Tag: opinion

  • What the DOJ Opinion Means for FAFSA Data Sharing and MSIs

    What the DOJ Opinion Means for FAFSA Data Sharing and MSIs

    In a dramatic reversal of long-standing federal support for minority students, the Department of Justice has declared that key programs serving historically Black and Hispanic-serving institutions are unconstitutional. The ruling targets race-conscious scholarship access and federal aid data sharing, effectively dismantling decades of policy designed to close educational gaps. For many MSIs and their students, the shift represents a Trump-era rollback of racial equity in higher education, leaving institutions scrambling to protect access and funding in a suddenly hostile legal landscape.

    The U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel has delivered what may be one of the most consequential legal opinions affecting federal education policy in decades: a sweeping conclusion that a suite of federal programs tied to minority‑serving institutions (MSIs) and race‑specific scholarships are unconstitutional under current equal‑protection jurisprudence. 

    At the center of this interpretation is a fundamental shift in how federal racial criteria are viewed post-Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard/UNC. In that landmark affirmative‑action decision, the Supreme Court significantly tightened the permissible bounds of race‑conscious decision making. The DOJ memo applies that framework beyond admissions, asserting that programs awarding federal funds based on racial or ethnic enrollment thresholds — including MSI grant programs — “effectively employ a racial quota.” 

    One particularly striking aspect of the opinion is its treatment of access to Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) data by the United Negro College Fund and the Hispanic Scholarship Fund — organizations that award scholarships targeted to students of specific racial or ethnic backgrounds. The opinion deems it unconstitutional for these groups to receive FAFSA applicant data because the statute enabling such sharing confers access only to entities that grant race‑specific awards. 

    Supporters of aiding historically marginalized students and institutions view this as an unprecedented restriction that could severely constrain outreach and support for those populations. Critics charge the move fits a broader administrative pattern of dismantling federal race‑conscious programs and argue that it disregards the statutory authority Congress explicitly provided — including the discretionary authority vested in the Education Secretary to administer FAFSA data sharing.

    As one expert aide pointed out in private correspondence, the statutory provision that enabled FAFSA access was framed with Secretary discretion in mind — meaning it was lawful as written. But with DOJ now labeling such practices as impermissibly discriminatory, liability has been reallocated onto the administrative apparatus itself. That shift, in effect, insulates senior officials — including the Secretary — from culpability once the practice ends, leaving career bureaucrats to unwind systems built over years.

    The Policy and Legal Stakes

    For nearly four decades, the federal government has maintained a suite of targeted programs intended to close longstanding educational opportunity gaps. These include grants for MSIs, race‑specific scholarships, and data‑sharing mechanisms like FAFSA access that enable outreach to underrepresented students seeking financial aid.

    Beginning in July 2025, the Department of Education began scaling back discretionary grants to MSIs after the U.S. Solicitor General declined to defend race‑based criteria in court, particularly the Hispanic‑Serving Institutions definition requiring at least 25% Hispanic enrollment. By September, the Department officially announced the planned termination of most MSI discretionary grant funds for FY2025 — a decision informed by the constitutional concerns later articulated in the DOJ opinion. 

    Until now, many observers assumed that statutory authority and congressional backing provided a stable legal foundation for such programs. But the OLC’s memo challenges that assumption, concluding that race‑based eligibility criteria — whether for institutional support or student scholarships — are no longer defensible under current constitutional interpretation. 

    The implications extend far beyond MSI grants. If organizations that provide targeted scholarships based on race or ethnicity can no longer receive key federal administrative data, the practical capacity of those groups to serve students could be significantly hampered.

    Political and Institutional Reactions

    The DOJ opinion has drawn sharply polarized responses. Administration officials frame the memo as an affirmation of equal protection and a necessary correction to federal programs that, in their view, relied on impermissible racial criteria. Congressional allies of the Administration characterize the changes as ending “racial discrimination” in federal education policy.

    Conversely, Democratic legislators and MSI leaders condemn the opinion as ideologically driven and harmful to institutions that serve historically underserved populations. Critics say the analysis ignores longstanding bipartisan congressional support for such programs and portends deep cuts in educational opportunity. 

    Institutional leaders at a range of MSIs have expressed alarm, underlining that funding and support mechanisms now in jeopardy are “vital” to student success and campus mission. Many campuses are scrambling to assess fiscal exposure and consider contingency planning.

    Looking Ahead

    With federal policy in flux and several legal questions unresolved, higher education professionals face an uncertain environment. Institutions historically supported by race‑conscious federal programs may need to rethink recruitment, financial aid outreach, and partnerships with scholarship providers. Meanwhile, advocates and lawmakers may pursue legislative fixes or constitutional litigation to reshuffle the legal landscape once more.

    Whatever the outcome, the DOJ opinion marks a pivotal moment in federal student aid policy — one likely to reshape how race, equity, and opportunity are legally navigated in the years to come.

    HEI Reader Context: What This Means for MSIs

    • Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs): Loss of FAFSA data access and potential cuts to discretionary MSI grants could disrupt scholarship outreach, enrollment initiatives, and pipeline programs designed to recruit and retain underrepresented students. HBCUs may need to develop alternative channels for financial aid outreach, including direct partnerships with donors and private scholarship organizations.

    • Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs): Many HSIs rely on federal discretionary grants to supplement state funding and support programs for first-generation and low-income students. The DOJ opinion may force HSIs to reallocate institutional resources to cover programs previously funded through race-conscious federal grants.

    • Scholarship Organizations: Groups like the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) and the Hispanic Scholarship Fund (HSF) may no longer receive FAFSA data, limiting their ability to identify eligible students efficiently. Expect increased reliance on outreach campaigns, social media, and partnerships with local school districts.

    • Institutional Planning: MSIs should assess short-term financial exposure, prioritize scholarship communications, and explore private funding alternatives. Legal and policy monitoring will be critical as legislative or judicial responses evolve.

    Sources

    1. Inside Higher Ed. “DOJ Report Declares MSIs Unconstitutional.” December 22, 2025. Link

    2. Higher Ed Dive. “DOJ Says MSI Grant Funding Unconstitutional.” December 22, 2025. Link

    3. ED.gov. “US Department of Education Ends Funding for Racially Discriminatory Discretionary Grant Programs, Minority-Serving Institutions.” July 2025. Link

    4. EducationCounsel. “E-Update: September 22, 2025.” Link

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  • Derrick Bell, Critical Race Theory and the Beginnings of School Choice – The 74

    Derrick Bell, Critical Race Theory and the Beginnings of School Choice – The 74


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    School choice — the idea that American education would function more efficiently and effectively if parents received public funding to send their children to private and religious schools — is commonly traced to an influential essay written in 1955 by conservative economist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman. It has provoked animated debate between adversaries on the political right and the political left ever since. Less well known is that school choice also has roots in the work of Derrick Bell, considered by many the father of critical race theory.

    In 1971, Derrick Bell became the first Black man to be awarded tenure at Harvard Law School. As part of his teaching load, he developed a civil rights course that focused on race. In order to meet its topical requirements, Bell wrote an accompanying textbook, Race, Racism and American Law, which is foundational in critical race theory. It holds that racism is an ordinary and permanent feature of American society. His claim was viewed by many colleagues at the time as a radical statement, and it remains so for many today. Yet, it carries forward a certain truth that the history of school choice persuasively illustrates.

    Having served as a federal attorney litigating desegregation cases, Bell had grown skeptical about forced racial integration and whether it would actually improve student learning. The original edition of his 1973 textbook included a chapter outlining “Alternatives to Integrated Schools” by which “black children might receive the long-promised equal educational opportunity — in predominantly black schools.” The chapter included a discussion of tuition vouchers.

