diego State—we launched an AI survey in 2023, within months of ChatGPT going public. We really wanted to establish a baseline and determine what tools our students were using, what opinions did they have about AI and maybe, most importantly, what did they expect from us institutionally in order to help them meet the moment?
During the analysis of those survey findings, we discovered evidence of a growing digital divide. For instance, we asked students about how many devices they had. If you have a smartphone, a tablet, a desktop and a laptop, you would have four smart devices.
What we found was more devices led to people being more likely to say that AI had positively affected their education, and more devices meant that they were more likely to be paying for the paid versions of these tools. We also saw in the open-ended responses … people being concerned about fee increases as a result of AI, people being concerned about students who didn’t have access to these tools or fluency with these tools being disadvantaged.
People were saying, “The people who are using these have an unfair advantage,” right? Students were asking questions about, is everybody going to be able to afford what they need in order to keep up with AI? So that really was a key driver in forming this alliance.
Q: When it comes to consolidating those resources or making sure that students have access, what does that look like? And how do you all share?
A: The Equitable AI Alliance is really two things. First, it’s a consortium that’s all about saving time and saving money and having universities and colleges come together to really look at ways to form these partnerships to democratize access to these high-quality tools. And also to provide the training that people need. So that’s kind of the first part of it, and that’s much larger than the regional consortium.
But we have a regional consortium between our San Diego Community College District, San Diego State University and the University of California at San Diego, which is also dubbed the Equitable AI Alliance. And the mission there is to ensure that every student, no matter where they begin their journey, has access to AI literacy, to those high-quality tools and opportunities to leverage those to help them succeed, both inside and outside of the classroom.
It’s really, ultimately about responding to the workforce needs that we’re seeing. Employers today are demanding students come to them with fluency using these tools, and if they don’t have that fluency, they’re not going to get that internship or that job interview. So it’s really important. That’s where those microcredentials that we’re sharing across our institutions are really powerful, because they can put that badge on their LinkedIn profile, which may make the difference between them getting the interview or not, just having that little artifact there that demonstrates that they have some skills and knowledge can really make an impact.
Q: What is the microcredential? How are students engaging with that?
A: The microcredentials themselves are really powerful because they’re basically mini courses in our learning management system. We try and make them bite-size enough to where people actually get through them.
There are five modules. The first module is really kind of demystifying AI—this is not some dark art. We try to explain, at a high level, how does AI work?
The second module, which is arguably the most important one, is all about responsible use. The fact that these models are built on information from human beings, which is inherently biased. How to be critical consumers of that information, the environmental costs, the human costs, talking about how to cite the use of these tools in your work, both academically and professionally.
Then there’s a module on what AI can do for you. And so we have different microcredentials, a microcredential for faculty, there’s microcredentials for students. For instance, in the microcredential for students, it’s focusing on using AI to find jobs, prepare for jobs, tailor your résumé for a particular job or internship, how to do role-playing—to practice for an interview, let’s say.
And then there’s finding apps, finding generative AI tools, how to do that, because there’s different AI tools you might want to use for certain things, like maybe you want to create some sort of graphic—you might want to use Midjourney or DALL-E, or whatever it might be.
And then there’s the activities. Part of the idea with the activities, which they have to do in order to earn the badge, is that we’re designing activities that try and keep the microcredential evergreen. So for instance, when we first rolled out the microcredential, nobody had heard of DeepSeek, because it didn’t exist. So now we have an activity that has people going out and looking for the latest large language models that are emerging. Every day, there’s some new model, it seems—that is something to be aware of.
And then bringing it back to again, why it’s important for them to be able to be in the loop, pointing out the fact that these models are often very sycophantic, right? They want to tell you what they think you want to hear. And so you really have to go back and forth and ideate with the tools, which requires a little practice, a little coaching, and you have to fact-check everything. And so that’s a really big part of this idea of, what does it mean to be literate when it comes to using these tools?
Q: When it came to developing the microcredential, who were the stakeholders at the table?
A: We have a long history of engaging with faculty and providing fellowships to faculty. That’s a way for us to incentivize engagement with faculty.
That manifests itself in the form of course release. So, in other words, we provide them with reassigned time, buy them out of teaching a course, so that they can come and work with us and consult with us. We have a long history of doing that, and this goes back decades, first helping us with faculty development around moving courses online.
