Tag: Jobs

Half of Colleges Don’t Grant Students Access to Gen AI Tools

Transformative. Disruptive. Game-changing. That’s how many experts continue to refer, without hyperbole, to generative AI’s impact on higher education. Yet more than two years after generative AI went mainstream, half of chief technology officers report that their college or university isn’t granting students institutional access to generative AI tools, which are often gratis and more sophisticated and secure than what’s otherwise available to students. That’s according to Inside Higher Ed’s forthcoming annual Survey of Campus Chief Technology/Information Officers with Hanover Research.

There remains some significant—and important—skepticism in academe about generative AI’s potential for pedagogical (and societal) good. But with a growing number of institutions launching key AI initiatives underpinned by student access to generative AI tools, and increasing student and employer expectations around AI literacy, student generative AI access has mounting implications for digital equity and workforce readiness. And according to Inside Higher Ed’s survey, cost is the No. 1 barrier to granting access, ahead of lack of need and even ethical concerns.

Ravi Pendse, who reviewed the findings for Inside Higher Ed and serves as vice president for information technology and chief information officer at the University of Michigan, a leader in granting students access to generative AI tools, wasn’t surprised by the results. But he noted that AI prompting costs, typically measured in units called tokens, have fallen sharply over time. Generative AI models, including open-source large language models, have proliferated over the same period, meaning that institutions have increasing—and increasingly less expensive—options for providing students access to tools.

‘Paralyzed’ by Costs

“Sometimes we get paralyzed by, ‘I don’t have resources, or there’s no way I can do this,’ and that’s where people need to just lean in,” Pendse said. “I want to implore all leaders and colleagues to step up and focus on what’s possible, and let human creativity get us there.”

According to the survey—which asked 108 CTOs at two- and four-year colleges, public and private nonprofit, much more about AI, digital transformation, online learning and other key topics—institutional approaches to student generative AI access vary. (The full survey findings will be released next month.)

Some 27 percent of CTOs said their college or university offers students generative AI access through an institutionwide license, with CTOs at public nonprofit institutions especially likely to say this. Another 13 percent of all CTOs reported student access to generative AI tools is limited to specific programs or departments, with this subgroup made up entirely of private nonprofit CTOs. And 5 percent of the sample reported that students at their institution have access to a custom-built generative AI tool.

Among community college CTOs specifically (n=22), 36 percent said that students have access to generative AI tools, all through an institutionwide license.

Roughly half of institutions represented do not offer student access to generative AI tools. Some 36 percent of CTOs reported that their college doesn’t offer access but is considering doing so, while 15 percent said that their institution doesn’t offer access and is not considering it.

Of those CTOs who reported some kind of student access to generative AI and answered a corresponding question about how they pay for it (n=45), half said associated costs are covered by their central IT budget; most of these are public institution CTOs. Another quarter said there are no associated costs. Most of the rest of this group indicated that funding comes from individual departments. Almost no one said costs are passed on to students, such as through fees.

Among CTOs from institutions that don’t provide student access who responded to a corresponding question about why not (n=51), the top-cited barrier from a list of possibilities was costs. Ethical concerns, such as those around potential misuse and academic integrity, factored in, as well, followed by concerns about data privacy and/or security. Fewer said there is no need or insufficient technical expertise to manage implementation.

“I very, very strongly feel that every student that graduates from any institution of higher education must have at least one core course in AI, or significant exposure to these tools. And if we’re not doing that, I believe that we are doing a disservice to our students,” Pendse said. “As a nation we need to be prepared, which means we as educators have a responsibility. We need to step up and not get bogged down by cost, because there are always solutions available. Michigan welcomes the opportunity to partner with any institution out there and provide them guidance, all our lessons learned.”

The Case for Institutional Access

But do students really need their institutions to provide access to generative AI tools, given that rapid advances in AI technology also have led to fewer limitations on free, individual-level access to products such as ChatGPT, which many students have and can continue to use on their own?

Experts such as Sidney Fernandes, vice president and CIO of the University of South Florida, which offers all students, faculty and staff access to Microsoft Copilot, say yes. One reason: privacy and security concerns. USF users of Copilot Chat use the tool in a secure, encrypted environment to maintain data privacy. And the data users share within USF’s Copilot enterprise functions—which support workflows and innovation—also remains within the institution and is not used to train AI models.

There’s no guarantee, of course, that students with secure, institutional generative AI accounts will use only them. But at USF and beyond, account rollouts are typically accompanied by basic training efforts—another plus for AI literacy and engagement.

“When we offer guidance on how to use the profiles, we’ve said, ‘If you’re using the commercially available chat bots, those are the equivalent of being on social media. Anything you post there could be used for whatever reason, so be very careful,” Fernandes told Inside Higher Ed.

In Inside Higher Ed’s survey, CTOs who reported student access to generative AI tools by some means were no more likely than the group over all to feel highly confident in their institution’s cybersecurity practices—although CTOs as a group may have reason to worry about students and cybersecurity generally: Just 26 percent reported their institution requires student training in cybersecurity.

