The latest report from the Office for Students (OfS) paints a stark picture of mounting financial pressures across the higher education sector.
The analysis suggests that 43% of institutions now forecast a deficit for 2024/25, in contrast with optimistic projections made by institutions that had looked to an improvement in financial performance for the year.
The key driver is lower-than-expected international student recruitment, according to Philippa Pickford, director of regulation at the OfS.
“Our independent analysis, drawn from data institutions have submitted, once again starkly sets out the challenges facing the sector. The sector is forecasting a third consecutive year of decline in financial performance, with more than four in ten institutions expecting a deficit this year,” she said.
“We remain concerned that predictions of future growth are often based on ambitious student recruitment that cannot be achieved for every institution. Our analysis shows that if the number of student entrants is lower than forecast in the coming years, the sector’s financial performance could continue to deteriorate, leaving more institutions facing significant financial challenges,” said Pickford.
We remain concerned that predictions of future growth are often based on ambitious student recruitment that cannot be achieved for every institution Philippa Pickford, Office for Students
Total forecasts continue to predict growth of 26% in UK student entrants and 19.5% in international student entrants between 2023/24 and 2027/28. However, in its report, the OfS said that “at an aggregate level, providers’ forecasts for recruitment growth continue to be too ambitious”.
Speaking to The PIENews on the topic, David Pilsbury, secretary to the International Higher Education Commission (IHEC), said that university target setting is, and has been for many years, “disconnected from reality”.
“There are not enough people that really know what their recruitment potential really is and how to deliver it, not enough people who push back on finance directors and university executive groups that see overseas recruitment as a tap that can simply be turned on to fill the funding gap, and not enough people developing the compelling business cases that put in place the infrastructure necessary to deliver outcomes,” he said.
IHEC recently released a landmark report urging action across several areas of UK higher education, including international student recruitment.
Pilsbury described the need to build “coalitions of the willing” between universities and with private providers – of data, admissions services, recruitment and beyond – to drive innovation, execute new models and establish different outcomes for the UK sector. The IHEC report warned that “failing to secure the future of international higher education in the UK would be an act of national self-harm”.
Total international student enrolment in the UK fell from 760,000 in 2022/23 to 730,000 last year. Currency devaluations in markets such as Nigeria and Ghana contributed to the decline, with Nigerian student levels dropping most dramatically by 23%.
Pickford does not expect to see multiple university closures in the short-term, but said that the “medium-term pressures are significant, complex and ongoing”.
“Many institutions are working hard to reduce costs. This often requires taking difficult decisions, but doing so now will help secure institutions’ financial health for the long term. This work should continue to be done in a way that maintains course quality and ensures effective support for students,” she said.
“Universities and colleges should also continue to explore opportunities for growth to achieve long-term sustainability. But some superficially attractive options, such as rapid growth in subcontractual partnerships, require caution,” Pickford warned.
Against a challenging operating environment, the OfS said it welcomes the work of Universities UK’s taskforce on efficiency and transformation.
The taskforce was announced earlier this year and was set up to drive efficiency and cost-saving across universities in England through collaborative solutions, including the exploration of mergers and acquisitions.
The report comes as UK stakeholders brace for the government’s imminent immigration white paper which is expected to include restrictions on visas from some countries and also changes to the Graduate Route.
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Dive Brief:
Three-quarters of graduating college students responding to a recent survey said they are ready to show up for work prepared and on time. Of the more than 2,800 college seniors responding, however, 56% expressed pessimism about starting their careers in the current economy, according to Handshake’s “Class of 2025 State of the Graduate” report.
More than a quarter of computer science majors said they’re “very pessimistic,” while the sentiment may be declining slightly among physical sciences, business and health field majors, Handshake reported.
Graduating seniors are also more concerned about how generative AI tools will affect their careers, an increase to 62% this year from 44% in 2023. Computer science majors are the most likely to be “very concerned,” possibly due to the speculation around how AI will impact entry-level programming roles, the Gen Z career platform noted.
Dive Insight:
It’s certainly not news that graduating seniors are entering a vastly different work environment than preceding generations: They applied to college in the early years of the pandemic, witnessed waves of layoffs and job market shifts and experienced the rapid rise of generative AI.
Now, they face tight competition for fewer entry-level jobs, with Handshake reporting that job postings on its site have decreased by 15%, while applications per job have increased by 30%.
