K-12 GenAI adoption rates have grown–but so have concerns
A new era for teachers as AI disrupts instruction
With AI coaching, a math platform helps students tackle tough concepts
For more news on GenAI, visit eSN’s AI in Education hub
Almost 3 in 5 K-12 educators (55 percent) have positive perceptions about GenAI, despite concerns and perceived risks in its adoption, according to updated data from Cengage Group’s “AI in Education” research series, which regularly evaluates AI’s impact on education.
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Our school has built up its course offerings without having to add headcount. Along the way, we’ve also gained a reputation for having a wide selection of general and advanced courses for our growing student body.
When it comes to visual creativity, AI tools let students design posters, presentations, and digital artwork effortlessly. Students can turn their ideas into professional-quality visuals, sparking creativity and innovation.
Ensuring that girls feel supported and empowered in STEM from an early age can lead to more balanced workplaces, economic growth, and groundbreaking discoveries.
In my work with middle school students, I’ve seen how critical that period of development is to students’ future success. One area of focus in a middle schooler’s development is vocabulary acquisition.
For students, the mid-year stretch is a chance to assess their learning, refine their decision-making skills, and build momentum for the opportunities ahead.
Middle school marks the transition from late childhood to early adolescence. Developmental psychologist Erik Erikson describes the transition as a shift from the Industry vs. Inferiority stage into the Identity vs. Role Confusion stage.
Art has a unique power in the ESL classroom–a magic that bridges cultures, ignites imagination, and breathes life into language. For English Language Learners (ELLs), it’s more than an expressive outlet.
In the year 2025, no one should have to be convinced that protecting data privacy matters. For education institutions, it’s really that simple of a priority–and that complicated.
Teachers are superheroes. Every day, they rise to the challenge, pouring their hearts into shaping the future. They stay late to grade papers and show up early to tutor struggling students.
Many of us working in higher education, including those of us in teaching and learning centers, might find that our work is dramatically accelerated by rapid technological change and increasing pressures to be more efficient and productive. Technology adoptions such as smartphones and Slack, video communication, and now generative AI all contribute to the acceleration of the organizational culture.
In her recent essay “Teaching Centers Aren’t Dumping Grounds,” Kerry O’Grady argues that many academic leaders “focus on more instead of on effectiveness and efficiency.” O’Grady recounts continued calls to “create more workshops, more one-pagers or more training when attendance was dismal for initial sessions, or when the original documents went untouched.” She argues that educational developers are in a constant state of emergency response, in which they are tasked with “retroactive cleanup” as opposed to “the work of proactive planning for teaching and learning success.” O’Grady calls for a much-needed reset—something that feels wonderfully exciting—and institutionally unrealistic.
Our collective teaching and working in higher education at more than 20 institutions over 50 years tells us that we are always working with limited agency to significantly change how our centers align with our strategic vision and the changing needs of the institution. Amid the dizzying pace of constant disruption, we feel a need to find a more sustainable and pragmatic approach. O’Grady’s essay inspired us to reflect on our strategic plans and how we support our respective communities. While the “dumping ground” metaphor importantly calls attention to current challenges, we consider a different metaphor that has guided our decisions as we direct centers and support educators.
The Dandelion and the Orchid
Dandelions are versatile flowers—resilient, fast-growing and abundant. In the context of educational development, dandelions represent the many ways developers adapt to institutional demands, producing quick outputs that propagate widely. Dandelion work is essential: It includes the programs and resources we create rapidly to meet pressing needs. However, as with real dandelions, the results of this work are often scattered, growing without the intentional design of a cultivated garden. When we run from meeting to meeting or throw together a one-off workshop to respond to emerging pedagogical issues, we rely on dandelions.
In contrast, orchids require significant care and controlled environments to flourish. Orchid work symbolizes slow, intentional cultivation—projects that are thoughtfully nurtured over time. These efforts demand patience, consistency and a commitment to depth over breadth. While the process is slower, the results are uniquely meaningful, reflecting a product of deliberate focus. Orchid work requires long-term planning, collaboration across units and thoughtful engagement. While orchids can result in beautiful landscapes, the time taken to cultivate them can mean that we miss many emergent day-to-day needs.
