As digital learning continues to evolve, K-12 districts are under pressure to deliver connectivity that’s as fast, secure, and flexible as the learning it supports. Outdated infrastructure can’t keep up with the growing demands of cloud-based instruction, data-heavy applications, and connected devices across campuses, buses, and beyond.
In this can’t-miss webinar, you’ll hear how forward-thinking school systems are building future-ready networks–combining 5G, LTE, Wi-Fi-as-WAN, and hybrid solutions to power learning anywhere, protect sensitive data, and stretch limited budgets even further with strategic E-rate funding.
In just one session, you’ll walk away with actionable insights on how to:
Modernize district and campus networks with hybrid WAN architectures that keep uptime consistent and students connected
Extend connectivity beyond the classroom–to buses, portables, athletic fields, and events–with mobile Wi-Fi, POS tools, location services, and security integrations
Simplify network management and strengthen protection through centralized cloud control, out-of-band alerts, and zero-trust security principles
Whether you’re upgrading your network or rethinking your entire connectivity strategy, this session will help you turn today’s infrastructure challenges into tomorrow’s opportunities.
Don’t fall behind–learn how leading K-12 IT professionals are future-proofing their districts and powering digital learning at scale.
Register now to reserve your spot and secure your district’s digital future!
Laura Ascione is the Editorial Director at eSchool Media. She is a graduate of the University of Maryland’s prestigious Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
This blog was kindly authored by Professor Paul Marshall, Vice-President (Global Campus) and Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Careers & Enterprise), University of East London.
As the UK Government prepares its long-awaited White Paper on the future of higher education, it is timely to reflect on the purpose and impact of our universities. At their best, they are not simply sites of knowledge creation – they are instruments of national capability. Few challenges illustrate that more vividly than cybersecurity.
When I joined a panel at the CyberBay Cybersecurity Conference in Tampa earlier this month, Dr Richard Munassi, Managing Director of Tampa Bay Wave, opened with a warning that set the tone for the discussion:
We are in a cyber war – a war waged by well-financed, state-backed criminal organisations so sophisticated that they have their own HR divisions.
He was right. Earlier this year, Jaguar Land Rover was forced to suspend production after a ransomware attack that rippled across its global supply chain. The UK Government’s intervention – with a support package approaching £1.5 billion – made clear that cybersecurity is not an IT issue; it is economic infrastructure.
As the sector awaits the Government’s vision for the future, one truth already stands out: higher education must not only prepare individuals for work – it must prepare the nation for risk.
At the University of East London (UEL), that challenge sits at the heart of our institutional strategy, Vision 2028, which seeks to transform lives through education, innovation, and enterprise. The strategy’s organising principle – Careers-First – redefines employability as capability.
Rather than positioning careers as an outcome of study, it embeds professional practice, enterprise, and resilience into every degree and partnership. The test for every programme is simple: does it equip our students to adapt, contribute, and lead in industries defined by constant change?
Nowhere is this approach more tangible than in cybersecurity. Our BSc Cyber Security & Networks, MSc Information Security & Digital Forensics, and Cyber Security Technical Professional Degree Apprenticeship all combine rigorous academic study with live, industry-based application.
Students work directly with BT, IBM, Fujitsu, and Ford, tackling real-time challenges in threat analysis, data forensics, and network defence. By the time they graduate, they are not simply work-ready — they are work-proven, having contributed to the resilience of the very sectors they will soon join.
The results speak for themselves:
With Siemens UK, students tested firmware vulnerabilities in industrial systems, informing Siemens’ internal training programmes.
With Barclays Eagle Labs, they created a fraud-analysis dashboard now in pilot testing.
With NHS Digital, they developed a ransomware-simulation tool to train hospital teams in incident response.
Each collaboration demonstrates a single idea: learning is most powerful when it changes the world beyond the classroom.
UEL’s Institute for Connected Communities (ICC), led by Professor Julia Davidson OBE, anchors this model in research excellence and policy leadership. The ICC brings together computing, criminology, psychology, and social science to examine the human, technical, and organisational dimensions of online safety.
Its research informs the UK Council for Internet Safety, Ofcom, UNICEF, and multiple international governments. Through projects such as Global Kids Online, ICC research directly shapes teaching, ensuring that our graduates understand not only how to secure systems, but why digital trust matters to society.
As policymakers consider the future role of universities in the forthcoming White Paper, the ICC already provides a working example of how academic research translates into practical and regulatory impact.
The White Paper will also need to consider how global collaboration strengthens national capability. UEL’s Global Campus model demonstrates how this can work in practice — connecting students and employers across India, Greece, Egypt, and the United States to create shared pathways for study, innovation, and employment.
Our developing partnership with Tampa Bay Wave, framed within the UK–Florida Memorandum of Understanding (2023), offers one illustration. We are building both virtual and physical experiences that will enable UEL students to engage with Florida’s growing cybersecurity and fintech ecosystem through mentoring, live projects, and placements, while providing a London base for US start-ups entering the UK market.
A genuine transatlantic bridge is being constructed – designed for movement in both directions, connecting students, researchers, and entrepreneurs to co-create secure-by-design technologies and governance frameworks. It is the Careers-First model, scaled globally.
