Tag: Higher

  • NSF Lowers Grant Review Requirements, NIH Hunts for Phrases

    NSF Lowers Grant Review Requirements, NIH Hunts for Phrases

    The NIH and NSF, which both fund research, gave staff new grant review instructions this month.

    sorbetto | DigitalVision Vectors

    Two major federal research funding agencies are altering their grant review processes. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is scaling back its reviews of grant proposals, according to a Dec. 1 internal memo that Science obtained and published, while STAT reported that the National Institutes of Health distributed guidance Friday ordering staff to use a “text analysis tool” to search for certain phrases.

    The NSF memo says the government shutdown, which ended in November, hampered its progress toward doling out all its funding by the end of the new fiscal year. It said “we lost critical time” and “now face [a] significant backlog of unreviewed proposals and canceled review panels. In parallel, our workforce has been significantly reduced.”

    The memo said the changes “enable Program Officers to expedite award and decline decisions,” including by moving away from the “usual three or more reviews” of proposals. It said that, now, “full proposals requiring external review must be reviewed by a minimum of two reviewers or have a minimum of two reviews. An internal review may substitute for one.”

    NSF spokesperson Mike England didn’t provide Inside Higher Ed the memo. He said in an email that the changes are “part of a comprehensive approach to streamlining processes and reducing administrative burden” and “also help expedite the processing of shutdown-related backlogs while maintaining the rigor of the external merit review process.”

    As for the NIH guidance, while it instructs program officers on how to review and possibly terminate grants, STAT reported that “some outside experts said the guidance is a positive step, making future terminations more of a dialogue that researchers can push back on.”

    But another media outlet, NOTUS, published a more critical article on the guidance, saying the “Trump administration is pausing new funding for National Institutes of Health grants that include terms like ‘health equity’ and ‘structural racism,’ pending review.” NOTUS reported that the guidance says new funding won’t be provided to “misaligned” grants until “all areas of non-alignment have been addressed.”

    Both articles said NIH ordered staff to use a “computational text analysis tool” to scan current and new grants for terms that may mean the submissions are misaligned with NIH priorities. (The NSF memo similarly said “Program Officers are also expected to maximize their use of available automated merit review tools, especially tools that identify proposals that should be returned without review.”)

    Andrew G. Nixon, a spokesperson for the Health and Human Services Department, which includes NIH, didn’t provide Inside Higher Ed a copy of the NIH guidance. In an email, he wrote that “claims that NIH issued a ‘banned words list’ or conducted word searches to remove specific terms from grants are unequivocally false. NIH has never prohibited the use of any particular words in grant applications.”

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  • Come and be an AI meat widget!

    Come and be an AI meat widget!

    Joining their Big Ten brethren, Purdue University recently announced that they will be adding an “AI working competency” graduation requirement that will go into effect for first-year students entering Fall 2026.

    I have some questions. And also some concerns.

    Back in October I shared my impressions and experiences having travelled to a number of different institutions that are directly confronting the challenge of how to evolve instructions and operations to deal with the existence of generative AI technology.

    I identified a number of common approaches that seemed to be bearing fruit when it comes to engaging and energizing the entire university community at meeting these challenges.

    This is, above all, a chance to refresh and renew the work of the institution and in the places operating in that spirit I’ve witnessed considerable hope for a good future.

    1. Administrations must lead, but they should lead from a position of institutional values that are centered in the discussion.
    2. The challenge must be viewed as a collaboration between administration, faculty, staff and, yes, students, where each constituent group has an opportunity to articulate their views under the umbrella of those root institutional values.
    1. As part of this process, there must be space for difference that preserves individual freedoms. Faculty should both have the resources necessary to experiment with AI use and the power to refuse its integration. Students must ultimately be respected as the chief agents behind their own educations.
    2. The discussion must go beyond merely adding another untethered competency. As I say in that previous column, we must “do more than doing school.” Layering AI on top of the status quo is a missed opportunity to reimagine the work of teaching and learning in ways that will make institutions far more resilient to whatever additional technological changes are coming.

    Working from the reporting at Forbes, I can declare with some confidence that what Purdue is proposing is the opposite of these emergent best practices that I have seen elsewhere.

    Here is how the initiative is characterized:

    The requirement will be embedded into every undergraduate program at Purdue, but it won’t be done in a “one-size-fits-all” manner. Instead, the Board is delegating authority to the provost, who will work with the deans of all the academic colleges to develop discipline-specific criteria and proficiency standards for the new campus-wide requirement. Chiang [Purdue President Mung Chiang] said students will have to demonstrate a working competence through projects that are tailored to the goals of individual programs. The intent is to not require students to take more credit hours, but to integrate the new AI expectation into existing academic requirements.

    This is, in a word, impossible. At least it’s impossible in any way that’s genuinely meaningful or useful to students.

    Purdue has over 40,000 undergraduate students. They have more than 200 majors. They offer thousands of different courses. They have thousands of faculty. The expectation is that specific proficiency standards will be created for every single one of these programs, and after that, students will have to be held accountable to these proficiencies by next Fall by doing “projects.”

    Does that sound possible? Because it’s not.

    As a source of comparison, consider how long it takes to redo an institution’s general education curriculum which involves many fewer courses and fewer faculty.

    Consider, also, as should be clear to anyone paying attention, we “don’t know how to teach AI.”

    The fact that we don’t know how to teach AI is why the institutions engaging in the best practices have provided resources to the people best placed to figure out what kinds of proficiencies, experiences and projects may be useful, the faculty. They are treating the problem seriously as a challenge for the university to figure out how to serve its constituents.

