Tag: opinion

  • On Climate Action, a View From Behind the Pack (opinion)

    On Climate Action, a View From Behind the Pack (opinion)

    The University of California system recently made waves by announcing a commitment “to fully decarbonize no later than 2045.” Unlike many “carbon neutrality” or “net zero” plans that rely heavily on carbon offsets, the UC system plans to cut emissions from campus electricity and fossil fuel use by at least 90 percent from 2019 levels and to balance residual emissions by investing in projects to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

    This win for the climate did not come easy: As activists from UC San Diego relate, they spent years building a coalition across campuses. Such success marks the UC system as a leader in American higher education, well ahead of other prestigious research universities with offset-heavy carbon neutrality plans—and well ahead of Purdue University, where we teach, which has no declared plans for decarbonization.

    Here, we wish to discuss our experiences advocating for a climate action plan at Purdue, where among our peer institutions we are decidedly a laggard, not a leader, in the climate space. We hope that detailing our frustrating lack of success provides a sober counternarrative to the success story of the UC system. Furthermore, we hope that knowing about our efforts may help others who are similarly involved in advocating for climate action at campuses in red states.

    Purdue’s Climate Story So Far

    A public, land-grant university in north-central Indiana, Purdue enrolls more than 44,000 undergraduates and almost 14,000 graduate and professional students. Purdue frequently touts itself as a world leader in innovation of all sorts, from artificial intelligence to biomedical research, even highlighting research on sustainability. Due to its size, the energy-intensive nature of its research activities and its location in a climate that sees both cold winters and hot, humid summers, Purdue’s campus emits as much climate pollution as a small city—439,000 metric tons per year of carbon dioxide equivalent as of 2023, the latest year for which official estimates are available.

    The Purdue community cares about sustainability: Classes in a wide range of majors feature considerable discussion of sustainability, and researchers across campus study the causes of and potential solutions for climate change. Purdue has won awards and recognition for low-hanging fruit, such as from Tree Campus USA and Bee Campus USA. Purdue also touts being named one of the most sustainable campuses by QS, although when one looks under the hood, such rankings give remarkably little weight to emissions reductions on campus. In the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education’s more rigorous reporting system, Purdue scored zero out of four on clean and renewable energy and 1.08 out of eight on greenhouse gas emissions.

    Purdue faces unique decarbonization challenges. Our university’s administration ultimately answers to the Indiana state government, which has recently canceled the state’s climate action planning and enables most counties to restrict renewable energy development. Electricity in Indiana has the highest carbon intensity of any state other than three major coal producers—Kentucky, West Virginia and Wyoming—and entails almost four times higher greenhouse gas emissions per unit of energy than electricity in California. Duke Energy, the utility that serves Purdue, is the fourth largest lobby in Indiana.

    While these challenges may seem daunting, progress on climate is possible even in Indiana. In 2023, our colleagues at Indiana University launched a plan promising carbon neutrality by 2040. They aim to get there by modest changes, such as improving energy efficiency in buildings and implementing renewable energy on campus. Purdue has also made progress—which we applaud—mainly by transitioning its combined heat and power plant from coal to natural gas. In 2023, Purdue estimated that its emissions were 27 percent lower than their coal-heavy 2011 level. But this only represents a small start to the actions needed for Purdue to live up to its obligations to students, staff, faculty, the community and, ultimately, the planet.

    Community Will and Administrative Inaction

    Many Purdue community members want substantial climate action. In 2020, more than 2,000 Purdue students signed a petition calling for Purdue to develop a climate action plan and create a universitywide, stand-alone sustainability office. The university’s president at the time, Mitch Daniels—Indiana’s former Republican governor and a noted climate change skeptic—dismissed the petition.

    In the fall of 2022, students and faculty formed the Purdue Climate Action Collective (PCAC), aimed at pressuring the university to develop a climate action plan and to be transparent in reporting emissions. In the spring of 2023, the Purdue Student Government, the Graduate Student Government and the University Senate each passed resolutions calling on the university to commit to a climate action plan. The Senate resolution also called upon Purdue to join the Greater Lafayette Climate Action Plan, developed by the surrounding county and cities. Once again, Purdue ignored these calls.

    Since then, PCAC has mounted numerous protests, spoken at student events, peppered campus with signs, reached out to the administration and attended Board of Trustees meetings to express our concerns. Our board is entirely appointed by the governor of Indiana. PCAC has also launched a new petition, now at 1,600 signatures.

    Despite the Purdue community’s advocacy for climate action, our new president, Mung Chiang, has authorized no comprehensive, campuswide climate action plan. The nearest thing is the Campus Planning, Architecture and Sustainability office’s Sustainability Master Plan for 2020–25, which aims to reduce Purdue’s emissions from electricity and fossil fuel use 50 percent below 2011 levels by 2025 and to pursue 500 kilowatts of renewable energy. While we applaud these near-term goals, and the incomplete but significant progress toward achieving them, decarbonizing Purdue will require making a long-term plan to outgrow natural gas and Duke Energy’s carbon-intensive electricity.

    On this topic, the Purdue administration told the University Senate in 2024 that “Purdue has a climate action plan consisting of two parts,” referring senators to the Sustainability Master Plan and to a joint study with Duke Energy on the feasibility of a small modular nuclear reactor (SMR) for the campus. While nuclear might play a role in Purdue’s energy future, SMRs are an unproven technology and should not be used as an excuse to delay the decarbonization of our campus.

    The SMR study’s 2023 report states, “whether SMRs will be an economic option for Duke Energy Indiana’s customers is unknown given current technology, timing and cost uncertainty.” The report cites a likely cost range of $1.1 to $2.25 billion (for context, Purdue’s endowment currently totals $4.1 billion) and discusses design technologies that may only become “commercially viable in 2035–2040.” A responsible climate action plan could certainly include nuclear energy down the road, if it proves successful, but the urgency of the climate crisis demands that institutions address their greenhouse gas emissions now.

    Possible Paths Forward

    Preliminary studies of decarbonization at Purdue suggest that climate action is feasible and affordable. Today, Purdue could take a number of proven, cost-effective actions, such as improving the efficiency of its building operations (for example, by using software to avoid heating or cooling unoccupied spaces), or increasing parking fees and investing the proceeds in infrastructure and incentives for buses and electric vehicle charging. In the next five to 10 years, Purdue could electrify its vehicle fleet and arrange power-purchase agreements with clean electricity generators in the area, as has been done successfully at places like the University of Michigan and the University of Minnesota.

    Long-term pathways to deep emission reductions remain uncertain, especially when considering Scope 3 emissions (emissions that are indirectly generated by university activities, such as employee commuting and flying), but Purdue has options and plenty of experts eager to investigate them. Inclusive and transparent processes for climate action planning would draw upon Purdue community expertise to identify, evaluate and select climate action pathways. But for any of this to happen, our administration must first acknowledge the need for climate action on campus.

