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When Kimberly Halevy’s son Joshua was 3, she started hearing from his preschool that he was acting out. He rarely participated in circle time and had trouble playing with other kids.
Halevy’s friend had recently opened the preschool, and she liked that someone she knew took care of her son. But eventually, the preschool said it would only allow him back if he had a 1-to-1 aide to address his “disruptive” behavior, Halevy said.
At first, Halevy thought getting him that aide would be straightforward. But she now describes the effort to get her kid support through Philadelphia’s federally mandated, publicly funded early intervention system as exhausting.
Though state evaluators found Joshua should receive multiple forms of therapy each week, it took months for any services to begin, Halevy said. Then, once providers contacted her, she said it became a “guessing game” whether her son would receive the home-based occupational therapy and specialized instruction he qualified for every week.
“I kept being mad at myself for not pushing,” Halevy said. “But now I realize that it’s just the program.”
Across Philadelphia, young kids like Joshua are waiting months and sometimes years for early intervention services that they are legally entitled to, according to families, therapy providers, and advocates Chalkbeat spoke with.
Federal law states a child must receive services as soon as possible after an evaluation team completes their Individualized Education Program, or IEP. Pennsylvania has interpreted that to mean 14 days. But one provider said the list she can access of children waiting for speech therapy — one of several early intervention services — is sometimes more than 2,000 families long.
Early intervention providers are under strain nationwide, with not enough funding or staffing to meet the need. But in Philadelphia — home to 16% of the state’s early intervention population — one player is largely responsible for the system: a 170-year-old nonprofit called Elwyn that the state pays to manage the publicly funded program.
As Philly’s early intervention system struggles to meet the needs of all kids, some providers and advocates say neither Elwyn nor the state officials who oversee the program are doing enough to ensure kids get services on time.
In response to Chalkbeat’s questions, Elwyn President and CEO Charles McLister said Elwyn does not comment on specific cases, but the organization works quickly to assess children and provide them with services. “For the vast majority of cases, services are provided within the defined window,” said McLister.
But McLister acknowledged that there can be delays due to family communication, transportation, scheduling, provider availability, and severe staffing shortages across the sector.
Erin James, press secretary at the Pennsylvania Department of Education, said in a statement that the department stays in close contact with Elwyn throughout the year “to remind them of their legal obligations.”
James did not respond to questions about service delays for Philadelphia families. But she said that early intervention programs often lack resources. “Current funding levels for EI [early intervention] services are not sufficient because the population of students who qualify for EI services has been increasing for years,” James said.
In Philadelphia, the program’s delays are a key reason many of the city’s most vulnerable kids fall behind before they even start kindergarten, advocates say. Data from early intervention program reports the state publishes shows Philly children in early intervention programs lag behind their peers elsewhere in key growth areas, like developing social emotional skills.
“The whole idea of having to wait more than the required time is really putting kids at a disadvantage,” said Inella Ray, director of parent advocacy and engagement at the advocacy organization Children First. “Because when kids don’t have the support that they need, in today’s current education or environment, they get pushed out.”
Parents face delays accessing early intervention services
Early intervention is part of the landmark Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which dictates that all children with disabilities must have access to a free and appropriate public education. Though each state creates and manages its own program, all kids through age 5 who are identified as having a developmental delay or disability are eligible.
In Pennsylvania, the Department of Education oversees local early intervention programs for preschool-age kids. In almost every county, families get connected with services through an intermediary unit, a kind of regional education service agency.
But in Philadelphia, things work differently. The state pays Elwyn a combination of state and federal dollars to administer the city’s preschool early intervention program, along with a much smaller program in Chester. Last fiscal year, its contract was worth around $90 million. Elwyn is in charge of assessing children, developing their IEPs, and subcontracting with a network of providers for services they qualify for.
When Halevy’s kids’ preschool said her son needed an aide, the preschool owner gave Halevy advice: phone Elwyn. So she did, and she was relieved when the organization told her they could fit Joshua in to begin his evaluation later that week.
That was July 2024. She hoped Joshua would have services in time to be back at preschool by the following September. But soon, Halevy said she began hitting roadblocks.
In August, she said she didn’t hear much from Elwyn. Like other early intervention programs statewide, Elwyn often takes a two-week service break at the end of summer — one of many scheduled break periods during the year.
But then when she did hear back that September, she learned Elwyn wouldn’t consider providing a 1-to-1 aide without observing Joshua in his educational environment. But the preschool said he couldn’t return to class unless he had someone there to specifically support him.
At the end of September, when evaluators wrote Joshua’s initial IEP, they documented that they discussed adding an aide to assist Joshua at preschool. But they wrote that because they could not observe Joshua in his educational environment, they did not have enough information to support that recommendation. “[T]he family is in a difficult position,” the team wrote on the IEP, which Chalkbeat has reviewed.
Joshua’s IEP states that he should receive occupational therapy and specialized instruction each week. The law requires services to begin within 14 days. But more than a month after, Joshua still wasn’t receiving services, Halevy said.
At the time, Halevy was stretched thin. She was also working to get services for her 2-year-old daughter, who struggled with speech, through the separate early intervention program that serves children up to age 3 run by the city.
For Halevy, sorting out her daughter’s services in the birth to 3 program was simple. Service providers quickly began contacting her and therapists started showing up for sessions. But for her son, nothing.
“One day, I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, what’s going on with Josh?’ and I start calling every number I had at Elwyn,” said Halevy.
It wasn’t until two more months later, in November, when he finally began to receive occupational therapy, she said recently after reviewing text messages. In December, she said his special instruction began.
Early intervention IEPs not always followed
Elwyn’s Philadelphia program is the largest in the state, serving around 11,000 preschool-age children, according to the most recent data from the 2023-24 school year. The organization first won its contract for early intervention services in Philadelphia in 1998.
But its outcomes for kids are behind the rest of Pennsylvania.
The state requires early intervention programs to report data on how kids progress in certain areas, like social emotional learning and acquiring new skills. State program reports show that for the last five years of data, children in Elwyn’s Philadelphia program have been less likely to progress in all three growth categories compared with the state average.
Margie Wakelin, a senior attorney at the Pennsylvania-based Education Law Center, said her team has assisted more than 80 Philadelphia families in the last year whose kids’ education was disrupted at least in part because they couldn’t access appropriate services from Elwyn. The vast majority of those children, she said, were Black and Brown kids affected by poverty.
Some families hire attorneys to help them access the services they’re entitled to, or get pro bono representation from organizations like the Education Law Center. Many who win their cases get compensatory education, often in the form of money the family can use to pay for services after the case is over.
But that doesn’t make up for lost time as children quickly age out of early intervention. Research shows that children’s brains develop more rapidly between birth to 5 than any other time of their life. Many families, Wakelin said, have also had their children suspended from preschool or made to only attend partial days because of their disabilities.
“It’s such a critical period for kids to have access to high quality education,” said Wakelin. A system that identifies children as needing services but doesn’t follow through, she added, is “really failing our kids.”’
