Tag: gain

  • Reclaiming the narrative of educational excellence despite the decline of educational gain

    Reclaiming the narrative of educational excellence despite the decline of educational gain

    There was a time when enhancement was the sector’s watchword.

    Under the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), concepts like educational gain captured the idea that universities should focus not only on assuring quality, but on improving it. Teaching enhancement funds, learning and teaching strategies, and collaborative initiatives flourished. Today, that language has all but disappeared. The conversation has shifted from enhancement to assurance, from curiosity to compliance. Educational gain has quietly declined, not as an idea, but as a priority.

    Educational gain was never a perfect concept. Like its cousin learning gain, it struggled to be measured in ways that were meaningful across disciplines, institutions, and student journeys. Yet its value lay less in what it measured than in what it symbolised. It represented a shared belief that higher education is about transformation: the development of knowledge, capability, and identity through the act of learning. It reminded us that the student experience was not reducible to outcomes, but highly personal, developmental, and distinctive.

    Shifting sands

    The shift from HEFCE to the Office for Students (OfS) marked more than a change of regulator; it signalled a change in the state’s philosophy, from partnership to performance management. The emphasis moved from enhancement to accountability. Where HEFCE invested in collaborative improvement, OfS measures and monitors. Where enhancement assumed trust in the professional judgement of universities and their staff, regulation presumes the need for assurance through metrics. This has shaped the sector’s language: risk, compliance, outcomes, baselines – all necessary, perhaps, but narrowing.

    The latest OfS proposals on revising the Teaching Excellence Framework mark a shift in their treatment of “educational gain.” Rather than developing new measures or asking institutions to present their own evidence of gain, OfS now proposes removing this element entirely, on the grounds that it produced inconsistent and non-comparable evidence. This change is significant: it signals a tighter focus on standardised outcomes indicators. Yet by narrowing the frame in this way, we risk losing sight of the broader educational gains that matter most to students, gains that are diverse, contextual, and resistant to capture through a uniform set of metrics. It speaks to a familiar truth: “not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts”.

    And this narrowing has consequences. When national frameworks reduce quality to a narrow set of indicators, they risk erasing the very distinctiveness that defines higher education. Within a framework of uniform metrics, where does the space remain for difference, for innovation, for the unique forms of learning that make higher education a rich and diverse ecosystem? If we are all accountable to the same measures, it becomes even more important that we define for ourselves what excellence in education looks like, within disciplines, within institutions, and within the communities we serve.

    Engine room

    This is where the idea of enhancement again becomes critical. Enhancement is the engine of educational innovation: it drives new methods, new thinking, and the continuous improvement of the student experience. Without enhancement, innovation risks becoming ornamental: flashes of good practice without sustained institutional learning. The loss of “educational gain” as a guiding idea has coincided with a hollowing out of that enhancement mindset. We have become good at reporting quality, but less confident in building it.

    Reclaiming the narrative of excellence is, therefore, not simply about recognition and reward; it is about re-establishing the connection between excellence and enhancement. Excellence is what we value, enhancement is how we realise it. The Universitas 21 project Redefining Teaching Excellence in Research-Intensive Universities speaks directly to this need. It asks: if we are to value teaching as we do research, how do we define excellence on our own terms? What does excellence look like in an environment where metrics are shared but missions are not?

    For research-intensive universities in particular, this question matters. These institutions are often defined by their research outputs and global rankings, yet they also possess distinctive educational strengths: disciplinary depth, scholarly teaching, and research-informed curricula. Redefining teaching excellence means articulating those strengths clearly, and ensuring they are recognised, rewarded, and shared. It also means returning to the principle of enhancement: a commitment to continual improvement, collegial learning, and innovation grounded in scholarship.

    Compass point

    The challenge, and opportunity, for the sector is to rebuild the infrastructure that once supported enhancement. HEFCE-era initiatives, from the Subject Centres to the Higher Education Academy, created national and disciplinary communities of practice. They gave legitimacy to innovation and space for experimentation. The dismantling of that infrastructure has left many educators working in isolation, without the shared structures that once turned good teaching into collective progress. Reclaiming enhancement will require new forms of collaboration, cross-institutional, international, and interdisciplinary, that enable staff to learn from one another and build capacity for educational change.

