Tag: Jobs

4 Ways to Better Grade Team Projects (opinion)
Some professors resist using teamwork in their classes because they mistakenly believe that team projects are too difficult to grade. One issue is that, as educators, we often only evaluate the team presentation, project or paper with a grade based on how well the team has met our learning objectives.

However, a single project evaluation at the end allows some members to potentially free ride on harder-working teammates, or enables one aggressive or dominating member to take over the entire project to ensure the team gets an A. If we simply grade team projects at the end, it is too late for our student teams to adapt or adjust and learn how to be better at working in teams, a key skill that employers look for in our graduates.

The key to effectively grading teamwork is to set up the grading process systematically at the start of the project. In this article, we offer four ways that you can grade team projects effectively to meet your learning objectives and help students become better team members.
1. Share your grading rubric at the start of the assignment. Students need to know at the outset of the team project how they will be graded. Many good students tell us they hate team projects because they know they will have to deal with “social loafers” who rely on one or two others to do the work. However, by sharing a rubric that highlights the expectations for each team member and how you will be combining individual and team grading, you can help students make more intentional decisions regarding how they distribute the assignment’s requirements. We not only distribute the rubric at the start of the project, but we post it on our course management system and frequently review it with the class so our expectations are clear.
2. Include peer evaluation as a part of the evaluation process. Students are sometimes asked to rate their fellow team members, but they are seldom taught how to do it well. As a result, they tend to only give positive feedback to avoid conflict or hurting another student’s feelings. Teaching peer feedback takes only a little class time, as few as 15 minutes. It starts with clarifying your expectations about how you will use peer feedback. You can use or create a form that allows students to provide quantitative and qualitative feedback, and then you should use this same form multiple times during the project. The first time you collect peer feedback should be a low-stakes or practice situation early during the project so that students have a psychologically safe opportunity to learn how to use it. Your students should begin with self-evaluation and then evaluate their peers.
  Next, you need to summarize the peer feedback and give results to individual students so they know how they are doing. Finally, have groups reflect on how well the group is doing without naming or shaming others. There are times when students will have to give feedback to a person who is free riding or loafing. When they do, make sure they know to first ask that person for permission before they give feedback, then praise in public, and finally provide any negative feedback in private. Finally, we have a YouTube video that instructors can show during class to help students learn about how to give and receive feedback.
1. Incorporate ongoing feedback from the instructor. We know of faculty who give out a team assignment and never mention it again until the week before the project is due. This is setting up the student teams for failure. Faculty need to check in frequently with their teams to be sure they are making progress on their work and any questions or concerns are answered. Taking just five minutes at the end of class for teams to meet can pay great dividends in a better project product. This instructor feedback can include a way to hold individual team members accountable for the work they are doing. For example, we have set up a separate Google folder for each team with instructor access. Each team member needed to post their contributions to the team project weekly. In this way, we could keep an eye on any social loafers, and provide feedback to those who were working independently instead of with the team. Instructors can also schedule a brief time to sit in on team meetings so that they get a more comprehensive update about the project and who is working toward each of the outcomes.
2. Carefully consider the weight you give to each phase of the project. It is essential to incorporate peer assessments and the instructor evaluation about how well the project met the learning objectives into any final grade; both are important. However, the weight of these different evaluations tells students the importance of each. More weight on the individual peer assessments stresses the individual work, while more weight on the instructor grade of the project shows the team efforts are more important. At a minimum, use the 80/20 rule: At least 20 percent of the student’s grade should be based on each.
  Also, be sure to check the peer evaluations to verify that they result from real behaviors rather than personal biases. We accomplish this by looking for consistency across the times of evaluation, across team members and between peer and self-evaluations. In most cases, we find that the evaluations show consistency in all three areas (though self-evaluations are often inflated). In the rare cases when they don’t align, we always refer to supporting documentation, such as agendas, meeting minutes and information that resulted from our ongoing check-ins to help make sense of the reasons underlying any inconsistencies.
Grading a team project may seem like a daunting challenge, but grading is by no means a reason to avoid giving students the experience of working with a team. By following these four principles for evaluating teamwork, instructors can account for the team’s achievement of the learning objectives as well as provide students with valuable teamwork experiences that they can take to future classes, internships, co-ops and employment.

Lauren Vicker is a communications professor emeritus, and Tim Franz is a professor of psychology, both at St. John Fisher University. They are the authors of Making Team Projects Work: A College Instructor’s Guide to Successful Student Groupwork (Taylor & Francis, 2024).
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October 14, 2025
IVF and the Leadership Gap for Women (opinion)
After a 20-year career in higher education, including roles as a chief academic officer and faculty member, I left to have a child. I was one step away from a presidency on the higher ed career ladder, and in fact I had written my dissertation on what gets in the way of women moving into college presidencies. Yet it was not until I finally met my life partner and had the opportunity, in my 40s, to start a family that I understood how fully the higher ed career deck is still stacked against those seeking to have children, and especially those seeking to have children in nontraditional ways—largely women, LGBTQIA+ folks and anyone facing a difficult pregnancy, in vitro fertilization, adoption or fostering process.

