Tag: Higher

  • Framework for GenAI in Graduate Career Development (opinion)

    Framework for GenAI in Graduate Career Development (opinion)

    In Plato’s Phaedrus, King Thamus feared writing would make people forgetful and create the appearance of wisdom without true understanding. His concern was not merely about a new tool, but about a technology that would fundamentally transform how humans think, remember and communicate. Today, we face similar anxieties about generative AI. Like writing before it, generative AI is not just a tool but a transformative technology reshaping how we think, write and work.

    This transformation is particularly consequential in graduate education, where students develop professional competencies while managing competing demands, research deadlines, teaching responsibilities, caregiving obligations and often financial pressures. Generative AI’s appeal is clear; it promises to accelerate tasks that compete for limited time and cognitive resources. Graduate students report using ChatGPT and similar tools for professional development tasks, such as drafting cover letters, preparing for interviews and exploring career options, often without institutional guidance on effective and ethical use.

    Most AI policies focus on coursework and academic integrity; professional development contexts remain largely unaddressed. Faculty and career advisers need practical strategies for guiding students to use generative AI critically and effectively. This article proposes a four-stage framework—explore, build, connect, refine—for guiding students’ generative AI use in professional development.

    Professional Development in the AI Era

    Over the past decade, graduate education has invested significantly in career readiness through dedicated offices, individual development plans and co-curricular programming—for example, the Council of Graduate Schools’ PhD Career Pathways initiative involved 75 U.S. doctoral institutions building data-informed professional development, and the Graduate Career Consortium, representing graduate-focused career staff, grew from roughly 220 members in 2014 to 500-plus members across about 220 institutions by 2022.

    These investments reflect recognition that Ph.D. and master’s students pursue diverse career paths, with fewer than half of STEM Ph.D.s entering tenure-track positions immediately after graduation; the figure for humanities and social sciences also remains below 50 percent over all.

    We now face a different challenge: integrating a technology that touches every part of the knowledge economy. Generative AI adoption among graduate students has been swift and largely unsupervised: At Ohio State University, 48 percent of graduate students reported using ChatGPT in spring 2024. At the University of Maryland, 77 percent of students report using generative AI, and 35 percent use it routinely for academic work, with graduate students more likely than undergraduates to be routine users; among routine student users, 38 percent said they did so without instructor guidance.

    Some subskills, like mechanical formatting, will matter less in this landscape; higher-order capacities—framing problems, tailoring messages to audiences, exercising ethical discernment—will matter more. For example, in a 2025 National Association of Colleges and Employers survey, employers rank communication and critical thinking among the most important competencies for new hires, and in a 2024 LinkedIn report, communication was the most in-demand skill.

    Without structured guidance, students face conflicting messages: Some faculty ban AI use entirely, while others assume so-called digital natives will figure it out independently. This leaves students navigating an ethical and practical minefield with high stakes for their careers. A framework offers consistency and clear principles across advising contexts.

    We propose a four-stage framework that mirrors how professionals actually learn: explore, build, connect, refine. This approach adapts design thinking principles, the iterative cycle of prototyping and testing, to AI-augmented professional development. Students rapidly generate options with AI support, test them in low-stakes environments and refine based on feedback. While we use writing and communication examples throughout for clarity, this framework applies broadly to professional development.

    Explore: Map Possibilities and Surface Gaps

    Exploring begins by mapping career paths, fellowship opportunities and professional norms, then identifying gaps in skills or expectations. A graduate student can ask a generative AI chatbot to infer competencies from their lab work or course projects, then compare those skills to current job postings in their target sector to identify skills they need to develop. They can generate a matrix of fellowship opportunities in their field, including eligibility requirements, deadlines and required materials, and then validate every detail on official websites. They can ask AI to describe communication norms in target sectors, comparing the tone and structure of academic versus industry cover letters—not to memorize a script, but to understand audience expectations they will need to meet.

    Students should not, however, rely on AI-generated job descriptions or program requirements without verification, as the technology may conflate roles, misrepresent qualifications or cite outdated information and sources.

    Build: Learn Through Iterative Practice

    Building turns insight into artifacts and habits. With generative AI as a sounding board, students can experiment with different résumé architectures for the same goal, testing chronological versus skills-based formats or tailoring a CV for academic versus industry positions. They can generate detailed outlines for an individual development plan, breaking down abstract goals into concrete, time-bound actions. They can devise practice tasks that address specific growth areas, such as mock interview questions for teaching-intensive positions or practice pitches tailored to different funding audiences. The point is not to paste in AI text; it is to lower the barriers of uncertainty and blank-page intimidation, making it easier to start building while keeping authorship and evidence squarely in the student’s hands.

    Connect: Communicate and Network With Purpose

    Connecting focuses on communicating with real people. Here, generative AI can lower the stakes for high-pressure interactions. By asking a chatbot to act the part of various audience members, students can rehearse multiple versions of a tailored 60-second elevator pitch, such as for a recruiter at a career fair, a cross-disciplinary faculty member at a poster session or a community partner exploring collaboration. Generative AI can also simulate informational interviews if students prompt the system to ask follow-up questions or even refine user inputs.

    In addition, students can leverage generative AI to draft initial outreach notes to potential mentors that the students then personalize and fact-check. They can explore networking strategies for conferences or professional association events, identifying whom to approach and what questions to ask based on publicly available information about attendees’ work.

    Even just five years ago, completing this nonexhaustive list of networking tasks might have seemed an impossibility for graduate students with already crammed agendas. Generative AI, however, affords graduate students the opportunity to become adept networkers without sacrificing much time from research and scholarship. Crucially, generative AI creates a low-risk space to practice, while it is the student who ultimately supplies credibility and authentic voice. Generative AI cannot build genuine relationships, but it can help students prepare for the human interactions where relationships form.

    Refine: Test, Adapt and Verify

    Refining is where judgment becomes visible. Before submitting a fellowship essay, for example, a student can ask the generative AI chatbot to simulate likely reviewer critiques based on published evaluation criteria, then use that feedback to align revisions to scoring rubrics. They can A/B test two AI-generated narrative approaches from the build stage with trusted readers, advisers or peers to determine which is more compelling. Before a campus talk, they can ask the chatbot to identify jargon, unclear transitions or slides with excessive text, then revise for audience accessibility.

    In each case, verification and ownership are nonnegotiable: Students must check references, deadlines and factual claims against primary sources and ensure the final product reflects their authentic voice rather than generic AI prose. A student who submits an AI-refined essay without verification may cite outdated program requirements, misrepresent their own experience or include plausible-sounding but fabricated details, undermining credibility with reviewers and jeopardizing their application.

    Cultivate Expert Caution, Not Technical Proficiency

    The goal is not to train students as prompt engineers but to help them exercise expert caution. This means teaching students to ask: Does this AI-generated text reflect my actual experience? Can I defend every claim in an interview? Does this output sound like me, or like generic professional-speak? Does this align with my values and the impression I want to create? If someone asked, “Tell me more about that,” could I elaborate with specific details?

    Students should view AI as a thought partner for the early stages of professional development work: the brainstorming, the first-draft scaffolding, the low-stakes rehearsal. It cannot replace human judgment, authentic relationships or deep expertise. A generative AI tool can help a student draft three versions of an elevator pitch, but only a trusted adviser can tell them which version sounds most genuine. It can list networking strategies, but only actual humans can become meaningful professional connections.

    Conclusion

    Each graduate student brings unique aptitudes, challenges and starting points. First-generation students navigating unfamiliar professional cultures may use generative AI to explore networking norms and decode unstated expectations. International students can practice U.S. interview conventions and professional correspondence styles. Part-time students with limited campus access can get preliminary feedback before precious advising appointments. Students managing disabilities or mental health challenges can use generative AI to reduce the cognitive load of initial drafting, preserving energy for higher-order revision and relationship-building.

    Used critically and transparently, generative AI can help students at all starting points explore, build, connect and refine their professional paths, alongside faculty advisers and career development professionals—never replacing them, but providing just-in-time feedback and broader access to coaching-style support.

    The question is no longer whether generative AI belongs in professional development. The real question is whether we will guide students to use it thoughtfully or leave them to navigate it alone. The explore-build-connect-refine framework offers one path forward: a structured approach that develops both professional competency and critical judgment. We choose guidance.

    Ioannis Vasileios Chremos is program manager for professional development at the University of Michigan Medical School Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies.

    William A. Repetto is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of English and the research office at the University of Delaware.

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  • On Climate Action, a View From Behind the Pack (opinion)

    On Climate Action, a View From Behind the Pack (opinion)

    The University of California system recently made waves by announcing a commitment “to fully decarbonize no later than 2045.” Unlike many “carbon neutrality” or “net zero” plans that rely heavily on carbon offsets, the UC system plans to cut emissions from campus electricity and fossil fuel use by at least 90 percent from 2019 levels and to balance residual emissions by investing in projects to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

    This win for the climate did not come easy: As activists from UC San Diego relate, they spent years building a coalition across campuses. Such success marks the UC system as a leader in American higher education, well ahead of other prestigious research universities with offset-heavy carbon neutrality plans—and well ahead of Purdue University, where we teach, which has no declared plans for decarbonization.

    Here, we wish to discuss our experiences advocating for a climate action plan at Purdue, where among our peer institutions we are decidedly a laggard, not a leader, in the climate space. We hope that detailing our frustrating lack of success provides a sober counternarrative to the success story of the UC system. Furthermore, we hope that knowing about our efforts may help others who are similarly involved in advocating for climate action at campuses in red states.