The next phase of cybersecurity will occur where AI, data, and physical systems converge. Attacks will target intelligent infrastructure – transport grids, hospitals and manufacturing. UEL is already embedding these challenges into its curriculum, guided by ICC research. Students design adversarial-AI tests, examine supply-chain vulnerabilities, and develop frameworks for organisational resilience.
This approach recognises that technology evolves faster than any static syllabus. Students are therefore treated as co-creators, working alongside academics and employers to design the solutions industry will need next.
As the UK Government prepares its White Paper, one principle should underpin the national conversation: universities are not peripheral to resilience – they are central to it. They educate the workforce, generate the research, and sustain the partnerships that keep the nation secure.
UEL’s Careers-First model, aligned to Vision 2028, embodies that principle. It fuses employability, enterprise, and global engagement into one coherent system of capability. Our collaboration with Tampa Bay Wave is a single, tangible expression of this – connecting East London’s lecture theatres to innovation ecosystems across the Atlantic.
In a global cyber war, the question is not whether universities should respond, but how fast they can. At UEL, that response is already underway – this is what Careers-First looks like.
by Mehreen Ashraf, Eimear Nolan, Manual F Ramirez, Gazi Islam and Dirk Lindebaum
Walk into almost any university today, and you can be sure to encounter the topic of AI and how it affects higher education (HE). AI applications, especially large language models (LLM), have become part of everyday academic life, being used for drafting outlines, summarising readings, and even helping students to ‘think’. For some, the emergence of LLMs is a revolution that makes learning more efficient and accessible. For others, it signals something far more unsettling: a shift in how and by whom knowledge is controlled. This latter point is the focus of our new article published in Organization Studies.
At the heart of our article is a shift in what is referred to epistemic (or knowledge) governance: the way in which knowledge is created, organised, and legitimised in HE. In plain terms, epistemic governance is about who gets to decide what counts as credible, whose voices are heard, and how the rules of knowing are set. Universities have historically been central to epistemic governance through peer review, academic freedom, teaching, and the public mission of scholarship. But as AI tools become deeply embedded in teaching and research, those rules are being rewritten not by educators or policymakers, but by the companies that own the technology.
From epistemic agents to epistemic consumers
Universities, academics, and students have traditionally been epistemic agents: active producers and interpreters of knowledge. They ask questions, test ideas, and challenge assumptions. But when we rely on AI systems to generate or validate content, we risk shifting from being agents of knowledge to consumers of knowledge. Technology takes on the heavy cognitive work: it finds sources, summarises arguments, and even produces prose that sounds academic. However, this efficiency comes at the cost of profound changes in the nature of intellectual work.
Students who rely on AI to tidy up their essays, or generate references, will learn less about the process of critically evaluating sources, connecting ideas and constructing arguments, which are essential for reasoning through complex problems. Academics who let AI draft research sections, or feed decision letters and reviewer reports into AI with the request that AI produces a ‘revision strategy’, might save time but lose the slow, reflective process that leads to original thought, while undercutting their own agency in the process. And institutions that embed AI into learning systems hand part of their epistemic governance – their authority to define what knowledge is and how it is judged – to private corporations.
This is not about individual laziness; it is structural. As Shoshana Zuboff argued in The age of surveillance capitalism, digital infrastructures do not just collect information, they reorganise how we value and act upon it. When universities become dependent on tools owned by big tech, they enter an ecosystem where the incentives are commercial, not educational.
Big tech and the politics of knowing
The idea that universities might lose control of knowledge sounds abstract, but it is already visible. Jisc’s 2024 framework on AI in tertiary education warns that institutions must not ‘outsource their intellectual labour to unaccountable systems,’ yet that outsourcing is happening quietly. Many UK universities, including the University of Oxford, have signed up to corporate AI platforms to be used by staff and students alike. This, in turn, facilitates the collection of data on learning behaviours that can be fed back into proprietary models.
This data loop gives big tech enormous influence over what is known and how it is known. A company’s algorithm can shape how research is accessed, which papers surface first, or which ‘learning outcomes’ appear most efficient to achieve. That’s epistemic governance in action: the invisible scaffolding that structures knowledge behind the scenes. At the same time, it is easy to see why AI technologies appeal to universities under pressure. AI tools promise speed, standardisation, lower costs, and measurable performance, all seductive in a sector struggling with staff shortages and audit culture. But those same features risk hollowing out the human side of scholarship: interpretation, dissent, and moral reasoning. The risk is not that AI will replace academics but that it will change them, turning universities from communities of inquiry into systems of verification.
The Humboldtian ideal and why it is still relevant
The modern research university was shaped by the 19th-century thinker Wilhelm von Humboldt, who imagined higher education as a public good, a space where teaching and research were united in the pursuit of understanding. The goal was not efficiency: it was freedom. Freedom to think, to question, to fail, and to imagine differently.
That ideal has never been perfectly achieved, but it remains a vital counterweight to market-driven logics that render AI a natural way forward in HE. When HE serves as a place of critical inquiry, it nourishes democracy itself. When it becomes a service industry optimised by algorithms, it risks producing what Žižek once called ‘humans who talk like chatbots’: fluent, but shallow.
