Tag: Higher

  • Education Dept. Agrees to Push DEI Compliance Deadline

    Education Dept. Agrees to Push DEI Compliance Deadline

    State education agencies are no longer bound to certify their compliance with President Donald Trump’s executive orders and guidance memos banning diversity, equity and inclusion programs in order to continue receiving federal funds—at least for now.

    K-12 school districts were originally required to prove they had met the president’s standard by April 14. But now, as the result of an agreement reached Thursday in a lawsuit, the Department of Education cannot enforce that requirement or enact any penalties until April 24. The move to require school systems to certify their compliance was one of the department’s first actions since releasing the Feb. 14 Dear Colleague letter that declared all race-conscious student programming, resources and financial aid illegal.

    The National Education Association challenged that letter in a lawsuit and then moved for a temporary restraining order to block the certification requirement. (The department notified state educational agencies of the deadline April 3.)

    In addition to not enforcing the certification requirement, the Education Department also agreed not to take any enforcement action related to the Feb. 14 guidance until April 24, though that doesn’t cover any other investigations based on race discrimination.

    The plaintiffs, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, still want to block the Dear Colleague letter entirely. But they see the agreement as a positive step.

    “This pause in enforcement provides immediate relief to schools across the country while the broader legal challenge continues,” the plaintiffs said in a news release.

    A judge will hold a hearing April 17 to consider the NEA’s motion for a preliminary injunction, which could block the guidance entirely.

    For more information on this case and others, check out Inside Higher Ed’s lawsuit tracker here.

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  • How a Drop in Ph.D. Students Could Affect Colleges

    How a Drop in Ph.D. Students Could Affect Colleges

    Under mounting financial and political pressures, universities have paused or rescinded graduate student admissions on an unprecedented scale, which could create cross-campus ripple effects next fall and beyond.

    The extent of the cuts to the graduate student workforce remains unclear and will vary from institution to institution. But if and when those losses come to pass, experts say that employing fewer graduate students—particularly Ph.D. students, who typically hold years-long research and teaching assistantships—will undermine universities’ broader operations, including undergraduate education, faculty support and the future of academic research, which is reliant on training the next generation of scholars.

    “First and foremost, a reduction in the number of graduate students may threaten that individualized, close attention for undergraduates,” said Julia Kent, vice president of best practices and strategic initiatives at the Council of Graduate Schools.

    That’s because many doctoral students work as teaching assistants, particularly for large introductory undergraduate courses, where they assist with grading, lead discussion sections, help students with assignments and supervise labs.

    “While a professor may be doing the lectures for those courses, they may not seem as approachable or accessible to undergraduates. In those cases, the graduate teaching assistant is the first point of contact for that student. They may go to them for questions or feel more comfortable asking for help with assignment,” said Kent, who added that graduate students also support universities’ learning missions in other ways, too. “They may also help staff in the writing center and support undergraduates writing essays for their classes and provide informal mentoring.”

    ‘Not Sustainable’

    Although colleges and universities haven’t felt the effects of losing a number of those roles yet, Kent said the uncertainty surrounding graduate admissions poses a “real risk” to undergraduate learning.

    If universities do want to maintain smaller class sizes with fewer graduate students, they may rely even more heavily on low-paid contingent faculty, said Rosemary Perez, an associate professor at the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan.

    “That’s not sustainable for those instructors, who may be teaching five or six classes at multiple campuses and still not making enough to live,” she said. And with fewer graduate students in the pipeline, “we’ll also have fewer people who are trained to be faculty. People are going to retire. Who’s going to teach these college classes that have experience working with college students?”

    Nothing concrete has to happen for people weighing their futures to decide to take a different path where it seems like there may be more stability. Rational humans may decide that’s not the direction they want to go in anymore, and that’s going to be an immediate loss to the field.”

    —Marcel Agüeros, astronomy professor at Columbia University

    And with fewer spots available to prospective graduate students, Perez fears students who don’t attend top-ranked institutions will be the first to disappear from the academic pipeline. That’s because when resources are scarce, “the tendency is to rely on markers of prestige or GRE scores as predictors of success,” she said. “But those aren’t great predictors of what people are capable of doing in their careers.”

    Fewer graduate students will also likely mean a heavier workload for faculty, who in addition to teaching, also rely on them to help with research by assisting in running labs and research groups and co-authoring papers.

    “They help universities’ reputation, but they also help faculty funding prospects by making the faculty more productive, because funding agencies like to see productive faculty. A lot of that labor is happening through graduate students,” said Julie Posselt, a higher education professor at the University of Southern California, which last month revoked outstanding offers for numerous Ph.D. programs, including sociology, chemistry, sociology, molecular biology and religion. “Meanwhile, there’s also plenty of evidence that Ph.D. students are contributing to universities’ research output and are independently advancing knowledge in their respective fields.”

