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Cultivating a Postdoc Community (opinion)
What happens when postdoctoral researchers feel like they truly belong? It is not just a feel-good moment—it is the foundation for success. A strong sense of community in the postdoctoral workplace can transform isolation into inclusion, stress into resilience and short-term survival into long-term thriving. It can help postdocs form the right mindset to face challenges such as career uncertainty, heavy workloads and relocation away from familiar support systems.

For postdocs, community combats a unique kind of professional isolation. Whether someone is fresh out of graduate school or pivoting from one career path to another, postdoctoral training is a time of both intense focus and high ambiguity. Demanding workloads, career uncertainty, immigration concerns and financial insecurity can weigh heavily on postdocs and increase their levels of stress and feelings of outsiderness, especially for those from historically underrepresented backgrounds. Because of this, for career practitioners, faculty and mentors, focusing solely on the professional development of postdocs no longer seems to be enough.

Why Community Matters

Looking to expand our support for postdocs beyond their professional development, we at the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs at Washington University in St. Louis embraced the need to prioritize postdoc well-being and the creation of an inclusive, engaged community. We believe postdocs who feel a sense of belonging to a supportive environment are more likely to:
- Maintain a healthier work-life integration, leading to better research outcomes, productivity and professional growth.
- Reflect on their career paths, plan their future goals and make informed decisions about their careers.
- Develop transferable skills such as communication, teamwork and leadership, which are crucial for career success.
- Stay at their institutions, avoiding disruptions in research projects or the research group’s morale.
With these objectives in mind, the skill-development side of the postdoctoral experience needs to be complemented with considerations about postdoc well-being, sense of belonging and identification with the institution.

Initiatives to Cultivate Community

Building a strong postdoc community and a strong sense of belonging has to be intentional. At WashU, partnerships and a little imagination helped us develop creative, low-cost initiatives to cultivate community, initiatives that any institution could tailor to fit the needs of their postdocs.

Our community-building work centers on three main strategies: programming, fun giveaways and improved communication methods.

Programming: Moments that Matter

From our fall holiday pop-up to year-round celebrations of cultural heritage and history months, we have hosted events that offer postdocs essential touch points for connection outside their academic research and scholarship. We have reached out to internal and local partners (such as libraries and cultural organizations) and found they are often enthusiastic about collaborating with programs that align with their educational and service missions.

For example, we connected with campus health and wellness programs to offer existing services (like CPR certification, health screenings or nutrition workshops) branded as postdoc-only events. Likewise, during LGBT History Month, we hosted Walk with Pride, a walking tour highlighting a local neighborhood’s LGBT history, in collaboration with the local history museum, which donated items for a raffle. With low investment, these events provide postdocs with opportunities to engage with diverse communities and cultures, enriching their personal and professional lives.

Fun Giveaways: Small Tokens, Big Meaning

We regularly ask our on-campus partners for fliers and branded stationery, which we include in a welcome kit we give away during orientation. A welcome kit is a small bag containing a collection of practical campus resources and promotional merchandise from the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs and our partners. We found that elements like stickers and branded lanyards not only boosted morale but also became a way for postdocs to visibly identify other postdocs across campus, sparking lighthearted and spontaneous conversation. We have learned to not underestimate the power of a sticker that says, “I’m a WashU Postdoc. I got this.” These small tokens help postdocs feel valued and connected.

Communication: Making Sure No One Misses Out

To ensure postdocs actually know about our programming and services, we leveled up our communications strategy with calendar invites, personalized welcome emails and festive event announcements tied to specific holidays or cultural celebrations. A successful strategy for us has been to share our announcements with the administrative staff in the academic units—they replicate our event invites in their internal departmental communications and thus create another avenue for the information to reach postdocs. Partnerships for proactive, clear communication go a long way in making sure everyone feels included.

Call for Action

There is still so much more we are excited to build at WashU. We are developing a postdoc parent network, a postdoc alumni network and a mentor network. We are planning more cultural events that connect postdocs with their identities and local history. We are finding ways to better support postdocs’ financial well-being.

Community building is essential. We believe every postdoc deserves to feel like they belong, not just as researchers, but as people. And through practical initiatives like the ones we’ve shared, postdocs can develop a wide range of career skills that will serve them well in their future endeavors.

There is no need for huge budgets or massive teams if we rely on curiosity, willingness to listen and partnerships across the campus and community. Talk to your postdocs. Then try something small, fun and heartfelt. It could be a sticker or a bake-off. Maybe it could be just a well-timed welcome email that says, “We are glad you are here.”

The difference between isolation and engagement can start with a single gesture. That is a difference worth making. A supportive, connected postdoc community is not just a nice-to-have—it is a must-have for professional growth.

Elizabeth Eikmann is currently the assistant director of curricular innovation in the College of Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis and previously served as program coordinator in WashU’s Office of Postdoctoral Affairs. Paola Cépeda is the assistant vice chancellor for postdoctoral affairs at WashU. They are both members of the Graduate Career Consortium—an organization providing an international voice for graduate-level career and professional development leaders. This article represents their views alone.
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May 5, 2025
Pasco-Hernando President Resigns Amid State DOGE Scrutiny

Pasco-Hernando State College president Jesse Pisors has resigned after less than 18 months on the job, amid scrutiny from Florida’s version of the Department of Government Efficiency, The Tampa Bay Times reported.

