Instead of generating answers, Study Mode asks students questions about what they know.
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | SDI Productions/E+/Getty Images
When classes resume this fall, college students will have access to yet another generative artificial intelligence tool marketed as a learning enhancement.
But instead of generating immediate answers, OpenAI’s new Study Mode for ChatGPT acts more like a tutor, firing off questions, hints, self-reflection prompts and quizzes that are tailored to the user and informed by their past chat history. While traditional large language models have raised academic integrity concerns, Study Mode is intended to provide a more active learning experience. It mimics the type of Socratic dialogue students may expect to encounter in a lecture hall and challenges them to draw on information they already know to form their own nuanced analyses of complex questions.
For example, when Inside Higher Ed asked the traditional version of ChatGPT which factors caused the United States Civil War, it immediately responded that the war had “several major causes, most of which revolved around slavery, states’ rights, and economic differences,” and gave more details about each before producing a five-paragraph essay on the topic. Asking Study Mode the same question, however, prompted it to give a brief overview before asking this question: “Would you say the war was fought because of slavery, or about something else like states’ rights or economics? There’s been debate over this, so I’d love to hear your view first. Then I’ll show you how historians analyze it today.”
Study Mode is similar to the Learning Mode that Anthropic launched for its chat bot Claude for Education back in April and the Guided Learning version of Gemini that Google unveiled Wednesday. OpenAI officials say they hope Study Mode will “support deeper learning” among college students.
While teaching and learning experts don’t believe such tools can replace the value faculty relationships and expertise offer students, Study Mode’s release highlights generative AI’s evolving possibilities—and limitations—as a teaching and learning aid. For students who choose to use it instead of asking a traditional LLM for answers, Study Mode offers an on-demand alternative to a human tutor, unbound by scheduling conflicts, payment or feedback delays.
But in an economy where generative AI’s ability to gather and regurgitate information is threatening the future of entry-level office jobs, students will need to understand what they’re trying to get out of their college coursework if they want Study Mode to deliver on its promise to foster deeper learning.
“Over all, it does represent a significant departure from how people are normally encouraged to use generative AI, given that the value proposition of this technology is largely couched in the concept of efficiency, speed and offloading things that are not as important,” said Trey Conatser, assistant provost for teaching and learning at the University of Kentucky and director of UK’s Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning. “But Study Mode actually asks us to stick with it for it to work, take some time to sit with the friction of learning and be patient with the practice and feedback.”
Critical Thinking in Age of AI
The release of Study Mode comes nearly three years after the debut of ChatGPT—and the many other large language models that have followed—set off ongoing concerns among educators that college students’ increased reliance on traditional LLMs to write papers or solve math problems may erode their critical thinking skills.
There’s not yet a consensus on if generative AI helps or hurts critical thinking, but at least two studiespublished in the last year found that adults, including college students, who use LLMs to research and learn about a subject exhibited weaker reasoning and analytical skills. And those may be the exact types of skills the roughly two-thirds who are already using generative AI tools like ChatGPT will need to make Study Mode reach its full potential.
While ChatGPT’s Study Mode is programmed to query students rather than generate answers, the users themselves also need to be prepared to push the LLM to ask deeper, more nuanced questions. At least, that was Conatser’s experience when he tested out Study Mode over the weekend and asked it to help him study for a hypothetical quiz on Romantic poets from 1780 to 1820.
First, the LLM asked him more about his education level and the focus of the quiz. He told it that he’s a college junior whose quiz will focus on historical context and specified that he wanted help studying William Wordsworth’s poem “The Prelude.”
The following conversation, which Conatser shared with Inside Higher Ed, ensued:
Study Mode: Wordsworth described “The Prelude” as “a poem on the growth of my own mind.” What exact subtitle did he eventually attach to the poem that captures this idea?
(Give it a try, and we’ll check your answer before moving on.)
Conatser: That’s not so much what I will need to answer. It will be open book, but I will be asked to provide some interpretations to historical context and literary traditions.
After some more dialogue asking Study Mode to focus on historical context, it generated the following question:
Study Mode: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive …” Based on that word, “bliss,” what general emotion do you think he felt when he first encountered the early French Revolution—excitement, fear or apathy?
Conatser: That seems like an obvious question
Study Mode: Understood—let’s turn up the difficulty. In “The Prelude” (Book X), Wordsworth writes of “how in my heart a dreary weight / Fell, and I turned away …”—a moment that marks his break with the revolution he once celebrated.
Question (one step): Which single, headline-making event in France during 1793 does this passage point to, and why did that event feel like a betrayal of the revolution’s original ideals for many sympathetic British observers?
Although it took some prodding to get the LLM to ask the type of questions Conatser wanted to see, “I’m still in the driver’s seat with Study Mode,” he said. “That’s where students are going to need to be when they’re using it.”
Knowing when to push back against Study Mode when it’s not asking the types of questions that will help students master material will be key to helping them get the most out of its ability to foster critical thinking, Conatser said.
“If someone is going to be totally passive with Study Mode, it may not drive them to where they need to go and they’ll still need to be thinking about how they’re supposed to be studying, what kind of assessment they’re leading up to and what kinds of skills will be more important for that assessment,” he said. “If you don’t know what you don’t know, then you won’t be very effective at using these tools even if they have the types of guardrails that Study Mode has.”
And if a student isn’t motivated to use Study Mode to its full potential, they can prompt it to generate complete answers, just like a traditional LLM, according to Christian Carmody, a senior researcher at the Research Institute for Learning and Development, who also tested it out this week.
“For a current events assignment, I prompted Study Mode right away and told it, ‘Before we engage, I do not want your help with this or [to] encourage me to think through this. I do this on my own another time. I really just want the answers,’” Carmody recalled. “It did exactly that.”
The ability for students to easily manipulate Study Mode could add more pressure to colleges and universities that are facing growing skepticism from students about the value of degrees in the age of AI.
“Students should be able to think about why learning is valuable to them and why they should be able to engage with material in a way that’s challenging and force deep thinking,” he said. “Until a student has that mindset, I’m not confident that they are going to use this study and learning tool in the way it’s intended to be used.”
Credit for prior learning is one strategy colleges and states can employ to expedite adult learners’ progress toward their degrees and promote student success. Past research also shows that students who take advantage of CPL opportunities have higher employment rates and increased earnings after graduation.
But administering CPL can be a challenge, in part because of different departments’ and academic disciplines’ understanding and evaluation of prior experience.
In the most recent episode of Voices of Student Success, host Ashley Mowreader speaks with Colleen Sorensen, Utah Valley University’s director of CPL and student assessment services, about new state legislation requiring credit for prior learning opportunities for students and how her office supports instructors and learners navigating CPL.
An edited version of the podcast appears below.
Colleen Sorensen, director of credit for prior learning and student assessment services
Colleen Sorensen, Utah Valley University
Q: Can you introduce yourself, your work and your institution to our audience?
A: My name is Colleen Sorensen. I’ve been at Utah Valley University located in Orem, Utah, for about 31 years. We’re a pretty large institution; we’re actually the largest in the state of Utah. Our enrollment in fall 2024 was 46,809 students. Now, of that, about 45,000 were undergraduates, just under 1,000 were graduate students, and we actually have a pretty large number of concurrent enrollment students. About 16,000 of our students are working towards adding some college-level work while they’re still in high school, and we’re open enrollment. All of that together makes for a really interesting blend of individuals, from first-generation to returning students to nontraditional who all come together at Utah Valley.
