Tag: News

U.K. Invests $40M to Attract International Researchers

The Royal Society has announced a $40 million fund designed to attract global research talent to the U.K.

The Faraday Fellowship “accelerated international route” will provide up to $5.4 million per academic or group willing to relocate to British universities and research institutes, over a period of five to 10 years. The society said that it would be willing to consider larger awards “in exceptional circumstances.”

The announcement comes as countries around the world vie to attract leading scholars who are considering fleeing the U.S. in protest of President Donald Trump’s attacks on research funding and diversity initiatives.

Adrian Smith, president of the Royal Society, said that international science was “in a state of flux with some of the certainties of the postwar era now under question.

“With funding streams and academic freedom coming under threat, the best scientific talent will be looking for stability. The U.K. can be at the front of the queue in attracting that talent,” Smith said.

“Our new opportunity, combined with schemes from [UK Research and Innovation] and the Royal Academy of Engineering, is a step in the right direction.”

The society said that two-thirds of the initiative’s budget would come from the Faraday Discovery Fellowship Fund, part of a $335 million government endowment set aside in 2023 to support attempts to attract midcareer academics to the U.K. The society will top this up with $13.4 million of its own, enabling the plan to be widened to cover researchers at other career stages.

Full eligibility criteria will be published by the end of June.

The announcement follows the European Union’s unveiling of a $565 million fund to attract researchers, including doubling to $2.25 million the maximum grant available to those arriving from outside the bloc to set up a laboratory or research team.

Individual European countries and universities have also launched initiatives to attract international researchers following Trump’s election, including a $9.8 million scheme in Norway. France’s University of Aix-Marseille is providing nearly $17 million in grants for those seeking “scientific asylum” from the U.S.

Leading scientists have been calling on the U.K. to launch a similar initiative. However, the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee has warned that such attempts could be stymied by U.K. immigration policies, including high visa and health-care costs.

Source link

May 23, 2025
Calif. Community Colleges Ramp Up Battle Against the Bots

Faced with an ongoing swell of fraudulent applications and enrollments, the California Community College system is hotly debating what to do next to win their battle against bot “students” for good.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the 116-college system has been haunted by ghost students—impostors who enroll online, apply for financial aid and disappear with the funds. System administrators say the issue arose in the last five years, with fraudsters eager to access federal aid made available to students. The growth of online education and spread of AI has exacerbated the problem, making it easier for bots to apply in droves. The issue has put strain on professors and staff who have had to flag and purge thousands of bots from online courses and led to the loss of millions of dollars of student aid.

System leaders brought a proposal before the Board of Governors in a meeting Tuesday, asking them to consider a “nominal” student fee to help pay for artificial intelligence tools and other defenses against the bots. After more than two hours of discussion, board members opted against taking steps to charge a fee. But the board didn’t reject the idea outright; instead they asked system staff to further “explore” it and unanimously voted in favor of other recommendations. Notably, the system now has approval to require an identity-verification process for all applicants and to ramp up use of high-tech and AI tools to combat the issue.

Over the past year alone, the system found 31.4 percent of applications were fraudulent, system officials said. Ghost students have stolen about $10 million in federal financial aid and $3 million in state and local aid in the past year, according to system officials. That’s an escalation from prior years; campus reports obtained by Cal Matters revealed that between September 2021 and January 2024, fraudsters took off with $5 million in federal aid and $1.5 million in state and local aid.

Those figures have alarmed state lawmakers. Last month, nine Republican members of Congress from California sent a letter to Education Secretary Linda McMahon and Attorney General Pam Bondi calling for a federal investigation into the fraud issue. State lawmakers, Republicans and Democrats alike, have since demanded a state audit of the system’s fraud challenges.

Chris Ferguson, executive vice chancellor of the California Community College system, told Inside Higher Ed that stolen funds account for “about two-tenths of a percent” of the several billion dollars of aid flowing into the colleges, “well below the threshold that would normally trigger federal investigations of financial aid fraud,” he said. He also emphasized that the system’s current tools for fraud detection capture about 85 percent of false applications.

At the beginning of last year, the system rolled out a new identity verification process as a part of applications, called ID.me. But the process was optional for community college districts until the Board of Governors voted to require it at this week’s meeting.

Ferguson would like to see the share of fraudulent cases caught—and prevented—approach 100 percent, partly by scaling AI tools already in use on some campuses. But advancing those efforts could cost up to $10 million, Ferguson estimated, which is why administrators requested the authority to charge a student fee in “the low tens of dollars.”

The goal of the fee would be to “both support application review costs and deter fraudulent application submissions,” according to the proposal.

James Todd, assistant vice chancellor of the California Community College system, told Inside Higher Ed that the system is trying to prevent fake students from continuing to take away resources from real students. He said campus employees have had to pivot from their day-to-day, student-facing work to focus their attention on identifying bots. Meanwhile, ghost students’ registrations are crowding out actual students from classes they need for their programs.

“Our entire system is based on increasing equitable access for students,” Todd said. “Students who are already on a degree or certificate path are sometimes finding barriers to being able to enroll in a class or a class being canceled because colleges have found that it’s all enrolled with fraudulent students. That is what we’re dealing with on an everyday basis across our campuses.”

But students came out in force at the Board of Governors meeting to express their opposition to the fee. Many students, from campuses across the system, acknowledged the importance of rooting out ghost students but also shared concerns that an additional charge, even if small, could pose a financial barrier for low-income students.

