Tag: Events

Cornell Settles With the Trump Administration

Cornell University has reached a deal with the Trump administration to pay the government a $30 million settlement—and invest another $30 million in agricultural research—in exchange for having its frozen federal research funding restored.

The agreement, announced Friday, makes Cornell the latest institution to strike a deal with the federal government in an effort to settle investigations into alleged civil rights violations. The settlement follows similar arrangements at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Brown University and the University of Virginia. Concessions varied by university, with Columbia making the biggest payout at $221 million.

Collectively, those institutions were targeted for a range of alleged violations, including allowing transgender athletes to compete on women’s sports teams, failing to police campus antisemitism amid pro-Palestinian protests and operating supposedly illegal diversity, equity and inclusion practices as the Trump administration cracked down on DEI initiatives.

Now the university will see roughly $250 million in frozen federal research funding immediately restored. The federal government will also close ongoing civil rights investigations into Cornell.

While some institutions, including Columbia, have given tremendous deference to the federal government and agreed to sweeping changes across admissions, hiring and academic programs, the deal at Cornell appears to be relatively constrained, despite the $30 million payout.

Under the agreement, Cornell must share anonymized admissions data broken down by race, GPA and standardized test scores with the federal government through 2028; conduct annual campus climate surveys; and ensure compliance with various federal laws. Cornell also agreed to share as a training resource with faculty and staff a July memo from U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi barring the use of race in hiring, admissions practices and scholarship programs. And in addition to paying the federal government $30 million over three years, Cornell will invest $30 million “in research programs that will directly benefit U.S. farmers through lower costs of production and enhanced efficiency, including but not limited to programs that incorporate [artificial intelligence] and robotics,” according to a copy of the agreement.

Cornell leaders cast the deal as a positive for the university.

“I am pleased that our good faith discussions with the White House, Department of Justice, and Department of Education have concluded with an agreement that acknowledges the government’s commitment to enforce existing anti-discrimination law, while protecting our academic freedom and institutional independence,” Cornell president Michael Kotlikoff said in a statement shared with Inside Higher Ed. “These discussions have now yielded a result that will enable us to return to our teaching and research in restored partnership with federal agencies.”

Education Secretary Linda McMahon also celebrated the deal in a post on X.

“The Trump Administration has secured another transformative commitment from an Ivy League institution to end divisive DEI policies. Thanks to this deal with Cornell and the ongoing work of DOJ, HHS, and the team at ED, U.S. universities are refocusing their attention on merit, rigor, and truth-seeking—not ideology. These reforms are a huge win in the fight to restore excellence to American higher education and make our schools the greatest in the world,” she wrote.

Some outside observers, however, excoriated the settlement as capitulation to authoritarianism.

“The Trump administration’s corrupt extortion of higher ed institutions must end. Americans want an education system that serves the public good, not a dangerously narrow far right ideology that serves billionaires,” American Association of University Professors President Todd Wolfson said in a statement, which also urged colleges to fight intrusion by the federal government.

This is a breaking news story and will be updated.

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November 7, 2025
Congress Accuses GMU President of Lying About DEI Efforts

House Republicans have accused George Mason University President Gregory Washington of lying to Congress about diversity practices at his institution, ratcheting up pressure on the president to step down.

The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee alleged in a report released Thursday night that Washington made “multiple false statements to Congress” in testimony about diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at GMU. The public university has been under fire for months over allegedly illegal DEI practices as the Trump administration has sought to crack down on such initiatives, claiming they are discriminatory and violate federal civil rights law. The Judiciary Committee report also alleged that the university “likely violated federal civil rights law by discriminating based on race in its hiring practices to advance Dr. Washington’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiative.”

Washington has denied breaking the law through efforts to diversify GMU’s faculty and staff, telling Congress that the university did not practice illegal discrimination under his leadership.

The report is the latest salvo from Republicans who have launched federal investigations into GMU over its hiring policies, including demands that the embattled president apologize for allegedly discriminatory practices, which he has refused to do as he denies any wrongdoing.

What’s in the Report

The House Judiciary Committee’s report zoomed in on an effort by GMU, launched shortly after Washington took office in July 2020, to diversify employee ranks. The Anti-Racism and Inclusive Excellence initiative the president introduced aimed to make faculty and staff “mirror student Demographics” at GMU, which is among the most diverse institutions in the country. As part of that effort, GMU tasked schools and departments with hiring more underrepresented individuals.

But in Congressional testimony, Washington denied the initiative was a strict mandate.