    Impact Will Reach All Fields

    Already, numerous universities across the country have said they’re reducing the number of Ph.D. students in the biomedical sciences as a result of drastic cuts to the National Institutes of Health, which each year sends universities billions of dollars in grants that indirectly and directly support graduate education.

    But it won’t just be those in the biomedical sciences that feel those cuts, especially as colleges downsize their budgets in light of the NIH’s plan to cap the amount of money it gives institutions for indirect research costs, which covers facilities maintenance, compliance with patient safety protocols and hazardous biowaste removal. Although a federal judge has blocked those cuts for now, the Department of Health and Human Services filed an appeal Monday; if the plan takes effect, it will force universities to find other areas they can cut from their budgets to make up the difference.

    “Even if you’re in the humanities, what’s happening right now in federal granting agencies that are far from the humanities has an impact on the humanities, because the overall budget for a university to do things like keep up their infrastructure and keep the lights on will go down,” said Jody Greene, associate campus provost and literature professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “And if we also don’t have international students, that’s also going to be a significant budget hit at institutions like ours.”

    International Students at Play

    In addition to drastic cuts in grant funding from the NIH, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Department of Education, the government has also revoked scores of international graduate students’ visas and detained several others.

    U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has characterized, with little concrete evidence, those students as “lunatics” who came to the United States “not just to study but to participate in movements that vandalize universities, harass students, take over buildings and cause chaos.” The administration is also considering a travel ban affecting 43 countries. (After Trump issued a travel ban for seven countries during his first term, the number of international applicants to U.S. colleges fell 5.5 percent for graduate students, though applications have been on the rebound post-pandemic.)

    But universities worry that targeting international students—who made up nearly one in four incoming graduate students in 2022—will create a chilling effect, cause international student enrollment to plunge and strip institutions of yet another vital revenue source. According to data from the Institute of International Education, 81 percent of international undergraduate students and 61 percent of graduate students completely fund their own tuition.

    Would-Be Ph.D.s Wary

    All this politically driven chaos and financial uncertainty is making graduate school—and a career as a faculty member—a harder sell for students interested in research careers.

    “Up until this year, we’ve been able to tell prospective graduate students that the university will cover the costs of their Ph.D.,” said Marcel Agüeros, an astronomy professor at Columbia University, where the Trump administration has frozen some $650 million in NIH funding. “We want to stay true to that commitment, but we’d be lying if we said that’s going to be 100 percent possible.”

    And even though his department is currently only expecting to offer one fewer Ph.D. slot, Agüeros said the uncertainty over the future of federal funding—and even what areas of research academics are allowed to pursue—is enough to push people out of academia.

    “Nothing concrete has to happen for people weighing their futures to decide to take a different path where it seems like there may be more stability,” he said. “Rational humans may decide that’s not the direction they want to go in anymore, and that’s going to be an immediate loss to the field.”

    And those are the questions would-be graduate students all over the country are asking themselves right now.

    “We don’t have any data yet, but anecdotally, I’m hearing that there are a ton of students who are choosing not to even try to go to graduate school this year and next year because they’re perceiving less funding and support,” said Bethany Usher, immediate past president of the Council on Undergraduate Research and provost at Radford University in Virginia.

    “Those Ph.D. students are the ones who push the boundaries of research,” she added. “They have the newest ideas, and if we reduce those, it will have a generational impact on higher education, industries and communities.”

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  • Navigating higher education in a changing landscape

    Navigating higher education in a changing landscape

    • Ahead of TASO’s annual conference, How to evaluate, on 29–30 April, Omar Khan, CEO of TASO (the Centre for Transforming Access and Student Outcomes in Higher Education) discusses the challenges facing higher education, particularly in the face of wider discussions around the value and purpose of higher education in the UK and beyond.

    We all know of the challenges facing higher education. The questions can feel existential: from the financial sustainability of institutions to the social consensus on the value and purpose of higher education itself.

    Without seeming pollyannish, I believe higher education can and must continue to argue for its value and purpose in these difficult times. There remains significant agreement that higher education brings value, for individuals as well as the economy, with reputational benefits for the UK internationally too. Similarly, there is broad consensus that addressing inequalities of participation as well as of the student experience is a priority. While we shouldn’t be complacent about the impact of criticism of ‘DEI’ (diversity, equity and inclusion) in the US, so far UK higher education has remained committed to the widening participation agenda and the sector has not been subject to sustained public attacks from the government.

    One reason that widening participation remains on the agenda is the legislative and regulatory environment. Significantly, for over a decade, the principle has been established that rising fees should be matched by a clear commitment to demonstrating improved access. As the sector will now know, in England this is delivered through providers submitting access and participation plans (APPs) to the Office for Students.

