Tag: fix

  • Therapists Can’t Fix What Society Broke (Steven Mintz)

    Therapists Can’t Fix What Society Broke (Steven Mintz)

    On a recent flight, a small child in the row behind me shrieked with piercing intensity. The passenger beside me leaned over and whispered, with assurance, “He’s autistic.”

    Neither of us knew the child. What we had was a familiar modern reflex: reaching immediately for a diagnostic label.

    Yet the scene likely had simpler explanations. Any parent knows toddlers often melt down. They have immature nervous systems, poor emotional regulation, and lack the linguistic tools to express their discomfort.

    Air travel makes this exponentially worse: altitude pressure that feels like a drill behind the eardrum, bright lights, crowding, disorientation, loss of routine, confinement in an airplane seat, and helpless parents who cannot walk, rock, or soothe as they ordinarily would.

    In such a setting, a screaming child isn’t a clinical puzzle. He or she is a human being overwhelmed by an environment for which their developmental stage is simply unsuited.

    But what struck me wasn’t the child’s distress—it was my fellow passenger’s interpretive leap. We now default to pathology. Behaviors that earlier generations would have recognized as overtiredness, frustration, temperament, or physiological misery are now reframed as sensory processing issues, spectrum behaviors, and emotional dysregulation.

    A century ago, William James or Émile Durkheim would have been baffled by our eagerness to see ordinary distress as a clinical symptom. They assumed a different relationship between individuals and their environments. They looked first to situational explanations, developmental stages, social settings, and institutional pressures—not to internal pathology.

    The classical social theorists were exquisitely attuned to context. They understood that behavior is produced not just by minds but by milieus; not only by individual traits but by social expectations, institutional routines, physical environments, and cultural frames.

    They would have asked: What was the situation? What were the constraints? What was the child’s developmental stage? What stresses shaped the parents’ responses? Why do modern societies interpret certain behaviors this way?

    Those are the questions we increasingly fail to ask.

    The Classroom Mirror

    I see this reflex every semester. Many students arrive with formal diagnoses—ADHD, social anxiety, depression, autism spectrum traits—and often understand these labels as central to their identity.

    I don’t doubt these conditions are real for many. But far more often than we acknowledge, their struggles stem less from an intrinsic disorder than from a structural mismatch between who they are and the environments we place them in.

    Large lecture halls; nonstop digital distraction; relentless assessment; pressure to perform perfectly; overcrowded advising systems; erosion of in-person community; feeling constantly watched and perpetually behind—these aren’t symptoms of personal pathology. They’re central to how colleges are currently designed. They generate anxiety, cognitive overload, disconnection, and inadequacy in perfectly healthy young adults.

    Yet in a culture where we no longer know how to talk about situational or structural problems, students understandably look inward. What earlier generations might have described as exhaustion, loneliness, discouragement, confusion, or developmental turbulence is now interpreted as a disorder to be treated.

    We diagnose individuals when the real problem lies in the systems, structures, and expectations surrounding them. Classical social theorists understood something we’ve forgotten—that human beings cannot be separated from the worlds they inhabit, and what looks like personal failure is often the predictable result of social arrangements, institutional pressures, and cultural transformations.

    Many problems we treat as individual psychology are, in fact, social. What feels personal is often produced by institutions, expectations, and culture.

    The Lost Questions

    There’s a paradox at the heart of contemporary social analysis. We have more data than ever—surveys tracking happiness, studies measuring loneliness, algorithms predicting behavior, and neuroscience mapping the brain. We can quantify anxiety rates, document declining social trust, and measure screen time to the second.

    Yet for all this empirical precision, we seem less able than earlier generations to explain why wealthy, free, technologically advanced societies produce so much unhappiness, alienation, and despair.

    Classical social thinkers—from roughly the 1880s through the 1950s—understood something we’ve forgotten. They grasped that modernity wasn’t simply adding new goods (wealth, freedom, and technology) to human life while leaving fundamentals unchanged. It was dissolving the very frameworks, rituals, and structures that had given life meaning, connection, and purpose.

    Modernity was a package deal, and the price of its benefits was the loss of much that made life livable.

    Contemporary social science has largely abandoned this tragic sensibility. We analyze discrete variables—income inequality, screen time, political polarization—without attending to deeper structural transformations that generate these symptoms.

    We prescribe technical fixes—better mental health services, regulated social media, and reformed institutions—without recognizing that problems run deeper than any policy intervention can reach.

    The classical thinkers knew better. They understood that modernity’s discontents weren’t bugs to be fixed but features of the system itself.

    What the Classics Saw

    A core insight runs through the writings of Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, Tönnies, Polanyi, and others: modern life systematically dissolves the dense webs of meaning, obligation, and continuity that structured pre-modern existence. This dissolution wasn’t avoidable—it was the necessary condition for everything modernity promised.

    Tönnies on the Shift from Community to Society

    Ferdinand Tönnies’s distinction between gemeinschaft (community) and gesellschaft (society) captures what changed. Gemeinschaft described life organized around kinship, locality, tradition, and unreflective bonds that made people part of something larger than themselves. You didn’t choose your village, extended family, place in the social order, or obligations to neighbors. These were given, woven into existence’s fabric.

    Gesellschaft described modern life organized around contract, choice, rational calculation, and instrumental relationships. You choose your career, residence, and associations. Relationships are voluntary, revocable, and organized around mutual benefit rather than organic solidarity. This brought enormous gains in freedom and opportunity. But it also meant nothing was given, everything was optional, all relationships were contingent rather than fixed.

    The real loss wasn’t some sentimental yearning for village life. It was the disappearance of what Robert Nisbet called “intermediate institutions”—the extended families, congregations, civil associations, unions, and community networks that once connected individuals to one another and gave daily life structure, support, and meaning.

    Church, guild, neighborhood, extended family, and craft tradition weren’t just social organizations but ontological anchors. They provided identity, purpose, standards of excellence, and narratives connecting past to future. When they dissolved or became voluntary lifestyle choices rather than unchosen obligations, something irreplaceable was lost.

    Durkheim on Anomie

    Émile Durkheim argued that people need moral frameworks—not in the sense of strict rules or puritanism, but shared expectations that help us decide what goals are reasonable and what counts as “enough.” Without those external standards, our desires have no limits; we keep wanting more without knowing why or to what end.

    This breakdown of guiding norms is what Durkheim meant by anomie. It’s not just chaos or “normlessness.” It’s the collapse of the social structures that tell us how to measure success, how to live a meaningful life, and where to direct our ambitions. When those frameworks erode, people feel unmoored—driven by endless wants but with no sense of direction or satisfaction.

    In the pre-modern world, Durkheim argued, people lived inside thick webs of meaning that helped them understand who they were, what counted as a good life, and when enough was enough. These frameworks came from many places: religious teachings about one’s duties, craft traditions that defined good work, sumptuary rules that kept status competition in check, seasonal rhythms that shaped time, and life-cycle rituals that marked major transitions.

    These systems could certainly be restrictive, but most people experienced them as simply the way life worked—structures that offered direction, limits, and shared expectations.

    Modernity dismantled many of these frameworks in the name of individual freedom and social mobility. Suddenly, people could aspire to anything and reinvent themselves entirely. But with old limits gone, desires multiplied. If you can always become more, achieve more, accumulate more, how do you ever know when you’ve done enough? What tells you that you are successful, secure, or “on track”?

    The result wasn’t pure liberation. It was a new kind of burden: wanting without an obvious endpoint, striving without clear measures, comparing yourself endlessly to others with no shared standard to anchor the process.

    This helps explain why so many people today feel anxious despite rising living standards. Wealth can meet basic needs, but it also fuels comparison—and modern life has stripped away many of the boundaries that once contained those comparisons. In achievement-driven cultures, where people set their own goals and judge themselves against constantly shifting internal standards, nothing ever feels sufficient.

