Tag: Jobs

  • Despite Reservations, Florida BOG Approves New Accreditor

    Despite Reservations, Florida BOG Approves New Accreditor

    Plans for a new accreditor, announced by Florida governor Ron DeSantis in June, are becoming a reality.

    The Florida Board of Governors voted Friday afternoon to create a controversial new accrediting agency, in coordination with five other state university systems. The decision came after about an hour of heated discussion between board members and the State University System of Florida’s chancellor regarding details of the plan.

    Chancellor Raymond Rodriguez argued that the new accreditor, called the Commission for Public Higher Education, would eliminate the bureaucracy that comes with existing accrediting agencies and focus specifically on the needs of public universities.

    “The Commission for Public Higher Education will offer an accreditation model that prioritizes academic excellence and student success while removing ideological bias and unnecessary financial burdens,” he said. “Through the CPHE, public colleges and universities across the country will have access to an accreditation process that is focused on quality, rooted in accountability and committed to continuous improvement.”

    But before voting in favor of the motion, board members repeatedly pushed back, arguing that the plans for starting an accreditor from scratch were half-baked. They raised a litany of questions about how the CPHE would work in practice.

    Some wanted to hash out the details of the would-be accreditor’s governance structure before voting. According to the CPHE business plan, the Florida governing board would incorporate the accreditor as a nonprofit in Florida and serve as its initial sole member, using a $4 million appropriation from the Florida Legislature for start-up costs. (Other systems are expected to put in similar amounts.) A board of directors, appointed by all the university systems, would be responsible for accrediting decisions and policies.

    But multiple BOG members worried that the roles of the governing board and board of directors were not clearly delineated.

    “With us as the sole member, it appears, or could appear, to stakeholders that the accreditor lacks independence from the institution being accredited,” said board member Kimberly Dunn.

    Alan Levine, vice chair of the Board of Governors, called for a clear “proverbial corporate veil” between the two in corporate documents.

    “Our role is not to govern or direct the activities of this body,” Levine said of CPHE. “It has to be independent or it won’t even be approvable by the Department of Education.”

    Board member Ken Jones pressed for greater detail on the governing board’s “fiduciary or governance obligation to this new entity.”

    “I’m in support of this … I really believe this is the right path,” he said. “I just want to be sure that we all go in, eyes wide-open, understanding what is our responsibility as a BOG? … We’re breaking new ground here, and we’re doing it for the right reasons. But I want to be sure that when the questions come—and I’m sure they certainly will—that we’ve got the right answers.”

    Members asked questions about the accreditor’s future cybersecurity and IT infrastructure, as well as its associated costs. Some asked whether accreditors have direct access to universities’ data systems and raised concerns about potential hacking and the board’s liability; they were given reassurance that colleges themselves report their data. Some board members also asked for budget projections of what CPHE would cost.

    “I have an internal, unofficial estimation around the funds and revenues, but nothing I’d be prepared and comfortable to put forward publicly,” said Rachel Kamoutsas, the system’s chief of staff and corporate secretary, who fielded questions about the initiative.

    The answers didn’t seem to fully satisfy the governing board.

    “I do think the chancellor and team have a lot of work to do to continue to educate this board, to be blunt,” said BOG chair Brian Lamb, “because a lot of the questions that we’re asking—forecast, IT, infrastructure, staffing—every last one of those are appropriate.”

    He emphasized to other board members, however, that voting in favor of the motion would jump-start the process of incorporating the new accreditor and provide seed money for it. But, he added, “not a penny is going anywhere until we have an agreed-upon document on how this money will be spent.”

    Accreditation expert Paul Gaston III, an emeritus trustees professor at Kent State University, raised similar questions in an interview with Inside Higher Ed.

    “The credibility of accreditation really is directly related to whether the public can accept it is an authoritative source of objective evaluation that is in the public interest,” he said. “And the question that I would ask as a member of the public is, how will an accreditor that is created by and that is answerable to the institutions being evaluated achieve that credibility?”

    Despite all the pushback, the BOG ultimately voted unanimously to approve the measure. Now CPHE can file for incorporation, establish its Board of Directors and set out on the multiyear process of securing recognition from the Department of Education.

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  • The Platform Monopoly on Jobs and Careers

    The Platform Monopoly on Jobs and Careers

    In the platform-dominated economy, Indeed.com has established itself as the central marketplace for jobseekers and employers alike, boasting tens of millions of listings across industries and geographies. But behind its user-friendly design lies a powerful, opaque system that reinforces labor precarity, exploits the desperation of the underemployed, and facilitates fraud and exploitation—including through job scams designed to funnel people into for-profit colleges and dubious training schemes.

    Indeed’s rise is emblematic of a larger pattern in the U.S. political economy, where platforms extract profit from human need—especially from the millions of Americans struggling to find secure employment in a shrinking labor market. While claiming to connect jobseekers with opportunity, Indeed increasingly operates as a gatekeeper and a filter, favoring employers with the ability to pay for prominence, and quietly profiting from a user base navigating worsening inequality.

