Ever since Miami Dade College announced last month that it was donating land for the construction of Donald J. Trump’s presidential library, the community college has faced criticism. Now it is fighting in court to prevent a public hearing on the deal, which would resolve a lawsuit brought by a citizen who has argued the move is illegal.
At a Sept. 23 board meeting, Miami Dade College transferred land to the state of Florida to be used for Trump’s presidential library. Critics alleged that the meeting was rushed, failed to offer adequate public notice on the specifics of the deal and lacked any discussion or debate; a public notice referenced only a “potential real estate transaction” as the reason for the meeting.
Some estimates have put the value of the 2.6-acre site in downtown Miami at $250 million to $300 million, though others say it is worth $67 million. But regardless of the dollar amount, Miami Dade College is giving the land away for free.
Marvin Dunn, a local historian, sued to block the transfer, alleging in his lawsuit that the Board of Trustees “unquestionably violated” state anticorruption laws. Dunn argued in a court filing that “depriving the public of reasonable notice of this proposed decision was a plain violation of the Sunshine Act and of the Florida Constitution” and asked for an injunction to block the transfer.
Judge Mavel Ruiz of Florida’s 11th Judicial Circuit granted Dunn a temporary injunction earlier this month, noting that he is likely to prove his claims about sunshine law violations, but she did not altogether block the land transfer. She also left the door open for the Board of Trustees to redo the deal.
“It is understood that the board can provide the reasonable disclosure and convey this property as they see fit,” Ruiz said. “That’s why this is not a case, at least for this court, rooted in politics.”
Jesus Suarez, an attorney for Continental Strategy (founded in 2022 by former Republican lawmaker Richard Corcoran, who was later tapped to lead New College of Florida), which is representing Miami Dade College, has contended that the deal is completely aboveboard.
“The law doesn’t require that there be any specificity in the notice,” Suarez has argued. College lawyers also said they would appeal the ruling to temporarily block the transfer.
State officials have bristled at Ruiz’s temporary injunction. Florida attorney general James Uthmeier, who has assigned members of his staff to assist the college in its legal battle, told The Miami Herald the temporary injunction is not technically in place because it was not issued as a written order.
Dunn, meanwhile, is seeking to expedite legal proceedings, aiming for a trial to begin by January.
While Ruiz emphasized that the case is not about politics, the MDC board, which is appointed by Republican governor Ron DeSantis, is overwhelmingly comprised of Republican donors. Board chair Michael Bileca and trustee Jose Felix Diaz are also former GOP lawmakers.
Of the seven trustees, six have donated to Republican candidates and causes. Miami Dade College president Madeline Pumariega, who has defended the way the board handled the transfer, has also donated to GOP candidates, though she has given to Democrats in the past as well. (Most of the presidents at Florida’s 40 public institutions have either Republican ties or past donations.)
Miami Dade College officials did not respond to a request for comment from Inside Higher Ed.
This speech was delivered by HEPI Director Nick Hillman at the University of Cardiff on Thursday, 16 October 2025.
Introduction
The other day, I was speaking to the University of Liverpool Council at the Ness Botanic Gardens on the Wirral, which as you know is four hours due north of here, pretty much on the Welsh / English border. I started my speech there by noting that I only exist because of the University of Liverpool, as my maternal grandparents met there in the early 1930s. Well, I also only exist because of the Welsh university system, as my parents met while they were students here in Wales in the early 1960s, just as my own children only exist because I met my wife in the early 1990s at university.
The fact that three generations of my family originally met while at university is a powerful reminder, at least to me, that higher education change lives. And at HEPI, we had another powerful reminder of that during our first event of this academic year, when – last month – we hosted the UK launch of the OECD’s Education at a Glance publication.
Education at a Glance
In case you have not come across it before, this is the most useful but worst titled publication on education that appears anywhere in the world each year. It is a vast 541-page compendium of comparative data that you need to pore over rather than glance at.
This year’s OECD report had a particular focus on tertiary education. While we have become used to people beating up on the UK higher education sector, the OECD actually painted a picture of a very successful sector playing to its strengths. When you look in from the outside, it seems the UK’s higher education institutions are not so bad after all.
For example, the OECD showed that, among the many developed countries covered in their report, the UK has:
higher than average participation in higher education;
lower than average graduate unemployment, irrespective of whether the individuals studied STEM, business or humanities; and
among the very highest undergraduate completion rates anywhere in the world, vying with Ireland for the top spot.
