Fewer than half of low-income students retain their state food benefits in the transition from high school to college or the workforce, even though they might still be eligible, according to a new report from the California Policy Lab, a nonpartisan research group affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley, and UCLA.
The report, released today, drew on data from 2010 to 2022 from five state agency partners: the California Departments of Education and Social Services, the California Student Aid Commission, the University of California Office of the President and the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office. It found that only 47 percent of high school seniors who participated in CalFresh were still enrolled in the state food assistance program two years after graduation.
“That’s a significant drop-off, and our goal is to shed some light on the causes of that drop-off and if there are ways to address it,” co-author Jesse Rothstein, professor of public policy and economics at UC Berkeley and the faculty director of the California Policy Lab’s UC Berkeley site, said in a news release.
Researchers estimated that 40 percent of those students were no longer eligible for CalFresh because of specific eligibility requirements for college students. But the remaining 60 percent were likely eligible.
Researchers also found disparities in which students maintained their CalFresh benefits. Students who participated in CalFresh for longer in high school were more likely to continue to participate afterward. Students who attended University of California campuses were also more likely to continue participating in CalFresh than those attending community colleges. The report suggests this is because community college students are more likely to live at home with their parents, whose incomes are factored into the eligibility for CalFresh, which can prevent them from meeting the program’s income requirements.
Some community college students, including Hispanic and Filipino students, were less likely than their peers to continue receiving food benefits. The report recommended targeted outreach to these students to help them stay enrolled in the program.
Adult learners often come to higher education with a variety of skills and experiences that aren’t directly reflected in their academic transcripts. Credit for prior learning (CPL) is one way colleges and universities can recognize education outside of the classroom and expedite a student’s degree completion.
An April 14 webinar hosted by the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning highlighted effective strategies for implementing credit for prior learning at four historically Black institutions: Elizabeth City State University, Atlanta Metropolitan State College, Morgan State University and Delaware State University.
Campus leaders shared the value of CPL policies, described how they’ve collaborated with various stakeholders at their institutions and provided logistical details for making CPL accessible for students and manageable for faculty.
Understanding the need: The administrators spoke of the importance of offering credit for prior learning to working adults seeking a credential.
“What we realized is that if you really want to continue to grow your enrollment, high school graduates cannot be the only population you serve,” said Farrah Ward, provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina.
One of the signature programs at her institution is a bachelor’s degree in aviation science. A significant number of students who enroll in the program already hold a private pilot’s license, but in the past they had to take repetitive courses to fulfill degree requirements. By offering CPL, the university is now able to recognize aviation students’ licenses and reduce redundancies in their course load.
Gaining buy-in: Before launching CPL, leaders at Elizabeth City State held an event for faculty and staff to talk about how to better serve adult learners in all departments and areas of the student experience.
The university also leveraged the expertise of various campus departments, including faculty, admissions professionals, military and veterans’ affairs staff, and student affairs leaders, Ward said.
Partnering with faculty members is key to a successful CPL process, Ward said, and can mean rolling out CPL in small measures to ensure frameworks are supported by professors and aligned with the respective learning outcomes for the discipline.
Atlanta Metropolitan State College has a CPL committee, which includes four faculty members to maintain the faculty voice in decision-making, said Kokila Ravi, director of online and specialized programs.
State policyalso drives the implementation of CPL. North Carolina uses a performance-based funding model, and Elizabeth City State is evaluated on how it increases the adult learner population on campus, tying CPL directly to institutional health and funding.
Similarly, Maryland state law requires higher education institutions to offer some form of competency-based learning or credit for prior learning, said Nicole Westrick, assistant vice president and dean of Morgan State University’s College of Interdisciplinary and Continuing Studies.
Creating early awareness: Alerting studentsof CPL opportunities is key, panelists said. “Most times [the admissions team] is the first point of contact, and when they are having those conversations with potential students, we let them know that CPL is an option,” said Rolanda Harris, director of adult and continuing education at Delaware State University.
Elizabeth City State is piloting an adult learner orientation tailored toward students ages 25 and over this fall, Ward said, during which staff will specifically talk about CPL.
Morgan State hosts intensive advising appointments with incoming students, in which advisers discuss CPL and the university’s transfer evaluation system.
Easing access: College leaders also shared innovations their campuses have implemented to reduce barriers to access for learners interested in taking advantage of CPL.
Morgan State offers students the option to enroll in a two-credit elective course to help them create a portfolio. “They participate in a peer review, practice their writing, preparing the portfolio, and when they’re finished, there’s a staff review of the portfolio to make sure that they’ve done a good job of aligning that prior learning experience with the learning outcomes from courses at Morgan State,” Westrick said.
Morgan State also creates digital rubrics for faculty members reviewing the portfolio, “so that it eases the cognitive load for our faculty in finding what they’re looking for; it always follows the same format,” Westrick said.
Some of the colleges offer a wide range of applications for CPL, requiring the students to earn a certain number of credits from the institution for their degree while allowing CPL to take the place of general education and major courses.
Funding CPL: Morgan State received a $5,000 grant from the American Council on Education to standardize and scale CPL on campus. Atlanta Metropolitan State received a $25,000 grant from the Adult Learning Consortium and the University System of Georgia to kick-start the process.