    From Opportunity to Exploitation: The Platform Economy

    Indeed’s near-monopoly over online job listings positions it as the Amazon of employment—a central aggregator of job ads, resume submissions, employer reviews, and workforce data. Its business model is rooted in ad-based revenue: companies pay to boost job visibility, while jobseekers receive a flood of suggested listings—many of which are irrelevant, low-quality, or outright deceptive.

    One particularly disturbing trend: a growing number of “job postings” on Indeed are not job offers at all, but veiled advertisements for for-profit colleges and unaccredited training programs. These listings typically appear legitimate, bearing the titles of medical assistant, phlebotomist, cybersecurity technician, or paralegal. But once an applicant shows interest, they are quickly routed to admissions representatives, not employers. In short, they’ve fallen for a bait-and-switch scheme.

    Indeed does little to prevent these tactics. Despite flagging mechanisms and user complaints, scammers and aggressive recruiters return repeatedly under new listings or shell company names. And because these advertisers pay to promote their listings, there is a built-in conflict of interest: Indeed profits from ads designed to exploit vulnerable jobseekers, many of whom are already burdened by unemployment, underemployment, or student debt.

    The Job Training Charade: A National Problem

    As labor economist Gordon Lafer argues in The Job Training Charade, job training programs have long functioned as a public relations tool for elected officials, who promise “skills-based solutions” rather than structural labor reform. Publicly funded retraining programs and for-profit career schools capitalize on this narrative, convincing jobseekers that their struggles stem from a personal “skills gap” rather than systemic inequality.

    Indeed’s platform reinforces this logic by flooding users with listings that promote training and certification programs as prerequisites for jobs that often don’t exist or pay poorly. Even in legitimate industries—like healthcare and IT—the overabundance of credential inflation and unnecessary gatekeeping leads to further debt accumulation without guaranteeing meaningful work.

    As Lafer writes, “Training has become a substitute for economic policy—a way of appearing to do something without actually improving people’s lives.” And Indeed is a willing partner in this substitution, profiting from a constant churn of dislocated workers trying to retool their résumés and lives to meet an ever-shifting set of employer demands.

    The Educated Underclass and Platform Paternalism

    Gary Roth, in The Educated Underclass, identifies another critical aspect of this ecosystem: the overproduction of college graduates relative to the needs of the labor market. As more people earn degrees, the wage premium diminishes, and once-secure professions become crowded with overqualified applicants chasing scarce opportunities.

    Indeed’s platform becomes the proving ground for this underclass: college-educated workers competing for service jobs, temp contracts, or entry-level roles barely above minimum wage. Meanwhile, the site’s tools—resume scores, AI-based job match algorithms, and automated rejection letters—reinforce the idea that unemployment is a personal failure rather than a structural outcome.

    This is platform paternalism at its worst. Jobseekers are “nudged” into applying for low-quality work, “encouraged” to pursue unnecessary training, and surveilled through behavioral data that is packaged and sold to employers and third-party marketers. Career development becomes not a public good but a private product—sold back to workers in pieces, with no guarantee of outcome.

    Job Scams and Regulatory Blind Spots

    The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and state attorneys general have received thousands of complaints about online job scams—including fake recruiters, phony employers, and misleading school advertisements. Yet enforcement remains weak, and platforms like Indeed enjoy limited legal liability, protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields them from responsibility for user-generated content.

    Even when caught, fraudulent advertisers often reappear. As one whistleblower told The Higher Education Inquirer, “We’d flag scam listings, and two days later they’d pop back up under a new name. It was like a game of whack-a-mole—and no one at the top cared.”

    Indeed’s user agreement explicitly disclaims responsibility for the authenticity of job listings. And although the company has instituted basic verification and reporting tools, they are inadequate to stem the tide of predatory postings, especially those tied to the multibillion-dollar for-profit education industry.

    A Broken System Masquerading as Innovation

    The consolidation of online job markets under platforms like Indeed represents a profound shift in the political economy of labor. No longer mediated by public institutions or strong unions, the search for work is now a privatized experience, managed by algorithms, monetized through ads, and vulnerable to deception.

    To be clear: Indeed does not create jobs. It creates the illusion of access. It obscures labor precarity behind UX design and paid listings. It enables fraudulent training pipelines while pushing the burden of risk and cost onto workers. And it profits from the widening chasm between what higher education promises and what the economy delivers.

    At The Higher Education Inquirer, we demand accountability—not just from institutions of higher learning but from the platforms that now mediate our futures. The illusion must be pierced, and jobseeking must be reclaimed as a public function, free from predation, profiteering, and platform capture.

    Sources:

    • Lafer, Gordon. The Job Training Charade. Cornell University Press, 2002.

    • Roth, Gary. The Educated Underclass: Students and the Promise of Social Mobility. Pluto Press, 2019.

    • U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC). “Job Scams: What You Need to Know.” 2024.

    • Recruit Holdings. Annual Reports and Investor Presentations, 2020–2024.

    • U.S. Department of Labor. “Contingent and Alternative Employment Arrangements.” 2023.