Colleges can also grant students access to tools that are much more powerful than freely available and otherwise prompt-limited chat bots, as well as tools that are more integrated into other university platforms and resources. Michigan, for instance, offers students access to an AI assistant and another conversational AI tool, plus a separate tool that can be trained on a custom dataset. Access to a more advanced and flexible tool kit for those who require full control over their AI environments and models is available by request.

Responsive AI and the Role of Big Tech

Another reason for institutions to lead on student access to generative AI tools is cultural responsiveness, as AI tools reflect the data they’re trained on, and human biases often are baked into that data. Muhsinah Morris, director of Metaverse programs at Morehouse College, which has various culturally responsive AI initiatives—such as those involving AI tutors that look like professors—said it “makes a lot of sense to not put your eggs in one basket and say that basket is going to be the one that you carry … But at the end of the day, it’s all about student wellness, 24-7, personalized support, making sure that students feel seen and heard in this landscape and developing skills in real time that are going to make them better.”

The stakes of generative AI in education, for digital equity and beyond, also implicate big tech companies whose generative AI models and bottom lines benefit from the knowledge flowing from colleges and universities. Big tech could therefore be doing much more to partner on free generative AI access with colleges and universities, and not just on the “2.0” and “3.0” models, Morris said.

“They have a responsibility to also pour back into the world,” she added. “They are not off the hook. As a matter of fact, I’m calling them to the carpet.”

Jenay Robert, senior researcher at Educause, noted that the organization’s 2025 AI Landscape Study: Into the Digital AI Divide found that more institutions are licensing AI tools than creating their own, across a variety of capabilities. She said digital equity is “certainly one of the biggest concerns when it comes to students’ access to generative AI tools.” Some 83 percent of respondents in that study said they were concerned about widening the digital divide as an AI-related risk. Yet most respondents were also optimistic about AI improving access to and accessibility of educational materials.

Of course, Robert added, “AI tools won’t contribute to any of these improvements if students can’t access the tools.” Respondents to the Educause landscape study from larger institutions were more likely those from smaller ones to report that their AI-related strategic planning includes increasing access to AI tools.

Inside Higher Ed’s survey also reveals a link between institution size and access, with student access to generative AI tools through an institutionwide license, especially, increasing with student population. But just 11 percent of CTOs reported that their institution has a comprehensive AI strategy.

Still, Robert cautioned that “access is only part of the equation here. If we want to avoid widening the digital equity divide, we also have to help students learn how to use the tools they have access to.”

In a telling data point from Educause’s 2025 Students and Technology Report, more than half of students reported that most or all of their instructors prohibit the use of generative AI.

Arizona State University, like Michigan, collaborated early on with OpenAI, but it has multiple vendor partners and grants student access to generative AI tools through an institutionwide license, through certain programs and custom-built tools. ASU closely follows generative AI consumption in a way that allows it to meet varied needs across the university in a cost-effective manner, as “the cost of one [generative AI] model versus another can vary dramatically,” said Kyle Bowen, deputy CIO.

“A large percentage of students make use of a moderate level of capability, but some students and faculty make use of more advanced capability,” he said. “So everybody having everything may not make sense. It may not be very cost-sustainable. Part of what we have to look at is what we would describe as consumption-based modeling—meaning we are putting in place the things that people need and will consume, not trying to speculate what the future will look like.”

That’s what even institutions with established student access are “wrestling with,” Bowen continued. “How do we provide that universal level of AI capability today while recognizing that that will evolve and change, and we have to be ready to have technology for the future, as well, right?”

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April 21, 2025
Northwestern to Fund Research After Federal Freeze

Northwestern University is stepping in to fund ongoing research projects after the private institution received stop-work orders on nearly 100 federal grants, CBS News Chicago reported.

The move comes after the Trump administration froze $790 million in federal research funding at Northwestern, which is one of multiple institutions across the U.S. hit by similar setbacks. Others include Harvard University, which had $2.2 billion frozen after it rejected changes demanded by the Trump administration in response to alleged antisemitism and harassment; Cornell University (more than $1 billion); Columbia University ($650 million); Brown University ($510 million); Princeton University ($210 million); and the University of Pennsylvania ($175 million).

Northwestern, like others on the list, had a pro-Palestinian encampment protest on campus last spring, which prompted Congress to bring its president in for a hearing on antisemitism in May.

Northwestern president Michael Schill and Board of Trustees chair Peter Barris told the university community in an email obtained by CBS News Chicago that the university still had not received formal notice that federal research funding had been pulled, but the university has received stop-work orders. They noted the university will continue funding on projects that received stop-work orders as well as other research threatened by the Trump administration.

“The work we do is essential to our community, to the nation and to the world. Enabling this vital research to continue is among our most important priorities, and supporting our researchers in this moment is a responsibility we take seriously,” Schill and Barris wrote in the Thursday email.

Northwestern is among the nation’s wealthiest universities, with an endowment recently valued at $14.2 billion. However, financial experts have cautioned against leveraging endowments to plug budget holes, prompting some wealthy institutions targeted by the administration to issue bonds or take out private loans.