    Purdue’s Climate Story So Far

    A public, land-grant university in north-central Indiana, Purdue enrolls more than 44,000 undergraduates and almost 14,000 graduate and professional students. Purdue frequently touts itself as a world leader in innovation of all sorts, from artificial intelligence to biomedical research, even highlighting research on sustainability. Due to its size, the energy-intensive nature of its research activities and its location in a climate that sees both cold winters and hot, humid summers, Purdue’s campus emits as much climate pollution as a small city—439,000 metric tons per year of carbon dioxide equivalent as of 2023, the latest year for which official estimates are available.

    The Purdue community cares about sustainability: Classes in a wide range of majors feature considerable discussion of sustainability, and researchers across campus study the causes of and potential solutions for climate change. Purdue has won awards and recognition for low-hanging fruit, such as from Tree Campus USA and Bee Campus USA. Purdue also touts being named one of the most sustainable campuses by QS, although when one looks under the hood, such rankings give remarkably little weight to emissions reductions on campus. In the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education’s more rigorous reporting system, Purdue scored zero out of four on clean and renewable energy and 1.08 out of eight on greenhouse gas emissions.

    Purdue faces unique decarbonization challenges. Our university’s administration ultimately answers to the Indiana state government, which has recently canceled the state’s climate action planning and enables most counties to restrict renewable energy development. Electricity in Indiana has the highest carbon intensity of any state other than three major coal producers—Kentucky, West Virginia and Wyoming—and entails almost four times higher greenhouse gas emissions per unit of energy than electricity in California. Duke Energy, the utility that serves Purdue, is the fourth largest lobby in Indiana.

    While these challenges may seem daunting, progress on climate is possible even in Indiana. In 2023, our colleagues at Indiana University launched a plan promising carbon neutrality by 2040. They aim to get there by modest changes, such as improving energy efficiency in buildings and implementing renewable energy on campus. Purdue has also made progress—which we applaud—mainly by transitioning its combined heat and power plant from coal to natural gas. In 2023, Purdue estimated that its emissions were 27 percent lower than their coal-heavy 2011 level. But this only represents a small start to the actions needed for Purdue to live up to its obligations to students, staff, faculty, the community and, ultimately, the planet.

    Community Will and Administrative Inaction

    Many Purdue community members want substantial climate action. In 2020, more than 2,000 Purdue students signed a petition calling for Purdue to develop a climate action plan and create a universitywide, stand-alone sustainability office. The university’s president at the time, Mitch Daniels—Indiana’s former Republican governor and a noted climate change skeptic—dismissed the petition.

    In the fall of 2022, students and faculty formed the Purdue Climate Action Collective (PCAC), aimed at pressuring the university to develop a climate action plan and to be transparent in reporting emissions. In the spring of 2023, the Purdue Student Government, the Graduate Student Government and the University Senate each passed resolutions calling on the university to commit to a climate action plan. The Senate resolution also called upon Purdue to join the Greater Lafayette Climate Action Plan, developed by the surrounding county and cities. Once again, Purdue ignored these calls.

    Since then, PCAC has mounted numerous protests, spoken at student events, peppered campus with signs, reached out to the administration and attended Board of Trustees meetings to express our concerns. Our board is entirely appointed by the governor of Indiana. PCAC has also launched a new petition, now at 1,600 signatures.

    Despite the Purdue community’s advocacy for climate action, our new president, Mung Chiang, has authorized no comprehensive, campuswide climate action plan. The nearest thing is the Campus Planning, Architecture and Sustainability office’s Sustainability Master Plan for 2020–25, which aims to reduce Purdue’s emissions from electricity and fossil fuel use 50 percent below 2011 levels by 2025 and to pursue 500 kilowatts of renewable energy. While we applaud these near-term goals, and the incomplete but significant progress toward achieving them, decarbonizing Purdue will require making a long-term plan to outgrow natural gas and Duke Energy’s carbon-intensive electricity.

    On this topic, the Purdue administration told the University Senate in 2024 that “Purdue has a climate action plan consisting of two parts,” referring senators to the Sustainability Master Plan and to a joint study with Duke Energy on the feasibility of a small modular nuclear reactor (SMR) for the campus. While nuclear might play a role in Purdue’s energy future, SMRs are an unproven technology and should not be used as an excuse to delay the decarbonization of our campus.

    The SMR study’s 2023 report states, “whether SMRs will be an economic option for Duke Energy Indiana’s customers is unknown given current technology, timing and cost uncertainty.” The report cites a likely cost range of $1.1 to $2.25 billion (for context, Purdue’s endowment currently totals $4.1 billion) and discusses design technologies that may only become “commercially viable in 2035–2040.” A responsible climate action plan could certainly include nuclear energy down the road, if it proves successful, but the urgency of the climate crisis demands that institutions address their greenhouse gas emissions now.

    Possible Paths Forward

    Preliminary studies of decarbonization at Purdue suggest that climate action is feasible and affordable. Today, Purdue could take a number of proven, cost-effective actions, such as improving the efficiency of its building operations (for example, by using software to avoid heating or cooling unoccupied spaces), or increasing parking fees and investing the proceeds in infrastructure and incentives for buses and electric vehicle charging. In the next five to 10 years, Purdue could electrify its vehicle fleet and arrange power-purchase agreements with clean electricity generators in the area, as has been done successfully at places like the University of Michigan and the University of Minnesota.

    Long-term pathways to deep emission reductions remain uncertain, especially when considering Scope 3 emissions (emissions that are indirectly generated by university activities, such as employee commuting and flying), but Purdue has options and plenty of experts eager to investigate them. Inclusive and transparent processes for climate action planning would draw upon Purdue community expertise to identify, evaluate and select climate action pathways. But for any of this to happen, our administration must first acknowledge the need for climate action on campus.

    Our experience at Purdue has affirmed that fighting for climate action on public red-state campuses is an uphill battle. We know that change must come from both above and below. Students, faculty and staff concerned about the future of our planet must continue to raise their voices and add to the pressure the university feels. Administrators more inclined toward shared governance—or toward maintaining a livable climate for the future generations that Purdue aims to serve—must also add their voices to the mix. As Purdue begins to act on climate, its passionate community of activists and innovators will be there to support implementation and to celebrate accomplishments along the way.

    Although we have much to learn from the success of places like UC, places like Purdue need a different set of tools and approaches. For those at similarly recalcitrant universities, we hope this message reminds them that institutions won’t take these steps without great pressure. But given the dire warnings about the future of our planet, the importance of local climate action as congressional Republicans and the Trump administration have repealed most federal support for climate action, and the important role of universities as thought leaders, we remain convinced that this is a fight worth having.

    Michael Johnston, a professor of English at Purdue University, founded the Purdue Climate Action Collective and has been involved in the fight for climate justice at Purdue since 2022.

    Kevin Kircher, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and, by courtesy, electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University, studies clean energy technologies and has worked on campus decarbonization projects at Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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  • The Next Phase of the Guided Pathways Movement

    The Next Phase of the Guided Pathways Movement

    In recent years, hundreds of community colleges have embraced the guided pathways model, a sweeping set of large-scale reforms to better steer students through academic programs and boost completion rates at community colleges.

    Researchers at the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College first introduced plans for the reform movement in 2015 in a book called Redesigning America’s Community Colleges: A Clearer Path to Student Success. They called on colleges to adopt a wide range of practices to help students devise and follow academic plans through graduation, including mandatory academic and career planning for all students; programs organized by “meta-majors,” or fields of interest; and extra supports for students in college-level math and English courses.

    A decade later, CCRC researchers have come out with a follow-up, More Essential Than Ever: Community College Pathways to Educational and Career Success (Harvard Education Press, 2025), which recounts their 10 years of research on the progress and outcomes of guided pathways. The book also explores areas where they believe the model could grow, including looking beyond graduation rates to focus on students’ job outcomes, adopting more engaging recruitment and onboarding practices, and ensuring students leave college with specialized knowledge in their fields but also versatile skills that apply to different industries.

    Davis Jenkins, senior research scholar at CCRC and a co-author of More Essential Than Ever, spoke with Inside Higher Ed about the book’s prescription to community colleges for taking guided pathways to the next level.

    The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

    Q: This book is the culmination of 10 years of research on guided pathways. What have been the most important lessons learned in that decade?

    A: The 10 years were really a learning experience, because the model for whole-college reform that Tom Bailey, Shanna Jaggars and I presented in Redesigning America’s Community Colleges in 2015 was very much theoretical. A lot of the ideas came out of four-year institutions, and maybe with the exception of Guttman Community College and others, no community college really had implemented these ideas. So, we’ve been learning along with the field. And you know, we’re impressed and humbled by the efforts by colleges in a very tough time, fiscally and otherwise, to really work on these efforts.

    And what we saw in the initial phase was it takes a long time to not just implement discrete interventions but to redesign whole parts of the student experience, from the start all the way through. But we saw that colleges that did focus on redesigning, not just one piece of the student experience but across the student experience, were able to achieve improvements in student early momentum and then, over the longer term, in completion rates.

    On one hand, it was important that colleges not just focus on one aspect, that they sort of changed the student experience throughout. But when we looked at particular practices, especially important was organizing advising, at least for continuing students, by career or academic field and then case managing those students’ progress based on students’ plans. It’s very important to have a plan for students, and students really want that plan.

    During this time, the environment changed, and community college enrollments, especially post–high school enrollments, continued to decline. There was a rise in focus on the value of a college degree, and while this was focused very much on four-year institutions—especially elite institutions—people were [also] questioning community colleges. Enrollment by older students is at historic lows. And even though community colleges have seen a huge increase in high school dual-enrollment students, they have been losing market share to public four-years for students right out of high school. So, there was this big focus on value. And we were able to observe and work with colleges as they adapted these completion-focused reforms to focus more on value.

