Tag: Operations

  • Education Department resumes operations after prolonged shutdown

    Education Department resumes operations after prolonged shutdown

    Federal education staff are returning to work after a weeks-long federal government shutdown that halted many U.S. Department of Education activities ended Wednesday. However, the agreed-upon plan to open the government is only temporary.

    The continuing resolution signed into law Wednesday funds federal education programs at fiscal year 2025 levels. This temporary spending plan expires Jan. 30, unless Congress agrees to a more permanent budget before that deadline.

    The deal nullifies the reduction-in-force notices sent to 465 agency employees on Oct. 10. The Education Department is also prohibited from issuing additional RIFs through the end of January and must provide back pay to all employees who did not receive compensation during the shutdown. 

    In a statement to K-12 Dive on Thursday, the Education Department said that it “brought back staff that were impacted by the Schumer Shutdown,” in a reference to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

    In Senate floor remarks Nov. 10, Schumer said, “The last 41 days have exposed the depths of Donald Trump’s cruelty. He shut the government down longer than any president in American history and took innocent kids, veterans, and federal workers as political hostages, all because he refuses to do anything — anything — to fix the healthcare crisis and instead keeps pushing policies that will cut people’s coverage even more.”

    The statement from the Education Department added that the “Department will follow all applicable laws” and that all employees coming off furlough are back to active duty.

    However, the American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, which represents more than 2,700 U.S. Department of Education employees, said the return to work for agency staffers has been “rocky.”

    Rachel Gittleman, president of AFGE 252, said in a statement Thursday afternoon that employees have not received official notices from the Education Department’s human resources office to return to work. Rather, they are relying on text messages from supervisors or colleagues. Gittleman added that many employees named in the October firings are locked out of their computers and do not have access to agency email. 

    “This disorganization and chaos only further demoralizes the hardworking public servants at the Education Department that have faced threats, harassment, illegal firings — and 44 days without paychecks,” Gittleman said.

    Shutdown impacts

    The shutdown — the longest in U.S. history — began Oct. 1 after Congress reached an impasse on spending for FY 2026. While day-to-day K-12 and higher education operations stayed mostly unaffected, the federal shutdown put a pause on Office for Civil Rights investigations, new grant-making activities and technical assistance support.

    Still, some disruptions trickled down to early childhood programs and K-12 school systems.

    The National Association of Federally Impacted Schools, in a Nov. 7 statement, warned that delays in Impact Aid payments, which help school systems that are located in areas with non-taxable federal property, were “destabilizing school districts across the country.”

    NAFIS Executive Director Cherise Imai said that funding delays were not only inconvenient, they were “dismantling student support systems and threatening the stability of entire communities.”

    The association said a survey of 90 federally impacted school districts found that more than one-third were feeling budget pressures, with many cutting programs, freezing hiring and drawing on reserves to stay open. 

    Early in the shutdown, it was expected that athletics and extracurricular activities at Department of Defense Education Activity schools would be paused, but those events were later deemed excepted activities during the lapse in appropriations. 

    Although the federal government has reopened, uncertainty remains. According to a Nov. 10 posting by Tara Thomas, senior government affairs manager at AASA, The School Superintendents Association, “the agreement does not provide superintendents with any additional certainty regarding education funding for the 26-27 school year.” 

    Staffing levels at the Education Department remain quite lean as well due to layoffs, buyouts and attrition that occurred prior to the shutdown. According to a court filing from Nov. 12, the total number of Education Department employees is 2,536, down from 4,133 when Trump was inaugurated Jan. 20. 

    In early childhood education, the shutdown caused nearly 10,000 children to temporarily lose access to federally supported Head Start centers after funding lapsed, according to the National Head Start Association. 

    Head Start provides early childhood education services for children from low-income families. NHSA said the shutdown caused thousands of parents to lose child care services and cut access to healthy meals at the same time federal benefits for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program expired Nov. 1.



    Source link

  • Purpose, strategy, and operations in that order – how to make a federation work

    Purpose, strategy, and operations in that order – how to make a federation work

    I’ve been doing some work with the University of London on the past, present, and future of university federations.

    I’ve looked at well over 60 kinds of different kinds of university partnerships, alliances, and coalitions, and the idea of a university federation avoids an easy definition. Crudely, it is a group of universities working together to achieve a shared goal but lots of kinds of partnerships would fall in and out of that definition. The University of London is the obvious example – it has seventeen independent members and it defines its mission as expanding access to higher education. Globally, the vast majority of other kinds of federated models do not work like this.

    Whose federation is it anyway?

    The University of Oxford describes its 36 colleges as operating within a “federal system” which are “independent and self-governing.” It seems odd to suggest a federation within an institution can exist (albeit the legal forms here complicate things) but federations are about the distribution of resources as much as regulatory structures.

