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  • Weekend Reading: Rethinking the Cost of Higher Education – A Lecture Revisited

    Weekend Reading: Rethinking the Cost of Higher Education – A Lecture Revisited

    • This lecture was originally delivered by the Rt Hon John Denham MP, former Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills in Gordon Brown’s Government. He gave this lecture from Opposition in January 2014. More than eleven years later, we revisit his lecture to consider what lessons it holds for today’s higher education sector.

    At the RSA in 2014,  I tried to address the mounting challenges facing the higher education sector:  a system with stressed finances, eye-watering fees,  educationally not fit for purpose in some parts, and in which limited public funds were written off while incentivising the provision of a monochrome one-size fits all teen-focussed education.  The National Accounting rules which framed much of the technical financial analysis have now changed.

    Overseas student fees held the crisis away much longer than I expected, albeit at the cost of financial and reputational vulnerability, but it’s with us now. I’d argue that today, ministers face much the same issues that I discussed.  

    The lecture is clearly a provocation, not a plan, but its key tenets are valid. It is better to use what money you have to teach students and reshape the sector today than write off unjustifiable debts in the future. Ministers should have the courage to incentivise a greater diversity of provision, options for cheaper study, different ways of working and closer relations with employers. Unless a lot more money is to be found, some of these questions can’t be ducked.

    John Denham, March 2025

    RSA Lecture – The Cost of Higher Education

    Good evening.

    Thank you to Matthew for hosting the meeting, Alison for agreeing to respond, and you for coming. You may not agree with me tonight. But if I don’t challenge at least some current assumptions about how we fund and deliver higher education I shall have failed.

    I want to change the terms of the debate, not present a detailed plan for university education.

    What’s the problem?

    But I suppose the first question is, why bother? Isn’t everything going very well?

    UCAS figures show the largest ever number of admissions last September, there’s further progress, in widening participation, and even a small increase in free school meal students going to the 35 most selective universities.

    And the Chancellor is apparently so flush with money he can lift the cap on student numbers, funding an extra 60,000 a year.

    I’m sure researchers and the UCU will say it’s no bed of roses, but cash from new fees means university life has been a lot more congenial than life in local government or the NHS for the past three years.

    The private cost is eye-watering but haven’t the high fees been accepted by parents and students?

    The problem, of course, is that the whole system of university finance for English students is sliding slowly but surely off a cliff.

    •  The £9000 fee is declining in real value
    • Capital spending has been slashed, pushing more universities further into debt driven investment
    •  The science budget will have fallen by 20% in real terms by 2016 – undoing the huge impact of Labour’s ten year investment
    •  The system runs so hot that a small misjudgement about student numbers creates a huge hole in the BIS budget. So we have ministers arguing about whether to cut research or support for poorer students
    •  The NAO have highlighted the black hole of unrecoverable loans, including those to EU students
    •  The cost of debt cancellation– the so-called Resource Account Budgeting or RAB charge – is rising steadily.
    •  The Chancellor’s new expansion – apparently based on the same accounting principles as Merdle’s Bank – has many questions about its sustainability.

    Across universities you hear the same story. ‘We might get through the next few years. But it can’t go on like this for long’.

    We already have the world’s most expensive public university system yet most proposals for change are variations on the theme of asking graduates to pay even more.

    But that’s not the end of the bad news.

    Quality and relevance

    English universities have huge strengths, of course. Our international research reputation is outstanding; we remain a magnet for international students; there is much excellence in our teaching.

    But concerns about what parts of higher education deliver simply won’t go away. Despite improvements, many employers remain deeply critical of the employability of too many graduates. One quote is not evidence, but it’s not hard to find ones like this one:

    ‘Despite our best efforts we have come to the decision that we would prefer to be understaffed than hire poor-quality applicants,’ said Bryan Urbick, founder and CEO of the Consumer Knowledge Centre. ‘As the economy rebalances, we will need more highly-skilled employees, particularly for young people with science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) degrees, but businesses are struggling to recruit good graduates from the UK.’

    And

    ‘Strong overall performance on higher skills participation must not be allowed to mask the skills shortages already impacting upon key sectors of the economy, which point to a mismatch between supply and demand’ said Katja Hall, Policy Director at the CBI.

    47% of new graduates, and a third of those who graduated five years ago, don’t work in graduate jobs. They’re in debt and its not the reason many went to Uni in the first place.

    There’s some big questions here about the links between higher education, the economy and economic growth.

    Social Mobility

    Despite steady progress in widening participation we are still miles away from a genuinely meritocratic, lifelong higher education system. The change in the most selective institutions has been small and there has been a sharp fall in mature student applications and a collapse in part time student numbers. These are the routes which have previously allowed talented individuals to enter higher education later in life.

    Austerity

    And austerity has not gone away.

    £25bn of more cuts, says the Chancellor. Labour may not have signed up to those sums, but every pound will be closely scrutinised.

    As a country, we actually spend too little on higher education. But we can’t even open the case for more until we’ve scrutinised every current pound we spend.

    And that’s not just the public money.

    The cohort of students who started in September 2013 will pay back £7.8bn over the years ahead. You can’t ask people to pay sums like this if you can’t prove it will be well spent.

    Getting more from current spending is not alternative to higher investment. It’s the essential precursor to it.

    My aim tonight

    I will argue that of the £bns taxpayers spend on higher education, hardly anything is spent directly on teaching students.

    I’m going to ask a radical question – what would universities look like if the state actually spent all it could on teaching students things.

    I will argue that we have foolishly turned our backs on modes of higher education which, for the right students, would be more cost-effective and better tailored to the economy’s needs, and do more for real social mobility.

    I’ll ask what a more cost-effective university system would look like.

    I will argue that the £bns that graduates will pay are inflated by all sorts of costs which are not their responsibility, the system lacks transparency and which, despite all the talk of choice, is actually narrowing many of the options students used to enjoy.

    I’ll ask what a fairer, more diverse university system might look like.

    And finally, I will argue that current spending does far too little to foster the real partnerships with employers that would benefit students, business and the wider economy.

    I’ll ask how we could use taxpayers more effectively to boost recovery and growth.

    Taken together, I’ll show how these changes will widen student choice, reduce the costs of higher education and improve social mobility

    I want to change the terms of the debate, not present a detailed plan for university education.

    The independent policymaker faces many obstacles.

    BIS [The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills] doesn’t allow independent access to their higher education finance model so we have to rely on their crude ‘ready reckoner’ published some time ago. An updated version promised before Christmas arrived on Tuesday – too late for today. We have, for example, had to assume a RAB charge of 35%, not the 40% which now seems likely.

    I have drawn heavily on the incomparable Paul Bolton in the House of Commons Library. But I’ve asked Paul to make so many heroic assumptions and approximations that the responsibility for using the figures is mine, not his.

    Higher Education finance

    Let’s take a quick look at the public finance of higher education

    On the government’s figures, by 2015-16 (and ignoring for now the sketchy announcement in the Autumn Statement):

    •  Of the £6.7bn of tax-funded spending, just £700m will be spent directly on teaching grant
    •  Of the rest £4.2bn is spent on debt cancellation (RAB charges)
    •  £330m goes on supporting more disadvantaged students to successfully complete their courses, and £1.5bn goes on maintenance grants to low-income students.

    Taxpayers now spend £6 on debt cancellation for every £1 they spend on teaching students anything.

    Defenders of the current system will say I just don’t understand the system.

    It is fees that pay for teaching costs, they say. And that’s made possible by RAB charges which are a progressive policy which protects graduates from degrees which turn out to be of limited economic value.

    The reality of course is that RAB charges are not so much a progressive policy as a simple recognition of the political reality that you can’t get blood out of a stone.

    According to David Willetts, perhaps 50% of this September’s students will not repay their loans in full.

    Half of all today’s students will pay 9% of all their income above the repayment threshold for the next 30 years and they still won’t clear their debts. And that takes no account of bank loans, credit cards and any other debts that mount up while studying

    We do have to hope that the mind-broadening, growing up, parts of their degree are worth it, because economically it hardly looks a good deal for them, taxpayers or the wider society.

    The RAB charge was 28% under Labour’s fee system, a projected 32% when the new system was introduced, now ministers say it is 40% and many independent experts say it will be higher.

    It’s not just that rising RAB charges are a problem for the government and the public finances.

    Debt write off also forces up everyone’s fees by top-slicing money which could have been spent on teaching, so keeping fees down.

    So it’s equally true to say that every time the RAB charge goes up it means fewer and fewer successful graduates paying off the debts of more and more economically less successful graduates.

    Or to put it another way,’ if your son didn’t go to that unsuitable course at that weak university, my daughter could pay lower fees for her degree at her more prestigious college.’

    That may not be an issue in English politics today, but it will be.

    Ever rising fees will lead more and more students and parents to ask what and who they are paying for.

    I don’t know of any progressive principle which thinks it is a good idea to induce people, generally from lower income backgrounds, to take on huge loans, demand big payments, and then to tell them they don’t have to pay after all. It’s not how progressive parents bring up our children, and the state shouldn’t do it to them either.

    Of course, some people will die, fall ill, devote themselves to their children or do what I did and spend 18 years after graduation working in low paid jobs in the voluntary sector.

