International students are placing getting a quality education over policy developments – with the UK keeping its spot as the preferred desitnation for 80% of nearly 1,000 pathway students surveyed by NCUK.
A new report covering the survey’s findings analyses data from 921 students across 88 countries studying an international foundation year or Master’s preparatino programs, looking at their motivations for studying in top destinations, as well as other preferences.
It found that Australia was the second most popular choice, with 4% of students surveyed marking it as their preference, followed by Canada, the US, New Zealand and Ireland at 3%. Meanwhile, the most coveted programs are business and computer science, as the preferred subjects for just under a third (31%) of respondents.
Students’ continued preference for the UK comes in spite of a slew of policy changes affecting international students. In May, the government unveiled its long-awaited immigration white paper, setting out the way Keir Starmer’s Labour party intends to tackle migration over the coming years.
It included plans to reduce the Graduate Route by six months to a total of 18 months, as well as new compliance metrics that higher education institutions must in order to continue recrutiing international students. Tougher Basic Compliance Assessment (BCA) requirements are set to take effect this month, meaning that universities will face penalties if more than 5% of their students’ visas are rejected, down from 10%.
And last September, the UK increased international student maintenance requirements for the first time since 2020. Under the new rules, students coming to London must show evidence of having £1,483 per month, while studying outside of London need proof that they have at least £1,136 per month.
But NCUK’s chief marketing officer Andy Howells pointed out that students are looking beyond arbitrary political decision when choosing their preferred study destination, thinking instead about their long-term prospects.
“This research demonstrates that international students are sophisticated decision-makers who look beyond political headlines to focus on educational quality and career outcomes,” he said. “While policy changes generate significant discussion in our sector, students are primarily motivated by the academic excellence and opportunities that institutions can provide.”
The survey found that, of a sample size of 646 students, just 12% who said they were considering studying in the UK said that financial requiremwnr increases would stop them from applying to UK instiutuons.
However, the popularity of other major study destinations were ore impacted by political headwinds, the survey found.
Over a third (36%) interested in applying the Australian institutions said that proposed international enrolment caps would affect their decision, while 26% of those looking to study in Canada said they would no longer apply to Canadian institutions over policy changes – particularly changes to the country’s postgraduate work permit scheme.
And almost four in 10 (38%) considering the US said Donald Trump’s second presidency would negatively impact their choice to study in America.
For the majority of students surveyed (69.9%), education quality is the primary driver leading them to seek study abroad opportunities, closely followed by enhanced career development opportunities (56.4%) and gaining new knowledge (55.2%).
The survey also shone a light on students’ post-graduation plans. Half of respondents said they wanted to stay in their study destination, with 31% planning to work and 19% looking at further studies.
This research demonstrates that international students are sophisticated decision-makers who look beyond political headlines to focus on educational quality and career outcomes Andy Howells, NCUK
But a growing number of students plan to return to their hoe country immediately after graduating, with 23% saying they want to do this – up from 18% in last year’s survey.
Immigration has continued to be a hot topic in the UK as the anti-immigration Reform party grows in popularity.
Just earlier this week, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper drew ire from the international education sector after announcing that the government will be tougher on overseas students who make asylum claims that “lack merit” as a means to stay in the country after their visa expires.
Some 10,000 students have already been texted and emailed warning them that they will not be allowed to stay in the UK if they have no legal right to remain and explicitly warning them against making bogus asylum claims.
The University of Birmingham, home to over 2,000 Indian students, has partnered with the University of Glasgow to create a new in-country role in India employability relationship manager – who will be responsible for building links with employers, career services, and alumni networks to help graduates succeed in the local job market.
According to a joint statement issued by the institutions, graduates will be offered practical support through pre-entry briefings, skills development programs, and post-graduation engagement.
The two universities have also launched an exclusive partnership with the Chinese graduate career support organisation, JOBShaigui.
The career portal, well regarded in China for its links to top employers, will offer a range of bespoke services, including online seminars with the latest job market insights, guidance on recruitment processes, access to an extensive employer network, and in-country networking events with alumni and employers.
Both Birmingham and Glasgow, ranked among the QS global top 100, see China and India, with their combined 400,000 alumni worldwide, as priority markets.
Offering enhanced career support is seen as crucial, as recent trends show a majority of students from these countries are choosing to return home after their study abroad journey.
“More and more students, quite reasonably, are saying: I want to know what my employment prospects are after getting a degree. We do a lot to prepare students for their future careers while they study with us, but it has become increasingly clear that we must also support them after they graduate,” Robin Mason, pro-vice-chancellor (international) at the University of Birmingham, told The PIE News.
“Our two largest cohorts of international students are from China and India, so we said: for these two really important countries, we’re going to create in-country support for careers and employability career fairs, interview preparation, CV workshops, all those sorts of things.”
Increasingly, after that period of work in the UK, Indian graduates are looking to come back home to India Robin Mason, University of Birmingham
While both Birmingham and Glasgow already collaborate on joint research, particularly in the medical field, the career support initiative made sense as the cost could be shared between the two universities, according to Mason.
