Tag: Higher

  • InsightsEDU 2026: The Higher Ed Conference Built to Disrupt the Status Quo

    InsightsEDU 2026: The Higher Ed Conference Built to Disrupt the Status Quo

     The 2026 landscape makes one thing clear: institutions that rely on incremental change will not make it in this new era of higher ed. 

    Student expectations are shifting, competition is intensifying and AI is reshaping how people search, compare and choose. The Modern Learner is moving faster than most institutions—clear on what they want and decisive about where they spend time and money. 

     In this reality, doing a little more of what you’ve always done isn’t neutral. It’s a liability. 

     At EducationDynamics, we think differently. We believe in the transformative power of education, and we believe higher ed can rise above the noise to better serve the Modern Learner.   

    That belief drives InsightsEDU. InsightsEDU 2026 gathers the leaders ready to reinvent—those willing to transform their programs, positioning and culture for the era ahead. From February 17–19 in Fort Lauderdale, presidents, marketers, enrollment leaders and more will come together not to trade small tweaks, but to rethink how their institutions serve learners, tell their stories and grow. 

    Why InsightsEDU Exists 

    We believe your institution’s why is its strongest enrollment tool. Yet on most campuses, brand, strategy and culture are owned by different teams and rarely viewed as one story—InsightsEDU is designed to collapse those silos and give leaders a holistic view of the learner journey from first impression to long-term outcomes.

    Modern Learners don’t see your brand and enrollment funnel as separate. They experience one journey: a promise made in your brand, a reality in your programs and support and a decision shaped by how clearly you communicate value. When those pieces align, you build reputation and revenue. When they don’t, both erode.

    InsightsEDU 2026 exists to close that gap. It’s the live expression of how we believe higher ed must operate now—designing around the Modern Learner, treating reputation and revenue as one integrated strategy, and running enrollment as a unified system that connects an institution’s entire ecosystem.

    This isn’t another conference. It’s a launchpad for institutional reinvention.

    The Future Unbound: Your Institution’s Growth Mandate 

    This year’s theme, The Future Unbound, is a mandate to stop waiting and start unbinding. 

    At InsightsEDU, that means letting go of the assumption that yesterday’s playbook will carry you through tomorrow. It means challenging structures and habits that separate brand, enrollment and student success even though students experience them as one continuum. It means pressure-testing who you serve, how they find you and whether your story still matches reality. 

    This conference is devoted to that mission: transformation in the face of uncertainty. Every session is intentionally crafted to equip leaders to navigate this environment and reinforce higher education’s value proposition. 

    What Makes InsightsEDU Different 

    You’ve been to enough events where you swap business cards, collect slide decks and go home unchanged. Explore how InsightsEDU 2026 is different by design. 

    A Keynote That Resets Your Why 

    At the center of InsightsEDU 2026 is a keynote from visionary Matt Dunsmoor from Simon Sinek’s The Optimism Company. He’s not here to offer feel-good inspiration you forget by next week. He’s here to confront a hard truth: when strategy and culture are disconnected, your why collapses—and your enrollment strategy with it. 

    The keynote will help you sharpen your institution’s why in ways that resonate with Modern Learners, expose where culture undercuts the story you tell and push you to reconnect purpose, people and plans so reputation and revenue move together. 

    An Exclusive First Look at the 2026 Modern Learner Report 

    If putting the Modern Learner first is non-negotiable, InsightsEDU is where you need to be. 

     Attendees receive an exclusive first look at EducationDynamics’ 2026 Modern Learner report, presented by EducationDynamics’ President of Enrollment Management, Greg Clayton, and Senior Director of Analytics and Business Intelligence, Katie Tomlinson. You’ll see what today’s students value in higher education and how that shapes their decisions; how brand and reputation influence their search; and how to engage Modern Learners where they are with messages that land. 

     The report shares insights from our survey of Modern Learners and lays out a framework for a strategic approach built on stronger reputation and smarter engagement. 

     InsightsEDU 2026 is grounded in this data—real students, real behavior and real tradeoffs. Throughout the conference, you’ll use these insights to test your messaging, rethink programs and refine your enrollment strategy so it reflects how students actually behave in today’s landscape, not how they used to. 

    A Clear Directive on What Actually Moves the Needle 

    Many conferences leave you energized but unfocused. InsightsEDU is built to narrow your focus to what truly moves the needle. Most conferences still split your reality into tracks—leadership talking mission in one room, marketing talking campaigns in another; enrollment trading tactics down the hall. InsightsEDU starts from a different assumption: in 2026, those divides are the problem. 

    The agenda is built around the idea that every function ultimately feeds your brand. By bringing everyone into the same general sessions and then into focus-specific tracks, InsightsEDU gives leaders a shared picture of the full enrollment ecosystem and a practical toolkit to decide which levers will actually change the trajectory of their institution. 

    Real Tactics from Real Higher Ed Leaders & Industry Pros 

    Reinvention doesn’t happen in theory. It happens when real people in real roles make different choices. 

     At InsightsEDU 2026, you’ll hear from higher ed leaders across enrollment, marketing, admissions and online education who are already reshaping how their institutions compete and serve learners. They’ll share strategies they’re testing, changes they’ve made and what they’d do differently next time. 

    You will also hear from platform insiders bringing expertise from the digital front lines of Google, Reddit, Snapchat, Meta and LinkedIn—the very places where Modern Learners search, scroll and decide what to do next. These leaders will unpack the trends and behavioral shifts they observe in the market, offering a tactical look at how these ecosystems are evolving and what that means for your institution’s strategy.  

     The result: a conference that doesn’t just tell you what to change but prepares you for the leadership required to make change stick. 

    Who InsightsEDU Is For? 

     In short, you. 

     You’re shaping the future of your institution. That’s why you belong at InsightsEDU 2026. 

     This conference is for leaders who feel the urgency of this moment and are ready to act—presidents and cabinet members responsible for both mission and margin; CMOs and marketing executives tired of disconnected campaigns that don’t translate into enrollment; enrollment leaders who live every day with the pressure of pipelines, outcomes and student success; and online, adult and continuing ed leaders who already live in the Modern Learner reality and want their institutions aligned to that same pace and expectation. 

    Graph showing the Common Titles at InsightsEDU, including Directors, managers, deans, advisors, senior leadership and more

    If you’re looking for another safe year of marginal change, you don’t need this conference. If you’re aiming for sustainable growth, stronger reputation and genuine student success, this is the room you need to be in. 

    What You’ll Take Back to Campus 

    When you leave Fort Lauderdale, you won’t just be inspired—you’ll know what to do next. 

    Expect to go home with: 

    A Modern Learner–informed strategy for 2026 and beyond 
    Concrete shifts in programs, positioning and experience based on fresh data about what students value, how they search and what drives trust. 

    A Unified Enrollment Framewrok 
    A practical model for breaking down silos and aligning marketing, enrollment and student success into one system that drives reputation and revenue. 

    A Playbook You Can Actually Use 
    Top priorities you’ll pursue immediately supported by metrics that create alignment across leadership, marketing and enrollment teams. 

    A Network You Can Activate 
    Connections with peers and industry partners you can tap long after the conference—people who will share results, compare notes and help you keep pushing your strategy forward. 

    The Conference for Transformation 

    You don’t need another conference that leaves your strategy unchanged. 

     InsightsEDU 2026 is built for leaders who are ready to confront what’s not working, commit to the Modern Learner and move their institutions from incremental adjustment to true reinvention.  

     If you’re ready to move beyond tweaks and start the work of institutional reinvention, join us in Fort Lauderdale for The Future Unbound. 

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  • The Higher Ed CFO’s Guide to Building a High-Performing IT Operation [eBook]

    The Higher Ed CFO’s Guide to Building a High-Performing IT Operation [eBook]

    Lead technology transformation with confidence, clarity, and control. 

    IT isn’t just a cost center. It’s a critical enabler of your institution’s strategic goals. But too often, campus technology operations are under-resourced, fragmented, and reactive. That leaves CFOs in the dark about what’s working, what’s wasted, and where to invest next. 

    We built this free guide specifically for higher ed finance leaders who are ready to shift from maintenance mode to a more strategic, future-ready approach. 

