Tag: News

2 Professors Teach About AI Using Print Book

University of Southern California professor Helen Choi had a pretty basic assignment for her students this fall: Read a book.

To be sure, Choi’s pedagogical choice isn’t novel for many faculty; 71 percent of professors use print materials in some capacity in their classroom, a Bay View Analytics survey found.

But Choi teaches Advanced Writing for Engineers, a course focused on teaching STEM students how to write across disciplines. Many of them “think nothing of shoveling a writer’s work into a chatbot for a summary,” Choi said. So this fall, Choi is encouraging students to close their laptops and spend time with Karen Hao’s book Empire of AI, about the evolution and tech behind AI.

Choi chronicled her decision in a Substack article titled, “I’m Making My Students Read a Book!” The post caught the attention of some faculty on Bluesky, including Vance Ricks, a Northeastern computer science and philosophy professor. Ricks had similarly selected Empire of AI for his master’s-level students to read this term.

Both Choi and Ricks hope to encourage their students to relearn how to read critically and engage in robust conversations with their peers. And after finishing the books, Choi and Ricks’s students will get the chance to reflect together on the book during a virtual meeting, where they will discuss the role of AI in their lives.

What’s the need: In the past, Choi would assign short online articles for students to inform their writing responses. “The questions I was getting from students indicated to me that the engagement with the underlying materials wasn’t as deep as I wanted,” Choi said. “Sometimes it was just straight up reading comprehension.”

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the average high school senior’s reading scores declined 10 points between 1992 and 2024.

In 2024, only 34 percent of students were considered proficient, which NAEP classifies as connecting key details within and across texts and drawing complex inferences about the author’s purpose, tone or word choice. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders ranked below “basic,” unable to locate and identify relevant details in the text to support literal comprehension.

In addition to helping students apply deeper learning and thinking skills, Choi hopes having print material will allow them to step away from their laptops and connect with peers in a more meaningful way.

In the classroom: Choi and Ricks have assigned the 482-page book to be read over four to five weeks, with students responsible for annotating and reflecting on the assigned sections on a weekly basis. Neither assigns content-based quizzes or reviews, relying on student discussions to reveal participation with the text.

At the start of the term, both Choi and Ricks said they spent time in class discussing why they were requiring a physical book, and specifically Hao’s book.

“You have to justify why you’re doing this abnormal thing,” Choi said.

Students seemed to get it and were excited about the opportunity, both professors said.

“They’re genuinely eager to have those conversations and engage in that sort of reflection,” Ricks said.

The assignment has, however, required some additional attention and time on their part to help students grasp reading.

“I’ve spent more time than I had anticipated literally walking around the book and saying, like, ‘This is an epigraph; why are the quotes here? What’s a prologue? What’s the index?’ Things like that,” Choi said.

Both professors said they’ve had to adjust their expectations for how quickly students would be able to complete the text. The book itself also proved more difficult than anticipated for students who speak English as a second language, so Choi and Ricks are considering ways to better support these students in the future.

The impact: “So far, students have shared that they are enjoying Hao’s book because it is relevant to their fields and lives outside of school,” Choi said. Their written responses to the reflection prompts also show improvement in clarity and organized reasoning.

In Ricks’s class, the print format has proven a fruitful learning experience in and of itself. “Just hearing from students about how they are engaging physically with the book, tactilely, in terms of the smell of the pages or the sound of turning the pages—all of those things, let alone the material that the book is about,” Ricks said.

The two classes will meet over Zoom on Sept. 26 for a student-led discussion on the book’s materials and themes.

While the overall goal is to promote better reading and writing for her students, Choi said the exercise has also been a bright spot in her courses.

“It’s really fun for me to teaching reading as part of writing,” she said. “It’s about the students, but I think having a joyful teaching experience is important for the classroom experience. Every day I’m pretty excited about having this book, and seeing the students with books makes me super happy.”

Source link

September 24, 2025
What’s So Conservative About Civics, Anyway? (opinion)
Amid rising political violence, the need for nonpartisan civic education has never been clearer. Yet saying, “civic thought” or “civic life and leadership” now reads conservative. Should it?

With the backing of a legislature his party dominated, Republican governor Doug Ducey created Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership in 2016. Both SCETL and its founding director, Paul Carrese, are now understood as key leaders in a movement for civic schools and centers.

In a March 2024 special issue on civic engagement in the journal Laws, Caresse outlines a deepening American civic crisis, including as evidence, “the persistent appeal of the demagogic former President Donald Trump.”

He’s not exactly carrying water for the MAGA movement.

Whether MAGA should be considered conservative is part of the puzzle. If by “conservative” we mean an effort to honor that which has come before us, to preserve that which is worth preserving and to take care when stepping forward, civic education has an inherently conservative lineage.

But even if we dig back more than a half century, it can be difficult to disentangle the preservation of ideals from the practices of partisanship. The Institute for Humane Studies was founded in the early 1960s to promote classical liberalism, including commitments to individual freedom and dignity, limited government, and the rule of law. It has been part of George Mason University since 1985, receiving millions from the Charles Koch Foundation.

Earlier this year, IHS president and CEO Emily Chamlee-Wright asserted that President Trump’s “tariff regime isn’t just economically harmful—it reverses the moral and political logic that made trade a foundation of the American experiment.” Rather than classifying that column through a partisan lens, we might consider a more expansive query: Is it historically accurate and analytically robust? Does it help readers understand intersections among the rule of law, individual freedom and dignity?

The editors at Persuasion, which ran the column, certainly would seem to think so. But Persuasion also has a bent toward “a free society,” “free speech” and “free inquiry,” and against “authoritarian populism.” The founder, Yascha Mounk, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, has been a persistent center-left critic of what he and others deem the excesses of the far left. Some of the challenges they enumerate made it into Steven Pinker’s May opinion piece in The New York Times, in which Pinker defended Harvard’s overwhelming contributions to global humanity while also admitting to instances of political narrowness; Pinker wrote that a poll of his colleagues “turned up many examples in which they felt political narrowness had skewed research in their specialties.” Has political narrowness manifested within the operating assumptions of the civic engagement movement?

