Tag: research

  • Trump issues directives on college admissions data and research grants

    Trump issues directives on college admissions data and research grants

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    President Donald Trump issued two sweeping directives Thursday — one that orders colleges to hand over additional data about their applicants and another mandating that political appointees approve federal grant funding. 

    Colleges will now be required to report additional admissions data to the National Center for Education Statistics, including data on the race and sex of their applicants, their admitted students and those who chose to enroll, per a memo from Trump to the U.S. Department of Education. Previously, institutions were only required to provide racial data for enrolled students. 

    Institutions must provide the data for undergraduate students and for certain graduate and professional programs, the Education Department said. 

    Separately, Trump signed an executive order directing his political appointees to review both grant awards and funding opportunity announcements. These appointees, along with subject matter experts, will evaluate grant decisions to align with the Trump administration’s policy priorities, according to a White House fact sheet.   

    Together, the two orders take aim at areas the Trump administration is attempting to tightly control — who colleges and universities enroll, and which research projects get federal funding. 

    In an announcement Thursday, the Education Department said the additional admissions data is needed “to ensure race-based preferences are not used in university admissions processes.” 

    Along with data on applicants’ race and gender, colleges must also include the prospective students’ standardized test scores, GPAs and other academic qualifications. This data will also be collected about admitted and enrolled students. 

    At the same time, U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon is ordering the National Center for Education Statistics to develop a process to audit the data to ensure its accuracy. 

    “We will not allow institutions to blight the dreams of students by presuming that their skin color matters more than their hard work and accomplishments,” McMahon said. “The Trump Administration will ensure that meritocracy and excellence once again characterize American higher education.”

    The order comes two years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down race-conscious college admissions in a landmark case involving Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Since then, colleges have overhauled their admissions practices, and many selective institutions enrolled lower shares of Black and Hispanic students in the aftermath, according to an analysis from The New York Times. 

    A new landscape for grants

    Trump’s executive order on grant funding castigated much of the current research landscape, decrying awards that went to projects such as developing transgender sexual education programs and training graduate students in critical race theory. 

    The directive accused other grants of promoting “Marxism, class warfare propaganda, and other anti-American ideologies in the classroom, masked as rigorous and thoughtful investigation.”

    Researchers and other groups have sued over past Trump administration attempts to control grant funding, including the cancellation of vast swaths of National Institutes of Health awards to comply with the president’s orders against diversity, equity and inclusion. A federal judge has ruled against the NIH’s grant cancellations, and the U.S. Government Accountability Office has likewise determined they were illegal. 

    Still, Thursday’s order directs agency heads to revise the terms of existing discretionary grants, “to the maximum extent permitted by law,” to allow them to be immediately terminated, including if an award “no longer advances agency priorities or the national interest.” 

    When assessing grant applications, senior appointees should weigh if they advance Trump’s policy priorities, according to the directive. 

    The order says grants should not be used to deny that sex is binary — a view at odds with scientific understanding — or promote “anti-American values.” They also should not be used to promote racial discrimination by awardees, including by using race or proxies to select employees or program participants, the order stated. 

    In addition, the order says preference for discretionary grants should be given to institutions “with lower indirect cost rates” — all things being equal. 

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  • Harnessing AI to advance translational research and impact

    Harnessing AI to advance translational research and impact

    In July, HEPI, with support from the publisher Taylor & Francis, hosted a roundtable dinner to discuss harnessing AI to advance translational research and impact. This blog considers some of the themes that emerged from the discussion

    Travel through a major railway station in the near future and you may see, alongside the boards giving train times, a video of someone using British sign language. This could be an AI-generated signer, turning the often difficult-to-hear station announcements into sign language so that deaf people can understand what is being said. It is just one example of how artificial intelligence is increasingly being used in the real world.

    The question this roundtable focused on was how AI could be used to advance translational research. That is, taking curiosity-driven research and turning it into a real-world application. What role can academic leaders and publishers play in shaping ethical, inclusive and innovative uses of AI in such research? How can AI enhance collaboration across disciplines, and what are the potential barriers, ethical dilemmas and risks involved in the process?

    The discussion, attended by senior university and research leaders, publishers and funders, was held under the Chatham House rule, by which speakers express views on the understanding they will be unattributed.

    Advantages and risks

    Speakers agreed that AI has huge potential to allow researchers to analyse large datasets cheaply, quickly, and accurately, turning research into real-world applications, as well as improving accessibility to scientific knowledge. They noted that AI can help provide plain language summaries of research and present them in different formats, including multilingual or multimedia content, while also opening useful ways for learned societies to disseminate research findings among their member practitioners.

