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  • Shape the Future or Get Left Behind: The New Reality for Higher Ed Leaders 

    Shape the Future or Get Left Behind: The New Reality for Higher Ed Leaders 

    Higher education is fundamentally rewiring in ways most legacy playbooks can’t handle.

    Declining birth rates, growing skepticism about the value of a traditional degree and the rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence have exposed the fragility of many institutional models.

    The leaders who treat this as a reset moment to rebuild for the Modern Learner will be the ones who thrive in the rewired landscape.

    On a recent episode of the Job Ready podcast, EducationDynamics’ President of Enrollment Management Services, Greg Clayton, sat down with hosts Jeff Nelder and Charlie Nguyen to unpack what it will really take for institutions to thrive in this AI-powered, skills-driven market. Explore the key takeaways from that conversation and what they mean for any institution that intends to shape the future instead of being shaped by it.

    You either evolve, or you don’t exist anymore.

    Greg Clayton, President, Enrollment Management Services

    Why Reputation and Revenue Now Drive Enrollment Growth 

    Revenue and reputation now function as the pillars of institutional viability.  

    Revenue growth is no longer just about filling seats. Institutions need diversified pathways, new program models and market strategies built around how learners actually discover, evaluate and choose programs today. 

    Reputation can no longer be reduced to prestige markers like rankings or athletics. Modern Learners quickly filter out surface-level messaging and evaluate institutions based on cost, convenience and career outcomes. Institutions that lead with tradition instead of value are losing ground. 

    Increasingly, learners also look for clear proof that an institution can deliver real job readiness and connect education to concrete career trajectories. 

    In this reality, reputation is revenue. It is earned by demonstrating academic rigor, employment relevance and a credible return on investment. Institutions that make those elements impossible to miss in the market win attention, trust and enrollment. Institutions that don’t are training Modern Learners to look elsewhere. 

    It’s not simply, ‘am I a flagship public institution with a football team’… What we’re talking about is, does the institution have a reputation for delivery of excellence that meets academic standards but also creates job readiness in the marketplace?

    Greg Clayton, President, Enrollment Management Services

    How AI Is Reshaping Discovery in Higher Education Marketing 

    Artificial intelligence is not a priority for tomorrow. It’s already here and rewriting the rules of search, discovery and decision-making.  

     Today, a large majority of .edu-oriented Google searches surface an AI overview before traditional organic results. For many prospects, the first touchpoint with an institution is now mediated by an AI-generated summary, not the homepage. 

    When institutions are not actively managing how they appear in those AI overviews, they effectively cede their first impression to an algorithm trained on everyone else’s narrative. 

    This shift  changes how institutions are discovered. Program details, brand signals and reputation markers are being interpreted and condensed by AI systems, which means fragmented or inconsistent market signals are quickly reflected in fragmented AI outputs. 

    Because AI now influences how learners search, compare and choose, institutions need a new blueprint for understanding how brand, reputation and revenue actually work together.  

     EducationDynamics’ AI visibility pyramid provides that blueprint, making one thing clear: revenue is no longer a standalone goal, but the outcome of coordinated brand amplification and reputation building. When an institution’s digital footprint and third-party credibility are reinforced through AI density—the consistency with which an institution appears in AI-generated responses—revenue follows at the top. 

    In this environment, content, PR, advertising and enrollment operations can’t operate in isolation. Disconnected efforts dilute AI visibility and waste spend. Institutions that orchestrate these functions around a unified strategy for AI discoverability will be the ones that win attention and intent. 

    How the Enrollment Cliff Is Exposing Fragile Models 

    The wave of closures and mergers over the past decade is not random. It is the predictable outcome of models built for a world that no longer exists. 

    The most vulnerable institutions tend to be heavily tuition dependent, slow to diversify revenue and reluctant to make structural changes even as market conditions shift around them. 

    Flagship publics and highly endowed privates have more buffer. Many regional and tuition-dependent institutions do not. As demographics tighten and competition increases, legacy models that once felt stable are now under significant strain. 

    Many of the institutions struggling most today share a common pattern: delayed pivots to online and hybrid delivery, continued reliance on tuition as the primary revenue source and limited attention to Modern Learner expectations around flexibility and cost. Those dynamics are now being tested by the market. 

    By contrast, institutions that are evolving have accepted that yesterday’s playbook is no longer sufficient. They are actively redesigning their models around revenue diversification, program-market fit and measurable outcomes. They understand that the expectations of Modern Learners have fundamentally changed and that tomorrow’s challenges will not be solved with yesterday’s solutions.  

    How Student Behavior Is Reshaping Enrollment Strategy 

    Modern Learner behavior has moved beyond traditional age-based segments. Preferences for online, hybrid and flexible formats cut across generations. Convenience, outcomes and affordability matter just as much to working adults and career switchers as they do to recent high school graduates. 

    Modern Learners are the architects of their own educational journeys. They don’t wait to be recruited and they don’t stay loyal when processes are rigid and difficult to navigate. 