    But a sound, progressive, politically sustainable system would have loans sufficiently affordable that the great majority pay them in full. If we want wealthy graduates to pay more we should tax them fairly.

    The economic and political costs of a high fees policy

    If you look at HE funding again, something else may stand out.

    Look at how many elements were the consequence of introducing a high fee market system. They are either economically unavoidable, or politicians had to introduce them to allay public concerns about high fees.

    A high cost of debt cancellation is simply unavoidable, but the repayment threshold also reflects a political calculation.

    The £150m a year National Scholarship Programme which flared and died in just three years was otherwise known as the Save Nick Clegg’s Face fund.

    In one of the largest politically driven programmes, the Office of Fair Access requires universities charging more than £6000 to plough around £700m of their fee income into bursaries, fee remission and the like of little proven benefit. The cost-effective AimHigher scheme was scrapped by the coalition

    The maintenance grant was increased by Labour and again by the Coalition to offset criticism of fees – even though there is little logical connection between the two.

    Received wisdom is that this spending is politically untouchable.

    But we must dare to think differently. Crude politics has created too many bad policies in the past.

    Let’s start by taking the radical step of putting all this money into teaching. And then, put back, working from first principles, the programmes that are really needed.

    Positive feedback

    As you put more money into teaching the cost of fees comes down. As fees fall, RAB charges fall, and the % of debt repaid increases. So you plough these RAB savings back into teaching, fees fall, RAB charges come down, you put the money into teaching and so on. The effect is striking.

    In our model, which also builds in some other changes I’m going to outline, spending on teaching rises from £700m to £4800m – a seven- fold increase. The spending on debt cancellation falls from £4,200m to £2,200m. In other words we have transferred £2bn from debt cancellation into the education of students!

    My first aim was to see what happens if we put all public funding into teaching. It turns out it would nearly halve current fees.

    But I’ve explored other changes which, though they contribute to reducing the cost of fees further, are really there because they are inherently desirable.

    In my view our university system would be stronger if it offered more choice to students who cannot or do not want to spend three years full time studying for a degree; if it gave students more choices of ways to reduce their living costs; if it made it easier for employers to partner universities in the delivery of degrees; and if it freed up other resources for re-investment.

    Cutting fees and debt repayments will ease the burden on graduates. The more immediate problem for most students is surviving while they study.

    Recent NUS research shows a £7000 shortfall per year between student living costs and the maximum income from grants and maintenance loans.

    I don’t want to sound like a party hack but the term ‘cost of living crisis’ comes to mind here.

    There’s just no prospect of finding the sort of public money which could make a significant impact on student incomes. The only way is to give students more choice of less expensive modes of study, whether

    studying more intensively for a less time, mixing part-time and full time education, combining work and study, or studying from home.

    Yet we seem to be going in the opposite direction.

    A one size fits all university system?

    Even the most fervent advocates of Labour’s 50% target would surely be surprised that it has been achieved almost entirely through the most expensive mode of higher education – the three year degree studied away from home.

    Part time education is collapsing. The number of two year honours degrees has barely changed. Labour’s employer backed degrees have been dropped. Fewer mature students are applying.

    Higher education is becoming ever more a one size fits all approach.

    It is almost a rite of passage for young people, defended as much for the so-called ‘student experience’ as the quality of education.

    I wouldn’t knock it; I enjoyed it myself.

    But should our universities be so focussed on this single mode of study?

    No one suggests that Open University graduates do not have real degrees, even though they – by definition – eschew the entire ‘student experience’.

    There is second reason for challenging our ever growing reliance on the three year degree study away from home.

    Of all the OECD countries, the UK has the highest percentage of young graduates. And this was before the fall in mature and part time student applications. Today, 90% of full time English students at university are under 25.

    More than anywhere else in the OECD we have made higher education a one-shot deal, for young people to do as early as possible.

    What on earth have we done?

    Our schools system fails more than most in overcoming inequality and social disadvantage by the age of 18 or 19. Yet on top of this inequitable schools system we have imposed the youngest HE system in the world.

    It is is impossible for all young people to compete fairly in such a system.

    Now, I don’t think we should give up trying to get the Russell Group to take admissions seriously. We should support Alan Milburn’s efforts to open up the professions. We should challenge the abuse of interns.

    But for the foreseeable future, a genuine commitment to social mobility will require the construction of routes for the late developers, those who went to weak schools and those whose parents had low aspirations.

    So as part of my thought experiment I’ve looked at the role of more intensive degrees, studying from home and combining work and study.

    Two year degrees

    Two year degrees exist in both the public and private sector.

    The private University of Buckingham repeatedly tops the National Student Survey for student satisfaction.

    We can’t know the real demand for two year courses – current financial rules make it hard for public universities to introduce them. Research for Kaplan, albeit an interested party, suggests an untapped market and good awareness of the pros and cons of intensive study.

    It certainly looks as though some students could study more intensively.

    David Willetts says that students study 5 hours a week less than in the 1960s. On average, students study for 30 hours a week for 30 weeks of the year.

    The Higher Education Policy Institute and Which study highlighted variations between similar courses in different institutions.

    And according to HEPI, EU students on the Erasmus programme find our courses less intensive than in other European countries.

    I have suggested that 30% of courses – half of them employer co-sponsored – should be taught intensively.

    Suggestions of two year degrees always bring out fears of dumbing down. But given their potential to save money both for students and the taxpayer, knee jerk responses are irresponsible unless soundly evidence based.

    In my model I’ve assumed a two year intensive degree – say 39 weeks of study a year– would cost 20% less to deliver than a three year degree. This is based on both public and private sector charges.

    But I’ve also set out to graduate the same number of students – three two year cohorts every six years rather than two three year cohorts if you like.

    So at any one time, teaching costs are about 7% less than at present, and there are 10% fewer students in the system.

    But I’ve also designed the system so that overall university income remains unchanged.

    So we have fewer students at any one time, lower costs, and the same resources. Better student-staff ratios. Less pressure on facilities. New options for research time and staff sabbaticals

    There is no reason at all why standards should fall.

    The key thing here is the use of intensive periods of study.

    Someone in work could work four intensive half years over a four year period. Someone else might do a couple of part-time years at a local college followed by an intensive full year at another university.

    Intensive study may not be for everyone. It will require commitment and a maturity of approach. In fact, perfect for the somewhat older student with work experience who needs a route into higher education but neither wants nor can afford a leisurely three year degree.

    ‘Studying from home’

    In our model, the public finance effect of more students studying from home is relatively small and not enough to justify taking choice away.

    My real motive in raising this issue is to challenge the lazy assumption that it does not matter if vast numbers of students have to leave home to study a suitable course. If anything, the current competitive regime has forced more universities to trawl a national market, not their more local communities.

    The effect is to impose quite avoidable costs on students which inevitably hit the poorest hardest. A new social divide is opening between those students who can only afford to study from home and those whose family gives them the choice to study away.

    We should give students a real choice to study from home because it is much cheaper and is the only realistic way of bridging the gap between the maintenance system and the real costs of studying.

    I’ve assumed that 60% of students might choose to study from home if they could.

    We can’t make students study from home. Many couldn’t for personal or geographical reasons.

    But we are a densely populated largely urban society with many universities; there is a network of FE/HE colleges already delivering respected degrees; it should be possible to offer the vast majority of students a real, quality, choice of courses within reach of their own homes.

    It is a scandal that, too often, that choice does not exist and universities in the same locality barely talk to each other.

    I’ve no illusions about how challenging this is.

    On the one hand, it would be big cultural shift in the way many young people and their parents see university education.

    On the other, it would be an even bigger cultural challenge to universities.

    It would actually mean – heaven forbid –suggesting that they sit down together at local or sub-regional level; Russell Group members and Million+; Alliance and GuildHE, to actually cooperate and collaborate on the delivery of courses. Real flexibility of study would enable students to study mutually recognised credits at universities within their locality.

    Some may think this is where my thought experiment breaks down completely!

    But shouldn’t we challenge universities to change their insular attitudes?

    Employer sponsored degrees

    Finally let’s look at the end product of all this.

    Of course, university education is not all about getting a job; etc; etc.

    But, you know, for many students the idea of getting a decent job is probably in there somewhere.

    The ONS figures tell us that nearly 50% of new graduates, and a third of those who graduated five years ago, don’t work in graduate jobs. Things have got steadily worse during the recession, but they were not great before the banking crisis.

    The figures don’t prove we are educating too many graduates. They do show that producing more graduates doesn’t automatically increase the demand for graduates – the drivers for that lie in research, development, innovation and the incentives for long term business investment.

    But they probably also tell us that employers are not wrong when they say many graduates lack the employability which would make employers to want them in graduate jobs.

    ‘One way to address this is to develop more partnership-based provision, with greater levels of business involvement in colleges and universities, as well as boosting apprenticeships. But the market in ‘learn-while-you-earn’ models – such as higher apprenticeships and more flexible degree programmes like part-time study – is underdeveloped.’

    CBI Tomorrow’s growth: New routes to higher skills (2013)

    So my final proposal is to subsidise employers to put their employees – current employees or potential students they recruit – through university. I’ve aimed for 50,000 a year – that’s half the total number of intensive two-year degrees.