    If educational gain as a metric was flawed, educational gain as an ambition is not. It reminds us that the purpose of higher education is not only to produce measurable outcomes but to foster human and intellectual development. It is about what students become, not just what they achieve. As generative AI reshapes how students learn and how knowledge itself is constructed, this broader conception of gain becomes more vital than ever. In this new context, enhancement is about helping students, and staff, to adapt, to grow, and to keep learning.

    So perhaps it is time to bring back “educational gain,” not as a measure, but as a mindset; a reminder that excellence in education cannot be mandated through policy or reduced to data. It must be defined and driven by universities themselves, through thoughtful design, collaborative enhancement, and continual renewal.

    Excellence is the destination, but enhancement is the journey. If we are serious about defining one, we must rediscover the other.

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  • How districts help students gain real-life skills

    How districts help students gain real-life skills

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    WASHINGTON — In Illinois’ Lake Forest School Districts 67 and 115, educators are incorporating real-life skills — such as adaptability, critical thinking, communication and other 21st century competencies — into their curricula in efforts to help students succeed in K-12 and beyond.

    The work is emphasized through activities like a blog for families and educators on resilience and growth mindset and a Portrait of a Learner construct that describes the competencies students need to demonstrate in addition to academic excellence.

    These real-life skills are “not nice to haves. They are musts,” said Matthew Montgomery, who is superintendent of both districts. “They are as important as a rich foundational experience of mathematics or the classics in literature. We cannot treat them as soft skills anymore.”

    Montgomery, along with about 150 other district leaders, educators, researchers and neuroscientists gathered last week at a Real Skills for Real Life Summit to discuss what host AASA, The School Superintendent Association called the “new basics for learning.”

    Speakers told the summit attendees that incorporating development of these skills into the school day must be intentional, collaborative and driven by student input. The work is rooted in building a sense of belonging and compassion, as well as encouraging students to take safe risks, they said.

    “Kids want to be listened to and they want to be heard. They want to be respected, connected, and they want to feel cared for. They want to have fun,” said Ryan Rydzewski, communications officer at The Grable Foundation, a nonprofit focused on children’s successful development. 

    Speakers and attendees offered practical ways schools can hone real-life skills in students, including:

    • Add joy and laughter into learning moments. 
    • Model and normalize making mistakes.
    • Offer students choice in how they engage in learning and how they demonstrate their knowledge.
    • Help teachers understand their own executive functioning skills and growth mindsets.
    • Guide students through holding themselves accountable for their choices.

    Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a professor of education, psychology and neuroscience at the University of Southern California, said real-life skills like self awareness, curiosity, executive functioning, agency and relationship-building are critical to a student’s learning process.

    “We in education systems traditionally think of academic knowledge and scholarly knowledge as being separate from the experience of being a person — and psychologically and, it turns out, neurologically, that is not correct,” Immordino-Yang said.

    Rydzewski acknowledged that the work to build real-life skills can be hard and complex. Montgomery agreed, saying the Portrait of a Learner used in the Lake Forest districts is consistently being reexamined and improved upon based on student needs. The districts’ partnerships with students, families, educators, board members and others are imperative to this work, he said.

    “We do not have it figured out,” Montgomery said. “I actually hope I never have it figured out, because that means there’s no work to do, but we are getting closer to defining what we are trying to work on and what matters to us.”

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  • Counting what counts: a multi-dimensional approach to educational gain 

    Counting what counts: a multi-dimensional approach to educational gain 

    This HEPI blog was kindly authored by Professor Billy Wong, Director of Research and Evaluation (Access & Participation) at the University of Reading. Billy has recently written the paper Rethinking educational gain in higher education: Beyond metrics to a multi-dimensional model, and blogs his thoughts on this below.  

    With the next iteration of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) under redevelopment, and confirmation that it will look vastly different to TEF 2023, we have an opportunity to rethink the notion of educational gain – if it is to continue as a core assessment. 

