Tag: risk

  • Nation’s Report Card at risk, researchers say

    Nation’s Report Card at risk, researchers say

    This story was reported by and originally published by APM Reports in connection with its podcast Sold a Story: How Teach Kids to Read Went So Wrong.

    When voters elected Donald Trump in November, most people who worked at the U.S. Department of Education weren’t scared for their jobs. They had been through a Trump presidency before, and they hadn’t seen big changes in their department then. They saw their work as essential, mandated by law, nonpartisan and, as a result, insulated from politics.

    Then, in early February, the Department of Government Efficiency showed up. Led at the time by billionaire CEO Elon Musk, and known by the cheeky acronym DOGE, it gutted the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, posting on X that the effort would ferret out “waste, fraud and abuse.”

    A post from the Department of Government Efficiency.

    When it was done, DOGE had cut approximately $900 million in research contracts and more than 90 percent of the institute’s workforce had been laid off. (The current value of the contracts was closer to $820 million, data compiled by APM Reports shows, and the actual savings to the government was substantially less, because in some cases large amounts of money had been spent already.)

    Among staff cast aside were those who worked on the National Assessment of Educational Progress — also known as the Nation’s Report Card — which is one of the few federal education initiatives the Trump administration says it sees as valuable and wants to preserve.

    The assessment is a series of tests administered nearly every year to a national sample of more than 10,000 students in grades 4, 8 and 12. The tests regularly measure what students across the country know in reading, math and other subjects. They allow the government to track how well America’s students are learning overall. Researchers can also combine the national data with the results of tests administered by states to draw comparisons between schools and districts in different states.

    The assessment is “something we absolutely need to keep,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said at an education and technology summit in San Diego earlier this year. “If we don’t, states can be a little manipulative with their own results and their own testing. I think it’s a way that we keep everybody honest.”

    But researchers and former Department of Education employees say they worry that the test will become less and less reliable over time, because the deep cuts will cause its quality to slip — and some already see signs of trouble.

    “The main indication is that there just aren’t the staff,” said Sean Reardon, a Stanford University professor who uses the testing data to research gaps in learning between students of different income levels.

    All but one of the experts who make sure the questions in the assessment are fair and accurate — called psychometricians — have been laid off from the National Center for Education Statistics. These specialists play a key role in updating the test and making sure it accurately measures what students know.

    “These are extremely sophisticated test assessments that required a team of researchers to make them as good as they are,” said Mark Seidenberg, a researcher known for his significant contributions to the science of reading. Seidenberg added that “a half-baked” assessment would undermine public confidence in the results, which he described as “essentially another way of killing” the assessment.

    The Department of Education defended its management of the assessment in an email: “Every member of the team is working toward the same goal of maintaining NAEP’s gold-standard status,” it read in part.

    The National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policies for the national test, said in a statement that it had temporarily assigned “five staff members who have appropriate technical expertise (in psychometrics, assessment operations, and statistics) and federal contract management experience” to work at the National Center for Education Statistics. No one from DOGE responded to a request for comment.

    Harvard education professor Andrew Ho, a former member of the governing board, said the remaining staff are capable, but he’s concerned that there aren’t enough of them to prevent errors.

    “In order to put a good product up, you need a certain number of person-hours, and a certain amount of continuity and experience doing exactly this kind of job, and that’s what we lost,” Ho said.

    The Trump administration has already delayed the release of some testing data following the cutbacks. The Department of Education had previously planned to announce the results of the tests for 8th grade science, 12th grade math and 12th grade reading this summer; now that won’t happen until September. The board voted earlier this year to eliminate more than a dozen tests over the next seven years, including fourth grade science in 2028 and U.S. history for 12th graders in 2030. The governing board has also asked Congress to postpone the 2028 tests to 2029, citing a desire to avoid releasing test results in an election year. 

    “Today’s actions reflect what assessments the Governing Board believes are most valuable to stakeholders and can be best assessed by NAEP at this time, given the imperative for cost efficiencies,” board chair and former North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue said earlier this year in a press release.

    The National Assessment Governing Board canceled more than a dozen tests when it revised the schedule for the National Assessment of Educational Progress in April. This annotated version of the previous schedule, adopted in 2023, shows which tests were canceled. Topics shown in all caps were scheduled for a potential overhaul; those annotated with a red star are no longer scheduled for such a revision.

    Recent estimates peg the annual cost to keep the national assessment running at about $190 million per year, a fraction of the department’s 2025 budget of approximately $195 billion.

    Adam Gamoran, president of the William T. Grant Foundation, said multiple contracts with private firms — overseen by Department of Education staff with “substantial expertise” — are the backbone of the national test.

    “You need a staff,” said Gamoran, who was nominated last year to lead the Institute of Education Sciences. He was never confirmed by the Senate. “The fact that NCES now only has three employees indicates that they can’t possibly implement NAEP at a high level of quality, because they lack the in-house expertise to oversee that work. So that is deeply troubling.”

    The cutbacks were widespread — and far outside of what most former employees had expected under the new administration.

    “I don’t think any of us imagined this in our worst nightmares,” said a former Education Department employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation by the Trump administration. “We weren’t concerned about the utter destruction of this national resource of data.”

    “At what point does it break?” the former employee asked.

    Related: Suddenly sacked

    Every state has its own test for reading, math and other subjects. But state tests vary in difficulty and content, which makes it tricky to compare results in Minnesota to Mississippi or Montana.

    “They’re totally different tests with different scales,” Reardon said. “So NAEP is the Rosetta stone that lets them all be connected.”

    Reardon and his team at Stanford used statistical techniques to combine the federal assessment results with state test scores and other data sets to create the Educational Opportunity Project. The project, first released in 2016 and updated periodically in the years that followed, shows which schools and districts are getting the best results — especially for kids from poor families. Since the project’s release, Reardon said, the data has been downloaded 50,000 times and is used by researchers, teachers, parents, school boards and state education leaders to inform their decisions.

    For instance, the U.S. military used the data to measure school quality when weighing base closures, and superintendents used it to find demographically similar but higher-performing districts to learn from, Reardon said.

    If the quality of the data slips, those comparisons will be more difficult to make.

    “My worry is we just have less-good information on which to base educational decisions at the district, state and school level,” Reardon said. “We would be in the position of trying to improve the education system with no information. Sort of like, ‘Well, let’s hope this works. We won’t know, but it sounds like a good idea.’”

    Seidenberg, the reading researcher, said the national assessment “provided extraordinarily important, reliable information about how we’re doing in terms of teaching kids to read and how literacy is faring in the culture at large.”