    This is especially true for the roughly 43 million Americans with some college and no credential. Many institutions have struggled to reach this audience due to higher acquisition costs, limited capital or an assumption that these learners fall outside their “core” market. 

    That assumption no longer aligns with how learners actually make decisions. Strategies built for 18–22-year-old residential students do not automatically translate to working adults balancing jobs, family and study. Reaching this audience requires rethinking acquisition channels, messaging, support models and program design. 

    Institutions that are successfully engaging this segment treat education as a lifelong relationship, not a one-time transaction. They are building pathways for learners to return to upskill and reskill over time, often in partnership with employers, creating recurring value for learners and recurring revenue for the institution. 

    Attracting traditional students into your institution does not work when it comes to tapping into the 43 million [Americans with] some college, no credential. It’s two completely different things.

    Greg Clayton, President, Enrollment Management Services

    Why Employer Alignment Now Shapes Reputation and Outcomes 

    Employer partnerships remain one of the most underleveraged assets in higher education. At the same time, employers consistently report difficulty finding candidates with applied, job-ready skills, particularly as AI reshapes roles and workflows across industries. 

    That disconnect is not a minor gap. It is a credibility problem. When programs are not aligned with the roles employers are hiring for, institutions are asking students to fund an education the market does not fully value. 

    High-impact employer partnerships go far beyond tuition discounts and logo swaps. Those are table stakes. The partnerships that move the needle help define the skills and competencies programs should teach, inform curriculum refresh cycles and create structured pathways into internships, apprenticeships and full-time roles. 

    When job readiness is deliberately designed into every program — including comfort with AI tools and workflows — institutions are better able to prove their value to both learners and employers. That, in turn, strengthens reputation, improves outcomes data and creates new opportunities for sustainable revenue. 

    What Institutions Are Rebuilding to Compete  

    Across the sector, a distinct pattern is emerging among institutions that are gaining ground. They aren’t optimizing at the edges. They’re reworking the systems that drive growth. 

    These institutions treat revenue as mission fuel, not a dirty word. They understand that without sustainable margin, they can’t expand access, invest in innovation or support students at the level the market now expects. 

    They make ROI explicit — in their marketing, advising and student experience. Cost, convenience and career outcomes are addressed head-on, not buried in fine print. Modern Learners can clearly see how a program connects to specific skills, roles and advancement paths. 

    Program portfolios are tightly aligned with workforce needs. Curricula are refreshed frequently. Skills and competencies are mapped to real job requirements, not just internal assumptions. Job readiness and AI literacy are integrated into programs, not offered as optional extras. 

    Brand, marketing and enrollment are orchestrated around AI-driven discovery. These institutions understand that AI is now a primary gateway to information, so they actively manage how they show up in AI overviews and search — not just in traditional rankings and media. 

    Employer partnerships are deep and operational. Employers help shape programs, provide work-based learning, and validate the skills graduates bring to the table. B2B and workforce channels become meaningful contributors to both impact and revenue. 

    Institutions design for Modern Learners across ages and life stages. They build flexible pathways, stackable credentials and re-entry points so learners can return to upskill and reskill over time. Education becomes an ongoing relationship, not a one-time transaction. 

    The common thread is not size, sector or selectivity. It is a willingness to challenge internal inertia, reject the status quo and align every part of the institution with how learners and employers actually behave today. In this market, safety often masquerades as stability — and stagnation carries real risk. 

    The Decision Facing Higher Ed Leadership 

    Taken together, these dynamics create a defining choice for higher education leaders: optimize a fading model or rebuild for an AI-powered, skills-driven market. There is no middle ground.  

    Those that clearly communicate ROI, align programs with workforce demand, build AI into their discovery strategy and use reputation to drive growth will define what comes next.  

    At EducationDynamics, we’re partnering with leaders ready to make that shift. For a deeper look at how and where to begin, listen to Greg Clayton’s full conversation on the Job Ready podcast. 

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  • As Feds Crack Down on Huge Ed Tech Data Breach, Parents and Students Left Out – The 74

    As Feds Crack Down on Huge Ed Tech Data Breach, Parents and Students Left Out – The 74

    School (in)Security is our biweekly briefing on the latest school safety news, vetted by Mark Keierleber. Subscribe here.

    The Federal Trade Commission announced this month plans to crack down on technology company Illuminate Education over a massive 2021 data breach. The move added to a long list of government actions against the firm since hackers broke into its systems and made off with the sensitive information of more than 10 million students.

    Three state attorneys general have also now imposed fines and security mandates on the company following allegations it misled customers about its cybersecurity safeguards and waited nearly two years to notify some school districts of the widespread data breach.

    The ones that haven’t made progress in their efforts to hold Illuminate accountable are parents and students.

    Their pursuit hit a wall in September when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed a federal lawsuit filed by the breach victims. The court, ruling on a case filed in California, found that the theft of their personal data — including grades, special education information and medical records — didn’t constitute a concrete harm.

