The Trump administration’s initial effort to convince universities to join its “Compact for Academic Excellence” did not go well. Of the original nine colleges and universities, so far none has signed it, and seven—Brown University, Dartmouth College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Universities of Arizona, Pennsylvania, Southern California and Virginia—have loudly and forcefully rejected it, citing “our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone” (MIT) and “the government’s lack of authority to dictate our curriculum or the content of academic speech” (Brown).
The Trump administration made more headway with its earlier efforts to force a “deal” on one university at a time. But that was never going to be enough. An authoritarian needs to establish control over the entire higher education sector, not just a handful of institutions. But the truth is, this government does not have the legal leverage or even the staff to negotiate bespoke agreements with the thousands of colleges and universities in the United States.
The compact is an effort to overcome that problem. But it is also a gift. It has flipped the default: Now collective action does not necessarily require affirmative acts like banding together to file a lawsuit (although several are warranted). Collective action can simply take the form of nonacquiescence. All university leaders need to do is … nothing.
Last week, the Trump administration—apparently unafraid to look desperate—decided to open the compact to any American college or university that will accept its terms. Suddenly, literally anyone affiliated with any college or university—faculty, staff, students, parents, alumni, trustees, donors—has the opportunity to use their voice to help persuade their institution not to sign, as their counterparts at the original nine invitees have been doing rather vociferously and, in six cases so far, successfully. By opening the compact so broadly, the government is risking, or inviting, an equally broad response: a recognition throughout the vast American higher education sector that the integrity and value of our whole enterprise depend on independence from government control.
Regardless of their politics, every university leader should reject this compact. University leaders have a fiduciary responsibility to plan ahead on a time scale longer than three years. As Sally Kornbluth, the president of MIT, explained, “America’s leadership in science and innovation depends on independent thinking and open competition,” not special “preferences” for institutions that submit to government control. Future federal governments are much more likely to embrace Kornbluth’s view than Trump’s. It does not put a university in a strong position to compete for future faculty and students if the university enthusiastically agrees to toe one administration’s political line.
To sign the compact is to invite a breathtaking degree of federal government control. Colleges signing it agree that in the future, if the Department of Justice—perhaps acting on orders from the president—“finds” that the university is disobeying any one of the compact’s many ambiguous commands, the department can take away all the university’s federal funding for a year or more. That includes not only scientific research grants but also student loans or Pell Grants, potentially even the university’s 501(c)(3) status—and not only future funds but also, incredibly, funds already spent that must somehow be returned.
The ambiguous rules that signing institutions must avoid transgressing are numerous. Signing universities must “abolish” or “transform” academic departments that “belittle” “conservative ideas.” They must screen out foreign students with “anti-American values” and those with “hostility” toward any of America’s “allies.” They must punish students or faculty whose speech, in the DOJ’s opinion, “support[s]” any group the government deems a terrorist group, which would include “antifa” as well as Hamas (and the government has a long recent record of defining “support for Hamas” extremely broadly, so that it encompasses much pro-Palestinian speech).
They must commit to “defining” and “interpreting” gender in the government’s preferred way, which denies that transgender people exist. Signing institutions must obtain, to the DOJ’s satisfaction, “a broad spectrum of viewpoints” not only in the university as a whole, but “within every field, department, school, and teaching unit.” They must admit students on the basis of sufficiently “objective” criteria. Leaders of signing universities must avoid speaking out about “societal and political events” beyond those that directly affect the university.
Not a single one of those terms is self-defining. The arbiter of whether a university is fulfilling these vague promises is a Department of Justice that has a record of acting in bad faith and takes orders from a notoriously mercurial president. No university leader or trustee can truthfully say that it fulfills their fiduciary responsibility to sign their school up for this.
The compact is also blatantly illegal. The Trump administration has cited no statutes that give it the authority to boss universities around in this way, because there aren’t any. Many of the compact’s provisions listed above—and others—violate the First Amendment. Clear black-letter law holds that what the government cannot impose by law, it also cannot impose as a condition of receiving government funds.
It is crucial to keep in mind the larger context here: the rise of an authoritarian regime that seeks to undermine the independence of many types of civil society institutions, not just universities. The national governments in both Turkey and Hungary have increased political control over their universities as part of their consolidation of power, but neither has gone as far as this compact would go in putting universities under the government’s thumb. To sign the compact is to participate in an authoritarian project.
Any university leaders still inclined to join the compact should consider a final argument: The dollars and cents simply don’t add up. The compact requires, among many other things, a five-year tuition freeze. In the high-inflation environment of the second Trump administration, this is very costly. (At today’s 3 percent inflation rate, it amounts to a 16 percent cut in real terms over five years; if inflation continues to rise, that could easily become a 20 to 25 percent cut.)
The government offers a vague, nonbinding promise that it will give signing institutions extra research grants, but such grants do not easily make up for lost tuition in an environment of rising costs. The grants require doing the research; that eats up most of the money. Any college that becomes dependent on extra grants, beyond those they would have been qualified to receive without the compact, is going to be in big fiscal trouble down the line.
This compact has vast implications, which deserve careful study. For faculty, staff, students, parents, donors and alumni hoping for a no but willing to settle for silence, time is your friend; inaction is your goal. A faculty committee would certainly be in order. If you do nothing, and most other universities do nothing, the government will have no more leverage over your institution than over any other, and academic freedom and the pursuit of knowledge and truth will continue for another day.
One of the great promises of higher education is that it acts as a social ladder—one that allows students from low-income backgrounds to climb up and reach a higher social and economic status. No one, I think, ever believed it was a guaranteed social leveler, or that children from wealthier families didn’t have an easier time succeeding after college because of their own, and their family’s, social and cultural capital. But most people, in America at least, believed that on the whole it played a positive role in increasing social mobility.
Over the past couple of decades, though, particularly as student debt has increased, people have begun to wonder if this story about social mobility through college is actually true. That’s a hard question to answer definitively. Data sets that track both student origins and outcomes are few and far between, and it’s also difficult to work out what social mobility used to look like in a quantifiable sense.
However, this summer economist Sarah Quincy of Vanderbilt University and Zach Bleemer of Princeton University released a paper called Changes in the College Mobility Pipeline Since 1900. This paper overcame some of those data limitations and took a long, more than century-long, look at the relationship between social mobility and college attendance.
What they found was sobering. Not only is higher education no longer helping poor students catch up with wealthier ones, but in fact the sector’s role as a social elevator actually stopped working almost 80 years ago. This seemed like a perfect story for the podcast, and so we invited Zach Bleemer—who you may remember from an episode on race-conscious admissions about two years ago—to join us to discuss it.
This discussion ranges from the methodological to the expositional. Where does the data come from? What does the data really mean? And are there alternative explanations for the paper’s surprising findings? But enough from me—let’s hear from Zach.
The World of Higher Education Podcast Episode 4.4 | The Widening Gap: Income, College, and Opportunity with Zachary Bleemer
Transcript
Alex Usher (AU): Zach, you wrote, with Sarah Quincy, a paper called Changes in the College Mobility Pipeline Since 1900, which looks a long way back. And you argue that the relative premium received by lower-income Americans from higher education has fallen by half since 1960. Take us through what you found—give us the 90-second elevator pitch.
Zachary Bleemer (ZB): Consider kids who were born in 1900 and were choosing whether or not to go to college in the late 1910s and early 1920s. What we were interested in was that choice, and in particular, following people for the next 20 years after they made it. Some people graduated high school but didn’t go to college, while others graduated high school and chose to go.
