Tag: News

  • Trends in Hiring, 2025 Graduate Readiness for the Workforce

    Trends in Hiring, 2025 Graduate Readiness for the Workforce

    SDI Productions/E+/Getty Images 

    Commencement season brings excitement to college campuses as community members look to celebrate the accomplishments of the graduating class and usher them into their next chapter of life.

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

    Inside Higher Ed compiled 25 data points regarding the Class of 2025 and the workforce they will enter, including levels of career preparedness, challenges in the workplace and the value of higher education in reaching career goals.

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

    We bet your colleague would like this article, too. Send them this link to subscribe to our newsletter on Student Success.

    Source link

  • Seven free speech groups issue a call to oppose Trump’s First Amendment violations… Why aren’t there more? — First Amendment News 471

    Seven free speech groups issue a call to oppose Trump’s First Amendment violations… Why aren’t there more? — First Amendment News 471

    There’s some very weird, strange and dangerous shit going on out there right now. In America, they are persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. This is happening now. — Bruce Springsteen (May 14)

    Was “the Boss” being partisan there? Donald Trump thought so:

    “This dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country, that’s just ‘standard fare.’ Then we’ll all see how it goes for him!”

    Just goes to show that there are two sides, both of them “partisan.” The singer has his partisan views, and so does the suppressor. We just need to chill, get along, and hear both sides. Ah yes, a Kumbaya embrace — yuck!

    The ‘Big Chill’

    Do you remember those “nonpartisan” folks who were so outraged by what was going on in the cancel culture world of college campuses? How they lamented the way the censorial mindset was choking the First Amendment? Oh, those First Amendment champions were so incensed.

    And fair enough, things were wildly out of control and those liberals responsible for supporting or allowing such censorship had to be called out. Again, fair enough. Of course, those who tolerated college censorship (dare I say “liberals”?) are now livid by what is going on. Rightfully so.

    But where are those guardians of free speech (dare I say “conservatives”) now? When never a day goes by when the Trump administration does not abridge the First Amendment with wild abandon?

    Censorship is censorship!

    Given where we are today, I’m tired of such rhetorical gaming. Censorship is censorship, period! The hell with the thinking that one must walk on “nonpartisan” eggshells before speaking too loudly or too often against censorship when it is as constant as it is today under this administration.

    Take heed: It was not partisan to boldly condemn John Adams or Woodrow Wilson or Joseph McCarthy for their crusades of suppression. And it was not partisan to call out their supporters who sat silently in the face of such tyranny. In such a world, there are not “two sides” such that the likes of Bill Maher could dine with “nonpartisan” delight with a “measured” opponent of free expression.

    Seven free expression groups speak out — Yes!

    Thus, I was delighted to learn that seven groups had written an open letter to “universities, media organizations, law firms, and businesses” to stand up against the “Trump administration’s multi-front assault on First Amendment freedoms.”

    Before I say more, let me quote from the timely and important open letter that these seven groups just released. First this: “In little more than 100 days, President Trump and the agencies under his control have threatened First Amendment rights through a breathtaking array of actions.”

    After that introduction, they listed an indictment of free speech abridgments, and in a style reminiscent of the indictment in the Declaration of Independence, they have delineated specific things the administration has done (I have added bullets to their text):

    • They have sought to control speech and association by imposing unconstitutional conditions on a wide range of federal grantees and contractors.
    • They have sanctioned lawyers for their representation of people whom the president views as political enemies.
    • They have arrested, detained, and threatened to deport international students — including lawful permanent residents — solely because of their participation in lawful political protest.
    • They have purged crucial datasets from government websites, gutted agency offices responsible for compliance with the Freedom of Information Act, and imposed new and indefensible restraints on public employees’ right to speak on matters of public concern.
    • They have invoked civil rights laws to justify extensive and unwarranted intrusions into universities’ autonomy and academic freedom.
    • Resurrecting a policy introduced during President Trump’s first term, they have barred legal scholars from providing information and expertise to the International Criminal Court.
    • They have banned the Associated Press from the White House press pool because it declined to update its stylebook to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.”
    • Books have been removed from U.S. military service academy libraries, and other federally operated educational institutions, because they do not conform to the administration’s ideological preferences, and federal funds are being used as a cudgel to censor curriculum and promote the administration’s viewpoints in schools.
    • The Federal Communications Commission has threatened to revoke the licenses of television and radio networks and stations whose reporting the administration disfavors.

    As Professor Timothy Zick has so ably documented, the Trump administration’s assault on free expression is unprecedented. The following assessment from the seven groups echoes what is reliably set off in detailed form in Zick’s repository over at First Amendment Watch:

    There have been other times in our nation’s history that witnessed sustained and misguided efforts to suppress speech. All of our organizations have opposed both Democratic and Republican administrations when they abridged First Amendment freedoms — as all of them, at various points, have done. But we share the view that the Trump administration’s actions, taken together, represent an extraordinary and in some ways unprecedented challenge to First Amendment rights and the values they embody [emphasis added]. These actions call for a forceful, uncompromising response. Some institutions have countered in exactly this way, to their credit.

    Where the hell are other free speech groups and individuals? 

    Against that backdrop, I ask: where the hell are all those other groups, who when it came to campus censorship were so outspoken in defense of free expression? Why don’t they have their own open letters? Why are so many of those groups not openly endorsing the courageous assessments of those who, like Judge Michael Luttig, condemn the tyranny that is Trump? Too many conservative and liberal groups are afraid to speak out, afraid to put their names on the line. 

    Judge Michael Luttig at a confirmation hearing

    Judge Michael Luttig

    What we are witnessing today is a BIG CHILL effect of enormous magnitude. Some liberals (in law firms, universities, think tanks, and elsewhere) are afraid to speak out, lest they be attacked by one of the president’s executive orders. By the same token, some conservatives are afraid to speak out (on their blogs or elsewhere) for fear that they will lose stock in their ideological world, or fall victim to Trump’s wrath.

    Bottom line: Tyranny is tyranny, and condemning it is not partisan — it’s American!

    Recent samples of the BIG CHILL in suppressive operation

    Related:

    The decision by nine of America’s biggest law firms to “bend the knee” to President Trump drew condemnation among lawyers across the political spectrum, including from attorneys inside the firms who quit or launched resistance campaigns. Others have chosen a less career-limiting form of rebellion.

    That would be offering leaks to Above the Law, a pugnacious legal industry website best known for scoops about law firm annual bonuses, snarky coverage of legal news and salacious stories of barristers behaving badly. But since March, when Mr. Trump began targeting for retribution top law firms whose clients and past work he does not like, Above the Law has become a rage read for lawyers incensed at the firms that accommodated him.

    Fueled by a stream of inside-the-conference-room exclusives, Above the Law delivers a daily public spanking to what it calls “The Yellow-Bellied Nine.” Those are the elite firms that pledged a collective $1 billion in free legal work to Mr. Trump after he signed executive orders threatening to bar their lawyers from federal buildings, suspend their security clearances and cancel their government contracts.

    Coming next week on FAN: Timothy Zick on institutional independence and democratic backsliding

    Although the Trump Administration’s agenda regarding freedom of expression can appear chaotic, one consistent strategy has been attacking institutions that are essential to checking executive power. It is no accident that many of President Trump’s Executive Orders and the agency actions they direct have targeted the media, universities and faculty, law firms, libraries, and museums. These and other entities are sometimes referred to as “First Amendment institutions” or “knowledge institutions,” because they contribute to and facilitate public discourse and are necessary to a free and open society.