    But risks were identified too. How could the use of AI affect creativity and critical thinking among researchers? How can academics guard against bias and ensure transparency in the data on which AI tools are based? And what about environmental concerns – in terms of maintaining the energy-guzzling AI system and managing electronic waste?  Most worryingly, when AI is involved in research and its application, who is ultimately accountable if something goes wrong?

    Such concerns were addressed in a guide for researchers on Embracing AI with integrity, published by the research integrity office UKRIO in June. https://ukrio.org/wp-content/uploads/Embracing-AI-with-integrity.pdf.

    Delegates at the roundtable were told that one message to draw from this guide was that researchers using AI should be asking themselves three essential questions:

    1. Who owns the information being inputted into the AI?
    2. Who owns the information once it is in the AI?
    3. Who owns the output?

    Working together

    Collaboration is key, said one speaker. That means breaking down existing academic silos and inviting in the experts who will be responsible for applying AI-driven research. It is also crucial to consider the broader picture and the kind of future society we want to be.

    One concern the roundtable identified was that power over AI systems is concentrated in the hands of just a few people, which means that rather than addressing societal problems, it is creating divides in terms of access to information and resources.

    ‘We are not in the age of AI we actually want’, said one speaker. ‘We are in the age of the AI that has been given to us by Big Tech.’

    Tackling this issue is likely to involve the development of new regulatory and legal frameworks, particularly to establish accountability. Medical practitioners are particularly concerned about ‘where the buck stops’ and how, for example, potentially transformative AI diagnosis tools can be used in a safe manner.

    Others at the roundtable were concerned that placing the bulk of ethical responsibility for AI on researchers might discourage them from testing boundaries.

    ‘When you do research, you can never have that control completely or you will never do novel things’, said one. Responsibility must therefore be shared between the researcher, implementer and user. That means everyone needs education in AI so they understand the tools they have been given and how to use them effectively.

    Reliable data

    Being able to rely on the underlying datasets used in AI is essential, said one speaker,  who welcomed the government’s decision to open up public datasets through the AI Opportunities Action Plan https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ai-opportunities-action-plan/ai-opportunities-action-plan and to curate a national data library https://datalibrary.uk/. 

    There was a difference, it was agreed, between research driven by commercially available AI tools when it was not possible to see ‘inside the black box’ and research based on AI tools in which the datasets and algorithms were reliable and transparent. The former was like presenting a research paper that provided the introduction, results, and analysis without explaining the methodology; it was suggested.

    Educating users

    Yet AI is not just about the data on which it is based but also about the competence of the people using it. How can higher education institutions ensure that students and researchers, particularly early career researchers, have the know-how they need to use AI correctly? (The Taylor and Francis AI Policy may be of interest here.)

    It was pointed out that the independent review of the curriculum and assessment system in schools in England, due to publish its recommendations later this year, is likely to be a missed opportunity when it comes to ensuring that pupils enter university with AI skills.

    Meanwhile, politicians are struggling to establish the right framework for AI research, as they often lack expertise in this field.

    This is a problem since the field is moving so fast. It was suggested that rather than wait for action from policymakers and a regulatory framework, researchers should get on with using AI or risk the UK being left behind.

    Social vision

    The roundtable agreed that making decisions on all this was not just the responsibility of academia. But where academic research could be useful was in filling the gaps in AI development that big commercial companies neglected because they prioritised business models.

    Here, researchers, including in the arts and humanities, could be important in deciding what society ultimately wants AI to achieve. Otherwise, one speaker suggested, it would be driven by the ‘art of the possible’.

    Meanwhile, what skills do universities want researchers to have? Some raised the fear that outsourcing work to AI could mean researchers being deskilled. Evidence already suggests that the use of AI can reduce students’ metacognition – the understanding of their own thought processes.

    ‘If we think it’s important for researchers to be able to translate their findings, don’t let a machine do it’, said one speaker. Another questioned whether researchers should ever be using tools they do not understand.

    Artificial colleagues

    One suggestion was that rather than outsourcing their work to AI, researchers should be using it to enhance their existing practices.

    And while some were concerned about the effect AI could have on creativity, one speaker suggested that, by calibrating AI tools to investigate concepts at the edge of scientific consensus, they could be used to spark more original approaches than a human group would achieve alone.