I recognise the OECD is looking at averages for the UK as a whole and the position of Wales is not necessarily the same but, in general, the weaknesses the OECD found in were on the lack of good opportunities for people who do not succeed in education first time around.
Specifically, the OECD found a profound problem among young men, a rising proportion of whom are classified as NEETs (Not in Employment, Education or Training). While the OECD use historic data for a year or two past, last week’s brand new NEET data for Wales confirms the depressing picture. Indeed, it was even more salutary, noting:
The proportion of young people aged 16 to 24 in Wales who were not in employment, education or training (NEET) was 15.1% in the year ending June 2025, an increase of 3.6 percentage points over the year.
The OECD additionally found that the UK has the biggest gap of all developed countries when it comes to the difference in earnings between low-skilled adults and those who leave school with A-Levels (or equivalent). This should perhaps worry Wales even more than the rest of the UK, given that Wales scores the worst for schoolchildren’s academic performance for any part of the UK. Indeed, Wales is the only part of the UK to perform worse than the OECD average in all three areas of Mathematics, Reading and Science.
When it comes to funding of higher education, the OECD found the UK spends more than most other countries … but the shift to loan-based finance means direct government spending on each student in higher education is only half the OECD average and only half the amount spent ‘at primary to post-secondary non-tertiary levels’ ($13,000). Of course, the UK’s figures are distorted by England’s numbers because England is much larger than the other parts of the UK and has moved towards loans to a greater degree than Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. That is one reason why we have worked with London Economics and the Nuffield Foundation to look at the picture in each part of the UK separately.
There are three profound differences. First, the Exchequer cost is lowest in England, which also has the highest per-student income for institutions. Scotland is at the other end of the scale, with the largest Exchequer cost but the lowest unit-of-resource for institutions. Wales is, as you may expect, somewhere in the middle, with an Exchequer cost and a per-student income for institutions that lies between those in England and Scotland.
There is a similar picture when we look – secondly – at the balance of who is paying the costs of higher education. In England, it is mainly former students via the loan system; in Scotland, it is entirely taxpayers (and then some). In Wales there is a more even split approaching 50:50 between the Exchequer and graduates, arguably reflecting the public and private benefits of higher education more accurately. There are probably lessons from Wales for the rest of the UK here, though seemingly not for Kemi Badenoch, who complained at the Conservative Party Conference last week that higher education in England still costs taxpayers too much.
The third big difference is on student maintenance, where the system in Wales is more generous and more logical than those elsewhere in the UK. Each student gets more and the non-repayable grants are more generous in Wales than elsewhere – all undergraduates have at least a small grant whereas no one currently gets a grant in England, where grants were abolished in 2016. (Ministers promised the return of grants in England at the Labour Conference a fortnight ago, but only for some students on some courses, meaning it is likely to prove a mouse of an intervention and a very complicated one at that. It is certainly set to be nothing like the Welsh system.)
Many people I know are fans of the system in Wales for the way that it tries to strike a balance. However, while there are certainly far worse systems even within the rest of the UK, I personally think the benefits of the Welsh system are sometimes oversold. For example, I think the structure of student support in Wales is excessively generous to students who come from wealthy households. In other words, it is not means tested enough, perhaps explaining the need for the recent cuts to postgraduate support.
I have held this view consistently since the current Welsh funding system was introduced on the back of the Diamond review in 2018, but it has got me in trouble. After my concerns reached the front page of the Western Mail, I got not only an official rebuke from the Welsh Government but HEPI also received a formal complaint that came jointly from Universities Wales and NUS Wales. Rather than persuading me to change my view, I must admit this mainly had the effect of making me wonder if higher education debates in Wales are sometimes a little too cosy and stifled.
Boys, Boys, Boys
One other area where the OECD painted a less positive picture is on the differential educational performance of young men and young women. Women are more likely to obtain tertiary education across the developed world but the gap between men and women is bigger in the UK than elsewhere and has been growing while it has stayed the same on average across the OECD as a whole. According to the OECD:
In the United Kingdom, they [women] accounted for 56% of first-time entrants in 2023, up from 55% in 2013. Across the OECD, women make up 54% of new entrants on average, the same share as in 2013.