    ‘[Re]Distributed for Conference’ — SCOTUS mantra in some First Amendment cases

    Apparently, the Justices are so overworked with all the Trump emergency appeals that they have to continue to pause on what to do with some of the First Amendment cases on their docket. For example, consider the following petitions:

    Jessica Levinson on Comey, protected speech, and DOJ investigation

    Professor Jessica Levinson of Loyola Law School

    Professor Jessica Levinson

    Questions are swirling following the launch of a federal investigation into former FBI Director James Comey over a now-deleted social media post of seashells arranged in the numbers “8647” on the beach. (“Eighty-six” is commonly understood to mean “get rid of.” President Trump is the 45th and 47th President of the United States.) Was Comey calling for the assassination of Trump? Or was he, as he has since stated, expressing a political opinion about Trump?

    If Comey’s post amounted to a siren song, beseeching others to kill the president, he can be punished for his speech. But should Comey’s post be viewed as political advocacy, which I argue it should, he is entitled to the full protection of the First Amendment.

    The genuine threat is not that a president’s life is in danger, but that the Trump administration is attempting to silence the speech of political adversaries. Even if it is unlikely that Comey faces anything more than a slap on the wrist for his post, the decision to open an investigation in and of itself should be worrisome. Comey has access to the media and resources to defend himself. Not everyone does. And the prospect of chilling political speech critical of government officials should concern all of us.

    Statement from the Institute for Free Speech on party coordination limits

    The Institute for Free Speech commends the Department of Justice’s decision in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC to acknowledge that federal limits on coordinated expenditures between political parties and their candidates violate the First Amendment. In a dramatic and unusual shift, the DOJ is now asking the Supreme Court to overturn its 2001 decision in Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee v. FEC (Colorado II).

    “The Solicitor General’s recommendation that the Court grant the petition is a commendable move that acknowledges the First Amendment flaws in these limits,” said Institute President David Keating. “As we argued in our amicus brief, the factual basis underpinning Colorado II has been proven wrong by real-world evidence.”

    The Institute’s brief demonstrated that over half the states allow unlimited party coordination, including 17 states that also restrict individual contributions—yet there is no evidence of these arrangements leading to corruption. The DOJ’s brief now acknowledges this reality, recognizing that the law represents a “prophylaxis-upon-prophylaxis approach” that fails heightened First Amendment scrutiny.

    “When more than half the states manage to operate elections without restricting coordinated party expenditures and without giving rise to any relevant quid pro quo corruption, it is hard to believe that the law is ‘necessary to prevent the anticipated harm,’” noted the Institute’s brief.

    The NRSC case challenges federal limits on how much political parties can spend in coordination with their candidates under 52 U.S.C. 30116(d). These restrictions severely burden the core function of political parties—to support and promote their candidates.

    [ . . . ]

    To read the Institute’s amicus brief in the case National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC, click here. To read the Solicitor General’s just-filed brief, click here. To read Institute Senior Attorney Brett Nolan’s expert analysis on the Sixth Circuit’s decision in NRSC, click here.

    Claim: The ‘deluge of pornography has had a negative impact on modern society’

    Christine Emba of the American Institute for Boys and Men Images

    Christine Emba

    It’s hard not to see a connection between porn-trained behaviors — the choking, slapping and spitting that have become the norm even in early sexual encounters — and young women’s distrust of young men. And in the future, porn will become only more addictive and effective as a teacher, as virtual reality makes it more immersive and artificial intelligence allows it to be customizable. (For a foretaste of where this might end up, you can read a recent essay by Aella, a researcher and sex worker, on Substack defending A.I. child porn.)

    In her new book “Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves,” Sophie Gilbert critiques the mass culture of the 1990s and 2000s, noting how it was built on female objectification and hyperexposure. A generation of women, she explains, were persuaded by the ideas that bodies were commodities to be molded, surveilled, fetishized or made the butt of the joke, that sexual power, which might give some fleeting leverage, was the only power worth having. This lie curdled the emerging promise of 20th-century feminism, and as our ambitions shrank, the potential for exploitation grew.

    [ . . . ]

    [W]hile Ms. Gilbert is unsparing in her descriptions of pornography’s warping effect on culture and its consumers, she’s curiously reluctant to acknowledge what seems obvious: Porn hasn’t been good for us. While her descriptions of the cultural landscape imply that the mainstreaming of hard-core porn has been a bad thing, she pulls her punches.” (emphasis added)

    Forthcoming scholarly essay on ‘Fascist Government Speech’

    Professor G. Alex Sinha of Hofstra University

    Professor G. Alex Sinha

    On the day he was sworn in for a second term, President Trump issued pardons and commutations to all of his supporters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. This sweeping act of clemency gave legal effect to a longstanding grievance: Ever since the attack, which disrupted congressional certification of his 2020 election defeat, President Trump has consistently glorified the attackers and denounced their prosecutors. In defending the clemencies two days after issuing them, President Trump reiterated familiar themes — once more refusing to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 election, celebrating the patriotism of his supporters, and maligning those who pursued their accountability through what became the largest criminal investigation in U.S. history.

    President Trump’s script was so familiar that it obscured a constitutional novelty. For most of the time between the January 6 attack and the subsequent clemencies, President Trump was not the president. He was a private citizen, and his speech about January 6 was protected by the First Amendment even to the extent that it was false or dangerous. But, by noon on January 20, 2025, he was once again President Trump—a government official, speaking on behalf of the government, and thus uttering government speech. Government speech is not protected by the First Amendment, but rather by an evolving set of Court-fashioned rules known collectively as the government-speech doctrine. In an instant, his comments took on an entirely new constitutional cast.

    Ordinarily, this transition would be unremarkable; it occurs whenever a private citizen assumes a governmental role. But, combined with their content, President Trump’s statements — on this subject and many others — create a serious First Amendment problem. His remarks are deeply and distinctly illiberal, calibrated to undermine, falsely, the democratic legitimacy of a previous administration and to rewrite the history of an insurrectionist threat that would have allowed him to maintain power by violent and anti-democratic means. It is fascist speech, which invites wildly different constitutional analysis depending on its source.

    Accordingly, this paper introduces and evaluates the concept of fascist government speech — a category we can no longer afford to ignore. Our First Amendment free-speech rights spring in substantial part from a commitment to self-governance, and the protections that follow generally extend to private fascist speech as part of a forceful commitment to free debate that courts and scholars have long believed would facilitate a robust democracy. By contrast, the basis of the government-speech doctrine is functional necessity, a recognition that our democratic self-governance would be rendered ineffective if the government could not spread its message. That backstory simply cannot justify protecting fascist government speech, which directly undermines the basis for governmental communicative prerogatives. Yet the doctrine, as constituted, ultimately does protect fascist government speech. Worse still, the doctrine operates to abrogate private free-speech claims, a result that is distinctly perverse when the abrogation functions to amplify fascist government speech. This paper therefore argues for significant revision to the government-speech doctrine to blunt the threat of fascist government speech.

    More in the news

    2024-2025 SCOTUS term: Free expression and related cases

    Cases decided

    • Villarreal v. Alaniz (Petition granted. Judgment vacated and case remanded for further consideration in light of Gonzalez v. Trevino, 602 U. S. ___ (2024) (per curiam))
    • Murphy v. Schmitt (“The petition for a writ of certiorari is granted. The judgment is vacated, and the case is remanded to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit for further consideration in light of Gonzalez v. Trevino, 602 U. S. ___ (2024) (per curiam).”)
    • TikTok Inc. and ByteDance Ltd v. Garland (9-0: The challenged provisions of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act do not violate petitioners’ First Amendment rights.)

    Review granted

    Pending petitions

    Petitions denied

    Emergency Applications

    • Yost v. Ohio Attorney General (Kavanaugh, J., “IT IS ORDERED that the March 14, 2025 order of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, case No. 2:24-cv-1401, is hereby stayed pending further order of the undersigned or of the Court. It is further ordered that a response to the application be filed on or before Wednesday, April 16, 2025, by 5 p.m. (EDT).”)

