Tag: Higher

  • Tulane Environmentalist Resigns Amid Research “Gag Order”

    Tulane Environmentalist Resigns Amid Research “Gag Order”

    An environmental researcher at Tulane University resigned Wednesday after accusing campus officials, reportedly under pressure from Gov. Jeff Landry, of issuing a “gag order” that prevented her from publicly discussing her work, which focused on racial disparities in the petrochemical workforce.

    “Scholarly publications, not gag orders, are the currency of academia,” Kimberly Terrell, the now-former director of community engagement at Tulane’s Environmental Law Clinic, wrote in her resignation letter. “There is always room for informed debate. But Tulane leaders have chosen to abandon the principles of knowledge, education, and the greater good in pursuit of their own narrow agenda.”

    Terrell’s resignation comes amid wider efforts by the Trump administration and its allies to control the types of research—including projects related to environmental justice—academics are permitted to pursue and punish campus protesters for espousing messages the president and other public officials disagree with.

    “It started with the pro-Palestinian activism on our campus and others across the country. It’s emboldened a lot of political leaders to feel they can make inroads by silencing faculty in other areas,” Michelle Lacey, a math professor and president of Tulane’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, told Inside Higher Ed. “That was the catalyst for creating a climate where university administrators are very nervous, especially now as we see the government pulling funding for areas of research they don’t like.”

    Last spring, Landry praised Tulane president Michael Fitts and university police for removing students who were protesting Israel’s attacks on Gaza. Soon after, the Legislature passed a provision creating harsher punishments for protesters who disrupt traffic, which Landry later signed into law.

    Landry, a Republican aligned with Trump, has a history of trying to exert control over the state’s public higher education institutions.

    Last summer, he enacted a law that allows him to directly appoint board chairs at the state’s public colleges and universities. And in November, following Trump’s election, Landry publicly called on officials at Louisiana State University to punish a law professor who allegedly made brief comments in class about students who voted for the president.

    Landry’s office denied to the Associated Press (which first reported on Terrell’s resignation) that it pressured Tulane to silence research from the law clinic. Michael Strecker, a Tulane spokesperson, also told the outlet that the university “is fully committed to academic freedom and the strong pedagogical value of law clinics” and declined to comment on “personnel matters.”

    Strecker added in a statement that Tulane administrators have been working with the law school’s leadership on how the law clinics could better support the university’s education mission.

    “Debates about how best to operate law clinics’ teaching mission have occurred nationally and at Tulane for years—this is nothing new,” Strecker said. “This effort includes most recently input from an independent, third-party review.”

    But Terrell’s account of the events that led to her resignation call the universities’ academic freedom commitments into question, while also implying that Landry—and powerful industry groups—wield some influence over private higher education institutions in the state.

    And it’s not something Tulane, a private university in New Orleans, should tolerate, Lacey said.

    Kimberly Terrell

    “The academic freedom of all university researchers must be unequivocally defended at both public and private institutions,” Lacey wrote in a statement. “This includes the right to conduct and disseminate research that may be unfavorably viewed by government officials or corporate entities. Political demands to stifle controversial research are an affront to the advancement of knowledge and open exchange of ideas, as is the voluntary compliance with such requests by university leadership.”

    The latest controversy at Tulane stems from a paper Terrell published April 9 in the peer-reviewed journal Ecological Economics. Her research found that while Black people in Louisiana are underrepresented in the state’s petrochemical workforce, they are overexposed to toxic pollutants the industry releases into an area of the state between New Orleans and Baton Rouge known as “Cancer Alley.”

    But according to emails obtained by Inside Higher Ed and other outlets, Fitts worried that publicizing Terrell’s research and the clinic’s other work, which includes legal advocacy, could jeopardize funding for the university’s $600 million plan to redevelop New Orleans’ historic Charity Hospital into residential and commercial spaces as part of a broader downtown expansion plan.

    As Terrell explained in her resignation letter, Fitts and other top Tulane executives were at Louisiana’s state capitol on April 16 lobbying for the project when “someone accused the university of being anti–chemical industry” and cited her study, which was receiving media attention after it was published the week prior. According to Terrell, “the story that came down to me through the chain of command was that Governor Landry threatened to veto any bill with funding for Tulane’s Charity project unless Fitts did something about the Environmental Law Clinic.”

    ‘Complete Gag Order’

    After that, Terrell says, she was “placed under a complete gag order,” which the emails appear to confirm.

    “Effective immediately all external communications that are not client-based—that is, directly related to representation—must be pre-approved by me,” Marcilynn Burke, dean of Tulane’s law school, wrote in an April 25 email to law clinic staff. “Such communications include press releases, interviews, videos, social media postings, etc. Please err on the side of over-inclusion as we work to define the boundaries through experience.”

    A week later, on May 4, Burke wrote another email to clinic staff explaining that “elected officials and major donors have cited the clinic as an impediment to them lending their support to the university generally and this project specifically,” referring to Fitts’s plans to redevelop the old hospital. Terrell wrote that when she pleaded her case to Provost Robin Forman, “he refused to acknowledge my right to freely conduct and disseminate research” and also “let slip that my job description was likely going to be rewritten.”

    Terrell described the entire law clinic as being “under siege” and said she would rather leave her position “than have my work used as an excuse for President Fitts to dismantle the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic.”

    Other academics, free speech experts and environmental justice advocates also believe Tulane’s moves to silence Terrell’s work amounts to an attack on academic freedom with implications beyond the campus.

    “The administration of Tulane University, far from standing up for academic freedom, is participating in the effort to suppress free inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge by scientific methods,” Michael Ash, an economics and public policy professor at the University of Massachusetts, said in a statement. “Any effort to reduce academic freedom for Dr. Terrell either by changing her job classification or by redefining whether the protection applies is a blatant and un-American attempt to suppress the type of free inquiry that has made this country great.”

    Joy Banner, co-founder and co-director of the Descendants Project, a community organization that works in Cancer Alley, added that the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic is a vital public health resource.

    Without the clinic, “it would be far more difficult to show the racially discriminatory practices of the industry, from preferential hiring practices to a pattern of concentrating pollution in majority Black neighborhoods,” she said in a statement. “President Fitts must commit to protecting it at all costs.”

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  • Tenn. Lawsuit Puts Hispanic-Servings’ Fate on the Line

    Tenn. Lawsuit Puts Hispanic-Servings’ Fate on the Line

    Two years after its Supreme Court victory against Harvard and UNC Chapel Hill, Students for Fair Admissions has a new target in its sights: Hispanic-serving institutions. On Wednesday, the advocacy group joined the state of Tennessee in suing the U.S. Department of Education, arguing that the criteria to become an HSI are unconstitutional and discriminatory. The move is distressing HSI advocates, who hoped to see the institutions left out of the political fray.

    To qualify as an HSI, a college or university needs to have a student body comprised of at least 25 percent Hispanic students and enroll at least 50 percent low-income students, or more than other comparable institutions, among other criteria. No Tennessee institutions operated by the state meet the threshold and are thus prohibited from applying for HSI-specific grants—even though they serve Hispanic and low-income students, according to the Tennessee attorney general and SFFA. As a result, the federal designation criteria amounts to discrimination, and Tennessee universities and students suffer as a result, the plaintiffs argue.

    They also say Tennessee institutions find themselves in an “unconstitutional dilemma”: Even if they wanted to, they argue, they can’t use affirmative action to up their Hispanic student enrollments since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against using race as a factor in college admissions. That 2023 decision resulted from lawsuits SFFA brought against Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

    “The HSI program is particularly egregious in terms of how it treats students based on immutable characteristics,” Tennessee attorney general Jonathan Skrmetti, who’s representing the state in the suit, told Inside Higher Ed. “It is just manifestly unfair that a needy student in Tennessee does not have access to this pool of funds because they go to a school that doesn’t have the right ethnic makeup.”

    The lawsuit calls for “a declaratory judgement that the HSI program’s ethnicity-based requirements are unconstitutional” and “a permanent injunction prohibiting the [Education] Secretary from enforcing or applying the HSI program’s ethnicity-based requirements when making decisions whether to award or maintain grants to Tennessee’s institutions of higher education.”

    HSI proponents may be jarred by the legal challenge, but they aren’t entirely surprised. Conservative think tanks like the Manhattan Institute and the American Civil Rights Project have previously proposed abolishing enrollment-based minority-serving institutions (MSIs), including HSIs and Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander–serving institutions, which are defined as enrolling 10 percent of students from these groups.

    “It was only a matter of time before the anti-DEI movement hit the enrollment-based MSIs,” said Gina Ann Garcia, a professor who studies MSIs in the school of education at the University of California, Berkeley. “It still was a punch to the gut.”

    2 Sides At Odds

    Congress established the HSI program in the 1990s to improve the quality of education at colleges and universities that disproportionately serve Latino students, who were concentrated at colleges with relatively fewer financial resources. They’ve historically enjoyed bipartisan support. Last year, the federal government appropriated about $229 million for the country’s roughly 600 Hispanic-serving institutions; $28 million of that funding went to 49 of the HSIs that applied for the competitive grants.

    Deborah Santiago, co-founder and CEO of Excelencia in Education, an organization that promotes Latino student success, believes the lawsuit mischaracterizes the program and its role in the national higher education landscape. She said it’s in the country’s “self-interest” to invest in colleges and universities with limited resources that serve a growing student population with stubborn degree-attainment gaps.

