Tag: Higher

Columbia Ends Some Teaching Roles for Grad Students

Columbia’s graduate student union is in the middle of negotiating a new contract with the university.

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Less than a month before the start of the semester, Ph.D. students at Columbia University in New York were told with little explanation that they would no longer be teaching this fall.

The catalyst for this change is unclear. The university said it’s an effort to reduce the teaching load on Columbia graduate students and allow them to finish their degrees in six years rather than seven. The students said it’s a move to weaken the labor power of their union, which is in the middle of tense negotiations with the university to renew its contract, which expired June 30.

The students, who are members of the graduate student union Student Workers of Columbia, will still be paid. However, instead of receiving a biweekly teaching stipend, they’ll get a lump sum at the start of the semester. To pay both the Ph.D.s and their replacements, “the cost to the university likely runs to millions of dollars,” estimated Michael Thaddeus, a mathematics professor at Columbia and vice president and acting president of the Columbia chapter of the American Association of University Professors. In July, Columbia agreed to a $221 million settlement with the federal government in order to restore hundreds of millions in federal research funding.

Columbia has traditionally tapped sixth- and seventh-year graduate students to teach foundational courses and some of the undergraduate college’s Core Curriculum classes, which includes courses, like University Writing and Frontiers of Science, that all first-year students are required to take. The work is more time-consuming than a regular TA job; as the so-called instructors of record, the Ph.D. students must teach two two-hour lectures and attend a pedagogy seminar each week, on top of all of the reading and prep time that goes on behind the scenes. The workload sidelines their research and writing, a representative from SWC explained. But it offers valuable teaching experience, and Ph.D. candidates are usually guaranteed a seventh year of funding when they sign on to teach a core class.

But this teaching expectation is unusually large for graduate students, according to Columbia officials.

“Columbia doctoral students have typically been required to teach more than Ph.D. students at peer institutions, which often means delays in their time to degree,” a university spokesperson wrote in a statement to Inside Higher Ed. “After discussions with some departments about teaching requirements and instructional staffing, we have released some graduate students from teaching obligations for the fall—while continuing to offer them the same funding and benefits. These students will have more time to complete academic requirements or advance their dissertation research and writing.”

Neither the students nor some faculty buy this explanation. Students say they didn’t receive any formal communication about changes to the graduate student teaching structure and that the move to dismiss or deny Ph.D.s from the teaching positions is an effort to undermine the labor power of the union, which had been planning a strike for the fall. As TAs and members of SWC, the students would still be able to participate in a work action, but it wouldn’t have as big an impact as lecturers walking out of class.

More than 100 students are affected by this change, according to the union. Columbia officials said the figure was much lower but declined to share an exact figure and noted that the number of Ph.D. core instructors varies year to year.

Columbia’s AAUP chapter denounced the university’s action in an Aug. 19 statement.

“We do not agree with the claim that this step has been taken to help graduate students. Rather, it clearly has to do with the looming contract negotiations. The timing makes this clear,” said Thaddeus. “Students applied for preceptor positions back in November, and then they heard nothing at all for many months. If this were being done to help graduate students, then it would have made sense to notify them promptly.”

The move will also damage the quality of Columbia’s doctoral and M.F.A. programs, Thaddeus argued.

“Practical experience with setting assignments and exams, giving final grades, and so on is invaluable to those graduate students who pursue a career in teaching,” he added.

One sixth-year Ph.D., who wished to remain anonymous to prevent retaliation from the university for speaking out, applied for a core teaching position in December. Over the next eight months, she received no communication about the position and finally received an offer for a TA position July 30. It wasn’t until Aug. 6, the day she was originally supposed to sign and return the teaching assistant appointment letter, that she heard back about the core position. She’d been rejected, the email said, and it included no explanation or information about the widespread changes to graduate teaching duties at Columbia.

The abrupt change is “really disrupting people in the later stage of the program, like myself, who thought that this was not going to be my last year,” says the Ph.D. student. “Now I’m having to go on the academic job market basically at the last minute.”