As early career hires, college grads will likely have to make fundamental adjustments after they’re hired. For instance, although 66% of graduating seniors feel fully ready to communicate through email or messaging at work, slightly less (59%) are fully prepared to communicate in person, the Handshake survey found.
The survey highlighted other insecurities as well: Only 35% of graduating seniors said they feel fully prepared to participate effectively in meetings, and 44% said they’ll need guidance on giving feedback to managers and leaders.
HR professionals can help, experts recently told HR Dive. One way is to ensure early career hires are properly onboarded, they said.
This means not rushing through the process, but instead giving new hires a 12- to 18-month comprehensive and structured experience that can include shadowing workers before doing the job on their own and being taught how to develop soft and hard skills, the experts explained.
HR can also create and manage cohorts of newcomers as they join an organization and undergo training, according to research in the Journal of General Management. Nurturing these connections and supporting these hires helps them better fit in and improves retention, the researchers said.
Graduating seniors do bring critical skills to the workplace, however; 98% say they’re familiar with generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, compared to 61% two years ago, Handshake found.
Also, while college seniors are concerned about how generative AI tools will affect their career, they are enthusiastic about upskilling, learning technology company D2L reported last year.
In a survey of 3,000 full- and part-time U.S. employees, younger workers were more likely to say they plan to take multiple professional development courses during the next year, D2L said.
There’s also positive news for employers favoring in-person work. According to the Handshake survey, that’s what 81% of seniors say they’d prefer for their first job after graduation.
Oklahoma wants some of its less-expensive universities to cut travel and operational costs, consolidate departments and reduce energy use — all in the name of saving money.
Already, earning a degree at one of these regional institutions is relatively inexpensive for students, costing in total as much as $15,000 less per year than bigger state universities in Oklahoma. And the schools, including Southeastern Oklahoma State University and the University of Central Oklahoma, graduate more teachers and nurses than those research institutions. Those graduates can fill critically needed roles for the state.
Still, state policymakers think there are more efficiencies to be found.
Higher education is one of the specific areas targeted by a new state-run agency with a familiar name, with the goal of “protecting our Oklahoma way of life,” Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt said in the first DOGE-OK report this spring. The Oklahoma Division of Government Efficiency, created around the same time as the federal entity with a similar title, counts among its accomplishments so far shifting to automated lawn mowers to cut grass at the state capital, changing to energy-efficient LED lighting and cutting down on state government cell phone bills. The Oklahoma governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment about this effort.
Oklahoma is one of about a dozen states that has considered an approach similar to the federal DOGE, though some state attempts were launched before the Trump administration’s. The federal Department of Government Efficiency, established the day Trump took office on Jan. 20, has commanded deep cuts to federal spending and the federal workforce, with limited justification.
As academia becomes a piñata for President Donald Trump and his supporters, Republican state lawmakers and governors are assembling in line: They want to get their whacks in too.
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Beyond Oklahoma, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis launched FL DOGE in February, with a promise to review state university and college operations and spending. Republicans in the Ohio statehouse formed an Ohio DOGE caucus. One of the Iowa DOGE Task Force’s three main goals is “further refining workforce and job training programs,” some of which are run through community colleges, and its members include at least two people who work at state universities.
The current political environment represents “an unprecedented attack on higher education,” said Veena Dubal, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and general counsel for the American Association of University Professors.
The state-level scrutiny comes atop those federal job cuts, which include layoffs of workers who interact with colleges, interdepartmental spending cuts that affect higher education and the shrinking of contracts that support research and special programs at colleges and universities. Other research grants have been canceled outright. The White House is pursuing these spending cuts at the same time as it is using colleges’ diversity efforts, their handling of antisemitism and their policies about transgender athletes to force a host of changes that go beyond cost-cutting — such as rules about how students protest and whether individual university departments require more supervision.
Florida Atlantic University students Zayla Robinson, Aadyn Hoots and Meadow Swantic (from left to right) sit together at the Boca Raton campus. Swantic objects to Florida’s efforts to dictate what subjects universities can or can’t teach: “You can’t erase history.” Credit: Michael Vasquez for The Hechinger Report
Higher education, which relies heavily on both state dollars and federal funding in the form of student loans and Pell grants, research grants and workforce training programs, faces the prospect of continued, and painful, budget cuts.
“Institutions are doing things under the threat of extinction,” Dubal said. “They’re not making measured decisions about what’s best for the institution, or best for the public good.”
