Trustees at member institutions across the Big Ten are pushing back on a proposed $2.4 billion private equity deal that some argue has been too rushed, lacking transparency and proper vetting.
Now, with trustee criticism mounting, the conference appears to be prolonging talks amid a push to finalize a plan to establish a for-profit arm of the Big Ten, which would control its media and sponsorship rights and sell a 10 percent stake of that entity to the investor. The deal would give members an immediate cash infusion, with a minimum $100 million disbursement across the league, while more prominent athletic programs would receive an even higher revenue share. That money is needed, even at wealthy institutions, as universities adjust to a changing world of college athletics, which includes direct payments for players that began earlier this year.
The proposal would also maintain the current 18 universities as Big Ten members through 2046.
Dissent among the Big Ten ranks seems to have prompted the potential investor—the University of California pension fund, or UC Investments—to slow down the deal.
While UC Investments indicated in a Monday statement that it “remains very excited” about the offer, officials wrote they will work with members in the “coming months” to solidify the deal. (Prior reports indicated the conference hoped to put the deal to a league vote by mid-November.)
“As we have continued to evaluate this opportunity over the past five months, we remain convinced that the unity of the 18 Big Ten university members is key to the success of Big Ten Enterprises,” Chief Investment Officer Jagdeep Singh Bachher wrote in the statement. “We also recognize that some member universities need more time to assess the benefits of their participation. UC Investments likewise requires some additional time to complete our due diligence as recent developments unfold and we continue to engage with the conference.”
The CIO also lauded Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti and his team.
“The process they have led has been rigorous, honest and fair—among the best we’ve seen. Recent misinformation has distorted some aspects of its effort,” Bachher wrote in the statement.
But several trustees at Big Ten member institutions have raised concerns about a lack of transparency into the deal, saying they have received little information about the arrangement and yet been asked to rubber-stamp it on a compressed timeline.
Trustee Dissent
UC Investments announced a commitment to a unified process for making a deal just a few days after the American Council of Trustees and Alumni held an online meeting with individual board members representing five Big Ten institutions. The meeting, held Friday, included trustees from the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, the University System of Maryland, Pennsylvania State University and the University of Southern California, all of whom had concerns about the deal.
Tom McMillen, a Maryland regent, said in the recorded meeting that “no trustee has been given a balanced view” of the pros and cons of the proposal, according to his conversations with other governing board members across the conference. He also called for third-party evaluations of the arrangement.
“It’s shocking to me that a decision of this magnitude, there are no opposing views presented,” McMillen said.
Michigan regent Sarah Hubbard echoed similar concerns on the ACTA call, arguing that there was a need for more oversight and for trustees to have a formal role in discussing the proposal. She also questioned the need to expedite the process with such limited information available.
“This lack of transparency and information for the fiduciaries at our universities is unacceptable,” Hubbard said.
Penn State trustee Jay Paterno questioned the need for secrecy around the potential investment. Given that the Big Ten is about to create “a for-profit company using what are essentially public dollars,” he argued, boards need to know more in order to be able to advise their institutions accordingly. Ultimately, Paterno said, he wanted to see the Big Ten put its cards on the table.
“If it’s such a great deal, show us the deal and let’s go,” Paterno said.
Outstanding Concerns
UC Investments signaled it would work on the deal over the “coming months”—likely signaling a slowdown in the process—but it has offered no information about where things stand.
A UC Investments spokesperson referred questions about trustee concerns to the Big Ten, which did not respond to a request for comment from Inside Higher Ed.
But outside analysts echo many of the concerns raised by trustees. Armand Alacbay, chief of staff and senior vice president of strategy at ACTA, said the organization has no position on the proposal itself but got involved because of concerns about trustees being shut out of the deal.
“Anyone we’ve heard from on this has said it’s not enough time, not enough information, not enough of anything to make this decision. Some have been told that it’s a nonvoting decision for them, that they don’t even have a right to make a decision because it’s the conference,” Alacbay said. “Well, I would say that the intellectual property and media rights of your athletic department are a significantly large asset of the institution and justify a level of board oversight.”
Karen Weaver, an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, told Inside Higher Ed that while private equity has seeped into numerous areas of college athletics in recent years, the investment in a conference is a new approach. And what happens with the Big Ten will likely set the stage for other conferences.
She said if the Big Ten can successfully navigate a maze of thorny legal and political concerns, then other athletic conferences will be more likely to follow in their footsteps. “But if they constantly get land mines and roadblocks thrown in the way,” others will be more hesitant, she said.
Weaver also pointed to concerns lawmakers raised that could upend or complicate the deal.
Last week U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell, a Washington Democrat, issued warnings about the proposal in a statement and individual letters to both university and conference leadership. She argued that such a deal “may be counter to your university’s academic goals, may require the sale of university assets to a private investor, and may affect the tax-exempt purpose of those assets.”
Cantwell also emphasized the different priorities of universities and private equity investors.
“The primary goal of these companies is to make money for the firm, which is unlikely to align with the academic goals of your university or its obligations as a not-for-profit organization,” Cantwell wrote. “These investors will be focused on maximizing their investment, not on preserving and growing athletic and academic opportunities for student athletes.”
McMahon is committed to fulfilling the president’s campaign promise—shutting down the department and putting herself out of a job.
Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
To Education Secretary Linda McMahon, outsourcing education-related grant programs to other federal departments is just a “proof of concept” for her larger goal—closing the 45-year-old agency.
“Let’s move programs out on a temporary basis. Let’s see how the work is done. What is the result? What is the outcome?” she said in an all-staff meeting at the department Tuesday, shortly after publicly announcing six interagency agreements. “And if it has worked and we have proven that this is the best way to do it, then we’ll ask Congress to codify this and make it a permanent move.” (The meeting was closed to the public. All quotes are pulled from a recording obtained by Inside Higher Ed.)
In 20 minutes, the secretary explained her plan and the framework through which she hopes her employees and the nation will view it.