    On this basis the University of the Arts London would also qualify as a kind of federation. The colleges maintain their own identity with their own expertise and reputation. Their work is framed about the idea of six colleges with one university. Similarly, the University of California has a single legal identity but with nine campuses. They are one institution with a single leadership but diverse enough to operate across different geographies, programmes, and sub-identities.

    There is perhaps then a difference between working in a federal way and being federated. This definition would encompass coalitions of universities working toward a single goal with some shared resources like The N8 research partnership. It would also include the University of the Arctic which is an almost entirely federal institution where its direction, governance, and activities, are directed by the shared agreement of its members.

    Scales

    Governance forms and organisational function are often but not always linked. The University of London’s membership has a formal governance responsibility to direct its activity while the University of London maintains its own strong central purpose and activities.  The University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) is potentially both more centralised and devolved than the University of London. Its degree awarding powers are centrally held by the university but delivery of programmes, in both FE and HE occurs over 70 learning centres. Additionally, the Post-16 Education (Scotland) Act 2013 identifies UHI as a regional strategic body with responsibilities for planning, delivery, monitoring, and efficiency savings in further education across its operating area.

    At the slightly less federated end there is somewhere like the University Arts Singapore (UAS) which emerged as an alliance between LASALLE College of the Arts (LASALLE) and Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA). UAS has a vice chancellor, each member has its own president (who are the deputy vice chancellors of UAS), and they lean into both their shared capacity and individual identity. As they state:

    As an alliance, UAS has the unique advantage of leveraging the strengths of both our founding members, LASALLE and NAFA, while allowing each to remain distinct colleges. UAS will work in close collaboration with the two arts institutions to lead and provide strategic direction, and will validate, confer and award UAS degrees offered by both arts institutions.

    There are lots of other examples including Paris Sciences et Lettres University which is a single institution with eleven constituent schools (some of which are several hundred years old.) To the Canadian model where the likes of the University of Toronto hold three religious independent institutions within their group where they share resources and maintain their own identities.

    Models

    The strictest definition of federation involves a legal form – but there is much in-between. A federation may be a shared brand, an informal network, a federated project with individual or shared ownership, a national or regional mission with shared funds, shared infrastructure with formal governance relationships, a group of universities with a single degree awarder, a coalition of providers with a shared and funded purpose, or an entirely devolved body that only exists through dint of the activities of its members.

    If a federation has lots of different forms it by extension has a lot of different purposes. Ideally, the form of the federation should follow the agreed purpose if it is to be successful. The strategic vision has to be big enough to make the difficult compromises that come with working together make sense. Cost-saving is unlikely to be big enough to motivate all the pieces within a federated ecosystem but improving international standing, delivering better teaching, and funding research more effectively, supported by the efficient allocation of resources, might be.

    Across federations there is often legislation and regulation that enables the constituent organisations to work together. This was the case with UAS, UHI has a long history of partnerships, funding, and regulation, while there is underpinning legislation in France to encourage the geographic coordination of research assets. It is noticeable that while the OfS has welcomed the idea of closing working together by institutions there isn’t actually a legislative or regulatory underpinning to make that easier.

    Success

    If a federation has a clear purpose and an accommodating regulatory environment it may have a reasonable chance of success. This still isn’t enough to wish one into being because of the operational complexity that can underpin such arrangements. Strategically, this includes whether it is more efficient, effective, or clear, to have a single governance, quality, and approval regime, whether resources are best shared or kept local, and whether staff should be separate or together. Again, much of this depends on federal form but sharing infrastructure between institutions even within federations is not that common. The sharing of resources should be the second order concern after the purpose of doing so but the practicalities can be complex, expensive, and absorb much organisational attention.

    It is therefore difficult to define success but it is possible to improve the chances of federations being successful. Federations should begin with a clear purpose, then look at how the strategic sharing of assets can achieve that purpose, and then work to the practicalities of sharing those assets. A federation is about purpose, governance, finance, and brand, but it is also about creating an ecosystem where partners believe the shared negotiation of purpose, strategy, and execution, is more powerful than a single organisation doing this alone. A federation is about giving something up, whether that is some identities or some resources, in the shared belief the collective gain will outweigh any individual loss.

    If federations are to become more of a feature of the higher education landscape the largest challenges may not be structural but cultural. Recent reforms of higher education in England were largely about greater competition between providers. A federation is to acknowledge that agglomeration benefits may be achieved through cooperation, consolidation, and the strategic deprioritisation of some work where others may have greater expertise.

    The central plank of the government’s recent white paper is that the homogeneity of the sector is an impediment to the efficient allocation of resources. If it is serious about specialisation, particularly within specific geographies, it should open up more routes to federal structures and the strategic benefits they may bring.

    James Coe is chairing a panel on federations at The Festival of Higher Education with the University of London. Tickets can be purchased here.