    Free speech related

    • Mahmoud v. Taylor (argued April 22 / free exercise case: issue: Whether public schools burden parents’ religious exercise when they compel elementary school children to participate in instruction on gender and sexuality against their parents’ religious convictions and without notice or opportunity to opt out.)
    • Thompson v. United States (decided: 3-21-25/ 9-0 w special concurrences by Alito and Jackson) (interpretation of 18 U. S. C. §1014 re: “false statements”)

    Last scheduled FAN

    FAN 470: “Trump’s ‘So what?’ stratagem

    This article is part of First Amendment News, an editorially independent publication edited by Ronald K. L. Collins and hosted by FIRE as part of our mission to educate the public about First Amendment issues. The opinions expressed are those of the article’s author(s) and may not reflect the opinions of FIRE or Mr. Collins.

    Source link

  • Students Getting You Down? It’s Not Them; It’s You (opinion)

    Students Getting You Down? It’s Not Them; It’s You (opinion)

    A week does not pass without my hearing about the apparently sorry state of the current crop of students. They are lazy, disengaged, clueless and so on. It is the dusty trope that the old do not appreciate the young.

    In a trip through the literature and news of the past, you will find Generation X described as underachieving, angry, psychologically damaged slackers who were indifferent to learning, brazenly rude, entitled, unprofessional whiners. Millennials were called “Generation Whine” and described as self-centered, unmotivated, disrespectful, depressed, anxious, disloyal, entitled cynics who were so overindulged and protected by their parents that they were incapable of working without constant hand holding.

    If this all sounds familiar, it should. Professors now bemoan the current crop of Gen Z students who will not read, cannot handle stress, procrastinate, lack basic academic skills, refuse to engage in class, are psychologically needy and are more interested in preparation for a career than appreciating knowledge.

    Meanwhile, every generation is described as being both skilled in and ruined by new technology. Boomers complained that Generation X could not write a proper formal letter and that Millennials expected email communication. Generation X now complains about Generation Z not attending to their email communication and lacking proper email etiquette. It is an ongoing cycle.

    Much of the educational discourse seems to assume that each new generation of students differs from the last to such a degree that many accommodations will need to be made. Every generation is indeed affected by the events of their time. The educational disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic likely widened the already existing achievement gaps among different groups of Generation Z learners. However, learning is learning. Decades of research across multiple fields of psychology have shaped our understanding of the human mind and how we best learn. Teaching is hard work, and we make teaching harder when we remain fixated on stereotypes, tech temptations and societal trends.

    Let’s refocus on what our trade is—learning. From my experience as a professor of more than 20 years specializing in educational psychology, and as a researcher and department chair, I offer these principles:

    1. Engage in your discipline. Maintain your expertise over time and share the developments of your field. If you are bored with your discipline, it will show. And if your knowledge is out of date and students find out, you lose all credibility. As a professor, few things are as awkward as when a student shares incorrect information they learned in another course and you must contradict it with up-to-date, accurate information.
    2. Figure out what type of teaching suits you and then master that type. If you are a lecturer, then study what makes someone the best lecturer. If you use PowerPoints, study best practices in their design. If you embrace group work, explore what types of assignments and student groupings are most effective. What pedagogy you use is less important than doing that pedagogy well. By all means, learn new techniques. But new does not always mean better, and not all techniques are going to fit with your content and style. I will be the first to admit that I am not the most dynamic speaker. I am, however, good at reading the room, pacing the delivery of knowledge and explaining ideas in many different ways. Lean into your strengths.
    3. Create opportunities for multiple types of learning. Humans learn best by engaging different areas of their brain: their auditory and visual systems, their logic and expressive capabilities, and their abilities to apply and build personal connections to new knowledge. Research shows that students do not have unitary learning styles: However, everyone learns better when they engage multiple processing modes. You do not need to do everything all at once. But across your design of homework, class time and assessment, remember: Variety is key. My own action research in my measurement and statistics course bears this out. Concerted effort to allow students to use analytic, practical and creative means to express their knowledge resulted in a productive experience in a class that many students dreaded.
    1. Do not let new technology pass you by. What is new in instructional technology now may become the norm tomorrow. Try new things and stay knowledgeable, but also consider how and why you would use the technology to improve teaching or other aspects of your course. For example, clickers did not work well for me, but many professors make great use of them. A useful strategy is to turn to your students and ask them how they would improve one of your assignments by integrating new technology. Guides such as the one here are available to help you make these decisions.
    2. Express a genuine interest in your students. You are not their friend, but you can be courteous and friendly. It is good manners, after all. Be a human being. As students gather before class begins, you might consider asking how the semester is going. Perhaps reference an event that has taken place on campus. Do not be afraid to mention your own experiences if they are directly relevant to the course. There is continuing lore related to my courses that if you find a way to include cats while also demonstrating the content and skills of the course you will receive extra credit (true). Do not be afraid to be real.

    Fulfilling these principles in your teaching career is not easy. It takes time, energy and a lifelong commitment to self-improvement—the same traits we wish for in our students. If you find that you are unwilling to strive to meet these principles, and then find the students are not living up to expectations, know that it is not them: It’s you.

    Erin Morris Miller is an associate professor of psychology at Bridgewater College.

    Source link

  • Free Speech Expert Discusses Open Expression and Trump

    Free Speech Expert Discusses Open Expression and Trump

    The University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement launched in 2017, at a time when students were shouting down conservative speakers on campus, raising questions about what role the First Amendment did—and should—play in higher education.

    Just eight years later, things have only gotten more complicated—first in the aftermath of an explosive protest movement against Israel’s war in Gaza and then in the wake of the Trump administration’s censorship across all areas of academe.

    Amid the chaos, the center and its fellows—researchers from a breadth of disciplines who work on projects related to open expression and civic engagement—continue to educate universities about the First Amendment and investigate the day’s most pressing free speech issues.

    Its executive director, Michelle Deutchman, who worked as an attorney for the Anti-Defamation League for 14 years before joining the center, stopped by the Inside Higher Ed office in Washington, D.C., last week to discuss the federal government’s attacks on free expression in higher education. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

    1. What are your biggest concerns with regard to the Trump administration and free speech and open expression in higher ed right now?

    Well, sadly, there’s kind of a long list. I think, from my vantage point, one of the greatest concerns is seeing students, and particularly international students, being, basically, taken away on what appears to be the basis of viewpoints and opinions that they might have shared, either in the form of protest or, in one case, an op-ed. That really flies in the face of exactly what the First Amendment is supposed to protect against, especially in a public institution, which is that it’s supposed to be a restraint on government. In fact, what we’re seeing right now is the government stepping over the line of what is permitted, and that is definitely creating, I think, a chilling effect, not just for international students, but for students across the board, whether they’re protesting or not.

    I also think that the specter of investigations on campuses—this list of 60 campuses [being investigated for alleged antisemitism], this idea that if you’re on a campus that’s potentially going to be under investigation—might impact what you say in class, outside of class, how you teach, everything that’s fundamental to the academy.

    2. What are some of the most common questions you’re getting about what is going on?

    Michelle Deutchman, a light-skinned woman wearing glasses and a dark suit over a dark green top.

    Deutchman has led UC’s National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement for eight years.

    Laurel Hungerford

    I don’t get as many questions as you would think, because I don’t give legal advice, and right now, what a lot of people want is legal advice. But I think one of the things that I’m struggling with is, how do you talk about open expression and dialogue in a moment when it’s largely being suppressed on campuses? One of the questions that people have been asking is what to say to students about the risk factors in terms of being very vocal with your opinions, and how should administrators address that—both wanting to, of course, encourage them to use their voices, but also wanting to be transparent about what the risks might be.

    There’s just a lot of other, bigger questions that are just about, what does this mean in general for higher education? Is this like an existential moment? What about the coercive use of money? A lot of questions of: Can the government do that? And I think it’s a really challenging situation where the answer is: Not sure that they should be doing it, but they are. So, how do we handle that sort of in-between space while we wait for the law to catch up to what’s going on on the ground?