    Producing a test without keeping the quality up, Seidenberg said, “would be almost as bad as not collecting the data at all.”

    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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  • Can your religion put your nationality at risk?

    Can your religion put your nationality at risk?

    Standing on the charred remains of his hut in a village near Assam’s Morigaon district in South India, Shafik Ahmed clutched a worn folder of papers: land deeds, ration cards and a laminated voter ID, all declaring the 68-year-old bicycle repairman an Indian citizen.

    None of it mattered when bulldozers rolled into his neighbourhood in June 2025, demolishing 17 homes, all belonging to Bengali-speaking Muslims.

    “I was born here, voted here, paid taxes here,” Ahmed said. “Still, they told me I am a foreigner. They dumped us near the border like we are cattle.”

    Ahmed is among the hundreds of Muslims who say they were pushed across India’s eastern border into Bangladesh in recent months, as part of what human rights lawyers say is a rapidly intensifying campaign of ethnic targeting in Assam, a region famous across the world for the quality of tea it produces. 

    The drive has escalated in the run-up to the 2026 state elections, with Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma branding undocumented Muslims as “infiltrators” and vowing to “protect the culture of Assam.”

    Islamophobia is a global concern.

    The expulsions, many executed without due legal process, have sparked concern far beyond India’s borders. As the United Nations warns of a global surge in anti-Muslim bigotry, activists say Assam’s campaign fits a broader pattern of Islamophobia playing out across continents.

    “They call it pushback,” Ahmed said. “We call it expulsion.”

    Across Assam, particularly in Muslim-majority districts like Dhubri, Barpeta and Goalpara, families wake up to midnight police knocks, arbitrary detentions and the looming threat of forced deportation.

    Rubina Khatun, 53, said she was taken without explanation from her home In May 2025, driven 200km to the Matia detention centre and later left in the no-man’s land near the India-Bangladesh border along with other women and children.

    “The soldiers shouted at us: ‘You’re not Indian anymore. Go to your country’,” she said. “But I have never been to Bangladesh. We spent hours in the swamp. No food, no water. It felt like we were being erased.”

    Applying old laws to new intolerance

    Human rights lawyer Hameed Laskar, who represents several families appealing the orders by the Foreigners Tribunals, says the government is misusing a 1950 law meant for undocumented immigrants.

    “These people have lived in Assam for generations,” Laskar said. “Some even appear on the National Register of Citizens. But a misspelled name or a missing land receipt from 1970 is enough to be declared a foreigner. It’s not legal enforcement. It’s engineered exclusion.”

    The targeting of Muslims in Assam is not new. But since the conservative Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in India in 2014, the rhetoric has hardened and the policies have sharpened.

    In 2019, the national registry process excluded nearly 2 million people, most of them Muslims. That has left families in limbo. While Hindus excluded from the list can claim citizenship under India’s 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act, there is no such provision for Muslims.

    The wife of Parvez Alam, a schoolteacher in the city of Barpeta, Aswas recently declared a foreigner despite having a birth certificate and electoral record.

    “Muslims now need 20 documents to prove their Indian-ness. Hindus only need to declare it,” Alam said. 

    Ping-ponging people across borders

    According to a June statement from Chief Minister Sarma in the state assembly, more than 300 “illegal Bangladeshis” have been expelled since May. Local media and community groups put the number closer to 500, including at least 120 women.

    But the Bangladeshi government has rejected many of these returnees, saying they have no proof of origin. Several have been stranded in border areas, caught in a bureaucratic tug-of-war.

    In one incident that drew widespread attention, 60-year-old Salim Uddin, a retired truck driver from Golaghat, was found wandering along the India-Bangladesh border after his family saw a viral video showing him being handed over to Bangladesh’s border guards.

    His son, Rashid, later confirmed that Uddin had served in the Assam Police for nearly three decades.

    “How can the son of a state police officer be declared Bangladeshi?” Rashid asked. “Had my grandfather been alive, it would have broken his heart.”

    A pattern of prejudice

    The Assam government has denied that the crackdown is communal, insisting it targets only “illegal foreigners.” But the pattern tells a different story. A recent report by a coalition of civil society groups found that over 95% of those detained or expelled this year were Bengali-speaking Muslims.

    The fear gripping Assam’s Muslims mirrors rising Islamophobia globally. From bans on hijabs in French schools to mosque attacks in the United Kingdom, Muslims across continents are facing what the United Nations calls a “widening wave of intolerance.”

    On March 15, UN Secretary-General António Guterres marked the International Day to Combat Islamophobia by warning of a disturbing rise in anti-Muslim bigotry. “This is part of a wider scourge of extremist ideologies and attacks on religious groups,” Guterres said in a video address. “Governments must foster social cohesion and protect religious freedom.”

    He called on online platforms to curb hate speech, and on leaders to avoid rhetoric that demonizes communities. Muslim civil rights groups in Europe and North America have echoed those concerns.

    A spread of intolerance across the globe

    A recent report by the Council on American-Islamic Relations documented a record 8,658 anti-Muslim incidents in 2024 alone.

    In the UK, advocacy group Tell MAMA has reported a 30% increase in Islamophobic hate crimes since October 2023, including attacks on mosques, verbal abuse and discrimination in housing and employment.

    Dr. Arshiya Khan, a political sociologist based in London, said these patterns are not isolated. “They’re interlinked,” Khan said. “What starts as state policy in one country often emboldens vigilante behaviour in others.”

    In Assam’s tea belt, the fear is palpable. In several villages, Muslim residents say they have stopped going to police stations or even hospitals, afraid they might be detained. In one case, a 27-year-old man who went to register a land dispute at a local police station was declared a foreigner after a routine ID check.

    “We don’t know who is next,” said Shahina Begum, a mother of three. “They say we don’t belong here. But where do we go?”

    Fighting back

    At least four petitions have been filed in the Assam High Court since June by families who say their relatives disappeared after being taken by police. Most had no ongoing legal cases against them.

    “They’re being disappeared without a trace,” said Laskar. “This is not law enforcement, it’s ethnic cleansing in slow motion.”

    Back in Morigaon, Shafik Ahmed said he has no plans to leave, even as bulldozers return to neighbouring villages.

    “This land is all I know. If they push me out again, I’ll come back again,” he said, eyes fixed on the debris of his former home.

    But for those like Rubina Khatun the trauma is lasting. “We’re citizens,” she said. “We have documents. We were born here. But in their eyes, we will never be Indian enough.”

    As global attention briefly turns to Assam, with international bodies urging India to uphold human rights, residents say they don’t expect justice, only survival.