    Our experience at Purdue has affirmed that fighting for climate action on public red-state campuses is an uphill battle. We know that change must come from both above and below. Students, faculty and staff concerned about the future of our planet must continue to raise their voices and add to the pressure the university feels. Administrators more inclined toward shared governance—or toward maintaining a livable climate for the future generations that Purdue aims to serve—must also add their voices to the mix. As Purdue begins to act on climate, its passionate community of activists and innovators will be there to support implementation and to celebrate accomplishments along the way.

    Although we have much to learn from the success of places like UC, places like Purdue need a different set of tools and approaches. For those at similarly recalcitrant universities, we hope this message reminds them that institutions won’t take these steps without great pressure. But given the dire warnings about the future of our planet, the importance of local climate action as congressional Republicans and the Trump administration have repealed most federal support for climate action, and the important role of universities as thought leaders, we remain convinced that this is a fight worth having.

    Michael Johnston, a professor of English at Purdue University, founded the Purdue Climate Action Collective and has been involved in the fight for climate justice at Purdue since 2022.

    Kevin Kircher, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and, by courtesy, electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University, studies clean energy technologies and has worked on campus decarbonization projects at Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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  • Normalize the Gap Year (opinion)

    Normalize the Gap Year (opinion)

    We’re two admissions leaders working to reframe how families and institutions think about the gap year. I’m Carol, a former college admissions dean with more than 20 years in higher education, and I’m also a therapist who works with teens. My co-author, Becky Mulholland, is director of first-year admission and operations at the University of Rhode Island. Together, we’re building a new kind of gap year model, one that centers on intention, purpose and career readiness for all.

    The gap year concept is overdue for a cultural reset. Most popular options on the market focus on travel, outdoor adventure or service learning, but they rarely emphasize self-exploration in conjunction with career readiness or curiosity about the future of work. The term itself is widely misunderstood and sometimes dismissed. Despite its reputation as a luxury for the privileged, it’s often the families juggling cost, stress and uncertainty who stand to gain the most from a well-supported pause.

    For many families, college is the most expensive decision they’ll ever make. Taking time to pause, reflect and plan shouldn’t be seen as risky—it should be seen as wise. At 17 or 18, it’s a lot to ask a young person to know what they want to do with the rest of their life. A 2017 federal data report found that about 30 percent of undergrads who had declared majors changed their major at least once, and about 10 percent changed majors more than once. These shifts often lead to extra courses and sometimes an extra semester or even a year. That’s a lot of wasted money for families who could have benefited from a more intentional pause.

    And yet for many parents, the phrase “gap year” still stirs anxiety. They imagine their child lying on a couch for three months, doing nothing, or worse, never learning anything useful and losing all momentum to return to school. The idea feels foreign, risky and hard to explain. They don’t know what to tell their friends or extended family. We push back on that fear and work to normalize the idea of intentional, structured time off. It’s not just for the elite—it needs to be reclaimed as a culturally acceptable norm. That’s why we champion paid, structured earn-while-you-learn pathways such as youth apprenticeships, paid internships, stipend-backed fellowships and employer-sponsored projects that keep income stable while skills grow.

    We personally promote the value of intentional pauses when talking with families and prospective students about college, helping them reframe what a year of growth and clarity can mean. We also strongly support programs with built-in pause requirements before graduate school. I’ve read thousands of applications as a dean and witnessed how powerful that year can be when it’s well guided.

    Gap years, when framed and supported correctly, can foster self-discovery, emotional growth and direction. But the gap year industry itself also needs to evolve. The industry should move toward models that prioritize intentional career exploration, rooted not only in personal growth and self-awareness but in helping students find a sense of fulfillment in their future careers and lives. If colleges acknowledged the value of these experiences more visibly in their advising models and admissions narratives, they could relieve pressure on families and students and potentially reduce dropout rates and improve long-term outcomes.

    We believe it’s time for higher education to actively support and normalize the gap year, not as an elite detour, but as a practical and often necessary path to college and career success. It’s time to give students and their families permission to pause.

    Carol Langlois is chief academic officer at ESAI, a generative AI platform for college applicants, and a therapist who specializes in working with teens. She previously served in dean, director and vice provost roles in college admissions.

    Becky Mulholland is director of first-year admission and operations at the University of Rhode Island.

    Becky and Carol both serve on the Policy Subcommittee of the National Association for College Admission Counseling’s AI in College Admission Special Interest Group.

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  • Framework for GenAI in Graduate Career Development (opinion)

    Framework for GenAI in Graduate Career Development (opinion)

    In Plato’s Phaedrus, King Thamus feared writing would make people forgetful and create the appearance of wisdom without true understanding. His concern was not merely about a new tool, but about a technology that would fundamentally transform how humans think, remember and communicate. Today, we face similar anxieties about generative AI. Like writing before it, generative AI is not just a tool but a transformative technology reshaping how we think, write and work.

    This transformation is particularly consequential in graduate education, where students develop professional competencies while managing competing demands, research deadlines, teaching responsibilities, caregiving obligations and often financial pressures. Generative AI’s appeal is clear; it promises to accelerate tasks that compete for limited time and cognitive resources. Graduate students report using ChatGPT and similar tools for professional development tasks, such as drafting cover letters, preparing for interviews and exploring career options, often without institutional guidance on effective and ethical use.

    Most AI policies focus on coursework and academic integrity; professional development contexts remain largely unaddressed. Faculty and career advisers need practical strategies for guiding students to use generative AI critically and effectively. This article proposes a four-stage framework—explore, build, connect, refine—for guiding students’ generative AI use in professional development.

    Professional Development in the AI Era

    Over the past decade, graduate education has invested significantly in career readiness through dedicated offices, individual development plans and co-curricular programming—for example, the Council of Graduate Schools’ PhD Career Pathways initiative involved 75 U.S. doctoral institutions building data-informed professional development, and the Graduate Career Consortium, representing graduate-focused career staff, grew from roughly 220 members in 2014 to 500-plus members across about 220 institutions by 2022.

    These investments reflect recognition that Ph.D. and master’s students pursue diverse career paths, with fewer than half of STEM Ph.D.s entering tenure-track positions immediately after graduation; the figure for humanities and social sciences also remains below 50 percent over all.

    We now face a different challenge: integrating a technology that touches every part of the knowledge economy. Generative AI adoption among graduate students has been swift and largely unsupervised: At Ohio State University, 48 percent of graduate students reported using ChatGPT in spring 2024. At the University of Maryland, 77 percent of students report using generative AI, and 35 percent use it routinely for academic work, with graduate students more likely than undergraduates to be routine users; among routine student users, 38 percent said they did so without instructor guidance.

    Some subskills, like mechanical formatting, will matter less in this landscape; higher-order capacities—framing problems, tailoring messages to audiences, exercising ethical discernment—will matter more. For example, in a 2025 National Association of Colleges and Employers survey, employers rank communication and critical thinking among the most important competencies for new hires, and in a 2024 LinkedIn report, communication was the most in-demand skill.

