High tuition rates and cost-of-living expenses can make it difficult for students to make ends meet in the present, but that doesn’t mean they’re not worried about future financial burdens. A 2025 Student Voice survey found that one in five respondents say their biggest source of stress when considering their post-college future is “affording life after graduation.”
A 2024 survey by Handshake found that more than 40 percent of students have thought at least “a fair amount” about planning for retirement; 15 percent say it’s a major focus area. However, a majority of young people are not saving for retirement (61 percent), according to a 2024 survey by CNBC and Generation Lab.
By the numbers: Nationally, about three in five adults have a retirement savings plan, with more college graduates (81 percent) likely to have a retirement plan than those with some college (58 percent) or those without a college education (39 percent), according to 2025 Gallup data. Young adults between 18 and 29 were less likely to be planning for retirement in general. However, many Gen Zers have aspirations to retire by age 65, 2024 Morning Consult data showed.
Preparing students for financial stability beyond college also has implications for their families; over half of students told Handshake they plan to provide financial support for older family members during their career.
Previous research shows that some graduates who take on large amounts of debt to attend college may be less likely to reach adequate retirement wealth. One study found that graduates in 60 percent of majors analyzed—including education, political science, journalism, biology and general business—were unable to reach $290,000 in retirement savings by age 65. For students who held $40,000 in debt, “80 percent of all majors will not reach a sufficient level of financial wealth to have a 50/50 chance of not outliving their money at retirement,” according to the report.
Future planning: To help students prepare for the future, some colleges and universities offer financial planning support or supply resources on financial education.
Many institutions partner with iGrad, which provides financial literacy training. iGrad offers courses for students to help them plan for retirement, with content including understanding tax implications, identifying Social Security benefits and navigating common retirement pitfalls. The platform also has a retirement analyzer tool to help students understand the gap between their retirement savings and their goals.
Kansas State University’s Powercat Financial division offers peer counselors and staff who can answer questions about retirement planning and help students navigate various accounts that might be available to them. The university has also created blog posts that detail how to evaluate employee benefits.
Two-thirds of undergraduates surveyed by Handshake said they wouldn’t accept a job that didn’t include retirement benefits, and an additional 32 percent said retirement benefits aren’t essential, but they are important.
Trinity College’s website features a Retirement 101 guide, which helps students understand when they might decide to retire, how to calculate comfortable retirement savings and how investing can factor into retirement income.
Wellesley College encourages students both to save for their own sake and also to consider how they can give back to the college through a charitable remainder trust or by deeding their residence to the college.
How does your college or university encourage students to practice wise money habits? Tell us about it.
Is your website’s organic traffic dipping lower each month? You’re not alone. Search behavior is undergoing its biggest transformation in decades, one powered by AI-driven tools that are rewriting the rules of how people find and consume information.
Instead of clicking through pages of search results, users now get instant, conversational answers from AI chatbots or search engine summaries. Google’s own Search Generative Experience (SGE) is a clear response to this shift, generating AI summaries directly in search results. The effect? A surge in zero-click searches, where users get what they need without ever visiting a website.
For higher education marketers, this new landscape poses a serious challenge. Prospective students can now learn about programs, tuition, and campus life straight from AI assistants, without setting foot on your website. If your school’s content isn’t being surfaced in these AI summaries, you risk losing both visibility and leads.
But here’s the good news: SEO isn’t dead, it’s evolving. By adapting your strategy to align with how AI engines interpret and present content, you can protect and even expand your organic reach.
In this article, we’ll unpack how AI-driven search and SEO evolution are reshaping student discovery, and what steps you can take to optimize for both traditional search and the emerging world of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). Ready to future-proof your visibility? Let’s get started.
Today’s Student Search Reality
Today’s prospective students have more ways than ever to find information, and they’re not just typing into search bars. They’re talking to AI tools. Voice assistants, chatbots, and platforms like ChatGPT are now part of everyday research habits. In fact, 54% of U.S. teens say it’s acceptable to use ChatGPT to explore new topics for school, a clear sign that AI is becoming a mainstream source of information. When future students want to know, “What are the best business programs in Canada?” or “How do I apply for scholarship X?”, they expect an instant, conversational answer, not a list of links.
Search engines are evolving to meet that expectation. Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) now delivers AI-generated overviews for nearly 47% of search queries, compiling snippets from multiple sites into a single summary. While convenient for users, this means fewer clicks for everyone else. According to Ahrefs, when an AI overview appears, the top organic result sees an average 34.5% drop in click-through rate.
This “zero-click” behavior has been building for years. By 2020, nearly 65% of Google searches ended without a single click, and AI summaries are accelerating that trend. In the past year alone, zero-click searches rose from 24.4% to 27.2%, with many results pulling directly from Google-owned platforms like Maps and YouTube.
Why SEO Still Matters in the Age of AI
Does SEO still matter in the age of AI? With AI tools answering questions directly on search pages, it’s a fair question to ask: The short answer is absolutely. But it’s no longer SEO as usual. Even as AI search evolves, organic SEO remains the foundation of online visibility for schools. Roughly 91% of organizations still report significant marketing gains from SEO.
Here’s why: AI depends on SEO. Google’s generative AI and similar systems pull information from optimized web pages, especially those already ranking high. One study found that 75% of pages featured in AI Overviews also appeared in the top organic results. Translation? Ranking well still boosts your odds of being cited by AI.
That said, SEO must adapt. Keyword stuffing is out; intent-based, high-quality content is in. Strong metadata, logical structure, and mobile-friendly design improve both SEO and user experience. Consistent, credible content also builds authority and trust, signals that matter to both Google and AI.
SEO Best Practices for Today’s Search Landscape
Search has changed, but the fundamentals of SEO haven’t disappeared. What’s different is how you apply them. The same pillars still matter: high-quality content, logical site structure, and credible backlinks, yet the way they’re interpreted by search engines and AI systems is evolving. To remain visible, your strategy must adapt. Here’s how.
1. Develop High-Quality, Intent-Focused Content
Content remains the cornerstone of SEO, and in the AI era, its importance has only deepened. Search engines and large language models now evaluate depth, clarity, and user intent more than ever. Each page should have a clear purpose and directly answer the kinds of questions your audience is asking.
Rather than thin content that skims the surface, build comprehensive, easy-to-scan pages that explore a topic fully, from program overviews and admission requirements to career outcomes and FAQs. This makes your content valuable to both users and AI systems, which pull key points from authoritative pages to construct summaries.
Freshness also counts. Adding new articles, student stories, or data-driven insights at least once a month signals that your site is active and relevant. High-quality, well-structured content written in your audience’s language (not overstuffed with keywords) naturally attracts both clicks and citations in AI-driven results.
Example: Excel High School maintains an active blog of expert tips and student success stories tailored to common questions from students and parents. The blog’s content is written in an easy-to-scan format with conversational titles (e.g., “Is Online Private High School Right for Your Child?”) and highlights like “Student Success Spotlight” profiles. These posts directly address the audience’s concerns (such as comparing online school vs. homeschooling) with depth and clarity. The school publishes new articles frequently (covering online learning tips, college prep, etc.), showing a commitment to fresh, high-quality content. By focusing on topics parents and students are asking, and answering them in detail, Excel High School naturally earns both user engagement and citations in AI-driven results.
Today’s algorithms understand context, relationships, and intent, not just keywords. That’s where semantic SEO comes in. Instead of creating isolated posts, organize your content around topic clusters: a central pillar page supported by subpages that dive deeper into related areas such as courses, career paths, and student experiences.