    “Every day we live feels like another test to prove we exist,” Ahmed said.

     

    Questions to consider

    1. Why do Muslim citizens of Assam India believe that their government treats them differently than non-Muslims? 

    2. Should religion be a factor in determining whether someone should get national citizenship?

    3. Should a government be concerned about the religions of its citizens? 

     

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  • Federal Grants for Area Studies and Foreign Language at Risk

    Federal Grants for Area Studies and Foreign Language at Risk

    For 67 years, the Department of Education has administered grants to universities to create centers devoted to foreign languages and area studies, a field focused on the study of the culture of a particular area or region. Now, those centers are under fire by the Trump administration, which has not released the funding the grantees expected to receive in July.

    The grants support what are known as National Resource Centers, which were originally developed as a national security tool to help the U.S. increase its international expertise in the midst of the Cold War and the aftermath of Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik. Since then, their purpose has shifted with the times, now focusing not only on producing scholars but also on community outreach and collaboration with K–12 schools.

    The office responsible for administering the grants—International and Foreign Language Education—was dissolved and its entire staff laid off as part of the March reduction in force at the Department of Education. But it seemed IFLE’s programs, which were authorized under Title VI of the Higher Education Act of 1965, would live on; they were moved under the ED’s Office of Higher Education Programs, according to an internal communication shared with Inside Higher Ed at the time.

    Since then, funding has come through “in fits and starts,” Halina Goldberg, the director of Indiana University’s Robert F. Byrnes Russian and East European Institute (REEI), told Inside Higher Ed in an email, though ultimately, the center received all its promised funds for fiscal year 2024–25. REEI was part of the first cohort of NRCs and has been continuously funded by the program since then.

    But NRC directors, including Goldberg, are concerned the funds for the upcoming year—the final year of the program’s four-year cycle—may not come through, and that the Trump administration may be planning to demolish the program altogether. NRC leaders have received no notice from ED about whether or when the funds are coming, and some say their contacts at the department have expressed uncertainty about the program’s future.

    The funding cuts appear to be caused by the Office of Management and Budget; records show that the agency has not approved appropriations for programs formerly housed in IFLE, including the NRC program, as well as the Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships, which fund scholarships and stipends for undergraduate and graduate students studying these disciplines. In total, about $85 million was appropriated for IFLE programs for FY 2025–26, including $60 million for NRCs and FLAS.

    “We’re just kind of in this holding pattern to learn whether our funds are going to be released or not. And there is some time pressure, because if that fiscal year 2025 funding is not allocated by Sept. 30, which is when the fiscal year, the government fiscal year ends, then it’s gone and we’re without funding,” said Kasia Szremski, associate director for the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

    A Discipline in Crisis

    NRC grant recipients worry about what the funding freeze and potential elimination of the program will mean for the disciplines of foreign language and area studies, which have already taken a beating in recent years; many colleges have eliminated such programs as cost-saving measures— including West Virginia University, which gutted nearly all of its language programs in 2023. More recently, the University of Chicago has paused admissions to all its humanities Ph.D. programs, including a slew of language programs, for the coming academic year.

    Emanuel Rota, a professor in the Department of French and Italian at Urbana-Champaign who leads the university’s European Union Center, said he was already worried about the future of area studies and foreign language education, but “now I’m terribly scared.”

    “I think this seems to be, at this point, slightly part of a trend to provincialize the United States in a way that is troubling for the future of this generation of students, who are, at this point, used to learning from other experiences around the world; knowing about ways of teaching, other ways of learning; establishing collaborations early on; and being able to be multicultural and multilinguistic like their peers around the world,” he said. “And all of a sudden they are told, ‘You only speak one language, you only know one culture and you only know your local environment, and you have to live with that.’”

    It also comes amid efforts to quash other forms of cultural education and intercultural exchange. OMB also recently cut funding from a number of State Department exchange programs, according to Mark Overmann, executive director of the Alliance for International Exchange, which represents organizations that administer such programs.

    Larger entities like the Fulbright program are being spared, he said, but the cuts include critical programming aiming at increasing STEM education access for girls around the world, fostering intercultural exchange with students in the Middle East, bolstering the study of foreign affairs in the U.S. and more.

    International students and immigration broadly are also being targeted by the Trump administration, which has recently revoked thousands of student visas and increased barriers for overseas students studying in the U.S.

    “I think international exchange programs, mobility, the presence of international students on our campuses have long been something that is supported in a bipartisan way, and that has been played out for decades in tangible ways,” Overmann said. “One would be increases in funding in both Democrat and Republican administrations, as well as Congresses. This is something we have seen transcend party lines and those across the political spectrum see that the mobility of our students, of our young professionals—both Americans going abroad and international students and professionals coming here—is something that supports our national security, our diplomatic interests, our influence around the world and our economy, down to very local levels.”

    This isn’t the first time Trump has targeted NRCs. In 2018, during his first administration, ED criticized a Middle Eastern studies consortium at Duke University and the University of North Carolina for delivering programs it alleged had “little or no relevance to Title VI.” The programs under scrutiny included a conference about “Love and Desire in Modern Iran” and another focused on film criticism in the Middle East.

    “It was probably a harbinger of what’s happening now,” said Brian Cwiek, a former IFLE program officer who lost his job when the office was dissolved. “I think that’s really where a lot of the same folks became intent on shutting down this same program.”

    Area studies funding is also singled out in Project 2025, an agenda developed by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation that the Trump administration is following closely.

    “Congress should wind down so-called ‘area studies’ programs at universities (Title VI of the HEA), which, although intended to serve American interests, sometimes fund programs that run counter to those interests,” Project 2025 reads. “In the meantime, the next Administration should promulgate a new regulation to require the Secretary of Education to allocate at least 40 percent of funding to international business programs that teach about free markets and economics and require institutions, faculty, and fellowship recipients to certify that they intend to further the stated statutory goals of serving American interests.”

    Outreach at Risk

    Although funding may still come through before the September cutoff date, some centers are already feeling the pressure.

    At the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University, which is home to two National Resource Centers, Kathi Colen Peck was responsible for administering an NRC-funded program focused on providing faculty development to professors at community colleges in upstate New York. Although the center has funding sources outside of ED, the community college program was almost entirely funded by an NRC grant.

    The program involved bringing international speakers—a dance instructor from Benin, for example—to give workshops in community college classrooms, as well as administering a fellowship for community college professors to create curricular projects.

    Once it became clear this year’s funding wasn’t going to become available when expected, Peck was laid off and the partnerships with community colleges for the upcoming academic year had to be discontinued.