We wanted that to be done by faculty for faculty. Yes, we have instructional designers who are staff, but we really wanted the faculty to be driving that. We identified in 2023 our first AI faculty fellows, and we got a faculty member from information systems and a faculty member from anthropology—very different in terms of their skill sets and their orientation to research. One a qualitative ethnographic researcher, another more of a quantitative machine learning focus. Very complementary in terms of just balancing each other out.
Twenty twenty-three was the first time we had ever provided fellowships to students. We provided fellowships to two students. One was an engineering student and another was an Africana studies student. Again, very different in terms of the academic domain and the discipline they were in, but again, very balanced.
So those two AI student fellows and the two AI faculty fellows helped us design the survey instrument, get the IRB [institutional review board] approvals, launch the survey, promote the survey. I really want to give credit where credit is due: We got an incredible response rate. We’re lucky if we usually get like a 3 percent response rate from a student survey. We got a 21 percent response rate in 2023; 7,811 students responded to that survey.
The credit for that goes to Associated Students, our student government. The president of Associated Students that year ran on a platform of getting students high-paying jobs, and he knew for students to get high-paying jobs, they needed to be conversant with AI. So he helped us promote that survey, and the whole campaign was around “your voice matters.” So thanks to his help and the help of these AI student fellows, we got this incredible response from our students.
So anyway, the students and the faculty fellows helped us analyze those results and then use that data to build these microcredentials. So very much involving faculty and students and our University Senate, our library. I mean, the library knows a thing or two about information literacy, right? They absolutely have to be at the table. Our Center for Teaching and Learning, which is responsible for providing faculty with professional development on campus, they were also very involved from the very outset, so very much of a collaborative effort.
Q: I wanted to ask about culture and creating a campus culture that embraces AI. How are you all thinking about engaging stakeholders in these hard conversations and bringing different disciplines to the playing field?
A: I think it’s really important. That’s what the data has done for us. It’s really created space for these conversations, because faculty will respond to evidence. If you have data that is from their students, who they care about deeply, that creates space for these conversations.
For instance, one of the things that emerged from the survey findings was inconsistency. In the same course, maybe taught by different instructors, there would be different expectations and policies with regard to AI.
In multiple sections of Psychology 101—and that’s not a real example, I’m just using that as a fictitious example—one instructor might completely forbid the use of AI and another one might require it, and that’s stressful for students because they didn’t know what to expect.
In fact, one of the comments that really resonated with me from the survey was, and this is a verbatim quote, “Just tell us what you expect and be clear about it.” Students were getting mixed messages.
So that led to conversations with our University Senate about the need to be clear with our students. I’m happy to report, just this past May, our University Senate unanimously passed a policy that requires an AI … statement in every syllabus. That was an important step in the right direction.
The University Senate also created guidelines for the use of generative AI in assessments and deliverables. You know, it’s important that you not be prescriptive with your faculty. You need to provide them with lots of examples of language that they can use or tweak, because they own the curriculum, and knowing that you don’t have to take a one-size-fits-all approach.
Maybe one assignment, it’s restricted; in another assignment, it’s unrestricted, right? You can do that. And they’re like, “Oh yeah, I can do that.” Giving them examples of language they can use, and also encouraging them to use this as an opportunity to have a conversation with their students.
The students want more direction on how to use these tools appropriately. And I think if you race to a policy that’s all about academic misconduct, it’s frankly insulting to the students, to just assume everybody’s cheating, and then when they leave here and go into their place of business, they’re going to be expected to use these tools. So, really powerful conversations.
That’s been key here—just talking about [AI]. I mean, it’s this seismic kind of epistemic shift for our faculty and how knowledge is created, how we acquire knowledge, how we represent knowledge, how we assess knowledge. It’s a stressful time for our faculty—they need to be able to process that with other faculty, and that’s super important.
Q: It’s also important that you’re having that conversation collegewide, because if this is a career competency and students do need AI skills, it needs to happen in every classroom, or at least be addressed in every classroom.
A: That’s a really good point, Ashley. In fact, we’re launching a program this year that we’re calling the AI-ready course design workshop, and the idea for that is that we’re identifying a faculty member from every major and we are paying them—and this is super important, too: It’s really a sign of respect, in terms of acknowledging the labor required to reimagine an assignment, to weave AI into the fabric of that assignment.
The goal is to have a faculty member from every major who teaches a required course in that major at least two times. We want to make sure that they have an opportunity to do this and then refine it and do it again. They’re being paid over break this winter to reimagine an assignment that leverages AI, and it is a deliverable. They will produce a three- to five-minute introspective video where they reflect on what they did, why they did it and what were the learning outcomes, both for them and for their students.