    And the main part of the book is five chapters devoted to what we see as the frontiers for further improving community college student outcomes, which are focused on values.

    Q: Tell me more about that. In the book, you looked at how far this movement has come. How do you hope the guided pathways model continues to evolve?

    A: There are five areas where we see colleges now working to improve. First of all, they’ve got to make sure that their programs lead to jobs that pay at least a living wage—otherwise, it’s not going to be worth students enrolling in them—or [allow] transfer with no excess credits in the student’s major field of interest. Related to that, though, it’s not enough just to work with universities and employers to ensure your programs have value for employment and further education after completion. You’ve got to make sure that students are learning the kinds of skills that they’ll need in the workplace and for their education. And frankly, that was probably the area of least progress in the earlier work in guided pathways.

    Particularly important is making sure that students have a rich learning experience in their program foundation courses, the hard 101 courses. In the book, we profile both very large and small colleges that have really built in experiential learning for all students. So that’s No. 2.

    No. 3 is focusing on onboarding. Community colleges lose many students early on because they don’t engage them. And so, in the later part of our work on guided pathways, the more recent part, we focus very much on this onboarding process to ensure students are engaged about what they want to do and help them connect to people and have this inspiring learning experience, and then very, very importantly, help them develop a plan that will at least give them direction.

    No. 4 is building on that plan. There have been efforts around compressed courses and scheduling, but in the book, we say that colleges need to look at this very systematically. The canonical completion [rate] for community college is two years. They’re called two-year colleges. But in fact, hardly any students complete in two years, and it’s not reasonable to expect all students, even the majority of students, to [take] 15 credits. In the book, we’re seeing colleges take three years as a template. And we know that if you include summer courses, if you include J terms, if you compress your terms, students even attending part-time can complete their programs. And community college students have very little margin for error. It’s very important that they be able to take the courses they need when they need them.

    Then, finally, as you know, dual enrollment has become huge. And colleges have taken, in the past, a very laissez-faire approach to it, such as the students who participate are students who are already likely going to college. And that’s a good thing because that makes dual enrollment very popular among middle-class families, and that gives it political power. But it’s also been sort of random courses, gen eds, without much advising. For students already going to college who have good advising from their families or from their better-resourced schools, that’s fine. But we have created this idea of applying the guided pathways practices to dual-enrollment students, to build an on-ramp, to motivate students to want to continue their postsecondary education.

    Q: It seems like, in the book, there’s a tension between, on one hand, striving to set students on a clear career path, a career ladder, while also trying not to box them into a track or a skill set that’s too narrow. How do you think colleges can balance both?

    A: This has always been the tension with guided pathways. Early on, there was a lot of emphasis on structured pathways, making things much more like a technical program, like an occupational certificate program. Not knocking it; those kinds of programs are important. But you’ll notice throughout, we’re focused on broad learning, skills, communication [and] problem-solving, and that can only be done through active, contextualized learning.

    The goal of guided pathways is not to set a student on a career. Careers are changing. The goal is to get a student engaged, to feel like the institution cares about their future, connect them with faculty and other students, employers, people they never would have met before that. It’s not just about learning skills or knowledge. It’s about connecting with people, building confidence in taking a really hard course that makes you really work and think. Students don’t like it. They’re not used to it in K–12 education. On the other hand, there’s just so much research showing that that’s really important.

    And then the plan is not a plan for life, but a plan is a direction to get you a credential and then to build into that enough experience. We make this case throughout, including at the end, there’s still a need, and it’s well documented, for a broader education—including technical skills, obviously, and content knowledge, but really in engaging students in problem-solving, communication—because those are the human skills that employers are going to pay a premium for and that are needed for further education at the bachelor’s level and in life.

    Q: As you’ve been thinking through where you want the guided pathways model to go, what do you think are going to be the biggest obstacles or challenges to colleges getting there?

    A: Well, one thing is the rise of online students. On one hand, we’re not against online. But the question is, especially for students in foundation courses and for students in high school, how to do it in a way that is engaging students. We’re very skeptical of asynchronous online instruction. Maybe for older students, career students, that’s OK, but not for students taking a foundation course that really is hard and needs interaction.

    The other [challenge] is funding. Community colleges are already always relatively low funded. It varies greatly by state, but nationally, about 40 percent [of their funding] comes from states. The second highest [funding source] is tuition. Asking community colleges to turn out high-value programs and to do all this advising is expensive. Thus far, community colleges have done this by redeploying their existing resources, which is actually a good thing, because they, like every institution, have tended to become too siloed. But there’s a limit to which community colleges can do more with less, and particularly in these high-cost, high-value workforce areas, those are very expensive, and our STEM programs and the like.

    So, the cuts in federal funding are concerning because community colleges throughout the country have used them to develop new programs and to focus advising and other supports on students from groups that haven’t done well in higher ed. Over the longer term, we’re concerned, since higher education is the biggest discretionary pot in about every state budget, the cuts to Medicaid and other fiscal pressures on states are likely to put big pressure on funding for higher education, of which community colleges, even compared to public regional four-years, are heavily dependent.

    One more thing is that guided pathways is basically asking colleges to take this very successful model that was the marvel of the world, that really helped broad-access education, and to change it—and to do so, by the way, with no money, or not enough money. We do a lot of work with colleges all over the country. We’ve done a lot of work with rural colleges. And in many ways, they have been facing the pressures that all higher ed is facing now for a long time: declining population, the challenge of helping students get living-wage jobs. [But] there’s something about community colleges. They just dig right in. Despite the challenges, I’m optimistic.

    It’s been humbling to go all around the country, working in so many different places. I don’t see them giving up on this. Despite all the challenges, I think, especially given their product, the fact that they’re local, the fact that they’re connected to local employers, and especially now, have this opportunity to build a better pipeline from schools, and are doing that. I think community colleges are going to rise to the challenge here.

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  • Reverse Transfer Policies Boost College Completion Rates

    Reverse Transfer Policies Boost College Completion Rates

    Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Remigiusz Gora/iStock/Getty Images

    It was legit: She was a beneficiary of the Colorado Re-Engaged Initiative (CORE), which draws on reverse-transfer policies to allow the state’s four-year institutions to award degrees to stopped-out students who have fulfilled the requirements of an associate of general studies degree.

    Created by state legislation in 2021, CORE seeks to reduce the share of the 700,000 plus students in the state who have completed some college credits but don’t hold a degree.

    “It has always been problematic for me to think that people could have gone three years, three and a half years to college and the highest credential that they have is a high school diploma,” said Angie Paccione, executive director of Colorado’s Department of Higher Education.

    For Varkevisser, getting recognized for her years’ worth of credit accumulation was simple; she just had to say yes to the email. “It came out of nowhere, but I have my college degree now,” Varkevisser said.

    Colorado isn’t the only state aiming to reduce the millions of individuals who fall in the some college, no degree population in the U.S. And reverse transfer—awarding an associate degree to students who have met the credit threshold—is a relatively simple way to do it, thanks to new technologies and state initiatives to streamline policies.

    But one barrier has tripped up colleges for over a decade: working with students to make them aware so they participate in these programs. In Colorado, for example, fewer than 5 percent of eligible students have opted in to CORE.

    “I can’t imagine why” a student wouldn’t opt in, Paccione said. “You’ve already paid money; you don’t have to do anything, all you have to do is call [the institution] up and say, ‘Hey, I understand I might be eligible for an associate degree.’ It takes a phone call, essentially.”

    Credits but No Credential

    In the 2010s, reverse transfer was a popular student success intervention, allowing students who transferred from a two-year to a four-year institution to pass their credits back to their community college to earn a credential.

    Experts say awarding an associate degree for credits acquired before a student hits the four-year degree threshold can support their overall success in and after college, because it provides a benchmark of progress. A 2018 report found that most community colleges students who transferred to another institution left their two-year college without a degree, putting them in limbo between programs with credits but no credential.

    Now, reverse-transfer policies are being applied to students who have enrolled at a four-year college and left before earning a degree, who often abandon a significant number of credits.

    The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center’s latest report on the some college, no credential (SCNC) population found that 7.2 percent of stopped-out students had achieved at least two years’ worth of full-time-equivalent enrollment over the past decade. In other words, 2.6 million individuals in the U.S. have completed two years’ worth of college credits but don’t hold a credential to prove it.

    In addition to Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Oregon and Texas are introducing or modifying policies to award associate degrees to stopped-out students who have earned enough credits. The trend reflects a renewed focus on better serving stopped-out students instead of simply pushing them to re-enroll.

    “What’s happening at the national level is that folks are recognizing that we’re still not seeing the completion that we want,” said Wendy Sedlak, the Lumina Foundation’s strategy director for research and evaluation. “It’s taking a long time to make headway, so nationally, people are looking back, and looking into what are those initiatives, what are those policies, what are those practices that have really helped us push ahead?”

    A stack of mail with a large no fold envelope.

    Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | stphillips/iStock/Getty Images

    Obstacles to Implementation

    Reverse transfer, while simple on paper, faces a variety of hurdles at the state, institutional and individual levels.

    At the highest level, most universities cannot award associate degrees due to state legislation. Before CORE, Colorado universities were limited to being “dual mission” (awarding two- and four-year degrees) or awarding higher degrees, such as master’s or doctorates.

    There’s also a stigma around offering two-year degrees to students. Only eight universities are participating in CORE, because “some of the institutions don’t want to be associated with an associate degree,” Paccione said. “They pride themselves on the bachelor’s degree and they want to make sure students complete that.”