We wanted to compare the differences in early 1930s wages between those two groups—both for kids from lower-income backgrounds and kids from upper-income backgrounds. Now, you might be surprised to learn that there were lower-income kids going to college in the U.S. in the early 1920s, but there were. About 5 to 10% of people from the bottom parental income tercile even then were attending college.
What we found, when we linked together historical U.S. census records and followed kids forward, is that whether you were low-income or high-income, if you went to college your wages went up a lot. And the degree to which your wages went up was independent of whether you were low-income or high-income—everyone benefited similarly from going to college.
If you compare that to kids born in the 1980s, who were choosing to go to college in the late 1990s and early 2000s, you see a very different story. Everyone still gains from going to college, but kids from rich backgrounds gain a lot more—more than twice as much as kids from poor backgrounds. And that’s despite the fact they’re making the same choice. They’re going to different universities and studying different things, but when it comes down to the 18-year-old making a decision, those from poor families are just getting less from American higher education now than they did in the past—or compared to kids from rich backgrounds.
AU: I want to make sure I understand this, because it’s a crucial part of your argument. When you talk about relative premiums—premium compared to what, and relative compared to what?
ZB: What we always have in mind is the value of college for rich kids, and then asking: how much of that value do poor kids get too? In the early 20th century, and as late as the 1960s, those values were very similar. Lower-income kids were getting somewhere between 80 and 100% of the value of going to college as higher-income kids.
AU: And by “value,” you mean…
ZB: That just means how much your wages go up. So, the wage bump for lower-income kids was very similar to that of higher-income kids. Today, though, it’s more like half—or even a little less than half—of the economic value of college-going that lower-income kids receive compared to higher-income kids.
AU: So in effect, higher education is acting as an engine of greater inequality. That’s what you’re saying?
ZB: I guess it’s worth saying that lower-income kids who go to college are still getting ahead. But it’s not as much of a pipeline as it used to be. Higher education used to accelerate lower-income kids—not to the same level of income as their higher-income peers; they were never going to catch up—but at least they got the same bump, just from a lower starting point.
AU: So the gap widens now. But how do you make a claim like that over 120 years? I mean, I sometimes have a hard time getting data for just one year. How do you track college premiums across a period of 120 years? How sound is the empirical basis for this? You mentioned something about linking data to census records, which obviously go back quite a way. So tell us how you constructed the data for this.
ZB: The first-order answer is that I called up and worked with an economic historian who had much more experience with historical data than I did. Like you said, it’s hard in any period to get high-quality data that links students in high school—especially with information on their parental income—to wage outcomes 10 or 15 years later.
What we did was scan around for any academic or government group over the last 120 years that had conducted a retrospective or longitudinal survey—where you either follow kids for a while, or you find a bunch of 30-year-olds and ask them questions about their childhood. We combined all of these surveys into a comprehensive database.
In the early 20th century, that meant linking kids in the 1920 census, when they were still living with their parents, to the same kids in the 1940 census, when they were in their early thirties and working in the labor market. That link has been well established by economic historians and used in a large series of papers.
By the middle of the 20th century, sociologists were conducting very large-scale longitudinal surveys. The biggest of these was called Project Talent, put together by the American Institutes for Research in 1961. They randomly sampled over 400,000 American high school students, collected a ton of information, and then re-surveyed them between 1971 and 1974 to ask what had happened in their lives.
In more recent years, there’s been a large set of governmental surveys, primarily conducted by the Departments of Labor and Education. Some of these will be familiar to education researchers—like the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). Others are less well known, but there are lots of them. All we did was combine them all together.
AU: I noticed in one of the appendices you’ve got about nine or ten big surveys from across this period. I guess one methodological limitation is that they don’t all follow respondents for the same amount of time, and you’d also be limited to questions where the surveys provided relatively similar answers. You never get your dream data, but those would be the big limitations—you’ve got to look for the similarities, and that restricts you.
ZB: I’d add another restriction. You’re right that, as we filtered down which datasets we could use, the key variables we needed were: parental income when the student was in high school, level of education by age 30, and how much money they made at some point between ages 30 and 35. All of our surveys had those variables.
We also looked for information about what college they attended and what their college major was. Ideally, the surveys also included some kind of high school test—like the SAT or an IQ test—so we could see what kinds of students from what academic backgrounds were going to college.
But there was another key limitation. In most of the data before 1950, it was really difficult to get a direct measure of parental income. Instead, we usually had proxies like parental occupation, industry, or level of education—variables that are highly predictive of income, but not income itself.
So, a lot of the work of the paper was lining up these measures of varying quality from different surveys to make sure the results we report aren’t just noise from mismeasurement, but instead reflect real changes on the ground in American higher education.
AU: So you ran the data and noticed there was a sharp inflection point—or maybe not sharp, but certainly things started to get worse after 1960. When you first saw that, what were your hypotheses? At that point, you’ve got to start looking at whatever variables you can to explain it. What did you think the answer was, and what did you think the confounding variables might be?
ZB: My expectation was that two things would primarily explain the change. My background is in studying undergraduate admissions, so I thought the first explanation would be rising meritocracy in admissions. That might have made it harder for lower-income and lower-testing kids to get access to high-quality education. I also thought changes in affirmative action and in access to selective schools for kids from different backgrounds, along with rising tuition that made it harder for lower-income kids to afford those schools, could have played a big role. That was one possible story.
The second possible story is that it had nothing to do with the causal effect of college at all. Instead, maybe the poor kids who go to college today aren’t as academically strong as they were in the past. Perhaps in the past only the brilliant poor kids went to college, while all the rich kids went regardless of ability. So it could have looked like poor kids were getting a big benefit from college, when in fact those few who made it would have done well anyway.
It turns out neither of these explanations is the primary driver of rising regressivity. On the test score story, it’s always been the case that rich kids who go to college have relatively higher test scores than rich kids who just graduate high school—and that poor kids who go to college have relatively lower scores compared to their peers. That hasn’t changed since 1960.
And on the access story, it’s always been the case that rich kids dominate the schools we now think of as “good”—the fancy private universities and the flagship public universities. But over the last 50 years, poor kids have actually slightly increased their representation at those schools, not the other way around. Rising meritocracy hasn’t pushed poor kids out. If anything, the variety of admissions programs universities have implemented to boost enrollment among racial minority and lower-income students has relatively increased their numbers compared to 1950 or 1960.
AU: You were just making the case that this isn’t about compositional change in where poor students went. I heard you say there are more lower-income students at Harvard, Yale, and MIT than there were 50 or 60 years ago—and I have no doubt that’s true. But as a percentage of all poor students, surely that’s not true. The vast wave of lower-income students, often from minority backgrounds, are ending up in community colleges or non-flagship publics. Surely that has to be part of the story.
ZB: Yes. It turns out there are three primary trends that explain this rising collegiate regressivity, and you just hit on two of them.
The first is exactly your point: lower-income students primarily go to satellite public universities, basically all the non–R1 publics. Higher-income students, if they attend a public university, tend to go to the flagship, research-oriented universities.
I’ll skip talking about Harvard, Yale, and Princeton—almost no one goes to those schools, and they’re irrelevant to the overall landscape.
AU: Because they’re such a small piece of the pie, right?
ZB: Exactly. Fewer than 1% of students attend an Ivy Plus school. They don’t matter when we’re talking about American higher education as a whole. The flagships, though, matter a lot. About a third of all four-year college students go to a research-oriented flagship public university.
What’s happened since 1960 isn’t that poor kids lost access to those schools—it’s that they never really had access in the first place. Meanwhile, those schools have gotten much better over time. If you look at simple measures of university quality—student-to-faculty ratios, instructional expenditures per student, graduation rates—or even our own wage “value-added” measures (the degree to which each university boosts students’ wages), the gap between flagship and non-flagship publics has widened dramatically since the 1960s.