That is great because we will have an example from every major of how you can use AI in the fabric of your teaching. And I think that’s what faculty need right now. Again, they need lots of examples, and we’re incentivizing that through this program. We already have something we call the “AI in action” video series, so we already have some examples, but we don’t have examples from every major.
For us right now, I think you’re seeing a lot of engagement from faculty in engineering and sciences. We’re concerned that our humanities faculty need to engage; we need to engage the political scientists. We need to engage the philosophers and the historians. They can’t just sit this out. They’re really going to be key players in moving this forward, to prepare our students, regardless of major, for this AI-augmented world that we’re living in.
Q: What are some of the lessons that you’ve learned that you hope higher education can learn from? How do you all hope to be a model to your peers across the sector?
A: I think key is the importance of data and using data to inform the choices you’re making, whether it’s in the classroom, whether it’s in the cabinet. I report to the president, and using data to really drive those conversations, and using that to make sure that you’re engaging all of those stakeholders.
For instance, we’re looking at the survey data. That survey that we did in 2023 and repeated in 2024, we’ve now scaled up to the entire California State University system, and that is underway right now. In fact, I was just looking at the latest response rates. We have had, as of this morning, 77,714 people responding to the survey … which is about a 15 percent response rate. We’ve got half a million students in the CSU, so it’s a big number.
I was looking at [the data] with the council of vice presidents and my colleague … the provost, and I said, “When you look at the numbers for San Diego State, we’ve had 10,682 responses from students. We’ve had 406 responses from faculty and 556 responses from staff. But relative to the students, the response rate from faculty is pretty low.” So I talked with [the provost] about sending a message out to our academic leaders—the deans and the department chairs and the school directors—encouraging their faculty to respond to the survey, so that we have a balanced perspective.
Everybody has a voice. That is certainly something that I want to encourage; this whole idea of incentivizing faculty engagement, I think, is important. I think you really need to provide that encouragement for faculty to experiment, to show off, and then to really use that as an opportunity to recognize those faculty and celebrate them. That does a couple things. One, it honors them for taking the risk to do this work. Then it might inspire another faculty [member] to build on that work, or have coffee with that person and talk about what they wish they would have known that they could advise this person on who maybe is early career and would appreciate their advice. I think that idea of incentivizing faculty engagement is another thing that I would encourage the audience to consider.
Q: What’s next for you all? Are there other cool interventions or programs that are coming out?
A: That survey data is going to do quite a few things for us. It’s going to help us to not only refine the microcredentials and the work we’re doing with the microcredentials, but it’s also going to allow us to scaffold conversations with industry and our industry partners in terms of being responsive to the competencies they’re going to need in their industry.
I think it’s something like 35 out of the top 50 AI companies are housed here in California, but they can’t find the talent they need in California, let alone the United States, so they’re having to go abroad to get the people they need to continue to innovate. So using this as an opportunity to work with our industry partners to make sure we’re preparing this workforce that they need to continue to innovate, that’s a key element of it, and then using this data also to help us get additional resources and use that data to say, “Hey, here’s a gap we’ve identified. We need to fill this gap,” and using that data to make the case for that investment.
One of the great ironies and great frustrations of my career teaching first-year college writing was having students enter our class armed with a whole host of writing strategies which they had been explicitly told they needed to know “for college,” and yet those strategies—primarily the following of prescriptive templates—were entirely unsuited to the experience students were going to have over the next 15 weeks of our course (and beyond).
I explored and diagnosed these frustrations in Why They Can’t Write, and while many other writing teachers in both high school and college shared that they’d seen and been equally (or more) frustrated by the same things. In the intervening years, there’s been some progress, but frankly, not enough, primarily because the structural factors that distorted how writing is taught precollege have not been addressed.
As long as writing is primarily framed as workforce preparation to be tested through standardization and quantification, students will struggle when invited into a more nuanced conversation that requires them to mine their own thoughts and experiences of the world and put those thoughts and experiences in juxtaposition with the ideas of others. The good news, in my experience, is that once invited into this struggle, many students are enthusiastic to engage, at least once they genuinely believe that you are interested in the contours of their minds and their experiences.
Clark calls for a “higher ed and secondary ed alliance” based in the values we all at least claim to share: free inquiry, self-determination and an appreciation for lives that are more than the “skills” we’re supposed to bring to our employers.