“We are not talking about shutting down the Department of Education. We are talking about returning education to states where it belongs,” she said. “That is the right messaging.”
McMahon cited polling that she said showed that while the public doesn’t support shutting down ED, respondents are more supportive when they hear the plan still preserves ED’s programs by sending them to other agencies.
A restructuring like the one in Tuesday’s announcement has been rumored for months, and the changes mirror recommendations outlined in Project 2025—a conservative blueprint that called for closing ED. (The education section of Project 2025 was spearheaded by Lindsey Burke, who is now the department’s deputy chief of staff for policy and programs.)
To advance President Trump’s goal of shuttering the agency, McMahon has previously shipped career and technical education programs to the Department of Labor and laid off nearly half of her staff.
But while the secretary said she understands the “unrest” and “uncertainty” the reductions in force have caused and stressed that they were hard decisions made with the “greatest of thought and care,” she stood firm on her belief that they were necessary.
“I applaud and appreciate everything that every one of you in this room is doing and has done over the years,” she said. “I’m not saying to any one of you that your efforts aren’t good enough—what I’m saying is the policies behind those efforts have not been good enough.”
By co-managing, “we can be more efficient and economical,” she said. “For instance, we’ve utilized Labor’s system now on grant drawdowns, and we’ve drawn down over 500 already, and they work very proficiently. It’s a better system than we had here.”
Although some conservatives praised the administration’s actions, others cast doubt on their magnitude or argued they were distracting attention from what really matters. For Margaret Spellings, former education secretary under President George W. Bush, that’s the “economic emergency” of improving student outcomes.
“Moving programs from one department to another does not actually eliminate the federal bureaucracy, and it may make the system harder for students, teachers and families to navigate and get the support they need,” she said. “We need to keep the main thing the main thing, and that is how to improve education and outcomes for all students.”
McMahon, on the other hand, told employees that this move is key to doing just that.
“We want to make sure that [students] understand there are many opportunities for them … that there are programs that will give them a great livelihood, whether they want to be electricians or doctors or Indian chiefs,” she said. “We are not closing education; we are lifting education up.”
Some people dream about retirement as heaven; I see it as hell. I do not wish to retire. I am only 80 and have been a college professor for a mere 56 years. I’m a workaholic and I have every reason to continue. My office is my Shangri-La. In a small space, it is a mini-museum of an entire career—2,000 books, plaques for well beyond a dozen teaching and scholarship awards, many photographs, travel mementos from around the world, and artifacts of every kind. All organized and I know where everything is. I look around and remember. And there is much to remember. Students from across the institution sometimes drop in just to marvel at what this office says about a career. I once wrote an article on one’s office as a teaching tool.
I’m a fairly ordinary guy. My degrees would not raise any eyebrows—undergraduate from a directional-named tertiary regional university, Ph.D. from my home-state Midwestern university. A tour in Vietnam and church-related travels all over the globe add some zest. I have had some successes in the academic world—books, lots of articles, some wider recognition and campus leadership roles. I’ve been department chair for 35 years; “it is a small place.” I’ve had some offers all the way up to a presidency inquiry. I’ve spurned them all.
I am a teacher, the highest calling in this human existence and at a place best suited for my practice. A colleague called our role “a slice of heaven breaking into this earthly realm.” He was right. It isn’t what I do; it is who I am. Back when I began graduate school, jobs in my discipline were plentiful. My early predecessors scrambled for prestigious appointments and got them. I declared from day one that what I wanted was a small liberal arts college where I could affect students’ lives. Some accused me of low aspirations. My adviser proclaimed, “You can do better than that.” However, things changed for historians dramatically in the mid-1970s, and the opportunities, prestigious and other, dried up. But I was fortunate; my desires came about.
Teaching is about mentoring students. And I have had my share. Of the majors, at least, I remember almost all of them, now in the upper hundreds. They have done well. I’m committed to that. I remember from my first year, my first high-profile student received a prestigious national Ph.D. award. I was ecstatic. She retired many years ago as a prominent scholar and provost. And I am just as enthusiastic about the several graduates from this past spring who went on to top graduate and professional schools and good career opportunities.
I am proud to hope that I have played a role in their becoming. If it is my fortune, they will join the ranks who check in periodically, send cards and letters, get married (and divorced), have kids, and come by to see me occasionally. Maybe it is just to confirm if the old man is still alive. I have several second-generation majors and a couple of third-generation ones—again, “it is that kind of place.” I have stories about their parents and grandparents, a bit disconcerting to their elders. I’m a storyteller and I have an almost inexhaustive supply. I’ve lived a lot of life, and this is a tool to employ in speaking to new generations of students. We travel quite a bit, and every place we go, every book read, movie watched, indeed every experience, I approach didactically. How does this become part of my classroom and student learning?
I’ve heard the cliché that we should teach learning to think, not what to think. Yes, but we also have a greater responsibility. I’m not tolerant enough to accept that genocide is OK, rape is just fine or that the world is flat and John F. Kennedy is alive in a hospital in Dallas. That is the antithesis of intellect. I have little patience for conspiracy theorists or patent immorality, even if there is a lot of both going around. Our goals must be higher, our expectations more worthy.
But it isn’t just about the students. I’ve hired several department members, selected to perpetuate the purposes we want to achieve. My job is to model the norms and culture that have made us successful and for my colleagues to achieve their best selves. The greatest tribute that I have received in my career was from a now-deceased member of the department who proclaimed, “His greatest strength as a leader is that he is so deeply committed to our success that he is just as pleased to see our work succeed as he is to see his own work succeed.” I hope that I have lived up to that high accolade.