I have the lucky pleasure of working with them in the space of credit for prior learning. I was officially made director [of CPL] in 2022; before that, I’ve been over all of testing services for the institution for about the last 25 years. So I’ve been a part of the credit for prior learning process with exam administration for challenge exams and CLEP and ACT and SAT and standardized assessments and professional licensure assessments. Now I get to work also in the space of making credit for prior learning, instead of it being just a department-run system, to taking that and scaling it and modeling it across the entire institution so that all of our academic departments have access to and support to develop credit for prior learning options.
Q: When you talk about this expansion and scaling of credit for prior learning across the institution, can you share more about how that looks and what that’s meant, in terms of where you started and now the vision moving forward?
A: When I started in this, we had a few areas that were already doing quite a bit of work in this space.
One of the things we value in the state of Utah is service, and so a lot of our students will stop out from college and go serve as missionaries across the world for 18 to 24 months.
During that time, they’re often learning a new language. Then they come back to UVU. Our language department recognized that years ago and put together a credit for prior learning process for those students to earn upwards of 16 credits of language [courses] if they can demonstrate [their skill] through a placement test and a course with a faculty member. If they pass that course, they’ll get up to 16 credits of 1000- to 2000-level language. So that’s been going on for a long time.
In 2019, there was legislation that was passed just before COVID that required all of the public higher ed institutions in the state of Utah to provide credit for prior learning options at a larger scale. So with the pandemic, that kind of put it on the back burner for a while, but in 2022 I started to pick this up as a new assignment.
At first, I met with different department chairs. I don’t know if it was just wrong timing with the pandemic, but it felt like a lot of doors closed to it at that time. But there were a few departments that were like, “Oh, I was one of those nontraditional students. I would like to see more opportunities in this space.”
And so slowly but surely, I started working with a few faculty, a few departments and started building sustainable systems of, how can we assess these students? Because each student is unique in what they bring as an adult learner. It’s not just like, “Let’s open this one program and as long as they have step one, two, three and four, they can award credit.” Each student needs to be looked at very uniquely. So I designed what I call a concierge approach to this process, where students can apply through our credit for prior learning website. We have a small team of students and part-timers and myself who are looking at what the student has provided. We’re prompting them with different things and then we’re reaching out within the academic community at UVU to look at possible matchups for credit for prior learning. So when we started, we only had a few departments that would engage with us, and now up to 75 percent of our academic departments are not just looking at but considering and awarding credit.
This year alone, we’ve awarded almost 6,000 credits to CPL over 1,500 courses. In just six months, we’ve saved students over $1.6 million in tuition. So that’s exciting to me.
Q: You bring up an interesting point with this division of responsibility between your office and then the faculty and the academic role in CPL. We want to ensure that students are actually meeting those learning outcomes and that the credits that we’re awarding them do reflect their experiences. But there can be some tension or a challenge point there when it comes to ensuring that there are these systems set up and making sure that every student is being recognized in the ways that reflect their abilities and their learning.
I wonder if you can talk about building that bridge between your office and these academic departments and how you opened up the conversation to make this a space that’s both trusting but also institutionalized.
A: What’s been really important is for me to establish [is] that I’m here to support academic departments and to ensure that the CPL policy that I’m the steward of is being met, but that the governance happens with the subject matter experts and the departments themselves.
Because the way that the school of business assesses prior learning is going to be very different than the way that dance or the botany lab assesses prior learning. I wanted to make sure that each department chair and subject matter expert understands that they’re in charge of deciding what we assess, how we assess it and when we assess it.
Some departments only look at 4000-level coursework for CPL. Others look at 1000- [and] 2000-level coursework. It’s not my job to tell them how to do that within their area. They’re the ones who know. My job is to support them with [questions such as:] Do we need to bring in a national expert in your area if the department is not feeling confident in doing this yourself? Or to bring in templates for them or trainings for them of how to assess their particular type of coursework?
That’s how I support them and then help them navigate through the whole process so that it’s not left to bureaucracy, red tape of sorts, just to support them all the way through.
Q: CPL can be a very confusing process for the student. Can you talk about how UVU seeks to support students as they navigate the process? One, in understanding that this is available to them and that you can recognize their prior learning, but also, what that process looks like and how they might feel navigating that situation.
A: Some departments have things really well established on their websites. Others do not. And so that’s why we have the CPL office and the CPL website. It’s a basic inquiry; it just asks a few questions to the student of, what are your academic goals? What do you think you might be eligible for and how much involvement do you want from us? Do they want a phone call from one of our CPL concierge support individuals, or do they just want to be sent on their way and take care of it themselves?
We really allow the student to gauge that, but we’re here to support them from inquiry all the way up until the credit is awarded. They can walk into our office, or they can contact us via the website and we’ll help them figure out any part of the process such as, do we just need to connect two individuals together? Do we have a faculty member who might be away and so their request has been sitting in a queue for longer than feels natural or normal to a college student? Or what is the natural process that the department has established?
Some departments will say that they’ll review inquiries during these windows of time and maybe the student didn’t catch that piece of information. We’ll reinforce that for the department to say, “Yes, you’re in the queue. It’s going to get reviewed during XYZ, so just hang tight and if you have any other questions, contact us again.”
We are there to support [students] all the way through. That’s the concierge aspect of it, and we found that to be really valuable, because there’s a lot of moving parts when it comes to credit for prior learning and creative solutions that we might not have thought of.
I’ll get three or four different areas together—I might get an associate dean, an adviser and two subject matter experts in a room together. I’m like, “OK, let’s look at this case. What can we do with what we know and what have we not thought of before? How do we best support the student in their academic goals while still keeping all of our academic rigor required?”
Q: I imagine you play the role of translator sometimes, too—helping the student understand what the department is asking and helping the department understand what the student wants to know—which can be a really needed role. It’s wonderful that you have yourself and your team to help draw those dots and connect the lines and make sure everybody’s working towards the same goal.
A: Yes. I’m setting up working with different departments on, “OK, if they do a challenge exam or they do a portfolio review, can they do a second [attempt]?” There are pros and cons to each, right? We want academic rigor, but also, depending on the area, it’s very contextual per level of course and program.
So for someone who’s going for a very high level of coursework [in CPL], is it a one-time [exam] or do you offer a retake, [giving them] one more time with some feedback, helping the student to be able to speak to the learning outcomes more clearly? I’ve seen departments do it both ways. Some will say, “No, they should either know it or they don’t, or they need to be in the classroom.”
The academic departments will go to their board of trustees and talk about it and have a good conversation of, “How much leeway do we want to give here?” Our policy states that you’re allowed up to one retake or not. Sometimes it works in the benefit [of the student] to have it be an all or nothing. And again, that’s very department and program specific. It’s not my job to tell them what it should or shouldn’t be; they know best.
Q: CPL can be very resource intensive, one, for the institution and the faculty or whoever is assessing the project, and sometimes there’s a fee associated for students. Can you talk about the labor, the time and the resources that go into this work and how you help coordinate that? And how is the institution investing in this work?
A: That is the hottest topic of conversation in this work. We’re a very large institution, the course load of our faculty— Adding this on top of it can feel significant in how much time it takes. This isn’t a quick grading process. To grade a portfolio, or to prepare for an oral interview or to write a challenge exam that needs to be updated on a regular basis, all of that takes faculty time.
At the moment, at our institution, there are small amounts of dollars involved that go back to the department who do the assessments and then the department decides whether they pool that money together or they pay out to their faculty. Often they’ll have a conversation among themselves of what’s the best usage of this and do a collaborative decision. Some it’s to pay the faculty; for others, it’s to help fund something that all of the faculty have agreed to.
Ideally, in our future, we would like to see more fees, smaller out of pocket, less than $100 fees, attached to credit for prior learning assessments. But we don’t have full consensus yet among all ofour leadership, and so that is still to be determined at our institution.
Q: Good luck with that conversation. It’s always fun to enter shared governance conversations, especially when we’re talking about student success and what’s gonna be best for the learner at the end of the day.