    Source link

  • Harvard’s operations lost $112.6M in FY25 amid Trump’s pressure campaign

    Harvard’s operations lost $112.6M in FY25 amid Trump’s pressure campaign

    This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.

    Dive Brief:

    • Harvard University reported a $112.6 million net operating deficit in fiscal 2025, its first shortfall since the pandemic and the largest that the private nonprofit has racked up since 2011. 
    • The deficit — a steep decline from last year’s surplus of $45.3 million — shows the toll the Trump administration’s financial war against the institution has taken on its finances.
    • Despite its fiscal challenges this year, Harvard remains the country’s richest university. At $82.4 billion, its total assets grew 7.3% year over year in fiscal 2025, thanks to donations and strong investment returns.

    Dive Insight:

    Harvard’s financials show strains from federal disruptions, with revenue from federal support dropping 8.4% to $628.6 million in fiscal 2025, which ended June 30. 

    “Even by the standards of our centuries-long history, fiscal year 2025 was extraordinarily challenging,” Harvard President Alan Garber said in a message accompanying the financial statements. 

    But the report understates the extent to which the Trump administration has tried to hurt the university as it pushes Harvard to enter a potentially expensive and far-reaching settlement. 

    The attacks began this spring with the cancellation of research grants over allegations that the Ivy League institution failed to protect students on campus from antisemitism. 

    In April, it froze $2.2 billion of Harvard’s grants and contracts after the university declined a settlement that would have given the federal government unprecedented say in academic operations

    In a Thursday Q&A, Harvard Chief Financial Officer Ritu Kalra described an “abrupt termination of nearly the entire portfolio of our direct federally sponsored research grants.” That included $116 million in reimbursement for money Harvard already spent that “disappeared almost overnight.” 

    The Trump administration has threatened and attempted to do much more. The administration has also tried through multiple maneuvers to block Harvard’s ability to enroll international students, who make up a little over a quarter of its student body. 

    A federal court overseeing Harvard’s litigation against the government has paused or blocked the above efforts, but the Trump administration has either filed or promised appeals over those decisions.

    President Donald Trump’s government has also sought to weaken Harvard’s patent rights by licensing them out through an obscure regulatory process never used by the federal government before and. Additionally, it has threatened Harvard’s access to federal student aid if the university does not comply with an expansive data request about undergraduate admissions. The administration further sought a $500 million settlement to resolve investigations into the university, a proposal Garber dismissed.

    All of that has come amid rising costs for the university and many others in the country. In fiscal 2025, Harvard’s total operating expenses rose 5.7% to $6.8 billion. 

    And starting in 2026 the university expects a tax bill on its endowment amounting to around $300 million a year going forward, after Republicans’ passed a massive spending package this year, which increased taxes on wealthy college endowments. 

    “That means hundreds of millions of dollars that will not be available to support financial aid, research, and teaching,” Kalra said. 

    To navigate the choppy, uncertain financial waters, Harvard has laid off employees, frozen hiring, kept salaries flat and slowed spending on new projects. Going forward, Garber said that Harvard has intensified efforts to expand its revenue pool and is “examining operations at every level of the University as we seek greater adaptability and efficiency.”

    Endowment distributions and current-use gifts comprise 46% of its operating budget, far outpacing funds that the university receives from tuition or sponsored research.

    Source link

  • The difficult human work behind responsible AI use in college operations

    The difficult human work behind responsible AI use in college operations

    This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.

    COLUMBUS, OHIO — Artificial intelligence-based products and software for college admissions and operations are proliferating in the higher education world. 

    How to choose from among them? Well, leaders can start by identifying a problem that is actually in need of an AI solution. 

    That is one of the core pieces of advice from a panel on deploying AI technology responsibly in college administration at the National Association for College Admission Counseling’s conference last week.

    Jasmine Solomon, senior associate director of systems operations at New York University, described a “flooded marketplace” of AI products advertised for a range of higher ed functions, from tutoring systems to retention analytics to admissions chatbots. 

    “Define what your AI use case is, and then find the purpose-built tool for that,” Solomon said. “If you’re using a general AI model or AI tool for an unintended purpose, your result is going to be poor.” 

    Asking why before you buy

    It’s also worth considering whether AI is the right tool. 

    “How does AI solve this problem better? Because maybe your team or the tools that you already have can solve this problem,” Solomon said. “Maybe you don’t need an AI tool for this.”

    Experts on the panel pointed out that administrators also need to think about who will use the tool, the potential privacy pitfalls of it, and its actual quality. 

    As Solomon put it, “Those built-in AI features — are they real? Are they on a future-release schedule, or is it here now? And if it’s here now, is it ready for prime time or is it ‘here now, and we’re beta testing.’” 

    Other considerations in deploying AI include those related to ethics, compliance and employee contracts.