McLister, Elwyn’s CEO, said the organization has learned that, in some cases, children are suspended from their preschool programs because of learning or behavioral needs. “Elwyn is not part of this decision making and often learns about it after the fact,” he said. He added that the organization is developing tools “that will help us understand the frequency in which this happens” and is creating additional resource materials for families.
State reports show that Elwyn’s program is successful in some areas, like evaluating 97% of kids within 60 days, the state-required timeline. But that’s just the first step in what advocates say often becomes a month-long process to get services.
Though the law is clear that kids should receive services within 14 days of their IEP being written, the state does not publish information on how long kids wait for services after an evaluation, or how many service interruptions they’ll experience when providers are no longer available.
When it comes to Elwyn’s performance, CEO McLister said that students’ growth data does not account for the unique challenges of providing services in Philadelphia. The children Elwyn serves have higher needs than the state average, he said, with higher incidences of developmental delays and a greater prevalence of multiple other challenges, such as limited English proficiency, economic disadvantages, and other social risk factors.
“For younger children, these factors produce more modest gains,” said McLister.
McLister emphasized that Elwyn has been successful in evaluating the vast majority of children on-time, and said the most common reason an evaluation falls outside the 60-day window is a parent cancelling an initial evaluation appointment and needing it to be rescheduled.
He said delays in getting kids services are often the result of scheduling challenges and staffing shortages — 95% of service issues related to speech and language services, he said, are due to a lack of staff. He said other delays occur when families move or change their child’s preschool enrollment, and when providers return kids to the “needs list,” meaning they stop service for that child, which happens “for a variety of reasons.”
For Joshua, getting a consistent special instructor, a position meant to support Joshua’s learning, has been impossible, Halevy said. Her text history, which she reviewed recently, documents the challenges: The first special instructor who contacted her never visited and stopped responding to texts, she said. The next person was more helpful and saw Joshua a few times, but then abruptly quit. Now, after more than a month of no special instruction, a new provider comes mostly regularly, Halevy said.
Access to occupational therapy has been slightly better, Halevy said. For the first several months of service, Joshua’s occupational therapist showed up inconsistently and seemed rushed, Halevy said. Now, after working out a schedule, she consistently comes around once a week.
Early childhood intervention needs more funding, some say
These and other challenges aren’t unique to Philadelphia families. But preschool operators and early intervention providers say there are particular and longstanding problems in Philly.
Two years ago, Sharon Neilson, former director of the Woodland Academy Child Development Center in West Philadelphia, was part of a group pushing to bring attention to problems in the city’s early intervention program. Council members held a hearing about parents’ challenges accessing services, and Neilson and other providers met with Elwyn.
At the time, Neilson said, she was hopeful that things would improve. But since then, she said, “we’ve actually seen it get worse.”
Neilson, who now works as support staff at Woodland Academy, said of the 22 children enrolled at the preschool, about four currently receive services from Elwyn, and three more are going through the process of getting evaluated.
The preschool helps families navigate the process, in part because submitting required paperwork and scheduling evaluations can create additional barriers, she said. But even with additional help, in her experience it still usually takes months for kids to be evaluated and services to begin, she said.
“I think that’s the saddest thing for me,” Neilson said. “The families are very frustrated because they don’t know what to do — they just know that they need help for their child, but it’s just very hard to navigate.”
Officials say a lack of resources is largely to blame. Over the past decade, the number of preschool-age children in Pennsylvania receiving early intervention services has grown by a third, and funding hasn’t kept up.
Pennsylvania Department of Education spokesperson Erin James said that is why Gov. Josh Shapiro proposed increasing funding for preschool early intervention by $14.5 million in the state budget. However, months past the budget deadline, lawmakers remain at an impasse over the budget and early education providers are further strained.
One provider who contracts with Elwyn said concerning inequities exist in Elwyn’s program. (Chalkbeat is not naming the provider due to her fears of retaliation from Elwyn.) It’s an accepted norm, the provider said, that kids in nicer neighborhoods get picked up for service much faster than those in poorer neighborhoods.
“There’s an access and equity issue across the board,” said the provider. “And that’s exacerbated by the shortage of providers.”
Asked about those access and equity concerns, McLister said that to address some related challenges, this year Elwyn is implementing more targeted training for staff and plans to develop a family resource center. He said the organization has also employed internal speech language pathologists to assign to high-priority cases.
When families reach out to Elwyn, McLister said staff provide them with documentation and verbal explanations of how the process works to ensure families understand their rights, next steps, and how to give consent for evaluations.
The organization also periodically notifies providers of historically underserved ZIP codes to encourage providers to serve kids equitably across the city, and includes provisions in its contracts meant to “promote fairness and accountability.” McLister said Elwyn places subcontractors on corrective action plans if the organization “detects patterns of non-acceptance that disproportionately impacts underserved areas.”
As for Halevy, she says her family has gotten relatively lucky. They were able to get Joshua started on an evaluation quickly. And she’s been able to get new therapists when others stop showing up.
But her family’s biggest piece of luck, she said, is that her husband recently got a new job with better health insurance. She plans to use that to get some of the services her kids need. That means she no longer will completely rely on Elwyn.
She just wishes she could erase the months of waiting and worrying about why Joshua’s services took so long to start.
“Basically, what happened is we fell through the cracks,” she said.
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.
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“Colleges are now closing at a pace of one per week. What happens to the students?” Jon Marcus asked in a recent Hechinger Report piece. It’s not a rhetorical question — and it doesn’t have an easy answer. As educators, we’ve read the headlines, seen the numbers, and felt the pressure. Undergraduate enrollment is down. Student confidence is eroding. The enrollment cliff looms.
But instead of asking when higher education will fail, we might ask: What if this is a market correction — not a collapse? What if the problem isn’t higher education itself, but how we’ve framed its value and how we’ve taught? What if this moment is less an ending and more a beginning?
In the face of uncertainty, it’s tempting to focus on control: measurable learning outcomes, career-ready skills, standardized assessments. But today’s students are entering a competitive job market — and a world defined by accelerating change, emerging technologies, and challenges we haven’t yet named. That means our teaching needs to prepare them what’s likely and for what’s possible — and even what’s unknowable.
Ronald Beghetto’s framework for “educating for unknowable futures” offers a helpful lens. He proposes three levels of preparation:
Educating for likely futures: equipping students with foundational skills and durable knowledge.
Educating for possible futures: helping students build agency, creativity, and adaptability.
Educating for unknowable futures: inviting students to grapple with uncertainty through reflection and imagination.
Each level requires a shift in how we think about learning and a new set of pedagogical commitments.
1. Educating for Likely Futures: Redesigning Assignments Around Students’ Real Lives
Career readiness remains a core concern. But often, our tools for building it are misaligned with students’ actual experiences. Take the classic business case method, for example: many cases center Fortune 500 CEOs or global crises, which can feel abstract or inaccessible to undergraduates, especially first-generation students.