As we’re thinking about scaling and institutionalizing CPL across UVU, one thing I wanted to ask about is some of those processes that can be very easy. We’ve talked about language requirements and how students who have come from their missions—that’s a pretty set process and it’s pretty understood and simple to navigate for the student. Are there other processes that you’re looking at or working with departments to streamline how this works and what a student can expect?
A: There’s a few things that we’re doing to help this. One, we’re encouraging every department to have some real estate on their home page, on their website, of CPL options so that students can look very quickly if they’re shopping at two o’clock in the morning and don’t want to wait for a response from one of our team who tend to work more traditional hours. We want websites to be able to cater to that, as well as we want advising conversations to be able to cater to that.
We’re even asking faculty to put CPL options on their syllabi, so that if a student sits down on day one and they’re looking at this course and they’re looking at the topics, they’re looking at the learning outcomes, they’re like, “I already know this.” Wouldn’t it be great to also see, “And here’s a credit for prior learning option that you could challenge this,” that maybe they missed up until this point in advising or on the websites, or maybe they didn’t know to contact the CPL office? The syllabus is also another place of marketing as well as [traditional] marketing, which we attempt to do quite a bit of, that could help the student to recognize that there’s another option here.
Q: If you had to give advice to a peer working in a similar role at a different institution, are there any lessons you’ve learned or insights you would want to pass on in this work and the ways that you’ve been advancing this university goal?
A: Start small, but strategically. Like find a department or a faculty champion who has a clear use case, like a common industry certification or a workforce training pathway and then support them with some tools, some templates, some training. Don’t just tell them, “You got to figure this out.”
Center it on the student experience. Talk with your students, learn what they wish could have happened, because there’s so much that can be done, or that might already be being done. It’s just that this department may not understand what that department is doing.
Something that we did this year for the first time is we hosted a faculty summer institute. It’s a three-week commitment, but it’s one day of being together in person. Faculty had to apply for this, and there were four areas of focus—you needed to have a tangible asset at the end of this. One was to develop a CPL pathway. Another was to embed a credential into a program. Another was experiential learning, and the fourth was a continuing education credit process for those who have finished up and now they just want to add on.
We did offer a stipend to these individuals who were approved to come to this training. We spent the morning in education—we brought in Nan Travers, director of the Center for Leadership in Credential Learning from SUNY Empire State College, who is considered the fairy godmother of all credentialing. She was fabulous—to teach and train our faculty. Then we brought in a statewide person to discuss workforce alignment. Then we had a luncheon and we strategically placed all of the faculty into their area of focus. So seated at my table were faculty all focused on generating a credit for prior learning pathway. We had botany, biotech, psychology, computer science and business accounting. They’re all coming in from different schools within the institution.
We sat together at lunch and then we had an afternoon of working on the projects. So Nan was there, as the expert; she would come around to the tables and discuss things and answer questions. But these faculty got to interact with each other, with people outside of their standard focus, and they loved it. They said, at the end of the day, “I never get to do this. I never get to talk with faculty outside of my own area of focus.” They were passing phone numbers to each other. They were sharing their models and thinking and helping tweak each other’s.
It was such a fun, collaborative experience. And we have 11 new CPL pathways that came out of that one day, and then we gave them another three weeks to work on it. We plan to continue to do that summer after summer. We need funding from our administration to help pay the faculty to do that, but I will advocate to do that again and again. It was so successful.
Q: It’s almost like a CPL incubator, like how they have the student entrepreneurship programs, but for faculty to think about ways to be entrepreneurial in their own field.
A: Yeah and, you know, they said, “Thank you for thinking about me and my needs as the faculty member,” really taking care to be able to answer their questions and help them get over those mental blocks that they were experiencing of, “I don’t know how to address this or this or this.” We took care of all of that that day.
Q: It’s nice to just do it all in one day sometimes, too, right? It’s not an email chain. It’s not a series of meetings—like, we can all just sit in the same room and figure it out all in one go.
A: One thing we’re known for in Utah is we like soda with mix-ins. So we had a little beverage bar for them to go get drinks whenever they wanted, with a cute little mix-in to keep them energized and caffeinated all afternoon.
Q: That’s so fun. So as you’re thinking about this work, what are your goals for the upcoming year? Where do you want this program to go?
A: Yeah. There’s a couple things. One, I would like to get us from 75 percent of departments tapping into CPL to over 90 percent, for starters.
We’ve been hosting at UVU for the last three years a statewide conference. We brought in all the other USHE [Utah System of Higher Education] schools to just share best practices in credit for prior learning and ask things such as: How do we make this work? How do we track the data? How do we compare things and be more inclusive as a whole structure within the state of Utah and have less competition between schools? How do we be more collaborative in this process? So continuing to expand that conference is one thing.
I’m partnering with another school, Salt Lake Community College, starting this fall to do a once-a-month lunch and learn hourlong best practices over the phone. Covering, “Hey, what’s keeping you up at night? What are your headaches? How have you solved this?” Just allowing everyone to learn together, because we’re all pretty new, since this legislative mandate in 2019, of really bringing this into fruition. And how do we not reinvent the wheel, but just learn from each other?
Those are a few things, as well as, UVU launched a campuswide adult learner initiative in 2022, and it’s strategically housed within the provost suite. It’s focused on reimagining adult education over all. We’re focusing on student support and faculty support, as well as credit for prior learning. As I said earlier, kind of getting into the mind of the adult learner. I’d really like to see more conversation in the coming year, and my goal is to have conversations around this—could we do shorter-term classwork, or more hybrid classwork, where students are on campus? Because we find there’s great value in face-to-face, what if we’re only bringing them to campus once a week and we’re hybrid twice a week for courses? Can we offer more adult learner–friendly pedagogy? What does that look like and how can we accomplish that? So, I’d like to spend more time in that space in the coming year and really listening to students of what’s working and what’s not working.
The U.S. Department of Justice sued the state of Oklahoma Tuesday over a state law that allows undocumented students to pay in-state tuition rates. Oklahoma is now the fourth state the DOJ has sued for having such a policy.
The state’s Republican attorney general, Gentner Drummond, swiftly sided with the federal government and filed a joint motion in support of quashing the law. He said in a statement that it’s “discriminatory and unlawful” to offer noncitizens lower in-state tuition rates “that are not made available to out-of-state Americans.”
“Today marks the end of a longstanding exploitation of Oklahoma taxpayers, who for many years have subsidized colleges and universities as they provide unlawful benefits to illegal immigrants in the form of in-state tuition,” Drummond said.
Now the state and the DOJ await a ruling from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Oklahoma.
Oklahoma’s quick support for the legal challenge is reminiscent of what happened in Texas when the DOJ sued the state in June: Within hours of the lawsuit, Texas sided with the Justice Department and a judge ruled in favor of a permanent injunction, ending in-state tuition for noncitizens. The DOJ then filed similar lawsuits against Kentucky and Minnesota, though those legal fights are still ongoing.
The lawsuits follow an executive order issued by President Donald Trump in April calling for a crackdown on so-called sanctuary cities and state laws unlawfully “favoring aliens over any groups of American citizens,” citing in-state tuition benefits for noncitizens as an example.
I recently coached a scholar through drafting a proposal for her second book. Her manuscript is almost complete, and our work together involved putting together a strong pitch for a few of the university presses that publish in her field. As she shared the last component of her book proposal with me for feedback, she observed with satisfaction that the proposal was indeed coming together but that the hard part would be working up the nerve to send the project off. If she only knew how many times I’ve seen that “hard part” be the step that kept people from realizing the publishing success they so deserve.