    • Brody, Leslie. “Students Lured Into For-Profit Colleges Through Fake Job Ads.” Wall Street Journal, 2022.

    • Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs, 2019.

    • Glassdoor, Indeed, and CareerBuilder community complaint forums (2021–2025).

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  • Student-Led Teaching Doesn’t Help Underprepared Students

    Student-Led Teaching Doesn’t Help Underprepared Students

    New research finds peer instruction models may be less impactful for students with lower standardized test scores than their higher-achieving peers.

    miodrag ignjatovic/E+/Getty Images

     

     

     

     

    Introductory STEM courses serve as a gatekeeper for students interested in majors or careers in STEM fields, and students from less privileged backgrounds are often less likely to succeed in those courses.

    As a result, researchers have explored what practices can make a difference in student outcomes in such courses, including creating sections with diverse student populations and offering grade forgiveness for students who performed poorly.

    A recent research article from the University of Texas at Austin examined the role peer instructors play in helping students from a variety of backgrounds. Researchers discovered that students who were enrolled in an interactive peer-led physics course section had worse learning outcomes and grades than their peers in a lecture section taught by an instructor. Students with lower SAT scores were also less likely to achieve a high grade in the student-taught class.

    The research: Historically, instructors teaching STEM courses have delivered content through lectures, with students taking a largely passive role, according to the paper. However, more active learning environments have been tied to higher student engagement and are largely preferred by learners. A May 2024 Student Voice survey by Inside Higher Ed found that 44 percent of respondents said an interactive lecture format helps them learn and retain information best, compared to 25 percent who selected traditional lectures.

    Interactive lectures can include instructors asking students questions throughout the class period or creating opportunities for them to reflect on course material, according to the paper. Peer instruction is touted as an effective means of flipped classroom teaching, requiring students to finish readings prior to class and reserving class time for interactive activities.

    While previous studies show the value of peer-led courses, much of that research focused on selective, private institutions, where students may have more similar backgrounds or levels of academic preparation, according to the authors of the new study.

    So researchers designed a study that would compare apples to apples: They looked at the outcomes for students learning physics in one course section taught by a professor versus one taught by fellow students to see which had a greater impact.

    The results: The paper analyzed the learning outcomes of two sections of students in an introductory mechanics course at a large public institution over three years. One section of the course was taught by a peer instructor, mostly in a small-group discussion format. The other section was taught by the professor using interactive lectures.

    Students completed identical homework and midterm exams on the same days and had the opportunity to attend identical tutoring sessions supported by teaching assistants.

    Though the course is designed for physics and astronomy majors, students from other majors participated as well. Each section had between 41 and 82 students, for a total of 367 students taking the course over three years.

    Not only did students in the peer-instruction section have lower grades, but students who had lower SAT scores from high school were less likely to demonstrate learning in fundamental concepts, as well as less likely to earn an A, compared to their peers with similar test scores taught by a professor. However, students with higher SAT scores made smaller gains (less dramatic grade increases or learning demonstrated) in the lecture section compared to students taught by peers, which researchers believe could mean that students with less academic preparation may benefit more from an instructor-led course, while their peers who had a high achievement history in high school could thrive more in a peer-led section.

    The analysis does not provide an explanation for why these differences exist, but researchers theorized that group work or peer dependency could result in some students being less knowledgeable about content matter because they trust others in the class to answer correctly. Creating postdiscussion follow-up questions can lessen this learning gap.

    We bet your colleague would like this article, too. Send them this link to subscribe to our newsletter on Student Success.

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  • Federal Policy Uncertainty Impacting College Budgeting

    Federal Policy Uncertainty Impacting College Budgeting

    Economic uncertainty—the kind that dominated headlines for the first half of 2025—makes long-term financial planning difficult. But nearly two in three college and university chief business officers say that uncertainty surrounding federal policy for higher education is hindering their ability to conduct even basic financial planning. That’s according to Inside Higher Ed’s forthcoming annual survey of CBOs with Hanover Research.

    “Higher education has not faced this level of financial uncertainty in generations,” said Robert Kelchen, chair of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, who reviewed preliminary survey data.

    While recent history offers one comparison—the early days of the pandemic, when uncertainty was similarly “off the charts”—the federal government at that time “quickly stepped in to provide support,” Kelchen continued. Today, by contrast, the federal government “is causing the uncertainty.”

    According to the survey, federal policy uncertainty under the second Trump administration is moderately impacting basic financial planning at 49 percent of institutions represented, meaning that challenges have arisen but CBOs and their colleagues have managed to adapt. Another 14 percent of institutions are severely impacted, meaning basic financial planning has been extremely difficult, leading to major disruptions. This is consistent across sectors.

    The survey was fielded in April and May, with CBOs from 169 institutions, public and private nonprofit, associate to doctoral degree–granting, responding. The full 2025 Survey of College and University Chief Business Officers will be released later this month. It includes additional findings on the second Trump administration’s impact on institutional finances so far, mergers and acquisitions, value and affordability, and more.