Something I can’t help but note is that the challenges college instructors are having getting students to steer clear of outsourcing their thinking to large language models would be significantly lessened if students had a greater familiarity with thinking during their secondary education years. Unfortunately, the system of indefinite future reward that has been reduced to pure transactions in exchange for grades and credentials has signaled that the outputs of the homework machine are satisfactory, so why not just give in?
When I go to campuses and schools and have the opportunity to speak to students, I try to list all kinds of reasons why they shouldn’t just give in, reasons which, in the end, boil down to the fact that being a big dumb-dumb who doesn’t know anything and can’t do anything without the aid of a predictive text-generation machine is simply an unfulfilling and unpleasant way to go through life.
In short, they will not be happy, even if they find ways to navigate their “work” with the aid of AI, because humans simply need more than this from our existences.
In a world where machines can handle the technical knowledge, the only differentiator is being human.
This is not news to those of us with those degrees, like my sister-in-law, who took her liberal arts degree from Denison University all the way to a general counsel job at a Fortune 300 company, or someone else with a far humbler résumé … me.
As I wrote in 2013 in this very space, the key to my success as an adult who has had to repeatedly adapt to a changing world is my liberal arts degrees, degrees that armed me with foundational and enduring skills that have served me quite well.
But, of course, it is about more than these skills. My pursuit of these degrees also allowed me to consider what a good life should be. That knowledge has put me in a position where—knock wood—I wake up just about every morning looking forward to what I have to do that day.
This is true even as the things I most care about—education, reading/writing, uh … democracy—appear to be inexorably crumbling around me. Perhaps this is because my knowledge of the value of humanistic study as something more than a route to a good job makes me more willing to fight for its continuation.
Sometimes when I encounter some hand-wringing about the inevitability of AI and the uncertainty of the future, I want to remind the fretful that we actually have a very sound idea of what we should be emphasizing, the same stuff we always should have been emphasizing—teaching, learning, living, being human.
We have clear notions of what this looks like. The main question now is if we have the collective will to move toward that future, or if we will give in to something much darker, much less satisfying and much less human.
Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has gifted Morgan State University $63 million in unrestricted funds, the largest gift in the university’s history.
In 2020, Scott awarded the historically Black university in Baltimore $40 million, which went toward multiple research centers and endowed faculty positions, among other advancements.
Morgan State leaders announced that the new funding will help build the university’s endowment, expand student supports and advance its research.
David K. Wilson, president of Morgan State, called the gift “a resounding testament to the work we’ve done to drive transformation, not only within our campus but throughout the communities we serve.”
“To receive one historic gift from Ms. Scott was an incredible honor; to receive two speaks volumes about the confidence she and her team have in our institution’s stewardship, leadership, and trajectory,” Wilson said in the announcement. “This is more than philanthropy—it’s a partnership in progress.”
A recent report from the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College found that high school students graduate college at higher rates and earn more after college if they’ve taken a combination of dual-enrollment and Advanced Placement courses.
The report, released Tuesday, drew on administrative data from Texas on students expected to graduate high school in 2015–16 and 2016–17, as well as some data from students expected to complete in 2019–20 and 2022–23. It explored how different kinds of accelerated coursework, and different combinations of such work, affected student outcomes.
Researchers found that students who combined Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate courses with dual-enrollment courses boasted higher completion rates and earnings than their peers. Of these students, 92 percent enrolled in or completed a credential a year after high school, and 71 percent earned a credential by year six.
These students also showed the strongest earnings outcomes in their early 20s. They earned $10,306 per quarter on average at age 24, compared to $9,746 per quarter among students who took only dual enrollment and $8,934 per quarter for students who took only AP/IB courses. However, students taking both dual-enrollment and AP/IB courses tended to be less racially and socioeconomically diverse than students taking AP/IB courses alone, the report found.
Students who combined dual enrollment with career and technical education—who made up just 5 percent of students in the study—also reaped positive outcomes later in life. These students earned $9,746 per quarter on average by age 24, compared to $8,097 per quarter on average for students with only a CTE focus.
“Most dual-enrollment students in Texas also take other accelerated courses, and those who do tend to have stronger college and earnings trajectories,” CCRC senior research associate Tatiana Velasco said in a press release. “It’s a pattern we hadn’t fully appreciated before, which offers clues for how to expand the benefits of dual enrollment to more students.”