    “If a disproportionate number of students of any background are at an institution that has a high enrollment of needy students, low educational core expenditures and serves a high proportion of students that that could benefit from that [funding] to serve the country, I don’t think that’s discriminating,” she said.

    She also stressed that the grant program “doesn’t explicitly require any resources to go to a specific population” but funds capacity-building efforts, like building new laboratories and facilities, that benefit all students at the institution.

    The HSI program is a way “to target limited federal resources and meet the federal mandate of access for low-income students,” she said. “We know that it costs more to educate Hispanic students, because they’re more likely to be low income and first gen, so college knowledge, student support services—all of that takes institutional investment.”

    But opponents of HSIs don’t buy it.

    Wenyuan Wu, executive director of the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, a think tank and watchdog organization focused on promoting “equal rights and merit,” firmly believes enrollment-based minority-serving institutions are discriminatory and applauded the lawsuit as a step in the right direction.

    She argued that HSI funding has gone to efforts specifically to support Latino students, including some she sees as “ideological.” For example, the University of Connecticut at Stamford proposed using the funding to start a program called Sueño Scholars, to “recruit, support and mentor undergraduate Hispanic, other minority, low-income, and high-need students” to enter teaching graduate programs and included a goal of “developing and sustaining antiracist orientations towards teaching and learning,” according to the department’s list of project abstracts.

    Wu asserted that putting federal money toward efforts like these is a problem. She’d rather see the funds designated for HSIs channeled into Pell Grants or other supports for low-income students.

    “Taxpayer funds should not be used to engage in racial balancing, and that’s exactly the kind of behavior that has been incentivized by MSIs,” said Wu, who is also chair of the Georgia Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

    Possible Outcomes

    Robert Kelchen, head of the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies Department at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, believes the lawsuit has “a possibility of success.” It was filed in a conservative-leaning federal district court in Knoxville, and Tennessee seems to have shown it has legal standing, he said.

    Even “if the court here in Knoxville doesn’t agree, another state could choose to file a similar lawsuit in their district court as well,” he said. Ultimately, “the question is, can they find one court that agrees with the plaintiffs’ interpretation.”

    The move by Tennessee comes just a week after the federal government successfully sued Texas to eliminate in-state tuition for undocumented students—a policy Republican state lawmakers had tried but failed to end. The Texas attorney general celebrated the challenge, siding with the U.S. Department of Justice in a matter of hours, and a judge promptly quashed the two-decade-old state law. (Stephen Vladeck, a professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center, called the episode “transparently collusive.”)

    Kelchen believes the Tennessee lawsuit is following a similar playbook. He expects to see more red states and conservative organizations sue the Education Department on issues where they align “to get rid of things that neither of [them] like,” he said—though in Tennessee’s case, it’s unclear how the department will respond.

    Skrmetti told Inside Higher Ed that “from Tennessee’s perspective, this is not part of a broader strategy to influence education policy. This is about discrimination against Tennessee schools because of the ethnic makeup of their student bodies.”

    If the plaintiffs win, it’s unclear whether that would mean changing the federal definition of an HSI to eliminate a Hispanic enrollment threshold or axing the HSI program altogether. The implications for other types of enrollment-based minority-serving institutions are also hazy.

    Skrmetti is open to multiple options.

    “At the end of the day, there’s [HSI] money out there to help needy students, and we want to make sure that needy students can access it regardless of the ethnic makeup of the schools they’re at,” he said. “There are a couple different avenues I think that could successfully achieve the goal operationally. We need to just get a declaration that the current situation does violate the Constitution.”

    Santiago, of Excelencia in Education, said there’s room for “thoughtful discussion” about reforming or expanding requirements for HSI grant funding, but she believes “it needs to come from the community.”

    She also pointed out that the lawsuit is against the Department of Education, which administers HSI funding but doesn’t control it—Congress does. So the department doesn’t have the power to end the funding.

    Nonetheless, “it would be foolish to not take it seriously,” she said.

    Garcia, the Berkeley education professor, said that while she’s not a lawyer, she believes there are legal questions worth raising about the lawsuit, particularly the way it leans on the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action in admissions.

    She pointed out that HSIs tend to be broad-access or open-access institutions that admit most applicants, rather than selective institutions explicitly recruiting Latino students; only about two dozen of the 600 HSIs are highly selective, she said. So, the assertion that HSIs have any connection to the affirmative action ruling is up for debate, she said.

    Skrmetti believes it’s a cut-and-dried case.

    “You can’t make determinations about the allocation of resources based on ancestry or skin color or anything like that without inherent discrimination,” he said. “We need to help all needy students. And the HSI designation is an obstacle to that.”

    Garcia believes that regardless of whether the lawsuit is successful, it’s already done damage to HSIs by dragging them—and enrollment-based MSIs in general—into the country’s political skirmishes over diversity, equity and inclusion.

    “I’ve been just watching HSIs fly a little bit under the radar,” she said. “They don’t come up a lot” in national conversations about DEI. But the lawsuit “brings HSIs into the light, and it brings them into the attack.”

    She worries that students are the ones who will suffer if HSIs no longer receive dedicated funding.

    HSIs “are often underresourced institutions,” she said. “They’re institutions that are struggling to serve a large population of minoritized students, of students of color, of low-income students, of first-gen students. We’re not talking about the Harvards and the Columbias.”

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  • The Role of Apprenticeships: Cultivating an Entrepreneurial Mindset in UK Higher Education

    The Role of Apprenticeships: Cultivating an Entrepreneurial Mindset in UK Higher Education

    • Gary Gillon is a lecturer in business and management at the University of the West of Scotland. Alan Martin is a lecturer in enterprise at the University of the West of Scotland. Dr Robert Crammond is a senior lecturer in enterprise at the University of the West of Scotland.

    In its competitive market, the UK’s universities face growing pressure to be enterprising and produce graduates with real-world skills and innovative thinking. Employers frequently voice concerns about graduates lacking practical skills required in today’s workplace. At the same time, a new generation of students is more entrepreneurial and digitally agile than ever.

    A 2023 survey published by the Association of Accounting Technicians found 64% of Generation Z (aged 16 – 25) have started or plan to start their own business, in addition to nearly 5,000 start-ups that were established in UK universities during the 2022-2023 academic session.

    With regards to university students specifically, around 27% are managing a business (around 14.4% amongst graduates) or intend to do so. A good figure, but it represents a fraction of the overall student population: so what are universities missing?

    Bridging this gap between academic learning and enterprise-ready skills is critical. One promising solution, which links universities and industry, lies in apprenticeships. Called Graduate Apprenticeships (GAs) in Scotland or Degree Apprenticeships (DAs) in England, these programmes combine university study with paid and relevant work experience.

    By design, GAs or DAs place students in work-based projects from day one, nurturing an entrepreneurial mindset through hands-on problem-solving, collaboration with industry, and continuous skills development. Through this comprehensive work-integrated learning model, students simultaneously acquire practical expertise while pursuing a degree qualification.

    Bridging Theory and Practice through Apprenticeships

    Admired by politicians and desired by university management wishing to bolster their institutional offering, apprenticeships have become an integral policy instrument for addressing skills shortages in fields from STEM to digital technology.

    Introduced in 2016, they have been central to Scotland’s efforts to reduce youth unemployment. The appeal of the GA pathway is clear: apprentices earn a wage, gain a degree, and directly apply academic theory to workplace projects. Government and industry bodies recognise the value of GAs for building a skilled, innovative workforce.

    The Scottish Government’s Future Skills Action Plan (2019) highlights the role of work-based learning in addressing skills gaps and promoting economic growth. Similarly, the UK Innovation Strategy (2021) identifies apprenticeships as essential for creating an “innovation-ready workforce”.

    In short, apprenticeships effectively bridge the gap between knowing and doing and naturally encourage an entrepreneurial way of thinking far better than traditional lecture-based university programmes, producing graduates who are work-ready and adept at translating theory into practice. In addition, they reward lifelong learning and lead to the gaining of new knowledge, experiencing varied modes of learning, and the acquisition of relevant skills development for today’s organisations and markets.

    However, forms of apprenticeships have their critics. Equitable, structured accessibility and supportive routes towards the degree award, amidst low completion rates and arguable bureaucracy, remain particular challenges.

    Therefore, drastic reform on regulation and administration, as well as an image change to increase the desirability of apprenticeships to meet demand, are needed.

    This can be achieved through universities highlighting enterprising and business growth benefits as key outcomes of the apprenticeship programme.

    Entrepreneurship in Action, Not Just in Theory

    A common criticism of higher education, often expressed in media outlets, is that it teaches ‘about’ entrepreneurship rather than providing opportunities ‘for’ entrepreneurship. Apprenticeships flip this script. By spending most of their time on industry projects, apprenticeship students learn entrepreneurship by doing: identifying opportunities, testing ideas, implementing solutions and seeing results. This ‘learning by doing’ approach is far more effective than studying entrepreneurship only in theory, and apprenticeships exemplify its success.

    Hands-on work-based learning projects allow students to generate original solutions to real needs and act on them even as conditions change. This is the essence of the entrepreneurial mindset. Crucially, the aim of apprenticeships is not to turn every student into a start-up founder, but to instil entrepreneurial thinking that applies in any context, including within established organisations.