    3. There’s been a lot of emphasis on civic dialogue education as one antidote to tensions around political speech on campus. Do you feel like this moment is sort of setting those efforts back at all?

    I don’t want to say they’re setting them back. I worry a little that they might be getting set aside. And that’s a concern that I’ve had, really, since after Oct. 7, where we saw so much time and energy go into the basics about the First Amendment and about time, place and manner, and about whether or not to use law enforcement, that there became a big focus on the enforcement regulations as opposed to sort of education. I think now, so much energy is being put into how to defend higher education against this assault that I worry that efforts that focus on how we teach not just students but all members of higher education communities to engage with one another and listen to one another and build the muscle of civic dialogue—I worry that there isn’t enough bandwidth to pay attention to that, and setting it aside, I think, is to the detriment of everyone at this moment.

    4. How is Trump’s cutting of grants his administration deems related to diversity, equity and/or inclusion connected to the government’s other attacks on speech?

    I think that the cutting of those kinds of grants is just another attempt at government censorship of speech. Expression and speech are the cornerstones of the creation and transmission of knowledge. So, I think that it you’re stopping grants about certain topics, topics that are either being researched or topics that are being taught, that is something that falls sort of in the viewpoint discrimination area and really runs afoul of the Constitution. We’ve certainly seen some successes in court cases and injunctions, but I think part of the problem is the gap between when an executive order is signed and when an injunction happens, the chilling effect that happens across the university, and this idea that I don’t know that you can unring certain bells.

    5. Though many are calling the Trump administration’s attacks unprecedented in many ways, there have been other moments in history when free speech on college campuses has been under assault. What do those moments teach us about what is happening today?

    I wish I could tell you that I am a historian, but I’m a lawyer, so I don’t necessarily have that historical perspective. Certainly, I think people say that this is the greatest threat to academic freedom and to the autonomy of the university since McCarthyism. It’s hard to know how, then, to take that information and do something with it, right? I mean, the hopeful take is: Well, we made it through that, even though it was a dark time.

    I mean, look, I’m a [University of California, Berkeley] Cal Bear. UC had people do loyalty oaths; it was not a good moment, and look where we are now. I think that is sort of the optimistic hope.

    I think the less optimistic [perspective] is that, in some ways, what we’re experiencing is much more far-reaching, and we will just have to wait and see what happens.

    Source link

  • Is the Partnership for American Innovation Gone? (opinion)

    Is the Partnership for American Innovation Gone? (opinion)

    In January I wrote a piece asking whether America’s research universities would make it to their 100th birthday, marking their birth with the creation of the National Science Foundation in 1950—its 75th birthday was May 10. The article built on concerns that our research universities are in a precarious state, with their resources stretched thin supporting their dual missions of education and research. At the end I added a new concern: with the beginning of the Trump administration would these institutions survive the year?

    In only the first 100-odd days, the precipitous cancellation of grants and freezing of research support and now the proposed slashing of the budgets of the NSF and the National Institutes of Health and dramatic increase in the tax on university endowments have made my worst fears real. Are we really trying to end the partnership that has led to the greatest period of innovation in history?

    With the creation of the NSF, the government and universities established a research partnership to feed the American economy and national defense and to train the R&D labor force. The partnership was supported by funding from both sides, coupled with an unrelenting commitment to research excellence and impact. By any measure it has been wildly successful, generating new knowledge, inventions and cures and educating generations to lead our economy and society.

    In 2022 alone, the 174 Carnegie R-1—very research intensive—universities filed more than 20,000 patent applications and were granted nearly 6,000. But perhaps to understand why sustaining this partnership is vital to our future we only need to recall that the mRNA vaccines that spelled the end of the COVID-19 pandemic were built on research supported over decades by the NIH.

    The scale of the partnership is apparent in the data: In 2022, university research spending totaled $97.8 billion, with $54.1 billion coming from the federal government. What has not been widely acknowledged is that universities contributed $24.5 billion of this total in the form of self-supported research and cost sharing, especially supporting the misunderstood indirect costs of research. Many of these expenses are not so “indirect,” as they support specialized spaces, facilities and instruments—you cannot do research in a parking lot.

    Universities invested 45 cents for each federal research dollar received— this is the financing of the partnership. It seems like a bargain for the government to contribute only 0.2 percent of GDP (or less than 1 percent of the federal budget) to fuel innovation and the labor force of the world’s largest economy. Federal support of university research has grown only 44 percent since 2010. This compares to China’s threefold growth in investment in its universities.

    The Chinese investment highlights the increasing competition for research talent, and we risk falling behind. Other countries are emulating us, building research universities and trying to attract the stream of talent that has come to the U.S. to learn, work and live. Our chilling climate for immigrants is making it much easier to lure this talent abroad.

    American universities have done what they can to stay in front, with their own support of research growing twice as fast as federal funding, up from 30 cents to a federal dollar in 2010. It will be difficult for universities to continue to grow this investment. Following the pandemic, inflation has taken its toll. Now the funding cuts already imposed, and the enormous ones in the administration’s proposed budget, will shift billions in research costs to universities—costs they cannot afford. The proposed 15 percent cap on indirect costs alone—spread across all federal support—could cost the R-1 universities more than $10 billion, doubling their support relative to the federal government.

    The result will be catastrophic, with universities retreating from research, essentially destroying in a few months the innovation ecosystem built over three-quarters of a century. The long-term impact will be devastating for all Americans, as measured in undiscovered inventions and cures, the global competition for ideas and people, and the country’s future economic prosperity.

    Our innovation ecosystem will be hamstrung by the loss of a generation or more of research talent, who are either not trained or who go elsewhere. Already our talent pipeline is being constricted by cutting in half the number of NSF fellowships awarded to the most promising scientists and engineers. Reports also are mounting of scientists moving to countries where they are warmly welcomed with substantial government support. Is this our national strategy to strengthen America’s knowledge-based economy?

    We are on the verge of an innovation winter that will last decades when we can ill afford it as we respond to demands to improve health care, compete for global dominance in AI and other critical technologies, and create a secure and peaceful world. Universities do face important challenges, such as expanding access, educating more Americans to be informed and thoughtful citizens, and giving them the skills to thrive in an AI-driven world. Universities can meet these challenges if they are supported.

    We must avoid the innovation winter by continuing the partnership so our research universities remain the beacons for innovation and education that they have been for three-quarters of a century. This is the only way to keep America at the forefront, not at the back of the pack.

    This choice is what is at stake for all of us.

    Robert A. Brown is president emeritus of Boston University.

    Source link

  • Harvard Hit With Another $60 Million in Grant Cuts

    Harvard Hit With Another $60 Million in Grant Cuts

    The Trump administration has ended $60 million in federal grant funding for Harvard University amid an ongoing fight with the private institution over concerns about alleged campus antisemitism.

    The Department of Health and Human Services announced the move late Monday night.

    “HHS is taking decisive action to uphold civil rights in higher education,” the agency posted on social media. “Due to Harvard University’s continued failure to address anti-Semitic harassment and race discrimination, HHS is terminating multiple multi-year grant awards—totaling approximately $60 million over their full duration. In the Trump Administration, discrimination will not be tolerated on campus. Federal funds must support institutions that protect all students.”

    HHS also linked to a report from The Daily Caller, a right-wing website, which noted that the $60 million in grants came from funding via the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    The Daily Caller reported that federal government officials sent a letter to Harvard that cites the university’s own findings of antisemitism on campus as detailed in a report published last month.

    A CDC official, according to The Daily Caller, told the university that funding an institution that the Trump administration perceives as discriminatory would be inconsistent with the CDC’s mission. The CDC official concluded that “no corrective action is possible here.”