The fee “is someone’s food, is someone’s gas,” Daniela Romo, president of the Associated Students of Delta College at San Joaquin Delta College, told the board. “But it’s also a message to other people that there is some barrier to entry … I think that the beauty of the California Community College system is that it accepts everybody with open arms.”

A National Issue

While California community colleges have a particularly stubborn bot problem, student aid fraud isn’t new or isolated to the system.

The Office of Inspector General at the federal Department of Education has been working for years to raise national awareness about financial aid fraud rings. For example, OIG investigations revealed $10 million worth of student aid fraud in Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina and other states, according to a 2021 report.

Community colleges tend to be the most vulnerable to these types of scams because of their open-access mission, said Jill Desjean, director of policy analysis at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. They intentionally make it easy for students to apply, unlike more selective universities, and they’re low-cost, or even no cost in states with free college programs. That means a fraudulent student who feigned eligibility for the Pell Grant could pay minimal tuition and pocket the rest of the aid money intended for other educational expenses like textbooks and transportation.

“Because of their very nature of being welcoming to all, [community colleges] invite this kind of opportunity for fraud,” Desjean said.

She emphasized that there are guardrails in place to prevent people from exploiting the financial aid system, like the FAFSA verification process, which requires some students to verify information on their financial aid applications. The Department of Education also flags potentially fraudulent behavior, like enrolling and withdrawing multiple times at different nearby institutions.

But there’s a difficult balance to strike between stopping fraudsters and making the financial aid process so burdensome that real students are deterred from applying, she said.

Adu Love, a student member of the Board of Governors, raised similar concerns about the community college system’s verification process, now required for all applicants. She told the board she worries extra steps could make applying more difficult for homeless, incarcerated or undocumented students, who might lack some of the necessary documentation. She herself drove five hours to Moorpark College to verify her identity because she was unable to use ID.me, she said.

“Our responsibility is not just to stop fraud, but it’s also to maintain the access we have as a system while we do it,” she told board members.

Using AI to Fight AI?

Earlier in the Board of Governors meeting, some community college leaders detailed the stress fraudulent applications have put on their campuses and the steps they’ve taken to resolve the issue.

Jeannie G. Kim, president of Santiago Canyon College, told the board that her institution identified about 10,000 fraudulent students by employing various verification methods, including making phone calls to individual students.

“We had to actually take them out of our system, and when we did that, of course, our enrollment numbers … dropped tremendously,” Kim said. “But we needed to do it, because we needed to bring our real students in. That saved the day for our students … Our students were clamoring for these classes that they could not gain access to.”

Clearing out the false students made room for about 8,000 actual students to enroll.

Jory Hadsell, vice chancellor of technology for the Foothill–De Anza Community College District, told the Board of Governors that “waves” of fraudulent applications last year left admissions and financial aid personnel “overwhelmed and exhausted” as they sifted through thousands of suspect applications.

“Internal fraud tools were no longer keeping up with the speed and the sophistication of the threat that we were facing,” he said.

Now the Foothill–De Anza district and Santiago Canyon are part of a group of 48 colleges that have turned to artificial intelligence to flag potentially fraudulent applications—and they say it’s working.

Kim told board members that AI has been a game changer, helping her college catch bots at the application stage and keep them out of enrollments and wait lists.

The AI model reviews each application and gives it a “fraud score” indicating how likely it is to be fraudulent, along with an explanation of what factors triggered its suspicions. For example, the AI can detect whether lots of applications are coming from the same IP address.

The fraud problem “is controllable,” Kim said. “We have a 99 percent efficacy rate with the implementation that we have done” for a cost of less than $100,000.

Kiran Kodithala, CEO of N2N Services, which offers LightleapAI, the tool colleges are using, said at the meeting that the company processed roughly three million applications in the last eight months and prevented about 360,000 fraudsters “from defrauding taxpayers, stealing classes from students” and worrying campus leaders, helping them avoid “waking up in the middle of the night” fretting over whether they can trust their enrollment numbers.

These are the kinds of tools Ferguson wants to see expanded to more institutions.

“The more we can stop [fraud] at the application phase, the less you have to do on the enrollment front and … the less you have to do on the financial aid front,” he said.

Kim told the board that not every institution can use the same AI tools, because the bots used for fraud are too “smart”—they’ll quickly adapt if colleges aren’t using a diverse set of defenses. But she believes the entire system should be required to use some form of AI as part of their antifraud strategy, especially lower-resourced institutions that may not have the money or staffing to flag a swell of suspect applications on their own.

“We have a lot of small rural colleges, and those colleges cannot handle the kind of attack that we endured last fall,” she said. “If that happens to them, they are going to be in jeopardy.”

Source link

May 23, 2025
Four Things to Know About the House Budget Plan

After much back-and-forth and late-night dealing, House Republicans have passed a sweeping budget plan to cut spending and taxes that is moving on to the Senate—a significant milestone for legislation that seemed dead in the water a week ago amid concerns that the bill didn’t include deeper cuts.

The plan, called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, narrowly advanced Thursday morning by a one-vote margin. All Democrats opposed the legislation, arguing that the spending cuts would hurt the working class and vulnerable populations while raising the deficit and giving tax breaks to wealthy individuals.

Among other changes, the legislation would levy new taxes on colleges, require institutions to pay millions to the federal government, change how students pay for college and limit eligibility for the Pell Grant. In the lead-up to Thursday’s vote, higher education leaders warned that the proposal would make trying to attend and pay for college much more complicated and raise costs for those who do enroll. The bill does include some wins for colleges, institutional lobbyists say, but those don’t outweigh the negatives.