    Critics of reverse transfer claim that awarding students an associate degree if they fail to complete a bachelor’s gives them an incentive to stop out, but most of these programs require students to have left higher education for at least two years to be eligible for reverse transfer.

    Restrictions on student eligibility has further limited the number who can benefit from reverse-transfer programs.

    To earn an associate degree retroactively through traditional reverse-transfer processes, students have to begin their college journey at a two-year institution and earn at least one-quarter of their credits there. They are also required to take a certain number (typically 60 or more) and type of credits to fulfill requirements for the degree, whether that’s an associate of arts, science or general studies. So a student who completed 59 credits of primarily electives or upper-level credits in their major would not be able to earn the degree, for example.

    While 700,000 students in Colorado have earned some college credit but no degree, only about 30,000 residents have earned the minimum 70 credits at a four-year state university within the past 10 years that makes them eligible for CORE, according to the state.

    Most colleges require students to opt in to reverse transfer due to FERPA laws, meaning that students need to advocate for receiving their award and facilitate transcript data exchanges between institutions. This can further disadvantage those who are unfamiliar with their college’s bureaucratic processes or the hidden curriculum of higher education.

    In addition, getting up-to-date emails, addresses or phone numbers for students who were enrolled nearly a decade ago can be difficult for the institution.

    For some students, the opportunity may seem too good to be true.

    Peter Fritz, director of student transitions and degree completion initiatives at the Colorado Department of Higher Education, talked to CORE participants at their graduation ceremony in 2023 who—like Varkevisser’s partner—initially thought the program was a scam. Media attention and support from the governor have helped build trust in CORE. And the state’s Education Department continues to affirm messaging that this isn’t a giveaway or a money grab, but recognition of work already completed.

    Thousands of Colorado residents are eligible for CORE, but Varkevisser said she hasn’t heard of anyone in her community who’s taken advantage of it. “Actually, I am the one that’s telling everyone I know, and they go, ‘That’s crazy!’”

    A open envelope with several associate’s degrees sticking out.

    Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed

    Giving Students Degrees

    Between CORE’s launch in 2022 and January 2025, 1,032 stopped-out students earned associates degrees, according to Colorado’s education department.

    At Metropolitan State University of Denver, one of the Colorado institutions that opted in to CORE, when administrators began combing through institutional data to see which students would be eligible for the associate of general studies degree, they found 4,256 that could earn an A.G.S.

    Another few thousand were eligible for a different degree entirely. If students had completed 15 or more credits at the community college system, “you wouldn’t be eligible for us to award you anything,” said Shaun Schafer, associate vice president of curriculum academic effectiveness and policy development. “Guess what? It’s reverse transfer.”

    MSU Denver identified nearly 2,000 students who could receive a two-year degree from their community college. “We sent that back to the different institutions saying, ‘Hey, this person is actually eligible to reverse transfer and get an associate’s from you,’” Schafer said. “We can’t really do anything for them.”

    In 2024, 336 students accepted an A.G.S. from MSU Denver, just under 9 percent of those eligible. An additional 130 or so students had reached 120 credit hours or more, so the university offered to help them re-enroll to finish their degree, and 300 had resumed coursework at other institutions.

    National data shows policies like reverse transfer are making a dent in the “some college no degree” population by eliminating the barrier of re-enrollment to attain a credential. In the past year, about one in four SCNC students who earned a credential in the U.S. (15,500 students in total) did so without re-enrolling, according to National Student Clearinghouse data.

    In Colorado, a total of 2,100 SCNC students completed a credential during the 2023–24 academic year alone, and 800 of those did not need to re-enroll, NSC data shows.

    Some states, including Colorado, Michigan, Missouri and Oregon, require institutions to contact upward transfer students to make them aware of their reverse-transfer eligibility. In Texas, students consent to participating in reverse transfer when they fill out their application; they have to uncheck the box to opt out, giving universities leeway to enroll them in the process when they become eligible.

    “Students often don’t do optional,” Sedlak said. “When you create additional barriers, you’re not going to see things get done.”

    The first Summer Ceremony for Associate’s degrees on June 22, 2024, in the Tivoli Turnhalle.

    Alyson McClaran/MSU Denver

    The first Summer Ceremony for Associate’s Degrees on June 22, 2024, in the Tivoli Turnhalle.

    Leveraging Tech

    Some universities have implemented new reverse transfer policies that capture students while they’re still enrolled, utilizing technology to expedite the process.

    The University of Nebraska system, which includes the Lincoln, Omaha and Kearney campuses, implemented an automatically triggered reverse-transfer initiative in 2023. All eligible students need to do is respond to an email.

    “Rather than putting the responsibility on the students to do that work—most of whom are not going to do that work—the system thought it would be better to create a mechanism that would automatically notify students when the courses that they’ve taken have gotten to that threshold,” said Amy Goodburn, senior associate vice chancellor at UNL.

    To be eligible, students must complete at least 15 credits at a community college and then transfer to the University of Nebraska. The registrar’s office monitors a dashboard and, after confirming a student completed the appropriate number and type of credits for an associate degree, notifies the student. If the student responds to the email, the university processes the reverse transfer with the prior institution to confirm the associate degree.

    “We’re trying to take the need for students to be proactive off their backs,” Goodburn said.

    The process is not a heavy lift, Goodburn said, and it boosts the community college’s completion rate, making it mutually beneficial.

    Still, the uptake remains stubbornly low.

    At UNL, February 2025 data showed that 2,500 students were eligible to participate in reverse transfer, but only 10 percent have opted in. A reverse-transfer initiative in Tennessee a decade ago saw similar numbers; 7,500 were eligible, but only 1,755 students chose to participate and 347 degrees were awarded.

    “I’m curious about the other 90 percent, like, are they not doing it because they don’t want it on their transcript?” Goodburn said. “Or they’re just not reading their emails, which is often the case? Or is there some other reason?”

    The University of Montana is in the early stages of building its own process for the reverse transfer of stopped-out students. The institution has offered an associate of arts degree for years as part of Missoula College, an embedded two-year institution within the university. Now, through the Big Sky Finish initiative, officials will be able to retroactively award degrees to former students.

    Brian Reed, the University of Montana’s associate vice president for student success, has been leading the project, convening with stakeholders—including the president, the provost, Missoula College leaders and the registrar’s office—to develop the process. The goal, Reed said, is to address the some college, no degree population while also investing in state goals for economic development.

    Big Sky Finish hinges on a partnership with the ed-tech provider EAB, which has created a dashboard connecting various institutional data sets to identify which students are eligible for reverse transfer. The system highlights former students who have 60 credits or more that fulfill a general studies associate degree, as well as stop-outs who are mere credits away from meeting the requirement.

    So far, Montana staff have identified just 11 students who are eligible to earn an A.A. degree and 150 more who are a class or two short of the needed credits.

    A degree put inside of a frame.

    Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | silverlining56/E+/Getty Images

    Putting Degrees to Work

    While CORE and similar initiatives are helping students earn a degree of value after leaving higher education, it’s less clear what impact associate degrees are having on students. Is it advancing their careers or getting them re-engaged in college?

    About 10 percent of Colorado’s stopped-out students have chosen to re-enroll in higher education to pursue their bachelor’s degree, Fritz said.

    For Varkevisser, receiving an A.G.S. degree provided the impetus to re-enroll and work toward a bachelor’s degree. The associate degree also gave her access to a variety of resources for alumni, including discounted tuition rates and career services.

    “We recognize that it may not be for everybody to do this as a bachelor’s completion model, but the advantage of having an associate over a high school diploma, I think, helps,” Paccione.

    But after students have their degrees, the career benefits and long-term implications for A.G.S. graduates are still murky. Median earnings of full-time, year-round workers with an associate degree are 18 percent higher than those with only a high school diploma, but still 35 percent lower than bachelor’s degree completers, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

    In Colorado, the average high school graduate in their mid-20s will earn about $25,000 per year, whereas a graduate with an associate of general studies degree will earn closer to $34,000 per year, according to 2021 data.

    “There was an assumption that maybe an A.G.S. wasn’t really worth much, but the data we had on hand locally said there’s not really much difference financially and employment-wise between the different types of associate degrees,” Fritz said.

    “I still don’t really know what all [the A.G.S.] can do for me,” Varkevisser said. “I was never not going to go for it once I got the email and found out it was a real thing, but I don’t know what to do with it necessarily.” She’s considered other forms of employment that require an associate degree, such as a laboratory or X-ray technician, while she finishes her bachelor’s degree in mathematics.

    In Montana, there’s a slight wage premium for individuals who hold an associate degree compared to those with only a high school diploma, Reed said. An associate degree also opens doors in some career fields, such as bookkeeping.

    The University of Montana is hoping to partner with the city of Missoula to identify small businesses looking for credentialed talent so completers can have a career pathway to transition into .

    “I don’t think people are going into six-figure jobs after this,” Reed said. “But it’s creating a step toward something else for these folks. They get another job a little higher up, a little higher up, that prepares them for the next thing.”

    But an A.G.S. isn’t a great target for workers and it can’t guarantee further education, MSU Denver’s Schafer noted.

    “I hate to say it, but it’s a little bit of, it’s a lovely parting gift,” Schafer said. “Here, you have something that you can now show to the world. But how do I [as an administrator] build you on to the next thing when you’ve already stopped out? Maybe that’s the best hope. Even then, maybe it doesn’t work quite as magically as we want it to.”