This is a convenient segue into some more of HEPI’s recent output because we have long worried about the educational performance of boys and young men and have published a number of papers on the topic over the years, with the most recent one appearing in March 2025. As Mary Curnock Cook wrote in the Foreword:
Something has surely gone wrong with education if boys – in aggregate at least – do worse than girls at all stages of education from early years to higher education and beyond.
Overall, out of every 100 female school leavers, 54 proceed to higher education by the age of 19; out of every 100 male school leavers, just 40 do so.
Again, the problems are worse in Wales than elsewhere. Over half of Inner London school leavers eligible for Free School Meals reach higher education by the age of 19; it is hard to get directly comparable figures for Wales but it seems the numbers are less than half as much for FSM Welsh-domiciled school leavers. Overall, while the gap in school leavers’ entry rates to higher education between men and women is dire in England, it is even worse in Wales. In fact, the proportion of young men who make it to higher education in Wales is lower than in every other part of the UK. It has been a known problem for at least 20 years yet for whatever reason, and perhaps because of misplaced fears of seeming politically incorrect, it has not been addressed.
Yet if male educational underachievement is not tackled, it seems certain that we will store up further societal problems for the future – including having more under-educated men veering towards the political extremes. Here, I note in passing the high polling of Reform for next year’s Senedd election. It is not rocket science to solve the boy problem, however, to take just one example, some schools following a ‘boy positive’ approach have managed to equalise their results for boys and girls and there is some great work underway in our own sector – for example, at Ulster University and the Arts University Bournemouth.
What remains completely absent, however, is any concerted interest at a national and ministerial level – certainly at Westminster and as far as I can tell in the Senedd too. People who did not want to take the Black Lives Matter protests seriously a few years ago sought to deflect attention from them by saying ‘All Lives Matter’, as if that was ever in doubt. Similarly, when Ministers wish to deflect attention from the crisis in boys’ education they like to respond by saying things like ‘Opportunity should be available to all’, which is true but it papers over the specific challenges faced by young men.
Our work on male underachievement sits alongside our work on the disadvantages faced by women, such as our reports on the substantial gender pay gap that remains in higher education as well as our other work on the overall gender pay gap among graduates. It also sits alongside a new HEPI report published just three months ago on the impact of menstruation on undergraduates’ attendance, academic engagement and wellbeing.
This revealed 70% of female students report being unable to concentrate on their studies or assessments due to period pain and that female students miss an average of 10 study days per academic year due to menstrual symptoms. It also suggested that just 15% of universities have a specific menstruation policy and, for those that do, the policy relates solely to staff rather than students.
So as I hope you can sense, the topics that tend to work best for HEPI are issues – like boys’ underperformance and the impact of menstruation on learning – that we should be speaking about more than we have done. Another area where that is true is public perceptions of higher education.
Misperceptions
A year ago, I had a drink with a neighbour who has a background in banking and two graduate children, meaning – in theory at least – that he knows the value of money and the value of education. However, when it came to universities, he expressed some typical rhetoric about them being too numerous, too big, too expensive and so on.
I responded by telling him I was on the Board at the University of Manchester and asking him to guess that institution’s financial turnover. His reply was £30 million – which is between 40 and 50 times smaller than the actual number of c.£1.3 billion (and over 20 times smaller than Cardiff’s turnover). Once my hangover had subsided, I contacted Bobby Duffy of the King’s College Policy Institute, who is the UK’s greatest expert on misperceptions – that is, the difference between what is true and what we tend to believe is true. This led over a process of many months to a new research project on what the public think about higher education, which we and King’s College launched the results of last month.
The findings are worth poring over in detail and we have brought hard copies of the work along for each you. Sone of the results particularly stand out.
For example, we gave people a list of seven institutions: Manchester City, Manchester United, the University of Manchester, the University of Oxford, the Daily Mail, MoneySupermarket.com and Greggs bakery.
When the public were asked about the relative financial size of these seven, the University of Oxford came fifth and the University of Manchester seventh, at the very bottom. More than half of respondents said they thought either Manchester City or Manchester United was the biggest in terms of their financial size; only 6% chose the right answer, the University of Oxford. The University of Manchester should be third in that list of seven by the way because, while it easily beats City and United in terms of its financial size, you might be surprised to know that Greggs has a turnover of £2 billion.