I do not enjoy summer, because my colleagues and our students are not around much. No hanging out in the office talking about everything from books, politics, philosophy, culture, teaching and maybe a little gossip. I find it hard to come to grips with what a full year would be as an extended summer. I can only read and write so many hours a day, especially if I can’t see it manifest itself in the classroom. I’ve been at this long enough to know that no matter your stature, when you are gone, your shelf life is short. In four years, or three, in many cases today, you are just a name that the ever-cycling group of current students may or may not have heard about, but in any case, you aren’t impacting them directly.
Everything about this academic life hasn’t been idyllic. Pay may have been less than ideal, frustrations exist, challenges are around every corner and today the very existence of my discipline, type of institution and indeed the liberal arts are under threat from forces internal and external.
I know that someday my portion of the quest will come to an end. Health is precarious, the mind fragile, life full of the unsuspected. I’ve witnessed that from 50-plus years of colleagues. I know my vulnerabilities—back surgeries, hearing and creeping infirmities. Things can change in the blink of an eye. But as long as mind and body cooperate, I remain a teacher, the highest calling with which we mortals are graced. It is my slice of heaven, and, as for my students and my sacred department office space, I do not want to give up either prematurely.
Joe P. Dunn is the Charles A. Dana Professor of History and Politics at Converse University.
On a normal day on the Florida State University campus, it’s not unusual to see a student drive by in a vehicle equipped with sirens and the name “Medical Response Unit” plastered to the side.
“I saw everybody driving around in the golf carts and I really wanted to know what was happening,” said neuroscience major Anakha Vargheese.
The vehicles are part of a student-led emergency medical response unit, connected to the student health center, that trains student volunteers to provide health care and assistance to their peers.
For the university, the unit provides emergency response support and health education to all students. For volunteers, the experience gives them needed work-based learning and professional development for future careers as medical professionals.
In action: FSU’s Medical Response Unit includes more than 150 trained student volunteers on staff, including Vargheese, who serves as director of administration for the unit. Volunteers are certified in various roles, including emergency medical technicians and paramedics.
To be eligible, students must be empathetic and committed to improving campus health and welfare. All volunteers agree to participate for four semesters including training, so students are primarily admitted in their first or second year of college.
The unit is well-known on campus, and the competition to earn a spot on the crew is fierce. In the most recent application cycle, MRU received 350 applications for 50 positions, said Bryce Couey, a senior biology major who serves as executive director for the MRU.
At the start of the term, students accepted to the program are assigned to a crew of three or four people, including one trainee who shadows the crew for the semester. Crews serve two-hour-and-fifteen-minute shifts between 7:45 a.m. and 6 p.m. and may be called on to help bandage a sprained ankle, provide transport to the campus health center or address whatever other issues may arise.
MRU volunteers provide care for campus community members at campus events, including football tailgates and an annual carnival.
During the academic year, volunteers cover various campus events, including football tailgates, baseball games, student organization events, intramural sports, the homecoming parade and an annual circus event, which is Vargheese’s favorite.
“One thing coming into the MRU that I really wanted to gain was clinical experience,” Vargheese said. “But another additional thing that I got out of it was the community and the people. So just being able to spend time with your friends and your crew at these really special events, it’s really fun.”
The unit has an assortment of vehicles to perform emergency responses, including SUVs, electric carts and a mobile first aid trailer, each equipped with emergency lights, sirens and medical equipment.
The unit also provides educational training sessions and certification for other students, including Stop the Bleed, which provides a national training certificate for bystanders to control a bleeding emergency before professionals arrive.
In addition, the unit leads two trainings developed in house for FSU students to recognize and respond to emergency situations, said program director Michael Stewart-Meza; one is tailored for students in fraternity and sorority life and another for the general campus population.
The impact: The unit is one way FSU hopes to destigmatize receiving help among the campus community.
“Before and after their shifts, [volunteers] are roaming around campus and attending class in their MRU uniforms,” Stewart-Meza said. “It develops a comfortability that other students will have with them. They’re their classmates, they’re their friends and they’re in the sororities and fraternities with them.”
Both Couey and Vargheese initially joined MRU to gain clinical experience for their premed education, but the experience has also taught them personal and professional skills, as well as helped them create a sense of connection on campus.
“It has made me a better person,” Couey said. “I was very introverted when I joined the unit, and I feel as if the people in the unit and the unit itself have gotten me out of my shell and allowed me to grow into the best version of myself.”
“Being out there in the field and treating patients, caring for them in whatever way that we can, it’s really affirming and rewarding,” said Vargheese. “Without MRU here at college, I don’t know what I’d be doing. I really found my place.”
During the recent government shutdown, I bravely traveled to Philadelphia for the annual meeting of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities’ annual meeting. Then I hung out at Bryn Mawr College, where Marjorie Hass, president of the Council of Independent Colleges, gave a fantastic talk about curriculum to a big group (that included not that many faculty). Finally, I Amtraked up to a conference at Drew University in New Jersey. In one week, I made the rounds of what most people think of as “college.”
In my role as creator of Inside Higher Ed’s wacky weekly newsletter The Sandbox, I go to plenty of higher ed conferences. The Drew gathering was a horse of another color. It convened 150 people from various sectors of learning—tech gurus, mentorship experts, K–12 educators, innovators in experiential learning, those who have started new organizations and institutions—to talk about the future of higher ed.
The Drew convening opened with a talk by Michael Horn of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. As a reminder, in 2013, he and Clayton Christensen predicted in a New York Times op-ed that online education was going to disrupt our sector and that 25 percent of struggling colleges and universities were going to close. He presented new research that shows dozens of brand-name schools in New England could now be in deep financial doo doo.
One of the questions at Drew was “What is the purpose of higher education?” If you ask faculty, the answers are likely to loftily uphold ideals we all believe: to open minds, spark curiosity, even help build citizens who will maintain our (endangered) democracy. Most will rightly claim that colleges and universities are engines of economic opportunity.
When I asked my students at a regional public what they wanted out of their education, they parroted these ideas. They came to be challenged, to meet people unlike themselves, to think differently. College, they complained noted, instills discipline and helps them ease into adulthood. Most believed in the value of a traditional liberal arts education.