The drift toward organised immaturity
Scholars like Andreas Scherer and colleagues describe this shift as organised immaturity: a condition where sociotechnical systems prompt us to stop thinking for ourselves. While AI tools appear to liberate us from labour, what is happening is that they are actually narrowing the space for judgment and doubt.
In HE, that immaturity shows up when students skip the reading because ‘ChatGPT can summarise it’, or when lecturers rely on AI slides rather than designing lessons for their own cohort. Each act seems harmless; but collectively, they erode our epistemic agency. The more we delegate cognition to systems optimised for efficiency, the less we cultivate the messy, reflective habits that sustain democratic thinking. Immanuel Kant once defined immaturity as ‘the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.’ In the age of AI, that ‘other’ may well be an algorithm trained on millions of data points, but answerable to no one.
Reclaiming epistemic agency
So how can higher education reclaim its epistemic agency? The answer lies not only in rejecting AI but also in rethinking our possible relationships with it. Universities need to treat generative tools as objects of inquiry, not an invisible infrastructure. That means embedding critical digital literacy across curricula: not simply training students to use AI responsibly, but teaching them to question how it works, whose knowledge it privileges, and whose it leaves out.
In classrooms, educators could experiment with comparative exercises: have students write an essay on their own, then analyse an AI version of the same task. What’s missing? What assumptions are built in? How were students changed when the AI wrote the essay for them and when they wrote them themselves? As the Russell Group’s 2024 AI principles note, ‘critical engagement must remain at the heart of learning.’
In research, academics too must realise that their unique perspectives, disciplinary judgement, and interpretive voices matter, perhaps now more than ever, in a system where AI’s homogenisation of knowledge looms. We need to understand that the more we subscribe to values of optimisation and efficiency as preferred ways of doing academic work, the more natural the penetration of AI into HE will unfold.
Institutionally, universities might consider building open, transparent AI systems through consortia, rather than depending entirely on proprietary tools. This isn’t just about ethics; it’s about governance and ensuring that epistemic authority remains a public, democratic responsibility.
Why this matters to you
Epistemic governance and epistemic agency may sound like abstract academic terms, but they refer to something fundamental: the ability of societies and citizens (not just ‘workers’) to think for themselves when/if universities lose control over how knowledge is created, validated and shared. When that happens, we risk not just changing education but weakening democracy. As journalist George Monbiot recently wrote, ‘you cannot speak truth to power if power controls your words.’ The same is true for HE. We cannot speak truth to power if power now writes our essays, marks our assignments, and curates our reading lists.
Mehreen Ashraf is an Assistant Professor at Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, United Kingdom.
Eimear Nolan is an Associate Professor in International Business at Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.
Manuel F Ramirez is Lecturer in Organisation Studies at the University of Liverpool Management School, UK.
Gazi Islam is Professor of People, Organizations and Society at Grenoble Ecole de Management, France.
Dirk Lindebaum is Professor of Management and Organisation at the School of Management, University of Bath.
As the vice president of academic affairs and a member of the admissions committee at SSP International (SSPI), a nonprofit organization offering immersive scientific experiences, I review hundreds of applications each year from rising seniors for our flagship program, Summer Science Program. What we’ve learned is that many of our bright and talented students are navigating their academic careers without access to the same supports as similarly high-achieving students.
Where other Summer Science Program applicants might benefit from private tutors, college consultants, or guidance from parents familiar with the college application process and the high stress of today’s competitive college market, these students rise to the top of the applicant pool without leaning on the same resources as their peers.
This is especially true for first-generation students who will be the first in their families to graduate from high school, go through the college admissions process, apply for financial aid, and enroll in college. Not only do they need to be more resourceful and self-reliant without the support of their personal networks, but they also often take on the responsibility of guiding their parents through these processes, rather than the other way around.
School counselor shortage
For many students who are underrepresented in academia, their exposure to different colleges, careers, and networks comes from their school counselors. While the American School Counselor Association (ASCA) recommends a minimum student-to-school counselor ratio of 250:1, the nationwide shortage of counselors led to a national average ratio of 385:1 between 2020-2023. That is a lot of strain on counselors who already serve as jacks of all trades–needing to keep up with evolving college admissions processes, understand the financial circumstances of hundreds of families, provide emotional support, and stay on top of the job market to advise accordingly. This ultimately affects the level of personalized counseling students receive.
Making the college admissions process accessible
In 2020, SSPI launched College Link, a mentorship program offering Summer Science Program alumni access to one-on-one or group mentoring. Mentors support students during their transition from high school to college through guidance on financial aid, early decision/early action processes, college applications, personal essay writing, resume workshopping, and more. To date, College Link has served over 650 mentees and recruited over 580 mentors sourced from SSPI’s 4,200 alumni network.
This mentorship network comprises individuals from various backgrounds, leading successful and diverse careers in academia and STEM. Mentors like Dr. Emma Louden, an astrophysicist, strategist, and youth advocate who also helped develop the program, provided SSPI’s recent alumni with insights from their real-world professional experiences. This helps them explore a variety of careers within the STEM field beyond what they learn about in the classroom.
Demographic data from last year’s Summer Science Program cohort showed that 37 percent of participants had parents with no higher education degree. That is why College Link prioritizes one-on-one mentoring for first-generation college alumni who need more personalized guidance when navigating the complexities of the college application and admission process.