This approach demonstrates expertise and gives both users and search engines a clear content map. It also increases your chances of ranking for multiple queries and being cited in AI-generated answers.
Don’t neglect long-tail keywords, the natural, conversational queries people use with voice and AI search. Phrases like “What is the best MBA program in Canada for working professionals?” signal specific intent. Use these as subheadings or FAQs to capture users who speak their searches out loud. The more your content mirrors natural language, the more relevant it becomes to AI assistants and human readers alike.
Example: The University of Cincinnati demonstrates semantic SEO by incorporating FAQ sections and natural long-tail queries into its content. In a blog post about an Interdisciplinary Studies degree, the page concludes with a Frequently Asked Questions section that uses the exact questions prospective students might ask, such as “Is interdisciplinary studies a good degree?” and provides a concise answer. These Q&A subheadings (which include conversational phrases like “Can I teach with an interdisciplinary studies degree?”) act as long-tail keyword targets. The surrounding content is organized in a hub-and-spoke model (overview, deeper career paths, then specific FAQs), reinforcing contextual relationships. This strategy not only improves human readability but also helps AI systems easily extract direct answers to niche voice queries.
A clear structure benefits both your audience and AI models. Use descriptive “Heading 2s; H2s” and (Heading 3s; H3s) to organize content logically.
For example: “Overview,” “Curriculum,” “Faculty,” “Admission Requirements,” and “FAQs.” This hierarchy improves readability, crawlability, and the likelihood that an AI engine will lift your text as a cited answer.
Equally important are your title tags and meta descriptions. Keep title tags concise and front-load the main keyword. Write meta descriptions that summarize the page with clarity and value. For instance:
“Explore the curriculum, admission requirements, and career outcomes of our Business Management Diploma, all in one place.”
Example: Great Bay CC’s program pages use a logical, repeatable structure that benefits both users and crawlers. Each certificate or degree page is segmented with descriptive headings such as “Overview,” “Curriculum,” “Admission Requirements,” “Outcomes,” and “Faculty.” For example, the Biotechnology Certificate page clearly presents these sections in order. A visitor can jump straight to Admission Requirements or Outcomes, and an AI can quickly identify which paragraph addresses which subtopic. This structured hierarchy (implemented via heading tags) improves crawlability and the likelihood of content being featured as rich results. Notably, each section is labeled in plain language (“Curriculum Outline,” “Admission Requirements”) so both search engines and prospective students instantly know what information follows. Even Great Bay’s site listings show these section labels, underscoring how metadata and structure align.
Even though Google may generate its own snippet, a strong description improves click-through rates and shapes how AI interprets your page.
Finally, optimize images with alt text and use descriptive anchor text for internal links. These seemingly small steps provide search engines with more context and make your pages more accessible, a win for both humans and machines.
4. Enhance Site Experience and Technical SEO
A technically healthy, user-friendly site is the foundation of all SEO. With mobile-first indexing, Google prioritizes mobile performance, and that’s crucial given how students search. Most Gen Z users browse on phones and rely heavily on voice assistants.
Ensure your pages load quickly, your navigation is intuitive, and your layout adapts smoothly to smaller screens. Use HTTPS, repair broken links, and maintain clean sitemaps and robots.txt files so your content can be crawled and indexed without friction.
Engagement also matters. Multimedia such as videos, infographics, or virtual tours can keep visitors on your site longer, signaling value to Google. Include captions or transcripts to make these assets indexable and accessible. Ultimately, fast, secure, and engaging sites don’t just rank better. They retain attention, a metric both search engines and AI models consider indicators of trustworthiness.
Example: Otis College provides a real-world example of technical and UX improvements elevating SEO. In June 2024, Otis unveiled its newly redesigned website. The responsive design ensures that whether a prospective student is on a phone or a laptop, the pages render correctly and quickly, a key factor now that Google uses mobile-first indexing. Otis also streamlined site structure (e.g., more logical menu categories and internal links), which helps web crawlers index the site efficiently.
Local search remains vital for institutions with multiple campuses or regional presence. Students often search with geographic intent, “colleges in Ontario biology program,” and Google tailors results accordingly.
Start by optimizing your Google Business Profile for each location: include up-to-date contact info, hours, and descriptions. Encourage authentic student reviews, as strong ratings can improve local visibility.
Create location-specific landing pages. For example, “Toronto Campus: Programs and Student Life” includes city or neighborhood references naturally within the text. Consistent local citations (accurate listings of your name, address, and phone number across directories) reinforce credibility and help you rank in local results.
These efforts support traditional SEO and feed data to AI systems, generating regional recommendations. When someone asks, “What’s the best college in Toronto for healthcare programs?” your optimized profile improves the odds of being mentioned.
Example:Humber College, which has multiple campuses in Ontario, optimizes for local search by creating dedicated location-specific landing pages. For example, its North Campus page welcomes users with localized content: a description of the campus setting in Toronto, highlights of on-campus amenities, and most critically, the full campus address and transit details prominently shown. The page naturally weaves in the city name (“Toronto”) and neighborhood context (adjacent to the Humber River, etc.), which improves its relevance for queries like “colleges in Toronto with residence”. The inclusion of a map link and transit routes not only helps users but also counts as structured local information that search engines can parse. Furthermore, Humber’s site encourages local engagement by listing “Nearby Toronto Attractions” near the bottom, referencing landmarks like the CN Tower and Royal Ontario Museum. These geo-references strengthen Humber’s local SEO signals.
GEO Best Practices: Optimizing for AI-Driven Search Results
What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), and how does it differ from traditional SEO? The rise of Generative AI in search has created a new SEO frontier known as Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): the art of making your content discoverable, understandable, and quotable by AI-powered tools like Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE), Bing Chat, ChatGPT, and others. While traditional SEO aims to improve rankings on a results page, GEO focuses on helping AI models use your content effectively in their generated answers. In essence, GEO extends SEO principles into a new space where machines summarize.
Unlike standard search results, AI overviews read and synthesize multiple sources to provide a direct, conversational response. To stay visible in this landscape, your content must be structured, authoritative, and AI-readable. Below are the essential GEO strategies to strengthen your position in AI-driven search.
1. Create Answer-Focused Content
Generative models extract concise, relevant passages to address user queries. The easier you make it for them to identify answers, the better your visibility. Structure sections in Q&A format or include an FAQ block with clear, scannable responses.
For example, if a user asks, “How much does it cost to attend your business diploma program?” an AI engine should easily find a line that reads:
“Tuition for the Business Diploma program is $X per year.”
This direct, declarative format makes your content quotable. Blogs framed as questions, such as “What Can You Do With a Psychology Degree?” often perform well in both AI summaries and voice search.
In other words: anticipate and answer the questions students are asking. If your institution doesn’t address them on its website, someone else, or the AI itself, will. The goal is to become the source AI systems trust to provide accurate, concise information about your programs and services.
2. Maintain Authority and Accuracy
AI models are built to prioritize credibility. They prefer information from authoritative, verifiable sources, and that means your content must demonstrate expertise.
Start by creating in-depth, well-researched resources that cite reliable references such as government data or industry reports. For example, a blog citing official labor statistics on graduate employment rates signals trustworthiness to both users and AI. Include bylines and author bios to show content expertise and keep your facts up to date.
Accuracy and consistency matter more than ever. If one page says your nursing diploma is two years and another says three, AI systems will hesitate to use either. Review and update your website regularly to maintain coherence across all mentions of tuition, program length, and admissions details.