That’s why I now write my own cases: short, specific, and grounded in contexts my students know. In one recent one, I explored a conflict between student-athletes and faculty at a nearby Division III college. For my mostly student-athlete class, this was familiar and therefore grounding. Their analysis shifted. So did their engagement.
Designing assignments that reflect students’ likely futures — their majors, their industries, their regions — signals that their lives are valid sites of learning. It builds relevance. And it reminds them that professional decision-making doesn’t start “out there.” It starts here.
2. Educating for Possible Futures: Using EdTech with Purpose
Students also need to develop adaptive skills: how to think critically, navigate ambiguity, and evaluate tools in evolving environments. EdTech is a perfect place to practice this.
Today’s education market is flooded with tools — over 370 vendors across over 40 market segments, according to Encoura. But quantity isn’t quality. Too often, we adopt tools based on novelty or institutional trends rather than instructional value.
To support students in building discernment, we must model it ourselves. That means asking: Does this tool solve a real problem in my class? Does it deliver on its promises? Does it support learning equitably and sustainably?
In other words, we must shift from passive adopters to intentional evaluators and invite students into that evaluative process. Helping them think about how technology shapes learning (and their own agency within it) equips them for any environment, not just the one we’ve built.
3. Educating for Unknowable Futures: Making Space for Reflection
Preparing students for the truly unknown requires something more radical: making space for performance, yes, but also for reflection.
In a recent MBA course on negotiation and conflict, I made a bold move: I assigned weekly reflection journals — raw, stream-of-consciousness entries that linked course themes to students’ lived experiences. Some students resisted at first. But by the end, many said it changed the way they approached class and life.
Reflection is often treated as an add-on, something optional or “soft.” But it’s essential. It helps students surface assumptions, interrogate choices, and practice metacognition. And in a world where knowledge and skills are constantly evolving, the ability to learn how to learn may be the most durable skill of all.
Possibility Thinking, in Practice
If our current moment is a reckoning, then our response must be one of responsibility. We cannot guarantee our students a particular future. But we can offer them the tools to shape one.
Beghetto calls this “agentic awareness” — a belief in one’s ability to influence outcomes. It’s a curriculum and a posture. And it’s something we can model by how we teach: with creativity, clarity, and curiosity.
So the next time you see another headline about higher ed’s collapse, ask yourself: What if we treated this as a moment to reimagine rather than as a crisis to survive?
That’s resilience, and it’s possibility thinking in action.
Three Small Shifts You Can Make This Semester
Now is the perfect time to start leaning into the possibility of our problems. To do so, try:
Redesigning one assignmentto reflect your students’ actual career goals or lived experiences. Meeting students where they are will help them better envision where they’re headed.
Asking your classroom technology better questions. Push beyond features to real learning outcomes when you choose to invite EdTech into your classroom.
Making reflection part of the grade. Don’t treat it as busywork but as weighted, important meaning-making.
Higher education may be facing unprecedented disruption, but disruption doesn’t have to mean decline. In fact, the classroom may be one of the last places where we still have real influence over what comes next. Each lesson we design, each conversation we facilitate, each moment we create for reflection — these are acts of future-building.
Educating for unknowable futures doesn’t mean we need to predict what’s next. It means we help students learn to ask better questions, adapt with confidence, and recognize their own capacity to shape change. And it means we embrace that same mindset ourselves.
The future of higher education won’t be saved by sweeping reforms or silver-bullet technologies. It will be co-created — one thoughtful assignment, one intentional choice, one student at a time. And that work starts not in distant policy meetings, but right here, in our classrooms.
Laura Nicole Miller, DET, is an assistant professor in the Grenon School of Business at Assumption University, where she teaches organizational communication, marketing, and management. A first-generation college graduate and former EdTech executive, she studies how communication practices shape equity, trust, and student success in high-stakes environments.
Craft, A. (2015). Possibility thinking: From what is to what might be. In R. Wegerif, L. Li, & J. C. Kaufman (Eds.), The Routledge international handbook of research on teaching thinking (pp. 15–26). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315797021
Miller, L. N. (2025). “D-III students deserve better”: strategic communication with college stakeholders. The CASE Journal, 21(3), 493-516. https://doi.org/10.1108/TCJ-06-2024-0184
“Colleges are now closing at a pace of one per week. What happens to the students?” Jon Marcus asked in a recent Hechinger Report piece. It’s not a rhetorical question — and it doesn’t have an easy answer. As educators, we’ve read the headlines, seen the numbers, and felt the pressure. Undergraduate enrollment is down. Student confidence is eroding. The enrollment cliff looms.
But instead of asking when higher education will fail, we might ask: What if this is a market correction — not a collapse? What if the problem isn’t higher education itself, but how we’ve framed its value and how we’ve taught? What if this moment is less an ending and more a beginning?
In the face of uncertainty, it’s tempting to focus on control: measurable learning outcomes, career-ready skills, standardized assessments. But today’s students are entering a competitive job market — and a world defined by accelerating change, emerging technologies, and challenges we haven’t yet named. That means our teaching needs to prepare them what’s likely and for what’s possible — and even what’s unknowable.
Ronald Beghetto’s framework for “educating for unknowable futures” offers a helpful lens. He proposes three levels of preparation:
Educating for likely futures: equipping students with foundational skills and durable knowledge.
Educating for possible futures: helping students build agency, creativity, and adaptability.
Educating for unknowable futures: inviting students to grapple with uncertainty through reflection and imagination.
Each level requires a shift in how we think about learning and a new set of pedagogical commitments.
1. Educating for Likely Futures: Redesigning Assignments Around Students’ Real Lives
Career readiness remains a core concern. But often, our tools for building it are misaligned with students’ actual experiences. Take the classic business case method, for example: many cases center Fortune 500 CEOs or global crises, which can feel abstract or inaccessible to undergraduates, especially first-generation students.
That’s why I now write my own cases: short, specific, and grounded in contexts my students know. In one recent one, I explored a conflict between student-athletes and faculty at a nearby Division III college. For my mostly student-athlete class, this was familiar and therefore grounding. Their analysis shifted. So did their engagement.
Designing assignments that reflect students’ likely futures — their majors, their industries, their regions — signals that their lives are valid sites of learning. It builds relevance. And it reminds them that professional decision-making doesn’t start “out there.” It starts here.
2. Educating for Possible Futures: Using EdTech with Purpose
Students also need to develop adaptive skills: how to think critically, navigate ambiguity, and evaluate tools in evolving environments. EdTech is a perfect place to practice this.
Today’s education market is flooded with tools — over 370 vendors across over 40 market segments, according to Encoura. But quantity isn’t quality. Too often, we adopt tools based on novelty or institutional trends rather than instructional value.
To support students in building discernment, we must model it ourselves. That means asking: Does this tool solve a real problem in my class? Does it deliver on its promises? Does it support learning equitably and sustainably?
In other words, we must shift from passive adopters to intentional evaluators and invite students into that evaluative process. Helping them think about how technology shapes learning (and their own agency within it) equips them for any environment, not just the one we’ve built.