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April 21, 2025
How Harvard Is Standing Up to Trump Means Everything

When it comes to fighting the current authoritarian threats coming out of the Trump administration, it’s important to remember that the symbol is the substance.

Frankly, this is always true of politics generally, but it’s more true and more important than ever in this moment.

We have an object example of this principle at work presently in the different responses from Harvard and Columbia when it comes to the threats to funding and demand for control by the Trump administration.

Columbia appeared to capitulate, forging an “agreement” to take steps sought by Trump, ostensibly to address antisemitism on campus, but this fig leaf was unconvincing, and Trump himself quickly dropped the pretense, as we all understand he has no interest in combating antisemitism and every interest in sending signals of domination and stoking fear that turns into pre-emptive compliance from other institutions.

Columbia looked unprincipled and weak in the face of the authoritarian threat, and the internal and external backlash against Columbia has been significant.

In contrast, once Harvard received the Trump administration demands, it crafted a careful public response, producing multiple public-facing communications meant to speak to different audiences (press, public, students, faculty, alumni) with different needs, including a letter from Harvard president Alan Garber to the university community that invoked a shared responsibility to defend the core values of the institution specifically and higher education in general.

To be fair, the call was much easier for Harvard than Columbia for several reasons. For one, Harvard had seen what happened to Columbia, where what looked like capitulation to outsiders still proved insufficient, because, again, Trump is interested in subservience, not reaching a mutual agreement. When Trump-world figures like JD Vance and Chris Rufo say they intend to destroy higher education, we should take them seriously.

The Trump administration demands of Harvard were also so extreme—amounting essentially to a takeover of the university—that it had no choice but to resist and take every possible step to rally others to the fight. The public thirst for an institutional response to Trump’s lawless power grabs has been so great that even the New York Times editorial board has weighed in with its approval of Harvard’s actions and the university’s explicit pledge to stand against violations of the rule of law.

An interesting bit of information in the form of an op-ed by Columbia history professor Matthew Connelly has come out that perhaps sheds additional light on Columbia’s actions. Writing at The New York Times, Connelly laments the hapless situation his institution finds itself in, first receiving blows from Trump and then being subjected to the “circular firing squad” of those who oppose Trump signing on to a collective boycott of Columbia.

Connelly argues that we should not view Columbia as “capitulating” to Trump because, “In fact, many of the actions the Columbia administration announced on March 21 are similar to those originally proposed last August by more than 200 faculty members.”

In other words, in agreeing with Trump, Columbia is only doing what it was possibly going to do anyway. Connelly goes on to argue that Columbia would never give in on key principles of institutional operations, and acting Columbia University president Claire Shipman has subsequently declared that Columbia would not sign any agreement that would “require us to relinquish our independence and autonomy as an educational institution.”

Columbia’s actions look similar to those taken by some of the big law firms that have reached vaguely worded “agreements” with Trump that have them pledging not to do “illegal DEI hiring” and to donate tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to pro bono causes favored by Trump. At Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall has gone digging into some of these agreements and found that there’s not much of specific substance to be found, the wording often so generalized and vague that it would be easy for firms to fulfill the agreements without doing anything beyond their usual patterns and practices.

I’m not entirely unsympathetic to Connelly’s irritation or the decisions by the big law firms; they thought they could make Trump go away with a little performative minor supplication and get back to their substantive work.

They’ve obviously misread the moment badly. I don’t know what more evidence we need to conclude that Trump intends to govern as an authoritarian. In both the cases of these law firms and Columbia University, the entire battle was over Trump being allowed to claim a symbolic victory over these institutions, to get them to be seen capitulating.

It is strange to say that the symbolic fight is the genuine battle over principles, but this is obviously the case. Trump wants to make others fearful of standing up to his authoritarian aims, so he will simply defy the rule of law until someone forces the victims to fight. There is no choice but to test the administration’s resolve. Trump’s response on Truth Social following Harvard’s action shows a lot of bluster aimed at tearing down Harvard’s reputation with a lot of right-wing tropes, but the rhetoric shows how nonexistent his substantive case is.

Any capitulation, real or even perceived, is a loss. Either choice will come with costs. Trump is going after Harvard’s funding and nonprofit status, and there will be significant turbulence for the university in the foreseeable future. But turbulence is not the same thing as a plane heading for the ground.

Harvard had its legal strategy prepared before the fight even went public. Law and precedent appear to be on its side, though this is not a guarantee of success. Trump seems determined to hold back whatever money he can in his ongoing attempts at coercion.

What we are learning is that there is no such thing as accommodating or reaching an agreement with an authoritarian project. Harvard’s stand is an important symbolic illustration of this, and because of the symbolism, it is proving to be hugely substantive.

Let’s hope it’s only the first example of how to fight back.

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April 20, 2025
Welcome, WINNERS, to Prosperity U (opinion/satire)

Dear Excepted Student,

Congratulations on your admission to Prosperity University’s class of 2026. We’re going to get you in and out of here faster and more efficiently than any of those LOSER Colleges that look like total DUMPS. You’re going to love it here. We’ve got the Best campus, the most beautiful Campus, the likes of which you’ve never seen. People are saying it’s the most Luxurious educational facility in the history of education, maybe ever.