Finally, use citations within your text where appropriate: “According to the Canadian Nurses Association, nursing graduates will see 7% job growth by 2030.” Such phrasing reinforces reliability and gives AI models clear attribution patterns to replicate.
Be the source worth quoting. In the AI era, your brand’s authority is built not just through backlinks but through data integrity and factual precision.
3. Implement AI-Friendly Schema Markup
Structured data, or schema markup, is the hidden language that helps search engines and AI systems understand your content. By tagging key elements of your pages (program names, events, FAQs, how-to steps), you make it easier for machines to extract and display your information accurately.
Use the FAQ schema and QAPage schema for question-based sections, the Course schema for program descriptions, and the Event schema for open houses, deadlines, and campus events. These schemas enable AI to pull details like:
“The next Open House is on October 15 at 10:00 AM.”
Schema can also help voice assistants through Speakable markup, which identifies which parts of your content are ideal for being read aloud.
Why it matters: Google’s SGE and Bing Chat frequently rely on structured data to identify authoritative responses. When your content is tagged properly, you make it easier for AI systems to find and quote your material verbatim.
Even if you’re not a developer, there are tools and generators for creating JSON-LD schema code for FAQs, events, and courses. Implementing this markup bridges the gap between human-readable content and machine understanding, boosting both traditional SEO and GEO performance.
4. Diversify Content Formats and Channels
AI doesn’t just read websites; it pulls data from across the web, including YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, and other platforms. That means your visibility in AI search improves when your content ecosystem extends beyond your main site.
Repurpose your strongest content into multiple formats. For instance, transform a blog on “Tips for Successful College Applications” into a YouTube video, an infographic, and a short LinkedIn post. Transcripts from your videos, captions on social media, and consistent keyword use across platforms all increase your digital footprint.
AI models often reference content from high-engagement communities. After seeing an AI summary, users frequently validate information through YouTube reviews or Reddit discussions. Being active and consistent on these platforms helps your brand appear wherever AI or your audience looks for confirmation.
When your messaging is aligned across channels, you build “community proof.” This type of engagement-driven validation strengthens how AI interprets your trustworthiness. The takeaway? Don’t let your best content live in isolation. Let it circulate. The wider your reach, the greater your chance of inclusion in AI-generated results.
5. Welcome AI Crawlers and Monitor Mentions
Just as you optimize for Googlebot, ensure your site welcomes legitimate AI crawlers. Tools like GPTBot (used by OpenAI) and similar agents from Anthropic, Perplexity, or Google can index your content for inclusion in their AI-generated answers.
Check your robots.txt file to confirm these crawlers aren’t unintentionally blocked. Allowing access means your pages can be referenced when users query AI assistants.
Once you’re visible to AI crawlers, start tracking how your content appears in AI-generated results. Emerging SEO analytics tools can now identify when your site is mentioned within AI overviews or cited in chat responses. Pay attention to referral traffic from sources like bard.google.com or chat.openai.com. These indicate clicks coming from AI-powered experiences.
While the volume of AI referral traffic is still relatively low, it’s expanding fast. Some studies report tenfold growth in a single year. And because these users arrive after seeing your content recommended by an AI model, they’re often high-intent visitors; individuals seeking more detail, verification, or enrollment information.
Track which pages attract this traffic and which topics generate it. This data can guide your next content updates and show where you’re already succeeding in GEO.
Measuring Your Progress and Adjusting Course
Implementing a strong SEO and GEO strategy is only half the battle. The other half is knowing whether it’s working. In an AI-driven search environment, measuring success means tracking both traditional SEO metrics and new signals that reflect your visibility within AI-generated results. Here’s how to evaluate progress, interpret your data, and refine your strategy over time.
Use the Right Analytics and Tools
Start with the essentials. Google Search Console remains your most valuable tool for understanding organic performance. It reveals which queries trigger your site, your average ranking position, impressions, and click-through rates (CTR). Pay attention to the relationship between impressions and clicks: if impressions stay steady or rise while clicks decline, you may be seeing the effects of zero-click searches, where users get answers directly from AI overviews or snippets.
Google Analytics (GA) complements this by providing insight into user behavior after they arrive. Track organic traffic volume, session duration, bounce rates, and key conversion events such as brochure downloads, form submissions, or virtual tour signups. If you notice a dip in organic traffic that aligns with the rollout of a new AI search feature, that correlation is important. GA’s referral data can also highlight hits from sources like chat.openai.com or Bing’s chatbot, small but growing indicators of AI-driven referrals.
Beyond free tools, platforms like Ahrefs and SEMrush are invaluable for deeper competitive and keyword insights. Ahrefs can show when a keyword’s results page includes an AI overview or featured snippet, while SEMrush offers comparative content analysis to identify what competitor pages are doing differently, such as using schema markup or answering queries more directly.
Finally, experiment with emerging platforms like Keyword.com’s AI Overview Tracker or similar products that monitor how often AI overviews appear for your target keywords. If your budget allows, these new metrics can help quantify your AI visibility, not just your search ranking.
Key Metrics to Watch
Organic Rankings: Continue monitoring rankings for your high-priority queries. For instance, “[Province] business diploma” or “[Your College] admissions.” If your positions hold steady but traffic drops, AI summaries could be diverting clicks. A sharp fall in rankings, meanwhile, may signal a technical or algorithmic issue that needs attention.
Click-Through Rate (CTR): In Search Console, compare CTR trends for your top-ranking pages. A consistent decline, say, a drop from 5% to 3% at the same rank, may indicate that an AI box is capturing user attention. Studies show that when AI overviews appear, the top organic result can lose up to one-third of its clicks. If this pattern matches your data, consider optimizing content to appear within the AI-generated summary, not just beneath it.
Zero-Click Indicators and Dwell Time: You can’t directly measure zero-click searches, but a combination of high impressions and low CTR is a clear proxy. Focus on dwell time or average session duration for those who do click through. Recent findings suggest that although fewer users click from AI-heavy results, those who do are more engaged, viewing multiple pages or staying longer on-site. If your analytics show longer sessions for specific queries, that’s a sign your content is effectively deepening the user journey beyond what the AI overview offers.
AI Referral Traffic: Check GA for referral traffic from AI platforms like bard.google.com, bing.com/chat, or chat.openai.com. While numbers may be modest now, early adopters are seeing these referrals increase quickly, in some cases by tenfold year-over-year. Each click from an AI platform often represents a highly motivated user seeking further detail or validation. Treat these as premium leads and track how they behave once on your site.
Conversion Metrics: Ultimately, your goal is engagement: inquiries, applications, and conversions. Even if top-of-funnel traffic decreases, conversion rates may improve as AI filters out casual browsers and sends you high-intent visitors.
Research suggests that users who click after an AI overview view roughly six pages per session, similar to traditional searchers but with greater purchase or enrollment intent. Monitor lead form submissions, email signups, and other goal completions closely; steady or rising conversions amid lower traffic mean your strategy is targeting the right audience.
Adjusting Your Strategy
Analytics are only useful if they lead to action. Once you’ve identified which queries or pages are underperforming, adjust your approach based on the data.
If a critical keyword consistently generates an AI overview that excludes your content, create a new page or update an existing one to address that question directly, complete with schema markup and concise Q&A formatting. Conversely, if you notice certain pages repeatedly mentioned in AI summaries or drawing high engagement, double down: expand those topics, interlink related content, and promote them across your channels.
