I will never forget the student who—upon being given 15 minutes at the end of class to get rolling on the writing assignment I’d just given—whipped out their phone and starting furiously typing away.
At first, I thought this was an act of defiance, a deliberate wasting of time I’d been generous enough to provide following a carefully constructed discussion activity that was meant to give students sufficient kindling to get the flames of the first draft flickering to life.
I said something about maybe texting people later and the student said that they were working on their draft, that they, in fact, first wrote everything on their phone. Not wanting to make a fuss in the moment, I shut up about it, but a week or so later in an individual conference I asked the student about their method, and they showed me the reams and reams of text in their phone’s Notes app.
The phone itself was a fright, the screen cracked, a particularly dense web of fractures at the bottom, but when I asked the student to show me how they used the app for writing, it became clear that they could type at a speed comparable or better to the average student on a computer keyboard.
I’d been teaching the writing process for my entire career, talking students through the steps and sequence to producing a satisfactory piece of work—prewriting, drafting, revision, editing, proofreading—with more detailed dives into each of those stages, but until that incident I didn’t fully appreciate that I shouldn’t be teaching the writing process per se, I should be giving students the kinds of challenges that allowed them to develop their own writing processes.
As I considered this distinction, I realized how truly idiosyncratic my own process is and how different it can be depending on the occasion and situation. An outside observer looking at how I put together a column or book or proposal would see all manner of inefficiency and declare my method … madness.
But the key thing about my method is that it’s mine, and I think I have sufficient proof that it works. It may continue to evolve over time, which I suppose we could equate with improvement, but it’s really just different.
My student’s strategy was rooted in resource constraints, both time and money. Typing on the phone had started as a way to get stuff done during brief in-between times when working as a bicycle delivery person for one of the downtown-Charleston sandwich shops. They’d capture a draft on the phone on the fly and then transfer it to a computer for further development. The phone text had notes like “put thing from that thing here” as place markers for sources or evidence.
I realized that this method required the student to fundamentally work from a place of their own thoughts and ideas, something that was actually at odds with some of their first-year writing classmates who had been conditioned to defer to their readings, seeing their job as students to prove that they’d read and (generally) understood the content, rather than building on that content with ideas of their own, as I’d been asking them to do.
At the time of the conference, the student didn’t even have a computer, having had theirs stolen and not having sufficient funds at the time to immediately replace it. The student had been using the terminals in the library computer lab for the nonphone work.
This conference also revealed the reason for the rather up-and-down nature of this student’s work that semester. This was a clearly curious and driven person who had a number of extra challenges at simply completing the work of college. The assignment we were working on at the time, an alternate history analysis where students had to take a past event, change some aspect of it and imagine a different future, was probably the most challenging experience of the semester, but according to my archives at least, it proved to be this student’s best work.
Writing the initial draft untethered from any sources or even being able to easily move between information online and the text on the screen required the student to think creatively and analytically in ways that unlocked interesting insights into their choice of subject. Because of fate and circumstance, and without me really planning it, this student was getting a high-level experience in how to harness their own mind.
I started thinking more deeply about the intersection between the affordances of the tools and the writing process. One of the biggest shifts in my method over the years was when I acquired an external monitor that allowed me to see two full pages of text simultaneously on screen. This was something I’d longed for for years but resisted because I’m cheap. I now have a hard time working without it.
This incident happened as I was also experimenting with approaches to alternative grading, so it became a natural fit to start asking students to reflect more purposefully on the literal mechanics of their writing process so they could identify missing needs that they might be able to fulfill.
At the time I hadn’t yet come up with my framework of the writer’s practice, but now I can see how integral asking students to be this mindful about their own process can be to the development of a practice.
It’s also a good route for introducing mindfulness into the choices they may make when it comes to using generative AI tools. If they understand their labor and its meaning, they will have the capacity to assess how using the tool may enhance or—what I think is more likely—distort their process. It is also a reminder to us to design challenges that encourage the kind of labor we want students to be doing.
Before we retreat to old technology that dodges these challenges, like blue books, I think we could do a lot of good by really leaning in to helping students see writing as an experience that will differ based on their unique intelligences, and that if they pay attention, if what they are doing matters, they can come to know themselves a bit better.
Approximately 65 percent of the 1.2 million active-duty service members in the U.S. armed forces have less than an associate degree level of education, according to 2023 data; many of them hold some college credits but no degree. Federal aid programs make enrolling in college and earning a degree more accessible for military-affiliated students, but not every student is aware of academic interventions that can help them complete a credential sooner, including credit for prior learning.
A 2024 research article found that prospective students with military experience were most likely to prioritize academic programming when selecting a college, followed by financial assistance and affordability. CPL is one way colleges and universities seek to expedite student veterans’ ability to enroll in and graduate from college, recognizing the learning already accomplished while in the armed forces.
In the most recent episode of Voices of Student Success, host Ashley Mowreader speaks with three experts from the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education—senior fellows Matt Bergman and Dallas Kratzer, and Tracy Teater, associate director of adult learner attainment—to discuss the state’s adult education attainment goals, challenges in CPL rollout and other models of success across the country.
An edited version of the podcast appears below.
Inside Higher Ed: Just to get us started, Matt, can you talk a little about the connection between credit for prior learning and adult learner success? What is that link and why is this an important starting point when it comes to engaging adult learners?
Matthew Bergman, senior fellow at the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education and an associate professor at the University of Louisville
Matt Bergman: Credit for prior learning has been around quite a long while, from the early 1930s to when we saw the transition of many military back into higher education. [We were] thinking about, how we could transition individuals that are work-ready but have some college-level and credit-worthy learning that would create more efficient pathways?
Credit for prior learning has been a huge benefit to so many of those folks with that experience. And this is just not experience alone; this is very thoroughly and rigorously assessed learning that we can translate and map directly to curriculum.
The University of Louisville was part of a 72-institution study by the Council on Adult and Experiential Learning, or CAEL, and the CPL Boost came out with some really hard-hitting empirical evidence that not only do people get to graduation faster, but they graduate at a higher rate, and also those that actually engage in this work take more credit hours.
That might seem a bit counterintuitive, but what it boils down to is this idea that you increase retention and persistence by percentage points that create a net-positive revenue for institutions along the way. So the myth of taking away tuition from the university is gone. We’ve got empirical evidence that not only does it benefit students and they save money, but actually the institutions are making more money in the long term because they are creating paths that are efficient, meaningful and impactful for these adult learners, military and beyond.
Inside Higher Ed: Why are students with military experience a focus area when it comes to CPL?
Dallas Kratzer, senior fellow at the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education
Dallas Kratzer: The American Council on Education has done the evaluation of a lot of military workplace learning, which can include not only the courses they’ve taken in their military careers but also the learning that they’ve had on the job.
