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Texas’ students saw some wins in reading but continued to struggle to bounce back from pandemic-related learning losses in math, state testing results released Tuesday showed.
Elementary students who took the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness exam this year made the biggest gains in reading across grade levels. Third graders saw a three percentage point increase in reading, a milestone because early literacy is a strong indicator of future academic success. Progress among middle students in the subject, meanwhile, slowed.
“These results are encouraging and reflect the impact of the strategic supports we’ve implemented in recent years,” said Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath. “We are seeing meaningful signs of academic recovery and progress.”
This year’s third grade test takers have benefited from state investments in early literacy in recent years. Teachers in their classrooms have completed state-led training in early literacy instruction, known as reading academies. The state also expanded pre-K access and enrollment in 2019.
Morath did acknowledge students needed more help to make similar gains in math. Five years after pandemic-related school closures, students are still struggling to catch up in that subject, the results showed. About 43% of students met grade-level standards for math, a 2 percentage point increase from the previous year, but still shy of the 50% reached in 2019.
Low performance in math can effectively shut students out of high-paying, in-demand STEM careers. Economic leaders have been sounding the alarm about the implications that weak math skills can have on the state’s future workforce pipeline.
The STAAR exam tests all Texas public school students in third through eighth grade in math and reading. A science test is also administered for fifth and eighth graders, as well as a social studies test for eighth graders. Science performance improved among fifth and eighth grades by 3 and 4 percentage points respectively, but students in those grades are still below where they were before the pandemic.
Students in special education also made small gains. English learners, meanwhile, saw drops in all subjects but one — a 4% decrease in reading, a 2% decrease in math, and a 2% decrease in social studies.
The test scores give families a snapshot of how Texas students are learning. School accountability ratings — which the Texas Education Agency gives out to each district and campus on an A through F scale as a score for their performance — are also largely based on how students do on the standardized tests.
The test often casts a shadow over classrooms at the end of the year, with teachers across the state saying they lose weeks of valuable instructional time preparing children to take the test. Some parents also don’t like the test because of its high-stakes nature. They have said their kids don’t want to go school because of the enormous pressure the hours-long, end-of-year test puts on them.
A bill that would have scrapped the STAAR test died in the last days of the 2025 legislative session. Both Republican and Democratic legislators expressed a desire to overhaul STAAR, but in the end, the House and Senate could not align on what they wanted out of an alternative test.
Legislators this session did approve a sweeping school finance package that included academic intervention for students who are struggling before they first take their STAAR test in third grade. The package also requires teachers get training in math instruction, mirroring existing literacy training mandates.
Parents can look up their students’ test results here.
Graphics by Edison Wu
This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune, a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.
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When the Office for Students included commuter students in the Equality of Opportunity Risk Register (EORR), it recognised the risk that commuter students may not always get the same experience as their “traditional” residential peers.
The second wave of access and participation plans (APPs) for 2025–26 to 2028–29 have slowly been published and in the wake of the EORR’s inclusion of commuter students, we’ve got a better sense of the steps providers are taking to make the experience more equitable.
Taking Universities UK’s member list as the sample and searching variations of the phrase “commuting student” in the currently available wave two APPs, 44 out of 81 APPs (at the time of writing) referred to commuter students in some form.
Sometimes this was a simple statement of demographics, for example, “over 86 per cent are commuters,” or a statement of intention – “increase… work with commuting and mature students.” Other plans detailed comprehensive work to reduce inequities with various interventions, projects and additional research to undertake.
Some plans referred to commuters broadly in a literature review but did not link this to their local contexts, and as such were not included in our analysis.
As part of our ongoing series about commuter students, convened with Susan Kenyon at Canterbury Christ Church University, one challenge when discussing support for commuters is working out if everyone is talking about the same thing.
The EORR sets out that commuter students referred to students “based on the distance or time [students] take to travel from their accommodation to their place of study” – but it then goes on to note there are many definitions, referencing both time and distance and the fact of not having re-located for university.
In the absence of a sector-wide definition, providers have had to work this out themselves.
The majority of plans that referenced a definition identified commuters as students whose home address matches their term time address, who had been recruited locally or still lived in their family home. Some plans used a distance to identify commuters, for example 15+ miles into their main campus base. When using distance as a criteria it opens up the possibility of a commuting student also being a student who has relocated to university but lives further away due to cost and housing pressures.