Some panelists said they charge a fee for portfolio assessment, for which the average student pays between $150 and $250. A few campus leaders said they provide a stipend to faculty for reviewing portfolios, while others offer the service pro bono.
Being mission-minded: For institutions considering implementing CPL, Ward said it’s important to start somewhere, even if it seems daunting. In the same vein, remaining flexible and understanding that CPL policies may have to pivot is important, said Harris. “I would just say, ‘Stay open.’”
Westrick said starting with the institutional mission in mind is critical, because that helps ground the process in understanding who will benefit from the policy and how it can make meaningful changes in their educational goals.
Utilizing faculty champions to advertise the offering and encourage students to take advantage of CPL is another lesson to learn, Ravi said. “We are still struggling to get the word out and get students to know about it. That’s why we are relying heavily on our faculty to promote the process.”
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In the days since Harvard University rejected the Trump administration’s demands, with billions in funding at risk, the U.S. president has weaponized multiple federal agencies to exert additional pressure on the university.
On April 11, the Trump administration sent the university a letter demanding changes to Harvard’s governance, admissions, hiring processes and more, signed by officials at the General Services Administration and the Departments of Health and Human Services and Education. Government officials argued in the letter that such changes were necessary because of alleged antisemitism and harassment on campus stemming from pro-Palestinian protests last spring.
After Harvard rejected those demands last week, the government retaliated within hours by freezing $2.2 billion in grants and another $60 million in contracts. The Trump administration is now reportedly planning to pull another $1 billion in funding. (On Monday, Harvard sued to put a stop to the funding freeze, which President Alan Garber argued was “unlawful and beyond the government’s authority.”)
Other federal agencies have also piled on.
On Thursday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced DHS had canceled $2.7 million in grants to Harvard, declaring the university “unfit to be entrusted with taxpayer dollars.” Noem also threatened to terminate Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification, which would render it unable to host international students, unless the university provided by April 30 “detailed records on Harvard’s foreign student visa holders’ illegal and violent activities,” according to a Thursday news release from the department.
DHS did not respond to a request for comment from Inside Higher Ed.
“Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’ Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!” Trump wrote on Truth Social last week.
With Harvard standing firm, the president appears willing to wield the full power of the federal government to bring the university to heel. But what would that actually look like in practice?
Stripping Tax-Exempt Status
If the Trump administration follows required legal processes, removing Harvard’s tax-exempt status would be a lengthy endeavor that experts say would likely take at least several months.
The process would begin with an audit, which itself could take a few months, explained Samuel Brunson, a professor at the Loyola University Chicago School of Law specializing in tax law.
“The IRS would have to do an audit of Harvard and determine that there were one or more reasons why Harvard did not meet the requirements for tax-exempt status,” Brunson said.
Once the IRS notified Harvard of its intent to revoke its exemption, the university would be able to appeal the decision directly to agency officials. If the IRS insisted on stripping Harvard of its tax-exempt status, the university could go to the courts seeking a reprieve. And if the courts sided with the federal government, Harvard could continue to fight by appealing the decision.
While stripping universities of tax-exempt status is rare, it has happened before.
In 1970, the IRS informed Bob Jones University, a private religious institution in South Carolina, that the agency planned to strip its tax-exempt status over racially discriminatory policies. At the time, the university, founded by its namesake evangelist, did not accept Black applicants—a policy it maintained until 1975, when it opened its doors only to married Black applicants, to avoid the possibility of challenging the institution’s strict opposition to interracial relationships. (Policies barring interracial relationships remained in place until 2000.)
The university filed suit in 1971, prompting a legal fight that lasted until 1983, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 in favor of stripping BJU’s tax-exempt status. Justices found that the government’s interest in eradicating racism superseded the tax burden placed on Bob Jones. The university eventually regained its tax-exempt status in 2017, during Trump’s first term.
Brunson expects the government to make a similar argument about Harvard.
“My assumption is that the Trump administration is going to argue that Harvard violated a fundamental public policy, either by not reining in pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protesters enough, or something related to [diversity, equity and inclusion],” Brunson explained.
Still, he said “the chances of Harvard actually losing its exemption are at best minuscule.” Brunson believes that Harvard has a strong case, while the Trump administration’s argument is weak, “unless they have something up their sleeve that literally everyone is not aware of.”
The IRS did not respond to requests for comment from Inside Higher Ed.
Targeting SEVP Certification
The government is also seeking to inflict pain on Harvard by cutting off its international student population, which would be a significant financial blow to the university. Harvard enrolled 6,793 international students in the 2024–25 academic year, according to the university website, which comprised more than 27 percent of its head count.
If the Trump administration follows legal avenues to strip Harvard’s SEVP certification—which would prevent it from hosting international students— the process would take some time. First the federal government would be required to provide notice of its intent to eliminate that certification, and Harvard would have 30 days to respond and take any necessary remedial action. If Harvard’s SEVP certification was stripped following its response, the university could challenge the decision in court, likely triggering a protracted legal battle before the issue was finally settled.
William A. Stock, managing partner at Klasko Immigration Law Partners, wrote by email that while colleges are subject to an SEVP recertification process every two years, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has the authority to conduct off-cycle reviews at any time. Such enforcement action is typically taken only when the federal government “comes into possession of information that may indicate possible noncompliance, or when major changes in a school’s operations require the school to update their registration with SEVP,” Stock explained.