    Another positive identified was that while biases in AI can be a problem, they can also be easier to identify than human biases.

    The roundtable heard that successfully accommodating AI should be about teamwork, with AI seen as another colleague – there to advise and reason but not do all the work.

    ‘The AI will be the thing that detects your biases, it will be the thing that reviews your work, and it will support that process, but it shouldn’t do the thinking, ’ was the message from one speaker. ‘Ultimately, that should come back to humans. ’

    Taylor & Francis are a partner of HEPI. Taylor & Francis supports diverse communities of experts, researchers and knowledge makers around the world to accelerate and maximize the impact of their work. We are a leader in our field, publish across all disciplines and have one of the largest Humanities and Social Sciences portfolios. Our expertise, built on an academic publishing heritage of over 200 years, advances trusted knowledge that fosters human progress. Under the Taylor & Francis, Routledge and F1000 imprints, we publish 2,700 journals, 8,000 new books each year and partner with more than 700 scholarly societies.

    We will be working together to develop a HEPI Policy Note on the use of AI in advancing translational research. If you have a fantastic case study or AI-related translational approach at your institution, we would love to hear from you. To tell us more about your work, please email [email protected].

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  • Massachusetts governor pitches $400M to support research funding

    Massachusetts governor pitches $400M to support research funding

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    Dive Brief: 

    • Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey has announced plans to propose legislation that would devote $400 million to support research across the state amid federal funding uncertainty. 
    • The money would be split evenly across two funds: a multiyear research funding pool to support projects at universities, hospitals and research institutions, and an additional funding reserve to support research and jobs at the state’s public colleges. 
    • “In the face of uncertainty from the federal government, this is about protecting one of the things that makes Massachusetts so special — our global leadership in health care and helping families across the world,” Healey said in the Thursday announcement. 

    Dive Insight: 

    Healey’s proposal comes as the Trump administration freezes and terminates research grants at universities in its crosshairs to pressure them into making policy changes, along with cutting funding more broadly across major scientific agencies. 

    In Massachusetts alone, the Trump administration has terminated research grants valued at nearly $583 million, according to a recent analysis from the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. When they were canceled, the grants had $252 million left to be paid out. 

    Overall, the Trump administration has terminated research awards valued at roughly $6.9 billion across the U.S., the analysis found. Of that, $3.3 billion of the canceled funding hadn’t yet been disbursed. The analysis did not account for frozen research grants, suggesting the level of hampered research funding across the nation may rise even higher. 

    Healey’s announcement pointed to the state’s economic reliance on federal research funding. The state received nearly $8.6 billion in federal research funding in fiscal year 2024, which supported roughly 81,000 jobs and $7.8 billion in household income, recent findings from the University of Massachusetts Amherst found. 

    Moreover, Massachusetts accounts for 1 in 10 research and development jobs in the U.S., according to the announcement. 

    Half of the $400 million would go toward a one-time funding pool to help pay for projects at universities, hospitals and research institutions. This pool would also support a one-year fellowship program for early-career researchers, the announcement said. 

    That pot of money would be housed at MassDevelopment, the state’s development finance agency, and Massachusetts would use interest from its state stabilization fund to finance it. 

    The other half of the $400 million would be housed in a bridge funding reserve for the state’s public colleges. That funding would support research costs, partnerships and jobs, including positions for graduate and postdoctorate students. 

    That fund would be paid for from revenue from Massachusetts’ Fair Share, which adds a 4% tax on those with incomes above $1 million. 

    Several university leaders in the state praised the proposal. They include the president of the University of Massachusetts, the state’s public university system, as well as leaders of private institutions including Boston University, Northeastern University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

    “Advances that spring from our universities, hospitals and laboratories benefit all Americans; if we see these institutions diminished or compromised, all Americans stand to lose,” MIT President Sally Kornbluth said in a statement on Thursday. 

    However, Kornbluth noted that “no other source can replace federal funding for sheer scale.”

    MIT has seen over $6 million worth of federal grants terminated, according to Center for American Progress data. 

    Massachusetts is also home to Harvard University, which the Trump administration has cut off from all future federal research funding. Earlier this month, Harvard officials said the Trump administration’s actions combined with recent congressional moves, such as raising the endowment tax wealthy institutions pay, could cost the university $1 billion a year.

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  • Research Funding Starts to Flow Back to Columbia, Brown

    Research Funding Starts to Flow Back to Columbia, Brown

    Much of the money funds medical research, including time-sensitive clinical trials.

    Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Wolterk/iStock/Getty Images | Alex Kent/Getty Images

    Days after reaching deals with the Trump administration, Columbia and Brown Universities say the government has already initiated the process of restoring hundreds of millions in federal research dollars it terminated earlier this year in retaliation for their alleged failures to address antisemitism on campus. 

    Many of those grants came from the National Institutes of Health, which is overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services, and funded medical research, including time-sensitive clinical trials.  

    “The agreement finalized this week restored all National Institutes of Health grants to Brown researchers that had been terminated,” Brian Clark, a Brown spokesperson, wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed Thursday evening. “We started to see that formalized in award letters today and expect in the coming days and weeks to see this across all of these grants.” 

    In April, the administration blocked $510 million in federal grants and contracts for Brown. But under the terms of the agreement the government and university finalized Wednesday, Clark said, “Any payments should resume within 30 days,” which applies to both “the restoration of specific grants that had been terminated, and also to active (non-terminated) grants for which Brown had not been reimbursed.”

    If you had a grant frozen because of the Trump administration’s investigations, we want to hear about your experience and whether you’ve received your funding. Email [email protected] to share more.

    The Brown deal came about a week after Columbia agreed to pay the government $221 million in addition to changing its admissions policies, disciplinary processes and academic programs in order to restore about $400 million in federal funding the administration canceled in March.

    According to Columbia’s website, “Funding and reimbursement payments have already begun to flow.”

    “One week later, more than half of the terminated grants have been restored, and we expect the others to be reinstated promptly,” the website says. “Renewals and continuations that were frozen are also coming in on non-terminated grants.”

    The university wrote that it’s “reviewing all grants that were terminated or suspended over the last months to identify those that were specifically directed at Columbia” and expects “the fair treatment of Columbia grants and ability to compete to be honored by all federal agencies.”

    The university noted that the agreement only applies to HHS and NIH grants that the administration canceled as part of its targeted pressure campaign on Columbia. 

    Faculty who asked to remain anonymous told Inside Higher Ed that either the university or NIH has told them that some grants are being reinstated or renewed. But it was unclear to them whether actual dollars have resumed flowing, and how many.

    Since Trump took office in January, numerous federal agencies, including the NIH, the National Science Foundation and Education Department, have terminated thousands of other research grants at institutions across the country that don’t align with their ideological priorities. In particular, many grants that focused on transgender health, vaccine hesitancy, climate change and racial disparities have been canceled. 

    Columbia researchers whose grants were terminated as part of that sweep should not expect to see their funding restored as part of this deal, the university wrote on its website. 

    “Some of these grants were terminated or suspended across the board for all institutions, and have nothing specific to do with Columbia,” the webpage said. “To the extent that the federal government has made the decision not to fund certain types of projects at any institution, those grants will not be coming back to Columbia.”

    Columbia and Brown are just two of numerous Ivy League Institutions that the Trump administration has targeted by threatening federal funding. 

    The administration was also holding up $175 million at the University of Pennsylvania in retaliation for the university allowing a transgender athlete to compete on its swim team. Last month, the university reached a deal with the government, which has said it will restore the funding. 

    The administration is also blocking $2.2 billion at Harvard University,  $202 million at Princeton University and $1 billion at Cornell University. However, those institutions have yet to reach agreements with the government that could result in restoration of their federal funding.

    So far, the administration has frozen nearly $5.9 billion across eight universities, including Brown, Columbia and Penn. Most of the funding freezes started in March, but in the last week, the administration resumed blocking funds at institutions under investigation. First, it put about $108 million on hold at Duke University, and then officials suspended an unspecified number of grants at the University of California, Los Angeles.

    Ryan Quinn contributed to this report.

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  • Mass. Governor Proposes $400M in State Funding for Research

    Mass. Governor Proposes $400M in State Funding for Research

    Massachusetts governor Maura Healey introduced legislation Thursday that would provide $400 million in state funding for research and development, including projects conducted by colleges and universities, The Boston Globe reported. The move appears to be an attempt to alleviate some of the pain caused by the Trump administration’s drastic federal funding cuts to higher ed institutions.

    Introducing the legislation at the State House yesterday, Healey cited Massachusetts’ prowess as a research leader, noting that it has the highest percentage of STEM graduates and hosts 10 percent of all research and development jobs in the country. It is also home to Harvard University, which has had roughly $2.6 billion in funding frozen by the Trump administration.