As a professional developmental editor and publishing consultant who has spent the last 10 years helping academics bring their books and articles to print, I’m well-versed in the struggles of the scholarly writer. It’s no small feat to find time to research and write amid other professional obligations (like teaching and service) and personal commitments (like childcare, eldercare and self-care), not to mention national and global turbulence. Those who manage to complete a scholarly manuscript under these conditions should be applauded. But then the writer who has already accomplished so much faces another hurdle: persuading a press or journal to publish the text they’ve written.
A common reaction to this hurdle is to find ways to delay having to confront it. I see writers get stuck in endless rounds of revision, going back and forth about which citations to include, tinkering with sentence structure and word choice, waiting to contact publishers until they’ve landed on the perfect phrasing for their cover letters.
The truth is that the minute details don’t matter as much in the first submission as authors might think, especially at book publishers. You do want to put your best foot forward, to show that you value an editor’s time and that of the peer reviewers who will consider your work for publication. But it’s expected that your manuscript will evolve with the input of peer reviewers and that polishing words and sentences will happen during the final revision and copyediting stages. The writer’s goal when submitting to publishers should therefore not be a perfectly finished text, but a “good enough” manuscript that allows a press or journal to seriously consider whether they want to give a greater platform to the writer’s ideas.
But what constitutes “good enough” in the eyes of scholarly publishers? The first criterion publishers are looking for is a sense of fit with their existing offerings. This actually has little to do with the quality of your writing. It’s more about whether the readership that the press or journal has already cultivated is generally welcoming to the topic, methods and theoretical framework of your piece.
To ensure your manuscript is good enough in the area of fit, do your homework on what your target press or journal has recently published in the last year or two. Get clear on whom you are writing for and find outlets where those readers are already gathering. The risk of rejection goes down exponentially when you send your manuscript to the right place.
Turning to your manuscript itself, before sending it to a publisher, you should evaluate it for what I call the four pillars of scholarly writing: argument, evidence, structure and style. Scholarly manuscripts must have a solid foundation in all four areas to be successful in the publishing process, because each of these fundamental aspects of the text has the potential to make or break the text’s chances of being received well by peer reviewers, getting approved for publication and ultimately reaching readers in the author’s scholarly field and beyond.
Your argument is the main claim that drives your text and that you want readers to accept. Is it clearly stated near the beginning and does it remain present throughout the text? Your evidence backs up the argument for the reader. Do you have sufficient evidence and do you analyze it effectively to guide your reader to the points you want them to accept?
The structure of your manuscript supports the reader in encountering your evidence and absorbing your points in a logical and engaging order. Structural concerns include the way the text is organized into chapters, sections and paragraphs, as well as your use of titles, headings, transitions and other signposts to move your reader along. Have you put thought into why the components of your text are organized the way they are, and have you used appropriate cues to make the structural logic obvious to your reader? By style, I mean the overall presentation of your writing, including how your attitude toward both reader and subject matter shows up on the page. Depending on the publishing venue, the style of a scholarly manuscript may be informal or formal, passionate or detached. Consider what will be most effective with your most important readers and ensure stylistic consistency across your text.
After attending to big-picture matters, you will want to double-check that everything in your text is accurate and that sloppy errors don’t interfere with a reader’s understanding of what you want to say. But resist the temptation to tinker endlessly with superficial details. Everyone’s time, labor and mental fortitude are limited these days, so spend yours where they will get you the greatest return on investment.
Try to reframe the editorial and publication process in your mind, thinking of it not as an adversarial set of gatekeeping encounters—though it can be that at times—but as a process designed to make your work the best it can be before it goes public. Your manuscript doesn’t have to be perfect when entering the process, because you’ll be taking it through several cycles of development before considering it to be finished. There will be multiple opportunities to improve it, and editors, peer reviewers and supportive readers will be alongside to help.
The prospect of hitting “send” on your manuscript can be incredibly nerve-racking, but your ideas can’t reach anyone, let alone do good work in the world, if you don’t put them out there. You must eventually let go of the manuscript so it can go do its work.
Doubts are natural. You may worry that a reader you respect will have reasonable objections or that you’ve missed something important. Perhaps you also worry about exposing yourself to criticism or rejection on the basis of your ideas, identity, background or political beliefs. Such fears are legitimate, especially for those scholars who are already marginalized in the academy. Name these fears and acknowledge that you have a right to feel your anxieties. Then assess whether the actual risks are worth silencing yourself by not putting your work out there at all.
Laura Portwood-Stacer is the author of Make Your Manuscript Work (Princeton University Press, 2025), which offers a practical method to develop scholarly texts for publication, including a list of the most common areas where manuscripts need improvement. She is also the author of The Book Proposal Book (Princeton, 2021) and the Manuscript Works Newsletter, providing weekly guidance for scholarly writers and publishing professionals.
From declining enrollments to equity gaps and growing concerns about student belonging, the pressures on colleges and universities—especially those serving first-generation and regional student populations—are intense and unrelenting. We have all read about the enrollment cliffs and seen firsthand how small, regional institutions are being asked to do more with less while still delivering transformational experiences to diverse and increasingly nontraditional learners.
While there is no single solution to these complex and multifaceted challenges, I believe we can and must do better to organize and focus our collective efforts. In my two decades of experience as a mathematics education professor, interim dean, student success leader and first-generation college graduate, I have repeatedly seen the power of synthesizing widely known but often disconnected strategies into coherent, institutionwide models for student success.
That experience led me to develop the ACCESS framework, a holistic and memorable approach that integrates six core pillars essential to supporting students from recruitment through graduation and beyond. These pillars—affinity, community, career, early alert, support and storytelling—are not novel in isolation. However, woven together, they offer a powerful and practical road map for institutions striving to create environments where students not only persist but thrive. Importantly, ACCESS also addresses what I see as a common and costly issue in higher education: fragmentation. Too often, well-intentioned programs exist in silos, failing to produce the sustained, cross-campus impact we seek. ACCESS offers a way to unify these efforts into a clear, student-centered strategy.
Affinity: Fostering Belonging From Day One
Students are more likely to succeed when they feel they belong. This is especially true for first-generation students, underrepresented populations and those navigating higher education in rural or regional settings where campus may feel unfamiliar or disconnected from prior experiences.
Affinity strategies focus on helping students quickly form meaningful connections with peers, faculty and the institution itself. Examples include first-year experience programs, peer mentorship initiatives, themed housing and proactive advising. Institutions that intentionally create these touch points early and often can increase students’ sense of belonging and purpose, which researchhasshown to be critical predictors of retention and achievement.
Affinity is about more than social engagement—it is about students seeing themselves as valued and capable members of the campus community.
Community: Building Meaningful and Reciprocal Connections
Beyond personal belonging, students benefit from opportunities to engage in shared purpose.
Community-focused strategies emphasize service learning, civic engagement, student organizations and collaborative learning experiences that help students feel connected not only to campus but to broader societal goals. Partnerships with local community and nonprofit organizations create reciprocal value: Students gain real-world experience and social capital while institutions strengthen ties with the communities they serve.
Moreover, community-building activities enhance peer support networks. Students engaged in study groups, cohort models or co-curricular leadership roles oftendemonstrate higher retention and graduation rates. Creating purposeful, inclusive spaces for students to connect with one another should be viewed as essential, not optional.
Career: Connecting Learning to Life After College
Students increasingly expect—and deserve—a clear connection between their academic experience and future opportunities. Career-connected learning, designed to deepen students’ classroom experiences by connecting skills to real-world occupations, has been shown to increase engagement, motivation, broader sense of purpose and sense of preparedness for employment. But career integration must go far beyond the traditional career center model. It should be infused throughout the student journey.