    Bell argued that for vouchers to work, poor families would need to receive substantially larger grants than the more fortunate. He also mentioned “free schools.” These were small, private institutions in poor areas supported by foundation grants, fundraising and, sometimes, public dollars. Tuition was charged on a sliding scale, and students whose parents could not pay attended for free. Many of these schools began “deep in the black community.” For example, Bell mentioned a system of schools operated by the Black Muslims that emphasized racial pride, self-discipline and self–sufficiency. He explained that such virtues are not commonly celebrated in the neighborhood public schools Black students attended. He pointed out that students at the Muslim schools performed several grade levels above most Black teenagers who attended public schools. 

    Bell saw school choice as the culmination of a series of disappointments in the fight for educational equality. He understood it as a dramatic manifestation of the ways the Black community was losing confidence in its public schools. After numerous false starts to achieve desegregation and equalized funding, many Black activists turned to demands for community control. In 1968, a group of local parents and residents in Brooklyn’s Ocean Hill-Brownsville neighborhood wrested local control of their school board. When a similar eruption took place in Milwaukee in 1988, those involved issued a call to action — commonly referred to as the Milwaukee Manifesto — demanding that the state allow them to establish an independent school district. 

    To lend a helping hand, Bell traveled to Milwaukee and wrote an op-ed for the Milwaukee Journal. Published under the headline “Control Not Color: The Real Issue in the Milwaukee Manifesto,” it took issue with the better-off liberal activists who condemned the plan. “Can we whose children are not required to attend the inner-city schools honestly condemn the Manifesto writers and their supporters?” Bell wrote. “After all, when middle-class parents — black and white — lose faith in the administration of a public school, we move to another school district or place our children in private schools. Inner-city black parents who can’t afford our options seek as a group a legislative remedy that may after a long struggle enable them to do what we achieve independently by virtue of our higher economic status.” 

    Soon after, in 1990, the same Black activists in Milwaukee joined forces with their white Republican governor, Tommy Thompson, and his conservative legislative colleagues to pass the nation’s first school voucher law. The original Wisconsin vouchers were targeted at low-income students stuck in chronically failing public schools. Five years later, Wisconsin became the first state to expand its voucher program to include religious schools.

    Bell revisited the topic of school choice in Silent Covenants (2004). By then, vouchers had been adopted in Cleveland and Washington, D.C., among other places. He acknowledged that vouchers were “probably the most controversial of educational alternatives to emerge in the last decade,” but that they were also growing in popularity. He understood that many opponents were liberal Democrats with long histories of civil rights activism. These critics alleged that minority parents were being duped, that the real beneficiaries of such programs were private religious schools gaining enrollment. 

    Bell recognized these criticisms but was also sympathetic to arguments by free-market advocates who believed that the competition fostered by choice would incentivize floundering public schools in Black communities to improve. He did not deny that the Catholic Church had become a major player in the choice movement to address its own declining school enrollments. But Bell was more impressed with how many Black and Hispanic parents chose Catholic schools over public schools because of their more disciplined learning environments and better academic outcomes. He cited one particular Catholic school in Milwaukee, where 80% of the students were not Catholic and the voucher covered most of the tuition.

    Silent Covenants also delves into the topic of charter schools. Bell lauded them as innovative institutions that give options to all students, not just the wealthy who can afford private school tuition. He rejected claims by liberals that the institutions would become bastions for middle-class families who were better prepared to work the system, citing evidence that two-thirds of charter students nationwide were nonwhite and more than half were from low-income families. Critics had also raised concerns that charter schools would discriminate, become racially isolated and drain resources from regular public schools. Bell, unmoved by these claims, was more concerned that charters were receiving 15% less funding than other public schools.

    Now, 30 years after the Milwaukee breakthrough, the school choice movement has taken off in a new direction. Republicans who once allied with Black advocates to demand better options for low-income students now rally behind appeals for universal choice, which provides such benefits to all students regardless of family income. Eighteen states have enacted such programs. When awards do not cover the entire cost of tuition, they end up subsidizing better-off families and neglecting those unable to make up the difference. As demands for private and religious schools grow, so does the competition for seats and the incentive to raise tuition. Yielding larger numbers of applications from a stronger pool of students, these initiatives can function more to enhance the choices available to school admissions officers than the most needy students.

    A law that President Donald Trump signed this year allows a tax deduction of up to $1,700 for anyone who donates to an organization that gives scholarships for students to attend private or religious schools. Like the state-level universal choice programs, the federal initiative does not target low-income students. Assistance will be available to any family whose income is below 300% of the average for their area.

    Here is the underlying political irony to the choice debate: For years, when programs were designed to help the most vulnerable students, the major opponents were activists who historically have identified with progressive causes. Now, conservatives are spending with abandon — in many cases, with limited public accountability — on programs that can create opportunities for students who need them the least. In either case, those who get hurt remain the same, and they are disproportionately under-resourced students of color. Derrick Bell would not be surprised. 

    In 1980, Bell wrote an article for the Harvard Law Review advancing a concept referred to in the scholarly literature as the “interest convergence dilemma” that is fundamental to critical race theory. It holds, “The interest of blacks in achieving racial equality will be accommodated only when it converges with the interests of whites.” Not very trusting of white collaborators hailing from either the left or right, it deems political alliances temporary and subject to the competing priorities of all pertinent parties, anticipating eventual abandonment. 

    And so, that’s the way it is.


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  • Three Promising Practices to Engage a New Workforce – The 74

    Three Promising Practices to Engage a New Workforce – The 74


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    Right now, tomorrow’s workforce is on TikTok and Instagram, looking at “influencer” or “crypto genius” as an exciting career option — not so different, really, from a previous generation wanting to be a pop star or win Shark Tank.

    Like those old-school dream gigs, today’s hot online careers are mostly unattainable and unstable. For some young people, they’re also a capitulation: “My job feels like a dead end and business school isn’t in my future. Maybe people will watch me unbox purchases.”

    The next generation, a huge reservoir of talent, is rarely challenged to set a higher bar — and they get a lot more advice about building a personal brand than about building a career. Those of us leading organizations owe it to them to demystify professions and create new pathways.

    Here are three promising practices for the new workforce, especially for young people without traditional access: intensive mentoring, cross-organizational cohorts, and early experiences with professional environments.

    Mentoring

    The traditional approach to mentoring is the “old boy network.” Since the 1990s, more workers have also benefited from informal networks such as alumni associations or sometimes nonprofits that serve this purpose. However, young people may need more formal mentoring within the workplace to thrive and persist.

    Many companies assign mentors to brand new employees, but not generally for the long term. The next generation needs ongoing mentoring. First-gen professionals, especially, can find it difficult to seek guidance. They may not want to appear vulnerable; they may not know what they don’t know. Online courses — valuable for a population that has grown up watching videos — can help. But there are a million; which ones are useful? And perhaps the new employee fears being caught trying to learn their job. To address such needs, they need more than a mentor. They need a navigator.

    Beyond knowledge gaps, some young employees also need help with organizational culture. I know a recent college graduate in a start-up job where colleagues regularly drink at work. She felt she had to participate to be taken seriously. Some other, more senior colleagues who had opted out could have helped her find another way to engage. It’s on us to assist young coworkers struggling with fit.

    These new members of the workforce also need encouragement to find ongoing mentoring and keep seeking engagement. For many of them, an elevator ride with the CEO would be a terrifying moment, rather than an opportunity. A lack of guidance leads to frustration, and ultimately nonpersistence.