    I would base this on the workforce development programme I introduced at DIUS [Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills] which after just three years was creating 20,000 places a year with employers paying wages and an average of £3000 towards the course costs. I’m not proposing a rigid system. We already have some companies, like JLR at Warwick, who pay the full fee costs. Others could not pay much at all. It’s the principle that matters.

    Employers and universities would work together to design the right course. Big companies can do it for themselves. Smaller companies will need to work together, but that may be a real strength if employers, perhaps under the umbrella of the Local Economic Partnerships, come together to shape provision in local universities.

    Bringing it together

    I have looked at four changes.

    • We put as much money as possible into teaching.
    •  We use public and private contributions more effectively by encouraging more intensively taught degrees
    • We ensure that more students can minimise the cost of study by providing a genuine choice of quality courses within reach of home, and that there are more routes for older students
    •  And we incentivise new collaboration between employers and universities.

    A brief financial overview

    It may be helpful to run back over the key changes this makes to HE finance

    These tables will repay a longer look when I publish this lecture, but they’ll give some idea of what is going on.

    The approximate financial impact shows how we have switched resources into teaching and away from RAB charges. By putting money from widening participation and maintenance grants into teaching, and by shortening courses, with more students studying at home, and employer backed courses, we make an initial savings of £2.3bn. The second and third round impact on RAB charges releases an additional £1.2bn.

    The next slide shows that we have kept public sector spending on higher education constant – at £6.730bn.

    And the next slide on institutional steady state income shows that the total university income also remains constant – allowing for rounding errors – at £9.430bn.

    Institutional income remains the same even though we have more students on cost-effective intensive courses and fewer students in the system at any one time. That’s why, as I mentioned earlier, student-staff ratios improve and there are resources to invest in teaching quality.

    Not shown almost £700m OFFA tells universities to spend on widening participation. With fees slashed, the case for such central dictation falls away. If you end this requirement, the money available to universities rises to £10.1bn.

    We shouldn’t overstate the case.

    One of the quirks of my model is that, while graduate numbers remain constant in the first few years, overtime they would decline.

    Clearly, we don’t want this to happen. The first call for more investment would be on the spare capacity built into our model and the second on the current OFFA spending. The next model will address this but here is more than enough money in the system to deal with it.

    Investment in widening participation by the most selective universities remains essential. But even so, I believe substantial sums could be freed up for research.

    The model has considerable flexibility.

    If you feel I have pushed for too many intensive courses, aimed for too many home students, been over optimistic about employer contributions, or the student

    Estimated institutional steady state income directly connected to full time English undergraduates: higher loans fully replace grants for low income students, and 15% premium

    premium is too low, then we can draw on these funds to adjust the system or make relatively modest changes to the level of the student entitlement and fees.

    I’ve pushed change as far as I can – partly to show what could be achieved, and partly because, frankly, I think it is essential to free up resources for research if we possibly can.

    We could deliver this system in different ways, but I think we need a fresh start; as clear, transparent and fair as it can be. So let’s make a radical break with both the current system and that left by Labour.

    The student entitlement

    I suggest that every student accepted on an honours degree course attracts a flat rate student entitlement which goes to their university. Flat rate, irrespective of institution, course, length of course or current fee level charged.

    So, you take the £4.7bn we have now allocated to teaching. You top slice, of course, the extra money required to support science, engineering and other high cost courses. And then you divide the rest amongst the students.

    In the simplest form, this produces a student entitlement of £14,800 per student.

    The fee now payable is the difference between the current cost of a degree and the value of the entitlement. It would be financed and paid back as at present.

    The total fee cost of the average three year degree – and remember that in my model the great majority of degrees, 70% – would be three year degrees or longer – the average total would be less than £10,000 – about the levels fees were at when Labour left office.

    And the total fee cost of a full cost university – currently £27k – would fall to about £12,000.

    The total fee cost for a two-year degree would be less than £5000.

    For those on employer sponsored degrees of course, there would be no fees and they would receive a wage as well.

    There are many different routes through this system. But this example – a three year degree studied away from home (so the most expensive option) – show how total debt falls, total payment falls, and the % repaying in full increases.

    The second example is a two-year degree – but again, assuming study away from home, so the most expensive choice – shows an even more marked difference.

    Students get a lot of choice. Money follows the student.

    But it is an entitlement, not a voucher.

    It is high time we set aside the childish fad which said that every public service reform had to be expressed in the banal and vacuous language of consumer capitalism.

    If my proposal were adopted it would be because the people of England had decided to establish an entitlement for their children to go to university, and that’s how it should be described.

    Support for low income students

    Significant fee reductions come from investing in teaching, rather than the political and economic costs of a high fee system.

    But some students from non-traditional backgrounds do need more support to complete their courses successfully. Students from poorer homes do have to live while they study. So we need to ensure these needs are still met.

    I doubt that the OFFA-mandated money has much effect. Bursaries may shift students between institutions, not get them to apply in the first place. Fee remission is simply inequitable in a system of graduate repayments. Much of this money could be better spent either on teaching or on research.

    The needs of students who need extra support are real as Million+ have argued. We could simply retain the current widening participation spending or student opportunity as it is now called.

    But I would rather create an additional student entitlement, a student premium if you like, which would clearly make disadvantaged students financially more attractive to universities. My model builds in a 15% enhancement to the student entitlement.

    My model replaces the student grant with a loan. By doing so we ensure that the low income student has just as much money to live on as at present.

    While their maintenance debt will go up, their fees have fallen dramatically, and it is the total debt – fees and maintenance – which determines how much graduates have to pay back.

    In all the modelling we have done, low-income students will end up owing less money and paying back less money on every single mode of study and length of course. But still have as much to live on while they study.

    This is such a radically different picture to the one we have today – lower fees, lower debt, lower payments, as many graduates, and new money for research and teaching – that you might be forgiven for thinking there is some sleight of hand. Mistakes aside, there isn’t.

    All I have done is ask a few basic questions about using money better.

    What George Osborne should have done

    In the Autumn Statement George Osborne announced that he would put money from the sale of the student loans book into creating 60,000 additional student places. He says it will cost £700m a year.

    There’s too little information to incorporate it into our modelling.

    But all other things being equal, if George had invested £700m in this system, he could have created as many additional graduates, at lower cost, and had money left over to invest in teaching quality or research.

    A few closing thoughts

    I’ve packed a lot into a short lecture, so I want to allow time for Alison’s response and your questions.

    But in closing, let me touch on a few other issues

    Firstly, we have cut private repayments by £2.4bn without reducing university income. I wanted to lower the private cost of a degree.

    But this does also substantially reduce payments by the wealthiest graduates; would that be fair?

    The option is there to introduce a free standing graduate tax. A 1% tax above the threshold would produce £1bn a year after 20 years and £2.5bn in the longer term. It would take time to start as you wouldn’t want anyone to be paying more than the current 9%. But it soon be generating useful funds.

    My model doesn’t depend on it. But it may be part of the longer term answer of generating new, hypothecated income for our universities.

    Second, no one is going to price a part-time degree higher than a full time degree, so part-time degree costs will fall. So we can trigger a renaissance in part time education.

    Thirdly, you would really want to integrate these reforms with higher level apprenticeships and the real problems of taught masters. We can at least see the analogies between higher level apprenticeships and employer co-sponsored degrees, and it’s worth noting that an integrated masters degree, with intensive teaching, would cost students less than a current three year degree.

    Fourth, It won’t be long before the most research intensive universities – come along and ask ‘can we put our fees up now please?’. This is indeed more politically feasible than under the current model.

    But we shouldn’t rush into it. We’ve raised university spending by £700m, largely by reducing obligations on the more expensive universities. So we need to know more about the impact of these reforms on different types of university.

    But, in any case, tough conditions would have to be met. We would need a self-limiting clawback mechanism of the type proposed by Browne; universities would have to take responsibility for any additional fee loans and write-offs; they would have to demonstrate collaboration with other local universities on courses and mutual recognition of credits; and they would have to deliver progress, not aspiration, on widening participation.

    Fifth, I’ve not looked at implementation. But I would note that if we started now we could take advantage of the current demographic decline and reduce the number of three year degrees more than the proportion of students taking them. We could build demand for intensive courses, beginning by ring-fencing money for the growth in employer co-sponsored degrees.

    Several people have already asked whether this is about to become Labour policy.

    I certainly hope Labour will look at this, but I hope others will too.

    The modelling is crude, the assumptions broad, the approximations considerable. It’s not a detailed plan for higher education and it’s in no state to go into anyone’s manifesto!

    We’ve had enough damage done by enthusiastic politicians working on the back of envelopes already.

    Wouldn’t it be good if BIS now took this concept, put it in their more sophisticated models, and informed a genuine public debate? But that would take Ministers who don’t feel personally or ideologically wedded to the current system.

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  • Try Reading Job Descriptions With a Growth Mindset (Opinion)

    Try Reading Job Descriptions With a Growth Mindset (Opinion)

    In a résumé workshop with a group of Ph.D. students, I shared a job description for a position for which they were qualified. The students had participated in an advanced pedagogy program at my university’s Center for Teaching and Learning, and the position was an instructional technologist at a small liberal arts college. Immediately, the students searched the job description for qualities and experiences they lacked and reasons why they were unqualified. Many were so turned off by the job title that they likely would not have continued reading had they come across this position on their own.