To fill the now-vacant teaching jobs, Columbia is recruiting for one-year lectureships and advertising the roles to adjuncts, postdocs and New York–based graduate students at other universities.

“I wanted to share with you a posting we’ve just made for full-time lecturer positions teaching all across our Core curriculum—in Art, Music, Literature, and Contemporary Civilization—where we are expecting a larger entering class that we’d originally thought,” Columbia officials wrote in a message that was passed along to faculty at the University of Chicago and obtained by Inside Higher Ed. Columbia has also sent the position to Yale University.

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August 27, 2025
HHS Ends Minority Biomedical Research Support Program

The Health and Human Services Department has terminated the Minority Biomedical Research Support program, which provided colleges and universities grants to increase the number of minority faculty, students and investigators conducting biomedical research.

In a notice published Monday in the Federal Register, HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the cancellation is to comply with two anti–diversity, equity and inclusion executive orders President Trump signed in January on his first two days back in office, plus the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action in college admissions decisions. The change is effective Sept. 25.

“The MBRS program prioritizes racial classifications in awarding federal funding,” including by relying on “‘minority student enrollment’ to determine applicant eligibility,” Kennedy wrote. And, though the Supreme Court ruling focused on university admissions, Kennedy wrote that “the principles identified in Students for Fair Admissions also apply to the federal government and require repeal of the MBRS program.”

STAT reported the move earlier. Rochelle Newman, a University of Maryland psychologist who used the grant to pay undergraduate researchers and train them, told STAT that “cutting of these programs means that an entire generation of students will end up being lost to science.”

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August 27, 2025
International Students Face Visa Issues Into Fall Semester

This week marked the start of the semester for hundreds of colleges across the U.S. But many international students, plagued by difficulty getting visa appointments and unusually high rates of visa denials, are still unsure if they’ll be able to attend college in the U.S. this year.

At the University of Maryland Baltimore County, a midsize public university that has a student body composed of about 15 percent international students, international Ph.D. and undergraduate students appear to be largely unaffected by visa issues. But the rate of visa issuance for master’s students is only about half what it has been in previous years, according to David Di Maria, UMBC’s vice provost for global engagement.

Most of UMBC’s master’s students are from India, the country that now sends the most international students to the U.S.—but which experts say has had virtually no visa appointments available for the past several months.

“I think what has impacted that population the most is that you’ve got a country where … you could probably guess, it’s the highest volume in terms of students visa applications at a time when there are fewer slots available,” Di Maria said. “Hopefully it’s a blip. Hopefully, in future terms, there won’t be an extended period where students are unable to secure visa appointments.”

The backlog in visa appointments dates to the Trump administration’s pause on all student visa interviews in late May, after which the government began mandating social media reviews for all F-1 visa applicants. Some experts argue that the mandatory social media reviews have also extended the visa process by adding more responsibilities to the workload of consulate staff.

Since then, experts have speculated about how significant the drop in international student enrollment will be this fall. NAFSA, the association that represents international education professionals, predicted earlier this summer that international enrollment would drop between 30 and 40 percent, resulting in $7 billion in lost revenue and 60,000 lost jobs. Experts warn that a dip that significant could have major repercussions for the economies of college towns and cities. Colleges may also have to scramble to find professors to lead low-level classes that international graduate students were slated to teach.

Stuck In a Holding Pattern

It’s difficult to tell if those projections are accurate. The Department of State hasn’t updated visa issuance numbers since May, at which point figures were already lower than they had been the previous year.

But now, the picture of what this academic year might look like is beginning to take shape as institutions and experts report that significant numbers of international students are stuck in a holding pattern, unable to find visa appointments even after the semester has begun.