    Weber’s Iron Cage

    Max Weber’s concept of rationalization captured another major shift in modern life: institutions stopped being guided by tradition, shared judgment, or moral purpose and instead became organized around efficiency, calculation, and technical control.

    Decisions that once involved human judgment increasingly followed rules, metrics, and procedures. This made institutions more predictable and effective—but also more rigid and impersonal.

    Modern life came to be shaped by what Weber called instrumental rationality: finding the most efficient means to a given end. Bureaucracies, markets, legal systems, and scientific institutions operate this way. The result was extraordinary productivity and administrative capacity. But it also stripped institutions of meaning and moral depth.

    Weber called this disenchantment. The world no longer appeared as a moral or spiritual order. It became a set of problems to manage, resources to optimize, and processes to streamline.

    His metaphor of the iron cage captured the paradox: we built rational systems to serve human needs, but those systems now constrain us. Bureaucratic procedures, market incentives, and technological imperatives keep operating even when they undermine human flourishing. Individuals become replaceable “human resources,” valued for their functions rather than their purposes.

    Simmel on Metropolitan Life

    Georg Simmel’s 1903 essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” reads uncannily like a diagnosis of smartphone culture. Simmel argued that modern city life bombards people with constant sensory and social stimuli. To cope, the urban mind develops a protective numbness—a “blasé attitude”—marked by detachment, indifference, and a shrinking capacity to feel surprise or deep emotion.

    Urbanites, he wrote, become more calculating because their social world is crowded with brief, superficial interactions. When you have to navigate countless encounters each day, you evaluate people quickly, in instrumental terms. The result is thinning of relationships: less depth, less intimacy, fewer truly authentic exchanges. The emotional and cognitive energy required for rich connection is already spent fending off overstimulation.

    If you swap “metropolis” for “social media,” Simmel’s analysis becomes even more resonant. The endless feed, the pressure to maintain hundreds of shallow ties, the constant performance of the self, the transformation of attention and emotion into metrics—these conditions supercharge the very defenses Simmel described. We become numb to protect ourselves, then wonder why so little feels meaningful anymore.

    Polanyi’s Great Transformation

    Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944) argued that the 19th century’s most radical innovation wasn’t the market—markets had existed for millennia—but the idea of a market society, where land, labor, and money themselves became commodities. This meant pulling these “fictitious commodities” out of the social relationships that once governed them and treating them instead as items to be priced, traded, and regulated entirely by the market.

    The result dissolved an older emphasis on reciprocity and the notion of a moral economy. Labor became a commodity to be bought and sold rather than a social relationship with obligations on both sides. Land became real estate to be traded rather than patrimony connecting generations. Social relationships became transactions rather than obligations. This created enormous wealth and flexibility. It also destroyed the social fabric that had made life meaningful.

    Polanyi’s key insight was that markets must be politically created and enforced. The “free market” required aggressive state intervention to break up common lands, abolish traditional rights, force people into wage labor, and override local customs limiting commodification. And once created, markets generated such social upheaval that societies repeatedly tried to protect themselves through counter-movements: labor unions, social insurance, land reform, and financial regulation.

    Contemporary debates about the gig economy, social safety nets, and the commodification of previously non-market domains (education, healthcare, relationships) still work through Polanyi’s problematic. We keep discovering that some things don’t work well as pure commodities—they need embedding in social relationships and moral frameworks. But market society’s logic keeps pushing toward total commodification.

    The Anthropological View

    Classical anthropologists—Malinowski, Benedict, Lévi-Strauss—understood that pre-modern societies weren’t simply primitive versions of modern ones, but operated according to different logics. They were organized around ritual, symbol, myth, and kinship rather than instrumental rationality and individual choice.

    Rituals weren’t quaint customs but mechanisms for managing life’s fundamental transitions and uncertainties. Birth, maturity, marriage, death—each required ritual marking to integrate individual experience into collective meaning. Seasonal cycles, agricultural rhythms, and religious calendars organized time as qualitatively different moments rather than homogeneous units to be optimized.

    Modernity systematically dissolved these meaning-making structures. We still have transitions, but we lack rituals adequate to mark them. We have time, but it’s homogeneous—Monday differs from Sunday only in what we’re scheduled to do. We have choices, but we lack the frameworks that once made choices meaningful rather than arbitrary.

    Selfhood as Social

    George Herbert Mead, Charles Cooley, and Erving Goffman understood that selfhood isn’t individual but social—it emerges from interaction, from taking on roles, from seeing ourselves through others’ eyes. The self is fundamentally dialogical, constituted through relationships rather than prior to them.

    This matters because modernity’s hyperindividualism misunderstands how selfhood actually works. We imagine autonomous individuals choosing identities from an infinite menu. But selves require stable social mirrors—enduring relationships and communities that reflect us back to ourselves consistently over time. When social life becomes fluid, optional, and temporary, selfhood itself becomes unstable and fragmented.

    Goffman argued that everyday life works much like a stage. We are all performers who must read cues, manage impressions, maintain face, negotiate interactions, and avoid embarrassment. And this requires constant emotional and cognitive effort.

    However, this work becomes exponentially harder when social roles are unclear, when we move among many different audiences (family, coworkers, online strangers), and when norms shift rapidly.

    No wonder anxiety is epidemic. We’re constantly performing for audiences whose expectations we can’t know, managing impressions across incompatible contexts, lacking the stable roles that once made social interaction navigable.

    Even though thinkers like Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, Polanyi, and Goffman sometimes overstated the contrast between “traditional” and “modern” life, their core insights remain indispensable. They identified pressures built into modern society—pressures we still feel every day.

    Why We Forgot

    If these thinkers diagnosed our condition so accurately, why did their insights fade from view?

    1. Disciplinary tunnel vision: The classic theorists read widely—history, philosophy, psychology, anthropology—and tried to make sense of society as a whole. Today’s social sciences reward narrow specialization. We have far fewer attempts to pull the pieces together into a coherent picture of how modern life works.

    2. The dominance of individual-based explanations: Much contemporary research, especially in economics and psychology, explains social problems as the sum of individual choices. That approach misses what the classics understood: that social structures—institutions, norms, incentives—shape what individuals can see, desire, or do. You can’t explain burnout, loneliness, or inequality only by analyzing individuals.

    3. Faith in technical fixes: Durkheim and Weber believed modernity involved tragic tradeoffs: more freedom but less stability, more efficiency but less meaning. It’s easier to believe that social problems just need better policy, better design, better apps. The classics remind us that some tensions aren’t solvable; they’re intrinsic parts of the modern condition.

    4. The retreat from big-picture thinking: After the 1960s, large theoretical systems fell out of fashion—often for good reasons. But the pendulum swung too far. We became wary of ambitious accounts of how society works. The result: many brilliant micro-studies but fewer frameworks to make sense of the whole.

    What We Might Relearn

    Returning to classical social theory is about recovering a way of thinking contemporary social science has largely abandoned: structural, historical, synthetic, attuned to modern life’s trade-offs and tragic dimensions.

    We need to follow their example, and:

    Understand problems as structural, not individual: The therapeutic turn treats unhappiness, anxiety, and alienation as individual psychological problems requiring individual solutions—therapy, medication, mindfulness. The classics understood these as social problems rooted in structural transformations. When Durkheim analyzed suicide, he showed it had social rates that varied systematically. Suicide was individual, but its causes were social. Similarly today: anxiety and depression have individual manifestations, but their epidemic proportions reflect structural conditions.

    Recognize trade-offs: The classics saw that you couldn’t have individualism without anomie, rationalization without disenchantment, urban sophistication without blasé indifference. Contemporary discourse often assumes we can have everything—complete individual freedom and strong communities, endless innovation and cultural continuity. The classics suggest we can’t.

    Recover a sense of history: The classic thinkers understood something we often forget: modern life is not just “human nature with gadgets.” It’s the result of specific historical changes that dissolved older ways of organizing family life, work, religion, politics, and even the self.