SEO and GEO are iterative disciplines. As AI search behavior evolves, so must your content. Make small, data-informed adjustments regularly rather than waiting for major overhauls.
Stay Ahead of Algorithm and AI Changes
Search engines are transparent, to a point, about major changes. Monitor updates from Google’s Search Central Blog, follow industry analysts, and participate in professional SEO communities to stay informed about algorithm shifts and AI integration.
For instance, during the Google March 2025 Core Update, industry data revealed a 115% increase in AI-generated overviews across queries. Knowing such patterns can help you anticipate traffic fluctuations and explain them internally before panic sets in. It also allows you to update your content proactively for new features, such as AI-generated “Education Q&A” boxes or visual search summaries.
Gather Qualitative Feedback
Not all insights come from dashboards. Pay attention to what prospective students and your admissions team are saying. If applicants mention, “I saw on Google that your program offers…”, check if that information is accurate. AI summaries sometimes simplify or misrepresent data. When they do, it’s your cue to clarify the information on your site so the AI can correct itself over time.
Listening to these real-world interactions helps bridge the gap between technical optimization and student perception. Remember: algorithms change constantly, but student questions about cost, programs, and outcomes remain remarkably consistent.
Partner with HEM to Make the Most of The AI Revolution
The rise of generative AI marks a turning point in search, but not the end of organic visibility. Like every major evolution in digital marketing, this shift calls for adaptation, not abandonment. The institutions that will stand out are those that embrace innovation while staying grounded in authenticity.
How can schools and marketers protect their organic traffic as AI-driven search evolves? To thrive, higher education marketers must blend SEO fundamentals: relevance, structure, and authority, with AI-era tactics like structured data, conversational formatting, and ongoing performance tracking. The goal isn’t just to rank; it’s to become the source AI trusts when answering students’ questions.
By creating genuinely useful, clearly structured content and continually measuring what works, your school can remain visible and credible, even as zero-click searches grow. Remember: AI hasn’t changed what students want, only how they find it. Keep listening, refining, and sharing real stories that resonate. In doing so, you won’t just survive the search revolution, you’ll lead it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Question: Does SEO still matter in the age of AI?
Answer: With AI tools answering questions directly on search pages, it’s a fair question to ask: The short answer is absolutely. But it’s no longer SEO as usual. Even as AI search evolves, organic SEO remains the foundation of online visibility for schools. Roughly 91% of organizations still report significant marketing gains from SEO.
Question: How can schools and marketers protect their organic traffic as AI-driven search evolves?
Answer: To thrive, higher education marketers must blend SEO fundamentals: relevance, structure, and authority, with AI-era tactics like structured data, conversational formatting, and ongoing performance tracking. The goal isn’t just to rank; it’s to become the source AI trusts when answering students’ questions.
Question: What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), and how does it differ from traditional SEO?
Answer: The rise of Generative AI in search has created a new SEO frontier known as Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): the art of making your content discoverable, understandable, and quotable by AI-powered tools like Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE), Bing Chat, ChatGPT, and others.
Tanish Doshi was in high school when he pushed the Tucson Unified School District to take on an ambitious plan to reduce its climate footprint. In Oct. 2024, the availability of federal tax credits encouraged the district to adopt the $900 million plan, which involves goals of achieving net-zero emissions and zero waste by 2040, along with adding a climate curriculum to schools.
Now, access to those funds is disappearing, leaving Tucson and other school systems across the country scrambling to find ways to cover the costs of clean energy projects.
The Arizona school district, which did not want to impose an economic burden on its low-income population by increasing bonds or taxes, had expected to rely in part on federal dollars provided by the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act, Doshi said.
But under HR1, or the “one big, beautiful bill,” passed on July 4, Tucson schools will not be able to receive all of the expected federal funding in time for their upcoming clean energy projects. The law discontinues many clean energy tax credits, including those used by schools for solar power and electric vehicles, created under the IRA. When schools and other tax-exempt organizations receive these credits, they come in the form of a direct cash reimbursement.
At the same time, Tucson and thousands of districts across the country that were planning to develop solar and wind power projects are now forced to decide between accelerating them to try to meet HR1’s fast-approaching “commence construction” deadline of June 2026, finding other sources of funding or hitting pause on their plans. Tina Cook, energy project manager for Tucson schools, said the district might have to scale back some of its projects unless it could find local sources of funding.
“Phasing out the tax credits for wind and solar energy is going to make a huge, huge difference,” said Doshi, 18, now a first-year college student. “It ends a lot of investments in poor and minority communities. You really get rid of any notion of environmental justice that the IRA had advanced.”
Emma Weber leads a chant at a Colorado state capitol rally in support of “The Green New Deal for Colorado Schools.” Credit: Courtesy of Emma Weber
The tax credits in the IRA, the largest legislative investment in climate projects in U.S. history, had marked a major opportunity for schools and colleges to reduce their impact on the environment. Educational institutions are significant contributors to climate change: K-12 school infrastructure, for example, releases at least 41 million metric tons of emissions per year, according to a paper from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. The K-12 school system’s buses — some 480,000 — and meals also produce significant emissions and waste. Clean energy projects supported by the IRA were helping schools not only to limit their climate toll but also to save money on energy costs over the long term and improve student health, advocates said.
As a result, many students, consultants and sustainability leaders said, they have no plans to abandon clean energy projects. They said they want to keep working to cut emissions, even though that may be more difficult now.
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Sara Ross, cofounder of UndauntedK12, which helps school districts green their operations, divided HR1’s fallout on schools into three categories: the good, the bad and the ugly.
On the bright side, she said, schools can still get up to 50 percent off for installing ground source heat pumps — those credits will continue — to more efficiently heat and cool schools. The network of pipes in a ground source pump cycles heat from the shallow earth into buildings.
In the “bad” category, any electric vehicle acquired after Sept. 30 of this year will not be eligible for tax credits — drastically accelerating the IRA’s phase-out timeline by seven years. That applies to electric school buses as well as other district-owned vehicles. Electric vehicle charging stations must be installed by June 30, 2026 at an eligible location to claim a tax credit.*
The expiration of the federal tax credits could cost a district up to $40,000 more per vehicle, estimated Sue Gander, director of the Electric School Bus Initiative run by the nonprofit World Resources Institute.
Solar projects will see the most “ugly” effects of HR1, Ross said.
Los Angeles Unified School District is planning to build 21 solar projects on roofs, carports and other structures, plus 13 electric vehicle charging sites, as part of an effort to reduce energy costs and achieve 100 percent renewable energy by 2040. The district anticipated receiving around $25 million in federal tax credits to help pay for the $90 million contract, said Christos Chrysiliou, chief eco-sustainability officer for the district. With the tight deadlines imposed by HR1, the district can no longer count on receiving that money.
“It’s disappointing,” Chrysiliou said. “It’s nice to be able to have that funding in place to meet the goals and objectives that we have.”
Emma Weber, at left, trains student leaders at Sunrise Movement’s “summer intensive” in Illinois this year. Credit: Courtesy of Emma Weber
LAUSD is looking at a small portion of a $9 billion bond measure passed last year, as well as utility rebates, third-party financing and grants from the California Energy Commission, to help make up for some of the gaps in funding.
Many California State University campuses are in a similar position as they work to install solar to meet the system’s goal of carbon neutrality by 2045, said Lindsey Rowell, CSU’s chief energy, sustainability and transportation officer.