    Without structured guidance, students face conflicting messages: Some faculty ban AI use entirely, while others assume so-called digital natives will figure it out independently. This leaves students navigating an ethical and practical minefield with high stakes for their careers. A framework offers consistency and clear principles across advising contexts.

    We propose a four-stage framework that mirrors how professionals actually learn: explore, build, connect, refine. This approach adapts design thinking principles, the iterative cycle of prototyping and testing, to AI-augmented professional development. Students rapidly generate options with AI support, test them in low-stakes environments and refine based on feedback. While we use writing and communication examples throughout for clarity, this framework applies broadly to professional development.

    Explore: Map Possibilities and Surface Gaps

    Exploring begins by mapping career paths, fellowship opportunities and professional norms, then identifying gaps in skills or expectations. A graduate student can ask a generative AI chatbot to infer competencies from their lab work or course projects, then compare those skills to current job postings in their target sector to identify skills they need to develop. They can generate a matrix of fellowship opportunities in their field, including eligibility requirements, deadlines and required materials, and then validate every detail on official websites. They can ask AI to describe communication norms in target sectors, comparing the tone and structure of academic versus industry cover letters—not to memorize a script, but to understand audience expectations they will need to meet.

    Students should not, however, rely on AI-generated job descriptions or program requirements without verification, as the technology may conflate roles, misrepresent qualifications or cite outdated information and sources.

    Build: Learn Through Iterative Practice

    Building turns insight into artifacts and habits. With generative AI as a sounding board, students can experiment with different résumé architectures for the same goal, testing chronological versus skills-based formats or tailoring a CV for academic versus industry positions. They can generate detailed outlines for an individual development plan, breaking down abstract goals into concrete, time-bound actions. They can devise practice tasks that address specific growth areas, such as mock interview questions for teaching-intensive positions or practice pitches tailored to different funding audiences. The point is not to paste in AI text; it is to lower the barriers of uncertainty and blank-page intimidation, making it easier to start building while keeping authorship and evidence squarely in the student’s hands.

    Connect: Communicate and Network With Purpose

    Connecting focuses on communicating with real people. Here, generative AI can lower the stakes for high-pressure interactions. By asking a chatbot to act the part of various audience members, students can rehearse multiple versions of a tailored 60-second elevator pitch, such as for a recruiter at a career fair, a cross-disciplinary faculty member at a poster session or a community partner exploring collaboration. Generative AI can also simulate informational interviews if students prompt the system to ask follow-up questions or even refine user inputs.

    In addition, students can leverage generative AI to draft initial outreach notes to potential mentors that the students then personalize and fact-check. They can explore networking strategies for conferences or professional association events, identifying whom to approach and what questions to ask based on publicly available information about attendees’ work.

    Even just five years ago, completing this nonexhaustive list of networking tasks might have seemed an impossibility for graduate students with already crammed agendas. Generative AI, however, affords graduate students the opportunity to become adept networkers without sacrificing much time from research and scholarship. Crucially, generative AI creates a low-risk space to practice, while it is the student who ultimately supplies credibility and authentic voice. Generative AI cannot build genuine relationships, but it can help students prepare for the human interactions where relationships form.

    Refine: Test, Adapt and Verify

    Refining is where judgment becomes visible. Before submitting a fellowship essay, for example, a student can ask the generative AI chatbot to simulate likely reviewer critiques based on published evaluation criteria, then use that feedback to align revisions to scoring rubrics. They can A/B test two AI-generated narrative approaches from the build stage with trusted readers, advisers or peers to determine which is more compelling. Before a campus talk, they can ask the chatbot to identify jargon, unclear transitions or slides with excessive text, then revise for audience accessibility.

    In each case, verification and ownership are nonnegotiable: Students must check references, deadlines and factual claims against primary sources and ensure the final product reflects their authentic voice rather than generic AI prose. A student who submits an AI-refined essay without verification may cite outdated program requirements, misrepresent their own experience or include plausible-sounding but fabricated details, undermining credibility with reviewers and jeopardizing their application.

    Cultivate Expert Caution, Not Technical Proficiency

    The goal is not to train students as prompt engineers but to help them exercise expert caution. This means teaching students to ask: Does this AI-generated text reflect my actual experience? Can I defend every claim in an interview? Does this output sound like me, or like generic professional-speak? Does this align with my values and the impression I want to create? If someone asked, “Tell me more about that,” could I elaborate with specific details?

    Students should view AI as a thought partner for the early stages of professional development work: the brainstorming, the first-draft scaffolding, the low-stakes rehearsal. It cannot replace human judgment, authentic relationships or deep expertise. A generative AI tool can help a student draft three versions of an elevator pitch, but only a trusted adviser can tell them which version sounds most genuine. It can list networking strategies, but only actual humans can become meaningful professional connections.

    Conclusion

    Each graduate student brings unique aptitudes, challenges and starting points. First-generation students navigating unfamiliar professional cultures may use generative AI to explore networking norms and decode unstated expectations. International students can practice U.S. interview conventions and professional correspondence styles. Part-time students with limited campus access can get preliminary feedback before precious advising appointments. Students managing disabilities or mental health challenges can use generative AI to reduce the cognitive load of initial drafting, preserving energy for higher-order revision and relationship-building.

    Used critically and transparently, generative AI can help students at all starting points explore, build, connect and refine their professional paths, alongside faculty advisers and career development professionals—never replacing them, but providing just-in-time feedback and broader access to coaching-style support.

    The question is no longer whether generative AI belongs in professional development. The real question is whether we will guide students to use it thoughtfully or leave them to navigate it alone. The explore-build-connect-refine framework offers one path forward: a structured approach that develops both professional competency and critical judgment. We choose guidance.

    Ioannis Vasileios Chremos is program manager for professional development at the University of Michigan Medical School Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies.

    William A. Repetto is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of English and the research office at the University of Delaware.

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  • Staff opinion of using AI – Campus Review

    Staff opinion of using AI – Campus Review

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  • The Meta-Lessons of College (opinion)

    The Meta-Lessons of College (opinion)

    What we learn in school comes in part, and perhaps the smaller part, through the manifest curriculum. We first learn skills—how to read and write and do arithmetic—and then we begin the long process of learning subject matter. This is what school is intended to impart to us. We are taught, in all manner of visible ways, how to do things and what we ought to know.

    From the start, we learn other things as well: how to follow rules, how organizational hierarchies work and how we can be held accountable for misbehavior. We learn, too, what matters to other members of our tribe—individual achievement, success in competition—and what makes some people more important than others. These are elements of the hidden curriculum, or what might be called the meta-lessons of school.

    By the time students get to college, they have already absorbed many such lessons, or they wouldn’t be here at all. But college offers a new set of meta-lessons. These are lessons about knowledge itself: how to assess it, how to identify its varieties, how it’s created. To miss out on these lessons, as can happen, is to miss out on what is most valuable about a college education.

    The meta-lessons of college come with political implications. As political scientists and others have shown, there is a diploma divide in this country. On one side is the largest and most loyal group of Trump supporters: whites without a college degree. On the other side are those with bachelor’s or advanced degrees, who tend to vote Democratic. Clearly, there is something about a college education that makes a difference in political behavior.