    Attend to what can’t be quantified: The classics understood that the most important social realities—meaning, purpose, moral order, authentic community—resist quantification. This doesn’t mean they’re not real, just that they can’t be captured by the metrics contemporary social science favors.

    Think about institutions as meaning-making structures: Modern social science often analyzes institutions in narrowly functional terms—schools educate, markets allocate, courts resolve disputes. The classic social theorists saw something deeper: institutions don’t just serve individuals; they form them. They shape our expectations, our aspirations, and even our sense of who we are. They teach us what to value, how to behave, and what kinds of lives are possible.

    Making Sense of Our Moment

    The classical social thinkers help explain phenomena contemporary frameworks struggle with:

    Why Wealth Doesn’t Bring Happiness: Economics assumes that more resources mean more satisfaction. But the classic thinkers saw something different: when moral limits collapse and wants become endless, no amount of wealth brings peace.

    Why Freedom Feels Like a Burden: We tend to imagine freedom as pure gain—more choice, more autonomy, more control. The classics remind us that freedom without structure is exhausting. When every commitment is optional, when identities must be invented rather than inherited, and when nothing outside us provides guidance, choice stops feeling liberating and starts feeling overwhelming.

    Why Community Keeps Falling Apart: Modern policies try to “build community” through programs, initiatives, and apps. The classics understood that real community doesn’t come from design. It comes from shared obligations, common rituals, unchosen relationships, and continuity over time.

    Why Technology Makes Things Worse, Not Better: We keep expecting technology to fix loneliness or rebuild connection. But when technology is built on market incentives and the logic of efficiency, it amplifies the very problems we hope it will solve.

    Why Institutions Keep Failing Us: Everywhere we look, institutions feel brittle, ineffective, or hollow. Our reflex is to demand better rules, stronger incentives, more oversight. But the classics point to a deeper issue: institutions designed mainly for efficiency and productivity can’t also provide identity, purpose, or belonging.

    Living in Modernity’s Ruins

    The classical social theorists don’t give us easy fixes because they knew that none exist. They understood that we cannot slip back into pre-modern forms of community, cannot simply unwind the rationalization that organizes modern life, and cannot restore the thick, taken-for-granted social structures that modernity dissolved.

    But what they can give us is clarity: clarity about what has been lost, about why our deepest problems endure despite extraordinary technical progress, and about which tensions are woven into the very fabric of modern life rather than amenable to policy tinkering or therapeutic intervention.

    This might seem pessimistic, but there is a kind of liberation in it. If we stop expecting technical fixes to repair what are really cultural contradictions, we may finally learn to cultivate more realistic expectations—and more sustainable forms of flourishing.

    And this is where a different kind of hope enters. While we cannot reenchant the world by wishing away modernity’s disenchantment, we can reenchant it through the things that only human beings can make: through art and music, through literature and ritual, through acts of creativity and meaning-making, through humanistic inquiry that deepens understanding, through scientific investigation that expands wonder, and through social scientific insight that clarifies the forces shaping our lives.

    These are not substitutes for the old frameworks; they are the means of creating new ones.

    The classical social thinkers help us see our moment with uncommon clarity because they stood close enough to modernity’s birth to witness both what was gained and what was lost. They watched the great transformation unfold and grasped its full scope in ways that are hard for us, living inside it, to perceive.

    Recapturing their wisdom will require us to recover their tragic sensibility, their structural understanding, and their recognition that modernity’s benefits and costs come bound together.

    We are richer, freer, healthier, and longer-lived than any previous generation. We are also more anxious, more isolated, more unmoored, and less certain of what makes life meaningful. The classics saw that these aren’t contradictions but two sides of the same coin.

    Understanding this won’t magically make us happy. But it might help us confront our condition honestly—and perhaps learn to reenchant a disenchanted world in the only ways that remain open to us: through imagination, creativity, inquiry, and the hard-earned clarity of seeing things as they really are.

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  • It will take patience and courage to fix K-12 education without the Department of Education

    It will take patience and courage to fix K-12 education without the Department of Education

    by John Katzman, The Hechinger Report
    November 19, 2025

    The Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education this week provides a rare opportunity to rethink our current top-down approach to school governance.

    We should jump on it. It’s not sexy to talk about governance, but we can’t fix K-12 education until we do so, no matter how we feel about the latest changes.

    Since the Department of Education opened in 1980, we’ve doubled per-pupil spending, and now spend about twice as much per student as does the average country in the European Union. Yet despite that funding — and the reforms, reports and technologies introduced over the past 45 years — U.S. students consistently underperform on international benchmarks. And people are opting out: 22 percent of U.S. district students are now chronically absent, while record numbers of families are opting out of those schools, choosing charters, private schools and homeschooling.

    Most federal and state reform approaches have been focused on curricular standards and have accomplished little. The many billions spent on the Common Core standards coincided with — or triggered — a 13-year decline in academic performance. The underlying principles of the standards movement — that every student should learn the same things at the same time, that we know what those things are and that they don’t change over time — have made our schools even less compelling while narrowing instruction to what gets tested.

    Related: A lot goes on in classrooms from kindergarten to high school. Keep up with our free weekly newsletter on K-12 education.

    We need to address the real problem: how federal, state and district rules combine to create a dense fog of regulations and directives that often conflict or constrain one another. Educators are losing a rigged game: It’s not that they’re doing the wrong things, it’s that governance makes them unresponsive, bureaucratic, ineffective and paralyzed — can you name an industry that spends less on research and development?

    Fixing governance won’t be simple, but it shouldn’t take more than 13 years to do it: three years to design a better system of state governance and 10 more to thoroughly test and debug it.

    I would start by bringing together experts from a variety of disciplines, ideally at a new “Center for K-12 Governance” at a university’s school of education or school of public policy, and give them three years to think through a comprehensive set of state laws and regulations to manage schools.

    The center would convene experts from inside and outside of education, in small groups focused on topics including labor, funding, data, evaluation, transportation, construction, athletics, counseling, technology, curricula and connections to higher education and the workforce. Its frameworks would address various educational and funding alternatives currently in use, including independent, charter and parochial schools, home schooling and Education Savings Accounts, all of which speak to the role of parents in making choices about their children’s education.

    Each group would start with the questions and not the answers, and there are hundreds of really interesting questions to be considered: What are the various goals of our K-12 schools and how do we authentically measure schools against them? What choices do we give parents, and what information might help them make the right decisions for their kids? How do we allow for new approaches to attract, support and pay great teachers and administrators? How does money follow each student? What data do we collect and how do we use it?

    After careful consideration, the center would hand its proposed statutes to a governor committed to running a long-term pilot to fully test the model. He or she would create a small alternative department of education, which would oversee a few hundred volunteer schools matched to a control group of similar schools running under the state’s legacy regime; both groups would include schools with a range of demographic and performance profiles. The two systems could run side by side for up to a decade.

    Related: Schools confront a new reality: They can’t count on federal money

    Each year, the state would assess the two departments’ performance against metrics like graduation and college-completion rates, teacher retention, income trajectories, civic participation, student and parent satisfaction, and, yes, NAEP scores. Under intense scrutiny by interested parties, both groups would be free to tweak their playbooks and evaluate solutions against a range of real-world outcomes. Once definitive longitudinal data comes in, the state would shutter one department and move the governance of its schools over to the other, perhaps launching a new test with an even better system.

    This all may seem like a lot of work, but it’s a patient approach to a root problem. Schools remain the nation’s most local public square; they determine income mobility, civic health and democratic resilience. If we fail to rewire the system now to support them properly, we guarantee their continued decline, to the detriment of students and society. Instead of celebrating students, teachers and principals who succeed despite the odds, we should address why we made those odds so steep.

    That’s why we should use this moment to draft and test something audacious, and give the next Supreme Court a happier education case to decide: how to retire a legacy system that finally lost a fair fight.