The flagships have pulled away. They’ve gotten more money—both from higher tuition and from huge federal subsidies, in part for research—and they’ve used that money to provide much more value to the students who attend. And those students tend to be higher income.
The second trend is what you mentioned: increasing diversion to community colleges. Interestingly, before 1980, community colleges were already well established in the U.S. and enrolled only slightly more lower-income than higher-income students. They actually enrolled a lot of high-income students, and the gap was small. Since the 1980s, though, that gap has grown substantially. There’s been a huge diversion of lower-income students toward community colleges—and those schools just provide lower-value education to the students who enroll.
AU: At some level this is a sorting story, right? You see that in discussions about American economic geography—that people sort themselves into certain areas. Is that what you’re saying is happening here too?
ZB: It’s not about sorting inside the four-year sector. It’s about sorting between the two- and four-year sectors. And on top of that, we think there’s fundamentally a story about American state governments choosing to invest much more heavily in their flagship publics—turning them into gem schools, amazing schools—while leaving the other universities in their states behind. Those flagships enroll far more higher-income than lower-income students.
AU: When I was reading this paper, one thing that struck me was how hard it is to read about American higher education without also reading something about race. The last time you were on, we were talking about SCOTUS and the Fair Harvard decision. But as far as I can tell, this paper doesn’t talk about race. I assume that goes back to our earlier discussion about data limitations—that race just wasn’t captured at some point. What’s the story there?
ZB: No—we observe race throughout this entire period. In fact, you could basically rewrite our study and ask: how has the relative value of college for white kids compared to Black kids changed over the last hundred years? I suspect you’d see very similar patterns.
The datasets we’re working with observe both parental income and race, but they aren’t large enough to separately analyze, for example, just white students and then compare lower- and higher-income groups over time. There’s a sense in which you could tell our story in terms of race, or you could tell it in terms of class—and both would be right. At a first-order level, both are happening. And within racial groups, the evidence we’ve been able to collect suggests that class gaps have substantially widened over time.
Similarly, we show some evidence that even within the lower-income group there are substantial gaps between white and Black students. So in part, I saw this as an interesting complement to the work I’d already done on race. It points out that while race is part of the story, you can also reframe the entire conversation in terms of America’s higher education system leaving lower-income students behind—irrespective of race.
AU: Right, because it strikes me that 1960 is only six years after Brown v. Board of Education. By the early to mid-1960s, you’d start to see a bigger push of Black students entering higher education, becoming a larger share of the lower-income sector. And a few years later, the same thing with Latino students.
Suddenly lower-income students are not only starting from further behind, but also increasingly made up of groups who, irrespective of education, face discrimination in the labor market. Wouldn’t that pull things down? Wouldn’t that be part of the explanation?
ZB: Keep in mind that when we measure wage premiums, we’re always comparing people who went to college with people who only finished high school. So there are Black students on both sides of that comparison, across both lower- and higher-income groups.
That said, I think your point is well taken. We don’t do any work in the paper specifically looking at changes in the racial composition of students by parental income over this period. One thing we do show is that the test scores of lower-income students who go to college aren’t falling over time. But you’re probably right: while racial discrimination affects both college-goers and non-college-goers, it’s entirely plausible that part of what we’re picking up here is the changing racial dynamics in college-going.
AU: What’s the range of policy solutions we can imagine here, other than, you know, taking money away from rich publics and giving it to community colleges? That’s the obvious one to me, but maybe there are others.
ZB: And not just community colleges—satellite publics as well. I’ve spent the last five years of my life thinking about how to get more disadvantaged students into highly selective universities, and what happens when they get there. The main takeaway from that research is that it’s really hard to get lower-income students into highly selective universities. It’s also expensive, because of the financial aid required.
But once they get into those schools, they tend not only to benefit in terms of long-run wage outcomes, they actually derive disproportionate value. Highly selective schools are more valuable for lower-income kids than for the higher-income kids who typically enroll there.
What I’ve learned from this project, though, is that the closing of higher education’s mobility pipeline isn’t fundamentally about access. It’s about investments—by state governments, by students, by donors, by all the people and organizations that fund higher education. Over time, that funding has become increasingly centralized in schools that enroll a lot of wealthy students.
So, the point you brought up—redirecting funds—is important. In California they call it “rebenching”: siphoning money away from high-funded schools and pushing it toward low-funded schools. There’s very little academic research on what happens when you do that, but our study suggests that this century-long trend of unequal investment has disadvantaged low-income students. Potentially moving in the other direction could make a real difference for them.
AU: Zach, thanks so much for being with us today.
ZB: My pleasure.
AU: It just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek, and you, our listeners and readers, for joining us. If you have any questions or comments about today’s podcast, or suggestions for future editions, don’t hesitate to get in touch at [email protected].
Join us next week when our guest will be Dmitry Dubrovsky, a research scholar and lecturer at Charles University in Prague. He’ll be talking to us about the slow-motion collapse of Russian higher education under Vladimir Putin. Bye for now.
*This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service.Please note, the views and opinions expressed in each episode are those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host and team, or our sponsors.
The last book I recommended for digital learning teams to read to fuel conversations about AI and higher education was Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With AI by Ethan Mollick. It is short, taking only four hours and 39 minutes to read in audiobook format. (Is there any other way to read books?)
Yuval Noah Harari’s Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI is an altogether different beast. Reading this book entails absorbing some significant opportunity costs at a portly 17 hours and 28 minutes of listening time.
Counterintuitively, at this moment in higher education, Nexus’s 17 hours and 28 minutes of required attention are more feature than bug. All of us working in digital learning and higher education would do well to trade time reading about the latest assault on our values and institutions and instead spend that time listening to Harari tell his AI story.
Despite the value of Nexus as a distraction from news, screens and any conversations about almost anything nowadays, real value can be derived from the book in our campus discussions about AI. Granted, a bit of handwaving may be necessary to connect Harari’s story with how we are going to infuse AI into our curriculum, course production and university administrative processes. As with most exercises in lateral thinking, the benefits come from the process, not the ends, and any attempt to connect the ideas in Nexus to campus AI policies and practices is sure to yield some interesting results.
What Harari sets out to do in Nexus is fit the emergence and future impact of AI within the broader historical story of the evolution of information networks. As with all prior information technology revolutions, AI (or at least generative AI) will decrease information creation and transmission costs.
In higher education, we already see the impact of AI-generated content, as AI-created assessments and AI-generated synthesis of course videos and readings appear across a wide range of online courses. Very quickly, we will start to see a transition from subject matter expert instructional videos to SME avatar media, generated from nothing more than a headshot and a script.
Harari’s worry about our AI future is that generative AI can create new information. Information does not equal knowledge, as platforms for dissemination can just as quickly (or more easily) spread disinformation as facts. What happens when generative AI generates and spreads so much disinformation that practical knowledge gets overwhelmed?
Unlike Mollick’s book Co-Intelligence, which is practical and positive, Nexus is abstract and a bit scary. It will be challenging to read Nexus with the goal of making connections with how we might handle the rise of generative AI on our campuses and within our industry without arriving at some level of pessimistic concern. After all, we are in the business of knowledge creation and dissemination, and generative AI promises to change (perhaps radically) how we go about both of these activities.
A second area of higher education AI concern that reading Nexus will do little to alleviate revolves around who creates the tools. The history of universities being dependent on the platforms of for-profit companies to accomplish our core mission-related teaching activities is not an encouraging precedent. The thought of higher education as a passenger in a corporate vehicle of AI tools and capabilities should invoke first worry and then action.