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  • Ask the Administrator: Advertising

    Ask the Administrator: Advertising

    An occasional correspondent writes,

    I am curious about your take on the amount of money that institutions are spending on marketing …

    According to this story, those four schools spent $676 million on marketing in one fiscal year.

    If private companies like Coke and Pepsi want to engage in an advertising arms race (a.k.a. the Cola Wars), that is fine because it is private money. If the shareholders don’t like it, they can vote out the board. However, a lot of this marketing money is from public dollars like Pell Grants, federal loans, GI Bill, etc. Public dollars should not be spent on an advertising arms race. Elizabeth Warren was looking into this in the context of OPMs.

    It seems like a huge transfer of wealth from taxpayers to Big Tech. The fact that adjuncts who teach online get paid so little is what really gets me upset about this.

    No one can unilaterally disarm in an arms race, but it seems like a condition of receiving federal aid could be that no more than X percent of your budget is marketing. This would mean some type of audits by government agencies, which are never fun, and the definition of “marketing” could be disputed. Schools might try to get around it with “content marketing” and other shenanigans, but it still seems like it’s worth a shot.

    So many thoughts …

    For obvious reasons, I’ve been reflecting a lot lately on my old constitutional law coursework. As long as the Supreme Court holds that money is speech—and the Supreme Court retains enough legitimacy to be taken seriously—I foresee major free speech issues around restricting advertising. If I were a betting man, I’d bet that the court’s legitimacy will have a shorter shelf life than its view on the “marketplace of ideas,” given how aggressively it’s shedding any pretense of respect for precedent.

    In the ’90s, a book called The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model (affectionately nicknamed SCAM) by Jeffrey Siegel and Harold Spaeth made some waves in political science circles for its claim that justices reasoned backward from the outcome they wanted. At the time, that was considered a shocking claim to make. Now it’s almost banal.

    And advertising generally isn’t what it used to be. Growing up, in the age of the media monoculture, ads tended to be corny. The best ones were either disarmingly sweet (Mean Joe Greene’s Coke ad, for example) or funny. They had to be, because they were expensive to air and the three networks had broad audiences. That led to inanity—anyone else remember the talking loaves of bread?—but the range of things that got advertised was relatively narrow and mostly inoffensive.

    Now it’s normal to see medicines advertised with machine-gun fire recitations of alarming side effects (“may cause fatal events”) and legal or legal-ish sports betting apps during games. In that context, ads for colleges are almost a relief, even if they sometimes seem excessive. At the last minor league baseball game I attended, three of the outfield billboards were for local colleges. I don’t remember that from earlier years.

    While we’re at it, separating institutional marketing from sports budgets at the Division I level would be a real challenge. How many students learn about universities from football? I’m guessing more than most of us would like to admit.

    That said, marketing isn’t cheap, and the money comes from somewhere.

    In the context of higher ed, separating public money from private money isn’t always clean. When I was at DeVry, the leadership there used to distinguish the taxpaying sector (meaning themselves) from the tax-consuming sector, which included private institutions. That was a bit convenient, as it left out the enormous reliance of most for-profits on federal and state financial aid, but there was a grain of truth to it. Nonprofit private colleges and universities benefit from tax exemptions and student financial aid, as well as (sometimes) research funding. In some states, they even receive direct operating aid. Higher ed is an ecosystem, rather than a system, but the entire ecosystem relies on public money in one form or another. In other words, assuming any actual respect for the law, it’s conceptually possible to attach limits on marketing expenses to the receipt of federal dollars.

    The underlying issue the correspondent raises is a serious one. Why do we force public or publicly funded institutions to compete with each other? Why do we underfund them to the point that they have to treat students as means rather than ends? The need for tuition dollars is behind the marketing; what if tuition were less relevant?

    Colleges have relatively fixed costs and relatively variable ones. In my more perfect world, public funding would cover the fixed costs and tuition could cover the variable ones. Instead, public funding falls well short of fixed costs, so they have to use variable revenues to cover fixed costs. That means scrambling to appease both prospective students and prospective funders, whether philanthropic or public. Advertising is part of that scrambling. When it works, it benefits the individual institution, but it’s likely negative for the ecosystem as a whole.

    Unfortunately, the ideology that assumes the market is always right has become common sense among one and a half of our two political parties. Markets are tools, not gods; regulating them is not heresy. But at this point in our political culture, anything that displeases markets is punished, often with an unnerving sense of righteousness among the punishers. We’ve even developed a new twist on Calvinism—the “prosperity gospel”—to sanctify wealth and to cast the nonwealthy as undeserving. I almost expect the mascot of the next for-profit educational behemoth to be the golden calf.

    Yes, I’d very much prefer to spend educational dollars on education, just as I’d rather spend medical dollars on medical care. Under the system we have, though, institutions can either compete or die. Changing that would require a political sea change.

    It’s almost enough to make me miss the talking loaves of bread.

    Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.

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  • Subcontractual higher education beyond the headlines

    Subcontractual higher education beyond the headlines

    We’ve written a lot about subcontractual provision on Wonkhe, and it is fair to say that very little of it has been positive.

    What’s repeatedly hit the headlines, here and elsewhere, are the providers that teach large numbers of students in circumstances that have sparked concerns about teaching quality, academic standards, and indeed financial probity or even ethics.

    There are a fair number of students that are getting a very bad deal out of subcontractual agreements and, although we’ve been screaming about this for several years, it is good to finally see the beginnings of some action.

    Student number tools

    The long-awaited release of OfS data is not perfect – there’s lots that we’d love to see that does not appear to have been delivered. One of these is proper student numbers: it should be possible to see data on how many students are studying at each subcontracted provider at the last census point.

    Instead, we are scrabbling around with denominators and suppressions trying to build a picture of this part of the sector that is both heavily caveated and three years out of date. This isn’t good enough.

    And it is a shame. Because as well as the horror show, the data we do have offers a glimpse of a little known corner of higher education that arguably deserves to be celebrated.

    I’ve developed some new visualisations to help you explore the data – these add substantial new features to what I have previously published. Both these dashboards work in broadly the same way – the first allows you to examine relationships at delivery providers, the second at lead providers. You choose your provider of interest at the top left, which shows the various relationships on a map on the left hand side. On the right you can see denominator numbers for each year of data – you can use the filter at the top right to see information about the total number of students who might be continuing, completing, or progressing in a given year.

    Each row on the right hand side shows a combination of provider (lead provider on the first dashboard, delivery provider on the second), mode, and level – with denominators and suppression codes available in the coloured squares on the right. The suppression codes are as follows:

    • [DQ]: information suppressed due to low data quality from the 2022-23 collection
    • [low]: There are more than 2 but fewer than 23 students in the denominator
    • [none]: There are 2 students or fewer in the denominator
    • [DP]: Data redacted for reasons of data protection
    • [DPL]: Data redacted for reasons of data protection (very low numbers,
    • [DPH]: Data redacted for reasons of data protection (within 2 of the denominator)
    • [RR] below threshold response rate (for progression)
    • [BK] no benchmarks (the benchmark includes at least 50 per cent of the provider’s students)

    You can see available indicators (including upper and lower confidence intervals at 95%), benchmarks, and numeric thresholds by mousing over one of the coloured squares. The filled circle is the indicator, the outline diamond is the benchmark, and the cross is the threshold.

    [Full screen]

    [Full screen]

    A typology

    It’s worth noting the range of providers that are subcontracted to deliver higher education for others. There were an astonishing 681 of these between 2014 and 2022.

    A third of those active in delivering provision for others (227) are registered with the Office for Students in their own right. Fifty-nine of these are recognisable as universities or other established higher education providers – including 14 in the Russell Group.

    Why would that happen? In some cases, a provider may not have had the degree awarding powers necessary for research degrees, so would partner with another university to deliver particular courses. In other cases, the peculiarities of this data mean that apprenticeship arrangements are shown with the university partner. There’s also some examples of two universities working together to deliver a single programme.

    We also find many examples of longstanding collaborations between universities and teaching organisations in the arts. Numerous independent schools of dance, drama, and music have offered higher education qualifications with the support of a university – the Bird School’s relationship with the Doreen Bird College of Performing Arts began in 1997. Italia Conti used to have an arrangement with the University of East London, it now works with the University of Chichester.

    There are 135 organisations delivering apprenticeships in a relationship with an OfS-registered higher education provider. Universities often offer end point assessment and administrative support to employers and others who offer apprenticeships between level 4 and level 7.

    Two large providers – Navitas and QA – offer foundation courses and accredited year one courses for international students at UK universities: QA also offers a range of programmes aimed at home undergraduates. We could also add Into as a smaller example. This dataset probably isn’t the best place to see this (QA is shown as multiple, linked, organisations) but this is a huge area of provision

    Seventy-four subcontracted providers are schools, or school centred initial teacher training (SCITT) organisations. As teacher training has gradually moved closer to the classroom and away from the lecture hall, many schools offer opportunities to gain the industry-standard Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE), which is the main route to qualified teacher status. A PGCE is a postgraduate qualification and is thus only awarded by organisations with postgraduate degree awarding powers.

    In total there are 144 providers subcontracted to deliver PGCE (initial teacher training) courses, primarily schools, local councils, and further education colleges (FECs). There are 166 FECs involved in subcontracted delivery – and this extends far beyond teacher training. Most large FECs have a university centre or similar, offering a range of foundation and undergraduate courses often (but not always) in vocational subjects. The Newcastle College Group used its experience of delivering postgraduate taught masters courses for Canterbury Christ Church University to successfully apply for postgraduate degree awarding powers – the first FEC to do so.