    John Katzman has founded and run three large ed tech companies: The Princeton Review, 2U and Noodle. He has worked closely with many large school districts and has served on the boards of NAPCS and NAIS.

    Contact the opinion editor at [email protected].

    This story about fixing K-12 education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.

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  • Good Marketing Won’t Fix Unpopular Programs

    Good Marketing Won’t Fix Unpopular Programs

    In full disclosure, I work in higher education marketing. But I’m here to say: Marketing can’t fix a bad program. OK, maybe “bad” is too strong of a word, but degree programs that aren’t aligned to the modern learner’s needs and expectations — or the job market — can be challenging. Let’s discuss.

    For this article, we’ll primarily focus on adult online learners. And these prospective students are very different from those coming right out of high school. According to Common App, first-time college students apply to about six different colleges, on average. The online learner typically inquires with only two institutions, according to an EducationDynamics report, and 45% apply to just one.

    What does this mean for schools with online programs? You have to get in front of your target audience quickly and make your case clearly. But if you don’t have the right mix of features or programs for these students, it doesn’t matter if your marketing is excellent.

    Give Online Learners What They Need 

    Online learners typically work at least part time and often full time. They have different needs and expectations for their higher education experience. They need flexibility. They also don’t want to be in school longer than necessary. Most are earning a degree to improve their career options. 

    Below are a few things to consider when formatting your programs and processes for online students.

    Efficiency 

    Once online learners have decided to take the step of applying, they’re committed and want to get started quickly. According to the EducationDynamics report, 80% enroll in the school that admits them first, and more than 50% expect to begin courses within a month of being admitted. 

    That means admissions teams have to move quickly and the programs must offer multiple start dates per year. If you make prospective students wait, you lose out. Delays can make an otherwise good program fall into the “bad” category.

    This one can be challenging. You need enough students to merit multiple start dates. That’s where that good marketing comes in!

    Relevant Skills

    Online learners choose online because they’re working and need a flexible school schedule to accommodate their work and personal commitments. But let’s focus on the work part here. These students need skills and credentials that will boost their earnings and opportunities. That’s one of the most cited reasons for returning to school.

    So, again, the degree must match the skills students need to find work. If the only online programs you offer are in computer science, you may find that you’re wasting your marketing dollars. Yes! Computer science! In the age of artificial intelligence (AI), computer science and engineering graduates are struggling to find work. 

    Personal opinion: Liberal arts and studies will become more important if they can teach students the durable skills needed in the AI era — communication, critical thinking, and research skills.

    Clear Information

    Degree program pages and websites sometimes obscure information users need to make decisions. And we saw above how quickly online learners are making decisions and want to get started. If your program page hides costs, financial aid information, credit hours, and requirements, you’re going to drop out of their consideration set. 

    Online learners want to weigh available information and make informed decisions. Some will certainly have price sensitivity, but it’s not the only consideration, so don’t hide tuition rates and fees. The EducationDynamics report notes that “flexibility can even overcome cost, with 30% of respondents indicating they would enroll at a more expensive institution if the available format, schedule, or location were ideal.” Show your cards. Let the students make their decisions with the information available.

    If your program doesn’t meet student requirements in this area, marketing won’t make a significant impact on your enrollments.

    Be Discriminating in Your Marketing Spend

    Sometimes there are politics at play or other reasons to market or support certain programs, but when possible, be thoughtful and intentional about where you spend your marketing dollars. Because marketing can’t solve for a challenging program, you must put your budget toward programs that meet student needs, including those that meet the criteria above.

    It’s tempting to give equal shares to all programs, but unless you have an unlimited budget, that’s not the best use of your funds. 

    If you must give some marketing love to all programs, even the “bad” ones, try a brand-focused approach that connects to an all-programs page. For example, send some limited traffic to a dedicated landing page that briefly covers all available programs. That way, you’ve covered the challenged programs without dedicated resources.

    Use the remainder of your budget on programs that align with students’ needs, so you can enjoy a lower cost per enrollment. Who doesn’t love a “chase the winners” strategy?

    Need More Help?

    Archer Education has deep expertise in both of these areas: marketing and program assessments. Our Strategy and Development team can help you take an unfiltered view of your programs and processes to create a plan for future success, even as the market shifts. If you have good programs and need marketing support, we’re here for that, too.

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  • Peer review is broken, and pedagogical research has a fix

    Peer review is broken, and pedagogical research has a fix

    An email pings into my inbox: peer reviewer comments on your submission #1234. I take a breath and click.

    Three reviewers have left feedback on my beloved paper. The first reviewer is gentle, constructive, and points out areas where the work could be tightened up. One reviewer simply provides a list of typos and points out where the grammar is not technically correct. The third reviewer is vicious. I stop reading.

    Later that afternoon, I sit in the annual student assessment board for my department. Over a painstaking two hours, we discuss, interrogate, and wrestle with how we, as educators, can improve our feedback practices when we mark student work. We examine the distribution of students marks closely, looking out for outliers, errors, or evidence of an ill-pitched assessment. We reflect upon how we can make our written feedback more useful. We suggest thoughtful and innovative ways to make our practice more consistent and clearer.

    It then strikes me how these conversations happen in parallel – peer review sits in one corner of academia, and educational assessment and feedback sits in another. What would happen, I wonder, if we started approaching peer review as a pedagogical problem?

    Peer review as pedagogy

    Peer review is a high stakes context. We know that we need proper, expert scrutiny of the methodological, theoretical, and analytical claims of research to ensure the quality, credibility, and advancement of what we do and how we do it. However, we also know that there are problems with the current peer review system. As my experience attests to, issues including reviewer biases and conflicts, lack of transparency in editorial decision-making, inconsistencies in the length and depth of reviewer feedback all plague our experiences. Peer reviewers can be sharp, hostile, and unconstructive. They can focus on the wrong things, be unhelpful in their vagueness, or miss the point entirely. These problems threaten the foundations of research.

    The good news is that we do not have to reinvent the wheel. For decades, people in educational research, or the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), have been grappling both theoretically and empirically with the issue of giving and receiving feedback. Educational research has considered best practices in feedback presentation and content, learner and marker feedback literacies, management of socioemotional responses to feedback, and transparency of feedback expectations. The educational feedback literature is vast and innovative.

    However – curiously – efforts to improve the integrity of peer review don’t typically frame this as a pedagogical problem, that can borrow insights from the educational literature. This is, I think, a woefully missed opportunity. There are at least four clear initiatives from the educational scholarship that could be a useful starting point in tightening up the rigour of peer review.

    What is feedback for?

    We would rarely mark student work without a clear assessment rubric and standardised assessment criteria. In other words, as educators we wouldn’t sit down to assess students work without at least first considering what we have asked them to do. What are the goalposts? What are the outcomes? What are we giving feedback for?

    Rubrics and assessment criteria provide transparent guidelines on what is expected of learners, in an effort to demystify the hidden curriculum of assessment and reduce subjectivity in assessment practice. In contrast, peer reviewers are typically provided with scant information about what to assess manuscripts for, which can lead to inconsistencies between journal aims and scope, reviewer comments, and author expectations.

    Imagine if we had structured journal-specific rubrics, based on specific, predefined criteria that aligned tightly with the journal’s mission and requirements. Imagine if these rubrics guided decision-making and clarified the function of feedback, rather than letting reviewers go rogue with their own understanding of what the feedback is for.

    Transparent rubrics and criteria could also bolster the feedback literacy of reviewers and authors. Feedback literacy is an established educational concept, which refers to a student’s capacity to appreciate, make sense of, and act upon their written feedback. Imagine if we approached peer review as an opportunity to develop feedback literacy, and we borrowed from this literature.

    Do we all agree?

    Educational research clearly highlights the importance of moderation and calibration for educators to ensure consistent assessment practices. We would never allow grades to be returned to students without some kind of external scrutiny first.