In the United States, 2.6 percent of all births—95,860 babies in 2023—result from IVF, a time-consuming, costly and physically and emotionally challenging process. The percentage for women academics may be even higher, given their relatively high education levels, socioeconomic status and pressure to delay childbearing for academic careers. According to Pew, 56 percent of people with graduate degrees have gone through or know someone who has undergone IVF or other assisted reproduction.

The literature has well documented how the academy has been created by men and is designed to fit their needs and their bodies. Women who have sought professorships or academic leadership positions have, historically, needed to conform to rules written for men’s life cycles. Articles such as Carmen Armenti’s classic “May Babies and Posttenure Babies” speak to women’s attempts to give birth at the end of the academic year and after earning tenure. The tenure clock illustrates this issue well—the usual seven years in which a newly hired assistant professor has time to sufficiently publish and obtain tenure largely coincide with women’s most fertile years. Many forward-thinking institutions such as the University of California system have been addressing this issue by stopping the tenure clock for childbirth and related family formation. It is a step in the right direction that all colleges and universities should consider.

But what happens when the usual challenges of pregnancy and childbirth are compounded by infertility, miscarriage and the sometimes years-long process of IVF?

I met my husband during the pandemic, and we married the next year. Both of us in our 40s and having always wanted a child but neither having met the right partner, we quickly found ourselves going down the IVF route. At the time, I had completed a one-year executive interim role and was on the job hunt and doing part-time remote teaching, and this situation proved fortuitous.

I had no idea how grueling the IVF process would be—multiple rounds of more than a month at a time of hormone pills; nightly self-administered injections for weeks on end; weekly doctor visits, blood draws and ultrasounds—and at the end of each round, a day surgery under anesthesia to retrieve eggs. Several iterations of this, followed by more of a similar process to prepare the body for embryo transfer. The journey is physically and emotionally exhausting, time-consuming, and logistically challenging. It can also be incredibly expensive, with the medications and surgeries costing into the tens of thousands for those whose health insurance does not cover it.

My husband and I had a number of factors helping us on this journey. We had built a supportive network of family and friends. We were fortunate that I was less sick than many women are on these medications. Finally, we were privileged to have insurance (through my husband’s job, which is not in higher ed) that paid for the majority of our treatments. Due to working part-time and remotely, I had the flexibility I needed to take naps, wear comfortable clothes that fit my bloated belly without having to reveal my family-forming status to anyone at work and generally have the privacy I needed during a challenging time.

Other women who work full-time in-person during this process navigate a daunting gauntlet of frequent doctor appointments, exhaustion and sickness at work, while trying to hide a body that can look pregnant before it is. Not to mention that few people fully understand the process, and telling a little can lead you down an uncomfortable path of revealing a lot. Because everything is timed to the menstrual cycle, seemingly innocent questions inevitably lead to awkward conversations. It’s therefore hard to share what you’re going through or ask for support at work at the time you need it most.

And then there are the chemical pregnancies and miscarriages that can happen, and did for us. Grieving for both parents is exacerbated by the isolation and privacy of the whole process. Some companies and higher ed institutions, such as Tufts University in Massachusetts, now offer bereavement leave for miscarriage, something that happens in 10 to 20 percent of pregnancies but is still rarely talked about. All institutions throughout higher ed should offer similar leave.

During this journey, I was also interviewing for full-time jobs, and I was hired into a senior leadership position. My husband and I were taking a break from the exhausting process at that point and the opportunity was once-in-a-lifetime, and so we picked up and moved two states away. My husband’s job had gone remote, giving us the flexibility we needed for my career. We wagered that if I stayed in a part-time role too much longer, it would be increasingly difficult to climb back into a full-time position. The stigma around a résumé gap is alive and well in higher education, with little understanding that this gap often reflects people’s (frequently women’s) time away for family and other care-taking needs, rather than their work experience or abilities. Yet, even when I’ve tried to explain to search committees that I’ve led how discriminatory it can be to overly focus on résumé gaps, faculty and staff often have looked askance at me. This is something else that needs to change.

My husband and I waited almost a year before doing our next embryo transfer. I settled into the job, we settled into our home, we finally had a post-COVID celebration of our marriage. And then I was pregnant! Sadly, I miscarried again toward the end of my first trimester. I powered through at work, serving as a chief academic officer and supervising 200 people while trying to juggle meds, doctor’s appointments, exhaustion and then loss. I read students’ names at a stadium-sized graduation ceremony soon after a miscarriage.

It became clear to me over the following months that the stress and lack of flexibility of a senior role would not lend itself to a last chance at a healthy pregnancy. It was a difficult decision to leave, but also one that I had no doubts about once made. Within weeks we were pregnant again, this time successfully so with a beautiful baby girl who is now a year old. It was not an easy pregnancy, and our daughter likely would not be here had I stayed in my role and not been able to rest as much as I did.