    In the news

    Students walkout of East Mecklenburg High School in protest of U.S.Border Patrol operations targeting undocumented immigrants on Nov. 18 in Charlotte, North Carolina. (Getty Images)

    The latest in President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown: In many cities across the country, from New Orleans to Minneapolis, resisting federal immigration enforcement means keeping kids in school. | The 74

    • Trump’s mass deportation effort has had a particularly damaging effect on the child care industry, which is heavily reliant on immigrant preschool teachers — most of them working in the U.S. legally — who have found themselves “wracked by anxiety over possible encounters with ICE.” | The Associated Press
    • ‘Culture of fear’: Immigrant students across the country have increasingly found themselves targets of bullying since the beginning of Trump’s second term, according to a new survey of high school principals. | The Guardian

    A Kansas middle school will no longer assign Chromebooks to each student: Computers have had “a wonderful place in education,” the school’s principal said. But schools have “simply immersed students too much in technology.” | KWCH

    A Florida middle school went into lockdown after an automated threat detection system was triggered by a clarinet. A student was walking in the hallway “holding a musical instrument as if it were a weapon.” | News6

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    ‘Got what he deserved’: A California teacher has filed a federal First Amendment lawsuit against her school after she was suspended for a Facebook post calling right-wing political activist and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk a “propaganda-spewing racist misogynist” a day after he was murdered. | NBC News

    • In Florida, two teachers have filed separate First Amendment lawsuits after they were punished for social media posts critical of Kirk after his death. | First Coast News
    • Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott announced a partnership with Turning Point USA to create local chapters of the group at every high school campus in the state, vowing “meaningful disciplinary action” against any educators who stand in the way. | The Texas Tribune
    • Kirk’s wife, Erika Kirk, will field questions from “young evangelicals, prominent religious leaders and figures across the political spectrum” during a live town hall Saturday on CBS News moderated by its new editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss. | CBS News
    • ICYMI: The Trump administration’s First Amendment crackdown in the wake of the activist’s violent death has left student free speech on even shakier ground. | The 74
    Vice chair Robert Malone during a meeting of the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices on Dec. 5 (Getty Images)

    Following a shakeup in its ranks by vaccine skeptic and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee voted to overturn a decades-long recommendation that newborn babies be immunized for hepatitis B — a policy credited with decimating the highly contagious virus in infants. | The 74

    • A measles outbreak in South Carolina schools is accelerating, with some unvaccinated students in a second 21-day quarantine since the beginning of the academic year. | NBC News  

    A photo that circulated online depicted California high school students lying in the shape of a swastika on the grass of a football field. Chaos ensued. | The Guardian

    ‘It feels nasty. It’s gross.’: Controversy has come to a head at a California high school after an adult film producer rented out the campus gym for a raunchy livestream. “The first thing I see is a full-grown adult, an adult man wearing a baby costume and being fed milk from a baby bottle,” one student observer noted. | NBC San Diego

    Two Texas teenagers allegedly conspired to carry out a school shooting at their high school but the plot was thwarted after classmates reported text messages with their plans to school police. “Don’t come to school on Monday,” one of the messages warned. | KHOU

    ICYMI @The74

    To Ease Civil Rights Backlog, McMahon Orders Back Staff She Tried to Fire

    A GOP push to limit public borrowing by graduate students could exclude many nursing students, as well as those training for several other professions. (Glenn Beil/Getty Images)

    Nurses, Social Workers Face ‘Bad Situation’ Under Proposed Loan Limits

    In New Mexico, Grandparents Caring for Grandkids Can Also Get Free Child Care Now(Co-published with The 19th)

    Emotional Support


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  • Learning to debate is an important facet of education, but too often public school students are left out 

    Learning to debate is an important facet of education, but too often public school students are left out 

    Ever since I first stepped onto the debate stage, I have been passionate about speech and debate. For the last three of my high school years, I have competed and placed nationally at major tournaments in Dallas, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta and Las Vegas, among many others. Debate demands an incredible amount of research, preparation and practice, but those aren’t the biggest challenges for me.  

    I attend a public high school in California that lacks a formal debate program or coach, which has forced me to choose between quitting an activity I love and competing independently without any school support.  

    I chose the latter. And that means I prepare alone in the dark, navigate complex registration processes and, most importantly, pay hefty fees. 

    As many of us know, debate is an effective way to strengthen students’ comprehension, critical thinking and presentation skills. Debate allows students to explore ideas in a myriad of topics, from biotechnology to nuclear proliferation​​​​, and find their unique passions and interests. 

    Yet for many students, a lack of school support is a major entry barrier. It has turned debate into another private-school-dominated space, where private-school students receive access to higher quality research and on-the-spot coaching on argument structure and prose, like a football coach adjusting strategy on the sidelines. Additionally, most prestigious tournaments in the U.S. prohibit non-school-affiliated debaters like me from competing altogether.  

    Related: A lot goes on in classrooms from kindergarten to high school. Keep up with our free weekly newsletter on K-12 education.  