“I actually joined a WhatsApp group in April … of all these Indian students who are aspiring to study in the U.S. this fall, and I [see] a lot of students saying, ‘No slots, no slots,’” said Girish Ballolla, chief executive officer of Gen Next Education, an international recruitment firm. “Basically, what they’re saying is they’re going online trying to schedule an appointment and they’re not finding any slots. Those students are, like, now talking about, ‘Oh, should I defer to spring? Should I take up my university’s offer of an online program?’”

Other countries with severely limited appointments include China, Japan and Nigeria, according to NAFSA.

Inside Higher Ed reached out to over 30 universities with significant international student enrollment to ask how many of their committed incoming students were unable to attend due to visa issues. Most did not respond; others declined to answer the question or said that data was not yet available.

A handful of institutions noted that they’ve had only a small number of students impacted by delays and denials; Grinnell College, located in Iowa, has only one international student out of 72 who was unable to come to campus due to visa delays. At Mount Holyoke College, “fewer than seven” students are still waiting on their visas, a spokesman said in an email, though he said other students had deferred until the spring. It’s not unusual for a small number of students to miss the start of the semester due to visa issues, even in a regular semester.

On the other hand, Cornell University, like UMBC, said some of its graduate students had trouble getting their visas—or were simply concerned about coming to the U.S.

“Cornell accepted roughly the same number of international students this year as in past years and roughly the same number accepted our offer as in the past, but we have experienced some melt at the graduate level as students were worried about the visa application process or chose not to come to the U.S. because of the political climate,” Wendy Wolford, vice provost for international affairs, told Inside Higher Ed in an email.

Grinnell, Cornell and Mount Holyoke, as well as UMBC, are among the 20 institutions with the highest proportion of international students in the U.S., according to The New York Times.

Visa Denials Are Up, Too

On top of having difficulty securing appointments, more students are having their visas denied, experts report.

Sudhanshu Kaushik, the director of the North American Association of Indian Students, said that students from the subcontinent are being denied at a higher rate than he’s seen in his five years leading the organization.

Many have been told the reason for their denial is because there’s not enough proof that they’re not attempting to immigrate to the U.S. That’s usual in some cases, Kaushik said, but it’s become common this year even among wealthier students from major cities with deep roots and connections in India.

“A demographic that’s never had an issue is facing lots of issues,” he said. He also noted that some students are receiving denials many weeks after their visa interview, in some cases getting the news just a few days before they were hoping to start classes.

Colleges are attempting to accommodate students facing visa delays and denials by offering them the chance to defer their admission until spring or take online classes, according to Joann Ng Hartmann, NAFSA’s senior impact officer.

“Schools are really thinking and working very hard to be flexible, because they want these international students on campus,” she said.

Cornell also devised what Wolford called a “global semester program” that will offer international students who couldn’t get their visas in time the option to spend their first semester at one of three international partner institutions before hopefully coming to Cornell in the fall.

Some students are still hoping they’ll make it to campus this semester, despite not receiving visas by orientation.

“At this point for us, the census date is Sept. 10, and that’s when we really know who’s here and who’s not,” said Di Maria of UMBC. “I do have a number of students who are still optimistic that say they would arrive later in the week, or even next week.”

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August 27, 2025
NIH Publisher Fee Cap Plan “Not Comprehensive Enough”

Members of the public have until Sept. 15 to weigh in on the National Institutes of Health’s plan to curb how much taxpayer money goes to journals to publish some federally funded research.

The agency, which is the nation’s largest funder of biomedical research, wants to do that by capping—or potentially disallowing—the amount of money it gives to NIH-funded researchers who want to make their work publicly accessible by paying publishers article processing charges. A July 30 request for information memo outlined five potential options, which the NIH says are all aimed at balancing the “feasibility of providing research results with maximizing the use of taxpayer funds to support research.”

Jay Bhattacharya, director of the NIH, has said the policy could be a mechanism for ending what he sees as the “perverse incentives” driving the $19 billion for-profit academic publishing industry and making it “much harder for a small number of scientific elite to say what’s true and false.”