Similarly, when we gave the public a list of five big industries – legal services, accountancy services, aircraft manufacturing, telecommunications and higher education – and asked them to say which is least important in terms of export revenues, higher education was the most popular option. That result could not be any more wrong because higher education actually brings in much more export income than each of the others.
Let me share three other fascinating data points from the survey with you too:
people greatly overestimate the level of graduate regret about going to higher education – on average, the public guess 40% of graduates would opt not to go to university if they had their again, when the actual proportion of graduates who say this is only 8%;
on average, the public guess half (49%) of graduates say their university debt has negatively impacted their lives – in reality only 16% of graduates feel this way; and
a majority of people, including a majority of Reform voters at the 2024 general election, have positive feelings about universities.
Oversight and regulation
Over the past decade, the oversight of tertiary education and research has been transformed in England, though not necessarily for the better. When I worked as a Special Adviser in Whitehall a dozen years ago, there was one Minister for Universities and Science who sat in one Government Department and who had oversight of one regulator that oversaw both teaching and research (known as the Higher Education Funding Council for England). But in recent years we have had different regulators, different Ministers and different Departments for the teaching and research functions of universities, meaning coordinated oversight has been missing.
Moreover, while the Westminster Government has promised more ‘clarity and coherence’, the latest Machinery of Government changes have made the current situation even more of a dog’s dinner. The Minister for Skills, who has responsibility for higher education, now has one foot in the Department for Education and another in the Department for Work and Pensions, which has just taken on the responsibility for ‘skills’, while the Minister for Science has one foot in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and another in the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. Split ministerial posts tend to be a recipe for chaos, as I saw close up during my own time in Whitehall.
So while I know that the new Medr (the Commission for Tertiary Education and Research) here in Wales has had some teething challenges, on paper it makes a lot more sense than what England has. At one point, it was thought England’s long-awaited post-16 skills white paper was likely to be heavily influenced by Wales; given the latest reshuffle and associated changes, that now – perhaps regrettably – seems less likely.
International students
Finally, I want to end by touching on the issue of international students. The majority of the really big projects HEPI has undertaken over the past few years have focused on international students. Perhaps that is not surprising, given the OECD data I started with, which shows that, while there is one international student for every thirteen home students across the OECD as a whole, the ratio in the UK is completely different at 1:3.
That helps to explain why we have calculated (more than once) the net economic benefits of international students to the UK. The latest iteration found a gross benefit of £41.9 billion for just one incoming cohort of students and a net benefit (after taking account of the impact on public services and so on) of £37.4 billion. We split up this total to reveal a number for each one of the 650 parliamentary constituencies across the UK, including Cardiff South and Penarth, which is the top-performing constituency in Wales and one where international students contribute significantly over £300 million a year.
We have separately calculated the positive tax contributions of those former international students who stay in the UK to work after completing their studies, undertaken detailed studies on the Graduate Route visa and looked specifically at the experience of Chinese students in the UK. In addition, we produce each year a Soft-Power Index that looks at how many very senior world leaders have been educated to a higher level outside of their own home country. If they return home with fond memories of their time in the UK and a better understanding of our country, then this tends to bring real benefits. We will be launching the results for 2025 next week but last year’s Soft-Power Index, which is regularly quoted by Ministers, showed that, across the globe’s 195 countries, there were 58 serving world leaders who received some higher education in the UK, second only to the US.
I am going to stop here because I started the speech on a positive – on the way higher education changes lives for the better. And despite all the numerous political, financial and geopolitical challenges facing higher education across the UK, the continuing immense soft-power benefits delivered by UK higher education institutions is another area where there is a huge amount of which we can be proud.
From space, Kenya’s sand-mining crisis is starkly visible. Satellite images reveal scars gouging riverbeds throughout its historic Rift Valley and fully extending border to border, west to east, from the shorelines of Lake Victoria to the Indian Ocean.
These growing scars tell the story of the nation’s booming construction sector and of a largely unregulated trade: sand harvesting.
Sand is the world’s second-most consumed natural resource after water. It fuels construction booms globally, including in Kenya, where urban expansion and large infrastructure projects have surged. Yet sand is also among the most illegally trafficked natural commodities.
In Kenya alone, around 50 million metric tonnes of sand worth roughly US$600 million are extracted each year, mainly for expansion of the nation’s capital, Nairobi, and major infrastructure projects. Yet the true cost of this extraction, particularly illegal operations, is far higher in terms of environmental degradation and human impact.