Republicans, who say the cuts are necessary, are using a legislative procedure known as reconciliation to advance the bill. That process allows lawmakers to fast-track the legislation and pass it with a simple majority of votes in both chambers. (Typically, the Senate requires 60 votes to cut off debate for a bill.)

“It’s time we stopped asking a factory worker in Michigan or a rancher in Texas to subsidize the student debt of a lawyer in Manhattan so colleges can continue to spike their tuition to whatever they want,” said Rep. Tim Walberg, a Michigan Republican and chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, in a statement. “By capping loan amounts and giving some financial responsibility to schools, this legislation addresses the root cause of high college costs and provides schools an incentive to deliver real value for students and taxpayers.”

With the measure now in the Senate’s hands and lawmakers eyeing a July 4 deadline, here’s what else you should know about the legislation that could reshape American higher education.

1. Students Set to Lose Pell Money

Many House committees had a hand in the legislation, but the proposals that will have the biggest impact on colleges are from the Committee on Education and the Workforce. The 103-page Student Success and Taxpayer Savings Plan, which is part of the broader reconciliation bill, would reduce spending by nearly $350 billion over the next 10 years.

Most of those savings stem from rolling back a Biden-era student loan repayment plan that never fully took effect and from capping how much students can borrow. But lawmakers are also planning to increase spending on Pell Grants by $2.8 billion as they aim to address a looming shortfall and open up the program to short-term workforce-training classes.

To make the math work, Republicans are changing who qualifies for a Pell Grant, proposing that students would have to take at least 15 credits a semester in order to receive the full award. They’ll also have to take at least 7.5 credits to get any money. Currently, the Pell Grant is prorated based on how many credits students take, and there’s no floor.

Changing the full-time-award definition would save $7.1 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office, which estimated that more than half of students currently enrolled would see their Pell Grant reduced.

The CBO also estimated that cutting off Pell for part-time students would save about $687 million over the next 10 years. Currently, about 10 percent of Pell Grant recipients enroll less than half-time. Of those students, the CBO predicts that one-third of students who stand to lose their grant under this change would enroll in more classes. Presumably, the other two-thirds would either stop out or pay for their education with loans or their own money. (The CBO report was based on a minimum of six credits, but that threshold has since increased to 7.5, so the number of students affected could be higher.)

Over all, about 700,000 students would no longer be eligible for the Pell Grant after all the changes take effect. The changes are currently set to take effect in summer 2026.

2. Colleges on the Hook for Unpaid Student Loans

In addition to the Pell Grant cuts, college leaders are particularly worried about a provision known as risk-sharing, which would require institutions to pay a financial penalty based on students’ unpaid loans. How much colleges would have to pay is unclear, but the CBO estimates that by 2034, payments would total $1.3 billion and then continue to increase each year. Risk-sharing is expected to save the government $5.3 billion over the next 10 years.

Because of risk-sharing and other changes in the bill aimed at limiting student borrowing, the CBO predicts that the volume of student loans would drop by about 20 percent.

College leaders and lobbyists argue that the formula that would determine institutions’ payments is untested, and without more information, they can’t accurately gauge the ramifications. One lobbyist said the proposal represented “an astonishing level of federal overreach.” Critics of the plan also worry that underresourced and minority-serving institutions would be hit the hardest.

“The risk is not equal among colleges,” Tuskegee University president Mark Brown told senators this week.

Risk-sharing is just one of several proposed changes that would upend the student loan system. House Republicans also want to end Grad PLUS loans along with subsidized loans, restrict Parent PLUS loans and tie how much students can borrow to the median cost of a program. Some consumer protection advocates argued that these changes would drive students to private lenders, which often charge higher interest rates.

3. More Taxes and Medicaid Cuts Threaten Colleges’ Bottom Lines

Other proposals in the bill from the Ways and Means Committee would levy a host of new or expanded taxes against universities.

First, the committee created new brackets to tax wealthy universities’ endowments. Currently, private universities with endowments that are worth more than $500,000 per student pay a 1.4 percent tax. But under the plan, some could see their endowments taxed at 21 percent.

Institutions with endowments valued at $750,000 to $1.25 million per student would be hit with a 7 percent tax. That rate would climb to 14 percent for colleges with endowments worth $1.25 million to $2 million per student, while colleges with endowments of $2 million or more per student would pay 21 percent. Colleges also can’t include international students in their tally of students, which could subject more institutions to the tax.

In addition to the endowment tax, the proposal also taxes a college’s intellectual property by stating that the endowment tax should include all forms of investment income. This means that any royalties from a private university’s intellectual property, including patents and copyrights, would be taxable. Additionally, the legislation removes colleges’ exemption from the unrelated business income tax so that all institutions, public and private, would be taxed for royalties from licensing their name and logo.

House Republicans in other committees also proposed cuts to the Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance programs, which critics say would hurt students and states’ budgets. And if states do take a hit financially, public colleges might see their budgets cut.

“If federal Medicaid funding is reduced in a new federal tax law, no public college or university will be immune from future state budget reductions and the austerity that will result. Public higher education must be prepared,” two professors wrote in an Inside Higher Ed op-ed earlier this year.

4. Warnings From Higher Ed Pile Up

Higher education groups warned before and after the vote of damaging consequences if the legislation becomes law.

American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten called it a “big, ugly betrayal,” while Kara D. Freeman, president and CEO of the National Association of College and University Business Officers, said in a statement that “the implications for student access, research, and innovation could be far-reaching.”

Freeman said the endowment tax is especially concerning and cited NACUBO data that shows colleges and universities spent $30 billion from their endowments in fiscal year 2024—nearly half of which funded student financial aid.

