New policy mandates force us to rethink how best to meet what the Boyer 2030 Commission termed “the equity-excellence imperative.” One way to pursue this goal is to consider the role played by first-generation student success initiatives, which continue to enjoy broad public support. In the current climate, higher ed may be forgiven a rush to establish centers or initiatives for first-generation student success, as many colleges and universities already have. But before we get to raising funds and creating logos, let’s pause and consider new ways to think about and organize such efforts to best meet the moment.
To put it bluntly, what business is it of ours, or anyone’s, what a student’s parents’ educational attainment happens to be? The usual answer is that we inquire because we aim to foster upward social mobility, and because we know from research that students who are the first in their families to attend college do not succeed at the same cohort rates as so-called continuing-generation students. But I emphasize cohort rates because we are not talking about a group, defined by self-awareness and interaction, but indeed a cohort, defined by impersonal and ill-defined criteria. At the level of individuals and families, first-gen discourse presumes deficits, is intrusive and can be off-putting and condescending.
Neither of your parents (you have two, right?) earned a bachelor’s degree?
I’d venture that most who work with first-gen students would agree that there are enduring questions about how best to define who is and is not first-generation using one of several plausible definitions. And even after four decades of promotion, I think it’s fair to say that few students arrive on campus as self-conscious “first-gens,” however defined.
Some imagine that they qualify if they are the first of their siblings to attend college. Others wonder, understandably, if a parent’s associate degree or years of college attendance not resulting in degree attainment substitutes for an earned bachelor’s degree. A few may even think, erroneously, that they qualify if they are the first in their family to attend a particular institution.
And then there are the overriding problems of stigma and stereotype threat. Efforts to dispel negative connotations and instill pride notwithstanding—First!—most people can smell a rat when in the presence of Rodentia. While some minoritized students may find it a useful alternative to other, more vexing labels, many students wrestle with it, as they might with any label, especially in the absence of a related scholarship or other inducement. I used to regularly tell first-gens that the land-grant university to which they had matriculated was theirs, that it was made for them and that it was nice of them to let others use it, too. But such tricks of the trade are needed only because the reality, often stark, is so contrary.
Instead of fighting a Sisyphean battle tainted by class bias, I suggest that we acknowledge that first-gen discourse defines students by a characteristic that is out of their control and that the label is troubling when applied to individual students. Consider that we have more control over almost every other way of identifying ourselves, including our gender and sexuality! Parents, guardians and other parental authorities are as close to a given as it gets, and to define one by a given is reductionist and objectifying.
To help underscore the stakes involved, consider this thought experiment. What if we labeled students whose parents possess earned doctorates as “dockies” and awarded them membership in the honors program? Most would recoil at even the thought of it. We assume that dockies are privileged or at least not in need of privileged access to scarce resources. We imagine them as possessed of abundant social and cultural capital and a healthy amount of regular old capital, too. Why actively reproduce privilege?
But let us immediately observe that such assumptions are just as potentially ill-founded for individual dockies as they are for individual first-gens. Ask a Ph.D.-holding parent of a neurodiverse child, of a drug-addicted child, a child with disabilities, a child prone to perfectionism, a child of mild ambition and so forth, and they are apt to share an earful. And let us acknowledge that dockies are often given access to scarce resources such as merit-based scholarships and extra help via supportive honors programs, and for legitimate reasons. For one, these students earn such considerations by virtue of their academic achievement. They also may need them to fulfill their considerable potential.
The key distinction, then, is between how we relate to students as individuals and what we do to make our institutional practices and campus cultures accessible and just. But before saying more about that, I acknowledge that there is an entrenched cultural assumption in play. We hold that individuals are infinitely complex and of universal value, each unique and sacred. (I mean this exactly and empirically; no rhetorical flourish or exaggeration is involved.) Individual students are not, in this view, bearers of three or four defining categories, nor should we treat them as representatives of groups. That is called stereotypical thinking, and it leads to tokenism, and neither stereotypical thinking nor tokenism have ever been good things. Students have multiple identities, as we all do, and we should not presume which of them are most salient or assume that they are immutable or invariant.
When, however, we turn attention to institutional and cultural realities—particularly to our college and university’s policies and practices, to campus values, norms and built environment and so forth—then, yes, by all means, dust off social science and humanities textbooks and deploy concepts, data and pertinent humanistic discourses that are needed to make sense of systems, contested histories, shared meanings and the like. Here is where centers for first-generation student success have their rightful place, as hubs for institutional reform, designed to bring into existence a higher education that meets students where they are, as we say.
First-gen centers might support research into how students experience college life and in other ways help faculty, staff, administrators and graduate students working with undergraduate students to better understand and interact with them. (Three cheers for faculty meals in residence halls!) First-gen centers might facilitate integration of high-impact practices into curricula, rendering these no-longer-nice-to-haves affordable and accessible, and help banish class biases as revealed in diffuse condescension by the college-educated and well-heeled with respect to those thus othered and belittled. Let us put an end to arcane language used for the latent purpose of policing class distinctions and eliminate barriers of entry to STEM majors, which track already underresourced students into lower-paying professions, however otherwise socially vital and personally fulfilling.
Colleges and universities cannot meet their missions in a democratic society unless they are shorn of institutionalized discrimination rooted in white supremacy, patriarchy, what the poet Adrienne Rich called “compulsory heterosexuality,” ableism, ageism, as well as discrimination against veterans and active-duty armed service members, students whose home countries are not the United States or for whom English is not their first language, students from rural communities, students from urban communities, students from tribal communities, students from foster homes, students who are first-gen as well as students who identify with one or more of the above and then some. Our to-do list is long and varied.
First-gen discourse is, like most student success discourse, best suited for use by administrators. It is not usually the language of educators, nor should we foist it upon students themselves. To best aid students who are the first in their families to attend college, make higher education affordable, campuses welcoming, curricula efficient and effective. Facilitate transfer student success via inter-institutional peer tutoring, and in myriad similar ways remove the fences surrounding the ol’ ball field in the DEI social imaginary. Higher education may then serve the people, one individual at a time.