    A commitment to evaluation

    APPs are now also expected to have a clear commitment to evaluation. Unsurprisingly, given my role as CEO of the higher education What Works Centre TASO, I think this is a good thing. At TASO we’ve seen a significant improvement in the number and robustness of evaluations across the sector since our founding some five years ago.

    As we gather for our fourth annual conference (29–30 April), we will continue to support the sector on understanding the evidence base on inequalities in higher education. We do this in two main ways: through synthesising and commissioning research, and by producing more practical guidance for the sector to deliver effective evaluation themselves.

    A library of providers’ evaluations

    Recently, we’ve announced a key way we will bring this work together: the Higher Education Evaluation Library, or HEEL (like the rest of the sector, we too love an acronym), working in partnership with HEAT, the Higher Education Access Tracker, to deliver it. The library will bring together higher education evaluations in one place, which are otherwise published across the wide range of institutions across the sector.

    At our conference, we will continue our consultation with the sector about the library to ensure we understand and are responsive to how evaluators and others can best use this resource. Once we have consulted and worked with HEAT to develop the infrastructure for HEEL, and once providers upload their evaluations into this online library, we will produce regular digests summarising what we find. Ultimately, the goal or promise is that these digests will improve the evidence base, reduce duplication across the sector and improve outcomes for students.

    Navigating the financial landscape

    At TASO we are optimistic about the future of evaluation in the sector, not least as we have seen a wider cultural and institutional commitment to joint learning as well as to the value of equal opportunity and social mobility that motivates all of us to do this work. However, I want to recognise and to flag a serious concern that TASO (and no doubt many others) is seeing across the sector, that is, how the financial situation impacts widening participation activity.

    To effectively evaluate and assess whether activities improve outcomes for students, those activities need to be adequately resourced. We have heard evidence that redundancies and cost-cutting across the sector are impacting on the ability of staff to deliver these activities, as well as to evaluate them. This is in a context where child poverty is increasing, where inequalities in school attainment are rising, and where the higher education attainment gap between free school meal students and their more advantaged counterparts is at its widest at over 20.8 percentage points.

    A refocus on values and mission

    We recognise that times are tight, that tough decisions need to be made and that this has an impact on staff morale. At the same time, higher education must continue to prioritise its values and mission: a commitment to evidence as well as to equality and social mobility. Furthermore, at a time of increased public scepticism of how the sector is delivering on these aims, delivering for the most disadvantaged students becomes a matter of public support and democratic consensus.

    As we’ve spent the past decade building the foundations to better address inequalities in higher education, it’s vital we continue to work together to make the promise of higher education a reality for everyone who wants to access it, regardless of their background.

    While TASO is here to support the sector to do this, we cannot do this alone, and I want to recognise and thank all of those who do this important work day in and day out: senior leaders, evaluators, practitioners, third sector organisations, teachers, parents and of course student leaders and activists committed to ensuring better lives for themselves and their peers.

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  • Higher education postcard: UWE Bristol

    Higher education postcard: UWE Bristol

    Medieval England was full of guilds – chartered bodies often relating to a particular trade – which gave members rights.

    One such was the Society of Merchant Venturers in Bristol: although chartered in 1552, it traces its lineage back to the thirteenth century with mention of a guild of merchants in the city. The society had some sort of monopoly on maritime trade “beyond the seas”, which was clearly advantageous to the society’s members, and the society and Bristol prospered.

    In 1595 the society established a school for mariners’ children. Over the years this would have developed; and in 1894 it was re-founded as the Merchant Venturers’ Technical College, with very fine new buildings, including forced air heating and ventilation systems. The college burned down in October 1906 – “reduced to a mere shell”, in the words of the Western Daily Press.

    In 1909 University College Bristol received a royal charter, and became the University of Bristol. I’ll write about this another time, but for now, let’s note that the engineering section of the Merchant Venturers Technical College became part of the faculty of engineering of the university. This shows that it must have been of a reasonable standard; I wonder also if the fire, and the need to find new accommodation, played a part.

    After the second world war, responsibility for the college transferred to the local authority. The two sites it then occupied became two different colleges: the Bristol College of Commerce at Unity Street and the Bristol College of Technology at Ashley Down. On 31 August 1949, just above an article celebrating the possible return of clotted cream from Devon, the Western Daily Press noted that courses offered by the College of Commerce ranged “from shorthand to shipbroking, languages to librarianship, and export to general education.”

    Further change came in 1960, when the College of Technology split into two: the Bristol College of Science and Technology, and the Bristol Technical College. The former moved to Bath in 1965, becoming the University of Bath. And that is a story for another day.