In the military, we have a lot of different types of things that we do, and ACE has evaluated many of those. In those evaluations, the great thing is, those types of jobs and skills line up to the civilian sector. About 85 percent of what we do in the military is done in the civilian sector. So, if we can get it right and benchmark off of what ACE has done, it makes it really easy for a higher ed institution to then step across the line to the civilian sector and say, “ACE evaluated it this way. This is how it looks in the civilian sector. We can take that same credit recommendation and make some linkage there.”
As a matter of fact, O*NET has a military jobs crosswalk to civilian jobs. So linking all of that together, and the program that Matt worked on at the University of Louisville, he and I both worked with it, they use it really heavily to make that crosswalk, or that linkage between those two.
Inside Higher Ed: Part of this is from the institution side—making it clear how military experience fulfills civilian responsibilities or those job functionalities. But there’s also making that linkage for the student; if you are somebody with military experience, maybe you haven’t considered the ways that that can translate into the transition outside the civilian world.
Kratzer: You are so on the mark with that comment, because so many folks in the military just see that they’re doing their job. I did 35 years in the Air Force and worked extensively with the Army in the later years, and [military personnel] often think that what they’ve learned on the job or the things that they are doing in their career fields are just that—a job. They don’t see the experiential learning that comes along with that and how that can be translated into college credit.
I’ve had times where I’ve worked with individuals, and I’m like, “So have you gone to college?” Yes, some of them have. “Have you completed a degree?” “No, but I’ve got some college.” And then about a third of them don’t even think about it, and they would say, “No, I don’t have any college [credit] at all.” I’m like, “Actually, you do. There’s this thing called a joint service transcript, and your workplace learning, your military courses have been evaluated, and you have this pot of credits that you need to take to your higher ed institution and say, ‘How does this translate into me completing my degree?’”
Inside Higher Ed: Kentucky has a large plan at the state level to support adults and nontraditional students; how does CPL fit into this vision of student success?
Tracy Teater, associate director of adult learner attainment
Tracy Teater: The Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education is committed to supporting and improving learner pathways, both to access and then successfully complete postsecondary goals across the age continuum, whether that is a traditional or a post-traditional student. We recognize that supporting our adult learners—whether they be adults with high school equivalency diplomas, adults enrolling for the first time or adults re-enrolling to finish their degree—leads to increased economic mobility for them and their families, increased workforce for Kentucky, of course, and an increased college-going rate for the next generation.
Because our adult learners are often parents, I can’t stress that point enough: By investing in our adult learners and our adult learner returners, we are investing in those generations to come.
Credit for prior learning is a key part of Kentucky’s larger vision for student success. It removes barriers and accelerates pathways for those adults to earn meaningful credentials. That supports Kentucky’s 60 by 30 goal, our North Star, if you will.
To ensure 60 percent of working-age adults hold that postsecondary credential by 2030, it requires that we recognize the learning and experiences that our adults often bring with them from military service, from work, from industry certifications and from their life experiences. This saves tuition dollars for our families and increases return on investment, as Matt shared earlier on, for both the campus and the state. I think also important and sometimes overlooked in this conversation is the fact that it sends a powerful message to the learner that you belong on campus and you’re respected and valued for the college credit–worthy experiences you bring. And so this sense of belonging, I think, impacts persistence towards learning goals. And so CPL for Kentucky is not a stand-alone effort. It’s woven into the broader student success agenda as a way to re-engage adults, and it’s been really exciting to be a part of the work, because Kentucky has a demonstrated commitment to adult learners.
The goals of the Kentucky Student Success Collaborative are we want to set the conditions for a culture of collaboration, and we want to build capacities of our campus partners to innovate and then ultimately accelerate progress.
Kratzer: I’d like to make a comment or tag on to what Tracy just said about one part of that, and that is the tuition dollars and how we can reduce the cost of going to college or returning to college through credit for prior learning. But more importantly, to the military community, the thing that we need to keep in mind is if they have already earned the training and the learning, and we don’t recognize that in higher ed, we’re not being a good steward of the taxpayers’ dollars, because we’re having them go back and take training that they’ve already accomplished. So this is such an important aspect to that military credit recommendation.
Inside Higher Ed: We’ve laid out a lot of the reasons why CPL is so beneficial to the state, to the institution, to the student, to their families, to their future families. But if CPL were easy to do, everyone would be doing it, and they’d be doing it well. So I wonder if we can talk about some of those hurdles when it comes to implementing and executing CPL effectively, and what sort of resources and time it takes to do this work and to do it well.
Bergman: There are a number of barriers, because it is labor-intense. In some ways now, as a result of the American Council on Education, we have military acknowledgment and recommendations for these credits that make it very tangible, almost as though it is transfer credit for most institutions. But the portfolio process that goes beyond that is a bit more labor-intense and faculty-driven. So that is a bit of a barrier.
But what we are seeing as a result of the people on this call here—Dallas, Tracy and so many others that are doing research in this field—we have seen barriers declining. The skepticism of this whole process is starting to wane in a way that is creating pathways for us to reach other institutions in Kentucky, but also nationally. And that’s good. A lot of thanks goes to some of the seminal authors in this work, like Nan Travers and Becky Klein-Collins. These individuals have produced scholarship that has really rooted empirical proof that this is most valuable. It creates efficiency. It helps with tax dollars, and when you boil down all of the pieces and parts, it becomes very process-oriented and very standard in approach.
Now, that has been a long road getting to this moment. So when you talk about barriers, they have been there for so many years that they are starting to diminish, and we are so grateful for that—not only in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, but beyond, because institutions and specifically faculty, which were the biggest barrier in acknowledgment of CPL, are starting to come onboard. Not only because of the demographic cliff, but also because of some of the skepticism that we have in higher education and the shortages that we have in enrollment now. [Faculty] are more likely open to this concept because we are taking this work, we are showing the process, we are showing a portfolio and we are being very transparent about how we calculate and assess learning and translate that to academic credit. In the moment that we do that, we show the robust process. We have new advocates for this work.
When we think about military personnel directly, we plug those individuals into some of those more traditional classes and disciplines, and those faculty are immediately like, “Bring every military learner into my class. They are so mission-driven. They are so committed to this goal of getting to the degree that I want every military learner in my classroom.”
When institutions become military-friendly, that’s when you see the pipeline. Because military folks are insular in their process of communicating about the programs that work well, that are very “military engaged,” to use the phrase from Dallas, but you have to be military engaged and ready for these learners if you’re going to serve them well. And more and more institutions are doing that, showing that commitment.
Kratzer: Just to add to what Matt’s talking about, this whole thing really boils down to awareness. And back in 2015, ACE and a couple of other organizations got together and produced this document called “Credit for Prior Learning: Charting Institutional Practice For Sustainability,” and they identified four major challenges: organizational structure, organizational awareness, student awareness and student engagement. When we see what the challenges are and then address those challenges, it’s really awareness. People just need to become more aware of the population and how what we do in the military can be translated to other sectors and other affinity groups and very easily done.