    What you’ll learn: 

    • Why most institutions struggle to modernize their IT function—and how to break the cycle 
    • How to assess infrastructure health, team capabilities, and tech ROI using a practical evaluation framework 
    • Where to find hidden costs, duplication, and vendor inefficiencies 
    • What a high-performing IT operation looks like—and how to build one at your institution 
    • Steps you can take today to align IT investments with institutional priorities 

    Who it’s for: 

    • CFOs and finance leaders 
    • COOs, CIOs, and enrollment executives involved in tech decision-making 
    • Presidents and provosts seeking better visibility into IT performance 

    Whether you’re facing outdated systems, overwhelmed teams, or rising IT costs with unclear returns, this guide will give you the insight and structure to lead with impact. 

    Submit the form on the right to get your free copy.

    Our mission is to enable impact in higher education. We help our partners achieve more, deliver superior experiences, and drive impact across the entire student lifecycle by leveraging and aligning data, technology, and talent.

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  • Udemy, Coursera to Merge in $2.5B Deal

    Udemy, Coursera to Merge in $2.5B Deal

    Coursera and Udemy both launched during the MOOC boom of the early 2010s.

    Allison Shelley/Complete College Photo Library

    To keep pace with advances in generative artificial intelligence technology, two big online learning companies are planning to merge in a deal valued at $2.5 billion.

    Coursera announced its plans to absorb Udemy in a news release Wednesday; both companies launched during the massive open online course provider boom of the early 2010s. Coursera, which offers a variety of courses, certifications and degrees, expects the all-stock merger to be finalized by the second half of 2026 and to generate more than $1.5 billion in annual revenue.

    Combining the two companies is also estimated to save $115 million in operating costs over the next two years and allow for sustained investment in “AI-driven platform innovation, rapid product development, and durable growth initiatives,” according to Coursera’s statement.

    Since Open AI launched ChatGPT three years ago, nearly every industry has moved to incorporate generative AI into its operations, and higher education is no exception. Although still contentious, students and faculty are increasingly using generative AI to help with research, writing and studying; a number of universities have launched campuswide AI partnerships with technology companies. In addition, learning management systems are touting their new AI capabilities, and employers say they want AI-ready graduates.

    Greg Hart, CEO of Coursera, said the companies are merging to better help learners, instructors, and enterprise, university and government customers keep up with the changes.

    “We’re at a pivotal moment in which AI is rapidly redefining the skills required for every job across every industry. Organizations and individuals around the world need a platform that is as agile as the new and emerging skills learners must master,” he said in the release. “By combining the highly complementary strengths of Coursera and Udemy, we will be in an even stronger position to address the global talent transformation opportunity, unlock a faster pace of innovation, and deliver valuable experiences and outcomes for our learners and customers.”

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  • A Better Way to Approach Antisemitism on Campus (opinion)

    A Better Way to Approach Antisemitism on Campus (opinion)

    For humanities faculty, the past five years have felt like a relentless assault on our ability to do our jobs. We have endured COVID, generative AI, budget cuts, and bitter fights over the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and Israel’s war on Gaza. At times it has been a challenge to remain human, let alone humanistic: to calm the nervous system enough to read a book, refine an argument, or show up for our colleagues and our increasingly fragile students. Now we are facing the Trump administration’s effort to gut-renovate our universities under the pretext of “combatting antisemitism.” With local enablers paving the way, that destruction may yet succeed.

    In February of this year, a few colleagues and I co-founded a group called Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff (CJFS), which now has more than 200 members on more than two dozen campuses. Our group, which is predominantly made up of academics at Massachusetts colleges and universities but includes members from across New England, is one of several such efforts nationwide that have coalesced into a new National Campus Jewish Alliance. We recognize that Jewish safety is inseparable from the safety of all people, and we work to foster academic environments that reduce antisemitism by treating educators as partners, not as suspects. I’d like to share a few examples of what this looks like in practice.

    Fearmongering Versus Tea

    As a Jewish professor of Arabic at Boston University, I mentor students with many different identities: Arab, Jewish, both or neither. After Oct. 7, 2023, I watched them struggle to metabolize the horrors in Israel and Gaza. They identified with various “sides” of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; what they shared was a sense of helplessness and a hunger for facts and insights beyond those found on Instagram. They needed contact with solid reading material, with trusted adults and, above all, with each other. My colleagues and I were in pain too. By mid-October, a few of us began meeting to discuss how to nurture a respectful and humane campus climate for ourselves and our students.

    As we looked around for helpful approaches, we noticed one very unhelpful one: Keep people constantly triggered so their brains can’t process new information or perspectives.

    Instead of trying to lower the temperature after Oct. 7, one influential institution on our campus immediately began stoking fear of antisemitism. On Oct. 18, they sent out an email telling students to record and report all instances of “antisemitism and anti-Zionism.” They encouraged students to submit videos and screenshots of their classmates. They conflated antisemitism and anti-Zionism, strongly implying that criticism of Israel’s government threatened the identity and even the safety of Jewish students at BU. They ignored the inconvenient facts that a great proportion of anti-Zionists at BU are Jewish and that nationwide, plenty of Israel supporters are antisemitic. Even worse than this bad-faith conceptual stew was the subtext. We know you’re scared. We know you feel everyone hates you. Although this university has 4,000 Jewish undergraduates, you’re basically alone and unsafe here. But don’t worry; we have your back. This gaslighting maneuver only stoked the anxieties it purported to calm.

    What my colleagues and I did instead was much smaller in scale. Four tenured humanities professors (all moms, as it happened) started gathering students for tea. We chose to work together because we did not agree about what was happening or should happen in the Middle East, but we respected and liked each other. Each of us personally invited a few students, for a total of about 12 per gathering. This was not an advertised event but a series of private teas. My colleagues brought concerned Muslim and Arab students, liberal Zionist students, and eventually some leaders of BU Students for Israel and the Hillel. I invited Arabic learners from various backgrounds and some pro-Palestinian students I knew, including some leaders of Students for Justice in Palestine. (Others, who had been doxxed, were scared to come.) We brought substantial and slightly awkward snacks, things like pistachios, clementines and pomegranates to keep people’s hands busy. We sat around in armchairs, more conversation circle than summit meeting. And we made one ground rule: For these 90 minutes you can’t talk about the region, which we can’t fix, but only the BU campus, which we share.

    When we passed a timer around the room, giving every student and faculty member 60 seconds to say what was on their minds, everyone heard at least one thing they didn’t expect. One male Jewish student who sometimes wore a kippah and sometimes didn’t told of how differently people looked at him in those two situations. The Muslim women—hijab-wearing or not—understood. As trust grew, students felt comfortable asking each other questions like, “Why do people tear down posters of Israeli hostages?” or “Why did your group blast disco music over our die-in?”

    The last tea occasioned two tiny breakthroughs. One student suggested BU’s “Jewish trustees and donors” were blocking the student movement to divest from Israel. Really? Together we checked the website: In fact, two of our most senior trustees are Arab. The student was taken aback, changing her view without ever being accused of antisemitic bias; everyone learned something. Later, a Palestinian student asked a pro-Israel Jewish student what the word “Zionism” meant to him. He began defining it, starting with “the right of the Jews to have self-determination in their ancestral homeland, Eretz Yisrael.” As she looked confused, he blushed and stammered, using more Hebrew words she didn’t understand. Finally he stopped: “I’m sorry, I’ve never had to explain this before. I’ve always been in Jewish schools or camps or Hillel or places where everyone just understood what Zionism means.” The conversation moved on. The next day he and his roommate came to my office to worry that he had not “represented his side” well enough; we talked for an hour; I assured him that he represented only himself, a student trying to learn and figure out what he believed. I doubt his politics changed, but the moment of aporia made everyone more human. When CJFS organized a Freedom Seder the next April, both he and his roommate came.

    Administrators have asked us how to scale up this effort. My long-term hope is to train students and colleagues to be peer educators in their own networks. But it would need to start small, with faculty and staff who trust each other. There are no shortcuts.

    Policing Versus Conversing

    Such efforts may soon be complicated by a harmful state-level effort by the politicians and legacy Jewish groups who make up the Massachusetts Special Commission on Combatting Antisemitism, which was established by the state legislature in 2024 and has been touted as a model for other states.