    “In the face of uncertainty from the federal government, this is about protecting one of the things that makes Massachusetts so special—our global leadership in health care and helping families across the world,” Healey said in a statement.

    The plan calls for $200 million to be appropriated for research at hospitals, universities and independent research groups; the other $200 million will support the state’s public colleges and universities in covering the direct and indirect costs of research and partnerships, as well as hiring personnel. The funds must be approved by the Legislature.

    Higher ed leaders applauded the move.

    “University research fosters the creation of new knowledge, drives regional economies, and is vital to prepare the next generation of innovators,” said Northeastern University president Joseph Aoun in a statement. “I commend Governor Healey and her team for their commitment to ensuring Massachusetts remains a global leader in cutting-edge research.”

    “In moments of uncertainty, it is essential that we protect the integrity of Massachusetts’ renowned biomedical research ecosystem, which contributes immensely to our nation’s research enterprise,” said Michael Collins, chancellor of the UMass Chan Medical School. “We are profoundly grateful to Governor Healey and her administration for their leadership in recognizing the urgent need to support research and innovation in the commonwealth, and we look forward to working with the Legislature to assure passage of this timely initiative.”  

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  • Peer review is broken, and pedagogical research has a fix

    Peer review is broken, and pedagogical research has a fix

    An email pings into my inbox: peer reviewer comments on your submission #1234. I take a breath and click.

    Three reviewers have left feedback on my beloved paper. The first reviewer is gentle, constructive, and points out areas where the work could be tightened up. One reviewer simply provides a list of typos and points out where the grammar is not technically correct. The third reviewer is vicious. I stop reading.

    Later that afternoon, I sit in the annual student assessment board for my department. Over a painstaking two hours, we discuss, interrogate, and wrestle with how we, as educators, can improve our feedback practices when we mark student work. We examine the distribution of students marks closely, looking out for outliers, errors, or evidence of an ill-pitched assessment. We reflect upon how we can make our written feedback more useful. We suggest thoughtful and innovative ways to make our practice more consistent and clearer.

    It then strikes me how these conversations happen in parallel – peer review sits in one corner of academia, and educational assessment and feedback sits in another. What would happen, I wonder, if we started approaching peer review as a pedagogical problem?

    Peer review as pedagogy

    Peer review is a high stakes context. We know that we need proper, expert scrutiny of the methodological, theoretical, and analytical claims of research to ensure the quality, credibility, and advancement of what we do and how we do it. However, we also know that there are problems with the current peer review system. As my experience attests to, issues including reviewer biases and conflicts, lack of transparency in editorial decision-making, inconsistencies in the length and depth of reviewer feedback all plague our experiences. Peer reviewers can be sharp, hostile, and unconstructive. They can focus on the wrong things, be unhelpful in their vagueness, or miss the point entirely. These problems threaten the foundations of research.

    The good news is that we do not have to reinvent the wheel. For decades, people in educational research, or the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), have been grappling both theoretically and empirically with the issue of giving and receiving feedback. Educational research has considered best practices in feedback presentation and content, learner and marker feedback literacies, management of socioemotional responses to feedback, and transparency of feedback expectations. The educational feedback literature is vast and innovative.

    However – curiously – efforts to improve the integrity of peer review don’t typically frame this as a pedagogical problem, that can borrow insights from the educational literature. This is, I think, a woefully missed opportunity. There are at least four clear initiatives from the educational scholarship that could be a useful starting point in tightening up the rigour of peer review.

    What is feedback for?

    We would rarely mark student work without a clear assessment rubric and standardised assessment criteria. In other words, as educators we wouldn’t sit down to assess students work without at least first considering what we have asked them to do. What are the goalposts? What are the outcomes? What are we giving feedback for?

    Rubrics and assessment criteria provide transparent guidelines on what is expected of learners, in an effort to demystify the hidden curriculum of assessment and reduce subjectivity in assessment practice. In contrast, peer reviewers are typically provided with scant information about what to assess manuscripts for, which can lead to inconsistencies between journal aims and scope, reviewer comments, and author expectations.

    Imagine if we had structured journal-specific rubrics, based on specific, predefined criteria that aligned tightly with the journal’s mission and requirements. Imagine if these rubrics guided decision-making and clarified the function of feedback, rather than letting reviewers go rogue with their own understanding of what the feedback is for.