Since her birth, I have launched a higher ed editing and consulting business, resumed teaching part-time, and otherwise adjusted to life as a new mother. For me, leaving higher ed senior leadership was a deliberate choice. I needed more flexibility and control over my own time to be able to care for myself and my child properly. I may or may not return someday to that leadership pathway, and that door may or may not be open to me if I attempt to do so. I’ve learned, however, that to address the question my dissertation asked—Why don’t we have more women in presidencies?—we need to better understand and respond to the many women (and many men and nonbinary folks) who find themselves going through similar family-formation challenges across higher education.
- First, we need to offer more flexibility—remote work, flexible hours, the option for extended parental leaves for new parents and foster parents.
- Second, we need to consider not only fully paid leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act for childbirth and parental bonding, but also paid medical benefits for IVF as well as similar support for adoption and fostering.
- Third, we need to formalize bereavement leave for miscarriage.
- Fourth, we need to destigmatize the career gap, so that those who leave would have the opportunity to return.
- Fifth, we need to fairly compensate those who assume the work of colleagues who take FMLA for any care-taking reason.
- Lastly, we need to change the higher ed culture to one that understands and supports family formation in all its iterations, not just traditional pregnancy with traditional medical leaves.
I recognize my privilege in being able to leave my job—privilege that enabled me to have a child when so many before me without the same economic resources have not been able to. My situation may seem like an outlier to those who are in their 20s or early 30s or who have had relatively easy and healthy pregnancies. But I’m sure that my story rings true for those who have delayed childbearing for their academic careers and then faced the rigors of IVF, or for people of any age who have faced infertility or more difficult pregnancies. For those LGBTQIA+ and other folks who go through the egg/sperm donation process and IVF and surrogacy. For couples and singles who may adopt or foster and face needs for legal meetings and other child-related time off that institutions do not always provide.

Higher ed has taught me so much about antiracism, feminism, LGBTQIA+ rights and other inclusive practices. However, higher ed writ large doesn’t offer the kinds of paid leave and flexibility needed for all employees to succeed at both parenting and work.

Higher ed is losing women with executive leadership potential. The majority of undergraduate and graduate students are women. Yet only 37 percent of full-time faculty are women. Only 33 percent of college presidents are women. Women melt away for a host of reasons. But this former chief academic officer, one step away from a presidency on the career ladder, left the executive pathway because it was the only way I could do so and have a healthy pregnancy and a healthy child.

As long as higher ed makes having a child versus having an academic career a zero-sum choice for many women, it shouldn’t be a surprise that we still have so few women in senior leadership. When the answer becomes “yes, have both” at institutions across the board is when we might start to see the numbers change.
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October 14, 2025
CSU Campuses Reel From Blow to HSI Funding

California State University, Fresno, celebrated the launch of a new program this fall called Finish in Five, which allows students to earn both a bachelor’s and master’s degree within five years. University leaders were eager to offer students at the Central Valley campus—which serves large populations of first-generation and low-income students, many the children of local farmworkers—a streamlined pathway to high-demand STEM fields in an economically distressed region.

But less than a month later, the program’s funding, which came from a Hispanic-serving institution grant, abruptly ended. The Education Department stopped awarding grants for HSIs and many other minority-serving institutions last month, claiming the federal programs amounted to “discrimination.” Officials argued the programs are “unconstitutional” because they require institutions to enroll certain percentages of students from specific racial or ethnic backgrounds, among other criteria.

Saúl Jiménez-Sandoval, president of Fresno State, said he doesn’t know what’s going to happen to the Finish in Five program now that the money is gone. In the past, the campus relied on about $5 million annually in HSI funding, which fueled a wide range of student supports and programs. The university was also expecting to receive $250,000 this fiscal year as an Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander–serving institution.

“In the grander scheme of things, most of the innovative programs that we have at Fresno State that further student success and graduation rates started with an HSI grant or with an MSI grant,” Jiménez-Sandoval said.

Similar stories are playing out across the California State University system. Hispanic students account for almost half of the system’s more than 450,000 students. Out of the CSU’s 22 campuses, 21 are Hispanic-serving institutions, meaning they enroll at least 25 percent Hispanic students and at least half low-income students. In addition, 11 are AANAPISIs, which have the same low-income student threshold and enroll at least 10 percent Asian and Pacific Islander students. CSU officials estimate ED’s axing of the grant programs leaves the system $43 million short on funds it expected for the 2025–26 fiscal year.

CSU chancellor Mildred García called the move “deeply troubling.”

“This action will have an immediate impact and irreparable harm to our entire community,” García said in a statement. “Without this funding, students will lose the critical support they need to succeed in the classroom, complete their degrees on time, and achieve social mobility for themselves and their families.”

Potential for ‘Great Devastation’

The sudden loss of funding caught system and campus leaders off guard.