College Link also offers group mentoring for non-first-generation students, who receive the same services from several mentors bringing great expertise on the varying topics highlighted from week to week.
With the support of College Link, nearly one hundred percent of Summer Science Program alumni have gone on to attend college, including MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Caltech and other prestigious institutions.
Using College Link as a blueprint
As the U.S. continues to face a counselor shortage, schools can further support students, especially first-generation students, through the college admissions process by creating mentorship networks using the College Link model. Schools can tap into their alumni network and identify successful role models who are ready to mentor younger generations and guide them beyond the admissions process. With the widespread implementation of Zoom in our everyday lives, it is now easier than ever to build networks virtually.
Mentorship networks in schools can provide additional support systems for high school students and alleviate the pressures school counselors experience daily during college admissions season. Let’s continue to ensure the college admissions process is accessible to all students.
Dr. Mike Manzella, SSP International
Dr. Mike Manzella is the VP of Academic Affairs at SSP International, where he oversees all academic aspects of SSPI’s new and existing STEM research programs and SSPI’s Summer Science Program faculty recruiting efforts. Mike holds a B.S. in Biotechnology from the Rochester Institute of Technology and a PhD in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics from Michigan State University.
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This HEPI blog was kindly written by Mike Boxall, writing in a personal capacity.
According to the latest survey by PA Consulting, over 90% of university vice-chancellors endorse a call for ‘fundamental system reforms’ to secure the survival of their sector against what they universally regard as an unprecedented combination of existential threats and challenges. Yet the responses seen from across the sector to date have been distinctly conventional and, in a literal sense, conservative: cost-cutting, portfolio rationalisation, recruitment freezes and redundancies, and forgone investments. While undoubtedly necessary in some cases to stave off short-term financial crises, such measures hardly represent transformational innovations; indeed, almost half the survey respondents predicted that their institutions would look and feel much the same in ten years’ time as today. As one vice-chancellor put it:
We have been propping up a 20th-century system that is no longer fit for the purposes of the early 21st century
Meanwhile, policymakers in the Department of Education and the Office for Students are busily preparing contingency measures against the heightened risk of multiple institutional failures and institutions plan for continued retrenchment. Big questions remain unanswered: Why might ‘fundamental system reforms’ be needed? What could (or should) a fundamentally reformed higher education system look like? And how might it be brought about in an era of continued fiscal and policy austerity?
Unlike just about every other sector facing seismic shifts in their markets and operating environments, universities have remained uniformly committed to what many regard as self-limiting and increasingly outdated business models:
Reliance on providing essentially similar subject-based courses to limited cohorts of school-leavers, largely neglecting the more diverse learning needs of much larger populations of in-career professionals and their employers.
Adherence to misleadingly named ‘full-time’ study schedules typically limited to 30 weeks a year or less, with single annual entry points and campuses and facilities largely empty of students and staff for almost half the year.
A deficit-based business model in which devolved expenditure plans are set (and spent) separately from confirmed earnings, often resulting in unexpected year-end shortfalls and relying on cross-subsidies from international student fees to balance budgets.
Over 150 autonomous and self-determining universities competing with one another for shares of largely fixed or even shrinking markets and funding sources, with success judged more in terms of reputational standings than by the quality and social value of their services.
It must be acknowledged that, despite these self-imposed limitations, the current university system has defied repeated prophesies of its demise. It has survived largely intact for many decades, with few provider closures or even forced mergers, and continues to recruit almost 1.5 million domestic and international students each year, generating over £55 billion in revenues. A handful of global institutions with annual incomes exceeding £1 billion or more may be considered too big and important to fail, and indeed these few continue to do relatively well, often at the direct expense of less-favoured rivals. However, many, perhaps even most, others face a future of chronic struggles to cover inexorably rising costs and to protect their shares of markets eroded by new competitors and alternative options for students, employers, knowledge users and public programmes. Survival for these providers through continued efficiency drives might be possible, but it won’t be fun; nor will it be sufficient to secure the pivotal roles of universities in educating and informing an increasingly complex and precarious world.
The roles and contributions of universities in today’s and tomorrow’s learning society are no less important than in the past, but they will be different. In particular, they have a unique responsibility for sustaining human and social intelligence in the face of impersonal AI and related technological advances. To fulfil this role, universities must move beyond the limitations of their legacy models, expanding their roles within national and localised ecosystems to promote:
Lifelong and continuous learning and professional development for all adults, from post-secondary to late-career stages, and from initial formation to periodic upskilling and personal renewal, facilitated and supported through the Lifelong Learning Entitlement and related schemes
Cumulative and personalised learning attainments, embracing the rounded acquisition and development of knowledge, competences, experience and personal development, incorporating micro-credentials and stackable awards on the lines proposed by the OECD
Variety and choice of accessible pathways through different modes of provision for useful learning as and when sought by individuals and employers, embracing universities, colleges, training providers and online services, as is being developed in Greater Manchester
Funding and economic structures based on the value and benefits of different modes of learning provision, shared equitably between individuals, employers, civic authorities and the State, on the lines explored by the UNESCO Innovative Funding for Education project.