Toward the beginning of this century, award-winning researchers Joel Westheimer and Joseph Kahne pushed for a social change–oriented civic education. Writing in 2004, in the American Educational Research Journal, they described their predispositions as such: “We find the exclusive emphasis on personally responsible citizenship when estranged from analysis of social, political, and economic contexts … inadequate for advancing democracy. There is nothing inherently democratic about the traits of a personally responsible citizen … From our perspective, traits associated with participatory and justice oriented citizens, on the other hand, are essential.”

Other scholars have also pointed to change as an essential goal of civic education. In 1999, Thomas Deans provided an overview of the field of service learning and civic engagement. He noted dueling influences of John Dewey and Paulo Freire across the field, writing, “They overlap on several key characteristics essential to any philosophy of service-learning,” including “an anti-foundationalist epistemology” and “an abiding hope for social change through education combined with community action.”

Across significant portions of the fields of education, service learning and community engagement, the penchant toward civic education as social change had become dominant by 2012, when I inhabited an office next to Keith Morton at Providence College. It had been nearly 20 years since Morton completed an empirical study of different modes of community service—charity, project and social change—finding strengths and integrity within each. By the time we spoke, Morton observed that much of the field had come to (mis)interpret his study as suggesting a preference for social change over project or charity work.

While service learning and community engagement significantly embraced this progressive orientation, these pedagogies were also assumed to fulfill universities’ missional commitments to civic education. Yet the link between community-engaged learning and education for democracy was often left untheorized.

In 2022, Carol Geary Schneider, president emerita of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, cited real and compounding fractures in U.S. democracy. Shortly thereafter in the same op-ed, Geary Schneider wrote, “two decades of research on the most common civic learning pedagogy—community-based projects completed as part of a ‘service learning’ course—show that student participation in service learning: 1) correlates with increased completion, 2) enhances practical skills valued by employers and 3) builds students’ motivation to help solve public problems.”

All three of these outcomes are important, but to what end? The first serves university retention goals, the second supports student career prospects and the third contributes broadly to civic learning. Yet civic learning does not necessarily contribute to the knowledge, skills, attitudes and beliefs necessary to sustain American democracy.

There is nothing inherently democratic about a sea of empowered individuals, acting in pursuit of their separate conceptions of the good. All manner of people do this, sometimes in pursuit of building more inclusive communities, and other times to persecute one another. Democratic culture, norms, laws and policies channel energies toward ends that respect individual rights and liberties.

Democracy is not unrestrained freedom for all from all. It is institutional and cultural arrangements advancing individual opportunities for empowerment, tempered by an abiding respect for the dignity of other persons, grounded in the rule of law. Commitment to one another’s empowerment starts from that foundational assumption that all people are created equal. All other democratic rights and obligations flow from that well.

Proponents of civic schools and centers have wanted to see more connections to foundational democratic principles and the responsibilities inherent in stewarding an emergent, intentionally aspirational democratic legacy.

In a paper published by the American Enterprise Institute, Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey consider next steps for the movement advancing civic schools and centers, while also emphasizing responsibility-taking as part of democratic citizenship. They write, “By understanding our institutions of constitutional government, our characteristic political philosophy, and the history of American politics in practice as answers to the challenging, even paradoxical questions posed by the effort to govern ourselves, we enter into the perspective of responsibility—the citizen’s proper perspective as one who participates in sovereign oversight of, and takes responsibility for, the American political project. The achievement of such a perspective is the first object of civic education proper to the university.”

This sounds familiar. During the Obama administration, the Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement National Task Force called for the “cultivation of foundational knowledge about fundamental principles and debates about democracy.” More than a half century before, the Truman Commission’s report on “Higher Education for American Democracy” declared, “In the past our colleges have perhaps taken it for granted that education for democratic living could be left to courses in history and political science. It should become instead a primary aim of all classroom teaching and, more important still, of every phase of campus life.” And in the era of the U.S. founding, expanding access to quality education was understood as central to the national, liberatory project of establishing and sustaining democratic self-government. Where does this leave us today?