Steven P. Dandaneau is an associate professor of sociology at Colorado State University. He is a former advisory board member for the Center for First-Generation Student Success, an initiative of NASPA: Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education and the Suder Foundation, and was recognized as a First Scholars First Generation Champion in 2018.
Judging from the widespread job and program cuts announced last month, higher education continues to face economic uncertainty on multiple fronts, from declining enrollment to federal funding issues.
September saw layoffs, program cuts and other budget moves at a mix of institutions. While some of the institutions listed below are regional universities battered by declining enrollment, others are among the nation’s wealthiest; they pointed to federal research funding cuts, soaring endowment taxes and other factors as the impetus for recent cutbacks.
Here’s a look at cost-cutting measures announced across the higher ed sector last month.
Washington University in St. Louis
One of the nation’s wealthiest universities is laying off hundreds of employees.
WashU chancellor Andrew Martin announced last month that the private university had cut 316 staff positions and closed another 198 vacant roles as part of an effort to restructure or reduce budgets. He wrote that the cuts, which extend to WashU’s Medical Campus, total “more than $52 million in annual savings.”
The chancellor cited both external and internal pressures.
“These include the changing needs of our students, emerging technologies, and innovations in teaching and learning,” Martin wrote. “Others come from internal decisions and structures that have, over time, created ineffective processes and redundancies in the way we operate. In addition, we’re still facing significant uncertainty about potentially drastic reductions in federal research funding.”
Uncertainty over federal research funding looms even as the university has lobbied heavily on Capitol Hill. Among individual institutions, WashU has been one of the top spenders on higher education lobbying this year, pumping $540,000 into those efforts across the first two quarters. (Third-quarter lobbying numbers are not yet available.)
Despite a $12 billion endowment, WashU follows well-resourced peers, including Johns Hopkins, Northwestern and Stanford Universities, in enacting steep layoffs.
Brown University
Squeezed by a budget deficit and reeling from a battle with the Trump administration over allegations of antisemitism that included a temporary federal research funding freeze and ended with the university making concessions, Brown is laying off 48 employees and axing 55 vacant jobs.
The cost-cutting measure comes after the Ivy League institution in Rhode Island already eliminated “approximately 90 mostly vacant positions” earlier this year, according to an announcement from senior administrators. Following the cuts, Brown is walking back freezes on hiring, travel and discretionary spending.
Officials announced they plan to monetize “non-strategic real estate holdings” and pause “spending on plans to move the University to net-zero emissions,” among other efforts, including “prioritizing fundraising for current-use gifts that have an immediate positive budgetary impact.”
Brown is among the nation’s wealthiest universities, with an endowment valued at $7.2 billion.
University of Oregon
Grappling with a budget deficit of more than $25 million, the public flagship announced plans to lay off 60 employees and close another 59 vacant positions, The Oregonian reported.
The move comes after the university cut dozens of jobs earlier this year.
“Through careful consultation with deans, department heads and the University Senate, we were able to substantially close our budget deficit without eliminating any degree programs,” UO senior officials wrote last month. “And while we are cutting 20 filled career faculty positions and 14 unfilled tenure track faculty positions, we are not eliminating any filled tenure track faculty positions.”
Berklee College of Music
College leaders cited “rising costs, a dynamic enrollment environment, and shifting national policies” in announcing the layoffs of 70 employees at the storied music school last month.
The layoffs reportedly amount to 3 percent of the Berklee College of Music workforce and include employees on campuses in Massachusetts, New York and Spain, according to Boston.com. Of the 70 employees laid off, all were staff members and no faculty jobs were cut.
The cuts will reportedly affect 70 faculty and staff jobs, though not all are currently filled. In addition to layoffs and the elimination of vacant jobs, the university also plans to scale back programs by cutting 10 majors—including chemistry and mathematics—and dropping a dozen minors.
University of Arizona
The public university in Tucson is cutting 43 jobs after Congress eliminated funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, The Arizona Daily Star reported.
The program, known as SNAP-Ed for short, was removed from the federal budget earlier this year. Termination of the program cut off about $6 million in annual funds to the university to provide education-related services, faculty members told the newspaper.
The public university eliminated six jobs and closed the Office of Sustainability and Community Engagement last month as it navigates a $25 million deficit, The Acadiana Advocate reported.
Other offices were restructured.
The newspaper reported that officials have already identified $15 million in cuts to help close the deficit. Most divisions across the university will be required to reduce operational expenses by 10 percent.
Cuyahoga Community College
Following other public institutions in Ohio, CCC is axing 30 associate degree programs in low-enrollment areas, as mandated by Senate Bill 1, which the State Legislature passed earlier this year, Signal Cleveland reported.
The cuts, announced last month, include a mix of programs ranging from advanced manufacturing to creative arts. Multiple apprenticeship programs are also being shut down.
East Carolina University
Officials at the public university in Greenville announced plans last month to cut $25 million from the budget amid declining enrollment and other factors, The Triangle Business Journal reported.
Belt-tightening measures will be implemented over three years and will include “permanent reductions, academic program optimization, and organizational adjustments,” ECU officials announced last month. Administrators did not specify the number of potential layoffs ahead.
Yale University
Increased taxes and federal funding uncertainty are driving cost-cutting measures at the Ivy League university in Connecticut, where officials last month announced retirement incentives to eligible faculty as the university braces for an 8 percent tax on endowment income.
Yale is one of the few universities with a multibillion-dollar endowment that will feel the tax at its highest level. The increase is a significant jump from the prior endowment tax of 1.4 percent.
The university is also delaying major construction projects, among other money-saving moves.
Three academics affiliated with U.S. universities have been awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Tuesday morning.
British physicist John Clarke, a professor of experimental physics at the University of California, Berkeley; French physicist Michel Devoret, professor emeritus of applied physics at Yale and a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara; and John Martinis, also a physics professor at UCSB, will share the nearly $1.2 million prize.