In other words, the Trump administration would need a reason to strip Harvard’s SEVP certification.
“Essentially, if the government determines that there is an abuse of the SEVP and F-1 and J-1 [visa] designation by Harvard, they can move to take away their ability to issue those visas, which would ostensibly hamper their ability to run an international student program,” said Jonathan Grode, managing partner for Green and Spiegel, a firm that practices immigration law.
Experts noted that losing SEVP certification would cause a substantial loss of international students and hit research projects hard—even as such endeavors are already in flux from the Trump administration’s freezes on federal funding—given the high share of Ph.D. students who come from other countries. And even if Harvard doesn’t lose its SEVP certification, the mere threat of it could harm international recruitment.
In any case, the federal government has rarely revoked SEVP certification.
“The few cases of withdrawal of SEVP certification have involved schools who took serious shortcuts in compliance due to financial troubles, and a handful of cases where school administrators were charged criminally for abusing the student visa system,” Stock wrote.
By threatening to limit Harvard’s ability to host international students, Grode believes the government is merely making a power play to get the university to yield to its demands.
“In a normal universe, there’s no way Harvard’s status as a provider of student visas would ever be challenged,” he said. “But as the federal government is trying to push and cajole Harvard to acquiesce on a number of different points, you’re seeing them leverage these ancillary types of activities.”
The Trump administration now appears to be targeting medical journals, questioning at least three different publications about how they represent “competing viewpoints” and assess the influence of funding organizations like the National Institutes of Health on submitted papers, MedPage Today reported.
Republican activist Edward Martin Jr., who is currently serving as interim U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., sent a letter to CHEST Journal and at least two other unnamed publications earlier this month demanding answers to a series of questions about their processes and practices.
“It has been brought to my attention that more and more journals and publications like CHEST Journal are conceding that they are partisans in various scientific debates—that is, that they have a position for which they are advocating either due to advertisement (under postal code) or sponsorship (under relevant fraud regulations),” Martin wrote. “The public has certain expectations and you have certain responsibilities.”
The letter then requested answers by May 2 to questions including “Do you accept articles or essays from competing viewpoints?“ and “How do you handle allegations that authors of works in your journals may have misled their readers?”
“I am also interested to know if publishers, journals, and organizations with which you work are adjusting their method of acceptance of competing viewpoints,” Martin wrote. “Are there new norms being developed and offered?”
CHEST is a peer-reviewed journal published by the American College of Chest Physicians that produces articles on such subjects as pulmonary hypertension, lung cancer and obstructive sleep apnea.
Martin’s letter “should send a chill down the spine of scientists and physicians,” Adam Gaffney, a pulmonary and critical care physician who has published in CHEST, told MedPage Today. “It is yet another example of the Trump administration’s effort to control academic inquiry and stifle scientific discourse—an administration, it warrants mentioning, that has embraced medical misinformation and pseudoscience to reckless effect. Journal editors should join together and publicly renounce this as yet more thinly guised anti-science political blackmail.”
JT Morris, a senior supervising attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told MedPage Today that the First Amendment clearly protects CHEST’s independence.
“A publication’s editorial decisions are none of the government’s business, whether it’s a newspaper or a medical journal,” he said. “Like with any bully, the best response is to stand up to them—and that includes officials who try to intimidate Americans into parroting the government’s view. The First Amendment packs a powerful punch, and it has these medical journals’ backs.”
After a weeks-long standoff with the federal government over alleged antisemitism on campus, Harvard University sued the Trump administration on Monday over the $2.2 billion federal funding freeze enacted after the private institution rejected a far-reaching slate of reforms last week.
The Trump administration had demanded Harvard overhaul university governance, hiring, admissions and more, despite the fact that an investigation has yet to reach any conclusions.
President Alan Garber announced the move in a statement to the university community Monday, noting that while some officials in the Trump administration have claimed the demand letter was sent by accident, the federal government has acted in ways that suggest it was purposeful.
“Doubling down on the letter’s sweeping and intrusive demands—which would impose unprecedented and improper control over the University—the government has, in addition to the initial freeze of $2.2 billion in funding, considered taking steps to freeze an additional $1 billion in grants, initiated numerous investigations of Harvard’s operations, threatened the education of international students, and announced that it is considering a revocation of Harvard’s 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. These actions have stark real-life consequences for patients, students, faculty, staff, researchers, and the standing of American higher education in the world,” Garber wrote.
The lawsuit comes as the Trump administration has threatened to cut off Harvard’s ability to host international students and reportedly sought to freeze another $1 billion in research funding.
“It has been clear for weeks that the administration’s actions violated due process and the rule of law,” said Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education. “We applaud Harvard for taking this step and look forward to a clear and unambiguous statement by the court rebuking efforts to undermine scholarship and science.”
Harvard’s lawsuit names the Departments of Health and Human Services, Justice, Education, Energy and Defense, the General Services Administration, the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and associated agency heads. The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts.
Borrowers in default could see their tax refunds or other federal benefits withheld once collections resume.
J. David Ake/Getty Images
The Education Department will resume collecting on defaulted student loans early next month, restarting a system that’s been on hold since spring 2020, the agency announced Monday.
Starting May 5, the department will withhold tax refunds or benefits such as Social Security from borrowers who are in default. Later this summer, the department will begin garnishing the wages of defaulted borrowers, a move consumer protection advocates have criticized as out of control.