    Consensus calibration refers to the practice of multiple evaluators working together to ensure consistency in their feedback and to agree upon a shared understanding of relevant standards. There is a clear and robust steer from educational theory that this is a useful exercise to minimise bias and ensure consistency in feedback. This practice is not typically used in peer review.

    Calibration exercises, where reviewers assess the same manuscript and have opportunity to openly discuss their evaluations, might be a valuable and evidence-based addition to the peer review process. This could be achieved in practice by more open peer review processes, where reviewers can see the comments of others and calibrate accordingly, or through a tighter steer from editors when recruiting new reviewers.

    That is not to say, of course, that reviewers should all agree on the quality of a manuscript. But any effort to consolidate, triangulate, and calibrate feedback can only be useful to authors as they attempt to make sense of it.

    Is this feedback timely?

    Best practice in educational contexts also supports the adoption of opportunities to provide formative feedback. Formative feedback is feedback that helps learners improve as they are learning, as opposed to summative feedback whereby the merit of a final piece of work is evaluated. In educational contexts, this might look like anything from feedback on drafts through to informal check-in conversations with markers.

    Applying the formative/summative distinction to peer review may be useful in helping authors improve their work in dialogue with reviewers and editors, rather than purely summative, which would merely judge whether the manuscript is fit for publication. In practice, adoption of this can be achieved through the formative feedback offered by registered reports, whereby authors receive peer review and editorial direction before data is collected or accessed, at a time where they can actually make use ot it.

    Formative feedback through the adoption of registered reports can provide opportunity for specific and timely suggestions for improving the methodology or research design. By fostering a more developmental and formative approach to peer review, the process can become a tool for advancing knowledge, rather than simply a gatekeeping mechanism.

    Is this feedback useful?

    Finally, the educational concept of feedforward, which focuses on providing guidance for future actions rather than only critiquing past performance, needs to be applied to peer review too. By applying feedforward principles, reviewers can shift their feedback to be more forward-looking, offering tangible, discrete, and actionable suggestions that help the author improve their work in subsequent revisions.

    In peer review, approaching comments with a feedforward framing may transform feedback into a constructive dialogue that motivates people to make their work better by taking actionable steps, rather than a hostile exchange built upon unclear standards and (often) mismatched expectations.

    So the answers to improving some parts of the peer review process are there. We can, if we’re clever, really improve the fairness, consistency, and developmental value of reviewer comments. Structured assessment criteria, calibration, formative feedback mechanisms, and feedforward approaches are just a few strategies that can enhance the integrity of peer review. The answers are intuitive – but they are not yet standard practice in peer review because we typically don’t approach peer review as pedagogy.

    There are some problems that this won’t fix. Peer review relies on the unpaid labour of time-poor academics in an increasingly precarious academia, which adds challenge to efforts to improve the integrity of the process.

    However, there are steps we can take – we need to now think about how these can be achieved in practice. By clarifying the peer review practice, tightening up the rigour of feedback quality, and applying educational interventions to improve the process, this takes an important step in fixing peer review for the future of research.

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  • “Fix issue with Indian student visas”

    “Fix issue with Indian student visas”

    As student visa backlogs continue to plague US embassies around the world and the start of the fall semester looms, a bipartisan group of 14 lawmakers have urged the US state department to resolve issues with Indian student visas.  

    “As members of Congress who represent research universities, we are concerned by reports from our constituent universities about Indian students who have been unable to obtain visas to continue their education in the United States,” they urged Rubio. 

    Indian students, the largest group of international students in the US, contribute $9 billion annually to the US economy, added the lawmakers, led by Democratic congresswoman Deborah Ross of North Carolina.  

    In a letter sent to the State Department on July 24, the group said they had seen “first-hand” how the contributions of Indian students to science and research “keep our nation competitive”. 

    “We are dismayed at the possibility that many of these bright young individuals may be blocked… from continuing their education and research in the United States,” they continued.  

    Thirteen of the letter’s 14 signatories are member of the Democratic party, with Nebraska representative Don Bacon the only Republican to join the efforts.  

    With classes starting in just over a month, thousands of students… are at risk of missing the start of the academic year

    The letter follows a near four-week suspension of student visa appointments by the state department that began during the peak season for visa processing, causing continued backlogs that remain nearly one month on from the lifting of the freeze. 

    Though backlogs are impacting students across the globe, the congresspeople raised particular concerns about delays at Indian embassies, with the Indian mission website still carrying a warning that the scheduling of visa appointments this summer cannot be guaranteed.   

    The Indian Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) is understood to have taken the matter up with the US Embassy in New Delhi as well as the US State Department, with news of the delays being widely circulated by Indian media.  

    As previously reported by The PIE News, some Indian education consultancies are expecting 80% declines in student levels going to the US, reporting that students are “refreshing their portal everyday” in search of appointments.  

    The largest source market to the US, visa issuance to Indian students saw a notable drop this May, falling by 41% compared to the same period in 2025, with stakeholders fearing that June data will reveal a worsening picture as the full impact of the visa pause takes hold.  

    Across the board, May 2024 data showed a 22% year-on-year reduction in the number of F-1 visas issued. Exchange visitor visas were also down 13%.  

    Appealing to Rubio, the congresspeople emphasised the integral contributions of Indian students to research universities in the US, as well as the wider value of educational exchange: “vital to encouraging collaboration between our nations”.  

    Advocacy efforts are also stepping up in the sector, led by the US for Success Coalition, a national alliance of more than 50 organisations spanning business, education and innovation.  

    “This delay and the resulting backlogs couldn’t have come at a worse time,” said Jill Welch, spokesperson for the coalition. 

    “With classes starting in just over a month, thousands of students – particularly from high-demand countries like India – are at risk of missing the start of the academic year,” Welch said.  

    The coalition highlighted the widespread consequences of the visa backlogs. If students are barred from entering the US, it could jeopardise the country’s position as the leading destination for global talent, with ripple effects touching local economies and long-term implications for scientific research. 

    “When we close doors – intentionally or by bureaucratic delay – we send a clear message to the world: that the US may longer be the destination of choice for the best and brightest,” it said. “That is not just a lost opportunity; it is a strategic risk”.  

    The alliance has called on the State Department to immediately “surge” resources to process new and returning international student visas and ensure there is interview capacity in high-demand countries.  

    Referring to Rubio’s new rules around social media vetting, it called on the department to prioritise both security and efficiency, “so that screening processes do not become barriers to opportunity”. 

    “For every three international students, one US job is created or sustained,” said the coalition, citing their annual economic contribution of nearly $44bn annually.  

    What’s more, “they are ambassadors of democracy and American values creating allyship between the United States and other countries,” they said, highlighting the value of people-to-people exchanges in ensuring the country’s national security. 

    The increasingly challenging visa policy landscape is already having an impact on student interest, with young people increasingly turning to other destinations, namely the UK.  

    Sector leaders are calling for “immediate action” to prevent the worst damages while there is still time before the full extent of declines become clear in September.  

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  • Special educators are in short supply at all levels. A cohesive fix is needed, experts say.

    Special educators are in short supply at all levels. A cohesive fix is needed, experts say.

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    ALEXANDRIA, Va. — To address chronic shortages of special educators and disability experts, leaders in the field are looking at best practices across early childhood, K-12 and postsecondary to focus on the similar challenges all three levels face in attracting, preparing and retaining special education professionals. 

    The cohesive approach to filling shortages of early interventionists, teachers, administrators, paraprofessionals and specialized instructional support personnel — as well as trying to reverse a decline in teacher education enrollment —  reflects a shared mission to support students with disabilities at all age levels, speakers said July 14 at a legislative summit hosted by the Council for Exceptional Children and the Council of Administrators of Special Education. 

    “Schools are facing a significant shortage of qualified special education teachers — a challenge that directly affects the support and outcomes for students with disabilities,” said Kevin Rubenstein, president of CASE.