    Cohorts

    It doesn’t always take a senior person to help a new employee navigate. Peer cohorts can also help. Most young workers are already comfortable traveling in packs socially. An ongoing professional conversation with their peers can benefit both them and the company, and shared responsibility for problem-solving can be liberating. Women in particular have a stereotypical but real inclination to be useful, and they are more apt to receive if they can also give. Cohorts offer a way to do that.

    Even for midlevel employees, there is value in connecting across silos. I know one organization where colleagues from different departments meet monthly to catch up on their work. Individuals offer each other expertise, and departments pitch in together, which creates efficiencies.

    Engaging like this especially helps employees who are more reticent. Helping as well as being helped creates social glue — and it can also build organizational loyalty, as employees see themselves in a bigger picture.

    Early exposure

    “Summer camp” experiences on college campuses are a common way to create access and persistence for first-generation students. When middle schoolers visit campuses, they can imagine college life. Similarly, Take Your Child to Work Day has, since the 1990s, offered glimpses of the working world—at least, for children of white-collar professionals.

    But when parents work in a meatpacking plant, their children have no opportunity to get to know office culture. More and more next-gen workers lack a vision of how to belong in a corporate or institutional setting. Yet that is the most powerful element: the vision of oneself in a new context, and permission to be there.

    To get the farm team ready and overcome the sense of “not for me,” employers must invite them in early. Google, for example, invites school groups to its campus. If these young people eventually land an interview, the campus already feels familiar.

    If these promising practices seem self-evident to you, consider where you learned about your work environment. If the answer is “in college” or “from relatives,” you might ask: Who in my workforce did not get that experience? And if the answer is “I learned the hard way,” can you help someone else not to have to learn the hard way, too? 


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  • Our 13 Most Read, Most Talked-About and Most Powerful Education Essays of 2025 – The 74

    Our 13 Most Read, Most Talked-About and Most Powerful Education Essays of 2025 – The 74

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  • A Better Way to Approach Antisemitism on Campus (opinion)

    A Better Way to Approach Antisemitism on Campus (opinion)

    For humanities faculty, the past five years have felt like a relentless assault on our ability to do our jobs. We have endured COVID, generative AI, budget cuts, and bitter fights over the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and Israel’s war on Gaza. At times it has been a challenge to remain human, let alone humanistic: to calm the nervous system enough to read a book, refine an argument, or show up for our colleagues and our increasingly fragile students. Now we are facing the Trump administration’s effort to gut-renovate our universities under the pretext of “combatting antisemitism.” With local enablers paving the way, that destruction may yet succeed.

    In February of this year, a few colleagues and I co-founded a group called Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff (CJFS), which now has more than 200 members on more than two dozen campuses. Our group, which is predominantly made up of academics at Massachusetts colleges and universities but includes members from across New England, is one of several such efforts nationwide that have coalesced into a new National Campus Jewish Alliance. We recognize that Jewish safety is inseparable from the safety of all people, and we work to foster academic environments that reduce antisemitism by treating educators as partners, not as suspects. I’d like to share a few examples of what this looks like in practice.

    Fearmongering Versus Tea

    As a Jewish professor of Arabic at Boston University, I mentor students with many different identities: Arab, Jewish, both or neither. After Oct. 7, 2023, I watched them struggle to metabolize the horrors in Israel and Gaza. They identified with various “sides” of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; what they shared was a sense of helplessness and a hunger for facts and insights beyond those found on Instagram. They needed contact with solid reading material, with trusted adults and, above all, with each other. My colleagues and I were in pain too. By mid-October, a few of us began meeting to discuss how to nurture a respectful and humane campus climate for ourselves and our students.

    As we looked around for helpful approaches, we noticed one very unhelpful one: Keep people constantly triggered so their brains can’t process new information or perspectives.

    Instead of trying to lower the temperature after Oct. 7, one influential institution on our campus immediately began stoking fear of antisemitism. On Oct. 18, they sent out an email telling students to record and report all instances of “antisemitism and anti-Zionism.” They encouraged students to submit videos and screenshots of their classmates. They conflated antisemitism and anti-Zionism, strongly implying that criticism of Israel’s government threatened the identity and even the safety of Jewish students at BU. They ignored the inconvenient facts that a great proportion of anti-Zionists at BU are Jewish and that nationwide, plenty of Israel supporters are antisemitic. Even worse than this bad-faith conceptual stew was the subtext. We know you’re scared. We know you feel everyone hates you. Although this university has 4,000 Jewish undergraduates, you’re basically alone and unsafe here. But don’t worry; we have your back. This gaslighting maneuver only stoked the anxieties it purported to calm.

    What my colleagues and I did instead was much smaller in scale. Four tenured humanities professors (all moms, as it happened) started gathering students for tea. We chose to work together because we did not agree about what was happening or should happen in the Middle East, but we respected and liked each other. Each of us personally invited a few students, for a total of about 12 per gathering. This was not an advertised event but a series of private teas. My colleagues brought concerned Muslim and Arab students, liberal Zionist students, and eventually some leaders of BU Students for Israel and the Hillel. I invited Arabic learners from various backgrounds and some pro-Palestinian students I knew, including some leaders of Students for Justice in Palestine. (Others, who had been doxxed, were scared to come.) We brought substantial and slightly awkward snacks, things like pistachios, clementines and pomegranates to keep people’s hands busy. We sat around in armchairs, more conversation circle than summit meeting. And we made one ground rule: For these 90 minutes you can’t talk about the region, which we can’t fix, but only the BU campus, which we share.

    When we passed a timer around the room, giving every student and faculty member 60 seconds to say what was on their minds, everyone heard at least one thing they didn’t expect. One male Jewish student who sometimes wore a kippah and sometimes didn’t told of how differently people looked at him in those two situations. The Muslim women—hijab-wearing or not—understood. As trust grew, students felt comfortable asking each other questions like, “Why do people tear down posters of Israeli hostages?” or “Why did your group blast disco music over our die-in?”

    The last tea occasioned two tiny breakthroughs. One student suggested BU’s “Jewish trustees and donors” were blocking the student movement to divest from Israel. Really? Together we checked the website: In fact, two of our most senior trustees are Arab. The student was taken aback, changing her view without ever being accused of antisemitic bias; everyone learned something. Later, a Palestinian student asked a pro-Israel Jewish student what the word “Zionism” meant to him. He began defining it, starting with “the right of the Jews to have self-determination in their ancestral homeland, Eretz Yisrael.” As she looked confused, he blushed and stammered, using more Hebrew words she didn’t understand. Finally he stopped: “I’m sorry, I’ve never had to explain this before. I’ve always been in Jewish schools or camps or Hillel or places where everyone just understood what Zionism means.” The conversation moved on. The next day he and his roommate came to my office to worry that he had not “represented his side” well enough; we talked for an hour; I assured him that he represented only himself, a student trying to learn and figure out what he believed. I doubt his politics changed, but the moment of aporia made everyone more human. When CJFS organized a Freedom Seder the next April, both he and his roommate came.

    Administrators have asked us how to scale up this effort. My long-term hope is to train students and colleagues to be peer educators in their own networks. But it would need to start small, with faculty and staff who trust each other. There are no shortcuts.

    Policing Versus Conversing

    Such efforts may soon be complicated by a harmful state-level effort by the politicians and legacy Jewish groups who make up the Massachusetts Special Commission on Combatting Antisemitism, which was established by the state legislature in 2024 and has been touted as a model for other states.