    The Commission furthers a nationwide plan to advance a program of what is fair to describe as “Don’t Say Palestine” policies. It aligns with the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) state-by-state Jewish Policy Index, which calls for such commissions, and follows the exact playbook of the Israel advocacy group ICAN (the Israeli-American Civic Action Network), which aims to bring hyperlocal pro-Israel advocacy to cities, towns and school boards, especially in blue states. A Massachusetts state senator has praised ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt for encouraging the establishment of the commission; ICAN has boasted of its influence on the process.

    One reason our group, Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff, has grown so fast is that everyone can see the Trump administration weaponizing antisemitism to attack universities and degrade civil rights. But another reason is anger at this state-level commission right here in our beloved Massachusetts, which has taken its eye off actual antisemitism and focused instead on policing discourse about Israel.

    The Commission conflates Jewishness with Zionism, pushing the incoherent and dangerously vague International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism and other sloppy ideas. But a deeper problem is its punitive approach, which focuses on policing a boundary of what is and isn’t antisemitic. In its 13 months of hearings, the Commission has modeled the punitive approach by attacking educators, publicly haranguing the (Jewish) president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) for two hours last February over some materials on an MTA website. In its final report, released in November, the Commission aims to institutionalize the punitive approach by creating a mechanism through which members of the public can report “problematic curriculum” in K-12 schools, as well as an anonymous reporting system for suspected acts of bias in K-12 schools “which may not rise to the level of a hate crime.” If adopted in any city or town, these measures will create an unpedagogical climate where teachers are afraid to teach and students hesitate to speak up in class: No one wants to be reported as an antisemite, even if the charge is disproven later. At best, such a climate will only drive anti-Jewish bias underground; at worst, because schoolchildren and college students are sensitive to hypocrisy, it will spark resentment and feed an anti-Jewish backlash. Several Concerned Jewish colleagues have written movingly on this commission’s dangers; CJFS has released a Shadow Report detailing its faulty assumptions and missteps.

    The question is what to do instead. What is a humane, pedagogical response to rising tensions and the ambient normalization of bigotry in all forms? Again, learning can happen only in an environment of respect and trust.

    Let’s take an example of casual classroom antisemitism. In March 2024, my Core Curriculum class was reading Foucault and discussing the Panopticon surveillance regime. When the talk turned to Internet culture and public discomfort with social media, one normally tuned-out student suddenly piped up: “The Jews want to ban TikTok. They’re against its pro-Palestine content.” The Jews. Because we all automatically love Israel and hate free speech? Luckily, I was the teacher; I could explain why it was incorrect to say some entity called “the Jews” either wanted or were able to control social media. I could cite a 2020 Pew research poll saying 41 percent of Jewish Americans are emotionally unattached or weakly attached to Israel. (Among secular Jews, that figure is 67 percent.) I could point out that the great majority of Israel’s U.S. supporters are not Jewish at all: One Evangelical lobby group, Christians United for Israel, claims ten million members, 2.5 million more than the total number of Jews in America. If this discussion happened today, I could cite a survey from The Washington Post finding that about 4 in 10 American Jews believe Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. And because I feel safe in my classroom—because my university does not endorse the conflation of Jewishness with Zionism—I could personally vouch that many Jewish people disavow nationalism altogether.

    Now, let me share an example of misperceived classroom antisemitism from my 40-person general education course, War in Arabic Literature and Film. The course confronts some difficult material set in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Israel-Palestine. We learn how war can harden sectarian identifications and gender roles. We read some American and Israeli authors as sidelights. We do a lot of social-emotional scaffolding and role-taking; students sit in small discussion groups, and I collect exit notes.

    One student, a self-described “proud Zionist,” was a wonderful presence in the course’s fall 2024 first run. But one day she was crying after class, and her exit note said: “I loved this course and was about to recommend it to all my Jewish friends, but now I can’t, because I feel today’s discussion was antisemitic.” That day’s session had focused on Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir, a stunning Israeli film about Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, paired with a student presentation on Edward Said’s classic essay, “Permission to Narrate.” (Incidentally, Waltz violates the IHRA definition of antisemitism, comparing the Sabra and Shatila massacre to Auschwitz.)

    I caught up with my student and we talked for an hour in the street and in my office. Raised to sincerely experience criticism of Israel as antisemitic, she felt hurt by the student presentation. I did not try to tell her about Edward Said’s humanistic outlook, deep empathy for Jewish victims of the Holocaust, or anything else. Instead, trusting her seriousness and troubled by her distress, I suggested: What if she was upset not by the reading material, but by the frame? Would she have preferred me to assign the Said essay as a primary source to analyze rather than an authoritative secondary source for a presentation? She said yes, that would be different. I offered to revisit that part of my syllabus the following year, empowering students to talk back to Said if they wished. She contributed enthusiastically to class for the rest of the semester.

    I am so grateful that this brave young woman shared her concerns with me rather than running to a dean, a “problematic curriculum” hotline, or a politico-religious organization, as students are being urged to do. By talking to each other honestly like intelligent adults, we both learned something.

    These experiences have convinced me that policing “antisemitic” speech about Israel is not only unjust but deeply counterproductive: it breeds suspicion between well-meaning people, making it harder for us to unite when genuine neo-Nazism rears its head. You can’t stamp out antisemitism, fear of Palestinians, or any other prejudice; only slow heart-changing conversations can melt it away. So, to foster a campus climate of real inclusion, we need to convene and converse, not record and report. The details are tricky, but teachers and students can figure them out together. Our administrations and governments just have to give us the respect, job security and academic freedom to do so.

    Margaret Litvin is an associate professor of Arabic and comparative literature at Boston University and a co-founder of Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff.

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  • Safeguarding the Integrity of College Sport

    Safeguarding the Integrity of College Sport

    In 2018, the Supreme Court struck down a ban on state-authorized sports betting, opening the floodgates to an industry that dumps billions of dollars into state budgets. According to the American Gaming Association, Americans wagered $119.84 billion on sports events in 2023, up 27.5 percent from the previous year. Professional leagues attract the highest betting volumes, but gambling in college sports is growing, according to Jim Borchers, president and CEO of the U.S. Council on Athletes’ Health (USCAH) and chief medical officer for the Big 10 Conference.

    Digital platforms, gamification and prop betting are driving this boom, he says. A former Ohio State football player, Borchers argues the influx in gambling threatens the integrity of college sports and risks athletes’ mental and emotional health. Name, image and likeness payments, combined with media revenue-sharing, contribute to a new reality for college sports that is more transactional than ever, with huge sums of money flowing in and out.

    To help students and institutions respond to the new environment, USCAH developed an accreditation process mapped to the National Collegiate Athletics Association’s best practices and standards of care. USCAH launched the program in September and is already working with 40 institutions at every level of college athletics from the power four conferences (the Big 10, SEC, Big 12 and ACC) to Division III institutions.

    Gambling is now an integral part of college athletics, Borchers acknowledges, but he is hopeful the new accreditation system will guarantee that student athletes’ health isn’t lost along the way.

    This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

    Q: In 2018, the Supreme Court ended the federal ban on sports gambling. From your vantage point, how has that changed gambling in college athletics?

    A: It’s been in the back rooms and dark corners, but I think gambling always existed, and there was always a concern around integrity in sport. But in the last five to seven years, gambling has exploded, and it’s really become part of the fabric of sport, so much so that many people consider it like a video game. It’s so easy make a wager on so many different things in sport. And it seems like it’s just a normal part of what goes on. So the technology piece of it—the predictive markets, the prop bets, the things that go beyond “is Team A going to beat Team B by a certain number of points?”—have a huge effect on the individual and that’s something that we have to take into account when we think about how this affects sport.

    Jim Borchers, president and CEO of the U.S. Council on Athletes’ Health and chief medical officer for the Big 10 Conference

    Q: Prop betting is where gambling gets more sophisticated, but also a bit wacky. How does prop betting, in particular, affect athletes?

    A: It gets really wacky because you’re betting on things that individuals may or may not do, or things that you would expect them to do in real time during the course of a game. I’ve explained it to people as: If you play a team sport and the overall objective is to play well and have your team win, you can have a good outcome. You and your coach could feel like you played pretty well. But if you didn’t meet these prop bets, all of a sudden you start seeing negativity around the way you performed, and you start thinking, “Wait, am I really doing what I should be doing?”

    How does that affect someone who’s 18 or 20 years old? It creates a whole outside amount of stress that obviously can become pretty specific for the individual. It can be very harassing. It can be malignant. It can be damaging. And I think that’s where you’ve seen a lot of the movement to try to get prop bets and predictive markets out of the sport betting market. But I just don’t think that’s realistic. The train has left the station, and we need to think of different ways to address it.