As we’ve seen earlier in the series, there are differences in the experience based on those who chose to commute versus those who do so out of necessity.
St Mary’s University in Twickenham explored using the Office of the National Statistics’ Travel to Work Areas maps to define commuters and setting an average travel time of 15 minutes or more (using public transport) from a term time address. They explicitly noted they had investigated the impact of using different definitions of commuter students when analysing student outcomes which led them to identifying commuters as their sixth risk category.
When identifying commuters in APPs, ten plans went into detail about the intersecting characteristics of this demographic of students. One provider noted that “commuter students are more likely to be Asian, black or from IMD Q1+2 than non- commuter students” – this is something Kulvinder Singh looked at earlier in the series. There were several links between the association of being a commuter and being from an underrepresented group such as a mature student, carer or from a geographical area of deprivation.
One provider interrogated whether being a commuting student was a direct factor on student outcome metrics and opted that it, in fact, coincided with other risk factors.
For plans that had identified a risk to the commuter student experience, a brief thematic analysis suggests continuation, completion and student outcomes metrics were most prevalent in the sample followed by cost (and transport costs) and its subsequent impact on belonging.
A lack of flexible timetabling was highlighted several times as a structural challenge for commuting students and plans honed in on the preciousness of commuters’ time.
Many universities plan to implement student centric timetables to tackle barriers to engagement and include plans to inform students as early as possible about scheduled classes. Flexible modes of learning, better communication methods and early timetables then further reduces peak-travel commuting costs, easing financial pressures.
A handful of universities offer pre-arrival events and bursaries, aimed at improving commuter student access. At Manchester Metropolitan University, for example, an introductory module to support students preparing for university was particularly valued by commuting students.
Interventions also emphasised the importance of space, with providers reviewing physical and virtual facilities, creating dedicated spaces to study and relax and improving the visibility of existing commuter spaces. The University of York’s APP suggested a provision of subsidised accommodation on campus to support commuters to engage in evening and social events.
Peer mentoring programmes, social prescribing, and the creation of commuter student networks are examples of belonging-based interventions. York St John University’s plan proposed social opportunities each month and drop-ins for commuters to be held as often as weekly on campus.
Many plans recognised a need to better understand the commuter student population. This often manifested as a commitment to engage or set up working groups and projects. Some providers viewed additional research as a first step toward supporting commuters, while others built on existing work and recognised that ongoing consultation offered the best way to deliver support.
As many of these plans have started to, counting commuters, recognising their experience is geographical and making them visible is the first step to service design with commuter students in mind. Our series has been exploring ways to support their experience through making space, pedagogy, data, shifting institutional thinking and transport agendas that may inspire providers ready to take the next step.
This blog is part of our series on commuter students. Click here to see the other articles in the series.
The Department of Education’s demands that University of Pennsylvania “restore” swimming awards and honors that had been “misappropriated” to trans women athletes and apologize to the cisgender women who had lost to them offer a glimpse into how the second Trump administration could use Title IX to force certain changes at colleges, experts and attorneys say.
The demands, issued April 28 in the form of a proposed resolution agreement, would resolve a civil rights investigation that found Penn violated Title IX by “permitting males to compete in women’s intercollegiate athletics and to occupy women-only intimate facilities.” The Office for Civil Rights didn’t offer specifics, but officials were likely referring to trans swimmer Lia Thomas, who competed on the university’s women’s team in the 2021–22 academic year.
Today is the deadline for Penn to either agree to the proposed demands or potentially face consequences. Department officials said they would refer to the case to the Justice Department for possible enforcement—a process that could end with the university losing access to federal funding—if Penn didn’t comply. (Penn has already lost $175 million in federal funding over this issue, though White House officials said that decision was separate from the Office for Civil Rights inquiry.)
Penn is among several colleges and K-12 schools, including San José State University, facing investigations over policies related to trans athletes, but Penn is the first college to be the target of such public demands. Experts say the speed of the investigation, OCR’s unusual demands and the fact that Penn was in compliance with Title IX at the time Thomas competed there reflect a shift toward a more aggressive use of Title IX to further President Donald Trump’s anti-trans agenda.
The crazy part of all of this is they may be asking Penn to discriminate in doing so, because the Trump administration has its interpretation, but that’s not definitive.”
—Brett Sokolow, former president of the Association of Title IX Administrators
The administration’s forceful attack on institutions that have been home to high-profile trans women athletes fits with its overall playbook, which includes using any tools at its disposal to advance Trump’s agenda.