Based on more than 20 years of research, teaching and administration centered around civic education, at institutions ranging from community colleges to the Ivy League, I have six recommendations for democratic analysis, education and action to move beyond this hyperpartisan moment.
1. Advance analysis rather than allegations. I started this essay with two critiques of President Trump advanced by leaders at centers ostensibly associated with conservativism. More recently I demonstrated alignments between current conservative appeals and civic aspirations under two popular Democratic presidents. We should spend far less time and ink debating whether something emerges from Republican or Democratic roots. Our proper roles as academics and as citizens direct us to consider specific policies and practices, to compare them historically and cross-nationally, and to gather evidence of impacts. We now have a landscape that includes more than a dozen new civic schools and centers. We therefore have opportunities to assess their differences, similarities and impact.
2. Demonstrate that rights derive from shared governance. Work with students to understand the relationship between good government and everyday functions such as freedom to move, freedom to associate, freedom to contract and freedom to trade. These rights manifest through the promise made in the Declaration of Independence. “Governments are instituted,” it reads, “to effect … Safety and Happiness.” Danielle Allen’s Our Declaration is an indispensable aid in any such effort.
3. Encourage historic political-economic comparisons of rights. Diving deep into history from all corners of the world clarifies various kinds of colonizing forces and diverse approaches to good government, from imperial China to the Persian Empire and American expansion. Last year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson, received the award for research demonstrating that societies with well-established rule of law and individual rights are more likely to become economically prosperous. Consider this and other, disciplinarily diverse explorations of the structural conditions for human flourishing. Push past dichotomizing narratives that sort history into tidy buckets. Rights as we know them—expanded and protected through state institutions—are tools of liberation with an extended, colonial and global heritage. Mounk’s podcast is an excellent resource for contemporary, comparative interrogation of the structures and cultural commitments that advance rights.
4. Wrestle with power and violence. Despite national and global history riven with conflict and conquest, many progressives came to imagine that democracy is a given, that having rights in conditions of comparative peace is the natural state. Yet those rights only manifest through the disciplined commitments of state officials doing their jobs. In a recent article in Democracy, William A. Galston, a Brookings Institution senior fellow, professor at the University of Maryland and former Clinton administration official, suggests democracy is on the defensive because citizens too frequently “regard the movement toward tolerance at home and internationalism abroad as irreversible.” Nonsense, argues Galston. History shows us societies descend into evil, governments revoke liberties and armies invade. Democratic liberties are co-created political commitments. They have always depended upon judicious, democratic stewardship of policing power at home and military power abroad. Questioning state structures of enforcement should be part of university-level civic education, but so too should respecting them and understanding the reasons for their persistence. Here and throughout, civic education must balance respect for the past, its traditions and its empirical lessons, with possibilities for the future.
5. Embrace and interrogate foundational democratic values. Meditate on the intentionally aspirational commitment to American democracy, embodied in the assertion that all people are created equal. Nurture the virtue of respect for others implied by inherent equality. Foster—in yourself and in your students—an embrace of human dignity so strong that you seek bridging opportunities across the American experiment, working to find the best in others, seeking connections with individuals who seem most unlike you. Even if they offer no reciprocity, never forget any person’s basic humanity. Before analyzing or convincing, listen and find ways to listen well beyond your normal circles. My colleague at the University of Pennsylvania Lia Howard is modeling such efforts with systematic approaches to democratic listening across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
6. Most of all, if principled, rigorous, honest analysis beyond partisan dichotomizing appeals to you, know that you are not alone. Danielle Allen (Harvard University), Kwame Anthony Appiah (New York University) and Eboo Patel (Interfaith America) lead among numerous scholars and organizers refreshing democratic ideals for our era. They demonstrate that democracy does not manifest without attention to our shared heritage, our collective institutions and our willingness to respect one another. They hold a pragmatic space between civic education as unquestioning nation-building on one extreme and as unmoored social justice activism on another. Readers curious about their approaches can begin with Allen presenting “How to Be a Confident Pluralist” at Brigham Young University, Appiah making a cosmopolitan case for human dignity and humility in The New York Times Magazine, and Patel in conversation with American University president Jonathan Alger in AU’s “Perspectives on the Civic Life” series.
This essay, it must be noted, was almost entirely completed before the political assassination of Charlie Kirk. It now becomes even clearer that we must identify ways to analyze beyond partisan pieties while embracing human dignity. Some leaders are reminding us of our ideals. Utah governor Spencer Cox’s nine minutes on ending political violence deserves a listen. Ezra Klein opened his podcast with a reflection on the meaning of the assassination, followed by his characteristic modeling of principled disagreement with a political opponent (in this case, Ben Shapiro). It is the second feature of that Klein podcast—extended periods of exploration, disagreement and brief periods of consensus regarding critical democratic questions—that we must see more of across campuses and communities. One of the worst possible, and unfortunately plausible, outcomes of this movement for civic schools and centers could be the continuing balkanization of campuses into self-sorted identity-based communities, with very little cross-pollination. That would be bad for learning and for our country.

Whatever the political disposition of civic centers or other programs across campus, we need more and better cross-campus commitment to democratic knowledge, values and beliefs if we wish to continue and strengthen the American democratic tradition.

Eric Hartman is a senior fellow and director of the executive doctorate in higher education management at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education.
Source link
September 23, 2025
3 Questions for Fractional COLO Jeremiah Grabowski

Jeremiah Grabowski’s LinkedIn article “Announcing Fractional Chief Online Learning Officer (COLO): Building Independence in Online Higher Education” caught my attention. Setting aside my worry that a fractional hire could replace my full-time role, I decided to reach out to Jeremiah to understand what this offering is all about.

Q: What is a fractional COLO? What types of schools might this service be a good fit for? Why would a college or university invest in a fractional COLO instead of recruiting for a full-time online learning leader?

A: A fractional COLO is a senior-level executive, chief online learning officer, who embeds within an institution on a part-time basis, providing executive-level expertise without the full-time commitment.

This service is particularly well suited for small to midsize universities that recognize the need to invest in online learning but lack the start-up capital for a full-time executive position, which can be quite expensive when you factor in salary and benefits at the senior level.

Many institutions approach fractional COLO services because they need to see a return on investment before making larger commitments. Building online learning programs requires significant up-front investment, and schools don’t always see returns in the first year. (I recently wrote an article exploring this: “Can You Build a Brand New Online Program for Half a Million Dollars?”)

Essentially, many schools know they need to make the investment in online learning leadership, but they can’t commit to a full-time hire right out of the gate. A fractional COLO allows them to get started with expert guidance while building revenues, which go towards that larger investment.

Q: Help us understand the fractional COLO from the provider perspective. How do you provide this service? How scalable is the model? How does the fractional COLO idea differ from the work of consultants/consulting companies, in terms of methods, deliverables, costs and outcomes?

A: I offer several service levels to meet schools where they are. Some institutions want an assessment of their current online operations—essentially an outsider’s perspective on their strengths and opportunities. I’ve developed a comprehensive rubric covering 10 key areas, from strategic planning to marketing, admissions, course design, faculty support and student services. I spend two days on campus meeting with staff, faculty and administrators to understand how they holistically support online students, then deliver a report with actionable improvements for six- and 12-month time frames.

From there, service levels scale up. Some schools need help launching specific programs, while others commit to the full fractional COLO engagement.

When I begin working with any institution, I always visit campus first to meet everyone, from senior leaders to registrars, financial aid staff, instructional designers and the entire support team. After conducting my assessment, we then develop a six- to 12-month strategic plan tailored to that institution’s specific needs.