    Then I encouraged the students to approach the position description with a bias toward “I’m qualified.” In other words, instead of starting with the assumption that they were not qualified for the role, do the opposite. Once they changed their mindset and believed that they were qualified, they were able to see many connections between their skills and experiences and what they read in the job description.

    In my work as a graduate student career adviser, I have found that this tendency for Ph.D. students to approach descriptions for jobs outside their academic field from a deficit perspective is quite common. Graduate students who have trained for years with an eye toward an academic position in their field often see themselves as utterly unqualified when they begin to search for jobs in other sectors. This can even be the case for those who have spent considerable amounts of time on career exploration and self-reflection and feel committed to a career in a field other than academia. Once they get to the job search process, they get hung up on the job descriptions themselves.

    When I told another career adviser about my “bias toward ‘I’m qualified’” approach, she said that this reminded her of the growth mindset concept. Psychologist Carol Dweck came up with the concept of the growth mindset nearly 20 years ago, and it has since been applied to everything from business to professional sports to early childhood education. In short, a growth mindset is, to cite Dweck’s definition, “based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts, your strategies, and help from others.” In other words, you can change and improve many aspects of yourself through hard work and help from others. This is in contrast to a fixed mindset, which is the belief that your qualities are “carved in stone” and cannot be changed.

    This concept has many applications in work and life, and when we are stressed about a job search it is easy to let a fixed mindset take over. However, adopting a growth mindset in just one context—reading job descriptions—can help you be more positive and open-minded in your job search. Of course, not everyone can do every job, but a growth mindset will help you see and articulate both your qualifications and your potential in a new career field.

    Consider the following ways in which reading job descriptions with a growth mindset can create more opportunities in your career exploration and job search.

    • See and articulate your transferable skills and experiences.

    Talk to a career adviser for five minutes, and they are likely to discuss the importance of transferable skills. Yet it can be tough to conceive of your skills, know which skills are most important, see how they might come in handy in other contexts and then articulate those skills in a way that is appealing to other audiences. Here is an example from my own career about how reading a job description with a growth mindset helped me identify and articulate a skill set I didn’t know I had.

    Shortly after finishing my Ph.D., I came across a job posting for a school relations manager at a nonprofit organization, liaising between high school teachers and the organization. The job fit my interests, but at first glance it didn’t seem to match my skill set. In particular, the job description asked for relationship-building skills, which I had never thought about as a skill set, let alone one that I possessed. As I reflected on my experience throughout my time in graduate school, I thought about a short-term, part-time position I had meeting once a month with high school history teachers to help them design lesson plans. I enjoyed this work and was good at it and, though I had never thought about it before, realized that I could frame this experience as relationship building. In my application materials and job interviews, I emphasized this skill set and expressed confidence in continuing to grow in this area, and I got the job.

    • Open up new career fields.

    Several years ago, I worked with a Ph.D. student in art history who was interested in a career in user experience research. Although she was still two years away from graduation, she started looking at job descriptions to get a better sense of the responsibilities and qualifications for the kinds of roles she desired. In her research, she noticed that many positions asked for evidence of user experience projects, and some even asked for a portfolio. While some students would have seen this as an insurmountable barrier (a fixed mindset), she instead let her growth mindset kick in and got to work building her portfolio through project-based online courses, independent projects and on-campus jobs, and continued to network with practitioners in the field. Her hard work and help from others paid off, and she was able to move into the field after she graduated.

    • Compete for jobs for which you may be somewhat underqualified.

    Students often let the perception of being underqualified for a job prevent them from applying. This is a well-documented tendency among women and underrepresented groups, and, for graduate students, the impostor phenomenon often contributes to reduced confidence in relation to career possibilities. Most graduate students know about this tendency and the advice to apply if you meet 60 to 75 percent of the qualifications, Yet, many still have difficulty getting over the hump to apply when they don’t meet 100 percent of the qualifications in the job description. Or, if they do apply, they undersell their qualifications in their application materials.

    When you approach a position description for a job that interests you but feels like a reach, start with the job responsibilities and imagine yourself performing the tasks listed. If there are things on the list you haven’t done before, imagine how you could build on the skills and capacities you have in a new setting and then improve over time. Next, go through each qualification and look for some connection, however tenuous, to something you have done before and write it down. If you have trouble doing this on your own, work with a career adviser who can help. Usually this process helps you see capacities and qualifications you didn’t know you had and will give you confidence that you can grow into a role that feels like a stretch.

    • Apply for jobs for which you may feel overqualified.

    This next piece of advice addresses the other end of the spectrum—jobs for which you feel overqualified. Ph.D. students who are entering a field other than academia are making a career transition, which often requires spending some time in a role that might feel beneath your qualifications. This is especially true in certain industries like publishing, journalism, marketing and communications, and others. It can feel demoralizing for doctoral students to apply for jobs that only require a bachelor’s degree.

    In this case, use a growth mindset to imagine how you could advance within the organization or how this first position could be a stepping-stone to another opportunity in a couple of years. Keep in mind that people with advanced degrees tend to get promoted to a higher level and more quickly than those with just a bachelor’s. You won’t be stuck in this first role forever, and it will give you a chance to demonstrate your skills in your new field.

    Underlying these tips is a nudge to get online and read some job descriptions, even if you aren’t yet ready to apply. Just make sure that when you do, you suit up with your growth mindset first.

    Rachel Bernard is the GSAS Compass Consultant at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where she focuses on career development for master’s and doctoral students. She is a member of the Graduate Career Consortium—an organization providing a national voice for graduate-level career and professional development leaders.

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  • AI Support for Teachers

    AI Support for Teachers

    Collaborative Classroom, a leading nonprofit publisher of K–12 instructional materials, announces the publication of SIPPS, a systematic decoding program. Now in a new fifth edition, this research-based program accelerates mastery of vital foundational reading skills for both new and striving readers.

    Twenty-Five Years of Transforming Literacy Outcomes

    “As educators, we know the ability to read proficiently is one of the strongest predictors of academic and life success,” said Kelly Stuart, President and CEO of Collaborative Classroom. “Third-party studies have proven the power of SIPPS. This program has a 25-year track record of transforming literacy outcomes for students of all ages, whether they are kindergarteners learning to read or high schoolers struggling with persistent gaps in their foundational skills.

    “By accelerating students’ mastery of foundational skills and empowering teachers with the tools and learning to deliver effective, evidence-aligned instruction, SIPPS makes a lasting impact.”

    What Makes SIPPS Effective?

    Aligned with the science of reading, SIPPS provides explicit, systematic instruction in phonological awareness, spelling-sound correspondences, and high-frequency words. 

    Through differentiated small-group instruction tailored to students’ specific needs, SIPPS ensures every student receives the necessary targeted support—making the most of every instructional minute—to achieve grade-level reading success.

    “SIPPS is uniquely effective because it accelerates foundational skills through its mastery-based and small-group targeted instructional design,” said Linda Diamond, author of the Teaching Reading Sourcebook. “Grounded in the research on explicit instruction, SIPPS provides ample practice, active engagement, and frequent response opportunities, all validated as essential for initial learning and retention of learning.”

    Personalized, AI-Powered Teacher Support

    Educators using SIPPS Fifth Edition have access to a brand-new feature: immediate, personalized responses to their implementation questions with CC AI Assistant, a generative AI-powered chatbot.

    Exclusively trained on Collaborative Classroom’s intellectual content and proprietary program data, CC AI Assistant provides accurate, reliable information for educators.

    Other Key Features of SIPPS, Fifth Edition

    • Tailored Placement and Progress Assessments: A quick, 3–8 minute placement assessment ensures each student starts exactly at their point of instructional need. Ongoing assessments help monitor progress, adjust pacing, and support grouping decisions.
    • Differentiated Small-Group Instruction: SIPPS maximizes instructional time by focusing on small groups of students with similar needs, ensuring targeted, effective teaching.
    • Supportive of Multilingual Learners: Best practices in multilingual learner (ML) instruction and English language development strategies are integrated into the design of SIPPS.
    • Engaging and Effective for Older Readers: SIPPS Plus and SIPPS Challenge Level are specifically designed for students in grades 4–12, offering age-appropriate texts and instruction to close lingering foundational skill gaps.
    • Multimodal Supports: Integrated visual, auditory, and kinesthetic-tactile strategies help all learners, including multilingual students.
    • Flexible, Adaptable, and Easy to Teach: Highly supportive for teachers, tutors, and other adults working in classrooms and expanded learning settings, SIPPS is easy to implement well. A wraparound system of professional learning support ensures success for every implementer.

    Accelerating Reading Success for Students of All Ages

    In small-group settings, students actively engage in routines that reinforce phonics and decoding strategies, practice with aligned texts, and receive immediate feedback—all of which contribute to measurable gains.