They won for performing a series of experiments using an electronic circuit made of superconductors, which can conduct a current with no electrical resistance, demonstrating “that quantum mechanical properties can be made concrete on a macroscopic scale,” according to the announcement.
“It is wonderful to be able to celebrate the way that century-old quantum mechanics continually offers new surprises. It is also enormously useful, as quantum mechanics is the foundation of all digital technology,” said Olle Eriksson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics.
Students link trust in higher education to affordability and financial stress to their academic performance. A new round of results from Inside Higher Ed’s Student Voice survey series, out today, delves deeper into the connection between students’ finances and their success. One key finding: Most students report some level of surprise with the full cost of attending college, including but not limited to tuition and other directly billable expenses. At least a quarter of students have trouble budgeting as a result.
In another set of findings, 36 percent of students say that an unexpected expense of $1,000, or even less (see breakdown below), could threaten their ability to stay enrolled. Another 22 percent say the same of an expense between $1,001 and $2,500. This is the kind of need that many emergency aid programs are designed for, but 64 percent of respondents don’t even know if their institution offers such assistance.
About the Survey
Student Voice is an ongoing survey and reporting series that seeks to elevate the student perspective in institutional student success efforts and in broader conversations about college.
Look out for future reporting on the main annual survey of our 2025–26 cycle, Student Voice: Amplified. Future reports will cover health and wellness, college involvement, career readiness, and more. Check out what students have already said about trust, artificial intelligence and academics.
Some 5,065 students from 260 two- and four-year institutions, public and private nonprofit, responded to this main annual survey about student success, conducted in August. Explore the data captured by our survey partner Generation Lab here and here. The margin of error is plus or minus one percentage point.
Mordecai Ian Brownlee, president of Community College of Aurora in Colorado, is walking 71 miles over three days next month to raise awareness of his own college’s emergency fund—specifically, to get community members to match a $71,000 donation. The fund started at just $8,000 during the pandemic, Brownlee said, but the college’s students frequently face unanticipated medical, utility, transportation and other costs. Without a way to bridge those gaps, their persistence is at risk. Even the standard grant of $250 can make a big difference, he said, though many of the college’s students are more chronically food- and housing-insecure.
Because need is a spectrum and many needs overlap, the college offers multiple forms of assistance and tries to build awareness of each where possible: Staff at the college food bank advertise the emergency grant fund, academic advisers act as case managers and so on. There’s also a community component: The college partners with a local nonprofit to offer students in need free groceries, and it recently got a city bus stop reinstated outside its primary campus so students wouldn’t have to spend money on rideshares, especially in the winter months.
“Previously, higher education was really seen as this transactional interaction of sorts, where you’re just focusing on delivering the learning outcomes—the wholeness and care of a person wasn’t necessarily a part of these institutional issues,” Brownlee said. “Yet if that person is in that classroom and hungry, there will be no retention, there will be no persistence, there will be no completion.”
Helping students realize social and economic mobility means addressing financial crises, food and housing insecurity, mental health and mentorship needs, and more, he added: “These are people who have a dream but may not have a network.”
Bahar Akman Imboden, managing director of the Hildreth Institute, which is focused on state-level practices and policies that enhance affordability, access and student success, said the new Student Voice findings reinforce how “lack of clarity around the true cost of attendance can derail students.” They also resonate with policy discussions in Massachusetts, where Hildreth is based, she said, as the state recently cut stipends for low-income students after the semester had started, reducing eligibility by up to $400 in some cases.
“We’ve struggled to communicate that even what may seem like a small amount can completely upend a student’s education,” Imboden said, and the new data “will be incredibly helpful in making that case to decision-makers.”
Students on Cost of Attendance, Emergency Aid and More
Here are more details about this newest round of survey results from our main annual Student Voice survey of more than 5,000 two- and four-year students.
1. Just 27 percent of students have a clear understanding of the full cost of attendance.
Asked about their grasp of the full cost of attending college, including tuition and fees but also housing, course materials, transportation, food and more, just over a quarter of students say they have a solid understanding that allows them to budget appropriately. This increases to 29 percent among students who have never seriously considered stopping out of college and decreases to 21 percent among students who have seriously considered stopping out—aligning with prior research identifying college costs as a top reason students do not persist.
The plurality of all Student Voice respondents, 47 percent, understand most costs, but not all. The remainder have less to no understanding and face various degrees of surprise about associated costs, challenging their ability to budget or pay for things they need.
2. A majority of students report that surprise costs, in some cases as little as $100, could put their enrollment at risk.
A slight plurality of students, 24 percent, say that an unforeseen cost exceeding $2,500 would challenge their ability to stay enrolled, while 19 percent say no surprise cost could threaten their persistence. But the remainder indicate that various expenses below $2,500 could push them out of college: Roughly one in five each say this of a $500 to $1,000 expense and of a $1,001 to $2,500 one. Particular differences emerge between continuing- and first-generation students, with 29 percent of the former and 46 percent of the latter indicating that amounts of $1,000 or less could challenge their ability to stay enrolled. The pattern is similar for four-year versus two-year students and for private nonprofit versus public institution students, with community college and public institution students significantly more likely than their respective counterparts to report that an unforeseen expense of $1,000 or less could threaten their persistence.
According to Trellis Strategies’ most recent Student Financial Wellness Survey, 56 percent of students would have trouble obtaining even $500 in cash or credit to meet an unexpected expense, and 68 percent have run out of money at least once since the beginning of the year. Many emergency grant programs are capped at $500 or less, but all these numbers can help local aid efforts.
3. Awareness of available aid is lacking.
Nearly two in three Student Voice respondents don’t know if their institution offers emergency aid, and just 5 percent have accessed emergency aid at their college. Just about one in 10 students each say that they know the criteria for eligibility for such aid, or that they know how to apply for it. Black (9 percent) and Hispanic students (7 percent) are somewhat more likely to have accessed such aid than white (4 percent) and Asian American and Pacific Islander students (3 percent).