But open-information advocates and experts who have reviewed the NIH’s proposed plans for capping the amount it will pay for article processing charges said it likely won’t reform academia’s incentive structure or rein in publishers, including some that charge academic researchers as much as $12,690 per article to make their work freely accessible to the public and more likely to get cited.

“It is important to keep in mind that any cap is a cap on the amount that can be budgeted to be paid from a grant. It is not a cap on what publishers can charge. What publishers charge may be influenced by a budget cap, but many other factors will also impact on that,” said Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, a professor and coordinator for research professional development at the University of Illinois library. “It is more likely that a budget cap causes publishers that charge less to raise their fees—the ceiling will become the floor—than it is that publishers charging more will lower their fees.”

The proposal, which if adopted would go into effect Jan. 1, 2026, is aimed at addressing one of the many criticisms the Trump administration has made about federally funded academic research and the journals that publish the results.

In May, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., head of the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, said he was considering preventing federally funded scientists from publishing in leading medical journals and launching in-house journals instead, claiming without evidence that pharmaceutical companies control the journals.

Then, in July, the NIH sped up the implementation of a Biden-era rule requiring federally funded researchers to immediately make their research findings publicly accessible. And earlier this month, Bhattacharya criticized academia’s “publish or perish culture” in a statement about the NIH’s strategy for advancing its mission.

“It favors the promotion of only favorable results, and replication work is little valued or rewarded,” he wrote. “We are exploring various mechanisms to support scientists focused on replication work, to publish negative findings, and to elevate replication research.”

Given all of that context, the publisher fee cap plan is “more or less a warning shot across the bow that the NIH is serious about scholarly communication reform,” said Chris Marcum, who was assistant director for open science and data policy at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy during the Biden administration. “The administration believes there’s massive market concentration held by just a few scholarly publishers, and they’re no longer going to subsidize the surplus revenues of those journals.”

While the Trump administration is far from alone in its criticism of big academic publishers—just six companies own 53 percent of academic journals—which rely on often-unpaid researchers and peer reviewers, Marcum said that even if the NIH adopted all five of the options it outlined to cap publisher fees, “it’s not comprehensive enough” to meet their stated goals.

“They could eliminate APCs and fix pricing, but the extremely useful tool that they have is influence over the universities,” he added.

For example, one of the options in the NIH’s proposal would increase limits on APCs if the journal paid peer reviewers, but Marcum said he’s concerned that could result in some peer reviewers trying to game the system to enrich themselves. Instead, he said, “if the NIH really wants to move the needle on this, they should think about other ways to compensate reviewers.” Some of those ideas could include giving peer reviewers credit toward their grant applications, including peer review as part of grant work or requiring universities that apply for NIH grants to include considerations for their researchers to engage in peer review.

Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, said that though the NIH “can’t single-handedly reform the global system of academic research incentives, they can play a leadership role.”

But capping APCs isn’t the only—or most effective—option to make that happen.

“Rather than just limiting the amount of money that the NIH provides researchers to publish in a journal, it could say, ‘If you choose not to publish in a journal and do something else, we’ll provide money to do that,’ and support other mechanisms that allow researchers to break that incentive cycle,” Joseph said. “The NIH could reward them for communicating their findings early and often, making the global conversation of science dynamic in real time so that people can really benefit from it.”

The publishing industry is also not keen on the NIH’s attempt to control article processing charges.

A “free and competitive scholarly marketplace, including not-for-profit societies and other publishers, remains the most effective means of sustaining this vital sector, and bolstering our nation’s leadership position in the sciences,” Carl Maxwell, senior vice president for public policy for the Association of American Publishers, which has opposed open access expansion, wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed.

“Models are now changing in the face of open access mandates, and AAP is analyzing the options put forth by NIH to identify the plan that will provide authors with maximum freedom to choose how to publish and communicate their work, while at the same time supporting the indispensable publication processes that deliver best-in-class, peer-reviewed articles.”