ACCESS emphasizes career as a core pillar, with a focus on early and ongoing exposure to career pathways, industry partnerships and hands-on learning. Microcredentials, internships, alumni mentoring and project-based courses all help students articulate the value of their degree and build the confidence to pursue their aspirations. When students can see the relevance of their studies to their goals, their motivation, persistence and sense of belonging increase substantially.
Early Alert: Leveraging Data to Intervene and Support
While many institutions have adopted early-alert systems, ACCESS emphasizes the importance of using data in intentional, coordinated ways across campus. A study of more than 16,000 students at a regional university found an early-alert system was effective at identifying students at significantly higher risk of dropping out, even when controlling for academic performance and demographic characteristics. Early-alert systems are not simply about identifying struggling students—they are about creating a culture where faculty, advisers and staff collaborate to proactively support students before issues become crises. Effective systems involve mobilizing cross-campus teams to conduct outreach—through emails, phone calls or in-person check-ins—to improve retention rates and remove barriers ranging from financial hardship to emotional stress.
Early alert requires more than technology. It requires buy-in, training and shared ownership. When done well, it sends a powerful message to students: “You matter, and we are here to help you succeed.”
Students’ lives are complex, and so are the challenges they face. ACCESS recognizes that academic success cannot be separated from wellness, financial stability and mental health. Institutions must offer robust, coordinated support systems that meet students where they are and that encompass everything from advising, tutoring and accessibility services to counseling, financial aid navigation and basic needs support. Centralized student success centers, coordinated case management models and wraparound services are all effective ways to ensure that no student falls through the cracks.
Wraparound student support services, especially when delivered through relational, trauma-informed and personalized case management, foster deeper connection and institutional engagement. This in turn supports retention and persistence outcomes. Importantly, support must be framed as a strength, not a deficiency. Normalizing help-seeking behavior and reducing stigma are essential to creating an environment where students feel safe accessing the resources they need.
Storytelling: Creating a Culture of Pride and Narrative
Finally, ACCESS includes a pillar that is often overlooked but profoundly impactful: storytelling. Students are more likely to persist and complete their degrees when they can see themselves as protagonists in their own educational journeys.
Institutions should prioritize sharing student and alumni stories—through social media, newsletters, admissions materials and campus events—to reinforce the value and relevance of the college experience. Equally important is empowering students to reflect on and tell their own stories, helping them make meaning of their experiences and building a sense of pride and ownership. Research suggests that as students reshape their narrative identities, seeing themselves not as outsiders but as capable contributors, they become more engaged and persistent in their academic work.
In my leadership roles, I have seen how storytelling humanizes data and drives institutional momentum. Donors connect emotionally to stories of transformation. Prospective students see possibilities reflected in the experiences of peers. Faculty and staff are reminded of their purpose. Storytelling, when done authentically, becomes a unifying force.
Putting ACCESS Into Action
The ACCESS framework is not prescriptive or rigid. Rather, it is an adaptable model that provides institutions with a common language and conceptual map for aligning efforts across recruitment, retention, student support and advancement.
I am mindful that the individual strategies embedded in ACCESS are not new. What is new—and, I believe, urgently needed—is a simple, memorable framework that helps institutions avoid fragmented initiatives and instead build integrated, student-centered ecosystems.
Importantly, ACCESS should not exist outside of the academic mission. Its greatest potential lies in integration with the curriculum. Faculty play a vital role in fostering belonging, connecting coursework to careers, identifying students in need of support and empowering students to reflect on their learning. When academic and co-curricular strategies align, student success becomes not a separate initiative but a seamless and transformative part of the college experience.
ACCESS can serve as a guide for cabinet-level planning, cross-departmental working groups, strategic enrollment management and assessment. It offers a way to bring together academic affairs, student affairs, advancement and community partners around a shared vision for student success.
As higher education faces unprecedented challenges, we must embrace models that are not only evidence-based but also intuitive and human-centered. I invite my colleagues across higher education to consider how ACCESS—or similar integrative models—might provide clarity, cohesion and inspiration as we work collectively to support the students we serve.
Laura J. Jacobsen is the chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics and a professor of mathematics education at Radford University.
Yet underneath those challenges lies another, less headline-grabbing danger: delayed upkeep and repairs to infrastructure and assets.
More on the Survey
Inside Higher Ed’s 15th annual Survey of College and University Chief Business Officers was conducted by Hanover Research. The survey included 169 chief business officers, mostly from public and private nonprofit institutions, for a margin of error of 7 percent. The response rate was 7 percent. A copy of the free report can be downloaded here.
On Wednesday, Aug. 20, at 2 p.m. Eastern, Inside Higher Ed will present a free webcast to discuss the results of the survey, with experts who can answer your most pressing questions about higher education finance—including how to plan effectively amid the current financial and policy uncertainty. Register here.
One in three surveyed CBOs (36 percent) identified infrastructure/deferred maintenance costs as a top financial risk to their institution, just behind state and/or federal policy changes—and ahead of options such as technology investment requirements, increased market competition (including from alternative credential providers), potential changes to international student enrollment and changes in student athletics revenue and name, image and likeness deals.
Most CBOs also say they’re at least moderately concerned about their institution’s ability to fund deferred maintenance and facility needs, with 11 percent extremely concerned and another quarter (25 percent) very concerned.
How bad is the problem? Just 1 percent of institutions represented were on track to fund no deferred maintenance in the then-current fiscal year (the survey was live in April and May). But another 63 percent were only poised to fund up to a quarter of identified needs. This is consistent across public and private nonprofit institutions.
By institution type, public doctoral university CBOs were most likely to report funding a quarter or less, at 89 percent. Community college CBOs were least likely to report this, at 44 percent. Still, just about a third of community college CBOs expected their institution to fund more than half of identified needs.
Across higher education, deferred maintenance needs span aging HVAC systems, roofs and dorms; buildings in need of rewiring; and more. Technical deferred maintenance, such as addressing choppy Wi-Fi, is another concern. These aren’t the flashy projects that attract donors or drive capital campaigns (exceptions notwithstanding). But they matter in terms of curb appeal and functionality. Prospective students notice the state of facilities. Dingy classrooms and buildings are current students’ learning and living conditions, and employees’ working conditions. Deferred maintenance may translate to safety or accessibility issues (think sidewalks and elevators). And problems only compound over time, meaning deferred maintenance can—and does—escalate to larger, costlier repairs.
Richard G. Mills Jr., president and CEO of United Educators, a liability insurance and risk management services provider, said that underfunding depreciation has “long been in the bag of tools that institutions will turn to in times of financial stress.” It’s never been a “great practice,” he continued, “but I understand why it happens, and there is even an argument that in the past era of growth—in endowments, tuition, philanthropy and student population—it wasn’t an outlandish way to approach what were largely temporary downturns.”
Now all that has changed, said Mills, a former college chief administrative, business and operating officer: “The forward environment is unlikely to be one of growth,” with philanthropy, tuition revenue and student populations “certain to remain flat or decline for some time.”
In this light, using deferred maintenance as a tool is simply delaying an expense whose cost is likely to compound at a significant rate, he added.
Ruth Johnston, vice president of consulting for the National Association of College and University Business Officers, agreed that deferred maintenance “is a very big and growing issue for universities and colleges and has been for many years.”
Public colleges and universities are often hardest hit, Johnston said, as state legislators “prefer to fund new capital projects over providing funds for the less glamorous options of deferred maintenance.” And unless universities and colleges “intentionally create budgets, and consistently add funds to them, they don’t prioritize deferred maintenance and often only pay for emergency needs.”
The shiny-object phenomenon isn’t exclusive to public institutions. Mills recalled, for example, how a dean at a private institution once said he wasn’t worried about underfunding because when major renewal was required, “he would simply run a capital campaign to build a new building.”