Regarding scalability, that’s a great question. As a new venture, I haven’t reached my bandwidth limit yet. Hopefully, that becomes a good problem to have! If demand grows, I’d look for individuals with a similar mindset: individuals with a teacher’s heart who want to roll up their sleeves and help institutions learn and implement best practices. I like to say I “teach institutions how to fish.”

What differentiates my approach from traditional consulting or vendors is the hands-on, DIY element. There are many excellent consultants and companies that do great work for institutions and achieve results. I focus on teaching and blending consultation with implementation. I’ll conduct assessments and provide strategic guidance, but I also get my hands dirty helping different departments across the institution implement those strategies.

This approach works best for institutions that want to build online learning capabilities internally [and] retain all tuition revenue and can commit to a one- to two-year development timeline. The costs are significantly less than a full-time hire, without the overhead of salary and benefits, and deliverables are always scaled to meet each institution’s specific needs.

Q: Why have you decided to build up this fractional COLO business instead of pursuing a more traditional COLO role at a single institution? Tell us about your educational and professional background and how that prepared you to create this concept.

A: I’ve always had an entrepreneurial itch, even though I spent over 20 years of my career in higher education in traditional roles. I was fortunate to serve as COLO at an institution for eight years. That was a valuable experience since fewer than 10 percent of institutions have an online learning leader serving on the cabinet or reporting directly to the president. That role gave me a unique perspective on integrating online learning throughout an institution rather than keeping it siloed.

My educational background combines business and education, which prepared me for this venture. My undergraduate degree was in business, which seeded those entrepreneurial interests, but I transitioned to education for my master’s and completed a Ph.D. in learning sciences.

In my previous role, we were essentially building from scratch, so I referred to our team as a start-up. We developed new standard operating procedures, created budget models and hired new team members. In some ways, I felt like I was running a business within the university. That unique combination of business skills, educational expertise and start-up experience prepared me for this role. Also, maybe most importantly, if you’re going to start a new company, you’d better have a supportive spouse because it’s not easy, lol.

One last comment related to the intro—my goal isn’t to replace full-time COLOs. It’s actually the opposite. My intent is that as institutions work with me and see the value a COLO brings, they’ll eventually hire their own full-time leader once operations are established. I hope this work helps more schools recognize the importance of dedicated online learning leadership, ultimately growing the pool of full-time COLO positions across higher education. I don’t want to take work away from anyone. I want to grow the position and demonstrate the value these roles bring to institutions.

Source link

September 23, 2025
AAUP Accuses Trump of Weaponizing Civil Rights Law

The Biden and Trump administrations have both stepped up enforcement of Title VI in the last two years.

Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Etienne Laurent/AFP/Getty Images | Scott Olson/Getty Images

A new report released Monday by the American Association of University Professors and its Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure argues that the Trump administration has weaponized federal civil rights laws with a goal of discrediting colleges and compromising their academic freedom and institutional autonomy.

The report focuses in part on a surge of investigations that have been launched by the Department of Education since Oct. 7, 2023, especially those that involve national origin and religion. Based on an analysis of those cases, AAUP argues that in many instances the Trump administration has targeted types of speech or programming that do not actually qualify as legally actionable discrimination. Rather, the association says, the Trump administration has used this surge to sidestep historical procedures and enforce its own interpretation of the law.

Both the Biden and Trump administrations stepped up their enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin, after the Hamas attack on Israel prompted a number of protests on college campuses and an increase in reports of antisemitism. Their approaches, however, have been quite different.

Biden civil rights officials took issue with how colleges responded to reports of antisemitic harassment and found several colleges in violation of that law.

However, the Trump administration has moved aggressively to cut off funds and to demand sweeping changes at institutions—all in the name of combating antisemitism. More recently, the administration has used Title VI as a way to restrict and investigate race-based practices and programs as well as admissions decisions.

“In a perverse reading of DEI, the administration makes it an instance of racial discrimination rather than an attempt to dismantle the structures of discrimination based on race,” the report notes.

Over all, the AAUP argues that the Trump administration is attempting to “unmake” and “hijack” Title VI.

The Trump administration is “unmooring the Civil Rights Act from its foundational commitments to addressing structures of discrimination that prevent educational access,” the report stated. And doing so “is nothing less than an attempt to rewrite the history of the nation.”

Source link

September 23, 2025
UNL Proposes Cutting Educational Administration Department

In an effort to address a deep deficit caused by rising costs, declining international enrollment and flat state funding, University of Nebraska–Lincoln officials have proposed merging or cutting a slew of programs. But one proposal has sparked particular outrage—within the university and beyond: the plan to ax the educational administration department.

If the plan goes through, faculty members and students worry the state will be left without a key pipeline to fill leadership roles at local schools and colleges, particularly in rural areas. The University of Nebraska–Lincoln is the only university in the state that offers a Ph.D. program in educational leadership or higher education, which has a distinct scholarly focus, while Ed.D. programs and master’s degrees to train education leaders can be found elsewhere.

“It’s hard for me to imagine the flagship university in a state does not offer a program to prepare future principals, future superintendents, future leaders of colleges and universities,” said Crystal Garcia, an associate professor and Ph.D. coordinator in the department. Eliminating the department would be “really doing a disservice to education as a whole in the state of Nebraska.” She noted the department is “incredibly impactful,” serving 316 current and incoming graduate students.

Administrators have proposed nixing five other academic programs as well: community and regional planning; earth and atmospheric sciences; landscape architecture; statistics; and textiles, merchandising and fashion design. The plan would potentially retain the master’s degree program in educational administration but rehouse it elsewhere.

Through these cuts, the university aims to reduce the budget by $27.5 million, in part by eliminating 58 roles—17 from the educational administration department, including tenured and tenure-track positions. University officials also proposed two department mergers and budget cuts to the College of Engineering and the College of Arts and Sciences, amid other cuts to administrative and staff expenses.

The proposal will now be considered by the Academic Planning Committee, a group of faculty, staff and students. Members of affected programs can make their case before the committee in live-streamed hearings, and the public can weigh in through a feedback form. Then, the APC will come out with recommendations the chancellor can take or leave. If the chancellor decides to move forward with the proposed cuts, the issue will come before the Board of Regents in December.