“The scale of environmental crime related to sand harvesting is significant but poorly understood,” says Dr. Willis Okumu, a senior researcher at ARIN Africa, an organization dedicated to sustainable management of natural resources and environmental governance.
A multinational problem
Okumu describes Lake Victoria — Africa’s largest lake by area, bordering Tanzania and Uganda as well as Kenya — as a convergence point for environmental crimes. These include illicit sand harvesting, charcoal burning and timber smuggling, facilitated by weak enforcement across bordering countries.
Illegal sand harvesting strips riverbanks and lakeshores. It weakens soil structures, causes landslides and floods and devastates aquatic habitats. River systems feeding into Lake Victoria have suffered badly, threatening fisheries crucial to local livelihoods.
These operations cause severe environmental impacts. Unregulated extraction weakens riverbanks, disrupts ecosystems, and significantly increases risks of flooding and deadly landslides.
River ecosystems, including those around Lake Victoria, suffer profound damage. Aquatic habitats and biodiversity are severely disrupted, jeopardizing livelihoods that rely on fishing and farming. Communities struggle with declining water quality and availability that are directly tied to unregulated sand extraction.
In Mombasa, a city in southeastern Kenya along the Indian Ocean, unregulated sand extraction has altered river flows. This has disrupted irrigation systems, making it harder for farmers to grow food in a region already hit by drought.
Sand loss and social ills
Socially, the consequences are equally dire. The United Nations Environment Programme reports that “sand extraction and its trade are fuelling a myriad of social issues in Kenya, with violence and deaths related to sand trade widely documented.” School dropouts, teenage pregnancies and drug abuse spike as impoverished youth turn to illegal sand mining for quick income.
Communities in the Rift Valley face a difficult trade-off: short-term survival through sand work or long-term sustainability. In Nakuru County, uncontrolled sand extraction has left homes exposed to erosion and collapse. Residents report that land beneath their feet is quite literally disappearing.
Consolata Achieng, of Asieko Village in Nakuru County, told a local news reporter that all the land surrounding her property had been sold off to harvesters over the last eight years. “We were assured that harvesting had stopped but we still see workers and lorries every day,” she said. “A lot of people live around here and have nowhere to go. This is the place we call home.”
Communities can also find themselves caught between environmental concerns and lack of alternatives. “All you need is a spade,” noted one senior Kenyan civil servant, highlighting how easy it is to mine sand. Labourers, including school-aged children, work in dangerous pits for low wages.
The lucrative nature of sand mining has attracted organized criminal groups that exploit the resource with impunity. Violent confrontations have occurred between cartels and local communities attempting to protect their resources, leading to injuries and fatalities.
These organized crime groups — known locally as “sand cartels” — are central to the illegal trade, often operating under the protection of corrupt state officials, enabling them to bypass regulations and continue illegal activities.
According to ENACT Africa, a program that focuses on addressing transnational organized crime in Africa, weak co-ordination among law-enforcement agencies across borders allows such networks to thrive. Violent confrontations have occurred between cartels and local communities attempting to protect their resources, leading to injuries and even deaths.
Efforts to regulate the industry have largely failed due to corruption and ineffective governance. In a UNEP Global Sand Analysis report, a senior official bluntly observed: “All you need to do is pay,” reflecting systemic bribery and regulatory capture, which occurs when a government agency that was created to act in the public’s interest ends up serving the interests of the industry it’s supposed to be regulating.
UNEP has warned that sand is becoming dangerously scarce. It advocates for stronger global regulations, regional co-operation and alternative construction materials such as crushed rock and recycled debris.
In Kenya, sand isn’t just used locally. It’s also smuggled to neighbouring countries and, allegedly, to international markets — further complicating enforcement.
However, there are signs of hope. Kenyan authorities have created specialized investigative units in the Mining Police Unit to crack down on illegal extraction. Officials are also piloting new tools, such as satellite tracking and GPS monitoring of trucks, to improve oversight.
Protecting the land
Some counties are fighting back. In West Pokot county, authorities recently launched new sand-harvesting policies to control extraction and protect the environment.
In Makueni County, the government implemented a comprehensive sand regulation act that has significantly reduced illegal activities and environmental damage within its jurisdiction. When the county lifted its decade-long ban on commercial sand mining to boost revenue, the move sparked concern among residents, who fear the return of water shortages and environmental degradation.