    And now the era of the polytechnics was here, and Bristol Polytechnic was formed. The College of Commerce and the Technical College were joined in this by the West of England College of Art. And the technical college split one more time: the Brunel Technical College offered lower level programmes; the higher level activity became part of the polytechnic.

    As far as I can tell, this latter college had its roots in the Bristol Academy for the Promotion of the Fine Arts, which seemed to have admitted its first students in something like 1844, and was certainly involved in seeking tenders for a new building in 1855. It wasn’t one of the first government schools of design, although it appears to have been modelled on the same principles. In any event (and if I am wrong about this college, please do correct me in the comments!) it was by 1969 well established in Bower Ashton.

    The nascent polytechnic was spread over several sites in Bristol, and in 1970 plans were announced to develop a campus in Frenchay, at Coldharbour Lane. Over time much of the activity of the various campuses would move to Frenchay, but for now it was just plans: the campus opened in 1975.

    We now need to go down another historical byway: in 1976 two colleges of education were incorporated into the polytechnic. These were the Gloucester and Bristol Diocesan Training Institution for School Mistresses, founded in 1853 and latterly called St Matthias, and Redland College, an emergency teacher training college established in 1947. There’s an excellent brief history of St Matthias on the university’s website, including some great stories.

    In 1992 the polytechnic – along with all others – was given university status and became the University of the West of England. A familiar tale of rebuilding an campus consolidation took pace, with the St Matthias site ultimately closing; the aggregation of city centre sites into one city centre campus; the growth of activity at Frenchay, and the establishment of a campus in Swindon. In 2012 there was an ill-fated attempt to create a stadium to be used by Bristol Rovers and the university, but this came to nothing other than legal arguments with Sainsbury’s.

    UWE is now the thirteenth largest UK university by student numbers (2023–24 HESA data).

    And there we have the UWE story, or at least one telling of it. The Merchant Venturers Technical College is unique, I think, in having given rise to three different universities. And, as the Brunel Technical College still exists as part of the City of Bristol College, and as the City of Bristol College has a university centre, there’s always room for a fourth to be created.

    The card was sent in 1988, addressed to David, c/o Mrs Williams, at St Martin de Porres school in Luton. David was Mario Morby’s father; Mario had cancer and was collecting postcards to try to get a world record. The LA Times has a good write up; happily it seems that Mario survived the cancer, and got into the Guinness Book of World Records.

    Here’s a jigsaw of today’s card for you to enjoy. And a bonus jigsaw of the St Matthias campus which is, frankly, quite challenging.

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  • Growing Orchids Amid Dandelions at Work (opinion)

    Growing Orchids Amid Dandelions at Work (opinion)

    Many of us working in higher education, including those of us in teaching and learning centers, might find that our work is dramatically accelerated by rapid technological change and increasing pressures to be more efficient and productive. Technology adoptions such as smartphones and Slack, video communication, and now generative AI all contribute to the acceleration of the organizational culture.

    In her recent essay “Teaching Centers Aren’t Dumping Grounds,” Kerry O’Grady argues that many academic leaders “focus on more instead of on effectiveness and efficiency.” O’Grady recounts continued calls to “create more workshops, more one-pagers or more training when attendance was dismal for initial sessions, or when the original documents went untouched.” She argues that educational developers are in a constant state of emergency response, in which they are tasked with “retroactive cleanup” as opposed to “the work of proactive planning for teaching and learning success.” O’Grady calls for a much-needed reset—something that feels wonderfully exciting—and institutionally unrealistic.

    Our collective teaching and working in higher education at more than 20 institutions over 50 years tells us that we are always working with limited agency to significantly change how our centers align with our strategic vision and the changing needs of the institution. Amid the dizzying pace of constant disruption, we feel a need to find a more sustainable and pragmatic approach. O’Grady’s essay inspired us to reflect on our strategic plans and how we support our respective communities. While the “dumping ground” metaphor importantly calls attention to current challenges, we consider a different metaphor that has guided our decisions as we direct centers and support educators.

    The Dandelion and the Orchid

    Dandelions are versatile flowers—resilient, fast-growing and abundant. In the context of educational development, dandelions represent the many ways developers adapt to institutional demands, producing quick outputs that propagate widely. Dandelion work is essential: It includes the programs and resources we create rapidly to meet pressing needs. However, as with real dandelions, the results of this work are often scattered, growing without the intentional design of a cultivated garden. When we run from meeting to meeting or throw together a one-off workshop to respond to emerging pedagogical issues, we rely on dandelions.

    In contrast, orchids require significant care and controlled environments to flourish. Orchid work symbolizes slow, intentional cultivation—projects that are thoughtfully nurtured over time. These efforts demand patience, consistency and a commitment to depth over breadth. While the process is slower, the results are uniquely meaningful, reflecting a product of deliberate focus. Orchid work requires long-term planning, collaboration across units and thoughtful engagement. While orchids can result in beautiful landscapes, the time taken to cultivate them can mean that we miss many emergent day-to-day needs.