For instance, the Trump administration extracted a number of pledges from Columbia University as part of its antisemitism charge, suspending $400 million in federal grants and contracts as leverage. This led campus faculty and labor unions to sue, citing an assault on academic freedom. (The Hechinger Report is in an independent unit of Teachers College.) Now Harvard faces a review of $9 billion in federal funding, also over antisemitism allegations, and the list of universities under similar scrutiny is only growing.
Budget cuts are nothing new for higher education — when a recession hits, it is one of the first places state lawmakers look to cut, in blue states or red. One reason: Public universities can sometimes make up the difference with tuition increases.
What DOGE brings, in Washington and statehouses, is something new. The DOGE approach is engaging in aggressive cost-cutting that specifically targets certain programs that some politicians don’t like, said Jeff Selingo, a special adviser to the president at Arizona State University.
“It’s definitely more political than it is fiscal or policy-oriented,” said Selingo, who is also the author of several books on higher education.
“Universities haven’t done what certain politicians wanted them to do,” he added. “This is a way to control them, in a way.”
The current pressure on Florida colleges extends far beyond budget matters. DeSantis has criticized college campuses as “intellectually repressive environments.” In 2021, Florida state lawmakers passed a law, signed by the governor, to fight this perceived ideological bent by requiring a survey of public university professors and students to assess whether there is enough intellectual diversity on campus.
A diversity-themed bus transports students at the University of Central Florida’s Orlando campus. Credit: Michael Vasquez for The Hechinger Report
At New College in Sarasota, DeSantis led an aggressive cultural overhaul to transform the college’s atmosphere and identity into something more politically conservative. The governor has cited Hillsdale College, a conservative private Christian institution in Michigan, as a role model.
Faculty and students at New College sued. Their complaints included allegations of academic censorship and a hostile environment for LGBTQ+ students, many of whom transferred elsewhere. One lawsuit was ultimately dropped. Since the takeover, the college added athletics programs and said it has attracted a record number of new and transfer students.
Across America, Republicans control both the legislature and the governor’s mansion in 23 states, compared with 15 states fully controlled by Democrats. In those GOP-run states, creating a mini-DOGE carries the potential for increased political might, with little oversight.
In Florida, “state DOGE serves as an intimidation device,” one high-ranking public university administrator told The Hechinger Report. The administrator, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution, said “there’s also just this atmosphere of fear.”
In late March, university presidents received a letter signed by the “DOGE Team” at the governor’s office. The letter promised a thorough review by FL DOGE officials, with site visits and the expectation that each college appoint a designated liaison to handle FL DOGE’s ongoing requests.
The letter highlighted some of the items FL DOGE might request going forward, including course codes, descriptions and syllabi; full detail of all centers established on campus; and “the closure and dissolution of DEI programs and activities, as required by law.”
The student union at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, launched FL DOGE in February, promising to review state university and college operations and spending. Credit: Michael Vasquez for The Hechinger Report
The state did not respond to a question about whether FL DOGE is designed to attack higher education in the state. Molly Best, the deputy press secretary, noted that FL DOGE is now up and running, and cities and counties are also receiving letters requesting certain information and that the public will be updated in the future.
DOGE in Florida also follows other intervention in higher education in the state: Florida’s appointed Board of Governors, most of whom are chosen by the governor, removed dozens of courses from state universities’ core curriculum to comply with the Stop WOKE Act, a state law that took effect in 2022. The law, which DeSantis heavily promoted, discourages the teaching of concepts such as systemic racism or sexism. The courses removed from Florida’s 12 state universities were primarily sociology, anthropology and history courses.
“You can’t erase history,” said Meadow Swantic, a criminal justice major at Florida Atlantic University, a public institution, in an interview at its Boca Raton campus. “There’s certain things that are built on white supremacy, and it’s a problem.”
Fellow Florida Atlantic student Kayla Collins, however, said she has noticed some professors’ liberal bias during class discussions.
“I myself have witnessed it in my history class,” said Collins, who identifies as Republican. “It was a great history class, but I would say there were a lot of political things brought up, when it wasn’t a government class or a political science class.”
At the University of Central Florida in Orlando, political science major Liliana Hogan said she had a different experience of her professors’ political leanings.
“You hear ‘people go to university to get woke’ or whatever, but actually, as a poli-sci student, a lot of my professors are more right-wing than you would believe,” Hogan said. “I get more right-leaning perspectives from my teachers than I would have expected.” Hogan said.
Another UCF student, Johanna Abrams, objected to university budget cuts being ordered by the state government. Abrams said she understands that tax dollars are limited, but she believes college leaders should be trusted with making the budget decisions that best serve the student body.