About 38 percent of the nearly 43 million student loan borrowers are current on their payments, and a record number of borrowers are at risk of or in delinquency and default, the department said Monday. Borrowers default when they miss at least 270 days of payments.
When the Biden administration restarted student loan payments in September 2023, it offered a one-year grace period for borrowers during which those who didn’t make payments were spared the worst financial consequences, including default.
Research into borrowers who default and other data shows they typically fall behind on their payments because other loans take a higher priority or they can’t afford their payments, among other reasons. And borrowers in default usually don’t have the ability to repay their loans. A survey from the Pew Charitable Trusts found that unemployed borrowers were twice as likely to default compared to those who worked full-time. Additionally, borrowers who didn’t complete the education they took out loans to pay for are more likely to default than completers.
“The folks who fall behind on their payments are those who are least well served by the higher education and repayment systems,” said Sarah Sattelmeyer, project director for education, opportunity and mobility in the higher education initiative at New America, a left-leaning think tank. “A lot of those folks did not receive a return on their higher education investment … These aren’t people who overwhelmingly do not want to pay their loans.”
About 5.3 million borrowers have defaulted on their loans, and many have been in default for more than seven years, according to the department. Another four million borrowers are in “late-stage delinquency,” or 91 to 180 days behind on their payments. The department expects about 10 million or nearly one-quarter of borrowers to default by the fall.
“We think that the federal student loan portfolio is headed toward a fiscal cliff if we don’t start repayment and collections,” a senior department official said on a press call Monday. “American taxpayers can no longer serve as collateral for student loans.”
The official didn’t take questions, and a department spokesperson referred reporters to Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. She’s also slated to appear on CNBC and Fox Business to discuss the restart in collections.
In her public statements Monday, McMahon blamed the Biden administration and colleges for the current situation.
“Colleges and universities call themselves nonprofits, but for years they have profited massively off the federal subsidy of loans, hiking tuition and piling up multibillion-dollar endowments while students graduate six figures in the red,” she wrote in the Journal.
Beyond the immediate restart, the senior department official said the department is planning to work with Congress to fix the system so that students can afford their loan payments and to lower the cost of college.
Former Biden administration officials, borrowers and debt-relief advocates havesaid that efforts to forgive student loans were a way to address systemic failures in the student loan system and to help vulnerable borrowers who were likely to never repay their loans.
The department is planning a “robust communication strategy,” the senior official said, to spread the word to borrowers and share information about their options, such as enrolling in an income-driven repayment plan or loan rehabilitation.
Currently, about 1.8 million borrowers have pending applications for an IDR plan, but the department intends to clear that backlog over the next few weeks, the official said. The department also is planning to email borrowers individually about their options. The outreach plan also includes extending the loan servicers’ call center hours on weekends and weeknights.
Sattelmeyer, who worked in the Office of Federal Student Aid during the Biden administration, said it will be important to ensure borrowers have access to information and the tools such as IDR plans to either get out of or avoid default and then stay on track. She questioned whether the department has enough staff to restart collections effectively, given the recent mass layoffs at the agency.
“The issue is that the system is in disarray right now and there have not been a consistent set of options available for borrowers at the same time that we’re turning back on collections,” she said. “At the end of the day, I think the most important thing is that it does not feel like we have the resources and the staffing in place to make this go smoothly and to ensure that borrowers have support and access to resources and tools.”
Colleges and universities are home to an array of resources to help students thrive and succeed, but many students don’t know about them. Just over half (56 percent) of college students say they’re aware of tutoring and academic supports on campus, compared to 94 percent of college employees who say their campus offers the resources.
At the University of South Florida, the Academic Success Center is a central office in the library that houses tutoring, the writing lab, peer mentoring and supplemental instruction, among other academic support offerings for undergraduates.
Zoraya Betancourt became director of the center in 2020 during a challenging time, she said—in part because the center had to reintroduce itself to incoming students who had never been on campus and those who had their college experience disrupted by COVID-19.
National data shows that students at large public institutions are spending less time studying outside of class now compared to during the 2018–19 academic year, and they are less likely to participate in a study group with their peers.
“For me, it was like, OK, we are going to have to be very different. We can’t go back to who we were,” Betancourt said.
Spurred by student data and feedback, Betancourt and her team led a remodel of the center to be more responsive to student needs and meet them where they are.
Data-based decisions: To start, Betancourt partnered with Steve Johnson, a data scientist on the university’s Predictive Analytics Research for Student Success team, to build a dashboard of student data.
“For many years the only data we had was how many students come and use the services how many times,” as well as some student identification data, Betancourt said. “I always thought we need more than that—we need to know more than that.”
Now, Betancourt has access to student majors, colleges and the types of services they utilize to identify high-demand subjects and create responsive learning support schedules. The dashboard also connects the way services are tied to student retention and outcome goals.
In addition to automating some work, the dashboard allows staff to engage students more directly. Each week, the system generates a report of new visitors to the center, which staff use to reach out and personally welcome students to the center and its services.
A care-centered model: One trend that became clear in student interactions was the prevalence of stress in the student experience, Betancourt said. “Our tutors are coming to us and saying, ‘I have a student … and I don’t know how to help them.’”