While fully articulated and integrated learning and skills ecosystems built on these principles may seem a long way off, the examples cited show that prototypes can already be seen in localised initiatives and emerging proposals across the international tertiary formation landscape. A variety of models built around these principles might emerge, displaying the characteristics of complex adaptive systems: self-organising and dynamic networks of diverse partners and stakeholders, producing emergent results in response to changing experiences.
Unpredictable and sometimes surprising outcomes of these kinds cannot easily be planned or fitted into pre-determined blueprints. They are thus unsuited to the normal pattern of government policy interventions. Rather, the role of government should be to provide the enabling conditions and supportive frameworks (including funds) within which self-organising solutions can emerge. A good start would be to reduce the fragmentation of policy, funding and regulatory constraints to innovation and enterprise across existing learning and skills provision. The Commission on Tertiary Education and Research (Medr) in Wales offers a laudable start towards that end, now being emulated in the Republic of Ireland and in New Zealand.
System-wide reforms on this scale do not in any way diminish the importance or critical roles of universities in serving fast-changing national needs for advanced education and skills. What they would do would be to shift the debate on the health of higher education provision from its current focus on enabling universities to continue doing what they have always done, on their own terms, to redefining and consolidating their roles at the heart of sectoral or place-related advanced learning ecosystems. In spirit, if not in forms, this would represent returns to the principles on which most universities (both pre- and post-1992) were first established and which many would argue are needed even more today.
Where hands-on learning meets visionary research in healthcare
The University of New Hampshire is home to the School of Nursing, where students can help shape the future of healthcare through real-world clinical experience and innovative research opportunities.
UNH’s status as an R1 research institution and its proximity to some of the nation’s premier medical centers provide you with unmatched clinical learning and nursing research opportunities—empowering you to make an impact in healthcare from day one.
Building on 60 years of nursing education excellence at UNH, the newly launched School of Nursing offers programs from pre-licensure through clinical doctorate, both in-person on the Durham campus and online, creating flexible pathways that meet you where you are in your journey toward meaningful impact in healthcare.
Explore different paths in nursing
At UNH’s School of Nursing, you’ll find your perfect fit among bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degree options designed to match your goals and aspirations.
Charles Adler discovered his passion through UNH’s hands-on approach. After earning his bachelor’s in nursing and a master’s as a clinical nurse leader, he’s now enrolled in the Family Nurse Practitioner (FNP) program, which offers the flexibility he needs.
“I love the clinical environment, whether it’s a pediatrician’s office or a primary care or hospital setting—that’s where things started to click for me,” Adler said.
The real-world experience that defines UNH’s approach has shaped his entire career trajectory. His senior practicum led directly to a job in an ICU, which opened doors to experience as a travel nurse, clinical nurse leader, and finally to his current role as an FNP.
“I wouldn’t have been able to have the experiences I’ve had if it weren’t for UNH nursing,” Adler reflects.
Where knowledge meets practice
At UNH, you don’t have to choose between rigorous academic learning and real-world practical skills; you get both. Our commitment to hands-on learning means you’ll graduate not just with depth of knowledge and a degree, but with the practical skills and forward-thinking approach that healthcare needs.
Ready to pursue meaningful impact in healthcare? If you’re drawn to a field where you can make a real difference, UNH’s one-of-a-kind School of Nursing offers clinical learning to propel you to exceptional career opportunities that make an impact.
The stubborn shortage of nurses has created abundant job opportunities, but barriers to entry and declining job satisfaction threaten efforts to improve recruitment and retention. What can nurses do for themselves and, in the process, help secure a better future for nursing?
Beverly Malone, Ph.D., RN, FAAN
President and CEO, National League for Nursing
With the stubborn nursing shortage, it is no wonder that job opportunities are abundant for anyone with a passion for healing to join America’s most trusted healthcare professionals.
How abundant? The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects an average of 194,500 job openings for registered nurses each year through 2033, a 6% growth rate, which exceeds the national average for all occupations. The wage outlook for RNs is also bright, with a median annual pay in May 2024 of $93,600, compared with $49,500 for all U.S. workers.
Yet, for so many of us who have long championed the rewards of nursing, barriers to entry and workplace challenges thwart the best efforts of nursing leadership and public policy experts to recruit and retain a diverse, competent nursing workforce. The resulting shortage in nursing occupations is expected to continue at least through 2036, according to the latest findings by the Health Resources & Services Administration.
Dismantling barriers to entry
We must find ways to reverse the biggest barrier to entry: a nurse faculty shortage that strains the capacity of nursing education programs to admit more qualified applicants. With a master’s degree required to teach, 17% of applicants to M.S.N. programs were denied entry in 2023, according to the National League for Nursing’s Annual Survey of Schools of Nursing.
That same study revealed that 15% of qualified applicants to B.S.N. programs were turned away, as were 19% of qualified applicants to associate degree in nursing programs. At the same time, a shrinking number of clinical nurse educators in teaching hospitals, plus budget cuts to academic medical centers, have decreased the placement sites for nursing students to complete clinical requirements for their degrees and licensure.
Along with taking steps to address the gaps in the pipeline, we must improve retention by focusing attention on the issues that impede job satisfaction and accelerate retirements, which place even greater pressure on the nurses who remain.