    Many apprentices initially see themselves as employees rather than ‘entrepreneurs’, so educators frame entrepreneurship as personal development, taking initiative, adapting to change, and solving problems on the job. By graduation, apprenticeship students may still pursue a conventional career but carry an entrepreneurial mindset that drives them to innovate and add value in any role. In essence, universities are creating intrapreneurs with the initiative and vision to act like entrepreneurs inside established companies.

    Key Skills Developed on the Job

    Fostering an entrepreneurial mindset requires developing a broad suite of skills and attributes. Apprenticeships are uniquely positioned to strengthen these through on-the-job learning.

    These include:

    1. opportunity recognition (spotting inefficiencies and identifying opportunities for improvement),
    2. creative problem-solving (inventing solutions under real constraints),
    3. comfort with uncertainty (making decisions with incomplete information and learning from failure),
    4. self-direction (taking initiative and managing projects independently),
    5. communication (building professional relationships), and
    6. resilience (maintaining a work-life balance).

    These are qualities employers seek in graduates. A national survey of hiring managers identified such traits as key markers of ‘work-ready’ graduates. By embedding these capabilities, Apprenticeships produce alumni who are not only academically qualified but also primed to drive innovation.

    Developing an Entrepreneurial Culture for All Students

    Maximising the impact of apprenticeships and making them more appealing requires universities to actively build a supportive entrepreneurial culture. This means going beyond isolated modules or one-off initiatives and making enterprise and innovation a core part of the learning experience.

    The University of the West of Scotland (UWS) provides a compelling example. UWS has promoted an ‘entrepreneurial mentality’ across its Business Management portfolio. Initiatives include a Student Innovation Hub where students, staff and industry partners collaborate on projects to expand their knowledge and skills around innovation and entrepreneurship in one space that leads to industry recognition.  

    Other universities are taking similar steps, integrating entrepreneurship into curricula and extracurricular activities, leveraging alumni and partners to provide students with project opportunities. Some universities have set up innovation hubs or incubators accessible to all students, offering resources to help turn ideas into ventures. This inclusive approach ensures that even those who do not identify as ‘entrepreneurs’ can gain entrepreneurial experience – whether by launching a social initiative, improving a workplace process, or starting a side business.

    By normalising entrepreneurial activity as a valued part of education, universities help students see it as a natural extension of their studies rather than a risky deviation. Combining this notion with apprenticeship offerings affirms the university as being at the service of its immediate community, transforming individuals and businesses, and contributing to local and regional economic growth.

    Professional Insights and Recommendations

    To fully realise the potential of apprenticeships in developing entrepreneurial mindsets, universities, employers and policymakers must work together. Here, we outline our recommendations:

    • Integration of entrepreneurship across the curriculum: embed entrepreneurial projects and assessments in all disciplines. National funding initiatives in Scotland already encourage such integration.
    • Empower and mentor educators: academic staff delivering apprenticeship programmes need targeted support and recognition. Well-supported educators can better guide apprentices in recognising opportunities, creating and building resilience.
    • Leverage alumni and industry networks: involve successful entrepreneurs and industry leaders in apprenticeship programmes as in-residence professionals or guest speakers. This gives apprentices expanded networks and firsthand insight into entrepreneurial careers.

    Conclusion: Shaping an Entrepreneurial Generation

    Universities appreciate that an entrepreneurial mindset is increasingly essential for creating value, whether someone is founding a company, driving change within an existing organisation, or thriving within an enterprise ecosystem. Apprenticeships provide a powerful model for contributing to this ecosystem by developing entrepreneurial mindsets and blending academic theory with practical application. This aligns higher education with the needs of a changing economy and with students’ aspirations for self-directed, innovative careers.

    Embedding entrepreneurship in higher education requires a deliberate culture change, supportive structures, and community engagement – it will not happen automatically. Apprenticeships shed light on business and societal realities, which can aid in this endeavour.

    But when achieved, the payoff is significant. Graduates leave university not only with a degree and work experience, but also with the ability to think and act entrepreneurially.

    By championing apprenticeships and entrepreneurial mindsets for all students, UK universities can drive innovation from within and empower the next generation to shape their own futures beyond graduation.

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  • Higher education postcard: University of Buckingham

    Higher education postcard: University of Buckingham

    It’s a commonplace that the University of Cambridge was founded by scholars fleeing Oxford. Today’s postcard comes from a university with a similar origin myth, albeit quite a lot less medieval.

    And a lot newer too. We need to start in 1967, in May to be precise, when Dr John Paulley, an inveterate writer of letters to the times, had one published on the subject of university education. This included a call to action:

    Is it not time to examine the possibility of creating at least one new university in this country on the pattern of those great private foundations in the USA, without whose stimulus and freedom of action the many excellent state universities in that country would be so much poorer?

    And the call got a response. Three private conferences were held, two in 1968 and the third in early 1969, with plenty of disaffected Oxford academics attending. Preceding this latter conference was a declaration signed by 46 academics across the UK and Ireland, raising concerns about the influence of the state on university education. To quote from the Belfast Telegraph of Friday 3 January 1969:

    Professor Gibson said today: ‘increasingly the universities are being told, usually very politely and often indirectly, at what rate they shall expand and in what directions, and most recently the relative emphasis that should be placed on teaching and research.’

    He believed that this influence would increase and the power to exercise it, ‘because of the almost total financial dependence of the universities on the state.’

    ‘Furthermore I am convinced that centralised control of university education will in time weaken and perhaps destroy the international reputation of British universities,’ he added.

    (Professor Gibson, by the way, was Norman J Gibson, financial economist and professor at the New University of Ulster – the local angle clearly caught the eye of the Belfast Telegraph.)

    The argument was basically this: if the state pays for higher education, they will call the tune. And this is a bad thing, with deleterious effects for academic autonomy, for research and for quality and standards.

    Now, to my mind this argument omits the social justice and economic benefits of expanding access to university education, but it is hard to deny the proposition that the current financially-dependent HE sector in the UK is not exactly brim-full with stable and autonomous universities.

    So what happened as a result of the conferences? University College Buckingham, that’s what. It gained corporate form (as a non-profit charity) in 1973, started building works in 1974, and admitted its first students in 1976. Its first vice chancellor was Max Beloff, an Oxford professor.

    Buckingham was different – its undergraduate degrees were offered over two years, not three, students started in January not September, and it sat outside the state’s funding apparatus, and outside the UCCA (the Universities’ Central Council on Admissions – along with its polytechnic counterpart, one of the precursors to UCAS). If my memory is correct, there was an external academic advisory committee, which mentored the new university college through its initial years. It gained university status in 1983, under Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. (Mrs Thatcher, as former education secretary in the 1970–74 government, and then leader of the Conservative Party, had also opened the university in 1976. It is safe to say that she was in favour of the project.)

    Buckingham continued its journey parallel to the mainstream university sector (albeit still with an element of state support – see the below snippet from the Lincolnshire Standard and Boston Guardian in 1976) until 2001, when it subscribed to the QAA and joined in with the sector’s quality assurance system. From 2004 its students were able to access loan funding via the Student Loans Company, which enabled more students to attend: between 2007 and 2012 the university roughly doubled in size, although it was (and is) still relatively small.

    With the coming of the Higher Education and Research Act and the establishment of the OfS in 2018, Buckingham opted to maintain a certain arm’s-length-ness from the state: it is an Approved provider, meaning that it does not get the full £9,250 fee, nor any form of grant support from the OfS; but nor are its fees capped at £9,250. Students can access fee support loans up to £6,000 (or thereabouts) but Buckingham can charge more. And it does, although total fees are comparable with a full-time fee at another English university. Overseas students pay more, but the premium looks to be less, to my eyes, than at other UK universities. So, the principal of autonomy from the state is protected, to some extent.

    But only to some extent: the university still has to comply with the OfS conditions, and it became one of the first cases of a fine being issued for non-compliance: in this case, over late publication of accounts. This caused a certain amount of interest at Wonkhe towers: here in relation to the accounts when published; it’s also worth reading the OfS note on why the fine was as it was.

    In 2015 the university opened the first private medical school in modern UK history, working with the Milton Keynes NHS Foundation Trust to provide clinical placements.

    Buckingham’s alumni include Brandon Lewis, former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland; Pravind Jugnauth, former Mauritian Prime Minister and leader of that country’s Militant Socialist Movement; and Marc Gené, racing driver and winner of the Le Mans 24 hour race.

    Before we finish, it is worth a pause for reflection on the Buckingham story. As an experiment in trying to create a university outside of the normal state apparatus it is, I would argue, an unequivocal success. It is coming up to 50 years since the first students were admitted; there must be at least 50,000 Buckingham graduates; the university has expanded into different subject areas. None of this will have been easy to achieve.

    But perhaps the wider quest – to help create a private university, whose freedom of action would stimulate the other universities to innovate and improve – is at the very best a work in progress. One could point to the two-year degrees now available at some universities, as being a consequence of Buckingham. And this probably has some merit. Equally, the experiment shows that the degrees work for some specific student groups – for example, some mature students on courses with a specific professional orientation – but they’re not a panacea to all cost evils.