“This scholarship tax takes funds away from students and makes it less possible for colleges to support them,” she said.

Meanwhile, the American Council on Education took issue with the use of the reconciliation process to advance sweeping changes, along with the provisions in the bill.

“The totality of the funding cuts, policy changes, and tax increases included in this reconciliation package will have a historic and negative impact on the ability of current and future students to access postsecondary education, as well as on colleges and universities striving to carry out their vital educational and research missions,” ACE wrote in a letter to the House.

So far, senators have said little about the higher ed provisions in the bill, so it’s not yet clear whether they’ll agree with the House plan. Generally, while the House prefers risk-sharing, the Senate is expected to back a measure that judges programs by their students’ employment rates and income levels after graduation.

But, with President Donald Trump backing the legislation and a fragile majority in the House, senators have few options if they want to change the legislation.

“This is arguably the most significant piece of Legislation that will ever be signed in the History of our Country!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Now, it’s time for our friends in the United States Senate to get to work, and send this Bill to my desk AS SOON AS POSSIBLE! There is no time to waste.”

Source link

May 23, 2025
Senate Committee Approves Education Under Secretary Nominee

The U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions voted to approve Nicholas Kent as under secretary of education, the top job in the country for higher education policy and oversight, by a narrow 12-to-11 vote. The Senate will hold a final confirmation vote at a later date.

Kent, a former Virginia deputy secretary of education, is a vocal critic of the Biden administration and a former lobbyist for for-profit colleges and trade schools.

His nomination earned a mix of support and concern from higher education associations and advocates, some of whom viewed it as a worrying harbinger of the Trump administration’s plans to reduce federal regulation and oversight of for-profit colleges and credential programs.

Kent was advanced to a full vote with a tranche of six other cabinet nominees. A few organizations, including the American Federation of Teachers and the Institute for College Access and Success, expressed concern that there was no public hearing about Kent’s ties to for-profit institutions. In 2015 Kent’s then-employer, Education Affiliates, a company that operates dozens of for-profit colleges nationwide, settled a False Claims Act case brought by the Department of Justice for $2 million.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont, voted no on Kent’s nomination Thursday morning, saying, “We should not be confirming a former lobbyist who represented for-profit colleges to oversee higher education.”

Other organizations say Kent could shake up a regulatory framework they believe has stifled innovation. The American Association of Community Colleges wrote a letter supporting Kent, saying it believes he is committed to “ensuring statutory compliance and program integrity while decreasing administrative burdens and supporting innovation.”

If confirmed, Kent will replace acting under secretary James Bergeron as the No. 2 education policy official in the country.

Source link

May 23, 2025
Trump Administration Strips Harvard’s SEVIS Certification

Amid an ongoing legal showdown with Harvard University, the Trump administration has carried through on a recent threat to halt the private institution’s ability to host international students.

The move was first reported Thursday afternoon by The New York Times, then subsequently announced on social media by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.

“This administration is holding Harvard accountable for fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus. It is a privilege, not a right, for universities to enroll foreign students and benefit from their higher tuition payments to help pad their multibillion-dollar endowments,” Noem wrote in the announcement. “Harvard had plenty of opportunity to do the right thing. It refused.”

(Though much of the federal government’s recent focus on Harvard has concerned the university’s alleged failure to address antisemitism on campus, the Trump administration has also raised questions about collaboration with foreign researchers, particularly those with ties to the Chinese and Iranian governments.)

In her statement, Noem wrote that Harvard’s Student Exchange and Visitor Information System certification was being stripped “as a result of their failure to adhere to the law,” which she said should “serve as a warning to all universities” across the U.S.

Current international students would be required to transfer to maintain their visa status.

Noem added that Harvard would need to turn over demanded records within 72 hours if it would “like the opportunity of regaining” SEVIS certification “before the upcoming school year.”

A Harvard spokesperson called the action “unlawful” in an emailed statement.

“We are fully committed to maintaining Harvard’s ability to host international students and scholars, who hail from more than 140 countries and enrich the University—and this nation—immeasurably,” the spokesperson wrote. “This retaliatory action threatens serious harm to the Harvard community and our country, and undermines Harvard’s academic and research mission.”

Impact on Harvard

Harvard enrolled 6,793 international students last fall, according to university data. International students have made up about a quarter of Harvard’s head count over the last decade—a population that could disappear, along with their substantial tuition dollars, if the Trump administration’s directive holds.

Noem threatened to revoke Harvard’s SEVIS certification last month after the university pushed back on federal government demands to turn over “detailed records on Harvard’s foreign student visa holders’ illegal and violent activities by April 30.” That threat followed Harvard’s refusal to acquiesce to sweeping demands to overhaul its governance, admissions and hiring processes and more in response to allegations of antisemitic conduct. The university then sued the Trump administration over a federal funding freeze and other recent actions.

Revoking Harvard’s SEVIS certification is the second punch the government threw at the university this week, coming after the Department of Health and Human Services announced the termination of $60 million in multiyear federal grants, which officials attributed to concerns about campus antisemitism.

Other sources of federal funding are on hold. Altogether, the Trump administration has frozen at least $2.7 billion flowing to the private university, or about a third of Harvard’s federal funds.

A New Political Cudgel

The Student Exchange and Visitor Program’s process for revoking universities’ SEVIS status is usually a prolonged and complicated bureaucratic affair, typically preceded by a thorough investigation of the institution and the possibility of appeal.