    Institutions need to be mindful of workflows, staff roles, data storage, privacy and AI stipulations in collective bargaining contracts, said Becky Mulholland, director of first-year admission and operations at the University of Rhode Island. 

    “For those who are considering this, please, please, please make sure you’re familiar with those aspects,” Mulholland said. “We’ve seen this not go well in some other spaces.”

    On top of all that is the environmental impact of AI. One estimate found that AI-based search engines can use as much as 30 times more energy than traditional search. The technology also uses vast amounts of water to cool data centers.

    Panelists had few definitive answers for resolving AI’s environmental problems at the institutional level. 

    “There’s going to be a space for science to find some better solutions,” Mulholland said. “We’re not there right now.” 

    Solomon pointed to the pervasiveness of AI tools already embedded in much of our digital technology and argued untrained use could worsen the environmental impact. 

    “If they’re prompting [AI] 10, 20 times just to get the answer they want, they’ve used far more energy than if they understood prompt engineering,” Solomon said. 

    Transparency is also important. At NYU, Solomon said the university was careful to ensure prospective students knew they were talking with AI when interacting with its chatbot — so much so that they named the tool “NYUAdmissionsBot” to make its virtual nature as explicit as possible. 

    “We wanted to inform them every step of the way that you were talking to AI when you were using this chatbot,” Solomon said. 

    ‘You need time to test it’

    After all the big questions are asked and answered, and an AI solution chosen, institutions still have the not-so-small task of rolling the technology out in a way that is effective in both the short and long term. 

    The rollout of NYU’s chatbot in spring 2024 took “many, many months,” according to Solomon. “If a vendor tells you, ‘We will be up in a week,’ multiply that by like a factor of 10. You need time to test it.” The extra time can ensure a feature is actually ready when it’s unveiled for use. 

    The upside to all that time and effort for something like an admissions chatbot, Solomon noted, is that the AI feature can be available around-the-clock to answer inquiries, and it can quickly address the most commonly asked questions that would normally be flooding the inboxes of admissions staff. 

    But even after a successful initial rollout of an AI tool or feature, operations staff aren’t done. 

    Solomon described a continuous cycle of developing key metrics of success, running controlled experiments with an AI product and carefully examining data from AI use, including by having a human looking over the shoulder of the robots. In NYU’s case, this included looking at responses the chatbot gave to inquiries from prospective students.

    Source link

  • Operations with Cloud Based Higher Education Management Solutions

    Operations with Cloud Based Higher Education Management Solutions

    Cloud based higher education management solution

    In the education industry, cloud-based technologies are driving a major revolution. Over 70% of colleges use cloud solutions to streamline operations and cut expenses as they balance budgets. Recent studies show that institutions that have adopted Cloud based higher education management solutions have seen an average reduction of 30% in reduce operational costs in higher educations, enabling them to reinvest in areas that enhance the student experience and drive academic success. 

    Keeping on budget while managing admissions, money, HR, and learning systems is no small task. Often caught handling costly, ineffective, error-prone fragmented systems are IT teams are assigned. Still, there is a smarter road forward. Higher education management solutions housed on clouds are meant to streamline your life. These tools are meant to combine all those disparate systems, automate tedious chores, and clear the mess of documentation. Consider it your default method for simplifying university processes.

    In this blog, we’ll dive deep into how cloud based higher education management solutions are optimizing university operations, enabling smarter decision-making, and unlocking efficiencies that were once unimaginable with legacy systems.

    Cloud based higher education management solutions: why?

    Cloud technology is improving campus operations, including:

    • Automating and removing paper workflows saves institutions up to 30%.
    • Efficiency: Real-time data and better cooperation boost productivity.
    • Scales smoothly: A rise in students? Program expansion? Your needs shape cloud systems.
    • Upgraded Security: Multi-factor authentication, encryption, and compliance safeguard data.

    Disjointed Systems Breakup

     

     

    Even the most efficient teams can be slowed by obsolete technologies and paper processes. To reduce redundancies and streamline operations, cloud solutions combine these systems into a single, easy platform. IT teams can focus on strategic innovations instead of segregated platform troubleshooting.

    Future-Ready Change

    Agility and resilience are essential for the future of higher education. Enabling seamless scalability, strengthening cybersecurity measures, and fostering innovation, cloud-based systems guarantee that your institution remains at the forefront. Not only do these solutions address current challenges, but they also establish your campus as a leader in adapting to the constantly changing educational landscape.

    Improving Efficiency with Creatrix Campus Cloud-Based Solutions

    Creative Campus provides a complete solution for your university. The automation of financial operations and real-time course registration are meant to simplify and improve your work.

    The platform’s easy design and customized modules let you solve campus issues. Because it’s cloud-based, Creatrix Campus integrates across departments, fosters collaboration, and supports growth without costly infrastructure updates.

    Source link