    Transparent rubrics and criteria could also bolster the feedback literacy of reviewers and authors. Feedback literacy is an established educational concept, which refers to a student’s capacity to appreciate, make sense of, and act upon their written feedback. Imagine if we approached peer review as an opportunity to develop feedback literacy, and we borrowed from this literature.

    Do we all agree?

    Educational research clearly highlights the importance of moderation and calibration for educators to ensure consistent assessment practices. We would never allow grades to be returned to students without some kind of external scrutiny first.

    Consensus calibration refers to the practice of multiple evaluators working together to ensure consistency in their feedback and to agree upon a shared understanding of relevant standards. There is a clear and robust steer from educational theory that this is a useful exercise to minimise bias and ensure consistency in feedback. This practice is not typically used in peer review.

    Calibration exercises, where reviewers assess the same manuscript and have opportunity to openly discuss their evaluations, might be a valuable and evidence-based addition to the peer review process. This could be achieved in practice by more open peer review processes, where reviewers can see the comments of others and calibrate accordingly, or through a tighter steer from editors when recruiting new reviewers.

    That is not to say, of course, that reviewers should all agree on the quality of a manuscript. But any effort to consolidate, triangulate, and calibrate feedback can only be useful to authors as they attempt to make sense of it.

    Is this feedback timely?

    Best practice in educational contexts also supports the adoption of opportunities to provide formative feedback. Formative feedback is feedback that helps learners improve as they are learning, as opposed to summative feedback whereby the merit of a final piece of work is evaluated. In educational contexts, this might look like anything from feedback on drafts through to informal check-in conversations with markers.

    Applying the formative/summative distinction to peer review may be useful in helping authors improve their work in dialogue with reviewers and editors, rather than purely summative, which would merely judge whether the manuscript is fit for publication. In practice, adoption of this can be achieved through the formative feedback offered by registered reports, whereby authors receive peer review and editorial direction before data is collected or accessed, at a time where they can actually make use ot it.

    Formative feedback through the adoption of registered reports can provide opportunity for specific and timely suggestions for improving the methodology or research design. By fostering a more developmental and formative approach to peer review, the process can become a tool for advancing knowledge, rather than simply a gatekeeping mechanism.

    Is this feedback useful?

    Finally, the educational concept of feedforward, which focuses on providing guidance for future actions rather than only critiquing past performance, needs to be applied to peer review too. By applying feedforward principles, reviewers can shift their feedback to be more forward-looking, offering tangible, discrete, and actionable suggestions that help the author improve their work in subsequent revisions.

    In peer review, approaching comments with a feedforward framing may transform feedback into a constructive dialogue that motivates people to make their work better by taking actionable steps, rather than a hostile exchange built upon unclear standards and (often) mismatched expectations.

    So the answers to improving some parts of the peer review process are there. We can, if we’re clever, really improve the fairness, consistency, and developmental value of reviewer comments. Structured assessment criteria, calibration, formative feedback mechanisms, and feedforward approaches are just a few strategies that can enhance the integrity of peer review. The answers are intuitive – but they are not yet standard practice in peer review because we typically don’t approach peer review as pedagogy.

    There are some problems that this won’t fix. Peer review relies on the unpaid labour of time-poor academics in an increasingly precarious academia, which adds challenge to efforts to improve the integrity of the process.

    However, there are steps we can take – we need to now think about how these can be achieved in practice. By clarifying the peer review practice, tightening up the rigour of feedback quality, and applying educational interventions to improve the process, this takes an important step in fixing peer review for the future of research.

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  • NCCU Receives $500K Grant to Study Career Barriers Facing Young Men in Research Triangle

    NCCU Receives $500K Grant to Study Career Barriers Facing Young Men in Research Triangle

    NDr. Tryan McMickensorth Carolina Central University has received a $500,000 grant from the Walton Family Foundation to launch a  research initiative addressing the systemic barriers that prevent young men in the Research Triangle region from accessing career pathways and educational opportunities.

    The two-year study, titled “Understanding Education as a Career Choice for NC Research Triangle Youth,” will focus on what researchers term “opportunity youth” – young men between ages 18 and 24 who have become disconnected from both education and employment systems. Despite broader national gains in educational access, this demographic continues to face significant obstacles that contribute to high dropout rates and limited postsecondary success.