Sarah Spreitzer, vice president and chief of staff for government relations at the American Council on Education, told Inside Higher Ed that the manner in which the federal government stripped Harvard’s SEVIS certification was unprecedented.

“In a normal world, Harvard is supposed to actually get a notice that their SEVIS certification is being revoked, and then there is an appeals process,” Spreitzer said. “It doesn’t seem that DHS is following any of the regular requirements that are included in statute for taking this action.”

In late March, Trump officials first proposed revoking SEVIS status from institutions that they believed fostered antisemitism on campus, aiming their threats specifically at Columbia and the University of California, Los Angeles, which were home to major pro-Palestinian protests in 2024. In mid-April they threatened Harvard with decertification.

Clay Harmon, director of AIRC: The Association of International Enrollment Management, told Inside Higher Ed in March that historically, SEVP investigations are conducted when universities are suspected of delivering less-than-bona-fide degree programs, using shady coursework as a way to essentially sell student visas to would-be immigrants who want a fast way to enter the country.

“It is the government’s primary way of ensuring that international student visas are not granted for diploma mills, fake institutions or institutions that are not adequately financially supported,” Harmon said. “I’ve never heard of a fully accredited, reputable institution—whether it’s Columbia or Bunker Hill Community College—being subjected to some kind of extraordinary SEVP investigation outside of the standard recertification process.”

The initial process of certification, Harmon added, is intensive and can take institutions months or even longer to complete, which is one reason why decertification is so rare. Wielding the organization’s oversight powers as a tool for leverage in a larger political battle, he said, would be “a significant departure from past practices and established precedents.”

“It is clear that the administration is putting forward new interpretations of laws and powers that have not been established through case law or regular practice,” Harmon said.

In an email to Inside Higher Ed on Thursday, Harmon said the administration’s decision to use decertification against Harvard “imposes real, immediate, and significant harm on thousands of students for reasons outside their control and unrelated to their own actions.”

“This action may have broad and long-term negative impacts—well beyond Harvard and well beyond 2025—to the educational experience and financial health of U.S. institutions,” he wrote.

Revocation of Harvard’s SEVIS certification prompted sharp reactions online.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, wrote on social media that Noem’s actions are “likely illegal” and her letter showed no evidence of Harvard’s violations.

“Nothing in here alleges ANY specific violation of the Student and Exchange Visitor Program. Nothing. She cites no law violated, no regulation broken, no policy ignored,” Reichlin-Melnick wrote. “I don’t care what you think of Harvard; this is clear weaponization of government.”

Will Creeley, legal director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, called the government’s revocation of Harvard’s ability to host international students “retaliatory and unlawful.”

In a statement posted on X, he assailed the Education Department’s demands that Harvard hand over footage of international students protesting on campus.

“This sweeping fishing expedition reaches protected expression and must be flatly rejected,” Creeley wrote. “The administration’s demand for a surveillance state at Harvard is anathema to American freedom … This has to stop.”

But some officials in the MAGA camp celebrated the move.

“This is a remarkable first step,” Republican senator Ashley Moody of Florida wrote on X. “I applaud the administration for taking a stand to rid our universities of malign foreign influence.”

Source link

May 22, 2025
Judge Orders Education Department Employees Reinstated

On Thursday a judge ordered more than 2,000 fired employees of the Education Department reinstated.

Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Tierney L. Cross/Getty Images | Matveev_Aleksandr and raweenuttapong/iStock/Getty Images

A federal judge blocked the Trump administration from firing thousands of employees at the Department of Education in a decisive rebuke of this spring’s sweeping reduction in force and the executive branch’s efforts to weaken the Education Department.

Judge Myong Joun rejected the administration’s argument that the layoffs, which affected half of the department’s workforce, were part of a “reorganization” aimed at improving efficiency and said evidence showed the administration’s “true intention is to effectively dismantle the Department without an authorizing statute.” His order also prevents the department from implementing President Donald Trump’s March directive to dismantle the agency.

Joun of the District of Massachusetts also said the injunction to rehire the fired staffers was necessary in order to restore the department’s ability to accomplish its core functions and statutorily mandated responsibilities.

“Not only is there no evidence that Defendants are pursuing a ‘legislative goal’ or otherwise working with Congress to reach a resolution, but there is also no evidence that the RIF has actually made the Department more efficient,” Joun wrote in his 88-page ruling. “Plaintiffs have demonstrated that the Department will not be able to carry out its statutory functions—and in some cases, is already unable to do so.”

Reports of systemic failings and overloaded staff have streamed out of the beleaguered department ever since the March layoffs, from an untouched backlog of complaints at the Office for Civil Rights to the piling up of applications for student loan repayment and forgiveness plans.

The injunction, handed down Thursday morning, means the administration must reinstate more than 2,000 Education Department employees and reopen regional offices that were shuttered during the reduction in force.

The administration has already said it has issued a challenge to the ruling. Madi Biedermann, the department’s deputy assistant secretary for communication, said the administration has already appealed.

In an email to Inside Higher Ed, Biedermann decried the decision, calling Joun a “far-left judge” who “dramatically overstepped his authority” and maintaining that the layoffs were “lawful efforts to make the Department of Education more efficient and functional.”

“President Trump and the Senate-confirmed Secretary of Education clearly have the authority to make decisions about agency reorganization efforts, not an unelected Judge with a political axe to grind,” she wrote.

A spokesperson for the Association of American University Professors, one of the plaintiffs in the case, wrote in a statement that they were “thrilled” with the decision.