In addition to the findings on deferred maintenance, the survey also suggests that some institutions are rethinking their physical campuses amid shifting enrollment and study trends. About two in five respondents (41 percent) report that their institution is retaining its current physical campus footprint but investing in renovations. Another 34 percent report targeted expansion, or moderate growth in specific areas. But relatively few CBOs report either strategic downsizing or significant expansion.
Deferred maintenance expenses can sometimes be bundled into other project budgets. But uncertainty and other factors are slowing or halting even capital spending on many campuses—even if strategic downsizing isn’t yet a major trend.
Seth Odell, founder of Kanahoma, an education marketing agency, underscored the gravity of the deferred maintenance backlog, saying it “feels like it’s a part of a broader death spiral many institutions have found themselves in.”
“We often treat deferred maintenance as a facilities or finance issue, but it’s increasingly a strategic enrollment risk—and one that’s compounding year over year,” he said. “I’ve worked with institutions where students are literally walking past shuttered buildings on campus tours, or sweating through admitted-student events due to outdated HVAC systems. In a competitive enrollment environment, these realities are no longer just aesthetic. They’re affecting yield.”
Compounding Problems, (Radical) Solutions
Even before it downgraded its higher education outlook in March due to federal policy uncertainty, Moody’s Ratings had warned that a “large and growing backlog of capital needs posed a significant credit risk for the higher education sector.” In a report last summer, Moody’s said that $750 billion to $950 billion of spending would be needed over the next decade for just its approximately 500 rated colleges and universities to make “significant headway toward reducing deferred maintenance, upgrading facilities and building the new projects that are critical to strategic positioning.”
“Colleges and universities that are unable to offer updated facilities, advanced technology and an attractive physical environment risk losing competitive standing,” Moody’s said at the time.
Construction cost data firm Gordian documented in its most recent “State of Facilities in Higher Education” report “ongoing curtailment of campus expansions as institutions take stock of what they will really need to own and operate,” plus shortfalls in the funding of needed campus renewal investments of more than 32 percent. It valued the backlog of capital renewal needs at over $140 per gross square foot.
The situation isn’t likely to improve anytime soon. Emily Raimes, associate managing director at Moody’s, told Inside Higher Ed that amid growing economic and policy uncertainty, “many institutions are adopting a more cautious approach to financial planning. This shift in strategy may lead to a deceleration or postponement of capital investment initiatives.”
Shrinking the footprint of a college campus is a real opportunity for colleges and universities to move forward and save money.”
—Consultant John Woell
F. King Alexander, who served as president of Louisiana State University from 2013 to 2020, said that deferred maintenance needs increased $30 million per year at the Baton Rouge campus alone during his tenure. The university “cobbled” together only about $8 to $10 million annually to address emergency issues, he said, so the problem still grew by about $20 million annually “despite what we were able to do.”
“We used a lot of duct tape,” he said.
Louisiana last year passed legislation designed to fund deferred maintenance and capital improvements at state institutions. It will take years and consistent support to tackle the state’s $2 billion backlog.
Alexander, now a professor of educational leadership at Florida Gulf Coast University, is currently involved in an ongoing national study that draws on the insights of chief community college financial officers. Based on that research, completed with colleagues at the University of Alabama’s Education Policy Center, only “marginal” progress has been made in facilities since 2007, as institutions “still have the same needs, the same backlogs, the same increases in maintenance and the same lack of planning,” he said. In 2024, the largest areas of deferred maintenance and facility problems for community colleges included science labs, classroom spaces and computer labs.
“States have consistently shifted their deferred maintenance costs from state government to the public colleges and universities over the last three decades,” Alexander said. “In other words, to student tuition and fees.”
Odell described deferred maintenance as “both a symptom and an accelerant of the bigger financial reckoning” now facing higher education.
For tuition-dependent institutions especially, he added, “it’s a vicious cycle. Declining enrollment leads to reduced revenue, which leads to deferred investments, which in turn erode the very experience that drives enrollment.”
Odell did note some “success stories,” including Southern New Hampshire University, which has been able to work somewhat in reverse, “using surplus generated from online enrollment growth to completely revamp and reimagine their campus experience.”
Among other strategies, the consultancy EAB recommends that campus leaders create maintenance endowments that will support a building’s “true needs” across its life cycle—not just construction.
John Woell, principal at Manitou Passage Consultancy, offered his own suite of suggestions—some of them unconventional: replacing faculty and staff offices with more flexible workspace arrangements, known as “hoteling”; being clear about needs, including how each campus space supports the college’s mission; and ending gifts in perpetuity by pivoting to “sponsorships.”
“If a gift pays to build a space that has a likely useful life span of 50 years, allow renaming at the end of the 50 years.”
Bigger picture, Woell said, “Shrinking the footprint of a college campus is a real opportunity for colleges and universities to move forward and save money.”
Alexander agreed that campus-based solutions such as rethinking physical spaces and even downsizing make sense where enrollment is not growing. But he stressed the importance of public investment in higher education—including more reliable state funding for deferred maintenance expenses at public institutions.
“This is a huge issue that presidents have to deal with that nobody’s talking about.”
The beta version of the financial aid application portal was released Monday, Aug. 4.
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | SimoneN/iStock/Getty Images
The Office for Federal Student Aid made history this week, launching the test version of this year’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid earlier than ever before, Aaron Lemon-Strauss, executive director of the FAFSA program, announced in a LinkedIn post Monday.
It marks the beginning of “the next chapter in making higher ed more accessible,” he wrote.
This comes less than two years after the botched rollout of what was supposed to be a simpler FAFSA form for the 2024–25 academic year. The opening of that year’s application platform, which typically occurs in October, was delayed until the very end of the year. And even when it launched in late December 2023, it had a myriad of glitches, significantly delaying financial aid award processing for colleges and students.
For the next FAFSA cycle, the Education Department revamped its planning processing, bringing in an outsider to lead the effort. The launch of the 2025–26 FAFSA was slightly delayed, but the agency spent months testing the form before opening it up to all students. Now, for the 2026–27 FAFSA, the application is set to open on time on Oct. 1.
To meet that deadline, the department kicked off several weeks of selective beta testing this week, starting with a small number of students and families. The plan is for the beta version to become public in early September. By launching ahead of schedule, the department hopes to boost application completion rates, improve troubleshooting tools for financial aid advisers and increase overall speed of the process, Lemon-Strauss explained.
“As we celebrate this milestone, we also push forward,” he said, “building a FAFSA that truly meets the evolving needs of students, families, and schools.”
First-generation students face a host of barriers when they go to college. Terms commonly used in higher ed, like “registrar,” “provost” or “credit hours,” can be mystifying. They’re confronted with a hidden curriculum, a set of unspoken expectations for how to succeed. And they don’t always know whom to turn to for help.
But a new book, the first of three volumes on first-generation students, argues that these challenges, while important to study, offer an incomplete picture of who these students are.
The book, How First-Generation Students Navigate Higher Education Through an Embrace of their Multiple Identities (Routledge, 2025), explores in a series of essays how different identities, including class and race, affect the first-generation student experience and how these students bring unique strengths and assets to the classroom. It also offers guidance to different types of institutions about how to support first-generation students better and highlights colleges and universities that have modeled successful reforms and programs. Some of the essays are research-focused and written by scholars, while others are personal narratives authored by first-generation college graduates.
Co-editor Matt Daily, assistant vice president and dean of students at Idaho State University, spoke with Inside Higher Ed about why he’s working to change the discourse around first-generation students, alongside his co-editors, University of Portland professors SimonMary Asese Aihiokhai and Layla Garrigues. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: A theme throughout this book is the idea that too often first-generation students are studied through a deficit-focused lens that emphasizes their challenges rather than their strengths. Why was it important to you to shift that approach?