    “The intention of [the outreach program] is really to sort of bridge resources and help the community college faculty have connections to the area studies expertise at, for example, Cornell. They’re able to leverage resources at Cornell where they wouldn’t necessarily have access to that in any other circumstances,” she said. “It’s really about trying to help the community college faculty internationalize their curricula.”

    At other campuses, cultural events and educational programs that NRC leaders say are immensely valuable to their communities could be on the chopping block. Hilary V. Finchum-Sung, the executive director of the Association for Asian Studies, said that the University of Michigan’s Korean Studies center, for example, hosts a free Korean film series at an off-campus theater that is open to members of the public. It’s an opportunity for members of the Ann Arbor community to see a film they likely never would otherwise—and to glean something new about a culture that they might be unfamiliar with.

    On the flip side, NRC programs can sometimes give immigrants a rare chance to connect with their culture on American soil. Szremski, of UIUC’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, said the center has partnered with local libraries to hold a Latin American Story Time Program for about 15 years. At these events, they read children’s stories in English and Spanish, but also in other Latin American languages including Portuguese, Guaraní, Q’anjob’al, and Quechua.

    “This is particularly important in Champaign and Urbana, because even though we’re in central Illinois, we have a very large and very vibrant Latino community, many of whom are native speakers of Indigenous languages,” she said.

    Once, after a Latin American Story Time event, a library worker once told her, an older woman “came up to her in tears because she was a native Guaraní speaker and had never thought [she would] hear her native language again, really, now that she was living in the United States.”

    Cwiek noted that some faculty positions may also be at risk without NRC funding; though the grants usually cover only a small portion of a professor’s salary, that portion may be the difference that allows a college to offer certain world languages.

    Scholarship Uncertainty

    Students are also in imminent danger of losing scholarships due to the funding pause. Graduate students relying on Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships to fund their education in the new academic year still don’t know whether they will receive that money. Szremski said on Friday that one incoming fellow recently made the choice to withdraw from UIUC and instead study in Colombia for the upcoming academic year due to funding fears. With UIUC’s academic year beginning this week, others were forced to make the decision about whether to come to campus without knowing if they would receive the scholarships they’d been promised. Across the university’s NRCs, 53 students are awaiting FLAS funds.

    Other universities are in a similar position. At Cornell, 18 students will be impacted if the money doesn’t come through, according to Ellen Lust, the director of the Einaudi Center for International Studies and a government professor.

    These fellowships provide the cultural awareness, understanding and skills that the U.S. “has relied on to be a world leader. Students who benefited from NRC support have gone on to join the US Foreign Service, engage in international business, and educate new generations of global citizens. They have conducted international collaborations and research that that ultimately benefit Americans,” she wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed.

    While the stipends allocated to undergraduate students are not as sizable as those for graduate students, Szremski said those recipients have told her they may have to take out private loans or start part-time jobs to fill the gap created by the missing FLAS money.

    The future of these grants remains unclear. The Senate’s appropriations bill maintains funding for IFLE programs, so even if the funding doesn’t come through this year, the program may be able to resume the following year.

    But if the NRC and FLAS programs are shuttered permanently, the effects will “be felt for generations to come,” wrote Lust.

    “Our current and future students are the foreign service officers, intelligence analysts and CEOs of the future,” she wrote. “Within a generation, US citizens will be ill-equipped to live, work and lead in a global world. They will be outmatched by those from other countries, who speak multiple languages, understand diverse cultures and have built relationships across borders. Ultimately, these policies weaken the US’ global position and will make America less secure and prosperous.”

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  • How to offer academic asylum to scholars at risk

    How to offer academic asylum to scholars at risk

    Since President Trump rolled out executive orders to eliminate DEI programmes and began to unpick the funding infrastructure of American research, a number of countries have offered safe haven to academics currently working in the USA.

    As rector of Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Jan Danckaert, noted:

    American universities and their researchers are the biggest victims of this political and ideological interference. They’re seeing millions in research funding disappear for ideological reasons.

    From Singapore and Australia to Norway and Belgium, governments and individual universities around the globe are seizing the opportunity to attract the top American minds. For scholars fearful of their government’s policy direction on academic freedom, such as those working in gender studies, on vaccine research or climate change, the situation is urgent.

    At risk academics

    Yet this is nothing new. The Council for At-Risk Academics (CARA) has helped researchers escape persecution and conflict for almost a century, bringing the likes of Nikolaus Pevsner, Max Born and Albie Sachs to safety in Britain. Conceived in response to the Nazi assault on universities, CARA drove Britain’s scholarly rescue mission in the 1930s. At the same time, a parallel movement began in the USA. The Institute for Advanced Study was created at Princeton, with Albert Einstein appointed as the first Fellow in 1932. Other European academics such as Paul Dirac and Emmy Noether soon followed.

    Just as German scientists sought academic freedom in the USA and UK in the 1930s, now American scholars are beginning to cross the Atlantic in the other direction. In France, Aix-Marseille University received around 300 applications for its Safe Place for Science initiative, which aims to offer 15 million Euro to support research across the next three years. The first eight researchers arrived in France in June, with up to 20 expected by the beginning of the new academic year.

    The UK’s universities meanwhile seem mired in a funding crisis due to financial models all too dependent on precarious markets of international students, leading to shrinking budgets, staff layoffs and even the looming possibility of full-blown bankruptcy. Offering cash and “academic asylum” to any foreign academics in these straitened circumstances is unlikely to be seen as a priority. And yet Institutes for Advanced Study, or IASs, already provide the necessary infrastructure and perhaps the fastest means of response.

    What is an Institute for Advanced Study?

    Princeton’s Institute remains remarkable: since its inception, visitors have been selected solely on the basis of academic ability, regardless of gender, race or religion; its mission of Advanced Study centres the “curiosity-driven pursuit of knowledge” as a good in itself, with no view to practical application or the expectation of meeting predetermined goals. This approach, and the inherent interdisciplinarity of bringing together researchers across the sciences, arts and humanities, inspired counterparts around the world, including the UK’s first IAS at the University of Edinburgh in 1969. Other UK universities with an IAS now include Warwick, Loughborough, Durham, Stirling, UCL and Birmingham.

    These Institutes vary in size and scope but all share Princeton’s founding mission of untrammelled academic freedom for blue-sky thinking. Interdisciplinarity is the scholarly keystone of Advanced Study. Researchers from diverse disciplines and career stages form a community of practice, which may also encompass artists, journalists, community activists and others who likewise benefit from a reflective, supportive, non-hierarchical environment in which to work. Conversations and serendipitous encounters in such an environment can be the “source from which undreamed-of utility is derived” in the words of Abraham Flexner, founder of Princeton’s IAS.