Together, this framework highlights a central question: Which systemic issues require sustained effort, and which challenges can be addressed through quick, one-off engagements? Balancing dandelion and orchid approaches helps educational developers respond to immediate needs while creating space for intentional growth.
Although meaningful relationships take time to develop, their benefits are powerful. Researchsupports the idea that individuals with a high relational self-construal—those who define themselves through their relationships with others—may be better able to embrace inconsistency and instability (two things that very much describe life in education today). Educational developers therefore can foster resilience and adaptability not only by caring for relational networks at their institution but also by defining their work based on such networks.
Lean into play and creative approaches: Include an exercise that might activate imaginative thinking like using visual thinking strategies or a paired movement activity and enjoy a shared experience of lightness.
Model care in facilitation: Demonstrate care in your interactions, setting a precedent for participants. Show genuine interest in their insights, making room for personal or contextual details that may be meaningful to them. Generate collective resources that bring a variety of participants’ contexts to the forefront.
Provide candor about institutional challenges: Directly speak to the realistic limitations of what the institution can do to support faculty; do not overpromise possibilities or shy away from the realities of the conditions in which the work will happen.
Balancing the orchid and the dandelion depends on priorities and time constraints. The dandelion approach can produce quick solutions when the pressure is high, and the orchid approach encourages us to carve out the time and tend to our relationships even in our constant push to maintain that field of flowers.
While it may disrupt our metaphor, dandelions can give way to orchids and orchids can give way to dandelions. After all, the more often that deeper relationships develop, the more often we’re going to be in contact with faculty and colleagues, which will seed new ideas and possibilities, be they orchids or dandelions.
The metaphor encourages us to ask how and where we can make space and time for deeper engagement. We cannot just grow a field of dandelions if we want to foster a culture of innovation, nor can we respond effectively and in a timely manner to an institution’s needs if we just focus on orchids. We have found that giving ourselves the permission to grow orchids amid the dandelions allows us to feel more agency and more relationally connected to the work we’re doing and the people we’re doing it with. The metaphor has helped us foster and model a more inclusive, supportive academic culture—one that balances collaboration with efficiency, collective resilience with institutional responsiveness and meaning with productivity.
JT Torres directs the Houston H. Harte Center for Teaching and Learning at Washington & Lee University.
Lance Eaton is an educator, writer and public speaker. He has worked in educational development for 15 years and recently became the senior associate director of AI in teaching and learning at Northeastern University.
Deborah Kronenberg is an educator, consultant and public speaker who approaches communities of learning with creative, interdisciplinary, relationship-centric leadership in faculty and administrative roles in the greater Boston area.
In recent weeks, a growing number of international students and green card holders at prestigious universities, including Cornell, Columbia, Georgetown, and Tufts, have been arrested and detained by federal immigration authorities. These actions appear to be part of a broader crackdown on pro-Palestinian activism within U.S. academic institutions and against dissent in general.
Tufts University
On March 26, 2025, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University, was detained by federal agents who revoked her student visa. Ozturk had co-authored an op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper condemning investments in companies linked to Israel and referring to the “Palestinian genocide” in Gaza. Her detention occurred as she was heading to an iftar dinner during Ramadan.
Columbia University
Earlier this month, Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent resident and recent graduate of Columbia University, was arrested in his university housing. Khalil’s participation in pro-Palestinian protests led to allegations of supporting Hamas, resulting in the revocation of his green card. He is currently detained while challenging the deportation order.
Subsequently, Yunseo Chung, a 21-year-old Columbia junior from South Korea holding a green card, was targeted for deportation due to her involvement in similar protests. A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order preventing her detention while she contests the deportation order.
Georgetown University
Badar Khan Suri, a Georgetown University postdoctoral fellow on a student visa, was detained on March 17, 2025, under accusations of spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism. His attorney disputes these claims, suggesting that Suri is being targeted because of his Palestinian wife’s heritage and their perceived opposition to U.S. foreign policy.