Pisors stepped down Thursday, the day before a special meeting called by board chair Marilyn Pearson-Adams to discuss concerns about student growth and retention, according to meeting documents. In a letter to other trustees, which included analysis from Florida’s DOGE on student growth and retention, Pearson-Adams noted the college was among the worst on those metrics.

Specifically, she noted PHSC was second-to-last in retention numbers, which she called “alarming.” She added that trustees “had not been made aware of these numbers” despite “our continued requests over the past 12 months regarding this type of information and data.”

The agenda shows only one action item for Friday’s special meeting of the Pasco-Hernando Board of Trustees: “Determination of Sustainability of College’s Future.”

Florida is one of several states that has sought to implement cost-cutting measures modeled on DOGE, the federal initiative led by billionaire bureaucrat Elon Musk to reduce government waste through layoffs and the elimination of various programs—an effort that has run into multiple legal challenges. DOGE-driven cuts have also fallen far short of their intended vision, with Musk often exaggerating savings for taxpayers in his work for the Trump administration.

Florida’s DOGE has also sought records of all faculty research at public institutions published in the last six years, leading to concerns about how the effort may be weaponized against faculty.

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May 5, 2025
Trump Proposes Deep Cuts to Education and Research

President Donald Trump wants to end funding for TRIO, Federal Work-Study and other grant programs that support students on campus as part of a broader plan to cut $163 billion in nondefense programs.

The funding cuts were outlined in a budget proposal released Friday. The document, considered a “skinny budget,” is essentially a wish list for the fiscal year 2026 budget for Congress to consider. The proposal kicks off what will likely be a yearlong effort to adopt a budget for the next fiscal year, which starts Oct. 1. Trump is unlikely to get all of his plan through Congress, though Republicans have seemed especially willing this year to support his agenda.

If enacted, the plan would codify Trump’s efforts over the last three months to cut spending and reduce the size of the federal government—moves that some have argued were illegal. (Congress technically has final say over the budget, but Trump and his officials have raised questions about the legality of laws that require the president to spend federal funds as directed by the legislative branch.)

The proposed budget plan slashes nearly $18 billion from the National Institutes of Health, $12 billion from the Education Department, and nearly $5 billion from the National Science Foundation. The skinny budget also eliminates funding for the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, AmeriCorps, National Endowment for the Arts, and National Endowment for the Humanities. Trump has already made deep cuts at those agencies and put most—if not all—of their employees on leave.

A fuller budget with more specifics is expected later this month.

Democrats were quick to blast Trump’s plan, saying it would set the country “back decades by decimating investments to help families afford the basics.” But Republicans countered that the proposal would rein in “Washington’s runaway spending” and right-size “the bloated federal bureaucracy.”

For higher ed groups and advocates, the proposed cuts could further jeopardize the country’s standing as a leader in global innovation and put college out of reach for some students.

“Rather than ushering in a new Golden Age, the administration is proposing cuts to higher education and scientific research of an astonishing magnitude that would decimate U.S. innovation, productivity, and national security,” said Mark Becker, president of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, in a statement. “We call on Congress to reject these deeply misguided proposed cuts and instead invest in the nation’s future through education and pathbreaking research.”

Zeroing Out ED Programs

At the Education Department, the Trump administration is proposing to end a number of programs and reduce funding to others.

The president wants to eliminate the department altogether; Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement that the proposal reflects “an agency that is responsibly winding down, shifting some responsibilities to the states, and thoughtfully preparing a plan to delegate other critical functions to more appropriate entities.”

McMahon laid off nearly half of the agency’s staff in March, so the budget also addresses those cuts.

To compensate for the cuts to programs that directly support students or institutions, the administration argued colleges, states and local communities should on take that responsibility. Other justifications for the cuts reflect the administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion programs and higher ed.

For instance, officials from the Office of Management and Budget wrote that the SEOG program “contributes to rising college costs that [institutes of higher education] have used to fund radical leftist ideology instead of investing in students and their success.” (The SEOG program provides $100 to $4,000 to students “with exceptional financial need,” according to the department.)

On TRIO and GEAR UP, which help low-income students get to college, the administration said those programs were a “relic of the past when financial incentives were needed to motivate Institutions of Higher Education to engage with low-income students and increase access … Today, the pendulum has swung and access to college is not the obstacle it was for students of limited means.”

Additionally, the administration wants to cut the Office for Civil Rights’ budget by $49 million, or 35 percent. The budget document says this cut will refocus OCR “away from DEI and Title IX transgender cases.” In recent years, the Biden administration pleaded with Congress to boost OCR’s funding in order to address an increasing number of complaints. The office received 22,687 complaints in fiscal year 2024, and the Biden administration projected that number to grow to nearly 24,000 in 2025.

But the OMB document claims that OCR will clear its “massive backlog” this year. “This rightsizing is consistent with the reduction across the Department and an overall smaller Federal role in K-12 and postsecondary education,” officials wrote.