Elizabeth Niehaus, a professor in the educational administration department, said faculty were stunned by the news and are preparing to defend the department to the committee—and the Board of Regents if need be. She and other faculty members believe the department is thriving.

The proposed cut was “quite honestly shocking, because we are a strong department with great students, great faculty, with a national reputation, folks who have been winning awards for teaching and research,” Niehaus said. “So, we did not see that coming.”

The Decision-Making Process

The university’s executive team undertook “a strategic, data-informed and holistic review of all academic programs,” said Mark Button, UNL’s executive vice chancellor.

The review weighed a variety of metrics, he said, including student success outcomes—such as retention rates and degree-completion rates over a five-year period—the ratio of student enrollments to faculty members, and demand for programs as measured in student credit hours and students joining majors.

Administrators also drew on metrics for research success used by the Association of American Universities; the university is seeking to regain membership in the organization, which it lost in 2011. Those measures include book publications, research citations and awards and fellowships. Administrators also compared programs to similar programs at other public AAU institutions, Button said, and considered more qualitative factors, like whether a program was distinctive in the state. The metrics were shared with college deans and then department chairs in May.

Button said the metrics used to review the academic programs reflected priorities already in the university’s strategic plan and the criteria used for past budget reductions. Education administration was among the departments that “didn’t perform as well,” he said.

Faculty members argue the process lacked transparency; they didn’t know until a day before the proposal came out that the department was on the chopping block. They say their specific questions have gone unanswered, including which particular measures caused them to fall short and whether the pandemic years were contextualized in the data.

“We were reduced to a single number that definitely does not reflect the depth and breadth of what we do and our contributions to the field, to the university, to the state,” Niehaus said of the scoring process.

The decision felt so at odds with how the department sees itself that associate professor Sarah Zuckerman said she wondered if it was being targeted for its outspoken faculty members. Zuckerman, who serves as president of the university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, said other members of the department are also active in the organization, as well as in Advocating for Inclusion, Respect and Equity, a faculty coalition focused on diversity issues.

“It gives me a little bit of a nauseous feeling,” Zuckerman said.

Button argued it’s “definitively not true” that the proposed cuts target outspoken departments. He said the proposal involved “very painful decisions.”

“I probably can’t underscore enough just how difficult this budget-reduction process is for our entire university community and for everyone who’s committed to an outstanding land-grant, flagship, Big Ten university here in Nebraska,” Button said. “I share the sense of pain and grief that everyone on our campus is going through now.”

If the cuts become a reality, tenured and tenure-track professors will have a year’s notice of their termination and the university has promised to develop teach-out plans for students. But students don’t have the details of those plans, and some said the uncertainty makes them ill at ease.

Korrine Fagenstrom, who is participating in the online Ph.D. program focused on higher ed administration from Montana, said she doesn’t know what she’s going to do.

Four years into her program, she doesn’t want to leave, she said, but “I don’t know what it would look like to stay—I don’t know that anybody does.”

“The idea of the program getting eliminated at my final hour is terrifying,” said Kathryn Duvall, a third-year student in the Ed.D. program. “I have made sacrifices to my family. I have made sacrifices to my own personal life and dedicated years to getting my education. And this program has spent years pouring into me and developing me as a researcher, as a writer, as an educator, as a leader.”

She also worries on a “macro level” that education in the state will suffer without the leadership training UNL provides.

“Eliminating a program like this is eliminating foundational training that produces equitable educational opportunities in our society,” Duvall said.

The Bigger Picture

University officials argue that other offerings in the state, such as Ed.D. programs at University of Nebraska–Omaha or small private universities, can fill the same needs as UNL’s educational administration programs.

But K–12 superintendents, who generally have doctorates, need more—not less—access to the affordable, high-caliber training public institutions like UNL historically provide, said Mónica Byrne-Jiménez, executive director of the University Council for Educational Administration. The proposal to cut the department has garnered national attention, because it’s an unusual move for a flagship campus or a university with a Research-1 Carnegie classification, she added.

“It’s nothing I’ve seen before,” Byrne-Jiménez said, noting most R-1 universities boast strong K–12 and higher ed leadership programs. “We don’t want it to become a national trend.”

Cheryl Holcomb-McCoy, president and CEO of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, said that while UNL is a “unique case,” she has seen a growing number of education schools or colleges merge with other programs over the last decade. The Iowa Board of Regents also approved plans last week to end the University of Iowa’s graduate and doctoral programs in elementary education, secondary education, special education and science education.

She worries that federal funding cuts, particularly to teacher training grants and Institute of Education Sciences contracts, is going to thrust more universities into positions where they consider taking such actions.

Byrne-Jiménez said such programs may be extra vulnerable at a time when Americans are questioning the value of higher education and schools are “hyperscrutinized.” Educational administration programs also tend to attract smaller cohorts, she said, because a select few want to go into education leadership roles. She fears their size, combined with national skepticism, makes them susceptible to budget cuts. But she believes these programs have an outsize effect on the long-term success of state residents that needs to be considered.

“From an external perspective, it looks like these are small, sort of niche programs that might not be generating a lot of money for the university,” she said. But “the impact is great.” At UNL, “those 300 students are going to go out to 300 schools and 300 communities.”

Source link

September 23, 2025
Bachelor’s Degrees Unaffordable for Most Low-Income Students

The high cost associated with college is one of the greatest deterrents for students interested in higher education. A 2024 survey by Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab found that 68 percent of students believe higher ed institutions charge too much for an undergraduate degree, and an additional 41 percent believe their institution has a sticker price that’s too high.

A recent study by the National College Attainment Network found that a majority of two- and four-year colleges cost more than the average student can pay, sometimes by as much as $8,000 a year. The report advocates for additional state and federal financial aid to close affordability gaps and ensure opportunities for low- and middle-income students to engage in higher education.