“The government’s job should be providing the funding for education, but not determining what is worthy of being taught,” Abrams said.
Whatever their missions and attempts at mimicry, state-level DOGE entities are not necessarily identical to the federal version.
For instance, in Kansas, the Committee on Government Efficiency, while inspired by DOGE, is in search of ideas from state residents about ways to make the state bureaucracy run better rather than imposing its own changes. A Missouri Senate portal inspired by the federal DOGE works in a similar way. Yet the federal namesake isn’t taking suggestions from the masses to inform its work.
And at the federal level, then-DOGE chief Elon Musk in February emailed workers, asking them to respond “to understand what they got done last week,” he posted on X. “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.” Employees were asked to reply with a list of five accomplishments.
The Ohio DOGE Caucus noted explicitly it won’t be doing anything like that.
“We’re not going to be emailing any state employees asking them to give us five things they worked on throughout the week,” Ohio state Rep. Tex Fischer, a Republican, told a local radio station. “We’re really just trying to get like-minded people into a room to talk about making sure that government is spending our money wisely and focusing on its core functions that we all agree with.”
Contact editor Nirvi Shah at 212-678-3445, securely on Signal at NirviShah.14 or via email at shah@hechingerreport.org.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Fourteen years ago, the legislature passed vital protections for freedom of speech in the Texas Citizens Participation Act. This week, they’re looking to gut it.
The TCPA addresses the common problem of strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPPs. These are frivolous lawsuits brought by the wealthy or powerful against private citizens to stop them from exercising their free speech rights.
For example, say your loved one is in an assisted living facility, and you think the facility is neglecting their care. You file a complaint with state regulators and then post honest, negative reviews of the facility online so that other people can make an informed choice about sending their family members there.
Then the facility sues you, claiming that you defamed them. Even though the case is frivolous, and your criticism is protected by the First Amendment, you have a tough choice: stop talking about the facility or hire an attorney to defend you. You don’t want to be silenced, but you don’t want to go through a lengthy, expensive, and exhausting legal battle.
This was the choice facing Carol Hemphill when she was sued for criticizing the facility housing her brother, who needed daily care after a traumatic brain injury.
Thankfully, the TCPA helps people like Hemphill. It allows SLAPP victims to get cases dismissed quickly, without racking up huge legal bills. It also helps the victims get lawyers to stand up to the bullies trying to silence them through the courts.
First, the TCPA lets a victim immediately move to dismiss the case if they can show the claim is meritless and targets their speech on issues important to the community. Then, if the court denies the motion to dismiss, there’s another layer of protection. The law automatically pauses any further court proceedings while the victim appeals the ruling, so that the case doesn’t turn into a sprawling legal battle before the court of appeals gets the chance to toss it out.
When a victim successfully gets the case dismissed, the TCPA also requires the other side to pay their legal bills. This helps ensure SLAPP victims can afford legal representation to fight the case, and it deters people from filing SLAPPs in the first place. Plus, it’s just basic fairness: if someone deliberately brings a frivolous SLAPP against you, they should reimburse you for the costs of getting it dismissed.
These protections ensure that everyone, not just those with money, can afford to fight for their rights. They helped Hemphill get her case dismissed and her legal bills paid. They helped Ken Martin, an independent local journalist, who was sued by a politician for reporting factual information about him. And they helped Dante Flores-Demarchi, who was sued by a wealthy school board member for publicly raising concerns about corruption.
In addition to protecting individual victims, the TCPA protects a culture of open political discourse. In 2023, John Seago, the president of Texas Right to Life, testified against amending the TCPA because of its importance to individuals and organizations that work on important political issues. He testified that he, his organization, and other Texans had been hit with 19 different lawsuits simply for speaking about abortion after passage of the Texas Heartbeat Act, which banned most abortions in the state. “We turned to the TCPA since we were being targeted simply for our activism,” he said last year.
Despite this enormous success, the legislature is currently considering bills to tear chunks out of the TCPA.
This week, a House committee is going to vote on HB 2988, from Rep. Mano DeAyala, R-Houston, which would end the requirement for people who file SLAPPs to pay the other side’s legal bills when the case is dismissed. This would make it harder for SLAPP victims to get lawyers to defend their free speech rights, and invite more suits aimed at silencing people — a fundamental encroachment of constitutional rights.