    Harvard did not respond to a request for comment from Inside Higher Ed.

    The latest move comes as the Trump administration has already pulled other grants and federal contracts and frozen more than $2.7 billion in federal funding—about a third of Harvard’s federal funds.

    Harvard is also facing several investigations from the Trump administration.

    The university has been locked in conflict with the federal government for months since it spurned Trump’s demands to overhaul governance, hiring, admissions and more, which prompted retaliation in the form of a funding freeze. Harvard sued the Trump administration last month, arguing that it sought to “impose unprecedented and improper control over the university.”

    A hearing in that case is set for July.

    Source link

  • Supporting Performing Art Students via Wellness Resources

    Supporting Performing Art Students via Wellness Resources

    The image of the suffering artist is a cliché that faculty and staff who work with students in the performing and visual arts are trying to dispel. They believe that creative inspiration doesn’t have to come at the expense of health and well-being.

    “You definitely have to be able to connect on some level to that artistry. But that doesn’t mean necessarily that you have to suffer mental health issues to be able to access this,” said Frank M. Diaz, professor in the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.

    A growing awareness of young people’s mental health and the challenges depression and anxiety pose to student retention and college completion has inspired services for students of underrepresented minority backgrounds, student athletes and other populations on campuses.

    More performing arts programs have also begun embracing education on emotional and physical well-being to equip students to succeed in college and beyond.

    Under pressure: Performing arts students, like many college attendees, face academic pressures—as well as financial responsibilities to pay for college—that can put them under immense stress. A 2024 survey by Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab found that just under half of respondents indicated their top stressor while enrolled was balancing academics with personal, family or financial responsibilities.

    Performers also juggle rehearsals, whether individual training or as part of an ensemble, that can require several hours of work outside of regularly scheduled classes. Musicians are often in practice rooms for hours each day, causing them to deprioritize their well-being.

    “Some of them practice for six hours,” Diaz said. “That does not include their academic courses, their music courses, their ensembles that they’re in, their lessons and their studio classes. While you pile all that on, it’s a lot.”

    Young people in general are more open to talking about mental health compared to previous generations, but performing arts students often feel cultural pressures to maintain certain appearances.

    “There’s a lot of stigma around the arts and mental health,” Diaz said. “Music students—we also have ballet here—don’t like to admit that they have issues. It’s seen as a weakness, so it’s been traditionally not talked about in our field.”

    Additionally, the performing arts can put pressure on students’ physical health if they’re not trained or properly supported. A research study of music schools in Switzerland and the U.K. found music students had lower levels of physical and psychological health compared to the general population.

    This unique combination of factors has pushed some colleges and universities to invest in specialized resources dedicated to students studying music.

    Institutional change: Members of the National Association of Schools of Music, the accrediting body for most music programs, are required to provide music students with information about physical and mental health. Most institutions meet this requirement through a dedicated webpage where students can browse campus and external services. If you ask James Brody, director of the Musicians’ Wellness Program (MWP) at the University of Colorado, Boulder, College of Music, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

    Brody and his colleagues have been engaging in this work informally for over a decade. In 2020 the university rolled out an embedded counseling program, which provided the College of Music with a dedicated mental health clinician, Matthew Tomatz, to lead outreach and deliver services to music students. Tomatz, a former musician himself, receives referrals from faculty and staff to meet with students and provides regular group therapy for student musicians to engage with peers and talk about their struggles.

    MWP was officially established in 2021, providing physical and social wellness education to learners across CU Boulder’s school of music to prevent and recover from injuries for long-term thriving.

    Approximately 160 students participate in MWP offerings each year, and more than 130 music students accessed counseling and psychiatric services in the 2022–23 academic year, according to a university press release.

    The Office of Wellness and Arts Health Initiative (OWAHI) at the Jacobs School of Music was established in 2023 as a way to increase student access to supports. The school is home to 1,600 students, making it one of the largest music schools in the U.S. The size can make music students more isolated from the larger campus community of Indiana University, because “everything [within the music school] is in one place and our students never go out and venture into this Big Ten campus that we have,” Diaz said.

    Instead of making students seek out resources, the school centralized offerings into the OWAHI, creating a one-stop shop for a variety of support services that are student-centered and student-led.

    Social wellness: One of the undertones of performing arts programs is competition; students fought hard to win a spot at an accredited music program, which can create feelings of rivalry and isolation from their peers.

    Jacobs School of Music students enjoy a holiday party thrown by the Office of Wellness and Arts Health Initiatives in partnership with the Jacobs School’s Health and Wellness Committee.

    Wendi Chitwood/Indiana University

    To combat this narrative, Diaz created events centered on relationships. “Our data basically indicates that people are seeking community. They don’t know how to find it; they don’t know how to build good relationships. They know they want them. So, to me, that’s the basis of everything we do.”

    OWAHI offers drop-in office hours for students to get snacks, talk with their peers and engage in destressing activities, including mindfulness training, massage, games and yoga. In addition, the office partners with the School of Social Work to provide student-led wellness coaching, which both connects learners with peers and gives social work students needed supervised practicum hours.

    Six students sit in chairs with their eyes closed in relaxed postures as they meditate.

    Jacobs students participate in a meditation session provided by the Office of Wellness and Arts Health Initiatives.

    Jacobs School of Music/Indiana University

    OWAHI offered about 70 coaching sessions in 2023–24 and an estimated 300 sessions during this academic year, which Diaz attributes to increased engagement on campus, student-led marketing and positive partnerships. Students who participate in services are also demographically representative of the school’s population, and Diaz has been pleased to see high participation rates among male students (41 percent of participants), given perceived barriers to engagement in mental health supports for men.

    At New York Film Academy in Los Angeles, acting professor Victor Verhaeghe noted that his students tended to arrive with fewer socio-emotional skills, making it harder for them to engage. Verhaeghe has started using class time to lead meditation and shared affirmations, allowing students to become more vulnerable and connected to each other, as well as create self-love.

    “I say, ‘Let’s start with sharing who you are; let’s open up to discussion,’” Verhaeghe said. “Some people are not ready to share, but I’ll share my story … It’s all about rewiring, it’s about changing the programming. As an artist, vulnerability is essential. You have to be able to tap into that.”

    Physical wellness: Injuries among college students often come from late-night recklessness, sports, accidents or overwork. Less common is the physical strain improper musical technique can have on musicians.

    “People don’t understand that musicians get injured, and the injury rate is high—as high as 80 percent of college students,” Brody of CU Boulder said.

    Brody offers one-on-one consultations and lessons with students to help them recover from injury, misuse, anxiety or physical tension, helping them connect music and the body to ensure they can continue playing for many years. “I am continually amazed at how anatomically illiterate most musicians are,” he said.

    James Brody helps position a young clarinet player to improve his posture

    Professor James Brody, director of the Musicians Wellness Program, instructs a student musician on clarinet.

    University of Colorado, Boulder

    He’s passionate about physical wellness education for musicians, and admits he sometimes has to pull back from overloading students with anatomy lessons.

    “Some people say, ‘No pain, no gain,’” Brody added. “I say, ‘No pain, no pain.’ It really shouldn’t hurt.”

    CU Boulder music students can also receive free hearing tests, a common practice for music schools to ward against noise-induced hearing loss.

    The University of North Carolina at Greensboro offers two elective courses within the school of music that connect physical health to performance, encouraging students to move strategically and reduce tension.

    In the future, Brody would love to see donor support for more resources to support musician well-being, including specially designed hearing protection and vocal health support from a laryngologist.

    Occupational wellness: College students in general are anxious about their careers—71 percent of students say they feel at least somewhat stressed thinking about life after college—but the performing arts has always been an especially challenging field. Recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that only about 20 percent of students with a fine arts degree actually work in arts, design, entertainment or media occupations.

    “Every single student is terrified right upon getting out because of the complete unpredictable nature of this business,” Verhaeghe said.