In response, the office adopted a care model for referrals that quickly connects support staff with other departments, reducing opportunities for students to fall through the cracks.
“Within this referral system, we can go in and see if a student who is using our services says, ‘I really need to change my major and I don’t know what to do, I’m really stressing out over it,’” Betancourt said. “We’re able to go into the system and refer them directly to an adviser.”
Larry Billue Jr. serves as the Academic Success Center point person for care management, guiding students to counseling support, financial aid, basic needs support and academic advisers or just sitting with the student to discuss how they’re feeling.
Increased peer engagement: Another new feature of the ACS was supplemental instruction. While the academic intervention has been around for decades, it was new to the university and created opportunities for increased collaboration between staff and faculty to promote academic success, as well as create jobs for student employees.
“That became more evident because we were hearing from students, ‘I need more than just tutoring. I like working with my peers,’” Betancourt said.
At USF, supplemental instruction is called PASS, short for peer-assisted study sessions. The ACS is tracking student participation in PASS to gauge use.
Students can also sign up to receive remote tutoring in select courses through the PORTAL (peer online resources for tutoring and learning), to supplement in-person opportunities when the office may be closed.
The impact: Over the past year, the center has seen a 75 percent year-over-year increase in student use.
Having a care team member on board has also been successful; Billue Jr. can physically walk a student across campus to the relevant office and make introductions as needed.
“It’s been well received by students; they take him up on the offer and they’ll walk with him,” Betancourt said.
The center has also expanded training for academic peer mentors to address not only study strategies and effective learning practices, but also how to make referrals to other offices.
The biggest lesson Betancourt has learned: There are a range of opportunities to engage students and connect with them, understanding those opportunities just requires a deeper look at what students need.
“We serve to engage students on campus, to engage students with each other, to engage students with faculty and with staff, and it’s looking at that a little bit closer to improve our services and how we can build on that,” Betancourt said.
Do you have an academic intervention that might help others improve student success? Tell us about it.
Transformative. Disruptive. Game-changing. That’s how many experts continue to refer, without hyperbole, to generative AI’s impact on higher education. Yet more than two years after generative AI went mainstream, half of chief technology officers report that their college or university isn’t granting students institutional access to generative AI tools, which are often gratis and more sophisticated and secure than what’s otherwise available to students. That’s according to Inside Higher Ed’s forthcoming annual Survey of Campus Chief Technology/Information Officers with Hanover Research.
There remains some significant—and important—skepticism in academe about generative AI’s potential for pedagogical (and societal) good. But with a growing number of institutions launching key AI initiatives underpinned by student access to generative AI tools, and increasing student and employer expectations around AI literacy, student generative AI access has mounting implications for digital equity and workforce readiness. And according to Inside Higher Ed’s survey, cost is the No. 1 barrier to granting access, ahead of lack of need and even ethical concerns.
Ravi Pendse, who reviewed the findings for Inside Higher Ed and serves as vice president for information technology and chief information officer at the University of Michigan, a leader in granting students access to generative AI tools, wasn’t surprised by the results. But he noted that AI prompting costs, typically measured in units called tokens, have fallen sharply over time. Generative AI models, including open-source large language models, have proliferated over the same period, meaning that institutions have increasing—and increasingly less expensive—options for providing students access to tools.
‘Paralyzed’ by Costs
“Sometimes we get paralyzed by, ‘I don’t have resources, or there’s no way I can do this,’ and that’s where people need to just lean in,” Pendse said. “I want to implore all leaders and colleagues to step up and focus on what’s possible, and let human creativity get us there.”
According to the survey—which asked 108 CTOs at two- and four-year colleges, public and private nonprofit, much more about AI, digital transformation, online learning and other key topics—institutional approaches to student generative AI access vary. (The full survey findings will be released next month.)
Some 27 percent of CTOs said their college or university offers students generative AI access through an institutionwide license, with CTOs at public nonprofit institutions especially likely to say this. Another 13 percent of all CTOs reported student access to generative AI tools is limited to specific programs or departments, with this subgroup made up entirely of private nonprofit CTOs. And 5 percent of the sample reported that students at their institution have access to a custom-built generative AI tool.
Among community college CTOs specifically (n=22), 36 percent said that students have access to generative AI tools, all through an institutionwide license.
Roughly half of institutions represented do not offer student access to generative AI tools. Some 36 percent of CTOs reported that their college doesn’t offer access but is considering doing so, while 15 percent said that their institution doesn’t offer access and is not considering it.
Of those CTOs who reported some kind of student access to generative AI and answered a corresponding question about how they pay for it (n=45), half said associated costs are covered by their central IT budget; most of these are public institution CTOs. Another quarter said there are no associated costs. Most of the rest of this group indicated that funding comes from individual departments. Almost no one said costs are passed on to students, such as through fees.
Among CTOs from institutions that don’t provide student access who responded to a corresponding question about why not (n=51), the top-cited barrier from a list of possibilities was costs. Ethical concerns, such as those around potential misuse and academic integrity, factored in, as well, followed by concerns about data privacy and/or security. Fewer said there is no need or insufficient technical expertise to manage implementation.
“I very, very strongly feel that every student that graduates from any institution of higher education must have at least one core course in AI, or significant exposure to these tools. And if we’re not doing that, I believe that we are doing a disservice to our students,” Pendse said. “As a nation we need to be prepared, which means we as educators have a responsibility. We need to step up and not get bogged down by cost, because there are always solutions available. Michigan welcomes the opportunity to partner with any institution out there and provide them guidance, all our lessons learned.”