    Dr. Tryan McMickens, professor of higher education and coordinator of NCCU’s higher education administration program, will lead the initiative alongside Dr. Jim Harper II, professor of history and associate dean of the School of Graduate Studies. Their research team will include faculty members, six graduate students from the higher education administration and history programs, and a dedicated project manager.Dr. Jim Harper II Dr. Jim Harper II

    “I am thrilled that the Walton Foundation has chosen to invest in NCCU faculty to advance research on postsecondary attainment among boys and young men,” said Dr. Ontario Wooden, NCCU provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs. “This support highlights the importance of this critical area and empowers our faculty to deliver meaningful, evidence-based results. I eagerly anticipate the insights and impact this work will bring.”

    The research aims to move beyond simply identifying problems to developing concrete solutions through research-based interventions, community engagement, and policy recommendations. The project will culminate in a two-day conference planned for 2026, where findings and potential interventions will be shared with stakeholders across the region.

    McMickens brings extensive expertise in higher education access and the experiences of Black male students to the project. His research centers on college mental health and historically Black colleges and universities, and he authored Black Male College Students’ Mental Health: Providing Holistic Support in Higher Education. Harper’s scholarship focuses on African and African American education and innovative uses of technology for public engagement with history. He co-authored With Faith in God and Heart in Mind: A History of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc.

    The Research Triangle region, encompassing Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, represents one of the nation’s most concentrated areas of higher education institutions and technology companies. However, the economic opportunities created by this educational and technological hub have not been equally accessible to all young people in the region, particularly young men from underserved communities.

    The Walton Family Foundation, established by descendants of Walmart founders Sam and Helen Walton, focuses its philanthropic efforts on three primary areas: improving K-12 education, protecting rivers and oceans along with their communities, and investing in Northwest Arkansas and the Arkansas-Mississippi Delta. The foundation also supports projects reflecting individual family members’ personal interests.

    The timing of this research initiative comes as higher education institutions nationwide are examining their role in addressing broader social and economic inequities, particularly those affecting young men of color who face disproportionate barriers to educational and career advancement.

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  • New Research Highlights the Power of Access Work — and the Tools We Need to Evaluate It 

    New Research Highlights the Power of Access Work — and the Tools We Need to Evaluate It 

    • This blog was kindly authored by Dr Anna Anthony, director of HEAT. HEAT provides a collaborative data service enabling higher education providers, Uni Connect partnerships and Third Sector Organisations to show the impact of their equality of opportunity delivery through a shared, standardised data system. By aggregating data from across the membership, HEAT can publish national-level impact reports for the sector. 

    It has never been more important for providers across the sector to show that access and participation activities have an impact. With resources stretched, we need to know the work we are doing is making a measurable difference. New research from HEAT reveals a series of powerful findings: 

    1. Intensive outreach boosts HE entry by up to 29% – Students who received at least 11 hours of intensive outreach were up to 29% more likely to enter higher education (HE) than matched peers receiving minimal support. 
    1. Disadvantaged students see the biggest gains – Free school meal (FSM) eligible students were up to 48% more likely to progress to HE when engaged in intensive outreach. 
    1. Uni Connect makes a difference – The largest relative increases in HE entry were observed in FSM-eligible students who participated in Uni Connect-funded activities, further demonstrating the importance of impartial outreach delivered collaboratively. 
    1. Access to selective universities improves – Intensive outreach from high-tariff providers increased the chance of progressing to a high-tariff university by 19%. 
    1. Sustained support across Key Stages is vital – Outreach delivered across both Key Stages 4 and 5 had the greatest impact, highlighting the need for long-term, multi-stage interventions throughout secondary education. 

    These findings provide compelling evidence that the work being done across the sector to widen participation is not only reaching the right students but changing trajectories at scale. Crucially, this latest research includes previously unavailable controls for student-level prior attainment — adding new rigour to our understanding of outreach impact. You can read the full report on our website. 

    What’s next for national-level research? 

    Our ability to generate this kind of national evidence is set to improve even further thanks a successful bid to the Office for Students (OfS) Innovation Fund. Through a collaboration with academics at the Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities (CEPEO) at the UCL Institute of Education, HEAT will lead on the development and piloting of a pioneering new Outreach Metric, measuring providers’ broader contribution to reducing socio-economic gaps in HE participation. More details about this project can be found here, and we look forward to sharing early findings with the sector in 2026. 

    Local-level evaluation is just as important 

    While national analyses like these are essential to understanding the big picture, the OfS rightly continues to require providers to evaluate their own delivery. Local evaluations are critical for testing specific interventions, understanding how programmes work in different contexts, and learning how to adapt practice to improve outcomes. Yet robust evaluation is often resource-intensive and can be out of reach for smaller teams. 