    We find 23 NHS organisations represented within the data. Any provider delivering medical, medical related, or healthcare subjects will have a relationship with one or more NHS foundation trust – as a means to offer student placements, and bring clinical expertise into teaching. This is generally an accreditation requirement. But in many cases, the relationship extends to the university awarding credit or qualifications for the learning and training that NHS staff do. The Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust works with multiple providers (the University of Oxford, Oxford Brookes University, and Buckinghamshire New University), to offer postgraduate apprenticeships in clinical and non-clinical roles.

    Nine police organisations (either constabularies or police and crime commissioners) have subcontractual relationships with registered higher education providers. Teesside University works with the Chief Constable of Cleveland to offer an undergraduate apprenticeship for prospective police officers.

    All three of the UKs armed forces have subcontractual relationships with higher education providers. The British Army currently works with the University of Reading to offer undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in leadership and strategic studies – in the past it has offered a range of qualifications from Bournemouth University. Kingston University has a relationship with the Royal Navy, currently offering an MSc in Technology (Maritime Operations) undertaken entirely in the workplace.

    Ecosystem

    When I talk to people about franchise and partnership arrangements, most (perhaps thinking of the examples that make the mainstream press) ask me whether it would not be easier to simply ban such arrangements. After all, it is very difficult to see any benefit from the possibly fraudulent and often low quality behavior that is plastered all over The Times on a regular basis.

    As I think the data demonstrates, a straight-ahead ban would be hugely damaging – swathes of national priorities and achievements (from NHS staff development, to offering higher education in “cold spots”, to the quality of performances on London’s West End) would be adversely affected. But the same could be said for increases in regulatory overheads.

    There are a handful of very large providers (I’d start with Global Banking School, Elizabeth School of London, Navitas, QA, Into, London School of Science and Technology, and a few others – and from the data you’d have included Oxford Business Colleges) that are, effectively, university-like in size and scope. It is very difficult to understand why these are not registered providers given the scale of their operations (GBS, Into, and Navitas already are) and this does seem to be the right direction of travel.

    There are a clutch of medium-sized delivery providers, often in a single long-standing relationship with a higher education institution. Often, these are nano-specialisms, particularly in the creative arts or in locally important industries. In many of these cases oversight on quality and standards from the lead provider has been proven over a number of years to work well – and there seems little benefit to changing this arrangement. I would hope for this group – as is likely to happen for the FECs, SCITTs, NHS, police, and armed forces – that a change to regulatory oversight only happens where there is an issue identified.

    There is also a long tail of very small arrangements, often linked to apprenticeships (and regulated accordingly). For others at this end of the scale it is difficult to imagine OfS having the time or the capacity to regulate, so almost by default oversight remains with the lead partners. I know I say this in nearly every article, but at this end it feels like we need some kind of regular review of the way quality processes work for external providers within lead providers – we need to be sure lead providers are able to do what can be a very difficult job and do it well.

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  • How higher education became a get rich quick scheme

    How higher education became a get rich quick scheme

    Sometimes, the problem with both media coverage and regulation is that critique of a part of the sector taints it all.

    When ministers or media outlets find sharp practice in recruitment or failings in student support, everything from OfS Insight Briefs to Sunday Times splashes can feel like the whole class being kept in for lunch when you weren’t making any noise.

    So has been the case for franchising. A specific group of universities has been subcontracting out to a specific group of private colleges in recent years – a group which has rightly picked up attention from the media, the National Audit Office (NAO), the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), the Office for Students (OfS), the Student Loans Company (SLC) and the Department for Education (DfE).

    Independent HE, for example, have argued elsewhere on the site that while they strongly support a tougher regime around franchising, the proposed approach of requiring only larger providers (300+ students) to register would be insufficient – missing many bad actors while creating administrative bottlenecks and failing to hold lead providers properly accountable for their partners. Instead, they advocate for universal basic registration for all teaching providers.

    Now, following last week’s long-awaited publication of data on subcontractual partnerships from OfS, we’re pretty confident that it’s possible to isolate and identify a specific subset of undergraduate providers in the English sector.

    Its defining characteristics are that its providers are privately owned, are (very much) for-profit, deliver non-specialist courses principally in Business and Management, and have been (very) rapidly expanding in recent years.

    Last year OfS said that in some cases there has been an “exponential growth” in student numbers in subcontractual partnerships over the last few years, with some lead providers now teaching more students through these arrangements than directly on their own campuses.

    It said that among other potential concerns, this raises questions about the direction of travel for the lead provider’s own strategic identity, aims and objectives.

    Our definition of a specific sub-sector is not perfect. There are a number of providers whose wholly-owned or directly-delivered satellite campus operations share some of those characteristics. Student numbers have not been formally published, and as ever there is lag in the data in general.

    In 2023-24, OfS’ student characteristics data dashboard shows that there were 101,950 students enrolled overall on subcontracted Business and Management courses – up from just 5,630 a decade ago.

    And if we derive from full-time, first degree continuation statistics, aggregate where companies are owned by the same parent, and attach those characteristics to partnerships where the entrant population was 100 or more in 2023-24, we can see 16 providers that enrolled over 40,000 FT FD entrants in 2022.

    Below threshold

    Aggregating both multiple providers in a group, and this sub set in general, is not an exact science. For each partnership between a university and private college, OfS has only published a denominator population rounded to 5 – which makes precision impossible. But we can estimate this sub group’s outcomes “performance” by implying a numerator from the percentages, and recompiling the numbers.

    The result is not stellar. In OfS’ press release to accompany the data, we learned that 77 per cent of FT FD subcontracted students continued courses into a second year, compared to 88 per cent in the sector as a whole. Against a regulatory minimum of 80 per cent, this group of providers averaged just 70 per cent.

    We learned that 74 per cent of subcontracted students completed their course, compared to 87 per cent for the sector as a whole and a regulatory minimum of 75 per cent. This subgroup scored just 70 per cent.

    The further out that a metric is from when students start, the longer it takes to pick up results – a real regulatory issue in a subsector that is expanding so rapidly. But when we look at progression to a graduate job or further study, it’s 71 per cent for the sector as a whole, 57 per cent of subcontracted students, and just 53 per cent of this subsector – against a regulatory minimum of 60 per cent.

    These providers are almost certainly inflating the sector’s performance on access – especially for those who are doing the franchising-to – access and participation stats are not (yet) split by partnership. But they are also dragging down the sector’s performance on outcomes, and giving subcontracting a bad name – all three of the key metrics would likely be above threshold if this group was removed.

    More importantly, if we follow OfS’ logic on outcomes and thresholds – that the figures are signals of whether students have the potential to succeed on the course, and receive good teaching and support through their studies – the group has been expanding yet failing.

    One area, though, where the group is not failing, is on financial performance.

    Healthy profits

    In 2023, the Russell Group estimated that in 2022/23, English universities on average supplemented the cost of educating each UK undergraduate student by £2,500 per year, with all subjects now making a loss on average.

    Not so much here in this sub sector. Because most of the 18 providers are not on the OfS register, the format (and even visibility) of annual accounts is uneven. Financial years and levels of disclosure differ, some are showing on Companies House as posting accounts late, and in many cases some of the income from fees moves up into a parent company in a way that prevents proper transparency.

    But on the basis that the bulk of their income is tuition fees after any franchising fee retained by the university passing on the SLC money that it gets, and assuming that “cost of sales” usually covers the provision of education rather than administrative expenses that are often dominated by acquisition costs, we can calculate a gross profit for the latest year that figures are available for.

    Below that line often huge dividends, director remuneration, domestic agent fees and the costs of renting space or borrowing from a parent co deflate the final profit figures. But in gross terms, notwithstanding that some of the group were micro-entities and exempt at last accounts publication, the group in scope posted gross profits of £504m on an income of £815m.

    Company Period end Turnover (£) Gross profit (£) Note
    Cecos Computing International Limited 31 Mar 2024 £ 20,269,818 £ 9,916,813
    Elizabeth School of London Limited 31 Aug 2024 £ 74,947,093 £ 46,856,529
    Fairfield School of Business Ltd 31 Aug 2024 £ 10,463,430 £ 7,254,024
    Global Banking School Limited 29 Feb 2024 £ 233,566,242 £ 128,068,724
    LCA (Education LTD + London LTD) 31 Dec 2024 £ 70,068,058 £ 36,388,054
    Ld Training Services Limited 31 Aug 2024 £ 10,185,134 £ 9,460,083
    London College of Contemporary Arts Ltd 31 May 2024 £ 25,360,932 £ 17,223,552
    London PT College Limited — — — Not disclosed in abridged filings
    London School of Commerce & IT Limited 31 Mar 2024 £ 6,385,138 £ 3,434,817
    London School of Science & Technology Limited 30 Jun 2024 (15months) £ 83,771,009 £ 62,903,105 Group figures as filed
    Mont Rose College of Management and Sciences Limited 31 Aug 2024 £ 9,904,941 £ 8,489,293
    Navitas UK Holdings Limited (group) 30 Jun 2024 £ 57,222,133 £ 27,004,304
    Oxford Business College UK Limited 31 Aug 2023 £ 49,734,100 £ 31,030,795
    QAHE (LM+NU+UR) Limited 31 May 2024 £ 60,800,000 £ 34,400,000
    St. Piran’s School (GB) Limited 31 Dec 2024 £ 72,470,964 £ 59,211,778
    UK College of Business and Computing Ltd 31 Jul 2024 £ 18,032,506 £ 14,196,396
    Waltham International College Limited 31 Jul 2024 £ 12,127,614 £ 8,118,100
    TOTAL £ 815,309,112 £ 503,956,367

    Figures like that should push any sensible policymaker into windfall tax territory – or at the very least taking some of that profit and using it to relieve students burdened by a lifetime of debt of some of the balance. But more broadly, perhaps policymakers should take a step back and ask whether what’s being facilitated here should be.