The administration also proposed cutting the Education Department’s overall budget for program administration by 30 percent. The $127 million cut reflects the staffing cuts and other efforts to wind down the department’s operations.

“President Trump’s proposed budget puts students and parents above the bureaucracy,” McMahon said. “The federal government has invested trillions of taxpayer dollars into an education system that is not driving improved student outcomes—we must change course and reorient taxpayer dollars toward proven programs that generate results for American students.”

Science and Research Cuts

Agencies that fund research at colleges and universities are also facing deep cuts. The $4.9 billion proposed cut at the National Science Foundation is about half of what the agency received in fiscal year 2024—the last year Congress adopted a full budget.

The cuts will end NSF programs aimed at broadening participation in the STEM fields, which totaled just over $1 billion, as well as $3.45 billion in general research and education.

“The budget cuts funding for: climate; clean energy; woke social, behavioral, and economic sciences; and programs in low priority areas of science,” the officials wrote in budget documents. “NSF has fueled research with dubious public value, like speculative impacts from extreme climate scenarios and niche social studies.”

As examples of “research with dubious public value,” officials specifically highlighted a $13.8 million NSF grant at Columbia University to “advance livable, safe, and inclusive communities” and a $15.2 million grant to the University of Delaware focused on achieving “sustainable equity, economic prosperity, and coastal resilience in the context of climate change.” The administration is maintaining the funding for research into artificial intelligence and quantum information sciences.

The budget plan also aims to make significant reforms at the National Institutes of Health while slashing the agency’s budget by $17.9 billion. NIH received $47 billion in fiscal 2024.

The plan would consolidate NIH programs into five areas: the National Institute on Body Systems Research; National Institute on Neuroscience and Brain Research; National Institute of General Medical Sciences; National Institute of Disability Related Research; and National Institute on Behavioral Health.

The National Institute on Minority and Health Disparities, the Fogarty International Center, the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health and the National Institute of Nursing Research would all be cut. The administration is planning to maintain $27 billion for NIH research.

“The administration is committed to restoring accountability, public trust, and transparency at the NIH,” officials wrote. “NIH has broken the trust of the American people with wasteful spending, misleading information, risky research, and the promotion of dangerous ideologies that undermine public health.”

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May 2, 2025
Modest Thoughts From a Minor Donor to Harvard (opinion)

Responding to Harvard University’s defiance of the coercive and illegal demands from the Trump administration, some major donors have recently urged the university to make accommodations rather than fight. A few have withheld large gifts over the last year and a half.

Holding degrees from two of Harvard’s least wealthy schools (Divinity and Education), I have made small annual donations to my relatively impecunious alma maters for 45 years, and I offer these considerations to weigh against those of the big donors who have generally graduated from Harvard’s wealthiest, so-called major schools.

Harvard’s resistance to authoritarian overreach bolsters the entire system of U.S. higher education, which came to be regarded as the best in the world only in the 1970s, after a century of slow development. Harvard’s defiance of unlawful authoritarianism inspires universities throughout the world.

This controversy is therefore not just about Harvard, but all of higher education everywhere. If Harvard caves, then no university will dare to defy governmental overreach. If Harvard resists, then others will be inspired to do so and shamed if they do not.

The urging by major donors to strike a deal with the Trump administration may result from feeling that Harvard’s small and secretive governing board, the Corporation, has, in recent months, not listened to them and ignored “the rightward shift of the country” that prompted Trump’s demands. (Although Harvard’s “major” and wealthiest professional schools—business, law and medicine—still graduate leading financiers on Wall Street and conservative justices of the Supreme Court, notwithstanding claims about the university’s “sins” of left-wing radicalism.)

In any case, the implied threat of major donors to withhold donations is transactional, just like the demands of the Trump administration. Thus, Harvard is caught between two transactional parties. Is the defiance of coercive and illegal overreach worth the possible loss in large gifts?

And the loss could be considerable. Over the last century, the rule in higher education fundraising is that 90 percent of gifts come from the top 10 percent of donors. Big donors count. Little ones scarcely, it seems.

But there are financial counterpoints.

By adjusting the spending rule for its endowment income and by floating bonds and loans, Harvard does have the resources to supplant lost federal income until its legal challenges are litigated, notwithstanding the prospect of further demands by the Trump administration.

Indeed, the annual investment income of large endowments vastly exceeds annual fundraising. As a result, wealthy universities were already shifting their focus from “gifts to growth” of investment yield by the beginning of the 21st century. Fundraising became less important than investing endowment.

Furthermore, major alumni donors, who might fear alienating the Trump administration by donating to Harvard, could easily make donations anonymously, which has long been a tradition in higher education.

Finally, and most importantly, Harvard’s defiance has already inspired support from many alumni who may now do more, counterbalancing the support of transactional big donors who withdraw.

I know that some little donors, like me, have not included Harvard in their estate plans precisely because Harvard has seemed so rich and invulnerable. As former president Drew Gilpin Faust once observed, Harvard’s commitment to its endowment could make the university “as close to immortal as any earthly institution might be.”

Now we see that Harvard needs the support of all of its alumni in these perilous times, not only for the sake of alma mater, but all of higher education.

