Tag: News

Higher Ed Spent Millions on Lobbying in 2025

Several research universities ratcheted up spending on lobbying last year.

Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Feverpitched/iStock/Getty Images

Major research universities spent more than $37 million on federal lobbying efforts in 2025 as the sector was beset by a flurry of policy changes during the first year of Donald Trump’s second term. That’s up significantly from 2024, when those same institutions spent $28.1 million.

Fourth-quarter lobbying expenditures, which were reported by most universities earlier this week, show that spending dropped toward the end of the year after it peaked in the spring. While college presidents have been criticized for failing to push back publicly on Trump administration initiatives seen as damaging to higher education and/or the social fabric, lobbying numbers show that institutions have been heavily engaged behind the scenes.

The Inside Higher Ed analysis of lobbying expenses focused primary on the Association of American Universities, which is made up of 71 research institutions in the U.S. and Canada. Throughout the last year, the representatives of these universities headed to Capitol Hill to fight for research funding and push back against plans in the sweeping One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which passed over the summer and ushered in a new era of higher ed accountability and student loan policy.

AAU members spent the most in the second quarter of 2025 at $10.7 million, when talks over OBBBA were at their peak. In the other quarters, spending ranged from $7.9 million to just over $9 million. However, data for the fourth quarter of the year is an undercount, as not all universities complied with federal lobbying disclosure deadlines, which required them to submit reports on such activities and expenditures by Tuesday.

Although the numbers only reflect spending by AAU members, the Inside Higher Ed review indicates research institutions were among the highest spenders last year. The one exception was the University of Phoenix, which is not part of AAU.

In terms of total spending, the University of Phoenix racked up the highest lobbying costs, spending $480,000 in each quarter for a total of $1.9 million. Disclosure forms show Phoenix lobbied on OBBBA and student veteran benefits and engaged in “general discussions covering change of control, and related regulatory requirements.” (Phoenix filed for an initial public offering last year after a sale to the University of Idaho fell through amid skepticism from state lawmakers over acquiring the for-profit college.)

Among AAU members, the University of Florida emerged as the top spender, a fact that went unnoticed last year because UF did not comply with federal lobbying disclosure deadlines and filed reports late for each quarter. For example, UF filed its Q1 report for 2025 on May 29, well past the April 20 deadline. UF officials posted Q4 results Thursday morning, two days after the deadline, and one day after Inside Higher Ed reached out to inquire about previously missed filing deadlines.

UF officials did not respond to a request for comment.

The top spenders engaged on a wide range of issues, according to details in lobbying disclosures. (The list does not include systems that lobby on behalf of individual members.)

UF lobbying reports show the university engaged Congress on topics such as research funding, artificial intelligence, federal spending bills, student visas, international education programs, graduate student loans, the endowment excise tax and cybersecurity, among other issues.

Most other universities that ranked in the top 10 lobbied on the same or related issues, often lobbying around specific legislation, such as OBBBA. A rare few, such as Johns Hopkins University, took on highly charged topics such as gender-affirming care and efforts to expand gun access.

While some universities sustained a steady lobbying effort throughout the year, maintaining similar spending levels across each quarter, others made a strong push at the end of 2025, such as the University of Pennsylvania, which doubled spending.

In a fourth-quarter push, most institutions focused on many of the same issues as they had in the earlier part of the year. However, in the last two quarters, especially Q4, some top spenders increased lobbying efforts around graduate medical education and nursing, back-room conversations that coincided with federal changes to that will cap federal loans for graduate and professional programs.

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January 23, 2026
Blending Culture and Safety at Fort Lewis

After the death of a student at Fort Lewis College, Kendra Gallegos knew the institution’s response had to do more than make space for grief—it also had to honor the cultural traditions of the college’s largely Native student body.

Fort Lewis, a public four-year college in Durango, Colo., invited an Indigenous healer to lead a traditional blessing of the residence hall where the student had lived.

That kind of healing ceremony reflects how campus leaders like Gallegos, the interim vice president of diversity affairs, approach student wellness programs: by grounding efforts in cultural practices that resonate with students.

“We’re always asking students what they need and recognizing that there are many different tribes, each with its own traditions and ways of responding when someone passes away,” Gallegos said.

With about 40 percent of its students identifying as Native, Fort Lewis offers a wide range of support services—from counseling rooted in Indigenous cultural identity to vending machines that provide anonymous access to Narcan, fentanyl test strips and emergency contraception—giving students multiple ways to seek help and protect themselves.

“We’re looking at a lot of different approaches and building partnerships across the state,” Gallegos said. “We want to look beyond our campus and ask, ‘How can we best serve our students’ needs and help them get access to care?’”

On the ground: Fort Lewis students have access to free, unlimited mental health and counseling services through the campus counseling center, including individual and group therapy, crisis support, and drop-in consultations.

But Gallegos said counseling alone is not “one-size-fits-all.” Students can also tap into Indigenous ways of knowing and healing, including through connections to traditional healers.

“We have a diverse group of students coming from all walks of life,” Gallegos said. “We get them connected with counselors who may be Indigenous, who may be from their tribe.”

Gallegos said traditional counseling is not always the most appropriate way to meet students’ needs.

“Maybe they need to go home and have a ceremony with their families, with their communities,” she said. “Or maybe they need a medicine man, or it’s herbal, like sage that we’re burning here in the campus community.”