    And maybe the quest is a chimera. The recent rows in the US about Harvard, the private university par excellence, show just how much state funding it receives. (The amount under threat is about $2 billion, which is about five per cent of the total turnover of all universities in the UK.) What I think, for what it is worth, is that the UK sector with a Buckingham is better that it would be without.

    The postcard itself is not only of the university, although one of its building is shown top left, by the Great Ouse. The others are Buckingham scenes: the old gaol, the High Street, and the golden swan atop the old Town Hall.

    Here’s a jigsaw of today’s card. Thanks to Harriet Dunbar-Morris, Pro Vice-Chancellor Academic and Provost of the university, and an old pal from 1994 Group days – for suggesting Buckingham. As always, if you have a request, please let me know. If I don’t have a postcard, I might enjoy tracking one down!

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  • Promoting access to higher education worldwide

    Promoting access to higher education worldwide

    by Graeme Atherton

    The shift to the political right in many countries in the world, including it appears the UK now, presents a new set of challenges for equitable access and success to higher education. Not that it needed any new ones. Inequalities in participation in higher education are pervasive, entrenched and low on the list of priorities of most governments. Since the early 2010s we have been working with other organisations across the world including the World Bank and UNESCO to understand the extent and nature of these inequalities but more importantly to initiate activities to address them. In 2016 working with colleagues including the late, great Geoff Whitty I undertook a project to bring together as much secondary data we could on who participates in higher education by social background across the world.

    The Drawing the Global Access Map report found that in all the countries where we could find data (over 90%) higher education participation was unequal. The extent of this inequality differs but it binds together countries and higher education systems of all varieties. Following convening 2 global conferences on higher education access around the time of this report in an attempt to galvanise the global higher education community, we then launched World Access to Higher Education Day (WAHED) in 2018. The aim of WAHED was to create a vehicle that would enable universities to launch activities to address inequalities in access and success on the day in their own place. As the pandemic hit we also started a global online conference and up to 2022 over 1000 organisations from over 100 countries engaged in WAHED. We also produced research to mark the day including the All Around the World – Equity Policies Across the Globe report in 2018 which looked at policies on higher education equity in over 70 countries. The report found that only 32% of the countries surveyed have defined specific participation targets for any equity group and only 11% have formulated a comprehensive equity strategy.

    WAHED played an important role as a catalyst for activism, especially in contexts where individuals or departments felt that they were acting in isolation. However, progress will be limited if efforts are restricted just to an International Day of Action. Hence, in December 2024, working again with the World Bank, UNESCO as well as Equity Practitioners in Higher Education in Australasia (EPHEA), and a number of educational foundations, we launched the World Access to Higher Education Network (WAHEN). The aim of WAHEN is to construct an alliance for global, collective action on higher education equity and more information can be found here. It will focus on:

    •              Capacity Building via the sharing, professionalisation and enhancement of practice in learning, teaching and pre-HE outreach

    •              Collaboration – enabling organisations to formulate and deliver shared goals through a set of global communities of practice.

    •              Convening – bringing together those from across countries and sectors to affect change in higher education through World Access to Higher Education Day.

    •              Campaigning – advocating and working with policymakers and governments around the world producing research and evidence.

    •              Critical thinking – creating an online space where the knowledge based on ‘what works’ in equitable access and success can be developed & shared.

    It was because there was a national organisation that works to tackle inequalities in higher education in the UK, the National Education Opportunities Network (NEON), that I founded and led for 13 years, that WAHED and WAHEN happened. NEON led these efforts to build a global network. There remains a large way to go for WAHEN to be sustainable and impactful. We are working intently on how to position WAHEN and how it should focus its efforts. Inequalities in access and success are locally defined. They can’t be defined from a Euro-centric perspective, and they can also only be tackled through primarily work that is regional or national. The added value of international collaboration in this area needs to be articulated, it can’t be assumed. But at the same time, nor should the default assumption be that such a network or collaboration is less required where equitable access and success is concerned than in other parts of higher education. This assumption encapsulates the very problem at hand, ie the lack of willingness to recognise the extent of these inequalities and make the changes necessary to start to address them.

    The present challenges to higher education presented by the global shift to the right brings into sharp focus the consequences of a failure to deal with these inequalities. Universities and left leaning governments are unable to frame higher education as open and available to all with the potential to enter. The accusations of elitism and the threats to academic freedom etc then become an easier sell to electorates for whom higher education has never mattered, or those in their family/community. It is more important than ever then that something like WAHEN exists. It is essential that we develop the tools that give higher education systems across the world to become more equitable and to resist populist narratives, and that we do this now.

    Professor Graeme Atherton is Director of the World Access to Higher Education Network (WAHEN) and Vice Principal, Ruskin College, Oxford.

    A hybrid conference Access and Geopolitics: Next Steps in Tackling the Equity Crisis in Global Higher Education, was held on 3 June 2025 at the Department of Education in Oxford, jointly organised by WAHEN, The Centre for Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance (SKOPE) and the Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE). There were almost 40 presentations on: the politics – and geopolitics – of widening participation; the challenge of financing access; private provision and higher education as a public good; populism and the equity ‘backlash’; and, the challenge of generating meaningful participation data. Speakers included: John Blake, Director for Fair Access and Participation at the Office for Students, England;  Dr Jamil Salmi, global tertiary education expert; Professor Shamit Saggar, Executive Director of Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success; Professor Rachel Brooks, Professor of Higher Education, Oxford and President of the British Sociological Association; Professor Johanna Waters, Professor of Human Geography, UCL; Dr James Robson, Director of SKOPE and Associate Professor of Tertiary Education Systems, Oxford; Graeme Atherton, Director of the World Access to Higher Education Network (WAHEN) and Vice Principal, Ruskin College, Oxford; and Danielle Watkis, DPhil student, Department of Education, Oxford. A full record of the event will soon be available on the CGHE website.

    Author: SRHE News Blog

    An international learned society, concerned with supporting research and researchers into Higher Education

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  • The Year the Money Ran Out: Global Higher Ed Review

    The Year the Money Ran Out: Global Higher Ed Review

    Hello everyone, and welcome to the World of Higher Education podcast. I’m Tiffany MacLennan, and if you’re a faithful listener, you know what it means when I’m the one opening the episode—this week, our guest is AU.

    We’re doing a year in review, looking at some of the global higher education stories that stood out in 2024—from massification to private higher education, from Trump’s international impact to the most interesting stories overall. But I’ll pass it over to Alex.

    The World of Higher Education Podcast
    Episode 3.35 | The Year the Money Ran Out: Global Higher Ed Review

    Transcript

    Tiffany MacLennan (TM): Alex, you’re usually the one asking the questions, but today you’re in our hot seat.

    Alex Usher (AU): It’s technically the same seat I’m always in.

    TM: Fair point. But today, you’re in the question seat. Let’s start with the global elephant in the room.

    Last week, we talked at length with Brendan Cantwell about the domestic effects of Donald Trump’s education policies. But what impacts are we seeing internationally? Are any countries or institutions actively trying to capitalize on the chaos in the U.S.? And if so, how serious are those efforts to poach talent and build their reputations?

    AU: There are lots of countries that think they’re in a position to capitalize on it—but almost none of them are serious.

    The question is: where is the real destruction happening in the United States? Where is the greatest danger? And the answer is in research funding. NIH funding is going to be down by a third next year. NSF funding is going to be down by more than 50%. So it’s the scientists working in STEM and health—those with the best labs in the world—who are suddenly without money to run programs.

    But what are they supposed to do? Are there alternatives to labs of that scale? Are there alternatives to the perks of being a top STEM or health researcher at an American university?

    Places like Ireland—well, Ireland has no research culture to speak of. The idea that Ireland is going to step in and be competitive? Or the Czech Republic? Or India, which keeps talking about this being their moment? Come on. Be serious. That’s not what’s happening here.

    There might be an exodus—but it’s more likely to be to industry than to other countries. It’s not clear to me that there will be a global redistribution of this talent.

    Now, the one group that might move abroad? Social scientists and humanities scholars. And you’ve already seen that happening—especially here in Toronto. The University of Toronto has picked up three or four high-profile American scholars just in the last little while.

    Why? Because you don’t need to build them labs. The American lead in research came from the enormous amounts of money spent on infrastructure: research hospitals, labs—facilities that were world-class, even in unlikely places. Birmingham, Alabama, for example, has 25 square blocks of cutting-edge health research infrastructure. How? Because America spent money on research like no one else.

    But they’re not doing that anymore. So I think a lot of that scientific talent just… disappears. It’s lost to academia, and it’s not coming back. And over the long term, that’s a real problem for the global economy.

    TM: Sticking with the American theme, are there other countries that have been taking, well, I hesitate to say lessons, but have been adopting policies inspired by the U.S. since Donald Trump came to power? Or has it gone the other way—more like a cautionary tale of what not to do if you want to strengthen your education sector?

    AU: I think the arrival of MAGA really made a lot of people around the world realize that, actually, having talented researchers in charge of things isn’t such a bad idea.

    We saw that reflected in elections—in Canada, in Australia—where center-left governments that were thought to be in trouble suddenly pulled off wins. Same thing in Romania.

    The one exception seems to be Poland. But even there, I’m not sure the culture war side of things was ever as intense as it was in the United States. In fact, the U.S. isn’t even the originator of a lot of this stuff—it’s Hungary. Viktor Orbán’s government is the model. The Project 2025 crew in the U.S. has made it pretty clear: they want American universities to look more like Hungarian ones.