Jeff Cullen, CSU’s assistant vice chancellor for federal relations, said he knew the HSI program was at risk when the state of Tennessee and the advocacy group Students for Fair Admissions sued the Education Department in June over such programs, questioning their constitutionality. But he expected the case to wind its way through the courts. He said ED’s swift decision to end the grant programs robbed campuses of time to prepare or fight on MSIs’ behalf. Cullen also pointed out that CSU campuses qualify as HSIs because of the demographics of their surrounding communities—not because they rely on affirmative action in admissions, one of the issues raised in the lawsuit; California banned affirmative action in 1996.

“Canceling grants midcycle and right in the middle of the semester creates unprecedented confusion and chaos,” Cullen said. “Our central goal is student success and getting students across the stage with a degree in hand. And this just continually undermines those efforts to do that.”

Meanwhile, CSU has no way to make up for the full extent of the funding losses, said Dilcie Perez, the system’s deputy vice chancellor of academic and student affairs. She called the abrupt end of MSI grants a “triple blow” at a time when the system’s campuses are already facing a $144 million cut in state support. The system also has only $760 million in reserves, a meager emergency fund compared to the endowments of wealthier institutions. She expects campus leaders will have to make painful choices, including cutting faculty and staff positions, to make the numbers work.

“I think the reality is we don’t know the magnitude yet,” Perez said, “but what we know is … we have folks who have lost positions, we have students who have lost support services, and that is not OK. What I know to be true is that no one campus can completely replace any of the funding that they lost.”

Jiménez-Sandoval, of Fresno State, said because of state-level cuts, he’s had to scrape together funds for “the basics,” leaving the university to rely on HSI funding to afford efforts to boost retention and graduation rates. More than 60 percent of Fresno State’s students are Latino, and about 65 percent qualify for Pell Grants and are the first in their families to attend college; many of them “need an extra little push in order to support them through their college career,” he said.

Despite some success with fundraising, he doesn’t believe philanthropy will ever make up for the missing funds.

The HSI program “is systemic and comprehensive in its support, and likewise, it is systemic and comprehensive in the tragic hit that we are taking right now,” he said.

Ronald S. Rochon, president of California State University, Fullerton, said he’s reaching out to alumni, donors and industry leaders in the hopes of keeping programs previously supported by HSI funding alive.

The end of HSI grants cost the campus at least $4.2 million, he said, endangering a range of student services. For example, money evaporated for the university’s Establishing Roots to Grow STEMs program, which offers peer mentoring and other supports to math and science majors, as well as the Fullerton ASPIRE program, which aims to improve graduation and retention rates for underserved students, including first-generation and community college transfer students.

Rochon plans to “fight hard” to preserve such programs. He emphasized that the university’s student success goals aren’t going to change, despite the losses. But he also pleaded with policymakers to “reconsider.”

While 54 percent of CSUF’s more than 45,000 students are Hispanic, “this is not just impacting students who identify as Hispanic,” Rochon stressed. “This impacts our entire campus community.” Some of these losses risk bringing “great devastation to our student body.”

Perez worries that the full effects of the funding losses on CSU students won’t be clear for years. She expects the sudden end of MSI funding will get in the way of the system’s long-term goals for students, including increasing graduation rates.

“More likely than not, there will be students who are not able to hit the finish line in the same time frame as they would have with this support and with this funding,” Perez said. CSU leaders are scrambling to figure out “how do we mitigate that as much as possible, because we’re not OK with students not crossing the finish line.”

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October 14, 2025
2 U.S. Academics Among Winners of Nobel Prize in Economics

Two American academics were among the three winners of this year’s Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. They were given the prestigious award “for having explained innovation-driven economic growth,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Monday morning.

Joel Mokyr, the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Economics at Northwestern University, will receive half the roughly $1.6 million prize “for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress,” according to the announcement.

Peter Howitt, a professor emeritus of economics at Brown University, will split the other half of the award money with Philippe Aghion of Collège de France and INSEAD and the London School of Economics and Political Science, “for the theory of sustained growth through creative destruction.”

“The laureates’ work shows that economic growth cannot be taken for granted,” said John Hassler, chair of the committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences. “We must uphold the mechanisms that underlie creative destruction, so that we do not fall back into stagnation.”

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October 13, 2025
Pepperdine Closes Exhibit Featuring “Overtly Political” Art

Pepperdine officials modified a sculpture to delete the text.

Henry Adams/Pepperdine Graphic

Last month Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., opened an art exhibit titled “Hold My Hand In Yours,” which was scheduled to run for six months in the on-campus Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art. But On Oct. 6, the university closed the exhibit after artists learned their work had been removed or altered for being “overtly political.”

The exhibition, curated by Weisman Museum director Andrea Gyorody, centered on the imagery of hands in paintings, drawings, sculpture and videos, among other media, with a focus on hands as a means of labor and care, according to the museum’s website.

Last week, one of the artists in the show learned her video had been turned off at the university’s request, and a sculpture had been modified to hide text that said “Save the Children” and “Abolish ICE,” Hyperallergic reported. The creators requested their pieces be removed from the museum, and several other contributors followed suit in solidarity with the affected artists and in opposition to the university.