    CBOs see federal student aid policy changes as a major risk, with 68 percent citing this as a top federal policy concern from a longer list of options. A distant second: research funding levels, cited by 24 percent of all CBOs. Public institution CBOs are relatively more concerned about research funding, at 36 percent versus 9 percent of private nonprofit peers.

    Questions about the future of federal student aid come on top of last year’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid fiasco. And nearly four in 10 surveyed CBOs (38 percent) report having already experienced significant to severe disruptions related to that FAFSA rollout.

    In Kelchen’s assessment, there’s no guarantee that the federal financial aid system will work as intended this fall—especially for colleges that require additional oversight before receiving funds, given recent mass layoffs at the U.S. Education Department. Congress also last week passed what he described as the largest set of changes to federal higher education policy in decades, via the Trump-backed One Big Beautiful Bill Act, with potential “downstream effects for state budgets due to cuts to federal benefits.”

    Throw in cuts to federal research funding and big changes for international students, and colleges’ budgets “are highly uncertain,” Kelchen said.

    Case in point: Michigan State University president Kevin Guskiewicz recently announced a plan to cut spending, including faculty and staff positions. He blamed expectations that the university will receive “less money from the federal government due to research cuts and restrictions on international enrollments, although the magnitude of those impacts is uncertain.” Also at play: increasing operating costs and state budget concerns.

    In another example of uncertainty in action, Val Smith, president of Swarthmore College, announced in late May that the institution’s Board of Managers had been unable to carry out “one of its primary fiduciary responsibilities: approving the college’s operating budget,” at least as usual. Given the “confluence of uncertainties we currently face,” she said at the time, the board moved forward with an interim operating budget for the first three months of the new fiscal year. It plans to revisit and adopt a full operating budget in the fall, “when we expect to have more clarity.”

    To Kelchen, interim budgets such as Swarthmore’s can make sense if revenues are “highly volatile.” So he said he wouldn’t be surprised if other institutions were quietly making similar moves.

    In an additional expression of uncertainty, most surveyed CBOs describe the impact of the second Trump administration’s policies on their institution’s financial outlook—both current and over the next 12 months—as somewhat or very negative.

    Most CBOs report minimal federal funding cuts under Trump so far. A handful do indicate that their funding has been reduced significantly, by more than 10 percent. An additional 11 percent report that funding has been reduced by 5 to 10 percent. And about as many aren’t sure. But the rest say funding has decreased by less than 5 percent or stayed consistent.

    While the ultimate impact of federal policy changes remains to be seen—and will look different at different institutions—strategist Rebeka Mazzone advised frequent collaboration and communication between CBOs and other cabinet-level leaders, “so that you always know what’s happening on a more real-time basis.”

    Also critical: forecasting, or “having a tool that allows you to constantly update the dollars you have so that you understand the impact.” Mazzone, founder of FuturED Finance, said that this real-time process is underused and very different from typical budgeting, in a which a yearlong spending plan is developed based on a particular moment in time. But the “smaller and the more cash-strapped the institution is, the more important the forecast becomes.”

    Fancy software isn’t necessary, she said, as forecasting can happen on a spreadsheet. What matters is “capturing changes and overlaying them on the budget so that you understand where you’re going to end the year, and that helps you to more proactively manage the outcomes.”

    Another important tool? Five-year projections. “If you have lower enrollment this year, that is going to affect you also for the next three years. If you have a higher discount rate this year, that is going to affect you also for the next three years.” So when institutions “suddenly” close, Mazzone said, “it’s not so sudden. They just weren’t using these tools to really understand how bad things were—and how quickly things were heading in the wrong direction.”

    To Mazzone’s point, while federal policy uncertainty is challenging short-term planning, many institutions now making budget cuts have significant underlying issues.

    What’s Kelchen’s advice for colleges and universities struggling with present uncertainty—including those navigating longer-term financial woes? Prepare multiple budget scenarios “ranging from something close to business as usual to the possibility of losing most federal funding.”

    Institutions will get “some answers on what actual revenues look like as the start of a new academic year draws nearer, but this will take time,” he said. Those in stronger positions can “operate more at business as usual and absorb losses if needed. But if there is underlying weakness, colleges need to budget for the worst right now and hope for something better.”

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  • Avoiding Work Has Always Been Part of College. This Is New.

    Avoiding Work Has Always Been Part of College. This Is New.

    In a recent piece in The New Yorker, “What Happens After AI Destroys College Writing?,” Hua Hsu tells a story that will be familiar to anyone working in higher education: students wrestling—to varying degrees—about when and how to use generative AI tools like ChatGPT in the completion of their schoolwork.

    There is a range of approaches and opinions among students—as there must be, as students are not a monolith—but Hsu centers the piece around “Alex,” an NYU student with a future goal to become a CPA who makes extensive and, to his mind, strategic use of these tools in various aspects of his life, including in writing the emails he exchanged with Hsu to arrange the interview for the piece.

    Alex walks Hsu through his use of Claude to first crunch an article on Robert Wedderburn (a 19th-century Jamaican abolitionist) into a summary, and then, when the summary was longer than he had time to absorb before class, to reduce it to bullet points that he then transcribed into a notebook since his professor didn’t allow computers in class.