“These are overall goals and they’re aspirational in focus,” Washington said, according to a transcript of his Sept. 17 interview released by the House Judiciary Committee Thursday.

Though the Anti-Racism and Inclusive Excellence initiative stemmed from his office, Washington told Congress that faculty in each department developed plans for their unit. He also cast the creation of such plans as optional, telling Congress “if units did not want to develop a plan, they did not have to.”

But the House Judiciary Committee claimed Washington lied about that.

“Documents and testimony obtained by the Committee … show that Dr. Washington and his deputies actively sought to punish schools that did not comply with his racial discrimination mandates,” the committee report states. “A senior GMU official told the Committee that GMU financially punished any school that resisted Dr. Washington’s unconstitutional initiative.”

Congress pointed to testimony from Ken Randall, the dean of George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, as evidence that Washington lied about the plan being optional.

“You’d get fired if you didn’t have a plan,” Randall said, according to an interview transcript.

Washington also denied the administration formally reviewed plans to diversify faculty hiring. Republicans accused him of lying about that, too, pointing to internal remarks from then-vice president of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Sharnnia Artis (who now has a different title), in which she said the DEI team “consistently reviewed, monitored, and supported” such plans.

“Again, the evidence contradicts Dr. Washington’s testimony,” the report states.

However, Douglas Gansler, a lawyer representing the GMU president sharply disrupted claims that his client lied to Congress, which he accused of carrying out a “political lynching” in an emailed statement to Inside Higher Ed.

“The political theater of the politicians accusing Dr. Washington of misrepresenting anything to them is unadulterated nonsense. Dr. Washington has never discriminated against anybody for any reason and did not utter one syllable of anything not verifiably completely true,” Gansler wrote.

What Happens Next

The GMU Board of Visitors has said little in the immediate aftermath of the report.

“Today, the Board of Visitors received an interim staff report from the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary. We are reviewing the report and consulting with University counsel and counsel for Dr. Washington,” board members wrote in a brief statement. “The Board remains focused on serving our students, faculty and the Commonwealth, ensuring full compliance with federal law and positioning GMU for continued excellence.”

While the board is reviewing the report, it appears unlikely members would be able to take action against Washington. GMU’s board, which is stocked with GOP donors and political figures appointed by Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin, is currently without a quorum after Virginia Democrats blocked multiple appointments in recent months. Now a legal battle over those blocked appointments is slowly winding its way through the judicial system. While the Virginia Supreme Court heard arguments in the case last month, it has yet to issue a ruling on the matter. In the meantime, with only six of its 16 seats filled, GMU’s board is hobbled.

Youngkin’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Inside Higher Ed.

The George Mason chapter of the American Association of University Professors offered a fiery defense of Washington, arguing in a statement the committee was carrying out a politically motivated attack designed to erode institutional autonomy and impose partisan control over the public university.

“The Committee’s unfounded accusations, dependence on clearly compromised sources, and selective presentation of ‘evidence’ represent an unprecedented abuse of congressional power—designed not to find the truth, but to silence leadership that refuses to yield to political pressure,” the GMU-AAUP chapter wrote in an emailed statement to Inside Higher Ed.

GMU students, employees and community members rallied in support of president Gregory Washington earlier this year, amid concerns the board would fire him.

With Washington under pressure from Congress, state and national Democrats have rallied to his defense, accusing the GOP of waging an ideological war on universities and hypocrisy by focusing on the GMU president’s alleged dishonesty while federal officials brazenly lie in court.

“In Donald Trump’s Gangster State, they pick the target first and figure out the charges later,” House Judiciary Democrats wrote on X. “Today’s target: GMU President Gregory Washington. The Trump Education Department failed to find evidence of employment discrimination at GMU. So [House Judiciary committee] Chairman [Jim] Jordan opened his own investigation. When that one only confirmed Dr. Washington followed Virginia law, Jordan pivoted and conjured up an absurd and convoluted criminal referral based on an alleged lie that takes 8 pages to explain.”

Representative James Walkinshaw—a Democrat in Virginia’s 11th district, which includes GMU—called Washington “an exemplary leader” in a biting statement posted on Bluesky.

“Make no mistake, this is an attack on free speech and academic freedom,” Walkinshaw wrote. “It’s cancel culture at its worst and the American people are tired of right-wing snowflakes like Jim Jordan trying to silence anyone who doesn’t bend the knee to their bizarre MAGA ideology.”

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November 7, 2025
Billions of Aid Dollars Go to High-Income Students

A new report from the Century Foundation found that state and institutional grant aid too often flows to higher-income students who don’t need it, while low-income students continue to struggle with unmet need.