Pepperdine administrators alleged the pieces went against the museum’s policy to “avoid overtly political content consistent with the university’s nonprofit status,” Michael Friel, senior director of communication and public relations at Pepperdine, told Inside Higher Ed in an email.

In addition to removing pieces, the university inquired about posting signage that notifies visitors that “the artwork does not necessarily reflect the views of the university,” Friel noted. “That process has not been successful.” With the addition of the artists pulling their work, the museum decided to close the gallery. All compensation agreements are being honored and inconvenienced artists have received an apology, according to Friel.

“For the past week, the administration’s rationale for the initial censorship and removal has been murky and opaque, and honestly, still unclear to me. It didn’t have to be this way,” Stephanie Syjuco, an artist who was featured in the show, wrote on Instagram.

The Weisman Museum is housed under the university’s advancement office. “Our intent is to maintain the highest standards of excellence as we celebrate artistic expression through the visual arts,” Friel said.

In 2019, Pepperdine censored a senior art student’s gallery because the art featured nude bodies; officials placed the art in a mobile gallery instead of in the Weisman Museum, which featured work by the artist’s peers.

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October 13, 2025
Trump Fires More Education Dept. Employees

As of Friday afternoon, it remained unclear how many staff members would be affected.

Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Tierney L. Cross/Getty Images | BraunS and Prostock-Studio/iStock/Getty Images

Staff members at the Department of Education will be affected by the mass layoffs taking place across the federal government, a spokesperson said Friday.

Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, has threatened the layoffs for weeks, citing the government shutdown. Vought wrote on social media Friday that his promised reduction in force had begun.

A department spokesperson then confirmed in an email to Inside Higher Ed that “ED employees will be impacted by the RIF.” The spokesperson did not clarify how many employees will be affected or in which offices. Other sources say no one who works in the Office of Federal Student Aid will be laid off.

Trump administration officials said in a court filing that an estimated 466 employees were given reduction-in-force notices. About 1,100 to 1,200 employees at the Department of Health and Human Services also got laid off. Overall, more than 4,200 workers across eight agencies were fired.

At the Education Department, the estimated layoffs will leave the department with just over 2,001 employees. The agency, which President Trump wants to close, already lost nearly half its career staff members during a first round of mass layoffs in March. In the wake of those layoffs, former staffers warned that the cuts would lead to technical mishaps, gaps in oversight and a loss of institutional knowledge. College administrators have also reported delays and issues in getting communications and updates from the department, though agency officials say critical services have continued.

The federal workers’ union and multiple outside education advocacy groups challenged the first round of layoffs in court. Lower courts blocked the RIF, but the Supreme Court overturned those rulings in July. Affected staff members officially left the department in August.

Another lawsuit challenged this latest round when Vought threatened the layoffs – before the pink slips had even been distributed today. It was filed at the end of September.

The union representing Education Department employees as well as sources with connections to staffers who were still working at the department as of Friday morning said that the latest round of cuts will at least affect staff members from the offices of elementary and secondary education and communications and outreach. A union representative added that all of the employees in the communications office’s state and local engagement division were laid off.

A senior department leader, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Inside Higher Ed that the layoffs were directed by OMB and came as a surprise.

“Last week the [education] secretary’s office had said no RIFs at all,” the senior leader explained. “We heard on Tuesday that OMB sent over a list of people for ED to RIF … ED apparently edited it and sent it back.”

In neither case were cuts planned for the Office of Federal Student Aid, which manages the Pell Grant and student loans, the senior leader added.

Rachel Gittleman, president of the union that represents Education Department employees, promised in a statement to fight the layoffs.

“This administration continues to use every opportunity to illegally dismantle the Department of Education against congressional intent,” Gittleman said. “They are using the same playbook to cut staff without regard for the impacts to students and families in communities across the country … Dismantling the government through mass firings, especially at the ED, is not the solution to our problems as a country.”

Through late September and into the first 10 days of the shutdown, both Vought and President Trump used the threat of further RIFs to try to convince Democrats in the Senate to acquiesce and sign the Republicans’ budget stopgap bill. But Democrats have stood firm, refusing to sign the bill unless the GOP meets their demands and extends an expiring tax credit for health insurance.

Health and Human Services Department spokesperson Andrew G. Nixon wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed earlier on Friday that “HHS employees across multiple divisions” received layoff notices. But he didn’t provide an interview or answer written questions about whether the layoffs include employees at the National Institutes of Health, a major funder of university research.

Nixon wrote that “HHS under the Biden administration became a bloated bureaucracy” and “all HHS employees receiving reduction-in-force notices were designated non-essential by their respective divisions. HHS continues to close wasteful and duplicative entities, including those that are at odds with the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda.”

Democrats and some Republicans have warned against the layoffs. Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who chairs the powerful appropriations committee, opposed the layoffs in a statement while also blaming Democrats in the shutdown.