The persistence of illegal sand mining underscores the need for robust enforcement of regulations, community engagement and the promotion of alternative construction materials to reduce reliance on natural sand resources.
Without urgent and co-ordinated action, Kenya faces continued ecological destruction and intensified community conflicts. As Okumu emphasized, transparent governance and meaningful community participation are critical. “With currently poor public participation, rehabilitation work rarely follows in Kenya’s land-based sand mining projects,” he said, underscoring the critical need for reform.
Research across Africa shows a consistent pattern: profits flow to powerful players, while environmental costs fall on the poorest. Labourers risk their lives in collapsing pits. Farmers and fishers lose the very resources they rely on.
“We are running out of time,” Okumu said. “Without immediate regional action, environmental damage from sand harvesting will become irreversible, devastating ecosystems and the communities dependent upon them.”
Questions to consider:
1. Why is sand so valuable?
2. How are countries like Kenya trying to stop the mining of sand?
3. Can you think of ways concrete and cement are used near you? Could you think of alternative materials?
HOUSTON — When Jefferson Early Learning Center first opened on the corner of a busy intersection in the city’s west side in 2022, school officials started receiving calls from irritated residents.
Residents wanted to know, “‘Why aren’t you cutting the lawn?’ ‘Why aren’t you keeping the grounds?’” recalled Hilda Rodriguez, the assistant superintendent of support services for the Alief Independent School District, home to Jefferson and nearly 50 other schools west of Houston.
Although Jefferson’s neighbors didn’t know it, the tall grass surrounding the early learning center was part of a larger strategy to mitigate climate-related issues in a county where a major flood occurs nearly every two years and the number of days at or above 95 degrees has increased significantly over the past 25 years.
In addition to choosing durable, impact-resistant materials to help the school building withstand natural disasters, Jefferson’s designers focused on the surrounding land. They chose to restore much of the ground’s nearly 20 acres to native prairie lands and wetlands, creating a habitat for more than 200 plant and animal species.
A sign at the front of Jefferson Early Learning Center teaches children about the surrounding land, which was designed to withstand floods and heat. Credit: Jackie Mader/The Hechinger Report
That sort of habitat is especially beneficial in an area vulnerable to climate change events such as the torrential rains that regularly hit the city, said Melissa Turnbaugh, senior principal at PBK Architects, which designed Jefferson. “By putting in native prairies and grasses, we can now actually absorb three to four times as much water as if we had manicured grass,” she said.
Experts who study early learning and climate science say there is growing demand for solutions like these to address challenges related to climate change, such as floods, fires and hotter temperatures. Angie Garling, a senior vice president at the Low Income Investment Fund, which runs initiatives to help build and improve early learning facilities, said that when her organization solicited applications from child care programs needing facilities improvements, the vast majority had to do with climate.
“They were asking for things like HVAC systems, misting systems, air filtration systems, shade structures, turf … because they couldn’t maintain their lawn anymore because the cost of water was too high,” said Garling. Due to the extreme level of climate-related need, LIIF recently partnered with other organizations to launch a program to help fund renovations for child care providers in Harris County, where Houston is located.
Alief officials have already noticed benefits from the unconventional use of the school land. During the school year, students can walk on trails that weave through the prairie, learning about insects, plants and flowers. The native plants can withstand Houston’s infamous summers, when the average temperature sits above 90 degrees. That saves work, time and money for Alief’s maintenance team, which rarely needs to mow or water the land at Jefferson.
Over the next few years, Turnbaugh, the architect, hopes the presence of the prairies and grassland — rather than concrete or other surfaces that are known to reflect heat — will pay long-term dividends in “an overall heat-challenged area.”
“I think we’re going to see that we’re actually cooling the neighborhood,” she said. “I think there’s not only good carbon capture, but we’re actually being good neighbors.”
Over time, Jefferson’s neighbors have seemed to realize that, said Alief’s Rodriguez. The calls, for the most part, have stopped. “Once they understood, it became very clear to them that this was purposeful.”
This story about climate change solutions was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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Colleges could lose access to federal financial aid or face penalties if their external service providers mislead their students, the U.S. Department of Education said Tuesday.
That includes companies that help colleges launch and run online programs.Employees of online program managers, or OPMs, cannot represent themselves as working directly for colleges, including by having email addresses or signatures implying they’re employed by those institutions, according to the guidance.