The analysis, released Thursday, shows that more than half of students from the top income quartile, 56 percent, receive grants that surpass their financial need, compared to a mere 0.2 percent of students from the bottom income quartile. That means that top income quartile students were 280 times more likely to receive grants that exceeded their level of need than their lowest income peers. The share of white students that receive grants beyond their needs (19 percent) far exceeds the share of Black of Hispanic students who receive such grants (5 percent).

Part of the issue is that the share of state grants that are merit-based jumped 17 percentage points between 1982 and now, according to the report. Over all, about 10 percent of grant aid—at least $10 billion annually in state and institutional aid—exceeds students’ financial need.

The analysis also found that state grants disproportionately go to students at highly selective public colleges versus students at open-admission public four-year institutions—$3,693 and $842 on average, respectively. And at four-year public colleges over all, students with an Expected Family Contribution of zero were less likely than students with higher EFCs to receive aid from their institution.

“What people think about as a pillar of the financial aid system in higher education has become a windfall for wealthy students that leaves working families paying the bill for tuition increases,” Peter Granville, the report’s author and a fellow at the Century Foundation, said in a news release.

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November 7, 2025
The Rise of the Campus Right, Plus What Are Adjuncts For?

It’s been a minute since I’ve done a Friday Fragments piece, but now that I’m publishing on Fridays, it seems a shame not to dust it off. So, here goes.

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As a political theorist who works in higher ed administration, I’m embarrassed to admit that it took me until last month to get around to Lauren Lassabe Shepherd’s excellent book Resistance from the Right. In a way, though, the delay helped.

Lassabe Shepherd outlines the rise of right-wing organizations on college campuses in the U.S. in the 1960s. That’s an unusual choice in its own right; most accounts of the 60s focus on the New Left, and most accounts of the rise of the right don’t focus on higher ed.

Hearing it now—I listened to it as an audiobook while driving, so I don’t have quotes at the ready—I was struck by several threads. The first was just how thoroughly intentional more established conservative figures were in seeding campus organizations. Students with conservative leanings were funded, groomed, trained and recruited with an efficiency that the leaderless New Left simply didn’t have. Prominent conservatives funded campus newspapers and radio stations that gave up-and-coming young conservatives platforms that their left or liberal counterparts couldn’t rival. The right was playing the long game, and it paid off.

As a theorist, too, I appreciated Lassabe Shepherd’s attention to the persistent tensions between the “traditionalist” and libertarian streaks within the right. In the context of a military draft, for instance, the two camps disagreed so fundamentally that organizations like Young Americans for Freedom had schisms, effectively banning one side (in their case, the libertarians) from the group entirely.

The most striking resonance, though, came from listening in 2025, as opposed to when it was published in 2023. The book offers a series of accounts of right-wing groups attacking college presidents and/or trustees for being insufficiently harsh on left-wing student protesters. In the wake of the Gaza protests of the last couple of years, the observation “hit different,” as the young say. And even in the moments when conservative organizations weren’t calling for vengeance, they were actively trying to narrow down colleges’ missions to vocational preparation, preferably with students bearing most of the cost. The idea was to use economic power to enforce political discipline. Lewis Powell himself—later to join the Supreme Court—made the connection explicit. It was a conscious strategy.

It’s one thing to suspect as much. It’s another to get empirical confirmation.

Lassabe Shepherd also hosts a terrific podcast, American Campus, that has quickly become a favorite. But I really can’t recommend her book highly enough.

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Thanks to the readers who wrote in with responses to the piece about hiring late-career professionals in technical fields as adjuncts as part of a glide path to retirement. Several readers noted that this was, in fact, the original vision of “adjunct” faculty: people with industry expertise who could offer a real-world complement to theory. Over time, the economic appeal of adjuncts to institutions led to expanding the category far beyond what it was intended to cover.

There’s truth in that. In a job interview once, a professor asked me what my ideal adjunct percentage was. I replied something like “lower than it usually is now, but not zero.” The role can make sense in some cases. For example, when I was at the County College of Morris, it had a large and well-respected music program. (That’s still true.) Music majors had to have a primary instrument and a secondary one, one of which had to be piano. We could never realistically have a full-time professor for every major instrument. But being close-ish to New York City, we could draw on professional musicians as adjuncts. Given that most professional gigs are at night, daytime sections of lessons were fairly easy to staff. In that specific case, the model worked well. And I’ve seen it work with, say, working attorneys hired to teach a business law class on the side. In those cases, the appeal wasn’t simply cheap labor.