    The Commission furthers a nationwide plan to advance a program of what is fair to describe as “Don’t Say Palestine” policies. It aligns with the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) state-by-state Jewish Policy Index, which calls for such commissions, and follows the exact playbook of the Israel advocacy group ICAN (the Israeli-American Civic Action Network), which aims to bring hyperlocal pro-Israel advocacy to cities, towns and school boards, especially in blue states. A Massachusetts state senator has praised ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt for encouraging the establishment of the commission; ICAN has boasted of its influence on the process.

    One reason our group, Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff, has grown so fast is that everyone can see the Trump administration weaponizing antisemitism to attack universities and degrade civil rights. But another reason is anger at this state-level commission right here in our beloved Massachusetts, which has taken its eye off actual antisemitism and focused instead on policing discourse about Israel.

    The Commission conflates Jewishness with Zionism, pushing the incoherent and dangerously vague International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism and other sloppy ideas. But a deeper problem is its punitive approach, which focuses on policing a boundary of what is and isn’t antisemitic. In its 13 months of hearings, the Commission has modeled the punitive approach by attacking educators, publicly haranguing the (Jewish) president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) for two hours last February over some materials on an MTA website. In its final report, released in November, the Commission aims to institutionalize the punitive approach by creating a mechanism through which members of the public can report “problematic curriculum” in K-12 schools, as well as an anonymous reporting system for suspected acts of bias in K-12 schools “which may not rise to the level of a hate crime.” If adopted in any city or town, these measures will create an unpedagogical climate where teachers are afraid to teach and students hesitate to speak up in class: No one wants to be reported as an antisemite, even if the charge is disproven later. At best, such a climate will only drive anti-Jewish bias underground; at worst, because schoolchildren and college students are sensitive to hypocrisy, it will spark resentment and feed an anti-Jewish backlash. Several Concerned Jewish colleagues have written movingly on this commission’s dangers; CJFS has released a Shadow Report detailing its faulty assumptions and missteps.

    The question is what to do instead. What is a humane, pedagogical response to rising tensions and the ambient normalization of bigotry in all forms? Again, learning can happen only in an environment of respect and trust.

    Let’s take an example of casual classroom antisemitism. In March 2024, my Core Curriculum class was reading Foucault and discussing the Panopticon surveillance regime. When the talk turned to Internet culture and public discomfort with social media, one normally tuned-out student suddenly piped up: “The Jews want to ban TikTok. They’re against its pro-Palestine content.” The Jews. Because we all automatically love Israel and hate free speech? Luckily, I was the teacher; I could explain why it was incorrect to say some entity called “the Jews” either wanted or were able to control social media. I could cite a 2020 Pew research poll saying 41 percent of Jewish Americans are emotionally unattached or weakly attached to Israel. (Among secular Jews, that figure is 67 percent.) I could point out that the great majority of Israel’s U.S. supporters are not Jewish at all: One Evangelical lobby group, Christians United for Israel, claims ten million members, 2.5 million more than the total number of Jews in America. If this discussion happened today, I could cite a survey from The Washington Post finding that about 4 in 10 American Jews believe Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. And because I feel safe in my classroom—because my university does not endorse the conflation of Jewishness with Zionism—I could personally vouch that many Jewish people disavow nationalism altogether.

    Now, let me share an example of misperceived classroom antisemitism from my 40-person general education course, War in Arabic Literature and Film. The course confronts some difficult material set in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Israel-Palestine. We learn how war can harden sectarian identifications and gender roles. We read some American and Israeli authors as sidelights. We do a lot of social-emotional scaffolding and role-taking; students sit in small discussion groups, and I collect exit notes.

    One student, a self-described “proud Zionist,” was a wonderful presence in the course’s fall 2024 first run. But one day she was crying after class, and her exit note said: “I loved this course and was about to recommend it to all my Jewish friends, but now I can’t, because I feel today’s discussion was antisemitic.” That day’s session had focused on Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir, a stunning Israeli film about Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, paired with a student presentation on Edward Said’s classic essay, “Permission to Narrate.” (Incidentally, Waltz violates the IHRA definition of antisemitism, comparing the Sabra and Shatila massacre to Auschwitz.)

    I caught up with my student and we talked for an hour in the street and in my office. Raised to sincerely experience criticism of Israel as antisemitic, she felt hurt by the student presentation. I did not try to tell her about Edward Said’s humanistic outlook, deep empathy for Jewish victims of the Holocaust, or anything else. Instead, trusting her seriousness and troubled by her distress, I suggested: What if she was upset not by the reading material, but by the frame? Would she have preferred me to assign the Said essay as a primary source to analyze rather than an authoritative secondary source for a presentation? She said yes, that would be different. I offered to revisit that part of my syllabus the following year, empowering students to talk back to Said if they wished. She contributed enthusiastically to class for the rest of the semester.

    I am so grateful that this brave young woman shared her concerns with me rather than running to a dean, a “problematic curriculum” hotline, or a politico-religious organization, as students are being urged to do. By talking to each other honestly like intelligent adults, we both learned something.

    These experiences have convinced me that policing “antisemitic” speech about Israel is not only unjust but deeply counterproductive: it breeds suspicion between well-meaning people, making it harder for us to unite when genuine neo-Nazism rears its head. You can’t stamp out antisemitism, fear of Palestinians, or any other prejudice; only slow heart-changing conversations can melt it away. So, to foster a campus climate of real inclusion, we need to convene and converse, not record and report. The details are tricky, but teachers and students can figure them out together. Our administrations and governments just have to give us the respect, job security and academic freedom to do so.

    Margaret Litvin is an associate professor of Arabic and comparative literature at Boston University and a co-founder of Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff.

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  • Colleges Don’t “Over-Accommodate” Disabilities (opinion)

    Colleges Don’t “Over-Accommodate” Disabilities (opinion)

    In the current climate, one might question whether academic accommodations are the most urgent avenue for discourse. Yet a pattern of uncontested opinion pieces in spaces like The Atlantic (the newly published “Accommodation Nation”), The Chronicle of Higher Education (“Are Colleges Getting Disability Accommodations All Wrong?), The Wall Street Journal (“Colleges Bend the Rules for More Students, Give Them Extra Help”) and, indeed, Inside Higher Ed itself (“How Accommodating Can (Should) I Be?”) speaks to the enduring cultural conflict around how the Americans With Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act are actualized in higher education.

    As members of the executive board of the Association on Higher Education and Disability (AHEAD) in Virginia—a professional organization for staff of disability service offices—It is our intention to define and defuse the recurring arguments of this specific “type” of opinion article, which for convenience we will call the “Do Colleges Over-Accommodate?” piece.

    Setting the Table With Statistics

    It is common to see these claims begin from an assumption that disability accommodations “are skyrocketing”—a claim that sensationalizes statistics. One author cites the large volume of accommodation letters sent by a university per semester. Such a claim is rooted in either misunderstanding or deliberate misrepresentation of accommodations. At any institution, the total count of all accommodation letters sent appears disproportionately large, because each student is enrolled in multiple courses.

    A better accounting would come from data on the representation of disabled students within the institution. Recent National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) data shows that among public, 4-year institutions, 10.1 percent of them report that students with disabilities make up 10 percent or more of their student population. This is an increase from the 1.5 percent of institutions in 2010–2011, but why is it shocking that disabled students also want to go to universities that their nondisabled peers attend?

    The NCES data do suggest that disabled students are more likely to enroll in private institutions (more than 23 percent of private nonprofit colleges report that students with disabilities make up 10 percent or more of their student population). While this is supportive of a claim that students from privileged backgrounds have higher access to accommodations (and indeed, research supports this) it is telling that authors who put elite institutions in the spotlight are more focused on reducing accommodations available to these students than on increasing the support available to students at less elite institutions.