    Some analysts have argued that the divide reflects a feeling on the part of non-college-educated whites of being left behind in a high-tech economy. These feelings of disappointment and failure in turn make this group receptive to racist dog whistles—DEI policies are giving undeserving minorities unfair advantages!—used by right-wing politicians. Others have argued that the divide reflects an indoctrination into liberalism that students experience in college.

    Analyses of the diploma divide have been going on for nearly a decade, since soon after Trump’s first election in 2016. Sorting out this body of work would require a separate essay. Here I am proposing only that the divide owes in part to the meta-lessons of college, in that these lessons should, in theory, make people less susceptible to political hucksterism, emotionally manipulative rhetoric and the embrace of simple nostrums as solutions to complex social problems.

    And so it seems worthwhile for pedagogical and civic reasons to put the meta-lessons of college on the table. I identify seven that strike me as crucial. No doubt others’ lists will vary, as will ideas about how much these lessons matter. Yet it seems to me that these lessons, if taken to heart and applied, are what enable college graduates to sort sense from nonsense, fact from fiction and rational argument from demagoguery. Here, then, are the lessons.

    1. Empirical claims are distinct from moral claims. To say, for example, that the death penalty deters capital crimes is to make an empirical claim. It isn’t a matter of opinion. With the right data, we can determine whether this claim is true or not (it’s not). To say the death penalty is wrong is to make a moral claim that must be addressed philosophically. Students who learn how to make this fundamental distinction are less likely to be distracted by philosophical apples when empirical oranges are the issue. Whether revenge feels like justice, they will understand, has no bearing on its practical consequences.
    2. Evidence must be weighed. Arguments gain credence when supported by evidence, especially when it comes to empirical matters. But the importance of assessing the quantity and quality of supporting evidence is less widely appreciated. To the extent that college students learn how to do this—and acquire the inclination to do it even when an argument or analysis is emotionally appealing—they are less likely to be misled by anecdotes, atypical examples or cherry-picked studies that employ weak methods.
    1. Errors often hide in assumptions. An argument can be persuasive because it sounds good and appears to be backed by evidence. Yet it can still be wrong because it starts from false premises. A key meta-lesson in this regard is that it is important to examine the foundations of an argument for logical or empirical cracks that make it unsound. To always ask, “What does this argument take for granted that might be wrong?” is a valuable habit of mind, a habit nurtured in college classrooms where students are taught, likely at the cost of some discomfort, to interrogate their own beliefs.
    2. Logic matters. Poets might want to express the contradictory multitudes they contain, but those who purport to offer serious political analysis must respect logic, the absence of which ought to be discrediting. If your theory of social attraction says birds of a feather flock together, except when opposites attract, you had better find a higher-order principle that reconciles the contradiction or admit that you’re just making stuff up. The meta-lesson that logic matters, again learned through disciplined skepticism, provides at least partial protection against toxic nonsense.
    3. Truth can be elusive, but it is not an illusion. Truth has taken a beating in recent decades under the influence of postmodernist social theories. Even so, it remains possible, unless we abandon the idea of evidence altogether, to have confidence that some empirical claims are true, in the ordinary sense of the term. Students learn this in their subject-matter courses; they learn that research can turn up real facts, that some empirical claims warrant more confidence than others and that some claims are demonstrably wrong. This meta-lesson can help ward off the nihilism—the paralyzing feeling that it is impossible to know what to believe—that often arises in the face of a blizzard of lies.
    1. Expertise is real. In college, students encounter people who have spent years studying, and possibly creating new knowledge about, some aspect of the natural or social world. These people—scientists, scholars—know more about their subject-matter areas than just about anyone else. The meta-lesson, hopefully one that sticks, is that hard-won expertise exists, and while experts might not always be right, they are more reliable sources of analysis than glib pundits and unctuous politicians.
    2. A slogan is not an analysis. Slogans that are useful as rallying cries often deliver no real understanding. “Defund the police” is as useful a guide to crime prevention as “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people” is to addressing the problem of gun violence. Other examples abound. The important meta-lesson is that a useful, sense-making analysis of a complex problem is likely to be complex in itself—and it would be wise, as college students ought to learn, not to forsake complexity in favor of a catchy sound bite.

    The suggestion that these meta-lessons inoculate college graduates against irrationality and unreason stumbles against the fact that college graduates can still succumb to these maladies. It’s hard to know whether this occurs because the lessons were not learned, or if circumstances make it expedient to forget them. I suspect that when well-educated people—the JD Vances and Josh Hawleys of the world—appear not to have learned these lessons, what we’re seeing is a cynical performance in the service of self-interest. The lessons were indeed learned, I further suspect, but are applied perversely, as when the physician becomes a skilled poisoner.

    Nonetheless, the diploma divide is real; a college education, on average, all else being equal, does seem to make people more resistant to misinformation, comforting myths, evidence-free claims about the world, irrational emotional appeals, illogical arguments and outright lies. This is as it should be; it is higher education having the effects it ought to have, effects that can impede authoritarianism. To be sure, college is not the only place where this kind of critical acumen is acquirable. College is just the place best organized to cultivate it.

    In the end, the issue is not the diploma divide. For educators, the issue should be how to do a better job of transmitting the meta-lessons of college, presuming a shared belief in the value of these lessons for the intellectual and civic benefits they can yield. Spotlighting these elements of the “hidden curriculum” of course means they are not hidden at all, and so when critics insist that our job is to teach students how to think, we can say, “Yes, look here: That is exactly what we’re doing.”

    Michael Schwalbe is professor emeritus of sociology at North Carolina State University.

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  • 4 Ways to Better Grade Team Projects (opinion)

    4 Ways to Better Grade Team Projects (opinion)

    Some professors resist using teamwork in their classes because they mistakenly believe that team projects are too difficult to grade. One issue is that, as educators, we often only evaluate the team presentation, project or paper with a grade based on how well the team has met our learning objectives.

    However, a single project evaluation at the end allows some members to potentially free ride on harder-working teammates, or enables one aggressive or dominating member to take over the entire project to ensure the team gets an A. If we simply grade team projects at the end, it is too late for our student teams to adapt or adjust and learn how to be better at working in teams, a key skill that employers look for in our graduates.

    The key to effectively grading teamwork is to set up the grading process systematically at the start of the project. In this article, we offer four ways that you can grade team projects effectively to meet your learning objectives and help students become better team members.