    What can these institutes offer?

    Amid difficult economic times, approaches to knowledge production have become ever more instrumental, with research increasingly valorised for its capacity to be commercialised or to have some form of impact beyond the academy. However, an overemphasis on applied research risks circumscribing the conceptual imagination that underscores so many scientific advances. The curiosity-driven IAS approach can be a necessary corrective to instrumentalism, bolstering a healthy research culture.

    From their inception in the 1930s, IASs have also always had a moral mission to support colleagues around the world when threatened by conflict, displacement or, in the case of the new wave of populist governments, by illiberalism. For those escaping war and trauma, such institutes form quiet places of refuge, rehabilitation and recovery. A small institute can be agile enough to respond to urgent need when research is threatened, where a whole department is less able to pivot. It is worth noting that recent programmes for Ukrainian scholars and their families have tended to emerge from IASs, along with bespoke schemes for researchers from Palestine, Syria, Hungary or Türkiye – and now perhaps America.

    Lastly, opportunities for career advancement have reduced across the whole university sector, nationally and internationally. Early-career scholars in particular face an impossibly precarious work environment, and staff development programmes are often the first casualty of cuts to expenditure. Whilst contracted research – as PDRA on a senior scholar’s project – can be an important stepping stone in the early stages of an academic career, there is a need for more funded opportunities to support independent research at postdoctoral level. IASs are one of very few means by which such research can flourish. Each year, hundreds of global scholars are appointed to IAS Fellowships at postdoctoral and more senior levels.

    Given the polycrises facing the sector, turning us inward, perhaps it is necessary to reconsider higher education as a global commons. In doing so, universities must embrace their particular responsibilities as places of sanctuary, of fundamental knowledge production and as incubators for the next generation of scholarship. The concept of Advanced Study was created to foster innovation across all these areas in a time of persecution.

    Now more than ever, Institutes devoted to that transformative potential could be the vehicle for promoting the highest standards of international collaboration, extending a hand to academics at risk in the global south and north, including our American counterparts.

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  • 3 risk factors making states vulnerable to federal funding cuts

    3 risk factors making states vulnerable to federal funding cuts

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    A dozen states and their school districts are more vulnerable to federal funding rollbacks than others in K-12 because of their higher proportions of high-need districts and students living in poverty, according to an analysis from nonprofit group Education Resource Strategies.

    Another risk factor for the 12 states is their higher dependency on federal funding: 16% of Alaska’s total education revenue, for example, came from the federal government in 2021-22. Nationally, 13.7% of public school funding came from the federal government that school year, according to USA Facts.

    According to ERS, there are 12 states that meet all three risk factors: Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia. 

    In addition to the three risk factors reviewed by ERS, states and public schools are facing myriad other funding pressures, including federal fiscal delays and cutbacks, the end of COVID-19 emergency aid and competition from school choice options. 

    Although most funding for public schools comes from local and state coffers, reductions in federal revenue could lead to school-level impacts, including staff reductions or program cancellations, ERS said.

    3 risk factors

    In its analysis, ERS considered three risk factors that would make states more vulnerable to federal funding cuts. The first is a higher reliance on federal funds as a percentage of total education revenue. 

    While federal funding has an impact on all states, those where federal funds exceed 10% of total K-12 revenue could be more vulnerable, ERS analysts said.

    The analysis considered all federal funding directed to public K-12 districts, including Medicaid reimbursements and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits. The analysis did not consider federal pandemic emergency funding.

    The second risk factor is the percentage of districts in a state serving students living in poverty. 

    Districts serving a high proportion of students living in poverty rely the most on federal funding, as federal grants support low income students and districts. 

    The ERS analysis said states that have more than 30% of districts defined as “high-need” means that many districts would be impacted by reductions or disruptions in federal funding. A high-need district is one in which more than 20% of students live in poverty.

    In Louisiana, for example, 81% of the state’s 69 public school districts qualify as high-need, which could be a challenge for Louisiana should Congress reduce federal funding for FY 2026, ERS said.

    The third risk factor is the percentage of students attending a high-need district. The analysis measured this as a risk factor if more than 20% of a state’s students attend a high-need district. For those states, many families would be impacted by any federal budget reductions, even if a family is not low income.

    ERS points out, however, that even if a state has a lower number of high-need districts, those few districts could be serving a large number of students. For example, only 12% of New York’s districts are considered high-need, but because New York City — a high-need district — serves more than 1 million students, 52% of the state’s students are served by a high-need district.

    An ‘unprecedented level of uncertainty’

    “It’s important for stakeholders to understand the challenges that schools and districts might face if federal funding cuts do happen, and to recognize that the impact will be different” depending on the risk factors, said Betty Chang, managing partner at ERS.

    “Districts are facing a pretty unprecedented level of uncertainty when it comes to their financial forecast,” Chang added. 

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  • Why College Deferred Maintenance Is a Growing Risk

    Why College Deferred Maintenance Is a Growing Risk

    Declining student numbers, funding reductions, rising personnel costs and policy changes at the state and federal level pose the biggest financial risks to institutions, according to Inside Higher Ed’s recent annual survey of chief business officers with Hanover Research. Those issues are consistent with an overall threat to higher education: that federal policy and economic uncertainty are stressing a sector already teetering on enrollment and demand cliffs.

    Yet underneath those challenges lies another, less headline-grabbing danger: delayed upkeep and repairs to infrastructure and assets.

    More on the Survey

    Inside Higher Ed’s 15th annual Survey of College and University Chief Business Officers was conducted by Hanover Research. The survey included 169 chief business officers, mostly from public and private nonprofit institutions, for a margin of error of 7 percent. The response rate was 7 percent. A copy of the free report can be downloaded here.

    On Wednesday, Aug. 20, at 2 p.m. Eastern, Inside Higher Ed will present a free webcast to discuss the results of the survey, with experts who can answer your most pressing questions about higher education finance—including how to plan effectively amid the current financial and policy uncertainty. Register here.

    One in three surveyed CBOs (36 percent) identified infrastructure/deferred maintenance costs as a top financial risk to their institution, just behind state and/or federal policy changes—and ahead of options such as technology investment requirements, increased market competition (including from alternative credential providers), potential changes to international student enrollment and changes in student athletics revenue and name, image and likeness deals.

    Most CBOs also say they’re at least moderately concerned about their institution’s ability to fund deferred maintenance and facility needs, with 11 percent extremely concerned and another quarter (25 percent) very concerned.