    Q: Especially because these betting companies buy TV ads during the games. Gambling is totally integrated in the college sport business. There’s just no way that you can separate them.

    A: And their number one market is males, ages 18 to 24. They give you free bets. They’re trying to create habits. Gambling, in and of itself, can be a very addictive and malignant behavior and lead to all sorts of health issues and personal issues. But there are a lot of people who don’t think anything of, “Yeah, I’ll take 20 bucks and make a few bets and see if I can hit something this weekend.” I think they see that as part of the fun of sport, rather than being invested in the sport or the game itself.

    Q: Give me some examples of the impact you’ve seen gambling have on student athletes.

    A: This whole financial marketplace now exists in college athletics—even high school athletics now has NIL payments—and so sport as a financial vehicle is growing, and these markets are growing, and that causes them stress. Young athletes are developing physically and mentally. Do we expect them to have a skill set to manage that financial stress like an adult, or the experiences and the ability to develop that skill set? I think it is misguided.

    You add into that the pressure of outside influences who now have their own financial market where they’re making these bets and providing those bets. And they can make comments to that person directly either on social media or direct messaging. It’s easy for me as a 55-year-old to say, “I’ll just turn my phone off,” but that’s not how these folks operate. It impacts their mental and emotional health, and that impacts their performance. We know athletes have to be physically, mentally and emotionally well to perform at their best.

    Q: You mentioned that these betting agencies are focusing on 18- to 24-year-old men, and I would take a guess that most of the games they’re betting on are football and men’s basketball. Is there enough discussion about this being an issue for males in particular?

    A: I don’t think there’s enough discussion at all, because the focus gets drawn away from the actual event. The other piece of it is, oftentimes, it’s peer groups that are engaging in these behaviors. It’s people that athletes see on campus or in their classes. It’s led to more isolation and more silos. College athletes feel like they have to wall themselves off from all of those parts of the college experience that are important to the overall development of a young adult.

    Look, higher education serves a lot of roles. There’s a knowledge base and building a foundation in a field of study. But there’s developing as a young adult through social interactions—being on your own for the first time and learning to engage in the community and interact with people with similar beliefs or maybe different beliefs. I think you’re seeing athletes become more isolated and unable to participate in that. In some way it’s stunting their development, and they leave college then, as young adults, without having had a lot of those experiences.

    Q: Division I sports and the big four conferences are where we see big sums of NIL payments and revenue sharing. Is gambling concentrated in those areas of college sport too?

    A: Gambling is universal. There’s a marketplace for everything. With the recent NCAA basketball issue you saw how it seeps down into schools, where people would have thought, wow, really, people are betting on these events? It’s misguided to think this is only happening at the highest level of sport. And I think it’s misguided to think that athletes themselves aren’t invested in it and doing it.

    Q: I even read a story about a bus driver who saw an athlete was limping and then capitalized on that.

    A: Yeah, information and the ability to gain information is key. You’re seeing people go to all sorts of lengths to try to find out information. And that introduces a whole different set of malignant consequences to that part of this industry. They’re trying to find out information from the individuals: people that are working with the medical staffs, as you mentioned, a bus driver. Are you a food services person? Are you doing something with athletes where you’re able to garner some information and pass that information off? And then there are the athletes themselves. If they are being approached for information and maybe think, “Well, I’m just giving an injury update on someone,” but they don’t realize the effect that’s having in the larger environment around wagering and sport.

    Q: To your point about integrity earlier, the amount of money in college athletics points to a greater question around the integrity of college athletics as a whole. Where is this all going?

    A: To me, it’s asking, “What is the purpose of sport?” Is sport, and your ability to participate in a sport and be good in sport, a financial vehicle? And if it is, what role does it play in education-based athletics? In the United States, sport is so much a part of what the community is and how people identify with an institution. But the financial markets are creating a transactional nature to it. I think most college athletes just want sport to continue to be part of their college experience, because it’s what they’ve known. They want to go to school, have a peer group and play a sport they enjoy. When it becomes a financial vehicle, there’s a whole different aspect to sport because now your efforts and what you’re doing in sport are objectively equated with a dollar amount.

    And how do we reconcile those two? It’s really challenging. Now that you have athletes in college making seven figures, they’re probably the financial engine for their families. Their purpose and why they’re there has changed. Not that sport hasn’t always been a big part of the collegiate experience, but if you’re paying somebody a million dollars or $500,000 to participate in sport, I don’t think they’re going to have much focus on any of the other reasons why they’re in college.

    Q: From my conversations with university leaders, it’s clear they’re not happy about how much money is flowing through athletics. But here we are. What can colleges do?

    A: Our most recent initiative is accreditation for athletic departments on health, safety and well-being. The other reality is I don’t know that athletic departments are complex enough to handle those and all the issues around the financial part of the business. Now there’s a whole different risk profile to sport when people are making this kind of money. I think you’re going to see more lawsuits because there’s going to be lost wages or an inability to earn income.

    We have to acknowledge that and then be very transparent about what the expectations are when people come to sport. As much as we want to say college athletics is still a relationship-driven industry where parents and their kids made an investment in going to school to play sport because they built great relationships with coaches or felt great about the institution, we’ve now allowed this transactional nature to take place. There are representatives, agents and other influences in college athletics. We have to allow it to be part of what we’re talking about every day, and thinking about as an athletic department or an institution. Unless you think of it that way, you’ll have outcomes that you’re just not prepared for.

    Q: Where did the accreditation standards come from?

    A: A group of higher education leaders asked the U.S. Council for Athletes’ Health about 18 months ago to develop an accreditation program that shows institutions are meeting best practices and standards of care based on the NCAA roadmap. We met with legal and education experts and have developed a program that focuses on ongoing self-study and assessment and education. It’s a four-year process. We’ve met with the NCAA and they acknowledge that it meets their best practice standards. We feel like accreditation is a step in the right direction because it’s something people in education understand—this is a four-year cycle, we educate people every year on these topics, we do a self-study every year, and once every four years, we do a more comprehensive self-study with an audit or an evaluation from the accrediting body, where we share our information and get feedback.

    Q: For academic accreditation, you either get access to Title IV funding or you don’t. Is there an incentive for what you’re talking about here?

    A: The incentive, in my opinion, is the risk and liability that exists if you’re not doing this. Because as somebody who sits in as an expert in cases, when there are unwanted outcomes, it’s the system failure that is the biggest issue. And it’s a reputational harm. I tell people all the time—you drop your child off at a daycare for eight hours a day. Would you drop your child off with coaches or with other people that aren’t going to meet best practices? It’s a process that you should be invested in and, if you choose not to be invested in it, that says something about what you’re doing.

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  • How Excessive Phone Use Can Hinder Student Success

    How Excessive Phone Use Can Hinder Student Success

    Many of today’s college students are digital natives, having grown up in a world dominated by cellphones, the internet, social media and rapid technological advancements.

    Coming of age alongside smartphones, however, has been linked to high rates of mental health concerns among Gen Z. A 2024 brief by the National Center for Health Statistics found that half of teenagers between the ages of 12 and 17 spent four or more hours on screens per day, and those teens were more likely to experience anxiety or depression symptoms. In 2025, 32 percent of college students reported moderate or severe levels of anxiety and 37 percent said they experience moderate or severe depression, according to the Healthy Minds Study.

    As a result, more primary and secondary schools are introducing phone-free policies to improve children’s interpersonal skills and mitigate the harms of social media on their developing brains.

    At some colleges and universities, students, faculty and administrators have identified opportunities to encourage healthy device habits and promote student success.

    By the numbers: Students, in large part, are aware of their heavy device use and its potential link to poor academic outcomes.

    A fall 2025 survey by Echelon Insights found that 54 percent of U.S. students say they spend five hours or more on recreational screen time, including scrolling social media, streaming or gaming. Of those students, 18 percent say they spend over six hours on their devices doing non–coursework-related tasks.

    Another 2025 study of smartphone use surveyed students in the U.K. and found that among young adults aged 18 to 22, 73 percent spend more than four hours on their phone each day. Over three in four students also believe their smartphone negatively impacts their academic performance.

    Finding ways to unplug, however, is difficult.