A: For a long time, when we’ve talked about first-gen, we’ve come in thinking that they need something, that they are lacking something, and I think for the last five years or so, that narrative has really shifted. It’s shifted from “What are they lacking?” to “What are they contributing?”
As we were doing a lot of research, as we were having a lot of conversations, while that’s something that we’re talking about at our respective institutions and starting to do more across the United States and beyond, it’s still something that we have to keep reminding ourselves is important—to really focus on the assets or the strengths that students bring.
And so, we thought that when we were dreaming up this project—and that’s a fun story, too, about how it came to be—we thought it really needs to be based in the strengths. And it would be so nice for practitioners, scholars, students, that they could find that the real theme and the real foundation and the real thread through it is the strengths of first-gen students, and what it is that they’re really bringing to these college campuses.
Q: What are some of the strengths and assets of first-generation students that you think are too often overlooked?
A: There’s really no one-size-fits-all for first-gen. Each first-gen student is as unique as the experience itself. I think that’s actually one trap we fall into: We really have to take each case as they come in and create that space.
In the introduction, I mention how Tara Yosso talks about her “community cultural wealth” model and cultural capital and talks about this idea of [ties to] family and culture [as] strengths. I think those are strengths that are really important. Laura Rendón also talks about—what Yosso was saying and building on it—this idea of ganas or perseverance, which is that ability to really develop inner strength and becoming self-reliant and determined to succeed.
There’s something about first-gen students where they are just so gritty. They really stick with it, and they are so inspiring. I love the way that they’re able to sort of exist in multiple worlds. I could have my college world, my peers, but also a lot of first-gen students work, so I can have that world, and then my family, and then maybe I’m from a different country. Really understanding how to exist in all those different worlds and being able to do that successfully, I think that is an incredible strength.
My biggest criticism of first-gen students is that they are too humble. They don’t think that their story is worthy enough to share. They don’t think it has worth, and I think they’re dismissive [of themselves], and that is my biggest criticism. Because for the amount of different first-gen students we have, there are an equal amount of stories that come with them. We need to encourage them to really share those and know that they have worth.
Q: Going off of that, you interspersed scholarly research with student narratives in this essay collection. Why was it important to you to include both perspectives?
A: That was really intentional. I think that the student voice gets ignored if we’re just talking about theory. If we’re going to talk about students, we need to hear their voice, right? It needs to be expressed, and we need to really have that authentic perspective. And so that was something we talked about early on in the project … especially in the last chapter, where we wanted to have students themselves or recent graduates share.
And I think that there’s equally as much value in terms of the research as to what the students are expressing, as they’re sort of in the moment, so to speak. I think [it’s important] even just coaching students that their voice matters … that you can go up and talk to senior administrators … and there’s value in that. I think that was one thing we were really hoping with this anthology was that maybe a graduate student or an undergraduate student could read that and feel inspired and go, “Oh, you know, this is something I could see myself doing,” and really get that spark, too. Gosh, if that happened, I would be over the moon.
Q: The book also emphasizes taking an intersectional approach to serving first-generation students. What does that mean to you? And what do you think we miss when we don’t factor in these students’ other identities?
A: I think that’s just so important. And I have to kind of acknowledge my own positionality. I’m a white male. And I am not first-gen. I will never understand a lot of these identities because I don’t identify that way. And so that’s something that’s been a part of my own journey. That was why it was so important with Simon, myself and Layla—we’re just a diverse collection. And then when you get to the other contributors, they do identify in a variety of different ways.
But that being said, identity is so important to the cultural richness of our college campuses. When I talk to college students, we talk about their gender identity, and sometimes that can be fluid; we talk about their racial or ethnic identity. We talk about their sexual identity, even their academic identity—meaning, what does it mean when I go from high school to college? Does that academic identity come into question when I experience different levels of success? But I think a lot of those identities we talk about, they’re visible. A lot of those identities we can see.
First-gen is not one of them. And that’s what’s interesting about being first-gen is you will never see physically if someone is first-gen. And so, it’s sort of this hidden identity. In a lot of my experiences working with first-gen students, I almost feel that I’ve outed them. When I explain to them, “Hey, I think you’re first-generation based on the information you’ve given me,” there’s a variety of different reactions, because it’s sort of a later-emerging identity. It’s not maybe one that’s discussed when a student is in elementary school, [with someone telling them],“Hey, you’re going to be a first-generation college student.” And so, I think what’s interesting is when you talk about this identity with other first-gen students, it’s one of many that intersect. But I think the timing of the intersection is so different for every first-gen student, if that makes sense.
In my previous role in Portland, when I would reach out to say, “I think you’re a first-gen student,” a lot of students would say, “No, I don’t want to be a first-gen student,” because they would think me identifying them in that way is something that’s negative. And part of that was really [making] that shift and going, “I am identifying you based on your mom and dad’s educational history or parent or guardian, and you might be first-gen—and that is so beautiful. Let’s celebrate that.”
I can be first-gen and a male or first-gen and African American male or I can be first-gen and a student athlete. What do those identities mean? Just being able to share what that identity means is so important for why a student is in college.
And I think that they forget that even as they graduate and go on to whatever’s next after college, to share that they’re first-gen is something that graduate schools, employers, what have you—they really value that.
It’s been programmed for so long that this is such a deficit. We’re working really hard at institutions to say, “Yeah, share that out—because of those qualities we talked about, this makes you a valuable part of this community.”
Q: I thought it was interesting that multiple chapters described how first-generation students can feel isolated from campus life, but also that campus life made them feel isolated from their home lives and families. How do you see the role of family and community for first-generation students’ success, and how do you think higher ed institutions can better account for that?
A: We assume that for first-gen students, when they go to college, that their families are behind it 100 percent, and that is not always the case. I think a lot of times the person that’s the most in favor of them going to college is themselves. And there’s a lot of, you know, “Why don’t you just work at the store?” The argument to convince others to go to college sometimes falls on the first-gen student, and we forget that. And so that kind of carries on through the experience, [family] going, “Why do you need to go to these programs?” or “Why do you need to go abroad?” It’s sort of having to be the explainer and the decoder for college life, and that is a lot for one student.
And so, I think that there is some push and pull with families sometimes, because the family wants to be supportive, but they don’t know how to be supportive strategically. In talking to a lot of families, I’ve coached them, saying, “Hey, you can just call your daughter or son and just say, ‘I love you. I support you doing this. I don’t know how I can strategically do that, but I want you to know I support you.’” That type of thing just goes so far.
The thing that’s also interesting, to your point about feeling isolated, we talk about programs and strategies that can really help first-gen students. But also on college campuses, the onus is on the student. You need to go do these things to be successful. And that’s not a first-gen thing, that’s a college thing. And I sort of push back on that. I think it’s on the institution to really create these spaces, to make students feel welcome, that they belong, that they matter, that they feel that they can have some sense of value in these spaces with their peers. And going back to first-gen identity, they’re not going to know who else is first-gen unless we create spaces where the students can find who else among their peer group is. And so, I think you kind of have to shift it a little bit.
They maybe feel isolated from family because we’re asking them to do a lot of things, such as engage with campus community, campus life, but sometimes that might come into conflict with what they’re being asked to do with their families, whether it’s watch my little brother or go to Grandma’s birthday party. That happened one time where a student really had to negotiate why they had to be on campus that first weekend of school for a lot of the programming [when] they were going to miss Grandma’s birthday. It really puts them in this code-switching situation where they feel isolated because they don’t feel anyone really gets what they’re going through.
Q: The book also offers a lot of concrete advice on how to better structure services and support for first-generation students and ensure they’re engaged and able to take advantage of opportunities like internships and study abroad. What do you think are some of the practical action steps you want to see higher ed leaders take away after reading this book?