In the case of trans athletes’ participation in athletics, the weapon of choice is Title IX, the 52-year-old law passed to guarantee women equal opportunity to education, which has since been interpreted as a broad tool to address sex-based discrimination and harassment on campus.
In recent years, though, the relationship between trans students’ rights and Title IX has become complicated. Those on the left argue that the nature of Title IX is to protect students from gender-based discrimination, and that includes discrimination against trans and nonbinary individuals. (Such protections were included in the Biden administration’s short-lived Title IX regulations.) But those on the right argue that allowing trans women to participate women’s sports and to use women’s bathrooms and locker rooms violates the rights of their cisgender teammates—a perspective the Trump administration squarely aligns with.
“The previous administration trampled the rights of American women and girls—and ignored the indignities to which they were subjected in bathrooms and locker rooms—to promote a radical transgender ideology,” Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights, said in a statement when the Penn investigation was first announced.
For those in the former camp, Trump’s demands of Penn are just another example of the president using any means possible to erode trans people’s rights.
“The news out of Penn, to me, was just another example of the way they are, unfortunately, using [Title IX] as a battering ram to beat down safe and inclusive school environments for trans students,” said Emma Grasso Levine, senior manager of Title IX policy and programs at Advocates for Youth, a youth sexual health and LGBTQ+ equality advocacy organization.
Conservative organizations, though, have applauded the proposed resolution agreement, with the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group that has repeatedly sued to prevent trans women from playing on women’s sports teams and using women’s locker rooms and bathrooms, calling it “another step in the right direction to restore fairness and safety in women’s sports.”
Since taking office in January, Trump has rolled back trans students’ rights, including signing an executive order banning trans student athletes from playing on the teams that align with their gender. That order prompted the Penn investigation, but at the time that Thomas was competing, trans women who met certain requirements related to hormone therapy—as Thomas did—were permitted by the NCAA and governmental regulations to compete on women’s teams.
The NCAA has since changed that rule. But despite the NCAA’s stance and the executive order, current Title IX regulations do not disallow trans women from playing women’s sports. In fact, the regulations are the exact same set of rules, passed by the first Trump administration in 2020, that were in place when Thomas swam for Penn. This raises the question, experts say, of whether Penn should be penalized under Title IX despite the fact that the institution was following those regulations to the best of its ability.
“That’s the interesting challenge, and probably where Penn will hang its hat if it fights this: ‘There was an interpretation of Title IX in place at the time that Penn followed. And there’s an interpretation of Title IX that’s different now. How is it fair to impose today’s interpretation of Title IX on a previous time period?’” said Brett Sokolow, former president of the Association of Title IX Administrators and chair of the crisis management consulting and law firm TNG Consulting.
This is just one element of the aggressive tack the Trump administration appears to be taking against institutions that allowed trans women to play women’s sports. Multiple experts also pointed out the quick, almost dizzying timeline of OCR’s investigation into Penn.
Feb. 5: Trump signs executive order prohibiting trans athletes from playing on teams that match their gender identity.
Feb. 6: Trump launches investigation into Penn. NCAA ends policy allowing trans athletes to play on teams that match their gender identity.
March 19: Trump administration pauses $175 million in federal funds to Penn.
April 28: OCR says Penn violated Title IX and must “restore” swimming honors given to trans women.
Ordinarily, investigations can take years to conclude—something that has often been a pain point for victims’ rights advocates, who argue that those timelines can seriously impede victims’ ability to complete their studies.
But OCR launched this investigation within a month of Trump entering office—and just two days after he signed the EO related to trans athletes—and resolved it less than three months later.
It’s also unusual for OCR to target a specific student with a resolution agreement, Sokolow said; most such agreements are stripped of names and identifying details. Although Thomas is not named in the department’s press release, it does call out her sport, swimming, and there have been no other out trans athletes at Penn.
“It’s very indicative of this administration—and concerning—that they’re targeting one person and demonizing them,” he said.
Experts also say the demands marks a sharp contrast from how OCR has resolved such cases in the past. Levine said that the requirements in resolution agreements are meant to “meaningfully impact a culture of sex-based harassment,” but she feels that OCR’s demands wouldn’t do that—if such a culture even exists at Penn.
If Penn fights the demands, the case could put the war between those who seek to protect trans athletes from discrimination and those who want to see them excised from their sports teams to the test. And until courts settle the question, students and institutions will be in limbo.