3. Educating for Unknowable Futures: Making Space for Reflection
Preparing students for the truly unknown requires something more radical: making space for performance, yes, but also for reflection.
In a recent MBA course on negotiation and conflict, I made a bold move: I assigned weekly reflection journals — raw, stream-of-consciousness entries that linked course themes to students’ lived experiences. Some students resisted at first. But by the end, many said it changed the way they approached class and life.
Reflection is often treated as an add-on, something optional or “soft.” But it’s essential. It helps students surface assumptions, interrogate choices, and practice metacognition. And in a world where knowledge and skills are constantly evolving, the ability to learn how to learn may be the most durable skill of all.
Possibility Thinking, in Practice
If our current moment is a reckoning, then our response must be one of responsibility. We cannot guarantee our students a particular future. But we can offer them the tools to shape one.
Beghetto calls this “agentic awareness” — a belief in one’s ability to influence outcomes. It’s a curriculum and a posture. And it’s something we can model by how we teach: with creativity, clarity, and curiosity.
So the next time you see another headline about higher ed’s collapse, ask yourself: What if we treated this as a moment to reimagine rather than as a crisis to survive?
That’s resilience, and it’s possibility thinking in action.
Three Small Shifts You Can Make This Semester
Now is the perfect time to start leaning into the possibility of our problems. To do so, try:
Redesigning one assignmentto reflect your students’ actual career goals or lived experiences. Meeting students where they are will help them better envision where they’re headed.
Asking your classroom technology better questions. Push beyond features to real learning outcomes when you choose to invite EdTech into your classroom.
Making reflection part of the grade. Don’t treat it as busywork but as weighted, important meaning-making.
Higher education may be facing unprecedented disruption, but disruption doesn’t have to mean decline. In fact, the classroom may be one of the last places where we still have real influence over what comes next. Each lesson we design, each conversation we facilitate, each moment we create for reflection — these are acts of future-building.
Educating for unknowable futures doesn’t mean we need to predict what’s next. It means we help students learn to ask better questions, adapt with confidence, and recognize their own capacity to shape change. And it means we embrace that same mindset ourselves.
The future of higher education won’t be saved by sweeping reforms or silver-bullet technologies. It will be co-created — one thoughtful assignment, one intentional choice, one student at a time. And that work starts not in distant policy meetings, but right here, in our classrooms.
Laura Nicole Miller, DET, is an assistant professor in the Grenon School of Business at Assumption University, where she teaches organizational communication, marketing, and management. A first-generation college graduate and former EdTech executive, she studies how communication practices shape equity, trust, and student success in high-stakes environments.
Craft, A. (2015). Possibility thinking: From what is to what might be. In R. Wegerif, L. Li, & J. C. Kaufman (Eds.), The Routledge international handbook of research on teaching thinking (pp. 15–26). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315797021
Miller, L. N. (2025). “D-III students deserve better”: strategic communication with college stakeholders. The CASE Journal, 21(3), 493-516. https://doi.org/10.1108/TCJ-06-2024-0184
When a crisis strikes, college and university presidents and chancellors are asked to balance competing priorities in real time: protecting students, reassuring faculty, and staff, addressing trustees and communicating with stakeholders, including the public and other key partners. All while trying to be the role model and stay on mission as best as possible.
While each crisis has distinctive characteristics, these situations never unfold in a vacuum. Today, they are happening as the value of higher education is being questioned, policymakers are sharpening their scrutiny, and financial pressures are forcing tough choices across campus communities. Moreover, our fast, fragmented information environment doesn’t just shape crises. It can, in effect, create them, manufacturing controversy where little existed.
Strong crisis communications are not just about surviving the alarming hours, days or weeks of a crisis. They are about preserving trust and protecting reputation–which inevitably connects with revenue–thereby positioning the institution to lead credibly into the future.
We were heartened when attending a recent annual, on-the-record convening of college presidents and journalists at the Press Club in Washington, DC, last month. Campus leaders showed up and readily expressed renewed energy for their roles and prospects for what remains the world’s most admired higher education system. These higher ed leaders gathered voluntarily (yes, voluntarily) to share specific examples of today’s campus environment, dispel some of the current higher ed narratives and inform the media–without defensiveness or naiveté–of the impact on their immediate communities and beyond.
We cannot recommend engaging in such public conversations highly enough, as a means of building goodwill and busting myths. After all, the best crisis “response” begins long before any crisis occurs.
Preparing before the crisis
Presidents should ensure their teams are equipped with:
Clear, values-based messaging. A well-defined set of institutional values, articulated consistently (and easily located on public-facing websites), gives everyone a steady reference point. Do students, faculty, staff, families, alumni, neighbors and legislators know what the university stands for during times thick and thin?
Scenario planning and tabletop exercises. Running through potential crises, from student protests to cybersecurity breaches, helps identify weaknesses in protocols and message discipline. Exercises also clarify roles so that when a real situation arises, the team knows who speaks, who decides and who executes.
Designated spokespeople, prepared with media training. While a president may become the voice in a crisis, other leaders, such as a provost, communications official or dean of students, must be ready to carry the message.
Leading during the crisis
During the heat of a crisis, your guiding stars are simple: safety and support for your people. Accuracy, speed and transparency will matter most. Keep the following principles in mind:
Respond promptly, but don’t speculate. Silence creates a vacuum, but premature statements can backfire or harm. Even a short acknowledgment, such as “We are aware of the situation and will share updates as we confirm details,” signals attentiveness and concern. This playbook paid off during the pandemic for William & Mary, when President Katherine A. Rowe gathered input from the university’s subject-matter experts early on and established credible public health and safety approaches.
Center your people, not your process. Your stakeholders need to hear about safety, support and accountability before they hear about the college’s committees or investigations coming together. Prioritize action coupled with compassion. Even 20 years later, we remember the example of Scott Cowen, president of Tulane University during Hurricane Katrina, and the trust built due to his people-first approach. During the pandemic, Colgate University President Brian Casey modeled people-first leadership by moving into student housing to better understand students’ experiences and guide the campus through an especially challenging time.
Communicate consistently across channels. Students, families and alumni are likely to first encounter your messages (or off-base, inaccurate versions of this news) on social media, while others may hear news via email, during town halls or staff meetings. Coordinated, consistent language is critical for accuracy and credibility.
Engage trustees and legislators early. Surprises erode trust. One university president we admire follows the “No surprises” rule, crisis or no crisis. Keep key stakeholders briefed, even if details are evolving. A healthy president-board relationship, or the opposite, can easily become apparent during a crisis.
The all-important post-crisis phase
Too many falter by assuming that once any headlines fade, the crisis is behind them. In fact, the post-crisis period is where reputations are refined and strengthened. Presidents should treat this phase as an opportunity for reflection, accountability and rebuilding confidence.
Conduct a candid after-action review. What worked? What didn’t? Invite honest feedback from leadership, communications staff and key campus partners. A president who once worked at NASA introduced that agency’s practice of conducting a “hotwash,” the immediate, constructive, after-action review at her university.