    Purdue is offering a press release, not a plan. It’s not even a policy. They are cooking up a recipe for chaos and demoralization, for half-assed B.S. meant to satisfy a bureaucratic box-checking exercise. This is serious stuff, and Purdue is treating it unseriously.

    It’s worth asking why. One reason may be that Purdue is well-enmeshed with their corporate partners (primarily Google) and locking in experiences that use the products of these partners is pleasing to those partners. Purdue Provost Patrick Wolfe said, “it was ‘absolutely imperative that a requirement like this is well informed by continual input from industry partners and employers more broadly,’ and therefore he has ‘asked that each of our academic colleges establishes a standing industry advisory board focusing on employers’ AI competency needs and that these boards are used to help ensure a continual, annual refresh of our AI curriculum and requirements to ensure that we keep our discipline-specific criteria continually current.”

    But guess who else doesn’t know what AI competencies employees need? Employers!

    And guess who else doesn’t know what we’re supposed to be doing with this stuff? The tech developers themselves! Microsoft recently “scaled back” its AI sales targets because “nobody is using copilot.”

    Purdue is sending clear signals to both students and employers that they are in the business of producing certified meat widgets for the AI-mediated future, even as we have no idea what that future may entail. There may be some students who find this proposition attractive, but it is not a leap in logic to imagine that the endpoint of this future is one where large, costly entities like Purdue University are not a necessary part of the equation.

    Also, I think there is significant evidence that AI meat widget is not what students are looking for from their university experiences.

    I will lay down a marker and predict there will be much sound and fury to meet the demands of the board, but it will signify nothing.

    There is no need to waste everyone’s time chasing phantoms. We know how to work this problem, and what Purdue is doing ain’t it.

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  • Turning Point’s Student Membership Keeps Growing

    Turning Point’s Student Membership Keeps Growing

    Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, was shot and killed Sept. 10.

    Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune/Getty Images News/Getty Images

    Three months after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the footprint of the right-wing youth organization he founded continues to grow on college campuses.

    This week, Turning Point USA chapters at both Indiana University Bloomington and the University of Oklahoma reported membership surges. According to the Indiana Daily Student (IDS) and Indy Star, IU’s chapter says its membership has tripled this fall, from 180 to 363. At the University of Oklahoma—which put an instructor on leave after the Turning Point chapter accused them of “viewpoint discrimination”—the group’s membership has grown from 15 to 2,000 over the past year, NBC reported.

    Those increases follow other local media reports about new chapters and membership growth at scores of other universities across the country, including the University of Missouri, and Vanderbilt and Brigham Young Universities. Within eight days of Kirk’s death, Turning Point said it received messages from 62,000 students interested in starting a new chapter or getting involved with one.

    “I think that our club has kind of become a beacon for conservatives,” a Turning Point chapter member told IDS, Indiana University at Bloomington’s campus newspaper. “So, after his death, more people showed up, more people got involved, and it was really nice to kind of see a scene in the way people wanted to get involved.”

    Kirk founded Turning Point USA in 2012, with the mission of “to identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote the principles of freedom, free markets, and limited government.”

    He gained notoriety in conservative circles by traveling to college campuses across the country, challenging students to prove wrong his conservative stances on topics such as race, gender, abortion and immigration.

    On Sept. 10, Kirk was speaking to a crowd at Utah Valley University when a gunman fatally shot him in the neck. After his death, Trump and his allies moved to canonize Kirk as an exemplar of civic debate—and called to punish anyone who publicly disagreed. Numerous colleges and universities have since suspended or fired faculty and staff who criticized Kirk for his political views.

    Although some faculty and students have objected to new Turning Point chapters, the students growing the organization insist they’re committed to considering all perspectives.

    “You have a place here, you’ll always have a place here,” Jack Henning, president of Indiana University’s Turning Point chapter, told IDS. “We don’t discriminate against any viewpoints at all, we debate them. That’s what American democracy was built upon.”

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  • Helping Students Achieve Economic Mobility

    Helping Students Achieve Economic Mobility

    Colleges that help provide economic mobility for first-generation and low-income students are more likely to have recruitment and retention practices that focus on sense of belonging.

    FatCamera/E+/Getty Images

    As college students have become more diverse over the past few decades, a growing focus in education policy has centered on the university’s role in influencing their economic mobility.

    New research from Public Agenda evaluates the promising practices colleges and universities employ to improve the earning potential of students from low-income families and provide a stronger return on investment, compared to other institutions.

    The report outlines three primary themes across policies and practices to advance student success: involving families, creating supportive campus systems, and investing resources in low-income students.

    Survey says: Two in five students said one of their main reasons for attending college is to increase their earnings potential, according to data from Inside Higher Ed’s 2025 Student Voice survey. The most popular response was “to pursue a specific career or profession,” followed by “to gain knowledge and skills.”

    Students aged 25 and older were more likely to signal they enrolled to increase earnings potential (53 percent), as were students working full-time (48 percent) and those attending two-year colleges (44 percent), compared to their traditional-aged peers or four-year counterparts.

    Methodology: Staff at Public Agenda traveled to 10 colleges or universities in Michigan, Texas and California in 2024 to conduct interviews with administrators, faculty and staff; they also held focus groups with students and alumni. In addition to the qualitative research, Public Agenda leveraged data from the Department of Education’s College Scorecard to evaluate trends in socioeconomic mobility by institution type and student persona.

    The research: One of the overarching takeaways Public Agenda staff gleaned from their site visits was that the institutions most effective in boosting students’ economic mobility tended to value and respect student-facing staff and their perspectives on improving systems.