“The crazy part of all of this is they may be asking Penn to discriminate in doing so, because the Trump administration has its interpretation, but that’s not definitive,” Sokolow said. “It does not have the force of law. If a court were to rule on this that Lia Thomas had rightfully won whatever competition the Trump administration is concerned about, any move to force to Penn to remove those victories could be discriminatory against a person who’s trans.”
Icon Sportswire/Contributor/Getty Images
Patricia Hamill, co-chair of the Title IX and campus discipline practice at Clark Hill, a Washington law firm, told Inside Higher Ed via email that the case “highlights the pendulum swing of Title IX in its enforcement and interpretation as well as in the government priorities over the last decade. Institutions are continuously being challenged on how to best to handle these very difficult situations on ground that continues to shift both because of Administration changes but also because of societal changes.”
Penn had not publicly commented on the proposed resolution agreement as of Wednesday evening. When news broke that the government was suspending its federal funds, Penn officials stressed in a statement that its “athletic programs have always operated within the framework provided by the federal government, the NCAA and our conference.”
Title IX experts expect that if the university does challenge the proposed agreement in court, it will focus on that very argument—that when Thomas was competing on Penn’s swim team, the university was, in fact, complying with NCAA rules and the department’s guidance.
AI is no longer a distant disruption. It’s already influencing how prospective students and families search, navigate, and make decisions on higher education websites. As teams responsible for delivering seamless digital experiences, we need to understand the behavioral shifts underway and how to respond strategically.
Across the institutions we support, we’re seeing early but consistent signals: users expect smarter, faster, and more personalized interactions. These changes are subtle in some places and dramatic in others. But they’re accelerating.
AI tools like Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE), ChatGPT, and other large language models are changing how people expect to interact with information. According to a 2023 Pew Research study, 58% of U.S. adults are aware of ChatGPT, and younger audiences are among the most active users. Meanwhile, Google continues testing SGE, which presents AI-generated summaries above traditional search results.
Students are learning to type full, natural language questions — and they expect precise, context-aware responses in return. This behavior is now showing up in on-site search patterns.
Across higher ed websites, here are a few things we’re noticing:
Higher ed is hard — but you don’t have to figure it out alone. We can help you transform challenges into opportunities.
It’s important to say: AI-driven search doesn’t eliminate the need for strong site structure. Navigation menus, clear page hierarchy, and thoughtful content design still matter — a lot. Most users move fluidly between browsing and searching. What’s changing is the expectation for speed, relevance, and control.
To meet this moment, higher ed websites should focus on:
This is not a single redesign or one-time upgrade. Optimizing your site for how people actually use it needs to be a continuous process.
This should include the following:
Higher ed website performance is directly tied to enrollment growth. According to a 2024 survey conducted by UPCEA and Collegis Education to better understand the perspectives of post-baccalaureate students, 62% of respondents said not being able to easily find basic program information on the institution’s website would cause them to disengage.
The survey focuses on program preferences, delivery methods, and expectations during the inquiry and application processes and offered insights into how these preferences vary by age and degree level.
To stay competitive and relevant, institutions need to invest in both smart search experiences and a streamlined digital journey. Here are some high-level recommendations:
The future of higher ed websites isn’t just about making information accessible. It’s about making it findable, meaningful, and actionable – and being able to act fast and stay committed to this work.
Institutions that recognize how AI is already reshaping user expectations, and respond with thoughtful, strategic digital experiences, will meet today’s learners where they are and build trust for the long-term.
We’re paying close attention to these shifts and helping institutions make smart, scalable updates. If you’re rethinking how your website supports recruitment, engagement, or conversion, now is the right time to start. Collegis Education supports institutions with strategic marketing and web solutions designed to meet these evolving needs.
Let’s talk about how we can work together to future proof your web and digital experiences to best support enrollment growth for years to come.
See how your website stacks up — Contact us to request your AI Readiness Assessment.
Higher ed is evolving — don’t get left behind. Explore how Collegis can help your institution thrive.
What do you get when you add a stewardship crisis, two expert fundraisers, and a whole bunch of Valentine’s Day puns? RNL’s February webinar, of course! Earlier this year, RNL hosted an hour-long conversation featuring Miranda Fagley and Becca Widmer, where they unpacked their strategies for creating meaningful moments through stewardship.