Fix what needs improvement. Based on what you learn from the after-action review, consider who among your team demonstrated they are best suited for crisis situations. Determine who will stand in when these individuals are away or temporarily unreachable. Have a backup plan for the backup plan, including communications tools ranging from analog to digital. Cybersecurity breaches happen, as do power outages. Consider engaging external expertise to audit your policies and practices before, yes, the next crisis.
Follow up with your community. Students, faculty, staff, families and alumni will remember how your institution followed through. Report on the status of (non-confidential) investigations, share policy changes and highlight steps taken to prevent recurrence. Determine the cadence and keep to it, for communication containing substantive updates. Demonstrating accountability reinforces trust.
Reconnect the crisis to the institution’s mission. For example, if the issue involved free speech, show how new steps align with the university’s now-broader commitment to inquiry and dialogue. If it involved safety, emphasize your institution’s improved duty of care.
Strengthen external relationships. Use the post-crisis time to meet with legislators, donors and alumni leaders. Transparency about what happened and how the university has responded often earns respect over time, potentially turning doubters into advocates. The word potentially is deliberate here, in that this work can be challenging, it may take years and we need to be realistic about what is feasible. Is there common ground to be found? Are we seeking to please a few at the expense of the many?
The special case of manufactured crises
While the principles of communication are consistent across all crises, a manufactured crisis—one designed to harm a leader through disinformation—requires a different approach. Unlike a natural disaster or an institutional mistake, these situations are orchestrated attacks. Their primary purpose is not to address a problem but to create one. They become personal, understandably taken to heart. Leaders must steel themselves, identify key allies to clarify misinformation, and draw from resources in the “bank of goodwill” built during their presidency. Always easier said than done, yet the challenge for any leader in such circumstances is to not become the crisis.
Why it matters more than ever
Higher education’s current reputational challenges heighten the stakes. Campus leaders cannot afford to treat crisis communications as a tactical exercise. Instead, crisis communications should be integrated into a broader strategy for sustaining trust in the institution and, by extension, in the value of higher education itself.
Handling a crisis can demonstrate an institution’s resilience, values and leadership. It can show students and families that the university is committed to their safety and success. It can show legislators that higher education takes accountability seriously. And it can remind the broader public that colleges and universities remain vital engines of knowledge, opportunity and community—even in turbulent times. You may have heard this beautiful phrase before, but remember and repeat: Higher education builds America.
Crises will come. Presidents cannot control exactly when or how. By preparing in advance, leading with compassion and clarity in the moment and taking ownership in the aftermath, leaders can turn adversity into an opportunity to strengthen their institution’s credibility and standing. All of higher education stands to benefit from such examples of leadership.
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Tanish Doshi was in high school when he pushed the Tucson Unified School District to take on an ambitious plan to reduce its climate footprint. In Oct. 2024, the availability of federal tax credits encouraged the district to adopt the $900 million plan, which involves goals of achieving net-zero emissions and zero waste by 2040, along with adding a climate curriculum to schools.
Now, access to those funds is disappearing, leaving Tucson and other school systems across the country scrambling to find ways to cover the costs of clean energy projects.
The Arizona school district, which did not want to impose an economic burden on its low-income population by increasing bonds or taxes, had expected to rely in part on federal dollars provided by the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act, Doshi said.
But under HR1, or the “one big, beautiful bill,” passed on July 4, Tucson schools will not be able to receive all of the expected federal funding in time for their upcoming clean energy projects. The law discontinues many clean energy tax credits, including those used by schools for solar power and electric vehicles, created under the IRA. When schools and other tax-exempt organizations receive these credits, they come in the form of a direct cash reimbursement.
At the same time, Tucson and thousands of districts across the country that were planning to develop solar and wind power projects are now forced to decide between accelerating them to try to meet HR1’s fast-approaching “commence construction” deadline of June 2026, finding other sources of funding or hitting pause on their plans. Tina Cook, energy project manager for Tucson schools, said the district might have to scale back some of its projects unless it could find local sources of funding.
“Phasing out the tax credits for wind and solar energy is going to make a huge, huge difference,” said Doshi, 18, now a first-year college student. “It ends a lot of investments in poor and minority communities. You really get rid of any notion of environmental justice that the IRA had advanced.”
Emma Weber leads a chant at a Colorado state capitol rally in support of “The Green New Deal for Colorado Schools.” Credit: Courtesy of Emma Weber
The tax credits in the IRA, the largest legislative investment in climate projects in U.S. history, had marked a major opportunity for schools and colleges to reduce their impact on the environment. Educational institutions are significant contributors to climate change: K-12 school infrastructure, for example, releases at least 41 million metric tons of emissions per year, according to a paper from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. The K-12 school system’s buses — some 480,000 — and meals also produce significant emissions and waste. Clean energy projects supported by the IRA were helping schools not only to limit their climate toll but also to save money on energy costs over the long term and improve student health, advocates said.
As a result, many students, consultants and sustainability leaders said, they have no plans to abandon clean energy projects. They said they want to keep working to cut emissions, even though that may be more difficult now.
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Sara Ross, cofounder of UndauntedK12, which helps school districts green their operations, divided HR1’s fallout on schools into three categories: the good, the bad and the ugly.
On the bright side, she said, schools can still get up to 50 percent off for installing ground source heat pumps — those credits will continue — to more efficiently heat and cool schools. The network of pipes in a ground source pump cycles heat from the shallow earth into buildings.
In the “bad” category, any electric vehicle acquired after Sept. 30 of this year will not be eligible for tax credits — drastically accelerating the IRA’s phase-out timeline by seven years. That applies to electric school buses as well as other district-owned vehicles. Electric vehicle charging stations must be installed by June 30, 2026 at an eligible location to claim a tax credit.*
The expiration of the federal tax credits could cost a district up to $40,000 more per vehicle, estimated Sue Gander, director of the Electric School Bus Initiative run by the nonprofit World Resources Institute.
Solar projects will see the most “ugly” effects of HR1, Ross said.
Los Angeles Unified School District is planning to build 21 solar projects on roofs, carports and other structures, plus 13 electric vehicle charging sites, as part of an effort to reduce energy costs and achieve 100 percent renewable energy by 2040. The district anticipated receiving around $25 million in federal tax credits to help pay for the $90 million contract, said Christos Chrysiliou, chief eco-sustainability officer for the district. With the tight deadlines imposed by HR1, the district can no longer count on receiving that money.
“It’s disappointing,” Chrysiliou said. “It’s nice to be able to have that funding in place to meet the goals and objectives that we have.”
Emma Weber, at left, trains student leaders at Sunrise Movement’s “summer intensive” in Illinois this year. Credit: Courtesy of Emma Weber
LAUSD is looking at a small portion of a $9 billion bond measure passed last year, as well as utility rebates, third-party financing and grants from the California Energy Commission, to help make up for some of the gaps in funding.
Many California State University campuses are in a similar position as they work to install solar to meet the system’s goal of carbon neutrality by 2045, said Lindsey Rowell, CSU’s chief energy, sustainability and transportation officer.