Tariffs on solar panel materials from overseas and the early sunsetting of tax credits mean that “the cost of these projects are becoming prohibitive for campuses,” Rowell said.
Sweeps of undocumented immigrants in California may also lead to labor shortages that could slow the pace of construction, Rowell added. “Limiting the labor force in any way is only going to result in an increased cost, so those changes are frightening as well,” she said.
New Treasury Department guidance, issued Aug. 15, made it much harder for projects to meet the threshold needed to qualify for the tax credits. Renewable energy projects previously qualified for credits once a developer spent 5 percent of a project’s cost. But the guidelines have been tightened — now, larger projects must pass a “physical work test,” meaning “significant physical labor has begun on a site,” before they can qualify for credits. With the construction commencement deadline looming next June, these will likely leave many projects ineligible for credits.
“The rules are new, complex [and] not widely understood,” Ross said. “We’re really concerned about schools’ ability to continue to do solar projects and be able to effectively navigate these new rules.”
Schools without “fancy legal teams” may struggle to understand how the new tax credit changes in HR1 will affect their finances and future projects, she added.
Some universities were just starting to understand how the IRA tax credits could help them fund projects. Lily Strehlow, campus sustainability coordinator at the University of Wisconsin, Eau-Claire, said the planning cycle for clean energy projects at the school can take ten years. The university is in the process of adding solar to the roof of a large science building, and depending on the date of completion, the project “might or might not” qualify for the credits, she said.
“At this point, everybody’s holding their breath,” said Rick Brown, founder of California-based TerraVerde Energy, a clean energy consultant to schools and agencies.
Brown said that none of his company’s projects are in a position where they’re not going to get done, but the company may end up seeing fewer new projects due to a higher cost of equipment.
Tim Carter, president of Second Nature, which supports climate work in education, added that colleges and universities are in a broader period of uncertainty, due to larger attacks from the Trump administration, and are not likely to make additional investments at this time: “We’re definitely in a wait and see.”
For youth activists, the fallout from HR1 is “disheartening,” Doshi said.
Emma and Molly Weber, climate activists since eighth grade, said they are frustrated. The Colorado-based twins, who will start college this fall, helped secure the first “Green New Deal for Schools” resolution in the nation in the Boulder Valley School District. Its goals include working toward a goal of Zero Net Energy by 2050, making school buildings greener, creating pathways to green jobs and expanding climate change education.
Emma, far left, and Molly Weber, far right, work with climate leaders from the Boulder Valley School District’s Sunrise Movement to prepare for Colorado’s legislative session. Credit: Courtesy of Emma Weber
“It feels very demoralizing to see something you’ve been working so hard at get slashed back, especially since I’ve spoken to so many students from all over the country about these clean energy tax credits, being like, ‘These are the things that are available to you, and this is how you can help convince your school board to work on this,’” Emma Weber said.
The Webers started thinking about other creative ways to pay for the clean energy transition and have settled on advocating for state-level legislation in the form of a climate superfund, where major polluters in a community would be responsible for contributing dollars to sustainability initiatives.
Consultants and sustainability coordinators said that they don’t see the demand for renewable energy going away. “Solar is the cheapest form of energy. It makes sense to put it on every rooftop that we can. And that’s true with or without tax credits,” Strehlow said.
*Correction: This version of the story includes updated information on the timeline for the expiration of tax credits for electric vehicle charging stations.
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at [email protected].
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.
Rigorous research rarely shows that any teaching approach produces large and consistent benefits for students. But tutoring seemed to be a rare exception. Before the pandemic, almost 100 studies pointed to impressive math or reading gains for students who were paired with a tutor at least three times a week and used a proven curriculum or set of lesson plans.
Some students gained an extra year’s worth of learning — far greater than the benefit of smaller classes, summer school or a fantastic teacher. These were rigorous randomized controlled trials, akin to the way that drugs or vaccines are tested, comparing test scores of tutored students against those who weren’t. The expense, sometimes surpassing $4,000 a year per student, seemed worth it for what researchers called high-dosage tutoring.
On the strength of that evidence, the Biden administration urged schools to invest their pandemic recovery funds in intensive tutoring to help students catch up academically. Forty-six percent of public schools heeded that call, according to a 2024 federal survey, though it’s unclear exactly how much of the $190 billion in pandemic recovery funds have been spent on high-dosage tutoring and how many students received it.
Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.
Even with ample money, schools immediately reported problems in ramping up high-quality tutoring for so many students. In 2024, researchers documented either tiny or no academic benefits from large-scale tutoring efforts in Nashville, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C.
New evidence from the 2023-24 school year reinforces those results.Researchers are rigorously studying large-scale tutoring efforts around the nation and testing whether effective tutoring can be done more cheaply. A dozen researchers studied more than 20,000 students in Miami; Chicago; Atlanta; Winston-Salem and Greensboro, North Carolina; Greenville, South Carolina; schools throughout New Mexico, and a California charter school network. This was also a randomized controlled study in which 9,000 students were randomly assigned to get tutoring and compared with 11,000 students who didn’t get that extra help.
Their preliminary results were “sobering,” according to a June report by the University of Chicago Education Lab and MDRC, a research organization.
The researchers found that tutoring during the 2023-24 school year produced only one or two months’ worth of extra learning in reading or math — a tiny fraction of what the pre-pandemic research had produced. Each minute of tutoring that students received appeared to be as effective as in the pre-pandemic research, but students weren’t getting enough minutes of tutoring altogether. “Overall we still see that the dosage students are getting falls far short of what would be needed to fully realize the promise of high-dosage tutoring,” the report said.
Monica Bhatt, a researcher at the University of Chicago Education Lab and one of the report’s authors, said schools struggled to set up large tutoring programs. “The problem is the logistics of getting it delivered,” said Bhatt. Effective high-dosage tutoring involves big changes to bell schedules and classroom space, along with the challenge of hiring and training tutors. Educators need to make it a priority for it to happen, Bhatt said.
Some of the earlier, pre-pandemic tutoring studies involved large numbers of students, too, but those tutoring programs were carefully designed and implemented, often with researchers involved. In most cases, they were ideal setups. There was much greater variability in the quality of post-pandemic programs.
“For those of us that run experiments, one of the deep sources of frustration is that what you end up with is not what you tested and wanted to see,” said Philip Oreopoulos, an economist at the University of Toronto, whose 2020 review of tutoring evidence influenced policymakers. Oreopoulos was also an author of the June report.
“After you spend lots of people’s money and lots of time and effort, things don’t always go the way you hope. There’s a lot of fires to put out at the beginning or throughout because teachers or tutors aren’t doing what you want, or the hiring isn’t going well,” Oreopoulos said.
Another reason for the lackluster results could be that schools offered a lot of extra help to everyone after the pandemic, even to students who didn’t receive tutoring. In the pre-pandemic research, students in the “business as usual” control group often received no extra help at all, making the difference between tutoring and no tutoring far more stark. After the pandemic, students — tutored and non-tutored alike — had extra math and reading periods, sometimes called “labs” for review and practice work. More than three-quarters of the 20,000 students in this June analysis had access to computer-assisted instruction in math or reading, possibly muting the effects of tutoring.
The report did find that cheaper tutoring programs appeared to be just as effective (or ineffective) as the more expensive ones, an indication that the cheaper models are worth further testing. The cheaper models averaged $1,200 per student and had tutors working with eight students at a time, similar to small group instruction, often combining online practice work with human attention. The more expensive models averaged $2,000 per student and had tutors working with three to four students at once. By contrast, many of the pre-pandemic tutoring programs involved smaller 1-to-1 or 2-to-1 student-to-tutor ratios.