Beyond clinical and cultural support, Fort Lewis’s peer support office offers confidential, peer-led assistance and help navigating campus resources.

“We’re trying to be more specialized, knowing that [peer supporters] aren’t counselors and don’t have advanced degrees,” Gallegos said. “They’re not doing counseling—they’re saying, ‘I have some knowledge in this area or lived experience, and I’m willing to talk with you.’”

Students rely on peer support for guidance on substance use, Indigenous identity, sexuality and gender, and student-athlete challenges, among other topics, she added.

In 2024, the college also launched a harm-reduction vending machine that provides free, anonymous access to health and wellness supplies such as Narcan, fentanyl test strips, emergency contraception, menstrual products and condoms.

So far, the vending machine has dispensed more than 2,600 items—including more than 100 boxes of Narcan and nearly 700 fentanyl test strips, Gallegos said—underscoring student engagement as well as need.

Gallegos said the goal of the vending machine is to keep students in school by removing barriers to getting help.

“We don’t actually get to know who they are or what their stories are,” she said. “But we know it’s making a difference.”

Most recently, Fort Lewis began piloting a substance-free housing option for students in recovery or those who choose to live sober. The plan is to create an eight-resident living community designed to provide a supportive environment for students focused on sobriety.

The college has hired two recent Fort Lewis graduates to help lead the initiative.

“They’ll be part-time and really grow the community and the purpose in the sober living community and nurture those who are there,” Gallegos said.

Signs of progress: For Gallegos, supporting students starts with making clear that conversations about substance use and mental health are welcome at Fort Lewis.

“We don’t want there to be a wrong door for support,” she said. “We’ve seen that students are ready to talk to us about these things—they’re less willing to brush them under the rug until the last minute.”

That openness doesn’t mean abandoning boundaries, Gallegos added.

“We still follow our conduct code and policies,” she said. “But we’ve learned there can be a warmer handoff and an opportunity for growth and education.”

Ultimately, Gallegos said, she’s proud to have helped build what she calls a “community of care” on campus.

“Please don’t shut the door on a student who’s struggling,” she said. “Help them get the resources they need.”

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January 23, 2026
Higher Ed Urged to “Stand Up” to Government Attacks

A free expression lawyer, a university system leader and a civil rights activist were unified in their call to higher ed leaders to “stand up” against violations of First Amendment rights and the stifling of free speech on campuses at the annual meeting of the American Association of Colleges and Universities in Washington, D.C., on Thursday.

At the opening plenary, the legal director at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Will Creeley, joined John King, chancellor of the State University of New York, and Maya Wiley, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, in condemning institutions that have bent to political pressure. They warned that threats to constitutional rights are no longer a red-state problem.

“I never thought I’d live in a country where you’d be snatched off the street for writing an op-ed, but that is most definitely our country now,” Creeley said, referring to the 2025 arrest and detention of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish international student studying at Tufts University.

Without naming the University of Arkansas or the professor directly, Creeley said it was “galling” that an institution “rolled over” when conservative politicians pressured it to rescind an offer to a law school dean—presumably Emily Suski—after discovering she signed an amicus brief in support of transgender athletes.

“Too often that kind of expedient capitulation, that kind of quiet cowardice, is seen as the easiest way to get through it,” he said. “Folks, I don’t think that’s going to work. We’ve got a serious challenge here. The time is now for institutions to stand up and fight.”

King acknowledged his “place of privilege” heading a public institution system under a Democratic governor, but he urged leaders in Republican-led states not to compromise their values.

“I have to say, in my view, some folks in leadership roles across the higher education sector have lost their sense of where the line is, and they are complicit in a dismantling, not only of core values in higher education, but frankly of our democracy,” he said.

King also warned against the “chilling effect” the attacks on speech are having on college campuses. “For people thinking, ‘I could teach this book but I don’t want to deal with the headache’ or ‘I could ask students to debate this question, but I think it could get out of hand and I don’t want to do it’—that day-to-day creeping fear is diminishing the quality of discourse on campuses,” he said. “And that is not just a red-state issue. That is a purple-state, blue-state issue that’s happening all over, and it’s very dangerous.”

Wiley, who has also served as a faculty member and senior vice president for social justice at the New School, suggested institutions take inspiration from the strategic planning behind the civil rights protests of the 1960s by creating courses and syllabi that would provoke “conflict-based constructive engagement,” including litigation.

“There’s an opportunity to understand our power where we’re willing to figure out a play and relationships to have the conflict-based constructive engagement because, in this period, there is no winning without conflict,” she said.

Both Wiley and Creeley called for greater coalition-building across colleges to respond to the attacks on the entire sector. For his part, King praised what he saw as greater cross-institutional collaboration to rebuild trust in higher ed, but he said institutions should be careful to avoid the “unforced errors” they made after the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

“That handed opponents of higher education the ability to structure this attack,” he said, calling for clear, content-neutral time, place and manner restrictions for student protests. “Those kinds of reasonable things were not necessarily communicated, were not necessarily enforced and the chaos that resulted became an opportunity for enemies of higher education to have a basis for attack,” he added. “We have to be very disciplined about that.”

In response to a question from the audience about increased surveillance of faculty and students online, Creeley said students in Oklahoma and Texas “manufactured outrage and made-for-TV moments” when they complained about a grade on an essay referencing the Bible and secretly recorded a confrontation with a professor who used the word “gender” in their classroom, respectively.