Tariffs on solar panel materials from overseas and the early sunsetting of tax credits mean that “the cost of these projects are becoming prohibitive for campuses,” Rowell said.
Sweeps of undocumented immigrants in California may also lead to labor shortages that could slow the pace of construction, Rowell added. “Limiting the labor force in any way is only going to result in an increased cost, so those changes are frightening as well,” she said.
New Treasury Department guidance, issued Aug. 15, made it much harder for projects to meet the threshold needed to qualify for the tax credits. Renewable energy projects previously qualified for credits once a developer spent 5 percent of a project’s cost. But the guidelines have been tightened — now, larger projects must pass a “physical work test,” meaning “significant physical labor has begun on a site,” before they can qualify for credits. With the construction commencement deadline looming next June, these will likely leave many projects ineligible for credits.
“The rules are new, complex [and] not widely understood,” Ross said. “We’re really concerned about schools’ ability to continue to do solar projects and be able to effectively navigate these new rules.”
Schools without “fancy legal teams” may struggle to understand how the new tax credit changes in HR1 will affect their finances and future projects, she added.
Some universities were just starting to understand how the IRA tax credits could help them fund projects. Lily Strehlow, campus sustainability coordinator at the University of Wisconsin, Eau-Claire, said the planning cycle for clean energy projects at the school can take ten years. The university is in the process of adding solar to the roof of a large science building, and depending on the date of completion, the project “might or might not” qualify for the credits, she said.
“At this point, everybody’s holding their breath,” said Rick Brown, founder of California-based TerraVerde Energy, a clean energy consultant to schools and agencies.
Brown said that none of his company’s projects are in a position where they’re not going to get done, but the company may end up seeing fewer new projects due to a higher cost of equipment.
Tim Carter, president of Second Nature, which supports climate work in education, added that colleges and universities are in a broader period of uncertainty, due to larger attacks from the Trump administration, and are not likely to make additional investments at this time: “We’re definitely in a wait and see.”
For youth activists, the fallout from HR1 is “disheartening,” Doshi said.
Emma and Molly Weber, climate activists since eighth grade, said they are frustrated. The Colorado-based twins, who will start college this fall, helped secure the first “Green New Deal for Schools” resolution in the nation in the Boulder Valley School District. Its goals include working toward a goal of Zero Net Energy by 2050, making school buildings greener, creating pathways to green jobs and expanding climate change education.
Emma, far left, and Molly Weber, far right, work with climate leaders from the Boulder Valley School District’s Sunrise Movement to prepare for Colorado’s legislative session. Credit: Courtesy of Emma Weber
“It feels very demoralizing to see something you’ve been working so hard at get slashed back, especially since I’ve spoken to so many students from all over the country about these clean energy tax credits, being like, ‘These are the things that are available to you, and this is how you can help convince your school board to work on this,’” Emma Weber said.
The Webers started thinking about other creative ways to pay for the clean energy transition and have settled on advocating for state-level legislation in the form of a climate superfund, where major polluters in a community would be responsible for contributing dollars to sustainability initiatives.
Consultants and sustainability coordinators said that they don’t see the demand for renewable energy going away. “Solar is the cheapest form of energy. It makes sense to put it on every rooftop that we can. And that’s true with or without tax credits,” Strehlow said.
*Correction: This version of the story includes updated information on the timeline for the expiration of tax credits for electric vehicle charging stations.
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at [email protected].
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A conservative mainland group whose lawsuit against Harvard University ended affirmative action in college admissions is now building support in Hawaiʻi to take on Kamehameha Schools’ policies that give preference to Native Hawaiian students.
Students for Fair Admissions, based in Virginia, recently launched the website KamehamehaNotFair.org. It says that the admission preference “is so strong that it is essentially impossible for a non-Native Hawaiian student to be admitted to Kamehameha.”
“We believe that focus on ancestry, rather than merit or need, is neither fair nor legal, and we are committed to ending Kamehameha’s unlawful admissions policies in court,” the website says.
Kamehameha’s Board of Trustees and CEO Jack Wong said in a written statement that the school expected the policy would be challenged. The institution — a private school established through the estate of Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop to educate Hawaiians — successfully defended its admission policy in a series of lawsuits in the early 2000s. The trustees and Wong promised to do so again.
“We are confident that our policy aligns with established law, and we will prevail,” the statement said.
The campaign also drew criticism from the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, established in the late 1970s for the betterment of Native Hawaiians. OHA’s Board of Trustees called it an “attack on the right of Native Hawaiians to care for our own, on our own terms.”
“These attacks are not new — but they are escalating,” the trustees said in a written statement. “They aim to dismantle the hard-won protections that enable our people to heal, rise, and chart our future.”
Several groups have tried and failed in the past to overturn Kamehameha’s admissions policy. Federal courts, siding with Kamehameha, have ruled that giving preference to Native Hawaiians helps alleviate historical injustices they faced after the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893.
In the 2006 decision upholding Kamehameha Schools’ admissions policy, a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals panel pointed to longstanding challenges Native Hawaiian students have faced in schools.
“It is clear that a manifest imbalance exists in the K-12 educational arena in the state of Hawaiʻi, with Native Hawaiians falling at the bottom of the spectrum in almost all areas of educational progress and success,” Judge Susan Graber wrote in the majority opinion.
These disparities persist. Just over a third of Native Hawaiian students in public schools were proficient in reading in 2024, compared to 52% of students statewide. Less than a quarter of Native Hawaiian students were proficient in math.
The state education department has also fallen short of providing families with adequate access to Hawaiian language immersion programs, according to two lawsuits filed against the department this summer. The Hawaiian immersion programs are open to all students, not just those of Hawaiian ancestry.
Moses Haia III, a lawyer and former director of the Native Hawaiian Legal Corp., said that improving outcomes for Hawaiian students is Kamehameha’s primary reason for existing. He said this new challenge appears to be based on ignorance of Hawaiʻi’s history.
“Ultimately, what I see is these people being uneducated,” Haia said of the mainland group. “Not knowing the history of Hawaiʻi, not knowing the reasons for Kamehameha’s existence, and just once again trying to push Hawaiians into this box… and wanting to be on top.”
Past Challenges
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that private schools can’t discriminate based on race in a case called Runyon v. McCrary, which involved Black school students trying to gain admission to private schools that had yet to integrate non-white students.
An anonymous student sued Kamehameha in 2003, invoking the 1976 ruling and alleging that the school’s policy of giving preference to Hawaiian children was discriminatory. The case eventually landed in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
A majority of the appeals court judges sided with Kamehameha. They used a part of the Civil Rights Act that prohibits discrimination in the workplace as a legal framework for looking at the admissions policy.
Judge Graber wrote that a preference for Native Hawaiian students “serves a legitimate remedial purpose by addressing the socioeconomic and educational disadvantages facing Native Hawaiians, producing Native Hawaiian leadership for community involvement, and revitalizing Native Hawaiian culture, thereby remedying current manifest imbalances resulting from the influx of western civilization.”