With geopolitical conflict running rampant, a rocky economic state, and a rapidly shifting domestic political landscape, it’s no wonder donors are wary of the future. During this tough heart-to-heart, we unpacked the various factors that might make donors hesitate before opening their wallets in 2025, and took a deep-dive into how the state of the world is impacting our donors, and therefore impacting the state of philanthropy as we know it. From generational differences and the more dollars/fewer donors trend we have all experiences to evolving donor expectations, advancement leaders are facing unprecedented challenges as the goal-line seems to move every year.
Jumping into the “heart” of our conversation, we went straight to the source—donor expectations gleaned from RNL’s 2025 National Alumni Survey. We noticed a few alarming trends when comparing this donor expectation data with the 2024 Giving USA report, which analyzed giving trends when accounting for inflation across our sector. Total giving declined by 2.1% when adjusting for inflation and, while higher education saw a 6.7% increase in overall giving, even when accounting for inflation, donor numbers across the board were down. There is also an obvious mismatch between donor expectations and reality, as seen in our comparison of RNL’s 2024 Advancement Leaders Speak report with the 2025 National Alumni Survey. Take, for instance, the fact that 66% of donors indicated that understanding the impact of their giving is important to them. This becomes an issue when 43% of advancement leaders reported that their shops have difficulty communicating the impact of specific funds. Storytelling is the name of the game, and it is becoming clear that communicating impact is a key piece of the donor acquisition and retention puzzle.
Many advancement shops are unknowingly leaving a trail of broken-hearted donors in the wake of annual campaigns. Why is thoughtful stewardship important?
On the flip-side, we unpacked that can happen if you don’t steward your donors well, including a shrinking pipeline, excessive spending when you do decide to attempt to reacquire them, and the loss of both short- and long-term revenue. Don’t be a heartbreaker!
Words of affirmation. Quality time. Acts of service. These are just a few love languages from Gary Chapman’s The Five Love Languages. Did you know donors have love languages too? It’s our job as mission-centric, donor-focused fundraisers to learn those love languages and lean into them through stewardship, relationship-building, and even solicitation.
In our exploration of donor love languages, we unpacked the first level- generational differences. Hearts are broken generationally when we do not pay attention to context and communicated need. While not always “the answer,” generational segmentation and a slight shift of message can be a simple way to get to the “heart” of what a majority of your donors want and need from your stewardship outreach. And, as we continue to experience generational shifts and the great wealth transfer, leaning into generational values will become even more important to attracting and retaining donors.
Another layer of love language exploration comes from you going straight to the source- your individual donors and what their giving history can tell you. We looked at one of RNL’s solutions for further discovering donor love languages, the RNL360, which offers an opportunity to dive into your database. By illustrating historic AND recent trends in giving and interaction, the RNL360 can provide you with a better understanding of giving and retention by donor type, an analysis of consistency and efficacy of your various giving channels (hello, smart investment in tools and campaigns!), and can help establish baseline metrics which can inform goal setting and future fundraising and engagement targets.
We can theorize all day about what donor expectations are, but the purest source of truth is looking at donor data and asking donors to tell you what they want and need. That’s where RNL’s Market Research solution comes into play. A complementary component of the RNL360, this additional solution allows you to hear directly from your donors by way of a private, but not anonymous, survey administered by RNL, where you can learn more about your donors’ philanthropic priorities, communication preferences, and sense of connectedness.
When it comes to effective stewardship and solicitation, knowledge is power.
Our two experts shared their take on stewardship and engagement with heart, with overlapping themes of getting personal, telling your story, and taking the time to really listen to what donors are telling you they want to hear from you.
Want to learn more about the RNL360 and Market Research to uncover your donor love languages and steward more thoughtfully? Connect with an RNL fundraising expert today!
This article originally appeared in Reason on March 14, 2025
The Federal Communications Commission is conducting an unseemly and unconstitutional spectacle, ostensibly to determine whether CBS violated its policy against “news distortion” by editing a “60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris. Its real purpose is to exercise raw partisan power.
The FCC already knows CBS did not violate any rules and merely engaged in everyday journalism. And there is nothing to be learned from the over 8,000 comments and counting that have poured into the commission’s inbox. Many simply registered their like or dislike of the network and mainstream media in general, and many others were just unserious quips submitted to troll the regulators.