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August 27, 2025
Agencies Share Guidance on Foreign Threats at U.S. Colleges

Federal agencies say that research at American universities contributes to the country’s national security and colleges need to guard against foreign threats.

Warning American colleges and universities about increasing foreign threats to research, a group of federal intelligence agencies and the Education Department released new guidance this week outlining how the institutions can better protect themselves.

For example, the 40-page “Safeguarding Academia” bulletin in part encourages colleges and researchers to be transparent about who else is involved in a research project, noting that failing to disclose foreign collaborations could lead to sanctions. The agencies urged researchers to do their due diligence on any potential collaborators and outlined other cybersecurity best practices.

“Protecting the integrity of U.S. research—while fostering international collaboration—is critical to maintaining a robust and secure research ecosystem,” the bulletin states. “Striking this balance is essential to preserving academic freedom, safeguarding researchers’ lifework, and ensuring that innovation continues to thrive in a secure and principled manner.”

James Cangialosi, the acting director at the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, added in a statement that while American colleges conduct research key to the country’s global competitiveness and national security, “foreign adversaries are increasingly exploiting the open and collaborative environment of U.S. academic institutions for their own gain.”

“Today’s bulletin highlights this evolving security threat and provides mitigation strategies that academic institutions can implement to better protect their research, their institutions, as well as their staff and students,” Cangialosi said. “With the new school year starting, it’s critical to get these materials in the hands of academic institutions now.”

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August 27, 2025
Financial Aid Advisers Question Trump’s ID Verification Efforts

Many financial aid advisers are worried that the Trump administration’s latest effort to bolster identity verification in the student aid system could have unintended consequences. Instead of simply catching fraudulent grant applicants and borrowers, some fear that the verification process could also prevent real, eligible students from accessing public benefits.

Education Department officials, however, assure aid advisers that one of their top priorities is to distribute aid smoothly to the students who have a right to it, even as they protect the integrity of the taxpayer-funded programs.

In an electronic announcement published Aug. 12, Federal Student Aid officials said they would be checking the identities of an additional 300,000 aid applicants, on top of the 125,000 students already flagged in June. Some college advisers said they were alarmed by the sheer scale of the requests—especially given what they describe as a very tight timeline.

While aid officers generally support the concept of catching identity thieves, they fear that requiring students to complete the verification process so quickly could delay or even block aid access for some legitimate students, putting them in a financial hole. FSA says the program will eventually be automated, limited to first-time students and managed by agency officials. But at the moment, it’s a manual process that can affect students midway through their program; financial aid officers say it is becoming increasingly complicated and burdensome.

“Schools have been asking for help on how to find these people and prevent fraudulent identities from obtaining Title IV aid, so we’re very supportive of the Department of Ed’s attempts to assume responsibility,” said Karen McCarthy, vice president of public policy and federal relations at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. “Unfortunately, the timing and how long it took ED to get this off the ground means that it’s August … We are entering, if not already in, the season of really large-scale disbursement. If verification is outstanding, schools may have to hold disbursements for those students.”

The largest unknown seems to be what the consequences of an incomplete or overdue identity verification will be.

The majority of students in the latest wave of verification requests are returning to college and need to verify their identity for the 2024–25 academic year as well as secure their awards for 2025–26. But some were flagged solely for last academic year and in most instances have already graduated or stopped out, making it harder to track them down and complete the process.

Verification results for 2025–26 can be submitted up to 60 days after the data portal opens Aug. 31. At the same time, according to a Federal Register notice, verifications and any other changes to aid applications for 2024–25 must be completed by Sept. 13, making for a busy two weeks for students and aid officers.

Experts have raised a number of questions about whether missing this tight deadline for 2024 could have repercussions. Some fear it could block students from completing future identity verifications or receiving upcoming disbursements; others worry that aid already disbursed in 2024–25 will need to be retracted. Either way, they say, it could have a crippling effect on low-income students.