Our professors? Top-notch people, very Smart people. Some of the smartest people in the world, actually. They know things other professors don’t know. They teach things other universities are afraid to teach, believe me. And guess what? Our provost is None other than Neon Mush! That’s right, the greatest BUSINESS GENIUS OF OUR TIME is running our academic operations. He’s going to send our education to Mars, LITERALLY to Mars!!!

And let me tell you, we don’t do this Ridiculous “tenure” thing here. No way. That’s for crooked lazy professors. At Prosperity U, you perform or you’re fired! Simple as that. “Academic freedom”? Just another excuse for Woke Liberal Indoctrination!!!! OUR PROFESSORS TEACH WHAT WE TELL THEM TO TEACH and it’s beautiful, believe me.

The curriculum at Prosperity is unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. We don’t waste time with the Boring stuff, failing subjects like “science” or “medicine” or “math.” No one reads anymore, so you don’t even Need to buy books. Useless BS. We teach our students to make money. You want art? We do the Art of the Deal. WINNING!

And let me tell you, you know, some very good people have been so discriminated against in this country. Very Good people. It’s terrible, just Terrible!! We just pick the best students, and if they happen to be the wealthy good-looking ones with great hair from the best Richest families with very big hands, which they Usually are, then that’s just how it is. That’s just how Winning works.

We don’t have any failing students here. Zero. If you’re not WINNING, you’re not trying. Everyone at the U of P is a winner. That I can tell you. If students don’t fit in with our values? They’re fired! We don’t need whiners. You either get with the Program or you’re out, folks. We have no tolerance for losers or troublemakers.

Let me tell you about our athletics program—it’s huge, just TREMENDOUS. We only play AMERICAN sports here, none of that soccer nonsense from shithole countries. Our football team? Undefeated. We’re winning bigly. Other schools are Terrified to play us, believe me. Nobody kneels during our national anthem, that I can Guarantee you. And we don’t have any of these women’s sports taking resources away from real sports. Title IX? Neon Mush is taking care of that. Our cheerleaders are the most Beautiful women you’ve ever seen, the most beautiful. Many people say they could be models. They love me. They’ll let you do anything to them!

The tuition? It’s not Cheap, folks. Quality costs Money. But it’s worth every penny, every single penny. And when you graduate—which everyone does, because we fire them if they don’t show up, or sometimes, even if they do—we have a 100% graduation rate, huge crowds, biggest crowds you’ve ever seen, it’s amazing—you’ll be so successful. SO SUCCESSFUL! You’ll be tired of success.

The other universities? Total Disasters. Sad! They’re Jealous of us, very jealous. But that’s OK. We’re making education great again, and they can’t stand it. The American people have lost faith in these liberal indoctrination camps they call “universities.” At Prosperity University, we teach Real skills for real Americans who want to stop this country from becoming a BUNCH of losers. NO SAFE SPACES HERE! No trigger warnings. We’re not afraid to pull triggers!

Believe me, folks. Believe me.

Sincerely,

THE PRESIDENT

Prosperity University

Rachel Toor is a professor of creative writing at Eastern Washington University in Spokane and a contributing editor at Inside Higher Ed.

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April 18, 2025
Mentoring in an Era of Uncertainty for Higher Education

More than half of college students believe professors should take on a mentoring role to support their career development, according to a 2024 Inside Higher Ed survey. And a 2023 report from the American Council on Education showed that informal and formal mentoring can broaden pathways to graduate education for students, particularly those from historically marginalized backgrounds.

But few faculty members receive formal training on how to be an effective mentor while also balancing teaching, research and publishing responsibilities. That’s only getting more difficult as faculty navigate a changing—and increasingly uncertain—higher education landscape marked by intensifying political scrutiny, ever-shrinking budgets, increased workloads and fewer academic job prospects for their students.

“The conditions for mentoring continue to deteriorate,” said Maria Wisdom, assistant vice provost for faculty advancement at Duke University. “At the same time, there’s never been a greater need for truly impactful mentoring, and I think there has never been a moment at which it’s clear that we need to learn to support people without having all the answers.”

After a decade working as an English professor at Columbia College, Wisdom turned her focus to coaching early and midcareer faculty across disciplines. She also leads mentoring workshops for faculty looking to improve their mentorship of junior researchers, scholars and colleagues.

Last month, she published How to Mentor Anyone in Academia (Princeton University Press), a practical guide aimed at demystifying what it means to be a mentor. Inside Higher Ed spoke with Wisdom about some of the advice she lays out in the book and how it may help mentors—and mentees—navigate the higher education sector’s uncertain future.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: How did your experiences as a mentee and mentor shape your approach to mentoring?

A: Looking back, the mentorship I received was only OK. Every now and then it was really helpful. But I can also think of multiple instances in my professional trajectory where things could have gone differently and better if I would have had more effective mentoring.