    One research study from San Jose State University found that students who logged daily social media use reported a slight decrease in overall screen time over the course of a month, but simply monitoring screen time didn’t change the students’ high internet use. A Northwestern study of Americans who deactivated their Facebook account found leaving the platform did improve their mental health, but many just spent their time on other platforms rather than go offline entirely.

    DIY: A 2023 survey of college students found that over 80 percent of respondents believe colleges and universities should do more to support breaks from technology. For practitioners looking to support students who are glued to their phones, other institutions and experts offer interventions that can encourage them to disconnect from devices.

    • Encourage sleep. Excessive screen time is linked to poor health outcomes; it has been shown to disrupt students’ sleep and energy levels as well as their emotional health and cognition. First-year seminar instructors at the New York Film Academy require incoming students to complete a sleep log. Students track how many hours they sleep in a week, and the log provides a space for reflection and links healthy habits to academic and personal performance.
    • Provide tech breaks. Fluid Focus’s survey of U.K. students found that 67 percent of students struggle to disconnect while they’re at home studying; an additional 16 percent said they have trouble disconnecting “during class.” Faculty and staff can help make it possible by assigning classroom activities that don’t require a device or creating phone-free class sessions.
    • Establish phone-free environments. New York University’s president announced this fall that the university would implement device-free spaces, classes and events at campuses in New York, Shanghai and Abu Dhabi. Wyoming Catholic bans phones outright on campus; it also limits students’ internet access in the dorms to college emails and selected websites for class. Students leave their phones at the student life center and can check them out before they leave town.
    • Support student leadership. The fear of missing out can also hinder students from spending less time on their smartphones, according to U.K. survey respondents. Some colleges and universities house student clubs that promote device-free engagement.
    • Provide incentives. Researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Texas at Austin evaluated how an app that rewards students for staying off their phone during class could change behaviors. They found that app users were more likely to be focused, attend class and be satisfied with their academics, but weren’t necessarily more likely to study using the time saved by staying off their phone.

    Do you have a wellness intervention that might help others promote student success? Tell us about it.

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  • It’s the higher education Christmas movie and TV guide 2025

    It’s the higher education Christmas movie and TV guide 2025

    There’s nothing on the telly this Christmas.

    There never is. But if, like me, you have trouble switching off from work but also enjoy being slumped in front of the box with a tub of Heroes (Quality Street are now banned in our house), I have good news.

    I’ve picked out films and TV shows released this year that either have something to say about higher education, are set on campus and/or depict contemporary student life.

    You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll shell out for a VPN, you’ll wonder why Disney thinks Nani should abandon her sister for college, and you’ll almost certainly switch off, which is what the break is for – eventually.

    Other than the fantastic but final season of Big Boys, it really was slim pickings again this year from a UK perspective – which reminds us that whatever else the BBC, ITV and C4 are doing, it’s not higher education.

    Before you take to the comments, I’ve not put in books or podcasts. I do enough reading in this job, and I edit ours, so my appetite for either is fairly thin – but do pop suggestions below if there are any.

    You’re welcome – and apologies in advance if you’re at work over the next couple of weeks.

    Julia Roberts heads to Yale (sort of – it’s actually filmed in Cambridge but set in New Haven) as a philosophy professor whose star student accuses her colleague of sexual misconduct. If you enjoyed the discomfort of Cate Blanchett in “Tár” but wished it had more Ivy League networking and dialogue about whether university should be a “safe space” or not, this is your Boxing Day sorted. Roberts delivers a line about education being meant to make you uncomfortable, not a “lukewarm bath”. Arif Ahmed will be thrilled.

    Guillermo del Toro got his passion project made, and it’s a meditation on academic hubris. Oscar Isaac plays Victor as the ultimate postdoc gone wrong – brilliant, egotistical, and convinced his research will change the world. The university scenes feature actual professors listed in the credits, though they don’t seem to have undertaken that optional supervisor training. Jacob Elordi brings surprising depth to the Creature, who arguably just needed better student support services.

    This documentary about the 1988 Gallaudet University protests is the year’s essential viewing for anyone who thinks student activism doesn’t achieve anything. Directed by Nyle DiMarco and Davis Guggenheim, it shows how four students shut down their campus and changed history, forcing the appointment of the university’s first deaf president. The board chair who supposedly said “Deaf people are not ready to function in a hearing world” will have you chanting “Deaf Power!” from your sofa.

    If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if someone tried to remake The Sopranos but set it in a Turkish university’s literature department, Bir Zamanlar İstanbul will be right up your street. Ali and Seher – a final-year Turkish Literature student and journalism student respectively – meet during a campus debate on whether crime is driven by society or personal choice, and the series quickly turns into a mafia thriller. It’s another one of those shows that casts 35-year-olds as undergraduates, but at least the debate scene offers a rare glimpse of Turkish academic culture before everyone starts shooting at each other. And just under the surface there’s some fascinating “western culture” v traditional Islamic values themes to get into too.

    Where did all the campus high-jinks go? It’s sign of the time that so many titles on this list are bleak – this Spanish show follows 18-year-old Javi as he navigates university after personal tragedy, and shows students dealing with grief, anxiety, and the pressure to experience the perfect university experience. The six half-hour episodes are eminently bingeable and capture the forced intimacy that comes from being thrown together with strangers who you’re told will be friends for life, but in reality are barely friends for the whole of freshers.

    Leo Woodall plays Edward Brooks, a Cambridge PhD student whose work on prime numbers could apparently unlock every computer in the world, which would be quite the REF impact if true. The eight-episode thriller sees him team up with an NSA agent after his supervisor dies under suspicious circumstances, and it’s very much The Imitation Game meets Good Will Hunting but with added paranoia about research security. Shot on location in Cambridge, critics moaned about its “uneven pacing” and “leaden dialogue,” which does suggest the writers have captured the authentic Cambridge tutorial experience.

    French singer Nolwenn Leroy stars as Fanny, a biologist who returns to teach at the University of Rennes’s biological field station at Paimpont (fictionalised as the “University of Brocéliande”) twenty years after her best friend disappeared and she was the prime suspect. When history repeats itself with another disappearance, we get six episodes of Gallic noir. The series was shot entirely on location at the real university and in the mystical Brocéliande forest, giving us gorgeous establishing shots of campus buildings. It’s particularly refreshing to see academic staff portrayed as accomplished professionals rather than the usual depiction of hapless eccentrics, though the murder rate does suggest their risk assessments need work.

    This is a reboot of the cult Russian sitcom “Univer” that brings five freshmen to Moscow State University’s legendary 510th dormitory block, where returning characters like rector Pavel Zuev try to make MVGU “the best university in the country”. The new students are proper Gen Z types who understand TikTok but not why they need to attend lectures, while dealing with the usual comedy of errors that comes from communal living. It’s basically Fresh Meat for the Soviet education system, and comes with the side plot dish of a wealthy student sponsor opening a dumpling restaurant on campus.

    Muriel Robin plays Louise Arbus, a psycho-criminology professor who solves murders with the help of four carefully selected students. Now in its second full season with new episodes in 2025, it’s like How to Get Away with Murder but only with more wine and fewer actual murders. The students function as a kind of Greek chorus explaining criminology concepts while their professor employs what I’ll describe here as questionable methods. Lots of vintage Volkswagens to look at too.

    It’s a Disney remake nobody wanted, but it puts Nani’s dilemma into policy reality. Her marine biology scholarship becomes the story of care work squeezing out opportunity. The ending has her heading off to university, while Lilo stays with Tūtū as her guardian. Higher education only looks like a choice when someone else is there to pick up the unpaid labour.

    If you’ve been missing the “American discovers themselves at Oxbridge” genre since Saltburn, here’s Sofia Carson learning about poetry and terminal illness. Her performance has been universally panned as “stiff” – one reviewer called her and her co-star “beautiful looking puppets going through motions” – but the film does feature that hidden church in Amsterdam if you’re planning a European city break. The student-supervisor romance is romanticised in ways that feel quite dated these days, and the idea that American students would be treated like a novelty at Oxford suggests the writers have never visited.

    The superhero university returns with our protagonists now framed as terrorists while the actual villain becomes dean. For me at least, it’s a fun satire of how university leaders someone chuck their own students under the bus. The handling of actor Chance Perdomo’s death (his character dies from the neurological toll of his powers) is genuinely moving, and the new villain Dean Cipher is basically every smooth talking university manager you’ve ever met, but with better hair.