The Case for Institutional Access
But do students really need their institutions to provide access to generative AI tools, given that rapid advances in AI technology also have led to fewer limitations on free, individual-level access to products such as ChatGPT, which many students have and can continue to use on their own?
Experts such as Sidney Fernandes, vice president and CIO of the University of South Florida, which offers all students, faculty and staff access to Microsoft Copilot, say yes. One reason: privacy and security concerns. USF users of Copilot Chat use the tool in a secure, encrypted environment to maintain data privacy. And the data users share within USF’s Copilot enterprise functions—which support workflows and innovation—also remains within the institution and is not used to train AI models.
There’s no guarantee, of course, that students with secure, institutional generative AI accounts will use only them. But at USF and beyond, account rollouts are typically accompanied by basic training efforts—another plus for AI literacy and engagement.
“When we offer guidance on how to use the profiles, we’ve said, ‘If you’re using the commercially available chat bots, those are the equivalent of being on social media. Anything you post there could be used for whatever reason, so be very careful,” Fernandes told Inside Higher Ed.
In Inside Higher Ed’s survey, CTOs who reported student access to generative AI tools by some means were no more likely than the group over all to feel highly confident in their institution’s cybersecurity practices—although CTOs as a group may have reason to worry about students and cybersecurity generally: Just 26 percent reported their institution requires student training in cybersecurity.
Colleges can also grant students access to tools that are much more powerful than freely available and otherwise prompt-limited chat bots, as well as tools that are more integrated into other university platforms and resources. Michigan, for instance, offers students access to an AI assistant and another conversational AI tool, plus a separate tool that can be trained on a custom dataset. Access to a more advanced and flexible tool kit for those who require full control over their AI environments and models is available by request.
Responsive AI and the Role of Big Tech
Another reason for institutions to lead on student access to generative AI tools is cultural responsiveness, as AI tools reflect the data they’re trained on, and human biases often are baked into that data. Muhsinah Morris, director of Metaverse programs at Morehouse College, which has various culturally responsive AI initiatives—such as those involving AI tutors that look like professors—said it “makes a lot of sense to not put your eggs in one basket and say that basket is going to be the one that you carry … But at the end of the day, it’s all about student wellness, 24-7, personalized support, making sure that students feel seen and heard in this landscape and developing skills in real time that are going to make them better.”
The stakes of generative AI in education, for digital equity and beyond, also implicate big tech companies whose generative AI models and bottom lines benefit from the knowledge flowing from colleges and universities. Big tech could therefore be doing much more to partner on free generative AI access with colleges and universities, and not just on the “2.0” and “3.0” models, Morris said.
“They have a responsibility to also pour back into the world,” she added. “They are not off the hook. As a matter of fact, I’m calling them to the carpet.”
Jenay Robert, senior researcher at Educause, noted that the organization’s 2025 AI Landscape Study: Into the Digital AI Divide found that more institutions are licensing AI tools than creating their own, across a variety of capabilities. She said digital equity is “certainly one of the biggest concerns when it comes to students’ access to generative AI tools.” Some 83 percent of respondents in that study said they were concerned about widening the digital divide as an AI-related risk. Yet most respondents were also optimistic about AI improving access to and accessibility of educational materials.
Of course, Robert added, “AI tools won’t contribute to any of these improvements if students can’t access the tools.” Respondents to the Educause landscape study from larger institutions were more likely those from smaller ones to report that their AI-related strategic planning includes increasing access to AI tools.
Inside Higher Ed’s survey also reveals a link between institution size and access, with student access to generative AI tools through an institutionwide license, especially, increasing with student population. But just 11 percent of CTOs reported that their institution has a comprehensive AI strategy.
Still, Robert cautioned that “access is only part of the equation here. If we want to avoid widening the digital equity divide, we also have to help students learn how to use the tools they have access to.”
In a telling data point from Educause’s 2025 Students and Technology Report, more than half of students reported that most or all of their instructors prohibit the use of generative AI.
Arizona State University, like Michigan, collaborated early on with OpenAI, but it has multiple vendor partners and grants student access to generative AI tools through an institutionwide license, through certain programs and custom-built tools. ASU closely follows generative AI consumption in a way that allows it to meet varied needs across the university in a cost-effective manner, as “the cost of one [generative AI] model versus another can vary dramatically,” said Kyle Bowen, deputy CIO.
“A large percentage of students make use of a moderate level of capability, but some students and faculty make use of more advanced capability,” he said. “So everybody having everything may not make sense. It may not be very cost-sustainable. Part of what we have to look at is what we would describe as consumption-based modeling—meaning we are putting in place the things that people need and will consume, not trying to speculate what the future will look like.”
That’s what even institutions with established student access are “wrestling with,” Bowen continued. “How do we provide that universal level of AI capability today while recognizing that that will evolve and change, and we have to be ready to have technology for the future, as well, right?”
Northwestern University is stepping in to fund ongoing research projects after the private institution received stop-work orders on nearly 100 federal grants, CBS News Chicago reported.
Northwestern, like others on the list, had a pro-Palestinian encampment protest on campus last spring, which prompted Congress to bring its president in for a hearing on antisemitism in May.
