I Am Captcha: ‘Ghost’ Students and the AI Machine
justin.morriso…
Fri, 02/21/2025 – 03:00 AM
Adam Bessie and Jason Novak capture the higher educator’s dilemma in the age of generative AI.
Tag: News
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12% of college students won’t participate in an internship
The value of internships for students’ career navigation and future employment opportunities is clear for colleges and many employers. But what do students think of internship experiences, and how do they benefit them in their future planning?
A new report from Handshake, published Feb. 20, highlights trends across students who have and have not participated in internships, the impact on their goals beyond college, and the barriers that hinder engagement.
Among the trends present: More interns are participating in paid internships and earning above minimum wage while doing so, and company culture can influence students’ willingness to return for a full-time position.
Methodology
Handshake’s Internship Index was assembled with data from a November 2024 survey of more than 5,605 students and 834 recent graduates, as well as job posting and application data from the platform. Recent graduates are those who completed their degree in 2022, 2023 or 2024.
Why intern? A majority of students said they pursue internships to build valuable skills (87 percent), to identify possible career opportunities (72 percent), to make professional connections (70 percent) or to get a leg up in their future job hunt (70 percent). About 59 percent say participating in an internship is an essential step toward clarifying their career goals.
Only one-third of students identified fulfilling a degree requirement as a primary factor for pursuing an internship, and just over half indicated financial motivation for interning.
Among students who have completed an internship, more than 80 percent say the experience shaped their preferences for industries and job roles. Around 54 percent of students said their internship made them more confident in their career goals, and 56 percent said it was essential for making progress toward career goals. One-quarter said it inspired them to set new career goals, which can be similarly valuable.
A winter 2023 Student Voice survey by Inside Higher Ed and College Pulse found 10 percent of students identified an internship as a top influence on their career decisions for after college.
What hinders internships: Around 12 percent of students in the Handshake study have not participated in an internship and do not expect to do so prior to finishing their degree. The greatest share of these students say they’re limited by time (33 percent)—overwhelmed by coursework and other commitments—or they’ve applied for roles and haven’t been selected (33 percent).
“Students may feel shut out of internships for a variety of reasons, ranging from packed schedules to financial and geographic constraints,” the report says. “Even for students who have ample time and resources, landing an opportunity has become more difficult as hiring contracts and competition increases, and the application process may feel overwhelming given the variation in hiring timelines across employers and industries.”
Internal data shows demand for opportunities among students that is outpacing the supply. The number of internship postings on Handshake declined 15 percent from January 2023 to January 2025, but applications surged, with 41 percent of the Class of 2025 having applied to at least one internship through Handshake, compared to 34 percent of the Class of 2023.
Only half of recent college graduates participated in an internship while enrolled in an undergraduate program. Even among students who do land an internship, time continues to be limited, with 56 percent of interns simultaneously taking classes and 36 percent working a part-time job. Around one in eight students said that their internship required them to work 40 hours a week or more.
First-generation students were more likely to say they completed an internship while taking classes or working (80 percent) compared to their continuing-generation peers (70 percent).
Pay day: As colleges and employers consider the importance of experiential learning for student career outcomes, more attention has been placed on the value of fair compensation to reduce equity gaps in who is able to participate in internships. Some colleges will provide stipends or scholarships for learners who take on an unpaid or underpaid internship, allowing them to still receive financial support for their work.
Almost all internships (95 percent) posted on Handshake in the past year were paid, which students say is important to them in selecting an internship role.
A majority of students who participated in an internship had an hourly wage (57 percent) or a fixed salary or stipend (24 percent). The highest average rate was for student interns working in professional services ($35 an hour) or financial services ($31 per hour). Students working in hospitality or education received the lowest average rate of $17.50 an hour.
A talent pipeline: Internships can be a great way for a student to get a foot in the door of a company and for the employer to offer training and a career pathway for early talent. Handshake’s data shows that the interpersonal experiences students have while in their internships can influence their desire to hold a full-time role in that company.
Three in five interns said the mentorship they received or didn’t receive had a major impact on their level of interest in working full-time for their internship employer. About 89 percent of students said team culture at least somewhat impacted on their interest in working full-time for their internship employer, and 90 percent said the same of their interactions with colleagues.
Similarly, pay was a factor that impacted students’ consideration of a full-time role at their employer. Eighty-two percent of interns who had a fairly compensated role would likely accept a full-time offer from their internship employer, compared to 63 percent of those who didn’t feel their pay was fair.
After finishing their internship, 59 percent of students said their experience impacted their interest in working for their employer at least moderately, but only 30 percent said they would definitely accept a full-time offer from their employer.