    “With SIPPS, students get the tools needed to read, write, and understand text that’s tailored to their specific abilities,” said Desiree Torres, ENL teacher and 6th Grade Team Lead at Dr. Richard Izquierdo Health and Science Charter School in New York. “The boost to their self-esteem when we conference about their exam results is priceless. Each and every student improves with the SIPPS program.” 

    Kevin Hogan
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  • Reading, Writing, and Thinking in the Age of AI – Faculty Focus

    Reading, Writing, and Thinking in the Age of AI – Faculty Focus

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  • Indiana First Lady to Raise Money for Dolly Parton’s Library Program – The 74

    Indiana First Lady to Raise Money for Dolly Parton’s Library Program – The 74


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    After slashing a popular reading program from the budget, Gov. Mike Braun said Friday he asked First Lady Maureen Braun to spearhead an initiative to keep Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library in Indiana.

    “She has agreed and she will work with philanthropic partners and in consultation with state leadership to identify funding opportunities for the book distribution program,” the governor said in a news release.

    The program gifts free, high quality, age-appropriate books to children from birth to age five on a monthly basis, regardless of family income.

    Former Gov. Eric Holcomb included a statewide expansion of the program in his 2023 legislative agenda. The General Assembly earmarked $6 million for the program in the state’s last biennial budget — $2 million in the first year and $4 million in the second — to ensure that all Hoosier kids qualify to receive free books.

    But when Gov. Braun prepared his budget proposal in January he discontinued the funding as part of an overall effort to rein in state spending.

    “I am honored to lead this work to help ensure our youngest Hoosiers have as much exposure as possible to books and learning,” said First Lady Maureen Braun. “Indiana has many strong community partners and I am confident we will collaborate on a solution that grows children’s love of reading.”

    Jeff Conyers, president of The Dollywood Foundation, said he appreciates Braun’s commitment to early childhood literacy.

    “The Imagination Library brings the joy of reading to over 125,000 Hoosier children each month in all 92 counties across the state, and we are encouraged by Governor and First Lady Braun’s support to ensure its future in Indiana. We look forward to working with the Governor and First Lady, state leaders, and Local Program Partners to keep books in the hands of Indiana’s youngest learners and strengthen this foundation for a lifetime of success,” he said.

    Indiana Capital Chronicle is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: info@indianacapitalchronicle.com.


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  • WEEKEND READING: Matt Goodwin’s ‘Bad Education’ isn’t good scholarship, but does that matter?

    WEEKEND READING: Matt Goodwin’s ‘Bad Education’ isn’t good scholarship, but does that matter?

    • Steven Jones is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Manchester and his latest book is Universities Under Fire (2022). This review of Bad Education by Matt Goodwin has been written in a personal capacity.
    • HEPI’s other review of the Matt Goodwin’s book can be accessed here.

    In Bad Education, Matt Goodwin makes the argument that Western universities have moved ‘sharply and radically to the left’ (p.51) over the last six decades, to the extent that diversity is now deemed more important than merit. According to Goodwin, a woke orthodoxy has gripped the sector: free speech is stifled; non-authorised viewpoints are unwanted; and social justice trumps the pursuit of truth. Some minorities flourish within this culture, but other ‘political’ minorities – like the one to which Goodwin claims membership – are structurally disadvantaged. 

    To stand this argument up, Goodwin needs the reader to accept two fundamental premises. The first is that the author’s sense of victimhood is real, while others are imaginary or exaggerated. Goodwin achieves this by attributing his every professional setback – from having journal articles and funding bids declined to being overlooked for invited talks (p.47) – to his whiteness, his maleness, or his political positions, such as his refusal to participate in ‘cult-like worship of the EU on campus’ (p.44). No other explanation is countenanced. 

    The second premise is that the real power in universities is cultural, not economic, and therefore held by diversity champions and other woke activists. The evidence Goodwin offers here is underwhelming. Where academic scholarship is cited, the sources are mostly US-based, and the author shows no curiosity about the think-tanks and lobby groups that funded the surveys in which he places his faith. Critical higher educational research is studiously avoided, though Goodwin does turn to Elon Musk for a quote about the ‘woke mind virus’ (p.104). In places, Bad Education reads as a checklist of debunked myths and personal memoirs (‘as I’ve seen first-hand’ is a familiar clause). Yet in the final chapter, Goodwin addresses the reader directly to assert: ‘I’ve bombarded you at times with statistics and research because I wanted you to read it for yourself and make up your own mind’ (p.198). 

    I tried hard to make up my own mind, but it’s difficult to be persuaded by Goodwin’s case against universities when the bulk of empirical data point in an opposite direction. If recruitment practices are so diversity conscious, why were there only 25 Black British female professors in the UK as recently as 2019? If ‘reverse racism’ is such a problem, why did the awarding gap between White and Black students achieving high degrees stand at 18.4% in 2021? In my experience, and according to my research, minority groups are far from over-represented in senior levels of university management and governance, and board cultures tend to be driven by corporate principles, not woke ideologies. As for no-platforming, fewer than 0.8 per cent of university events or speaker invitations were cancelled in 2021-22. In other words, the truths that Goodwin is so boldly willing to speak may be his truths, but they are not universal.

    Among the fellow marginalised white men willing to support Goodwin is the University of Buckingham’s Eric Kaufmann, who is quoted extensively, and whose back-cover endorsement describes Bad Education as ‘deeply personal and impeccably researched.’ It’s certainly deeply personal. Take Goodwin’s indignation towards a lecturer who unfriended some Conservative voters on Facebook after the 2015 UK general election (p.89). The reader is not told what this incident is supposed to signify, let alone why Goodwin’s cherished free speech principles appear not to extend to academics’ private social media accounts.

    That’s not to say that the sector is always operating to the highest ethical standards. Goodwin is on firmest ground when highlighting human rights violations in China (p.90), and calling out universities for turning a blind eye. But rather than take this argument to its logical conclusion – by critiquing a fee model that leaves sectors reliant on income from overseas students – Goodwin pivots back into anger and anecdote, rebuking universities for being defensive about their historic links with the slave trade (p.91) and sharing stories about junior colleagues too scared to disclose their pro-Brexit leanings (p.94).

    Despite Goodwin’s stated aim to ‘push back against authoritarianism’ (p.208), there are echoes of Donald Trump’s playbook throughout Bad Education. The author’s anti-diversity bombast recalls the President’s recent claim that a fatal air crash near Washington DC was connected to DEI programmes in federal government. It’s not entirely clear to which level of institutional bureaucracy Goodwin is referring when he imagines a ‘hyper-political and highly activist managerial blob’ (p.157), but the language is redolent of that being deployed in the US to justify a purge of federal bureaucrats. According to Goodwin, this ‘managerial blob’ is defined by an insistence on rainbow lanyards and flags on campus, among other things. This is not a characterisation of senior leaders that most university staff would recognise. Could it be that the author is so distracted by empty performative gestures that he fails to see where power is really located?

    Goodwin has now left academia, a story he tells in most chapters, steadily elevating it to the level of Shakespearean tragedy: ‘my professorship – everything I had ever wanted, everything I had worked for – was over’ (p.195). At a time when 10,000 jobs are on the line at UK universities, such self-indulgence is unfortunate. Goodwin’s contrast between the ‘luxury beliefs’ of academics and the ‘real world’ he claims to inhabit (p.78) encapsulates what makes Bad Education read like a ‘prolonged gripe,’ as another reviewer put it. Paradoxically, Goodwin now enjoys a range of high-profile platforms from which to air his grievances about being no-platformed, regularly appearing on television to blame wokeism for various social ills. Why is it that only ‘cancelled’ academics seem to have media agents?

    Bad Education builds towards what Goodwin calls a ‘manifesto’ for universities (pp.217-19) that want to have ‘good, not bad, education’ (p.217). It’s a simplistic way to wrap up any book, comprising a bullet-pointed list of the same few complaints expressed in slightly different terms. Those of us in higher education will quickly recognise Bad Education’s distortions: universities haven’t lurched radically left and there’s no woke coup. But does that matter? Are we the target readership? Or is the book speaking to external audiences? What if a review like this merely confirms what Goodwin and his fellow academic outcasts have been saying all along?

    Since accepting the terms of the market, English universities have struggled to articulate their role in society. Academic expertise has been devalued and the status of higher education as a public good compromised, with universities increasingly embroiled in unwinnable culture wars. These are perfect conditions for someone like Goodwin to ‘blow up’ his own career (p.4), break the ‘secret code of silence’ (p.3) and position himself as the fearless ‘rogue professor’ (p.16). In such ways, important debates become framed by individuals with the shallowest insights but the deepest grudges. Bad Education does a passable job of confirming suspicions about what really goes on inside a secretive and often aloof sector, guiding its readers further down an anti-university, anti-expert rabbit hole. If we continue to leave vacuums in the discourse, then diversity-blaming narratives like Goodwin’s will continue to fill them.

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  • America’s kids are still behind in reading and math. These schools are defying the trend

    America’s kids are still behind in reading and math. These schools are defying the trend

    This story was produced by the Associated Press and reprinted with permission.

    Math is the subject sixth grader Harmoni Knight finds hardest, but that’s changing.

    In-class tutors and “data chats” at her middle school in Compton, California, have made a dramatic difference, the 11-year-old said. She proudly pulled up a performance tracker at a tutoring session last week, displaying a column of perfect 100 percent scores on all her weekly quizzes from January.