    “Success at the institutions we studied depends on cultivating an environment in which everyone recognizes that the people who interact directly with students possess the most important information and have the clearest ideas about how to fix problems,” according to the report.

    The evaluated colleges prioritized recruiting first-generation students and engaging with their families to help them understand the accessibility and value of higher education, because they were most likely to go straight into the workforce from high school, rather than consider college.

    “When senior leaders and front-line staff at these institutions refer to ‘the competition,’ they are talking about the forces pulling students away from college—not about other colleges,” the report said.

    It also noted that families and local schools are invited to campus for various events to establish familiarity and comfort with the institution. Offering resources in various languages or connecting families with bilingual staff can build trust and demonstrate commitment. Hiring staff who share identities with students, or are alumni themselves, can create a support system that helps first-gen and low-income students feel seen and understood.

    “The baseline of shared experience functions as a lubricant, reducing friction in efforts to achieve commonality of purpose among everyone working at the institution,” according to the report.

    Providing peer-to-peer resources and creating physical spaces on campus that engage learners can also establish a sense of belonging.

    In addition, researchers noted that creating affordable pathways to education can increase students’ overall economic mobility. Each of the states evaluated had some form of state funding for low-income students to enroll in college, and many had institution-level initiatives that bridge funding gaps between the Pell Grant and state dollars.

    In addition to meeting tuition costs, colleges invested dollars in data systems that relieved staff of burdensome administrative duties and increased the number of academic advisers on campus to provide more personalized, one-on-one advice and encouragement for students.

    Other trends: Researchers also underscored the role of financial stability in achieving socioeconomic mobility for low-income students. Financial obstacles and personal challenges are the top reasons students leave college.

    Ensuring students are aware of how to access emergency aid on campus or other social support benefits, such as food pantries or childcare assistance, is also critical, researchers wrote.

    Many low-income students work while enrolled, so creating opportunities for student employment on campus or connecting students to meaningful employment experiences can help them stay on track to graduate and develop career skills.

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  • Higher Education Inquirer : Understanding U.S. Campus Safety and Mental Health: Guidance for International Students

    Higher Education Inquirer : Understanding U.S. Campus Safety and Mental Health: Guidance for International Students

    The tragic shooting at Brown University in December 2025, which claimed two lives and left nine students wounded, is a stark reminder that even elite U.S. campuses are not immune to violence. For international students, understanding this incident requires placing it in the broader context of the United States’ history of social dangers, treatment of mental illness, and policies affecting foreigners.

    The United States has historically had higher rates of violent crime, including gun-related incidents, than many other developed nations. While campus shootings remain statistically rare, they reflect deeper societal issues: widespread gun access, social inequality, and a culture that often prioritizes armed self-protection over preventative public safety measures. Universities, traditionally viewed as open spaces for learning and discussion, are increasingly sites of surveillance and armed response, reshaping the student experience.

    Foreign students and immigrants may face additional vulnerabilities. Throughout U.S. history, immigrants have often been subject to discrimination, harassment, or violence based on nationality, race, or religion. Universities are not insulated from these pressures, and international students can be particularly susceptible to microaggressions, exclusion, or even targeted hostility. These risks were heightened under the Trump administration, when rhetoric and policies frequently cast foreigners as suspicious or undesirable. Visa restrictions, heightened scrutiny of foreign scholars, and public statements fostering distrust created an environment in which international students might feel unsafe or isolated.

    Mental illness plays a critical role in understanding campus violence, but its treatment in the United States is inconsistent. While many universities provide counseling centers, therapy services, and crisis hotlines, the broader mental health system in the U.S. remains fragmented and under-resourced. Access often depends on insurance coverage, ability to pay, and proximity to care, leaving some individuals untreated or inadequately supported. Cultural stigmas and underdiagnosis can exacerbate the problem, particularly among minority and immigrant populations. International students, unfamiliar with local mental health norms or hesitant to seek care due to cost or cultural barriers, may be less likely to access help until crises arise.

    U.S. universities deploy extensive surveillance systems, emergency protocols, and campus police to respond to threats. These measures aim to mitigate harm once an incident occurs but focus less on prevention of violence or addressing underlying causes, including untreated mental illness. Students are required to participate in drills and safety training, creating a reactive rather than preventative model.

    Compared to other countries, the U.S. approach is distinct. Canadian universities emphasize mental health support and unarmed security. European campuses often maintain open environments with minimal surveillance and preventive intervention strategies. Many Asian universities operate in low-crime contexts with community-based safety measures rather than extensive surveillance. The U.S. approach emphasizes rapid law enforcement response and monitoring, reflecting a society with higher firearm prevalence and less coordinated mental health infrastructure.

    The Brown University tragedy underscores a sobering reality for international students: while the U.S. offers world-class education, it is a nation with elevated risks of violent crime, inconsistent mental health care, and historical and ongoing challenges for foreigners. Awareness, preparedness, community engagement, and proactive mental health support are essential tools for international students navigating higher education in this environment.

    Sources

    The Guardian: Brown University shooting: police release more videos of person of interest as FBI offers reward

    Reuters: Manhunt for Brown University shooter stretches into fourth day

    Washington Post: Hunt for Brown University gunman starts anew as tension rises

    AP News: Brown University shooting victims identified

    People: Brown University shooting victim Kendall Turner

    WUSF: Brown University shooting victims update

    Wikipedia: 2025 Brown University shooting

    Pew Research Center: International Students in the United States

    Brookings Institution: Immigrant Vulnerability and Safety in the U.S.