    And the Hungarian Minister of Higher Education has been holding press conferences around the world, claiming that everyone’s looking at Hungary as a model.

    So, there’s definitely been a shift—America is moving closer to the Hungarian approach. But I don’t think anyone else is following them. Even in Poland, where there’s been political change, the opposition still controls the parliament, so it’s not clear anything dramatic will happen there either.

    So no—I don’t think we’re seeing widespread imitation of U.S. education policy right now. Doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen—but we’re not there yet.

    TM: One thing we’ve seen a lot of this year is talk—and action—around the massification of higher education. What countries do you think have made some of the most interesting moves in expanding access? And on the flip side, are there any countries that are hitting their capacity?

    AU: Everyone who’s making progress is also hitting their capacity. That’s the key thing. Massification isn’t just a matter of saying, “Hey, let’s build a new school here or there.” Usually, you’re playing catch-up with demand.

    The really interesting case for me is Uzbekistan. Over the past decade, the number of students has increased fivefold—going from about 200,000 to over a million. I’m not sure any country in the world has moved that fast before. That growth is driven by a booming population, rising wealth, and—crucially—a government that’s willing to try a wide range of strategies: working with domestic public institutions, domestic private institutions, international partners—whatever works. It’s very much a “throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks” approach.

    Dubai is another case. It’s up 30% this year, largely driven by international students. That’s a different kind of massification, but still significant.

    Then there’s Africa, where we’re seeing a lot of countries running into capacity issues. They’ve promised access to education, but they’re struggling to deliver. Nigeria is a standout—it opened 200 new universities this year. Egypt is another big one. And we’re starting to see it in Kenya, Tanzania, Ghana—places that have reached the level of economic development where demand for higher education takes off.

    But here’s the catch: it’s not always clear that universal access is a good idea from a public policy standpoint. At certain stages of economic development, you can support 70% participation rates. At others, you’re doing well to sustain 20%. It really depends where you are.

    And these are often countries with weak tax systems—low public revenue. So how do you fund it all? That’s a major challenge.

    What we’re seeing in many places is governments making big promises around massification—and now struggling to keep them. I think that tension—between rising demand and limited capacity—is going to be a major story in higher education for at least the next three or four years.

    TM: I think that leads nicely into my next question: what’s the role of private higher education in all of this?

    Private institutions have been popping up more and more, and the conversation around them has only grown. Sometimes they’re filling important gaps, and sometimes they’re creating problems. But this year, we also saw some pretty major regulatory moves—governments trying to reassert control over what’s become a booming sector.

    Do you see this as part of a broader shift? And what do you think it means for the future of private higher education?

    AU: I don’t see a big shift in private education in less industrialized countries. What you’re seeing there is more a case of the public sector being exhausted—it simply can’t keep up with demand. So private providers show up to fill the gap.

    The question is whether governments are regulating those providers in a way that ensures they contribute meaningfully to the economy, or if they’re just allowing bottom-feeders to flourish. And a lot of places struggle to get that balance right.

    That said, there are some positive examples. Malaysia, for instance, has done a pretty good job over the years of managing its private higher education sector. It’s a model that other countries could learn from.

    But I think the really interesting development is the growth of private higher education in Europe.

    Look at Spain—tuition is relatively cheap, yet 25% of the system is now private. France has free tuition, but still, 25% of its system is private. In Germany, where tuition is also free, the private share is approaching 20%.

    It’s a different kind of issue. Strong public systems can ossify—they stop adapting, stop responding to new needs. In Europe, there’s very little pressure on public universities to align with labor market demand. And rising labor costs can mean that public universities can’t actually serve as many students as they’d like.

    France is a good example. It’s one of the few countries in Europe where student numbers are still growing significantly. But the government isn’t giving public universities more money to serve those students. So students leave—they say, “This isn’t a quality education,” and they go elsewhere. Often, that means going to private institutions.

    We had a guest on the show at one point who offered a really interesting perspective on what private higher education can bring to the table. And I think that’s the fascinating part: you’d expect the private sector boom to be happening in a place like the U.S., with its freewheeling market. But it’s not. The big story right now is in Europe.

    TM: Are there any countries that are doing private higher education particularly well right now? What would you say is the “good” private higher ed story of the year?

    AU: That’s a tough one, because these things take years to really play out. But I’d say France and Germany might be success stories. They’ve managed to keep their top-tier public institutions intact while still allowing space for experimentation in the private sector.

    There are probably some good stories in Asia that we just don’t know enough about yet. And there are always reliable examples—like Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico, which I think is one of the most innovative institutions in the Americas.

    But I wouldn’t say there’s anything dramatically different about this year that marks a turning point. That said, I do think we need to start paying more attention to the private sector in a way we haven’t since the explosion of private higher education in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

    Back then, governments looked around and said, “Okay, we need to do something.” Their public universities—especially in the social sciences—were completely discredited after decades of Marxist orthodoxy. So they let the private sector grow rapidly, and then had to figure out how to rein it in over time.

    Some countries managed that fairly well. Romania and Poland, for instance, have built reasonably strong systems for regulating private higher education—though not without some painful moments. Romania in particular had some pretty chaotic years. If you look up Spiru Haret University, you’ll get a sense of just how bad it can get when you completely let the market rip.

    But now there are decent examples that other regions—especially Africa and Central Asia—can look to. These are areas where private education is going to be increasingly important in absorbing new demand.

    The real question is: how do you translate those lessons from one context to another?

    TM: Alex, when it comes to the least good stories of the year, it felt like the headlines were all the same: there’s no money. Budget cuts. Doom and gloom.

    What crisis stood out to you the most this year, and what made it different from what we’ve seen in other countries?

    AU: Well, I think Argentina probably tops the list. Since President Milei came into power, universities have seen their purchasing power drop by about 60%. It’s a huge hit.

    When Milei took office, inflation was already high, and his plan to fix it was to cut public spending—across the board. That meant universities had to absorb the remaining inflation, with no additional support to help cushion the blow. And on top of that, Milei sees universities as hotbeds of communism, so there’s no political will to help.

    It’s been brutal. So that’s probably the number one crisis just in terms of scale.

    Kenya is another big one. The country has been really ambitious about expanding access—opening new universities and growing the system. But they haven’t followed through with adequate funding. The idea was that students would pick up some of the slack financially, but it turns out most Kenyan families just aren’t wealthy enough to make that work.

    They tried to fill the gap with student loans, but the system couldn’t support it. And now there’s blame being placed on the funding formula. But the issue isn’t the formula—it’s the total amount of money being put into the system.

    There’s a common confusion: some people understand that a funding formula is about dividing money between institutions. Others mistakenly think it dictates how much money the government gives in total. Kenya’s leadership seems to have conflated the two—and that’s a real problem.

    Then you’ve got developed countries. In the UK, there have been lots of program closures. France has institutions running deficits. Canada has had its fair share of issues, and even in the U.S., problems were mounting before Trump came back into the picture.

    We’ve almost forgotten the extent to which international students were propping things up. They helped institutions on the way up, and they’re now accelerating the downturn. That’s been a global issue.

    And I know people are tired of hearing me say this, but here’s the core issue: around the world, we’ve built higher education systems that are bigger and more generous than anyone actually wants to pay for—whether through taxes or tuition.

    So yeah, we’ve created some great systems. But nobody wants to fund them. And that’s the underlying story. It shows up in different ways depending on the country, but it’s the same problem everywhere.

    TM: Do you think we’re heading into an era of global higher ed austerity, or are there some places that are bucking the trend?

    AU: It depends on what you mean by “austerity.”

    Take Nigeria or Egypt, for example—the issue there isn’t that they’re spending less on higher education. The issue is that demand is growing so fast that public universities simply can’t keep up. You see similar dynamics in much of the Middle East, across Africa, to some extent in Brazil, and in Central Asia. It’s not about cuts—it’s about the gap between what’s needed and what’s possible.

    Then you have a different set of challenges in places with more mature systems—places that already have high participation rates. There, the problem is maintaining funding levels while demographics start to decline. That’s the situation in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and parts of Europe. The question becomes: can you sustain your system when there are fewer students?

    And then there’s a third category—countries that are still growing, but where governments just don’t want to spend more on higher education. That’s Canada, the United States, and the UK. Those systems aren’t necessarily shrinking, but they’re certainly under strain because of political choices.

    But keep in mind—those are also among the richest countries in the world, with some of the best-funded universities to begin with.

    In a way, what’s happening internationally mirrors what we saw in Canada with the province of Alberta. For many years, Alberta had post-secondary funding that was 40 to 50% above the national average. Then it started to come down toward the mean.

    I think that’s what we’re seeing globally now. Countries like the UK, U.S., and Canada—whose systems were well above the OECD average in terms of funding—are being pulled back toward that average.

    To us, it might feel like austerity. But if you’re in a country like Greece or Lithuania, and you look at how much money is still in the Canadian or UK system, you’d probably say, “I wish I had your problems.”

    So I’d say we’re seeing three different dynamics at play—not a single, uniform trend.

    TM:  One of the most fun things about working at HESA is that we get to read cool stories for a good chunk of the time. What was the coolest or most unexpected higher education story you came across this year?