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College English classrooms should be slow (opinion)
In a minorly famous letter to the duchess of Sutherland, Henry James advises that The Ambassadors should be read “very easily and gently,” specifying that his correspondent should ideally “read five pages a day.” At this pace, the duchess would have taken almost exactly 13 weeks to finish the book if she read every day of the week. One imagines that the novel would be tucked into otherwise inaccessibly glamorous, luxurious days for the duchess, days filled with, among other comforts, corresponding with James about how to read his latest novel.
Five pages a day is very slow reading, but most of us would love to approach our reading at a more leisurely pace, if not a pace determined so prescriptively. On the other side of the spectrum of reading experiences, one finds the average student in college English classes—both undergraduate and graduate. To use my experience as an example, I was at the nadir of my reading life as an undergraduate English major; as someone who naturally reads quite slowly, I spent many nights of my undergraduate career standing at my dresser so I wouldn’t fall asleep while reading. (I couldn’t afford, and doubt I had ever heard of, a standing desk at that point in my life, and my dresser was the tallest piece of furniture in my room.)
While doing this, I often took notes blindly in a notebook with my right hand while I held whatever book I was reading in my left. I would reread my notes the next morning to help me remember what I had read the night before. I loved the books I was reading, and I wanted to succeed in the classes I took, but I was also, by trying to read upward of 500 pages a week, making myself miserable.
I don’t blame the professors who assigned the reading—all of them were gifted pedagogues, and not all of them assigned too much reading. They, too, inhabited a culture in which they were expected to work quickly and fulfill numerous demanding institutional roles (years later, I still remember one of my undergraduate professors saying she worked around 70 hours a week).
Now that I’m on the other side of the academic experience, however, I’ve come to realize that each of us is responsible for resisting a culture that is, by all accounts, making students anxious, depressed and—dare I say it—unproductive at unprecedented rates. Students in undergraduate classes are primed to work quickly. Almost every part of their life—their experience on social media, their online shopping, their use of ChatGPT to complete assignments and their selection of a route on Apple Maps—is designed to help them reach tangible and intangible destinations as quickly as possible. Most students, meanwhile, are terrible at working slowly.
As academicians, we’re constricted, of course, by all the reasonable and unreasonable demands placed on us by work, family and the other important parts of life, and when we read—especially when we read for professional, critical purposes—we read and work as quickly as possible, that “possible” being an ever-nebulous boundary toward which we strain and suffer while still trying to produce quality work. As professors, if we read books like The Ambassadors, we’re likely to read them in bursts and chunks—butcherly words that sound as unappealing as the process of reading a dense, beautiful novel in such a manner actually is.
While we cannot, in the immediate future, totally alter the institutional structures of postsecondary liberal arts education, there are still things that English professors can do to resist the pressure for speed. Chief among them is to design a classroom that encourages our students to go slow.
In their 2016 book, The Slow Professor, Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber challenged the culture of speed in academia by advising faculty to work more slowly, a laudable goal, but one that critics pointed out was a luxury that untenured faculty simply couldn’t enjoy. The problem, of course, is that the people who design a job decide how much work ought to be accomplished in a given time frame, and untenured faculty have little control over the amount of work they are expected to produce to attain job security. However, what almost all professors, regardless of contract status, do have control over is how much work we require within a given time frame from the students we teach. In other words, we should design classes that treat our students in a way that we’d like our institutions to treat us.
As English professors, our job is not to encourage quick thinking but to foster thorough, imaginative and critical thinking. To do this, we must design our courses to foster and prompt slow work that breaks students out of the habits of expediency they have developed throughout their time in school. Designing classes that foster intentional slowness takes effort, but it also means that we can craft the kinds of spaces that make literature enjoyable and show students the value and beauty of literary texts when they are encountered in an environment suitable for literary consumption.
A slow classroom can take several forms. In the slow classes I’ve taught, it means requiring students to purchase paper copies of the texts we read and to keep a real, physical journal in which they respond to prompts weekly outside of class. I also do something in these classes that I wish someone had done for me when I was a student: I make it clear that they should spend a certain amount of time on work for my class outside the classroom but that they should also give themselves a cutoff time, especially when it comes to reading for class. I tell them that I take around two or three minutes to read a page of a novel well, sometimes more if the prose is dense, and that they should plan for each page of reading to take three to four minutes. I also tell them that if they make time to read and don’t finish, they shouldn’t panic; they should move on with their day and enjoy the nonacademic parts of their life.
Most importantly, I assign less reading. Of course, I’d love to live in a world where my students have thoroughly read the English literary canon (whatever that means), but more than anything, I want them to have read something and to have read it well. To this end, I try to assign between 20 and 30 pages of reading per class meeting, which amounts to around 10 to 15 pages per day, not too far from James’s edict. Rather than just assigning this reading and hoping for the best, I explain to my students about why I assign this number of pages, talk to them about creating and choosing a time and space to read in their daily lives, and describe the process of reading in my class as one they should understand as a reprieve from the time-pressured demands of other courses.