Many years later, after I had left the professoriate, I was working at Duke—first as a graduate adviser and then as a certified coach, working first with grad students and then with faculty. It was through that professional training—which was a very different kind of training than what I received in my graduate education—that I was able to understand what it means to be a professional helper and how many different roles we can occupy when we’re professional helpers. And all of those roles overlap in some way with mentoring.

That awareness helped me realize that the majority of faculty mentors just don’t have the time or bandwidth or resources to be thoughtful about those role distinctions and what it means to actually mentor somebody in a certain context at a certain time.

Q: In the book you write about three different approaches to mentoring: mentoring with a heart, a backbone and like a coach. Can you describe the difference between those approaches and how mentors can employ all three?

A: They’re all connected and they’re all important.

All effective leaders need to have both backbone—which means firmness, rigor and consistency—and heart, which is empathy, understanding and kindness. A good leader balances these two things out at the same time, and rarely is a leader a natural in both areas.

Maybe they aren’t good at giving feedback, don’t establish clear expectations at the outset of the relationship or don’t have a system of regular check-ins with their mentee. Those are all elements of backbone. Or maybe they’re not putting enough heart into it. They may set clear expectations and give regular feedback, but they’re kind of insensitive to the needs of the mentee, or they’re just not very empathetic, and so I think you need to have both.

And that’s where coaching comes in. Coaching is a structured conversation, one in which you need to be fully present and empathetic. So that’s how I see coaching, marrying both aspects of backbone and heart.

Q: What are some of the common misconceptions about what it takes to be an effective academic mentor? What does it take to be an effective mentor?

A: There’s this prevailing assumption among many academics that mentoring is just something you naturally figure out how to do as you go along. Faculty either mentor the way they’ve been mentored, or they mentor in opposition to an ineffective way they were mentored. I also see too much of what I call mentor impostor syndrome in the academy, which is this faulty assumption that you can only mentor people in the same discipline as you or who follow the same career path as you.

We tend to underestimate the power all of us have to be helpful to each other’s professional growth in ways that have nothing to do with disciplinary expertise. Those are things like active listening, cultivating empathy, basic coaching skills and doing more listening and active questioning than talking at somebody.

We need to stop assuming that mentoring is something you’re born with and instead think of it as a set of skills, competencies and even an entire worldview that can help you be helpful to anyone. It’s not about pouring knowledge into an empty vessel. It’s about being a facilitator and creating the space to ask provocative questions that are going to help somebody remember just how talented and resourceful they are.

Q: How does effective mentoring benefit students and higher education more broadly?

A: Good mentorship is upending, to some extent, all these hierarchies we have in higher education, where professors are the fountain of all knowledge, holding all the power, and graduate students are more like apprentices or vessels to be filled with that knowledge. It’s charging mentees with a much greater responsibility for their own learning, growth and development.

That may seem like a big burden to place on the shoulders of a mentee. But if a grad student learns during their degree program how to be reflective about their own professional needs, how to ask for help in a respectful and effective manner, and how to set clear goals and work toward them in small steps, they’re going to be set up for success for the rest of their career.

Q: The higher education landscape is changing, with faculty jobs and funding becoming more scarce. How do these realities make mentoring more challenging?

A: Often, people aren’t taking on mentoring roles because they simply feel like they don’t have enough time. Meetings are rushed, or maybe the mentor is distracted while mentees are in their office. And that’s just a microcosm of a larger deterioration of relationships across our society.

Nobody in higher ed has the answers about what’s going to happen three months from now, let alone three years from now. But that doesn’t mean we just give up and stop supporting my junior faculty or my graduate students. We need to think about how we can help them learn and grow even in the midst of this type of environment. And that’s the kind of mentoring that my book is trying to encourage people to adopt.

Q: How can mentors help students navigate the changing academic job market?

A: In academia, we still tend to assume that not only are there academic jobs to be had, but that people will stay in the same career their entire 30- to 40-year career. For plenty of senior faculty, that has been their life experience, but we can’t assume anymore. Mentors aren’t doing their students any favors by preparing them for these linear, stable, nearly nonexistent career paths. Mentors need to think about how they can support people in being nimble and adaptable in the face of unpredictable change.

We need to make our students comfortable with trying new things, taking risks, being proactive and building relationships. These are all things that will help them to weather change. Every now and then I’ll hear about a faculty member or adviser who didn’t want their student doing an internship because it had nothing to do with their dissertation and [would] make it take longer to finish the program; they see it as a distraction. But for some of those students, internships were the most valuable thing they did in graduate school, because it led directly to their first nonacademic job after graduation.

Q: How can mentors support themselves and each other in trying to improve mentoring?

A: Improving mentoring can’t just happen by improving one relationship at a time. We need to think about how to build cultures that support excellent, effective mentoring. Too often, mentoring is still practiced in isolation and faculty are shy to talk publicly about their mentoring experiences. That’s kind of silly, because I think you could have many faculty members in a single program all dealing with the same mentoring challenges. But because they never sit down to compare notes, they don’t even realize it.

I talk in the book about the importance of chairs and associate deans normalizing conversations about faculty mentoring. Faculty members should ask themselves when the last time faculty, graduate student mentoring or new faculty mentoring was on the agenda over the past year.