A few other readers pointed out the need to provide serious pedagogical training for anyone picking up teaching as a late-career shift. (One reader made a distinction between the soon-to-retire and the retired; given the speed of technological change in many fields, folks who’ve been retired for a while may not be up-to-speed in the field anymore.) That’s obviously true, and something that we should be doing anyway. Many community colleges have variations on “centers for teaching and learning” that provide some of that, and some have formal mentoring programs as well. That said, I’ve also worked as an adjunct in places where the formal training consisted of showing me where to pick up my mail and where to get copies made. I hope things are better now, but I suspect the improvements are uneven across the industry.

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Thanks, too, to the folks who wrote in about dual enrollment and its economic impact on community colleges. I was especially struck by a note from a college president I know who mentioned that she’s in the midst of a reduction in force caused by the economic consequences of dual enrollment. That’s rough. Honestly, I would rather have been wrong.

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Some parents bond with their adult children over celebrity gossip, sports fandom or recipes. We do that too, but with a distinctly academic variation.

The Girl and I recently spent a lovely hour or so rehashing and relishing the midcentury literary tiff between Irving Howe and Ralph Ellison.

I’ll take it.

Even better, she has her own distinct perspective on it, which she can back up with citations.

As an academic Dad, I couldn’t be prouder.

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November 7, 2025
Talladega College Sells Off Murals

Talladega College, a historically Black college in Alabama, is selling murals by artist Hale Woodruff to shore up its finances and keep the art publicly accessible.

The Toledo Museum of Art bought one mural, and three others were jointly acquired by the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Art Bridges Foundation. Two murals that depict the founding of the college and its library will remain on campus, under the college’s ownership. The murals will be reunited at Talladega, likely every six to eight years, and their connection to the college will be highlighted in future exhibitions, The New York Times reported. Art experts estimate the sales are worth about $20 million, a boon for an institution with a $5 million endowment that’s faced recent financial crises, struggling to make payroll in spring 2024.

The goal of these new arrangements is “to ensure a vibrant future for Talladega by creating a meaningful financial opportunity that better prepares our students for an evolving world,” Rica Lewis-Payton, chair of Talladega’s Board of Trustees, said in a news release from the college. Officials also hope to “expand the profile of Alabama’s first private Historically Black College” and “increase the visibility of Hale A. Woodruff’s extraordinary paintings.”

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November 7, 2025
U.K. University Apologizes to U.S. Scholar Over Publication Ban

Sheffield Hallam University has apologized to a professor whose research into alleged human rights abuses was blocked from publication after political pressure from the Chinese security services.

In late 2024, a study by Laura Murphy, an American professor of human rights and contemporary slavery at Sheffield Hallam, into forced labor practices Uyghur Muslims allegedly face was refused publication by her institution after a campaign of harassment and intimidation from Beijing, T h e G uardian and BBC News reported.

Sheffield Hallam staff working in offices in mainland China faced visits from intelligence officials over the research, while access to the university’s websites was blocked for more than two years, hampering student recruitment, officials say.

In an internal email from July 2024 obtained by Murphy using a subject access request, university officials said “attempting to retain the business in China and publication of the research are now untenable bedfellows.”

After taking a career break to work for the U.S. government, Murphy returned to Sheffield Hallam in early 2025 and says she was told by administrators that the university was no longer permitting any research on forced labor or on China, prompting her to start legal action.

Her solicitor, Claire Powell, of the firm Leigh Day, said that Murphy’s “academic freedom has been repeatedly and unlawfully restricted over the past two years.”

“The documents uncovered paint an extremely concerning picture of a university responding to threats from a foreign state security service by trading the academic freedom of its staff for its own commercial interests,” Powell added.

Murphy, who claimed her university failed to protect her academic freedom, has now received an apology and the institution has told her it “wish[ed] to make clear our commitment to supporting her research and to securing and promoting freedom of speech and academic freedom within the law.”

“The university’s decision to not continue with Professor Laura Murphy’s research was taken based on our understanding of a complex set of circumstances at the time, including being unable to secure the necessary professional indemnity insurance,” a spokesperson for the university added.

These circumstances relate to a defamation case brought by a Hong Kong garment maker which initiated a libel case against Sheffield Hallam after its name was included in a report into forced labor published in December 2023. A preliminary rule at the High Court in London found the report had been “defamatory.”

The apology comes months after new free speech laws came into effect in England in August, with the Office for Students’ free speech champion Arif Ahmed warning the regulator would take action if universities bowed to pressure from foreign governments regarding contentious areas of research.