    This is where use of a sector-wide system for evaluation helps – shared systems like HEAT provide the infrastructure to track student engagement and outcomes at a fraction of the cost of building bespoke systems. Thanks to a decade of collaboration, we now have a system which the sector designed and built together, and which provides the tools necessary to deliver the evaluation that the OfS require providers to publish as part of their Access and Participation Plans (APP).  

    We’re also continuing to improve our infrastructure. Thanks to a second successful bid to the OfS Innovation Fund we are building system functionality to support providers to use their tracking data when evaluating their APP interventions. This includes an ‘automated comparator group tool’ that will streamline the process of identifying matched participant and non-participant groups based on confounding variables. By reducing the need for manual data work, the tool will make it easier to apply quasi-experimental designs and generate more robust evidence of impact. 

    Next steps – sharing through publication 

    With all these tools at their disposal, the next step is to support the sector to publish their evaluation. We need shared learning to avoid duplication and siloed working. HEAT is currently collaborating with TASO to deliver the Higher Education Evaluation Library (HEEL), which will collect, and share, intervention-level evaluation reports in one accessible place for the first time. By collating this evidence, the HEEL will help practitioners and policymakers alike to see what works, what doesn’t, and where we can improve together. 

    If we want to continue delivering meaningful progress on access and participation, we need both meaningful, critical local evaluation and powerful national insights. Centralised data tracking infrastructure can give the sector the tools it needs to do both. 

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  • Dilemmas of research

    Dilemmas of research

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    The post Dilemmas of research appeared first on HEPI.

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  • UNCF Taps Veteran HBCU Leader Dr. Walter M. Kimbrough for Key Research and Engagement Role

    UNCF Taps Veteran HBCU Leader Dr. Walter M. Kimbrough for Key Research and Engagement Role

    Dr. Walter M. KimbroughThe United Negro College Fund (UNCF) has appointed Dr. Walter M. Kimbrough, a seasoned higher education administrator known for his transformational leadership at historically Black colleges and universities, to serve as Executive Vice President of Research & Member Engagement, effective September 2, 2025.

    The appointment represents a strategic move by UNCF to strengthen its support for member institutions through enhanced research capabilities and deeper engagement initiatives. 

    Kimbrough, who is an expert on Black fraternities and sororities, brings decades of presidential experience from multiple UNCF member institutions, positioning him uniquely to understand the challenges and opportunities facing HBCUs today.

    “Dr. Kimbrough’s appointment is the culmination of our lengthy search for a transformational leader,” said Dr. Michael L. Lomax, UNCF President and CEO, in announcing the selection to UNCF staffers.

    Kimbrough’s extensive presidential portfolio includes leadership roles at three UNCF member institutions: Dillard University in New Orleans, Philander Smith College (now University) in Arkansas, and most recently as interim president at Talladega College in Alabama. UNCF officials add that this breadth of experience across different regions and institutional contexts provides him with an insider’s perspective on the diverse needs of UNCF’s 37 member institutions.

    In his new role, Kimbrough will report directly to the Office of the President, working alongside Dr. Lomax on strategic initiatives while collaborating with the Chief Operating Officer on operational priorities. His portfolio encompasses four major UNCF initiatives that span the educational pipeline from K-12 through higher education.

    The Frederick D. Patterson Research Institute (FDPRI), one of the key components under his leadership, serves as UNCF’s research arm, producing critical data and analysis about HBCUs and their impact on American higher education. As chief research officer and principal editor of research publications, Kimbrough will guide the institute’s scholarly output while serving as a spokesperson for UNCF in media appearances and external engagements.

     Kimbrough will also oversee the Institute for Capacity Building (ICB), positioning him as UNCF’s lead consultant for member institutions seeking to strengthen their operational and academic capabilities. This role leverages his presidential experience, allowing him to provide peer-to-peer guidance to current HBCU leaders navigating similar challenges he has faced throughout his career.

    His responsibilities also extend to HBCUv® Digital Learning Solution, UNCF’s innovative technology platform designed to support online and hybrid learning at member institutions—a particularly relevant initiative in the post-pandemic educational landscape.

    “I have had the great honor to serve four UNCF member institutions, three as president, and for over 20 years I benefited from the advocacy and support of UNCF,” Kimbrough told Diverse. “This position allows me to pour back into UNCF, its member institutions and students.”

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