We’re in a spot right now in higher education. And Tracy alluded to this with the demographic cliff, that we see that adult learners have become a recognized population, and in that adult learner population are different subsets that we can engage with. I think the military one is the best one to start with, because so much of the work has been done and it’s just capitalizing on that. Additionally, the military community is a different set of learners. Military training is about learning, and in the military today, it is very technical thought processes, processing information, very much focused on that academic rigor. So that’s why they make some of the best students today, and anything that we can do to help attract them to our institutions will be incredibly beneficial for all of us.
Inside Higher Ed: We’ve mentioned CAEL and ACE and some other well-known organizations who are supporting this work, but are there other states that you’re learning from or other organizations that you think are doing this work well?
Bergman: One in particular is North Carolina, and through the Belk [Endowment], my buddy Mike Krause is making magic happen down there through InsideTrack and their connection to reconnecting learners that have some college and no degree, but also tying in CPL and then military-connected learners. They are going full force with the type of resources to really re-engage those learners and create a very clear path.
Oftentimes when trying to reconnect with people, they need to see how this might fit into a compartment of their lives. Because we know, as we serve these learners, they have No. 1, No. 2, No. 3 priorities and then education might come into the conversation [later]. So it’s really important for when we engage these types of learners, when we think about military learners, we have to understand that [education] is not likely priority No. 1.
I use this analogy of “Would you give up some streaming services or social media scrolling to the tune of four to five hours a week for a bachelor’s degree in two years?” And oftentimes people are going to say, “What do you mean? Of course I would.” And I say, “OK, let me break this down and work backwards,” and you look at the number of credits one can earn that they get from CPL, but also what they’ve accumulated thus far, and you start to put the pieces of the puzzle together.
States like North Carolina, Tennessee have done an absolutely wonderful job. California has gone all in on CPL as well, to really try and reconnect learners and show them that the light at the end of the tunnel is quite bright.
We learn from one another—these people are just colleagues in the weeds, really grinding, trying to find ways to really replicate and make it respective to our own institutions and just chop and drop these policies so that we really can scale and impact more and more learners. Now we have battled for years and years and years, and you can hear my passion in this, but we have fought the very traditional mechanisms of institutions, and we are starting to break down so many of those barriers, partially because of the demographic cliff, partially because of some of the skepticism. But as Dallas said, adult learners, military learners are on the forefront. We are at the table for traditional higher ed, and that is a huge change in such a benefit for these learners, because there are new funding models, there are scholarships, grants and then CPL, creating efficiency that we just didn’t have 15 years ago.
Kratz: A couple of organizations that I think are doing some interesting work here … the Council of College and Military Educators. They do an amazing job at bringing the senior leadership of the Department of Education, Department of Labor, Veterans Affairs, all these folks together to talk about education related to the military community.
One that I see as a rising star is NASPA Vets. They have a military-connected students conference every year. I was very excited to see what they’re doing, because it’s helping student affairs administrators to better understand the military population, and part of this is this whole awareness and how we can serve that community.
Of course, Student Veterans of America, it’s a great organization to have on your campus. The work they’re doing in getting the word out to service members is so important … “Hey, come and be in higher education, because we have space for you. This is part of your culture and you can be part of it through this student organization.”
Some states to add on to what Matt was saying about Tennessee and California: Ohio started this thing called Collegiate Purple Star, and I think we need to do that across the country. The reason for that is everybody’s military-friendly right now, but with both Ohio and Indiana’s Collegiate Purple Star, it’s about not only being military-friendly, but military-ready, meaning that you’ve gone the extra mile and you’ve created the pathways to degree completion for service members based on their experiential learning that they’ve had during their military careers.
Inside Higher Ed: How are you all tracking effectiveness and the impact of the work that you’re doing? What does it mean to apply data to CPL for military-affiliated students? What are some of those metrics that you’re tracking?
Teater: I would back up one step to say that data alignment has been a gap that we have learned firsthand about during this pilot. One of the things that we know is that across the broader CPL opportunities, our campus partners are tracking that in different ways, which means that it is a definite gap of how we can track impact as a state without having aligned ways to do that. I wouldn’t call it a challenge; I think I’d call it an opportunity. But it’s something that we definitely want to end this with state recommendations so that we can do a really, really good job of tracking all types of CPL across the state. That’s one gap we’ve seen that I think we will be able to end this with a definite solution to and again, looking at some of our neighboring states and how they’ve been able to address that.
Bergman: It’s important to note that the state work that we’re engaged in, the CPL Council on Postsecondary Education initiative, we are collecting data around metrics directly in growth of CPL, total numbers of credits earned, those programs that are offering them—so additional programs beyond just single adult-friendly programs at institutions—and then actually the number of humans that are connected in the work, so hiring individuals that are responsible for CPL and tracking data through the institutional research office.
We are seeing great growth there, but this is also a direct by-product of what we are seeing in the field, in research and scholarship. I did my dissertation roughly 15 years ago, and it was a really challenging enterprise to find empirical work and scholarship that would really drive my dissertation forward, looking at adult military persistence. What I see today, as I am looking at journals almost daily, is new articles, new empirical pieces and new national work and research that is popping up almost monthly now that is focused on these populations. It is such a boon to our work, because individuals are doing this work, not only for their dissertations, but in their research and scholarship field.
There were not a lot of folks doing this work many years ago, but now we have a new crop of young people jumping in as advocates and allies of military and adult learners, and it truly is making a direct impact, because we have data to lean on and say, “Here is empirical proof of how this directly impacts this individual program or this particular state or this region,” and using that to guide a lot of our push and our nudging that we do, both in Kentucky and beyond, to make institutions think differently about how they formalize policy to really attract these folks and know that they can get them to and through more efficiently.
Kratzer: ACE and CAEL just partnered together to do the national landscape of credit for prior learning, talking about how states are making those recommendations. And I think there’s a lot of work to be done yet to help states, particularly at the legislative position, to understand how to help systems better collect the information. Because from the state, we hear them say, “Yes, you must accept military credit recommendations.” And the schools go, “OK, we accepted, but we don’t apply it well.” We need to be better at counting how we apply it so that we can provide back better information to say, “It does. It is valued in our state. It’s not just brought in as elective credit, but it’s brought in as degree credit that will accelerate degree completion,” and we’re not tracking that as well as I think we could.
Inside Higher Ed: I think you bring up a really valuable point there about the different types of credit. Just because it’s accepted doesn’t necessarily mean it’s helpful to the student in their specific career goal. But I think making sure that all credit is recognized and supported as part of a degree pathway is definitely the next step that we need to see.