Cornell University
Momodou Taal, a Cornell graduate student with dual British and Gambian citizenship, was instructed to surrender to ICE authorities on March 22, 2025. Taal’s legal team preemptively filed a lawsuit challenging the deportation order, citing concerns over potential surveillance and targeting due to his activism.
These incidents have raised significant concerns among civil rights organizations, university officials, and international communities. Critics argue that the Trump administration’s actions infringe upon First Amendment rights and target individuals based on their political views. In response, legal challenges are underway, with courts issuing orders to halt certain deportations and detentions.
As this situation develops, universities and advocacy groups continue to monitor and respond to the evolving landscape of immigration enforcement affecting international students and green card holders across the nation.
Edward Blum isn’t quite a household name. But at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., he’s a minor celebrity.
The conservative think tank has played host to an array of high-profile politicos, pundits, journalists and businesspeople over the years: Bill Gates, Mike Pence, Jordan Peterson, the Dalai Lama. Blum, who took affirmative action to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2023 and won, spoke at the institute earlier this month about his decades of legal activism.
It was something of a homecoming for the president of Students for Fair Admissions, who lives in Florida but has been a visiting fellow at AEI since 2005. It was also, in many ways, a victory lap.
Since the court ruled in his favor in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and the University of North Carolina, Blum’s vision of what he calls a “colorblind covenant in public policy” has been ascendant, and in the new Trump administration, Blum’s zealous opposition to race-conscious programs has become a domineering force driving education policy.
Over the weekend, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights issued a letter outlining an expansive interpretation of the SFFA ruling and its plans to enforce a ban on all race-conscious programming in higher ed; colleges that don’t comply in 14 days could lose their federal funding. During her confirmation hearing Thursday, Education Secretary nominee Linda McMahon said ending “race-based programming” would be a priority if she were confirmed.
Blum, who spoke with Inside Higher Ed before the OCR letter was published, believes that affirmative action has long been unpopular—winning the public relations battle, he said, was “the easiest part of my job.” Still, he said the political, legal and cultural backlash against affirmative action and DEI over the past few years was affirming. In Trump’s Washington, Blum, who fought the courts unsuccessfully for decades, feels like an insider at last.
“It’s gratifying for those of us who have labored in this movement to see that now, rather than these policies being whispered about as unfair and illegal, there’s a full-throated cry against them,” he said.
The Trump administration’s adoption of Blum’s views on race in higher ed has also prompted another wave of backlash from Blum’s many critics, who say his work is undoing decades of progress toward racial equality and integration.
During his AEI session, Blum was asked about his own views on racial diversity on college campuses, constitutional law notwithstanding. He rejected the premise outright.
“The question implies that someone’s skin color is going to tell me something very fundamental about who they are as an individual. I don’t believe that’s the case,” Blum said. “Your skin color, the shape of your eyes, the texture of your hair tells me nothing about who you are. For some people, being on a campus with racial diversity is important … There are others that don’t seem to care about that.”
From Outsider to Agenda Setter
Blum has railed against race-conscious admissions for two decades. A former businessman in Houston, Blum, who has no law degree, founded the legal defense fund Project on Fair Representation in the mid-2000s. He challenged Texas’s reinstatement of race-based admissions in the second Fisher v. the University of Texas case; the case went to the Supreme Court but was ultimately defeated in 2016 when justices ruled that the university’s admission practices were constitutional.
Now, he’s not alone. A corps of public interest law groups has sprung up to litigate the SFFA decision in higher ed at prestigious law firms, on Wall Street and beyond. This month, a brand-new public interest legal group filed a lawsuit against the University of California system accusing it of secretly using racial preferences in admissions, citing increases in Black and Hispanic enrollment at its most selective colleges.
Blum said SFFA isn’t passing the buck and is committed to challenging universities on their compliance with the law, but a groundswell of efforts has lightened his load.
“The SFFA decision has energized the public interest law apparatus,” Blum said. He predicted that under Trump, the Education Department will also play a bigger role in investigating institutions for their compliance with the affirmative action ban. That forecast appears to be coming true with Friday’s Dear Colleague letter, though the agency still has to enforce the directive, a complicated prospect considering its broad scope.