A U.K. government spokesperson said, “Any attempt by a foreign state to intimidate, harass or harm individuals in the U.K. will not be tolerated, and the government has made this clear to Beijing after learning of this case.

“The government has robust measures in place to prevent this activity, including updated powers and offenses through the National Security Act.”

The Chinese Embassy in London told the BBC that the university had “released multiple fake reports on Xinjiang that are seriously flawed.”

“It has been revealed that some authors of these reports received funding from certain U.S. agencies,” the embassy added.

Murphy told the BBC she has received funding over the course of her career from multiple U.S. research agencies, including the U.S. National Endowment for Humanities for work on slave narratives, the U.S. Department of Justice for work on human trafficking in New Orleans, and more recently from USAID and the U.S. State Department for her work on China.

The Chinese Embassy said the allegations of “forced labor” in her reports “cannot withstand basic fact-check.”

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November 7, 2025
Report: Sticker Prices Inch Up
Full-time students at community colleges have been receiving enough grant aid to cover their tuition and fees since fall 2009.

Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Rawpixel
College sticker prices rose slightly across all sectors for the 2025–26 academic year, according to the College Board’s Trends in College Pricing and Student Aid report, released Wednesday.

For the 2025–26 academic year, the average published price for tuition and fees at public four-year institutions for in-state students is $11,950, a 2.9 percent increase before inflation over 2024–25 prices. For out-of-state students, public four-year institutions are charging an average of $31,880, up 3.4 percent from 2024–25. Public two-year colleges charge in-district students an average of $4,150, up 2.7 percent from the previous year—though notably, full-time students at community colleges have been receiving enough grant aid to cover their tuition and fees since the 2009–10 academic year. The average published price at private four-year colleges is $45,000, up 4 percent from 2024–25.

Inflation-adjusted prices at public institutions have been on the decline for a while. Between the 2015–16 and 2025–26 academic years, the average inflation-adjusted tuition and fees at public four-year colleges fell 7 percent, and at public two-year institutions, the average fell 10 percent. At private nonprofit four-year colleges, average inflation-adjusted tuition and fees rose by 2 percent during the same ten-year timeframe.

Net prices are also down as average student aid packages rise. The average net tuition and fees paid by first-time, full-time students at private nonprofit four-year institutions declined from $19,810 (in 2025 dollars) in 2006–07 to $16,910 in 2025–26. At public four-year institutions, the average net price fell from a high of $4,450 in the 2012–13 academic year to $2,300 for the 2025–26 academic year.

When the maximum Pell grant award increased from $6,895 in 2022–23 to $7,395 in 2023–24, so too did the number of Pell Grant recipients. Between 2022–23 and 2024–25, the total number of Pell Grant recipients increased by 22 percent to 7.3 million, and total Pell Grant expenditures increased by 32 percent to $38.6 billion after adjusting for inflation.

Other notable findings include:
- Total annual student and parent borrowing is up slightly in 2024–25, to $102.6 billion, following a 38 percent decline between 2010–11 ($163.9 billion) and 2023–24 ($101.4 billion).
- Institutional grant aid for undergraduates increased by 22 percent between the 2014–15 and 2024–25 academic years.
- As of June 2025, 32 percent of borrowers owed less than $10,000 in federal loan debt. Another 21 percent of borrowers owed between $10,000 and $20,000 in federal loan debt. These groups held 4 percent and 8 percent of the total outstanding federal loan debt, respectively.
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November 7, 2025
Florida DOGE Finds Disproportionate Spending at New College

New College spent $83,207 per student in fiscal year 2024, the highest among state universities.

Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Thomas Simonetti/The Washington Post/Getty Images

Nearly three years into a conservative overhaul of New College of Florida, costs are adding up as the operating expenses per student dramatically outpace other State University System of Florida members.

Data presented at Thursday’s Florida Board of Governors offers the clearest breakdown so far of what New College is spending per student compared to 11 other system members. NCF spent $83,207 per student in fiscal year 2024, the highest among state universities.

The University of Florida, a major research institution, was the next highest at $45,765 per student, while the lowest was the University of Central Florida at $12,172 per student, according to data compiled by the Florida Department of Government Efficiency.

New College and UF also had the highest number of administrators per 100 students. New College had 33.3 administrators per 100 students while UF had 26.9. Others in the system ranged from a low of 4.6 administrators per student at UCF to 12.6 at the University of South Florida.