But it was a narrow victory for Kamehameha, an 8-to-7 vote. Dissenting judges wrote that admitting mostly Hawaiian students didn’t create a diverse student body; others said that the policy was clearly discriminatory.
The anonymous student appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. But Kamehameha entered a $7 million settlement with the student and their mother before the court decided whether to take up the case.
While the settlement safeguarded the admission policy from a ruling by the nation’s highest court it also meant lawyers punted the issue.
Another group of anonymous students challenged the admissions policy a few years later and again took that case to the Supreme Court. But the court declined to take up that case in 2011.
Students for Fair Admissions previously brought two landmark cases against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, arguing that the two schools’ race-conscious admissions policies discriminated against Asian American and white applicants. The Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that colleges cannot use race as a factor in their admissions, although the decision didn’t specify what this could mean for K-12 schools.
Last fall, the number of Black students enrolled at both universities fell, although some researchers cautioned that colleges might not see the full impact of the Supreme Court ruling until a few admissions cycles have passed.
The challenge to Kamehameha Schools’ admissions policies comes amid national pushback on efforts to promote diversity in schools. In February, the U.S. Department of Education said any colleges and K-12 schools using race-based practices in hiring and admissions could lose federal funding, although a court subsequently prevented the department from enforcing those requirements.
Kamehameha receives no funding from the federal government, according to its tax filings. The school, which is the state’s largest private landowner, has assets valued at about $15 billion.
Nearly 60% of student affairs professionals witnessed racism on their campuses in the past year, with one-third experiencing it directly, according to a new national study that exposes significant racial disparities in workplace conditions across higher education.
Dr. Royel M. JohnsonThe report, released by the USC Race and Equity Center, analyzed responses from 1,992 student affairs professionals at 73 colleges and universities who participated in the National Assessment of Collegiate Campus Climates Staff Survey between 2021-2023.
“When we look at over 2000 student affairs professionals across 73 institutions, we often see that student affairs professionals are really the backbone of our campuses, who are the first line of defense in supporting students and responsible for creating the conditions of belonging,” said Dr. Royal Johnson, a professor in the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California and director of the National Assessment of Collegiate Campus Climates in the USC Race and Equity Center. “But the same sort of realities that students are facing of race and discrimination, student affairs professionals are also being plagued with those same challenges.”
Black student affairs professionals reported the highest rates of direct racist experiences at 61%, followed by Asian (46%) and multiracial staff (46%). In contrast, only 17% of white professionals reported experiencing racism personally.
“Student affairs professionals are expected to champion equity and care for students, yet they often labor in environments that fall short of those same principles,” the researchers wrote.
In an interview with Diverse, Johnson noted that upwards of 60% of those surveyed reported experiencing racism and the lingering consequences, “whether it be the emotional toll and frustration associated with it, the distrust that emanates from it, their sense of mattering,” he added.
The perpetrators of racism came primarily from within institutions themselves. White staff members were the most common source of racist behavior (27% of respondents reported experiencing racism from white colleagues), followed by white students (22%) and white faculty (21%). Additionally, 22% experienced racism from external contacts such as vendors and community partners.
The emotional toll proved significant, with 72% of respondents reporting feelings of frustration and 50% experiencing anger as a result of racist incidents. More than a quarter (27%) said the experiences led to declines in mental health and emotional well-being.
Confidence in institutional commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion varied sharply by race. While half of white staff expressed strong confidence in their institution’s DEI commitment, only 30% of Black staff and 35% of Asian staff shared that view.
The workplace climate issues extended beyond racist incidents to broader patterns of exclusion and inequality. Less than half of all respondents felt they mattered at their institution, with Asian (33%) and Black (38%) professionals reporting the lowest rates of feeling valued.
Staff of color also reported significant barriers to advancement. Among Black professionals, 34% disagreed that they received equal opportunities for advancement compared to colleagues, while 32% of Hispanic/Latinx staff reported similar concerns. One in ten Black professionals said their perspectives were not valued at all in workplace decision-making processes.
“We know that staff of color have long struggled with equitable professional mobility kind of opportunities, or feel relegated to lower level, lower status kinds of roles,” Johnson explained, adding that the study represents “one of the more larger scale analysis that’s national in scope, that’s offering behind the scenes if you will, of the kind of racial realities that folks are experiencing.”
The study revealed gaps in institutional support systems as well. While 70% of staff of color and 81% of white staff learned about race through self-directed efforts, only about half received formal professional development from their institutions on racial topics.
During the survey period, which coincided with national discussions about anti-Asian hate crimes and police brutality against Black Americans, less than half of institutions addressed these issues. Only 42% of respondents said their leaders addressed anti-Asian hate crimes, while 50% said leaders addressed police brutality and racially motivated violence against Black people.
The findings come as student affairs faces broader retention challenges, with 39% of staff indicating they are likely to seek other employment within the next year, according to separate research by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources.
The USC researchers offered seven recommendations for institutional action, including strengthening reporting mechanisms, embedding equity goals in staff evaluations, regularly assessing campus climate with disaggregated data, and ensuring transparent advancement pathways.
“Addressing racism in the workplace is not about individual resilience—it is about institutional responsibility,” the researchers concluded. “Without bold, sustained, and collective action, campuses risk losing the very professionals who are central to advancing their diversity and student success missions.”
The study’s sample included professionals from 28 two-year and 45 four-year institutions. The demographic breakdown was 54% white, 18% Hispanic/Latinx, 12% Black, 5% Asian, and 7% biracial or multiracial staff members.
This week marked the start of the semester for hundreds of colleges across the U.S. But many international students, plagued by difficulty getting visa appointments and unusually high rates of visa denials, are still unsure if they’ll be able to attend college in the U.S. this year.
At the University of Maryland Baltimore County, a midsize public university that has a student body composed of about 15 percent international students, international Ph.D. and undergraduate students appear to be largely unaffected by visa issues. But the rate of visa issuance for master’s students is only about half what it has been in previous years, according to David Di Maria, UMBC’s vice provost for global engagement.
Most of UMBC’s master’s students are from India, the country that now sends the most international students to the U.S.—but which experts say has had virtually no visa appointments available for the past several months.
“I think what has impacted that population the most is that you’ve got a country where … you could probably guess, it’s the highest volume in terms of students visa applications at a time when there are fewer slots available,” Di Maria said. “Hopefully it’s a blip. Hopefully, in future terms, there won’t be an extended period where students are unable to secure visa appointments.”
The backlog in visa appointments dates to the Trump administration’s pause on all student visa interviews in late May, after which the government began mandating social media reviews for all F-1 visa applicants. Some experts argue that the mandatory social media reviews have also extended the visa process by adding more responsibilities to the workload of consulate staff.
Since then, experts have speculated about how significant the drop in international student enrollment will be this fall. NAFSA, the association that represents international education professionals, predicted earlier this summer that international enrollment would drop between 30 and 40 percent, resulting in $7 billion in lost revenue and 60,000 lost jobs. Experts warn that a dip that significant could have major repercussions for the economies of college towns and cities. Colleges may also have to scramble to find professors to lead low-level classes that international graduate students were slated to teach.