Key to improving the work environment must be a serious commitment to empowering nurses with strategies and resources to battle conditions like burnout, bullying and violence, unacceptable staff-to-patient ratios, and communications breakdowns — all factors that nurses have cited as reasons for leaving the workforce.
Making legislative change
Another strong avenue for change exists through legislative channels. Nurses at every level of experience can tap into the power of their voices by contacting federal and state lawmakers to influence public health and budgetary policies that support nursing workforce development. In our outreach to lawmakers, we can seek to help them craft bills that address nursing’s most pressing needs.
In fact, the Title VIII Nursing Workforce Reauthorization Act of 2025 is just such a bill. This legislation would extend the federal programs that provide most of the financial support for the recruitment, education, and retention of nurses and nurse faculty. Reauthorizing these programs is vital to strengthening nursing education programs and preparing the next generation of nurses.
Also, a year ago, a pair of bills was introduced in the House of Representatives aimed at curbing the nursing shortage. One sought to increase the number of visas available to foreign nurses who would be assigned to rural and other underserved communities throughout the country, where shortages are most acute. The other bill, the Stop Nurse Shortage Act, was designed to expand BA/BS to BSN programs, facilitating an accelerated pathway into nursing for college graduates.
While both bills failed to gain passage into law in the last Congressional session, they could be reintroduced or included in other legislation in the future. Nurses must remain persistent and vigilant in pursuit of our vision for nursing’s future.
The government watchdog explored what went wrong with the 2024–25 FAFSA in a new report.
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | sdominick/Getty Images | Ake/rawpixel
The Education Department is on track to release the 2026–27 Free Application for Federal Student Aid by Oct. 1, but a government watchdog warned this week that future forms are at risk of technical issues.
The Government Accountability Office, in its second report on the botchedlaunch of the 2024–25 FAFSA, found that the department has yet to implement a number of its recommendations from the first report released in September 2024. Additionally, the agency needs to improve its oversight of contractors. The GAO also noted that the department doesn’t have a plan for testing future FAFSAs and that staff overseeing the application lack key experience and training.
“Until [the Office of Federal Student Aid] makes progress in these important areas, [the FAFSA Processing System] is at risk of not functioning as intended in future releases, leading to students having trouble in obtaining timely aid,” the report states. “Further, the FPS contract is at risk of overexpenditure and potentially wasting taxpayer dollars. These risks are compounded by reductions in staff that likely impact the agency’s ability to carry out its mission to manage and oversee student financial assistance programs.”
FSA officials took issue with parts of the report and recommendations in a response to the agency.
“We believe that GAO’s analysis teaches the wrong lessons and, as an unintended consequence, reinforces the exact practices that led to the FAFSA’s initial challenges,” wrote Aaron Lemon-Strauss, executive director of the FAFSA program.
Lemon-Strauss said GAO is applying a “more traditional, and somewhat outdated, project-based model that does not support modern technology development for scaled systems like the FAFSA.” He went on to outline a number of changes that the department made to improve the system, as well as the key challenges they faced.
Among other things, he noted that FSA had no internal engineering expertise until last year and that contractors working on different pieces of the process used different tools that didn’t integrate with each other.
“The team is still working to unwind these parallel environments and the technical debt created by these decisions today,” he wrote.
GAO officials disagreed with some of the department’s statements and proposed changes to their recommendations, countering that the review was based on both federal and department guidelines and that ED needs a way to hold its contractors accountable.
“As our report notes, FSA was not appropriately overseeing the work of its contractor and did not adequately ensure rigorous testing of the system,” officials wrote. “By not doing so, FSA put the FAFSA modernization effort at risk of failure, which their letter points out.”
Wednesday saw a moment without precedent in recent history: A college speaker shot to death on a campus during an event. That fact alone would’ve escalated growing concerns about the future of free speech and civil discourse at colleges and universities.
But this speaker was Charlie Kirk, a prominent ally of a U.S. president who was already crusading against higher ed. Kirk, a national political figure in his own right, was one of the foremost conservative critics of intolerance for right-wing views in higher ed and the founder and leader of Turning Point USA, a nationwide organization of conservative campus groups that aided the president’s re-election. Kirk even spoke at Trump’s January inauguration.
He was known for goading students on campuses to “prove me wrong,” posting the resulting clips online, appearing in conservative media to denounce higher ed, spreading his views further on his own podcast and using his organization’s online presence and on-the-ground staff to target left-leaning faculty.
“College is a scam,” Kirk, who dropped out of Harper College in Illinois, wrote in a 2022 Fox News op-ed, in which he urged most students not to go.
“Universities are indoctrination zones where free speech is crushed,” he wrote. “Radical students and faculty coerce and persecute their nonconforming peers through ‘cancel culture’ and threats … I firmly believe that most—if not all—the destructive ideas that are now eating away at the foundation of American society originated on college campuses.”
His death at Utah Valley University could put more pressure on higher ed at a time when colleges and universities have already been excoriated and targeted by the right. Faculty and those who criticize higher ed as being insufficiently open to civil debate between different viewpoints are worried that free expression will further erode.
“This is an epic moment for the future of higher ed,” said John Tomasi, president of Heterodox Academy. “For the issue of free speech, there’s been nothing quite like this ever before.”