Bergman: I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the fact that we have nearly 150 institutions involved in the prior learning assessment network. So for listeners that are checking in on this particular podcast, you can say, “Hey, I’m going to connect with Dallas,” or “I’m going to reach out to Matt and join this prior learning assessment network and hear from these institutions that are doing this work on the ground.” Each month, it costs zero money—we have a featured individual from an institution talking about, whether it be marketing or military credit recommendation or policy implementation or the admissions process in CPL; we are looking at all angles of CPL through the prior learning assessment network from people on the ground.
Inside Higher Ed: That’s amazing. I love especially when we can talk about different institution sizes and types, because what works for one institution might not be easy to do at another.
Bergman: And the best part of that is it’s free. We are not charging individuals. We are just a community of committed professionals that have been working for so many years trying to make an impact, and now we see our crop of individuals growing and growing every single month.
Inside Higher Ed: I want to hear more about what’s next for the state as you all consider adult learners and that lofty goal of 60 percent attainment.
Teater: Matt laid it out beautifully from a national perspective; from a Kentucky perspective, we hope to do the exact same thing.
We are exploring ways to align data collection efforts so we can accurately gauge impact across the state, impact for the institutions and then impact, of course, for the adult learner. We also hope to explore ways to align and standardize credit mobility across our two-year and four-year campuses, so that credit earned at one institution can be recognized at another, so that our two-year graduates can seamlessly transfer to our four-year campuses, and then this will lead to state standards and policies to further support CPL efforts. We’re looking to some of our neighboring states on best practices there.
Then finally, we are, in the fall, launching our Kentucky Adult Attainment Network, from which we will convene a state working group and community of practice to continue to build champions for the work, but also share resources, best practices and be able to offer up policy recommendations that will enact to further address this key part of our adult learner action plan.
Inside Higher Ed: Do you have any advice or insight for others looking to support military-affiliated learners?
Kratzer: I think the big thing that my peers need to know and to understand about the military community is that there’s a significant amount of learning that they gain from their military experience. However, the service member doesn’t always appreciate it the way that we as academics can understand it. They just say, “Hey, I was just doing my job.”
Well, that job has worth and value beyond what you did when you were in the service. There’s so much more we can do. The leadership training that they get—business and industry are just dying for that kind of professional development, so let’s recognize it. Let’s help them to see how they can transition to the civilian sector and bring those great learning skills into the workplace and into higher education.
Bergman: CPL for military and beyond is being done very effectively. If your institution is not doing it perfect or is not even involved, it is being done and there are so many people that are ready to provide open-source information, policy practice, forms, strategies, techniques and nuanced information to your institution directly for free, so that you can engage in this work without having to start from scratch. So to boil it down, you don’t have to start from scratch. So many institutions are doing so well in this work, and if you want to engage, just reach out and we will plug you into the prior learning assessment network or any type of forums at the University of Louisville or share data or information that we use in the state of Kentucky’s CPL initiative. We are ready to share these things because it matters and it’s impactful.
Teater: The awareness is critical, and that’s awareness across states, across institutions and within institutions. One of the things that we have seen is sometimes just a gap in awareness on what’s possible, what’s available and then how best to pull the technical levers to make those things happen for students. So I would say every single conversation that we come out of, we learn something new, and hopefully others learn something new as well. And I just think that that awareness can’t be underestimated.
The new “Tracking Transfer” report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center shows little improvement in transfer rates for first-time college students. But it also sheds light on factors that could contribute to better outcomes.
The latest report, part of a series, examined transfer data for students who entered community college in 2017 and for former community college students enrolled at four-year institutions that academic year.
It found that only 31.6 percent of first-time students who started community college in 2017 transferred within six years. And slightly fewer than half of those who transferred, 49.7 percent, earned a bachelor’s degree, consistent with outcomes for the previous cohort.
But some types of students had better outcomes than others. For example, students who came to community college with some dual-enrollment credits had higher transfer and bachelor’s degree completion rates, 46.9 percent and 60.1 percent, respectively.
Bachelor’s degree completion rates were also highest for transfer students at public four-year institutions compared to other types of institutions. Nearly three-quarters of students who transferred from community colleges to public four-year institutions in the 2017–18 academic year earned a bachelor’s degree within six years. The report also found that most transfer students from community colleges, 75.2 percent, attend public four-year colleges and universities.
Retention rates among these students were also fairly high. Among students who transferred, 82 percent returned to their four-year institutions the following year. The retention rate was even higher for students who earned a certificate or an associate degree before they transferred, 86.8 percent, which was nearly 10 percentage points higher those who didn’t earn a credential before transferring.
Other business schools, including University of Michigan’s Ross Business School and Columbia Business School, also enforce set grade distributions.
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Ralf Geithe/iStock/Getty Images
Some faculty members at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business have been instructed to eliminate grade rounding, remove the A-plus grade option and keep average section GPAs between 3.3 and 3.5 for the fall semester.
The grading changes aim to “address grade inflation and promote rigor across our curriculum,” according to an email sent to faculty in the Communication, Professional and Computer Skills (CPS) department from business writing course coordinator Polly Graham, which was obtained by Inside Higher Ed. “During the COVID-19 pandemic, [CPS] grades elevated, and in recent years, grades have remained high. In recent semesters, some instructors have awarded 100% A’s in standard (i.e., non-honors) sections, and others have awarded extraordinary numbers of A+’s and incompletes,” the email said.
The new grading policy was sent to instructors in early August without faculty discussion or approval, according to a faculty member in the CPS department who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution. The department, which does not have its own governance or bylaws beyond what governs the business school writ large, is the only one in Kelley that is staffed entirely by lecturers who do not have tenure protections. So far, the new grading policies apply only to courses in the CPS department, the faculty member said.
Instructors of standard, nonhonors courses must make the GPA of each section average between 3.3 and 3.5, and honors course GPA averages must fall within 0.2 points of the “section’s cumulative student GPA,” the email stated. Faculty members should not round up final grades “even if the student’s grade is very close to a higher letter grade,” and each instructor will complete two check-ins with CPS leadership—one before and one after midterms—after which “formative support will be provided to faculty as requested or needed.” It’s unclear what form the support will take, but the faculty member suspects it could be additional assistance from the chair on lesson plans or grading strategies.
It’s not unusual for business schools to enforce a set grade distribution. At the University of Michigan’s Ross Business School, for instance, core class instructors must follow a distribution that allows 40 percent or fewer undergraduates to earn an A-minus or higher, 90 percent or fewer undergraduates to earn a B or higher, and at least 10 percent of undergraduates must earn between a B-minus and an F. Emory University’s Goizueta Business School also enforces a grade distribution, as does Columbia Business School.