In class, I designate much of our time together as technology-free in order to make space for the rich and meaningful conversations that occur most fruitfully when we aren’t distracted by notifications from our phones and laptops. Students engage in small group and classwide discussions, and I challenge them with daily questions that push them out of their comfort zones. I task them with coming up with steel man arguments in support of cultural and fictional villains, I ask them to articulate what makes a good life by finding evidence for and theories of good lives in their reading, and I frequently make them dwell with a given scene until we’ve extracted every last bit of sense (and often a bit of senselessness) from it.
We tackle around one question a day, if we’re lucky. But the answers and questions we walk away with are finer and fuller than the formulaic answers that students give when they’re in a hurry. In return for designing my class in a way that allows students to work slowly, I expect around the same amount of essayistic output in terms of page numbers, but I design essays to be completed slowly, too, by scaffolding the work and requiring creative responses to prompts to encourage the slow, critical thinking and writing that English professors long to read and rarely encounter. I’ve received work that was thoughtful and occasionally even beautiful, work that couldn’t have been written by AI.
In many ways, my experience of earnestly trying to read around 500 pages of fiction a week as an undergraduate might seem anachronistic. Professors across disciplines have noted the apparent inability of students to engage with any extended reading, whether this means they’re not reading at all or that they just ask ChatGPT to do the “reading” for them. The irony of worrying—as many academics seem to be doing these days—that students will use artificial intelligence to read or write for them is that many undergraduate classes require students to work like machines, to read and write at a breakneck pace, a demand that prompts the ridiculous phenomenon of classes on speed reading, which many universities advertise and which are also available online (the one I’ve linked here is accompanied by the terrifying motto “Reading at the Speed of Thought™”).
In a discipline for which the core method is close reading, the idea of students reading a novel as quickly as possible ought to make English professors shudder, and while it’s not necessary to dedicate an entire semester to a single novel, we ought to see course design as part of the solution to students rushing through their work. In an age that privileges fast work, near-constant availability and answers on demand, the slow English classroom is a reprieve, a space where deep, creative and inspired thought is given the time it needs to blossom.
While our students will likely never occupy the rarefied spaces that the duchess of Sutherland enjoyed when James wrote to her in 1903, with our guidance and course design, they can experience the joy, power and, yes, the luxury of reading and writing slowly. We just have to give them the time.
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More calls for Michigan colleges to end Chinese partnerships
More Republican politicians are calling for colleges to end their partnerships with Chinese universities.
U.S. representatives John Moolenar and Tim Walberg wrote letters to the presidents of Eastern Michigan University, Oakland University and the University of Detroit Mercy demanding that they cancel their partnerships with institutions in China, expressing concerns that sensitive research could help the Chinese military advance its technological capabilities.
“The university’s [People’s Republic of China] collaborations jeopardize the integrity of U.S. research, risk the exploitation of sensitive technologies, and undermine taxpayer investments intended to strengthen America’s technological and defense capabilities,” Moolenar and Walberg wrote in all three letters. “You must immediately terminate these collaborations.”
Pressure is mounting on U.S. higher ed institutions to cut ties with Chinese partners, whether in research collaborations, exchange programs or branch campus initiatives.
Moolenar and Walberg’s letters come a few weeks after the University of Michigan ended a 20-year partnership with Shanghai Jiao Tong University. In September, Moolenar wrote a similar letter to Michigan president Santa Ono demanding an end to that collaboration after five Chinese international students were caught taking photos of training exercises at nearby Camp Grayling, where the state National Guard trains.
EMU has partnerships with Beibu Gulf University and Guangxi University; Oakland partners with Changchun University of Science and Technology, Zhengzhou University of Light Industry, and Beijing Information Science and Technology University; and Detroit Mercy offers dual-degree programs with Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Yancheng Institute of Technology and Anhui Polytechnic University.
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College presidents stay mostly silent on Trump
In his first month, President Donald Trump has upended federal research funding and taken aim at race-conscious programs amid a flurry of executive orders and other actions.
While some higher ed associations and universities have responded with lawsuits, college presidents, for the most part, have watched in relative silence. Some have released statements on changes to their institutions’ federal funding or diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, but those announcements have mostly been vague, with little mention of the political forces driving the changes. Few college leaders have publicly criticized the president’s efforts to overhaul the sector to match his vision.
The muted or mostly nonexistent response comes as campuses have increasingly grappled with how to navigate political events since last spring’s pro-Palestinian protests, when students demanded their leaders speak up about the war between Israel and Hamas. That seems to have quelled interest in taking institutional positions. Any pushback college leaders voiced during Trump’s first term has been largely replaced by silence.
The Presidents Speaking Up
Still, there have been some notable exceptions to the trend.