Bruce A. Kimball, emeritus professor at the Ohio State University, is a former Guggenheim Fellow and co-author with Sarah M. Iler of Wealth, Price and Cost in American Higher Education: A Brief History (Johns Hopkins, 2023) and co-author with Daniel R. Coquillette of the two-volume history of Harvard Law School (Harvard 2015, 2020).

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May 2, 2025
NIH Speeds Up Implementation of New Public Access Policy

The National Institutes of Health is accelerating a Biden-era plan to make its research findings freely and quickly available to the public, the agency announced Wednesday.

The 2024 Public Access Policy was set to take effect Dec. 31, 2025, but will now take effect July 1 of this year. It updates the 2008 Public Access Policy, which allowed for a 12-month delay before research articles were required to be made publicly available. The 2024 policy removed the embargo period so that researchers, students and members of the public have rapid access to these findings, according to the announcement.

NIH director Jay Bhattacharya, who took over last month, said the move is aimed at continuing “to promote maximum transparency” and rebuilding public confidence in scientists, which has waned in recent years.

“Earlier implementation of the Public Access Policy will help increase public confidence in the research we fund while also ensuring that the investments made by taxpayers produce replicable, reproducible, and generalizable results that benefit all Americans,” Bhattacharya said in the memo. “Providing speedy public access to NIH-funded results is just one of the ways we are working to earn back the trust of the American people.”

Although the scientific research community is supportive of the policy itself, some are calling on the NIH to reinstate the original implementation date to give researchers time to effectively comply with this and other new agency regulations.

“This new effective date will impose extra burdens on researchers and their institutions to meet the deadline,” Matt Owens, president of COGR, which represents research institutions, said in a statement Wednesday. “Ironically, at the same time NIH is accelerating implementation of this policy, the agency is adding new burdensome certification and financial reporting requirements for grant recipients. This runs counter to the administration’s efforts to reduce regulations.”

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May 2, 2025
AmeriCorps Cuts Force College Access Groups to Reduce Staff

Brianne Dolney-Jacobs has spent the last year advising high school seniors in Bay City, Mich., on their options after graduation.

She met with 96 percent of the seniors at least once to talk about college applications, financial aid options, standardized tests and more. In doing so, she helped nearly 30 students access a countywide scholarship, up from under 10 in the previous year.

But now, she’s one of 32,000 people affected by sweeping cuts to AmeriCorps, a federal agency focused on service and volunteerism across the United States. At least 100 college-access groups, including the Michigan College Access Network, where Dolney-Jacobs works, rely on AmeriCorps funding or members to make the college application process more accessible to high school students, especially those in low-income areas and at schools with low rates of college attendance.

MCAN lost its grant funding this week and was ordered to cease all AmeriCorps work immediately, though the organization was able to use its own funds to buy staff members an extra month. Dolney-Jacobs will now wrap up her time at the high school at the end of May; she was supposed to stay on through late June.

Without someone in her position, Dolney-Jacobs told Inside Higher Ed, there is no one at her school who would have the bandwidth to meet with individual students as they navigate the college application process. Many students would never have heard about different scholarships that are available to them or know that community college—including both an associate’s degree and some trade certifications—is free for recent high school graduates in Michigan.

When her students heard that her position had been impacted, a group brought flowers to her office.

“They told me, ‘you are the Class of 2025’s hero,’” she recounted. “And I was just bawling.”

The National College Attainment Network, the association for MCAN and other similar organizations, is still taking stock of how many of its members have been impacted, said Elizabeth Morgan, NCAN’s chief external relations officer. But damage has been widespread.

“I think it’s safe to say probably our members that use AmeriCorps are serving hundreds of thousands of students across the country,” Morgan said. “They are devastated by this news for a couple of reasons: The students they are supporting right now, many are high school seniors who are just weeding through their [college] decision-making process … [and] the AmeriCorps members are being thrown out of work months early.”

A total of $400 million in AmeriCorps grants were axed, according to America’s Service Commission, a nonprofit that represents state and national service commissions, including funding for food pantries and disaster relief programs in areas impacted by recent natural disasters. The majority of AmeriCorps’ staff was also put on administrative leave in mid-April.

It’s just one of the many agencies that have faced funding cuts and grant cancellations as part of the Trump administration’s war on government spending. Its defenders say that the agency, which pays modest stipends to its members, is anything but wasteful: It provides both vital supports for American communities and professional development training to its members, all for a low price tag.

“I don’t believe Washington is really in tune to what is going on in the local communities,” said Grady Holmes, who works with a different MCAN AmeriCorps program that provides college success coaching to community college and tribal college students. “This is a program that is not government waste. It basically assists the government in making sure their productive citizens are being moved toward self-sufficiency and obtaining a college degree … When the powers that be decided this is wasteful spending—they don’t understand AmeriCorps.”

Twenty-four states sued the Trump administration over the cuts, calling the dismantling of the agency, which was created by Congress in 1993, “unauthorized.”