    It is also important to view these figures in the context of the post-ADA era. The ADA is only 35 years old, and its amendments passed in 2008. Today’s students come from an environment where they are more likely to expect accessibility, which is reflected in these “skyrocketing”—or “breathtaking”—numbers.

    Categorizing the Case Against Accommodations

    In our review of the “Do Colleges Over-Accommodate” archetype, we saw a clear pattern of essential recurring arguments:

    1. Academic accommodations unfairly advantage disabled students.
    2. Disabled students “game the system.”
    3. More rigid documentation standards are needed to “create equity.”

    In these arguments, we see unfortunate parallels to other attacks on civil rights playing out in our public discourse. Each individual claim requires a full-throated counterargument—which we will provide below.

    Claim: Accommodations Convey Advantage

    This is the most prevalent claim within these articles, and we will spend the greatest effort defusing it. This claim suggests that all accommodations create advantages for students with disabilities—that we should fear for “fairness,” or that accommodations will compromise rigor. In this piece, the author asserts that additional testing time for students with disabilities “is as unfair to other students as a head start would be to other runners.”

    This metaphor reveals a flawed assumption—that education is inherently a place of competition, with a fixed number of winners and losers. A zero-sum game. But universities are not limited in their capacity to provide degrees, nor is there a fixed number of A’s available.

    Still, there is value in ensuring fairness. Disability services officers (DSOs) develop rigorous criteria for assessing and analyzing cases where academic accommodations would “fundamentally alter” key aspects of courses. DSOs also seek to apply a measured approach to approval of accommodations, consistent with professional guidance. The purpose of accommodations—to return to the metaphor—is ensuring that students run in the same race.

    Research such as this 2022 U.K.-based study, which found that accommodations in most cases “worked as intended and helped [with] leveling the playing field,” challenges this narrative further.

    The work of DSOs relies on an interactive process at the individual level. A student who is dyslexic may benefit from a dictation tool for writing essays in a way that another would not. A student who has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder may benefit from a quiet testing environment—but not all students with the same diagnosis would have the same needs. The individualized identification and selection of supports to address disability-specific barriers is the cornerstone of DSO work, and it is work that our offices conduct effectively.

    Claim: Disabled Students ‘Game the System’

    Running through these articles is an implicit—at times explicit—assumption that DSOs are either tricked by students and their medical providers into approving accommodations inappropriately, or that students deliberately misuse even appropriate accommodations. Implicitly, this assumption is communicated to readers through less-than-subtle reliance on words like “claim” for how students communicate their disability, rather than “disclose.” Explicitly, this line of argument appeals to scholarship debating the ways in which individual disabilities are defined.

    Some of the most-cited sources in support of this claim are of questionable reliability. For example, this article from the Canadian Journal Psychological Injury and Law has been held as “sobering” evidence that DSOs are insufficiently rigorous in approving accommodations. In the study, researchers asked DSO staff if they would accommodate a fictitious prospective student based solely on what the researchers deemed insufficient documentation.

    Setting aside gaps in context between Canada and the U.S., what a DSO professional would hypothetically do and what they would do when presented with a live student are different. Our professional guidelines encourage the use of self-report, triangulated with other forms of information. Without following a student through the interactive process, the authors project bias and incorrect assumptions onto the work of DSO professionals—just as asking a doctor to suggest treatment without an exam would likely produce similarly “sobering” results.

    Claim: Rigid Documentation Requirements Create Equity

    The inaccuracy of this claim is likely to be apparent to anyone involved in accommodations review. Moreover, some of the sources cited by proponents of this claim directly contradict it. For example, Ashley Yull’s 2015 article about the intersection of race class, and disability notes:

    “Premising access to accommodations in post-secondary education on receipt of a psychiatric diagnosis magnifies the negative impact of childhood poverty.”

    And Bea Waterfield and Emma Whelan observed in their 2017 article:

    “SES [socioeconomic status] contributes to the experience of disadvantage for learning disabled students when they lack the financial means to obtain required diagnoses.”

    It is no wonder that scholars would dispute that documentation is a lever for equity, given the staggering cost of psychological assessments. There is variance in the pricing of these assessments, but in some areas they can cost between $1,000 and $5,000. While some university-operated assessment centers can be less costly, they typically have very long waiting lists. Meanwhile, 1 in 5 dependent undergraduate students come from families below the poverty line—and nearly half of independent students (those without financial support from family) met this criterion.

    Financial cost is not the only barrier to accessing rigorous documentation. Mental health providers experience significant demand, stretching wait times and disproportionately impacting rural and marginalized communities.

    If DSOs demanded that each student claiming a learning disability or ADHD diagnosis supply such a document, accommodations would be unavailable to poorer students and to many students from rural areas. For all students, the provision of accommodations would be delayed. This is why those working as DSOs are often so willing to work with students when they can articulate an access barrier. To claim otherwise can be understood as either a statement of ignorance about disability services or, perhaps, as reflective of a desire for accommodation requests to diminish.

    Conclusion

    As we noted, our goal is to present a measured response to these opinion essays. Having done so, we will do our readers the service of stating our own view:

    • Disability services professionals are thoughtful and effective in discharging their responsibilities in the interactive process.
    • Disabled students belong on college campuses, and accommodations serve to enable access to higher education.
    • Accommodations level the playing field for students within environments that were built without considering their very existence.
    • Rigidity in the interactive process burdens the student, and these burdens disproportionately impact marginalized communities.

    We encourage readers to draw their own conclusions—however, in doing so, we encourage you to listen to the voices of the disabled community, disability services professionals, and those with stakes and experience in navigating the accommodations process.

    In the current climate, where we are asked to consider whether empathy might be a sin, and whether disability might be incongruent with merit in the workplace, it is important to uplift these voices. It is important to stand firm in the knowledge of the expertise and value of those in helping professions. It is important to affirm that all means all, and that includes students with disabilities.

    Chris Parthemos and Martina Svyantek are the president-elect and president, respectively, of the Association on Higher Education and Disability in Virginia.

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  • OPINION: Workforce Pell can lead to good jobs for students if they get the support needed for long-term success

    OPINION: Workforce Pell can lead to good jobs for students if they get the support needed for long-term success

    by Alexander Mayer, The Hechinger Report
    December 16, 2025

    Ohio resident Megan Cutright lost her hospitality job during the pandemic. At her daughter’s urging, she found her way to Lorain County Community College in Ohio and onto a new career path.  

    Community colleges will soon have a new opportunity to help more students like Megan achieve their career goals. Starting next summer, federal funds will be available through a program known as Workforce Pell, which extends federal aid to career-focused education and training programs that last between eight and 15 weeks. 

    Members of Congress advocating for Pell Grants to cover shorter programs have consistently highlighted Workforce Pell’s potential, noting that the extension will lead to “good-paying jobs.”  

    That could happen. But it will only happen if states and colleges thoughtfully consider the supports students need for success.  

    This is important, because helping students pay for workforce programs is not enough. They also need support and wraparound services, much like the kind Megan was offered at Lorain, where her program followed an evidence-based model known as ASAP that assigns each student a career adviser. 

    Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter. 

    Megan’s adviser “helped me from day one,” she said, in a story posted on the college’s website. “I told her I was interested in the radiologic technology program but that I had no idea where to start. We just did everything together.”  

    Megan went on to secure a job as an assistant in the radiology department at her local hospital, where she had interned as a student. She knew what steps she needed to take because her community college supported and advised her, using an evidence-backed practice, illustrating something we have learned from the experience of the community colleges that use the ASAP model: Support is invaluable.  

    Megan also knew that her path to a full-time position in radiologic technology required her to pass a licensure test — scheduled for four days after graduation.  