This is not surprising because, well, they’re college students and they’ve been chugging the Kool-Aid we serve them. We live these values when they come to our campuses. My old friend Stanley Hauerwas, the potty-mouthed esteemed theologian, used to say in typical fashion, “I don’t want my students to make up their goddamned minds; they don’t have minds worth making up until I’ve taught them.” Coming to college can feel for many the way Dorothy did when she went over the rainbow. Life goes from drab sepia tones to a Technicolor.
Twenty years ago, when I won the lottery became faculty, things were still pretty Emerald City–esque. I had landed a tenure-track job after a couple different careers as a nine-to-fiver. What a luxurious and privileged position! How many other employees have this kind of flexibility, job security and, well, lack of accountability?
But boy howdy, we’re back in dusty Kansas.
Because here’s the thing: As enrollments drop, state and federal support withers, and philanthropic dollars are necessary to keep our citizens safe, fed and healthy, the number of faculty at most institutions has remained mostly unchanged while expenses continue to rise. This is a math problem a fifth grader could solve. We need to adapt if we want to continue to prepare the next generations to keep our country going.
A handful of elite institutions have turned themselves into high-end brands, with people mistaking exclusivity for excellence and the national media mistaking them for the whole sector, fueling the rankings arms race and copycat syndrome.
Meanwhile, most of us are stuck in the messy middle, trying to do everything everywhere all at once. Research, workforce training, student life, athletics, DEI, study abroad, mental health—missions layered like geological strata. The result? Silos, identity crisis, bloat and burnout.
The sad truth is that few people outside academe are convinced we’re doing a good job. That includes not just the disaffected without degrees who were told they were losers if they didn’t go to college, but plenty of professionals who did and are still paying off debt and are not convinced their kids should follow that path. Plus, the children of privilege are dropping out of fancy-pants schools to work at start-ups. For many young people, the choice now is not which college to attend but whether to bother going at all.
There are still plenty of folks who want access to more education, and we have to remember that most degree seekers aren’t of traditional college age. But that doesn’t mean even they want to buy what we’re currently selling. There are nearly 4,000 institutions of higher learning in this country. Some will survive, others will thrive, and for some, it may end up looking like the Hunger Games.
At dinner with a dozen presidents this fall, one told a story that captured how resistance to current reality can end. That president had been warning his faculty about the financial cliff ahead. They either didn’t believe him or couldn’t be bothered to figure out how to change. Then he told them the school was closing and handed out pink slips. That’s what happens when you wait for someone else to solve the math problem.
Those in the group that Michael Horn and Clay Christensen said were going to go belly up—small privates and regional publics—are going to have to do some hard rethinking and find a way to be something other than, in the formulation of Jeff Selingo, “Comprehensive U.”
We’ve been able to muddle through with tiny ivory towers on each campus: disciplinary niches, departments, divisions, colleges. The world, however, does not follow the ways of our little chessboard pieces that each move in their quirky little ways.
We are in the midst of some serious paradigm shifts, folks. Not just in the last two decades, but in the past two years, since AI began to change every aspect of life as we know it, whether you like it or not (and yes, I know that many do not like it and stick their fingers in their ears saying la la la I can’t hear you).
This is why the Drew convening felt like going from sepia tones to Oz. If there was a man behind the curtain, it was the visionary president of Drew, Hilary Link, whose scholarship on the Renaissance shows that we already have within us what we need, if we’re only able to see from a different perspective. This perpetual learner has been on an 18-month journey asking questions of all different types of thinkers and trying to figure out where to go next. The convening was a first step in consolidating what she’s learned, backed by a university board that understands the survival challenges and prizes boldness.
In the final session, President Link asked me to talk about innovations I’ve seen as I talk to presidents around the country. The sad truth is that while there are many creative leaders well aware of the need to change, they face resistance from the usual suspects.
Boards are often filled with well-meaning and accomplished people who went to college in another era and may not understand much about our current environment.
And faculty cling to traditions that define their own legitimacy. The Angry Eight (or Furious Five or Irate Individual) on a campus can stop brilliant ideas in two sessions of the Faculty Senate. And while these longtime faculty members try to burn it all down, they rarely come up with realistic and informed solutions to move forward.
Because of resistance from above or below, institutions are cycling through presidents faster than drug-aided Lance Armstrong could pedal, leaving little time for anything but triage. Finding good examples of meaningful innovation is hard.
So, I pointed to a quirky example that has caught my attention. The Community Solution Education System consists of six private, previously independent not-for-profit institutions that act as one entity. They share infrastructure and an overarching mission while maintaining their individuality. This approach takes aim at the real obstacles: redundancy, inefficiency, low morale, leadership churn and the isolation that keeps colleges from learning from one another. It smashes the silos.
Shared services for essential stuff—HR, IT, procurement—free up resources for student services. Networks of presidents and provosts who actually talk to one another about practical, scalable solutions. Small, niche-y colleges get the efficiencies of large ones without losing their soul.
Collaboration and radical cooperation, not competition, might be higher ed’s best survival strategy. The Community Solution proves that shared purpose doesn’t have to mean sameness. It’s one of the rare higher ed innovations not about shiny tech or brand reinvention but about rebuilding the scorched environment of the ecosystem itself.
The ground beneath us is shifting faster thanChatGPT could rewrite this essay. One of the speakers at the meeting in New Jersey aptly quoted the boss. Bruce Springsteen sang, “I can’t tell my courage from my desperation.” Yep. As long as it motivates you to get shit done, does it really matter which one it is?
Rachel Toor is a contributing editor at Inside Higher Ed and the co-founder of The Sandbox, a weekly newsletter that allows presidents and chancellors to write anonymously. She is also a professor of creative writing and the author of books on weirdly diverse subjects. Reach her here with questions, comments and complaints compliments.