While Nexus’s lack of actionable steps for universities in the age of AI might frustrate many in our community looking for that road map, it may be that taking a 30,000-foot view is what is needed to best assess the landscape. What Nexus lacks in practical advice around AI for higher education, it excels in providing the overarching framework (information networks) and historical context in which to have different (and perhaps more ambitious) campus conversations on AI.
Despite a flurry of announcements for the higher education sector in the first half of 2025, much remains unknown about what is to come in this summer’s promised higher education reform plans. However, it is a pretty safe bet that opportunity and access will feature prominently. The Government has put ‘breaking down barriers to opportunity’ as one of its key missions for this Parliament, and higher education remains a core driver of social mobility.
Data consistently show that higher education qualifications are clearly and unambiguously associated with increased earnings and employment prospects. Research from the Sutton Trust found that attending a Russell Group university narrows the existing gap between state school students eligible for school meals and their privately educated peers in the likelihood of becoming a top earner.
At the same time, deeply entrenched inequalities prevail, as the UPP Foundation inquiry into widening participation highlights. The stark findings in itsrecent report included the difference in progression to higher education across the country: 71.6% of 18-year-olds in Battersea, compared to just 11.1% in Barrow-in-Furness. The Government is right to be looking at ways to address this striking imbalance, and universities are ready to be even more ambitious to reach more young people.
It is undoubtedly a huge challenge – both the task itself, given these inequalities are largely set at primary school and are already entrenched by the time it comes to post-16 options; and the wider context, given the university sector’s own financial challenges.
But good progress is being made. The number of young people from the most underrepresented backgrounds studying at Russell Group universities has seen a 56% increase since 2019. The number of Black placed applicants has increased by 62% in the same period. However, there is a mixed picture across the different measures of disadvantage – not helped by a cost-of-living crisis hot on the heels of the pandemic, both of which are still having an impact.
In this context, the Russell Group has today published a new paper, Building Opportunity For All. This sets out just some of the ambitious work our universities are already doing alongside new commitments they’ve made to going further. These commitments include expanding participation in regional partnerships, committing to a tailored support package for care leavers and care-experienced students, improving transparency around contextual admissions, and supporting the new TASO Evaluation Library to track the impact of activity.
These new collective commitments build on the work already detailed in universities’ access plans. These are being supported by an investment of more than £250m a year across the Russell Group.
Widening access is not a solo endeavour, which is why many of our ambitions involve making the most of partnerships with others inside and outside higher education. Combining ambitions and resources with others means our universities can go even further. Russell Group universities already spend millions of pounds a year on third sector partnerships, enabling us to provide almost 100,000 young people across the UK with practical support in achieving their university ambitions – from tutoring to advice on completing university applications.
Across the UK, universities are thinking creatively about what participation in higher education means for different people and how we can open up our campuses and opportunities to everyone. At the University of Bristol, partnership working not only helps young people gain a place at the University but also improves community engagement more broadly. The university has two micro-campuses located in areas of the city with the lowest higher education participation rates. Since 2020, the Barton Hill campus has worked with over 60 partners annually and welcomes 160+ users each week as a hub for research, teaching and outreach. Meanwhile, the new Hartcliffe campus is co-developing a micro-qualification with local colleges, employers and community groups to create new routes into work and study.
Our partnerships with further education are also developing more flexible learning pathways to raise attainment. The University of Glasgow, for example, runs Higher National Certificate (HNC) Articulation Programmes, developed with eight West of Scotland colleges. These enable eligible students – care-experienced individuals, estranged students, carers and those with refugee or asylum seeker status – to progress directly into Year 2 of some undergraduate degrees. Integrating college-based HNC study with university-led sessions and full access to campus resources fosters academic readiness and a sense of belonging, helping participants progress further in their educational journeys.
Opportunity is a shared challenge, and the Government needs to be our partner on this. We expect the Department for Education – quite rightly – to put opportunity as a central pillar of higher education reform. Our universities are already responding by increasing their ambition and being creative in their thinking. For example, the care leaver support packages our universities are implementing encompass everything from assistance applying to university and finding accommodation, to providing kitchenware, luggage, vouchers and gym memberships to help with a smooth transition and settling into university life.
But we can’t solve everything alone. We have long been calling on successive governments to improve student maintenance to remove financial barriers. Universities are doing what they can to support students. Over 60% of Russell Group universities’ £250m annual investment in access goes on direct financial support for students who need it the most. However, while significant, this is the context of the poorest students in 2025/26 being entitled to borrow around £1,125 (10%) less in real terms towards their living costs than in 2020.
It is also challenging to narrow equality gaps that have been growing since childhood. It’s vital that the Government’s opportunity mission considers the whole lifecycle of a student’s journey, from early years to post-16 education and beyond. Universities are ready and willing to be a vital part of the picture of improving opportunity, but they are still just one element. If inequalities are addressed at a young age, it will become easier to ensure access to university for everyone – not only helping students achieve their individual ambitions, but also bringing greater rewards for the government’s skills and workforce ambitions.
The American higher education system, long admired as a global bastion of innovation, faces an existential threat. Since early 2025, sweeping federal funding cuts and politically motivated restrictions have destabilised universities, echoing the mid-twentieth century flight of European scientists to the USA – but with the roles reversed.
This time, the UK has a chance to emerge as a refuge for displaced talent. To do so, it must act decisively, blending strategic policy with moral clarity.
Academia unravelled
Federal grants have historically fuelled breakthroughs in US universities, from cancer therapies to artificial intelligence. However, recent policies have transformed funding into a tool of ideological control. Take Columbia University, which lost $400 million in federal contracts after refusing to dismantle its diversity initiatives. Or Dr Naomi Lee, a public health researcher in Arizona, whose decade-long NIH-funded programme linking indigenous students to STEM careers was abruptly defunded. “They told us our work ‘promoted division,’” she says. “But our data showed it was bridging gaps.”
The consequences ripple beyond individual projects. At Johns Hopkins, layoffs have gutted labs studying pediatric vaccines. Graduate students at Southern Illinois University, already grappling with shrinking state support, now face indefinite pauses on dissertations reliant on federal grants. “I’ve seen colleagues pack up microscopes and hard drives,” says Dr Raj Patel, a materials scientist at SIU. “They’re not just leaving institutions – they’re leaving the country.”
This climate of fear mirrors Europe’s 1930s, when scholars fled fascism for American shores. Albert Einstein, denied a professorship in Nazi Germany, reshaped US physics. Enrico Fermi’s reactor experiments at the University of Chicago laid groundwork for the atomic age. Today, the US risks squandering this legacy – and the UK can learn from history.
Post-war America’s scientific dominance wasn’t accidental. Programmes like the Rockefeller Foundation’s refugee fellowships lured talent with visas, funding, and academic freedom. Similarly, the UK’s response must be proactive. Canada’s “Tech Talent Strategy,” which fast-tracked visas for 3,000 displaced US researchers in 2025, offers a blueprint. But Britain’s advantages – language, elite universities, and shared research traditions – could yield even greater rewards.
Here’s how
Simplify pathways for displaced scholars: the UK’s Global Talent Visa, while robust, remains underutilised. Streamlining applications for researchers in contested fields – climate science, EDI, public health – would signal openness. Pair this with grants to offset relocation costs, as Germany’s Alexander von Humboldt Foundation does.
Forge strategic institutional partnerships: UK higher education institutions should leverage ties with US peers under duress. Imagine Cambridge and Columbia co-funding a “satellite lab” in Cambridge for researchers fleeing US restrictions. During the Cold War, the CERN particle accelerator thrived through multinational collaboration.