    From learning gain to educational gain, the concept is appealing for its emphasis on understanding how students grow and develop over time, and the extent to which higher education institutions can make robust claims about their roles and contributions. 

    However, the Office for Students (OfS) left the definition and measurement of educational gain to individual providers to decide for themselves, which left the sector with a multitude of definitions. In the absence of a clear, shared definition of and approach to educational gain, the sector has tended to default to what is most easily measured.  

    Yet, an over reliance on student outcome metrics (such as the National Student Survey, continuation/completion or Graduate Outcome data) reduces the indicators of student development into just numbers. More concerningly, this approach meant student groups with small numbers may be lumped together or even excluded in various statistical analyses. When we focus on lived experience as headline statistics, the nuances are swept away. 

    Sector conversation 

    Recent sector work has explored the complexities of educational gain, from Fung’s (2024) analysis of Gold-rated TEF institutions to Quality Assurance Agency’s Collaborative Enhancement Project, which found diverse, developing but disparate approaches. 

    For individual institutions, a context-specific relevant approach makes sense, reflecting their own goals, priorities and practical considerations. But as a sector, including for the OfS, such freedom makes national comparison difficult if not impossible, and we revert to readily accessible and available outcome data. 

    Yet, educational gain must not only capture cognitive progress, but also the broader and holistic developments such as confidence and belonging. 

    The sector would benefit from a shared but flexible frame of reference for educational gain, which advocates for a diverse approach to evidence student growth over time. 

    A multi-dimensional approach to educational gain 

    Informed by the foundations of learning gain, this new paper proposes a multi-dimensional model of educational gain through three interrelated domains: cognitive and metacognitive, personal and affective, and social and cultural. Drawing on educational, psychological and sociological perspectives, these domains recognise the different aspects of student development, which also foregrounds the importance of longitudinal data from both qualitative and quantitative methods. 

    A multi-dimensional approach appreciates the student experience across the agency-structure spectrum. It provides an overarching frame of reference that enables institutions to tailor the specific approach as appropriate for their contexts. There will be differences across the sector in how institutions apply these in practice, but if the three domains (cognitive and metacognitive, personal and affective, and social and cultural) are broadly shared and operated as a thematic proxy across the sector, then we are at least in a position to explore how different institutions have collectively explored those dimensions. 

    For example, for cognitive and metacognitive development, it is conceivable that TASO’s Access and Success Questionnaire (ASQ) is adopted nationally to provide sector-wide comparable data with use value within and across institutions. In parallel, it is also conceivable to run a longitudinal qualitative study that unpacks how students articulate, reflect on and discuss their cognitive and metacognitive development. 

    Similarly, quantitative and qualitative methods can explore the extent to which students grow in confidence, resilience and self-efficacy, or whether they expand their social capital, sense of belonging or broader development as global citizens. 

    A multi-dimensional approach offers a unified lens for understanding educational gain that recognises sector benchmarks as well as local narratives. Without such a multi-dimensional view, the sector risks defaulting to established metrics that do not capture the full breadth of gains students achieve during their higher education. 

    What institutions can do 

    Short, funded pilot projects – supported by modest capacity-building grants – would give staff the space to test these methods before it is rolled out more widely. Contextually relevant reflective tasks could be strengthened and encouraged across programmes to encourage students to engage more critically with their own development. Crucially, it is important to ensure that any evidence gathered is conceptually robust and grounded in relevant theories of student progress and gains, for example: cognitive and metacognitive development, personal and affective growth, and social and cultural development. National-level benchmarks can be used effectively alongside the richness of context-specific data and evidence collected over time at the institutional level – reconciling national comparability with institutional distinctiveness. 

    What next? 

    If educational gain – and variations of it – is part of any next assessments, then the OfS should really be more explicit about what it expects from institutions. The ‘test’ from TEF 2023 to give providers the freedom to set their own criteria may be well-intended, but it served limited value for the sector, and presumably for the regulators themselves. A broad, flexible guiding principle or framework might provide the necessary coherence, preferably one that invites theoretical and methodological foundations in addition to the practical and pragmatic. 