    These circumstances de facto prevent lower-income debaters from becoming successful in the activity. And that is why I believe that all schools should incorporate speech and debate classes into their core curriculums. Existing history and English teachers could act as debate coaches, as they do in many private schools. School districts could even combine programs across high schools to save resources while expanding access (Mountain View High School and Los Altos High School in California have pursued this strategy).  

    Over the past two decades, the debate community has engaged in efforts to democratize access to speech and debate through the creation of new formats (for example, public forum), local debate associations and urban debate leagues, among others.  

    However, many of these initiatives haven’t been successful. These newer formats, initially intended to lessen the research burden on debaters, have shifted toward emphasizing strict evidence standards and complex debate jargon. This shift has made debate less, not more, accessible, and led to more students from private schools — who were quickly able to ​​​​out-prepare those from public​​ schools — entering and dominating the competition.  

    Local debate associations and​​​​ competitive leagues for neighboring schools have provided more students with opportunities to participate. Still, debate via these organizations is limited, as they don’t provide direct coaching to member schools or rigorous opportunities for students, and prohibit certain students and programs from competing.  

    Similarly, urban debate leagues (for example, the Los Angeles Metropolitan ​​​​Debate League) have been incredibly successful in expanding debate access to lower-income and minority students; however, these programs are concentrated in major metropolitan cities, face opposition from some school districts and rely on donor funding, which can be uncertain.  

    In my debate rounds, I have analyzed pressing social problems such as global warming and economic inequality through a policymaking lens; in some rounds I defended increased wealth taxes, and in others I argued against bans on fossil fuels. Without debate, I wouldn’t be so conscious of the issues in my community. Now, as I enter college, I’m looking forward to continuing debate and leveraging my skills to fight for change.  

    Related: High school students find common ground on the debate stage 

    Speaking of college, in the competition for admission to the most selective colleges, extracurricular involvement can be a deciding factor, and debate is an excellent way to stand out, at least for those students with proper support.  

    However, when students from rural and low-income communities lack access to the same opportunities as students from more metropolitan and higher-income communities, we risk exacerbating the educational achievement gap to our collective detriment.  

    In the meantime, debate tournaments should reduce entry barriers for nontraditional debaters and for students from public schools without coaches and extra support.  

    Without these initiatives, too many rural and low-income students will be excluded from an amazing activity, one that is especially important in today’s polarizing and divisive climate.  

    Aayush Gandhi is a student at Dublin High School. He is an avid writer and nationally ranked Lincoln-Douglas debater.  

    Contact the opinion editor at [email protected].  

    This story about debate programs was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.  

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

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  • Left Forum: Critically Understanding Capitalism (Richard Wolff)

    Left Forum: Critically Understanding Capitalism (Richard Wolff)

     

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  • Why gen-Z men are turning far right and women far left (Money & Macro-Dr. Joeri Schasfoort)

    Why gen-Z men are turning far right and women far left (Money & Macro-Dr. Joeri Schasfoort)







    Higher Education Inquirer : Why gen-Z men are turning far right and women far left (Money & Macro-Dr. Joeri Schasfoort)




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  • Legal defense fund will seek to fill gap left by OCR reduction

    Legal defense fund will seek to fill gap left by OCR reduction

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    Education attorneys are set to launch a new organization by fall 2025 that would defend students’ civil rights in court and also track and report civil rights data. The effort, according to its founding nonprofit, aims to fill the gap left by the Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education and its civil rights enforcement arm. 

    The Public Education Defense Fund will be launched by the National Center for Youth Law, which advocates for educational equity among other youth-related issues. It will contract with former Office for Civil Rights attorneys. 

    “At a time when civil rights protections for students are under unprecedented attack, preserving those rights is not negotiable — it’s vital,” said Johnathan Smith, chief of staff and general counsel at NCYL. “We can’t stand by while the federal government abandons its responsibility to uphold the basic rights of children and young people in this country.”

    As part of the administration’s efforts to “end bureaucratic bloat” and send educational control to the states, U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon laid off half of the Education Department’s staff as part of what she called the agency’s “final mission.” The move was followed by an executive order from President Donald Trump calling for the department to be shut down to “the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.”

    The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights took a major blow, with the department shuttering seven of the 12 regional offices that were in charge of more than half of the nation’s open civil rights cases. Over 200 OCR employees were laid off as part of the reduction in force.

    Under the Biden administration, those employees carried a load of more than 40 cases per person. Attorneys fired as part of the reduction in force were in charge of investigating civil rights complaints related to discrimination and harassment in schools, as well as overseeing resolution agreements with school districts. These agreements guide the school systems involved in making policy changes to improve educational access, especially for historically marginalized students.

    Prior to the announcement of the Public Education Defense Fund, NCYL filed a lawsuit against the Education Department in March to challenge the changes at the OCR. The lawsuit said the civil rights enforcement arm “stopped investigating complaints from the public based on race or sex discrimination, it cherry-picked and, on its own initiative, began targeted investigations into purported discrimination against white and cisgender students.”