“[These incidents are] manufactured to go viral—a culture war sugar rush for all kinds of media outlets. To the extent you can prepare your educators for that … I think is for the better.”

Correction: King used the word “chaos” not “payoff” to describe the student protests after Oct. 7.

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January 23, 2026
A How-To Guide for Handling Campus Speech Controversies

In the years since free speech and academic freedom experts Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman published their book Free Speech on Campus, which explained the importance of free speech at colleges and universities, much has changed as colleges faced new pressures and tests and sought to adapt to the changing political climate.

Institutions created—and later abolished—diversity initiatives in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. Campuses weathered the brutal COVID-19 pandemic. State legislatures increased their meddling in what public university faculty can and cannot teach.

Chemerinsky and Gillman’s second book, aptly named Campus Speech and Academic Freedom (Yale University Press, 2026), addresses complicated questions that aren’t necessarily answered by basic speech principles. For example, what obligation do universities have to cover security fees for controversial speakers? Or, does an institution have a responsibility to protect employees and students who are doxed for online speech?

The book was initially scheduled to publish in 2023 but was pushed back and will be released this month.

“Our editor at Yale Press told us he was never so pleased to have a manuscript come in late,” said Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley—2024 ended up being a year ripe with speech-controversy examples that ultimately strengthened the book, including college responses to the Oct. 7 attack; congressional testimonies from the presidents of Columbia University, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rutgers University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Los Angeles, about campus antisemitism; and student and faculty encampments in protest against Israel’s actions in Gaza.

Chemerinsky and Gillman, chancellor of the University of California, Irvine, co-chair the University of California’s National Center on Free Speech and Civic Engagement. They are both well versed in First Amendment law as well as campus leadership. Inside Higher Ed spoke with Chemerinsky and Gillman over Zoom about the modern challenges that university leaders face in responding to speech and academic freedom controversies on campus.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: It’s been about nine years since the two of you last wrote a book on this topic. What do you hope this book adds to the conversation about campus free speech?

Gillman: At the time we wrote the original book, there were very basic issues about why you should defend the expression of all ideas on a campus that were not resolved. If you remember in 2015–16, there were strong efforts to demand that universities control speakers or prevent certain people from speaking. And at the time, a lot of university leaders … didn’t have the language to explain why a university should tolerate speech that a lot of people thought could be dangerous or harmful.

So we thought we needed to cover the basics. But once you accept that it is a good idea to protect the expression of all ideas, it turns out there’s lots of questions. What do you do about regulating tumultuous protests or people who think that they’re entitled to disrupt speakers with whom they disagree? What do you do about security costs if the need to protect the speaker puts enormous pressures on the budgets of universities? What do you do about speech in professional settings, which maybe shouldn’t be governed by general free speech principles? … So we knew we needed to reassert the importance of the basic principles of free expression, but then we had to systematically go through and address all of the issues that aren’t resolved by that basic question, and that’s what we hope the new book does.

Q: And I have questions about those new questions you answer in the book. One is about institutional neutrality. For a university that claims to have core values like diversity and social justice, couldn’t silence on major global events be interpreted as a violation of those values?

Gillman: We note that a lot of universities have embraced the Kalven report, which suggests that universities should very rarely speak out on matters that are of political debate, because universities should be housing critics and debate rather than taking strong stands. We review how many state legislatures were demanding that universities embrace a policy of neutrality when it comes to political statements.

But the view that we have is that neutrality is really not possible because, as you say, universities are value-laden institutions. It is inevitable that universities are going to take positions. We note, for example, in the wake of Oct. 7, some university leaders took a position and said things that led to controversy. Some university leaders initially attempted not to say anything, and that led to controversy. So we suggest that neutrality is essentially impossible, but university leaders should show restraint for all the familiar reasons—that you need to allow for enough debate on the campus. It’s more important for campus communities to have their voice, rather than for universities and their leaders to always jump in.

Chemerinsky: We both reject the Kalven report approach of silence for university leaders. I think that it’s a question of, when is it appropriate [to speak]? This is an example where, like so many in the book, we never imagined we’d be writing from a first-person perspective, but a lot of the book ended up being written that way. For me, it’s always a question of “Will my silence be taken as a message, and the wrong message?” As an example, I felt it important to put a statement out to my community after the death of George Floyd, and I thought it important to make a statement to the community after Jan. 6. So I very much agree with what Howard said about the importance of restraint, but I also reject across-the-board silence.

Q: Something else you address is how professors approach certain academic materials in the classroom. We’ve seen professors in hot water for reading certain historical texts or using slurs for an academic purpose. Where do you draw the line between the professor’s right to determine their curriculum and the university’s responsibility to prevent a hostile learning environment for students?

Gillman: Professors in professional settings do have the academic freedom as well-trained, ethical professionals to speak in ways that are consistent with their professional responsibilities. So the classroom, for example, is not a general free speech zone where professors can walk in and say whatever they want. We try to provide lots of examples of case studies where professors said and did some things that some people in the classroom or the larger academic community would have objected to, but nevertheless reflect legitimate judgments of how best to approach the issue.