“Arbitrary layoffs result in a lack of sufficient personnel needed to conduct the mission of the agency and to deliver essential programs, and cause harm to families in Maine and throughout our country,” she said.

But Democrats in particular have argued that firing federal workers during a shutdown is unconstitutional.

“No one is making Trump and Vought hurt American workers—they just want to,” Sen. Patty Murray, a Washington State Democrat and vice chair of the appropriations committee, said in a statement Friday afternoon. “A shutdown does not give Trump or Vought new, special powers to cause more chaos or permanently weaken more basic services for the American people … This is nothing new, and no one should be intimidated by these crooks.”

Rep. Bobby Scott, a Virginia democrat and ranking member of the House Education and Workforce Committee, pointed out in a statement that the administration has had to rehire employees who were fired earlier this year.

“In addition to wasting millions of taxpayer dollars to fire and rehire government employees, arbitrarily firing government employees means there are fewer people to help administer essential programs,” he said. “Moreover, I fear the lasting impact of mass firings will be an incredible loss of invaluable institutional knowledge. Furthermore, random and chaotic layoffs will make it difficult to recruit qualified employees in the future.”

Ryan Quinn contributed to this report.

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October 10, 2025
MIT Rejects Proposed Federal Compact

Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

Massachusetts Institute of Technology has rejected the Trump administration’s proposal to sign on to the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” which would mandate sweeping changes across campus in exchange for preferential treatment on federal funding.

MIT is the first of the nine universities invited to join the compact to publicly reject the proposal that has ignited fierce pushback from other higher ed leaders, faculty and experts who see the document as a way to strip institutions of their autonomy. The Trump administration also asked Brown University, Dartmouth College, the University of Arizona, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, University of Texas at Austin, the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University to sign. Most have provided vague statements saying that they are reviewing the compact, though Texas officials have expressed some enthusiasm about the offer.

MIT President Sally Kornbluth announced the move in a Friday morning letter to the campus community, which included a copy of her response to Education Secretary Linda McMahon.

Kornbluth highlighted in the response to McMahon a number of areas emphasized by the White House in the compact, such as focusing on merit, keeping costs low for students and protecting free expression.

“These values and other MIT practices meet or exceed many standards outlined in the document you sent. We freely choose these values because they’re right, and we live by them because they support our mission—work of immense value to the prosperity, competitiveness, health and security of the United States. And of course, MIT abides by the law,” Kornbluth wrote.

She also noted that MIT disagreed with a number of the demands in the letter, arguing that it “would restrict freedom of expression and our independence as an institution” and that “the premise of the document is inconsistent” with MIT’s belief that funding should be based on merit.

“In our view, America’s leadership in science and innovation depends on independent thinking and open competition for excellence,” Kornbluth wrote. “In that free marketplace of ideas, the people of MIT gladly compete with the very best, without preferences. Therefore, with respect, we cannot support the proposed approach to addressing the issues facing higher education.”

This is a breaking news article and will be updated.

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October 10, 2025
Improving Academic Supports for Incarcerated Students

In 2023, Congress reinstated use of Pell Grants for students in prison, expanding their access to higher education.

One of the stipulations was that colleges would provide them with the same access to resources that on-campus students have, including academic supports, career advising, tutoring, mental health resources and study halls. However, a recently published report from the University of Puget Sound finds that this provision has been difficult to fulfill, in part because of prison systems, but also because of the overly bureaucratic processes at higher ed institutions themselves.

The report identifies existing barriers, as well as opportunities to better serve incarcerated students.

What’s the need: Higher education programs in prisons can help incarcerated individuals improve their educational attainment and career opportunities upon release, as well as increase socioeconomic mobility for affected individuals and their families.

Providing education to incarcerated individuals, however, can be a challenge due to their lack of access to technology and learning materials, restrictions on when they can participate and policies like lockdowns that impede learning opportunities.

“Prison rules and staff often limit the ability to study, work together, possess books and supplies in cells, and meet outside the classroom,” according to the report. Students can also lack access to faculty outside of the classroom.

Students often are unaware of or unable to access traditional campus resources such as research databases, learning management systems, disability and mental health resources, and tutoring.

The findings: Puget Sound’s report includes survey data from alumni of higher education in prison (HEP) programs and faculty. Researchers also relied on in-depth interviews with 25 stakeholders involved in such programs, as well as any affiliated teaching and learning center staff members. Interviews were conducted between August and November 2024.

In conversations with faculty, researchers learned that silos often exist between teaching and learning centers and HEP programs, which can leave professors without sufficient resources or supports to be effective instructors. Even at the national level, pedagogical or student success–oriented conversations often don’t take into account incarcerated students.

For instructors, working with incarcerated students can be demanding because it’s not part of their regular teaching load, they have long commutes or they have to adapt their materials and syllabi to a low- or no-tech teaching environment, according to the report. Some professors reported feeling isolated from peers or unable to share or receive feedback about their teaching.