    How bad is the problem? Just 1 percent of institutions represented were on track to fund no deferred maintenance in the then-current fiscal year (the survey was live in April and May). But another 63 percent were only poised to fund up to a quarter of identified needs. This is consistent across public and private nonprofit institutions.

    By institution type, public doctoral university CBOs were most likely to report funding a quarter or less, at 89 percent. Community college CBOs were least likely to report this, at 44 percent. Still, just about a third of community college CBOs expected their institution to fund more than half of identified needs.

    Across higher education, deferred maintenance needs span aging HVAC systems, roofs and dorms; buildings in need of rewiring; and more. Technical deferred maintenance, such as addressing choppy Wi-Fi, is another concern. These aren’t the flashy projects that attract donors or drive capital campaigns (exceptions notwithstanding). But they matter in terms of curb appeal and functionality. Prospective students notice the state of facilities. Dingy classrooms and buildings are current students’ learning and living conditions, and employees’ working conditions. Deferred maintenance may translate to safety or accessibility issues (think sidewalks and elevators). And problems only compound over time, meaning deferred maintenance can—and does—escalate to larger, costlier repairs.

    Richard G. Mills Jr., president and CEO of United Educators, a liability insurance and risk management services provider, said that underfunding depreciation has “long been in the bag of tools that institutions will turn to in times of financial stress.” It’s never been a “great practice,” he continued, “but I understand why it happens, and there is even an argument that in the past era of growth—in endowments, tuition, philanthropy and student population—it wasn’t an outlandish way to approach what were largely temporary downturns.”

    Now all that has changed, said Mills, a former college chief administrative, business and operating officer: “The forward environment is unlikely to be one of growth,” with philanthropy, tuition revenue and student populations “certain to remain flat or decline for some time.”

    In this light, using deferred maintenance as a tool is simply delaying an expense whose cost is likely to compound at a significant rate, he added.

    Ruth Johnston, vice president of consulting for the National Association of College and University Business Officers, agreed that deferred maintenance “is a very big and growing issue for universities and colleges and has been for many years.”

    Public colleges and universities are often hardest hit, Johnston said, as state legislators “prefer to fund new capital projects over providing funds for the less glamorous options of deferred maintenance.” And unless universities and colleges “intentionally create budgets, and consistently add funds to them, they don’t prioritize deferred maintenance and often only pay for emergency needs.”

    The shiny-object phenomenon isn’t exclusive to public institutions. Mills recalled, for example, how a dean at a private institution once said he wasn’t worried about underfunding because when major renewal was required, “he would simply run a capital campaign to build a new building.”

    In addition to the findings on deferred maintenance, the survey also suggests that some institutions are rethinking their physical campuses amid shifting enrollment and study trends. About two in five respondents (41 percent) report that their institution is retaining its current physical campus footprint but investing in renovations. Another 34 percent report targeted expansion, or moderate growth in specific areas. But relatively few CBOs report either strategic downsizing or significant expansion.

    Deferred maintenance expenses can sometimes be bundled into other project budgets. But uncertainty and other factors are slowing or halting even capital spending on many campuses—even if strategic downsizing isn’t yet a major trend.

    Seth Odell, founder of Kanahoma, an education marketing agency, underscored the gravity of the deferred maintenance backlog, saying it “feels like it’s a part of a broader death spiral many institutions have found themselves in.”

    “We often treat deferred maintenance as a facilities or finance issue, but it’s increasingly a strategic enrollment risk—and one that’s compounding year over year,” he said. “I’ve worked with institutions where students are literally walking past shuttered buildings on campus tours, or sweating through admitted-student events due to outdated HVAC systems. In a competitive enrollment environment, these realities are no longer just aesthetic. They’re affecting yield.”

    Compounding Problems, (Radical) Solutions

    Even before it downgraded its higher education outlook in March due to federal policy uncertainty, Moody’s Ratings had warned that a “large and growing backlog of capital needs posed a significant credit risk for the higher education sector.” In a report last summer, Moody’s said that $750 billion to $950 billion of spending would be needed over the next decade for just its approximately 500 rated colleges and universities to make “significant headway toward reducing deferred maintenance, upgrading facilities and building the new projects that are critical to strategic positioning.”

    “Colleges and universities that are unable to offer updated facilities, advanced technology and an attractive physical environment risk losing competitive standing,” Moody’s said at the time.

    Construction cost data firm Gordian documented in its most recent “State of Facilities in Higher Education” report “ongoing curtailment of campus expansions as institutions take stock of what they will really need to own and operate,” plus shortfalls in the funding of needed campus renewal investments of more than 32 percent. It valued the backlog of capital renewal needs at over $140 per gross square foot.

    The situation isn’t likely to improve anytime soon. Emily Raimes, associate managing director at Moody’s, told Inside Higher Ed that amid growing economic and policy uncertainty, “many institutions are adopting a more cautious approach to financial planning. This shift in strategy may lead to a deceleration or postponement of capital investment initiatives.”

    Shrinking the footprint of a college campus is a real opportunity for colleges and universities to move forward and save money.”

    —Consultant John Woell

    F. King Alexander, who served as president of Louisiana State University from 2013 to 2020, said that deferred maintenance needs increased $30 million per year at the Baton Rouge campus alone during his tenure. The university “cobbled” together only about $8 to $10 million annually to address emergency issues, he said, so the problem still grew by about $20 million annually “despite what we were able to do.”

    “We used a lot of duct tape,” he said.

    Louisiana last year passed legislation designed to fund deferred maintenance and capital improvements at state institutions. It will take years and consistent support to tackle the state’s $2 billion backlog.

    Alexander, now a professor of educational leadership at Florida Gulf Coast University, is currently involved in an ongoing national study that draws on the insights of chief community college financial officers. Based on that research, completed with colleagues at the University of Alabama’s Education Policy Center, only “marginal” progress has been made in facilities since 2007, as institutions “still have the same needs, the same backlogs, the same increases in maintenance and the same lack of planning,” he said. In 2024, the largest areas of deferred maintenance and facility problems for community colleges included science labs, classroom spaces and computer labs.

    “States have consistently shifted their deferred maintenance costs from state government to the public colleges and universities over the last three decades,” Alexander said. “In other words, to student tuition and fees.”  

    Odell described deferred maintenance as “both a symptom and an accelerant of the bigger financial reckoning” now facing higher education.

    For tuition-dependent institutions especially, he added, “it’s a vicious cycle. Declining enrollment leads to reduced revenue, which leads to deferred investments, which in turn erode the very experience that drives enrollment.”