Advisers’ Impacts

MCAN is facing cuts to two student-facing programs: AdviseMI, which is focused on college readiness for high schoolers, and the College Completion Corps, which is geared toward students at tribal and community colleges. Both rely on AmeriCorps grants and are staffed by AmeriCorps members, who work in yearlong service positions in exchange for stipends and educational awards that can cover current educational expenses or pay off student loans. The organization employs over 100 AmeriCorps members across both programs.

Both programs have been successful, MCAN leaders say. In the 2023–24 academic year, students supported by AdviseMI advisers submitted 21,420 college applications and were awarded more than $32 million in financial aid.

The advisers “often interact with parents, as well, to help parents understand the role of FAFSA and help parents understand what’s happening with their student,” said Ryan Fewins-Bliss, the organization’s executive director. “And [they] engage the school in what we hope to be a schoolwide college-going culture … so when the juniors become seniors, they’re ready for this.”

After MCAN learned Friday night that it lost one of its AmeriCorps grants, the organization spent the weekend trying figure out how it could keep its AmeriCorps staff on board if the rest of the grants were also canceled. (In total, MCAN lost $2.1 million in AmeriCorps funds.)

Come Monday, MCAN found out its remaining grants, including funding for AdviseMI and College Completion Corps, were indeed cancelled, and that it had to stop operating those programs immediately. MCAN was able to find funding in the budget to continue those programs for an extra month, but the future beyond then is uncertain.

Other organizations had to lay off their AmeriCorps members entirely. Partnership 4 Kids, a Nebraska-based organization that works with students from prekindergarten through college, had two full-time AmeriCorps fellows working with high school seniors and three fellows working directly with college students. All five had to stop working Friday, immediately after P4K received word that its grants had been terminated.

“These two in the high schools had great relationships with their students. They were doing one-on-one case management; they were the driving force [behind] college applications, scholarship applications, helping students overcome barriers they might have, and really to get them to that finish line to graduate,” P4K president Deb Denbeck said.

This year, 97 percent of P4K’s senior cohort graduated and 80 percent of them are going to college—an impressive feat in a state where the college-going rate for high school graduates has been on the decline.

‘Brings Out the Best in People’

AmeriCorps members have worked in high schools as college advisers for at least two decades, starting with the College Advising Corps, an organization that began in Virginia and has since expanded to 15 states. It’s a model that college-access leaders say has been incredibly effective, helping thousands of students go to college and boosting the careers of the advisers.

It’s also been embraced by politicians on both sides of the aisle, according to Nicole Hurd, who founded the CAC and is now president of Lafayette College.

AmeriCorps members are a natural fit for college-readiness work, these leaders say. Because many are recent college graduates, they can remember what it was like to be in the high schoolers’ shoes, making it easy for them to empathize with and respond to the challenges their students are facing. The college adviser positions are relatively easy to train, meaning individuals from any background can take on these roles.

But perhaps most importantly, leaders of college-access nonprofits feel AmeriCorps’ long-standing ethos of volunteerism aligns perfectly with their missions to bring educational opportunity to all.

“AmeriCorps brings out the best in people, and it gives them an opportunity to learn as well—to learn how to be professionals in their field,” said Denbeck. “When you look at everything that AmeriCorps does, whether it’s working in education or mentoring or agriculture or disaster relief, they’re doing it because of their heart.”

The impacted organizations doubt they’ll be able to rely on AmeriCorps going forward. For now, they’re working to figure out how to continue their work and where they might get the funding necessary to deploy college advisers into the communities that need them most.

“In the future, it’s safe to say that there are countless students that won’t attend college because they’re not getting this kind of support,” Morgan said.

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May 2, 2025
ED Announces Further Changes to Accreditation

Secretary McMahon said the Dear Colleague letter will “foster a competitive marketplace” for accreditors and the institutions they oversee.

Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

The Department of Education intends to accelerate the process for changing accreditors, a move announced in a Dear Colleague letter that builds on other recent changes to oversight.

Last week the Trump administration released a highly anticipated executive order to overhaul accreditation. That order took aim at accreditors who have diversity, equity and inclusion in their standards, threatening to revoke their recognition, and sought to make it easier for institutions to switch from one accrediting body to another and for new accreditors to enter the marketplace.

The Department of Education cast the Dear Colleague letter as an action to comply with that executive order and announced that ED had “lifted the Biden Administration’s moratorium on accepting and reviewing applications for initial recognition of potential new accreditors.”

The Trump administration revoked guidance from the Biden administration from 2022 that exerted more scrutiny over changing accreditors, which came after Florida’s Republican-led Legislature passed a bill that year requiring its public institutions to switch accreditors regularly. (The bill came after state officials clashed with the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, which accredited all of Florida’s public institutions, over concerns of political influence.)

“We must foster a competitive marketplace both amongst accreditors and colleges and universities in order to lower college costs and refocus postsecondary education on improving academic and workforce outcomes for students and families,” U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a statement about the guidance. “President Trump’s Executive Order and our actions today will ensure this Department no longer stands as a gatekeeper to block aspiring innovators from becoming new accreditors nor will this Department unnecessarily micromanage an institution’s choice of accreditor.”

Thursday’s letter, signed by Deputy Under Secretary James P. Bergeron, emphasized that the U.S. Department of Education aims to expedite the process of changing accreditors by removing what ED called “unnecessary requirements” that officials argued stifle institutional innovation.