    The students who will enroll in Workforce Pell programs deserve the same careful attention. To ensure that Workforce Pell is effective for students, we should follow the same three critical steps that helped drive the expansion of ASAP and brought it to Megan’s college: (1) experiment to see what works, (2) collect and follow the data and (3) ensure that colleges learn from each other to apply what works. 

    Before ASAP was developed, the higher education community had some ideas about what might work to help students complete their degrees and get good jobs. When colleges and researchers worked together to test these ideas and gathered reliable data, though, they learned that those strategies only helped students at the margins. 

    There was no solid evidence about what worked to make big, lasting improvements in college completion until the City University of New York (CUNY) worked with researchers at MDRC to test ASAP and its combination of longer-lasting strategies. They kept a close eye on the data and learned that while some strategies didn’t produce big effects on their own, the combined ASAP approach resulted in significant improvements in student outcomes, nearly doubling the three-year college completion rate.  

    CUNY and MDRC shared what they learned with higher education leaders and policymakers, inspiring other community colleges to try out the model. Those colleges started seeing results too, and the model kept spreading. Today, ASAP is used in more than 50 colleges in seven states. And it’s paying off — in Ohio, for example, students who received ASAP services ended up earning significantly more than those who did not. 

    That same experimentation and learning mindset will be needed for Workforce Pell, because while short-term training can lead to good careers, it’s far from guaranteed.  

    For example, phlebotomy technician programs are popular, but without additional training or credentials they often don’t lead to jobs that pay well. Similarly, students who complete short-term programs in information technology, welding and construction-related skills can continue to acquire stackable credentials that substantially increase their earning potential, although that also doesn’t happen automatically. The complexity of the credentialing marketplace can make it impossible for students and families to assess programs and make good decisions without help.  

    Related: OPINION: Too many college graduates are stranded before their careers can even begin. We can’t let that happen 

    A big question for Workforce Pell will be how to make sure students understand how to get onto a career path and continue advancing their wider career aspirations. Workforce Pell grants are designed to help students with low incomes overcome financial barriers, but these same students often face other barriers.  

    That’s why colleges should experiment with supports like career advising to help students identify stepping-stones to a good career, along with placement services to help them navigate the job market. In addition, states must expand their data collection efforts to formally include noncredit programs. Some, including Iowa, Louisiana and Virginia, have already made considerable progress linking their education and workforce systems.  

    Offering student support services and setting up data systems requires resources, but Workforce Pell will bring new funds to states and colleges that are currently financing job training programs. Philanthropy can also help by providing resources to test out what works best to get students through short-term programs and onto solid career paths.  

    Sharing what works — and what doesn’t — will be critical to the success of Workforce Pell in the long-term. The same spirit of learning that fueled innovation around the ASAP model should be embedded in Workforce Pell from the start.  

    Alexander Mayer is director of postsecondary education at MDRC, the nonprofit research association. 

    Contact the opinion editor at [email protected]. 

    This story about Workforce Pell was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter. 

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  • Loan and Degree Insurance May Be Self-Defeating (opinion)

    Loan and Degree Insurance May Be Self-Defeating (opinion)

    Imagine you are the parent of an incoming college student who wants to study theology, ranked among the lowest-paid majors after graduation. You’re proud of their conviction, but also anxious because friends and family keep reminding you that theology is a major for which career prospects are uncertain at best. Then, in the thick of college decision season, you learn that the college your child is considering offers something called “degree insurance”: If your graduate doesn’t earn above a set threshold, the program will step in to cover part of the gap.

    The promise is meant to ease parents’ and students’ fears. Yet, it raises a deeper question: Why would a college degree, still the surest path to economic advancement and long-term financial stability, suddenly require insurance at all?

    Across the country, colleges and universities are rolling out a new suite of financial products targeting undergraduates, marketed as “loan” and “degree” insurance. Loan repayment assistant programs (LRAPs), sometimes also called loan repayment guarantees, are a form of loan insurance that protect students against default: If a graduate doesn’t earn above a certain threshold, their student loan payments are reimbursed to a certain amount. Degree insurance is a mechanism akin to public “wage insurance” programs, where if a graduate makes less than the average income in their field adjusted for regional differences, the insurance would “top up” the difference in wages for a period of time.

    These two tools have distinct origins and underlying rationales. Loan Repayment Assistance Programs (LRAPs) originated in Yale Law School in the 1980s, and spread to other law schools, as the rising cost of legal education began to deter graduates from pursuing lower-paying public interest careers. While they began as internal sources of funding, the privatization of LRAP offerings and search for profit have pushed the industry to expand into new markets, namely undergraduate education. Indeed, Ardeo Education Solutions, an early and prominent player in this sector, was founded by Yale Law graduate Peter Samuelson, who himself benefited from Yale’s loan assistance program. Ardeo positions itself as reassuring families about the risks of taking on debt in order to pay for undergraduate education, “increasing access to the life-changing impact of higher education,” and freeing students from having to choose “between their passions and a paycheck.”

    Degree insurance products take a different approach. Degree Insurance, which counts Augustana College in Illinois as a client, draws on the cultural cachet of the American dream to market itself as an income equalizer; its flagship product, “American Dream Insurance,” guarantees “equal pay for equal study,” where “no graduate will have to earn less than their peers, regardless of race or gender, because everyone will have the same safety net.” This is insurance against the uncertainties and inequalities of the labor market as well as against individual weaknesses of any particular candidate.

    While the current scope and reach of this sector is challenging to assess, Ardeo Education advertises that it’s provided LRAPs to more than 30,000 students at more than 200 American colleges and universities. Participating institutions range from a number of small, faith-based colleges like Lyon College and MidAmerica Nazarene University to a public research university like Eastern Michigan University. Eligibility for repayment assistance usually requires graduation from the offering institution, full-time work (30+ hours/week), and staying below the income cap.

    The extension of LRAPs and degree insurance into undergraduate programs represents a new dimension of risk management in higher education, which has gone through several phases since it began in earnest in the late 20th century when colleges and universities started responding to increased personal injury and campus safety litigation. These risk management programs, tailored to protect institutions, eventually expanded to include Title IX, Occupational Safety and Health Administration requirements, environmental regulations, reputation management, crisis communications, cybersecurity and, most relevantly for this topic, financial sustainability. Loan and degree insurance represent the latest iteration of such efforts.

    For now, colleges typically pay for these programs, though it is unclear how much of the cost is passed on to students through tuition. How students are selected for inclusion in these programs is also opaque. Institutions are free to determine which students and majors are offered the program. Augustana College’s website, for example, says that it offers degree insurance at no direct cost to the student, but participation is on an invitation-only basis.

    There are, of course, reasons to defend these programs. Scrutiny of the student loan system, which has resulted in a student debt crisis, has intensified across the political spectrum, as policymakers from both parties recognize the harm it has caused (even as they disagree on the solutions). LRAPs and degree insurance may decrease the rate of loan default and reassure low-income families who were unable to save for college and are averse to taking on loans to pay for college.

    In an environment marked by increasing competition for students, admissions professionals see offering LRAPs and degree insurance as a competitive advantage. Loan repayment and degree insurance plans also encourage students not only to enroll in college in general but to pursue degrees with more challenging career prospects, which are also often the ones at risk of being cut due to low enrollment. This is increasingly relevant given the almost daily news of program closures.

    The arrival of these financial instruments is perhaps an understandable response to the rising cost of a college education, increased competition for students, overall wage stagnation and shifting public views about the purpose, value and outcomes of higher education. The adoption of these tools, however, is not simply driven by the current circulation of the idea of college education as a risk; it also further reinforces that view.