The Kelley School will also enforce an attendance policy for CPS classes this fall. Students will be allowed up to three absences without a grade penalty. After the fourth absence, they lose one-third of their final letter grade, and after five absences, they lose a full letter grade. Six absences will result in an automatic “failure due to non-attendance,” the email explained. The school will allow exceptions on a case-by-case basis.
All Kelley students are required to take courses within the CPS department, including a business presentations class, a business writing course and three “Kelley Compass” classes that teach soft business skills such as team building, interviewing and conflict management. Like the lab time that accompanies physical science classes, CPS courses offer skills-based training that encourages mastery, the CPS faculty member told Inside Higher Ed. Faculty are concerned that the new GPA targets put an artificial limit on students’ success.
A spokesperson for the Kelley School did not answer Inside Higher Ed’s questions about the grade recalibration and instead provided the following statement: “At Kelley, faculty design courses to be both rigorous and fair, while supporting student development and career preparation. Our longstanding priority is to ensure that grades reflect the quality of each student’s performance and that grade distribution is fair and consistent, including across multiple sections of the same course.”
The statement language echoes what faculty have been instructed to tell students and parents who ask about the grading changes, according to the CPS faculty member.
Indiana’s Kelley School has become more popular of late, and administrators appear to be tightening admissions standards in response. The school has fielded some 27,000 applications for approximately 2,000 spots in recent years, the faculty member said, though the Kelley spokesperson did not confirm or refute these numbers.
In March, Kelley promoted Patrick E. Hopkins, an accounting professor who has worked at the business school since 1995, to dean. Just over two months later, on June 2, incoming Indiana University prebusiness students were notified that the minimum grade for automatic admission to the Kelley School would be raised from a B to a B-plus, starting with their cohort. Christopher Duff, the father of an incoming Indiana prebusiness student who plans to seek admission to Kelley, said the change was a “bait and switch.”
“To be crystal clear, I have zero issues with the Kelley School of Business changing their admission criteria. I do, however, have a major issue in the timing of this change. We made our decision based on clearly stated information at the time of commitment. We jettisoned all other schools, offers and financial aid to pursue a degree from Indiana-Kelley,” Duff told Inside Higher Ed. “You want to change the criteria? Fine. Do so with the incoming class who will be aware to make an informed decision. We did not get that choice. It was made for us and when we complained—and we all did—we were essentially told to take it or leave it.”
Duff said he met with Kelley’s undergraduate admissions director, Alex Bruce, in June to discuss the change, and in that meeting Bruce told him the school had overadmitted for the incoming class and received commitments from far more students than they anticipated.
“I asked [Bruce] if the admission department was telling the academic departments to grade harder, to weed out even more students than prior years,” Duff said. “He assured me that admissions and academics are separate entities and have no control over each other. I do not believe anything he told me that day.”
Following more than a year of scrutiny from Republicans over how Northwestern University handled pro-Palestinian campus protests last year as well as a months-long federal funding freeze, President Michael Schill plans to step down.
Schill, who has been president since 2022, announced his departure Thursday.
“Over the past three years, it has been my profound honor to serve as president of Northwestern University,” Schill wrote in a message to the campus community. “In that time, our community has made significant progress while simultaneously facing extraordinary challenges. Together, we have made decisions that strengthened the institution and helped safeguard its future.”
Schill’s exit marks an end to a tumultuous tenure at Northwestern.
The wealthy private institution in Illinois has weathered attacks from congressional Republicans over a deal Schill struck with pro-Palestinian campus protesters who set up an encampment on university grounds. Congress hauled Schill in for a hearing on antisemitism in May 2024 over his agreement with the protesters. Schill agreed to provide more insight and input into university investment decisions, amid demands to divest from companies attached to the Israeli war effort. He also promised more support for Palestinian students and faculty, among other concessions.
(However, Northwestern has not provided the level of endowment transparency it promised.)
The president defended the deal before Congress. Schill, who appeared alongside the leaders of Rutgers University and the University of California, Los Angeles, was the main target for congressional Republicans, but he stood his ground—batting away hypothetical questions and refusing to discuss the conduct of individual faculty members.
Still, accusations that Northwestern mishandled antisemitism have continued to dog Schill since, and the Trump administration launched an investigation into alleged civil rights violations and later froze $790 million in federal research funding at the university, which led to deep job cuts this summer.
Schill and other Northwestern leaders said in July that they were working to restore the research funding and were “hopeful it will happen soon.”
Faculty members and other critics also raised concerns about actions taken by Northwestern under his leadership. Steven Thrasher, a journalism professor involved in pro-Palestinian protests on campus, alleged in March that Northwestern denied him tenure for his activism.
Schill also navigated turmoil in athletics when a whistleblower alleged in late 2002 that hazing was allowed to run unchecked in the football program. Schill briefly suspended and later fired Northwestern football coach Pat Fitzgerald and a subordinate. The coach sued Northwestern for wrongful termination in 2023; the two parties reached an undisclosed settlement last month.
“As I reflect on the progress we have made and what lies ahead, I believe now is the right time for new leadership to guide Northwestern into its next chapter,” Schill said Wednesday.
Schill will remain in his role until an interim president steps into the job.
Schill’s pending exit now means only one of seven campus leaders who were called to testify in congressional hearings on campus antisemitism in late 2023 and 2024 still has her job. Leaders at Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, UCLA, Rutgers and now Northwestern stepped down within a year of the hearings. (Then–UCLA chancellor Gene Block was already set to retire.) Only Sally Kornbluth at Massachusetts Institute of Technology remains in her job.
Rep. Elise Stefanik, a New York Republican, who emerged as one of the more aggressive inquisitors in prior campus antisemitism hearings, celebrated the news on social media.
“LONG overdue!” she wrote on X. “@NorthwesternUni President Michael Schill finally resigned today after he failed protect Jewish students, caved to the demands of the antisemitic, pro-Hamas mob on Northwestern’s campus, and failed to hold students who perpetuate antisemitic attacks accountable at an Education and the Workforce Committee hearing.”
The White House also welcomed Schill’s resignation in an emailed statement.
“The Trump Administration looks forward to working with the new leadership, and we hope they seize this opportunity to Make Northwestern Great Again,” spokesperson Liz Huston wrote.
In a nearly daily barrage, President Trump and his MAGA forces heave fireballs at science and higher education. In the last weeks alone, the administration has been busy hurling a demand for a billion dollars from the University of California, Los Angeles; axing proven mRNA vaccine research; and demanding colleges submit expanded sex and race data from student applications, among other startling detonations. Amid the onslaught of these unsettling developments, it would be easy to miss the decisive change in conventional scientific and scholarly practice, one so vast that it threatens to overturn our revered American research achievements.
On Aug. 7, Trump issued an executive order that uproots more than a half century of peer review, the standard practice for funding federal scientific grants. Taking approval out of the hands of experts, the new rule makes grant approval contingent upon the assent of political puppets who will approve only those awards the president finds acceptable.