    Together, this framework highlights a central question: Which systemic issues require sustained effort, and which challenges can be addressed through quick, one-off engagements? Balancing dandelion and orchid approaches helps educational developers respond to immediate needs while creating space for intentional growth.

    Growing Relationships

    Resilience does not sprout in isolation but through networks of care, mutual support and shared experiences. To push the floral metaphor further, if our goal in centers for teaching and learning is to help educators help students bloom, then we need to model and promote the space and time needed to learn, even if social pressures point in the opposite direction.

    Although meaningful relationships take time to develop, their benefits are powerful. Research supports the idea that individuals with a high relational self-construal—those who define themselves through their relationships with others—may be better able to embrace inconsistency and instability (two things that very much describe life in education today). Educational developers therefore can foster resilience and adaptability not only by caring for relational networks at their institution but also by defining their work based on such networks.

    In our own ways, we make space for orchids in our work and programming by emphasizing the ways in which relationships and time are necessary conditions for educational development. Some of the ways we do this as we go about our regular, day-to-day “dandelion” programming include:

    Balancing the orchid and the dandelion depends on priorities and time constraints. The dandelion approach can produce quick solutions when the pressure is high, and the orchid approach encourages us to carve out the time and tend to our relationships even in our constant push to maintain that field of flowers.

    While it may disrupt our metaphor, dandelions can give way to orchids and orchids can give way to dandelions. After all, the more often that deeper relationships develop, the more often we’re going to be in contact with faculty and colleagues, which will seed new ideas and possibilities, be they orchids or dandelions.

    The metaphor encourages us to ask how and where we can make space and time for deeper engagement. We cannot just grow a field of dandelions if we want to foster a culture of innovation, nor can we respond effectively and in a timely manner to an institution’s needs if we just focus on orchids. We have found that giving ourselves the permission to grow orchids amid the dandelions allows us to feel more agency and more relationally connected to the work we’re doing and the people we’re doing it with. The metaphor has helped us foster and model a more inclusive, supportive academic culture—one that balances collaboration with efficiency, collective resilience with institutional responsiveness and meaning with productivity.

    JT Torres directs the Houston H. Harte Center for Teaching and Learning at Washington & Lee University.

    Lance Eaton is an educator, writer and public speaker. He has worked in educational development for 15 years and recently became the senior associate director of AI in teaching and learning at Northeastern University.

    Deborah Kronenberg is an educator, consultant and public speaker who approaches communities of learning with creative, interdisciplinary, relationship-centric leadership in faculty and administrative roles in the greater Boston area.

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  • Wraparound Support Network Aids College Student Math Completion

    Wraparound Support Network Aids College Student Math Completion

    Corequisite educational models are tied to higher pass and completion rates for students compared to remedial education, but ensuring learners are passing college-level courses often requires additional institutional investment.

    Middle Georgia State University reimagined its corequisite education model to embed tutors, peer mentors and success coaches in entry-level math courses. Now, students who are falling behind are identified on a weekly basis, allowing for targeted and individualized outreach.

    After the first term of the initiative, passing rates grew over 10 percentage points and withdrawals decreased, encouraging the university to scale the intervention to English courses and, starting next fall, STEM courses with high failure—D or F—or withdrawal rates.

    What’s the need: Middle Georgia State offers 29 sections of its corequisite math course, Qualitative Reasoning. The course has seen stagnant success rates over the past few years, even though the number of students enrolled in corequisites grew, said Deepa Arora, senior associate provost of student success at Middle Georgia State.

    Students who didn’t pass the class were less likely to stay enrolled and progress, prompting institutional leaders to consider new ways to engage these learners.

    How it works: The solution was to create a support network of professionals who assist learners.

    Faculty members are at the center of the initiative, flagging at-risk learners who are missing goals or failing to submit work.

    From there, student success coaches, who are embedded in the course’s learning management system, reach out to those students to share resources, create a success plan and make referrals. Coaches also initiate a follow-up a week later to see if students have completed any action.

    Depending on the student’s area of weakness, success coaches funnel them to one of two types of student employee: an embedded tutor or a peer mentor.

    Embedded tutors address primarily academic concerns, such as low grades. Tutors attend class sessions, provide content-specific coaching and host review sessions as well as set up appointments for learners who need additional assistance, Arora said.

    Corequisite learners who may be missing or not participating in classes are referred to a peer mentor, Arora said. In addition to teaching academic skills, peer mentors focus on a student’s sense of belonging and connection to the institution. They facilitate workshops, provide referrals to other support resources and connect students with classmates.