    1. Share your grading rubric at the start of the assignment. Students need to know at the outset of the team project how they will be graded. Many good students tell us they hate team projects because they know they will have to deal with “social loafers” who rely on one or two others to do the work. However, by sharing a rubric that highlights the expectations for each team member and how you will be combining individual and team grading, you can help students make more intentional decisions regarding how they distribute the assignment’s requirements. We not only distribute the rubric at the start of the project, but we post it on our course management system and frequently review it with the class so our expectations are clear.
    2. Include peer evaluation as a part of the evaluation process. Students are sometimes asked to rate their fellow team members, but they are seldom taught how to do it well. As a result, they tend to only give positive feedback to avoid conflict or hurting another student’s feelings. Teaching peer feedback takes only a little class time, as few as 15 minutes. It starts with clarifying your expectations about how you will use peer feedback. You can use or create a form that allows students to provide quantitative and qualitative feedback, and then you should use this same form multiple times during the project. The first time you collect peer feedback should be a low-stakes or practice situation early during the project so that students have a psychologically safe opportunity to learn how to use it. Your students should begin with self-evaluation and then evaluate their peers.
      Next, you need to summarize the peer feedback and give results to individual students so they know how they are doing. Finally, have groups reflect on how well the group is doing without naming or shaming others. There are times when students will have to give feedback to a person who is free riding or loafing. When they do, make sure they know to first ask that person for permission before they give feedback, then praise in public, and finally provide any negative feedback in private. Finally, we have a YouTube video that instructors can show during class to help students learn about how to give and receive feedback.
    1. Incorporate ongoing feedback from the instructor. We know of faculty who give out a team assignment and never mention it again until the week before the project is due. This is setting up the student teams for failure. Faculty need to check in frequently with their teams to be sure they are making progress on their work and any questions or concerns are answered. Taking just five minutes at the end of class for teams to meet can pay great dividends in a better project product. This instructor feedback can include a way to hold individual team members accountable for the work they are doing. For example, we have set up a separate Google folder for each team with instructor access. Each team member needed to post their contributions to the team project weekly. In this way, we could keep an eye on any social loafers, and provide feedback to those who were working independently instead of with the team. Instructors can also schedule a brief time to sit in on team meetings so that they get a more comprehensive update about the project and who is working toward each of the outcomes.
    2. Carefully consider the weight you give to each phase of the project. It is essential to incorporate peer assessments and the instructor evaluation about how well the project met the learning objectives into any final grade; both are important. However, the weight of these different evaluations tells students the importance of each. More weight on the individual peer assessments stresses the individual work, while more weight on the instructor grade of the project shows the team efforts are more important. At a minimum, use the 80/20 rule: At least 20 percent of the student’s grade should be based on each.
      Also, be sure to check the peer evaluations to verify that they result from real behaviors rather than personal biases. We accomplish this by looking for consistency across the times of evaluation, across team members and between peer and self-evaluations. In most cases, we find that the evaluations show consistency in all three areas (though self-evaluations are often inflated). In the rare cases when they don’t align, we always refer to supporting documentation, such as agendas, meeting minutes and information that resulted from our ongoing check-ins to help make sense of the reasons underlying any inconsistencies.

    Grading a team project may seem like a daunting challenge, but grading is by no means a reason to avoid giving students the experience of working with a team. By following these four principles for evaluating teamwork, instructors can account for the team’s achievement of the learning objectives as well as provide students with valuable teamwork experiences that they can take to future classes, internships, co-ops and employment.

    Lauren Vicker is a communications professor emeritus, and Tim Franz is a professor of psychology, both at St. John Fisher University. They are the authors of Making Team Projects Work: A College Instructor’s Guide to Successful Student Groupwork (Taylor & Francis, 2024).

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  • IVF and the Leadership Gap for Women (opinion)

    IVF and the Leadership Gap for Women (opinion)

    After a 20-year career in higher education, including roles as a chief academic officer and faculty member, I left to have a child. I was one step away from a presidency on the higher ed career ladder, and in fact I had written my dissertation on what gets in the way of women moving into college presidencies. Yet it was not until I finally met my life partner and had the opportunity, in my 40s, to start a family that I understood how fully the higher ed career deck is still stacked against those seeking to have children, and especially those seeking to have children in nontraditional ways—largely women, LGBTQIA+ folks and anyone facing a difficult pregnancy, in vitro fertilization, adoption or fostering process.

    In the United States, 2.6 percent of all births—95,860 babies in 2023—result from IVF, a time-consuming, costly and physically and emotionally challenging process. The percentage for women academics may be even higher, given their relatively high education levels, socioeconomic status and pressure to delay childbearing for academic careers. According to Pew, 56 percent of people with graduate degrees have gone through or know someone who has undergone IVF or other assisted reproduction.

    The literature has well documented how the academy has been created by men and is designed to fit their needs and their bodies. Women who have sought professorships or academic leadership positions have, historically, needed to conform to rules written for men’s life cycles. Articles such as Carmen Armenti’s classic “May Babies and Posttenure Babies” speak to women’s attempts to give birth at the end of the academic year and after earning tenure. The tenure clock illustrates this issue well—the usual seven years in which a newly hired assistant professor has time to sufficiently publish and obtain tenure largely coincide with women’s most fertile years. Many forward-thinking institutions such as the University of California system have been addressing this issue by stopping the tenure clock for childbirth and related family formation. It is a step in the right direction that all colleges and universities should consider.

    But what happens when the usual challenges of pregnancy and childbirth are compounded by infertility, miscarriage and the sometimes years-long process of IVF?

    I met my husband during the pandemic, and we married the next year. Both of us in our 40s and having always wanted a child but neither having met the right partner, we quickly found ourselves going down the IVF route. At the time, I had completed a one-year executive interim role and was on the job hunt and doing part-time remote teaching, and this situation proved fortuitous.

    I had no idea how grueling the IVF process would be—multiple rounds of more than a month at a time of hormone pills; nightly self-administered injections for weeks on end; weekly doctor visits, blood draws and ultrasounds—and at the end of each round, a day surgery under anesthesia to retrieve eggs. Several iterations of this, followed by more of a similar process to prepare the body for embryo transfer. The journey is physically and emotionally exhausting, time-consuming, and logistically challenging. It can also be incredibly expensive, with the medications and surgeries costing into the tens of thousands for those whose health insurance does not cover it.

    My husband and I had a number of factors helping us on this journey. We had built a supportive network of family and friends. We were fortunate that I was less sick than many women are on these medications. Finally, we were privileged to have insurance (through my husband’s job, which is not in higher ed) that paid for the majority of our treatments. Due to working part-time and remotely, I had the flexibility I needed to take naps, wear comfortable clothes that fit my bloated belly without having to reveal my family-forming status to anyone at work and generally have the privacy I needed during a challenging time.

    Other women who work full-time in-person during this process navigate a daunting gauntlet of frequent doctor appointments, exhaustion and sickness at work, while trying to hide a body that can look pregnant before it is. Not to mention that few people fully understand the process, and telling a little can lead you down an uncomfortable path of revealing a lot. Because everything is timed to the menstrual cycle, seemingly innocent questions inevitably lead to awkward conversations. It’s therefore hard to share what you’re going through or ask for support at work at the time you need it most.

    And then there are the chemical pregnancies and miscarriages that can happen, and did for us. Grieving for both parents is exacerbated by the isolation and privacy of the whole process. Some companies and higher ed institutions, such as Tufts University in Massachusetts, now offer bereavement leave for miscarriage, something that happens in 10 to 20 percent of pregnancies but is still rarely talked about. All institutions throughout higher ed should offer similar leave.