    These programs are not simply a new and neutral financial option for students. By extending the logics of institutional risk management to the economic futures of students, these tools cement the troubling, and potentially self-defeating, idea that a college degree itself is a financial risk requiring protection rather than the most reliable path to upward mobility and a critical component of our continued economic and cultural prosperity. Their adoption by colleges and universities is a reflection of the “short-termism” that has increasingly marked higher education strategy. As more institutions inevitably adopt these programs, it is unclear how long they will remain a competitive advantage. Furthermore, as the trend spreads, we may see the labor market respond, with employers lowering entry-level salaries even further as they take into account insurance payouts. Indeed, like many aspects of higher education today, it feels like a race to the bottom.

    Comparisons between insurance products and other forms of income or employment assurances are difficult to make. Should families prioritize colleges with strong outcomes (e.g., graduation rates upward of 70 percent and reassuring post-graduation employment statistics), robust alumni networks, or loan and insurance programs? It is also too early to tell what the consequences of transferring the risk to third parties, a common higher education risk management strategy, might be for students and institutions in the long term. And, it further financializes education, such that in the process of character formation, managing risk, rather than other values or logics, becomes central to identity.

    Colleges and universities might want to ask themselves whether treating college degrees as a risk serves their long-term interests. Loan and degree insurance products may deliver short-term enrollment gains, ease families’ anxieties, and even encourage students to pursue majors often viewed as less “marketable.” In the long-term, however, these strategies relieve the pressure to address underlying structural challenges such as rising costs, stagnant wages and a flawed loan system. Ultimately, they undermine our ability to make the case for higher education as a public good, thus putting the future of the entire endeavor at risk.

    Margarita Rayzberg is an assistant professor of sociology and criminology at Valparaiso University.

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  • Hope Is Essential to Success of Any Job Search (opinion)

    Hope Is Essential to Success of Any Job Search (opinion)

    We live in uncertain and unstable times. The job market is contracting due to economic uncertainty, political instability and the increase of AI-driven automation. In my role as a career adviser, I talk to many students and recent graduates who have faced a long and difficult job search. The words and phrases I hear most often in these conversations are “dejected,” “soul-crushing,” or “I feel like I am screaming into the void.” International students face an added challenge, with H-1B visas seeming out of reach as they become more difficult and expensive for employers to process.

    All of this uncertainty can lead to feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. What I hear from students, and in particular our international community at Columbia University, is, “What is the point of applying to jobs if no one will hire me?” Such self-defeating thoughts can lead to inaction and feelings of despair. Yet hope is essential to the success of any job search. Having hope or optimism that something will work out is central to achieving one’s goals.

    It is likewise essential that a career coach or adviser have a hopeful, positive attitude. A recent article published by the IZA Institute of Labor Economics describes how when people who were unemployed for a long period of time worked with caseworkers who had “strong confidence in the potential of their clients to find employment,” the relationship led to an increase in the client’s motivation and resilience, and to improved earnings and employment outcomes over time. Thus, our outlook as advisers can impact the students we are working with, so we must manage our own feelings of hopelessness. I find myself returning to Jane Goodall’s The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times for inspiration.

    Another source of inspiration I return to is a framework called Career Flow: A Hope-Centered Approach to Career Development, developed in 2011 by Spencer G. Niles, Norman E. Amundson and Roberta A. Neault. In the remainder of this article, I plan to provide career development professionals with an overview of this hope-based career development model and suggestions on how they can implement it to assist their students and graduates.

    In the theory, “Career Flow” is an analogy that compares different types of experiences in one’s career to the flow of water. Anyone who has felt “underwater” at work can understand this metaphor. Finding “optimal” flow in a professional setting means that your skills and personality match the tasks and requirements of your role. Below, I outline suggested steps based on the model to help you implement a hope-based approach to career advising.

    Step 1: Assessing and Establishing Hope

    Start by letting the advisee tell their story and share the challenges that they face. Listen and reflect back what you are hearing. But also start to consider the person’s outlook and demeanor. Many of the people I talk to, including federal workers who were laid off or furloughed, exhibit signs of hope even though they understand the current challenges they are facing and express frustration and sometimes fear. I have been surprised and impressed by people’s resilience and willingness to pivot, which I make sure to point out. That helps them see the strength they are exhibiting even in a moment of crisis.

    However, some people will present as mostly frustrated, with little hope. If you are talking to someone who seems particularly hopeless about their situation, it could be helpful to reflect that back to them. You might say, “What you just described to me seems like a very tough situation. I wonder if you might feel a sense of hopelessness?” Sometimes it just takes awareness for someone to realize that they need to shift their mindset. Validate their struggle, then help them reframe their point of view toward one that is more hopeful. For example, you could mention the Career Flow model that shows the positive benefits of having hope in a career search. If a student seems unwilling to shift, you might want to suggest that they seek extra support through family, friends or counseling services.

    Step 2: Self-Reflection and Self-Clarity

    Self-reflection and self-clarity are essential to any job search, including when it comes to establishing a hopeful approach. If someone is not clear about their own needs and values or has a lack of understanding of their situation and challenges, that person can struggle to succeed in their goals. Therefore, help them gain a greater sense of self-clarity by reflecting any key interests, skills and values you hear them describe in your conversation. At the same time, it is important to ask about possible challenges or obstacles to fully understand their situation and address hurdles standing in the way of their goals.

    If a student seems hopeless about succeeding in their goals, advisers can bolster hope by asking about areas of strength or asking them to describe a time they felt they succeeded when faced with a difficult task. Reminding students of past successes and helping to celebrate these wins can increase their sense of agency and help them believe they can overcome future challenges.

    Step 3: Visioning

    An inherently hopeful exercise, visioning is the ability to brainstorm future possibilities and identify desired outcomes. Sometimes, I talk to a student who is so focused on one goal, such as finding an academic job or postdoc position, that they forget to consider other opportunities where they can apply their skills and expertise. When starting the visioning process, encourage advises to imagine multiple ways of reaching their desired goal. This is also known as “pathways thinking” and, in the Career Flow model, quantity is more important than quality. When an extensive list of possible career paths is identified, the advisee should use self-reflection and self-clarity to narrow their options by selecting a few paths that best align with their interests, skills and values. Pathways thinking also supports advisees in being both flexible and adaptable, traits that are incredibly important in any job search.

    However, people who feel hopeless can sometimes lack the capability to consider other options. Help connect them to resources, such as career assessments like ImaginePhD, myIDP or O*Net, where they can gather information to explore different types of employment. Also, help them consider ways they can gain skills or experience through online courses, volunteering, on-campus work or internships.

    Step 4: Goal Setting and Planning

    Once a student has selected a few possible paths, then focus on setting specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound (SMART) goals. Students often set lofty or poorly defined goals such as, “I want to find a job.” Help them identify small, realistic steps they can take to achieve their main goal of employment. For example, suggest that they find a job they want to apply to and create a tailored résumé and cover letter for the role and then schedule another career advising session in two weeks to review the documents. Again, consider possible barriers to their goals and how they can overcome them.

    Step 5: Implementing and Adapting

    As students start to reach their incremental goals they will encounter either positive feedback (e.g. a request for an interview) or a lack of success (silence or rejection emails). As they gather more data, help them revise or relinquish possible paths that are no longer relevant or serving them. Sometimes, you will need to help them accept the fact that a goal might not be achieved. This process is known as radical acceptance, or giving in to your current reality. Help them see that finding employment during a period of uncertainty is difficult and can cause pain, but life can still be hopeful and joyful.