    Since the pandemic first shuttered American classrooms, schools have poured federal and local relief money into interventions like the ones in Harmoni’s classroom, hoping to help students catch up academically following COVID-19 disruptions.

    But a new analysis of state and national test scores shows the average student remains half a grade level behind pre-pandemic achievement in both reading and math. In reading, especially, students are even further behind than they were in 2022, the analysis shows.

    Compton is an outlier, making some of the biggest two-year gains in both subjects among large districts. And there are other bright spots, along with evidence that interventions like tutoring and summer programs are working.

    Students interact in a fourth grade classroom at William Jefferson Clinton Elementary in Compton, Calif., Thursday, Feb. 6, 2025. Credit: Eric Thayer/Associated Press

    The Education Recovery Scorecard analysis by researchers at Harvard, Stanford and Dartmouth allows year-to-year comparisons across states and districts, providing the most comprehensive picture yet of how American students are performing since COVID-19 first disrupted learning.

    The most recent data is based on tests taken by students in spring 2024. By then, the worst of the pandemic was long past, but schools were dealing still with a mental health crisis and high rates of absenteeism — not to mention students who’d had crucial learning disrupted.  

    “The losses are not just due to what happened during the 2020 to 2021 school year, but the aftershocks that have hit schools in the years since the pandemic,” said Tom Kane, a Harvard economist who worked on the scorecard.

    In some cases, the analysis shows school districts are struggling when their students may have posted decent results on their state tests. That’s because each state adopts its own assessments, and those aren’t comparable to each other. Those differences can make it impossible to tell whether students are performing better because of their progress, or whether those shifts are because the tests themselves are changing, or the state has lowered its standards for proficiency.

    The Scorecard accounts for differing state tests and provides one national standard.

    Higher-income districts have made significantly more progress than lower-income districts, with the top 10 percent of high-income districts four times more likely to have recovered in both math and reading compared with the poorest 10 percent. And recovery within districts remains divided by race and class, especially in math scores. Test score gaps grew by both race and income.

    A student works in a classroom at Benjamin O. Davis Middle School in Compton, Calif., Thursday, Feb. 6, 2025. Credit: Eric Thayer/Associated Press

    “The pandemic has not only driven test scores down, but that decline masks a pernicious inequality that has grown during the pandemic,” said Sean Reardon, a Stanford sociologist who worked on the scorecard. “Not only are districts serving more Black and Hispanic students falling further behind, but even within those districts, Black and Hispanic students are falling further behind their white district mates.”

    Still, many of the districts that outperformed the country serve predominantly low-income students or students of color, and their interventions offer best practices for other districts.

    Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter featuring the most important stories in education.

    In Compton, the district responded to the pandemic by hiring over 250 tutors that specialize in math, reading and students learning English. Certain classes are staffed with multiple tutors to assist teachers. And schools offer tutoring before, during and after school, plus “Saturday School” and summer programs for the district’s 17,000 students, said Superintendent Darin Brawley.

    To identify younger students needing targeted support, the district now conducts dyslexia screenings in all elementary schools.

    The low-income school district near downtown Los Angeles, with a student body that is 84 percent Latino and 14 percent Black, now has a graduation rate of 93 percent, compared with 58 percent when Brawley took the job in 2012.

    Harmoni, the sixth-grader, said that one-on-one tutoring has helped her grasp concepts and given her more confidence in math. She gets separate “data chats” with her math specialist that are part performance review, part pep talk.

    “Looking at my data, it kind of disappoints me” when the numbers are low, said Harmoni. “But it makes me realize I can do better in the future, and also now.”

    Brawley said he’s proud of the district’s latest test scores, but not content.

    “Truth be told, I wasn’t happy,” he said. “Even though we gained, and we celebrate the gains, at the end of the day we all know that we can do better.”

    A tutor helps students at Benjamin O. Davis Middle School in Compton, Calif., Thursday, Feb. 6, 2025. Credit: Eric Thayer/Associated Press

    As federal pandemic relief money for schools winds down, states and school districts will have limited resources and must prioritize interventions that worked. Districts that spent federal money on increased instructional time, either through tutoring or summer school, saw a return on that investment.

    Reading levels have continued to decline, despite a movement in many states to emphasize phonics and the “science of reading.” So Reardon and Kane called for an evaluation of the mixed results for insights into the best ways to teach kids to read.

    Related: Why are kids struggling in school four years after the pandemic?

    The researchers emphasized the need to extend state and local money to support pandemic recovery programs that showed strong academic results. Schools also must engage parents and tell them when their kids are behind, the researchers said.

    And schools must continue to work with community groups to improve students’ attendance. The scorecard identified a relationship between high absenteeism and learning struggles.

    In the District of Columbia, an intensive tutoring program helped with both academics and attendance, said D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Lewis Ferebee. In the scorecard analysis, the District of Columbia ranked first among states for gains in both math and reading between 2022 and 2024, after its math recovery had fallen toward the bottom of the list.

    Pandemic-relief money funded the tutoring, along with a system of identifying and targeting support at students in greatest need. The district also hired program managers who helped maximize time for tutoring within the school day, Ferebee said.

    Students who received tutoring were more likely to be engaged with school, Ferebee said, both from increased confidence over the subject matter and because they had a relationship with another trusted adult.

    Related: Some of the $190 billion in pandemic money for schools actually paid off

    Students expressed that “I’m more confident in math because I’m being validated by another adult,” Ferebee said. “That validation goes a long way, not only with attendance, but a student feeling like they are ready to learn and are capable, and as a result, they show up differently.”

    Federal pandemic relief money has ended, but Ferebee said many of the investments the district made will have lasting impact, including the money spent on teacher training and curriculum development in literacy.

    Students walk through a hallway at Benjamin O. Davis Middle School in Compton, Calif., Thursday, Feb. 6, 2025. Credit: Eric Thayer/Associated Press

    Christina Grant, who served as the District of Columbia’s state superintendent of education until 2024, said she’s hopeful to see the evidence emerging on what’s made a difference in student achievement.

    “We cannot afford to not have hope. These are our students. They did not cause the pandemic,” Grant said. “The growing concern is ensuring that we can … see ourselves to the other side.”

    The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

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  • The buzz around teaching facts to boost reading is bigger than the evidence for it

    The buzz around teaching facts to boost reading is bigger than the evidence for it

    Over the past decade, a majority of states have passed new “science of reading” laws or implemented policies that emphasize phonics in classrooms. Yet the 2024 results of an important national test, released last month, showed that the reading scores of elementary and middle schoolers continued their long downward slide, hitting new lows.

    The emphasis on phonics in many schools is still relatively new and may need more time to yield results. But a growing chorus of education advocates has been arguing that phonics isn’t enough. They say that being able to decode the letters and read words is critically important, but students also need to make sense of the words. 

    Some educators are calling for schools to adopt a curriculum that emphasizes content along with phonics. More schools around the country, from Baltimore to Michigan to Colorado, are adopting these content-filled lessons to teach geography, astronomy and even art history. The theory, which has been documented in a small number of laboratory experiments, is that the more students already know about a topic, the better they can understand a passage about it. For example, a passage on farming might make more sense if you know something about how plants grow. The brain gets overwhelmed by too many new concepts and unfamiliar words. We’ve all been there. 

    A ‘Knowledge Revival’

    A 2025 book by 10 education researchers in Europe and Australia, “Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking: The Knowledge Revival,” makes the case that students cannot learn the skills of comprehension and critical thinking unless they know a lot of stuff first. These ideas have revived interest in E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curriculum, which gained popularity in the late 1980s. Hirsch, a professor emeritus of education and humanities at the University of Virginia, argues that democracy benefits when the citizenry shares a body of knowledge and history, which he calls cultural literacy. Now it’s a cognitive science argument that a core curriculum is also good for our brains and facilitates learning. 

    Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.

    The idea of forcing children to learn a specific set of facts and topics is controversial. It runs counter to newer trends of “culturally relevant pedagogy,” or “culturally responsive teaching,” in which critics contend that students’ identities should be reflected in what they learn. Others say learning facts is unimportant in the age of Google where we can instantly look anything up, and that the focus should be on teaching skills. Content skeptics also point out that there’s never been a study to show that increasing knowledge of the world boosts reading scores.

    It would be nearly impossible for an individual teacher to create the kind of content-packed curriculum that this pro-knowledge branch of education researchers has in mind. Lessons need to be coordinated across grades, from kindergarten onward. It’s not just a random collection of encyclopedia entries or interesting units on, say, Greek myths or the planets in our solar system. The science and social studies topics should be sequenced so that the ideas build upon each other, and paired with vocabulary that will be useful in the future. 

    The big question is whether the theory that more knowledge improves reading comprehension applies to real schools where children are reading below grade level. Does a content-packed curriculum translate into higher reading achievement years later?