It is inevitable that if you give professors freedom of mind, that some of them are going to exercise their professional competency in ways that some people disagree with. So we try to suggest lots of examples where that academic freedom should be protected, but we also try to identify some examples where people were acting in ways that were not consistent with either their academic competence or their professional obligations. Once you understand the basic boundaries and responsibilities of faculty—not just their privileges, but their responsibilities to act in professional ways—we think that’ll help people do a proper assessment and not always just react whenever what a professor says in a classroom is causing some controversy.

Chemerinsky: I obviously agree. I think your question also raises another major issue that occurred between Free Speech on Campus and this book, and that’s the tension between free speech and academic freedom and Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Former assistant secretary for civil rights Catherine Lhamon was very outspoken in saying, “Just because it’s speech protected by the First Amendment doesn’t excuse a university from its Title VI obligations.”

It’s certainly possible that a professor in class could say things that are deeply offensive to students, and [the students] could say, well, this is creating a hostile environment under Title VI. Then the issue becomes: What should the university’s response be? As Howard said, you start with assessing academic freedom—is it in the scope of professionally acceptable norms? To take a recent example, a professor who would go into a computer science class and use it to discuss his views on Israel and the Middle East, that wouldn’t be protected by academic freedom because it’s not about his teaching his class.

Q: Another scenario for you: Event cancellations related to security concerns for speakers feel especially relevant after Charlie Kirk was killed during a campus event. But not all institutions can necessarily afford security for high-profile controversial speakers. For those institutions, would a budgetary-based cancellation be distinct from a speech-based cancellation, or are they the same?

Chemerinsky: The answer is, we don’t know at this point in time. In fall of 2017, a conservative group on the Berkeley campus had scheduled a free speech week, and they invited Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Shapiro, Ann Coulter and Charles Murray. It cost the university $4 million in security to allow those events to go forward. But what if it wasn’t free speech week? What if it was free speech semester? And what if the cost was $40 million? There has to be some point at which a university says we can’t afford it.

Gillman: But there are certain principles that should govern how you think it through. You need general rules that you apply to every circumstance, but those rules cannot, in effect, be discriminating against people based on their viewpoints. So if your rule is “well, any time a controversial speaker is proposed, we’re worried that it’s going to cost too much in security, so you’re not allowed to bring controversial speakers,” that will create viewpoint discrimination on campuses. It would mean, for example, on a liberal campus, that every liberal student group would always be able to bring their speakers in, but conservative student groups could not.

Q: Right, because what’s controversial would be subjective.

Gillman: Very subjective. So you need a rule in advance … We review in the book a few choices. At the University of California, Irvine, we charge people exactly the same security cost based on the same criteria—the size of the group, how big an event it is, whether you need a parking facility and the like. If we think that there is going to be external [controversy], or other concerns that are not under the control of the sponsoring student group, then the university has to cover those additional costs. Now, so far, that hasn’t bankrupted my university. But, by contrast, UCLA realized that it may quickly end up blowing through its budget, and so they created a policy that, in advance of the year, limited the total number of dollars that they were going to use to cover security on events. Once they blew through that budget for the year, they weren’t going to allow other kinds of speakers after that. You need rules that you will apply in a viewpoint-neutral way and that do protect the expression of all ideas. But then those rules have to be mindful.

Q: One more for you: There were debates, especially in the 2023–24 academic year, over campus encampments and what constitutes a disruption of the educational mission. If a protest on campus is peaceful, but it occupies a space for weeks, is it the duration of the protest or the existence of it that justifies its removal?

Chemerinsky: Campuses can have time, place and manner restrictions with regard to speech, and the rules are clear that they have to be content-neutral. So a campus can have a rule saying “no demonstrations near classroom buildings while classes are in session,” or “no sound amplification equipment on campus,” or they can restrict speech near dormitories at nighttime. As part of time, place and manner restrictions, a campus can say that they’re not going to allow encampments for any purpose, whatever the viewpoint, whatever the topic.

It then becomes a question of, should the campus choose to have such a rule? And how should the campus decide about enforcing that rule? One of the parts of the book that I’m most pleased with is where we go through and offer suggestions to campus administrators about things to consider when dealing with encampments. How much is the encampment disrupting the actual activities? How much is there a threat of violence? How have similar things been dealt with before? What kind of precedent do you want to set? What action might you take, and what would be the reaction to it?

Gillman: I think that very few people believe that individuals or groups of people on the campus or off the campus have a right to come and commandeer a space on the campus for themselves and to do that for an extended period of time. A campus may decide it doesn’t want to rule against that, but I think everybody would understand if campuses had rules against encampment activity. But it has to be viewpoint- and content-neutral.

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January 23, 2026
Florida Proposes H-1B Hiring Ban at All Public Universities

DeSantis told universities in October to end the use of the visa program.

All Florida public universities would be banned from hiring foreign workers on H-1B visas under a policy change that the Florida Board of Governors will consider next week.

Next Thursday, the board’s Nomination and Governance Committee will consider adding to a policy a line saying the universities can’t “utilize the H-1B program in its personnel program to hire any new employees through January 5, 2027.” If the committee and full Board of Governors approve the addition, there will be a 14-day public comment period.

The proposal, reported earlier by Politico, comes after Florida governor Ron DeSantis ordered the state’s public universities in October to “pull the plug on the use of these H-1B visas.” Fourteen of the Board of Governors’ 17 members are appointed by the governor and confirmed by the state Senate.