In the coming weeks, we expect other committees to take up SB 336/HB 2459. The bills, authored by Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, and Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, would remove the TCPA’s automatic pause while a victim appeals their motion to dismiss the SLAPP.
The only people who benefit from weakening these parts of the TCPA are those with deep pockets who want to abuse the courts to silence their opponents. For those people, these bills are a gift.
For Texans like Hemphill, who just want to speak their mind without being hauled into court, they’re a slap in the face.
Spending on higher education facility operations is keeping up with inflation, but it has yet to return to what it was before and during the pandemic, according to a report by construction data company Gordian.
Capital spending is also up, but because the backlog of needs is so high, the spending increase has only slowed the pace of growth in unmet needs; it hasn’t led to progress in closing the gap, the report said.
“Planned project costs [are] outstripping available and allocated budgets, tempering the impact of even the most well-meaning and thoughtfully directed dollars,” according to The State of Facilities in Higher Education, released this week.
Dive Insight:
Colleges and universities across the United States are facing a systemic enrollment gap driven by a projected drop in the number of high school graduates as well as broader cultural changes in which households are rethinking the value of higher education
“Difficult choices that [institutions] have been talking about for several years now are upon them,” the Gordian report noted. “Most sustaining models involve reimagining the institution as a smaller place with reductions in employees and property to align spending with revenue. Alternatives demonstrated over the past decade would include merger, sale or dissolution.”
Despite the long-term trends, 27% of colleges are expanding, although at a modest 3% rate on average. Some are growing because they’re seeing an increase in students, but others are building out because they don’t have high repair and replacement costs. “They are not yet feeling the pressure financially to keep up with what they have already built,” the report says.
Where institutions are renovating or replacing obsolete buildings, “these enhancements are being implemented with … thought to the costs to sustain that investment and healthy caution about a future with great uncertainty,” the report noted.
When the pandemic ended, schools quickly upped their spending on renovations — increasing spending 26% between 2021 and 2023. Spending is still relatively strong, but growing at a lower rate, Gordian said. Despite the spending, a funding shortfall of more than 32% persists.
“The gap between what is being invested and what is needed to sustain the institutional assets … will continue to grow,” the report said
The backlog of capital renewal projects is more than $140 per gross square feet, up 2% from the previous year and up from just under $125 per gross square feet two years ago, according to the report.
Spending on operations is a bright spot — up 4.5% year over year. That rate is higher than inflation, but it’s still below what it was before the pandemic, and operational costs are rising.
“There may have been legitimate opportunities to cut back on spending based on innovation, enrollment decline or program changes,” the report said. “But there are usually going to be drivers outside of the department’s immediate control like salaries and wages, utility costs and any number of commodities expenses which continue to drive costs upward.”
The Trump administration is freezing more than $1 billion in federal funds at Cornell University and $790 million at Northwestern University—the latest colleges to see their federal grants and contracts threatened, The New York Timesreported Tuesday, citing anonymous officials.
The affected funds will include money from the Agriculture, Defense, Education and Health and Human Services Departments. The Times didn’t say why those universities were losing the money aside from noting that both institutions are facing civil rights investigations related to alleged antisemitism on campus. In recent weeks, Northwestern has sought to highlight its efforts to combat antisemitism, which include policy changes and mandatory antisemitism training for students, faculty and staff.
However, the administration can’t legally pull funding from colleges for civil rights violations until after a lengthy process that’s supposed to include notice to Congress and the opportunity for judicial review. Still, the Trump administration has used other avenues—which some experts say are illegal and are the subject of legal challenges—to cut off money. They include tapping a task force to investigate colleges and targeting their grants and contracts. The task force is currently reviewing Harvard University’s federal funding, which totals $9 billion, and has demanded several changes in order for the college to continue receiving money.
“This was wrong last week, it is wrong this week, and it will be wrong next week,” said Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education.
Jon Yates, a Northwestern spokesman, said the university learned via the media about the freeze, which would affect “a significant portion of our federal funding.”
“The University has not received any official notification from the federal government,” Yates wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “Federal funds that Northwestern receives drive innovative and life-saving research, like the recent development by Northwestern researchers of the world’s smallest pacemaker, and research fueling the fight against Alzheimer’s disease. This type of research is now at jeopardy. The University has fully cooperated with investigations by both the Department of Education and Congress.”
Cornell didn’t respond to an Inside Higher Ed request for comment.
The American Jewish Committee on Tuesday warned the Trump administration against making dramatic cuts to universities’ funding, adding that such a step should be a last resort.