Northwestern president Michael Schill and Board of Trustees chair Peter Barris told the university community in an email obtained by CBS News Chicago that the university still had not received formal notice that federal research funding had been pulled, but the university has received stop-work orders. They noted the university will continue funding on projects that received stop-work orders as well as other research threatened by the Trump administration.
“The work we do is essential to our community, to the nation and to the world. Enabling this vital research to continue is among our most important priorities, and supporting our researchers in this moment is a responsibility we take seriously,” Schill and Barris wrote in the Thursday email.
Northwestern is among the nation’s wealthiest universities, with an endowment recently valued at $14.2 billion. However, financial experts have cautioned against leveraging endowments to plug budget holes, prompting some wealthy institutions targeted by the administration to issue bonds or take out private loans.
This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.
Students tap on their keyboards as a professor lectures at the front of the room. It looks like any other college course, except that it’s taking place at a high school. This year, more than 150,000 California teens are earning college credit in dual enrollment courses.
Dual enrollment offers high schoolers the chance to attend community college, typically for free, often without having to leave their campuses. By helping students tackle the college academic experience, the programs increase the likelihood that students attend college after graduating high school.
About 80% of California’s dual enrolled high school students go on to a community college or university, compared to 66% of California 12th grade students in general, the Public Policy Institute of California found. More than a third of California’s dual enrolled students go on to attend the same community college they attended while in high school after they graduate, according to the Community College Research Center.
Many college and high school administrators have pushed to increase students’ college attainment rates, and the state has invested more than $700 million in dual enrollment, leading to a significant expansion. The number of students in these courses tripled between spring 2015 and spring 2024, according to state data. The Public Policy Institute of California found that about 30% of California’s high school graduating class of 2024 took at least one dual enrollment course.
The growth of high schoolers is a bright spot in overall student totals at the state’s community colleges, which have struggled to fully rebound after enrollment tanked during the pandemic. However, some community college faculty have pushed back against widespread dual enrollment due to concerns about academic rigor and working conditions for educators.
Furthermore, data shows that some of California’s rural students, as well as males and students of color, don’t enroll in and complete these courses at the same rate as others. Some experts and administrators say they’re not just missing out on a couple of college credits, they’re not getting the same opportunities to envision themselves as future college students.
“When high schoolers complete these courses, they are able to fulfill requirements that help them access associate degrees and bachelor’s degrees,” said Daniel Payares-Montoya, a PPIC research associate. “The students benefit, but so do the community colleges, because it helps them enroll more students.”
Rural schools and colleges face dual enrollment hurdles
In Siskiyou County, at the northern tip of California, the only community college serves a sprawling region that covers mountains, forests and rural towns. Although the county has a population of just 43,000, it is the fifth largest county in California by area, meaning that often the hardest part of supporting dual enrolled students isn’t the actual teaching — it’s having the right technology and transportation to reach them in the first place.
“The personal interaction is a challenge, because we have high schools that are two hours away,” said Kim Peacemaker, a counselor and dual enrollment coordinator at College of the Siskiyous. The college currently has about 230 dual enrolled high school students and about 2,390 students total, based on state data.
Peacemaker said the college has worked to make dual enrollment accessible by allowing professors to meet virtually with students in their high school classrooms. However, she added that some students don’t have reliable internet access at home for homework or tutoring. In Siskiyou County, 13.7% of households don’t have broadband internet.
Students walk through one of the main walkways onto Bakersfield College on June 14, 2023. (Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters/CatchLight Local)
California’s rural colleges generally lag behind urban colleges in dual enrollment. Kern Community College District in the southern Central Valley and the Compton Community College District near Los Angeles had the two highest percentages of high school students in 2024, at 41% and 36% respectively, based on state data. In comparison, 9.7% of students at College of the Siskiyous are dual enrolled high schoolers, and this drops to about 5% in some other parts of the state.
Sonya Christian, the chancellor of the California Community College system, previously led the Kern Community College District, spearheading its expansion of dual enrollment. Now, dual enrollment in the district is “one of the most successful models in the state,” Christian said in an emailed statement to CalMatters.
“I prioritized dual enrollment because I saw it as a potential pathway to increase college-going rates, accelerate degree completion and provide students — especially those in rural and low-income communities — with early exposure to college-level coursework,” Christian said in the statement.
For many high school students in the small city of Blythe, which sits along California’s border with Arizona, the only people they know with bachelor’s degrees are their teachers. That’s why Clint Cowden, the vice president of instruction and student services at Palo Verde College, said the exposure to college that dual enrollment provides these students can be transformative.
“It’s really a win-win for the community,” Cowden said.
A recent alumnus of Palo Verde College’s dual enrollment program, Manuel Milke earned his high school diploma and his associate degree simultaneously, while juggling varsity soccer and football. Now Milke, who is 19, is set to graduate in the fall from San Diego State with a bachelor’s degree in kinesiology. Milke said he chose to attend San Diego State to stay close to his family in Blythe, and aspires to work as a physical therapist somewhere nearby.
“Everyone should do dual enrollment,” said Milke. “It saved me time, it saved me money and it made me feel more prepared for college.”