Silence on Spending

Now, despite support from Republican governor Ron DeSantis—who appointed a slate of conservative trustees in early 2023 and tasked them with reimagining the small liberal arts college—NCF is facing growing scrutiny over soaring operating expenses from alumni and other community members. But the Florida Board of Governors, which is appointed by DeSantis, had little to say when presented with the numbers at Thursday’s meeting.

Eric Silagy, who has been the board member most critical of NCF’s spending and has previously pressed college leadership on the matter, was the only one to offer remarks about the disparity. In limited comments, Silagy thanked Ben Watkins, director of the Florida Division of Bond Finance, for the presentation, which he said made university spending clear.

Now, Silagy said, “there can be no question anymore about what the numbers really are.” He added that Florida’s DOGE data will allow the Board of Governors to “address outliers where it’s not working” and determine how to reach “better outcomes for the students and the taxpayers.”

Silagy had clashed with NCF President Richard Corcoran, a former Republican lawmaker, on how much New College spends per student in past meetings. Silagy had estimated NCF spent $91,000 per student, while Corcoran initially said the number was closer to $68,000 per head. Corcoran later backtracked, agreeing the figure was between $88,000 and $91,000 per student.

That spending has ticked up even as critics in the community and state legislature are growing, and as the college saw its place in U.S. News & World Report rankings fall nearly 60 spots since the takeover. The rankings are highly valued by Florida lawmakers and system officials.

Asked about DOGE’s findings, a New College spokesperson said issues preceded current leadership.

“Thanks to Governor DeSantis and the Florida Legislature making a bold move to appoint new leadership with clear goals, the impact of New College’s revitalization is already visible with enrollment surpassing 900 students for the first time in history,” New College spokesperson James Miller wrote in an emailed statement to Inside Higher Ed. “As enrollment growth continues to skyrocket, cost-per-student and cost-per-graduate metrics will be one of the lowest of all top liberal arts schools in the country.”

Other Meeting Notes

Thursday’s board meeting also included an update from UCF President Alexander Cartwright, who told FLBOG members that the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) had approved the university for initial accreditation, amid an effort to switch accreditors that had been underway since 2023.

UCF, like other state institutions, sought to switch from Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges to another accreditor, following a change to state law in 2022 that mandated the switch after state officials clashed with the organization over various issues.

Cartwright said he received the news from HLC just hours earlier during the meeting.

State University System of Florida Chancellor Ray Rodrigues credited Cartwright for his work on the effort and criticized the Biden administration for allegedly slow-walking the process.

Rodrigues argued that the Biden administration “did not want to see reform in the area of accreditation” and “put up barriers and obstacles to states like Florida and universities like UCF” who were seeking to change accreditors while following Department of Education guidelines.

The Florida Board of Governors also approved a policy change that will now require professors at all state universities to publicly post course materials. The policy will require “universities to post current syllabi for all courses and course sections offered for the upcoming term” at least 45 days before the first day of class. Those materials will then remain online for at least five years.

That policy change, which has been the subject of recent media coverage highlighting faculty concerns about being targeted for course content, was passed as part of the consent agenda with no public discussion. No faculty members spoke about the policy change during the public comment portion of the meeting despite concerns expressed by professors in recent coverage.

The board did not take action or discuss a directive from DeSantis late last month to “pull the plug” on hiring workers on H-1B visas at state universities amid concerns that such hires are taking jobs that could otherwise be filled by Floridians. (However, critics have noted such jobs are often highly specialized and hard to fill.) The board plans to consider that directive in January.

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November 7, 2025
Congress Tackles College Cost Transparency

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-LA, advocated for his own legislation, the College Transparency Act, as potential solution to the issue.

Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty Images

After passing a sweeping higher ed overhaul in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Congress now has its sights set on reforming college cost transparency. In a hearing Thursday, members of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions questioned experts on how to make college pricing—and how costs compare to student outcomes—more understandable to families.

“You don’t buy a car without comparing prices, quality and finance options. The same is true for buying a home. Why can we not do this for higher ed?” asked Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican who chairs the committee and recently issued a request for information about the cost of higher education.

The hearing follows a House hearing in September on the same topic—and including one repeat witness, Justin Draeger, senior vice president of affordability for Strada Education Foundation.

Cost transparency has long been a pain point for both students and institutions, who have attempted to clarify via marketing campaigns, improved price calculator tools and tuition resets that their costs of attendance are often lower than their sticker price would indicate. Students, meanwhile, struggle to find reliable information about the costs of their prospective institutions, leaving them without the financial information they need to decide what institution to attend.