These conversations are rarely happening. There’s a need for mentoring mentors. And very often, they are your peers or somebody you consider a professional mentor. There’s a lot of strength in learning to build these informal networks of support.

Mentor burnout is also a big problem. If you’re trying to mentor somebody and you’re showing up with dark circles under your eyes at every meeting, your mentee is going to assume that’s necessary for success in the academy. Faculty need to model wellness and self-care, not just in mentoring, but in just about every area of their lives.

Q: Does your book offer any advice for mentees?

A: Yes. This book actually grew out of a course that I taught for graduate students, which addressed how to get the most out of mentoring relationships.

Most graduate students haven’t had the opportunity or the luxury to sit and think about what a good mentor is or how they’ll advocate to get better mentoring. At the end of every chapter, I have a little section called takeaways for mentees, including one section on how to accept and use feedback. There’s also another on how to build an informal mentoring network if you’re not getting enough from your formal mentors.

I wrote this book for mentees as well as mentors.

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April 18, 2025
How Colleges Can Increase Transfer Student Success
Upward transfer from a community college to a four-year bachelor’s degree–granting institution is a complicated process that leaves many students behind—particularly those from historically underrepresented backgrounds.

Last month, the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College and the Aspen Institute College Excellence Program published the second edition of the Transfer Playbook, a guidebook for colleges and universities seeking to eliminate barriers to transfer and increase the number of students who start at a community college and complete a bachelor’s degree.

The report details how colleges and universities can implement three evidence-based strategies that improve transfer and includes examples of institutions that are successful in this work.

By the numbers: Previous surveys have shown that a majority (80 percent) of community college students aspire to a bachelor’s degree, but only 16 percent earn a bachelor’s degree within six years of starting college.

Transfer rates are even lower for some student groups, including those from low-income backgrounds, adult learners and Black and Hispanic students, according to the report.

With the cost of higher education climbing, many students consider community college an affordable route to a postsecondary credential. However, little progress has been made over the past decade in increasing transfer rates from two-year to four-year institutions, according to the report’s authors.

“Transfer and bachelor’s attainment rates for students who start in community colleges have remained virtually unchanged since we started tracking transfer in 2015,” they write.

The playbook identifies colleges and universities that have achieved better outcomes for various groups using some of the recommended practices. None of the institutions or partnerships exhibited all the practices. “However, we hypothesize that by combining the exemplars’ efforts into a comprehensive, idealized framework, higher education leaders and practitioners can adapt it to meet their students’ needs and achieve strong outcomes for all—and at scale,” the report says.

Put into practice: Researchers identified a few consistent themes that set innovative institutions apart, which include:
- Leveraging proximity. Research shows students are more likely to enroll in college based on proximity, so creating local pathways between community colleges and four-year universities can support students who want to stay in the region.
- Providing empathy in high-stakes decisions. Missteps in course, major or transfer destination selection can have financial and opportunity costs for a student, which can impede their attainment or push them to stop out entirely. Effective colleges offer personalized support through staff or create tools that provide guidance in a timely manner.
- Establishing universal systems and initiatives. Some programs provide strong outcomes for historically underrepresented groups but are not large enough to reach students at scale. Exemplars instead use these programs as pilots to test effective measures and then scale them.
- Achieving support from leaders. Grassroots efforts can help move the needle, but recognition, elevation and investment by senior leadership allow work to scale in sustained ways, regardless of staffing turnover.
According to the report, the most effective strategies for creating sustainable transfer student success at scale are:
- Prioritizing transfer at the executive level. A key driver in systemwide change was community college and four-year presidents who understand the central role of transfer student success in their respective institutional missions and business goals. This top-down approach allows for allocation of resources, division mobilization and partnerships across colleges, which often benefit the local community and workforce. This also allows for end-to-end redesign of the transfer student experience, and establishment of systems and processes.
- Aligning programs and pathways. Colleges that create and regularly update term-by-term, four-year maps for each degree program can promote learning and ensure students are making significant progress toward a bachelor’s degree, such as completing college-level math and English and major-related courses. These maps should also prioritize accessibility and flexibility, understanding that student needs and priorities may shift and the way they complete courses may change. Some students may need exploratory curricula to help them identify their educational and career goals, so embedding this instruction early is also paramount.
- Tailoring advising and nonacademic supports. “Research indicates that about half of the community college students nationally who intend to transfer do not access transfer services,” the report says. Instead, institutions should put in place inevitable advising, engaging transfer students before, during and after their transition to a university. Advisers should receive professional development and training that centers the student experience and equips them to engage with individual students and their respective circumstances. Once students land at their four-year institution, creating systems and supports that uplift the transfer experience and inspire feelings of belonging is also critical.
Researchers call out a variety of campuses for their work, including George Mason University and Northern Virginia Community College’s ADVANCE program, Tallahassee State College’s transfer pathway work, and Arizona Western College and North Arizona University’s strategy to increase bachelor’s attainment in their two-county region.