“There’s going to be a variety of impact,” one financial aid adviser said. “The monetary impact could be anything from a few hundred dollars to 10-, 15- or 20,000.”

However, the Office of Federal Student Aid told Inside Higher Ed that missing that deadline shouldn’t be a problem—except in rare situations.

Verifications for 2024 don’t have to be reported through the portal the same way upcoming 2025 ones do, one agency official said on background. Rather, aid officers just need to verify the student’s identity and determine internally whether a student’s 2024 aid should be awarded; therefore, “there’s no deadline that people are going to hit and fall afoul of,” he added.

And in the “rare” scenario where an institution discovers inaccuracies on a 2024 FAFSA form, the department said, colleges can reach out to FSA to ensure a student’s eligibility is not impacted.

‘We Are Not Blocking Students’

“If anyone has any examples of that Sept. 13 deadline actually being a blocker for students, we can move the deadline back, because we are here to make sure we are not blocking students,” the FSA adviser said. “There is no reason” a 2024 verification delay should affect a student’s ability to complete the 2025 process and have their award disbursed.

Department officials also noted that they have streamlined the process to reduce the administrative burden, cutting steps such as making students provide a statement of purpose or notarizing the verification.

And of the 300,000 aid applicants flagged in the most recent set of verification requests, the external vendor that helped identify them says that at least 50,000 are examples of fraud. The vendor is “very confident” that the other 250,000 are as well, the FSA official said, but the agency is playing it safe and having colleges check each case for good measure before stripping those recipients of aid.

Ellen Keast, the department’s deputy press secretary, said it’s all part of the agency’s “student- and taxpayer-first mentality.”

“We are committed to ensuring that every single dollar is spent on eligible students, not fraudsters,” she said. “This is not about putting a burden on postsecondary institutions; it’s about warning them, before they disburse both taxpayer money and their own, that the ‘student’ in front of them is most likely not a real person.”

But representatives from NASFAA and college financial aid officers are still not clear on how the process will play out.

Caleb Williams, director of enrollment management at Northern Arizona University, said that in addition to the typical verifications that occurred before the Trump administration’s new campaign was announced, selection rates for 2024–25 verification at his institution rose by 54 percent in June and another 13 percent in August. As he understands it, he added, a student “flagged for Identity verification cannot receive aid in any year until the process is completed.”

Meanwhile, Charles Mayfield, the director of financial assistance at Northwest Missouri State University, believes that if an institution misses the September deadline for 2024 verifications, it will not be able to reinstate any of last year’s aid. But it would still be able to complete the 2025 verification and process that year’s aid.

Mayfield hopes that the department will put out clarified guidance to relieve aid advisers’ confusion and explain exactly what the September deadline means, how it will be enforced and what the consequences will be for students. But like the staff at NASFAA, he said his greatest frustration is not the general need for clarification but its timing at the end of an academic year.

“These students have received financial aid for the whole academic year, and now it’s all going to be taken away, and they’re at risk of not being able to enroll for the next academic year,” he said. “In the industry, we all know that students who stop out are much less likely to finish their degree.”

It would be one thing if these concerns and challenges were specific to one college, Mayfair said, but when there are 15 or 20 colleges expressing the same confusion on a Listserv on the same day, the department should be more responsive.

“It feels like when something doesn’t go right, we have to prove to the FSA that it didn’t work the way it was supposed to,” he said. “And until we can outright prove that—using data that’s on their system, that they should already have access to—they won’t acknowledge it.”

McCarthy from NASFAA said that what the department told Inside Higher Ed about 2024 and 2025 verification being handled separately “sounds promising,” but as of Aug. 22 she hadn’t received the same notification from FSA.

Other smaller concerns, such as whether the system for flagging fraud is accurate and if the new portal is functional, also have yet to be addressed, she added.

“It’s an awful lot of work being pushed onto schools,” she explained. “So we want to make sure that it’s useful, beneficial work and that these are actual, really concerning applications, not sloppy work on the Department of Ed which then leads to delays for students.”