A 2016 survey by NASPA: Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education found that three in four institutions offered emergency aid of some kind, including one-time grants, loans and completion scholarships of less than $1,500 for students facing unexpected financial crises, as well as food pantries and housing and transportation assistance. The pandemic put a spotlight on student financial insecurity and brought new, if temporary, funding opportunities. Taken together, these data points suggest a large gap between available assistance and students’ awareness of it.
4. Some students are more stressed about finances than they are about academics.
Balancing academics with personal, family or financial responsibilities, including work, remains a top source of stress for students, at 50 percent, compared to 48 percent in last year’s main Student Voice survey. Some 38 percent of students also cite paying for college as a top stressor in 2025, up from last year’s 34 percent. Fewer, but still a significant share—22 percent—flag paying for personal expenses. Private nonprofit students are actually less likely than their public institution peers to say paying for college is a top stressor, at 22 percent versus 42 percent, respectively. The four-year–versus–two-year split here is narrower, at 37 percent versus 43 percent.
Some 37 percent of all students say short-term academic pressure is a top issue, while 38 percent cite job and internship searches. These are both more traditional stressors associated with college, but the latter has a clear financial dimension.
Addressing Higher Ed’s Cost Transparency Problem
Anika Van Eaton, vice president of policy at uAspire, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing economic mobility for underrepresented students, said that even financial aid offers don’t always include the full cost of attendance, citing a 2022 federal Government Accountability Office report finding that 91 percent of colleges do not provide accurate information in these letters. According to the report, colleges should include a net price that includes all key costs, subtracting only grants and scholarships—though many don’t include information on books, off-campus housing and meals, and other living expenses. Some colleges also “make their net price seem cheaper by factoring in loans that students will eventually have to repay,” the office found, while about a quarter don’t even include information on tuition and fees. Forthcoming research from uAspire suggests that colleges are improving in this area, Van Eaton said, but, ultimately, “we need standardized financial aid offers using the same terminology that show a complete cost picture so students are guaranteed to receive this crucial information up front.”
Students also need to understand college costs “beyond just seeing the numbers,” she added. One implication: High schools have an important role to play in educating and supporting soon-to-be graduates as they “navigate deciding their postsecondary plans and making what is likely one of the largest financial decisions of their lives.”
Sarah Austin, a policy analyst at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, said students tend to focus more on direct costs, or what “they actually see on their bill,” versus all the indirect costs that go along with attending college. NASFAA, which has a voluntary College Cost Transparency Initiative, seeks to promote accuracy and clarity in financial aid offers by encouraging even small shifts, such as colleges using standard terminology, “or making it clear what is loan aid versus gift aid—things like that. Because students are, in fact, not clear on what their total cost is in many situations,” Austin added.
Realistic indirect costs estimates are also crucial—and these are “are tricky for many schools to construct,” she said. Forthcoming research from NASFAA examines how institutions are calculating indirect costs and cost of attendance in general, in part to identity best practices. “Some schools have super robust cost of attendance construction processes where they’re surveying students, looking at, maybe, local data that they have access to, and putting that together every year,” Austin said. “Other schools maybe just have a set amount—they don’t review it annually, or they just blanket increase it because they know costs are going up.”
A provision in the FAFSA Simplification Act passed in 2020 allowed the Education Department to begin regulating cost of attendance, but it hasn’t exercised that power, and experts are divided on whether that is the best approach.
Congress continues to take interest in cost transparency. The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee last month published a request for information on ways to improve transparency to lower costs. “Americans want the most value for their hard-earned money,” wrote Senator Bill Cassidy, the committee’s Republican chair. “They are used to shopping for products where prices are clearly labeled and information on quality is readily available. But when they shop for a college—one of the biggest financial decisions of their lives—it’s much harder to compare price and value across the available options.”
Alyssa Manthi
Student Voice respondent Alyssa Manthi, a first-generation, fourth-year undergraduate studying history and religious studies at the University of Chicago, said she used to think attending a private nonprofit institution like hers was financially out of reach. That’s until a high school counselor—and her mother—pushed her to apply to a scholarship program through which she received a full ride to Chicago, including a cost-of-living stipend that Manthi said generally reflects the indirect costs of attendance.
Finances did become less predictable when Manthi was studying in Paris during her sophomore year, however. She’d had to front the payment for her plane ticket and spent much of her savings to replace a damaged computer during finals week before she left. Once abroad without a meal plan for the first time, and without a campus job, she ran out of cash with a few weeks left in the term.
Luckily, she was able to access emergency aid through the university, she recalled.
“They have it through the bursar’s office, where you can fill out an emergency aid application,” she said. “I was like, ‘Hey, I just need to be able to get food for the next two weeks before I go home,’ and I provided the proof that my laptop broke, since a lot of that was the money I was going to spend.”
Manthi said she does sometimes worry about what might happen if she needs significant additional emergency aid before she graduates, since it’s such a limited resource. Complications around costs and housing also effectively stymied her tentative plan to study abroad for another term. Still, she said she credits the university’s Odyssey Scholars cohort model and Center for College Student Success with connecting her to resources and peers who have made navigating college’s hidden financial curriculum easier. This includes information about various emergency aid resources and job listings.
“Just making sure that students have access to that information from the get-go was very helpful to me,” she said. Of her funding package generally, which includes a federal Pell Grant dollars and other institutional aid, Manthi added, “Knowing that I have that backing has relieved a lot of stress that I think I would have felt the past three years.”
Knowing that I have that backing has relieved a lot of stress that I think I would have felt the past three years.”
—Student Voice respondent Alyssa Manthi
In terms of college cost transparency, Manthi said her biggest outstanding concern is that many prospective students may not understand that private nonprofit institutions, even highly selective ones, could be financially within reach. She said she’d be paying significantly more to attend the Illinois public institution to which she was also accepted, for example.
High sticker prices that are often deeply discounted are another part of the cost transparency conversation, with some experts warning that this practice is sowing further distrust in higher education. Institutions are expensive to run, and college pricing is complex, but leaders may not recognize the extent of the public dissatisfaction of this practice, at least concerning their campus: According to Inside Higher Ed’s 2025 Survey of College and University Chief Business Officers with Hanover Research, 88 percent agreed that their own institution is transparent about the full, net cost of attendance, but just 42 percent said the same of colleges and universities as a whole.