    Brody noted student musicians’ anxiety levels are high regarding their future plans, particularly due to a shrinking number of symphony orchestras and full-time opportunities. “Still, folks line up to do it,” he said. “We don’t have any lack of talent and motivation.”

    In class, Verhaeghe talks about the challenging elements of being an actor, from not having work to playing demanding roles with long hours. “I think it’s important that we talk about the next phase,” he said. “I believe this is a calling to do this work, and not everybody’s called … if you really want to have a craft, then you will invest.”

    Performing arts students also often live with the tension of trying to balance passion and work. Many people consider art to be a healing or soothing experience, allowing them to engage in mindfulness or relaxation. “The evidence is pretty clear that musicians and artists in general are the exception to the, ‘I do art and I feel good’ thing, like, we don’t experience that because it’s vocational,” Diaz said.

    There’s one exception to this work, Diaz noted: when art becomes a service. At IU, students can participate in performances at senior centers through the Senior Outreach Program.

    “Instead of going as ‘I’m going to perform this awesome thing with you,’ [it’s] ‘I’m going to connect with you, I’m going to go learn your name and learn what you like and perform for you at these senior community centers,’” Diaz said.

    Faculty members agreed there’s a need to encourage students not to burn out or overexert themselves for the sake of their art, because it’s not sustainable in the long term and reduces their career potential.

    “The culture is gradually changing because it has to,” Brody said. “If it doesn’t, it’s like feeding people into a wood chipper.”

    Source link

  • Our Debate Over Higher Ed Has Lost the Plot (opinion)

    Our Debate Over Higher Ed Has Lost the Plot (opinion)

    There is an endless war being waged against colleges and universities in this country, one unprecedented in our lifetimes. Not merely a war of words, it is one of deeds. Beginning with state-level efforts to ban “critical race theory” and “divisive concepts” from college classrooms and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives from campuses, it has now grown into an obsessive preoccupation of federal policy.

    Broad executive orders have sought to ban concepts related to race, gender and identity on campus, using the leverage of withheld federal grants. Drastic and indiscriminate cuts have been made to university funding. International students have had their visas revoked on the basis of their political views. Attacks on nonpartisan university accreditors have mounted. And escalating demands that elite private research universities effectively place themselves in government receivership or lose further billions in federal dollars have thrown the sector into chaos.

    That is why I was honored to sign, and to help coordinate, last month’s letter from more than 600 college, university and scholarly society presidents in defense of our nation’s institutions of higher learning. The letter, which calls for “constructive engagement that improves our institutions and serves our republic,” also criticizes “the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering” institutions of higher learning and warns that “the price of abridging the defining freedoms of American higher education will be paid by our students and our society.”

    I remain concerned that the problems colleges and universities face today go deeper than funding cuts and government threats. Indeed, our national debate over higher education has lost the plot entirely. Critics of higher education present the entire sector as an elitist, out-of-touch indoctrination factory for liberal orthodoxy, one that has replaced the great books of the Western canon with political claptrap. This charge has gained broad traction among the public. But not only is it untrue on the merits, it fundamentally misunderstands the purpose and mission of higher education. It asks the wrong question and delivers the wrong answer.

    If our sector is to regain the respect and appreciation of American society, we need to reorient the national conversation. We need to help people remember what it is that colleges and universities actually do—and why it matters.

    The American Association of Colleges and Universities, where I have been president since 2016, is a voice and a force for what we call liberal education. Let me be clear: teaching students to believe in liberal politics or conservative politics is the opposite of what “liberal education” means. Rather, the term, which predates modern political labels, refers to liberating the mind from received orthodoxies of all types.

    I agree with Margaret Mead—and with leaders across the political spectrum, from Barack Obama to Ron DeSantis—that students should be taught how to think, not what to think. A successful college education is measured not by what its graduates believe but by what they can conceive. It fires the imaginations of its students, helps them explore ideas and experiences different from their own, and trains them in habits of thought and mind that aid them in making their own meaning from the world. It provides them both with the practical skills they will need for their future employment and with the critical thinking tools that help them attain, and succeed in, their jobs of choice. By providing a forum and a method for open inquiry and intellectual freedom, and by exposing students and communities to new ideas and perspectives, it also helps to strengthen our democracy.

    This type of education does not happen by chance, from a hodgepodge of unconnected courses; it is part of a plan. For decades, AAC&U has served as a learning lab for a type of comprehensive undergraduate education that teaches students in a systematic way, over the course of a two-year or four-year degree, how to become effective thinkers and problem-solvers. We pioneered the concepts of high-impact practices, inclusive excellence and innovations in general education, learning outcomes and assessment, innovations that have been adopted by hundreds of campuses across the country, including many of our nearly 900 member institutions.

    Higher education should always try to do better at opening students’ minds; in fact, that commitment is at the core of my organization’s work. Taking criticism seriously is how colleges and universities innovate and improve. But that innovation cannot happen if the government steps in to ban or defund ideas it dislikes, taking away the academic freedom of faculty; if it strips university leadership of its autonomy to make decisions about what ideas are permitted or promoted on campus; or if it makes so many threats or cuts that professors and students become afraid to speak and think freely.

    The careful process of preparing students for democratic citizenship requires helping them understand the great multiplicity of people, cultures and beliefs that make up the world we live in. It is time for us to stop asking whether colleges and universities teach the “right” ideas and ask, instead, whether they teach students the skills they need to navigate our complex world. That approach would lead us away from culture wars and heavy-handed government restrictions and toward constructive engagement with the educational missions of colleges and universities so they can work together with government to improve our students’ educations.

    Lynn Pasquerella is president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities.

    Source link

  • Three Questions for Coursera’s New CEO, Greg Hart

    Three Questions for Coursera’s New CEO, Greg Hart

    For many institutions of higher education (including the one I work for), Coursera is an important online learning partner. Therefore, it was a big deal when Coursera announced earlier this year that Greg Hart was taking over as CEO from Jeff Maggioncalda. This space seemed like a good place to begin to get to know Greg, and he graciously agreed to answer my questions.

    Q: You’ve spent the majority of your career at Amazon, so education is a new space for you. What do you want universities to know about how you’ll approach partnerships, and how will your background influence how you lead Coursera? 

    A: My background is rooted in building and scaling technology-driven businesses that serve millions of customers. At Amazon, I led the creation and launch of Alexa and later served as the global head of Prime Video. Those roles shaped how I think about innovation, long-term customer value and meaningful experiences at scale. While higher education is a new sector for me, there are clear parallels: At Amazon, we solved enduring customer problems through technology. That same principle applies at Coursera—learners are seeking flexible, high-quality and job-relevant education, often in moments that define the trajectory of their lives. Both our university and industry partners are working with us to meet these evolving needs with world-class learning content, enabled by our platform’s ability to deliver personalized learning experiences at scale.

    What makes this work especially meaningful is the higher stakes involved. We’re not just helping people shop or stream content—we’re helping them transform their lives through access to learning. That sense of purpose is what drew me to Coursera. I approach our university partnerships with deep respect for the role higher education plays in society, and I see my responsibility as ensuring Coursera is a trusted, effective and mission-aligned partner for institutions around the world.

    Q: Can you update us on Coursera’s business, focusing on the biggest growth drivers and challenges? How confident can universities be in Coursera’s long-term financial resilience as a strategic partner?

    A: Coursera is where the world comes to gain new skills and learn from the most trusted institutions. Content is the engine of our business and the foundation of our ecosystem. Today, we partner with more than 350 leading universities and companies, offering job-relevant content across a wide range of domains, including technology, business, AI and data science.