    Putting knowledge to the test

    Researchers have been testing content-packed lessons in schools to see how much they boost reading comprehension. A 2023 study of the Core Knowledge curriculum, which was not peer reviewed, received a lot of buzz. The students who attended nine schools that adopted the curriculum were stronger readers. But it was impossible to tell whether the Core Knowledge curriculum itself made the difference or if the boost to reading scores could be attributed to the fact that all nine schools were highly regarded charter schools and were doing something else that made a difference. Perhaps they had hired great teachers and trained them well, for example. Also, the students at these charter schools were largely from middle and upper middle class families. What we really want to know is whether knowledge building at school helps the poorest children, who are less likely to be exposed to the world through travel, live performances, and other experiences that money can buy.

    Another content-heavy curriculum developed by Harvard education professor James Kim produced a modest boost to reading scores in a randomized controlled trial, according to a paper published in 2024. Reading instruction was untouched, but the students received special science and social studies lessons that were intended to boost young children’s knowledge and vocabulary. Unfortunately, the pandemic hit in the middle of the experiment and many of the lessons had to be scrapped. 

    Related: Slightly higher reading scores when students delve into social studies, study finds

    Still, for the 1,000 students who had received some of the special lessons in first and second grades, their reading and math scores on the North Carolina state tests were higher not only in third grade, but also in fourth grade, more than a year after the knowledge-building experiment ended. Most of the students were Black and Hispanic. Forty percent were from poor families.

    The latest study

    The Core Knowledge curriculum was put to the test in another study by a team of eight researchers in two unidentified cities in the mid-Atlantic and the South, where the majority of children were Black and from low income families. More than 20 schools had been randomly assigned to give kindergarteners some lessons from the Core Knowledge curriculum. The schools continued with their usual phonics instruction, but “read aloud” time, when a teacher ordinarily reads a picture book to students, had been replaced with units on plants, farming and Native Americans, for example. More than 500 kindergarteners looked at pictures on a large screen, while a teacher discussed the topics and taught new vocabulary. Additional activities reinforced the lessons. 

    According to a paper published in the February 2025 issue of the Journal of Education Psychology, the 565 children who received the Core Knowledge lessons did better on tests of the topics and words that were taught, compared with 626 children who had learned reading as usual and weren’t exposed to these topics. But they did no better in tests of general language, vocabulary development or listening comprehension. Reading itself was not evaluated. Unfortunately, the pandemic also interfered in the middle of this experiment and cut short the analysis of the students through first and second grades.  

    Related: Inside the latest reading study that’s getting a lot of buzz

    Lead researcher Sonia Cabell, an associate professor at Florida State University, says she is looking at longer term achievement data from these students, who are now in middle school. But she said she isn’t seeing a clear “signal” that the students who had this Core Knowledge instruction for a few months in kindergarten are doing any better. 

    Glimmers of hope

    Cabell did see glimmers of hope. Students in the control group schools, who didn’t receive Core Knowledge instruction, also learned about plants. But the Core Knowledge students had much more to say when researchers asked them the question: “Tell me everything you know about plants.” The results of a test of general science knowledge came just shy of statistical significance, which would have demonstrated that the Core Knowledge students were able to transfer the specific knowledge they had learned in the lessons to a broader understanding of science. 

    “There are pieces of this that are promising and encouraging,” said Cabell, who says that it’s complicated to study the combination of conventional reading instruction, such as phonics and vocabulary, with content knowledge. “We need to better understand what the active ingredient is. Is it the knowledge?” 

    All the latest Core Knowledge study proves is that students are more likely to do well on a test of something they have been taught. Some observers errantly interpreted that as evidence that a knowledge rich curriculum is beneficial. 

    Related: Learning science might help kids read better

    “If your great new curriculum reads articles about penguins to the kids and your old stupid curriculum reads articles about walruses to them, one of these is going to look more successful when the kids are evaluated with a penguin test,” explained Tim Shanahan, a literacy expert and a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago who was not involved in this research.

    Widening achievement gaps

    And distressingly, students who arrived at kindergarten with stronger language skills absorbed a lot more from these content-rich lessons than lower achieving students. Instead of helping low achieving kids catch up, achievement gaps widened.

    People with more knowledge tend to be better readers. That’s not proof that increasing knowledge improves reading. It could be that higher achieving kids like learning about the world and enjoy reading. And if you stuff a child with more knowledge, it’s possible that his reading skills may not improve.

    The long view

    Shanahan speculates that if knowledge building does improve reading comprehension, it would take many, many years for it to manifest. 

    “If these efforts aren’t allowed to elbow sound reading instruction aside, they cannot hurt and, in the long run, they might even help,” he wrote in a 2021 blog post.

    Researchers are still in the early stages of designing and testing the content students need to boost literacy skills. We are all waiting for answers.

    Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595 or barshay@hechingerreport.org.

    This story about Core Knowledge was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

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  • WEEKEND READING: Change is our ally by Professor Sir Chris Husbands

    WEEKEND READING: Change is our ally by Professor Sir Chris Husbands

    This blog has been kindly written for HEPI by Professor Sir Chris Husbands, who was Vice-Chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University between 2016 and 2023, and is now a Director of  Higher Futures, working with university leaders to lead sustainable solutions to institutional challenges.

    The scale of the funding challenge in higher education is widely known, though almost every week brings news of fresh challenges and responses. Real term funding for undergraduate teaching in 2025 is close to 1997 levels – levels which led the Blair government to introduce £1,000 top-up fees. Some commentators have argued that the scale of the challenge now is as great as the 1981 cuts in government funding for universities, which reduced spending on universities by 15%, and saw Salford University lose 44% of its income.

    As contemporary funding challenges have intensified, growth options have become more difficult:

    • international student numbers have either stalled or declined;
    • undergraduate growth, although evident, has not tracked demographic trends;
    • the Office for Students has identified persistent optimism bias in the sector’s funding projections; and
    • competitive pressures are multiplying.

    In many countries, flexible for-profit providers are growing fast, especially in professional and post-graduate education. Many of these are backed by funds with deep investment pockets; some UK for-profit providers are growing very quickly and the expansion of private provision in Germany, France and Canada has been remarkable. In summary, the funding challenge is not only real but increasingly profound.

    Institutional responses to these challenges have been extensive. Almost all universities are now undertaking significant change programmes. There have been major strides in revising operating models, especially for professional and support services, and the impact has been significant. On the other hand, although portfolio reviews are widespread, there have been fewer developments in reshaping business models for teaching and research, though some do exist. Core delivery arrangements largely remain based on a two-semester or three-term model. Staff-student ratios which, as the King’s College Vice-Chancellor Shitij Kapur has repeatedly emphasised are low by international standards, have not been significantly shifted. Undergraduate study remains relatively inflexible. Module sharing and simplified credit transfer arrangements remain small scale. Estate use has not been significantly intensified. All this suggests that individual institutions are finding it difficult to look at the challenge strategically with an eye to the longer term shape, size, structure and nature of the university. There is a lot happening in individual change plans, but probably not enough. Without a secure and sustainable core academic model, institutions will be forced into repeated restructurings, which will not be comfortable for them or for the sector more generally.  

    This is the background to the important Jisc-KPMG report Collaboration for a sustainable future, which was the subject of a this week’s HEPI / Jisc webinar. For all the evidence of individual institutional change, the report argues that a collaborative approach is needed to secure sustainability and reshape the sector. Institutions need to find ways to work together, in back-office functions, in professional services and perhaps in academic delivery. The report acknowledges that there are technical difficulties to overcome, including the requirement to pay VAT on shared services and the need to navigate competition law, though these need to be genuinely tested in practice, but it also argues that the deeper barriers to effective collaboration are cultural. 

    The ingrained habit of individual autonomy, even and perhaps especially in non-competitive services (as Nick Hillman reinforced, no one chooses their undergraduate degree based on the university’s finance system) is a major barrier to significant change.  Moreover, the report acknowledges that collaboration and shared service arrangements are unlikely to deliver cost savings in the short-term – and just now a good deal of thinking in the sector seems to be shaped by Keynes’ dictum that ‘in the long-run we are all dead’. Institutions are caught between the economic realities of the funding challenge and the cultural challenges of collaboration.

    In Four Futures, my HEPI paper published in June last year, I argued that the financial and funding circumstances which produced the sector we have no longer exist. Government is unwilling or unable to pay for the sector most university leaders would like. I argued that there were some policy choices for higher education, and that the sector will almost certainly be different in the future. There are public policy questions here, but there are also questions and challenges for institutions. That means strategic choices for leaders, with universities being much clearer about the things they can do well, and do well sustainably, and building different relationships with other institutions. Leadership matters. As the Jisc / KPMG report observes:

    Given the current trajectory, there is a window of opportunity for institutions to act now and help drive this forward before they are compelled into action by necessity.

    Competition over the past decade has undoubtedly delivered benefits, and we should not understate those, especially in estate investment, student experience, teaching quality and research performance. But competition has also delivered homogeneity, duplication and overlap, and that needs to change.   And for that, as the Jisc / KPMG report identifies, the leadership culture needs to change. Hyper-competitiveness has driven institutionally focused leadership behaviours and associated performance indicators, targets and rewards. But there have been different leadership assumptions in higher education in the past, and other sectors have grappled with the challenge of changing leadership culture. The most successful school improvement initiative of the past generation was London Challenge, in which the performance of schools across the capital was significantly raised. One of the most important shifts was a cultural one, persuading headteachers to think not about ‘my school’ but about ‘[all] our children’: success across the system was a leadership challenge for all.