DeSantis complained about professors coming from China, “supposed Palestine” and elsewhere. He said, “We need to make sure our citizens here in Florida are first in line for job opportunities.”

Last fiscal year, according to a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services database, the federal government approved 253 H-1B visa holders to work at the University of Florida, 146 at the University of Miami, about 110 each at Florida State University and the University of South Florida, 47 at the University of Central Florida, and smaller numbers at other public institutions. Universities use the program to hire faculty, doctors and researchers and argue it’s required to meet needs in health care, engineering and other areas.

Spokespeople for the State University System of Florida and DeSantis didn’t respond to requests for comment Thursday.

The policy revisions would also say that each university board’s “personnel program must not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex.”

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January 22, 2026
Rethinking Technical Violations, Supervision in Prison Education

In response to Joshua Bay’s recently published Inside Higher Ed article, the Consortium for Catholic Higher Education in Prison, a coalition of partnerships between Catholic universities and departments of corrections in 15 states across the country, is adding its voice to those of other leaders in the field alarmed by the piece’s misleading framing: a framing that flies in the face not just of decades of established literature on the subject, but of the study (as yet unpublished and unreviewed) itself.

Since misleading titles and leads can have very real effects on people not versed in the field, it feels important to identify what exactly is misrepresentative in the article, and to invite a fuller discussion on the known and proven benefits of higher education in prison and the important questions around supervision policy and technical violations the study raises.

The data analysis therefore provides important information on the challenges of work release for students in prison education programs but not arguments against prison education programs—if anything, calling for the release of these alumni “free and clear.” That is an issue for DOC re-entry and work-release programs, not education, and should be taken as such.

The national evidence remains unequivocal: A RAND meta‑analysis still shows a 43 percent reduction in recidivism for those who participate in prison education, which remains the most comprehensive study in the field. Facilities with education programs report up to a 75 percent reduction in violence among participants, improving safety for staff, educators and incarcerated people alike. Campbell and Lee also confirm improved employment outcomes for program participants. Employment is one of the strongest predictors of long‑term desistance, so this alone is a key success indicator.

It seems likely that not just the study’s authors, but Joshua Bay and the IHE editors, are aware of all this. The title’s amendment suggests as much, and the caption beneath the article’s lead photo reads like that of an article urging greater freedoms for formerly incarcerated students: “Incarcerated individuals who enroll in college courses are less likely to be released free and clear and more likely to be assigned to work release.” These points show that the Grinnell finding is not evidence of a flawed model—it is evidence of a local anomaly shaped by supervision practices, not by the educational intervention itself.

Decades of research, Grinnell’s own admissions and the lived outcomes of our students and graduates across the country all affirm that the work of higher education in prison is effective, restorative and socially transformative. Thus, as the field draws attention to the tensions between the article’s substance and its misleading title, the study’s findings and the way those findings are framed, and as this working paper undergoes peer review and revision, we hope that fruitful conversations may grow from this around the obstacles that students face and the possibility for transformative changes to supervision policy that sets formerly incarcerated students up for failure rather than success.

Thomas Curran, SJ, Jesuit Prison Education Network

Michael Hebbeler, Institute for Social Concerns, University of Notre Dame

The Consortium for Catholic Higher Education in Prison

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January 22, 2026
Alliance for Higher Education in Prison Responds

Dear Editor,

As the national organization for higher education in prison in the United States, we at the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison feel it our responsibility to challenge the framing and conclusions of the Jan. 12 article “Prison Education May Raise Risk of Reincarceration for Technical Violations,” as well as the study it references. The article uses a misleading and sensationalist headline, elevates an unpublished study relying on limited data, and omits crucial context, all of which have very real implications for incarcerated learners and the field.

Despite the claim made in the article title, the cited study by Romaine Campbell and Logan Lee—“A Second Chance at Schooling? Unintended Consequences of Prison Education” (July 1, 2025), which is an unpublished working paper—does not find that prison education causes an increase in reincarceration. In fact, as stated in the study’s abstract, there is “no relationship between education and reincarceration after we control for release type.” Instead, the observed increase in reincarceration in the study is related to work-release and technical violations.

The study authors themselves caution against interpreting the findings as evidence that education is harmful (p. 20, Campbell & Lee, 2025), and identify systemic supervision and release practices as the key drivers of observed outcomes. They also find evidence that education may improve postrelease employment outcomes (p. 31, Campbell & Lee, 2025).

The underlying framework of the study around the “unintended consequences” of prison education is nevertheless problematic. The study’s findings do not demonstrate “unintended consequences” of higher education in prison. Rather, they reflect outcomes of release placement and supervision level that are associated with increased risk of technical violations and reincarceration. These outcomes are not caused by participation in educational programming; they result from the structuring of re-entry and supervision systems.

Connecting the findings in this working paper to outcomes of higher education programs is misleading. Doing so perpetuates negative public narratives that many within the field (including students and alumni) work hard to combat and fails to capture the potential policy implications of the study. The study authors themselves emphasize that the policy focus should be around how education is considered in release decisions and how supervision intensity increases risk of recidivism (p. 5, Campbell & Lee, 2025). The study does raise important questions about how education affects release placement, supervision level and technical violation risk. Thus, the appropriate provocation of the study is to rethink technical violations as well as supervision and release decision-making, which so often sets people who are re-entering society up for failure rather than success.