    Avoiding scandals

    Ever since I was sent a photo back in 2022 of a domestic agent’s pull-up banner in a London shopping centre inviting students to claim their £15,000 in maintenance support, we’ve been trying to get to the bottom of what’s been happening with franchising.

    There’s a compelling reason for that. Franchising scandals over the last decade caused huge reputational damage for the sector and created an enormous regulatory distraction. When HEFCE and the Department for Education were spending their time devising ways to crack down on sharp practice, they weren’t focusing on improving the sector. The opportunity costs of franchising scandals are significant.

    We could see what was coming – a repeat of the problem. The Office for Students, already stretched, would end up spending much of its time attempting to regulate the rapid expansion. There was real danger of further reputational damage for the sector.

    What we’ve found are highly litigious providers, and real difficulty in getting the data we needed. We wanted to see who these rapidly expanding private companies were – companies specialising in “widening access” students, and lead providers appearing in graphs showing students claiming maintenance loans without fee loans.

    And from a student perspective, one of the issues has long been that if they want to find out what the outcomes would be like, they can’t really tell.

    This matters because almost all higher education advertising says “here’s what this has been like in the past, and so here’s what might happen to you.” The big problem was that when they apply to those providers, they are often told about the franchising provider’s outcomes – not the franchisee provider’s. They hear about the university’s figures for business studies, but can’t see the actual provider’s numbers.

    Franchise partners change frequently, and course names change often. The historical data needed to support statistics on Discover Uni simply aren’t available. Given that providers often have franchising deals with multiple universities, it can’t be unreasonable to ask how well these colleges perform on continuation, completion and graduate employment – especially when so much advertising focuses on careers and improving life chances, while obscuring debt.

    In OfS’ words:

    This [data] will be useful for prospective students, lead providers responsible for registering the students, and institutions responsible for teaching students on these courses.

    Even if the regulation was tightened, the incentives for the latter two of the parties on that list may be too strong to ever aspire beyond minimums. And for students – who have characteristics that are least frequently associated with an “informed actors in a choice market” ideal, even OfS’ data doesn’t show each of the franchised-to providers in aggregate.

    Why?

    This leaves us with a simple question. If the problem is non-specialist franchised provision – which certainly appears to be the case – why is the Department for Education funding it?

    It’s not provision that’s otherwise unavailable. It’s not serving some niche that doesn’t already exist. Students with talent, drive and aspiration would still access traditional universities. Students unsuitable for full-time study would pursue other routes. Students who need more support would have more money spent on them if it wasn’t being delivered to the bottom line in profit.

    This is, lest we forget, a part of the sector where expectations on harassment and sexual misconduct, or free speech, or charter work on mental health or fair admissions, are established only in part and often only in theory – and where student protection in the event of course, campus or provider closure is even thinner than it is elsewhere. Why are these risks concentrated on some of the least advantaged students in the sector?

    There are now real risks in contraction. Already some of the providers on the list have closed campuses and shuttered courses. Have reportable events been made? Are students being compensated for any breach of contract? And what happens if any of these companies just collapse – when the lead provider is often hundreds of miles away? These are tasks the government needs to take on.

    There are risks to allowing franchising, risks to allowing private providers to access the loan book, and risks to having no student number caps. In the last decade, the view was that the potential rewards were greater than risks. But notwithstanding the need to contract with care, it simply cannot be true that the world would be worse if these providers didn’t exist.

    Many things could be done. We’ve made proposals over on the Post-18 Project on different ways to regulate and restrict what’s happening here that draw on valuable lessons from colleagues in FE. But at the simple core, it comes down to this – why does DfE think it’s worth the risk to keep open the student loan book to private providers through franchise agreements for non-specialist subject higher education?

    The faster the government changes course, the faster all of us can turn our attention to improving higher education’s contribution to society and economic growth – rather than chasing around owners of colleges who, collectively, are getting rich off outcomes which OfS says are unacceptably poor.

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  • Five myths: Higher education at this weekend’s Battle of Ideas

    Five myths: Higher education at this weekend’s Battle of Ideas

    • HEPI Director, Nick Hillman OBE, spent some of his weekend listening to, and participating in, discussions about higher education at the Battle of Ideas at Church House in Westminster.
    • Here are his remarks from a debate on whether we are now in ‘The Era of the Downwardly Mobile Graduate’.

    Thanks for inviting me to speak. I agreed to do so for two reasons. First, the Battle of Ideas is a wonderful grassroots event. Secondly, Claire Fox invited me to speak immediately after the murder of Charlie Kirk. My daughter is keen on telling me where Charlie Kirk was misguided but, whether she is right or wrong, universities should be places where free and fervent debate thrives; not places where discussion gets closed down with a bullet. That should not need saying but, sadly, of course it does.

    Last night, I went to a gig in Oxford by the fabulous band EMF – I first saw them as a fresher 35 years ago and, yes, they are still going. As you doubtless know, their most famous song is ‘Unbelievable’. And most of what we have heard, and are going to hear, is exactly that: unbelievable. Not in the ‘incroyable’ sense of the word, but in the sense that the claims are simply not true.

    Let me explain in my few minutes why pretty much every point in the advertising blurb for this event is a myth.

    Myth 1

    We are told there are millions upon millions of people in ‘non-graduate roles’. But this relies on weird and poorly understood definitions of what graduate jobs are. Official definitions obviously rely on jobs being categorised into graduate and non-graduate.

    My favourite critique of what this means comes from an – admittedly – old article by Peter Brant (on Wonkhe), which looked at the official classification from a few years ago, writing:

    A civil servant who was promoted from an Executive Officer to a Higher Executive Officer would be moving from a graduate job to a non-graduate job. Managing an off-licence is a graduate job, managing a pub or a wine bar is a non-graduate job. A singer is a graduate role, a dancer is a non-graduate role. A clown is a graduate job, the manager of a circus is a non-graduate job. And – my personal favourite – a rag-and-bone man is a graduate job, an antiques dealer is a non-graduate job. The list goes on and on.

    Myth 2

    Myth number 2 is the idea that graduates ‘face grim prospects’. The OECD’s new Education at a Glance, which is an annual compendium of global education facts, shows this to be untrue.

    Unemployment is much lower among UK graduates than among non-graduates – irrespective of subject area studied. Indeed, unemployment is much lower among UK graduates than graduates in other developed countries too.

    OECD data, Education at a Glance https://www.hepi.ac.uk/events/launch-of-oecds-flagship-report-education-at-a-glance-2025-hosted-by-hepi-on-tuesday-9-september-2025/

    There isn’t time to go into the huge other benefits of higher education but they include better physical and better mental health.

    The OECD also show the UK does have a problem of low incomes. But this is not among graduates, where our outcomes are positive and comparable with those in other countries. We are literally at the bottom of the OECD league when it comes to earnings for people who have left school with low or no qualifications. They are the people being most let down.

    Myth 3

    The third myth in the blurb for today is that AI will remove the need for employers to recruit people with higher level skills. This is just a revamped version of John Maynard Keynes’s nonsense prediction that people at the end of this current decade would in future work for just 15-hours a week.

    We published a collection of essays on AI last week. Perhaps the most thought-provoking one was by Professor Rose Luckin of the UCL Knowledge Lab. She argues persuasively that:

    The AI revolution represents a pivotal moment where humans need to become more intelligent, not less, as we develop increasingly sophisticated tools.

    Do come to our webinar on the back of the report early next month.

    Myth 4

    The fourth myth is that there are multiple really good alternative options to higher education. Ministers of different stripes have been telling us for years that there is about to be a huge expansion of apprenticeships for young people. Meanwhile, your children and mine are being pumped full of information about why they should do an apprenticeship rather than traditional higher education.

    Yet the number of degree apprenticeships for school leaver is tiny, the number of apprenticeships has fallen since the Apprenticeship Levy was introduced and all those people who worry about university drop-outs should take a look at the high non-continuation rate for apprenticeships.

    Apprenticeships don’t just happen because Keir Starmer or Kemi Badenoch say they should. Apprenticeships are jobs with training attached and the state of the labour market and the regulation of apprenticeships, not to mention the structure of the British economy, are not conducive to big increases in supply.

    Myth 5

    The final myth is the idea that there are tonnes of ‘disaffected university leavers’. Of course, higher education does not work out for all those who go all of the time. Indeed, we have shown in work with the University of Bristol that a high proportion of graduates would make a different choice, such as a different course and / or institution, if they were going back in time.

    However, whether they chose exactly the right course or not, in our new work with King’s College Policy Institute, we show shows that a mere 8% of graduates regret their decision to enter higher education. Meanwhile other work shows younger graduates might have even lower regret rates than that.

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  • Why Isn’t RSS More Popular By Now? – Teaching in Higher Ed

    Why Isn’t RSS More Popular By Now? – Teaching in Higher Ed

    It was a bit of a relief to have well-traveled terrain as the today’s topic in Harold Jarche’s Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop: Aggregators and RSS.

    While I still want to drop everything going on in my life right now and dive deep into the topic from two days ago (the Cynefin Framework), that just isn’t realistic. This PKMastery workshop has been a wonderful blend of ideas that challenge me, coupled with topics that I always enjoy learning more about, but am not starting from scratch with…

    RSS – Not-So-Popular

    It seems RSS could really have used some help from Galinda in the musical, Wicked, in terms of getting popular. I wish aggregators and RSS were something that the vast majority of people knew about and had incorporated into their lifelong learning and sense-making. It’s strange to me that RSS has been around such a long time, yet still isn’t very common in organizations at all.