“Eliminating the [Education Department] would hurt everyday Americans, severely limit access to education, eviscerate funding for HBCUs and [tribal colleges and universities] while benefiting partisan politicians and private corporations,” they wrote.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon defended the layoffs at a budget hearing just a day prior to the ruling. She said the goal was to “wind down the bureaucracy” of the department, and that while she hoped to have congressional support to dismantle it eventually, the administration did not intend to so on its own.

Joun’s decision undercuts that defense. In the budget hearing, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Democrat of Connecticut, told McMahon that the cuts were “unlawful” and a usurpation of congressional authority.

“As long as you continue to deliberately and flagrantly defy the law, you will continue to lose in court,” DeLauro said.

The injunction is the latest in a string of court orders challenging the Trump administration’s rapid cuts to federal agencies in its first 100 days, often under the supervision of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE was responsible for the vast majority of the Education Department layoffs, according to McMahon’s House testimony Wednesday.

Joun’s ruling wasn’t the only one aimed at undoing the administration’s Education Department cuts. Judge Paul Friedman of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia also ordered that the department restore grant funding to a Southern nonprofit that has helped further school desegregation efforts since the 1960s. The grant had been defunded as part of the administration’s push to eliminate spending on diversity, equity and inclusion.

Source link

May 22, 2025
Trump Adviser Blames “Scientific Slowdown” on DEI, Red Tape

President Donald Trump’s science adviser and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy believes the recent, seismic cuts to federal research funding offer “a moment of clarity” for the scientific community to rethink its priorities, including the government’s role in supporting research.

Michael Kratsios, who is pushing for increased private sector support of research, said that federal investment in scientific research—much of which happens at universities—has yielded “diminishing returns” over the past 45 years.

“As in scientific inquiry, when we uncover evidence that conflicts with our existing theories, we revise our theories and conduct further experiments to better understand the truth,” Kratsios, a former tech executive with ties to tech titan and conservative activist Peter Thiel, said at a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday. “This evidence of a scientific slowdown should spur us to experiment with new systems, new models, new ways of funding, conducting and using science.”

But some experts believe Kratsios’s comments mischaracterized trends in the nation’s academic research enterprise, which has been faced with decades of declining federal funding.

“Kratsios may have things exactly backward. Our growth has slowed down over decades—the same decades where we have been funding science less and less as a share of GDP,” Benjamin Jones, an economics professor at Northwestern University and former senior economist for macroeconomics for the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “Federally supported research is near its lowest level in the last 70 years. If the U.S. really wants to be ‘first’ in the world, the key will be how fast we advance. Cutting science is just a huge brake on our engine.”

A wide body of literature confirms that federally funded research and development continues to produce enormous social returns. A 2024 paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas showed that rates of return on nondefense R&D spending range from 140 to 210 percent. Another report from United for Medical Research determined that for every dollar the National Institutes of Health spent on research funding in 2024, it generated $2.56 of economic activity. And yet another science policy expert has estimated that an additional dollar of government-sponsored R&D generates between $2 and $5 in public benefits via economic growth.

But those facts were absent from Kratsios’s remarks, which accused scientists of focusing on “trying to score political points” and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives instead of so-called gold-standard science. “Spending more money on the wrong things is far worse than spending less money on the right things,” he said. “Political biases have displaced the vital search for truth.”

Kratsios also cited “stalled” scientific progress despite “soaring” biomedical research budgets and “stagnated” workforce training as proof that “more money has not meant more scientific discovery, and total dollars spent has not been a proxy for scientific impact.” Since 1980, he specified, “papers and patents across the sciences have become less disruptive,” and since the 1990s, “new drug approvals have flatlined or even declined.”

The White House OSTP did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for Kratsios’s sources of information, but some outside experts said those specific claims have merit, even if they lack additional context.

A 2023 paper in Nature shows that patents and papers are indeed becoming less “disruptive” over time. But the authors themselves said the slowdown is “unlikely to be driven by changes in the quality of published science, citation practices or field-specific factors,” but rather “may reflect a fundamental shift in the nature of science and technology,” which is presenting increasingly difficult and complex problems for researchers. The authors also called on federal agencies to “invest in the riskier and longer-term individual awards that support careers and not simply specific projects.”

(Many of the federal research grants the Trump administration has terminated in recent months supported those aims, including funding for graduate and postdoctoral students and multiyear projects that weren’t yet complete.)

And even though new inventions may be decreasingly likely to push science and technology in new directions, as the Nature paper indicated, federally funded research has nonetheless expanded its reach to consumers since 1980—the same time frame Kratsios claims has been marked by diminishing returns that warrant an overhaul of federal research policy.

Prior to the 1980s, the government owned the intellectual property of any discoveries made using federal research dollars. The policy gave universities little incentive to find practical uses for inventions, and fewer than 5 percent of the 28,000 patents held by federal agencies had been licensed for use, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

That changed when Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980, allowing universities, not-for-profit corporations and small businesses to patent and commercialize federally funded inventions. Universities began transferring inventions to industry partners for commercialization. Between 1996 and 2020, academic technology transfers in the U.S. contributed $1.9 trillion in gross industrial output, supported 6.5 million jobs and resulted in more than 126,000 patents awarded to research institutions, according to data from the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM).

As for Kratsios’s claim that drug approvals have “flatlined,” Matt Clancy, a senior research fellow at Open Philanthropy, said that’s a matter of interpretation. “If you think it means discovery is dead and not happening, that’s clearly false,” he said, noting that while drugs had been getting steadily more expensive to develop in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, costs have started falling over the past decade. “If you think it means the rate of discovery has not increased in proportion to the increase in spending, I think that is correct.”