The editorial decision to elevate unpublished research in such a way that it contradicts an established body of evidence is additionally concerning. Decades of research across multiple states have demonstrated that participation in higher education–in–prison programming is associated with improved outcomes. It is noteworthy that the study uses administrative data from a single state (Iowa) to draw its broad conclusions. Presenting early-stage research without thorough evidentiary framing has the potential to distort public understanding with misleading conclusions.

Indeed, a large body of research has consistently shown that participation in higher education while incarcerated is directly correlated with positive outcomes, including significantly lower recidivism rates. It is also important to note that recidivism alone is a flawed and incomplete metric for evaluating the success of higher education in prison programs. Recidivism is often shaped by supervision level, conditions of release and enforcement practices that vary from region to region. Overreliance on recidivism as a performance metric can obscure other, potentially more important outcomes (and also, critical gaps in service) such as employment, educational attainment, civic engagement, family reunification and financial stability. Higher education in prison can and should be evaluated using a broad dataset to reflect the real landscape of opportunity and well-being possible after people have access to these opportunities. The article omits all of this context, which is crucial to understanding the body of research and the study’s place within it.

How research findings are framed matters, especially when research enters public discourse. Headlines circulate widely and are often consumed without context. The framing of this article could very well have unintended consequences of its own. This article reinforces the problematic narrative that educational opportunities for people in prison are risky and that system-impacted people are to blame rather than overly punitive supervision and release practices. Sensationalist articles with misleading headlines like this one prioritize clicks and undermine decades of hard-won progress expanding access to college in prison.

Alliance for Higher Education in Prison

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January 22, 2026
What Does It Mean to Use an LLM for a “Personal Statement”?
Here’s a question that I think lots of people in higher education may be confronting over the next few weeks: What should we do with the personal statement for graduate admissions?

I’ve now seen multiple anecdotal reports on social media (and also in my email inbox) of faculty on graduate admission committees across different subjects remarking that they think students are making significant use of large language models in drafting their personal statements.

This feels dismaying, particularly in disciplines like creative writing and English, where we would expect students to take some interest and pride in their own unique expression.

The easy narrative around this behavior is to lament over declining standards and student capacities, a lament as long and loud as the existence of organized education, but a lament also that prevents a deeper look at what’s driving the behavior and, in turn, what we could do to incentivize choices that we feel are better aligned with the goals of the institution and program.

Rather than blaming this on defective students, I think we’re incentivizing this kind of behavior, the same way we retain incentives for students to complete homework with large language model outputs.

From the beginning I’ve argued that one of the chief benefits of large language models is that their capacity to mimic human outputs gives us an opportunity to consider more closely what we actually want from writing that is supposed to come from humans working as humans.

Here’s my attempt at a deeper look at this phenomenon.

First, what are students thinking and experiencing, and how do these things impact their choices?
1. With the personal statement, students don’t have a firm idea of what they’re being asked to do and what the audience might want in the piece of writing.
The personal statement is a strange and unfamiliar genre to most of the people tackling them. The desirable end to the transaction—admission—is clear, but the communication that would result in that end is decidedly not clear. I have never been on the receiving end as part of an admission committee, but I have helped dozens of students attempt to draft these letters, and when I asked students what the school might be looking for in the statement, the reasoning becomes circular, orbiting around a general principle of “excellence.”

This lack of knowing leads to great uncertainty and an impulse to pitch oneself to the committee, often through rather generic presentations of what “excellence” entails, usually descending into abstractions as a defense against the abstraction that is the idea of “excellence.”

“Prove you’re more excellent than the other excellent people” is not a prompt likely to engender interesting or insightful writing.
1. Students think the LLM will do a “better” job than they will on producing a text that will find favor with the committee.
The black-box nature of the committee’s desire, combined with student unfamiliarity with the genre, results in doubt and fear, which can be resolved by turning to the text-production machine, which will, at least, generate something that “sounds good.”

It will not be a truly meaningful piece of writing, but at least it won’t be outright wrong, or disqualifying. Students are missing key information that would allow them to write clearly and effectively inside the rhetorical situation. The world students are hoping to enter is foreign to them, and the LLM serves as a crude sort of translator to the discourse that they think might be expected of them.
1. It is difficult to ask for a truly personal personal statement for an occasion and situation with such a high-stakes transaction at the other end and expect anything other than a sales pitch from the student.
Students applying to these programs know they are competitive. They believe that failure to achieve admission may irreparably damage their future prospects. (Not true, but it’s what they believe.)

When it comes to these statements, I think admission committees can’t handle the truth (or students, at least, perceive this) and so some portion of BS is going to result. Why not outsource the thing to the BS machine?

So, what can we do about this?

After some mutually frustrating experiences in trying to help students with their statements, brainstorming what committees might be looking for, I gave up on trying to help students hit a target that we couldn’t actually define and instead focused on something I do know: using writing as a way to better understand ourselves and then using that understanding to create a piece of writing that is interesting to read.