Michael Roth at Wesleyan University and Patricia McGuire at Trinity Washington University—two notoriously outspoken presidents—are among those who have voiced alarm about Trump’s attacks on the sector.
Roth has written op-eds calling on his fellow college presidents to “weigh in when they see the missions of their institutions” and the health of their campus communities “compromised.” He also shared his thoughts on speaking up at the American Council on Education conference last week, noting that he tries “not to speak about the president directly” but rather the need to stand up for institutional values when they are threatened by external forces, such as Trump.
McGuire remains an outspoken presence on social media and in interviews.
Other leaders have spoken forcefully to their constituents about Trump’s interference.
Following a recent and widely panned Dear Colleague letter that declared race-conscious programming, resources and financial aid illegal, Case Western Reserve University president Eric Kaler wrote in a message to campus that “this expansion to include all aspects of campus life appears to be a gross overreach of the Supreme Court decision and may be challenged in the legal system.” He added that the university “will remain firmly committed to our core values.”
Some presidents at minority-serving institutions have added their voices to the mix.
David Thomas, president of Morehouse College, a historically Black institution, told CNBC last month that Trump’s attempted freeze on federal funding represents an “existential threat.” He also called out an executive order targeting diversity, equity and inclusion, telling MSNBC that “we must be a point of resistance to that effort to essentially teach untruths.”
Thomas, who is retiring in June, suggested a second Jim Crow era was coming, which he called “a reaction to the progress of people of color and others who have been disenfranchised.”
Presidential Silence
But as most presidents have remained silent, some critics have blamed institutional neutrality, the concept that universities should refrain from making statements on social or political issues. The movement seemed to boom last year as pro-Palestinian protests spread nationally and students often called on presidents to make public statements.
Roth, speaking at ACE, cast institutional neutrality as “a vehicle for staying out of trouble.”
The American Association of University Professors has also taken a critical view of institutional neutrality, writing in a lengthy statement earlier this month that it “conceals more than it reveals.”
Joan Scott, professor emerita at the Institute for Advanced Study who was part of the AAUP group that crafted the statement on institutional neutrality, is also critical of presidential silence in the face of what she described as an attack by the Trump administration on higher education.
“I think there is no question that the target is the university mission as we’ve known it, and that very few people are speaking up,” Scott said. “And in fact, I would say that institutional neutrality is being used as a kind of protective stance for those administrators who are not speaking up.”
A frequent refrain from campus leaders who have adopted institutional neutrality is that they would speak up when the core institutional mission is threatened, which experts argue is happening. However, most presidents are not speaking up despite perceived threats to the core mission.
Inside Higher Ed contacted 10 universities with institutional neutrality policies, all among the wealthiest in the nation, with multibillion-dollar endowments. Only Yale University provided a statement, though some others shared prior messages from their presidents to the campus communities regarding the federal funding freeze and Trump attacks on DEI. Of those messages, none directly connected their concerns to the Trump administration or said what was driving federal actions.
“The university is working to understand the scope and implications of the recent [Dear Colleague] letter and remains committed to the mission, to the principles of free expression and academic excellence, and to supporting the community,” Yale spokesperson Karen Peart wrote by email. “President [Maurie] McInnis and Provost [Scott] Strobel sent a message to the Yale community that addresses recent developments from the federal government. President McInnis has also shared a message to the community about the university’s commitment to the research mission.”
Yale did not answer specific questions sent by Inside Higher Ed.
Scott believes presidents are conducting a balancing act—one she views as cowardly. She argues that many are more concerned about “short-term risks,” such as an increase to the endowment tax or the loss of federal funding, than “the long-term risk” that “higher education as we’ve known it disappears or is put on hold” through the remainder of Trump’s four-year term.
“What we’re watching is a struggle on the part of university administrators to balance some commitment to the mission—the attacked mission of the university—and some anxiety about the funding that keeps the mission going, even as the mission is being undermined,” Scott said.
Jeremy Young, director of state and higher education policy at PEN America, a free expression group, takes a more charitable view of college presidents remaining mum on Trump’s actions.
Speaking up is fraught with risks, Young argues, ranging from punitive actions by the Trump administration to pushback from trustees. Instead, he thinks leaders should organize a unified sector response.
“If you’re looking to individual presidents to face off against the power of the U.S. government, you’re looking in the wrong place,” Young said.
He believes associations are leading the fight and urges them to collaborate more, arguing that organizations need to stick together to flex collective strength. That’s the only way “higher ed will be strong enough to be able to respond effectively,” he said.
But just because presidents aren’t speaking up doesn’t mean they have to cower, he said.