Most CBOs also agreed their institution is sufficiently affordable. Yet more than half were at least moderately concerned about the sustainability of their institution’s tuition discount rate, with private nonprofit college and university CBOs especially concerned. About the same share were concerned about sticker price increases. And some 65 percent of all CBOs said their institution had increased institutional financial aid/grants in the last year to address affordability concerns.
One notable exception to the high-price, high-discount trend is Whitworth College, which is in the middle of a tuition reset.
“What I do wish students knew is, don’t write off the private institutions just because of the high sticker cost, because that’s what I did to start,” Manthi said. “It was just so ingrained that those places weren’t for us, or it didn’t feel like it was accessible.”
This independent editorial project is produced with the Generation Lab and supported by the Gates Foundation.
Q: What is the university’s mandate behind this role? How does it help align with and advance the university’s strategic priorities?
A: Excellence in undergraduate education is essential to how Notre Dame envisions itself fulfilling its institutional mission. The digital learning project manager will contribute directly to the educational experience of our undergraduate students, working with faculty, learning designers, a media team and other project management professionals to create cutting-edge digital offerings meant to enhance Notre Dame’s signature residential learning environment.
In addition, the person in this role will manage initiatives that bring elements of Notre Dame’s academic life to learners beyond our campus. These range from online courses open to the general public to online pathway programs for current high school students exploring college opportunities and incoming first-year Notre Dame students prepping for the rigors of a university curriculum.
Q: Where does the role sit within the university structure? How will the person in this role engage with other units and leaders across campus?
A: The digital learning project manager is a member of the Office of Digital Learning, which is part of a larger unit, reporting to the Office of the Provost, called Notre Dame Learning. Housing the ODL and the Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence, Notre Dame Learning brings together their teaching and learning expertise along with that of the Office of Information Technology’s Teaching and Learning Technologies group to serve as the hub of learning excellence and innovation at Notre Dame.
Working in the ODL will give the person in this position the chance to collaborate directly with instructors, the university’s academic departments and colleges, and colleagues across the Notre Dame Learning organization. They will work closely with the ND Learning leadership team to advance the organization’s strategic priorities.
Q: What would success look like in one year? Three years? Beyond?
A: From day one, building relationships will be paramount in this position. The Notre Dame family embodies a strong sense of community, and successful project managers on our campus are those who embrace the human component of their work, recognizing that shepherding a project from initiation to completion requires personal connection as much as it does the ability to keep a group on task. The importance of being able to understand faculty priorities and concerns, interface with administrators both internal and external to Notre Dame, and partner with colleagues across the ODL and Notre Dame Learning more generally cannot be overstated. As these relationships deepen over time, the digital learning project manager will become a go-to member of the Notre Dame Learning team and assume a larger role in driving its initiatives.
Q: What kinds of future roles would someone who took this position be prepared for?
A: Given all the different skill sets someone in this position will draw on and/or develop—e.g., project management, client/stakeholder relations, written and verbal communication, familiarity with media production and learning design processes, knowledge of higher education and organizational dynamics more broadly—it is a role that can serve as a springboard into opportunities with expanded leadership components. This might be within a unit like the Office of Digital Learning, in other areas of higher ed such as student services or information technology, or in fields outside academia altogether. Named as America’s Best Large Employer by Forbes earlier this year, Notre Dame is a great place both to work and build toward future career success.
Please get in touch if you are conducting a job search at the intersection of learning, technology and organizational change. If your gig is a good fit, featuring your gig on Featured Gigs is free.
Walk into almost any office on a campus right now and you’ll hear the same thing: “We’re experimenting with AI.” Someone is drafting social posts in ChatGPT. Someone else is piloting a chatbot for admissions FAQs. Another is tinkering with predictive models in the CRM.
These efforts are well intentioned, but nearly three years into the ready availability of generative AI tools, higher ed needs to understand that dabbling isn’t enough anymore.
Higher education is under immense pressure. From the demographic cliff to the search cliff, the drop in international enrollment to the decline in the public perception of higher education, our industry is fraught with challenges. When we combine these challenges with the escalating expectations from students and families and the “experience economy,” we’re setting ourselves up to fall dangerously behind.
AI can be part of the solution to those challenges. But if we limit ourselves to scattered experiments, we risk wasting resources and missing the opportunity to use AI as a true strategic advantage.
The Risks of Dabbling
When AI adoption is fragmented, several challenges emerge:
Duplicated work and tool sprawl. Different units adopt different tools, leading to confusion, inconsistent data and hidden costs.
Inconsistent brand voice. Without shared guidelines, AI-generated content can erode the consistency of a university’s storytelling.
Ethical blind spots. Dabbling often means no governance. Sensitive student data can inadvertently end up in AI tools.
Staff frustration. When AI feels like extra work instead of a supportive tool, teams become skeptical. That makes adoption harder later.
Lost momentum. When experiments aren’t connected to measurable outcomes, leadership may conclude that AI “doesn’t work here.”
The paradox is this: Dabbling may feel safer, but it is actually riskier than intentional adoption.
What Intentional Adoption Looks Like
Intentional adoption doesn’t mean rushing into automation or replacing staff. It means aligning AI with institutional goals, building literacy across teams, creating ethical guardrails and sharing results transparently.
Take admissions chatbots. Many institutions piloted them to handle high-volume FAQs. Some fizzled out because there was no plan for training, governance or integrating insights back into the enrollment strategy. But at campuses where chatbots were tied to yield goals, tested with student input and connected to human follow-up, they became powerful tools for reducing melt and increasing student satisfaction.
Or consider content creation. I’ve seen marketing teams use AI to repurpose one student story into dozens of assets, like email copy, Instagram posts, video scripts. When done thoughtfully, this allowed teams to do more with the same staff, freeing time for higher-level strategy. When done haphazardly, it can lead to a flood of off-brand content that students recognize as AI, eroding trust.