    AU: I think my favorite was the story out of Vietnam National University’s business school. Someone there clearly read one of those studies claiming that taller people make more successful business leaders—you know, that there’s a correlation between CEO pay and height or something like that.

    Same idea applies to politicians, right? Taller politicians tend to beat shorter ones. Canada, incidentally, has a lot of short politicians right now. Anyway, I digress.

    At VNU in Hanoi, someone apparently took that research seriously enough that they instituted a minimum height requirement for admission to the business school. That was easily my favorite ridiculous higher ed story of the year—just completely ludicrous.

    There were others, too. Just the other day I saw a job posting at a university in China where credential inflation has gotten so bad that the director of the canteen position required a doctorate. That one stood out. And yet, people say there’s no unemployment problem in China…

    Now, in terms of more serious or long-term developments, one story that really caught my attention is about Cintana. They’re using an Arizona State University–approved curriculum and opening franchises across Asia. They’ve had some real success recently in Pakistan and Central Asia, and they’re now moving into South Asia as well.

    If that model takes off, it could significantly shape how countries in those regions expand access to higher education. That’s definitely one to watch.

    And of course, there’s the gradual integration of AI into universities—which is having all sorts of different effects. Those aren’t headline-grabbing curiosities like the Vietnam height requirement, but they’re the developments we’ll still be talking about in a few years.

    TM: That leads perfectly into my last question for you. What’s one trend or change we should be watching in the 2025–26 academic year? One globally, and one locally?

    AU: Globally, it’s always going to come back to the fact that nobody wants to pay for higher education. That’s the obvious answer.

    And I don’t mean that people in theory don’t want to support higher ed. It’s just that the actual amount required to run higher education systems at their current scale and quality is more than governments or individuals are willing to pay—through taxes or tuition.

    So I think in much of the Northern Hemisphere, you’re going to see governments asking: How do we make higher education cheaper? How do we make it leaner? How do we make it less staff-intensive? Not everyone’s going to like those conversations, but that’s going to be the dominant trend in many places.

    Not everywhere—Germany’s finances are still okay—but broadly, we’re heading into a global recession. Trump’s policies are playing a role in triggering that downturn. So even in countries where governments are willing to support higher education, they may not be able to.

    That means we’re going to see more cuts across the board. And for countries like Kenya and Nigeria—where demand continues to grow but capacity can’t keep up—it’s not going to get any easier.

    Unfortunately, a lot of the conversation next year will be about how to make ends meet.

    And then there’s what I call the “Moneyball” question in American science. U.S. science—particularly through agencies like NIH and NSF—has been the motor of global innovation. And with the huge cuts now underway, the whole world—not just the U.S.—stands to lose.

    In Moneyball, there’s that moment where Brad Pitt’s character says, “You keep saying we’re trying to replace Isringhausen. We can’t replace Isringhausen. But maybe we can recreate him statistically in the aggregate.”

    That’s the mindset we need. If all the stuff that was going to be done through NIH and NSF can’t happen anymore, we need to ask: How can we recreate that collective innovation engine in the abstract? Across Horizon Europe, Canada’s granting councils, the Australian Research Council, Japan—everyone. How do we come together and keep global science moving?

    That, I think, could be the most interesting story of the year—if people have the imagination to make it happen.

    TM: Alex, thanks for joining us today.

    AU: Thanks—I like being on this side. So much less work on this side of the microphone. Appreciate it.

    TM: And that’s it from us. Thank you to our co-producer, Sam Pufek, to Alex Usher, our host, and to you, our listeners, for joining us week after week. Next year, we won’t be back with video, but we will be in your inboxes and podcast feeds every week. Over the summer, feel free to reach out with topic ideas at [email protected]—and we’ll see you in September.

    *This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service. Please note, the views and opinions expressed in each episode are those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host and team, or our sponsors.

    This episode is sponsored by KnowMeQ. ArchieCPL is the first AI-enabled tool that massively streamlines credit for prior learning evaluation. Toronto based KnowMeQ makes ethical AI tools that boost and bottom line, achieving new efficiencies in higher ed and workforce upskilling. 

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  • Existential Questions for Higher Education and the Nation

    Existential Questions for Higher Education and the Nation

    “Who are we? Where are we going? Where do we come from?” These existential questions are not luxuries in times of crisis—they are necessities. And as the storms of political, social, and environmental upheaval grow darker, they demand our full attention.

    For many in the United States, especially younger generations, the future feels bleak. Student loan debt weighs down tens of millions. Meaningless, low-wage, precarious employment—what anthropologist David Graeber called “bullsh*t jobs”—dominates the landscape, even for the college educated. Higher education, once touted as the great equalizer, has increasingly functioned as a sorting mechanism that reinforces class division rather than dismantling it.

    This is not accidental. It is the consequence of more than a half century of growing inequality, fueled by tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, union busting, and the privatization of public goods. Since the 1970s, wages for working people have stagnated, while the top one percent has consolidated unimaginable wealth and power. Higher education has both suffered from and contributed to this shift: as public funding declined, universities increasingly turned to corporate partnerships, tuition hikes, student loans, and contingent labor to survive. In doing so, they have often replicated the very inequalities they claim to challenge.

    Instead of building an informed and empowered citizenry, the modern university too often churns out debt-saddled consumers, precarious workers, and disillusioned graduates. The idea of education as a public good has been replaced by the logic of the market—branding, metrics, debt financing, and labor flexibility.

    Meanwhile, U.S. politics offers little solace. We are caught between the reactionary authoritarianism of Trumpism and the managerial neoliberalism of the Democratic establishment. Both forces have proven inadequate in confronting systemic inequality, environmental collapse, and imperial overreach. Instead, they compete to maintain the illusion of normalcy while conditions deteriorate.

    Internationally, the collapse of moral leadership is most evident in the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Backed by billions in U.S. aid and political cover, the Israeli military has killed tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza and displaced countless more. Hospitals, schools, and entire neighborhoods have been leveled. On college campuses across the U.S., students and faculty who dare to speak out against this atrocity have faced surveillance, censorship, arrests, and administrative repression. At a moment when moral clarity should be the minimum, too many institutions of higher learning have chosen complicity.

    This convergence of global injustice and domestic repression raises urgent questions for academia. What is the role of the university in a world marked by war, inequality, and ecological collapse? What values will guide us through the storm?

    The answer begins with honesty. We must recognize that higher education is not separate from society’s failures—it is entangled in them. But that also means it can be part of the solution. Colleges and universities can serve as spaces of resistance, reflection, and regeneration—but only if they reject their alignment with empire, capital, and white supremacy.

    Where do we come from? From resistance: from student uprisings, civil rights sit-ins, anti-apartheid divestment, labor organizing, and community building. From people who believed—and still believe—that education should serve justice, not profit.

    Where are we going? That depends on whether we are willing to confront power, abandon illusions, and build institutions that are democratic, transparent, and rooted in the needs of the many rather than the few.

    The future is uncertain. The storm is here. But history is not finished. A more humane and equitable society remains possible—if we have the courage to demand it.

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  • Tennessee Sues to End HSI Requirements

    Tennessee Sues to End HSI Requirements

    The state of Tennessee filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education on Wednesday seeking to nix traditional requirements for Hispanic-serving institutions’ federal designation and grant funding. The state is joined by Students for Fair Admissions, the advocacy group whose lawsuits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action in college admissions.

    The plaintiffs argue it’s unconstitutional and discriminatory for the Education Department to designate grants for Hispanic-serving institutions, defined as colleges and universities where at least a quarter of students are Hispanic. Today, about 600 colleges and universities meet the criteria for the federal designation, established by Congress in the 1990s.

    The lawsuit laments that Tennessee higher ed institutions serve Hispanic and low-income students but don’t receive grants intended for HSIs because they don’t meet the enrollment threshold. As a result, the plaintiffs argue, Tennessee institutions find themselves in an “unconstitutional dilemma”—they want to enroll more Hispanic students to earn HSI status, but using race as a factor in admissions would be illegal.

    “Funds should help needy students regardless of their immutable traits, and the denial of those funds harms students of all races,” the lawsuit reads.

    The plaintiffs seek “a declaratory judgment that the HSI program’s ethnicity-based requirements are unconstitutional” and “a permanent injunction prohibiting the [Education] Secretary from enforcing or applying the HSI program’s ethnicity-based requirements when making decisions whether to award or maintain grants to Tennessee’s institutions of higher education.”

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  • Implementing Climate Education for Gen Z Students

    Implementing Climate Education for Gen Z Students

    As climate disasters become more frequent and severe, more institutions are investing in programs to address environmental changes and prepare students to engage in green careers.

    Clark University plans to launch its School of Climate, Environment and Society this fall, institutionalizing the university’s commitment to climate action and investing in interdisciplinary learning for students interested in the work of sustainability.

    In this episode of Voices of Student Success, host Ashley Mowreader speaks with Lou Leonard, the inaugural dean of Clark’s School of Climate, Environment and Society, about the need for this new school and how such education can tackle climate anxiety in young people.

    An edited version of the podcast transcript appears below.

    Inside Higher Ed: Can you talk a little bit about the new school? How does it tie into institutional priorities?