    Rubenstein added that finding enough teachers to fill staff vacancies “feels like trying to spot a unicorn,” because it’s “rare but magical.”

    At the start of the 2024-25 school year, 74% of both elementary and middle schools reported difficulty filling special education teacher vacancies with fully certified teachers, according to federal data. Early childhood education is also facing challenges in recruiting and retaining early interventionists.

    At the higher education level, enrollment in teacher preparation programs has plummeted by 45% in one decade, according to CASE.

    Supporting special educators

    Developing a comprehensive special educator pipeline can better support teacher prep activities so future educators can eventually help boost outcomes for students at all levels, speakers said.

    According to Amanda Schwartz, associate project director of the Maryland Early EdCorp Apprenticeship Program at the University of Maryland, some solutions to recruiting and retaining early interventionists include: boosting salaries, reducing teacher-student ratios, and training on high standards for early intervention services. 

    Recruiting and retaining qualified early interventionists is critical to children’s development, Schwartz said. “We want our teachers to have all this content in order to be able to deliver appropriate practice in classrooms,” she said. 

    David Krantz, executive director of special education at Michigan’s Saginaw Intermediate School District, said it’s helpful to have robust data that can pinpoint where there are staffing struggles. 

    Krantz then pointed to specific ways districts can attract and retain paraprofessionals who support special educators in the classroom. For starters, he said, paraprofessionals need to know their work matters.

    “If people don’t feel valued in their service, they’re going to leave,” Krantz said.

    The Michigan Association of Administrators of Special Education started a paraeducator learning series in January to provide professional development and other support to paraprofessionals. About 350 paraprofessionals have participated so far, Krantz said.

    In the higher education field, Kyena Cornelius, an education professor at the University of Florida, put it bluntly: “Our supply pipeline is broken.” 

    While alternative pathways to the teaching profession have grown, those programs often don’t provide the depth of training into teaching pedagogy or disability-specific knowledge needed, she said. The alternative pathways, Cornelius added, were never meant to replace traditional teacher preparation programs

    She highlighted CEC’s professional standards for special educators as a blueprint for the knowledge and skills teachers need so they are ready to serve students with disabilities and stay in the profession. 

    “We need to think about how we can not only attract and retain but how we can comprehensively prepare teachers in an affordable way, how we can make it attractable and get them the skills,” Cornelius said.

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  • We Can’t Ban Generative AI but We Can Friction Fix It (opinion)

    We Can’t Ban Generative AI but We Can Friction Fix It (opinion)

    As the writing across the curriculum and writing center coordinator on my campus, faculty ask me how to detect their students’ use of generative AI and how to prevent it. My response to both questions is that we can’t.

    In fact, it’s becoming increasingly hard to not use generative AI. Back in 2023, according to a student survey conducted on my campus, some students were nervous to even create ChatGPT accounts for fear of being lured into cheating.  It used to be that a student had to seek it out, create an account and feed it a prompt. Now that generative AI is integrated into programs we already use—Word (Copilot), Google Docs (Gemini) and Grammarly—it’s there beckoning us like the chocolate stashed in my cupboard does around 9 p.m. every night.

    A recent GrammarlyGO advertisement emphasizes the seamless integration of generative AI. In the first 25 seconds of this GrammarlyGO ad, a woman’s confident voice tells us that GrammarlyGO is “easy to use” and that it’s “easy to write better and faster” with just “one download” and the “click of a button.” The ad also seeks to remove any concerns about generative AI’s nonhumanness and detectability: it’s “personalized to you”; “understands your style, voice and intent so your writing doesn’t sound like a robot”; and is “custom-made.” “You’re in control,” and “GrammarlyGO helps you be the best version of yourself.”  The message: Using GrammarlyGO’s generative AI to write is not cheating, it’s self-improvement. 

    This ad calls to my mind the articles we see every January targeting those of us who want to develop healthy habits. The ones that urge us to sleep in our gym clothes if we want to start a morning workout routine. If we sleep in our clothes, we’ll reduce obstacles to going to the gym. Some of the most popular self-help advice focuses on the role of reducing friction to enable us to build habits that we want to build. Like the self-help gurus, GrammarlyGO—and all generative AI companies—are strategically seeking to reduce friction by reducing time (“faster), distance (it’s “where you write”) and effort (it’s “easy”!). 

    Where does this leave us? Do we stop assigning writing? Do we assign in-class writing tests? Do we start grading AI-produced assignments by providing AI-produced feedback? 

    Nope. 

    If we recognize the value of writing as a mode of thinking and believe that effective writing requires revision, we will continue to assign writing. While there is a temptation to shift to off-line, in-class timed writing tests, this removes the opportunity for practicing revision strategies and disproportionately harms students with learning disabilities, as well as English language learners.  

    Instead, like Grammarly, we can tap into what the self-help people champion and engage in what organizational behavior researchers Hayagreeva Rao and Robert I. Sutton call “friction fixing.” In The Friction Project (St. Martin’s Press, 2024), they explain how to “think and live like a friction fixer who makes the right things easier and the wrong things harder.” We can’t ban AI, but we can friction fix by making generative AI harder to use and by making it easier to engage in our writing assignments. This does not mean making our writing assignments easier! The good news is that this approach draws on practices already central to effective writing instruction. 

    After 25 years of working in writing centers at three institutions, I’ve witnessed what stalls students, and it is rarely a lack of motivation. The students who use the writing center are invested in their work, but many can’t start or get stuck. Here are two ways we can decrease friction for writing assignments: 

    1. Break research projects into steps and include interim deadlines, conferences and feedback from you or peers. Note that the feedback doesn’t have to be on full drafts but can be on short pieces, such as paragraph-long project proposals (identify a problem, research question and what is gained if we answer this research question). 
    1. Provide students with time to start on writing projects in class. Have you ever distributed a writing assignment, asked, “any questions?” and been met with crickets? If we give students time to start writing in class, we or peers can answer questions that arise, leaving students to feel more confident that they are going in the right direction and hopefully less likely to turn to AI.

    There are so many ways we faculty (unintentionally) make our assignments uninviting: the barrage of words on a page, the lack of white space, our practice of leading with requirements (citation style, grammatical correctness), the use of SAT words or discipline-specific vocabulary for nonmajors: All this can signal to students that they don’t belong even before they’ve gotten started. Sometimes, our assignment prompts can even sound annoyed, as our frustration with past students is misdirected toward current students and manifests as a long list of don’ts. The vibe is that of an angry Post-it note left for a roommate or partner who left their dishes in the sink … again!

    What if we were to reconceive our assignments as invitations to a party instead?  When we design a party invitation, we have particular goals: We want people to show up, to leave their comfort zones and to be open to engaging with other people. Isn’t that what we want from our students when we assign a writing project? 

    If we designed writing assignments as invitations rather than assessments, we would make them visually appealing and use welcoming language.  Instead of barraging students with all the requirements, we would foreground the enticing facets of the assignment. De-emphasize APA and MLA formatting and grammatical correctness and emphasize the purpose of the assignment. The Transparency in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education framework is useful for improving assignment layout. 

    Further, we can invite students to write for real-world audiences and wrestle with what John C. Bean calls “beautiful problems.” As Bean and Dan Melzer’s Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom (Wiley, 2021) emphasizes, problems are naturally motivating. From my 25 years of experience teaching writing, students are motivated to write when they:

    • write about issues they care about;
    • write in authentic genres and for real-world audiences;
    • share their writing in and beyond the classroom;
    • receive feedback on drafts from their professors and peers that builds on their strengths and provides specific tasks for how to improve their pieces; and
    • understand the usefulness of a writing project in relation to their future goals. 

    Much of this is confirmed by a three-year study conducted at three institutions that asked seniors to describe a meaningful writing project. If assignments are inviting and meaningful, students are more likely to do the hard work of learning and writing. In short, we can decrease friction preventing engagement with our assignments by making them sound inviting, by using language and layouts that take our audience into consideration, and by designing assignments that are not just assessments but opportunities to explore or communicate. 