A Framework for Readiness
So how can institutions move from dabbling to adopting? One approach I use with teams is the AI Maturity Matrix.
The matrix evaluates readiness across six dimensions—vision, leadership support, skills, governance, collaboration, and technology—and places organizations on a five-stage curve:
Nascent: AI is barely leveraged, or individual experiments happen in silos.
Developing: Small pilots exist but aren’t connected to strategy.
Scaling: Multiple projects are coordinated and tied to goals.
Optimized: AI is part of daily workflows, with governance and training in place.
Transformational: AI is a true differentiator, fueling innovation and efficiency across the institution.
Most higher ed teams that I speak with fall in the second and third categories. They are experimenting and maybe scaling, but without the governance or strategy to optimize. The matrix helps teams see their starting point clearly and, more importantly, identify what it will take to get to the next stage.
The key is not to leap from nascent to transformational overnight, but instead move steadily, stage by stage, building capacity along the way.
A Call to Action for Higher Ed Leaders
The issue isn’t whether higher education will use AI; it’s whether we’ll use it well.
If you’re leading a team, here are three questions to start with:
Do we know where we stand on the AI maturity curve?
Are our current experiments connected to our overarching goals?
What’s one step we could take in the next 30 days to build intentional capacity?
These questions are urgent. Students are already comparing their campus experience to the seamless, personalized interactions they get from Amazon, Spotify or Netflix. Faculty and staff are already using AI tools in their personal lives, whether institutions acknowledge it or not. The longer we leave AI adoption uncoordinated, the greater the gap grows between what higher ed delivers and what students expect.
I still hear from people who believe AI is a passing fad. Meanwhile, the world around us is shifting in significant ways that have the potential to leave us far behind. Institutions must approach their AI adoption with clarity and intentionality. Those that treat it as a novelty risk being left behind.
The time for dabbling is over. The time for intentional adoption is now.
Jaime Hunt is president of Solve Higher Ed and an adjunct faculty member at West Virginia University teaching courses in higher ed marketing and emerging media.
For more than 80 years, the system of higher education in the United States has partnered with the federal government to produce the best science, technology and scholarship in the world. Competing for federal research support on the basis of merit, universities have produced countless innovations and spurred enormous economic growth. The Trump administration has now proposed a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” that threatens to destroy this partnership.
Holding hostage federal loans and grants, the “compact” is essentially a unilateral executive decree that cannot be refused. Although it sounds in high and unobjectionable ideals, it is in fact designed to undermine the traditional academic independence and freedom that have sustained the greatness of American universities. The compact should be immediately and forcefully rejected by all self-respecting institutions of higher education.
Universities and colleges have two essential missions. They serve to increase our knowledge of the world and to educate our young. Knowledge cannot be increased if it is assessed by political criteria, as distinguished from standards of intellectual merit. But the compact requires that institutions of higher education abolish “institutional units that … belittle … conservative ideas.” What exactly counts as conservative is unstated and left in the control of the administration. The compact seeks to supplant intellectual competence with explicitly political criteria, to be determined by a political agency. This demand violates not only academic freedom, but also free speech. It imposes government orthodoxy on private entities.
The compact demands that universities offer empirical verification that each institutional field, department and unit represent a “broad spectrum of viewpoints.” It thus invites government to overrule scientific consensus on the range of acceptable inquiry. Most colleges of environmental sciences, for example, teach that global climate change is accelerated by human conduct. But Trump himself, speaking before the United Nations, branded this view the “greatest con job.” Most medical schools teach that vaccines are important to health. But Trump’s secretary of health and human services “has been crusading against vaccines for decades.” Under the compact, government might insist that every biology department house a vaccine denier, or that every environmental science program contain a climate change skeptic. Political control of this kind would quickly degrade the intellectual integrity of university scholarship.
Early in the 20th century, American universities were managed by laypersons who attempted to censor and control the scholarship of professors. But in 1915, the newly established American Association of University Professors defined and defended academic freedom in the canonical Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure. The declaration set forth principles that are now enshrined in contracts at virtually every American college and university. These principles protect academic freedom, which rests on the axiom that scholarly excellence is to be determined by academic rather than political standards. Trump’s proposed compact wantonly violates this essential principle, even as it purports to protect academic freedom.
The declaration also makes clear the educational goal of American colleges and universities, which is to equip students to think for themselves. The compact, in contrast, requires universities to suppress “support for entities designated by the U.S. Government as terrorist organizations.” Government may of course create such designations, but unfortunately they may also be problematic, overbroad or erroneous. Students and professors should be allowed to criticize such errors, but the compact would prevent this. It would require American colleges and universities to become instruments of official thought control. This is what happened in the United States during World War I, when professors were fired for opposing the war. We have spent a century repenting those mistakes, and now the Trump administration demands that we repeat them.
Some provisions in the compact are unobjectionable because they merely restate existing law. The Supreme Court has outlawed the use of race in admissions. Congress has laid out procedures for enforcing antidiscrimination law under Title VI and Title IX. These tools are adequate to enforce the law. But the compact has a larger goal: It seeks to break the independence of American higher education, an independence that has fueled the ascent of American colleges and universities to greatness. The compact goes far beyond the Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action to require that all admissions decisions “be based upon and evaluated against objective criteria.” It also requires “grade integrity,” freezing tuition rates for five years, disclosure of postgraduate earnings and free tuition for students in the hard sciences at universities with large endowments. It limits the percentage of foreign students and requires screening for anti-American bias.
The diversity of American institutions of higher education is commonly understood to be a source of its enormous strength. Competing against each other for students, American colleges and universities admit students based on their own distinct and legal criteria. But the administration seeks to end that heterogeneity. For many institutions what matters is the creativity of a student’s essay, the qualitative assessment of recommendations and the resilience of an applicant’s personality as revealed in a résumé. The administration would have universities ignore all that. It would turn our colleges and universities into drab, bureaucratic and uniform institutions, under the shadow of the continuous threat of government interference.