“I think the one thing that’s easy is that presidents shouldn’t overinterpret the law,” Young emphasized. “They shouldn’t comply in advance. You look at the Dear Colleague letter—it’s very clear in the letter that it does not have the force of law. There is an attempt here to scare presidents, and they should avoid being scared into doing things that aren’t required.”
He stressed the importance of maintaining normalcy and core values on campus. One area where college presidents could improve is on their internal messaging, he said. As political pressures mount on higher ed, it’s vital that administrators communicate with constituents “to reassure them that they have their backs.”
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Senate panel approves McMahon for education secretary
Dr. Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana and chair of the Senate HELP Committee, led the hearing and voted to advance McMahon’s nomination to the Senate floor.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Linda McMahon’s bid to become the next education secretary moved forward Thursday after a Senate committee voted 12–11 along party lines to advance her nomination.
At the preceding committee hearing on Feb. 13, Republicans of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee largely praised McMahon, saying they couldn’t think of a better person to lead the nation’s education system.
They used their questions to ensure the nominee recognized that only Congress has the statutory power to carry out Trump’s plan to abolish the Education Department—to which she said, “Well, certainly President Trump understands that we will be working with Congress.” In addition to shutting down or reducing the size of the department, McMahon made clear at the hearing that she supports combating campus antisemitism, prohibiting trans women from participating in sports and eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
Since the hearing, the Education Department released a sweeping Dear Colleague letter that directs colleges to end any race-based policies or programming in K-12 schools and colleges by Feb. 28. The letter, which targeted “every facet of academia,” has received significant pushback from the public but likely won’t affect McMahon’s confirmation.
The committee’s vote advances McMahon’s confirmation to the Senate. The full Senate will now vote on McMahon’s nomination, likely in the next two weeks.
Once formally recognized as secretary, McMahon will be an important arrow in Trump’s quiver, as she’s seen as dedicated to carrying out the president’s agenda, from abolishing the agency to stripping certain institutions of access to federal student aid when they do not align with his ideals.
This story will be updated.
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Lawsuit slaps heart of academic freedom (opinion)
A lawsuit filed in July against the Columbia University chapter of the American Association of University Professors, along with 20 other organizations and individuals, alleged that our public statements in support of antiwar and pro-Palestinian student protests last spring harmed other students by contributing to the campus shutdown that followed. Unraveling the cynical logic of this claim is for the courts. But what is clear from this lawsuit is that the purpose of such recourse to legal theater is not to ameliorate harm. It is to silence public and academic speech.
This effort is part and parcel of a broader attack on higher education, one characterized by legislative attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion; instruction; and tenure; and an epidemic of jawboning by public officials meddling into curricula, campus programming and even the careers of individual faculty members. Following a series of executive orders from President Donald Trump, colleges and universities across the country now find themselves in the crosshairs.
The tactic used against us is what is known as a strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP). These suits are brought principally not to win in court but to harass and intimidate individuals or groups into curtailing speech. By entangling defendants in costly and invasive litigation—or even just threatening to do so—plaintiffs can frighten those with whom they disagree into silence. In the context of higher education, this comes at an incalculable cost.
On its own, this lawsuit certainly threatens the speech of Columbia-AAUP. But in the current climate, it also opens a front in the widespread attack on universities as sanctuaries of critical inquiry and reasoned debate. In their mere filing, lawsuits like this one aim especially to chill dissenting speech, including speech that takes place at the intersection of the classroom and the public square. Such legal instruments are a dangerous cudgel that could be used to threaten broad swaths of political and academic speech on American campuses.
Our chapter has precisely sought to combat this hostile environment in the speech over which we are being sued. In multiple public statements made during the height of the campus protests last spring, we condemned partisan congressional meddling in Columbia’s affairs, arguing that this “undermine[s] the traditions of shared governance and academic freedom.” We called for a vote of no confidence in university leadership, who we believe “failed utterly to defend faculty and students” and “colluded in political interference.” And we affirmed the Columbia Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ subsequent vote of no confidence in our then-president for her “failure to resist politically motivated attacks on higher education,” whereby she endangered students and undermined our rights as faculty.
In challenging our statements in support of faculty and students, this particular SLAPP targets both our constitutionally protected public speech and our academic freedom. We are fortunate enough to be represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and civil rights firm Wang Hecker LLP, who have filed a motion to dismiss on our behalf that utilizes New York State’s anti-SLAPP law, one of the 35 state-level anti-SLAPP laws on the books across the United States. But the outcome of a SLAPP shouldn’t depend on your counsel, or the state in which you live. Unfortunately, for many faculty and students faced with a SLAPP, the only available option may well be to self-censor.