    In a more elaborate example, Alex also used it to complete an art history assignment rooted in a visit to a museum exhibition, where he took pictures of the works and wall text and then fed it all into Claude.

    His rationale, as told to Hsu, was “I’m trying to do the least work possible, because this is a class I’m not hella fucking with.”

    At the end of the article, we check in with Alex on his finals. Alex “estimated he’d spent between thirty minutes and an hour composing two papers for his humanities classes,” something that would’ve taken “eight or nine hours” without Claude. Alex told Hsu, “I didn’t retain anything. I couldn’t tell you the thesis for either paper hahhahaha.”

    Hsu then delivers the kicker: “He received an A-minus and a B-plus.”

    I mean this without offense to Hsu, an accomplished writer (New Yorker staff writer and author of the best-selling memoir Stay True) and professor at Bard College, but the piece, for all its specifics and color, felt like very old news—to me, at least.

    The transactional mindset toward education, something I’ve been writing about for years, is on perfect display in Alex’s actions. Generative AI has merely made this more plain, more common and more troubling, since there aren’t even any hoops to jump through in order to fake engagement. Alex is doing nothing (or nearly so) and earning credits from New York University.

    On reflection, though, the story of Alex is even older than I thought, since it was also my story, particularly the line “I’m trying to do the least work possible,” which was very much my experience for significant chunks of my own college experience from 1988 to 1992.

    I earned quite a few credits in my time for, if not doing nothing, certainly learning nothing. Or not learning the subject for which I’d earned the credits, anyway.

    How could I blame a student of today for adopting the attitude that I lived by? With my own students, when I was teaching college, I often made hay from my lackluster undergraduate performance, talking about how I skipped more than 70 percent of my class meetings second semester of freshman year but still received no grade lower than a B.

    In the article, Hsu remarks that “None of the students I spoke with seemed lazy or passive.” The students “worked hard—but part of their effort went to editing out anything in their college experiences that felt extraneous. They were radically resourceful.”

    I, on the other hand, at least when it came to the school part of college, was resolutely lazy and largely passive, except when it came to making sure to avoid courses I was not interested in—essentially anything outside of reading and writing—or that had a mode of assessment not suited to my skills.

    My preferred structure was a lecture or lecture/discussion with in-class essay exams and/or short response papers geared to specific texts. Exams and research papers were to be avoided, because exams required studying and research papers required … research.

    If you let me loose on a reading or a few chapters from a textbook, I had no trouble giving something that resembled a student doing college, even though the end result was very much akin to Alex’s. I didn’t retain anything.

    But hindsight says I learned a lot—or learned enough, anyway, through the classes I was interested in and, perhaps more importantly, the noncurricular experiences of college.

    While there are some similarities between my and Alex’s mindset vis-à-vis college, there is a significant difference. Alex appears to be acting out of an “optimization” mindset, where he focuses his efforts on what is most “relevant,” presumably to his future interests, like employment and monetary earnings.

    I, on the other hand, majored in the “extraneous experiences.” I was pretty dedicated to the lacrosse club, showing up for practice five days a week with games on the weekend, but I also recall a game day following my 21st birthday when I was so hungover (and perhaps still drunk) that you could smell the alcohol oozing from my pores. My shifts in the midfield were half the length of my line mates’.

    (That was the last time I got that drunk.)

    I recall a contest at my fraternity where the challenge was to gain the most weight within an 18-hour period, during which we stuffed ourselves with spaghetti, Italian bread, chocolate pudding and gallons of water until we were sick and bloated. Another time we ground through an entire season of Nintendo Super Tecmo Bowl football over the span of a few days, skipping class if you had a matchup that needed playing. We had a group of regulars who gathered in my room to watch All My Children and General Hospital most weekdays. I am the least successful of that crew by a fair stretch.

    I know that I took courses in economics, geography, Asian studies and Russian history where, like Alex, I retained virtually nothing about the course material even days after the courses, when I crammed for a test or bs’ed my way through a paper to get my B and move on to what I wanted to spend my time on.

    From my perspective as a middle-aged person whose life has been significantly enhanced by all the ways I dodged schoolwork while I was in college, including spending inordinate amounts of time with the woman to whom I have been married for 25 years this August, I would say that missing out on those classes to make room for experiences was the right thing to do.

    (Even though I had no understanding of this at the time.)

    Will Alex look back and feel the same?

    So many questions that need exploring:

    Would Alex be as appalled by my indigence, my failure at optimization, as I am by his ignorance?

    Have we lost our belief that we as humans have agency over this world of technology?

    Is Alex actively deskilling himself, or am I failing to develop the skills necessary for surviving in the world we’ve made for students like Alex?

    I wonder if Alex and I have different definitions of what it is to survive.

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  • George Mason Faces 2 Title VI Investigations

    George Mason Faces 2 Title VI Investigations

    George Mason University in Virginia is under investigation for alleged violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, the Department of Education announced Thursday.

    Multiple university professors reportedly filed complaints that the institution “illegally uses race and other immutable characteristics in university policies, including hiring and promotion,” according to the news release. 