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  • Redistribution doesn’t work when there’s nothing left to redistribute

    Redistribution doesn’t work when there’s nothing left to redistribute

    Too many people across our country do not get the chance to succeed.

    So the government is committed to supporting the aspiration of every person who meets the requirements and wants to go to university or pursue an apprenticeship, regardless of their background, where they live and their personal circumstances.

    Those aren’t my words – they’re the words of the House of Commons’ HE supply teacher Janet Daby, who answers for actual (Lords) minister Jacqui Smith whenever a question comes up about universities or students.

    This answer is a typical one – in which she notes that in the summer, the department (for education) will set out its plan for HE reform and that it will expect providers to play an “even stronger” role in improving access and outcomes for all disadvantaged students.

    Specifically on financial support:

    Whilst many HE providers have demonstrated positive examples of widening access, including targeted outreach and bursaries, we want to see the sector go further.

    Back in 2014, partly to get “top-up fees” through Parliament, then secretary of state Charles Clarke announced that a new Office for Fair Access (OFFA) would be created – and that it would require universities to offer up some of their additional fee income in bursaries.

    Assuming that a proportion of student financial support should come partly via universities’ own budgets has always created a tension – between those who say that local decision making (aka institutional autonomy) is better at designing schemes that get the money to where it’s really needed, and those that argue that redistributing fee income within a provider rather than across the country means that financial support ends up being based not on need, but on the number of other students at your university that need it.

    We used to be able to see that clearly. OfFA used to track how many “OfFA countable” students each provider had and their spending on financial support, and it would generally show that providers doing the most for access tended to have the least to spend per student.

    Over time, direct student financial support declined in popularity. Research questioned bursaries’ impact on applications (unsurprising given how hard it was to find information on them), and it tended to struggle to find retention benefits from 2006-2011 – findings that then got extrapolated far beyond their timeframe.

    Pressure to demonstrate impact led providers to focus on entry and completion metrics rather than the experience students were having as a result. That seemed less critical in the mid-2010s when inflation was low and maintenance loans were cranked up to hide the fact that grants were eliminated. Students living at home (more likely from widening participation backgrounds) also got relatively generous maintenance support compared to their costs.

    Eventually, provider-level reporting on student financial support pretty much disappeared as the Office for Students started to emphasise outcomes over experience or spending transparency.

    But with maintenance support over the past few years some distance from inflation, and the income thresholds over which parents are expected to top up stuck at the level they were set at in the year that Madeleine McCann went missing (18 whole years ago), we really do need some sense of how the mix is panning out.

    So to help us to understand what’s been going on, for the fourth year running we’ve managed to extract some data out of OfS via an FOI request.

    The data

    Ever since the days of the Office for Fair Access (OFFA), HESA has collected data on the amounts of student financial support, and the number of students that helps, for each university in England – and here we have that data over the past few years.

    It covers four different types of spend on student financial support:

    • Cash: This covers any bursary/scholarship/award that is paid to students, where there is no restriction on the use of the award
    • Near cash: This includes any voucher schemes or prepaid cards awarded to students where there are defined outlets or services for which the voucher/card can be used
    • Accommodation discounts: This includes discounted accommodation in university halls / residences
    • Other: This includes all in-kind or cash support that is not included in the above categories and includes, but is not limited to, travel costs, laboratory costs, printer credits, equipment paid for, subsidised field trips and subsidised meal costs

    Some caveats: We remain less than 100 per cent convinced about the data quality, this doesn’t tell us how much money is going to disadvantaged students specifically, it doesn’t tell us about need (and the extent to which need is being met), I’ve yanked out most of what we used to call alternative providers for comparison purposes, and it only covers home domiciled undergraduates (and below, in terms of level of study).

    But it is, nevertheless, fascinating. Here’s the numbers for each provider in England:

    [Full Screen]

    If we nationally just look at cash help, in 2023/24 just over £496m went to just under 311k students – a spend per head of £1,598 – very slightly above last year’s £1,464 per head.

    But dive a little deeper and you find astonishing disparities. In the Russell Group the £ per head was £2,362 – about £40 up on the previous year. Across Million+ providers that figure was £726 – just £4 more than 2 years ago.

    Interestingly, per student helped, the Russell Group spent the same in cash help per student as it did in 2019. Maybe inflation doesn’t apply in elite universities, or maybe they’re getting worse at recruiting those on low incomes. Meanwhile the cash spend per student helped across Million+ universities has almost halved from £1,309 in 2019/20.

    Clearly all universities are under financial pressure – but what we see is almost certainly an artefact of redistributing fee income around a provider rather than around a country, and it appears to result in manifest unfairness.

    Even if we don’t adjust for inflation, spend per student helped has fallen for 45 universities between 2022/23 and 2023/24, and since 2019, it’s fallen for 56 universities. If we do apply inflation (CPI), only five are beating their 2019 SPH. No wonder students are struggling to come to campus.