Now, Congressional Republicans are taking notice—and are tying efforts to improve affordability and cost transparency in with their existing focus on the return on investment for students and taxpayers.

At Thursday’s hearing, lawmakers and witnesses alike stressed how little information is available to students about the price of college, with research showing that most students overestimate the price of a public college education. Witnesses also brought up parents’ and families’ confusion about aid offer letters, which the Government Accountability Office has found often understate or fail to include the net price students will actually be paying.

Cassidy stressed the need for transparency as it relates to outcomes and return on investment. Students should be able to compare graduation rates and projected incomes of earning a degree at two different institutions, he said, to give families an accurate picture of what they’re paying for when they pay tuition.

The two Democratic witnesses, meanwhile, argued that college cost transparency is ineffective without also focusing on college affordability—something that is being worsened not only by increasing tuition costs but also by the larger cost-of-living crisis. Nontuition costs, said Mark Huelsman, Director of Policy and Advocacy at The Hope Center for Student Basic Needs, make up the bulk of the cost of attendance. He added that if student aren’t able to afford food or housing, that can severely impact their ability to succeed in college.

“I urge this committee not just to find ways to increase clarity, but to do everything in its power to lower the price that students pay,” he said.

Bipartisan Solutions?

Legislators pointed toward several potential legislative solutions that they said had support on both sides of the aisle. That list included Cassidy’s College Transparency Act, a bill that would provide more detailed information on costs, academic outcomes and career outcomes of specific programs and majors. Cassidy has championed the bill for years, alongside Sen. Elizabeth Warren, CTA’s other lead author, but Rep. Virginia Foxx opposed the measure when she led the House education committee. Foxx, who ultimately proposed her own effort to track students’ outcomes, resisted CTA due to privacy concerns. Cassidy noted during the hearing that the bill includes strict data security standards.

Meanwhile, Sen. Jon Husted, an Ohio Republican, also touted his bill with fellow Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama—the Debt, Earnings, and Cost Information Disclosure for Education Act—which would make changes to the Department of Education’s College Scorecard. It would require the resource to include information on average loan amounts in a given academic program, as well as default rates, how long it takes graduates to pay off their loans and how that debt compares to their earnings.

That information would help prospective students “know exactly what they’re getting themselves into before they make a decision to make a huge, huge investment,” Husted said.

Witnesses enumerated their own cost transparency wish lists.

Draeger said, among other things, that the federal government should regulate financial aid offers to use straightforward and standardized language. Huelsman, on the other hand, argued that the “simplest way, and the most powerful way” to make college costs transparent is to make college tuition- or debt-free. He also said that the Trump administration appears to be working against, not toward, cost transparency in higher ed.

“Many of the bipartisan reforms being discussed today require staffing capacity at the Department of Education that frankly, at this moment, do not exist, including at the Institute for Education Sciences,” he said. “Meanwhile, the Trump administration has worked to dismantle the CFPB, which provides oversight and essential information to borrowers, and conducts essential research on the student loan market. Sadly, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act takes us in the wrong direction on both affordability and transparency.”

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November 7, 2025
Higher Ed Feels “Cumulative Exhaustion” of Longest Shutdown

As the current government shutdown claims the mantle of longest in American history, uncertainty is ratcheting up for faculty, students and their institutions trying to budget for the weeks, months and years ahead.

Five weeks in, the federal government’s closure has disrupted nearly all aspects of campus life, including research, basic needs support and military-affiliated students’ access to tuition assistance.

On Monday, North Carolina State University joined a growing list of institutions that have limited spending and faced research disruptions as a result of the government’s inaction. The university said the ongoing shutdown has delayed payment for federally funded research activities worth more than $25 million per month, according to an internal memo reviewed by Inside Higher Ed.

“To ensure the long-term continuity of our research, we must take steps to preserve the university’s available resources that support our vital research projects,” administrators wrote in the memo to deans, directors and department heads. “Effective immediately, we are directing all colleges and units to limit all non-payroll expenses on federal contract, grant or other award mechanisms.”

While federal payments remain suspended, federally funded researchers at NC State won’t be able to spend money on new hires, nonessential travel, consulting services, and supplies and materials among other things.

Meanwhile, it’s still not clear when the government might reopen.

Health Care in Question

On Tuesday, Senate Republicans and Democrats failed for the 14th time in 36 days to negotiate an end to the shutdown. Those negotiations have centered on Democrats’ demands—and Republicans’ refusal—to extend enhanced tax credits for health insurance premiums through the Affordable Care Act, which are set to expire at the end of the year.