    The accusations come less than two weeks after the University of Virginia’s president was pressured to resign by the Department of Justice for similar DEI-related complaints. Thursday’s announcement sparked concerns among some higher education professionals that George Mason president Gregory Washington, who is Black, could face similar pressure. This is the second civil rights investigation that the Education Department has opened at George Mason this month. The other one is focused on allegations that university didn’t sufficiently respond to antisemitic incidents.

    “It looks like the Trump administration is trying to force out George Mason’s president,” Robert Kelchen, an education policy professor at the University of Tennessee, wrote on BlueSky.

    “When people ask why Higher Ed presidents aren’t being publicly vocal—here’s why,” responded Dan Collier, a higher education professor at the University of Memphis.

    Department officials said in the news release that the investigation is justified by the university’s “unlawful DEI policies.” The release cited policies aimed at ensuring a diverse applicant pool and that departments at George Mason embrace antiracism and inclusiveness. The department declared race-based programming and activities illegal in guidance earlier this year, but a federal judge blocked that directive.

    “This kind of pernicious and wide-spread discrimination—packaged as ‘anti-racism’—was allowed to flourish under the Biden Administration, but it will not be tolerated by this one,” said Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor in the release.

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  • Fla. Board of Governors to Vote on Creating New Accreditor

    Fla. Board of Governors to Vote on Creating New Accreditor

    Gov. DeSantis has called the current system an “accreditation cartel.”

    Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Joe Raedle/Getty Images | ricul/iStock/Getty Images 

    The governing board of the State University System of Florida is set to vote Friday on whether to form a new accrediting agency focused on public universities, known as the Commission for Public Higher Education. While some accreditation experts say the move could be a positive development, they also worry it may lead to undue political influence in the accreditation process.

    If the vote goes as planned, the Florida governing board will create the proposed agency along with five other public university systems: the University System of Georgia, University of North Carolina system, University of South Carolina, University of Tennessee system and the Texas A&M University system.

    “The launching of a new institutional accreditor is a major undertaking, and CPHE’s Founding University Systems have not undertaken it lightly,” reads the business plan for the Commission for Public Higher Education. “Growing dissatisfaction with current practices among the existing institutional accreditors and the desire for a true system of peer review among public institutions have led to this endeavor.” The plan accuses some existing accreditors of “bureaucratic bloat, delays, and increased costs.”

    University of North Carolina system president Peter Hans dropped the news in May that UNC was in talks with other public university systems to launch a new accrediting agency—an idea Inside Higher Ed discovered they’d been discussing for at least a year. The project has taken on distinct political undertones; last month Florida governor Ron DeSantis announced the effort in a speech largely focused on what he calls “woke ideology.”

    “What we’ve seen develop is an accreditation cartel,” he said in his address. “And the accreditors by and large are all singing from the same sheet of music, and it’s not what the state of Florida wants to see reflected in its universities in many different respects.”

    According to the business plan, the new agency “will laser-focus on student outcomes, streamline accreditation standards, focus on emerging educational models, modernize the accreditation process, maximize efficiency without sacrificing quality, and ensure no imposition of divisive ideological content on institutions.”

    How It Would Work

    The Commission for Public Higher Education would be incorporated as a nonprofit organization in Florida, initially funded by a $4 million appropriation from the Florida State Legislature, according to the business plan. Other involved higher ed systems are expected to cough up similar funds. A board of directors representing each of the founding systems would oversee the new accreditor.

    The goal is to accredit six institutions by next summer and secure Department of Education recognition by June 2028, according to the business plan. (A new accreditor typically has two years to prove it is operating in accordance with federal regulations to receive federal approval.)

    In the meantime, higher ed institutions pursuing accreditation from CPHE can retain their current accreditors, the plan notes. Later, when CPHE gains department recognition, they can adopt CPHE as their primary accreditor.

    Accreditation experts say that the time frame is doable but optimistic if the Department of Education maintains the rigor of its current recognition process for new accreditors.

    “The timeline proposed by Florida seems aggressive since in the past, it usually took the [Education Department] more time to approve new accreditors,” Cynthia Jackson Hammond, president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, wrote in a statement to Inside Higher Ed.

    But the Trump administration has shown interest in making it easier for new accreditors to form. President Trump signed an executive order in April that spoke of “recognizing new accreditors” among other reforms.

    Mixed Views

    Jackson Hammond said CHEA isn’t against new accreditors, as long as they go through the standard recognition process and show they’re following federal regulations for ensuring institutions’ quality. But she and her colleagues have qualms about the idea of state-sponsored accrediting bodies like the Commission for Public Higher Education.

    “CHEA does not believe that states are likely to be effective accreditors,” she wrote. “Historically, states have not had the staff, experience, or knowledge necessary to create a higher education accreditor. It is critically important that higher education reflects an impartial and unbiased accrediting review process that is focused on student learning outcomes. To date, there has not been a state that has accomplished this.”

    Robert Shireman, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, worries the structure of the new accrediting agency may make unbiased evaluations more challenging, given the involvement of state policymakers.