    Some may say that it might be better just to look at what’s been going on under the auspices of formal, declarable access and participation work. HESA finance data now includes a look at expenditure – but not the number of students that expenditure covers, nor the total amounts invested pre-pandemic, and nor the amounts allocated in premium funding, all of which would aid meaningful comparison.

    Moving money around

    I tend, in general, to be a fan of redistribution and cross-subsidy. It can help reduce economic inequality, promote social stability, and ensure that everyone has access to basic necessities. It reflects a commitment to fairness and the idea that a society should care for all its members.

    As such, the logical bit of my brian never had much of a problem with the Charles Clarke/OFFA expectation – it was at least aimed at ensuring that everyone got to have a decent experience at university.

    But the redistributive effects of moving money around a provider when some providers (which already tend to be the richest) have fewer poor kids to spend it on never really added up.

    If you really wanted the system to be fairer, and for the most money to reach those who need it most, you might start by acting regionally. I doubt that John Blake’s regional partnership structures – which will involve cohort-level renewal for Access and Participation Plans will actually go as far as expecting providers in a region to pool their bursary or hardship spend – but there’s a very good logical case for that kind of approach.

    When students at Salford are getting £358 each in cash help while their neighbours at the University of Manchester are getting £1,829, there’s a very strong case for pooling the money.

    But even if that was to happen, beware the regional agglomeration effects. The region with the lowest higher education participation rate in the UK is the North East of England, at 33.4 per cent. London, with its 63 per cent rate, ought to be giving some of its spend on student financial support away to support participation up North.

    And once you’re there, you (re)realise what many said at the time of the Clarke announcement – that moving money around a university when participation in universities is so unequal to start with is no way to run a fair system.

    And even more importantly, it’s not fair on fee-paying students. When the assumption was that fees were a small part of the overall funding mix, we could say to students that the state’s contribution would be focussed more on those in need.

    Even with fees at £9,000, the redistributive effects of some paying much more than that through interest of RPI+3% and some much less via the repayment threshold and the cut-off – all while funding a moderately comfortable financial support system for all – was some sort of egalitarianism in action.

    But once the subsidy slips away, and students are expected to pay back almost all of the debt they incur, we end up expecting their personal debt to do what the state ought to do. And while it’s one thing for your fees to be spent subsidising other students at your own university, it would be quite another for them to be spent subsidising those at others in your region, or even around the UK.

    Then add in the fact that in UUK’s cuts survey, just under half of universities (49 per cent) say they may still need to cut hardship funding and 59 per cent say they may need to cut bursaries. Even if some sort of tougher APP regime was to find a way to stop that, that just means that wider cuts will fall on everyone – and so for some students, less and less of their actual contribution will end up being spent on their actual education.

    It turns out that the progressive taxation – ensuring that those with higher incomes contribute a larger share of their earnings to public services – is the much better way to promote economic fairness and reduce income inequality. Who knew?

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  • Digital Darwinism in Higher Ed: Adapt Your Marketing for AI — or Get Left Behind [Webinar]

    Digital Darwinism in Higher Ed: Adapt Your Marketing for AI — or Get Left Behind [Webinar]

    Your students are already running to AI for answers. The only question is — what’s it saying about your institution? More importantly, are you in the conversation or being left out? If you’re not actively shaping how your school shows up in AI-driven search and decision-making platforms, you’re not just invisible — you’re irrelevant.  

    Digital Darwinism in Higher Ed:
    Adapt Your Marketing for AI — or Get Left Behind
    Date    : May 29, 2025
    Time: 2:00 p.m. ET / 1:00 p.m. CT

    In this webinar, Collegis Education’s Ashley Nicklay, Sr. Director of Marketing, and Jessica Summers, Director of Web Strategy, will unpack what “AI-ready” really means for higher ed marketing and enrollment leaders. We’ll explore how generative AI influences the student journey from search to selection, why most websites and content strategies are falling short, and what forward-thinking institutions are doing to lead the algorithm, rather than get buried by it. 

    This isn’t just about better SEO or smarter ads. It’s about understanding how AI evaluates your institution — and making sure you’re feeding it the right data, signals, and story to stay in the game.  

    What You’ll Learn 

    • How AI impacts the early stages of the enrollment journey: Understand how tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews influence what students see when exploring colleges.  
    • Why AI prompt bias is real — and how to beat it: Learn how content, structured data and reputation shape AI responses. 
    • What AI actually sees when it looks at your website (and what it may miss): Explore how site structure, clarity and technical markup shape what AI-based tools can find and summarize – and what they may overlook.  
    • What it really means to have an AI-optimized website: We’ll show you our checklist of what your .edu needs to show up in AI-generated answers.  
    • How to future-proof your marketing model in an AI-driven search landscape: Assess your current channels and content strategy for resilience as search becomes more conversational and less click-based.  

    Future-Ready Starts Here: Secure Your Spot 

    The institutions that will thrive tomorrow are learning how to market to machines today. Reserve your seat and find out what it takes to survive the AI era of higher ed marketing. 