    Eva Victor off of TikTok makes her directorial debut with this fractured narrative about a professor dealing with trauma. Shot in Ipswich, Massachusetts, it’s been doing the festival circuit and dividing audiences who either find it “nuanced and brilliant” or “self-pitying mumblecore.” I just thought it was boring.

    The final season of Jack Rooke’s masterpiece begins with the gang on holiday in Faliraki before returning to Brent Uni for their terrifying final year. It’s easily both the funniest and most devastating thing on television, dealing with Danny’s mental health crisis and Jack’s Princess Diana poetry with equal sincerity. If you don’t cry at the ending, you will need to check you still have a pulse. Jon Pointing deserves awards for his portrayal of male depression, and the show remains the gold standard for depicting that specific third-year feeling of everything ending before it’s begun.

    Odessa A’zion (who’s apparently going to be massive) plays a scholarship student facing expulsion after her father’s death, who deals with it by pool-hopping through Chicago’s wealthy suburbs instead of attending her make-or-break meeting. It’s “The Breakfast Club” meets “Booksmart” meets class warfare, with a healthy dose of Malort (if you know, you know). The film captures the emptiness of a campus over the summer – no catering open and the wrong kind of quiet…

    A French philosophy student navigates her Muslim faith, her emerging lesbian identity, and the commute between the Parisian banlieue and the Sorbonne. Based on Fatima Daas’s autobiographical novel, it’s been doing the festival circuit to acclaim, though reviews get it right when they say the pacing is “deliberately contemplative” (nothing happens for ages). Stick with it for some thoughtful A&P parallels – the university serves as both escape and alienation, a place where she can be herself but never quite belong.

    Netflix threw a lot of money at this Japanese series about a college drummer recruited by the “Amadeus of Rock” for his new band. Takeru Satoh learned to actually sing and play guitar for the role, the campus (actually a private management uni in Tokyo) looks amazing and the music slaps. The romance subplot is however dire, not least because the male band members have better chemistry with each other than with the female lead.

    Amazon’s take on the 2022 University of Idaho murders focuses on the victims rather than the killer (still on trial when released) – which is fine, but makes for an oddly unfinished documentary. The interviews with the Dean of Students show a management completely overwhelmed by the media circus, while the exploration of how TikTok sleuths made everything worse should be mandatory viewing for anyone teaching crisis communications.

    George Clooney produced this documentary about decades of sexual abuse by team doctor Richard Strauss and the wrestling coaches who allegedly knew. It’s harrowing viewing – a real lesson in how institutional harbouring works – and multiple reviewers single out current congressman Jim Jordan’s alleged complicity, making this essential context for American politics watchers.

    Season 2 of South Africa’s answer to “Euphoria” has more chaos in the Pantera residence. Four young women navigate koshuis culture, drug dealing to pay fees, and the casual trauma of South African university life. It’s dedicated to the late rapper Angie Oeh and features enough Afrikaans slang to make subtitles essential even for Dutch speakers. The show’s frank depiction of everything from abortion to assault has made it a massive hit on Showmax while horrifying conservative viewers, which is usually a good sign.

    It’s a merger! Due to budget cuts, a university merges its engineering department with its modelling department, forcing computer science students to share space with fashion students. The protagonist, Ju Yeon San, is a brilliant coder who treats human emotion like buggy software that needs fixing. When campus celebrity Kang Min Hak – famous from a dating show but unable to operate a laptop – accidentally destroys her computer, he becomes the test subject for her new AI dating programme, LOVE.exe. A cautionary tale for those engaged in wedging modules together to create “interdisciplinary” programmes.

    The Dutch have made a #MeToo university drama, focusing on a young lawyer forced to re-examine her “consensual” relationship with her thesis supervisor when he’s accused of abuse by current students. Based loosely on real University of Amsterdam scandals, it features a charismatic predator (Fedja van Huêt is terrifyingly good) and asks uncomfortable questions about power and consent.

    Benito Skinner (of TikTok fame) created this series about a closeted freshman football player desperately trying to maintain his facade. Filmed in Toronto pretending to be America, featuring actors who are clearly 30 pretending to be 18, it nonetheless captures something real about the exhausting performance of identity that university demands. Reviews praise its “chaotic energy” and “intentionally unlikeable characters” – it certainly reminded me of those lads lads in the sports clubs that roam around in jackets.

    A mockumentary that follows a struggling junior college cheerleading team in Oklahoma. Kristin Chenoweth plays an assistant coach with aggressively toxic positivity, while the rest of the cast nail a specific community college/clearing energy of “we’re all here because we couldn’t get in anywhere else.” Wholesome chaos.

    Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut adapts the memoir of a competitive swimmer turned writer navigating trauma through a non-linear narrative. Jim Belushi plays Ken Kesey running a writing workshop, and reviews are divided between “visionary” and “pretentious,” with one critic comparing it to “watching someone’s therapy session through a kaleidoscope.” It took them 10 years to finish it, and it very much felt like a decade watching it.

    A soapy “vertical” (watch it on your phone Grandad) mini-series that dives into the high-stakes, exclusionary world of elite university Greek Life. The plot follows a student at a top-tier university who becomes entangled in a volatile love triangle, struggling to balance a relationship with her boyfriend while maintaining a secret affair with a fraternity president. Starring K-Ledani, Amalie Vein, and Ellen Dadasyan, the show explores the social stratification of campus culture, where maintaining one’s reputation in the “elite social scene” often comes at the cost of personal integrity. Ideal for a hangover.

    Fees! An Indonesian student accepts a polygamous marriage to fund her Korean study abroad dreams. It’s based on a hit novel and was the first Indonesian film shot on location in Korea, combining K-drama aesthetics with conservative Islamic values. The student finance crisis that drives the plot feels painfully real even if the solution doesn’t.

    This documentary follows tech millionaire Bryan Johnson as he spends $2 million a year trying to reverse aging. The contrast between his son preparing for university naturally while Bryan frantically tries to reclaim his youth through supplements and plasma exchanges is weirdly poignant. Academics from Harvard and Birmingham pop up to point out the obvious flaws in his methodology while he ignores them, making this basically a film about the dangers of having too much money and not enough peer review.

    Student protests

    If you’re in the mood for student protest cinema, 2025 has a clutch. As Quatro Estações da Juventude (Four seasons of youth) spent a decade documenting Brazilian students fighting to keep their university funded while completing their degrees, creating an archive of a generation that refused to give up. Inner blooming springs captures Georgian students at Tbilisi State University moving between lecture halls and tear gas during the Foreign Agents law protests, with the director as part of the friend group being filmed, blurring the line between documentation and participation.

    And Wake up, Serbia! gains exclusive access inside Belgrade’s University of Dramatic Arts during the student uprising, showing how the campus became the nerve centre of resistance against authoritarianism. All three refuse to romanticise protest – they show the exhaustion, the infighting, the way movements fragment when the cameras leave, and the specific courage required when your education becomes inseparable from your politics.

    This Finnish documentary deserves more attention than it’s getting. An Australian neurodivergent man called Andrew Clutterbuck appears in Helsinki and somehow becomes the darling of Aalto University’s innovation ecosystem. They love him when he’s being disruptive and bringing that “entrepreneurial energy” that the strategic plan talks about. Then something tragic happens (the film’s coy about what), and suddenly Mr Innovation is yesterday’s news. Nine psychiatric diagnoses later, the “happiest country in the world” can’t find a bed for him.

    And the rest

    I’ve not had time to catch everything, obviously. Tiny Toons Looniversity finished with the characters getting degrees in “Toonery” from ACME Looniversity [insert Mickey Mouse degrees joke here]. Night of the dead sorority babes exists and features cannibal witches running a sorority and some nudity. There’s also Shutter, where past university crimes return as literal ghosts, The family plan 2, where Mark Wahlberg’s daughter studying in London kicks off an European heist (you’ll not be hankering for Family Plan 1), and College of the dead does exactly what it says on the tin.