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The University of Puget Sound compiled resources from higher education in prison programs to improve teaching and learning, including trainings, sample faculty and student handbooks, models for mental health support, and more.

See the full guide here.

What can help: The researchers identified a variety of innovative programs to enhance incarcerated students’ learning and educational outcomes.

Some HEP programs, including those at Rutgers University and Scripps College, established peer tutoring opportunities among incarcerated students, in which graduates provide feedback on writing, research, time management and study skills.

“The implementation of peer-to-peer tutoring does not just help the students receiving support. It builds professional development skills, volunteer or employment histories, and confidence for the tutors themselves as they continue their learning journeys,” the report says.

The University of Utah Prison Education Program pays incarcerated students about $600 per month to provide peer support in a one-stop location. Student employees offer homework assistance, help organize events and educate their peers on health and wellness topics.

The report also advocates for developing college prep and student success courses for incoming incarcerated students to help them get familiar with resources and technology that they may not know about. Tufts University Prison Initiative of Tisch College offers a two-semester foundation of academic success course, for example.

Incarcerated students may also have mental health needs or disabilities that require extra intervention from the institution. Loyola University in Chicago’s HEP program employs a social worker who meets with students individually to understand their needs and connect them with support.

Administrators can also institutionalize support for instructors of these programs by counting teaching in prison settings as a part of a regular course load or providing training for such programs during new faculty orientations. Learning communities, course development stipends and certifications can also incentivize effective teaching practices among instructors who teach in prisons.

Connecting campus staff, particularly those in teaching and learning centers, with HEP faculty and students can also break down silos between campus and incarcerated students and ensure learners are being best served, according to the report.

In the future, researchers hope to establish a national learning community for pedagogy in prison and a convening of stakeholders in this space to share resources.

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October 10, 2025
Changing the Default Setting

Earlier this week the presidents of three of the formerly regional accreditors—Middle States, SACSCOC and WASC—hosted a webinar on AI and transfer credit. I watched, as did several colleagues; both topics are important, and since we’re covered by Middle States, it’s useful to know where its policies and expectations are heading. Credit loss upon transfer is a chronic issue on which accreditors have historically been muted; serious attention would be welcome.

It was … frustrating My colleagues and I tried afterward to isolate actual concrete changes and came away befuddled. It reminded me a bit of “strategic plans” that say things like, “We will achieve excellence.” OK, but that’s neither a strategy nor a plan. At best, it’s an intention.

Heather Perfetti, the president of MSCHE, stated that she doesn’t want accreditors to be seen as barriers to credit transfer; if anything, they’re urging a shift in the burden of proof for credit transfer from yes to no. That’s good, as far as it goes, but the key word is “urging.” Urging is not requiring. Kay McClenney famously noted that “students don’t do optional.” I’ve seen too many cases of universities not doing optional when it comes to accepting credits in transfer.

The stated reason is usually something about standards; the real reason is economic self-interest. Departments don’t want to “give away” any more credits than they have to, so they don’t. That changes only when orders come down from above—say, from a provost’s office because the college is desperate for enrollment, or from a State Legislature that got sick of shenanigans and passed a law, like MassTransfer in Massachusetts. Accreditors could conceivably play that role—it would be naïve to think that outcomes assessment would have gained the momentum it did without pressure from accreditors—but they’d have to put some force behind it. I didn’t catch any mention of that.

To be fair to the accreditors, that’s much harder now that they’ve lost their de facto regional monopolies. The regional accreditors are membership-driven organizations whose imprimatur opens up access to federal financial aid. Membership-driven organizations aren’t normally tough on their members, but the unusual combination of regional monopoly and access to federal financial aid gave them the leverage to push their members harder than they otherwise could. That didn’t always work out ideally—some colleges went bankrupt having recently satisfied accreditors that they were financially sound—but the structure made it at least possible for the accreditors to carry real weight.

The first Trump administration broke the regional monopolies and opened the door to alternative accreditors. Now there’s an entirely new body emerging in SACS’s territory, and colleges are empowered to shop around. When members can shop around for more lenient or ideologically aligned accreditors, it becomes more difficult for the legacy accreditors to issue mandates.

The new preference—I can’t call it a mandate or a policy—seems to mean that colleges should “default to yes” on credit transfer, in the absence of evidence that they shouldn’t. It wasn’t immediately clear what would constitute evidence that they shouldn’t. Lack of regional accreditation isn’t supposed to be dispositive in itself. Over time, a college could track success rates of students in Calc II who transferred in Calc I from College X, and if the rate were low enough, they could cite that. But that would require first allowing everything in for several years to build a track record; after that, the politics of saying no would be more complicated.

The connection to AI, as near as I could tell, was that it would allow colleges to assess transcripts and issue transfer decisions much more quickly at scale. That would actually help. As one of the presidents put it—I should have written it down, but alas—the current system works like trading in a car for a new one but not being told the value of your trade-in until you’ve had the new one for a few months. It’s not consumer-friendly at all. If transfer credit decisions could be issued at the same time as admission and financial aid decisions, students would be much more able to make informed decisions. I have concerns about AI hallucinations in this context (and many others), but if defaulting to yes is built in, it might work at least as well as the current system.