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August 27, 2025
Ohio State Restricts Decorations in Public Dorm Spaces

Ohio State University has advised resident advisers to restrict all dorm floor and common room decor—as well as welcome programming for incoming students—to “Ohio State spirit themes” to avoid offending or alienating students. That means motifs like “retro video games and SpongeBob” motifs, which one outraged former RA on Reddit said they decorated with, won’t be allowed.

The move comes partly in response to SB1, a higher ed law Ohio passed in March that prohibits DEI, requires institutions to “demonstrate intellectual diversity” and mandates institutional neutrality on “controversial” subjects such as climate change, electoral politics, foreign policy, immigration, marriage and abortion.

“SB1 was certainly a factor, but our goal is to create an open and welcoming environment for all students … including in our residence halls, as we build community throughout our spaces and programming,” Dave Isaacs, OSU communications and media relations manager, said in a statement shared with Inside Higher Ed. “And this was discussed with RAs during their orientation for the position.”

Move-in activities are also required to be Buckeye-themed, including “necklace making and mug decorating,” the statement said.

Students took to Reddit to pan the new decorating rules, with one commenter posting, “SB1 and university leadership has sucked the life out of literally everything.”

“There were no comments supporting Ohio State’s decision,” the student newspaper, The Lantern, noted. “However, one user called on students to protest the state and national government over these decisions, rather than Ohio State’s administration.”

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August 27, 2025
How to Make Career Connections for Online College Learners
Assuring positive career outcomes for college students is a growing priority for institutions, policymakers and students themselves as they consider the value of higher education. A July report from the Center for Higher Education Policy and Practice at Southern New Hampshire University identifies opportunities for institutions to enhance career readiness for online learners and nontraditional students, a growing demographic within undergraduate populations.

The report authors urge college leaders to consider the unique needs and circumstances of working and older students and to develop creative solutions to connect classroom and career learning.

What’s the need: Most students attend college to improve their economic circumstances or to secure employment, according to the report.

Risepoint’s Voice of the Online Learner survey for 2025 finds that majorities work full-time while pursuing a degree (75 percent), are enrolled in a program related to their current industry (78 percent) and are parents with children under the age of 18 (53 percent). The greatest share of students pay for college out of their income and savings (48 percent) or federal loans (41 percent).

However, not every student will participate in a work-based learning experience, and nontraditional students often face the biggest barriers to participation.

A 2024 Student Voice survey by Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab found that 34 percent of respondents working more than 30 hours a week (n=1,106) said they have had no experience with the career center on their campus. Of that group, students 25 and older (n=501) were far more likely to say they hadn’t engaged with the career center (76 percent).

As a result, the report advocates for flexible, workforce-aligned and embedded strategies to help older students prepare for careers and their lives after college.

Making career connections: CHEPP defines “career connection strategies” as activities, services and experiences that help students select, prepare for and pursue a career path, according to the report. These strategies range from internships to informational interviews and career exploration events.

One opportunity is workforce-aligned curriculum, which focuses on developing students’ skills and competencies in connection to future employment roles. Workforce-aligned curricula can be particularly beneficial for adult and working learners because it makes materials engaging and “keeps them from having to choose between pursuing a degree or work-relevant training,” the report authors wrote.

For example, Calbright College in California, an online public community college, has 10 “durable skills”—such as critical thinking and collaboration—embedded into the curriculum with dedicated modules for each that award students badges upon completion. All academic programs include at least two of these modules in their curriculum.

The authors also advocate for career exploration opportunities that are flexible and tailored to the individual, such as offering career advising alongside credit for prior learning assessments, remote job shadows and employer relations events.

Making career services more accessible on campus should also be a top priority for administrators, because many adult learners do not take advantage of these supports, as highlighted in the Student Voice data.