Target gaps in the US research landscape: The Trump administration’s aversion to “politicised” fields has left vacuums. The NIH’s 2025 freeze on gender-affirming care research stalled dozens of clinical trials. By prioritising such areas, UK funders could attract top talent while addressing unmet needs.
Mobilise private and philanthropic support: A modern “research sanctuary fund” could operate on this principle – pooling resources from philanthropic organisations, ethical investors, and forward-thinking corporations to create a safety net for displaced researchers. Unlike traditional grants tied to narrow deliverables, this fund might prioritise intellectual freedom, offering multi-year support for teams whose work has been deemed “controversial” or politically inconvenient elsewhere.
The power of such a fund lies in its ability to align diverse interests. Corporate partners, for instance, could gain early access to breakthroughs in exchange for underwriting lab costs, while higher education institutions might leverage these partnerships to expand their global research networks. To attract talent, the fund could experiment with hybrid models – pairing academic stipends with industry fellowships, or offering “innovation visas” that fast-track relocation for researchers whose expertise fills critical gaps in national priorities like AI ethics or climate resilience.
Speed would be essential. When a government abruptly withdraws funding, researchers don’t have years to navigate bureaucracy. A streamlined application process – perhaps involving peer endorsements rather than exhaustive proposal requirements – could allow decisions within weeks, not months. The goal? To position the UK as the default destination for thinkers seeking stability, not just survival.
Critics might argue this approach risks politicising philanthropy. But that’s precisely the point. In an era where knowledge itself is increasingly weaponised, protecting open inquiry becomes a radical act. By framing the fund as a defence of academic sovereignty, backers could transcend traditional charity narratives, appealing to those who view intellectual migration not as a crisis to manage but a talent pipeline to cultivate.
Navigating challenges
Any ambitions for the UK to become a global hub for displaced academic talent face undeniable obstacles. Lingering funding shortfalls following Brexit, coupled with persistent political resistance to immigration, threaten to undermine even the most well-intentioned initiatives. The bureaucratic realities – such as visa processing times stretching to six months – create additional friction at precisely the moment when speed and flexibility are most critical.
Yet these challenges only underscore the urgency of action. The competition for top-tier researchers has never been more intense. Countries like Canada and Germany have already streamlined their immigration systems to capitalize on the shifting academic landscape, offering faster visa approvals and more generous relocation packages. Every day of delay risks ceding ground to these rivals, eroding the UK’s long-term position as a leader in research and innovation.
The choice is stark: adapt quickly or accept a diminished role in shaping the future of global scholarship. Addressing these hurdles will require more than piecemeal solutions – it demands a fundamental rethinking of how the UK attracts and retains intellectual talent. This means not only expediting visa processes but also confronting deeper questions about funding priorities and public narratives around immigration. The alternative – watching as the world’s best minds bypass Britain for more welcoming shores – would represent a historic missed opportunity.
A question of values
This isn’t merely about poaching talent. It’s about safeguarding the ethos of academia – curiosity, collaboration, dissent – at a time when the US is retreating from these principles. When the University of Frankfurt dismissed Einstein in 1933, he didn’t just bring equations to Princeton; he brought a belief that science should transcend borders and ideologies.
The UK now faces a similar crossroads. By opening its doors, it can honour the spirit of figures like Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray work in London (though overlooked in her lifetime) underpinned DNA discovery. It can also modernise its economy: a 2024 Royal Society study found that every pound invested in migrant researchers yields four pounds in patents and spin-offs.
History rarely offers second chances. The UK has an extraordinary, fleeting opportunity to redefine itself as a global hub for free inquiry – one that could echo America’s post-war ascent. This requires more than visas and funding; it demands a public commitment to academia as a force for progress, not a political pawn.
Twenty-five years on from Blair’s target for 50 per cent of young people to go to higher education, the Labour Party set out a new ambition to “break down barriers to opportunity.”
The opportunity mission articulates a multi-generational challenge: to make sure that children and young people can get on, no matter what their background; to change Britain so that a child’s future earnings are no longer limited by those of their parents; and to make Britain one of the fairest countries in the OECD. It is a fundamentally important challenge, and one that will be years in the undertaking.
Widening participation in higher education plays a huge part in this mission, and it is for that reason that the UPP Foundation has announced a major new inquiry into the future of widening participation and student success. We have launched this inquiry by publishing a short “state of the nation” summary of the key issues in 2025. Because while success in the opportunity mission would transform the shape of British society, Labour is all too aware of the differences between the optimism of Blair’s famous 50 per cent pledge and the markedly different political and economic circumstances Keir Starmer’s government finds itself in now.
A changed landscape
Universities and schools face significant headwinds when it comes to dismantling the gaps students face when looking to get in and get on. The HE sector is facing well-publicised and unprecedented financial challenges, with the recent rise in fees doing nothing to alleviate pressure amid rising costs. With institutions contemplating restructuring moves and the government no closer to outlining a solution for widespread mounting deficits amid heavy fiscal weather, it is hard to see universities or the government finding much bandwidth for widening participation in the near future.
There is also no equivalent target or metric that captures the challenge in quite the same way as Blair’s. This is understandable. Part of the reason no similar metric presents itself is because widening participation is now seen as multidimensional: not just focused on access to university, but also continuation rates, graduate outcomes, and less easily quantifiable measures of success, such as student belonging and participation in the immersive elements of the student experience.
With the number of commuter students rising to reflect different learning patterns and pathways in a diverse student population, student living arrangements are also a major part of this puzzle. As the Secretary of State alluded to prior to the general election in an address to Universities UK, modern widening participation must reach out to more of those coming from nontraditional backgrounds, and those pursuing non-linear pathways through higher education.
A wider view of widening participation means we need a more nuanced understanding of how access to university varies along socioeconomic, geographical and other demographic lines. As today’s report outlines, the difference in progression rates to higher education between students eligible for free school meals and their peers has widened to 20.8 per cent – the highest on record. Young people in London are significantly more likely to progress to higher education than their counterparts in the North East. The continuation gap between students from the most and least advantaged backgrounds now sits at 9.4 percentage points, having increased from 7.5 in 2016–17. As one of many charities operating in this space, we come face-to-face with the scale and scope of this disadvantage gap time and again. Equality of opportunity is still some way off.
As well as this, some are schools struggling to do as much as others to support access to HE. Polling in our new report finds that 75 per cent of teachers in London expect at least half of their class to progress to higher education, compared to just 45 per cent in the North West and Yorkshire and the North East. Similarly, 75 per cent of teachers in Ofsted Outstanding schools thought that more than half their class would progress to HE, compared to just 35 per cent in schools rated as Requires Improvement or Inadequate.
Although the Secretary of State said in a letter to heads of institution in November 2024 that expanding access and improving outcomes for disadvantaged students was her top reform priority in HE, the long list of challenges facing this government poses the risk that widening participation becomes a footnote to the geopolitical crisis.
What we’re doing
Despite the difficult environment facing both universities and the government, we think this agenda is too important to be put on the back burner. We hope our inquiry will help to establish new collective goals for widening participation and student success for the years ahead.
The current moment provides a significant opportunity to interrogate the ways in which access and participation, student finance, student experience on campus, careers guidance, and student belonging intersect. It is in the context of this opportunity that the UPP Foundation, supported by Public First, is launching this inquiry, which aims to establish a new mission for widening participation.
Following the introductory paper, we will publish two investigations, the first focusing on the persistent widening participation problems latent in “cold spot” areas of England, and the second exploring how the university experience differs based on students’ living arrangements and economic backgrounds, with poorer students often receiving a secondary experience that contributes to lower continuation and completion rates. Cumulatively, they will shed light on what meaningful widening participation really looks like to those who need it most, and what levers can be pulled to realise this vision.