So, I’ll give this shift a cheer and a half out of three. The direction is positive; I just hope they can find a way to move from an intention to a plan.

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October 10, 2025
Trump Targets Nevada at Reno’s Undocumented Student Supports

Brian Sandoval, former Republican governor and president of University of Nevada at Reno, is standing up for the university’s undocumented student support program, despite threats of an investigation from the federal government.

Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Cheriss May/NurPhoto/Getty Images | Brycia James/iStock/Getty Images

Centers and programs for undocumented students are caught in a politically precarious moment after the Department of Justice called for an investigation of the University of Nevada at Reno’s undocumented student services. Immigrant students’ advocates say the move marks an escalation in the Trump administration’s ongoing crackdown on higher ed benefits for these students. And they worry campus programs supporting undocumented students might pre-emptively scale back or close altogether.

In a letter late last month, DOJ officials directed Education Secretary Linda McMahon to investigate the Nevada university over UndocuPack, its support program for undocumented students.

According to the letter, the DOJ had received reports of the university’s “efforts to assist illegal immigrants” by providing referrals to on- and off-campus resources, student aid, and academic and career support, including helping students find “career opportunities that do not require applicants to provide a Social Security Number.”

“We are referring this matter to the Department of Education to investigate whether UNR is using taxpayer funds [to] subsidize or promote illegal immigration,” the letter read.

The U.S. Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment; Inside Higher Ed received an automatic out-of-office message citing the government shutdown.

But UNR is pushing back. Brian Sandoval, a former Republican governor of Nevada and the university’s first Hispanic president, responded with a forceful defense of the program.

He stressed to students and staff that the UndocuPack program offers supports to all students, regardless of citizenship status, and uses no federal funds. He also emphasized that several state-funded scholarships don’t take immigration or residency status into account; the university doesn’t dole out state or federal aid to anyone ineligible.

“The University has remained in compliance with federal and state law, as well as the Nevada and United States Constitutions regarding adherence to federal and state eligibility requirements for undocumented students for federal aid and scholarships,” Sandoval wrote. “In addition, we have made good, and will continue to make good on our commitment in ensuring a respectful, supportive, and welcoming environment on our campus where all our students have access to the tools they need for success.”

He said the university plans to respond to the proposed investigation “through the appropriate legal channels.”

A ‘Test Case’

The threat to UNR brings fresh worries for undocumented students’ advocates, who say it’s the latest in a string of federal efforts to curb public higher ed benefits for such students.

The Justice Department has already sued five states over policies allowing undocumented students to pay in-state tuition, successfully quashing state laws in Texas and Oklahoma after their attorneys general swiftly sided with the federal government. Over the summer, the Education Department announced it would investigate five universities for offering scholarships intended for undocumented students, claiming such programs violated civil rights law. The department also ended Clinton-era guidance that allowed undocumented students to participate in adult and career and technical education programs in response to Trump’s February executive order demanding that “no taxpayer-funded benefits go to unqualified aliens.”

Diego Sánchez, director of policy and strategy at the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, said going after UNR’s UndocuPack program is “part of a broader effort by the administration to intimidate colleges and universities that seek to serve undocumented students.” But it also takes the campaign a step further, “targeting any form of campus support for undocumented students,” including academic and career services. “It’s definitely a pattern of escalating attacks via different avenues of law.”

The DOJ’s letter cites the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, which bars undocumented immigrants from many public benefits, but Sánchez maintains that “no court has ever interpreted PRWORA to bar universities from offering support offices, mentoring resource centers for undocumented students.”

Those kinds of supports for undocumented students exist at colleges and universities across the country. A 2020 study found at least 59 undocumented student resource centers on campuses nationwide, mostly in California but also in other states including Arizona, Colorado, Florida, New Jersey, Oregon, Texas, Utah and Washington.

Sánchez worries that colleges and universities could modify or scrap perfectly lawful programs out of fear after seeing the DOJ chide UNR for such common supports. He also expects the Trump administration to target more programs like UndocuPack.

UNR feels like “a test case,” he said.

Gaby Pacheco, president and CEO of TheDream.US, a scholarship provider for undocumented students, said other colleges and universities with undocumented student supports are already weighing what to do in response to the developments in Nevada.

“Do we duck and hide and lay low so that we don’t get picked on, or do we stand together with others and potentially become a target of this? It’s a question that a lot of people and institutions … are asking themselves,” Pacheco said.

She worries canceling or minimizing undocumented student support programs will send those students a message—“that they don’t belong.” And she doesn’t believe trying to lie low or scale back programs will deflect federal attention.

“This is just month nine into this administration. We still have a full three more years to go,” she said. And the administration seems like it plans to “continue full force until, in essence, there are no policies left where undocumented students have access to higher education.”

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October 10, 2025