Student gaps remain in dual enrollment
As a Latino male, Milke is in the minority for dual enrollment. Based on state data, Black and Latino students are both underrepresented in dual enrollment courses. In the spring 2024 semester, 41% of dual enrollment students were male, while 56% were female. According to Payares-Montoya, these gaps in access to dual enrollment can make it so Black, Latino and male students are less likely to see higher education as an option, compared to their dual enrolled peers.
For Jesse Medrano, an 18-year-old senior at Daniel Pearl Magnet High School in the Los Angeles Unified School District, dual enrollment has provided “a good outline of what college is like.” His high school first placed him in dual enrollment in ninth grade, and since then he has taken five classes, covering topics including economics and political science.
“I didn’t have the drive to seek these courses out, so the fact that they put me in them set this standard for me, and now I’m meeting it,” said Medrano, who is Latino and plans to study accounting at Cal State Northridge. “I didn’t have the motivation, but now I do, and I’m able to succeed.”
At Compton College more than a third of the current students are still in high school, according to state data. Latino and Black students comprise 75% and 9% of dual enrollees, respectively, which are significantly higher than state averages. Keith Curry, the college’s president, said that when students of color complete dual enrollment courses, this gets them comfortable with college academics and leads to better representation at colleges and universities.
Some faculty push back against expansion
Some community college faculty have raised concerns about the process by which dual enrollment partnerships are established, the level of readiness of high school students for college courses, and who teaches these classes. In many districts across the state, some dual enrollment courses are not taught by community college faculty, but by existing high school teachers who hold the credentials required to teach at a college level. In the Kern Community College District, about 60% of dual enrollment courses held on high school campuses are taught by high school teachers who meet the college qualifications, according to district spokesperson Norma Rojas.
Tim Maxwell, an English professor at College of San Mateo, is a “conscientious objector” to California’s expansion of dual enrollment. Maxwell said he is concerned about what he sees as a focus to get as many students to graduate and earn college credits as quickly as possible, sacrificing college-level rigor and evaluation.
“Completion is important, but our primary responsibility is for students to learn something along the way,” said Maxwell, who has taught community college courses for about 30 years.
Maxwell has taught creative writing courses on his college campus with several dual enrolled students, one as young as 15 years old, and he said these students are “phenomenal.” But, he added, there’s a difference between a handful of proactive high schoolers going to a community college campus and a high school classroom that “switches to a college class during fifth period.” He said he is concerned about poor working conditions for professors, primarily adjunct faculty, who have to travel to high schools and teach without the proper background or support.
“We need to resist this, and we need lawmakers who understand something about education and not just spreadsheets,” Maxwell said.
Wendy Brill-Wynkoop, the president of the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges, said dual enrollment is beneficial for students, but that she has “heard grumblings” about a need for faculty to have a more active role in setting standards and policies for dual enrollment.
Students walk near Hepner Hall at San Diego State University in San Diego on Oct. 10, 2024. (Adriana Heldiz/CalMatters)
While in high school in Blythe, Milke said his dual enrollment courses were generally easier than the courses he takes at San Diego State. But they still challenged him and prepared him for a college-level workload, he said.
Lawmakers work to continue growth
Several state laws have been enacted in the past decade to expand dual enrollment in California. In 2015, Assembly Bill 288 established the College and Career Access Pathways program, allowing community colleges and high schools to enter into dual enrollment partnerships. These institutions bring the courses to students, as opposed to those students having to seek them out. The state streamlined the pathways program with the passage of Assembly Bill 30 in 2019, allowing students to submit fewer forms to enroll. Assembly Bill 731, which is currently in committee, would, among other changes, increase the number of units that students in the program can take.
Based on PPIC research, students in the College and Career Access Pathways program now account for about 37% of dual enrollees. This program has a higher percentage of underrepresented students compared to other dual enrollment programs, in part because it eliminates some of the restrictions that can make it hard for schools to offer broad and barrier-free dual enrollment.
As dual enrollment continues to expand, it increases costs to California beyond the more than $700 million that the state has already invested. That’s because both community colleges and high school districts are typically both able to receive state funding for dual enrolled students, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office.
According to the statement from Christian, state leaders are working to increase dual enrollment access by expanding partnerships between high schools and colleges.
“My vision is to make dual enrollment a standard opportunity for all California students, not just an option for a select few, increasing equitable access to higher education and workforce-aligned learning,” Christian said in the statement.
Alana Althaus-Cressman, who runs the dual enrollment program at Golden Eagle Charter School, a K-12 school in Siskiyou County, markets the program to all students, not just those who already have a record of high achievement. She studied dual enrollment access for rural students for her graduate school dissertation at Sacramento State University, and started the early college high school program at Golden Eagle Charter in 2024. Students in the program take dual enrollment courses for part of the school day, and high school courses for the rest.
Althaus-Cressman said that because dual enrollment offers students a glimpse of college, it’s important that the classes aren’t only filled with students who already plan to attend college. Some high schools require minimum grade point averages or have other barriers to entry for dual enrollment, which Althaus-Cressman said can perpetuate inequalities.
The early college high school program enrolls about a third of Golden Eagle Charter’s ninth graders. Althaus-Cressman attributes this level of participation to extensive outreach, which included working with school staff to call the families of every incoming high school student to invite them to a dual enrollment orientation.
“We don’t want students to think that they aren’t the type of student for this program,” Althaus-Cressman said. “It’s for everybody.”