Numerous higher ed leaders, advocates and politicians weighed in on McMahon’s plan to ship several ED programs to other agencies. Here’s a snapshot of what they said.
McMahon has said the recent government shutdown proved that the Education Department isn’t necessary.
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images | Pete Kiehart for The Washington Post via Getty Images
The Education Department is planning to move TRIO and numerous other higher education programs to the Labor Department as part of a broader effort to dismantle the agency and “streamline its bureaucracy.”
Instead of moving whole offices, the department detailed a plan Tuesday to transfer certain programs and responsibilities to other agencies. All in all, the department signed six agreements with four agencies, relocating a wide swath of programs.
For instance, the Labor Department is set to take over most of ED’s higher education programs, which include grants that support student success, historically Black colleges and universities, and other minority-serving institutions. Meanwhile, the State Department will handle Fulbright-Hays grants as well as those administered by the International and Foreign Language Education office. Indian Education and programs for tribal colleges are moving to the Interior Department.
Several of the offices that have overseen these grant programs were gutted in recent rounds of layoffs, but any staff members who are still managing them will move to the other agencies. ED also has sought to defund some of the grants, deeming them unconstitutional, so it’s not clear what is moving to the other agencies.
The agreements were signed Sept. 30—the day before the government shut down. ED officials expect the transition to take some time.
No programs, however, have been moved from the Office for Civil Rights, the Office of Federal Student Aid or the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services. The department is still “exploring the best plan” for those offices, a senior department official said in a press call Tuesday afternoon.
“These partnerships really mark a major step forward in improving management of select programs and leveraging these partner agencies’ administrative expertise, their experience working with relevant stakeholders and streamlines the bureaucracy that has accumulated here at ED over the decades,” the senior department official said. “We are confident that this will lead to better services for grantees, for schools, for families across the country.”
Education Secretary Linda McMahon hinted at the sweeping announcement in a social media post Tuesday morning. The secretary posted an ominous video of a ticking clock followed by President Ronald Reagan urging Congress to dissolve the Department of Education. The video ended with a flickering screen that read “The Final Mission,” an echo of her first letter to Education Department staff in which she outlined how she would put herself out of a job.
President Donald Trump directed McMahon in March to close down her department “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.”
Liz Huston, a White House spokesperson, applauded the announcement describing it as a “bold, decisive action to return education where it belongs—at the state and local level.”
“The Trump Administration is fully committed to doing what’s best for American students, which is why it’s critical to shrink this bloated federal education bureaucracy while still ensuring efficient delivery of funds and essential programs,” she said in a statement.
These moves are the most significant steps McMahon has taken beyond the layoffs to comply with the president’s directive.
Congress has pressed McMahon multiple times to acknowledge that neither she nor the president can fully shut the department down without lawmakers’ approval. But when addressing these concerns, McMahon has made a point to note that shutting the department and its programs down entirely is different than dismantling bureaucracy and co-managing operations with other cabinet-level departments.
The department official echoed this Tuesday when talking with reporters, saying that policy and statutory oversight of the programs will still rest with employees at the Department of Ed. But execution of processes, particularly as it pertains to grants, will be managed by other agencies.
“Education has broad authority under several statutes to contract with other federal agencies to procure services, and the department has had that authority since its inception,” the official said. “We at the Department of Ed have engaged with other partner agencies over 200 times through [inter-agency agreements] to procure various services of other partner agencies over the years—even the Biden administration did it.”
The department has already moved Career, Technical and Adult Education to the Department of Labor. McMahon has said that effort was essentially a test run to see how other agencies could handle the department’s responsibilities. Democrats in Congress have decried the plan to move CTE to Labor as illegal.
Many of the department’s offices have already experienced dramatic disruptions this year, as McMahon used tworeductions in force to cut the head count of her staff by more than 50 percent. The latest mass layoff, which took place during the government shutdown, has since been enjoined by a federal court. President Trump also agreed to return affected employees to “employment status” administration when he signed a stopgap bill to temporarily end the 43-day shutdown.
But it remains unclear whether those staff members have returned or will ever return to work. Multiple sources told Inside Higher Ed that the language of the bill may allow Trump to leave employees on paid administrative leave until the bill is no longer effective on Jan. 30 and then re-administer the pink slips.
Prior to Tuesday’s announcement, many higher education experts as well as current and former ED employees were hesitant to declare the department dead. Some said as long as the department and its functions remain codified, it will still be alive. But one former staff member put it this way: “If you take the major organs out of a human, do you still have a human or do you have a corpse?”
Amy Laitinen, senior director of the higher education program at New America, a left-leaning think tank, said moving the offices to other federal agencies would not save tax dollars.
“It fractures and weakens oversight of those dollars, it’s duplicative and it’s wasteful,” she said. “How are you tracking student outcomes to ensure taxpayer dollars are well spent when all of the entities responsible are scattered to the wind? For example, separating the agency in charge of financial aid policy (OPE) from the entity responsible for financial aid implementation (FSA) makes no sense.”
The economy is uncertain, but eight in 10 undergraduates somewhat or strongly agree that their college is preparing them with the skills, credentials and experiences they need to succeed in today’s job market. At the same time, most students are stressed about the future. Their biggest stressors vary but include not being to afford life after graduation, not having enough internship or work experience to get a job, and feeling a general pressure to succeed. That’s all according to new data from Inside Higher Ed’s annual Student Voice survey of more than 5,000 two- and four-year students with Generation Lab.
What can colleges do to help? The No. 1 thing Student Voice respondents want their institution to prioritize when it comes to career readiness is help finding and accessing paid internships. No. 2 is building stronger connections with potential employers. Colleges and universities could also help students better understand outcomes for past graduates of their programs: Just 14 percent of students say their college or university makes this kind of information readily available.
Some 5,065 students from 260 two- and four-year institutions, public and private nonprofit, responded to this main annual survey about student success, conducted in August. Explore the data captured by our survey partner Generation Lab here and here. The margin of error is plus or minus one percentage point.