    The Jisc / KPMG Report is strong on the potential for collaboration to shape the future of the system, though it also makes painful reading on the challenges which have bedevilled this in the past. In the current context, government is unlikely to provide additional funding. The private sector could no doubt provide standardised sector-wide services, but the risks of a single supplier for key services are enormous. If government is not the solution, if the private sector is not the solution, if the status quo is not sustainable, the answer must be imaginative and engaged leadership which is not simply about ‘my institution’ but also about ‘our future’.

    This week’s HEPI / Jisc webinar on ‘Competition or collaboration? Opportunities for the future of the higher education sector’ can be watched back here.

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  • A dismal report card in math and reading

    A dismal report card in math and reading

    The kids are not bouncing back. 

    The results of a major national test released Wednesday showed that in 2024, reading and math skills of fourth and eighth grade students were still significantly below those of students in 2019, the last administration of the test before the pandemic. In reading, students slid below the devastatingly low achievement levels of 2022, which many educators had hoped would be a nadir. 

    The test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), is often called the nation’s report card. Administered by the federal government, it tracks student performance in fourth and eighth grades and serves as a national yardstick of achievement. Scores for the nation’s lowest-performing students were worse in both reading and math than those of students two years ago. The only bright spot was progress by higher-achieving children in math. 

    The NAEP report offers no explanation for why students are faltering, and the results were especially disappointing after the federal government gave schools $190 billion to aid in pandemic recovery. 

    “These 2024 results clearly show that students are not where they need to be or where we want them to be,” said Peggy Carr, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, in a briefing with journalists. 

    Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.

    More than 450,000 fourth and eighth graders, selected to be representative of the U.S. population, took the biennial reading and math tests between January and March of 2024. 

    Depressed student achievement was pervasive across the country, regardless of state policies or instructional mandates. Student performance in every state remained below what it was in 2019 on at least one of the four reading or math tests. In addition to state and national results, the NAEP report also lists the academic performance for 26 large cities that volunteer for extra testing.

    An ever-widening gap

    The results also highlighted the sharp divergence between higher- and lower- achieving students. The modest progress in fourth grade math was entirely driven by high-achieving students. And the deterioration in both fourth and eighth grade reading was driven by declines among low-achieving students. 

    “Certainly the most striking thing in the results is the increase in inequality,” said Martin West, a professor of education at Harvard University and vice chair of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the NAEP test. “That’s a big deal. It’s something that we hadn’t paid a lot of attention to traditionally.”

    The starkest example of growing inequality is in eighth grade math, where the achievement gap grew to the largest in the history of the test.

    Source: NAEP 2024

    The chart above shows that the math scores of all eighth graders fell between 2019 and 2022. Afterward, high-achieving students in the top 10 percent and 25 percent of the nation (labeled as the 90th and 75th percentiles above) began to improve, recovering about a quarter of the setbacks for high achievers during the pandemic. That’s still far behind high-performing eighth graders in 2019, but at least it’s a positive trend. 

    The more disturbing result is the continuing deterioration of scores by low-performing students in the bottom 10 percent and 25 percent. The huge pandemic learning losses for students in the bottom 10 percent grew 70 percent larger between 2022 and 2024. Learning losses for students in the bottom 25 percent grew 25 percent larger.

    “The rich get richer and the poor are getting shafted,” said Scott Marion, who serves on the NAEP’s governing board and is the executive director of the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, a nonprofit consultancy. “It’s almost criminal.”

    More than two-thirds of students in the bottom 25 percent are economically disadvantaged. A quarter of these low performers are white and another quarter are Black. More than 40 percent are Hispanic. A third of these students have a disability and a quarter are classified as English learners. 

    By contrast, fewer than a quarter of the students in the top 25 percent are economically disadvantaged. They are disproportionately white (61 percent) and Asian American (14 percent). Only 5 percent are Black and 15 percent are Hispanic. Three percent or fewer of students at the top have a disability or are classified as English learners.  

    Related: Six puzzling questions from the disastrous [2022] NAEP results

    Although average math scores among all eighth grade students were unchanged between 2022 and 2024, that average masks the improvements at the top and the deterioration at the bottom. They offset each other. 

    The NAEP test does not track individual students. The eighth graders who took the exam in 2024 were a different group of students than the eighth graders who took the exam in 2022 and who are now older. Individual students have certainly learned new skills since 2019. When NAEP scores drop, it’s not that students have regressed and cannot do things they used to be able to do. It means that they’re learning less each year. Kids today aren’t able to read or solve math problems as well as kids their same age in the past.

    Students who were in eighth grade in early 2024, when this exam was administered, were in fourth grade when the pandemic first shuttered schools in March 2020. Their fifth grade year, when students should have learned how to add fractions and round decimals, was profoundly disrupted. School days began returning to normal during their sixth and seventh grade years. 

    Harvard’s West explained that it was incorrect to assume that children could bounce back academically. That would require students to learn more in a year than they historically have, even during the best of times.

    “There’s nothing in the science of learning and development that would lead us to expect students to learn at a faster rate after they’ve experienced disruption and setbacks,” West said. “Absent a massive effort society-wide to address the challenge, and I just haven’t seen an effort on the scale that I think would be needed, we shouldn’t expect more positive results.”

    Learning loss is like a retirement savings shortfall

    Learning isn’t like physical exercise, West said. When our conditioning deteriorates after an injury, the first workouts might be a grind but we can get back to our pre-injury fitness level relatively quickly. 

    “The better metaphor is saving for retirement,” said West. “If you miss a deposit into your account because of a short-term emergency, you have to find a way to make up that shortfall, and you have to make it up with interest.”

    What we may be seeing now are the enduring consequences of gaps in basic skills. As the gaps accumulate, it becomes harder and harder for students to keep up with grade-level content. 

    Another factor weighing down student achievement is rampant absenteeism. In survey questions that accompany the test, students reported attending school slightly more often than they had in 2022, but still far below their 2019 attendance rates. Eleven percent of eighth graders said that they had missed five or more school days in the past month, down from 16 percent in 2022, but still far more than the 7 percent of students who missed that much school in 2019. 

    “We also see that lower-performing readers aren’t coming to school,” said NCES Commissioner Carr. “There’s a strong relationship between absenteeism and performance in these data that we’re looking at today.”

    Eighth graders by the number of days they said they were absent from school in the previous month 

    Source: NAEP 2024

    Fourth grade math results were more hopeful. Top-performing children fully recovered back to 2019 achievement levels and can do math about as well as their previous peers. However, lower-performing children in the bottom 10 percent and 25 percent did not rebound at all. Their scores were unchanged between 2022 and 2024. These students were in kindergarten when the pandemic first hit in 2020 and missed basic instruction in counting and arithmetic.

    Reading scores showed a similar divergence between high- and low- achievers.

    Source: NAEP 2024

    This chart above shows that the highest-performing eighth graders failed to catch up to what high-achieving eighth graders used to be able to do on reading comprehension tests. But it’s not a giant difference. What’s startling is the steep decline in reading scores for low-achieving students. The pandemic drops have now doubled in size. Reading comprehension is much, much worse for many middle schoolers. 

    It’s difficult to say how much of this deterioration is pandemic related. Reading comprehension scores for middle schoolers had been declining for a decade since 2013. Separate surveys show that students are reading less for pleasure, and many educators speculate that cellphone use has replaced reading time.

    Related: Why reading comprehension is deteriorating

    The biggest surprise was fourth grade reading. Over the past decade, a majority of states have passed new “science of reading” laws or implemented policies that emphasize phonics in classrooms. There have been reports of improved reading performance in Mississippi, Florida, Tennessee and elsewhere. But scores for most fourth graders, from the highest to the lowest achievers, have deteriorated since 2022. 

    One possibility, said Harvard’s West, is that it’s “premature” to see the benefits of improved instruction, which could take years.  Another possibility, according to assessment expert Marion, is that being able to read words is important, but it’s not enough to do well on the NAEP, which is a test of comprehension. More elementary school students may be better at decoding words, but they have to make sense of those words to do well on the NAEP. 

    Carr cited the example of Louisiana as proof that it is possible to turn things around. The state exceeded its 2019 achievement levels in fourth grade reading. “They did focus heavily on the science of reading but they didn’t start yesterday,” said Carr. “I wouldn’t say that hope is lost.”

    More students fall below the lowest “basic” level 

    The results show that many more children lack even the most basic skills. In math, 24 percent of fourth graders and 39 percent of eighth graders cannot reach the lowest of three achievement levels, called “basic.” (The others are “proficient” and “advanced.”) These are fourth graders who cannot locate whole numbers on a number line or eighth graders who cannot understand scientific notation. 

    The share of students reading below basic was the highest it’s ever been for eighth graders, and the highest in 20 years for fourth graders. Forty percent of fourth graders cannot put events from a story into sequential order, and one third of eighth graders cannot determine the meaning of a word in the context of a reading passage. 

    “To me, this is the most pressing challenge facing American education,” said West.

    Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595 or barshay@hechingerreport.org.

    This story about the 2024 NAEP test was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for  Hechinger newsletters.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

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