Tomasi, whose organization promotes “viewpoint diversity” and “constructive disagreement” on campuses, noted both Kirk’s national stature and his association with campus free expression. He was the kind of person that conservatives had long argued wasn’t welcome on campuses.
“This is an attack on a magnitude that we have not previously seen,” he said. He said national attention on campus cultures intensified when Congress in late 2023 started calling university presidents into televised hearings regarding alleged campus antisemitism. Now, that “white-hot spotlight” is even hotter.
“This is a killing of a person who exemplifies the struggles of viewpoint diversity on college campuses … in the act of speaking on a college campus,” Tomasi said.
Multiple college presidents have issued statements condemning the shooting. Michael Roth of Wesleyan University, a vocal critic of Trump’s targeting of higher ed, wrote that “those who choose violence destroy the possibility of learning and meaning. Mr. Kirk’s murder on a college campus is an assault on all of us in education.” University of California system president James B. Milliken wrote, “This wasn’t just an attack on an individual; it was an attack on the very freedoms we as a nation hold dear.”
Some universities have also acted swiftly to punish employees who appeared to celebrate or make light of Kirk’s death in online comments.
I think it marks a breakdown of the culture of free speech.”
—Lindsie Rank, director of campus rights advocacy at FIRE
The killer has yet to be apprehended, their motive is unknown and the FBI is offering up to $100,000 for information. But in a video from the Oval Office Wednesday evening, President Trump called Kirk’s killing a “heinous assassination” of a “martyr for truth and freedom” and a “dark moment for America.” He said, “There’s never been anyone who was so respected by youth,” whom Kirk brought into the political process “better than anybody ever.”
“Charlie was a patriot, who devoted his life to the cause of open debate and the country that he loved so much,” Trump said, adding that Kirk “traveled the nation, joyfully engaging with everyone interested in good-faith debate.”
Kirk in the Oval Office
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
But the president—who has demanded an undefined viewpoint diversity from universities while threatening them with sweeping federal funding cuts—didn’t go on to defend all free speech, which includes even hate speech. He denounced the “radical left,” saying that “violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year.”
“Those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” Trump said. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.” (His speech didn’t mention the 2022 attack on former House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, or the killings earlier this year of Democratic former Minnesota House speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark.)
Trump isn’t the only person calling it an assassination. Free speech advocates have called past shoutdowns of campus speakers the “heckler’s veto.” Lindsie Rank, director of campus rights advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, called this an “assassin’s veto.”
“Regardless of how one feels about Charlie Kirk’s viewpoints, his tactics, his background, assassination cannot be a response to disagreement in a civilized society,” Rank said. “That’s the whole purpose of free speech: that we have a better way to engage in discourse across differences to settle disagreements.”
“I think there’s a lot of faculty thinking, ‘Is it going to be me, and maybe instead of a video, it’s a rifle?’”
—Isaac Kamola, director of the AAUP Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom
Rank said free speech allows people “to exchange words instead of bullets.” She said what happens on campus is never isolated to campus and raised concern about a feedback loop.
“Our society has started to accept violence as an appropriate response to viewpoints that folks disagree with,” Rank said. “I think it marks a breakdown of the culture of free speech.”
Isaac Kamola, director of the American Association of University Professors’ Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom and an associate political science professor at Trinity College in Connecticut, is among the fierce critics of Kirk’s tactics. While Trump called the “radical left’s” rhetoric dangerous, Kamola said Kirk’s was.
“He literally wrote the book titled Campus Battlefield,” Kamola noted. “He built a career out of treating higher education as a war zone … and treating professors and students that he disagreed with as enemies that posed an existential threat to America … That being said, when actual violence—physical violence and murder—come to college campuses, that ratchets things up to an even more dangerous degree.”
Kamola added that, “without knowing who the gunman is,” Trump is already saying “he’s going to use this as an opportunity to punish the left, and I think that’s really scary.” (Kirk’s final post on X to his over 5.4 million followers said it was “100% necessary to politicize the senseless murder” of a Ukrainian woman in Charlotte, N.C., last month.)
Kamola pointed to Turning Point USA’s own Professor Watchlist and Texas A&M University’s firing of a professor earlier this week after a student filmed herself challenging the legality of teaching about gender identity in a children’s literature class. He said the killing could now leave faculty to think, “Is there going to be retaliation for this assassination?”
“I think there’s a lot of faculty thinking, ‘Is it going to be me, and maybe instead of a video, it’s a rifle?’” he said.
Another Turning Point
Trump redefined conservatism, attracting new adherents. Kirk appeared to do the same for conservative students across the nation, adding them to the MAGA movement.
Amy Binder, SNF Agora Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, said she’s studied conservative campus activism for decades. She said Kirk “kind of burst on the scene right around the time” Trump won his first term in office.
Vigils to remember Kirk have popped up at college campuses and at the Turning Point USA headquarters in Arizona.
Rebecca Noble/Getty Images
Binder, co-author of Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives and The Channels of Student Activism, said Kirk’s Turning Point group attracted students who initially weren’t sure they were Republicans and weren’t attracted to the College Republicans chapters that traditionally mobilized students.