Interests committed to the mainstream political consensus have found pro-Palestinian political advocacy on American campuses to be unacceptable. To silence dissent, they have shown themselves willing to use every instrument at their disposal in a manner that recalls the red scares of the early and mid-20th century, when character assassination and blacklists were employed in industry and civil society, including academia. This SLAPP revives such measures, as do the theatrical congressional grillings of college presidents, including our own, and the wave of censorship that has swept over higher education during the course of the past year. In this context, attacks on public speech are also attacks on academic freedom.
Academic freedom depends essentially upon a social contract that remains under perpetual debate both inside and outside the academy. SLAPPs like this one aim at the very heart of that contract, which accords to academics relative autonomy to explore difficult and often uncomfortable truths on the assumption that those truths will ultimately benefit society. Although the classroom, the laboratory and the library are classic sites for the practice and protection of this freedom, the truths pursued there translate to worlds outside the campus gates. Bullying faculty and students into self-censorship in the public square, SLAPPs seek to further silence and constrain the pursuit of uncomfortable truths in the classroom.
Scholarly knowledge consists of truth claims, not dicta. Whether exercised in the classroom or in the public square, academic freedom is therefore the freedom to make and to contest such claims. This goes for all sides in a debate, including the debates still quietly raging on our campuses. However, a stark reality disclosed by SLAPPs is that political force is now poised to govern the contest over truth in place of enlightened reason and democratic deliberation.
If such high-minded concepts as truth claims, enlightened reason and democratic debate seem too lofty for the dirty realism of the day, it is important to remember that these still lie at the core of any academic freedom worthy of the name. Academic freedom is not a narrowly academic matter; it is a matter of determining whether something is or is not true. SLAPPs are designed to decide such questions in advance, in favor of those who can afford the attorneys, or on whose behalf politically motivated law firms work. It is time for us to exercise our freedoms and responsibilities as academics, in defense of our right and that of our students to speak.
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Higher ed unions rally against Trump’s cuts, layoffs
At more than a dozen events across the country Wednesday, workers and faculty at colleges and universities gathered to speak out against what they see as an attack on federal research funding, lifesaving medical research and education.
In Washington, D.C., hundreds rallied in the front of the Department of Health and Human Services, while in Philadelphia, hundreds gathered at the office of Senator Dave McCormick, a Pennsylvania Republican. Other protests were planned at colleges in Seattle and St. Louis, among others.
The rallies were part of a national day of action organized by a coalition of unions representing higher ed workers, students and their allies. The coalition includes the American Association of University Professors, the American Federation of Teachers, Higher Ed Labor United and United Auto Workers, among others.
Hundreds in Philly braved the freezing temps to rally for our healthcare, research, and jobs! ❄️💪Workers & students from CCP, Drexel, UPenn, Rutgers, Temple, Jefferson, Arcadia, Rowan, Moore—alongside elected leaders & union presidents—made it clear: We won’t back down. #LaborForHigherEd
— Higher Education Labor United (HELU) (@higheredlabor.bsky.social) February 19, 2025 at 2:33 PM
In recent weeks, the Trump administration has proposed capping reimbursements for indirect research costs, laid off hundreds of federal employees and cracked down on diversity, equity and inclusion. Most recently, the Education Department gave colleges and K-12 schools until Feb. 28 to end all race-conscious student programming, resources and financial aid. Higher education advocates have called that directive “dystopian” and “very much outside of the law.”
Colleges and universities sued to block the rate cut for indirect costs, warning it would mean billions in financial losses and an end to some research. Some colleges have already frozen hiring in response, even though the cut is temporarily on hold.
“If politics decides what I can and cannot study, I’m afraid I will fail the very people who need this research and inspire me to do it,” said Lindsay Guare, a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania, in a news release about the Philadelphia event. “In an ideal world, I would be fighting to expand support for my science instead of fighting to keep it afloat … The work done in Philadelphia’s institutions doesn’t just lead the world in innovation—it saves lives.”
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Higher ed must resist authoritarian rule. It’s the mission.
Together, we should be clear on what President Donald Trump is trying to do to higher education.
Destroy it. Whatever public rationales he or his administration release, the intent of his actions is clear, so if we’re going to discuss responses to those actions, we must remember, always, that Donald Trump is trying to destroy higher education.
Michelle Goldberg at The New York Times gets it; the rest of us should, too.
This goal is not new. In 2021 in a speech at the National Conservatism Conference, future vice president JD Vance declared, “We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” Vance (and Trump) are open admirers of Hungarian authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán, who has subjugated the once-free higher education institutions of his country to his own needs.
This is the Trump/Vance playbook. The unannounced, unilateral (now paused thanks to court intervention) cuts to NIH grants, and the Dear Colleague letter that goes well beyond, and even actively distorts current law to threaten institutions with punishment for failing to obey, are just the latest attacks in a war that has been going on for quite some time, and not just at the federal level, but in the states as well, as exemplified by Ron DeSantis’s wanton destruction of Florida’s New College.