To accommodate these students, SNHU offers professional communication and career planning courses that focus on career development. Calbright College assigns each student a student success counselor who can address some career readiness and exploration topics and connect them with workshops offered by the career services team.

Key elements: When considering traditional models of career preparation and readiness, the report encourages higher education practitioners and policymakers to determine how best to meet adult and nontraditional students where they are, including by:
- Establishing authentic workforce opportunities that promote real-world professional development, such as having an assignment supervisor or participating in team meetings.
- Respecting and validating learners’ existing skills from previous life experiences, including through credit for prior learning.
- Offering paid opportunities, which allow students to forgo earnings from work in order to pursue new career experiences or development events.
- Pairing advising with comprehensive supports to help students understand options, develop a plan and leverage existing skills.
- Embedding career prep into existing commitments to limit the competing priorities students must balance and the number of hours they spend on career development outside the classroom.
- Identifying clear goals for student learning, including the duties students will perform and outcomes from the experience.
- Instituting good data practices to ensure continuous improvement and gauge employer and student satisfaction at the end of experiences.
Do you have a career-focused intervention that might help others promote student success? Tell us about it.
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August 26, 2025
Public Ill. Universities Will Provide Medication Abortions

Public colleges and universities in Illinois will now be required by law to supply contraception and abortion medication in the student health center or pharmacy, according to Illinois Public Media.

Democratic governor JB Pritzker signed HB 3709 into law Friday, requiring colleges to supply birth control and medication abortions starting this academic year. Only three other states—California, Massachusetts and New York—currently have similar laws.

The law was inspired in part by a student referendum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign regarding whether the university health center should offer medication abortions. About three-quarters of the more than 6,000 undergraduates who voted were in favor of the idea, but the university didn’t implement the idea, saying it didn’t have the expertise to provide abortions.

The governor also signed a bill increasing protections for abortion providers on the same day.

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August 26, 2025
It’s More Difficult to File Student Aid Complaints, Dems Say

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, submitted the letter to the Department of Education on Monday evening.

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Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren and four of her fellow Democrats asked Education Secretary Linda McMahon in a letter Monday why her department has made it more difficult to file complaints about federal student aid and demanded her staff remove any extra steps that have been added to the process.

“ED is covering up its attempts to make [the Office of Federal Student Aid] less responsive to millions of students, families, and borrowers who rely on the agency to lower the cost of attending college and protect them from loan servicer misconduct,” the senators wrote. “We urge you to immediately act on our findings by streamlining the ‘Submit a Complaint’ process and restoring FSA’s workforce so borrowers can get the help they need.”

Who Signed the Letter?

Richard Blumenthal (Conn.), Mazie Hirono (Hawaii), Jeff Merkley (Ore.), Chris Van Hollen (Md.), Elizabeth Warren (Mass.)

In the letter, Warren states that she told FSA in March that the button for submitting online complaints had been “hidden.” The department responded in April that the button had just been moved from the top of the webpage to the footer and relabeled as “submit feedback.” The department added that no employees who handle technical functions of the aid applications of loan servicing had been laid off, and while some employees that handle complaints were, the remaining employees will “still be responding” to future complaints.

But the Democrats say they tested those claims and found the department’s reassurances were misleading. Although the department did move and rename the complaint button, it also added a series of four extra navigation clicks that must be made before the user actually reaches the webpage where they can file a complaint. (Inside Higher Ed checked the website and verified these steps. You can see screenshots of the process below.)

“Via an unintuitive, multi-step process,” the department is “making it more difficult for borrowers to let ED know when they are experiencing issues with their student loan servicer,” the letter reads.

The senators argue that this change was geared toward increasing the difficulty of filing complaints, citing an email sent by a senior department staff member and obtained by Politico. According to a report published by the department at the end of the Biden presidency, more than 289,000 complaints were filed with FSA in 2024 alone.

In the email obtained by Politico, the official wrote, “I believe this change would help decrease contact center volume and the number of complaints … so an overall win.”

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August 26, 2025