OPM employees are also not allowed to represent a virtual program as equivalent to a college’s campus-based version if they have dissimilar admissions criteria, completion rates, faculty qualifications or other substantive differences.And workers in recruiting or sales roles can’t call themselves an “academic counselor” or use a similar title if it doesn’t accurately describe their position.
The guidance — issued in the waning days of the Biden administration — aims to add more oversight to colleges’ relationships with OPMs.Student advocacy groups have long called for stricter rules for these companies, which often help colleges launch online programs in exchange for a significant cut of their tuition revenue.
Carolyn Fast, director of higher education policy at The Century Foundation, a left-leaning think tank, praised the letter Wednesday.
“Today’s move by the Department of Education is a step in the right direction, affirming what we already know: OPMs commonly mislead students about the quality of their online programs and that is illegal,” Fast said in a statement. “This action will deter misconduct by OPMs and their college partners and will help protect online college students from the risks posed by predatory OPMs.”
What led to the guidance?
The guidance comes after the Biden administration’s other plans to add oversight to the OPM industry faltered.
In early 2023, the administration said it would review guidance that allows colleges to enter tuition-sharing deals with OPMs that provide recruiting help — so long as it is part of a larger bundle of services.Despite asking for public comment on the matter, the Education Department has not updated or rescinded the 2011 guidance.
At the same time it announced the review, the administration issued separate guidance that would designate OPMs and other organizations as third-party servicers.The change would have subjected them to regulations that would give the department insight into their contracts with colleges.
However, the Education Department quickly delayed the guidance — and eventually rescinded it altogether — amid widespread criticism that it would create burdensome requirements for the higher education sector.
“We finally have clarity, in the last days of the administration, what they’re actually going to do with the guidance around [third-party servicers]” and OPMs, said Phil Hill, an ed tech consultant. “It’s just been this soap opera for 2 1/2 years now.”
However, Hill described Tuesday’s guidance as “petulant rulemaking” from the Biden administration.
“This Dear Colleague letter is attempting to go down to the level of telling colleges and universities and vendors what words are allowable and what aren’t,” Hill said. “And this went through zero process, zero attempt to get input from schools.”
That includes whether the guidance will hamstring colleges from running online programs or whether the policies address the issues they’re trying to solve, Hill said.
Stephanie Hall, senior director for higher education policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, took a different stance.
The Education Departmentreceived a “treasure trove of comments” when it sought public input in 2023 on policies that would have impacted the OPM sector, Hall argued.
“A lot was given over the past couple of years, and I see this guidance letter as just an extension or a conclusion of that process and not something new that didn’t take any input,” Hall said.
Whether the Trump administration will enforce the new guidance is another matter. But Hall said the guidance is likely to create changes either way.
“Schools are put on notice,” Hall said. “It’s something they take very seriously.”
The incoming Trump administration could also rescind the guidance altogether, though it’s unclear if OPM oversight is a priority issue to incoming officials.
“Are they aware of the impact this could have on online education, and is this going to be on their radars to take action and just immediately get rid of it?” Hill said.
The guidance could also draw legal challenges. The Biden administration’s now-rescinded 2023 guidance sparked a lawsuit from 2U, a prominent OPM.
“This is just waiting for a rescission or a lawsuit,” he said.
What’s in the guidance?
In Tuesday’s guidance, the Education Department listed several examples of statements that OPM employees could make that would likely qualify as misrepresentations. That includes OPM employees using email addresses or signatures that suggest they are directly employed by their college clients.
At least one prominent OPM has caught flak for using college email addresses — 2U. In 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported that the company used the “.edu” email addresses of its college clients in order to recruit prospective students into their online programs.
Hall noted that this is a widespread practice in the OPM industry.
“It’s wonderful that they’re addressing that and making it clear that that could be a substantial misrepresentation, and that schools would be held responsible for that,” she said.
A 2U spokesperson said that the company’s marketing and recruitment teams use university email addresses to reach out to prospective students and include transparent disclosures about their affiliation with the company.
2U is reviewing the Education Department’s letter to ensure the company remains aligned “with evolving regulatory guidance and best practices,” it said in a Thursday statement.
“Transparency has always been at the heart of our mission, and we remain steadfast in upholding this principle as we partner with universities to deliver transformative outcomes through high-quality online education,” 2U said.