    This catalog has attracted more than 175 million learners globally, including more than seven million new registered learners in the first quarter of this year alone. Many learners come to Coursera directly through our platform, while a growing number access content through institutional settings via our enterprise offerings. This entire ecosystem is powered by a unified platform that enables our partners to reach a global audience at scale, leverage data to inform content strategy and skills recommendations and harness advanced AI tools to drive personalized learning and discovery.

    Since going public in 2021, we’ve operated as responsible stewards of our capital, balancing disciplined cost management with long-term investments in growing our business and advancing our mission. Coursera is in an extremely stable position financially: We are growing, we generate positive free cash flow, we have a very healthy balance sheet and we have no debt.

    In Q1 2025, we delivered $179 million in revenue, up 6 percent year over year on growth in our consumer and enterprise segments and generated over $25 million in free cash flow, marking our strongest quarter of cash performance to date. Based on this strong start, we now expect full-year 2025 revenue to be between $720–730 million, with annual adjusted EBITDA margin improvement of 100 basis points to 7 percent—an outlook that reflects both durable demand and growing operating leverage. As of March 31, 2025, we have approximately $748 million in unrestricted cash and no debt, giving us both the stability and flexibility to invest in platform innovation, expand our content ecosystem and continue supporting our partners and learners around the world.

    Q: Given your background in industry, do you see more value in partnerships and content from businesses, like industry microcredentials? How do colleges and degrees factor into your long-term vision?

    A: Coursera was founded in 2012 by two Stanford professors, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller. Universities are, and will continue to be, central to Coursera’s mission and strategy—especially in an era shaped by generative AI, where enduring human skills and trusted credentials are more important than ever. University content is vital not only to degree programs, but also to our offerings for individuals, businesses and governments. Some of our most popular courses are from top university instructors—Jules White of Vanderbilt, Vic Strecher of Michigan, Laurie Santos of Yale and Sydney Finkelstein of Dartmouth.

    We do not view degrees and nondegree programs as competing priorities. Rather, we believe in building an interconnected ecosystem that gives learners the flexibility to start with entry-level microcredentials, build towards academic credit and ultimately stack into full degrees. Today, 90-plus entry-level professional certificates are offered by our industry partners, and a third of them carry credit recommendations, making them a natural on-ramp to higher education. Our degree portfolio has expanded to over 50 programs and remains a strategic component of our consumer offering.

    Source link

  • Experts Weigh In on “Everyone” Cheating in College

    Experts Weigh In on “Everyone” Cheating in College

    Is something in the water—or, more appropriately, in the algorithm? Cheating—while nothing new, even in the age of generative artificial intelligence—seems to be having a moment, from the New York magazine article about “everyone” ChatGPTing their way through college to Columbia University suspending a student who created an AI tool to cheat on “everything” and viral faculty social media posts like this one: “I just failed a student for submitting an AI-written research paper, and she sent me an obviously AI-written email apologizing, asking if there is anything she can do to improve her grade. We are through the looking-glass, folks.”

    It’s impossible to get a true read on the situation by virality alone, as the zeitgeist is self-amplifying. Case in point: The suspended Columbia student, Chungin “Roy” Lee is a main character in the New York magazine piece. Student self-reports of AI use may also be unreliable: According to Educause’s recent Students and Technology Report, some 43 percent of students surveyed said they do not use AI in their coursework; 5 percent said they use AI to generate material that they edit before submitting, and just 1 percent said they submit generated material without editing it.

    There are certainly students who do not use generative AI and students who question faculty use of AI—and myriad ways that students can use generative AI to support their learning and not cheat. But the student data paints a different picture than the one presidents, provosts, deans and other senior leaders did in a recent survey by the American Association of Colleges and Universities and Elon University: Some 59 percent said cheating has increased since generative AI tools have become widely available, with 21 percent noting a significant increase—and 54 percent do not think their institution’s faculty are effective in recognizing generative Al–created content.

    In Inside Higher Ed’s 2025 Survey of Campus Chief Technology/Information Officers, released earlier this month, no CTO said that generative AI has proven to be an extreme risk to academic integrity at their institution. But most—three in four—said that it has proven to be a moderate (59 percent) or significant (15 percent) risk. This is the first time the annual survey with Hanover Research asked how concerns about academic integrity have actually borne out: Last year, six in 10 CTOs expressed some degree of concern about the risk generative AI posed to academic integrity.

    Stephen Cicirelli, the lecturer of English at Saint Peter’s University whose “looking glass” post was liked 156,000 times in 24 hours last week, told Inside Higher Ed that cheating has “definitely” gotten more pervasive within the last semester. But whether it’s suddenly gotten worse or has been steadily growing since large language models were introduced to the masses in late 2022, one thing is clear: AI-assisted cheating is a problem, and it won’t get better on its own.

    So what can institutions do about it? Drawing on some additional insights from the CTO survey and advice from other experts, we’ve compiled a list of suggestions below. The expert insights, in particular, are varied. But a unifying theme is that cheating in the age of generative AI is as much a problem requiring intervention as it is a mirror—one reflecting larger challenges and opportunities within higher education.

    (Note: AI detection tools did not make this particular list. Even though they have fans among the faculty, who tend to point out that some tools are more accurate than others, such tools remain polarizing and not entirely foolproof. Similarly, banning generative AI in the classroom did not make the list, though this may still be a widespread practice: 52 percent of students in the Educause survey said that most or all of their instructors prohibit the use of AI.)

    Academic Integrity for Students

    The American Association of Colleges and Universities and Elon University this month released the 2025 Student Guide to Artificial Intelligence under a Creative Commons license. The guide covers AI ethics, academic integrity and AI, career plans for the AI age, and an AI toolbox. It encourages students to use AI responsibly, critically assess its influence and join conversations about its future. The guide’s seven core principles are:

    1. Know and follow your college’s rules
    2. Learn about AI
    3. Do the right thing
    4. Think beyond your major
    5. Commit to lifelong learning
    6. Prioritize privacy and security
    7. Cultivate your human abilities

    Connie Ledoux Book, president of Elon, told Inside Higher Ed that the university sought to make ethics a central part of the student guide, with campus AI integration discussions revealing student support for “open and transparent dialogue about the use of AI.” Students “also bear a great deal of responsibility,” she said. They “told us they don’t like it when their peers use AI to gain unfair advantages on assignments. They want faculty to be crystal clear in their syllabi about when and how AI tools can be used.”

    Now is a “defining moment for higher education leadership—not only to respond to AI, but to shape a future where academic integrity and technological innovation go hand in hand,” Book added. “Institutions must lead with clarity, consistency and care to prepare students for a world where ethical AI use is a professional expectation, not just a classroom rule.”

    Mirror Logic

    Lead from the top on AI. In Inside Higher Ed’s recent survey, just 11 percent of CTOs said their institution has a comprehensive AI strategy, and roughly one in three CTOs (35 percent) at least somewhat agreed that their institution is handling the rise of AI adeptly. The sample size for the survey is 108 CTOs—relatively small—but those who said their institution is handling the rise of AI adeptly were more likely than the group over all to say that senior leaders at their institution are engaged in AI discussions and that effective channels exist between IT and academic affairs for communication on AI policy and other issues (both 92 percent).

    Additionally, CTOs who said that generative AI had proven to be a low to nonexistent risk to academic integrity were more likely to report having some kind of institutionwide policy or policies governing the use of AI than were CTOs who reported a moderate or significant risk (81 percent versus 64 percent, respectively). Leading on AI can mean granting students institutional access to AI tools, the rollout of which often includes larger AI literacy efforts.

    (Re)define cheating. Lee Rainie, director of the Imagining the Digital Future Center at Elon, said, “The first thing to tackle is the very definition of cheating itself. What constitutes legitimate use of AI and what is out of bounds?” In the AAC&U and Elon survey that Rainie co-led, for example, “there was strong evidence that the definitional issues are not entirely resolved,” even among top academic administrators. Leaders didn’t always agree whether hypothetical scenarios described appropriate uses of AI or not: For one example—in which a student used AI to generate a detailed outline for a paper and then used the outline to write the paper—“the verdict was completely split,” Rainie said. Clearly, it’s “a perfect recipe for confusion and miscommunication.”