    During this journey, I was also interviewing for full-time jobs, and I was hired into a senior leadership position. My husband and I were taking a break from the exhausting process at that point and the opportunity was once-in-a-lifetime, and so we picked up and moved two states away. My husband’s job had gone remote, giving us the flexibility we needed for my career. We wagered that if I stayed in a part-time role too much longer, it would be increasingly difficult to climb back into a full-time position. The stigma around a résumé gap is alive and well in higher education, with little understanding that this gap often reflects people’s (frequently women’s) time away for family and other care-taking needs, rather than their work experience or abilities. Yet, even when I’ve tried to explain to search committees that I’ve led how discriminatory it can be to overly focus on résumé gaps, faculty and staff often have looked askance at me. This is something else that needs to change.

    My husband and I waited almost a year before doing our next embryo transfer. I settled into the job, we settled into our home, we finally had a post-COVID celebration of our marriage. And then I was pregnant! Sadly, I miscarried again toward the end of my first trimester. I powered through at work, serving as a chief academic officer and supervising 200 people while trying to juggle meds, doctor’s appointments, exhaustion and then loss. I read students’ names at a stadium-sized graduation ceremony soon after a miscarriage.

    It became clear to me over the following months that the stress and lack of flexibility of a senior role would not lend itself to a last chance at a healthy pregnancy. It was a difficult decision to leave, but also one that I had no doubts about once made. Within weeks we were pregnant again, this time successfully so with a beautiful baby girl who is now a year old. It was not an easy pregnancy, and our daughter likely would not be here had I stayed in my role and not been able to rest as much as I did.

    Since her birth, I have launched a higher ed editing and consulting business, resumed teaching part-time, and otherwise adjusted to life as a new mother. For me, leaving higher ed senior leadership was a deliberate choice. I needed more flexibility and control over my own time to be able to care for myself and my child properly. I may or may not return someday to that leadership pathway, and that door may or may not be open to me if I attempt to do so. I’ve learned, however, that to address the question my dissertation asked—Why don’t we have more women in presidencies?—we need to better understand and respond to the many women (and many men and nonbinary folks) who find themselves going through similar family-formation challenges across higher education.

    • First, we need to offer more flexibility—remote work, flexible hours, the option for extended parental leaves for new parents and foster parents.
    • Second, we need to consider not only fully paid leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act for childbirth and parental bonding, but also paid medical benefits for IVF as well as similar support for adoption and fostering.
    • Third, we need to formalize bereavement leave for miscarriage.
    • Fourth, we need to destigmatize the career gap, so that those who leave would have the opportunity to return.
    • Fifth, we need to fairly compensate those who assume the work of colleagues who take FMLA for any care-taking reason.
    • Lastly, we need to change the higher ed culture to one that understands and supports family formation in all its iterations, not just traditional pregnancy with traditional medical leaves.

    I recognize my privilege in being able to leave my job—privilege that enabled me to have a child when so many before me without the same economic resources have not been able to. My situation may seem like an outlier to those who are in their 20s or early 30s or who have had relatively easy and healthy pregnancies. But I’m sure that my story rings true for those who have delayed childbearing for their academic careers and then faced the rigors of IVF, or for people of any age who have faced infertility or more difficult pregnancies. For those LGBTQIA+ and other folks who go through the egg/sperm donation process and IVF and surrogacy. For couples and singles who may adopt or foster and face needs for legal meetings and other child-related time off that institutions do not always provide.

    Higher ed has taught me so much about antiracism, feminism, LGBTQIA+ rights and other inclusive practices. However, higher ed writ large doesn’t offer the kinds of paid leave and flexibility needed for all employees to succeed at both parenting and work.

    Higher ed is losing women with executive leadership potential. The majority of undergraduate and graduate students are women. Yet only 37 percent of full-time faculty are women. Only 33 percent of college presidents are women. Women melt away for a host of reasons. But this former chief academic officer, one step away from a presidency on the career ladder, left the executive pathway because it was the only way I could do so and have a healthy pregnancy and a healthy child.

    As long as higher ed makes having a child versus having an academic career a zero-sum choice for many women, it shouldn’t be a surprise that we still have so few women in senior leadership. When the answer becomes “yes, have both” at institutions across the board is when we might start to see the numbers change.

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  • How D.C. Public Schools Are Reimagining What’s Possible for Every Student – The 74

    How D.C. Public Schools Are Reimagining What’s Possible for Every Student – The 74


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    Every morning in the District of Columbia, nearly 100,000 students step into 251 public schools with hopes and ambitions for their future. After years of pandemic disruption, recent results show clear signs of progress in how students are recovering and advancing.

    In our roles as deputy mayor for education and state superintendent, we see something remarkable taking shape — a citywide education system leading the nation in how to reimagine what’s possible for every child.

    This year’s statewide assessment results tell a clear story of momentum. On the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment of Progress in Education, students made the largest gains in English Language Arts and math proficiency since the pandemic. Forty percent of schools raised proficiency by at least 5 points in one of these subjects, and more than 60% showed measurable progress in both. Across the city, 137 of 223 tested schools boosted English scores, while 141 schools improved in math.

    ELA proficiency has now surpassed pre-COVID levels, increasing from 37.5% in 2019 to 37.6% in 2025. Math proficiency reached a record high since COVID, rising from 19.4% in 2022 to 26.4% this year. This is evidence that students are not only recovering, but moving forward at a faster pace than before the pandemic.

    National data confirms this progress. The Harvard Center for Education Policy and Research’s 2024 Education Recovery Scorecard ranked D.C. first in the nation for learning recovery in both math and reading for grades 3 to 8 between 2022 and 2024. In that two-year period, D.C. students gained back the equivalent of half a grade level in math and a quarter of a grade level in reading. Just a few years ago, D.C. ranked 32nd in math recovery since 2019; today, it leads the country.

    Federal relief dollars helped make this possible. D.C. received more than $600 million in K-12 pandemic recovery funds, about $6,800 per student — nearly double the national average of $3,700. Research shows that targeting these dollars toward tutoring, summer learning and other evidence-based strategies contributed directly to the rebound.

    Together, these results demonstrate what families and educators across the city already feel in classrooms: Students are making meaningful, historic gains in learning.

    Several factors are driving this progress. Since 2015, local per-student funding has increased from $16,032 to $28,040 — a 75% rise — with more money provided for serving students with the greatest needs.

    D.C.’s early education stands above national enrollment levels, with 95% of 4-year-olds and 82% of 3-year-olds citywide enrolled in pre-K. At the high school level, more students are graduating in four years than in 2010-11, with nearly a 20- point increase since 2010-11, growing from 58.6% to 76.1%. These students now graduate with college credits, industry certifications and real-world experience in high-demand fields through career and technical Education programs, dual enrollment and our growing network of citywide Advanced Technical Centers, preparing them for success in their next chapter.