ED will no longer scrutinize reasons for changing accreditors, according to the letter.

“The law and regulation do not dictate a robust or onerous process for receiving the Department’s approval for a change in accrediting agencies or maintaining multiple accreditation,” Bergeron wrote in the Dear Colleague letter. “Therefore, consistent with statutory and regulatory obligations, the Department will conduct expeditious reviews of applications received except in rare cases where an institution lacks a reasonable cause for making a change.”

The new guidance noted that institutions can switch to accreditors for a variety of reasons, including better alignment with their religious mission, a change mandated by state law or because an accrediting body requires a university to adopt “discriminatory” DEI principles.

Additionally, Bergeron wrote, if the department “does not approve a change in accrediting agency within 30 days of the date of its receipt of a complete notice of this change and materials demonstrating reasonable cause, approval will be deemed to have been granted, unless the change or multiple accreditation is prohibited as described” in the Dear Colleague letter.

Some accreditors offered a positive response to the change.

The Middle States Commission on Higher Education, which recently launched its own effort to streamline the process of changing accreditors, welcomed the development in a statement.

“As an accreditor with institutions that have been stalled in the process, this guidance will have a positive impact on the work we have been doing with several institutions. We look forward to helping our institutions understand what this may mean for them and for us,” MSCHE president Heather Perfetti wrote. “We appreciate that there are well-defined restrictions that will not allow for institutions to change accreditors to avoid accountability with an existing accreditor.”

Thursday’s letter also prompted celebration in some conservative quarters.

The Defense of Freedom Institute, a conservative think tank, urged ED in February to revoke the Biden administration’s guidance on switching, saying that in doing so the department would “wipe away politically motivated and patently unlawful actions of the previous administration.”

They argued that doing so would create a more effective accreditation system. Following the release of the Dear Colleague letter Thursday, the organization thanked the Trump administration in a statement.

“The Defense of Freedom Institute applauds the Trump administration for taking bold, necessary action to restore integrity, accountability, and competition to our broken accreditation system. For too long, accreditors have leveraged their Title IV gatekeeper status to stifle innovation in American higher education and to require ideological litmus tests that undermine civil rights and academic freedom on campus,” DFI president and co-founder Bob Eitel wrote.

Critics, however, argue that making it easier to switch accreditors will have negative effects.

Wesley Whistle, project director for student success and affordability in the higher education initiative at New America, a left-leaning think tank, told Inside Higher Ed that the new process amounts to a rubber stamp for changing accreditors. He argued that allowing institutions to switch accreditors more easily will likely drive them toward accreditors with lower standards.

“What this Dear Colleague letter does is dilute that requirement [to demonstrate reasonable cause to switch accreditors], and undermines a critical safeguard that’s meant to ensure that institutions don’t escape oversight just because they don’t like scrutiny,” Whistle said.

Whistle also suggested the compressed timeline for ED approval within 30 days limits any actual oversight. Timing is compounded, he added, by the lack of personnel, given the job cuts at the department.

“This guarantees there will be no meaningful review. This isn’t about streamlining, it’s surrender. It’s the Wild West here: Do whatever you want, just say ‘mission’ and you can change accreditors,” he said.

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May 2, 2025
Trump Order Targets Undocumented Students’ In-State Tuition

Immigrant rights advocates are urging state and higher ed leaders not to make any hasty changes to their in-state tuition policies after President Trump issued an executive order on Monday threatening to crack down on sanctuary cities and localities with laws that benefit undocumented immigrants.

The blow to undocumented students, who in nearly half the country pay in-state tuition, is tucked into an executive order focused mostly on pressuring state and local officials to abandon their cities’ sanctuary status and cooperate with federal immigration authorities. The order demands federal officials make lists of “sanctuary jurisdictions” and the federal funds that could be suspended or cut if they don’t change course. The order also commands them to take “appropriate action” to stop the enforcement of state and local laws and practices “favoring aliens over any groups of American citizens,” including in-state tuition benefits to undocumented students “but not to out-of-state Americans.”

The move has the potential to affect 24 states and Washington, D.C., which allow in-state tuition for local students with or without citizenship. (Florida previously allowed undocumented students to pay in-state tuition rates but ended its decade-old, historically bipartisan policy in February.) Undocumented students and supporters have long touted these policies as a way to make college more affordable for those who can’t access federal financial aid but who grew up in the states and plan to work in their local communities after they graduate.

“What immigrant, international and refugee students bring is needed talent, skills and contributions,” said Miriam Feldblum, executive director of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration. “In-state tuition increases the number of a state’s residents who are college educated, who are able to contribute far more to the state’s economy and to their communities than if they did not have a college education.”

Gaby Pacheco, president and CEO of TheDream.US, a scholarship provider for undocumented students, said many of these students come from low-income backgrounds and couldn’t afford college otherwise.

Her organization is currently scrambling to help undocumented students in Florida pay for the remainder of their credits and graduate before they have to pay much higher out-of-state tuition rates. In some cases, that means helping them transfer to more affordable institutions.

For many, “it’s just impossible for them to be able to come up with that money,” she said.