Sadly, as callous, counterproductive and wasteful of taxpayer money as it was, DeSantis taking a wrecking ball to New College in order to install his cronies while recruiting enough athletes for three baseball teams—despite New College not being in an athletic conference—was within the power of the state’s chief executive.
What Trump is doing to higher education institutions is not. It should be unthinkable for institutions to obey diktats that are not only unlawful, but in direct conflict with the purported mission of the institution.
If any institutional leaders are thinking that if they do just enough compliance with Trump’s demands, he will stop the war, they are kidding themselves.
How is the rush to declare institutional neutrality to not just words but actions, as enacted by Vanderbilt chancellor Daniel Diermeier last year, working out? Surely they are feeling secure knowing that they got ahead of the abuse.
What’s that? That isn’t happening? Turns out Vanderbilt has had to pause graduate student admissions because of concerns about funding. I guess surrendering in advance wasn’t the way to go.
I used Vanderbilt only because it was a recent, handy example, not the only one. The silence from major, well-resourced higher education institutions is truly deafening.
Writing at her personal website, Jackie Gharapour Wernz, an education and civil rights attorney, calls the Dear Colleague letter “regulation by intimidation,” which is exactly right. Bending the knee at this moment only demonstrates the effectiveness of intimidation.
Wernz walks through a number of ways the advisories in the letter go well beyond well-established law, while also making an additional important point: Trump is busy gutting the very agencies that would be able to do the investigation and enforcement of institutions they believe are in violation of legal regulations. This reality, plus the various procedural steps involved in these investigations, suggests that it may be far more advantageous to dig in and run out the clock of this initial flurry, particularly when existing law is clearly on your side.
But this doesn’t seem to be the strategy for most institutions. They are going to hope this goes away. Trying to make yourself a smaller target doesn’t mean the people intent on destroying you are going to stop attacking.
Interestingly, the group of higher ed leaders who are … uh … leading belong to the Education for All coalition, primarily consisting of community college administrators. Under the “freedom’s just another world for nothing left to lose” theory, this should not be surprising. Giving in to the Trump administration’s demands to give up on providing educational opportunities to diverse cohorts of students with different desires and needs would be to abandon their work entirely. Their defiance is both principled and practical.
To me, this suggests that the more prestigious institutions that are cowering in the face of the intimidation perhaps do not see their mission in terms of providing access to all. In a lot of ways, the present situation is primarily revealing that which we already knew—that the interests in diversity, equity and inclusion in elite spaces were a virtue-signaling scrim over the much less savory reality of wealth and exclusion.
Look, I’m getting worked up here. The truth is, I don’t wish any harm on any higher education institution, but the institutions with the most resources, most power and most influence must step up.
The present threat goes well beyond an attack on the institutional coffers. These attacks on higher education are part of a much broader push toward authoritarianism as a federal executive (and his minions) direct the actions of formerly free institutions and people.
The good news is that should institutions stand up for themselves, I think they will find many people standing up with them, including, most importantly, the students. Unfortunately, the longer institutions hesitate to stand for the values they claim to hold, the more distrust they’re sowing with the very constituencies who could save them, who do not want to destroy them, but the opposite, who want to see them thrive.
The stakes are almost impossibly high. Shouldn’t we act like it?
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Florida ends in-state tuition for undocumented students
Florida state lawmakers have eliminated in-state tuition for undocumented students, reversing a decade-old law that once enjoyed bipartisan support.
Previously, undocumented students in Florida could apply for waivers to pay in-state tuition rates, if they went to high school in the state for at least three consecutive years and enrolled in college within two years of graduating.
Under the new policy, included in a sweeping immigration bill signed by Governor Ron DeSantis last week, only “citizens of the United States” or those “lawfully present in the United States” qualify. Students receiving the waivers need to be “reevaluated for eligibility” by July 1.
“I don’t think you should be admitted to college in Florida if you’re here illegally,” DeSantis said in a press conference Friday, “but to give in-state tuition was just a slap in the face to taxpayers.”
Florida was one of 25 states that offered in-state tuition to undocumented students at public colleges and universities, according to the Higher Ed Immigration Portal, a data hub run by the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration. These reduced tuition prices came as a relief to undocumented students, who can’t access federal financial aid like their peers and often lack work authorization unless they’re part of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program. (Of the approximately 400,000 undocumented students enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities, most don’t hold DACA status.)
Policymakers in other states are considering taking similar steps to curb in-state tuition for these students as they embrace President Donald Trump’s national push against undocumented immigration. Since the presidential election in November, state lawmakers in Massachusetts, Minnesota and Texas have introduced legislation to remove in-state tuition for undocumented students. As the issue becomes a political lightning rod, politicians in other states are doubling down on financial supports for these students, introducing bills that would expand in-state tuition eligibility, including in Indiana, New Mexico, Oregon and Pennsylvania.