    In case the terms (RSS and aggregators) are new to you, Common Craft’s RSS in Plain English from 18 years ago still checks out:

    The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

    I’ve got some good news for you, some bad news, and some real ugly news.

    The good: There’s a ton of information on the internet, which has the potential to be transformative for us, as sense-making human beings.

    The bad: We can’t keep up and the quantity of information just keeps on growing, yet not enough of us know ways to harness the possibilities.

    The ugly: Some of us give up on thinking we’ll never be able to have a way of seeking, sensing, and sharing, so we resolve to just search for things at the exact moment we realize we have a specific question about something (a gap in our knowledge that we are aware of in that moment).

    What gets missed here in “the ugly” (among other things) are the questions we don’t even realize that we have… The unknown unknowns… Not to mention misinformation/disinformation, etc.

    Getting to Know RSS

    Here are some RSS-related articles that I’ve saved on my digital bookmarking tool of choice: Raindrop:

    Next, let’s take a look at how I’ve set things up to be a tap away from a world of possibilities for sense-making…

    My RSS + Aggregation Tools

    I use Inoreader as my RSS aggregator. That means that when I discover a source (news site, blog, newsletter, YouTube channel, etc.) that I discern will serve me up potentially useful information, I add it to Inoreader inside my existing folders (e.g. News, Technology, Business, Digital Pedagogy, Higher Ed, Thinkers). Each time one of those sources (called feeds in RSS nomenclature) posts something new, it automatically shows up as an unread item on Inoreader.

    Screenshot of the Inoreader RSS website with folders on the left (AI, YouTube, News, Personal, etc.) and images/headlines on the right.

    Thats where some people stop.

    They download Inoreader’s app(s) and read their feeds on their computers or smart phones and they’re off to the races. Inoreader is both an RSS aggregator (keeping track of what feeds the user subscribes to, as well as which stories they have read/not read).

    However, I’m picky about my reading experience and have gotten particular about being able to read via my iPad and navigate everything with just one thumb.

     

    "Who has two thumgs and can operate Unread with just one of them? this guy (and me)" Guy wearing a medical coat and a stethoscope puts both his thumbs up, which then point back at him.

     

    This is where you insert a joke about “who has two thumbs and can set up RSS aggregators and tools? ME.” Except that in my case, it actually only takes one thumb, using my preferred RSS reader.

    Unread = The Best RSS Reader I’ve Ever Experienced

    Those who read on iPads would be hard pressed to find a better RSS reader than Unread, especially if you want to be able to skim and scroll through headlines (you can set up Unread to automatically mark the items as read, as you scroll through them, making the navigation even easier).

    Inoreader does the work behind the scenes of keeping track of all my subscriptions and what is read/unread. The Unread app then presents me with a “window” into all that “stuff” Inoreader is keeping track of in the background. Unread “syncs” with Inoreader. I don’t have much use of an RSS reader on my Mac, preferring to do most of my RSS consumption via my iPad, but I wanted to mention that even if you had a different app/service you preferred to use on your computer, Inoreader (and other RSS aggregators) are able to keep track across different RSS readers what you’ve read/unread.

    Something Very Cool

    Harold Jarche suggested that those of us who already have an aggregator / RSS workflow to share tips. I’ve kind of done that, already, above. But I will say that through his materials, I was delighted to discover that I can set up feeds for Mastodon #hashtags.

    From Harold:

    You can also subscribe to any Mastodon feed by adding .rss to the address, e.g. mastodon.social/@harold.rss

    You can subscribe to #hashtags by appending .rss — e.g. https://mastodon.social/tags/pkmastery.rss

    The PKMastery workshop is the gift that just keeps on giving. I’m looking forward to giving that a try this weekend. So cool.

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  • Higher education data explains why digital ID is a good idea

    Higher education data explains why digital ID is a good idea

    Just before the excitement of conference season, your local Facebook group lost its collective mind. And it shows no sign of calming down.

    Given everything else that is going on, you’d think that reinforcing the joins between key government data sources and giving more visibility to the subjects of public data would be the kind of nerdy thing that the likes of me write about.

    But no. Somebody used the secret code word. ID Cards.

    Who is she and what is she to you?

    I’ve written before about the problems our government faces in reliably identifying people. Any entitlement– or permission– based system needs a clear and unambiguous way of assuring the state that a person is indeed who they claim they are, and have the attributes or documentation they claim to.

    As a nation, we are astonishingly bad at this. Any moderately serious interaction with the state requires a parade of paperwork – your passport, driving license, birth certificate, bank statement, bank card, degree certificate, and two recent utility bills showing your name and address. Just witness the furore over voter ID – to be clear a pointless idea aimed at solving a problem that the UK has never faced – and the wild collection of things that you might be allowed to pull out of your voting day pocket that do not include a student ID.

    We are not immune from this problem in higher education. I’ve been asking for years why you need to apply to a university via UCAS, and apply for funding via the Student Loans Company, via two different systems. It’s then never been clear to me why you then need to submit largely similar information to your university when you enroll.

    Sun sign

    Given that organs of the state have this amount of your personal information, it is then alarming that the only way it can work out what you earn after graduating is by either asking you directly (Graduate Outcomes) or by seeing if anyone with your name, domicile, and date of birth turns up in the Inland Revenue database.

    That latter one – administrative matching – is illustrative of the government’s current approach to identity. If it can find enough likely matches of personal information in multiple government databases it can decide (with a high degree of confidence) that records refer to the same person.

    That’s how they make LEO data. They look for National Insurance Number (NINO), forename, surname, date of birth, postcode, and sex in both HESA student records and the Department for Work and Pension’s Customer Information System (which itself links to the tax database). Keen Wonkhe readers will have spotted that NINO isn’t returned to HESA – to get this they use “fuzzy matching” with personal data from the Student Loans Company, which does. The surname thing is even wilder – they use a sound-based algorithm (SOUNDEX) to allow for flexibility on spellings.

    This kind of nonsense actually has a match rate of more than 90 per cent (though this is lower for ethnically Chinese graduates because sometimes forenames and surnames can switch depending on the cultural knowledge of whoever prepared the data).

    It’s impressive as a piece of data engineering. But given that all of this information was collected and stored by arms of the same government it is really quite poor.

    The tale of the student ID

    Another higher education example. If you were ever a student you had a student ID. It was printed on your student card, and may have turned up on various official documents too. Perhaps you imagined that every student in the UK had a student number, and that there was some kind of logic to the way that they were created, and that there was a canonical national list. You would be wrong.

    Back in the day, this would have been a HESA ID, itself created from your UCAS number and your year of entry (or your year of entry, HESA provider ID, and an internal reference number if you applied directly). Until just a few years ago, the non-UCAS alternative was in use for all students – even including the use of the old HESA provider ID rather than the more commonly used UKPRN. Why the move away from UCAS – well, UCAS had changed how they did identifiers and HESA’s systems couldn’t cope.

    You’re expecting me to say that things are far more sensible now, but no. They are not. HESA has finally fixed the UKPRN issue within a new student ID field (SID). This otherwise replicates the old system but with one important difference: it is not persistent.

    Under the old approach, the idea was you had one student number for life – if you did an undergraduate degree at Liverpool, a masters at Manchester Met, and a PhD at Royal Holloway these were all mapped to the same ID. There was even a lookup service for new providers if the student didn’t have their old number. I probably don’t even need to tell you why this is a good idea if you are interested – in policy terms – in the paths that students within their career in higher education. These days we just administratively match if we need to. Or – as in LEO – assume that the last thing a student studied was the key to or cause of their glittering or otherwise career.

    The case of the LLE

    Now I hear what you might be thinking. These are pretty terrible examples, but they are just bodges – workarounds for bad decisions made in the distant past. But we have the chance to get it right in the next couple of years.

    The design of the Lifelong Learning Entitlement means that the government needs tight and reliable information about who does what bit of learning in order that funds can be appropriately allocated. So you’d think that there would be a rock-solid, portable, unique learner number underpinning everything.

    There is not. Instead, we appear to be standardising on the Student Loans Company customer reference number. This is supposed to be portable for life, but it doesn’t appear in any other sector datasets (the “student support number” is in HESA, but that is somehow different – you get two identifiers from SLC, lucky you). SLC also holds your NINO (you need one to get funding!), and has capacity to hold another additional number of an institution’s choice, but not (routinely) your HESA student ID or your UCAS identifier.

    There’s also space to add a Unique Learner Number (ULN) but at this stage I’m too depressed to go into what a missed opportunity that is.

    Why is standardising on a customer reference number not a good idea? Well, think of all the data SLC doesn’t hold but HESA does. Think about being able to refer easily back to a school career and forward into working life on various government data. Think about how it is HESA data and not SLC data that underpins LEO. Think about the palaver I have described above and ask yourself why you wouldn’t fix it when you had the opportunity.

    Learning to love Big Brother

    I’ll be frank, I’m not crazy about how much the government knows about me – but honestly compared to people like Google, Meta, or – yikes – X (formerly twitter) it doesn’t hugely worry me.

    I’ve been a No2ID zealot in my past (any employee of those three companies could tell you that) but these days I am resigned to the fact that people need to know who I am, and I’d rather be more than 95 per cent confident that they could get it right.

    I’m no fan of filling in forms, but I am a fan of streamlined and intelligent administration.

    So why do we need ID cards? Simply because in proper countries we don’t need to go through stuff like this every time we want to know if a person that pays tax and a person that went to university are the same person. Because the current state of the art is a mess.

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