    Lou Leonard, Clark University’s inaugural D. J. A. Spencer Dean of the School of Climate, Environment and Society

    Leo Leonard: The school officially launches next fall. We’ll have our first incoming cohorts for some new degree programs that are specifically linked to the starting of the school, and so we’ll have an undergraduate major in climate, environment [and] society, and a new professionally oriented master’s degree in climate, environment and society.

    But the school really is coming together from a place of long-standing commitment and expertise within Clark on these topics. The school will include a core set of departments that have existed for a long time. In fact, one of them is the geography department at Clark, which has been around for over 100 years. And then a department called Sustainability and Social Justice, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary next year.

    The Economics Department for the university will also be housed in the new school, which I think is exciting, because it’s one of these fields that is so significant and important for the way we think about, address, understand and really create climate solutions. But it’s a department that, in many universities, would say, “Oh, well, that can’t be in a school of climate, environment and society, because economics is bigger than that.” I think [Clark’s] decision is emblematic of a bigger decision by the university, which is to really go all in on climate action and on the issues that are under this umbrella of climate, environment and society, the way climate change and environmental degradation intersect with human society.

    In that sense, it’s not just the launching of a new school. It’s the university saying, “This is one of the things that Clark already does really well. We want to do better, and we want to be known for it in the world.” I think having a school like this demonstrates that the university is making a real, serious commitment to these issues.

    Q: I think sometimes sustainability or climate action can be seen as something new or trendy with young people, or a response to things that have happened in the past 20 years. But, as you allude to, some of these departments and majors have existed for 20-plus years. I wonder if you can speak to that element of, not everything within the school is new, but it’s a rehousing and reorganization of programs and majors that are already important to the university.

    A: I think that your question applies to this school and the way higher education can think of its role in climate, but it actually also points at the larger question of climate change itself, right?

    A lot of times, we think of climate change as something that’s a separate issue. But really what the climate crisis represents, and what issues related to climate impacts—the energy transition, biodiversity conservation—all of these topics existed since before there were humans on this planet, some of them, anyway.

    What the layer of climate change brings to these things is often an acceleration of challenges or a way in which we need to think across traditional disciplines when we’re trying to figure out how to respond to some of the challenges that climate change presents for us. Climate is not a wholly new thing in the world or in higher education.

    Q: I’m even thinking, like, food systems is something that we traditionally house in a school of agriculture, but there’s definitely climate implications when it comes to that. Or we talked about economics and how business and society functions are completely dependent on climate and the external circumstances that drive those factors.

    I also really appreciate the fact that the school includes the “and society,” because there’s that human implication as well, where it’s not just “we’re trying to fix the planet,” but also “we’re trying to impact the world in a more positive way.”

    A: That’s right. In some ways, the planet is going to be fine. The planet is a set of geophysical, geochemical processes. And the real question is whether the conditions for stable, predictable human life are going to continue in the same ways that have allowed humans to prosper and to be thinking about leading better and more fulfilling lives.

    It’s those conditions that—we’ve been lucky—for the last 20,000 years have been pretty stable, and basically, we’re leaving that period. We’re leaving that period of Goldilocks, stable climate conditions that have allowed human society to focus on other things, including their own prosperity. Now we don’t have the luxury anymore; we have to understand the intersection between human society and what’s changing around us in order to maintain a future where we can prosper and we can live lives of purpose.

    Q: Absolutely. That is very scary, though, especially for our young people, who are growing up in a world where this is the reality that they’re facing in their future.

    I pulled a few stats. Inside Higher Ed did a survey in 2022 and we found that 81 percent of college students said they were at least somewhat worried about climate change. And then, more recently, Sacred Heart University found more than half of U.S. youth report eco-anxiety, and 74 percent said they agree with the statement “I’m personally worried about climate change.”

    When we think about climate, higher education obviously has a role when it comes to resources and research, and helping people understand solutions and the implications of climate change, but also educating young people and helping them prepare for their future and understanding the world around them. I wonder if you can talk about that mission of the school as well as helping students engage in this sort of work.

    A: I’m hearing two things here. One is the understandable—and it’s not just something that younger folks are experiencing, but a lot of folks are experiencing—sense of uncertainty, anxiety and fear about what it means to live in a world that’s not as stable in some fundamental ways as what we’re used to.

    And the other is “How do we still find purpose, agency and careers that are meaningful for us in that kind of world?”

    So if we take the first part of that, I think it is fundamental that we understand and provide students with the tools to address the kind of social, emotional dimensions of the climate crisis present to us. And if you’re going to have a school that focuses on these topics and brings an interdisciplinary perspective to it—which is what the school aspires to do—then that has to include ways for students to name, hold and manage the emotional sides of this.

    I think Clark’s really lucky. Clark University is very well-known for its psychology program—Sigmund Freud gave his only lectures in the United States at Clark … Bringing that sort of perspective to the Clark education is something we’ve done forever, and I think a really important part of what the school does going forward is being intentional about that.

    But I think the second part of your question is related to the first, which is, can we find a sense of purpose, a sense of agency, a sense of “I have a way to contribute to this”? You know, action metabolizes anxiety, and a sense of purpose allows us to have a ballast during times that are shaky around us—and, quite frankly, the world is shaky right now. So for those people that particularly—and you said, the number is pretty high—care about these issues, building a set of skills competencies, confidence that you can be part of the response going forward … I think that is critical to your emotional well-being in these changing times.

    Q: I’ve been reading [Jonathan Haidt’s] The Anxious Generation, and it talks a lot about how social media can be a portal to too much information, where students are always seeing each other and always hearing from each other.

    I think, in the same way, climate information can be really overwhelming, where it’s like, “Oh my gosh, the polar bears are dying; what am I supposed to do about it in my dorm room at Clark University?” But there’s also an element of “OK, now I know about it and I get to be equipped with that information.”

    I think helping students understand the problems and contribute to solving them, but also like you said, making sure that they are mentally well and capable of handling what that looks like and having that sense of advocacy for themselves and the world around them—that’s a really tough tension for students to live between.

    A: The difference between going on to the virtual world, whether it’s social media or the internet more broadly, it’s like you’re putting yourself in front of a fire hose or this waterfall that feels uncontrollable related to the information that’s flying at you.

    Those places—social media, the internet in general—do not provide you a way to manage that information flow. But a good education, one that’s grounded in different ways to understand and make sense of the complexity of the world, that is the role a good education, particularly the role that an undergraduate education, has traditionally played. That’s what we do.

    So if that’s true, and if the liberal arts education was always supposed to provide that equipment for students to then enter the world with more confidence in understanding it and therefore being able to navigate it in all of its complexity, then, in some ways, the degrees and the programs under the School of Climate, Environment and Society at Clark being interdisciplinary, being experiential, are a kind of a new liberal arts in a way.

    It’s a specialized set of equipment that allows you to understand that torrent of information, particularly about climate, environment and its relationship to society. I think it’s in some ways the opposite of just going on social media. It’s being intentional about creating those filters, that equipment, that way to understand and see the world that you need to avoid feeling overwhelmed. It’s not that we’re never going to— We’re still going to feel overwhelmed at times, right? I’ve been in this work my entire life. I’m now in my 50s. I still feel overwhelmed by it at times. That part doesn’t go away. It’s not that it goes away; we just become more able to manage it while we’re contributing to the change that needs to happen.

    Q: You’ve mentioned a few times now the interdisciplinary lens of the world. Can you talk about that and the experiential elements, both getting students that hands-on experience but also transcending the traditional majors and disciplines to help students be able to grapple with this issue from a lot of different angles?

    A: I’m glad that you paired interdisciplinary with experiential, because those two things need to go together from a pedagogical standpoint, from a learning-how-we-do-the-learning standpoint.

    Interdisciplinarity, or transdisciplinarity, says that the world is really complex, and, in fact, some of what has led to the slow and, at best, incomplete—and some would say, woefully inadequate—response to the climate crisis and the even longer biodiversity crisis and the related impacts to communities, environmental justice crisis, is because we haven’t adequately been able to look across those different ways in which to understand the world. Whether it’s economic, physical sciences … policy and governance, the role that the private sector plays, or technology and the issues there.

    That’s why, five years ago now, the National Academies of Sciences did a review of education related to sustainability and said, “What is the right formula for pulling together programs that meet this complex need, give students equipment to deal with this complexity and to then contribute to new ways of developing solutions or working across these traditional aspects of society, so we can see new ways to unlock progress on climate change?”

    That combination [of interdisciplinary and experiential] is important, because transdisciplinary or interdisciplinary work can be conceptual until you actually get into an applied setting, until you actually start doing projects. Either research projects that are especially designed to be cross- or interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary, or you get out into the working world through an internship, through a class project. At Clark we have something called the Global Learning Collaboratives, these places where students can go and engage in projects in other countries, where their work in the classroom starts to make sense, because they’re now doing it in an experiential way, in an applied way.

    You need both, otherwise you get lost. It becomes very conceptual. Or if you’re just doing applied work, you don’t have any framework to see how these different aspects or the way the world gets in the way of some of these applied challenges, then you’re not able to do things differently. So you need both.

    Q: Another really important facet of climate and society and understanding how sustainability impacts communities is doing community-based learning or service-based learning. How are you considering ways to put students out in the world and engage with communities that are being directly impacted by climate change?