    How then do we create friction when it comes to using generative AI? As a writing instructor, I truly believe in the power of writing to figure out what I think and to push myself toward new insights. Of course, this is not a new idea. Toni Morrison explains, “Writing is really a way of thinking—not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.” If we can get students to truly believe this by assigning regular low-stakes writing and reinforcing this practice, we can help students see the limits of outsourcing their thinking to generative AI. 

    As generative AI emerged, I realized that even though my writing courses are designed to promote writing to think, I don’t explicitly emphasize the value of writing as mode of discovery, so I have rewritten all my freewrite prompts so that I drive this point home: “This is low-stakes writing, so don’t worry about sentence structure or grammar. Feel free to write in your native language, use bullet points, or speech to text. The purpose of this freewriting is to give you an opportunity to pause and reflect, make new connections, uncover a new layer of the issue, or learn something you didn’t know about yourself.” And one of my favorite comments to give on a good piece of writing is “I enjoy seeing your mind at work on the page here.” 

    Additionally, we can create friction by getting to know our students and their writing. We can get to know their writing by collecting ungraded, in-class writing at the beginning of the semester. We can get to know our students by canceling class to hold short one-on-one or small group conferences. If we have strong relationships with students, they are less likely to cheat intentionally. We can build these bonds by sharing a video about ourselves, writing introductory letters, sharing our relevant experiences and failures, writing conversational feedback on student writing, and using alternative grading approaches that enable us to prioritize process above product. 

    There are no “AI-proof” assignments, but we can also create friction by assigning writing projects that don’t enable students to rely solely on generative AI, such as zines, class discussions about an article or book chapter, or presentations: Generative AI can design the slides and write the script, but it can’t present the material in class. Require students to include interactive components to their presentations so that they engage with their audiences. For example, a group of my first-year students gave a presentation on a selection from Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, and they asked their peers to check their phones for their daily usage  report and to respond to an anonymous survey.

    Another group created a game, asking the class to guess which books from a display had been banned at one point or another. We can assign group projects and give students time to work on these projects in class; presumably, students will be less likely to misuse generative AI if they feel accountable in some way to their group. We can do a demonstration for students by putting our own prompts through generative AI and asking students to critique the outputs. This has the two-pronged benefit of demonstrating to students that we are savvy while helping them see the limitations of generative AI. 

    Showing students generative AI’s limitations and the harm it causes will also help create friction. Generative AI’s tendency to hallucinate makes it a poor tool for research; its confident tone paired with its inaccuracy has earned it the nickname “bullshit machine.” Worse still are the environmental costs, the exploitation of workers, the copyright infringement, the privacy concerns, the explicit and implicit biases, the proliferation of mis/disinformation, and more. Students should be given the opportunity to research these issues for themselves so that they can make informed decisions about how they will use generative AI. Recently, I dedicated one hour of class time for students to work in groups researching these issues and then present what they found to the class. The students were especially galled by the privacy violations, the environmental impact and the use of writers’ and artists’ work without permission or compensation. 

    When we focus on catching students who use generative AI or banning it, we miss an opportunity to teach students to think critically, we signal to students that we don’t trust them and we diminish our own trustworthiness.  If we do some friction fixing instead, we can support students as they work to become nimble communicators and critical users of new technologies.

    Catherine Savini is the Writing Across the Curriculum coordinator, Reading and Writing Center coordinator, and a professor of English at Westfield State University. She enjoys designing and leading workshops for high school and university educators on writing pedagogy.

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  • How Being a Mother and Academic Helped Me Fix Higher Education’s Transfer Crisis

    How Being a Mother and Academic Helped Me Fix Higher Education’s Transfer Crisis

    Dr. Alicia M. AlveroWhen my daughter transferred to Queens College in Spring 2019, I could not have been more excited. As associate provost at the college, I’ll admit I was biased but even two decades of experience in higher education couldn’t fully prepare me for her struggle to transfer credits. 

    Queens College is one of The City University of New York’s 25 colleges. My daughter transferred from another school within the system yet despite mastering course material, she was told to take what was basically the same course all over again. 

    Fortunately, I understood the appeals process and was able to point her in the right direction. As a result, she obtained credit for the course, which counted toward her major. At the same time, reality struck: A student should not need to have an associate provost as a parent to transfer college credits. Frankly, they shouldn’t even need to appeal credits within the same system. 

    Nationally, the transfer system has been set up to let students fail for decades. On average, students lose a fifth of their credits when transferring to a four-year college, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. This leads to wasted tuition dollars and makes it more challenging to earn a bachelor’s degree. A 2023 report by the Community College Research Center found that only 16% of community college students earned a bachelor’s program within six years and just 10% of low-income students did. 

    As the largest public urban university system in the nation, CUNY had a real opportunity to make a change. In 2023, CUNY’s Board of Trustees charged the University’s leadership – including myself – to fix the transfer system. 

    CUNY has long been dedicated to eliminating the obstacles that result when a student transfers. In fact, the expectation that CUNY should provide a seamless ability to transfer between its constituent colleges dates to its formation as a centralized system in the 1960s. 

    Enshrined in New York state education law is the mandate for CUNY to “maintain its close articulation between senior and community college units.” Each year, up to 15,000 CUNY students – like my daughter – transfer between campuses, most commonly from a community college to a four-year college. 

    The purpose of an integrated university system is to offer an array of options for students which transfer seamlessly across all colleges. And over the years there have been efforts to achieve that at CUNY.  

    In 2013, the University implemented the Pathways initiative which established the seamless transfer of general education courses across its undergraduate colleges.  There are also many individual articulation agreements between colleges. But such agreements, between a singular CUNY community college’s program and a corresponding bachelor’s level program at another college, could only go so far in addressing a systemic problem and sometimes result in credits transferring as blanket elective, which does not help a student make progress in their major. Truly universal transferability would require faculty buy-in and better digital tools. 

    And so, one of the first things I knew I needed to do was engage our University Faculty Senate, both out of respect for their role in our decision-making process as part of shared governance and to leverage their expertise. This would come to be one of the most important steps in making this effort successful. 

    As we engaged faculty in discussions about transfer, we shifted the focus from simply identifying equivalent courses to defining the essential competencies students must master in the first half of their major. Faculty across institutions readily reached consensus on the core knowledge and skills students needed to succeed in the second half of their program.

    This competency-based approach then led to productive conversations about how specific courses developed these critical skills. Initially, the goal was to group courses into equivalent “blocks,” ensuring students could transfer seamlessly. In some cases, this process led faculty to align their individual courses more closely; others maintained course groupings but ensured consistency across institutions. Both approaches resulted in universal transfer pathways, guaranteeing students full credit toward their major at any receiving college. 

    At the same time, faculty helped us navigate practical roadblocks. For instance, we recognized that a universal approach could not always apply to programs leading to licensing exams— such as the CPA exam— where external accrediting bodies impose strict curricular requirements. While this nuance was clear to accounting faculty, it underscored for others the importance of discipline-specific constraints in shaping transfer policy. 

    Ultimately, this collaborative process ensured that transfer credit advances students’ progress toward degree completion rather than being lost as elective credit. Through collaboration, more than 300 courses, or blocks of courses, are now universally equivalent to each other across all colleges. 

    Starting in fall 2025, for over 75% of students transferring anywhere within the system, they will carry over most credits in their major. The University tackled the six most common transfer majors first – accounting, computer science, biology, math, psychology and sociology – ensuring credits transfer retroactively. We will work to align 100% of majors next. 

    The new system creates consistency on what students across CUNY campuses need to learn in the first half of their major and is expected to save students an average of $1,220 in wasted credits. 