This inquiry comes at a crucial moment. We want to help the sector, the Office for Students and the government by setting out a series of evidence-based goals, recommendations and policies which could help make the broader vision a reality, while recognising “the art of the possible” in an era of fiscal restraint. Through these recommendations we hope to see the rhetoric of the opportunity mission and the Secretary of State start to become reality.
Right now, improving access to educational opportunities for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds is high on the agenda of both universities and the UK government.
While Labour draws up plans to break the link between background and success, universities continue to invest significant time and resources into creating and implementing widening participation initiatives. If these efforts are to be successful, it’s vital that more young people are given access to tailored tutoring support during their time in compulsory education.
The advantage gap in achieving GCSE English and maths at age 16 is at its widest since 2011, with over half of pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds leaving school without these crucial qualifications. Missing these qualifications limits young people’s opportunities to progress in education. A 2021 study for the Nuffield Foundation primarily of the 2015 GCSE cohort found that young people who left school without GCSE English and maths are much less likely to study for a qualification higher than GCSE the following year, and even fewer pursue A levels.
The 16-19 attainment gap persists in post-16 education. On average, young people facing economic disadvantage are over three grades behind their peers across their best three subjects by the time they leave compulsory education. The gap is even wider for those in long term poverty, at almost four grades behind.
Tutoring has long been recognised as one of the most effective ways to boost attainment. Research by the Education Endowment Foundation suggests targeted tutoring leads to an average of five months additional progress when delivered one-to-one and four months additional progress when delivered in a small group.
Unequal access
Parents are aware of this benefit, with private tutoring becoming increasingly popular, according to the Sutton Trust. But low-income families are often priced out of accessing this kind of support should their child fall behind.
This unequal access is something that was addressed by The National Tutoring Programme and the 16-19 Tuition Fund – both government-funded tutoring schemes that ran in state schools and colleges between 2020–24. These programmes were created in response to the pandemic, to help young people catch up on lost learning. During the lifetimes of these programmes, the Sutton Trust examination of the tutoring landscape found that the gap in access to tuition between poorer and wealthier families in England all but disappeared.
A new report published this week from Public First – Past lessons, future vision: evolving state funded tutoring for the future – finds that schools and colleges have struggled to maintain tutoring beyond the end of the dedicated funding provided by these schemes. despite the strong evidence base for tutoring, its popularity among parents and government plans for tutoring to become a “permanent feature of the system” provided by these schemes.
The report compiles lessons learned from the National Tutoring Programme and the 16-19 Tuition Fund and uses these to create a blueprint for what the future of state-funded tutoring should look like. Based on interviews and focus groups with teachers, it reveals that many school leaders see relying on Pupil Premium funding to sustain tutoring as unrealistic. Schools face competing pressures on this funding, including the need to cover gaps in their core budgets.
Funding for tutoring programmes in colleges is even more limited. Unlike younger pupils, disadvantaged students in further education receive no equivalent to the Pupil Premium, despite still being in compulsory education. As a result, there is no dedicated funding for initiatives that could help bridge the attainment gap.
This is particularly troubling when you consider that young people in this phase have the shortest time left in compulsory education, and that the majority of students who resit their GCSEs in English and maths – subjects that are crucial for accessing higher level study – do so in FE colleges.
Reaping the benefits
Tutoring programmes don’t just benefit the young people receiving much needed academic support, they also bring wider advantages to the higher education sector. By partnering with local schools and colleges to deliver tuition programmes, higher education institutions can take a leading role in advancing social mobility, delivering on their access and participation priorities, and strengthening ties with their local communities.
These programmes also create valuable job opportunities for undergraduate and postgraduate students. At Get Further – a charity that supports students from disadvantaged backgrounds to succeed in their GCSE resits through small-group tuition – 61 per cent of our tutors in 2023–24 were students: 23 per cent postgraduate and 38 per cent undergraduate.
When recruiting new tutors, we prioritise offering opportunities to students at our partner universities, providing them with comprehensive training and ongoing personal development. This enables them to build transferable skills in a paid role while making a meaningful contribution to widening participation, enriching both their own educational experience and that of the learners they support.
Similarly, the University of Exeter tutoring model has had success with its literacy programme for 12-13 year olds – a scheme delivered entirely by undergraduate tutors, who are either paid for their time or earn credits towards their degree. Programmes like these provide students with the opportunity to develop skills in communication, mentoring, adaptability, and critical thinking. This is all while taking on a flexible role that fits around their studies, supports their finances and makes a positive impact on their local communities.
Creating tutoring jobs for university students could also create a pipeline into teaching – a critically understaffed profession. In 2024, a survey of Get Further tutors revealed that 68 per cent of our tutor pool either were interested or might be interested in pursuing a career in teaching, and 67 per cent said that they were more likely to consider pursuing a career in teaching having tutored on our programme.
Investing in tutoring isn’t just about closing the attainment gap – it’s about expanding opportunity at every stage of education. By making high-quality tuition accessible to all young people, regardless of background, we can remove barriers to higher education while also creating valuable work experience for university students.
The Past lessons, future vision report sets out a clear blueprint for a sustainable, national tutoring programme. The evidence is compelling, the need is urgent, and the potential impact is transformative. The government must act to reinstate state funding so that this vital support remains available to those who need it most.
In the meantime, universities have a crucial role to play. By embedding tutoring within their widening participation efforts, they can not only support young people facing disadvantage but also strengthen ties with local colleges and schools, enhance student employability, and help shape a fairer, more ambitious education system.
This spring, the number of high school graduates in the United States is expected to hit its peak. Starting in the fall, enrollment will likely enter a period of decline that could last a decade or more.
This looming “demographic cliff” has been on the minds of education leaders for nearly two decades, dating back to the start of the Great Recession. A raft of college closures over the past five years, exacerbated by the pandemic, has for many observers been the canary in the coal mine.
In the years to come, schools at all levels — reliant on per-pupil funding for K-12 and on tuition dollars for colleges and universities — will begin feeling the squeeze.
The question now is whether to treat the cliff as a crisis or an opportunity.
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As they prepare for enrollment shortfalls, superintendents and college presidents are primarily focused on crisis management. With good reason, they’re spending the bulk of their time on the hard short-term decisions of cutting programs and personnel to meet looming budget shortfalls.
In the precious few years before the situation becomes even more dire, the question is whether schools should just continue bracing for impact — or if they can think bigger in ways that could be transformative not just for the landscape of education, but for the economy more broadly. In my view, they should think about what it would look like to make a moment of crisis a real opportunity.
Here are some ideas about how that could happen. The first involves blurring the lines between high school and college.
Colleges today feel immense pressure because there aren’t enough high school graduates. High schools feel similar pressure because there are fewer young people around to enroll each year — not to mention the chronic absenteeism and disengagement that has persisted since the pandemic.
What if the two worked more closely together — in ways that helped high schools keep students engaged while enabling colleges to reach a broader range of students?
In many states, this is already happening. At last count, 2.5 million high schoolers took at least one dual-enrollment course from a college or university. But it’s not enough to just create tighter connections between one educational experience and another. Today’s students — and today’s economy — also demand clearer pathways from education to careers. It makes sense to blur the lines between high schools, colleges and work.
So imagine taking these changes even further — to a world in which instead of jumping from high school to college, students in their late teens entered entirely new institutions that paid them for work-based learning experiences that would lead them to a degree and eventually a career.
That’s a lofty goal. But it’s the kind of big thinking that both high schools and colleges may need to reinvent themselves for the country’s shifting demographics.