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  • How do we gain and measure social licence? – Campus Review

    How do we gain and measure social licence? – Campus Review

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    Martin BettsAugust 4, 2025Last Updated: August 4, 2025

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  • AUD $50bn net gain from students with minimal rent price impact

    AUD $50bn net gain from students with minimal rent price impact

    International students are not responsible for sky-high rental price hikes, according to the latest analysis produced by Australia’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of Australia.

    In its latest bulletin assessing the role international students play in Australia’s economy, it estimated a AUS$50bn net gain from students and underlined their value as employees too.

    Spending by international students was also an important contributor to growth in consumer demand in Australia following the pandemic, it declared.

    “In periods of strong inflows of students, such as just after borders reopened after the pandemic, this likely had an important effect on aggregate demand in the economy.”

    And the report pointed out that international students constitute the second largest group of temporary visa holders with work rights in Australia after New Zealand citizens.

    “A greater share of international students work in accommodation and food, as well as retail, compared with the share of the total labour force,” detailed report authors.

    “Further, an increasing share of students are now working in health care, consistent with strong labour demand in this sector.”

    The report noted this contribution was important in helping businesses in these sectors facing labour shortages in the tight labour market that emerged post-pandemic.

    The timing of the report is useful, as new ESOS legislation is considered and the government is facing calls from the sector to stop stifling international student demand – with the latest calls relating to the new visa application fee which is killing demand from short-term students.

    When it comes to the political hot potato of international student populations squeezing out domestic renters or contributing to accommodation price surges, RBA was dismissive of that thesis.

    The rise in international student numbers is likely to have accounted for only a small share of the rise in rents since the onset of the pandemic
    Reserve Bank of Australia

    Models of the housing market used by the RBA suggest that a 50,000 increase in population would raise private rents by around 0.5 per cent compared with a baseline projection. The marginal effect of an additional renter may be greater in periods where the rental market is tight and vacancy rates are low, such as occurred post-pandemic.

    “Nonetheless, the rise in international student numbers is likely to have accounted for only a small share of the rise in rents since the onset of the pandemic, with much of the rise in advertised rents occurring before borders were reopened.”

    One area where higher international student numbers have generated a supply response has been in purpose-built student accommodation, noted the report, with rapid growth in building approvals for such projects in recent years.

    Note the gov plan to expand cap for insttutions investing in PBSA.

    Another interesting fact shared was that International students make up around one-third of Australia’s permanent resident intake –  around 30 per cent of international students went on to apply for temporary graduate visas in the five years to 2022, said the report citing 2022 data.

    There is less expected flow into temporaray labour market now – “this is because the recent tightening in visa policy has targeted groups of students who were more likely to be seeking to work” explained RBA.

    “That is, those international students who do receive visas going forward are less likely to be focused on employment opportunities in Australia on average,” said the report, citing Andrew Norton.

    In sum, “rapid growth in the international student stock post-pandemic likely contributed to some of the upward pressure on inflation from 2022 to early 2023, especially as arriving students frontloaded their spending as they set up in Australia and took time to join the labour market. However, the increase in international students was just one of many other forces at play in this time that drove demand above supply in the economy, and hence higher inflation. For instance, supply-side factors were the biggest driver of the increase in inflation in 2022 and 2023 (RBA 2023; Beckers, Hambur and Williams 2023) while strong domestic demand arising from supportive fiscal and monetary policy also played an important role.”

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  • “Am I Sure?” — A Mindful Question to Reduce Stress & Gain Perspective (Dr. Ryan Niemiec, VIA Strengths)

    “Am I Sure?” — A Mindful Question to Reduce Stress & Gain Perspective (Dr. Ryan Niemiec, VIA Strengths)

    How often do we let our assumptions add to our stress—without even realizing it? In this short video, Dr. Ryan Niemiec invites us to pause and ask one simple, powerful question: “Am I sure?” By gently challenging our perceptions, we create space for clarity, balance, and authenticity. Learn how mindfulness and the character strength of Perspective can help reduce stress and bring you back to what truly matters.