    Odell did note some “success stories,” including Southern New Hampshire University, which has been able to work somewhat in reverse, “using surplus generated from online enrollment growth to completely revamp and reimagine their campus experience.”

    Among other strategies, the consultancy EAB recommends that campus leaders create maintenance endowments that will support a building’s “true needs” across its life cycle—not just construction.

    John Woell, principal at Manitou Passage Consultancy, offered his own suite of suggestions—some of them unconventional: replacing faculty and staff offices with more flexible workspace arrangements, known as “hoteling”; being clear about needs, including how each campus space supports the college’s mission; and ending gifts in perpetuity by pivoting to “sponsorships.” 

    “If a gift pays to build a space that has a likely useful life span of 50 years, allow renaming at the end of the 50 years.”

    Bigger picture, Woell said, “Shrinking the footprint of a college campus is a real opportunity for colleges and universities to move forward and save money.”

    Alexander agreed that campus-based solutions such as rethinking physical spaces and even downsizing make sense where enrollment is not growing. But he stressed the importance of public investment in higher education—including more reliable state funding for deferred maintenance expenses at public institutions.

    “This is a huge issue that presidents have to deal with that nobody’s talking about.”

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  • Education at Risk: The Fallout from the Trump Administration’s Education Cuts

    Education at Risk: The Fallout from the Trump Administration’s Education Cuts

    A new report from Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) office outlines the far-reaching consequences of the Trump administration’s efforts to defund and dismantle the U.S. Department of Education.

    Education at Risk: Frontline Impacts of Trump’s War on Students draws on responses from 12 national education organizations—including the American Council on Education—to paint an unsettling picture of disrupted services, rising costs for students, and weakened civil rights enforcement.

    Among the report’s key findings:

    • Federal student aid operations are faltering. Layoffs at the Education Department’s (ED) office of Federal Student Aid have caused website outages, delayed financial aid, and left thousands of borrower complaints unanswered. ACE warned that such disruptions can prevent students from enrolling or staying in college, increasing the likelihood they’ll take on more debt to finish their degrees.
    • Graduate and low-income students are being squeezed. The administration’s “Big Beautiful Bill” eliminates Grad PLUS loans, caps borrowing for parents, and replaces income-driven repayment plans with costlier alternatives, which is expected to reduce access and increase hardship for first-generation and financially vulnerable students.
    • Civil rights enforcement is eroding. ED’s Office for Civil Rights has lost nearly half its staff and closed seven regional offices. With over 22,000 complaints filed in 2024 alone, remaining staff are overwhelmed, and students facing discrimination are left without a path to resolution. ACE and others note the long-term danger of weakened oversight, especially for students with disabilities.
    • Essential education data are disappearing. The National Center for Education Statistics now has just three employees. Longstanding surveys like the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and College Scorecard are at risk, threatening everything from institutional benchmarking to accreditation.
    • Programs for students with disabilities are being dismantled. Key oversight and transition programs have been cut or reassigned to agencies like the departments of Health and Human Services and Labor, which lack educational expertise. Advocates warn this could roll back decades of progress toward inclusive education.
    • Education functions are being scattered across agencies. Proposals to move federal student loans to the Small Business Administration or Department of the Treasury and civil rights enforcement to the Department of Justice raise serious concerns about cost, efficiency, and legal access. As ACE noted, scattering the department’s core responsibilities could reintroduce the very fragmentation ED was created to fix.

    The report concludes that the cumulative effect of these actions threatens to leave millions of students without access to basic services, data, and legal protections at a time when they need them most.

    Read the full report here.

    If you have any questions or comments about this blog post, please contact us.

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  • Drops in International Student Tuition Could Pose Credit Risk

    Drops in International Student Tuition Could Pose Credit Risk

    Just over one in 10 higher education institutions enroll at least 20 percent international students.

    Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | skynesher/E+/Getty Images

    Colleges and universities with a high percentage of international students face a credit risk as the federal government continues to target international students, according to a new report from Moody’s Ratings.

    Those most at risk include the 11 percent of American institutions where international students make up more than 20 percent of the student body, the ratings agency said, as well as institutions that are already struggling financially. (In total, 6 percent of students at U.S. institutions come from other countries.)

    “The reduction in international students presents a credit risk for universities heavily reliant on this demographic because of potential declines in tuition income, as international students typically pay full tuition fees,” the report states. “Additionally, with declining numbers of high school students over the next several years in the U.S. leading to fewer domestic students, universities intending to fill the gap with more international students may fall short.”

    The report follows the Trump administration’s months-long attack on immigrants and international students specifically, which began with the sudden removal of thousands of students from the Student Exchange and Visitor Information System, putting their legal status at risk. Since then, the administration has implemented a travel ban that includes 12 countries, prohibiting students from those countries from studying in the United States, and has targeted international students at Harvard University specifically, attempting to end the university’s ability to host international students. The State Department has also increased scrutiny into student visa applicants’ social media presences.

    It’s unclear as of yet how those factors will impact international enrollment in the fall. According to a recent report by the Institute of International Education, an approximately equal number of colleges and universities said they expected their international enrollment in the 2025–26 academic year to increase (32 percent), decrease (35 percent) and stay the same (32 percent) from this year’s numbers. But the percentage who expect a decrease was much higher than last year, when only 17 percent of institutions thought they might lose international students.

    The hit to the sector may not be as significant as it would be in countries like the United Kingdom and Australia, where about 25 percent of all students are international, Moody’s reported. Still, if the U.S. lost 15 percent of its international student population, a substantial number of colleges could experience at least moderate financial repercussions, according to one projection.

    About one in five colleges’ and universities’ EBIDA (earnings before interest, depreciation and amortization) margins would shrink by 0.5 to two percentage points, according to the ratings agency’s calculations.

    “For entities that already are under fiscal stress and have low EBIDA margins (the median EBIDA for private nonprofit colleges and universities was 11.7 percent in fiscal 2024 and 10.7 percent for publics), a change of one or two percentage points could push them into negative territory, especially if they are heavily discounting domestic tuition or losing enrollment because of demographic shifts,” according to the report. “Also, many small private schools may need to contend with federal changes to student loan and aid programs, further depressing domestic enrollment prospects and stressing budgets, especially for those with low liquidity.”

    The report stresses that this model does not account for any steps the institutions might take to mitigate those losses—especially at wealthier institutions. (Fifty-four percent of institutions with at least 15 percent international students are highly selective, while 25 percent are nonselective.)