When I first came upon the order, I was immediately struck by how closely it resembles the unquestioned authority granted to senior political appointees in Soviet Russia and Communist China. As if dictated by commissars, the new rule requires officials to fund only those proposals that advance presidential priorities. Cast aside, peer review is now merely advisory.
It took my breath away, suddenly realizing how completely threatening the new order is to the very foundations of the democratic practice of research and scholarship. As Victor Ambros, Nobel laureate and co-discoverer of microRNA, aptly put it, the order constitutes a “a shameless, full-bore Soviet-style politicization of American science that will smother what until now has been the world’s pre-eminent scientific enterprise.”
Decades ago, long before I entered higher ed, I worked at a small publishing company in New York that translated Russian scientific and technical books and journals into English. As head of translations, I’d travel once or twice a year over many years to Moscow and Leningrad (now, once again, St. Petersburg) to negotiate with Soviet publishers to obtain rights to our English translations.
One evening in the late ’60s, I invited a distinguished physicist to join me for dinner at a Ukrainian restaurant not far from my hotel in Moscow. We talked for some time openly over a bottle of vodka about new trends in physics, among other themes. As dinner drew to a close, he let his guard down and whispered a confidence. Mournfully, he told me he’d just received an invitation to deliver the keynote address at a scientific conference in England, but the Party official at his institution wouldn’t permit him to travel. I still remember the sense of being privy to a deep and troubling secret, reflected in the silence that followed and the palpable unease at the table. Shame enveloped him.
Over a couple of dozen years of frequent trips to the Soviet Union and Communist China, I never met a single Party official. My day-to-day interactions were with administrators, editors, researchers and faculty who managed scientific publishing or were involved in teaching, research or other routine matters. The Party secretary remained hidden behind a curtain of power as in The Wizard of Oz.
On one rare occasion in the 2010s, at a graduation ceremony at a local technical university in Beijing where I ran a couple of online master’s degrees in partnership with Stevens Institute of Technology, a student seated next to me in the audience drew near and identified a well-dressed official several rows ahead of us up front. “The Party secretary,” he revealed in hushed tones. I saw the officer later at the reception, standing by himself with a dour expression, as faculty, students and family members bustled about at a distance.
One afternoon at that university in Beijing, I came upon a huddle of faculty in a corner office. As they chatted quietly among themselves in Mandarin, I took a seat at the far end of the room to give them privacy. But I could make out that a man in the group was disturbed, his face flushed and his eyes close to tears. Later, I approached one of the faculty members in the group with whom I’d grown close and asked what had troubled his colleague.
“Oh,” he replied. “He often gets upset when the Party secretary objects to something we’re doing. He worries that our joint program is in jeopardy.”
These personal reflections, based on my limited encounters with scientists and faculty, do not reveal the full extent of the control over scientific research exerted by Party functionaries. But if you compare the president’s new order with that of the Party’s authority in Soviet Russia and Communist China, you’ll find they’re all out of the same playbook.
The order’s demand for political appointee approval takes decisions out of the hands of apolitical, merit-based peer-review panels. In the Soviet Union and China, adherence to the Party line and loyalty to the regime was (or is) paramount, with grant funds being used to advance ideological or state power. Similarly, the president’s order establishes a party line, stating that federal money cannot be used to support racial preferences, “denial … of the sex binary in humans,” illegal immigration or initiatives deemed “anti-American.”
Relegating peer review is no small matter. It is at the center of modern science, distributing responsibility for evaluating scholarly work among experts, rather than holding this responsibility in the fist of authority. Even though peer review is under criticism today for its anonymity and potential biases, among other perplexing features, when researchers referee proposals, they nevertheless participate in a stirring example of collaborative democracy, maintaining the quality and integrity of scholarship—characteristics anathema to far-right ideologues.
Of all the blasts shattering American science and higher education since the president assumed office in January, this executive order may be the most devastating. It is not one of Trump’s random shots at research and scholarship, but an assault on democracy itself.
About 10 years ago, the guided pathways movement got its user’s manual. Redesigning America’s Community Colleges, by Thomas Bailey, Shanna Smith Jaggars and Davis Jenkins of the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College, was a sustained and well-received brief in favor of community colleges moving away from a “cafeteria” or “food court” model and toward a “guided pathways” model.
The idea was that the quasi-libertarian view that more choice is invariably good didn’t match the reality of most students’ lives; in fact, most students crave direction. Without clear direction, the argument went, students often flounder. They take credits that won’t transfer, get lost in remediation or drop out because they don’t see the point. Colleges should streamline their offerings—especially in remediation—and ensure that students get on pathways quickly and stay on them.
The book resonated. It picked up on the “completion agenda,” as it was known, and offered a series of steps that colleges could take to improve retention and graduation rates. It popularized “meta-majors,” subjected remedial courses to severe scrutiny and offered a unifying theme (and a brand name) to what could have looked like a disparate set of reforms.
To its considerable credit, the CCRC has subjected its own recommendations to empirical study. Now, with the benefit of 10 years’ worth of data, it has issued a follow-up. More Essential Than Ever, by Davis Jenkins, Hana Lahr, John Fink, Serena Klempin and Maggie Fay, looks closely at what happened as colleges implemented the recommendations of the earlier book. (Jenkins co-authored both the original and the follow-up.) The new book also takes stock of developments in the field in the last 10 years that weren’t focuses of the first book, including dual enrollment, short semesters and support for student basic needs.
Conceptually, the major innovation in the new book is the expansion of the goals of the guided pathways movement to include postgraduation outcomes. It looks primarily at labor market outcomes, though transfer also gets some attention. Instead of defining the task as getting students to graduation, the new book defines the task as getting students credentials that will lead to salaries that can sustain families. Where a social work graduate and a nursing graduate may show up interchangeably in a graduation rate, the latter is much more likely to make a living wage.
Liberal arts/transfer degrees come in for considerable skepticism, on the grounds that they only help if students actually transfer. That struck me as a bit unfair—nursing degrees only help if students pass the NCLEX, too. Degrees have intended outcomes; using them off-label is taking a risk. That’s not unique to the liberal arts. As the book correctly notes, most of the jobs that pay family-sustaining wages require a bachelor’s degree or higher; in that light, seamless and effective transfer is very much a workforce initiative. Transfer degrees, used as intended, can open doors to those jobs.
The new book is a follow-up, and it reads like one. Although there’s a helpful synopsis of earlier recommendations in the beginning, the book likely makes the most sense if the reader is familiar with both the earlier work and the world of community colleges generally. This one is very much for practitioners. That makes it somewhat less fun to read, but probably more useful.