Methodology: NCAN’s formula for affordability compares total cost of attendance (tuition, fees, housing, etc.) plus an emergency reserve of $300 against any aid a student receives. This includes grants, federal loans and work-study dollars, as well as expected family contribution and the summer wages a student could earn in a full-time, minimum-wage job in their state. Housing costs vary depending on the student’s enrollment: Bachelor’s-granting institutions include on-campus housing costs, and community colleges include off-campus housing rates.

A graphic by the National College Attainment Network demonstrating how the organization calculated affordable rates for the average college student.
National College Attainment Network

Costs that outweigh expected aid and income are classified as an “affordability gap” for students.

A recent Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab survey of 5,065 undergraduates found that 9 percent of respondents said an unexpected expense of $300 or less would threaten their ability to remain enrolled in college.

The total sample size covered 1,137 public institutions, 600 of which were community colleges.

Majority of colleges unaffordable: Using these metrics, 48 percent of community colleges and 35 percent of bachelor’s-granting institutions were affordable during the 2022–23 academic year. In total, NCAN rated 473 institutions as affordable.

Comparative data from 2015–16 finds slightly more community colleges were affordable then (50 percent) than in 2022–23 (48 percent), but that the average affordability gap, or total unmet need, has grown from $246 to $486.

Among four-year colleges, more public institutions were affordable in 2022–23 than in 2015–16 (29 percent) and the average affordability gap shrank slightly, from $1,656 to $1,554. The data indicates slight improvement in affordability metrics but highlights challenges for low-income students interested in a bachelor’s degree, according to the report.

NCAN researchers believe the $400 increase in the maximum Pell Grant in 2023 helped lower costs per student at bachelor’s-granting institutions, but community colleges appear less affordable due to the loss of HEERF funding and the increase in cost of attendance due to rising housing costs.

Affordability ranges by states: Access to affordable institutions is also more of a challenge for students in some regions than in others. NCAN’s analysis found that 14 states lacked a single institution with an affordable bachelor’s degree program for low-income students. In 27 states, 65 percent of public four-year colleges were unaffordable.

For two-year programs, five states lacked an affordable community college. Some states had a small sample (fewer than five) of community colleges analyzed; Delaware and Florida had no community colleges in NCAN’s sample.

In Kentucky, Maine and New Mexico, 100 percent of the two-year colleges analyzed were found to be affordable for students, along with at least 80 percent of the bachelor’s degree–granting institutions in those states.

Students pursuing a bachelor’s degree in New Hampshire ($8,239), Pennsylvania ($8,076) and Ohio ($5,138) had the largest affordability gaps. For community colleges, students in New Hampshire ($11,499), Utah ($7,689) and Pennsylvania ($4,508) had the greatest unmet need.

Conversely, some states had aid surpluses, which can help address other expenses associated with college, including textbooks and transportation.

Cost isn’t the only barrier to access, however. “For many students who live in rural or remote areas, far from the postsecondary institutions in their state, college may remain inaccessible,” the report noted.

Based on the data, NCAN supports additional funding for higher education at all levels, federal, state and local, to provide students with financial aid.

Get more content like this directly to your inbox. Subscribe here.

Source link

September 23, 2025
Texas State Prof Sues, Claiming Free Speech, Contract Violations

Thomas Alter had received tenure as an associate history professor just 10 days before he was fired.

Mikala Compton/Austin American-Statesman/Getty Images

A tenured Texas State University professor who was terminated earlier this month after allegedly inciting violence during a speech has sued the university, CBS Austin reported. In the lawsuit filed in district court, Thomas Alter, the former associate professor of history, claims that university leadership violated his free speech and due process rights and breached his employment contract.

At a Sept. 7 conference organized by Socialist Horizon, Alter said in part that “without organization, how can anyone expect to overthrow the most bloodthirsty, profit-driven mad organization in the history of the world—that of the U.S. government.” His speech was recorded and circulated by a right-wing YouTuber who had infiltrated the event. Alter was terminated three days later.

In a statement announcing his termination, Texas State president Kelly Damphousse said Alter’s “actions are incompatible with their responsibilities as a faculty member at Texas State University.” Alter told CBS Austin that he did not associate himself with Texas State during the conference.

“The reasons Provost Aswrath provided for Dr. Alter’s termination are false and give every appearance of politically-motivated discrimination,” the lawsuit states. “In truth, Dr. Alter was terminated because he espoused views that are politically unpopular in today’s politically-charged climate, in violation of his First Amendment right to free speech.”

Alter told CBS Austin that his dismissal “turned my world upside down and my family’s world upside down.”

“Anyone should be able to express their views no matter how unpopular they are without facing the repercussions that many people are seeing,” he added. (Alter had earned tenure just 10 days before he was removed, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported.)

Texas State did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for comment, but a spokesperson told CBS Austin the university declined to comment on pending litigation.

Source link

September 23, 2025
Why Did College Board End Best Admissions Product? (opinion)

Earlier this month, College Board announced its decision to kill Landscape, a race-neutral tool that allowed admissions readers to better understand a student’s context for opportunity. After an awkward 2019 rollout as the “Adversity Score,” Landscape gradually gained traction in many selective admissions offices. Among other items, the dashboard provided information on the applicant’s high school, including the economic makeup of their high school class, participation trends for Advanced Placement courses and the school’s percentile SAT scores, as well as information about the local community.

Landscape was one of the more extensively studied interventions in the world of college admissions, reflecting how providing more information about an applicant’s circumstances can boost the likelihood of a low-income student being admitted. Admissions officers lack high-quality, detailed information on the high school environment for an estimated 25 percent of applicants, a trend that disproportionately disadvantages low-income students. Landscape helped fill that critical gap.

While not every admissions office used it, Landscape was fairly popular within pockets of the admissions community, as it provided a more standardized, consistent way for admissions readers to understand an applicant’s environment. So why did College Board decide to ax it? In its statement on the decision, College Board noted that “federal and state policy continues to evolve around how institutions use demographic and geographic information in admissions.” The statement seems to be referring to the Trump administration’s nonbinding guidance that institutions should not use geographic targeting as a proxy for race in admissions.