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  • ensure college grads gain higher incomes

    ensure college grads gain higher incomes

    Seventeen years ago, the Lumina Foundation set out to try to raise the percentage of working-age U.S. adults with a college credential from 38 percent to 60 percent by 2025.

    It didn’t reach that goal, though it was only short a few percentage points; today, 55 percent of individuals between the ages of 25 and 64 have a college degree or short-term credential, an increase that Lumina CEO Jamie Merisotis called “one of the most significant but least recognized success stories of the past decade and a half.” 

    But times have changed since 2008, Lumina’s leaders said during a news briefing Monday, and in developing a new goal for the coming 15 years, they chose to focus not only on college attainment, but also on making sure that people’s college degrees help them find success and prosperity in their careers.

    That’s why the foundation’s new goal aims to increase the number of adults in the labor force who have a “credential of value”—meaning they have earned a college credential and now make an income at least 15 percent more than the national average for high school graduates—to 75 percent by 2040. That number lines up with various labor projections, such as a Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce report, released earlier this year, that anticipated that 72 percent of jobs will require postsecondary education or training by the year 2031.

    Lumina’s leaders decided to focus on earnings in large part because of Americans’ lack of confidence in the value of higher education. Polls by Gallup and Lumina have shown that a major reason people don’t think a degree is worth the high cost of attending college is because they don’t believe higher education sets people up well to be successful in the workforce.

    “Our view is that we’ve got to do more to transform higher education workforce systems in order to meet human talent needs, in order to expand economic prosperity for individuals and for families and for communities,” said Merisotis. “Today, we have to make sure higher education literally serves more people better.”

    Currently, only 44.1 percent of the U.S. labor force—which includes members of the military and those who are looking for work—has a college degree or certificate and earns at least 15 percent more than those with just a high school diploma, according to the foundation’s analysis of Census data. Those rates are significantly lower for Native American, Hispanic and Black people, and higher for white and Asian people.

    The foundation laid out four pillars it plans to prioritize to reach that 75 percent goal: continuing to expand access to college, promoting student success and retention, redesigning college and workforce readiness to better support today’s students, and ensuring the credentials students receive do, in fact, pay off.

    Wil Del Pilar, senior vice president at the education equity nonprofit EdTrust, lauded the foundation for turning its focus to college value—and for providing a definition of what a valuable credential actually is.

    “The return-on-investment piece is under serious scrutiny nationally,” he said. “Including a metric that measures outcome—that measures income as an outcome—pushes folks to think about the return on investment of higher education that I think is a much-needed data point”—though he noted that earning 15 percent more than high school graduates, who made an average of about $38,000 in 2023, seems like “a low bar.”

    (Courtney Brown, Lumina’s vice president of impact and planning, said at the media briefing that the 15 percent figure was determined in consultation with multiple labor economists.)

    Lumina’s quest to increase credentials of value will be a boon not only to graduates, but also to employers seeking to recruit talent they can trust will have the job skills to succeed in their role, according to Shawn VanDerziel, president and CEO of the National Association of Colleges and Employers. In an email to Inside Higher Ed, he called the project a “worthy goal” and a “win-win” for graduates and employers.

    “The education landscape is changing and how adults are consuming education is changing,” he wrote in an emailed statement to Inside Higher Ed. “With Lumina’s assistance, I hope we can expand the speed at which our educational institutions can evolve to meet the changing needs of employers and their focus on skills-based hiring.”

    Charles Ansell, vice president for research, policy and advocacy at Complete College America, noted that while he appreciated the foundation’s focus on the value of credentials, he was also happy Lumina hadn’t shifted its focus away from attainment entirely.

    “College attainment is still the best predictor of the higher wage outcomes,” he said. “If you have full-time-student graduation rates hovering in the 20s at best in the community college space … it’s hard to get economic mobility. It’s still extremely important to put that attainment goal itself first and not to lose sight of quantifying that college completion.”

    As for whether the 75 percent goal seems achievable? That’s irrelevant, Ansel argued, because it’s simply what needs to happen to keep the country’s economy and democracy healthy.

    “We should never lie to ourselves about what we need to do,” he said. “I don’t find it unrealistic—it’s what we need to do.”

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