I read it with a pen and dog-eared too many pages. It makes compelling arguments for embedding academic advisers in specific majors, helping students identify career goals early, adopting a case-management model of advising, ensuring that students get at least one identifiably goal-relevant or exciting class in the first semester, assessing academic programs’ labor market outcomes and supporting contextualized teaching, among other possibilities. I was particularly struck at the observation that changing the culture of an institution takes steady leadership and that it’s reasonable to expect full-scale change to take five to 10 years. In a time of rapid presidential and cabinet turnover, that’s a big ask. Having seen the damage that rapid turnover can do, though, I think they’re right.
The specific measures are, for me, the highlights of the book. They’re the reason I plan to keep my copy near my desk. True to the CCRC’s mission as a research center, the authors back up their recommendations with ample citations, as well as narrative case studies. It’s dense in the best way: The ratio of useful ideas per page is off the charts. It looks like a trade paperback, but I’d file it under reference.
Of course, no book is perfect. I would have liked to see a deeper discussion of internal resistance, for example, as well as the impact of high turnover and low pay among adjuncts on aspirations for more adventurous teaching.
Those are questions of emphasis. The one substantive flaw I couldn’t write off as a stylistic choice is its chapter on dual enrollment. In arguing for more career-focused dual enrollment, the book neglects the key role of dual credit in ensuring that students graduate high school on time. It underplays questions of funding—in a parent-pay state like my own, the absence of financial aid effectively prices dual enrollment out of possibility for many students—and treats questions of faculty credentials much more blithely than they deserve. In a largely flattering profile of the dual-enrollment program at Lee College in Texas, they note approvingly that the college addressed concerns about ninth graders making career choices by urging them to just “pick something to try out,” which comes dangerously close to the “random acts of dual enrolment” they otherwise advise against (p. 144). And they ignore the reality of credit loss upon transfer after dual enrollment when students decide to change majors upon arrival to college. I’ve seen it myself; the disappointment is real.
Still, this is likely to be one of the most referred-to, useful, practical books for improving student success for a long time. It stands as a testimony to what a funded community college research center can do; although it wasn’t conceived this way, it makes for a hell of a counterargument to the claim that research funds aren’t necessary. In this political moment, the CCRC’s work is more essential than ever; the book’s title couldn’t have been better chosen.
The start of the new academic year has all eyes looking ahead. As we all know, prediction is very difficult, particularly about the future, as physicist Niels Bohr cheekily put it. At the same time, the future is already here—it is just unevenly distributed, as writer William Gibson said. In other words, while predictions are difficult, we have evidence of what we might expect. This essay applies those logics to higher education governance.
If predictions about the future are difficult, predictions about the future of governance might be outright foolish. Nevertheless, it is worth speculating and preparing.
On the Board’s Radar
Since higher education is in the headlines—if not the headline in the news—boards are likely to be more aware and informed of the issues and trends in higher education than they were in the past. This is particularly true because of federal action (I once would have said “policy,” but we are not seeing policy being made or even discussed) making news in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and other outlets read by trustees. Boards read about the Trump executive orders, drastic and devastating reductions in federal research funding, and attacks on institutional autonomy, as well as on specific universities: Harvard, Penn, Columbia, George Mason. The attacks on inclusion and student support for underrepresented groups (even the phrase “underrepresented groups”), DEI or its dismantling, and antisemitism are all subjects of conversations among trustees. Many are having parallel conversations in their corporate and law offices.
The demographic cliff—the long-foretold decline in the numbers of traditional-age students—has only gotten closer. Boards are worried about enrollment. There is concern over international students who are expected to seek alternatives other than the U.S.
For those universities with Division I athletics, there are complexities associated with name, image and likeness rights; the coaching hiring carousel; the transfer portal; and direct student athlete compensation. Boards like to be associated with winning.
Inflation over the past few years has made costs higher and budgets tighter. This means not only that there are fewer operational resources, but fewer dollars have gone into infrastructure. Therefore, deferred maintenance is growing and worrying many.
Then there is AI. As a Princeton University professor wrote in a recent article in The New Yorker, “The White House’s chain-jerk mugging feels, frankly, like a sideshow. The juggernaut actually barreling down the quad is A.I., coming at us with shocking speed.”
Underlining all of this is finances. For boards, particularly those at tuition-dependent institutions as well as those at research funding–dependent institutions, financial well-being is still king. It can and will continue to dominate board conversations. And in extreme cases, it risks becoming the only thing these boards care about.
Governance Crystal Ball
What does the above mean regarding the near-term future for governance? Before answering that question, I need to acknowledge the tremendous variation in boards and their composition as well as in the mission and geographic contexts in which they are operating. Governance generally is not governance locally. At the risk of overgeneralizing:
Expect more anxiety and energy in the board room. Board members feel the pressure on higher education and their institutions. Some boards will amplify that pressure and others will help dissipate it. Nevertheless, expect boards to be 1) well-read on higher education because it’s in the national headlines and 2) animated about what they are reading and how they are translating that into the institutional context.
Anticipate activist trustees and activist boards. In some instances, activism will be instigated by individual board members. Activist trustees as well as donors will likely continue to borrow approaches from their corporate brethren, driving agendas, trying to influence board composition, leveraging philanthropy and working behind the scenes. Ten years ago, the Harvard Business Review published an article about corporate activism. While there are clearly lessons to be learned and translated, the most striking part was that one named example of a corporate activist is now a familiar name to many in higher education after playing a key role in forcing the leadership change at Harvard University.
In other instances, the boards themselves (or at least a majority of members) may be activist. We have seen such examples in Florida, Idaho, Texas and Virginia. This is a different conversation altogether, when it is the full board as compared to individuals.
Increased questioning of the role if not value of faculty governance. Many more boards are likely to openly question the value of faculty governance and how it can be improved. They may have done this privately in the past, but don’t expect quiet conversations about faculty decision-making. Given the enrollment and other external pressures and the “entrenched problems” with higher education (real and perceived, thus the quotation marks), boards may increasingly ask what faculty governance has contributed and in extreme instances why it exists. Most do not have it, or anything substantially similar, in their professional lives.
A desire to consolidate power in the presidency. When the chips are down, corporate leaders may see their roles as being about making hard decisions, leading change and making unpopular choices to right their organizations. Captains of industry steer the ships under their charge. In higher education boardrooms, they then wonder why the college president—the institutional CEO—seems to have such comparatively little power in relation to their corporate peers. Often without realizing the differences in organizational contexts, they think that their approach to leadership, which typically works for them because they are successful (otherwise they most likely would not be trustees) should apply to colleges and universities. Presidents will be presented with corporate playbooks.
Increased focus on what is taught. The idea of viewpoint diversity will likely gain increased weight this year in board rooms. Boards may see it as part of their oversight role to ensure a range of ideas is being taught. This means that boards may be focusing on the curriculum and in some instances on the content of individual courses. This also means that boards may want to create new structures and centers, particularly those focused on conservative thought. This too requires much unpacking. Some boards will likely approach this issue with a genuine sense of inquiry and interest, with student learning at heart. Other boards—not so much.