    State university systems are “essentially run by the governors and their appointees,” said Shireman, who was a deputy under secretary at ED during the Obama administration. So “it really detracts from the independence of public institutions from political meddling. This feels like it’s part of an effort for closer political control over colleges and that would just embroil them in culture war issues and sort of the political issue of the day.”

    But he doesn’t rule out the potential positives of having an accreditor focused on public universities. He said such an agency could emphasize college access and affordability in ways that accreditors that oversee private colleges don’t.

    As state higher ed systems, “they’re all government actors,” he said. In an ideal scenario, “they can work together [to say], ‘Let’s be affordable. Let’s make sure students get served.’”

    Jamienne Studley, former president of the WASC Senior College and University Commission, also emphasized that agencies that accredit “like-type” institutions can benefit from their similarities—“as long as the federal oversight of agencies is consistent, the standards are solid and their application is rigorous.”

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  • Satirical Essay on Restructuring Humanities (opinion)

    Satirical Essay on Restructuring Humanities (opinion)

    The administration at U of All People has suffered long enough with the underperforming School of Social Sciences and Humanities. Its various departments, programs and whatnot have grown arcane to the point where the students themselves no longer understand the difference between, say, philosophy and psychology, save that both begin with the letter p. And since many students no longer engage in reading or writing without the aid of AI, we should stop supporting distinct majors that encourage both. Consequently, we are restructuring the school to reflect the current dictates of academic administration.

     Here are some issues we have made up to justify the restructuring:

    • There has been a recent decrease in enrollment, or at least there ought to have been.
    • These are perilous times for the humanities, and smushing them together will help.
    • Merging departments will make the infrastructure more economical, particularly if we do away with pesky department offices and office staff.
    • Just saying the word “interdisciplinary” makes us feel connected to the 21st century.

    SSSH currently includes English, history, philosophy, religion, sociology, anthropology, modern languages, linguistics, political science, psychology, classics and several others that may have escaped our notice. However, we have hired a consultancy firm that can list them all. Already, the consultants have put together a PowerPoint presentation advising what they have inferred we want.

    The restructuring will feature programs such as philohistenglish-religiosophy (PHER), anthrosociopsychology (ASP) and perhaps two other smushes with better acronyms. The new, flexible majors may be grouped under the Program for (Somewhat Limited Freedom of) Speech, the Program for Global Awareness of What Trouble We’re In and the Program That Resembles a Grab Bag From a Kids’ Party. Instead of a bunch of quarrelsome department heads and a dean, a triumvirate of armed SSSH administrators will be responsible for keeping the peace.

    We have already polled the faculty and students in a metric calculated to prove our point: On a scale of one to 10, please rate how dissatisfied you are with the current setup, with one being “very” and 10 being “extremely.” The 12 respondents answered that they were very dissatisfied. Note that we are perfectly willing to listen to suggestions from the faculty and in fact have invited them all to attend a feedback session to take place yesterday at 3 a.m. in the Student Center Ballroom (bring your own flashlight!). However, we urge the faculty not to think outside the box we have placed them in while also being nimble when it comes to downsizing.

    During this process, the SSSH building itself, shabby compared to the shiny new STEM complex, will be restructured, possibly to a multilevel parking garage with spots reserved for U of All People administrators. It has also been suggested that the faculty themselves could use some restructuring, starting with their mouths, which can be sealed through a painless surgical procedure.

    Don’t think of it as a loss of autonomy and shared governance. Consider it a gain for this administration!

    David Galef is a professor of English and the creative writing program director at Montclair State University. His latest book is the novel Where I Went Wrong (Regal House, 2025).

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  • ED Won’t Fund CTE, Dual Enrollment for “Illegal” Students

    ED Won’t Fund CTE, Dual Enrollment for “Illegal” Students

    The Education Department said Thursday that federal money shouldn’t fund dual enrollment, adult education and certain career and technical education for “illegal alien” students, whether they’re adults or K–12 pupils who are accessing postsecondary education.

    Department officials said in a news release that they are rescinding parts of a 1997 Dear Colleague letter that had allowed undocumented students to access those programs.

    In the interpretative rule published on the Federal Register, the department declared that “non-qualified alien adults are not permitted to receive education benefits (postsecondary education benefits or otherwise) and non-qualified alien children are not eligible to receive postsecondary education benefits and certain other education benefits, so long as such benefits are not basic public education benefits. Postsecondary education benefits include dual enrollment and other similar early college programs.”

    Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in the release that “under President Trump’s leadership, hardworking American taxpayers will no longer foot the bill for illegal aliens to participate in our career, technical, or adult education programs or activities. The department will ensure that taxpayer funds are reserved for citizens and individuals who have entered our country through legal means who meet federal eligibility criteria.”

    Augustus Mays, vice president of partnerships and engagement at EdTrust, an education equity group, said in a statement that the change “derails individual aspirations and undercuts workforce development at a time when our nation is facing labor shortages in critical fields like healthcare, education, and skilled trades. This decision raises barriers even higher for undocumented students who are already barred from accessing federal financial aid like Pell Grants and student loans.