    Both tutors and mentors are paid positions for which students must meet certain qualifications: They need to have passed the relevant course, be enrolled at least part-time and fulfill role-specific training.

    Building better: The staffing changes were supported by revenue from tuition increases over the past two years. Faculty buy-in was also essential. “Faculty collaboration and cooperation with the success team was an integral part of the initiative and led to the development of a support ecosystem for the student,” Arora said.

    Prior to implementing the new model, faculty members were briefed on the initiative’s design and asked to provide feedback and meet with the success coaches to build relationships.

    Faculty didn’t receive any specific training other than guidance on how to identify at-risk students—those missing classes, earning low grades or failing to engage. Campus leaders also encouraged professors to send weekly communication regarding student performance and share related information about content with the success coach assigned to their section, Arora said.

    The impact: The initiative succeeded in its goal of improving student pass rates: 73 percent of students who attempted the course in fall 2024 passed, a 14-percentage-point increase from the previous fall’s rate. (Excluding withdrawals, 77 percent of fall 2024 students passed the course.)

    One trend the university noted was that the students who did fail were primarily in the online sections, suggesting that improvements to the in-person experiences were moving the needle.

    Additionally, the connection between faculty and success coaches broke down institutional silos through ensuring timely identification of barriers and sharing of best practices. Success coaches appreciated being embedded in the learning management system, as it gave them greater insight into where the students needed help.

    Support staff also noted increased student use of resources.

    What’s next: After the initial positive results, university leaders chose to extend the initiative this term to include all sections of Composition I and its corequisite support courses. “The plan is also to extend this strategy to all sections of Anatomy and Physiology I and II where additional support is needed to improve their success rates,” Arora said.

    The university will also invest in additional focus on online courses to close success gaps there.

    Do you have an academic intervention that might help others improve student success? Tell us about it.

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  • To Improve Peer Review, Give Reviewers More Choice (opinion)

    To Improve Peer Review, Give Reviewers More Choice (opinion)

    “Greetings! You’ve been added to our journal’s editorial system because we believe you would serve as an excellent reviewer of [Unexciting Title] manuscript …”

    You probably get these, too. It feels like such emails are propagating. The peer-review system may still be the best we have for academic quality assurance, but it is vulnerable to human overload, preferences and even mood. A result can be low-effort, late or unconstructive reviews, but first the editors must be lucky enough to find someone willing to do a review at all. There should be a better way. Here’s an idea of how to rethink the reviewer allocation process.

    The Pressure on Peer Review

    As the number of academic papers continues to grow, so do refereeing tasks. Scientists struggle to keep up with increasing demands to publish their own work while also accepting the thankless task of reviewing others’ work. In the wake, low-effort, AI-generated and even plagiarized reviewer reports find fertile ground, feeding a vicious circle that slowly undermines the process. Peer review—the bedrock of scientific quality control—is under pressure.

    Editors have been experimenting with ways to rethink the peer-reviewing process. Ideas include paying reviewers, distributing review tasks among multiple reviewers (on project proposals), transparently posting reviews (already an option for some Nature journals) or tracking and giving virtual credits for reviews (as with Publon). However, in one aspect, journals have apparently not experimented a lot: how to assign submitted papers to qualified reviewers.

    The standard approach for reviewer selection is to match signed-up referees with submitted papers using a keyword search, the paper’s reference list or the editors’ knowledge of the field and community. Reviewers are invited to review only one paper at a time—but often en masse to secure enough reviews—and if they decline, someone else may be invited. It’s an unproductive process.

    Choice in Work Task Allocation Can Improve Performance

    Inspired by our ongoing research on giving workers more choice in work task allocation in a manufacturing setting, it struck me that academic referees have limited choices when asked to review a paper for a journal. It’s basically a “yes, I’ll take it” or “no, I won’t.” They are only given the choice of accepting or rejecting one paper from a journal at a time. That seems to be the modus operandi across all disciplines I have encountered.

    In our study in a factory context, productivity increased when workers could choose among several job tasks. The manufacturer we worked with had implemented a smartwatch-based work task allocation system: Workers wore smartwatches showing open work tasks that they could accept or reject. In a field experiment, we provided some workers the opportunity to select from a menu of open tasks instead of only one. Our results showed that giving choice improved work performance.

    A New Approach: Reviewers’ Choice

    Similar to the manufacturing setting, academic reviewers might also do better in a system that empowers them with options. One way to improve peer review may be as simple as presenting potential referees with a few submitted papers’ titles and abstracts to choose from for review.

    The benefits of choice in reviewer allocation are realistic: Referees may be more likely to accept a review when asked to select one among several, and their resulting review reports should be more timely and developmental when they are genuinely curious about the topic. For example, reviewers could choose one among a limited set of titles and abstracts that fit their area of domain or methodological expertise.