Colleges have an opportunity right now to double down on creating and expanding job-relevant programs — and to think even bigger about who they serve. That could include expanding opportunities for adult learners who have gained skills outside the classroom through credit for prior learning and competency-based learning. It could also mean speeding up the development of industry-relevant coursework to better align with the needs of the labor market and leaning into short-form training programs to upskill incumbent workers.
Not every student is ready to invest four years of time and money to earn a bachelor’s degree. But they shouldn’t have to be — and colleges have a chance to expand their offerings in ways that give students more pathways into today’s fast-changing economy and further education if they so choose.
Part of the problem with the current trajectory from high school to college is that the wrong things get incentivized. Both K-12 schools and colleges get money and support based on the number of students they enroll and (sometimes) the number of people who graduate — not on how well they do at helping people gain the skills to effectively participate in the economy.
That’s not anyone’s fault. But it often boils down to a matter of policy. Which means that changing policy can create new incentives to tighten the connections between high school, college and work.
States like Colorado are already taking the lead on this shift. Colorado’s “Big Blur” task force put out a report with recommendations on how to integrate learning and work, including by creating a statewide data system to track the outcomes of educational programs and updating the state’s accountability systems to better reflect “the importance of learners graduating ready for jobs and additional training.”
If schools and policymakers stay the course in the decade to come, they already know what’s ahead: declining enrollment, decreased funding and the exacerbation of all the challenges that they’ve already begun to face in recent years.
It’s not the job of the education system to turn the tide of demographic change. But the system does have a unique, and urgent, opportunity to respond to this changing landscape in ways that benefit not only students but the economy as a whole. The question now is whether education leaders and policymakers can seize that opportunity before it’s too late.
This story about demographic cliff in higher education 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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We cheer his continued focus on evaluation and collaboration (both topics close to our collective heart). In particular, we raised imaginary (in some cases…) glasses to John Blake’s observation that:
Ours is a sector founded on knowledge creation, curation, and communication, and all the skills of enquiry, synthesis and evidence-informed practice that drive the disciplines English HE providers research and teach, should also be turned to the vital priorities of expanding the numbers of students able to enter HE, and ensuring they have the best chance to succeed once they are admitted.
That’s a hard YES from us.
Indeed, there’s little in our Evaluation Manifesto (April 2022) that isn’t thinking along the same lines. Our final manifesto point addresses almost exactly this:
The Evaluation Collective believe that higher education institutions should be learning organisations which promote thinking cultures and enact iterative and meaningful change. An expansive understanding of evaluation such as ours creates a space where this learning culture can flourish. There is a need to move the sector beyond simply seeking and receiving reported impact.
We recognise that OfS has to maintain a balance between evaluation for accountability (they are our sector regulator after all) and evaluation for enhancement and learning.
Evaluation in the latter mode often requires different thinking, methodologies and approaches. Given the concerning reversal of progress in HE access indicated by recent data this focus on learning and enhancement of our practice seems even more crucial.
This brings us to two further collective thoughts.
An intervention intervention
John Blake’s blog references comments made by the Evaluation Collective’s Chair Liz Austen at the Unlocking the Future of Fair Access event. Liz’s point, which draws on a soon to be published book chapter, is that, from some perspectives, the term intervention automatically implies an evaluation approach that is positivistic and scientific – usually associated with Type 3 causal methodologies such as randomised control trials.
This kind of language can be uncomfortable for those of us evaluating in different modes (and even spark the occasional paradigm war). Liz argued that much of the activity we undertake to address student success outcomes, such as developing inclusive learning, teaching, curriculum and assessment approaches is often more relational, dynamic, iterative and collaborative, as we engage with students, other stakeholders and draws on previous work and thinking from other disciplinary area.
This is quite different to what we might think of as a clinical intervention, which often involves tight scientific control of external contextual factors, closed systems and clearly defined dosage.
We suggest, therefore, that we might need a new language and conceptual approach to how we talk and think about evaluation and what it can achieve for HE providers and the students we support.
The other area Liz picked up concerned the burden of evaluation not only on HE providers, but also the students who are necessarily deeply integrated in our evaluation work with varying degrees of agency – from subjects from whom data is extracted at one end through to co-creators and partners in the evaluation process at the other.
We rely on students to dedicate sufficient time and effort in our evaluation activities. To reduce this burden and ensure we’re making effective use of student input, we need better coordination of regulatory asks for evaluation, not least to help manage the evaluative burden on students/student voices – a key point also made by students Molly Pemberton and Jordan Byrne at the event.
As it is, HE providers are currently required to develop and invest in evaluation across multiple regulatory asks (TEF, APP, B3, Quality Code etc). While this space is not becoming too crowded (the more the merrier), it will take some strategic oversight to manage what is delivered and evaluated, why and by whom and look for efficiencies. We would welcome more sector work to join up this thinking.
Positing repositories
We also toasted John Blake’s continued emphasis on the crucial role of evaluation in continuous improvement.
We must understand whether metrics moving is a response to our activity; without a clear explanation as to why things are getting better, we cannot scale or replicate that impact; if a well-theorised intervention does not deliver, good evaluation can support others to re-direct their efforts.
In support of this, the new evidence repository to house the sector’s evaluation outcomes has been confirmed, with the aim of supporting our evolving practice and improve outcomes for students. This is another toast-worthy proposal. We believe that this resource is much needed.
Indeed, Sheffield Hallam University started its own (publicly accessible) one a few years ago. Alan Donnelly has written an illuminating blog for the Evaluation Collective reflecting on the implementation, benefits and challenges of the approach.
The decision to commission TASO and HEAT to develop this new Higher Education Evidence Library (HEEL), does however, beg a lot of questions about how material is selected for inclusion, who makes the selection and the criteria they use. Here are a few things we hope those organisations are considering.
The first issue is that it is not clear whether this repository is merely primarily designed to address a regulatory requirement for HE providers to publish their evaluation findings or a resource developed to respond to the sector’s knowledge needs. This comes down to clarity of purpose and a clear-eyed view of where the sector needs to develop.
It also comes down to the kinds of resources that will be considered for inclusion. We are also concerned by the prospect of a rigid and limited selection process and believe that useful and productive knowledge is contained in a wide range of publications. We would welcome, for example, a curation approach that recognised the value of non-academic publications.
The contribution of grey literature and less formal publications, for example, is often overlooked. Valuable learning is also contained in evaluation and research conducted in other countries, and indeed, in different academic domains within the social and health sciences.
The potential for translating interventions across different institutional and sector contexts also depends on sharing contextual and implementation information about the target activities and programmes.
As colleagues from the Russell Group Widening Participation Evaluation Forum recently argued on these very pages, the value of sharing evaluation outcomes increases the more we move away from reporting technical and statistical outcomes to include broader reflections and meta-evaluation considerations, the more we collectively learn as a sector the more opportunities we will see for critical friendships and collaborations.
While institutions are committing substantial time and resources to APP implementation, we must resist overly narrowing the remit of our activities and our approach in general. Learning from failed or even poor programmes and activities (and evaluation projects!) can be invaluable in driving progress.
Ray Pawson speaks powerfully of the way in which “nuggets” of valuable learning and knowledge can be found even when panning less promising or unsuccessful evaluation evidence. Perhaps, a pragmatic approach to knowledge generation could trump methodological criteria in the interests of sector progress?
Utopian repositories
Hot on the HEELs of the TASO/HEAT evaluation library collaboration announcement we have put together a wish list for what we would like to see in such a resource. We believe that a well-considered, open and dynamic evaluation and evidence repository could have a significant impact on our collective progress towards closing stubborn equality of opportunity risk gaps.