Thisstory was produced by Floodlight and republished with permission.
President Donald Trump and his administration have called it the “Great American Comeback.” But environmental advocates say the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s reversing course on enforcing air and water pollution laws is more of a throwback — one that will exacerbate health risks for children who live and study in the shadows of petrochemical facilities.
The American Lung Association has found that children face special risks from air pollution because their airways are smaller and still developing and because they breathe more rapidly and inhale more air relative to their size than do adults.
Environmental lawyers say Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s slashing of federal protections against toxic emissions could lead to increased exposure to dangerous pollutants for kids living in fenceline communities.
Community advocates like Kaitlyn Joshua, who was born and raised in the southeast corridor of Louisiana dubbed “Cancer Alley,” say they are horrified about what EPA’s deregulation push will mean for the future generation.
“That is not an exaggeration; we feel like we are suffocating without the cover and the oversight of the EPA,” Joshua said. “Without that, what can we really do? How can we really save ourselves? How can we really save our communities?”
Kaitlyn Joshua is a native of the southeast corridor of Louisiana dubbed “Cancer Alley,” and has spent the last few years leading the fight against a hydrogen and ammonia facility being built within 2,000 feet of an elementary school in Ascension Parish. Joshua says she is ‘horrified’ about the recent deregulation measures the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently announced for the petrochemical industry. Credit: Claire Bangser/Floodlight
Ashley Gaignard knows how hard it is to keep kids safe when pollution is all around.
When Gaignard’s son was in elementary school, a doctor restricted him from daily recess, saying the emissions from an ammonia facility located within 2 miles of his playground could be exacerbating a pre-existing lung condition, triggering his severe asthma attacks.
“I had asthma as a kid growing up, and my grandfather had asthma, so I just figured it was hereditary; he was going to suffer with asthma,” said Gaignard, who was born and raised in Louisiana’s Ascension Parish, also located within Cancer Alley. She’s now chief executive officer of the community advocacy group she created, Rural Roots Louisiana.
“I just never knew until the doctor said, ‘Okay, we have to think about what he is breathing, and what’s causing him to flare up the minute he’s outside’,” she said.
Gaignard said the further her son got away from that school, as he moved through the parish’s educational system, the less severe his attacks were. She said he’s now an adult living in Fresno, California — and no longer suffers from asthma.
Zeldin sent shockwaves throughout the environmental justice sector on March 12 when he announced that the EPA was rolling back many of the federal regulations that were put in place under the administration of Joe Biden — many built around environmental justice and mitigating climate change.
Those included strengthening the Clean Air Act by implementing more stringent controls on toxic air emissions and increased air quality monitoring in communities near industrial facilities. The new standards were expected to reduce 6,000 tons of air toxins annually and reduce the emissions related to cancer risks in these communities in Texas, Louisiana, Delaware, New Jersey, the Ohio River Valley and elsewhere.
A new memo from the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, which serves as the law enforcement arm of the EPA — circulated the same day as Zeldin’s announcement — states that environmental justice considerations would no longer factor into the federal agency’s oversight of facilities in Black and brown communities.
Zeldin said the goal was “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.”
Port Allen Middle School sits in the shadow of the Placid petrochemical refinery in West Baton Rouge Parish, La. A 2016 report found nearly one in 10 children in the U.S. attends one of the 12,000 schools located within 1 mile of a chemical facility, which for environmental advocates highlights the danger of the recently announced rollbacks of air and water pollution regulations by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Credit: Terry L. Jones / Floodlight
That means the EPA will no longer target, investigate or address noncompliance issues at facilities emitting cancer-causing chemicals such as benzene, ethylene oxide and formaldehyde in the places already overburdened with hazardous pollution.
“While enforcement and compliance assurance can continue to focus on areas with the highest levels of (hazardous air pollutants) affecting human health,” the memo reads, “…to ensure consistency with the President’s Executive Orders, they will no longer focus exclusively on communities selected by the regions as being ‘already highly burdened with pollution impacts.’”
The agency also will not implement any enforcement and compliance actions that could shut down energy production or power generation “absent an imminent and substantial threat to human health.”
In is prepared video statement about the EPA’s deregulation measures, Zeldin said, “The agency is committed to fulfilling President Trump’s promise to unleash American energy, lower cost of living for Americans, revitalize the American auto industry, restore the rule of law, and give power back to states to make their own decisions. ”
Top officials with the nonprofit environmental advocacy group Earthjustice recently said there is no way for the Trump administration to reconcile what it’s calling “the greatest day of deregulation” in EPA’s history with protecting public health.