    Taking it further, publishers could consider pooling submissions from several journals in a cross-journal submission and peer-review platform. This could help make the review process focus on the research, not where it’s submitted—aligned with the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment. I note that double-blind reviews rather than single-blind may be preferable in such a platform to reduce biases based on affiliations and names.

    What Can Go Wrong

    In light of the increased pressure on the publishing process, rethinking the peer-review process is important in its own right. However, shifting to an alternative system based on choice introduces a few new challenges. First, there is the risk of authors exposing ideas to a broader set of reviewers, who may be more interested in getting ideas for their next project than engaging in a constructive reviewing process.

    Relatedly, if the platform is cross-journal, authors may be hesitant to expose their work to many reviewers in case of rejections. Second, authors may be tempted to use clickbait titles and abstracts—although this may backfire on the authors when reviewers don’t find what they expected in the papers. Third, marginalized or new topics may find no interested reviewers. As in the classic review process, such papers can still be handled by editors in parallel. While there are obstacles that should be considered, testing a solution should be low in risk.

    Call to Action

    Publishers already have multi-journal submission platforms, making it easier for authors to submit papers to a range of journals or transfer manuscripts between them. Granting more choices to reviewers as well should be technically easy to implement. The simplest way would be to use the current platforms to assign reviewers a low number of papers and ask them to choose one. A downside could be extended turnaround times, so pooling papers across a subset of journals could be beneficial.

    For success, the reviewers should be vetted and accept a code of conduct. The journal editors must accept that their journals will be reviewed at the same level and with the same scrutiny as other journals in the pool. Perhaps there could be tit-for-tat guidelines, like completing two constructive reviews or more for each paper an author team submits for review. Such rules could work when there is an economy of scale in journals, reviewers and papers. Editors, who will try it first?

    Torbjørn Netland is a professor and chair of production and operations management in the Department of Management, Technology, and Economics at ETH Zurich.

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  • NSF, NIH Slash Support for Early-Career Scientists

    NSF, NIH Slash Support for Early-Career Scientists

    Both the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health are slashing funding support for graduate students and early-career researchers as President Donald Trump continues dramatic federal budget cuts. 

    Since Trump took office in January, the two agencies—which send billions in funding to research universities each year—have stalled grant reviews, fired scores of workers and terminated or flagged hundreds of active grants that conflict with the administration’s ideological goals.

    On Tuesday, Nature reported the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program awarded 1,000 fellowships—fewer than half of the record-setting 2,555 fellowship offers it made in 2023, and the second-smallest number of awards since 2008. 

    Prior to this year, the fellowship program’s stated goal was to “ensure the quality, vitality, and diversity of the scientific and engineering workforce,” though the Trump administration has since replaced the word “diversity” with “strength.” 

    Since 1952, the NSF’s fellowship program has funded more than 75,000 master’s and Ph.D. students pursuing science degrees. Fellows receive five years of funding, which includes a $37,000 annual stipend and the cost of tuition. The fellowships are highly competitive; of the more than 13,000 applicants who apply each year, only about 16 percent typically get an award. While the cuts made it even more competitive this year, a record 3,018 applicants also received “honorable mentions,” which don’t come with an award but can boost a CV nonetheless. 

    Over the past two weeks, the NIH has also canceled numerous institutional and individual training grants, including many that support scientists from underrepresented communities, according to The Transmitter. 

    The outlet reported that a chemistry professor at the University of Puerto Rico–Río Piedras Campus received a letter from the NIH terminating funding for the Undergraduate Research Training Initiative for Student Enhancement because the award “no longer effectuates agency priorities.”

    That justification is now central to a federal lawsuit researchers and advocacy groups filed against the NIH last week, which among other points argues that the Department of Health and Human Services (the NIH’s parent agency) hasn’t yet adopted rules that would allow it to terminate an award for not effectuating agency priorities. 

    Other terminated NIH training programs, according to The Transmitter, include the Maximizing Access to Research Careers program, which funded undergraduate researchers; the Post-Baccalaureate Research Education Program; the Bridges to the Doctorate program, which trained master’s students; the Initiative for Maximizing Student Development, which supported graduate students; and the Institutional Research and Academic Career Development Award, which aided postdoctoral researchers.

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  • DHS Formalizes Policy Screening Noncitizens’ Social Media

    DHS Formalizes Policy Screening Noncitizens’ Social Media

    The Department of Homeland Security is formalizing a policy to search the social media accounts of all foreign applicants for U.S. visas or other benefits, according to a memo issued Wednesday morning. 