A: I think high-impact practices are so important.
We talk so much about what student success means—what does it mean to have a sense of belonging, that type of thing—but I think one thing we really don’t talk a lot about is, other than the degree that the students are seeking, what is it that we really want them to take away from the college experience? What type of skills? Do we want them to think critically? Do we want them to be really engaged with the community? I think that we need to be really intentional on our college campuses about talking about what we want the students to take away, besides the degree. That can really help them in their next step. And I hope that maybe this book can talk a little bit about that. Can we really reimagine what we’re trying to do rather than just be very transactional about the degree?
I hope that they realize that it’s important to invest in this, that we need to invest in sustainable programs. Because I think a lot of times, what you have happen is different leaders or champions of first-gen work will leave institutions and then these initiatives really fizzle out. So, how can we think strategically that it’s not about the person, it’s about the program and initiatives. I think some of the things we talk about in here are almost a love letter to higher education institutions to say, “Look, this population is worth investing in, and it’s not just a one-size-fits-all, but if we can all adopt something that’s really creative and sustainable, all these students across the United States and even globally can benefit.”
In response to federal guidance, Johnson County Community College no longer allows undocumented students to take adult education courses.
Matthew Fowler/iStock/Getty Images
An adult education instructor at Johnson County Community College in Kansas resigned after finding out the college would require proof of immigration status for adult ed programs in response to federal policy shifts, The Kansas City Star first reported.
Daniel Tyx, previously a middle school Spanish teacher, started teaching English to adults part-time at the college last year. He told the Inside Higher Ed that he took the job because he has a passion for working with immigrant students, and he planned to stay if not for the new policy. He described the college’s English language learner program as thriving, with over 800 students.
These students “always come to class. They’re always excited to be there. They’re full of questions. It’s just a dream job,” Tyx said.
But Tyx quit his job last Friday after he was told that he would have to verify students’ immigration statuses.
“That was not in alignment with my values,” Tyx said. “And I didn’t feel like, as a matter of conscience, that I was going to be able to continue.”
The college’s decision came after a February executive order demanded “no taxpayer-funded benefits go to unqualified aliens.” The U.S. Department of Education then announced in July that, to comply with the order, it would end Clinton-era guidance that allowed undocumented students to participate in adult and career and technical education programs. The department insisted that institutions receiving federal funds for these programs begin verifying that students are eligible to benefit from them.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, hardworking American taxpayers will no longer foot the bill for illegal aliens to participate in our career, technical, or adult education programs or activities,” U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in the announcement. “The department will ensure that taxpayer funds are reserved for citizens and individuals who have entered our country through legal means who meet federal eligibility criteria.”
Checking a student’s immigration status is not a typical practice for community colleges, which are now grappling with how to comply with the federal edicts and continue to serve students, and staffers are uncertain how to move forward. Another complication for community colleges and other public institutions is the Trump administration’s crackdown on policies that allow undocumented students to pay in-state tuition if they meet other requirements. After Texas overturned its policy, state officials asked universities to identify undocumented students. At least one Texas institution, the University of Texas at Austin, now requires students to submit proof of immigration status, as well, KVUE reported.
The department’s guidance to bar undocumented students was the second blow to adult education programs after the Trump administration held up about $716 million in federal funds to these programs as part of a wider review of education-related grants in early July. The funds have since been released.
Johnson County Community College now has a message on its website saying that, starting in late July, students are required to show a Real ID, birth certificate, U.S. passport or their most recent immigration documents when they register for adult education classes.
Chris Gray, vice president of strategic communications and marketing at JCCC, said in an email to Inside Higher Ed that the college’s “compliance with federal requirements in this matter allows us to continue to serve qualified individuals” in adult education programs.
Tyx said he felt that college administrators were trying to get ahead of the federal guidance, which he considers “cruel and unjust.” He’s worried for his students, who have been peppering him with questions about whether their documents will suffice.
“My students make such sacrifices to come to class,” he said. “They have so many different reasons to want to learn English, and they’re all good ones. My students want to be able to connect better with their children or their children’s schools. They want to be able to employ the skills that they already have at work and progress in their work lives … It’s very weird that would be something that would be considered to be not desirable by our government.”
A new survey will collect data on academic flourishing among students enrolled in colleges and universities.
Joseph Prezioso/AFP/Getty Images
For prospective students looking to enroll in higher education, there are a variety of institutional factors to consider, among them location, course of study, cost of tuition and campus culture. Various sets of rankings provide additional information that might matter to students, such as spending on research or socioeconomic mobility for graduates.
But one key outcome of higher education remains underappraised, according to Tyler VanderWeele, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at Harvard University and director of the Human Flourishing Program: a student’s personal growth.
Many institutions publish lofty mission statements that connect the learning experience to students’ personal growth, leadership skills, vocation and sense of purpose upon graduation. But beyond anecdotal testimony, there are few measures to understand the influence of colleges and universities on student flourishing.
Next spring, Harvard University and Wanderweele are launching a new assessment tool as part of the Human Flourishing Program. The Flourishing Data Collaborative survey asks students to reflect on their college experience and provide their home institution with feedback as to what’s working and what needs additional intervention to affect student thriving.
What’s the need: Researchers created the survey in part to encourage colleges and universities to consider flourishing and student development a core function of the institution.
“I really do believe that what we measure shapes what we discuss, what we aim for, what policies are put in place to achieve those aims,” VanderWeele said. “So the very act of measurement, in some sense, itself constitutes an intervention and might help colleges and universities better pursue this.”
The assessment is not designed as a replacement for other measures of student success, including job placement or retention rates, Wanderweele noted. But sometimes a focus on ranking metrics can shift institutional priorities in a way that neglects the human-centered mission of postsecondary education, he said.
“For example, U.S. News & World Report rankings [have] very much shaped higher education, and people pay a lot of attention to this, but I think it’s also reoriented colleges and universities to specific metrics and ends that will help them go up in those rankings,” VanderWeele said. “Is it really the most important thing how much money has been spent on new student center facilities?”
The program also wants to better understand the role of higher education in promoting student well-being. Large numbers of young people report feeling on edge, lonely, unmoored or directionless, according to a study from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. To get at this question, the survey asks about a learner’s sense of happiness and meaning and their financial security.
How it works: After promising results from pilot surveys conducted at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Harvard and Campus Bio-Medico University of Rome last year, the annual survey will launch in spring 2026, allowing first-year students to have at least one semester of undergraduate experience under their belts. Learners will respond to 24 questions ranging from “to what extent has university life helped you pursue truth?” to “to what extent has university life helped you to better lead a moral life?”
VanderWeele hopes the survey will serve as a reflection tool for students to consider how education has contributed to their development, but also where they can be self-motivated to improve their well-being.
After data collection is complete, each institution will receive a 50-page report and a dashboard with their survey results, allowing them to filter by specific data points.
What’s next: Presently, the program is recruiting member institutions to participate in the survey and engage in a community of practice, Wanderweele said. The goal is for institutions to gain insight about their current practices, or even assess interventions across several surveys, but also to learn from their peers.
“Our goal with this is not to differentially rank institutions, but to help each of these institutions come together, reflect on their strengths [and] areas for growth and to learn from one another in these different ways,” VanderWeele said.
Institutions will pay an annual $10,000 membership fee to participate, which VanderWeele said is a similar rate to other survey offerings of this kind.
Approximately 20 colleges have indicated interest in membership and another 100 have signed up for an upcoming webinar on Aug. 20 for additional information. VanderWeele said he is hoping a few dozen colleges and universities join the initiative this year.
In addition to providing institution-specific insights and policy recommendations, VanderWeele and his team hope to use survey results to conduct research on human flourishing in higher education in general.