Under the compact, universities also must commit to institutional neutrality, the idea that university leaders and departments will not officially comment on social and political issues of the day that do not affect the university. This is an ideal embodied in the 1967 Kalven report at the University of Chicago, but its adoption and interpretation is a very local matter, and it should not be required as a condition for receipt of federal funds.
Institutional neutrality is important because it protects the maximum freedom of students and faculty to vigorously inquire, without battling the pall of official ideas. But some institutions might have specific missions that they deem essential. For example, a religious institution of higher learning might have a certain set of principles that require leaders to speak out. If government gets to decide what counts as a social or political issue, a medical school might not be able to opine on the safety of vaccines, an environmental department on the impacts of climate change or a law school on violations of the rule of law. Of course, universities may choose not to opine on these matters, but for the administration to impose this silence is truly inimical to a marketplace of ideas.
The compact insists that universities “commit to defining” gender roles “according to reproductive function and biological processes.” Gender troubles certainly abound in universities, and prior administrations may have contributed to these difficulties. But these quandaries are for universities to settle. The diversity of approaches taken by American colleges and universities is our greatest strength. The compact unaccountably seeks to impose its own ideology on all institutions of higher education. It seeks to replace a pluralist market with a single orientation set by Washington, D.C.
The architect of America’s public-private research partnership, Vannevar Bush, asserted that “scientific progress” required “the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.” The Trump administration would do well to recognize that a genuine marketplace of ideas requires academic freedom for scholars and a competitive environment for institutions.
For the administration to attempt to use federal funds to force colleges and universities to toe a conservative line is to create what our constitutional law calls unconstitutional conditions. No university that is committed to independently searching for the truth, or to producing students who can think for themselves, should submit to the deliberate and possibly illegal humiliations contained in the compact. Institutions that do so may very well cease being universities in the full sense of the term. They should just say no.
Robert Post is the Sterling Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where he served as dean from 2009 to 2017. His research specialties include issues of free speech and academic freedom.
Tom Ginsburg is the Leo Spitz Distinguished Service Professor of International Law at the University of Chicago Law School and director of Chicago’s Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression.
Employees who had the messages put on their accounts told Inside Higher Ed that it was “wild to see your name attached to a message that you had nothing to do with.”
J. David Ake/Getty Images
The American Federation of Government Employees, a union representing federal workers, sued the Trump administration Friday, challenging the automated out-of-office email responses it placed on many employees’ email accounts when the government shut down.
The message, which was placed on the email accounts of all furloughed staff members without their consent, blamed Democrats in the Senate for causing the shutdown.
AFGE’s members, who will be represented by the legal firms Democracy Forward and Public Citizen Litigation Group, argue in the complaint that the message Trump attached to their email accounts is “partisan political rhetoric.” Not only does it violate the Hatch Act, a federal law that requires nonappointed government staff to stay nonpartisan, but it also violates the First Amendment rights of the individual employees, they argue.
“The Trump-Vance administration is losing the blame game for the shutdown, so they’re using every tactic to try to fool the American people, including taking advantage of furloughed civil servants,” Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward, said in a news release. “Even for an administration that has repeatedly demonstrated a complete lack of respect for the Constitution and rule of law, this is beyond outrageous. The court must act immediately to stop this flagrant unlawfulness.”
Two years ago, the Supreme Court dealt a devastating blow to opportunity in America when it gutted access to higher education for underrepresented groups. That decision was not only legally misguided but also turned a blind eye to the deep inequities that have long shaped our education system. Our colleges and universities scrambled to find lawful tools to ensure that their student bodies still reflected the breadth of talent and promise in this country.
One of those tools was Landscape, a program recently canceled by the College Board that gave admissions officers data about a student’s high school and neighborhood while explicitly excluding race or ethnicity.
Standardized test scores and GPAs never tell the whole story. Median family income, access to Advanced Placement courses, local crime rates and other key indicators help admissions officers see the full picture and provide crucial context to help identify high-achieving students from disadvantaged communities. These are students whom universities might otherwise overlook. Tools that give context level the playing field—not by lowering standards, but by lifting students up according to their merit and the obstacles they have overcome.
The Supreme Court, even in striking down diversity initiatives, still made clear that universities could explore race-neutral alternatives to achieve equity. The use of socioeconomic and geographic factors is exactly such an alternative. Despite U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi’s recent nonbinding guidance warning against the use of geographic indicators as “proxies” for race, make no mistake: Abandoning consideration of these elements of an applicant’s background is not a legal requirement but a political choice, reflecting fear rather than courage.
Without tools that account for the barriers students face, colleges will fall back on practices that overwhelmingly favor the privileged, shutting out low-income and first-generation students who have already beaten the odds. This spoils opportunity for millions, and our campuses and our nation will suffer for it. Diversity is not a box to check; it is a vital engine of education and democracy. Classrooms that bring together students from different walks of life prepare all graduates to lead a diverse society, foster innovation and strengthen our communities.
We cannot allow the Supreme Court’s decision—and the chilling effect in its wake—to undo decades of progress. And we cannot allow educational institutions to abdicate their responsibility in this moment of crisis. The data that provides broader context for applicants remains available, but without the will to use it, too many doors will remain closed for the students who need them most.
America has always promised to reward hard work and perseverance, no matter where you come from. That promise rings hollow if we allow the wealthy and well connected to monopolize educational opportunity. Colleges and universities must honor that promise by continuing to seek out and support students who have succeeded against the odds. Fairness demands it, equal opportunity requires it and the future of our country depends on it.
The authors all serve as state attorneys general: New York Attorney General Letitia James, Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin, Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark and Washington Attorney General Nick Brown.
The U.S. Department of Education is doubling down on its emphasis on workforce development. Education Secretary Linda McMahon recently proposed adding career pathways and workforce readiness to her list of priorities for discretionary grant funding, possibly guiding how the department spends billions of dollars.
“After four years of the Biden Administration pedaling [sic] divisive ideology and racial preferencing, the Trump Administration will prioritize discretionary grants to education programs that actually improve student outcomes by using evidence-based strategies for instruction and creating pathways to high-demand fields,” U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a statement late last month. “The department looks forward to empowering states to close achievement gaps and align education with the evolving needs of the workforce.”