But judging the merits of the “news distortion” allegation was never the point. The FCC staff already dismissed the complaint—filed by a partisan activist group—as fatally defective back in January. As outgoing FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel explained, “The FCC should not be the President’s speech police. . . . The FCC should not be journalism’s censor-in-chief.” But one of Brendan Carr’s first acts as the new FCC chair in Donald Trump’s administration was to reinstate the complaint and call for public comments.
Asking members of the public to “vote” on how they feel about a news organization’s editorial policies or whether they think the network violated FCC rules is both pointless and constitutionally infirm. In 1943, Justice Robert Jackson wrote that the right to free speech and a free press “may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.”
The FCC’s reanimated proceeding lacks any legitimate regulatory rationale. But its realpolitik purpose is sadly transparent. This fishing expedition is designed to exert maximum political leverage on the CBS network at a time when Trump is engaged in preposterous litigation over the same “60 Minutes” broadcast, claiming CBS’ editing violates a Texas law against fraudulent commercial transactions. Adding to the pressure, Chairman Carr said he will consider the thousands of comments in this proceeding when evaluating whether to approve a merger of Skydance Media and CBS parent company Paramount Global worth billions of dollars.
There is a name for what the FCC is doing in this proceeding: a show trial. When investigations become a performative exercise designed to further a political purpose, they forfeit any claim to legitimacy.
There is nothing here for the FCC to investigate. The complaint alleges that Harris gave a “word salad” response to a question about whether Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was listening to the Biden administration and that CBS edited it to make her sound more articulate. One part of her responses was aired on “60 Minutes” and another part aired on “Face the Nation.”
In short, CBS stands accused of committing journalism. Every day, from the smallest newspaper to the largest network, reporters and editors must make sense of and condense the information they collect—including quotes from politicians and other newsmakers—to tell their stories concisely and understandably. That task necessarily requires editing, including selecting what quotes to use. If the cockamamie theory underlying this FCC “investigation” had any merit, every newsroom in America would be a crime scene.
That’s why the FCC in the past has never defined the editing process as “news distortion.” In fact, the commission made quite clear when it first articulated the news distortion policy in 1969 that “we do not mean the type of situation, frequently encountered, where a person quoted on a news program complains that he very clearly said something else.” It stressed, “We do not sit to review the broadcaster’s news judgment, the quality of his news and public affairs reporting, or his taste.”
The commission understood that this very narrow approach is required to respect both the First Amendment and the Communications Act, which denies the FCC “the power of censorship.” As the FCC observed, “In this democracy, no Government agency can authenticate the news, or should try to do so.”
There is a name for what the FCC is doing in this proceeding: a show trial. When investigations become a performative exercise designed to further a political purpose, they forfeit any claim to legitimacy. Show trials are intended to send a message, not just to their unfortunate victims, but to other would-be transgressors.
FIRE submitted a comment to the Federal Communications Commission about a complaint about a 60 Minutes interview with then Vice President Kamala Harris.
There is a dark and deadly history of such proceedings in authoritarian regimes around the world, ranging from Josef Stalin’s purges of perceived political opponents to China’s trials of “rioters and counterrevolutionaries” after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Though less extreme in nature, during the Red Scare, the House Committee on Un-American Activities similarly staged show hearings where they pressured witnesses to name names while presuming guilt. The stakes of a sham FCC proceeding may differ, but the tactics and perversion of the rule of law are the same.
Somewhere along the way, the FCC’s current leadership abandoned that basic truth in exchange for political expediency. And in doing so, it is ignoring a unanimous holding from the Supreme Court just last term that threatening legal sanctions and other means of coercion to suppress disfavored speech violates the First Amendment.
The commission can begin to recover some dignity only by dropping this show trial immediately.
I was recently browsing Board Game Geek, an online forum for nerds who like tabletop games, and came across a thread entitled “anyone have a use for the University?”
This contained a complaint about the board game Puerto Rico. In Puerto Rico, although the University is potentially a very powerful card, it’s considered too expensive and therefore not worth players’ investment – and I couldn’t help being struck by a resonance with real life higher education in the UK.
Following the recent increase in tuition fees, reports of students perceiving university education as a poor investment of time and money have proliferated. As such, understanding and communicating the value of higher education has become an increasingly pressing concern.
In 2024, over 1,000 papers were published which mention the value of higher education, going over themes like economic gain, professional and academic experience, networking, “cultural capital”, and a sense of the value that higher education institutions offer to society in general. Authors explore how value is perceived differently by applicants, students, graduates, staff and the public, and by different demographic communities within these groups. Undoubtedly, the value of higher education is multifaceted and complex.