Patrice Simms, vice president of litigation for healthy communities for Earthjustice, went a step further pointing out during a press briefing that the reason EPA exists is to protect the public from toxic air pollution.
“The law demands that EPA control these pollutants, and demands that EPA protect families and communities,” Simms said. “And these impacts on these communities most heavily land on the shoulders of children. Children are more susceptible to the harms from pollutants, and these pollutants are often happening right in the backyards of our schools, of our neighborhoods and our playgrounds.”
A 2016 report published by the Center for Effective Government found that nearly one in 10 children in the country attends one of the 12,000 schools located within 1 mile of a chemical facility. These children are disproportionately children of color living in low-income areas, the report found.
For the past several years, Joshua has been leading the opposition to a hydrogen and ammonia facility being built within 2,000 feet of an elementary school in Ascension Parish. Air Products plans to start commercial operation in 2028 where an estimated 600,000 metric tons of hydrogen will be produced annually from methane gas.
The $7 billion project has been touted as a clean energy solution because the company intends to use technology to collect its carbon dioxide emissions, and then transport them through pipelines to be stored under a recreational lake 37 miles away.
Carbon capture technology has been controversial, with skeptics highlighting the possibilities for earthquakes, groundwater contamination and CO2 leaking back into the atmosphere through abandoned and unplugged oil and gas wells or pipeline breaches. Pipeline ruptures in the past have also led to communities having to evacuate their homes.
Joshua said these communities need more federal regulation and oversight — not less.
“We had a community meeting … for our Ascension Parish residents, and the sentiment and the theme on that call was very much like ‘Kaitlyn, there is nothing we can do.’ Like, we just had to literally lie down and take this,” Joshua said. “We had to kind of challenge people and put them in the space, in time, of a civil rights movement. We have to get creative about how we’re going to organize around it and be our own version of EPA.”
This screenshot from CLEAR Collaborative’s Petroleum Pollution Map models health risks from hazardous air pollution from petrochemical facilities around West Baton Rouge Parish near Port Allen Middle School. The map uses U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data analyzed by the Environmental Defense Fund. Environmental advocates have sounded the alarm on the dangers of the EPA’s rollback of air and water regulations for children in fenceline communities. Credit: Provided by The Environmental Defense Fund
Sarah Vogel, senior vice president of health communities with the Environmental Defense Fund, said the move toward deregulation comes as the U.S. Department of Justice announced on March 7 that it was dropping the federal lawsuit the Biden administration lodged against Denka’s Performance Elastomer plant in Louisiana. That plant had been accused of worsening cancer risks for the residents in the surrounding majority-Black community.
The DOJ said its decision was tied to Trump’s moves to dismantle all federal programs tied to diversity, equity and inclusion.
“What they’re trying to do is just completely deregulate everything for oil and gas and petrochemical facilities, just absolutely take the lid off,” Vogel said. “We have long known that children are uniquely susceptible to air pollution and toxic chemicals. Like they’re huge, huge impacts. It’s why what they are doing is so devastating and cruel in my mind.”
Floodlight, which produced this story, is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powers stalling climate action.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
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A worker who was fired by Liberty University for disclosing her transgender status and announcing her intention to transition may proceed with her employment discrimination case against the institution, a Virginia district court judge ruled Feb. 21 (Zinski v. Liberty University).
The case involved a worker who was hired in February 2023 as an IT apprentice at the university’s IT help desk. She received positive performance reviews until July of that year, when she emailed Liberty’s HR department, explaining that she was a transgender woman, had been undergoing hormone replacement therapy and would be legally changing her name, according to court documents. An HR representative promised to follow up with her.
Shortly thereafter, after hearing nothing, the worker reached out again and was scheduled for a meeting later the same day. She was presented with a letter terminating her employment and explaining that her decision to transition violated Liberty’s religious beliefs and its Doctrinal Statement.
In response to the worker’s lawsuit, Liberty University argued that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (among other laws) allow religious employers to discriminate on the basis of religion, contending that the worker’s firing was religion-based rather than sex-based in discriminatory nature.
While Judge Norman Moon appreciated that the case presents a “novel question of law in the Fourth Circuit,” he ultimately found current case law didn’t fully or clearly support the university’s argument.