She’s encouraging state and institutional leaders to avoid “panicking” or “making abrupt policy changes” in response to the executive order.

Other executive orders have “created so much panic and unnecessary movement from colleges, universities, states, that it was more hurtful than anything,” she said. The administration is putting forward a “belief” that charging undocumented students in-state tuition rates is unlawful, but “that belief is legally dubious.”

Deciphering the Executive Order

Immigrants’ advocates and legal scholars say the meaning of the executive order is somewhat hazy. For example, it’s unclear what it means for federal officials to “take appropriate action” to prevent in-state tuition policies from being enforced.

The order also doesn’t directly say states or institutions with such laws will lose any federal funding, noted Ahilan Arulanantham, professor from practice at the UCLA School of Law and co-director of the law school’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy.

Still, the order’s threatening tone toward sanctuary cities’ federal funds could be “a window into where this fight could go if the federal government wants to expend significant political capital on this issue,” Arulanantham said. Congress, for example, could decide to pass a law to cut federal funds from universities that offer undocumented students in-state tuition—a proposal outlined in Project 2025. But the executive order itself doesn’t explicitly take away federal dollars from anyone or have the power to do so, he said.

“If I were a local government or state government official, I probably wouldn’t sue tomorrow over this,” Arulanantham said. “I would wait to see if this is actually going to have any teeth, or if it’s just like a press release.”

Pacheco similarly described the order as “warning” states of the administration’s posture toward these policies. At the same time, she believes it’s important to plan ahead in case Trump takes the issue further.

“They’re trying to tell states, ‘We believe that you providing certain benefits for undocumented students is against the law,’” she said. “We’ve known this forever—these states are not violating the law.”

The order suggests that in-state tuition for undocumented students “may violate” a federal statutory provision that says undocumented people can’t receive higher ed benefits unless citizens are also eligible. But in-state tuition policies are designed to serve citizens living in these states, as well. For example, under California’s Assembly Bill 540, any nonresident who spent three years in California high schools is eligible for in-state tuition. That policy also benefits citizens who grew up in the state who may have left for any reason and returned.

These types of in-state tuition policies, including California’s, have faced legal challenges in the past, “but all the challenges have failed, said Kevin Johnson, dean of the UC Davis School of Law. He described the executive order as “vaguely worded,” while the state laws, by contrast, are “very clear.”

The legal argument is that undocumented students are “just being treated equally as all other residents of the state,” he said. “The idea is that they’re residents, which means they’re taxpayers—maybe it’s sales tax, maybe state income tax, federal income tax—whatever it is, they should be treated like other residents and not discriminated against because of their immigration status.”

What Happens Next

Arulanantham worries that despite their strong legal foundation, states and higher ed institutions may rush to end in-state tuition benefits for undocumented students out of fear.

“That’s actually almost certainly the primary purpose of this order”: to spur “pre-emptive discrimination because [institutions] think they have to or they think it’s safer to,” he said.

Feldblum noted that, prior to the executive order, some state lawmakers were already starting to shift on the issue, perhaps “to align themselves with the federal government.”

While some states have recently doubled down on such policies, proposing new legislation to expand in-state tuition eligibility, others have also moved to curtail them. Following in Florida’s footsteps, lawmakers in other states, including Kansas, Kentucky and Texas, are considering legislation to prohibit in-state tuition for undocumented students. Texas was the first to allow undocumented students to pay in-state tuition rates in 2001, joined by California that same year.

“This is not coming in a vacuum … We have to take this seriously and substantively, consider the kinds of actions we need to take to defend in-state tuition—including, if needed, legal action,” Feldblum said. “And then also make sure we’re placing equal emphasis on supporting and communicating with potentially impacted students so that they know their education is important and that they’re important.”

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May 2, 2025
New ICE Policy Puts International Students at Greater Risk

The Trump administration issued plans earlier this week for a new policy that vastly expands federal officials’ authority to terminate students’ legal residency status, according to newly released court documents.

The policy detailed in the filings asserts that immigration officials have the “inherent authority” to terminate students’ legal residency status in the Student Exchange and Visitor Information System “as needed.” It also explicitly lays out two new justifications for SEVIS terminations: the vague “evidence of failure to comply” with nonimmigrant visa terms, and a visa revocation, which can be issued without evidence of a violation by the State Department—and which, crucially, is not subject to court challenges.

Immigration attorneys told Inside Higher Ed that if implemented, the new policy would enshrine broad permission for ICE to begin deporting students practically at will.

“This is very bad news for foreign students,” said Charles Kuck, an immigration attorney representing 133 international students in the largest lawsuit challenging recent SEVIS terminations. “Any student who’s arrested, literally for any reason, is probably going to have their status terminated going forward.”

Last Friday a U.S. attorney promised an official update to ICE policy on SEVIS terminations. On Tuesday, U.S. attorneys presented the document as evidence in a court filing in Arizona, describing it as “recently issued … policy regarding the termination of SEVIS records.”

It was the first time that details of a new SEVIS termination policy were made public, and it was not at first clear whether it reflected official federal policy. On Tuesday, U.S. attorney Johnny Walker confirmed during another hearing for a SEVIS lawsuit in D.C. that it did, though the policy had yet to be finalized. Spokespeople for ICE did not respond to multiple questions from Inside Higher Ed.