    Rainie’s additional action items, with implications for all areas of the institution:

    1. Create clear guidelines for appropriate and inappropriate use of AI throughout the university.
    2. Include in the academic code of conduct a “broad statement about the institution’s general position on AI and its place in teaching and learning,” allowing for a “spectrum” of faculty positions on AI.
    3. Promote faculty and student clarity as to the “rules of the road in assignments.”
    4. Establish “protocols of proof” that students can use to demonstrate they did the work.

    Rainie suggested that CTOs, in particular, might be useful regarding this last point, as such proof could include watermarking content, creating NFTs and more.

    Put it in the syllabus! (And in the institutional DNA.) Melik Khoury, president and CEO of Unity Environmental University in Maine, who’s publicly shared his thoughts on “leadership in an intelligent era of AI,” including how he uses generative AI, told Inside Higher Ed that “AI is not cheating. What is cheating is our unwillingness to rethink outdated assessment models while expecting students to operate in a completely transformed world. We are just beginning to tackle that ourselves, and it will take time. But at least we are starting from a position of ‘We need to adapt as an institution,’ and we are hiring learning designers to help our subject matter experts adapt to the future of learning.”

    As for students, Khoury said the university has been explicit “about what AI is capable of and what it doesn’t do as well or as reliably” and encourages them to recognize their “agency and responsibility.” Here’s an excerpt of language that Khoury said appears in every course syllabus:

    • “You are accountable for ensuring the accuracy of factual statements and citations produced by generative AI. Therefore, you should review and verify all such information prior to submitting any assignment.
    • “Remember that many assignments require you to use in-text citations to acknowledge the origin of ideas. It is your responsibility to include these citations and to verify their source and appropriateness.
    • “You are accountable for ensuring that all work submitted is free from plagiarism, including content generated with AI assistance.
    • “Do not list generative AI as a co-author of your work. You alone are responsible.”

    Additional policy language recommends that students:

    • Acknowledge use of generative AI for course submissions.
    • Disclose the full extent of how and where they used generative AI in the assignment.
    • Retain a complete transcript of generative AI usage (including source and date stamp).

    “We assume that students will use AI. We suggest constructive ways they might use it for certain tasks,” Khoury said. “But, significantly, we design tasks that cannot be satisfactorily completed without student engagement beyond producing a response or [just] finding the right answer—something that AI can do for them very easily.”

    In tandem with a larger cultural shift around our ideas about education, we need major changes to the way we do college.”

    —Emily Pitts Donahoe, associate director of instructional support in the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and lecturer of writing and rhetoric at the University of Mississippi

    Design courses with and for AI. Keith Quesenberry, professor of marketing at Messiah University in Pennsylvania, said he thinks less about cheating, which can create an “adversarial me-versus-them dynamic,” and more about pedagogy. This has meant wrestling with a common criticism of higher education—that it’s not preparing students for the world of work in the age of AI—and the reality that no one’s quite sure what that future will look like. Quesenberry said he ended up spending all of last summer trying to figure out how “a marketer should and shouldn’t use AI,” creating and testing frameworks, ultimately vetting his own courses’ assignments: “I added detailed instructions for how and how not to use AI specifically for that assignment’s tasks or requirements. I also explain why, such as considering whether marketing materials can be copyrighted for your company or client. I give them guidance on how to cite their AI use.” He also created a specialized chat bot to which students can upload approved resources to act as an AI tutor.

    Quesenberry also talks to students about learning with AI “from the perspective of obtaining a job.” That is, students need a foundation of disciplinary knowledge on which to create AI prompts and judge output. And they can’t rely on generative AI to speak or think for them during interviews, networking and with clients.

    There are “a lot of professors quietly working very hard to integrate AI into their courses and programs that benefit their disciplines and students,” he adds. One thing that would help them, in Quesenberry’s view? Faculty institutional access to the most advanced AI tools.

    Give faculty time and training. Tricia Bertram Gallant, director of the academic integrity office and Triton Testing Center at the University of California, San Diego, and co-author of the new book The Opposite of Cheating: Teaching for Integrity in the Age of AI (University of Oklahoma Press), said that cheating part of human nature—and that faculty need time, training and support to “design educational environments that make cheating the exception and integrity the norm” in this new era of generative AI.

    Faculty “cannot be expected to rebuild the plane while flying it,” she said. “They need course release time to redesign that same course, or they need a summer stipend. They also need the help of those trained in pedagogy, assessment design and instructional design, as most faculty did not receive that training while completing their Ph.D.s.” Gallant also floated the idea of AI fellows, or disciplinary faculty peers who are trained on how to use generative AI in the classroom and then to “share, coach and mentor their peers.”

    Students, meanwhile, need training in AI literacy, “which includes how to determine if they’re using it ethically or unethically. Students are confused, and they’re also facing immense temptations and opportunities to cognitively offload to these tools,” Gallant added.

    Teach first-year students about AI literacy. Chris Ostro, an assistant teaching professor and instructional designer focused on AI at the University of Colorado at Boulder, offers professional development on his “mosaic approach” to writing in the classroom—which includes having students sign a standardized disclosure form about how and where they’ve used AI in their assignments. He told Inside Higher Ed that he’s redesigned his own first-year writing course to address AI literacy, but he is concerned about students across higher education who may never get such explicit instruction. For that reason, he thinks there should be mandatory first-year classes for all students about AI and ethics. “This could also serve as a level-setting opportunity,” he said, referring to “tech gaps,” or the effects of the larger digital divide on incoming students.

    Regarding student readiness, Ostro also said that most of the “unethical” AI use by students is “a form of self-treatment for the huge and pervasive learning deficits many students have from the pandemic.” One student he recently flagged for possible cheating, for example, had largely written an essay on her own but then ran it through a large language model, prompting it to make the paper more polished. This kind of use arguably reflects some students’ lack of confidence in their writing skills, not an outright desire to offload the difficult and necessary work of writing to think critically.

    Think about grading (and why students cheat in the first place). Emily Pitts Donahoe, associate director of instructional support in the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and lecturer of writing and rhetoric at the University of Mississippi, co-wrote an essay two years ago with two students about why students cheat. They said much of it came down to an overemphasis on grades: “Students are more likely to engage in academic dishonesty when their focus, or the perceived focus of the class, is on grading.” The piece proposed the following solutions, inspired by the larger trend of ungrading:

    1. Allow students to reattempt or revise their work.
    2. Refocus on formative feedback to improve rather than summative feedback to evaluate.
    3. Incorporate self-assessment.

    Donahoe said last week, “I stand by every claim that we make in the 2023 piece—and it all feels heightened two years later.” The problems with AI misuse “have become more acute, and between this and the larger sociopolitical climate, instructors are reaching unsustainable levels of burnout. The actions we recommend at the end of the piece remain good starting points, but they are by no means solutions to the big, complex problem we’re facing.”

    Framing cheating as a structural issue, Donahoe said students have been “conditioned to see education as a transaction, a series of tokens to be exchanged for a credential, which can then be exchanged for a high-paying job—in an economy where such jobs are harder and harder to come by.” And it’s hard to fault students for that view, she continued, as they receive little messaging to the contrary.

    Like the problem, the solution set is structural, Donahoe explained: “In tandem with a larger cultural shift around our ideas about education, we need major changes to the way we do college. Smaller class sizes in which students and teachers can form real relationships; more time, training and support for instructors; fundamental changes to how we grade and how we think about grades; more public funding for education so that we can make these things happen.”

    With none of this apparently forthcoming, faculty can at least help reorient students’ ideas about school and try to “harness their motivation to learn.”

    Source link