Submission to this kind of repository could also be helpful for the professionalisation of HE-based evaluation and good for organisational and sector recognition and career progression.
A good model for this kind of approach is the National Teaching Repository (self-upload, no gatekeeper – their tag line “Disseminating accessible ideas that work”). This approach includes a way of tracking the impact and reach of submissions by allocating them a DOI.
We are also mindful of the increasingly grim economic contexts in which most HE staff are currently working. If it does its job well, a repository could help mitigate some of the current constraints and pressures on institutions. Where we continue to work in silos there is a continued risk of wasting resources, by reinventing the same intervention and evaluation wheels in isolation across a multitude of different HE providers.
With more openness and transparency, and sharing work in progress, as well as in completion, we increase the possibility of building on each other’s work, and, hopefully, finding opportunities for collaboration and sharing the workload, in other words efficiency gains.
Moreover, this moves us closer to solving the replication and generalisability challenges, evaluators working together across different institutions can test programmes and activities across a wider set of contexts, resulting in more flexible and generalisable outcomes.
Sliding doors?
There are two further challenges, which are only nominally addressed in John Blake’s blog, but which we feel could have significant influence on the sector impact of the repository of our dreams.
First, effective knowledge management is essential – how will time-pressed practitioners find and apply relevant evidence to their contexts? The repository needs to go beyond storing evaluations to include support to help users to find what they need, when they need it, and include recommendations for implications for practice.
Second, drawing on the development of Implementation Science in fields like medicine and public health could help maximize the repository’s impact on practice. We suggest early consultation with both sector stakeholders and experts from other fields who have successfully tackled these knowledge-to-practice challenges.
At this point in thinking, before concrete development and implementation have taken place, we have the potential for a multitude of possible future repositories and approaches to sector evaluation. We welcome TASO and HEAT’s offer to consult with the sector over the spring as they develop their HEEL and hope to engage in a broad and wide-ranging discussion of how we can collectively design an evaluation and evidence repository that is not just about collecting together artefacts, but which could play an active role in driving impactful practice. And then we can start talking about how the repository can be evaluated.
John Blake will be talking all things evaluation with members of the Evaluation Collective on the 11th March. Sign up to the EC membership for more details: https://evaluationcollective.wordpress.com/
The wave of new executive orders on DEI, immigration and gender identity has already significantly impacted the higher ed workplace. While the pace of change may feel overwhelming, HR departments are taking a leading role — just as they did during the COVID-19 pandemic — in navigating change and making sure all employees feel valued and supported at work.
As CUPA-HR President and CEO Andy Brantley affirmed in his message about the recent executive orders, higher ed workplaces can still:
Promote equitable work and career pathing opportunities and pay for all employees.
Cultivate inclusive learning and working communities.
Create a workplace culture that embraces respect and civil discourse.
Level the playing field for everyone by working to remove bias, reviewing outdated policies, and creating transparency.
Reinforce institutional values by ensuring that all employees feel connected and supported.
As you strategize your response to changes taking place on your campus, here are some considerations for ensuring that you are providing equal access and opportunity for all.
Conduct an Audit of Your Institution’s DEI Efforts
If you haven’t started already, conducting an audit of programs, policies and procedures can help identify areas of concern. Design a simple spreadsheet to help you organize and track your findings in areas such as training and development, hiring, performance management, communications and website content. For each item, indicate where it falls on the legal spectrum. Does it violate the law? Is it in compliance but in need of adjustments? Is it in compliance and effective as it stands?
When reviewing your programs and processes, the central question to ask is, do they provide equal access and opportunity to all employees without giving special advantages to any one person or group?
Here’s one example. The language of the recent DEI-focused executive orders emphasizes merit. Merit has always been critical to hiring, reviewing performance and making promotion decisions. Do your policies around hiring and promotion reflect that focus on merit? Are hiring and promotion processes fair and transparent? Are hiring and promotion decisions documented, and do they reflect those policies and processes?
Connect with Campus Partners
Your institution’s general counsel can help ensure any changes made to policies and procedures are in compliance with the new executive orders and mitigate risk for your institution.
If you’re undertaking a website audit, consult your chief information officer. Is there AI-enabled software that might help identify noncompliant wording or outdated programs?
Is your institution a federal contractor or subcontractor? If so, you may face additional oversight, including new contract terms certifying that your institution is following federal antidiscrimination laws. If your status is unclear, first check with the office of research.
Consider creating a neutral body of campus stakeholders to help suggest, implement and communicate changes in response to the executive orders, but also expect that employees and administrators will have strong opinions and feelings about these changes.
Reframe Inclusion
As you review policies and communications to ensure compliance, take the opportunity to make your workplace even more welcoming and accessible.
Align with your institution’s values. What are your institution’s core values and mission? It’s likely they involve respecting diversity of thought and perspective, creating a welcoming environment, and providing equal access and opportunity to all regardless of identity. Affirming and communicating these values can be an important way to stay focused on what matters during times of change.
Consider accessibility. When revising programs and processes to be more inclusive, envision accessibility for all. For example, if your goal is to make career development programs accessible to all employees, look for gaps in access across your employee population. Just as holding trainings in non-ADA compliant buildings may limit the ability of some people to participate in career development, so might neglecting the needs of groups like non-exempt employees and working parents and caregivers. Are there more flexible options? Can you support supervisors to make it easier for an employee to take time away from regular duties?
Ensure clarity and transparency. Equity in compensation, hiring and promotion is an effective way to bolster recruitment and retention. For example, hiring and promotion practices that are not transparent, written down, and consistently followed can negatively affect the workforce. Women are less likely than men to be promoted if clear, fair criteria aren’t used. Neurodivergent candidates are disadvantaged when job interviews rely on indirect measures like succeeding at small talk rather than a skills-based assessment. In both of these instances, vague criteria such as “culture” and “fit” may prevent qualified, highly skilled employees from being hired and from moving up the ladder. Finally, be sure that your institution’s job descriptions and job requirements are up to date and are being used as the basis for decisions related to hiring and pay.
Focus on purpose. To avoid misinterpretation, your efforts at creating an inclusive workplace should be characterized in ways that are purpose driven. For example:
Communities of people with varied backgrounds and life experiences create opportunities for community members to grow personally and professionally. When employees thrive, institutions thrive.
Parity and equity, in opportunity and pay, support job satisfaction, recruitment and retention.
A safe and welcoming work environment fosters community and collaboration.
Emphasize outcomes. Lily Zheng, author of the book DEI Deconstructed, encourages those invested in fair and healthy workplaces to strengthen outcomes. Zheng recommends an outcomes-based approach “focusing on measurable results like pay equity, physical and psychological safety, wellness, and promotion rates, rather than … a one-time training, posting on social media, or other behaviors that signal commitment without demonstrating results.”
Take Steps to Educate Employees
Review the ways managers and senior leadership are implementing the policies and processes that are in place. Is additional training required? If you have made changes to policies and processes, how will you communicate those to supervisors and other campus leaders?
Be sure to evaluate anti-harassment and antidiscrimination trainings you have in place. These trainings should continue, although they may need to be adjusted to emphasize even more strongly the importance of opportunity and respect for all.
Know That You’re Not Alone
The higher ed HR community has been through challenging times before, most recently as the pandemic reshaped the workplace. If you have resources or ideas to share with other CUPA-HR members regarding ways that you and your HR colleagues are creating and sustaining an inclusive campus community, please email them to [email protected]. Your submission will be treated as confidential and, if shared, will be described in terms that will not identify your institution.
Resilience in the Workplace — This CUPA-HR webinar, recorded in 2021, was designed to serve as resilience training for attendees, as well as a model that could easily be replicated at your institution for HR teams and other employees.