    The Education Through Employment Pathways initiative enables the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education to connect data from pre-K-12 with postsecondary outcomes to better identify which programs propel students forward in college and careers, helping D.C. make future investments accordingly.

    Teachers are a cornerstone of this progress. Thanks to big investments in recent years, D.C. Public School educators now earn an average salary of $109,000, among the highest in the nation, with comparable pay in charter schools. Investments in professional development, coaching, structured literacy training, high-quality instructional materials in literacy and math and high-impact tutoring have also helped to strengthen classroom instruction, so students feel challenged, supported and inspired. At the same time, D.C. is tackling barriers outside the classroom, securing school-based mental health supports, providing safe passage to schools and expanding the District’s Out of School Time programming. As a result, chronic absenteeism overall has declined 18.3% between 2021-22 and 2023-24, while profound chronic absenteeism — a student missing 30% or more of school days — is down 34.2% over the same time period. 

    The vast majority of families receive one of their top choices of district and charter schools through a universal enrollment lottery, helping drive D.C.’s national leadership in parent satisfaction. This system, combined with investments in quality and variety, has helped drive the city’s sustained enrollment growth since the 2008-09 school year and added more than 5,000 students after COVID. This is at a time when many large districts across the country experienced declines.

    D.C.’s education success isn’t just about test scores. It’s about the child who now walks into class with confidence because tutoring makes reading click. It’s about the high schooler graduating with a resume that includes a paid internship and college credits already earned. It’s about showing the nation that D.C. students — no matter their background or income — can succeed at the highest levels.

    D.C.’s experience shows how large urban education systems can rebound and thrive when funding is deep and sustained, resources meet student needs, teachers are well supported and compensated, and learning starts early.

    While challenges remain, the data show encouraging momentum that is worth studying nationally. D.C.’s educational vision invariably focuses on ensuring every child is prepared for higher education and a family-sustaining career, while making certain that the city continues to be the nation’s talent capital.

    D.C.’s public education leaders can keep proving to the nation what happens when a city dreams big for every student, invests strategically and stays the course: Students and schools will surpass expectations.

    Paul Kihn is deputy mayor for education in the District of Columbia. Dr. Antoinette Mitchell is state superintendent of education for the District of Columbia.


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  • Universities Are Curators of Knowledge, Not Chaos (opinion)

    Universities Are Curators of Knowledge, Not Chaos (opinion)

    In a year already defined by polarization and violence, the assassination of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University plunged higher education into crisis. The killing of one of the nation’s most prominent conservative activists on a college campus has been weaponized by political factions, prompting administrative crackdowns and faculty firings. What were once familiar battles in the campus culture wars have escalated into something more dangerous: a struggle over the very conditions of inquiry, where violence, scandal and political pressure converge to erode academic freedom. And now, a proposed “compact” with higher education institutions would seek to condition federal funding on requirements that colleges ensure a “broad spectrum of viewpoints” in each academic department and that they abolish “institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”

    At the center of this struggle lies a persistent illusion: that the university should provide a platform for “every perspective.” Critics claim campuses suppress conservative voices or silence dissenting students, arguing institutions should resemble open marketplaces where all viewpoints compete for attention. Enticing as this rhetoric may be, the expectation is both unworkable and misguided. No university can present every possible outlook in equal measure, nor should it. The mission of higher education is more demanding: to cultivate, critique and transmit knowledge while attending to perspectives that have shaped history and public life. The contrast between an endless marketplace of opinion and the rigorous pursuit of knowledge is crucial to understanding what universities are for.

    Karl Mannheim once distinguished between ideology and knowledge, cautioning against their uncritical conflation. That warning remains essential. Universities are not platforms for unchecked ideology but institutions dedicated to showing how knowledge emerges through observation, interpretation, critique and debate. Perspectives matter, but exposure alone is insufficient; they must be contextualized and weighed against evidence. Free speech and academic freedom overlap but are not the same. Free speech protects individuals from state repression in public life. Academic freedom protects scholars in their pursuit of inquiry and ensures students gain the tools to test claims critically. The distinction is central: The university has an obligation not to amplify all voices equally, but to cultivate discernment.

    This does not mean shielding students from offensive or discredited ideas. On the contrary, a serious education requires grappling with perspectives that once commanded influence, however abhorrent they may now appear. Students of American history must study the intellectual justifications once advanced for slavery—not because they deserve validation, but because they shaped institutions and legacies that continue to structure society. Students of religious history should encounter theological controversies that once divided communities, whether or not they resonate today, because they explain enduring traditions and conflicts. To include such perspectives is not to offer them equal standing with contemporary knowledge, but to illuminate their historical weight and consequences.

    Confusing exposure with endorsement—or opinion with knowledge—risks leaving students adrift in noise. Universities are not megaphones for any thesis but arenas where students learn how to evaluate sources, test claims and trace the consequences of ideas over time. Academic freedom does not mean a free-for-all. Instead, it allows scholars to curate, critique and contextualize knowledge—including ideas that are controversial, even offensive or (as in the study of slavery or fascism) historically consequential. Education that multiplies opinions without cultivating methods of judgment undermines critical capacity; education that fosters discernment equips students to enter public debates wisely and responsibly.

    Recent events in higher education reveal how fragile these principles have become. Violence itself intimidates expression, but administrative and political overreaction magnifies the threat. Faculty have been disciplined for social media posts. In Texas, a lecturer was dismissed for teaching about gender identity. In California, University of California, Berkeley administrators released to federal authorities the identities of more than a hundred students and faculty whose names appeared (as accused, accuser or affected party) in complaints about antisemitism. Faculty watch colleagues punished unjustly, while students—especially international and marginalized ones—face surveillance and potential charges. Across the country, dissent is mistaken for hate, controversial speech treated as threat and scandal avoidance prioritized over defending expressive rights.

    Academic freedom has long enjoyed special constitutional protection, granting professors wide latitude in teaching and research. But this protection depends on public trust: the sense that higher education fosters critical inquiry rather than partisan indoctrination. When professors behave as ideologues or exercise poor judgment in public, that trust erodes. Yet the greater danger comes not from individual missteps but from capitulating to the demand that every perspective deserves equal standing—or from letting violence and political pressure set the boundaries of what may be said. Higher education should not resemble a bazaar of endless opinion but a community dedicated to the disciplined creation, transmission and critique of knowledge. By training students not to hear every voice equally but to weigh evidence and evaluate claims, universities preserve both their scholarly mission and their democratic role. Institutions that cave to intimidation, or that mistake neutrality for abdication, abandon their responsibility to defend inquiry.

    Equally important, universities serve as legitimating institutions. To place a perspective within their walls signals that it merits serious study, that it has crossed the threshold from private belief to public knowledge. This conferral of legitimacy makes curatorial responsibility critical. Treating perspectives as interchangeable voices distorts the university’s purpose, but so does admitting or excluding them solely under political pressure. Both compromises undermine credibility. External actors understand this and exploit universities’ legitimating authority, pressing institutions to provide platforms that elevate discredited or dangerous views into claims of scholarly validation. The responsibility of the university is not to magnify every claim in equal volume but to steward the line between ideas worth engaging and those demanding correction or refusal. Only in this way can institutions preserve their academic mission and their democratic contribution.