“Their complaint about College Republicans was that it was too establishment, it was kind of fusty, stale, too focused on getting people elected,” Binder said of these students. She said Turning Point told them that “you are part of a liberal, left campus and you are mistreated here and you need to come out of the closet and declare that you’re conservative in a big, broad way—and we’ll help you do that with really splashy events and really splashy speakers.”
“All of the incentive structure there was to go big, go confrontational,” she said. Kirk exemplified that in his sparring matches with left-leaning students on campuses.
Binder said, “Kirk was really excellent at cross-branding,” frequently appearing on Fox News, recording videos for the conservative education video website PragerU and more.
“Over time, Kirk was really involved with the Trump family, and with MAGA under Trump,” Binder said. “And he really became an ambassador for that—not only to young people, but to others as well … He was really crossing over into other age brackets and he just kind of became a face—or the face—of energized, youthful conservatism.”
Turning Point sought to elect conservatives to student governments by providing funding. It broadcast online the names of faculty it considered too left-leaning or intolerant of conservative views and marshaled voters for Trump during his re-election campaigns.
“He became the face of young Republicans and probably helped Trump win Arizona, maybe Wisconsin, maybe Michigan, with his get-out-the-vote” in 2024, Binder said. She said he “might have been predicted to have a political career in the future. He’s charismatic, he’s good-looking, he has a perfect family, he’s obviously had success.”
Charlie Kirk was speaking at Utah Valley University on Sept. 10 to kick off his American Comeback Tour when he was shot and killed.
Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune/Getty Images
But now, Kirk is dead. While Binder said there will continue to be a “very robust right ecosystem of organizations that seek mobilized students on campus,” it’s unclear what Turning Point’s future will be.
“Is there a power vacuum, is there a succession plan, what does that look like? I certainly don’t know,” she said. Turning Point didn’t respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for an interview Thursday.
As for how his death could impact campus free expression, Binder said, “It’s really, really horrible on just all of the fronts, and in the wrong hands, something like this could shut down speech.”
Rank, from FIRE, said that while the shooter’s motive is unknown, the effect that violence can have on free expression isn’t. She said it can not only create a chilling effect within people, but it also can cause higher ed institutions to clamp down on speech to prevent violence.
“If an administration comes in and prevents controversial speaking engagements, then you’re creating a situation where the violence wins and that just causes free speech to deteriorate even further,” Rank said. She said that would not only be wrong, but “it would be a strange way to honor his legacy.”
For those just joining us on TEF-Watch, this is where the TEF began back in the 2015 Green Paper.
At that time, the idea of linking tuition fees to the TEF’s measure of quality was dropped pretty quickly because it was, and remains, totally unworkable in any fair and reasonable way.
This is for a number of reasons that would be obvious to anyone who has a passing understanding of how the TEF measures educational quality, which I wrote about on Wonkhe at the time.
Can’t work, won’t work
First, the TEF does not measure the quality of individual degree programmes. It evaluates, in a fairly broad-brush way, a whole institution’s approach to teaching quality and related outcomes. All institutions have programmes of variable quality.
This means that linking tuition fees to TEF outcomes could lead to significant numbers of students on lower quality programmes being charged the higher rate of tuition fees.
Second, and even more unjustly, the TEF does not give any indication of the quality of education that students will directly experience.
Rather, when they are applying for their degree programme, it provides a measure of an institution’s general teaching quality at the time of its last TEF assessment.
Under the plans currently being considered for a rolling TEF, this could be up to five years previously – which would mean it gives a view of educational quality at least nine years before applicants will graduate. Even if it was from the year before they enrol, it will be based on an assessment of evidence that took place at least four years before they will complete their degree programme.
Those knowledgeable about educational quality understand that, over such a time span, educational quality could have dramatically changed. Given this, on what basis can it be fair for new students to be charged the higher rate of tuition fees as a result of a general quality of education enjoyed by their predecessors?
These two reasons would make a system in which tuition fees were linked to TEF outcomes incredibly unfair. And that is before we even consider its impact on the TEF as a valid measure of educational quality.
The games universities play
The higher the stakes in the TEF, the more institutions will feel forced to game the system. In the current state of financial crisis, any institutional leader is likely to feel almost compelled to pull every trick in the book in order to ensure the highest possible tuition fee income for their institution.
How could they not given that it could make the difference between institutional survival, a forced merger or the potential closure of their institution? This would make the TEF even less of an effective measure of educational quality and much more of a measure of how effectively institutions can play the system.
It takes very little understanding of such processes to see that institutions with the greatest resources will be in by far the best position to finance the playing of such games. Making the stakes so high for institutions would also remove any incentive for them to use the TEF as an opportunity to openly identify educational excellence and meaningfully reflect on their educational quality.
This would mean that the TEF loses any potential to meet its core purpose, identified by the Independent Review of the TEF, “to identify excellence and encourage enhancement”. It will instead become even more of a highly pressurised marketing exercise with the TEF outcomes having potentially profound consequences for the future survival of some institutions.
Any regulator that had the capacity and expertise to do either of these things would simply not be making such a suggestion at any time but particularly not when the sector faces such a difficult financial outlook.
An OfS out of touch with its impact on the sector. Haven’t we been here before?