    Happy viewing, and if you’re struggling to stream any of these, HMU and I’ll put you in touch with Firestick Dave down the road from me 😉

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  • New HEPI Debate Paper: ‘A Baker’s Dozen: Thirteen years of book reviews on higher education, 2013 to 2025’

    New HEPI Debate Paper: ‘A Baker’s Dozen: Thirteen years of book reviews on higher education, 2013 to 2025’

    Author:
    Nick Hillman

    Published:

    HEPI’s final publication of 2025 takes a timely look back to reflect on a period of profound change in higher education policy and debate.

    A Baker’s Dozen: Thirteen years of book reviews on higher education, 2013 to 2025 (HEPI Debate Paper 42), written by HEPI’s Director Nick Hillman OBE, brings together 30 book reviews published since higher undergraduate tuition fees first came into effect in 2012/13. This moment marked the beginning of an era that reshaped higher education across the UK: from the removal of student number controls to the creation of the Office for Students, with lasting consequences for the sector.

    The collection spans books by leading academics, politicians, commentators and international figures, as well as a cultural perspective from beyond the policy world. Authors reviewed include Peter Mandler, Alison Scott-Baumann, David Cameron, Wes Streeting, David Goodhart, Sam Freedman, Richard Corcoran, Ben Wildavsky and David Baddiel. Together, the reviews chart how debates about higher education, the state, students, institutions and free speech have evolved over more than a decade.

    Organised into five thematic sections, the debate paper offers both a historical record and a platform for renewed discussion. With further reform on the horizon, new leadership at the Office for Students and elections in Wales and Scotland approaching, this Debate Paper offers an important moment to consider how we arrived at the current policy landscape and how debate should develop next.

    You can read the press release and access the full debate paper here.

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  • Digital Tools for Note Taking and PKM – Teaching in Higher Ed

    Digital Tools for Note Taking and PKM – Teaching in Higher Ed

    My friend Kerry left me one of her infamous voice messages today. These are the fancy kinds that go beyond voice mail, but instead show up in my text messages app, only I get to hear her voice. Apple nicely transcribes these messages for me, too, though it cracks me up what it sometimes thinks Kerry says in these messages. This time, it thought that she called me “Fran,” but instead she was calling me, “friend.”

    She’s going to be on sabbatical next semester, so is wanting to get going with a note-taking application. In my over two decades in higher education, I’ve never had a sabbatical, but I imagine that if that time were to come, I would really want to get a jump on the organization side of things, as well. I’ve enjoyed following Robert Talbert’s transparency around his sabbatical as he seeks to be intentional with his sabbatical, even subtitling one of his blogs: Or, how my inherent laziness has made me productive on a big project. He also suggests that we regularly carve out time to reflect on whether where we are spending our time and devoting our attention is in alignment with the things that are most important to us.

    I like reading Robert’s blogs in which he geeks out about the tools that he uses. Like me, he’s evolved what applications he uses, most recently documenting the digital tools he is using for his own sabbatical project (part 1 and part 2).

    Even though Kerry asked me about my suggestions for a note-taking tool, I can’t help but zoom back out and make sure we both understand that bigger picture. I can’t really answer the question as to giving my advice related to taking notes, unless I’m sure she’s got the other vital pieces going that she will need to maximize her time. Not to mention, giving herself permission to wander and be entirely “unproductive” for at least some portions of this time away.

    The Tools

    For any sabbatical, I’m making an assumption that at least some portion of it will involve doing research and some writing.

    References Manager

    There are many good references managers out there. I haven’t changed mine really ever, since landing on Zotero many years ago. I didn’t have a references manager when doing my master’s or doctorate, so when I talk about the power of one, I tend to sound like an old person talking about having to walk uphill to get to school, both ways, with a bit of “get off my lawn” sentiment, throughout.

    Hands down, if you’re going to research, or plan on doing some academic writing, it makes zero sense not to be capturing sources in a references manager. Off the top of my head, be sure you know how to:

    1. Add sources using the Zotero extension installed on your preferred browser. Zotero must be running in the background as an application, at least for how I have things configured on my Mac, but it will nudge you, if you forget.
    2. I choose to check each source, as I add it, though this isn’t necessary. Zotero is great because much of the time, it will grab the metadata associated with the item you have saved, including the author’s name, date of publication, URL, etc. However, sometimes websites don’t have their information set up such that some of the information gets missed. I would always way rather just add it, manually, in the moment I’m already on that page. Others just figure they’ll wait to see if they actually wind up citing that source.
    3. Cite sources within your word processor, which for me is Microsoft Word. I use the toolbar for Zotero when I need to cite a source, as I’m writing, I easily search for it, and then press enter and away I go.
    4. Create a bibliography using Zotero. This would have been a game changer, had I had this tool when I was in school. Some years back, they made this auto-update so each time you add a new source, your references list automatically updates, as you go. If you delete a sentence containing a citation, it is removed from your references. So cool.

    Digital Bookmarks

    For any other type of digital resource (ones I doubt I’ll wind up citing in formal, academic writing), I save them to my preferred digital bookmarking tool: Raindrop.io. I can’t even imaging doing any computing in any context without having a bookmarking tool available to save things to…

    I’ve got collections (folders) for Teaching in Higher Ed, AI (this one is publicly viewable as a page, and as an RSS feed), Teaching, Technology, and ones for specific classes, just as an example. Take a look at my Raindrop blog post, which talks more about why I recommend it and how I have it set up to support my ongoing learning.

    Note-Taking

    Now we’re finally getting around to Kerry’s original question. I had to first talk about a references manager and digital bookmarks, since I wanted to ensure that she will have at least Zotero (or similar tool) for the formal, academic writing, including citing sources and doing the necessary sense-making required for academic writing.

    Chicken Scratch (Quick Capture) Notes

    There’s a place in many people’s lives for quick-capture notes. You’re talking to someone and they mention something you want to remember. You don’t first want to figure out where to put that information; you just want to grab it, like you might a sticky note in an analog world.

    Hands down, for me, that app is Drafts.

    At this exact moment, I would consider myself a “bad” Drafts user. I’ve got 172 “chicken scratch” notes sitting, unorganized. That said, I don’t put anything there that it would be terrible if the notes got “lost” from my attention for a while. These past three months, I was a keynote speaker at a conference in Michigan, and did a pre-conference workshop for the POD Conference in San Diego. Being on the road means lots of opportunities for me to hear about something, or have an idea, that I just want to quickly capture in that moment, and get back to, later.

    I submitted grades late last night, so today means getting back to a more regular GTD weekly review, at which point I’ll be emptying my inboxes, including my Drafts inbox. If you’re curious about the process I use to accomplish this, I couldn’t recommend more another post by Robert Talbert: How and why to achieve inbox zero.

    One other thing I’ll mention about Drafts is that it is incredibly easy to get started with… and once you’re up and running, there are a gazillion bells and whistles you could discover, should you want to get even more benefit out of it.

    One fun thing I enjoy is using an app on my iPhone and Apple Watch (via a complication) called Whisper Memos, which lets me record a voice memo and then receive an email with my “ramblings turned into paragraphed articles.” However, instead of cluttering up my email inbox, I have it set up to send an email to my special Drafts email, which then sends the transcription (broken into paragraphs, which I find super handy) to my Drafts inbox, for later use.

    I also keep a Drafts workspace (not in my inbox) dedicated just to my various checklists, such as packing lists, a school departure checklist (which we haven’t had to use in a long while, since our kids keep getting older and more independent), password reset checklist (where are all of the different apps and services I need to visit, anytime I get forced to reset my password for work), and a checklist for all the places I have to change my profile photo, anytime in the future I get new headshots or otherwise want a change.

    Primary Note Taking Tool

    Now we’re finally to the real question Kerry was asking: What app should she use to take notes? Well, as I mentioned, I actually have a fair amount of them, but since I’m at least attempting to stay focused on the sabbatical needs, I had better get back to it now.

    My primary notetaking tool these days is Obsidian. Robert Talbert again does a great job of articulating how and why he uses Obsidian. A big driver for me is that if I ever want to switch things up down the road, I don’t have to worry about how to get stuff out of Obsidian. As it is just a “wrapper” or a “view” of plain text files that are sitting on my computer. If they ever decided to jack their users around by significant increases to their pricing model, without the added value one might expect, I wouldn’t be locked in at all. There are plenty of other note-taking apps that would know how to “talk” to and display the plain text files on my computer in a similar fashion as Obsidian.