A powerful way of understanding value is through metaphor. When we use a metaphor, we ascribe the value of one thing to another. For instance, universities are beacons of knowledge positions universities as guiding lights, illuminating the path to progress (or something).
Some common metaphors ascribed to universities include: universities are innovators that drive progress and create new ideas; universities are catalysts for personal and societal transformation; and universities are providers which supply a skilled workforce to deliver economic growth.
When metaphors are layered together, they become a narrative – a way of conveying greater meaning through interconnected symbols. Games, as a form of interactive storytelling, take this concept even further. They combine metaphors with player agency, allowing players to actively engage with and shape the narrative. In games, players don’t just passively observe metaphors at work; they inhabit and interact with them.
Because games are dynamic, this means that universities appear in games only when they are actively doing something: acting on the simulation and changing the outcome for the player. Analysing these dynamics leads to some thought-provoking insights into how universities are perceived as acting on the real world, and therefore what value higher education holds in society.
Our most familiar metaphors for universities are easily recognisable in games. For example, in strategy games such as Age of Empires, universities are innovators which generate “research points” which can be spent to unlock new things. In city-building games like Megapolis, universities are providers that give the player more resources in the form of workers. In Cities: Skylines, universities are catalysts for growth: once a citizen has attended university their home will be upgraded to higher building levels, and they can get better jobs, which in turn levels up their place of employment.
To return to Puerto Rico: in the normal rules of the board game, players can “construct” a building (such as a factory or warehouse) but cannot use it until the next “mayor phase” is triggered, at which point they can be “staffed”, and its benefits can be used by the player thereafter. The university card grants the player the ability to both “construct” and “staff” new buildings instantly, without waiting. This significantly speeds up the gameplay for the owner of the card.
When used in this way, the university card changes the mechanics of the game for the player who can use it.
Puerto Rico is not alone in this. For example, in Struggle for Catan, the university card allows the possessor to buy future cards more easily by swapping one required resource for any other kind. This has such an unbalancing effect that it changes the game from that point onwards. As one Board Game Geek user puts it:
When I play with my wife we ban the University to keep it a friendly game […] In a four player game everyone just gangs up on whoever gets the University.
In both of these games, universities are cheat codes: “a secret password […] that makes something unusual happen, for example giving a player unusual abilities or allowing them to advance in the game.”
Cheat codes are used by players to create exceptions to the standard game rules everyone else must abide by. Universities change the mechanics of the game and enable players to act in a way that would be otherwise impossible.
The idea of students using universities to gain an advantage is not new. When university strategies talk about “transforming students’ lives”, this is generally what they’re referring to. “Educational gain”, “cultural capital”, “graduate attributes”, and “personal development”, are all facets of the same sort of idea.
However, I’d argue that using the metaphor of a “cheat code” forces us to see students as active players who are using their experiences agentically and strategically, rather than just passively receiving something. When a player uses a cheat code, they generally have an intention in mind. Using the game metaphor reminds us to see students as individual players, who are interested in developing their own palette of cheat codes for their own personal goals.
If the value of a university experience for students is in developing and testing cheat codes, then we should be intentionally structuring higher education to teach the most effective “hacks”. As Mark Peace has argued on this site in the past, we mustn’t be complacent about the process by which students “catch” transferrable skills. We need to be much more intentional about how we scaffold the development of these cheat codes, and how we work collaboratively with students to identify the skills they want to build and create meaningful ways to help them develop their own toolbox of cheat codes.
Without this, there is a real danger that we will return to the original scenario of this article, the forum post bemoaning the high-cost, low-return of the university card in Puerto Rico. We must guard against the “university card” being almost unplayable, because it is too expensive, not flexible enough, or too dated. The challenge to institutions is to ensure our provision is more like the university card in Struggle for Catan: truly game-breaking.
Thinking about universities in terms of game design invites us to rethink the rules we’re playing by and imagine a world where some rules don’t apply. It’s a reminder that the narratives that shape higher education aren’t set in stone. Players have autonomy and can change the direction of the game. This might mean building a toolbox for life with students – and for us, it means taking a wider look at the system we’re part of. What would it look like to recover our agency and, as Edward Venning puts it on HEPI recently, “recover an assertive self-confidence”? For too long, universities have been stuck playing the game instead of changing the rules.