Edward Blum (left) at the American Enterprise Institute on Feb. 5, with moderator Frederick Hess.
Blum supports the intensifying attacks on DEI and said that with more state laws forbidding spending on diversity and equity programs, there’s room for legal work to ensure colleges aren’t spending on “DEI by another name.”
But despite the high-profile political implications of his work, he doesn’t see himself as a political actor. In the late 1990s, he ran a failed congressional campaign in Houston, but the thought of running for office now evokes “overwhelming negative emotions.” And he’s careful to draw a line between his legal advocacy work and the anti-DEI crusades of conservative lawmakers.
“There is a 20-foot wall between the political people in the movement and the public interest groups,” he said.
‘A Forever Endeavor’
Blum is not finished suing colleges over affirmative action, or at least those he believes could be flouting the law. He’s particularly interested in selective colleges that reported similar or higher rates of Black and Hispanic enrollment this year, such as Yale, Duke and Princeton—a sure sign, he believes, that they’ve been “cheating.” SFFA has a “vibrant role to play,” he added, in holding them to account.
“So many of us are befuddled and concerned that in the first admissions cycle post-SFFA, schools that said getting rid of affirmative action would cause their minority admissions to plummet didn’t see that happen,” he said.
When asked if recent expansions to financial aid offerings at these universities could account for the change, Blum was circumspect. He’s not opposed to economically progressive admissions initiatives; he calls Rick Kahlenberg, a liberal proponent of “class-based affirmative action,” a like-minded friend. But he said the onus was on colleges to prove that’s the source of their continued racial diversity. He also said that geographic diversity initiatives would be unconstitutional if they only applied to “Harlem and the South Side of Chicago, and not also rural Missouri and northern Maine.”
Since the Supreme Court ruling, experts, college administrators and lawyers have debated whether the SFFA decision applies to race-conscious scholarships, internships and precollege programs as well as admissions. In the months after the ruling, attorneys general in Ohio and Missouri issued orders saying it did, and some colleges have begun to revise racial eligibility requirements on scholarships. At the same time, scholars and lawyers said implementing changes to nonadmissions programs amounted to overreach from state lawmakers and institutions alike.
Blum doesn’t actually believe the decision itself extends to those programs. He does think they’re illegal—there just hasn’t been a successful case challenging them yet.
“I haven’t really made myself clear on this, which is my fault, but the SFFA opinion didn’t change the law for those policies” in internships and scholarships, he said. “But those policies have always been, in my opinion, outside of the scope of our civil rights law and actionable in court.”
He’s still looking for a case that could enshrine his view in the law—two weeks ago McDonald’s settled a lawsuit he filed against their Latino scholarship program, putting that one out of contention. But he said that for the most part, in the wake of the SFFA decision, colleges have proactively altered or ended those programs themselves.
“Even if the ruling didn’t apply directly, it’s had this cascading effect,” he said.
That effect, Blum said, has spread to cultural and corporate institutions as well as higher ed, contributing to a general chilling effect on what he views as unconstitutional racial preferences in American society. It’s a major turnaround, he acknowledged, from the ubiquity of DEI initiatives and racial reckoning just five years ago after the murder of George Floyd.
While he’s relishing in the legal, political and cultural victory of his crusade, he’s not resting on his laurels.
“There are no permanent victories in politics,” Blum said, loosely quoting Winston Churchill. “The same applies to legal advocacy. This is a forever endeavor.”
Title: The Hidden STEM Gender Gap: Why Progress at Top Universities Masks a Growing Crisis
Source: Brookings Institution
Authors: Joseph R. Cimpian and Jo R. King
A recent Brookings Institution article, “The Hidden STEM Gender Gap: Why Progress at Top Universities Masks a Growing Crisis,” paints a complex picture of the state of gender equity in STEM higher education. While top universities have made notable progress in narrowing the gender gap in physics, engineering, and computer science (PECS) majors, institutions serving students with lower math achievement are falling further behind.
Over the past two decades, the male-to-female ratio in PECS majors decreased from 2.2:1 to 1.5:1 at universities with the highest average math SAT scores. However, at institutions with the lowest average scores, the gender gap has dramatically widened from 3.5:1 to 7.1:1. This disparity persists even when accounting for differences in math ability, confidence, interests, and academic preparation. The findings point to institutional barriers that disproportionately impact women at less selective schools.