Despite the disappointing results, researchers said that educators shouldn’t give up. “High-dosage tutoring is still a district or state’s best bet to improve student learning, given that the learning impact per minute of tutoring is largely robust,” the report concludes. The task now is to figure out how to improve implementation and increase the hours that students are receiving. “Our recommendation for the field is to focus on increasing dosage — and, thereby learning gains,” Bhatt said.
That doesn’t mean that schools need to invest more in tutoring and saturate schools with effective tutors. That’s not realistic with the end of federal pandemic recovery funds.
Instead of tutoring for the masses, Bhatt said researchers are turning their attention to targeting a limited amount of tutoring to the right students. “We are focused on understanding which tutoring models work for which kinds of students.”
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.
Over the past seven months, members of the American Association of University Professors, a 110-year-old organization that is fundamental in defining and protecting academic freedom, have found themselves, their disciplines and their universities on the receiving end of the Trump administration’s unrelenting attack on higher ed.
As Republicans in some states diminish the influence of faculty senates, AAUP state- and campus-level chapters, which often also represent faculty as official unions, have led the criticism of the federal government’s actions. But how is the AAUP planning to fight now—more than half a year into Trump’s return to power, as Washington continues to pressure some of the country’s most powerful universities into making concessions?
Late last week, Inside Higher Ed interviewed Todd Wolfson, whom AAUP members elected as their president in June 2024. A former union leader at Rutgers University, Wolfson denounced the Trump-Vance ticket well before the GOP victory in November. Now, he’s leading the AAUP as it protests, sues and otherwise tussles with Trump.
The following transcript of the interview has been edited for clarity and concision.
Q: We’re now more than six months into Trump’s second administration. What is the current state of academic freedom?
A: It’s being washed over by an administration that has no respect, or even probably understanding, of the concept. We’re seeing massive infringement of academic freedom at the individual level. But then, it’s also the academic freedom of institutions.
In the McCarthy era, the attacks on academic freedom were attacks on individual faculty and demands for loyalty oaths and those sorts of attacks on individuals, not on institutions. So I’d say that, in the current moment, academic freedom is under its most fundamental attack we’ve ever seen, both in its attack on individual academics, but also on institutional autonomy from the federal government, ideological control.
Q: Did you expect the Trump administration to target higher ed this much, or in these ways? What has and hasn’t surprised you?
A: We were raising the alarm about this from before the election. We were very concerned about statements coming out of … the Trump campaign and then JD Vance’s mouth. So we recognized a threat. I mean, if you go back and look at Trump’s campaign video about higher ed, it’s like pure lunacy, right?
And it’s not that this was new—because [of Florida governor] Ron DeSantis—but it was alarming. Even with that, though, I would say that, clearly, we underestimated how dangerous it was. I did not expect a wholesale assault on the sector, squeezing it from every direction. And so, yes, I’m surprised. We were not prepared for how they’ve approached dismantling higher education.
I never expected the Trump administration to take a democracy, or the health of American society, to heart, because they’re grifters and they’re in it for their own personal power and their own personal wealth. But I did not expect that they would be so outlandishly intent on destroying a sector that’s so important to the fundamental values and power of American society.
Q: Yeah, you called then–vice presidential candidate JD Vance a fascist last August. Has he turned out to be one?
A: I would say so.
Vance and Trump and [Christopher] Rufo and Stephen Miller and the ilk that run our government are fascist in a 21st-century variant—not operating within the constructs of our society, [but] trying to rip those constructs down. I think the last six months have borne out my position pretty well.
The ilk that run our government are fascist in a 21st-century variant—not operating within the constructs of our society, [but] trying to rip those constructs down.”
Q: How has the AAUP resisted the Trump administration’s actions, and universities’ apparent responses to those actions?
A: The first and most important is we’re organizing our members, we’re doing a lot of political education with them, we’re thinking together about the problems at the campus level and then the problems at the state and national level, and we’re talking about how we approach it. We’ve grown more than this organization has ever grown in the last six months.
We built out coalition[s]. And so I think the most important [coalition]—but not the only one—is that we have established and coordinated a space called Labor for Higher Ed where all the international unions sit together and work together to come up with a coordinated plan to respond to the Trump administration. That’s never happened before. We have every major union that has higher ed workers sitting at that table.
[Secondly,] we sued the Trump administration on our own six times. With our AFT [American Federation of Teachers] as our [union] affiliate … probably another three or four times.
They’re doing so many things that are so obviously unconstitutional and illegal, and so we’re trying to use the courts to slow them down.
The third [tactic]—and you’ll see more of this, but you’ve probably been watching and seen it throughout the spring of last year—is getting our people into the streets, fighting back, offering a different vision. This has primarily happened in response to the NIH, NSF cuts.
Wolfson (at podium) at a news conference at AAUP headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Ryan Quinn/Inside Higher Ed
The fourth area is that we need to offer … a countervision of higher education to the Trump vision, which is higher education ideologically controlled by the federal government, in its most extreme form, as well as the complete destruction of our biomedical research infrastructure and our research over all.
We’re working on a policy vision that will move us into the midterms … a counterimaginary of higher ed to the imaginary that’s been developed by the Trump administration, by Chris Rufo, one where we’re all Marxist ideologues indoctrinating our students.
The last area is that we’re supporting the development of organizing at the campus level to challenge and hold our administrations accountable, whether supporting the mutual aid defense compact projects that [have] mushroomed across higher ed, or supporting the fights at campus levels around academic freedom and freedom of speech, or any other number of things that we’re doing to support faculty at the campus level, to get their administrations to hold firm and not to bow to the Trump administration’s demands before they even make them.
We had 40,000 members, now we have something like 50,000 members [since Wolfson was elected president last year]. By the end of the calendar year, I’d like to see [60,000]. And that’s dues-paying members.
Q: Has there been an increase in the number of campus chapters or state conferences?
A: Since Trump was elected, I think we’ve grown by at least 40 chapters. Some of those chapters had gone dormant and then renewed and came back to life.
So if we had, when [current AAUP leaders] took office, something like 500 chapters, now there’s something like 550.
Q: Do you have any regrets about tactics or actions your organization has taken so far during the second Trump administration?
A: Certainly, I have regrets. Everyone makes mistakes. I don’t know if this is a regret, [but] I think that our sector is not fully ready to respond to the real threats. Our sector needs to be able to take militant job actions and other sorts of actions as this issue continues to ramp up.
We won’t do that if we don’t have the ability to do it at a scale that makes it powerful and meaningful and effective. And so I think that’s the thing we are working on, and anything we do—and I want to underscore this—would be nonviolent and peaceful.
But, nonetheless, we need to be able to militantly show how concerned we are—not only over our own institutions and our own jobs and our students, but also around higher education and the future of our democracy.
Q: Is what you’re saying is needed is a simultaneous general strike across higher education institutions across the country?
A: If we continue to have a federal government that takes over our cities and puts our cities under martial law and abuses the institutional autonomy of our higher education institutions and does all sorts of things that we all see are undemocratic and dangerous, we need to be prepared not only for a general strike in higher education, but a general strike over all.
I don’t think a higher education general strike is an action that will be effective, because I don’t think that higher education alone has this sort of industrial power to hurt the economy in a way that could force us to try to move through this moment.
If the Trump administration continues on its course … the only force that could respond to that effectively is a labor movement that is willing to withhold its labor, and in a general way.”