    National Alliance on Mental Illness: Mental Health in Higher Education

    Journal of American College Health: Mental Health Services Utilization Among College Students

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  • That’s All, Folks? Five points of note about higher education in 2025

    That’s All, Folks? Five points of note about higher education in 2025

    Nick Hillman, HEPI’s Director, takes a look at some of the changes affecting higher education in 2025. (These remarks were originally delivered to the Executive Advisory Council of HEPI Partner Ellucian on the evening of 15 December 2025.)

    Room at the top

    The higher education sector continued to see huge churn in those who oversee it during 2025. In the middle of last year, we had a change of Government; in the middle of this year, we saw a new Chief Executive at UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) when Professor Sir Ian Chapman succeeded Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser, and a new Chair in the Office for Students (OfS), when Professor Edward Peck replaced the interim Chair, Sir David Behan.

    Then last month, we heard that John Blake, the Director for Fair Access and Participation, one of the three really big executive jobs at the OfS, had stood down with pretty much immediate effect – with John’s predecessor, Professor Chris Millward, taking back the reins.

    And we end the year with the news that the hardest job in the whole of English higher education is soon to fall vacant, as the Chief Executive of the OfS, Susan Lapworth, will stand down at the end of her four-year term in charge. So one thing seems certain: 2026 will see a continuing shift in the OfS’s priorities.

    There are other personnel changes I could mention too, such as the incoming CEO of the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), Kathleen Fisher, who will take over early in the new year. 

    It feels like we have had a new broom in other respects too. While our two main Ministers in Whitehall, Baroness Smith (Minister for Skills) and Lord Vallance (Minister for Science), remain in place, their jobs have changed significantly as a result of the reshuffle forced on the Prime Minister when Angela Rayner resigned.

    Jacqui Smith is no longer just a Minister in the Department for Education as she was at the beginning of the year; she is now also a Minister in the Department for Work and Pensions. Meanwhile, Patrick Vallance is not just a Minister in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology; he is also now a Minister in the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.

    If, like me, you thought it was all a bit of a mess before – with the teaching functions of higher education separated from the research functions of universities at a ministerial, departmental and quango level – it is undeniably even more of a mess now.

    And who knows what the 2026 elections in Scotland and Wales will mean for oversight of higher education, not to mention the local elections in England? (Look out for some HEPI output on Wales early in 2026.)

    Incoherence?

    Perhaps the biggest higher education news in 2025 was the Post-16 Education and Skills white paper. Certainly, Ministers had seemingly spent the previous 12 months and more responding to every tricky higher education and skills question by telling people to wait for this all-important document. Yet when it appeared, many felt it was a bit of a damp squib.

    The clue to the problem lies in the Foreword to the white paper, which is signed by three different Secretaries of State: the Rt Hon. Bridget Phillipson MP, Secretary of State for Education; the Rt Hon. Pat McFadden MP, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions; and the Rt Hon. Liz Kendall MP, the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology. On reading the document, it seemed a bit too obvious who had overseen which bits with some frustrating cracks between the different sections. Together, the ideas seemed to be less than the sum of their parts, as they did not really add up to a truly coherent new plan in the way white papers are meant to.

    For example, the white paper urged institutions to change direction, for example by doing less (labelled ‘specialisation’) and also, perhaps contradictorily, collaborating more. But the white paper lacked the clear incentives necessary for institutions to overcome countervailing pressures, such as those that come from market competition, institutions’ own statutory charitable responsibilities, a shortage of resources, a highly unionised workforce and the priorities of league table compilers.

    In the cold light of day, the top line of the white paper seemed to be ‘we want you to use your autonomy to do what we want you to do’, but with little in the way of policy levers or new funding to persuade institutions to do something radically different from what they have been doing.

    As I noted in one blog before the white paper came out, this is the same challenge that Lionel Robbins wrestled with over 60 years ago, for the Robbins report concluded:

    it is not reasonable to expect that the Government, which is the source of finance, should be content with an absence of co-ordination or should be without influence thereon. … where free discussion is not sufficient to elicit the desired result in the desired time, it is still possible, and may often be expedient, to attempt to secure it by special incentives. … in emphasising the claims of academic freedom, we stipulate that they must be consistent with the maintenance of coherence throughout the system as a whole.

    It is not only me who sees these sorts of problems with the white paper by the way. For example, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, has said:

    the proposals do not always add up to a coherent overall strategy. There is insufficient indication of how the different reforms connect, or strategic vision for how key trade-offs in the system will be resolved.

    Thinking about this whole issue more parochially, it strikes me that there is an analogy with think-tank land. HEPI is an autonomous independent charity, just as most universities are. If Ministers were suddenly to declare that think tanks should specialise and collaborate, I suspect it would only happen if this were in line with each organisation’s charitable objectives and strategy, if each organisation’s Trustees agreed and if there were sufficient resources to make it feasible. It certainly would not happen just because Ministers say it should.

    Resources

    Yet to be fair to the Government, they did use the Post-16 white paper to do something important and overdue that the previous Government repeatedly chickened out of doing: raising tuition fees in line with inflation. This will protect the unit-of-resource spent on students to some degree and is aligned with the sector’s lobbying, so the representative bodies and mission groups have generally felt obliged to welcome the news.

    But in truth, the extra money is chicken feed because it merely beds in the real terms cuts that have occurred since 2012 and takes no account of rising costs, including those imposed on the sector by the current Government, such as higher National Insurance payments. Any university on the cusp of discussing a breach of convenant with their main lender is unlikely to feel in a much more secure position now than before the tuition fee rises were announced.