Without those subsidies, the cost of health insurance is expected to increase for millions of Americans, including thousands of adjunct professors who don’t qualify for health insurance through their institutions and have only a small margin of discretionary income.

“In this stalemate, there are no options I have to meaningfully plan for what the next month-and-a-half looks like going into the new year. There’s just no way to get ahead,” said Thomas Moomjy, a lecturer in American Studies at Rutgers University at New Brunswick who buys health insurance through New Jersey’s health care exchange. “I also have to account for the fact that the cost of everything else—electricity, car insurance—is going up, too.”

But the results of Tuesday’s elections, which saw wins for Democrats in numerous state and local races, may further complicate the path toward reopening the government.

President Donald Trump blamed Republican losses on the shutdown, emboldening Democrats to double down on their fight to extend the health insurance subsidies. “Donald Trump clearly is feeling pressure to bring this shutdown to an end,” Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer said on the Senate floor Thursday. “Well, I have good news for the president: Meet with Democrats, reopen the government.” So far, Trump has refused such a meeting, insisting that the government reopen prior to any negotiations.

None of this week’s developments offer hope to college students, or some faculty and staff, who aren’t sure if they’ll be able to afford basic necessities as the shutdown continues.

“At this point, I just want the government to reopen,” Moomjy said. “I’m not sure that will fix the ACA stuff, but we’re reaching a point of cumulative exhaustion. If this pushes on much further without [Congress] offering something to the American people to say, ‘We at least hear you and can help to lower it in some way,’ then it feels like they’re fighting each other with slogans. The people that are getting hurt are us down on the ground.”

Basic Needs Insecurity

Vulnerable Americans also include more than 1 million college students who rely on the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to buy food, and who didn’t receive those subsidies as planned on the first of the month.

On Monday, in response to court orders, Trump agreed to fund half of the program during the shutdown. After Tuesday’s election, he increased it to 65 percent of full funding, though experts say most SNAP recipients will get far less than that once they receive their already-late benefits. Despite those partial concessions, many colleges—which are already grappling with tight budgets as a result of Trump’s ongoing assault on higher education this year—are still scrambling to help their students cope with the partial loss to benefits this month.

On Thursday, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to fully fund SNAP.

Concerns about paying for food, health care and housing during the shutdown are top of mind for students and families, according to an informal survey conducted by the American Council on Education (ACE). And those worries extend beyond students and parents who work in the public sector or receive government assistance directly; 30 percent said their private sector jobs are suffering because of the shutdown.

“One [parent of a college student] said they work for a private contractor whose budgets partially depend on federal funding. The shutdown has reduced and delayed funding which affects their ability to provide services, earn their regular income and meet their basic needs,” Emmanual A. Guillory, senior director of government relations for ACE, told Inside Higher Ed. “Other [students and parents] said their inability to pay bills is causing strain on their mental health.”

Disruptions for Military Students

The shutdown is also directly threatening some students’ ability to stay enrolled at all.

While civilian students can at least access federal financial aid to cover their tuition during the shutdown, student-veterans and their dependents who rely on military benefits—including Military Tuition Assistance (TA) and the My Career Advancement Account (MyCAA) tuition assistance program for military spouses—to pay for their education are dealing with disruptions and delays to those payments.

Some institutions, including Austin Peay State University in Tennessee and the online learning behemoth Southern New Hampshire University, are helping military-affiliated students stay on track during the shutdown by allowing them to register without payments or tuition assistance in place.

According to an SNHU spokesperson, 2,840 undergraduates who receive military tuition assistance were impacted by the shutdown when they started a new term last week. If the government is still closed by the time the next graduate term starts next week, an additional 440 military-affiliated students who have already registered for classes will need waivers from SNHU.

Disruptions to GI Bill payments—caused by a system failure at the Department of Veterans Affairs and compounded by the shutdown—may also put up to 75,000 survivors and dependents of deceased military veterans at “serious” risk of losing access to post-secondary education subsidies, according to the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors.

Meanwhile, Senate Democrats and Republicans remain at an impasse on resuming government operations.

Guillory of ACE, who was at the Capitol this week for discussions about implementing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, said that from what he’s observed “it’s highly unlikely” that a deal to reopen the government will be reached by Friday.

But whenever it does finally happen, higher education institutions and their students and faculty who have been affected by the shutdown won’t just be able to pick up where they left off.

“There’s going to be a backlog of things that needs to get done,” Guillory said. “This is pushing everything back and leaving institutions in a place of uncertainty.”

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November 7, 2025