    Complete the form on the right to reserve your spot.

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  • Pell Grant Dollars Are Left Unclaimed: What That Means for Students and States

    Pell Grant Dollars Are Left Unclaimed: What That Means for Students and States

    Title: Pell Dollars Left on the Table

    Authors: Louisa Woodhouse and Bill DeBaun

    Source: National College Attainment Network

    Pell Grants have long supported low-income students as they pursue higher education, increasing the financial capabilities and academic opportunities afforded to students. However, receiving federal financial aid through Pell Grants is dependent on filing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), which can serve as a barrier to students.

    The National College Attainment Network (NCAN) has published a report on the unclaimed Pell Grants left on the table by high school graduates. Approximately 830,000 Pell Grant-eligible students did not complete FAFSA in the 2024 cycle, resulting in nearly $4.4 billion in unclaimed Pell Grant awards. These unclaimed funds are valuable to both students and states, with the ability to further the educational pursuits of low-income students and strengthen state economies.

    NCAN has run reports detailing the value of unclaimed Pell Grants over the past four years. Typically, nearly 60 percent of high school graduates complete the FAFSA by June 30, with completion rates trailing off markedly as students begin their summer.

    However, due to the technical challenges and delayed launch of FAFSA that occurred in the 2024 cycle, by the end of June, only 50 percent of high school graduates had completed the form. By August 30, 57 percent of students had filed the FAFSA, decreasing the amount of financial aid left on the table. The implications are clear: hindrance to the financial aid application process, whether that be through technical difficulties, decreased assistance, or short staffing, can result in many students losing access to Pell Grant funds.

    The impact of lower FAFSA completion rates, and therefore more unclaimed Pell Grants, is not felt exclusively by students but by states as well. In 2024, students in California and Texas each left nearly $550 million in Pell Grant awards unclaimed. While these states lose the most when FAFSA completion rates are low, they also stand to gain the most if completion rates increase.

    Analysis from NCAN finds that if FAFSA completion rates had increased by an additional 10 percentage points this year, California would have seen a $145 million increase in Pell Grant awards while Texas would have received an additional $130 million. The additional federal aid could translate into more students attending postsecondary institutions, filling workforce gaps and strengthening the states’ economies.

    In establishing the significance of increasing FAFSA filing rates for low-income students, NCAN offers commentary on how states can better support students, especially in the wake of potential policy changes directed at higher education. States can fund FAFSA completion efforts, providing additional in-school and online resources for students to access when filing. Additionally, FAFSA data sharing among states may enable high school counselors and local college access partners to better target students that could benefit from additional assistance.

    To read more about unclaimed Pell Grants and the role states can play on bolstering FAFSA completion rates, click here.

    —Julia Napier

    If you have any questions or comments about this blog post, please contact us.

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  • Balls to left, Willetts to the right, creates an industrial strategy with a gaping hole for universities

    Balls to left, Willetts to the right, creates an industrial strategy with a gaping hole for universities

    Denizens of public service reform former Shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls, and former Universities Minister, David Willetts, have reignited the debates of 00s with new arguments on when government should intervene in the economy.

    In two recent papers, one authored by Willetts alone, and one by Dan Turner, Huw Spencer, Julia Pamilih, Vidit Doshi, and Ed Balls, two different versions of industrial strategies emerge. For Willetts, taking on the industrial strategy directly, there is a world of gently incentivising universities to align their fundamentals with an industrial strategy which picks some good areas to invest in if not winners . For Balls, addressing the industrial strategy via Bidenomics, there is a bazooka of more funding, support, and investment, to break the economy from its malaise, with far more far-reaching consequences for universities.

    Survivor

    Balls and Willetts are interesting messengers for new industrial policy. Back in 2014 Balls delivered a speech to London Business School entitled Beyond the Third Way. In it he argued that

    After the debacle of British Leyland in the 1970s, ‘industrial policy’ have been dirty words in Britain. Some remain cautious about the politics of ‘picking winners’ – but that misses the lesson of the 1970s. Back then, it was the industrial losers who did the picking and good money was poured after bad.

    His argument, albeit oddly worded, was that industrial strategies had focussed on the industries that were already in terminal decline. For him, industrial strategies had not been maps to the future but buckets to bailout the important but failing industries of the past.

    Willetts was even more pugnacious still. Back in 2013 he was not willing to cede that the government should back winners, that would be too much like the economic blunders of the 1980s, but that

    Focusing on R&D and on particular technologies is not the same as picking winners, which notoriously became losers picking the pockets of tax payers. It is not backing particular businesses. Instead we are focusing on big general purpose technologies. Each one has implications potentially so significant that they stretch way beyond any one particular industrial sector. Information Technology has transformed retailing for example. Satellite services could deliver precision agriculture.

    At the time, Balls gave barely a mention to universities beyond noting that the UK’s educated workforce struggled to find jobs to meet their qualifications. Willetts, in a style familiar to anyone following industrial policy, mentioned universities mostly (albeit not exclusively) as tools to promote wider policy objectives not instruments in their own right.