Shawn VanDerziel, president and CEO of the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), said there’s “no doubt that the college experience equips students with a lifelong foundation for the general job market,” so it’s “heartening to hear” they have confidence that their academic programs are setting them up to succeed.
The challenge, however, “often becomes putting that learning and experience into the job market context—translating and articulating the experience that is meaningful to employers,” he added.
Beyond helping students frame what they’ve learned as competencies they can clearly communicate to prospective employers (who are increasingly interested in skills-based hiring), colleges also need to scale experiential learning opportunities. NACE has found that paid internships, in particular, give students a measurable advantage on the job market, and that Gen Z graduates who took part in internships or other experiential learning opportunities had a more favorable view of their college experience than those who didn’t. These graduates also describe their degree as more relevant to their eventual job than peers who didn’t participate in experiential learning.
While paid internships remain the gold standard for experience, student demand for them vastly outstrips supply: According to one 2024 study, for every high-quality internship available, more than three students are seeking one. Other students can’t afford to leave the jobs that fund their educations in order to take a temporary internship, paid or unpaid; still others have caring or other responsibilities that preclude this kind of experience. VanDerziel said all of this is why some institutions are prioritizing more work-based learning opportunities—including those embedded in the classroom.
Many institutions are “working toward giving more of their students access to experiential learning and skill-building activities—providing stipends for unpaid experiential experiences and ensuring that work-study jobs incorporate career-readiness skills, for example,” he said. “There is positive movement.”
One note of caution: Colleges adding these experiences must ensure that they have “concrete skill-building and job-aligned responsibilities in order to maximize the benefits of them for the students,” VanDerziel added.
Here are the career readiness findings from the annual Student Voice survey, in five charts—plus more on the experience gap.
Program outcomes data is unclear to students.
Across institution types and student demographics, a fraction of respondents (12 percent over all) say they know detailed outcomes data for their program of study. A plurality of students say they know some general information. Just 14 percent indicate this information is readily available.
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Students remain lukewarm on career services.
Similar to last year’s survey, students are more likely to describe career services at their institution as welcoming (31 percent) than effective (17 percent), knowledgeable about specific industries and job markets (15 percent), or forward-thinking (9 percent). Career centers across higher education are understaffed, which is part of the reason there’s a push to embed career-readiness initiatives into the curriculum. But those efforts may not be made plain enough, or come across as useful, to students: Just 8 percent of respondents this year indicate that career services are embedded in the curriculum at their institution. Double that, 16 percent, say that career services should be more embedded in the curriculum. Three in 10 indicate they haven’t interacted with career services, about the same as last year’s 30 percent.
Students still want more direct help finding work-based learning opportunities.
Also similar to last year, the top thing students want their institution to prioritize regarding career readiness is help finding and accessing paid internships. That’s followed by stronger connections with potential employers and courses that focus on job-relevant skills. A few differences emerge across the sample, however: Adult learners 25 and older are less likely to prioritize help finding internships (just 26 percent cite this as a top need versus 41 percent of those 18 to 24); their top want is stronger connections with potential employers. Two-year college students are also less likely to prioritize help finding internships than are their four-year peers (30 percent versus 41 percent).
Most students are worried about life after college, but specific stressors vary.
Just 11 percent of students say they’re not stressed about life postgraduation, though this increases to 22 percent for students 25 and older and to 17 percent among community college students. Top stressors vary, but a slight plurality of students (19 percent) are most concerned about affording life after college. Adult learners and community college students are less likely than their respective traditional-age and four-year counterparts to worry about not having enough internship or work experience.
Despite their anxiety, students have an underlying sense of preparation for what’s ahead.
Some 81 percent of all students agree, strongly or somewhat, that college is preparing them with the skills, credentials and experiences they need to succeed in today’s job market. This is relatively consistent across institution types and student groups, but the share decreases to 74 percent among students who have ever seriously considered stopping out of college (n=1,204).
The Widening Experience Gap
Students increasingly need all the help they can get preparing for the workforce. For the first time since 2021, the plurality of employers who contributed to NACE’s annual job outlook rated the hiring market “fair,” versus good or very good, on a five-point scale. Employers are projecting a 1.6 percent increase in hiring for the Class of 2026 when compared to the Class of 2025, comparable to the tight labor market employers reported at the end of the 2024–25 recruiting year, according to NACE.
Economic uncertainty is one factor. Artificial intelligence is another. VanDerziel said there isn’t meaningful evidence to date that early-talent, professional-level jobs are being replaced by AI, and that even adoption of AI as a tool to augment work remains slow. Yet the picture is still emerging. One August study found a 13 percent relative employment decline for young workers in the most AI-exposed occupations, such as software development and customer support. In NACE’s 2026 Job Outlook, employers focused on early-career hiring also reported that 13 percent of available entry-level jobs now require AI skills.
The August study, called “Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence,” frames experience as a differentiator in an AI-impacted job market. In this sense, AI may be widening what’s referred to as the experience gap, or when early-career candidates’ and employers’ expectations don’t align—a kind of catch-22 in which lack of experience can limit one from getting the entry-level job that would afford them such experience.
Ndeye Sarr, a 23-year-old engineering student at Perimeter College at Georgia State University who wants to study civil and environmental engineering at a four-year institution next fall, believes that her studies so far are setting her up for success. Earlier this year, she and several Perimeter peers made up one of just 12 teams in the country invited to the Community College Innovation Challenge Innovation Boot Camp, where they presented RoyaNest, the low-cost medical cooling device they designed to help babies born with birth asphyxia in low-resource areas. The team pitched the project to a panel of industry professionals and won second-place honors. They also recently initiated the patenting process for the device.