The plan comes less than a week after the administration began restoring thousands of foreign students’ SEVIS statuses after a series of court decisions overturned hundreds of status terminations. Kuck said the plan seemed to be a way for ICE to get around those rulings.

“This is basically a cover-your-ass policy,” he said. “The fact that ICE initially reinstated visas was no surprise. They probably had U.S. attorneys screaming at them, ‘What are you doing?’ Now they’re trying to retroactively develop a policy that would allow them to do what they already did.”

Immigration lawyer and Columbia University Immigrants’ Rights Clinic director Elora Mukherjee has been counseling international students across New York City for the past two months. After the visa-restoration decision last week, some students wanted to know if they were in the clear; she cautioned them against celebrating prematurely.

“Whiplash is a good way to describe it,” she said. “Students are losing sleep—not just those whose visas have been terminated but those who are worried theirs could be next any day.”

Fly-by-Night Policymaking

The updated policy was outlined in an internal Department of Homeland Security memo filed as evidence in an Arizona federal court on Wednesday, where one of more than 100 lawsuits challenging visa revocations is being litigated.

The unorthodox manner in which it was publicized has left immigration attorneys scratching their heads and international students’ advocates wondering how to respond.

It also appears to have taken some federal officials by surprise. Kuck said that when he heard about the memo and brought it before the judge in his own case in Georgia, the U.S. attorney defending the government asked if he could send him a copy.

Fanta Aw, president of NAFSA, an association of international educators, wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed that the document “should not be relied upon as ICE’s new policy.” She also emphasized that there is no change to ICE’s visa termination policy included in the memo, only SEVIS terminations.

The document is labeled as a “broadcast message … for internal SEVP use only,” meaning it would have been sent to Designated School Officials working in colleges’ international student offices. But Aw said that’s not accurate, either, because it lacks the customary broadcast message number, and DSOs in her organization said they had not received it.

Kuck said the lack of a rule-making process for a sweeping policy change like the one outlined in the memo is most likely unlawful, and he was working on filing an amendment to challenge it on Thursday. But that doesn’t mean it should be taken lightly.

“People should view this as the future,” Kuck said. “This is clearly the power ICE wants to give itself, so they’re going to move ahead with it.”

‘A Nightmare Booby Trap’

Mukherjee said such a broad license to terminate SEVIS status would allow ICE to deport international students far more quickly and with less accountability. The new policy, if implemented and upheld by the courts, wouldn’t just revert to the status quo of the last few months, she said; it would create a landscape in which ICE could begin deportation proceedings with impunity.

“We’ve already seen many students whose SEVIS terminations led directly to removal proceedings,” Mukherjee said. “It’s terrifying.”

Kuck said it’s crucial that students understand that they’re still in danger of deportation even if their status was restored last week—and not just because of the new policy plan.

The few hundred students who won a temporary restraining order in court over the past week have had their statuses reinstated and backfilled to when they were revoked. But the status of thousands more who did not file lawsuits was only reactivated from that point onward. That means they have a gap in status for the days or weeks in between—which, according to ICE policy, is grounds for removal from the country, even if their initial SEVIS termination was accidental.

“This is a nightmare booby trap for these kids,” Kuck said.

The only way to protect them, he said, is by filing a class action lawsuit for all affected international student visa holders. Kuck said he’s working on filing an injunction for one right now, and he is acting with urgency.

In the meantime, Mukherjee said students—both those in the country and those who had planned to come in the fall—are “deeply unsettled.” She’s been asking them questions she’d never been concerned about before: whether they have any social media accounts or even tattoos.

“I’m talking to international students who are currently in the U.S., to international students who’ve been admitted to study in the U.S. starting in the fall, and they’re asking, ‘Will we be able to complete our degree program?’” she said. “The answer is that it’s unclear.”

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May 2, 2025
Higher Ed After Trump’s First 100 Days: The Key Podcast

Inside Higher Ed journalists analyze the first 100 days of the Trump administration in this week’s episode of The Key, IHE’s news and analysis podcast.

Editor in chief Sara Custer, along with news editor Katherine Knott and reporters Johanna Alonso and Liam Knox, discuss the major events of the last three months and the impact they have had on universities and colleges.

The team summarizes the executive orders that will affect higher education, including one to shutter the Department of Education, another to overhaul accreditation and another to tackle alleged antisemitism.

The conversation also explores the new relationship the federal government has established between itself and higher education and how the administration is threatening federal research funding to set ultimatums and progress its agenda, in particular with Columbia and Harvard University.

The group updates listeners on the latest developments with international students’ Student Exchange and Visitor Information System status reinstatements. Alonso and Knox also talk about what they learned about the administration’s targeting of international students from speaking to students, their advisers and digging through dozens of lawsuits brought against the government.

While what comes next is anyone’s guess. The team discusses what they’ll be watching over the next 100 days, including what Congress will be working on, the fallout from the international student crackdown and how summer might shift the vibe on campus.

Listen and download the episode here.

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May 2, 2025