    And this year, we also had the announcement and then fleshing out of another new cost in England’s new International Student Levy, to be set at a little under £1,000 per student. When this was first announced, many people I know seemed to think it was such a mad idea it could never be implemented. But never underestimate the disdain for universities among some policymakers, especially when they are under pressure from a resurgent populist right. While it continues to seem mad to most of us that we would voluntarily self-impose a big new tariff on one of the most successful export sectors of our whole economy, it does tell us something about current political realities and also reminds us we live in a world of ever higher borders in which global conflict sadly no longer looks so unlikely.

    When it comes to the other big resource issue of student living costs and maintenance support, 2025 saw no change to the way that we deal with rising living costs among students, with the only clear commitment to continued increases in line with forecast inflation, which tends to run far behind real inflation and is anyway a continuation of the status quo dressed up as something new.

    Our research from August of this year suggests students need around £20k a year, twice as much as the standard maximum maintenance loan, to take part fully in university life. Our numbers are used by the Foreign Office for international scholars but not (yet) by the Department for Education for home students. So no wonder, as the HEPI / Advance HE 2025 Student Academic Experience Survey as well as our more recent work with a diverse group of four universities led by the University of Lancashire shows, two-thirds of today’s undergraduates now take part in paid employment during term time.

    Personally, I would like to see a modern version of the Anderson Committee, which sat from 1958 until 1960 and which considered student living costs in detail, leading to the first set of national rules on maintenance support. However, we should not kid ourselves on the likelihood of this happening: the same arguments that are used against increases to the benefits bill will likely continue to be used against changes to students’ maintenance costs at a time when there is such a big deficit and when we are spending so much on debt interest as a country.

    In the absence of better maintenance and at a time of rising unemployment, my best guess is people will still choose to go to higher education but may look for cheaper ways to live as a student, such as living at home. It had been said that, ‘You can see the commuter student everywhere—except in the student data‘ but it now appears as if the data might be catching up too. Last week, UCAS noted:

    31% of UK 18-year-old accepted applicants indicated in their UCAS application that they intended to live at home this year – a record high and a slight increase on 30% in 2024. This compares to 22% a decade ago, with the number of young people planning to live at home climbing steadily since 2016.

    Young people from the most disadvantaged backgrounds are also more likely to live at home. In total, 52% of UK 18-year-olds in IMD Quintile 1 indicated they planned to live at home compared to 17.9% of UK 18-year-olds in IMD Quintile 5. By nation, this means IMD Quintile 1 in England are 3.5 times more likely to live at home, SIMD Quintile 1 in Scotland are 1.7 times more likely and WIMD Quintile 1 in Wales 2.3 times more likely. There is no difference between NIMDM Quintiles 1 and 5 in Northern Ireland.

    The pipeline

    Another big event in higher education in 2025 was Keir Starmer’s ‘bold new target’, made at the Labour Party Conference, to get ‘two-thirds of young people participating in higher-level learning – academic, technical or apprenticeships – by age 25’.

    Personally, I welcome this, though it is important to note it is not actually that ambitious but rather a continuation of the direction of travel of the last few decades. Oddly, the new target was dressed up as an attack on Blair’s 50% target, long since surpassed. Either we have to wonder whether the Government’s heart is really in it or, more likely, whether they thought they were performing some clever-clever political trick in announcing a progressive target in a regressive way.

    Either way, to hit the target we need to make further strides in widening participation. And one disappointment this year was a continuing failure to grip the educational underperformance of boys, a long-term interest of HEPI and the theme of a report we published in March of this year.

    When Ministers want positive headlines in right-of-centre media, they tend to speak out about the educational underachievements of white working-class boys, including in August of this year during exam results season. So I was presumably not the only person to be disappointed that October’s Post-16 white paper or November’s Government-commissioned Curriculum and Assessment Review and associated Government response did not include clear measures aimed at addressing the issue.

    Sadly, this fight needs to go on – and that is one reason why, last week, we published a blog by the author of some vitally important new research from the Netherlands proving the achievement gap between boys and girls is ‘larger in favour of girls in countries where women are more strongly overrepresented among secondary-school teachers’.

    Technology

    Given my audience, I touch upon my fifth and final topic of technology, including AI, a little trepidatiously. But I do not want to leave it out because the appetite for discussing it is huge: HEPI has been going nearly 25 years and our most well-read piece of output ever is the 2025 wave of our annual survey on students’ use of generative AI, which came out in February of this year. Similarly, our most well-read full-length HEPI Report of 2025 was our collection with the University of Southampton on AI and the Future of Universities, which looked at how AI could change everything from strategic planning, through teaching, to university research.

    So the march of AI continues at pace, but it still feels as if no one has fully worked out what it all means yet, including for education. Alongside all those hits on our AI work, for me 2025 will also partly be remembered for some pretty embarrassing AI cock ups, including:

    One of the more interesting books I read this year, and one which I reviewed for the HEPI website, was More Than Words: How to Think about Writing in the Age of AI by John Warner.

    In this book, the author upends one traditional approach to AI by arguing that it is wrong for students to think generative AI is good for creating an initial draft. Instead, he argues the first draft is the most important draft ‘as it establishes the intention behind the expression.’ In other words, just as we might expect a musician to use technology to hone a song they have written; we would probably approach a song that was entirely created by AI from the ground up with a little more scepticism about its originality or authenticity. 