Ndeye Sarr
“This has helped me have a bigger vision of all the problems that are happening in the world that I might be able to help with when it comes to medical devices and things like that,” Sarr said, adding that faculty mentorship played a big role in the team’s success. “I think that’s what we’re most grateful for. Perimeter College is a pretty small college, so you get to be in direct contact with most of your mentors, your professors, which is very rare in most settings. We always get the support we need it anytime we’re working on something, which is pretty great.”
RoyaNest was born out of a class assignment requiring students to design something that did not require electricity. Sarr said she wishes most courses would require such hands-on learning, since it makes class content immediately relevant and has already helped put her in touch with the broader world of engineering in meaningful ways. This view echoes another set of findings from the main 2025 Student Voice survey: The top two things students say would boost their immediate academic success are fewer high-stakes exams and more relevant course content. And, of course, there are implications for the experience gap.
Sometimes you can even be in your senior year, and you will be like, ‘I don’t think I have all these skills!’ Even for an entry-level job, right?”
—Student Ndeye Sarr
“Mostly it’s like you go to class, and they will give you a lecture because you have to learn, and then you go do a test,” Sarr said of college so far. “But my thinking is that you can also do those hands-on experiences in the classroom that you might have to do once we start getting into jobs. Because when you look at the job descriptions, they expect you to do a lot of things. Sometimes you can even be in your senior year, and you will be like, ‘I don’t think I have all these skills!’ Even for an entry-level job, right?”
This challenge also has implications for pedagogy, which is already under pressure to evolve—in part due to the rise of generative AI. Student success administrators surveyed earlier this year by Inside Higher Ed with Hanover Research described a gap between the extent to which high-impact teaching practices—such as those endorsed by the American Association of Colleges and Universities—are highly encouraged at their institution and widely adopted (65 percent versus 36 percent, respectively). And while 87 percent of administrators agreed that students graduate from their institution ready to succeed in today’s job market, half (51 percent) said their college or university should focus more on helping students find paid internships and other experiential learning opportunities.
In addition to the national innovation challenge, Sarr attended the Society of Women Engineers’ annual conference this year, where she said the interviewing and other skills she’s learned from Perimeter’s career services proved helpful. Still, Sarr said she—like most Student Voice respondents—worries about life postgraduation. Top concerns for her are financial in nature. She also feels a related pressure to succeed. Originally from Senegal, she said her family and friends back home have high expectations for her.
“You pay a lot of money to go to college, so imagine you graduate and then there’s no way you can find a job. It’s very stressful, and I am from a country where everybody’s like, ‘OK, we expect her to do good,’” Sarr said. But the immediate challenge is paying four-year college expenses starting next year, and financing graduate school after that.
“I want to go as far as I can when it comes to my education. I really value it, so that’s something I am very scared about,” she said. “There’s a lot of possibilities. There are scholarships, but it’s not like everybody can get them.”
VanDerziel of NACE said that, ultimately, “Today’s labor market is tough, and students know it. So it doesn’t surprise me that they are feeling anxiety about obtaining a job that will allow them to afford their postgraduation life. Many students have to pay back loans, are uncertain of the job market they are going to be graduating into and are concerned about whether their salary will be enough.”
This independent editorial project is produced with the Generation Lab and supported by the Gates Foundation.
On his website, antizionist.net, Ramsi Woodcock asks fellow legal scholars to sign a “Petition for Military Action Against Israel.” He says Israel is a colony and war is needed to decolonize, and he calls for the war to continue until “Israel has submitted permanently and unconditionally to the government of Palestine everywhere from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.”
In his lawsuit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky, Woodcock asks a judge to order the university and top officials to restore his normal teaching and other duties, allow him back into the College of Law building, end the university’s investigation of him, and pay monetary damages. But he also asks the judge to order Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “refrain from requiring or using” the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism when enforcing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The IHRA says antisemitism “might include the targeting of the state of Israel,” “comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” or claims “that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.” Earlier this year, Kentucky state lawmakers ordered public universities to use the IHRA definition in their policies combating antisemitism. Woodcock is also asking the judge to declare that that order violates the First Amendment.
His lawsuit alleges the state and federal actions are related to his “suspension,” saying the university’s tolerance of his speech “ended in summer 2025” after the federal government threatenedto withdraw funding from universities and moved to enforce the IHRA definition. He also cited the passage of thestate legislation that “enabled and pressured administrators to suppress speech critical of Israel and Zionism.”
The Education Department didn’t respond to requests for comment Friday. A university spokesperson said Woodcock hasn’t been suspended but was “reassigned pending the outcome of an investigation,” adding that the university will be “limited in our comments while that investigation is ongoing.”
In an email to Inside Higher Ed, Woodcock responded, “Israel is a colonization project that practices apartheid and is currently exterminating two million Palestinians in Gaza. The scandal is not that I am calling for immediate military action to end Israel but that the university is willing to violate our nation’s constitution in order to preserve Israel. Every American scholar has a First Amendment right to oppose Israel and I look forward to holding the university accountable for breaking the law.”
Leaders of faith-based colleges and universities have spoken out on a slew of political issues in recent months, sometimes standing alongside secular universities and at other times differentiating themselves and defending their unique standing and missions.
The Council for Christian Colleges and Universities and the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities signed on to an October statement from the American Council on Education opposing the administration’s higher education compact, for example. Over the summer, CCCU also came out with a statement on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that echoed those of secular associations and institutions, expressing concern that “it ultimately falls short in supporting student access and success.”
ACE’s Commission on Faith-Based Colleges and Universities was among the higher ed groups that lobbied hard against Pell Grant cuts, later dropped from the bill. At the same time, the University of Notre Dame and other faith-based institutions fought for an exemption for religious institutions from the higher education endowment tax, ultimately left out of the legislation’s final version.
Like their secular peers, faith-based colleges and universities have been buffeted by the rapid-fire policy changes roiling higher ed this year. Some leaders of religious colleges say their institutions are enjoying renewed support that they hope sets a precedent for future policymakers across party lines. At the same time, some advocates fear religious colleges—and their missions—are suffering collateral damage in Trump’s war against highly selective universities, and they’re making careful decisions about when and how to speak out.