But I’m saying if the Trump administration continues on its course—which is a course that’s antidemocratic, that could undermine elections, that could take over cities, that could endanger citizens in the way it did in L.A. and now is doing in D.C., and that is destroying our democracy one piece at a time—that the only force that could respond to that effectively is a labor movement that is willing to withhold its labor, and in a general way.
Q: I was wondering whether you felt that your organization relied a little too much on litigation, or whether protest fell flat.
A: Maybe society writ large in the U.S. is depending too much on courts. I wish we were prepared, as workers in the sector, to take approaches that were more direct than just the courts. But, obviously, we can only be a reflection of the workers in the sector. We cannot, as an institution, push ourselves well beyond where our workers are at.
Q: I think many people would agree that things have gotten worse and worse as the Trump administration has progressed … What does AAUP plan to do differently going forward?
A: There can’t be an expectation that the moment that the Trump administration took office, that … all of the higher ed workers and our students would have been ready and prepared to respond. There is often a lag time between a crisis and the public’s response to that crisis.
We should be critical of ourselves and critical of our tactics and think about how to respond better and move forward better. We see the next 16 months as really important, and that rolls us through the midterms of 2026.
We don’t plan to do this alone. We plan to do this with every higher ed worker, and so that’s why Labor for Higher Ed—this table that represents millions of higher ed workers coming together and working together and coming up with this plan together—is so important. We’re also building an aligned table with our students and student organizations, and also with alumni and alumni organizations. And so we think that if those three forces can come together and fight specifically over higher ed, we can make a real fight.
Wolfson at a rally outside the Health and Human Services Department headquarters.
Ryan Quinn/Inside Higher Ed
But I’ll say this … higher ed workers alone cannot beat back the Trump administration. It needs to be a multisector fight. Federal workers—who are also under attack—we need to build alliance with them. K–12 teachers, health-care workers, immigrant workers, progressive community organizations all need to build an aligned front that is ready to take risks, because if we don’t take those risks, we may look at what we have in 2026 and we might not have clean, fair elections.
I think we have to take that very seriously, and we have to build our power to respond.
[Currently, we need] a real fight around the budget, from now through October, a fight around the budget that demands a fully funded NIH, NSF, NASA, [that] pushes around the destruction of the student loan program [and] fights over the TRIO program … which is a program for first-generation college kids.
From there, we are going to be really working on our campuses, building campus-level campaigns and state-level campaigns around higher education.
The things we want to have in [the national] vision are things like a demand for free public higher education, college for all and an end to adjunctification, an end to student debt, more research funding … and then use that vision to really fight for candidates that lift up our imagination of higher education as we move into the midterms.
We are going to fight in the streets and we’re going to fight politically. This is a political battle, and we need to respond politically in this battle.
Q: How do you fight an enemy that seems to thrive on conflict and to derive strength partly by othering certain groups of people—and, among those groups of people … faculty?
A: Faculty and the press and people of color and women and gay people and trans people and anybody that’s not white, Christian nationalist, in the end, is othered. And then even within the white Christian nationalist community, if you’re not MAGA, or you care about a free press, or care about free inquiry, you’re othered.
That first six months was a freaking whirlwind, and so we were really reactive, we were reacting. The Trump administration set the tone—not just for us, to be clear, obviously [for] the Democratic Party, but the progressive community more generally or any sector under attack.
We have been too reactive to the political environment, and so I think the biggest thing that we need to do is stay on our message and vision.
Now there seems to be some fracturing, maybe over Palestine, in the right-wing echo chamber. But, in general, that echo chamber has operated in lockstep and it’s huge, and we don’t have anything like that. Whatever we do, we’re never going to have the megaphone that they have. But, what I do believe is that we must put out our own proactive vision. It can no longer be “Ron DeSantis is mean, and he’s saying bad things about DEI and we need to stop him,” or “Donald Trump is saying bad things about Harvard,” or “Chris Rufo, can you believe how ridiculous the things he puts out are?”
We can’t be constantly responding to them. We can’t have kids going into hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to get a college degree, and we need to make sure that we have work with dignity and free inquiry and we need to make sure we have the best research infrastructure in the world.
Q: You mentioned Palestine. What position, what action, if any, does national AAUP need to take on Israel and Palestine at this moment? … I know that you guys already dropped your categorical opposition to academic boycotts before Trump’s election.
A: We believe strongly that no weapons should be sent to Israel, at all. Not defensive or offensive, nothing.
What do we do in the U.S., where antisemitism has been used as a weapon, in many ways, by the Trump administration to bring universities to heel—and many times stripping out, or threatening to strip out, hundreds of millions of research dollars that often affect Jewish faculty members? Versus what our position should be on the conflict in the Middle East?
First and foremost, our job is to safeguard ourselves at home and to set a vision that aligns with what we’re trying to do in the United States. We need to stand up for academic freedom, for freedom of speech, for freedom of assembly for our students so they can protest the war—the genocide, excuse me—that’s taking place in Gaza.
We need to stand up to the weaponization of antisemitism in the Title VI process. And we need to make sure that we defend our members.
We think the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, which does not get involved with questions of the Israeli state at all, is a much more apt way of defining antisemitism.
The numbers of universities and faculty and university presidents [in Gaza] that have been killed and universities that have been destroyed in this war is mammoth. We are certainly educating our members on this concept of scholasticide.
It seems pretty obvious that they are—but if, in fact, Israel is purposefully destroying the educational infrastructure, both K–12 and higher ed, of Palestine, and of Gaza, that stands against our values of academic freedom. And if that’s the case, and we can unify around that, then we will take a stand and call for an end to the scholasticide.
Q: What will it take, ultimately, to get the Trump administration to relent in its attacks on higher ed?
A: Ultimately, we need a massive movement of higher ed workers and students. But, again, I don’t think that’s enough.
I believe as higher ed goes, so goes democracy. But the converse isn’t absolutely true. Higher ed alone cannot save democracy, but we’re a critical part.
It needs to be a broader societal movement to save our country.
The Trump administration threw its hat in the ring Thursday amid growing debates over how best to manage compensation for college athletes, issuing an executive order titled Saving College Sports.
It comes just over 24 hours after House Republicans in two separate committees advanced legislation concerning the same topic.
“The future of college sports is under unprecedented threat,” the order stated. “A national solution is urgently needed to prevent this situation from deteriorating beyond repair and to protect non-revenue sports, including many women’s sports, that comprise the backbone of intercollegiate athletics, drive American superiority at the Olympics … and catalyze hundreds of thousands of student-athletes to fuel American success in myriad ways.”
Ever since legal challenges and new state laws drove the National Collegiate Athletic Association to allow student-athletes to profit off their own name, image and likeness in 2021, America has entered a new era that many refer to as the wild west of college sports.
Lawmakers have long scrutinized this unregulated market, arguing that it allows the wealthiest colleges to buy the best players. But a recent settlement, finalized in June, granted colleges the power to directly pay their athletes, elevating the dispute to a new level. Many fear that disproportionate revenue-sharing among the most watched sports, namely men’s football and basketball, will hurt women’s athletics and Olympic sports including soccer and track and field.
By directing colleges to preserve and expand scholarships for those sports and provide the maximum number of roster spots permitted under NCAA rules, the Trump administration hopes to prevent such a monopolization.
The order also disallows third-party, pay-for-play compensation that has become common among the wealthiest institutions and booster clubs, and mandates that any revenue-sharing permitted between universities and collegiate athletes should be implemented in a manner that protects women’s and nonrevenue sports.