    That said, some people might be intimidated by becoming familiar with writing using Markdown, which is the formatting used in plain text files. Since the text is “plain,” that means you can only make something bold by using other indicators that a given word or phrase is meant to be bold. However, I find you could get up and running with the vast majority of Markdown in less than five minutes, such that this isn’t as big a barrier as it might seem.

    As an example, I don’t have to type the formatting for bold, I can just high light those words and then press command-B on my keyboard, same as I would in any other writing context. Headings are just indicated by typing the number of pound signs at the start of a line. So the heading for this section of this post required four number signs, because it is a heading 4 (H4), and then I just press space and type the subheading, like normal.

    That said, you couldn’t go wrong with Bear, or Craft, if you aren’t as concerned about being able to get stuff easily out of them, should you ever change note taking tools in the future.

    Getting Started

    The tool we select is important, yes. But more important is how we set them up to help us achieve the intended purpose of wanting a note taking tool in the first place.

    Daily notes. I am not as disciplined about this as I once was, but hope to get back to doing daily notes. Carl Pullein talks about the history of the “daily note” and how to use them to keep yourself organized and focused.

    Meeting notes. I am close to 100% disciplined about taking notes during meetings (really helps me stay focused, as otherwise my mind can wander quite a bit), or when attending conferences or webinars. I keep a consistent naming convention for these notes, as follows: yyyy-mm-dd-meeting-name and then move the note to a dedicated folder in Obsidian. I only move the note into the follow after I have reviewed it for any “open loops” and then captured those in my task manager.

    Other writing. I’ve got folders for other types of writing that I do, as well. To me, the key is having a “home” for where things belong and to be super disciplined about consistent naming conventions, so I don’t get overwhelmed with the messiness of the creative process.

    That said, Kerry will first want to play around with any note taking tool she is considering just at the note level, before she worries about how she will organize things. Otherwise, it is way too easy to get overwhelmed and not cross over the finish line of getting started using a note taking tool, consistently.

    The University of Virginia Library offers ideas for how to organize research data across all disciplines. Don’t miss the part where they say to write down your organization system before you start, or in my experience, it is too easy to forget how I set things up in the first place.

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  • Higher ed should look to limited series podcasts.

    Higher ed should look to limited series podcasts.

    Pressing record is not a plan.

    Last November, I wrote in Inside Higher Ed about the expanding opportunities for scholars and mission-driven organizations to embrace audio. According to eMarketer, U.S. adults spend about 21 percent of their media time with audio, yet brands devote only about four percent of ad budgets to it. That gap is a missed opportunity and a signal to communicators and institutions ready to build real loyalty through sound.

    And since that article was published, I have seen more teams start to recognize and implement audio as an essential channel for embedding important ideas into the culture. University centers, institutes and nonprofits are launching shows, and some are even building podcast “networks.” HigherEdPods, a community for higher ed podcasters, already counts 133 members, and its directory lists 1,205 podcasts from 210 colleges and universities. This is good, and it should definitely be happening.

    But the boom in podcasting has also created a new problem: It’s increasingly a one-percenter’s game. A small slice of shows capture most of the listening, and everyone else is left fighting over whatever attention remains. You can see this in higher ed’s own backyard. Click over to the “Podcasts by popularity” tab on HigherEdPods and you’re greeted mostly by celebrity science and psychology shows—Huberman Lab, The Happiness Lab, WorkLife with Adam Grant, No Stupid Questions—and by the usual institutional suspects, the Ivies, Stanford, MIT, and other major brands, at the top. (One delightful outlier in the top 20 is History That Doesn’t Suck, run by a fellow in Integrated Studies at Utah Valley University, a regional public school in my home state of Utah.)

    And this pattern isn’t unique to higher ed. As Axios’s 2025 Media Trends report notes, top creators across formats are capturing a disproportionate share of engagement.

    The legacy advice to build a podcast audience is to “stick it out”—to publish weekly or in seasons, and to expect it to take 50 to 100 episodes before an audience begins to form. That might be fine advice for an independent creator whose main product is the show.

    For institutions, it’s terrible advice. Most don’t have the mandate, appetite, budget or capacity to grind out 100 episodes and hope. A few marquee institutions can launch a weekly interview show and pull in listeners on brand name alone, for a while. But keeping them is another story. For other institutions and centers still building their reputations and networks, asking an audience to commit to an endless series is an even taller order. The appetite for podcasts is still strong; people simply have more, and more polished, choices than ever.

    When podcasting got easy, formats got generic.

    Part of how we got here is that podcasting became easy, in all the best and worst ways. The tools improved, the price of decent audio gear plummeted, and platforms made it almost frictionless to publish. That lowered barrier is great for access and experimentation. It also means “we should have a podcast” is now a default instinct, not a strategic decision.

    The result is a glut of weekly interview shows that all feel vaguely the same: a host, a guest, 45 minutes of conversation and a title that reads like a panel description. When these shows fall flat, they usually fail in one of two ways. They sound like a lecture (overstructured, dense, information-first) or a meeting (under-edited, meandering, inside baseball). Both signal the same problem: no designed listener experience.

    What’s been lost in the rush is not enthusiasm or expertise, but form.

    Weekly shows encourage institutions to think in terms of slots to be filled rather than journeys to be designed. The question becomes “Who do we put on the podcast next?” instead of “What story are we telling, and who actually needs to hear it?”

    There’s a better fit for how institutions work and how people listen: the limited series.

    From Endless Feed to Bingeable Arc

    A limited series treats audio not as an endless stream but as a complete experience. Instead of promising listeners “new episodes every Tuesday,” you promise them something like:

    “Five episodes that will change the way you think about X.”

    That simple shift does three important things.

    First, it aligns with how people actually listen. A recent Podcast Trends Report found that about 60 percent of listeners say mini-series or seasonal podcasts are easier to complete than ongoing shows. And SiriusXM notes that among binge listeners, roughly 60 percent say they finish an entire series within the first week of its release, and nearly 9 in 10 say they’re happy to listen to episodes that are several months old. In other words, a well-crafted limited series can pull people through quickly and keep working long after launch.

    Second, it matches how institutions actually operate. Universities and mission-driven organizations already think in projects and initiatives: a new center launch, a major report, a grant, a campaign, an anniversary. A three- to 10-episode arc maps cleanly onto that reality. It becomes a narrative companion to the work and a way to walk a specific audience through the why, the how and the stakes.

    Third, it forces craft. When you only have a few episodes, you can’t afford to wander. You have to choose a central question, decide whose voices matter most and design an arc that gives each episode a clear job to do. You’re not filling airtime; you’re building a story people can binge and remember.

    We’re already seeing this in higher education. Stanford’s Haas Center for Public Service recently produced Mosaic: 40 Years of the Haas Center, a three-episode limited series on the past, present and future of public service at Stanford, all organized around the question of why service learning is an essential part of student life and how its impact extends beyond the university.

    And this isn’t an either/or choice. Limited series can live inside an existing weekly show as clearly branded “special seasons,” giving loyal listeners something to sink their teeth into while also creating a front door for new audiences who want a finite, bingeable story before they decide whether to subscribe. They can also be packaged and repurposed long after the initial release as a project you can point to in syllabi, campaigns, grant reports and fundraising campaigns.

    The AI, Unscripted podcast from the University of Maryland shows what this kind of nested limited series can look like. This seven-part arc, designed to guide faculty from AI-curious to AI-confident, lives within the broader Moving the Needle teaching-and-learning podcast. It opens with a “host handover” episode between Moving the Needle host Scott Riley and the AI, Unscripted co-hosts—Mary Crowley-Farrell, Michael Mills and Jennifer Potter—and then rotates those co-hosts through episodes on AI in business, journalism, nursing, psychology, English and graduate education. The episodes are published in the same Moving the Needle feed and clearly tagged as a “Special Edition,” making the series easy to find while still drawing traffic to the main show.

    For institutional podcasters, that’s the big opportunity in this crowded, one-percenter landscape. You don’t need to win the “most episodes” game. You need to make a small number of episodes so compelling, so clearly scoped and so bingeable that the right people choose to press play, and then keep going.

    Danielle LeCourt is the founder and principal of De LeCourt, a strategic communications studio that helps universities, research institutes and mission-driven organizations turn complex ideas into stories that people care about. A longtime strategist and podcaster, she has worked with institutions such as Harvard, Southern Methodist University, the University of Delaware, and Genentech to elevate the visibility and impact of their work through storytelling and sound.

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