    Fast forward a decade or so and a lot has changed.

    Frosted tips

    In his latest piece for the Resolution Foundation, How to do industrial strategy, Willetts has a clear view of what an industrial strategy is. It’s not about picking winners but about picking some obvious areas of strength for investment while freeing up some capacity to allow industries to strike their own sector deals. The strategy should not necessarily be about new money but about marshalling resources around industries for example opening up supply chains, easing procurement routes, and management training.

    It is in Willetts’ views of the relationships between industrial strategy and higher education where things get really interesting. He is cognisant of the sometime disconnect between university education and skills needs and writes that

    The University of Sunderland runs automotive engineering course directly serving the automotive facilities nearby. Some universities include in their degree programmes elements specifically designed with local business requirements in mind. The Government’s new entity, Skills England, should help promote these.

    The Vice Chancellor of the University of Sunderland is now of course the Vice Chair of Skills England. However, it is interesting that for all of the fanfare of skills England the level of intervention he proposes is to promote these industrial links. He does not advocate for greater interventions by government nor employers. He promotes the idea of kitemarks for programmes aligned to industrial priorities, more funding competitions for business schools, and Centres for Doctoral Training co-funded with business.

    It is not surprising that the man who invented much of the current higher education architecture does not call for its complete reform but his proposals seem modest given the ongoing economic collapse the country is enduring.

    However, Willetts is perturbed by absence of universities from the industrial strategy green paper which he describes as “very odd”. His advice here is to encourage greater incubation of university start-ups, remove the numbers of spin-outs as a measure of success to discourage their premature release, and get universities to reduce their stakes in spin-outs. Again, all entirely sensible but not very large for the enormous challenges ahead. His more radical idea, innovation vouchers to support businesses to use university expertise, is a rehash of ideas that have been used across the UK including in Dundee to bring together businesses and academics around gaming. The trick is not to issue these vouchers generally but to target them at businesses with latent potential, where there are regional strengths, and commensurate university expertise.

    Destiny’s Child

    And this opens up a fundamental tension which Balls’ paper tries to address. Whether an industrial strategy is primarily about economic growth of the country or regions, investment in leading or latent assets, and how far the government should intervene. In a co authored paper, What should the UK learn from Bidenomics, Balls et al imagine the forthcoming industrial strategy as an opportunity to ruthlessly focus on the things that are strategic for the future of the UK’s economy. As they conclude in their paper

    With clear goals in place, the toolkit of the Industrial Strategy should then seek to minimise the risk of capture by incumbent firms. That means using rules-based mechanisms like tax credits to realise clear growth objectives, crowding in private investment through public incentives, while resisting the pressure to reduce competition or favour incumbents.

    Their view is the goal is not to ease the path for winners but to pick a few priority areas and support them with general levers of support that would benefit a range of firms. One of the lessons from Bidenomics is that their industrial policy succeeded on the basis that it was massive with $108bn of investment in energy deals alone. Balls and his co-authors highlight the need to support and expand areas of existing economic strength, this includes universities and spending outside of the golden triangle.

    On the face of it the Balls proposition is more appealing. The basis of his argument would seem to be that if the government simultaneously invests in its leading assets while encouraging competition it can grab the best of both worlds. A more dynamic economy with more funding for the leading assets. The challenge is, as the paper acknowledges, the economic success of Bidenomics was also predicated on an appetite to allow creative destruction. Allowing zombie firms to die and workers to be made redundant and moved to more productive parts of the economy in order for the economy to grow. The paper refers to labour market churn and new business formation as the secret sauce “which appears to have contributed to higher productivity, stronger job creation, and faster growth.”

    Blockbuster

    Any decision ever to make any public investment implies winners and losers. The real debate is the extent to which the government should back those winners.

    The Willetts view of the world would see universities broadly fulfilling the same role they do now with a bit of new funding for collaboration. The more challenging view by Balls and his colleagues is that economic dynamism is inherently linked to creating and destroying more business and labour market churn. This would not only mean that universities would have to adapt more rapidly in their kinds of labour market work, skills training, CPD, KTPs and so on. It would also mean that they may also find themselves in urgent need of yet another political narrative, levelling up, securonomics, whatever next, in an ever changing policy landscape.

    The challenge that has yet to be fixed in any industrial strategy is regional inequality. Even America with all of its economic levers to pull still has many places that have been “hollowed out” with a mixed record of turning things round through public investment. Any university that can play a distinct role in this puzzle is likely not only to win the favour of the government but solve one of the biggest impediments to the UK’s productivity, and by proxy the quality of life of its people.

    The Balls view of industrial strategy as a tool for economic dynamism, the Willetts view of industrial strategy as a tool for reorientating government and reorganising bits of the economy, may both lose out to a Chancellor who may feel she has little fiscal headroom to make dramatic economic interventions. For universities, the opportunity is to define their role in the government’s central economic policy, if they do not their role will be defined for them.

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