Many sports law experts are skeptical about the order, suggesting it’s unlikely to move the needle and might create new legal challenges instead.
However, Representative Tim Walberg, a Michigan Republican and chair of the Education and Workforce Committee, thanked the president for his commitment to supporting student-athletes and strengthening college athletics.
“The SCORE Act, led by our three committees, will complement the President’s executive order,” Walberg said. “We look forward to working with all of our colleagues in Congress to build a stronger and more durable college sports environment.”
The Biden Administration’s Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) repayment plan promised to lower monthly student loan payments for millions of Americans. But legal attacks by the same conservative state attorneys general who exploited the courts to block President Biden’s original student debt relief plan resulted in a court injunction that has blocked borrowers from enrolling. Thus, borrowers have been trapped in a year-long, interest-free forbearance while their unprocessed Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) applications wait in limbo.
But now, Trump and Education Secretary McMahon are saddling these borrowers with interest. Last week, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) announced that it will begin restarting student loan interest charges on August 1, 2025, for the nearly 8 MILLION borrowers stuck in this forbearance.
McMahon voluntarily chose to do this—there was no state or federal court order forcing her hand. Read our Executive Director Mike Pierce’s statement on this below:
Coming off the back of Brexit, on the heels of Covid, and foreshadowing a putative levelling up agenda, it gave shape to things universities had always done and permission to discuss more openly the things they had always wished to do.
The civic university agreements were sometimes a fresh coat of paint on already ongoing work but undoubtedly provided new momentum to an old idea. There has been significant debate on how to define civic, the National Civic Impact Accelerator (NCIA) happens to have a very good framework, but this is less important than the interest that was generated which made the debate worth having.
The civic movement – and whether it is a movement is also debatable – has given an intellectual hinterland to a set of disparate activities. It is the wrapper through which anything can be presented as being civic. The research project in the heritage centre, the outreach programmes with school, and employing people, are no longer just things universities do but they are part of a grander civic mission.
It can also all feel a bit hollow. The shell of the strategies break open to reveal a kind of saccharine sweetness of advertisement and gross value added appraisals that tell the world what a university is doing, but tell us very little about what has been done differently thanks to their renewed civic approach.
Commissioning
The test of whether a civic approach is working can’t be whether a university is doing things that are labelled civic. Every single university that employs anyone locally, or puts students in the NHS, or does any kind of access scheme in their local area, is doing something civic. Universities have to geographically exist somewhere (mostly) and therefore they are lashed to the mast of their places.
Recent work by NCIA talks about civic capitals. These are the deep internal resources that allow civic work to happen:
Civic capitals are resources that exist in an organisation that enable it and the individuals who work within it to achieve their civic goals. They include day-to-day resources such as the budgets that pay for staff time and activities, and the resources such as skills and knowledge that are built up over time and that individuals and teams draw on to do their work.
This is not the same as how these resources might be structured. As the UPP Foundation note in their recent report emerging from a series of roundtables with sector leaders:
Participants highlighted that the civic role doesn’t fall under typical funding or strategic pillars, and has in the past been prone to being seen as a ‘nice-to-have’ extra, rather than a necessary function of the university, making it vulnerable to cuts in times of financial pressure. With the Government’s renewed attention on civic purpose, universities should embrace the chance to re-embed this ambition into their work and future-proof it for the coming decades.
Put together, the fundamental weakness at the heart of the civic agenda is that at the point it becomes separate from other business in the university it becomes vulnerable. It becomes far too easy to cut or quietly put away.
Incentives
The people I speak to across the sector give a sense that programmes of work are being scaled back and posts that were once devoted to civic work are being quietly not filled. Last week’s report from the National Civic Impact Accelerator appears to agree with these conclusions.
Aside from the roles that are distinctly labelled as civic there is definite pressure on activities that are civic in and of themselves. It is much harder for universities to be good employers, or run significant school interventions, or co-build research projects, when there is such acute financial pressure facing the sector.
Outside of anything that universities can do to maintain their civic work there are a set of incentives that militate against their ambitions. Their primary financial incentive is to recruit students whose fees are uncapped above any consideration for the local labour market or local recruitment cold spots. Their major research incentives are about quality, their university environment, and impact – but impact does not have to be in their places. And while the access regime is tilting toward school engagement the business of raising educational standards is expensive, difficult, and often gets comparatively few students through the door.
The secretary of state has called for universities to “to shape and deliver the economic and social change that is needed across skills, research and innovation,” but this is hard to do with a range of incentives working against them doing things in skills, research, and innovation.
Give up?
The fatal risk in all of this is not that universities stop doing civic work. Every university, to a lesser or greater extent, is civic. The risk is that universities try to salami slice their civic activity in the same way they might other funding pots. The widespread harm would potentially fatally damage the whole civic project.
The work of being civic should be everyone’s business but aside from finances and national incentives there are substantive barriers.
The main one is that civic work, done properly, is a long-term endeavour. Improving school attainment, or deploying research for local impact, or shared capital ambitions, and the litany of things which actually improve the economic fortunes of a place and the people that live in it take years, sometimes decades, not months. The things that actually move the dial on civic impact will often live well beyond the tenure of any one vice chancellor.
The problem is that it is often the case that investing in long-term civic capacity comes at a distinct short-term cost. Universities could do more to support school improvement, there are lots of examples universities who are, but often this will come from the same funding pot used for bursaries for current students. Embedded research projects which meet a local need require deep listening, trust, and expertise that cannot easily be built over a single REF cycle.
The irony is that being civic is usually used as a proxy for being “nice” but to do it properly means making some very hard decisions. The most crucial is whether the greatest civic impact is achieved through the cumulation of small wins within an institution or through the longer-term, less immediately rewarding, and very difficult, capacity building out in the town or city.
Put bluntly, every pound spent on the students of today is a pound not spent on the students of tomorrow.
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A strategy, no matter how well thought out and how popular, is not the same as doing civic work well. There is no lack of excellent ideas. There are significant and ambitious pieces of work with widespread support on getting in, getting on, and getting out of higher education. There are universities like LJMU that have thought deeply about the needs of their local businesses and places and built new partnerships and programmes off the back of their analysis.
The impact of civicness is sometimes achieved through the big-bang initiatives but more often civic impact is mundane. For example, the University of Derby is doing a lot of excellent things – but crucially civic is one of their key organisational purposes. It is not this fluffy sense of doing good but a series of embedded work packages with targets, staff, and a shared responsibility throughout the organisation for doing civic good.
This means not a dramatic moment of civic leadership but the slow tedious grind of looking at every single activity through a civic lens and supporting and rewarding staff members who do so. Analysing not just how many students can be recruited but how recruitment would have to change to support more local students into university. Targeting not only research income but how much research funding is redistributed to civic, business, and education partners. Engaging not only in on campus developments but considering how the university estate should be shared, expanded, or condensed, to meet the needs of a place.
The prize
The government has not lost sight of the civic agenda and while it might no longer be called levelling up the idea that universities should make their places better is embedded in every major education and research strategy, missive, and ministerial statement. The government may not save universities on their own terms but they may save places where universities are key to their economic success.
The tragedy would be that just as a constellation of industrial strategies, new modes of qualifications, and new research funds become available, the sector steps away from the civic strategy. It may save some short-term income but in the long-term it would close doors to future income, harm the prospects of a place, and make everything a university does with their partners that much harder.
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