    U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services will collect applicants’ social media handles and scour their accounts for any “antisemitic activity.” Social media content “endorsing, espousing or promoting antisemitic terrorism, antisemitic terrorist organizations, or other antisemitic terrorist activity” is now “grounds for denying immigration benefit requests.”

    “This will immediately affect aliens applying for permanent resident status, foreign students and aliens affiliated with educational institutions linked to antisemitic activity,” the memo continued. 

    Secretary of State Marco Rubio proposed the policy last month, drawing criticism from free speech advocates. Others objected to the broad scope of the proposal, which included not just visa applicants but also current residents and green card holders. The new policy is just as broad.

    The news comes after weeks of escalating attacks on international students, many of whom have had their visas and legal resident status revoked for pro-Palestinian speech under an obscure legal clause that allows the secretary of state to determine if a visa holder is a “foreign policy threat.” An Axios report found that the State Department was already using artificial intelligence to scan student visa holders’ social media accounts looking for the allegedly antisemitic speech referenced in the new memo. 

    Many more students have had their visas revoked over minor criminal infractions; others have no clear understanding why their status was terminated. 

    An Inside Higher Ed analysis found that nearly 450 students have had their visas revoked as of Wednesday afternoon. Follow along with our interactive map and tracker. 

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  • NIH Freezes Millions More in Funding for Columbia

    NIH Freezes Millions More in Funding for Columbia

    Columbia University was dealt another blow to research funding this week.

    DNY59/iStock/Getty Images

    The Trump administration has frozen all U.S. National Institutes of Health funding for research grants at Columbia University, Science reported, cutting off the flow of $250 million to the private institution mere weeks after it yielded to sweeping demands related to pro-Palestinian campus protests.

    The federal government had already clamped down on $400 million in research funding for Columbia last month. But after the university agreed to enact various reforms the Trump administration demanded to address alleged antisemitism on campus, it appeared a reprieve was in order. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said last month that she believed Columbia was “on the right track” toward final negotiations to unfreeze the research funds.

    Instead, the Trump administration has gone in the opposite direction, cutting off even more research funding. According to Science, the NIH froze Columbia’s funding Monday at the direction of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is reportedly not only blocking new funding but also ceasing payments for work on existing projects. In addition, the agency will require prior approval to tap existing disbursements.

    “HHS strongly condemns anti-Semitic harassment against Jewish students on college campuses,” a department spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed by email. “In line with President Trump’s mission to combatting discrimination and promoting fairness, HHS is partnering with other federal agencies to conduct a comprehensive review of grants awarded to universities that have failed to protect students from discriminatory behavior. We will not tolerate taxpayer-funded institutions that fail to uphold their duty to safeguard students from harassment.”

    Critics assailed the move.

    “It’s shocking, but not surprising, as with so many previous developments in this matter,” said Michael Thaddeus, a Columbia math professor and vice president of the institution’s American Association of University Professors chapter. “And it shows that the Trump administration just has an animus against American universities.”

    Thaddeus called the actions “so patently unlawful” that litigation against the Trump administration would have a strong chance of success—yet Columbia hasn’t sued. The AAUP and the American Federation of Teachers union, with which the AAUP is affiliated, have filed a lawsuit over the prior $400 million cut.

    “If what you’re dealing with is threats from an extortionist, then capitulating to the threats of an extortionist is not a wise move,” Thaddeus said. “What’s happening is not an enforcement action, it’s a political vendetta.”

    Reinhold Martin, president of the Columbia AAUP chapter and an architecture professor, said “the defunding of science” reflects a structural pattern: “the movement of public funding out of the nonprofit sector into, eventually, we can fully expect, the for-profit sector. So that’s what this is about.”

    A Columbia spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed the university has not yet been notified of the freeze. “At this time, Columbia has not received notice from the NIH about additional cancellations,” the spokesperson said via email. “The University remains in active dialogue with the Federal Government to restore its critical research funding.”

    Columbia would not be the first university to learn about the loss of federal funding indirectly. The Trump administration also froze $790 million in federal research funding at Northwestern University earlier this week, which officials learned about via media reports. Cornell University was also dealt a $1 billion blow to its federal funding this week.

    Elsewhere in the Ivy League, the Trump administration has frozen $510 million at Brown University, $175 million at the University of Pennsylvania and $210 million at Princeton University. The funding freezes mainly come in response to allegations of antisemitism related to pro-Palestinian campus protests, though federal investigations into the claims are ongoing.

    Outside of Columbia, scholars noted that even though the university gave in to Trump’s demands, the administration still seemed unsatisfied.

    “The NIH just froze ALL grant funding owed to Columbia University, meaning that the university’s concessions to the Trump administration clearly didn’t go far enough to satisfy the federal government,” Robert Kelchen, a professor of education and head of the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, wrote in a BlueSky post.

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