    The way forward is neither unbounded opinion nor fearful silence. It is the principled defense of creating, critiquing and reimagining knowledge through inquiry guided by evidence and protected from violence and censorship. To retreat from this responsibility is to weaken not only higher education but democracy itself.

    Gerardo Martí is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Sociology at Davidson College.

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  • Stop Labeling Students “First-Gen” (opinion)

    Stop Labeling Students “First-Gen” (opinion)

    New policy mandates force us to rethink how best to meet what the Boyer 2030 Commission termed “the equity-excellence imperative.” One way to pursue this goal is to consider the role played by first-generation student success initiatives, which continue to enjoy broad public support. In the current climate, higher ed may be forgiven a rush to establish centers or initiatives for first-generation student success, as many colleges and universities already have. But before we get to raising funds and creating logos, let’s pause and consider new ways to think about and organize such efforts to best meet the moment.

    To put it bluntly, what business is it of ours, or anyone’s, what a student’s parents’ educational attainment happens to be? The usual answer is that we inquire because we aim to foster upward social mobility, and because we know from research that students who are the first in their families to attend college do not succeed at the same cohort rates as so-called continuing-generation students. But I emphasize cohort rates because we are not talking about a group, defined by self-awareness and interaction, but indeed a cohort, defined by impersonal and ill-defined criteria. At the level of individuals and families, first-gen discourse presumes deficits, is intrusive and can be off-putting and condescending.

    Neither of your parents (you have two, right?) earned a bachelor’s degree?

    I’d venture that most who work with first-gen students would agree that there are enduring questions about how best to define who is and is not first-generation using one of several plausible definitions. And even after four decades of promotion, I think it’s fair to say that few students arrive on campus as self-conscious “first-gens,” however defined.

    Some imagine that they qualify if they are the first of their siblings to attend college. Others wonder, understandably, if a parent’s associate degree or years of college attendance not resulting in degree attainment substitutes for an earned bachelor’s degree. A few may even think, erroneously, that they qualify if they are the first in their family to attend a particular institution.

    And then there are the overriding problems of stigma and stereotype threat. Efforts to dispel negative connotations and instill pride notwithstanding—First!—most people can smell a rat when in the presence of Rodentia. While some minoritized students may find it a useful alternative to other, more vexing labels, many students wrestle with it, as they might with any label, especially in the absence of a related scholarship or other inducement. I used to regularly tell first-gens that the land-grant university to which they had matriculated was theirs, that it was made for them and that it was nice of them to let others use it, too. But such tricks of the trade are needed only because the reality, often stark, is so contrary.

    Instead of fighting a Sisyphean battle tainted by class bias, I suggest that we acknowledge that first-gen discourse defines students by a characteristic that is out of their control and that the label is troubling when applied to individual students. Consider that we have more control over almost every other way of identifying ourselves, including our gender and sexuality! Parents, guardians and other parental authorities are as close to a given as it gets, and to define one by a given is reductionist and objectifying.

    To help underscore the stakes involved, consider this thought experiment. What if we labeled students whose parents possess earned doctorates as “dockies” and awarded them membership in the honors program? Most would recoil at even the thought of it. We assume that dockies are privileged or at least not in need of privileged access to scarce resources. We imagine them as possessed of abundant social and cultural capital and a healthy amount of regular old capital, too. Why actively reproduce privilege?

    But let us immediately observe that such assumptions are just as potentially ill-founded for individual dockies as they are for individual first-gens. Ask a Ph.D.-holding parent of a neurodiverse child, of a drug-addicted child, a child with disabilities, a child prone to perfectionism, a child of mild ambition and so forth, and they are apt to share an earful. And let us acknowledge that dockies are often given access to scarce resources such as merit-based scholarships and extra help via supportive honors programs, and for legitimate reasons. For one, these students earn such considerations by virtue of their academic achievement. They also may need them to fulfill their considerable potential.

    The key distinction, then, is between how we relate to students as individuals and what we do to make our institutional practices and campus cultures accessible and just. But before saying more about that, I acknowledge that there is an entrenched cultural assumption in play. We hold that individuals are infinitely complex and of universal value, each unique and sacred. (I mean this exactly and empirically; no rhetorical flourish or exaggeration is involved.) Individual students are not, in this view, bearers of three or four defining categories, nor should we treat them as representatives of groups. That is called stereotypical thinking, and it leads to tokenism, and neither stereotypical thinking nor tokenism have ever been good things. Students have multiple identities, as we all do, and we should not presume which of them are most salient or assume that they are immutable or invariant.

    When, however, we turn attention to institutional and cultural realities—particularly to our college and university’s policies and practices, to campus values, norms and built environment and so forth—then, yes, by all means, dust off social science and humanities textbooks and deploy concepts, data and pertinent humanistic discourses that are needed to make sense of systems, contested histories, shared meanings and the like. Here is where centers for first-generation student success have their rightful place, as hubs for institutional reform, designed to bring into existence a higher education that meets students where they are, as we say.

    First-gen centers might support research into how students experience college life and in other ways help faculty, staff, administrators and graduate students working with undergraduate students to better understand and interact with them. (Three cheers for faculty meals in residence halls!) First-gen centers might facilitate integration of high-impact practices into curricula, rendering these no-longer-nice-to-haves affordable and accessible, and help banish class biases as revealed in diffuse condescension by the college-educated and well-heeled with respect to those thus othered and belittled. Let us put an end to arcane language used for the latent purpose of policing class distinctions and eliminate barriers of entry to STEM majors, which track already underresourced students into lower-paying professions, however otherwise socially vital and personally fulfilling.

    Colleges and universities cannot meet their missions in a democratic society unless they are shorn of institutionalized discrimination rooted in white supremacy, patriarchy, what the poet Adrienne Rich called “compulsory heterosexuality,” ableism, ageism, as well as discrimination against veterans and active-duty armed service members, students whose home countries are not the United States or for whom English is not their first language, students from rural communities, students from urban communities, students from tribal communities, students from foster homes, students who are first-gen as well as students who identify with one or more of the above and then some. Our to-do list is long and varied.

    First-gen discourse is, like most student success discourse, best suited for use by administrators. It is not usually the language of educators, nor should we foist it upon students themselves. To best aid students who are the first in their families to attend college, make higher education affordable, campuses welcoming, curricula efficient and effective. Facilitate transfer student success via inter-institutional peer tutoring, and in myriad similar ways remove the fences surrounding the ol’ ball field in the DEI social imaginary. Higher education may then serve the people, one individual at a time.

    Steven P. Dandaneau is an associate professor of sociology at Colorado State University. He is a former advisory board member for the Center for First-Generation Student Success, an initiative of NASPA: Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education and the Suder Foundation, and was recognized as a First Scholars First Generation Champion in 2018.

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