“I knew change would be coming,” said David Hoag, president of CCCU, “but I never expected the pace to be this fast.”
Raising Concerns
Under any administration, CCCU’s job is to “make it possible for our institutions to achieve their missions,” Hoag said. But some recent policy changes pose an obstacle to that.
Christian colleges—which tend to be small, enrolling about 2,500 students on average—can’t afford to join Trump’s proposed compact for higher ed, he said. He believes some of the compact’s demands, such as freezing tuition for five years, are a tall order with campus expenses on the rise. He also opposes the compact’s standardized test mandate when so many Christian colleges offer broad access, and he’s concerned by the possibility that government could have some control over curriculum, though he said the compact was unclear on that score.
“On the curriculum side, most of our institutions are conservative. We have a solid Christian mission,” Hoag said. “I’m fine with civics being a part of some of the work that we do, but it, to me, starts to … step over academic freedom.”
Christian colleges are also balking at the new $100,000 fee for H-1B visas, which these institutions use to bring in visiting professors from other countries.
“Our institutions can’t afford anything like that,” Hoag said. Such a fee might be more easily affordable for tech or other industries that use H-1B visas to hire foreign employees, he said, “but for nonprofit colleges and Christian colleges, that’s a big financial burden.”
He’s also alarmed by some of the provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, including the requirement that programs prove students will earn more than high school graduates in order to access federal loans. Hoag worries that won’t bode well for institutions where a significant portion of students go into ministry, social work or other public service jobs that don’t necessarily pay high wages. He said the end of the Grad PLUS program is also poised to hurt Christian colleges; graduate students borrowed about $460 million annually to attend CCCU institutions, he said. Now he expects many will struggle to pay. Caps on loans for professional school students are also going to affect those earning master’s degrees in divinity.
Donna Carroll, president of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities, said Catholic institutions are hardly “immune” to the challenges rocking the rest of higher ed. She said her nonpartisan organization has decided to speak up on a particular set of policy issues, including financial aid and supports for low-income students, autonomy for faith-based institutions, and immigration policy and access for international students. For example, the association signed on to a statement by U.S. bishops condemning “indiscriminate mass deportation” as an “affront to God-given human dignity.”
“There are some issues and situations where there is consensus and a unity across Catholic institutions,” Carroll said. “There are other situations where different institutions have different perspectives.”
In a similar vein, Clark G. Gilbert, commissioner of the church educational system for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and chair of the Commission on Faith-Based Colleges and Universities, said members of his coalition had mixed views on parts of the bill involving federal loans—he’d like to see colleges drop their prices—but they collectively pushed hard against proposed cuts to Pell Grants, which didn’t make it into the legislation.
“We’re concerned about first-generation and low-income students. That’s not a partisan issue,” Gilbert said.
‘Not Like Some of These Ivies’
A mounting frustration for some faith-based institution leaders is the blowback their campuses face from Trump administration policies targeting expensive, highly selective private universities, even though they view their missions as distinct.
Hoag pointed out that, while some Christian colleges are pricier, the average tuition costs about $30,600 per year, not including room and board, and the average tuition discount rate is about 52 percent.
“Christian schools are very affordable, and we’re not like some of these Ivies that have tuition from $80,000 to $100,000 a year,” Hoag said. Yet “I do feel that they’re … putting everybody in the same category.”
Some faith-based institutions, led by the University of Notre Dame, sought to distinguish themselves from other higher ed institutions when they pushed for a religious exemption from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s endowment tax.
Gilbert said Brigham Young University joined that effort because university leaders viewed the situation as a religious freedom issue.
“We feel like there are public goods of faith-based schools that are often ignored,” such as research from faith-based perspectives, he said. “Without the internal funding at these schools, it wouldn’t happen. We feel like there is a religious liberty issue at stake there.”
“I’m sure secular schools would feel their unique missions need that protection, too—that’s not my job to write and defend that,” he added.
Gilbert said he feels a particular need to advocate on behalf of religious colleges, compared to higher ed as a whole, because he believes faith-based institutions are too often maligned. He said such institutions are doing research on topics ignored by their secular counterparts—like how family structures affect intergenerational poverty or how faith and religious community resources affect health outcomes—but these projects struggle to get federal funding or recognition from secular peers. He also stressed that these institutions provide a campus climate religious students can’t find elsewhere.
“Many Jewish students do not feel safe at Columbia and at Harvard and at UCLA. Many LDS students do not feel welcome in certain programs,” he said. “Faith-based schools do feel like they need to preserve their rights.” He emphasized that doesn’t mean he wants to see any university lose out on cancer research funding, for example, but “faith-based scholars are doing things that no one else is doing, and why isn’t that getting the attention, the funding and the support, regardless of who the administration is?”
Despite their policy disagreements, some leaders of faith-based institutions believe the Trump administration is offering them a warmer reception than they’ve perhaps received in the past. The president issued an executive order in February founding a task force on eradicating “anti-Christian bias” within government. In May, Trump’s Education Department also rescinded a $37.7 million fine levied by the Biden administration on Grand Canyon University, a private Christian institution, for allegedly misleading doctoral students about its cost. And the Trump administration recently partnered with Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian campus in Michigan, on a series of videos for the country’s 250th anniversary. The president of Yeshiva University, Rabbi Ari Berman, gave the benediction at Trump’s inauguration.
Amid renewed outreach to faith-based institutions under Trump, Gilbert said he’s trying to walk a fine line, advocating for more attention and resources for faith-based institutions’ research but doing so in a way that remains apolitical.
“We don’t care about party politics. We care about the American family. We care about alleviating poverty,” he said. “We’re going to continue to help shine a light on the contributions these schools make in the current climate, but not so overboard that when things may change, and they will, that we can’t make the same arguments using the same principles with a different administration.”