I redirected the students to a different question. Rather than trying to convince a faceless committee of their general excellence, I asked them to write to themselves and answer three questions:
1. Why do you want to do this specific thing?
2. What makes you prepared to do this specific thing?
3. How do you know that you’re going to follow through and complete this specific thing?
The results of this shift were immediate and profound. In at least a third of the cases (maybe more), this exercise resulted in students deciding to not apply for the graduate program. By forcing them into a reflective practice—as opposed to writing a sales pitch as part of a transaction—students had to confront where their desires originated, and in a lot of cases the impulse toward a graduate program was primarily rooted in being “good at school” and not knowing what they should do next.

For those who determined that a graduate program still fit their desires, this reflection helped on two fronts:
1. It helped clarify their own motives, giving them specifics they could now explain to someone else (like a committee) about why they desired this path.
2. It boosted their self-confidence in choosing this path, as they developed a more specific and concrete notion of the capacities they’d developed up to that point and what else they hoped to gain from additional study.
I don’t know how committees received the writing that resulted from this process in terms of the transactional nature of the exchange, but I know for a fact that as pieces of writing they were far superior to what students had produced previously. I hope that at least made the admission committee’s work more interesting.

I learned something from this exercise for myself for a different genre that is also transactional at its core, the book proposal.

The book proposal was once my least favored genre, an exercise engineered for angst and writer’s block as I wrestled over what might be convincing to publishers to give me a shot at their support for a project.

But then I realized that the first purpose of a book proposal was not to convince a publisher to fund it, but to convince myself that I could actually do it! The exercise became inherently more interesting as I explored what I knew, what I wanted to know and why I thought audiences might be interested in the results. Convincing myself of the viability of the project was, in many ways, harder than convincing a publisher. Multiple times I’ve wisely talked myself out of projects that I maybe could have sold if I treated the proposal solely as a pitch, but that I would’ve struggled to execute, primarily because I wasn’t as interested in the project as I needed to be.

I’m three for three on the proposals that I’ve completed and taken to market using this method. The books I’ve published from these proposals are also better—and were completed more quickly—because of the process I went through to write these proposals. I metabolized much more of the material that would go into the books in a way that provided great fuel for the writing.

As to what this means for the personal statement and admission committees, my recommendation is to think deeply about what kind of experience you’re seeking to engender in applicants and how that experience can be used to better inform your choices of whom to admit.

This joining of students with institutions is a much deeper thing than a mere transaction. Ask applicants to produce something worthy of that fact.

Or … drop the personal statement entirely. If it’s simply going to be a pro forma part of a larger process, why put everyone through an experience without meaning?
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January 22, 2026
Turning Over Jewish Employees’ Names Unconstitutional

The University of Pennsylvania has refused to disclose the names and personal information of Jewish employees to the Trump administration.

The University of Pennsylvania filed its formal response Tuesday to the Trump administration’s demand that the university disclose the names of Jewish employees without their consent, arguing the request is unconstitutional and that it disregards the “frightening and well-documented history” of governmental cataloging of people with Jewish ancestry.

In a July subpoena, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission asked Penn to turn over the names and information of employees with Jewish faith or ancestry, as well as the personal information of employees affiliated with Jewish studies, organizations and community events. Penn has refused to do so and thus entered into a legal battle with the Trump administration, which is now seeking a court order to force Penn to comply.

“The government’s demand implicates Penn’s substantial interest in protecting its employees’ privacy, safety, and First Amendment rights,” the filing states.

A university spokesperson said the filing is “comprehensive and speaks for itself.” Faculty at Penn and other higher ed groups have backed Penn in its fight to avoid disclosure.

“The charge does not refer to any employee complaint the agency has received, any allegation made by or concerning employees, or any specific workplace incident(s) contemplated by the EEOC, nor does it even identify any employment practice(s) the EEOC alleges to be unlawful or potentially harmful to Jewish employees,” the filing states.

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January 22, 2026
Empowered Virginia Democrats Move Fast to Reshape Higher Ed

When Virginia’s new Democratic leaders took control of the governor’s office and attorney general position last week, they wasted no time overhauling higher ed.

Abigail Spanberger, the new governor, immediately appointed more than two dozen members to the governing boards of the Virginia Military Institute, George Mason University and the University of Virginia, meaning she’s already appointed the majority of members on the George Mason and UVA boards. Her Republican predecessor, Glenn Youngkin, stocked university boards with conservatives who cracked down on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. UVA went through high-profile controversies under its Youngkin-era board, including the resignation of former president Jim Ryan under pressure.

Now, Spanberger’s appointees—at least 13 of whom donated to her gubernatorial campaign—are expected to lead universities in a different direction. Spanberger also signed an executive order Saturday directing her education secretary to assess the board member appointment process and recommend legislative changes, including possible modifications to term lengths, term starts and reappointments. In the order, Spanberger wrote that the Trump administration’s actions necessitate this review.

“Virginia colleges and universities have faced unprecedented challenges from shifts in federal policy to attacks on institutional autonomy and mission,” Spanberger said. “These pressures underscore the urgent need for the Commonwealth to reevaluate how governing boards are appointed, ensuring they are composed of individuals dedicated to upholding the quality, independence, and reputation of our institutions.”

The new attorney general, Jay Jones, also moved swiftly. He fired GMU’s university counsel K. Anne Gambrill Gentry and associate counsel Eli Schlam, leaving the institution with two remaining in-house lawyers, the university said. Jones also ousted VMI general counsel Patrick O’Leary; a spokesperson for the institution said O’Leary “notified us that he received a letter late last week informing him that his services were no longer required.”