‘The Enemy of Good Science’

Kratsios also tied those alleged declines in innovation to the assertion that researchers have fallen victim to a misguided “professional culture” and to “social pressures.” As an example, he pointed to the scientific community’s insistence on keeping schools closed to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus as an example of scientists’ unwillingness to question dominant viewpoints. “Convention, dogma and intellectual fads are the enemy of good science,” he said.

Administrative burdens have also hamstrung the scientific enterprise, he added.

“The money that goes to basic and blue-sky science must be used for that purpose, not to feed the red tape that so often goes along with funded research,” Kratsios said. “We cannot resign our research community and the laboratory and university staff who support them to die the death of a thousand 10-minute tasks. To assist the nation’s scientists in their vocation, we will reduce administrative burdens on federally funded researchers, not bog them down in bureaucratic box checking.”

Expanding the role of private funders is part of Kratsios’s solution.

“In particular, in a period of fiscal constraints and geopolitical challenges, an increase in private funding can make it easier for federal grant-making agencies to refocus public funds on basic research and the national interest,” he said at the NAS meeting, which was attended by university lobbyists and senior administrators.

“Prizes, challenges, public-private partnerships and other novel funding mechanisms can multiply the impact of targeted federal dollars. We must tie grants to clear strategic targets while still allowing for the openness of scientific exploration and so shape a general funding environment that makes clear what our national priorities are.”

According to Kratsios, private industry is well positioned to step in. He claims the sector spends “more than three times on R&D than does the federal government,” though it’s not clear from where he drew that statistic. Data from AUTM shows that in 2023, industry expenditures made up just 6.8 percent of all research spending in the United States, compared to 56.6 percent from the federal government. (Inside Higher Ed has previously reported on the challenges of looking to private funders to meaningfully make up for the Trump administration’s current and proposed cuts to academic research.)

Shalin Jyotishi, senior adviser for education, labor and the future of work at the left-leaning think tank New America, said that while some of the issues that Kratsios raised regarding federal science policy have merit, the administration hasn’t put forth a clear vision for reform.

“Instead, what we are seeing is ‘creative destruction’ playing out across the federal research enterprise—without the ‘creative’ part,” he said. “It’s not too late. The administration can and should still salvage the federal research enterprise and enact reform to make it even better.”

Source link

May 22, 2025
Pasco-Hernando Taps DeSantis Ally as Interim President

Weeks after Pasco-Hernando State College president Jesse Pisors resigned abruptly, the board named Florida Department of Juvenile Justice secretary Eric Hall interim president Tuesday.

Republican governor Ron DeSantis appointed Hall to the department in late 2021. Prior to that role, Hall served as senior chancellor of the Florida Department of Education from early 2019 to late 2021. Before that appointment, his educational experience was largely in the K-12 space.

Hall was a finalist in the 2023 PHSC presidential search that ended with Pisors in the top job.

Pisors resigned after less than 18 months as president. His departure followed the release of a critical report by Florida’s version of the Department of Government Efficiency, which indicated the college was among the worst in the state in terms of student growth and retention. Board members alleged that they had not been made aware of those numbers, despite requests.

However, The Tampa Bay Times reported that there has been skepticism around the validity of the report, which some critics argued was a flawed analysis of PHSC’s student outcomes.

The newspaper also noted that DeSantis appointed Hall to a government efficiency task force in late 2023, an effort that was ultimately a forebear of the state’s DOGE apparatus.

Hall is one of multiple DeSantis allies hired to lead a public institution in Florida this year. Others include Marva Johnson, a lobbyist, hired to lead Florida A&M University last week, and former Florida lieutenant governor Jeanette Nuñez at Florida International University, as well as former state lawmaker Adam Hasner at Florida Atlantic University, both of whom were hired in February. (Nuñez was hired as an interim but has since been named sole finalist for the job.)

Prior political hires include Ben Sasse, a former Republican U.S. senator from Nebraska, who briefly led the University of Florida before stepping down amid a spending scandal, and former state lawmaker Richard Corcoran at New College of Florida. Another former GOP lawmaker, Ray Rodrigues, was hired as chancellor of the State University System of Florida in 2022.

Source link

May 22, 2025
Trends in Hiring, 2025 Graduate Readiness for the Workforce
The Class of 2025 is prioritizing location, job stability and benefits when considering their first job postgraduation.

SDI Productions/E+/Getty Images
Commencement season brings excitement to college campuses as community members look to celebrate the accomplishments of the graduating class and usher them into their next chapter of life.

The Class of 2025, however, is gearing up to enter a challenging environment, whether that’s a competitive application cycle for gaining admission to graduate school or a tighter job market compared to previous years.