“If discharge based upon transgender status is sex discrimination under Title VII generally, it follows that the same should be true for religious employers, who, it has been shown, were not granted an exception from the prohibition against sex discrimination,” Judge Moon said in his order denying the university’s motion to dismiss the case. “They have been entitled to discriminate on the basis of religion but on no other grounds.”
Judge Moon pointed out that “no source of law … answers the question before us,” but “we find that a decision to the contrary would portend far-reaching and detrimental consequences for our system of civil law and the separation between church and state.”
“This case — and the law it implicates — points to the delicate balance between two competing and laudable objectives: eradicating discrimination in employment, on the one hand, and affording religious institutions the freedom to cultivate a workforce that conforms to its doctrinal principles, on the other,” Moon wrote. “We find that our holding today — that religious institutions cannot discriminate on the basis of sex, even if motivated by religion — most appropriately maintains this balance.”
When President Trump ordered a 90-day freeze on foreign aid, no one felt the impact more than the people of Sudan. Two years of civil war has left more than 25 million Sudanese starving in what is the largest humanitarian crisis the world has ever seen. Debora Patta reports.
Diversity rates at several elite colleges and universities have plummeted, a little over a year after the Supreme Court’s restriction on race-conscious admissions. It’s a divisive but unsurprising blow to historically underrepresented students seeking educational opportunity and access.
While demographic data is still forthcoming, the challenges these students face to attend certain colleges continue to build. MIT, Amherst College, and Tufts have already seen sharp declines in the diversity of their student populations.
But not all is lost. Ethnically diverse students have options to express their full identities, and organizations providing services to them have options to support these students’ overall success through postsecondary pathways.
While assessing the state of race in higher education admissions, we cannot ignore its historical context in colleges in America. Colleges and universities were built by and explicitly served the educational needs of wealthy white men. For too long, the only people of color on campus were the (often enslaved) servants of white students.
We should also bear in mind that, at elite universities today, the students who are overlooked in favor of race-neutral policies are not the only ones who miss out — students already on campus lose out on the richness that having a diverse array of educational experiences can provide, with their opportunities to encounter alternative viewpoints limited.
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Oftentimes, first-generation, Black, Hispanic and Native American students experience an inherent and often unspoken isolation on campus at predominantly white institutions.
As a Black Chicana, I vividly remember being the singular student of color in my freshman-year seminar at Michigan State. My experience was not without the awkwardness of questioning my own merit and if I belonged there in the first place. We traveled to Ireland, and due to the humidity, I put on my silk bonnet to protect my hair. It was met with questions and stares.
Here we are in 2025, discussing the all-too-familiar concept of racial bias in America, while institutions are bound by new laws that result in restricted access for the students whose right to educational access has historically been systematically denied. So what can we do?
While it requires creativity, students can still highlight who they are in their applications by foregrounding their lived experiences outside of their grades, test scores and academic histories. For example, students can share the intricacies of being a historically marginalized person in America — from being asked to speak English to being pulled over for driving while Black. They can write about their experiences and identities in personal statements and on their resumes and through discussions of their community involvement. Students owe it to themselves to share their personal moments of overcoming barriers in everyday life.
Institutions can ask essay questions that provoke such responses and allow students to share without prejudice or fear of reprisal. Students’ insightful perspectives should be applauded by educational institutions, and the power of their words should be respected.
Underrepresented students also have options other than the traditional elite universities. Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs) are an alternative to predominantly white institutions like the ones mentioned above. Students can make the college experience what they want and need, and it is no different at smaller institutions like Lane College, an HBCU, or Colorado State University, Pueblo, an HSI.
At these schools, a student’s culture and identity are revered and shared. Educational institutions that see the value in diversity should be reconsidered as the best option for ethnically diverse students.
And, as educational institutions grapple with the effects of the Supreme Court ruling, they should support the students from historically marginalized populations already on their campuses to ensure that they feel welcome, supported and valued. Building robust affinity groups not only provides current students with communities they can co-create and adapt to their needs, but also demonstrates that the institutions are committed to creating spaces for all students.
Scholarship providers and organizations that support underrepresented students will continue to play a vital role in fostering diversity on college campuses. Mission-driven organizations like the one I work for, the Sachs Foundation, still help Black students who lack the financial capacity or easy access to attend elite schools like MIT and Brown.
Students deserve to have their whole selves valued, welcomed and supported when applying for higher education.
Pamela Roberts-Mora is the chief operations officer at the Sachs Foundation, serving Black youth from Colorado through educational and community programs. She was a first-generation college student.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