Seeking stories from campus leaders, faculty members and staff for our Student Success focus. Share here.
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April 18, 2025
DHS Threatens Harvard With Loss of International Students

The Department of Homeland Security canceled $2.7 million in grants going to Harvard University Wednesday night and threatened to terminate its Student and Visitor Exchange Program certification, which would bar the private Massachusetts institution from enrolling international students.

DHS’s threats came shortly after Harvard rebuffed the Trump’s administration’s demands to overhaul governance, admissions, hiring processes and more amid allegations of antisemitism and harassment tied to pro-Palestinian protests last spring. Although the Trump administration has opened a civil rights investigation into antisemitism at Harvard, that inquiry remains in process.

Even so, the federal government has already moved to punish the university.

The Trump administration froze $2.2 billion in research grants after Harvard rejected its initial demands, and the Internal Revenue Service is reportedly taking aim at its tax-exempt status. Now SEVP certification appears to be in the Trump administration’s crosshairs as well.

“Harvard bending the knee to antisemitism—driven by its spineless leadership—fuels a cesspool of extremist riots and threatens our national security,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a Thursday statement. “With anti-American, pro-Hamas ideology poisoning its campus and classrooms, Harvard’s position as a top institution of higher learning is a distant memory. America demands more from universities entrusted with taxpayer dollars.”

DHS demanded the university provide “detailed records on Harvard’s foreign student visa holders’ illegal and violent activities by April 30” or lose SEVP certification. The demand comes as the federal government has revoked visas for international students across the U.S., in some cases for political speech. (Inside Higher Ed has tracked more than 1,450 visa revocations.)

Harvard spokesperson Jason Newton emphasized the need for due process in federal actions.

“Harvard values the rule of law and expects all members of our community to comply with University policies and applicable legal standards,” Newton wrote. “If federal action is taken against a member of our community, we expect it will be based on clear evidence, follow established legal procedures, and respect the constitutional rights afforded to all individuals.”

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April 18, 2025
Judge Blocks Energy Dept. Plan to Cap Indirect Cost Rates

A federal judge temporarily blocked the U.S. Department of Energy’s plan to cap universities’ indirect research cost reimbursement rates, pending a hearing in the ongoing lawsuit filed by several higher education associations and universities.

Judge Allison D. Burroughs of the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts wrote in the brief Wednesday order that the plaintiffs had shown that, without a temporary restraining order, “they will sustain immediate and irreparable injury before there is an opportunity to hear from all parties.”

Plaintiffs include the Association of American Universities, the American Council on Education, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities and nine individual universities, including Brown, Cornell and Princeton Universities and the Universities of Michigan, Illinois and Rochester. They sued the DOE and department secretary Chris Wright on Monday, three days after the DOE announced its plan.

Department spokespeople didn’t return Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment Thursday afternoon.

DOE’s plan is to cap the reimbursement rates at 15 percent. Energy grant recipients at colleges and universities currently have an average 30 percent indirect cost rate. The Trump administration has alleged that indirect costs are wasteful spending, although they are extensively audited.

The DOE sends more than $2.5 billion a year to over 300 colleges and universities. Part of that money covers costs indirectly related to research that may support multiple grant-funded projects, including specialized nuclear-rated facilities, computer systems and administrative support costs.

The department’s plan is nearly identical to a plan the National Institutes of Health announced in February, which a judge also blocked.

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April 18, 2025
Southwest Wisconsin Tech Wins Aspen Prize

The Aspen Institute announced Thursday that Southwest Wisconsin Technical College has won this year’s Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence, an honor bestowed on high-achieving community colleges that have made strides in their academic outcomes.

The Aspen Institute commended the college for its high completion rates and wage outcomes. Southwest Wisconsin Tech’s 54 percent graduation rate exceeds the national average for community colleges by nearly 20 percentage points. The college also set a goal to reach 70 percent through various strategies, including creating career-aligned success plans for every student. Additionally, five years after graduation, alumni of Southwest Wisconsin Tech earn almost $14,000 more than new hires in the region on average.

“Southwest Wisconsin Technical College inspires the field with how they connect every program to a good-paying job that regional employers need to fill,” Aspen Prize co-chair Tim O’Shaughnessy, CEO of Graham Holdings Company, said in a news release. “Their emphasis on work-based learning and hands-on training in every program shows how an engaging, high-quality education can change lives while strengthening a regional economy.”

The college won $700,000 as a part of the prize. Two other institutions were recognized as finalists with distinction—San Jacinto College in Texas and South Puget Sound Community College in Washington State—for their transfer and workforce practices. Wallace State Community College–Hanceville in Alabama also earned Aspen’s Rising Star award for meaningful improvements in its student outcomes. These institutions will each receive $100,000.

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April 18, 2025
How AI Challenges Notions of Authorship (opinion)

Have you seen the Apple Intelligence writing tools commercial featuring a dim-witted office drone named Warren? Tapping away on his iPhone, he writes a goofy, slangy email to his boss and then has the app transform his prose by selecting “Professional.” The manager reads the resulting concise memo and, stunned at the source, asks himself, “Warren?”

Warren has a ghostwriter. In fact, we all do.