    A: There’s a lot that we already have at Clark that’s being brought together under the umbrella of the new school that’s related to this. I spoke a second ago about the Global Learning Collaboratives. This is something that emerged from one of the units that’s going to be part of the new school, and we’re going to build on it going forward. We have projects in Bangladesh and Ethiopia, in Mexico, but also in Worcester [Mass.], in our backyard, in the community that Clark has lived in for almost 150 years.

    It is really important that that is what experiential and applied work is: It’s work in communities or with institutions or businesses or others. But I think the community part that you’re pointing out is important to talk about in its own special way, as well as being a part of a broader way to do experiential learning. Because I think, for too long, higher education has—there’s always been exceptions—but I think for too long, too much of the sort of, like, engagement or research that higher ed has done is seeing communities as a subject or a set of data or problems that we in higher education want to understand and bring back into our world and study.

    For a long time, we’ve understood that that’s both ethically not appropriate and it doesn’t produce the richest form of learning. The richest form of learning, I think, is co-created. You co-create knowledge. You co-create understanding with communities. When students can be part of that, it actually provides a new way of understanding what it means to be in relationship with communities.

    And hopefully that means that students take that forward when they go out into their work, because the same thing could [be applied there]. There’s a similar history within the way nonprofits and advocacy groups engage with communities, or businesses engage with communities. I think if we can model a better way of how to do that within higher ed, then that will have ripple effects into the way students, when they go out into the world, can bring that new approach to their jobs.

    Q: I’m glad that you mentioned jobs, because in the same way that students who are interested in federal or research roles right now—which I know there’s an intersection between that and sustainability and climate work—they have a lot of anxiety around this current time and the recent policy changes that we’ve seen, or different priorities from this current administration.

    I wonder if you can touch just briefly on how policy is reshaping climate [work] or how policy is reshaping the conversations around climate and the school and the work that you’re all doing helping students think about careers, given the fact that we are seeing a different set of priorities than we did under the previous administration.

    A: I’ve been in the environmental sustainability field my whole career. So that’s over 30 years, and I’ve been really working on climate for almost 20. I think sometimes it’s like, “Oh, jeez, old guy,” but there is at least one benefit to being in this work for a long time: You see the peaks and valleys. You see the way these fundamental issues of society transform and change—which is happening no matter what.

    The number of people who now say climate change is not happening is much lower than it was 20 years ago, 10 years ago. Politics affects that to some degree, on the margins, but if you look at the trend line, that is less and less the debate, and that was not the case 20 years ago, I’ll tell you that.

    In that sense, we’re seeing kind of a positive trend line of understanding that stuff is happening, so society is going to transform, whether we like it or not, because the conditions around us are changing. The question is, how do we respond? I think again, the trend line is, if we step back and look—and I don’t think this is going to change going forward—the need to address this, and the understanding of the need to address this is only going to maintain a positive trend line. Even if, right now, it seems like certain aspects of the climate response have got caught up in the political maw or munching, kind of snarly, world of politics, we shouldn’t be confused and think that that means that these issues are going to go away.

    They present a new set of challenges for us, which we should not ignore, either, which is why we need to really think hard about how to create spaces for learning and conversation around these topics that feels less politically charged—not because we want to agree or disagree with a certain political view on these issues, but so that we can bring more people into the conversation. So that we don’t lose time that we desperately need and can’t afford to lose to make progress on these issues.

    It’s definitely a challenge for us. It does not, in my view, at all represent a long-term change in the trend. I think that’s why those who care about these issues, whether you’re at the stage of trying to choose an undergraduate program or a grad program, or you’re not in the market for higher ed at all, I would not be discouraged to the point where you change something that feels meaningful to you, that feels like part of your purpose, because we need to listen to that voice, and these issues are going to have growing amounts of room for people to contribute going forward.

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  • How Higher Ed Marketers Can Lead With Creativity

    How Higher Ed Marketers Can Lead With Creativity

    Colleges and universities continue to compete for attention across countless platforms; this scattershot approach often comes at the expense of cohesion. But simply adding more content—made easy within the decentralized environment of many campuses—isn’t a solution to deeper strategic and directional challenges. In the famous words of Merry Baskin, “Like a shark, brands must move forward or die.” For colleges and universities, that forward motion begins with centering courageous, strategic creativity as a core operating principle and with higher education marketing leaders creating a system to ensure all are moving in the correct direction.

    I have argued that creativity continues to drive commercial value, however, investing in the intangible up front can be difficult when budgets remain static. So, our focus isn’t on only proving that creativity adds value but also showing how investing in it up front can maximize the value it creates. We need a framework for higher ed marketing leaders to establish a system for defining and embedding a culture of creativity across teams. This will help teams create more effective work and collaborate with agencies in support of institutional goals.

    Modeled loosely on WARC’s creative effectiveness ladder, this three-phase framework should help marketing leaders not only spark creativity but also systematize it as a shared method. First, start by defining what creativity means within our unique institutional contexts instead of a loose collection of ideas. Then, develop the systems, roles and language that bring that definition to life. Finally, diffuse those practices across teams and departments to embed creativity into the fabric of institutional strategy.

    Step 1: Define

    Start by establishing the foundation for creative effectiveness by aligning on what creativity means, how it’s measured and why it matters. This will bring clarity to metrics, principles and strategic outcomes so creative work can be evaluated with purpose.

    Create a shared set of key measures for creative effectiveness

    Marketing leaders must establish clear, institution-specific indicators of what effective creativity looks like. No matter how rigorous the approach, consistent application and ensuring these measures are aligned are most important. Example measures include:

    • Brand recall: Did prospective students or alumni remember the name of the institution after seeing an ad? This indicates a clear connection to the brand.
    • Distinctiveness scores: In focus groups, ask audiences to compare your marketing to peer institutions—does your work stand out or feel generic? No matter the medium, attention is the first barrier to more effective work.

    Determine principles of creative effectiveness

    Determining principles of creative effectiveness means articulating the core beliefs and standards that guide all creative work across the institution. These principles serve as guardrails—ensuring that creativity remains consistent, purposeful and aligned with institutional values. When widely understood and adopted, they help teams evaluate work objectively and make more confident, collaborative decisions. Examples can be directional:

    • Brand prominence: Brand or branding must be present within the first three seconds.
    • Distinctive assets: Consistently use the school’s signature color palette, typeface and photographic style—even on social platforms—to maintain visual recognition. Stay on brand, not on trend.
    • Commit to creativity: Use longer durations, more media channels and consistent storytelling over time to drive cumulative impact.
    • Emotional truth wins: Campaigns should connect emotionally with audiences; stories of real students often outperform statistics.

    Align key measures of effectiveness to marketing KPIs

    Marketing leaders should evaluate creative work using engagement-based metrics—such as time on page, view-through rates, social saves and content shares. These go beyond impressions to signal true resonance and provide a shared set of indicators for what effective creativity looks like in practice.

    Step 2: Develop

    Once effectiveness is clearly defined, leadership should build the internal systems to support and scale it. This phase is about ensuring teams are equipped to execute in practice.

    Identify critical roles within the institution

    First develop a network of collaborators: content producers, enrollment leaders, advancement partners, institutional researchers and/or agency teams. Map out who holds creative influence across the institution and define the roles they play in shaping, supporting and evaluating creative work. Clarity will empower contributors and reinforce accountability.

    Create a shared language for evaluation

    Marketing leaders need a consistent, responsive way to evaluate creative work. By building in intentional check-ins throughout the creative process, teams can replace feelings with shared language that sharpens feedback and improves outcomes.

    Leaders should consider three stages of evaluation:

    • Pretest: Introduce a lightweight, consistent method to test creative ideas before launch. This might include quick student feedback loops, internal scoring rubrics or pilot testing in key markets.
    • Platform: Centralize creative assets, guidelines and effectiveness learnings into a shared, accessible platform.
    • Pulse: Establish a regular cadence for reviewing the performance of creative work both in-market and in internal perception.

    Step 3: Diffuse

    With creativity defined and the right systems in place, the final step is to diffuse that culture across the institution. To drive real institutional value, creative effectiveness must be shared, socialized and scaled across departments, disciplines and decision-makers.

    Identify key working groups to deliver creativity workshops

    Start by identifying key teams or departments—enrollment, advancement, student life, academic units—that shape public-facing messages or student experiences. Bring them into the fold through collaborative workshops that unpack creative principles, show examples of effective work and introduce shared evaluation tools.

    Develop measurement frameworks aligned to department-level KPIs

    Creativity becomes powerful when its effectiveness is measured in context. That means helping individual departments or units tie creative performance to their own goals—whether it’s growing attendance at student events, boosting open rates on fundraising emails or improving reputation scores for a new academic program. By co-creating simple measurement frameworks with each team, marketing leaders position creativity as a strategic asset.

    Build a best-in-class repository for cross-campus learning

    Finally, celebrate and scale what works. Create a living archive of standout creative work, from bold campaigns to scrappy social posts that have delivered results. Share the backstory: What was the challenge? What was the idea? What impact did it have? This becomes a source of inspiration, a tool for onboarding new team members and a tangible way to reinforce these new values.

    By defining what creativity means, developing the systems to support it and diffusing its value across campus, marketing leaders can turn creativity into a measurable, repeatable driver of effectiveness.

    Christopher Huebner is a director of strategy at SimpsonScarborough.

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