    You may or may not think I am right about this but you can come to your own judgement later this week when our last publication of the year (and one of the biggest we have ever done) appears. This gathers together 30 of my book reviews about higher education that have appeared on the HEPI website and other outlets over the past 13[ years, since 2012/13 when those higher tuition fees first began. After all, our goal as a think tank is to make people think; it is not to tell people what to think. So do look out for this new publication on Thursday.

    Finally, let me end by thanking everyone who has supported our work in whatever way in 2025 and wishing all our readers the very best for the Christmas and New Year break.

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  • Colleges Don’t “Over-Accommodate” Disabilities (opinion)

    Colleges Don’t “Over-Accommodate” Disabilities (opinion)

    In the current climate, one might question whether academic accommodations are the most urgent avenue for discourse. Yet a pattern of uncontested opinion pieces in spaces like The Atlantic (the newly published “Accommodation Nation”), The Chronicle of Higher Education (“Are Colleges Getting Disability Accommodations All Wrong?), The Wall Street Journal (“Colleges Bend the Rules for More Students, Give Them Extra Help”) and, indeed, Inside Higher Ed itself (“How Accommodating Can (Should) I Be?”) speaks to the enduring cultural conflict around how the Americans With Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act are actualized in higher education.

    As members of the executive board of the Association on Higher Education and Disability (AHEAD) in Virginia—a professional organization for staff of disability service offices—It is our intention to define and defuse the recurring arguments of this specific “type” of opinion article, which for convenience we will call the “Do Colleges Over-Accommodate?” piece.

    Setting the Table With Statistics

    It is common to see these claims begin from an assumption that disability accommodations “are skyrocketing”—a claim that sensationalizes statistics. One author cites the large volume of accommodation letters sent by a university per semester. Such a claim is rooted in either misunderstanding or deliberate misrepresentation of accommodations. At any institution, the total count of all accommodation letters sent appears disproportionately large, because each student is enrolled in multiple courses.

    A better accounting would come from data on the representation of disabled students within the institution. Recent National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) data shows that among public, 4-year institutions, 10.1 percent of them report that students with disabilities make up 10 percent or more of their student population. This is an increase from the 1.5 percent of institutions in 2010–2011, but why is it shocking that disabled students also want to go to universities that their nondisabled peers attend?

    The NCES data do suggest that disabled students are more likely to enroll in private institutions (more than 23 percent of private nonprofit colleges report that students with disabilities make up 10 percent or more of their student population). While this is supportive of a claim that students from privileged backgrounds have higher access to accommodations (and indeed, research supports this) it is telling that authors who put elite institutions in the spotlight are more focused on reducing accommodations available to these students than on increasing the support available to students at less elite institutions.

    It is also important to view these figures in the context of the post-ADA era. The ADA is only 35 years old, and its amendments passed in 2008. Today’s students come from an environment where they are more likely to expect accessibility, which is reflected in these “skyrocketing”—or “breathtaking”—numbers.

    Categorizing the Case Against Accommodations

    In our review of the “Do Colleges Over-Accommodate” archetype, we saw a clear pattern of essential recurring arguments:

    1. Academic accommodations unfairly advantage disabled students.
    2. Disabled students “game the system.”
    3. More rigid documentation standards are needed to “create equity.”

    In these arguments, we see unfortunate parallels to other attacks on civil rights playing out in our public discourse. Each individual claim requires a full-throated counterargument—which we will provide below.

    Claim: Accommodations Convey Advantage

    This is the most prevalent claim within these articles, and we will spend the greatest effort defusing it. This claim suggests that all accommodations create advantages for students with disabilities—that we should fear for “fairness,” or that accommodations will compromise rigor. In this piece, the author asserts that additional testing time for students with disabilities “is as unfair to other students as a head start would be to other runners.”

    This metaphor reveals a flawed assumption—that education is inherently a place of competition, with a fixed number of winners and losers. A zero-sum game. But universities are not limited in their capacity to provide degrees, nor is there a fixed number of A’s available.

    Still, there is value in ensuring fairness. Disability services officers (DSOs) develop rigorous criteria for assessing and analyzing cases where academic accommodations would “fundamentally alter” key aspects of courses. DSOs also seek to apply a measured approach to approval of accommodations, consistent with professional guidance. The purpose of accommodations—to return to the metaphor—is ensuring that students run in the same race.

    Research such as this 2022 U.K.-based study, which found that accommodations in most cases “worked as intended and helped [with] leveling the playing field,” challenges this narrative further.

    The work of DSOs relies on an interactive process at the individual level. A student who is dyslexic may benefit from a dictation tool for writing essays in a way that another would not. A student who has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder may benefit from a quiet testing environment—but not all students with the same diagnosis would have the same needs. The individualized identification and selection of supports to address disability-specific barriers is the cornerstone of DSO work, and it is work that our offices conduct effectively.

    Claim: Disabled Students ‘Game the System’

    Running through these articles is an implicit—at times explicit—assumption that DSOs are either tricked by students and their medical providers into approving accommodations inappropriately, or that students deliberately misuse even appropriate accommodations. Implicitly, this assumption is communicated to readers through less-than-subtle reliance on words like “claim” for how students communicate their disability, rather than “disclose.” Explicitly, this line of argument appeals to scholarship debating the ways in which individual disabilities are defined.

    Some of the most-cited sources in support of this claim are of questionable reliability. For example, this article from the Canadian Journal Psychological Injury and Law has been held as “sobering” evidence that DSOs are insufficiently rigorous in approving accommodations. In the study, researchers asked DSO staff if they would accommodate a fictitious prospective student based solely on what the researchers deemed insufficient documentation.