If College Board was worried that somehow people were using the tool as a proxy for race (and they weren’t), well, it wasn’t a very good one. In the most comprehensive study of Landscape being used on the ground, researchers found that it didn’t do anything to increase racial/ethnic diversity in admissions. Things are different when it comes to economic diversity. Use of Landscape is linked with a boost in the likelihood of admission for low-income students. As such, it was a helpful tool given the continued underrepresentation of low-income students at selective institutions.

Still, no study to date found that Landscape had any effect on racial/ethnic diversity. The findings are unsurprising. After all, Landscape was, to quote College Board, “intentionally developed without the use or consideration of data on race or ethnicity.” If you look at the laundry list of items included in Landscape, absent are items like the racial/ethnic demographics of the high school, neighborhood or community.

While race and class are correlated, they certainly aren’t interchangeable. Admissions officers weren’t using Landscape as a proxy for race; they were using it to compare a student’s SAT score or AP course load to those of their high school classmates. Ivy League institutions that have gone back to requiring SAT/ACT scores have stressed the importance of evaluating test scores in the student’s high school context. Eliminating Landscape makes it harder to do so.

An important consideration: Even if using Landscape were linked with increased racial/ethnic diversity, its usage would not violate the law. The Supreme Court recently declined to hear the case Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board. In declining to hear the case, the court has likely issued a tacit blessing on race-neutral methods to advance diversity in admissions. The decision leaves the Fourth Circuit opinion, which affirmed the race-neutral admissions policy used to boost diversity at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, intact.

The court also recognized the validity of race-neutral methods to pursue diversity in the 1989 case J.A. Croson v. City of Richmond. In a concurring opinion filed in Students for Fair Admission (SFFA) v. Harvard, Justice Brett Kavanaugh quoted Justice Antonin Scalia’s words from Croson: “And governments and universities still ‘can, of course, act to undo the effects of past discrimination in many permissible ways that do not involve classification by race.’”

College Board’s decision to ditch Landscape sends an incredibly problematic message: that tools to pursue diversity, even economic diversity, aren’t worth defending due to the fear of litigation. If a giant like College Board won’t stand behind its own perfectly legal effort to support diversity, what kind of message does that send? Regardless, colleges and universities need to remember their commitments to diversity, both racial and economic. Yes, post-SFFA, race-conscious admissions has been considerably restricted. Still, despite the bluster of the Trump administration, most tools commonly used to expand access remain legal.

The decision to kill Landscape is incredibly disappointing, both pragmatically and symbolically. It’s a loss for efforts to broaden economic diversity at elite institutions, yet another casualty in the Trump administration’s assault on diversity. Even if the College Board has decided to abandon Landscape, institutions must not forget their obligations to make higher education more accessible to low-income students of all races and ethnicities.

Source link

September 22, 2025
A Better Way to Prepare for Job Interviews (opinion)
One of the things that makes interviews stressful is their unpredictability, which is unfortunately also what makes them so hard to prepare for. In particular, it’s impossible to predict exactly what questions you will be asked. So, how do you get ready?

Scripting out answers for every possible question is a popular strategy but a losing battle. There are too many (maybe infinite?) possible questions and simply not enough time. In the end, you’ll spend all your time writing and you still won’t have answers to most of the questions you might face. And while it might make you feel briefly more confident, that confidence is unlikely to survive the stress and distress of the actual interview. You’ll be rigid rather than flexible, robotic rather than responsive.

This article outlines an interview-preparation strategy that is both easier and more effective than frantic answer scripting, one that will leave you able to answer just about any interview question smoothly.

Step 1: Themes

While you can’t know what questions you will get, you can pretty easily predict many of the topics your interviewers will be curious about. You can be pretty sure that an interviewer will be interested in talking about collaboration, for example, even if you can’t say for sure whether they’ll ask a standard question like “Tell us about a time when you worked with a team to achieve a goal” or something weirder like “What role do you usually play on a team?”

Your first step is to figure out the themes that their questions are most likely to touch on. Luckily, I can offer you a starter pack. Here are five topics that are likely to show up in an interview for just about any job, so it pays to prepare for them no matter what:
1. Communication
2. Collaboration (including conflict!)
3. Time and project management
4. Problem-solving and creativity
5. Failures and setbacks
But you also need to identify themes that are specific to the job or field you are interviewing for. For a research and development scientist position, for example, an interviewer might also be interested in innovation and scientific thinking. For a project or product manager position, they’ll probably want to know about stakeholder management. And so on.

To identify these specific themes, check the job ad. They may have already identified themes for you by categorizing the responsibilities or qualifications, or you can just look for patterns. What topics/ideas/words come up most often in the ad that aren’t already represented in the starter pack? What kinds of skills or experience are they expecting? If you get stuck, try throwing the ad into a word cloud generator and see what it spits out.

Ideally, try to end this step with at least three new themes, in addition to the starter pack.

Step 2: Stories

The strongest interview answers are anchored by a specific story from your experience, which provides a tangible demonstration about how you think and what you can do. But it’s incredibly difficult to come up with a good, relevant example in the heat of an interview, let alone to tell it effectively in a short amount of time. For that, you need some preparation and some practice.

So for each of your themes, identify two to three relevant stories. Stories can be big (a whole project from beginning to end), or they can be small (a single interaction with a student). They can be hugely consequential (a decision you made that changed the course of your career), or they can be minor but meaningful (a small disagreement you handled well). What is most important is that the stories demonstrate your skills, experiences and attitudes clearly and compellingly.

The point is to have a lot of material to work with, so aim for at least 10 stories total, and preferably more. The same story can apply to multiple themes, but try not to let double-dipping limit the number of stories you end up with.

Then, for each of your stories, write an outline that gives just enough context to understand the situation, describes your actions and thinking, and says what happened at the end. Use the STAR method, if it’s useful for keeping your stories tight and focused. Shaping your stories and deciding what to say (and not say) will help your audience see your skills in action with minimal distractions. This is one of the most important parts of your prep, so take your time with it.