I’m hardly alone in thinking AI chat bots such as ChatGPT are a lot like ghostwriting. In an Inside Higher Ed blog post, “ChatGPT: A Different Kind of Ghostwriting,” Ali Lincoln, herself a ghost, finds nothing wrong with using AI to write an outline or even a first draft. After all, she argues, “in both writing and editing, we’ve used some element of AI for many years, such as software that evaluates the readability of a written piece, programs to check writing like Grammarly, and even spell-check and autocorrect.”

An especially intriguing piece appeared in, of all places, Annals of Surgical Oncology: “A Ghostwriter for the Masses: ChatGPT and the Future of Writing.” The author, a physician, writes mostly positively of the potential uses of ChatGPT to assist in medical and scientific writing.

Throwing this discussion into sharper relief, there is even Ghostwriter OpenAI ChatGPT, an add-in that embeds ChatGPT directly into Microsoft Office. With Ghostwriter, you simply open Word and have the chat bot on the same screen as your document—a ghost in the machine.

These arguments and recent AI developments have caught my attention, because throughout most of my academic career I moonlighted as a corporate ghostwriter. I wrote magazine articles on scientific topics for a large technical company, articles that were published under someone else’s name, typically a scientist or engineer whom I interviewed for the piece.

My favorite moment in that role came when I sat down with a manager who was new to the company to discuss a writing project. She handed me an offprint of an op-ed by the division vice president, accompanied by his photo.

“Study this,” she said, a bit officiously. “Everything you need to know is in his article.”

Maybe you see where this is going. Notwithstanding the VP’s smiling face, I’d written every word.

Ghostwriting can lead to this sort of haziness about authorial authenticity. But is it unethical?

Certainly, I didn’t think so. I produced what was essentially the voice of the corporation placed in the mouths of its subject matter experts (SMEs) and executives, who were either too busy or incapable of writing the articles. The company hoped readers would contact the SMEs to learn more; they weren’t interested in anyone talking to me. And I was happy to remain in the shadows (yes, with my check).

I explained as much to students in my professional writing classes, where I focused on the business of writing, pointing out that CEOs are no more likely to write their own op-ed pieces than are U.S. presidents to write their own speeches. But they were nevertheless uneasy with the practice. They couldn’t imagine writing anything without getting a byline, even when I explained the concept of work for hire.

Ghostwriting is a kind of imposture, presenting to the world writing that is not one’s own. Nevertheless, like the spirits for which it is named, ghostwriting exists in a shadowy realm where things are not what they seem. It inhabits an ethical twilight zone.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson stated as much in her groundbreaking work, Eloquence in an Electronic Age: The Transformation of Political Speechmaking:

“When students fail to acknowledge the sources from which their essays are drawn or, worse, when they expropriate the language of another, we righteously cry plagiarism and penalize them; once the student attains the status of senator, congressperson, or president, the rules change. Feigning authorship of another’s thoughts and words is then not only expected but publicly funded.”

When Jamieson wrote those words, in 1988, she could not have foreseen how ChatGPT would make ghostwriting available to everyone, not just politicians and celebrities, making questions about its ethicality even more pressing.

I plugged into Ghostwriter OpenAI ChatGPT and asked it to expound briefly on the ethicality of ghosting:

“Ghostwriting is a contentious practice within the realm of ethics. On one hand, proponents argue that it is a legitimate form of collaboration, where the writer’s expertise brings another individual’s ideas to life. It allows busy or less skilled individuals to share their knowledge and experiences through the written word. However, critics argue that ghostwriting undermines authenticity and intellectual integrity.”

This isn’t exactly an incisive analysis of the topic, but it’s not a bad start. Yes, ghostwriting is ethically contentious. However, and this is a crucial point, it allows “less skilled individuals to share their knowledge and experiences through the written word.”

Of course, the person who turns to AI for these answers may not do any deep thinking about the topic—or any thinking, at all. And this is what we ask of writing, especially in the academic setting, that it serve as a way to wrestle with ideas and arguments, to write our way toward conclusions. Further, this is why the answer to the question “May students use ChatGPT to write essays?” must be a hard no.

Still, we have to face the question of ghostwriting’s ethicality in other instances. When is it allowable? I think for practical, workaday writing chores, AI technology has already won out.

When I began teaching professional writing some 40 years ago, I included instruction on putting together an effective memo. I did something similar in numerous training sessions I conducted for corporations. Today, with AI ghosts haunting every classroom and office, this sort of coaching would be like teaching a driver how to read a road map.

Universities have long privileged writing, introducing students to the academic enterprise in freshman composition classes and making writing central to innumerable courses. Now, the primacy of writing skills is being challenged by the ghosts of AI. And not just for students: I cannot point to any data; however, my experience with colleagues suggests that faculty are using ChatGPT and other AI applications to assist in their writing. A draft journal article I reviewed recently included text stating the authors used ChatGPT to edit their manuscript.

Kathleen Jamieson argued that the rules for authorial authenticity change when people become elected officials. Now they change when we have access to the internet.

Ghosts are everywhere.

Patrick M. Scanlon is a professor emeritus in the School of Communication at Rochester Institute of Technology.

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April 18, 2025