    “Institutions that are highly selective, or those with considerable reserves, may better absorb the impacts by adjusting operations or increasing domestic enrollment,” it states. “Some elite institutions are less reliant on tuition, deriving income from endowments, fundraising or research, thereby mitigating the financial impact.”

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  • Universities “At Risk of Overassessing” in Response to AI

    Universities “At Risk of Overassessing” in Response to AI

    The number of assessments set by universities is steadily rising, but there are worries this could result in student burnout and prove counteractive if implemented without centering learning.

    A recent report by the U.K.-based Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi) and Advance HE found that assessments at U.K. institutions have risen to 5.8 summative assignments and 4.1 formative assignments per semester in 2025, compared to five summative assessments and 2.5 formative assessments in 2020.

    Josh Freeman, policy manager at Hepi and co-author of the report, said the advent of AI is “reducing the accuracy of assessments as a measure of students’ performance,” prompting universities to re-evaluate their examination methods.

    “It’s possible that course organizers are assessing students more to improve the confidence they have in their assessments,” he said.

    “It’s also possible that, as they redo assessment models, which may have remained the same for a long time, they are switching to alternative models of assessment—for example, those that assess students on an ongoing basis, rather than simply once at the end of the year.”

    However, rising numbers of exams risks universities “overassessing” students, he added, as “students now face an intense battle over their time,” noting that the number of hours that students spend studying has fallen.

    “[Many are making] sacrifices around social activities, sports and societies. These ‘extra’ activities are the first to go when students are squeezed and would probably be cut further if the academic elements of university become more demanding.”

    Some 68 percent of students in the U.K. are now undertaking part-time work during term time, a record high, largely in response to cost-of-living pressures.

    Michael Draper, a professor in legal education at Swansea University and chair of the university’s academic regulations and student cases board, said that some universities have begun supplementing assessments with “some form of in-person assessment” to counteract AI “credibility concerns.” But “that of course does lead to perhaps overassessment or more assessments than were in place before.”

    “Students have got so many competing claims on their time, not just in relation to work, but care responsibilities and work responsibilities, that you run the risk of student burnout,” he continued.

    “That is not a position you actually want to be in. You want to make sure that students have got a fair opportunity to work consistently and get the best grade possible. You want students to have a chance to reflect upon their feedback and then to demonstrate that in other assessments, but if they’re being continuously assessed, it’s very difficult to have that reflection time.”

    However, Thomas Lancaster, principal teaching fellow in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, speculated that a rise in the number of exams could be a sign that assessments are being “split into smaller stages,” with more continuous feedback throughout the process, which could also simultaneously have benefits for counteracting AI use.

    “This is something I’ve long recommended in response to contract cheating, where it’s good practice to see the process, not just the final product. So I do hope that the revised assessment schedules are being put in place to benefit the students, rather than purely as a response to AI.”

    While breaking assessments down could prove beneficial to student learning, Drew Whitworth, reader at the Manchester Institute of Education, questioned, “How does one count what constitutes ‘separate’ assessments?”

    “If a grade is given partway through this process … this is actually quite helpful for students, answering the question ‘How am I doing?’ and giving them a pragmatic reason to show [their work and that they are working] in the first place.

    “But does this count as a separate assessment or just part of a dialogue taking place that helps students develop better work in response to a single assessment?”

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  • The risk of unrepresentative REF returns hasn’t gone away

    The risk of unrepresentative REF returns hasn’t gone away

    The much awaited Contributions to Knowledge and Understanding (CKU) guidance for REF 2029 is out, and finally higher education institutions know how the next REF will work for the outputs component of the assessment. Or do they?

    Two of us have written previously about the so-called portability issue, where if a researcher moves to a new institution, it is the new institution to which the research outputs are credited and potentially future REF-derived funding flows.

    We and others have argued that this portability supports the mobility of staff at the beginning of their careers and the mobility of staff that are facing redundancy. We believe that this is an important principle, which should be protected in the design of the current REF. If we believe that the higher education system should nurture talent, then the incentive structure underpinning the REF should align with this principle.

    We maintain that the research, its excellence, and the integrity with which it is performed depends upon the people that undertake it. Therefore, we continue to support some degree of portability as per REF 2021, acknowledging that the situation is complex and that this support of individual careers can come at the expense of the decoupling and the emerging focus on institutions. The exceptions delineated around “longform and/or long process outputs” in the CKU guidance are welcome – the devil will lie in the detail.

    Who the return represents

    Leaving aside portability, the decoupling of outputs from individuals has also resulted in a risk to the diversity of the return, especially in subject areas where the total number of eligible outputs is very high.

    In previous REF exercises the rules were such that the number of outputs any one researcher could return to the department/unit’s submission was restricted (four in REF 2014 and five in REF 2021). This restriction ensured that each unit’s return comprised a diversity of authors, a diversity of subdisciplines and diversity of emerging ideas.

    We recognise that one could argue the REF is an excellence framework, not a diversity framework. However – like many – we believe that REF also has a role to play in supporting the inclusive research community we all wish to champion. REF is also about a diversity – of approaches, of methodologies, of research areas – research needs diversity to ensure the effective teams are in place to deliver on the research questions. What would the impact be on research strategies if individual units increasingly are dominated by a small number of authors?

    How the system plays out

    Of course, the lack of restriction on output numbers does not preclude units from creating a diverse return. However, especially in this time of sector-wide financial pressures, those in charge of a submission may feel they have no option other than to select outputs to maximise the unit score and hence future funding.

    This unbounded selection process will likely lead to intra-unit discord. Even in an ideal case will result in the focus being on outputs covering a subset of hot topics, or worse, subset of perceived high-quality journals. The unintended consequence of this focus could place undue importance on the large research groups led by previously labelled “research stars”. For large HEIs with large units including several of these “stars”, the unit return might still appear superficially diverse, but the underlying return might be remarkably narrow.

    While respecting fully the contribution made by these traditional leaders, we think the health of our research future critically depends upon the championing of the next and diverse generation of researchers and their ideas too. We maintain the limits imposed in previous exercises did this, even if that was not their primary intent.

    Some might, for a myriad of reasons, think that our concerns are misplaced. The publication of the guidance suggest that we have not managed to land these important points around diversity and fairness.

    However, we are sure that many of those who have these views wish to see a diverse REF return too. If we have not persuaded Research England and the other funding councils to reimpose output limits, we urge them at least to ensure that the data is collected as part of the process such that the impact upon the diversity of this unrestricted return can be monitored and hence that future REF exercises can be appropriately informed. This will then allow DSIT and institutions to consider whether the REF process needs to be adjusted in future.

    Our people, their excellence and their diversity, we would argue, matter.

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