Step 3: Approaches

As important as stories are in interviewing, you usually can’t just respond to a question with a story without any framing or explanation. So you’ll want to develop language to describe some of your usual strategies, orientations or approaches to situations that fall into each of the themes. That language will help you easily link each question to one of your stories.

So for each theme, do a little brainstorming to identify your core messaging: “What do I usually do when faced with a situation related to [THEME]?” Then write a few bullet points. (You can also reverse engineer this from the stories: Read the stories linked to a particular theme, then look for patterns in your thinking or behavior.)

These bullet points give you what you need to form connective tissue between the specific question they ask and the story you want to tell. So if they ask, “Tell me about a time when you worked with a team to achieve a goal,” you can respond with a story and close out by describing how that illustrates a particular approach. Or if they ask, “What role do you usually play on a team?” you can start by describing how you think about collaboration and your role in it and then tell a story that illustrates that approach.

Though we are focusing on thematic questions here, make sure to also prepare bullet points for some of the most common general interview questions, like “Why do you want this job?” and “Tell us about yourself.”

Step 4: Bring It All Together

You really, really, really need to practice out loud before your interview. Over the years, I’ve found that many of the graduate students and postdocs I work with spend a lot of time thinking about how they might answer questions and not nearly enough time actually trying to answer them. And so they miss the opportunity to develop the kind of fluency and flexibility that helps one navigate the unpredictable environment of an interview.

Here’s how to use the prep you did in Steps 1-3 to practice:
- First, practice telling each of your 10-plus stories out loud, at least three times each. The goal here is to develop fluency in your storytelling, so you can keep things focused and flowing without needing to think about it.
- Second, for each of the bullet points you created in Step 3, practice explaining it (out loud!) a few times, ideally in a couple of different ways.
- Third, practice bringing it all together by answering some actual interview questions. Find a long list of interview questions (like this one), then pick questions at random to answer. The randomness is important, because the goal is to practice making smooth and effective connections between questions, stories and approaches. You need to figure out what to do when you run into a question that is challenging, unexpected or just confusing.
- And once you’ve done that, do it all again.
In the end, you’ve created a set of building blocks that you can arrange and rearrange as needed in the moment. And it’s a set you can keep adding to with more stories and more themes, keep practicing with new questions, and keep adapting for your next interview.

Derek Attig is assistant dean for career and professional development in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Derek is a member of the Graduate Career Consortium, an organization providing an international voice for graduate-level career and professional development leaders.
Source link
September 22, 2025
Online Course Gives College Students a Foundation on GenAI

As more employers identify uses for generative artificial intelligence in the workplace, colleges are embedding tech skills into the curriculum to best prepare students for their careers.

But identifying how and when to deliver that content has been a challenge, particularly given the varying perspectives different disciplines have on generative AI and when its use should be allowed. A June report from Tyton Partners found that 42 percent of students use generative AI tools at least weekly, and two-thirds of students use a singular generative AI tool like ChatGPT. A survey by Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab found that 85 percent of students had used generative AI for coursework in the past year, most often for brainstorming or asking questions.

The University of Mary Washington developed an asynchronous one-credit course to give all students enrolled this fall a baseline foundation of AI knowledge. The optional class, which was offered over the summer at no cost to students, introduced them to AI ethics, tools, copyright concerns and potential career impacts.

The goal is to help students use the tools thoughtfully and intelligently, said Anand Rao, director of Mary Washington’s center for AI and the liberal arts. Initial results show most students learned something from the course, and they want more teaching on how AI applies to their majors and future careers.

How it works: The course, IDIS 300: Introduction to AI, was offered to any new or returning UMW student to be completed any time between June and August. Students who opted in were added to a digital classroom with eight modules, each containing a short video, assigned readings, a discussion board and a quiz assignment. The class was for credit, graded as pass-fail, but didn’t fulfill any general education requirements.

Course content ranged from how to use AI tools and prompt generative AI output to academic integrity, as well as professional development and how to critically evaluate AI responses.

“I thought those were all really important as a starting point, and that still just scratches the surface,” Rao said.

The course is not designed to make everyone an AI user, Rao said, “but I do want them to be able to speak thoughtfully and intelligently about the use of tools, the application of tools and when and how they make decisions in which they’ll be able to use those tools.”

At the end of the course, students submitted a short paper analyzing an AI tool used in their field or discipline—its output, use cases and ways the tool could be improved.

Rao developed most of the content, but he collaborated with campus stakeholders who could provide additional insight, such as the Honor Council, to lay out how AI use is articulated in the honor code.

The impact: In total, the first class enrolled 249 students from a variety of majors and disciplines, or about 6 percent of the university’s total undergrad population. A significant number of the course enrollees were incoming freshmen. Eighty-eight percent of students passed the course, and most had positive feedback on the class content and structure.

In postcourse surveys, 68 percent of participants indicated IDIS 300 should be a mandatory course or highly recommended for all students.

“If you know nothing about AI, then this course is a great place to start,” said one junior, noting that the content builds from the basics to direct career applications.

What’s next: Rao is exploring ways to scale the course in the future, including by developing intermediate or advanced classes or creating discipline-specific offerings. He’s also hoping to recruit additional instructors, because the course had some challenges given its large size, such as conducting meaningful exchanges on the discussion board.

The center will continue to host educational and discussion-based events throughout the year to continue critical conversations regarding generative AI. The first debate, centered on AI and the environment, aims to evaluate whether AI’s impact will be a net positive or negative over the next decade, Rao said.

The university is also considering ways to engage the wider campus community and those outside the institution with basic AI knowledge. IDIS 300 content will be made available to nonstudents this year as a Canvas page. Some teachers in the local school district said they’d like to teach the class as a dual-enrollment course in the future.

Get more content like this directly to your inbox. Subscribe here.

Source link

September 22, 2025