The institutions struggling most with gender equity serve the majority of American students, particularly students of color and those from lower-income families. PECS degrees offer a path to high-paying careers, and research suggests women may see an even greater earnings premium from these majors at less selective institutions compared to their more selective counterparts. By failing to recruit and retain women in PECS programs, we are denying millions the opportunity to benefit from these rewarding fields.
The authors propose several strategies to shrink this gap:
Allocate resources strategically, directing support to the institutions facing the greatest challenges rather than those already making progress.
Adapt proven practices like undergraduate research and peer mentoring to the unique needs and constraints of less-resourced institutions, forging creative partnerships to ensure successful implementation at scale.
Mobilize external partners, from nonprofit organizations to industry groups, to strategically focus their outreach and pathway-building efforts on the schools and communities with the most severe gender imbalances.
Achieving gender equity in STEM will require acknowledging where we are falling short and building the collective determination to change. The success of top universities shows that progress is possible, but it will take targeted interventions and a sustained commitment to extending opportunities to all students. Until then, our celebrations of narrowing gaps will ring hollow for the women left behind.
To read the full Brookings Institution article, click here. The complete research is also available in the journal Sciencehere.
—Alex Zhao
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The release of provider-level end of cycle data for the 2024 cycle confirms what has been long known informally; this year a group of “higher-tariff” providers went for growth, in some cases by reducing their entry tariff significantly. You can see DK’s crunching of the provider data here.
Typically, behaviour like this leads to grumbling elsewhere in the sector. That’s partly because there’s a direct impact on other institutions’ bottom line when the big players flex in this way, meaning that those who lose out may need to suspend planned investment and/or embark on portfolio rationalisation, rounds of voluntary redundancy, and other cost-reduction measures to stay afloat.
But it’s also because there’s a perception that the selective institutions are pulling in students that mid or lower tariff institutions consider themselves to be best equipped to support and nurture. This (arguably) creates additional risk for the students who find themselves studying at an institution that culturally may assume a greater degree of academic self-efficacy than they actually have.
The debate rumbles on as to whether it’s reasonable to “permit” popular institutions to grow at the expense of others. But much less attention is generally given to the question of why any successful provider with significant overheads would seek to grow home student recruitment at all. In 2022 the Russell Group warned that the average deficit incurred by English universities per home student per year was £1,750 per student per year, and that a “conservative estimate” would see that deficit increasing to £4000 by the current academic year.
Assuming you’re not an economist or a strategy consultant (if you are, do write in), you might legitimately be scratching your head about the strategic intent behind increasing sales of a product you don’t make any money on – indeed, that you have to subsidise from other sources. Higher education institutions don’t have to make money of course – the goal is generally to realise a small surplus across the breadth of activities, recognising that some degree of cross-subsidy, primarily from international student income, is part of the business model. But even with that caveat, growth of a loss-making activity in times of financial pressure remains, on the face of it, a peculiar approach.
What’s going on?
There are three strategic rationales for this that I can think of. It might be that hitherto high tariff institutions are growing for public interest reasons – to meet their access and participation targets, or because they are offering new courses of value to their regions or that will attract a wider range of international students or even support a particular research ambition.
It might be that they are growing in the subject areas that are cheaper to teach in hopes of making inroads into that average deficit and reducing the level of cross-subsidy from other sources. Over on DK’s end of cycle data visualisations you can take a look at the general subject areas where particular institutions have seen growth. DK would no doubt be the first to tell you that HECoS subject grouping isn’t quite as nuanced as you’d need to be able to make that case plausibly, though there’s probably a bit of it going on. This was a concern the Augar review flagged back in 2019 – that the fixed unit of resource, all other things being equal, tends to incentivise growth in subject areas that have higher margins and for which there is stable or growing demand, rather than trying to generate additional demand for more expensive and less popular subjects.