McMahon’s plan would channel federal funds toward efforts to align workforce-development programs with state economic priorities. The department proposed supporting projects dedicated to identifying and promoting strong industry-recognized credentials, building tools for students to compare costs and earnings of different educational pathways and growing work-based learning opportunities, like apprenticeships and pre-apprenticeships. It also encouraged support for skilled trades and the development of talent marketplaces, digital platforms run by states to connect job seekers and potential employers based on skills.
“For decades, the dominant ‘college for all’ narrative has led to a narrow focus that often leaves students with degrees and debt but limited job prospects,” the grant priority proposal reads. “By expanding the range of options so that a broader array of education providers can access existing funding in a manner that aligns outcomes with the demands of today’s workforce, the government can foster both economic mobility for students and sustained competitiveness for the nation.”
McMahon has named other grant priorities since becoming secretary as well, including mathematics education, evidence-based literacy education, education choice, patriotic education and returning education to the states. The Education Department takes its priorities into account and can give them extra weight when approving discretionary grant awards.
The department’s workforce-readiness proposal mirrors other plans from the Trump administration to put workforce development center stage. An April executive order, for example, charged federal officials with better addressing the nation’s workforce needs, including by reaching, and surpassing, one million new active apprenticeships. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law in July, established workforce Pell, allowing Pell Grants, starting next year, to flow to low-income students in short-term programs.
The Department of Labor also came out with a report outlining “America’s talent strategy” in August and is moving forward with a controversial interagency agreement with the Department of Education for a more “coordinated federal education and workforce system.” (The agreement would move administration of career and technical education programs to the DOL.)
Education and workforce advocates say the new grant priority—open for public comment until Oct. 27—is a welcome win for causes they’ve long championed, but their celebration is tempered by some questions and concerns. Some argue ED’s workforce goals could be disrupted by other Trump administration policies. Others worry the department’s focus on nondegree pathways could lead to an underinvestment in traditional higher ed. And while some are cautiously optimistic about the proposed plan, they’re waiting to see how it works in practice.
“When we look at this functionally, in theory, all of this looks like things that we like,” said Jennifer Stiddard, senior director of government affairs for Jobs for the Future, an organization focused on the intersection between education and the workforce. “Career-connected learning … creating better pathways for students, creating better opportunities to learn about careers—these are all things that are included in here. Where we always have pause is understanding how all of this is going to be applied.”
Hopes and Worries
The proposal has sparked hope for workforce development wonks, as some of their long-held goals are becoming national priorities.
Erica Cuevas, director of education policy at Jobs for the Future, said she’s still reviewing the grant priority language, but she’s heartened to see the administration using its “bully pulpit and its discretionary grant authority to promote career-connected learning within the broader K–12 educational ecosystem,” beyond career and technical education programs, which reach a limited number of students.
Katie Spiker, chief of federal affairs for the National Skills Coalition, a research and advocacy organization focused on workforce training, said it’s clear the Education Department is focused on aligning education offerings with workforce needs, fostering industry partnerships and expanding work-based learning opportunities. She also applauded the department for its focus on forging connections between high school programs, apprenticeships and other workforce development programs, which “really reflects how the work is done on the ground,” as a “holistic effort across education and workforce.”
But she also worries that the Trump administration is simultaneously pushing policies that don’t serve these goals. For example, the president’s budget for fiscal year 2026 proposed zeroing out funding for adult education, which she views as critical for training adults in basic skills so they can fill workforce gaps.
“The funding conversations and the massive shifts and reductions in investments that we’ve seen both from the House appropriations process and from the president’s budget request are really incongruent with these important priorities that they’re setting out in this document,” Spiker said.
She also emphasized that the proposed grant priority doesn’t put any focus on “reaching and engaging with communities that have not traditionally had access” to certain high-demand jobs, including women, communities of color and workers with disabilities. She believes filling workforce shortages will require actively recruiting, and building up supports for, workers underrepresented in industries with workforce gaps.
Businesses “are scrambling to try and build broader pipelines of folks, both because of job openings that they have today, as well as those that they are projecting for next year, five years from now and into the future,” Spiker said.
In a similar vein, Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, said she found it “frustrating” that McMahon’s announcement of the grant priority described workforce readiness and diversity, equity and inclusion efforts as at odds.
“We know that employers are insisting that their employees be able to speak across differences, work in diverse teams and engage in cross-cultural understanding,” based on surveys AAC&U conducts with employers, Pasquerella said.
She supports aligning education programs with workforce needs and offering students more experiential learning opportunities. But she believes liberal arts education is also a part of training students for the workforce and fears such offerings could be sidelined in the department’s vision for supporting workforce readiness.
“The risk is always that if we focus too narrowly on career preparation—without recognizing that career preparation must involve skills, competencies and dispositions central to a liberal education—that we will have a group of students who are narrowly technically trained without the capacity to grapple with the grand challenges that will confront us in the future,” she said. “We shouldn’t create a false dichotomy between career preparation and liberal education.”
John Colborn, executive director of Apprenticeships for America, believes the proposed grant priority is over all a “positive development” for learners.
“I think it brings some more balance to the educational enterprise, which has been overwhelmingly focused on getting everyone into college,” he said. “I think we’ve realized the limitations of that particular approach.”
But while he favors exposing K–12 students to a broader range of career pathways, including apprenticeships, he also wants to make sure career-focused programs prepare students for both careers and college. He said one of the problems with vocational training in high schools in the past was that students too often were “constrained into a particular pathway.”
“We don’t want to go down that road or repeat some of those mistakes,” he said.
He noted that the partnership between the Education Department and the Department of Labor raises these types of concerns, because the DOL has less of an academic focus. But he believes stronger ties between the agencies is a net positive.
The long-term effects of the proposal, and other workforce-development plans, “is really going to turn on whether or not that nuance can be represented in the grant making and priority setting for the department,” Colborn said.