    Setting aside gaps in context between Canada and the U.S., what a DSO professional would hypothetically do and what they would do when presented with a live student are different. Our professional guidelines encourage the use of self-report, triangulated with other forms of information. Without following a student through the interactive process, the authors project bias and incorrect assumptions onto the work of DSO professionals—just as asking a doctor to suggest treatment without an exam would likely produce similarly “sobering” results.

    Claim: Rigid Documentation Requirements Create Equity

    The inaccuracy of this claim is likely to be apparent to anyone involved in accommodations review. Moreover, some of the sources cited by proponents of this claim directly contradict it. For example, Ashley Yull’s 2015 article about the intersection of race class, and disability notes:

    “Premising access to accommodations in post-secondary education on receipt of a psychiatric diagnosis magnifies the negative impact of childhood poverty.”

    And Bea Waterfield and Emma Whelan observed in their 2017 article:

    “SES [socioeconomic status] contributes to the experience of disadvantage for learning disabled students when they lack the financial means to obtain required diagnoses.”

    It is no wonder that scholars would dispute that documentation is a lever for equity, given the staggering cost of psychological assessments. There is variance in the pricing of these assessments, but in some areas they can cost between $1,000 and $5,000. While some university-operated assessment centers can be less costly, they typically have very long waiting lists. Meanwhile, 1 in 5 dependent undergraduate students come from families below the poverty line—and nearly half of independent students (those without financial support from family) met this criterion.

    Financial cost is not the only barrier to accessing rigorous documentation. Mental health providers experience significant demand, stretching wait times and disproportionately impacting rural and marginalized communities.

    If DSOs demanded that each student claiming a learning disability or ADHD diagnosis supply such a document, accommodations would be unavailable to poorer students and to many students from rural areas. For all students, the provision of accommodations would be delayed. This is why those working as DSOs are often so willing to work with students when they can articulate an access barrier. To claim otherwise can be understood as either a statement of ignorance about disability services or, perhaps, as reflective of a desire for accommodation requests to diminish.

    Conclusion

    As we noted, our goal is to present a measured response to these opinion essays. Having done so, we will do our readers the service of stating our own view:

    • Disability services professionals are thoughtful and effective in discharging their responsibilities in the interactive process.
    • Disabled students belong on college campuses, and accommodations serve to enable access to higher education.
    • Accommodations level the playing field for students within environments that were built without considering their very existence.
    • Rigidity in the interactive process burdens the student, and these burdens disproportionately impact marginalized communities.

    We encourage readers to draw their own conclusions—however, in doing so, we encourage you to listen to the voices of the disabled community, disability services professionals, and those with stakes and experience in navigating the accommodations process.

    In the current climate, where we are asked to consider whether empathy might be a sin, and whether disability might be incongruent with merit in the workplace, it is important to uplift these voices. It is important to stand firm in the knowledge of the expertise and value of those in helping professions. It is important to affirm that all means all, and that includes students with disabilities.

    Chris Parthemos and Martina Svyantek are the president-elect and president, respectively, of the Association on Higher Education and Disability in Virginia.

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  • Sick of Doomscrolling? Join This New Research Paper Collective Instead

    Sick of Doomscrolling? Join This New Research Paper Collective Instead

    Anuja Uppuluri used to spend a lot of time scrolling social media apps dictated by algorithms designed to keep users glued to their screens no matter how mind-numbing the content.

    “I always had something else that I could be doing or wanted to be doing, but I was choosing to watch TikTok videos for five hours,” said Uppuluri, who completed a bachelor’s degree in information systems at Carnegie Mellon University in May. “And then by the end of it I couldn’t remember anything that I had watched.”

    Uppuluri, who now works as a machine learning engineer for Anthropic, sought to become more intentional about the information she consumes and has since scaled back her social media usage. Rather than scroll aimlessly, she wanted to fill her time digesting more research related to her career field, especially about the inner workings and implications of increasingly prevalent generative artificial intelligence tools.

    She discovered all types of academic papers, articles and blog posts she wanted to read, but it wasn’t easy to keep organized. “I didn’t know where to put all of this stuff, because there’s no central location for it,” Uppuluri told Inside Higher Ed. “I started thinking about how I want to use my research and what I want to see from other people’s research.”

    So Uppuluri developed Paper Trails, which she described as “Goodreads for academic papers” in an X post announcing the website’s launch last week. “I built it because I wanted a place where engaging with research felt fun, beautiful, and personal to you.”

    Similar to the book-focused website Goodreads, Paper Trails is designed to help users discover new research and ideas, though it’s not powered by an AI algorithm. It’s a crowd-sourced platform where users can post links to papers from any field, peruse summaries of those papers, create shelves (public reading lists), and comment, review or rate papers.

    In the week since its public debut, Paper Trails has grown its users from 10 to 2,200; the number of articles available on the site has increased from 20 to 3,100.

    Inside Higher Ed spoke with Uppuluri to hear more about her vision for Paper Trails.

    (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

    Q: What sparked your interest in reading more academic research, especially about computer science and AI?

    A: I always thought of a computer scientist as someone who writes code, builds infrastructure and makes sure systems are built to scale. But AI is blurring the line between research and engineering. Every new discovery that comes out of a large language model (LLM) lab is research-oriented.

    Understanding why the technology is the way it is can be done by reading papers and understanding the research about large language models. These models are like black boxes—you can’t entirely understand what’s going on inside it—and that’s created all of the research subfields. For example, a subfield called interpretability is about trying to interpret what the models are doing. The more you do with these models, the more you have to read to understand how they work to gain context on how to build things better.

    Q: How did your previous experiences reading and writing research papers inform the creation of Paper Trails?