Increased focus on how the curriculum is taught. Boards may be asking new and more pointed questions about how teaching and learning is conducted. The AI conversation may be driving some of this focus, but not all. Instructional costs, program enrollments, challenges of postgraduation employment and strained resources may also be behind their interest in curriculum.
More time on campus issues and on campus. I sense that all of these will mean that board members will be increasing their engagement with higher education trends and issues and also spending more time on or in close contact with the campus. I anticipate calls and texts to presidents and possibly others on campus will increase—first in response to the day’s headlines. And second because they will simply have more questions or solutions.
Near-Term Action Agenda for Campus Leaders
While the above are predictions, solid and careful preparation may suit presidents well. It’s best to take that umbrella rather than get caught out in the rain.
Make more time for governance. We all know the complexities and demands of presidential schedules. Yet, be prepared to increase the time dedicated to the board. Board engagement is something that for the most part only presidents can do. That will mean delegating other tasks and responsibilities to the team. One might consider extending the time of board meetings and creating ways to meet with the board between meetings (briefings and updates are good strategies). There will likely be more governance work to do; don’t let old meeting structures impede good governance.
Increase communication with board leaders and with the board as a whole. It’s better to shape the narrative of information rather than constantly respond. Increase regular communications; send out special messages. Be sure to spend more time helping the board understand what they need to know and appreciate.
Prepare the board for crises. We don’t know what will happen this year, but one can safely assume there will be crises of some magnitude across a range of institutions. Have a clear communications plan—know who speaks for the campus and who speaks for the board. Clarify the process for the board of how messages get crafted and vetted. Be clear on who will communicate to the individual trustees. Set expectations for which trustees will know what and when. Remind trustees of the importance of confidentiality. Finally, consider conducting tabletop activities in which the board can work through a crisis before one occurs.
Lay the foundation for discussions about faculty governance. Be prepared to explain and possibly defend the idea, its structures and the culture of shared decision-making. A simple point to remind the board is that making decisions and actually implementing them are two different things. While shared governance may result in slower decision-making processes, it expedites implementation and ensures a greater likelihood of success because faculty were involved and have a sense of ownership. Bring faculty into board conversations as experts and contributors. Demonstrate their value, which is more powerful than explaining their value.
Invest in board education. Board members will want to engage. So it’s best to prepare them to do so from the point of knowledge and information. If boards are going to question academic freedom, for example, get ahead of the inquiries.
Bolster the board chair. Chairs play exceedingly important roles in effective governance. These are volunteer roles in which they manage the board and its personalities; set governance expectations and run interference, when need be; facilitate meetings (again running interference when need be); and support the president and serve as a strategic thought partner.
Ensure you have a top-notch board professional. Just as chairs play pivotal roles, so do board professionals. Good ones are worth their weight in gold, as they work mostly behind the scenes on governance, but they also engage directly with trustees. And speaking of gold, do your best to ensure they have the resources needed to do their jobs.
Spend more time on the development of committee and board meeting agendas. Boards do much of their work through meetings. Make sure the president and the senior team are intentional about the content of the agendas, the anticipated outcomes of each meeting and the materials boards need to have informed discussions. This point should go without saying, but too many board agendas are rote, poorly framed and lack focus.
Finally, intentionally address issues of finances—again particularly for those tuition-dependent and research funding–dependent institutions. Boards will be concerned and want action: By addressing financial well-being intentionally, you can then get the board to focus on other strategic priorities without being distracted. Attending to trustee priorities is important, but ensuring a balanced board agenda will better play the long game needed right now.
Conclusion
This calendar year has been one like no other. A safe bet is to predict that this academic year will be no different. The ideas above may be alarmist. Many boards will continue to govern effectively and do so in ways consistent with past practices. For that be thankful. Other boards may take it upon themselves to look in the mirror and move forward in new, positive and more constructive ways. Be even more thankful for that. As one experienced general counsel said to me, “If trustees truly want to guide their institutions and make sure that their problem-solving and future planning decisions are the best they can be, they need to keep their governance blades sharp.”
Peter Eckel is a senior fellow and director of the Global Higher Education Management program at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. He thanks two humans, a ChatGPT-generated novice board chair and a long-serving president for their feedback on the essay. The humans offered better insights, which could be due to the prompt writing or the caliber of the humans.
The U.S. Department of Justice sued Illinois on Tuesday over its policy to allow in-state tuition rates for undocumented students. Illinois is the fifth state targeted by such a lawsuit.
The DOJ filed a complaint in the Southern District of Illinois against the state, Gov. JB Pritzker, the state attorney general and boards of trustees of state universities. The complaint argues that it’s illegal to offer lower tuition rates to undocumented students if out-of-state citizens can’t also benefit.
Illinois passed a law in 2003 that grants in-state tuition to undocumented students who meet certain criteria. To qualify, students need to reside and attend high school in the state for three years, graduate from an Illinois high school, and sign an affidavit promising to apply to become a permanent resident as soon as possible. Pritzker then signed a bill into law last year that would loosen these criteria, starting in July 2026. Students will be able to pay in-state tuition rates if they meet one of two sets of requirements, including attending an Illinois high school for at least two years or a combination of high school and community college in the state for at least three years.
“Under federal law, schools cannot provide benefits to illegal aliens that they do not provide to U.S. citizens,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a news release. “This Department of Justice has already filed multiple lawsuits to prevent U.S. students from being treated like second-class citizens—Illinois now joins the list of states where we are relentlessly fighting to vindicate federal law.”
In Texas and Oklahoma, the DOJ successfully ended in-state tuition for undocumented students; attorneys general in the two red states swiftly sided with the federal government’s legal challenges. Lawsuits against Kentucky and Minnesota are still ongoing.
This latest lawsuit will likely escalate the Trump administration’s battle with the state of Illinois. President Donald Trump has said he wants to send the National Guard to Chicago, a move that Pritzker forcefully pushed back on. Since Trump took office, Pritzker has been an outspoken critic.
April McLaren, deputy press secretary for the Illinois attorney general’s office, said officials are reviewing the case and have “no further comment.” Representatives at Eastern Illinois University, Northeastern Illinois University and Southern Illinois University, whose boards were among those named in the lawsuit, similarly told Inside Higher Ed that they can’t comment on pending litigation.
A spokesperson for the governor’s office defended the state’s policy and called the lawsuit “yet another blatant attempt to strip Illinoisans of resources and opportunities.”
“While the Trump Administration strips away federal resources from all Americans, Illinois provides consistent and inclusive educational pathways for all students—including immigrants and first-generation students—to access support and contribute to our state,” the spokesperson wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “All Illinoisans deserve a fair shot to obtain an education, and our programs and policies are consistent with federal laws.”