    “Across the country, we’re seeing migrant communities targeted with sweeping raids, amplified surveillance, and fear-based rhetoric designed to divide and dehumanize,” Mays said. “Policies like this don’t exist in a vacuum. They are rooted in a political agenda that scapegoats immigrants and uses fear to strip rights and resources from the most vulnerable among us.”

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  • Hiring With Your Head—and Your Gut (opinion)

    Hiring With Your Head—and Your Gut (opinion)

    We’ve all been there: sitting on a search committee, sifting through credentials, interview notes and teaching demos, trying to decide whom to bring into our academic community. We talk about fit, collegiality and the balance between teaching and research. We refer to the rubric, the required qualifications and the preferred ones. We weigh experiences, diversity, alignment with the mission and potential.

    And sometimes, quietly and without warning, we feel that small, subtle shift in our gut that says something doesn’t align.

    For me, it happened during a campus interview years ago. The candidate had strong materials, solid experience and a warm, engaging manner. Throughout the formal interview, they said all the right things. Faculty were cautiously optimistic. But as I drove the candidate to the airport at the end of the visit, something changed. They relaxed, as anyone would, and for a brief second, I saw something in their eyes. A flash of disdain, maybe. Something sharper than the persona we had seen earlier. It was a shift in energy. A flicker of incongruence between how they had presented themselves and how they now carried themselves.

    I put the feeling aside. After all, it was just a second. A moment. Something I couldn’t explain. Was I reading too much into it? Was I being unfair?

    Later, I reflected on smaller details from their candidacy that had already made me pause. Their responses to scheduling emails had been brief and slow, lacking the warmth or curiosity I’d seen from other candidates. These weren’t red flags on their own, but together they created a subtle unease.

    At the time, I was a relatively new assistant professor. I didn’t have the language or the authority to raise what I sensed in a meaningful way. And so, I said nothing.

    Looking back, I now realize I could have simply asked a question like, “Did anyone else notice anything that felt a little different or off in our less formal moments with the candidate?” or “How did the candidate’s tone and energy feel during the downtimes between scheduled sessions?” These aren’t accusations—they’re openings for reflection. Questions like these can invite others to surface what they might have noticed but hadn’t yet verbalized.

    Gut Feeling Meets Emotional Intelligence

    Intuition doesn’t have to be the enemy of process. In fact, it can be part of an emotionally intelligent hiring culture—one that’s reflective, discerning and transparent. Emotional intelligence in this context is about being attuned to the human elements of a candidate’s fit. When we notice a gut reaction—whether it’s a spark of enthusiasm or a twinge of concern—it often stems from that attunement. What we call a “gut feeling” is frequently our mind’s quick synthesis of subtle cues, from body language to tone, guided by our own experiences and values.

    Emotional intelligence in faculty hiring begins with self-awareness: tuning in to how a candidate’s presence affects you—whether through curiosity, ease or discomfort—and asking what your reactions might be signaling. It includes social awareness, noticing how others respond in informal moments and whether the candidate engages in ways that feel consistent with your department’s values.

    Emotionally intelligent hiring also requires self-regulation—the discipline to slow down, hold back from snap judgments and lean into questions rather than assumptions. It thrives on relational transparency, where committee members can share subtle impressions without fear of being dismissed as merely “subjective.” And it rests on ethical discernment: the ability to examine whether those impressions are connected to job-relevant behaviors, not unconscious biases.

    Testing What We Feel

    Intuition shouldn’t be used to override policy or protocol. It should be used to sharpen it. When something feels off, ask yourself,

    • Am I noticing a misalignment between the candidate’s stated values and their interpersonal behavior?
    • Have others noted something similar?
    • Is there a way to probe deeper in follow-up interviews?
    • Can references offer insight into what I’m sensing?
    • Is what I’m noticing connected to the job’s required competencies, or is it something unrelated?

    If the answer to that last question is unclear, slow down. Revisit the evaluation criteria. Look for patterns. Talk with colleagues. Our job isn’t to be mind readers—it’s to be community stewards.

    When Intuition Becomes Wisdom

    We often think of emotional intelligence as something soft and interpersonal. But it’s also rigorous. It requires noticing your own biases, resisting overconfidence and attending to the full emotional ecology of a hiring process.

    The truth is, faculty hires change departments. They shape culture, morale, collaboration and stability. We owe it to our institutions and ourselves to trust what we notice and to reflect on it with care.

    Sometimes the most important insights don’t shout—they whisper. When we honor our instincts enough to examine them, and then ground them in facts, we hire with both head and gut. That practice doesn’t just avoid heartbreaks, mismatches and regrets—it builds stronger hires and healthier departments.

    When we talk openly about what we sense—not just what we score—we build departments rooted in both discernment and trust.

    Treavor Bogard is a department chair and associate professor of teacher education at the University of Dayton. He writes about emotionally intelligent leadership in higher education and is the author of The Emotionally Intelligent Chair, a Substack newsletter exploring the inner work of leading academic departments with purpose, reflection and care.

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