    Another approach is to help students see what they have control over. We might not be able to control the economy, but we can control our actions and our outlook, and we can seek out help when we need it or find support in community with others. Overall, be there as a source of support, guidance and encouragement.

    In conclusion, it can take substantial effort to choose to be hopeful in periods of uncertainty, but we must maintain hope even in the darkest of times. To quote C. R. Snyder, who writes about the psychology of hope, “in studying hope …, I observed the spectrum of human strength. This reminds me of the rainbow that frequently is used as a symbol of hope. A rainbow is a prism that sends shards of multicolored light in various directions. It lifts our spirits and makes us think of what is possible. Hope is the same—a personal rainbow of the mind.”

    So, let us be a rainbow for those we work with and help them to let hope, rather than despair, lead the way.

    Francesca Fanelli has 10 years of experience working with graduate-level students and is a licensed mental health counselor in the state of New York. She currently serves as senior associate director of graduate career development at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where she specializes in career advising and event management.

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  • AI Can Help With Viewpoint Diversity Challenges (opinion)

    AI Can Help With Viewpoint Diversity Challenges (opinion)

    Viewpoint diversity and artificial intelligence are two of the most widely discussed challenges facing higher education today. What if we could address these two simultaneously, employing AI to create productive intellectual friction across different political and philosophical positions?

    Consider taking this approach: Whom do you ardently disagree with, philosophically or morally, but view as smart and rigorous in their analysis and arguments? I can think of one of my high school heroes, Ayn Rand, whose The Fountainhead I initially regarded as a powerful affirmation of creativity and innovation without knowing much about her deeper political ideology. This summer, I decided to read her collection of essays on capitalism, which I suspected I would disagree with at a fundamental level. Then I looked to AI. Could I engage Ayn Rand’s ideas through a large language model that would “disagree” with me, allowing me to experience intellectual friction with less at stake personally?

    I began my conversation with the chatbot Claude 3.5, asking it to play the role of Ayn Rand, by addressing her core argument: Capitalism is the only moral system because it honors the rights and liberty of every person to reap the benefits of their own creativity and effort without being coerced to give up some of what they have produced to “benefit” society. Here is how it went.

    Me: In your version of capitalism, how do humans/societies decide to produce something bigger than anyone could do alone? What if sending someone to the moon could never be coordinated through independent, voluntary contracts and instead requires some larger entity, like a government, to coordinate and incentivize? If democratic citizens vote to have the government organize a mission to the moon, why is that coercive?

    *Adjusting her glasses with a stern expression* (Stage cues provided by the bot)

    Rand bot: Your question reveals the very philosophical premises I reject. You speak of “democratic citizens” voting to achieve something “greater together”—but greater for whom? By what right do these citizens vote to expropriate the wealth of others for their collective fantasy?

    The fact that some men dream of reaching the moon does not give them the moral right to force others to fund their dream. If reaching the moon is truly valuable, let those who see that value risk their own capital, form their own companies and make voluntary contracts. Look at what private enterprises like SpaceX have achieved through voluntary cooperation and the profit motive!

    You present a false dichotomy between individual rights and large-scale achievement. The greatest achievements in human history—from the transcontinental railroad to the electric light—came from private individuals working through voluntary contracts, not government force. Even when multiple parties were involved, they chose to cooperate for mutual benefit.

    The moment you accept that it’s acceptable to violate individual rights for some “greater good,” you’ve accepted the premise of every dictator and looter in history. There is no such thing as a “right” to violate rights. A group’s desire, no matter how noble-sounding, does not trump an individual’s right to the product of their own effort.

    *Takes drag from cigarette* (more stage cues …)

    Would you care to explain why you believe some men have the right to enslave others for their collective goals?

    I was fully engaged at this point, and I wanted to expose her rigid thinking, so I raised the stakes.

    Me: Would you agree that public health might require a “collective response”? Let’s say that individuals acting independently have no incentive to invest in clean water, vaccines or databases that collect public health data. Is it better to allow millions of people to die from the spread of disease in the name of maximum individual freedom, or to have the government coordinate action to provide public health benefits to everyone?

    Rand bot: *Tapping cigarette ash with visible irritation*

    Your premise rests on the most dangerous of all moral fallacies— that the mere existence of a problem justifies the use of force to solve it. You speak of “public health” as if it were some mystical collective entity that supersedes individual rights. There is no such thing as “public health”—there are only individual human beings, each with the right to make their own decisions about their health and well-being.

    This back-and-forth went on for more than an hour, covering topics like innovation, market failures and unequal access to basic resources. I was worn out, so I closed the conversation.

    Me: I am arguing that humans can create mixed economic and political systems and that those systems can muddle along—imperfectly—and people may live with those compromises because they still have freedom while affording greater opportunity to their fellow citizens. You believe in an inevitable slide toward destruction and loss of freedom. I don’t see that slide happening in much of the democratic world. So compromise is possible. So I think we can work with this hybrid system—improve, find the right balance, and continue to advance a more perfect union.

    And then, “Ayn Rand” made her final summation:

    Rand bot: You want me to acknowledge that reality has not matched my darkest predictions. That humans have found ways to maintain significant freedom and progress despite what I see as moral compromise. And you argue that evidence matters—that decades of relative prosperity and innovation under mixed systems deserve consideration.

    I cannot and will not concede the fundamental moral principle: that force is force, whether applied by a dictator or a democratic majority. Your “muddling along” is built on a fundamental contradiction that I believe must eventually resolve itself—either toward freedom or toward force …

    I was impressed that the bot could articulate Rand’s core arguments, impersonate her direct writing and speaking style, question my own logic, provide specific examples, “reason” beyond the time and place of her original writing, and offer creative analogies (when pressed to explain the economic success of today’s welfare capitalism, she responded, “You are celebrating reaching the 2nd floor while I am pointing out that we could have built a skyscraper”). This was one of the most intellectually engaging 90 minutes I have spent in a long time.

    I wanted to check my reactions against the wisdom and judgment of one of our philosophy professors at Hamilton College, so I sent the entire exchange to him. He noted that the AI bot argued like a robot and relied too heavily on rhetoric rather than sound argumentation. Ultimately, the problem, as he sees it, is that “an AI Bot will never be able to genuinely distinguish between debating with the intent of ‘winning’ an argument and debating with the intent of arriving at a deeper understanding of the subject matter at hand.” It is also worth pointing out that debating across a screen, with AI or with friends and strangers, is partly why we are having so much trouble talking to each other in the first place.

    AI is not a substitute for what we learn in our philosophy classes. But there is something powerful about practicing our ideas with people across time and place—debating race with James Baldwin, asking Leonardo da Vinci to think about how we reconcile innovation with destruction.

    One of our faculty members worked with our technology team to create an AI agent based on thousands of documents and writings from our nation’s founders. At the end of this class on the founding of America, the students debated with “Alexander Hamilton” about the role of the central government, inherited wealth and his views on war. Perhaps the answers were a bit robotic, but they were based on Hamilton’s documented thoughts, and as our language models get better, the richness of the discussion and debate will grow exponentially.

    The best classes and teachers maximize learning by bringing opposing ideas into conversation. But we know that college students, faculty and many others in America find it very difficult to engage opposing views, especially those we find fundamentally objectionable. Ultimately, this must happen on a human-to-human level with skilled educators and facilitators. But can we also use AI to help us practice how we engage with difference, better formulate our arguments and ask deeper and more complex questions?

    AI can be part of the solution to our challenge of engaging with ideas we disagree with. If you disagree, try your argument with an AI bot first, and then let’s talk.

    Steven Tepper is president of Hamilton College.

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