Inside Higher Ed compiled 25 data points regarding the Class of 2025 and the workforce they will enter, including levels of career preparedness, challenges in the workplace and the value of higher education in reaching career goals.
1. Over half of seniors feel pessimistic about starting their careers because they worry about a competitive job market and a lack of job security.
2. Seventy-eight percent of students rank job stability as a “very important” attribute in potential employers, followed by a healthy workplace culture.
3. Eighty-eight percent of college juniors and seniors believe their coursework is adequately preparing them for entry-level roles in their chosen fields.
4. Eight out of 10 soon-to-be graduates plan to start work within three months of graduating.
5. Hiring for college graduates is down 16 percent compared to last year, and 44 percent below 2022 levels.
1. Starting salaries are up 3.8 percent year over year, outpacing inflation’s growth of 2.4 percent, as of March.
2. Seventy-nine percent of young adults say health benefits are a “high” or “very high” priority for them when considering a job opportunity.
3. Desired location is a top priority for 73 percent of 2025 graduates in deciding which jobs to apply for, followed by job stability (70 percent). Over two-thirds said they’re looking for a job near their family.
4. If they choose to relocate for work, cost of living is the most pressing issue for new graduates (90 percent), followed by a diverse and tolerant community (64 percent). Ninety-eight percent of young adults say cost of living is their No. 1 money stressor, as well.
5. Flexibility remains key for graduates, with 43 percent looking for hybrid work, defined as being on-site for two or three days a week. Forty-four percent cited the ability to work from home as an important benefit, and over half want more than two weeks of vacation or paid time off in their first year of work.
1. Roughly half of entry-level job postings employers plan to create will be hybrid, and about 45 percent will be for fully in-person roles.
2. Engineering students are expected to be the highest paid of all the majors pursued by the class of 2025, earning an average of $78,731 this year.
3. Recent college graduates who participated in experiential learning while in college earn on average $59,059, compared to their peers without internships, who earn an average of $44,048.
4. As of last fall, only half of first-generation students in the Class of 2025 had completed an internship, compared to 66 percent of their peers.
5. About 12 percent of students have not participated in an internship and do not expect to do so before finishing their degree—lower than the average of 35 percent of workers who enter the workforce without an internship or other relevant work experience.
1. Ninety-eight percent of employers say their organization is struggling to find talent, but nearly 90 percent say they avoid hiring recent grads—in part, as 60 percent noted, because they lack real-world experience.
2. One-third of hiring managers say recent graduates lack a strong work ethic, and one in four say graduates are underprepared for interviews.
3. Over half (57 percent) of HR departments expect to increase spending on training and development in the year ahead.
4. As of March, nearly 6 percent of recent graduates (ages 22 to 27 who hold a bachelor’s degree or higher) were unemployed, compared with 2.7 percent of all college graduates. The unemployment rate for all young workers (ages 22 to 27) is approximately 7 percent.
5. Twenty-five percent of young adults are struggling to find jobs in their intended career fields; 62 percent aren’t employed in the career they intended to pursue after graduation.
6. Nearly 90 percent of students chose their major with a specific job or career path in mind.
7. Finding purposeful work is critical to Gen Z’s job satisfaction, and more than half say meaningful work is important when evaluating a potential employer.
8. One-quarter of young adults already have a side hustle, and 37 percent of Gen Z want to start a side hustle.
9. Ninety-seven percent of human resources leaders say it’s important that new hires have a foundational understanding of business and technology, including in such areas as artificial intelligence, data analytics and IT.
10. Gen Y and Gen Z workers are more likely than their older peers to worry they will lose their job or their job will be eliminated by generative AI.
We bet your colleague would like this article, too. Send them this link to subscribe to our newsletter on Student Success.
Source link
May 22, 2025
LimmyTalks Talks College Preparedness – Education and Career News

Daniel Lim | Photo by Alina Lim

Daniel Lim, also known as LimmyTalks online, shares his advice for college applications, finding mentors, and finding your place in the world.

What’s one piece of advice you wish someone had told you when you were preparing for college?

Talk to as many people as you can. I did this for the first month of college, and I probably met a couple hundred people in that month alone, going to everything I could and talking to every person on the bus and in the food court. I stopped doing that after the first month, and I wish I hadn’t — but now you know not to do what I did.

Many students feel overwhelmed or unsure about their next steps. What’s your message to someone who doesn’t have it all figured out yet?

There are two options: You can either work inhumanely hard at something that’s already established, or you can — and, in my opinion, should — experiment. One example of the former is basketball. If you become the best basketball player in the world, the NBA is a guaranteed job for you. Your interest in painting, poker, or the psychology behind love might not lead to a clear path for a career. However, that’s the beauty of it. Not knowing means you’re more likely to find something new to contribute to the world. Every major invention you can think of was a result of serendipitous experimentation. So, experiment with what you like! It won’t be clear immediately, but you’ll learn things that will eventually help you find the next stepping stone, then the next one, and the next one until you find yourself in a great spot — career-wise, fulfillment-wise, financially, or whatever else it is that worries you now.

What’s one mindset shift or daily habit you think every high school or early college student should adopt starting today?

Just stick to something. Do things. The worst thing you can do is not do anything. You learn way more from doing things than anything else. Just do stuff, don’t think too much, and dive in!

What role do you think mentorship or guidance plays in making college feel more accessible, and how can students find that support?

It’s immeasurable. I attribute a lot of my growth as a person to older friends I made at the tennis courts as a middle and high schooler. I also think it’s the No. 1 thing that can alter someone’s trajectory — having one person who believes in you, full stop.

As for finding mentors, the common advice is to find a way to add value to their lives as well. The actual thing doesn’t matter much when you’re young, it’s the effort that counts. Just reach out to people who are cool to you!

What’s your message to the student who doesn’t have straight A’s but still has big dreams?

You’ve got this! Somebody needs to scream that in your ears until you actually believe it. Also, grades don’t mean anything if you have big dreams. They’re just one measurement — there are a billion other ways to show greatness. Your ambition is what’s truly valuable.

What’s something you learned after high school that you wish you had known while applying to college?

The admissions officers are not going to be impressed. You’re 17. They’re in their late 20s at the youngest — at this point in their life, they’ve seen a lot more than you. They’re looking for nice people. Don’t get me wrong, you need great grades and extracurriculars to get into a top university. However, beyond that, stress less about trying to come off as an intellectual person and just be a normal, nice human being in your essays.

Source link

May 21, 2025