Stuck In a Holding Pattern
It’s difficult to tell if those projections are accurate. The Department of State hasn’t updated visa issuance numbers since May, at which point figures were already lower than they had been the previous year.
But now, the picture of what this academic year might look like is beginning to take shape as institutions and experts report that significant numbers of international students are stuck in a holding pattern, unable to find visa appointments even after the semester has begun.
“I actually joined a WhatsApp group in April … of all these Indian students who are aspiring to study in the U.S. this fall, and I [see] a lot of students saying, ‘No slots, no slots,’” said Girish Ballolla, chief executive officer of Gen Next Education, an international recruitment firm. “Basically, what they’re saying is they’re going online trying to schedule an appointment and they’re not finding any slots. Those students are, like, now talking about, ‘Oh, should I defer to spring? Should I take up my university’s offer of an online program?’”
Other countries with severely limited appointments include China, Japan and Nigeria, according to NAFSA.
Inside Higher Ed reached out to over 30 universities with significant international student enrollment to ask how many of their committed incoming students were unable to attend due to visa issues. Most did not respond; others declined to answer the question or said that data was not yet available.
A handful of institutions noted that they’ve had only a small number of students impacted by delays and denials; Grinnell College, located in Iowa, has only one international student out of 72 who was unable to come to campus due to visa delays. At Mount Holyoke College, “fewer than seven” students are still waiting on their visas, a spokesman said in an email, though he said other students had deferred until the spring. It’s not unusual for a small number of students to miss the start of the semester due to visa issues, even in a regular semester.
On the other hand, Cornell University, like UMBC, said some of its graduate students had trouble getting their visas—or were simply concerned about coming to the U.S.
“Cornell accepted roughly the same number of international students this year as in past years and roughly the same number accepted our offer as in the past, but we have experienced some melt at the graduate level as students were worried about the visa application process or chose not to come to the U.S. because of the political climate,” Wendy Wolford, vice provost for international affairs, told Inside Higher Ed in an email.
Grinnell, Cornell and Mount Holyoke, as well as UMBC, are among the 20 institutions with the highest proportion of international students in the U.S., according to The New York Times.
Visa Denials Are Up, Too
On top of having difficulty securing appointments, more students are having their visas denied, experts report.
Sudhanshu Kaushik, the director of the North American Association of Indian Students, said that students from the subcontinent are being denied at a higher rate than he’s seen in his five years leading the organization.
Many have been told the reason for their denial is because there’s not enough proof that they’re not attempting to immigrate to the U.S. That’s usual in some cases, Kaushik said, but it’s become common this year even among wealthier students from major cities with deep roots and connections in India.
“A demographic that’s never had an issue is facing lots of issues,” he said. He also noted that some students are receiving denials many weeks after their visa interview, in some cases getting the news just a few days before they were hoping to start classes.
Colleges are attempting to accommodate students facing visa delays and denials by offering them the chance to defer their admission until spring or take online classes, according to Joann Ng Hartmann, NAFSA’s senior impact officer.
“Schools are really thinking and working very hard to be flexible, because they want these international students on campus,” she said.
Cornell also devised what Wolford called a “global semester program” that will offer international students who couldn’t get their visas in time the option to spend their first semester at one of three international partner institutions before hopefully coming to Cornell in the fall.
Some students are still hoping they’ll make it to campus this semester, despite not receiving visas by orientation.
“At this point for us, the census date is Sept. 10, and that’s when we really know who’s here and who’s not,” said Di Maria of UMBC. “I do have a number of students who are still optimistic that say they would arrive later in the week, or even next week.”
Utah State University will undergo a state audit following an initial review that found “concerns about USU’s governance, leadership, and culture of policy noncompliance.”
At a Tuesday meeting, the state Legislature’s audit subcommittee voted unanimously to conduct a deeper review of the university, which will look at governance and procurement processes, particularly in the president’s office.
The review comes amid reporting that Elizabeth Cantwell, the university’s former president, spent heavily on office remodeling and transportation during her tenure before departing earlier this year.
Dive Insight:
State legislative auditors raised issues with both spending practices and oversight controls at the highest levels of Utah State.
Under the heading of “leadership concerns,” they pointed to institutional purchase card transactions that “significantly increased” during the past two years compared to the preceding half decade.
Those increases occurred during the tenure of Cantwell, who was appointed president in 2023 and stepped down unexpectedly earlier this year to serve as president of Washington State University.
Alan Smith, dean of Utah State’s college of education and human services, is serving as interim president while the institution searches for a permanent leader.
This March, shortly after the announcement of Cantwell’s departure, Cache Valley Daily obtained public records of heavy spending during her tenure. The report noted a $285,000 office remodel that included more than $184,000 in furniture costs, over $800 in spending on mirrors and a $750 bidet toilet.
It also detailed several vehicles Cantwell used for transportation during her time at Utah State, including a new Toyota SUV and a $30,000 electric vehicle.
Auditors flagged purchase card spending during the past two years that “may be concerning due to the nature of the purchases, the dollar amounts involved, and the level of oversight.”
They also noted “issues with the amount spent on presidential motor vehicle assets in the last two years being almost triple the amount for the five years before.”
The review also raised concerns about how Utah State’s leaders acquired goods and services from third parties. Specifically, they found that some executive staff committed the university to contracts over $52,000 — and up to $430,000 — before completing the purchasing process.
Their report recommended a review of procurement policies, controls over open purchase orders, and spending and assets in the Utah State president’s office, as well as an evaluation of whether “governance and leadership at USU have the appropriate structure, tools, processes, culture, structure, and personnel in place to ensure success.”
On Tuesday, state lawmakers on the audit subcommittee called for a deep investigation of the university’s spending.
“I love Utah State. It’s a big part of my district, it employs a lot of people in my district,” one member told audit staff during the meeting. “But I have serious concerns about what is happening at Utah State right now, and so whatever latitude you feel that you need, I like to be part of authorizing that — as deep as you can go.”
Tessa White, chair of the university’s trustee board, voiced support for the state audit at the meeting.
“We welcome the audit,” White said. “There are areas that we are aware of and taking aggressive steps to remedy. We hope that by the time that your audit is done, we will have a whole list of things completed that will give you greater confidence in the school.”
Procurement policies and processes have come under fire at other public institutions as politicians and auditors home in on their spending practices.
Early this year, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham called for Western New Mexico University’s entire board of regents to resign after an auditing report surfaced spending by leadership that showed “a concerning lack of compliance with established university policies.”
A state audit late last year of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system found several financial transactions that violated institutional policies or lacked adequate documentation. That included some $19,000 in spending on food over two years by Chancellor Terrence Cheng.
In 2024, a state audit of University of Maryland Global Campus raised issues with leadership oversight of a spinoff nonprofit, pointing to — among other issues — a $25.7 million IT project that ended without a viable product.