Miriam Feldblum, president and CEO of the Presidents’ Alliance, said advocates “should be prepared and ready” to come out against similar legislation elsewhere in the country.
A Game of ‘Political Football’
In-state tuition for undocumented students has become a “political football” in Florida, said Jared Nordlund, Florida state director at UnidosUS, a Latino civil rights organization. But that wasn’t always the case.
Republican lieutenant governor Jeanette Nuñez—who resigned last week to become interim president of Florida International University—originally advocated for extending in-state tuition to undocumented students, and former Republican governor Rick Scott, now Florida’s senior U.S. senator, signed the bill into law. Nuñez has since pulled back her support for the policy, posting on X in January that the law had “run its course” and needed to be repealed.
The political winds have shifted on what was once a fairly bipartisan issue, Nordlund said. “Ten years ago, the Republican Party wasn’t the party of Trump.”
Ira Mehlman, media director at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an organization that promotes more restrictive immigration policies, applauded Republican state lawmakers for “not rewarding people who are in the country illegally.”
“The more you reward people for breaking the laws, even if it’s through their kids, the more likely people are to disobey the laws,” Mehlman said. And “you are filling seats that might otherwise have gone to kids who are equally deserving and whose parents have not violated any laws.”
Now undocumented students are left to pay out-of-state tuition prices, a significant cost difference. During the 2023–24 academic year, average tuition and fees at Florida colleges and universities for out-of-state students was more than triple the cost state residents paid, according to the Florida Policy Institute, an organization that promotes economic mobility in Florida. The state’s in-state tuition waivers benefited an estimated 6,500 undocumented students that year.
The Ripple Effects
An undocumented student at University of Central Florida, who requested anonymity, told Inside Higher Ed that she couldn’t have pursued a bachelor’s degree as a full-time student without in-state tuition. She would’ve gone for an associate degree instead, taking one or two classes at a time, to keep costs down.
Without in-state tuition, “who knows if I’d be graduating right now,” she said.
The student, who was brought to Florida from Mexico at age 4, is graduating this spring, before the policy change takes effect. But she worries about her peers who won’t have the same resources she did. She previously helped and encouraged other undocumented students to apply for the in-state tuition waiver because of how much it helped her.
“I gave them that hope,” she said, “and now it’s being snatched away from them.”
The student argued she and other undocumented students would use their degrees to contribute to the local labor market, a point they’ve made to state lawmakers in the past; her long-term goal is to open a marketing agency and work with small business owners in the state.
“We studied here our whole life, and our goal is to get our degree and be able to contribute to the economy,” she said.
Diego Sánchez, director of policy and strategy at the Presidents’ Alliance, said he scrambled to pay for college in Florida before in-state tuition became available to undocumented students like him.
In 2008, he enrolled at St. Thomas University, a private institution, and joined as many activities as he could that came with university scholarships—student government, choir and cross country, even though he wasn’t a singer or a runner. He couldn’t have afforded college otherwise, which is why he and other activists advocated for in-state tuition for Florida’s undocumented population. He’s “very disappointed” to see that win reversed.
“It’s about scoring political points,” Sánchez said. “And unfortunately, these students who grew up in Florida, went to our public schools, are going to suffer the consequences … The state has already invested in them, and they’re working their way up to contribute to the community, [to] pay taxes.”
Undocumented students and their supporters argue Florida is going to lose out on these students as future skilled workers at a time when the state is challenged by workforce shortages and an aging population.
Feldblum said these students tend to be “tremendously determined” and will likely attend college in other states, taking their talents with them. She also expects some will stop out of higher ed altogether because they can’t afford it or because they don’t know about other resources available to them, like privately funded scholarships.
“When there are obstacles put in front of students, when students are told, ‘You’re not welcome here’ in different ways, that’s really discouraging,” she said. “That’s disincentivizing,” when Florida has a “need for talent, the need for workforce development.”
What’s Next
The fight for in-state tuition in Florida isn’t over, some advocates say.
“Hopefully we can eventually undo the repeal [of in-state tuition] when the time is right,” Nordlund said. For now, he’s focused on educating state lawmakers and the public about the economic benefits of the repealed policy.
Sánchez plans to lobby state lawmakers to at least let undocumented students already in college finish their degrees at in-state tuition prices, a proposed amendment to the law that previously failed. He hopes colleges and universities push state lawmakers on the issue as well.
He continues to worry, however, that these kinds of attacks on students’ in-state tuition “could spread to other parts of the country.”
Mehlman would like to see other states, and even Congress, look to Florida’s example and work to end in-state tuition for noncitizens nationwide.
“Florida and Texas have sort of been leaders in this area,” he said, “and they certainly can show the way for other states that might be considering this as well.”