    The CUNY Transfer Initiative extends beyond curricular alignment; it also involves evaluating the tools, policies, and practices that affect transfer student success. By reviewing policies, we identified gaps where new policies were needed and determined where existing policies required adjustments to better achieve their intended outcomes. We enhanced the CUNY Transfer Explorer (T-Rex), a tool that shows students how their credits transfer across the system, by adding leaderboards with key transfer metrics for each college and a feature that estimates how much of a degree would be completed at any CUNY school. 

    On January 21, the University automated a critical process in its student information system, known as CUNYfirst, ensuring admitted transfer students can immediately see how their credits apply at their new college. Previously, this was a manual, campus-specific process that required student advocacy and often caused delays. On its first day, the automation benefited 18,850 students, reducing stress and supporting informed academic decisions. 

    Fixing the transfer crisis will take continued effort. 

    To make sure that this system does not break again, we will be working with faculty to  adjust how we develop the curriculum for new courses. This means we will now proactively consider how a potential new course will transfer across the CUNY system before it even exists. As the initiative grows, we will have 100% of credits in the first half of a major count towards a degree when students transfer from one of CUNY’s associate programs to the same major in a CUNY bachelor’s degree program.

    The conversation is also continuing across the country. In 2023, the United States Department of Education hosted a summit of 200 higher education leaders on improving the transfer process. Then-U.S. Secretary of Education Dr. Miguel Cardona acknowledged that the current state of the college transfer system is broken, saying that it, “stacks the deck against community college students who aspire to earn four-year degrees.” 

    As part of my research when starting this effort, I reached out to my colleagues from colleges across the country to see what I could learn about what may work in improving outcomes for our transfer students. The collective response? “If you find a solution, please let us know.” 

    Everyone sees that the current state of our higher education system does a great disservice to students who transfer, presenting logistical and financial challenges that derail students who are otherwise dedicated to enhancing their education. While there is still work to be done, I am proud to say that we’ve truly begun to dismantle those barriers in an effort that I hope other public institutions of higher education will take inspiration from. 

    Dr. Alicia M. Alvero is the interim executive vice chancellor and university provost at The City University of New York. A professor of organizational behavior management for nearly two decades at CUNY’s Queens College, she also served as the college’s associate provost for academic and faculty affairs.   

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  • TEQSA can’t fix wage underpayment, VC pay issues: Governance inquiry

    TEQSA can’t fix wage underpayment, VC pay issues: Governance inquiry

    The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) has told the Education and Employment Senate Committee that the sector regulator doesn’t have the correct functions to address staff underpayments, amid calls it needs more power.

    Union policy and research officer Kieran McCarron said there are two general issues with Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) that impact staff.

    “The threshold standards are too high-level and vague, especially when it comes to governance and staffing,” he told the Committee.

    “The second issue is that either the enforcement powers are too weak, it’s too complicated for TEQSA to access them, or they’re just simply inappropriate. For example, deregistration is just inappropriate overkill to deal with the issues that our members face.

    “Having everyone lose their jobs and the universities shut down doesn’t solve wage theft and it doesn’t help the community, so it’s not an appropriate power.”

    He said there needs to be changes to TEQSA so it can “ensure compliance with appropriate penalties,” and better reflect current staff conditions.

    TEQSA chief executive Mary Russell told the same Committee her body needs more powers to wrangle universities and help it to deal with staff-related issues, giving an example of a teaching issue that can’t currently be resolved by TEQSA under its existing powers.

    “There’s actually already a legislative requirement that any person teaching in higher education needs to be engaged in continuing scholarship and research. That’s your traditional “40:40:20 academic.”

    “How is it that at least half of the teaching performed in our universities is performed by casual staff who are hired on an hourly basis and who are only paid for the hours in which they are directly engaged with students?

    “How is it being ensured that they’re performing scholarship and research – because they’re not paid to do that. There’s an assumption made that they’ll just do that in their own time, and that’s unpaid work. This is an example of an issue that TEQSA is aware of but doesn’t have any appropriate tools to deal with.”

    Wage underpayment and financial management

    Wage underpayments and high vice-chancellor pay are the two biggest money-related issues universities have.

    The Fair Work Ombudsman Anna Booth later told the Committee her office has recovered $180.9m for 99,000 university employees as of February 28, 2025. The NTEU has estimated wage underpayments, paid or unpaid, are set to exceed $400m.

    Fair Work Ombudsman Anna Booth said there are repeating factors as to why universities keep discovering underpaid staff. Picture: Martin Ollman

    Ms Booth said the most common “trends” Fair Work sees when dealing with underpayments include: high numbers of casual staff; poor governance and management oversight practices; a lack of centralised human resources functions; pay related issues commonly dealt with by academic managers who lack appropriate expertise; and lack of investment in payroll and time-recording systems.

    “Our investigations have largely concerned casual professional and academic staff and have largely included unpaid work – unpaid marking activities, lecture and tutorial attendance, and other student interactions – as well as the application of incorrect classifications, unpaid entitlements and the improper use of piece rates,” she told the Committee.

    Universities Australia, which is the vice-chancellor’s membership group, in its submission said debate about VC salaries, which average $1m, are solely political and distract from issues of underfunding degrees and research.

    “Debate over vice-chancellor salaries, for example, distracts from the conversation we need to have about funding our universities properly,” chief executive Luke Sheehy wrote.

    “Their salaries are set by university councils. I don’t believe they should be the sole focus of parliamentarians, certainly not at the expense of the policies and funding needed to keep our universities strong.”

    Related stories: La Trobe most recent uni to reveal it underpaid staff | Monash underpays $7.6m as ‘expert council’ on uni governance members announced

    Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi, who disclosed she is an NTEU member, said she was “pretty outraged” when she read the UA submission.

    “I think this debate is fundamental to how universities operate, especially given the exorbitant pay packets of executive staff and VCs on the one hand and the systemic wage theft, rampant casualisation and insecure work on the other,” she said.

    Fear and secrecy

    NTEU branch president at Federation University Dr Mathew Abbott said constant cuts and restructures throughout the sector has created a workplace culture that fears retribution.

    “University staff fear for their livelihoods, and that creates a culture in which staff become more compliant and less likely to speak out,” he said.

    “This is something I’ve tried to raise – the psychological toll it takes, the professional toll, and, of course, the impact of this on students.

    “When staff are placed under this kind of pressure, along with other issues like workloads and so on, it has a flow-on effect to the quality of the education that we provide to our students.”

    He said there is a “culture of secrecy” in university councils and senates, something NTEU member Professor Fiona Probyn-Rapsey from University of Wollongong also said is exacerbated by largely non-staff elected boards.

    There were multiple calls made for university council meeting minutes to be available to all university staff.

    “We have very little access to what university councils are discussing and how decisions are made. We don’t see minutes, and we barely get any interaction with university council members,” Professor Probyn-Rapsey said.

    “They don’t operate in the same way that the rest of the university does – in a collegial manner – or in the way a university should be behaving.”

    Management should also let staff have more say in teaching decisions, Professor Andrea Lamont-Mills, University of Southern Queensland NTEU branch president, added.

    Professor Andrea Lamont-Mills is associate dean of research at UniSQ. Picture: Newswire

    “Staff feel disempowered because they’re not using their expertise – it’s not valued, and their professionalism is not valued,” she said.

    “It’s disempowering when you get excluded from decisions that actually impact you, or you have limited input into decisions that directly impact you.

    “Our staff are highly skilled and highly knowledgeable, and they want to be part of developing decisions and coming up with solutions, yet they’re disempowered – they’re not able to do that.”

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  • How universities can fix health workforce shortages

    How universities can fix health workforce shortages

    A panel of experts discuss the health workforce crisis at the UA Solutions Summit 2025. Picture: UA



    By: Stefanie Schultz

    in Industry & Research, Top Stories


    March 5, 2025

    Three Australian healthcare experts last week told universities how to solve the biggest challenges and possible solutions to a number of issues.

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