It is possible there might be changes to teaching and/or student support provision that have generated sufficient efficiencies to get to a break-even or modest surplus situation on home students that would make overall growth a sensible business strategy. This is the current focus of a lot of sector thinking on efficiency – if the unit of resource isn’t increasing fast enough, but student (and regulatory) expectations aren’t reducing, then the sector has to figure out ways to make its provision sustainable, through technology adoption, more sharing and collaboration among institutions, reducing costs in areas where the institution believes there is minimal impact on student experience, and so on.
While there is a lot of interesting thinking going on around efficiency, it’s doubtful that this number of institutions has made such significant progress as to get to the point of wiping out the home student deficit in its totality, though there may be some efficiencies to be gained through economies of scale.
There are also several less overtly strategic options. One is that the institutions in question don’t have that strong a central grip on their admissions. It’s easy to imagine in a devolved academic system individual departments and faculties pursuing growth to increase their own overall income without a great deal of attention being given to the aggregate effect on the institution as a whole.
The final possibility – and in all honesty I think this is probably at least a somewhat accurate assessment – is that the calculation is that growth, even cross-subsidised growth, will demonstrate market strength, which will satisfy boards of governors, reassure lenders, and keep the university in good fettle with the bond markets. Which raises the question about what happens next year and the year after that. Growth, even for the most popular institutions can’t be an indefinite strategy. And what happens to the rest?
For the big players, growth can generally be deployed as a tactical response to immediate financial pressure, while structural or operational change can be deferred to future times, when there’s more bandwidth and appetite for change, or clarity about the policy environment. Other institutions don’t in most cases have that luxury and some are likely to be less stable as a result.
The policy response
So how should government respond? It’s very hard to make the case that students should be forced – or at least obliged – to attend an institution that isn’t their first choice simply to ensure that that institution remains generally healthy and sustainable. We should also on principle give those selective institutions the benefit of the doubt on their strategic preparedness for a different intake this year. Growth in the hundreds in an institution of thousands, if fairly evenly spread, needn’t be an issue if there is a plan in place to support those students and notice if any are struggling.
It’s still worth saying, though, that if you’re looking through the lens of student interest, the market principle that student choice is the most important thing only holds true if the basis on which prospective students are making choices has a meaningful relationship with their prospect of flourishing at their chosen institution. So it remains a bit of a worry that if there are issues we’ll only know about it when the outcome data surfaces in the coming years – too late to do anything about it.
Some in the sector wish there was a way of putting restraints on the market without resorting to institutional student number controls. There are options short of total control that might focus on restraining or encouraging recruitment in particular subject areas, or asking institutions to evidence the case for growth, and/or subjecting them to more stringent oversight when growth exceeds a certain margin. It would also be theoretically possible, though very complicated, to set quality thresholds around inputs ie set conditions around the available resources in the learning environment all students should be able to expect.
But it’s also worth government giving consideration to the idea that in market terms all of this only is an issue because the perception is that the size of the market is pretty fixed and institutions are by and large vying for a larger slice of the pie rather than trying to grow the pie. UCAS data tends to support that view as applications via UCAS have seen growth at a lower rate than the sector hoped given the demographic growth in 18-19 year olds in the wider population.
Published UCAS data does not, however, capture applications made direct to institutions or, indeed, PG-level applications, and there may be growth or potential for growth in other parts of the market. Market purists would argue that if a provider is not seeing success in its traditional market then the smart move is to tap into a different market. While this might be accurate in strategic terms, this analysis tends to gloss over the risks and complexities involved in making such a pivot, especially when the provider in question is already feeling financially squeezed.
Even if your market share is eroding, trying to win it back can be perceived as a path of less resistance and more immediate potential reward than entirely retooling the whole offer – even if thinking this way is also a highly risky strategy if things continue as they are and the rewards fail to materialise, as some institutions have discovered to their cost.
If government wants a policy win on two key fronts: widening access to selective institutions and broadening the pool of people who benefit from HE in general, it could do worse than to create a programme of support explicitly targeted at those institutions who are less powerful in the “traditional” market but that still have a great deal to offer their localities, and work with them to develop the offer to prospective students where there is latent growth potential – pooling risk and transition costs, with a payoff ultimately realised in skills and economic growth.