Under the department’s new guidance, it could also be misleading for OPM recruiters or sales representatives to present themselves to students as academic counselors or other similar positions.
“Such practices create a high risk of misrepresentation since rewarding an individual based on sales indicates that individual’s role is not focused on impartially counseling prospective or enrolled students, but rather on securing a financial transaction,” the Education Department said.
The overall guidance focuses on disclosures to students, Hall said.
“The biggest change is really just disclosures, disclosures that are going to be coming from the contractor and overseen by the institution,” she said. “I don’t see this mocking the core of the actual online program itself, or its operations or its business model.”
The agency also warned against OPMs casting online programs as equivalent to their campus-based counterparts if they provide “distinct and substantively different” resources to students, including instructors, curricula and advisers.
In a footnote, the guidance cites a class-action lawsuit against the University of Southern California, which alleged that the institution presented its online master’s degree in social work as the same as a campus-based one, even though it outsourced “substantial aspects” of the virtual version to 2U.
2U was not named as a defendant in the case.
The company’s college partners retain full control over core functions of their degree programs, including tuition rates, faculty hiring, and admissions standards and decisions, a 2U spokesperson said. 2U’s clients also review and approve marketing materials for their programs, the spokesperson said.
However, USC and 2U announced in late 2023 plans to wind down their partnership on most of their online programs, including the social work master’s degree.2U continues to support a USC physical therapy program.
Project on Predatory Student Lending is helping represent the students in the lawsuit against the University of Southern California. In a statement Thursday, PPSL President and Executive Director Eileen Connor said she hoped the Trump administration would take the letter’s concerns seriously.
“This letter calls out just how dangerous the OPM industry is to our higher education system,” Connor said.
If you believe you can extract strategy from prior activities, I have something for you to try to make sense of here. This is a long compilation of tuition and fees at America’s Flagship and Land Grant institutions. If you are not quite sure about the distinction between those two types of institutions, you might want to read this first. TLDR: Land Grants were created by an act of congress, and for this purpose, flagships are whoever I say they are. There doesn’t seem to be a clear definition.
Further, for this visualization, I’ve only selected the first group of Land Grants, funded by the Morrill Act of 1862. They tend to be the arch rival of the Flagship, unless, of course, they’re the same institution.
Anyway, today I’m looking at tuition, something you’d think would be pretty simple. But there are at least four ways to measure this: Tuition, of course, but also tuition and required fees, and both are different for residents and nonresidents. Additionally, you can use those variables to create all sorts of interesting variables, like the gap between residents and nonresidents, the ratio of that gap to resident tuition, or even several ways to look at the role “required fees” change the tuition equation. All would be–in a perfect world–driven by strategy. I’m not sure I’d agree that such is the case.
Take a look and see if you agree.
There are five views here, each getting a little more complex. I know people are afraid to interact with these visualizations, but I promise you can’t break anything. So click away.
The first view (using the tabs across the top) compares state resident full-time, first-time, undergraduate tuition and required fees (yellow) to those for nonresidents (red bar). The black line shows the gap ratio. For instance, if resident tuition is $10,000 and nonresident tuition is $30,000, the gap is $20,000, and that is 2x the resident rate. The view defaults to the University of Michigan, but don’t cheat yourself: Us the filter at top left to pick any other school. If you’ve read this blog before, you know why Penn State is showing strange data. It’s not you, it’s IPEDS, so don’t ask.)
The second tab shows four data points explicitly, and more implicitly. This view starts with the University of Montana, but the control lets you change that. On top is resident tuition (purple) and resident tuition and fees (yellow). Notice how the gap between the two varies, suggesting the role of fees in the total cost of attendance. The bottom shows those figures for nonresidents.
The third view looks a little crazy. Choose a value to display at top left, and the visualization will rank all 77 institutions from highest to lowest. Use the control at top right to highlight an institution to put it in a national context. Hover over the dots for details in a popup box. If you want to look at a smaller set of institutions, you can do that, too, using the filters right above the chart. The fourth view is the exact same, but shows the actual values, rather than the rank. As always, hover for details.
Finally, the fifth view is a custom scatter plot: Choose the variable you want on the x-axis and the variable to plot it against on the y-axis. Then use the filters to limit the included institutions. As always, let me know what you find that’s interesting.