    A: A research paper to me used to mean something related to medicine, chemistry or biology. I didn’t understand or realize that it had a place in computer science until a few months before I wrote the only research paper I did in college. For that paper, I wrote the methodology and code, but my co-author, who was doing his Ph.D., helped me structure the paper, write the references and get it through the formatting process. It felt like a high barrier to entry for doing and reading research, which I associated with work instead of fun.

    I thought having some type of casual thing like [Paper Trails] to organize research papers would maybe help me read more. But other existing websites I experimented with looked so dated and used software I had to learn. It looked complicated and didn’t seem fun. I also didn’t want to organize my research in a big Google Doc that has 50 links on it that I’m never going to touch again—that looks ugly.

    So, I knew I could probably make my own site that looks nice and is easy to use.

    At its core, Paper Trails is a tool to put papers and other reading material together in a way that’s pretty and fun. Sometimes that’s what you need to make something feel more like a hobby rather than more work you have to do.

    Q: What went into developing the Paper Trails website and how does it work?

    A: I coded most of it from scratch, with the exception of pasting in a few codes to fix some bugs.

    When I first launched, there were only around 20 papers on the site. Now, there’s around 3,000 just from more people being on the site and adding the things that they want to read.

    I chose not to mass import a bunch of stuff at the outset because if people look at it and it’s not something they’re interested in, it’s still there. It’s kind of cool to look at every single paper and know that it’s there because it’s something on someone else’s reading list.

    Everything on the main page is organized by publication date. You can also use keywords to search or just click some buttons to see what people are logging. There is no personalized algorithm for users. While there isn’t anything necessarily wrong with a recommendation assistant, it’s also nice when there’s nothing telling you what to look at.

    Q: What is the value of Paper Trails for its users?

    A: There’s a lot of people who would like to get into research or just reading more. And if you want to spend your time in that way, having a tool to help you do it and encourage you to do makes it a lot easier to follow through on.

    There’s also value coming from all the people that make it a collaborative thing. It allows people to explore, kind of like going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. You can just keep clicking on random links and reading. You don’t know what you’re going to learn at the start of your session but, if you’re interested in it, you can read it.

    Q: Now that people are showing interest, what are the next steps for Paper Trails?

    A: I was thinking about sending it to some of my old professors, especially if they have Ph.D. students who may be interested in working on it.

    There are even more elements that I could add that would improve the user experience. A lot of people have papers that are already saved on another site, so being able to bulk import would be helpful. Or allowing a few people to edit a shelf rather than just one person could make collaboration a little bit better. Or being able to clone somebody’s shelf so that another user can add some of their own stuff to it.

    I don’t know exactly what growth looks like. But to me, success means the people using it are happy.

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  • Education Dept. $15M Fund to Support Talent Marketplaces

    Education Dept. $15M Fund to Support Talent Marketplaces

    The statewide talent marketplaces should include credential registries, learning and employment records, and skills-based job description generators.

    ATHVisions/E+/Getty Images

    The Department of Education launched a new $15 million grant competition to promote the development of what it calls statewide “Talent Marketplaces,” or digital systems that track the credentials, employment records and skills of students and graduates.

    “Talent Marketplaces give learners, earners, and employers a clearer way to validate skills, opening doors to stackable credentials and stronger recognition of prior learning and work experience,” Nick Moore, the acting assistant secretary for the Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education said in a Friday news release about the program. “As we expand these systems, we open more pathways into good jobs, support broader participation in the workforce, and help strengthen our Nation’s economy.”

    The announcement came just days after the House Education and Workforce Committee held a hearing about expanding access to similar Learning and Employment Records. The goal, according to Republicans in both Congress and the Education Department, is to help institutions better match talent to opportunity and expand access to career pathways with a positive return on investment.

    In this first competition, the department will identify up to 10 award winners, each of whom will receive a portion of the $15 million as well as technical assistance in refining and implementing their development plans. It is unclear based on the news release where the funding for this program will come from.

    The application will open in January, according to the release.

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  • College Park President Cleared of Plagiarism Claims

    College Park President Cleared of Plagiarism Claims

    An investigation cleared Pines of academic misconduct.

    University of Maryland, College Park

    University of Maryland College Park President Darryll Pines did not commit academic misconduct, an investigation determined, clearing him of plagiarism allegations that emerged last September.

    A joint investigation that involved both the campus and the University System of Maryland but was led by an outside law firm “found no evidence of misconduct on the part of President Pines,” according to an emailed announcement from College Park and system officials sent on Friday.

    Last fall, Pines was accused of lifting 1,500 words from a tutorial website for a 5,000-word paper that he co-authored in 2002, and of later reusing that same text for a 2006 publication, according to the initial allegations against him that first broke in The Daily Wire, a conservative website.

    Pines disputed the claims from the start, stating that they had no merit.

    However, Joshua Altmann, who wrote the text that Pines was accused of lifting, told Inside Higher Ed last year that “I do consider it to be plagiarism, and not worthy of an academic.”

    The investigation, which concluded after more than a year, included three rounds of external reviews and was extended to other articles Pines wrote. While it found no evidence of misconduct, investigators noted attribution errors in some works.

    “The committee did determine that the two works highlighted last year contained select portions of text previously published by another author in the introductory sections. In a separate text, a discrepancy in assignment of authorship was made. However, President Pines was not found responsible for the inclusion of such text in any of the three works, nor was he found responsible for scholarly misconduct of any kind,” College Park and system officials announced last week.

    Officials also expressed confidence in Pines’s leadership going forward.

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