Furthermore, on Tuesday, Jones’s office withdrew his Republican predecessor’s agreement with the Justice Department to disregard a state law that provides in-state tuition rates to undocumented students. The department sued the state Dec. 29, seeking to invalidate the law, and the next day—on his way out of office—former Virginia attorney general Jason Miyares concurred in a court filing that the law was unconstitutional.

In a news release on the reversal, Jones said, “On day one, I promised Virginians I would fight back against the Trump Administration’s attacks on our Commonwealth, our institutions of higher education, and most importantly—our students.”

And Democrat General Assembly members—who control both legislative chambers, including a supermajority in the House for the first time since the 1980s—have already expressed interest in higher ed changes. Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell filed a bill in the current legislative session that would, among other things, lengthen governing board members’ terms from four to six years and add one faculty, one staff and one student voting member to each board.

Furthermore, House member Dan Helmer filed a resolution to create a task force to determine whether VMI—where the Youngkin-era board last year rejected a contract extension for the university’s top leader—should no longer be a public university that receives public funding. If the resolution passes, the task force will explore “expanding programs at other public institutions of higher education to replace the role of VMI” in training commissioned military officers.

Among other things, the resolution calls for the group to audit whether the university responded to a report to the 2021 State Council of Higher Education for Virginia detailing discrimination by initiating “any substantial changes” to “reduce acts within their student body that could be perceived or classified as racist, sexist, or misogynistic or as an act of sexual harassment or sexual assault,” and whether the university “possesses the capacity as an institution to end celebration of the Confederacy.”

In an email to Inside Higher Ed, a VMI spokesperson said, “We are reviewing many pieces of legislation, including Del. Helmer’s, and plan to work with our elected officials to demonstrate VMI’s progress.”

Altogether, the moves show state Democrats’ willingness to act quickly to counteract the rapid changes to higher ed that Republicans—at both the state and federal level—rushed into place last year. Democratic leaders don’t appear afraid of attracting the ire of the Trump administration after its interventions in 2025, including the Justice Department’s demand that Ryan step down from leading UVA and Justice and Education Department investigations into George Mason that observers feared would oust the president there.

But Surovell’s bill, and Spanberger’s recent statements to the General Assembly, also suggest that Democrats are seeking more than to bask in their newfound, but likely fleeting, power; they’re aiming to insulate higher ed decision-making from future political turnovers.

“Virginia has some of the finest colleges and universities in the world,” Spanberger told lawmakers in a Monday address. “And yet, news story after news story isn’t about their successes—it’s about them becoming political battlegrounds.”

She touted her review of the appointments process but added that she “will also work with this General Assembly to pursue reforms that prevent any future governor—Democrat or Republican—from imposing an ideological agenda on our universities. As governor, I have and will appoint serious, mission-driven individuals to our Boards of Visitors—people whose allegiance is to the institutions they serve, not to any political agenda.”

The state’s Republican Party didn’t respond to requests for comment Wednesday.

A Question of Stability

Walt Heinecke, past president of UVA’s American Association of University Professors chapter and a current member of the Virginia state AAUP conference’s executive committee, opposed Ryan’s ouster from UVA and the Youngkin-era board’s appointment of a new president on their way out the door.

“This has just been a mess for a year, and it’s important for us to clean house,” Heinecke said.

He said Democrats “realized that, since last January, there’s been an attempt to basically take over universities with the Trump agenda, and I think they’re sick and tired of the moves that have been made.”

Jon Becker, a tenured associate professor of educational leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University, said the speed with which Spanberger moved to appoint new board members was “no surprise.” Starting last year, Democrats blocked several of Youngkin’s board appointments, and those boards needed people.

“At UVA, they were effectively without a board,” Becker said, adding that George Mason’s board similarly lacked the required number of members to conduct business. He said it was “fairly urgent” for Spanberger to appoint members to allow those boards to function again.

Going forward, Becker said, “I would expect the focus on board reform to continue.”

“A good, thorough review would show that there are practices in other states that might bring better governance to higher education in Virginia,” he said, such as requiring geographic diversity on boards and other ways of making them more representative of the state. He said, “Board members are mostly … kind of wealthier people, and they really should be more representative of the citizens.”

But he also sees the Democratic moves as an attempt to tell the federal government to keep its hands off the state’s universities. And he said he thinks Virginia is indicative of what other states will do regarding higher ed when a single party takes control and realizes it needs to move fast to make change.

Alex Keena, a tenured associate professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth, said, “I think what we’ve seen here in Virginia is a reflection of national trends, where national party politics is starting to influence how things are done at the state level.”

“You have positions in government that used to be insulated from partisan politics that are now like the latest battlegrounds,” Keena said. In certain cases, he said, Youngkin’s board appointments were “antagonistic to the whole project” of higher ed, or “had very extreme ideas about the future of higher ed.”

Now, Keena said, Democrats seem to be reacting to what the Youngkin and Trump administrations did last year, “which is this politicization of these boards that we really hadn’t seen in Virginia.” While Democrats will probably offer some stability for universities, he said, “it doesn’t really change the big picture—that you have this very hostile approach from the federal government.”

Keena said he wonders how Spanberger will respond to attacks from the Trump administration.

“How will she deal with that friction?” he said. “It’s a lot of uncertainty.”

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January 22, 2026