Moreover, the universities expect the initiative to be particularly successful in India, from where students make up the largest cohort of graduate visa holders.
“Particularly Indian students, more than Chinese students, want to stay in the UK after graduation. But increasingly, after that period of work in the UK, Indian graduates are looking to come back home to India,” stated Mason.
According to Mason, while most Indian students prefer fields such as computer science, data science, engineering, business management, finance, economics, and health-related subjects, in principle students of any discipline, “even classics, English, or history”, will be supported equally in their careers back in India.
The initiatives also come at a time when international students in the UK are being urged to “sharpen their skills” for both the UK and global job markets, as employers increasingly look beyond “textbook skills” to focus on a candidate’s ability to bring innovation to the table.
Further plans in India for University of Birmingham
Although the University of Birmingham operates an overseas campus in Dubai, an attractive option for Indian students given its proximity to the UK and large Indian community, the institution has no plans to establish a campus in India anytime soon.
Instead, it is focusing on initiatives such as the in-country employability role and partnerships with local institutions.
While the University of Birmingham offers dual degrees with Jinan University in China in fields such as maths, economics, statistics, and computing, it is now exploring a partnership with IIT Bombay in India in areas such as quantum technology, energy systems, AI, and healthcare, building on its successful venture with IIT Madras.
“If you do it properly, campuses are very expensive things. I don’t think you do these things lightly. You have to make the investment and be there for the long term,” said Mason. “Birmingham is 125 years old this year, and you need to be thinking in terms of decades if you’re going to build a campus. It’s a really long-term commitment because it takes so much time and investment to build a high-quality university.”
As part of its 125-year celebrations, the institution also announced scholarships for Indian students, offering funding of £4,000 to £5,000 for a wide range of postgraduate taught master’s degrees starting in September 2025.
“As part of our 125th anniversary celebrations, we introduced a special scholarship, offering up to 40% funding for students joining our Dubai campus,” stated Devesh Anand, regional director, South Asia and Middle East, University of Birmingham.
“This was combined with academic and merit-based scholarships, giving students the opportunity to access multiple forms of support. The response has been fantastic, as students saw it as a real achievement and recognition of their efforts.”
The number of Indian students studying in the UK remains high, with the Home Office data showing 98,014 study visas granted in the year ending June 2025.
However, not everything is rosy, as students are increasingly concerned about their future in light of the immigration white paper, which proposes reducing the Graduate Route by six months and imposing a levy on international student fees.
In such a situation, the aim for institutions like the University of Birmingham is to remain attractive to graduates seeking employment opportunities.
“What we have to ensure is that University of Birmingham graduates are career-ready and can get the sorts of jobs that allow them to continue working in the UK if they want to, so they can be sponsored by an employer at the required graduate-level salary,” said Mason.
“To put it delicately, I think the universities that will struggle with the immigration changes are those not paying enough attention to employability. If your graduates are employable, it’s not an issue.”
PITTSBURGH — Saisri Akondi had already started a company in her native India when she came to Carnegie Mellon University to get a master’s degree in biomedical engineering, business and design.
Before she graduated, she had co-founded another: D.Sole, for which Akondi, who is 28, used the skills she’d learned to create a high-tech insole that can help detect foot complications from diabetes, which results in 6.8 million amputations a year.
D.Sole is among technology companies in Pittsburgh that collectively employ a quarter of the local workforce at wages much higher than those in the city’s traditional steel and other metals industries. That’s according to the business development nonprofit the Pittsburgh Technology Council, which says these companies pay out an annual $27.5 billion in salaries alone.
A “significant portion” of Pittsburgh’s transformation into a tech hub has been driven by international students like Akondi, said Sean Luther, head of InnovatePGH, a coalition of civic groups and government agencies promoting innovation businesses.
The Pittsburgh Innovation District along Forbes Avenue in Pittsburgh’s Oakland section, near the campuses of the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. Credit: Nancy Andrews for The Hechinger Report
“Next Happens Here,” reads the sign above the entrance to the co-working space where Luther works and technology companies are incubated, in an area near Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh dubbed the Pittsburgh Innovation District. The neighborhood is filled with people of various ethnicities speaking a variety of languages over lunch and coffee.
What might happen next to the international students and graduates who have helped fuel this tech economy has become an anxiety-inducing subject of those conversations, as the second presidential administration of Donald Trump brings visa crackdowns, funding cuts and other attacks on higher education — including here, in a state that voted for Trump.
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Inside the bubble of the universities and the tech sector, “there’s so much support you get,” Akondi observed, in a gleaming conference room at Carnegie Mellon. “But there still is a part of the population that asks, ‘What are you doing here?’ ”
Much of the ongoing conversation about international students has focused on undergraduates and their importance to university revenues and enrollment. Many of these students — especially in graduate schools — fill a less visible role in the economy, however. They conduct research that can lead to commercial applications, have skills employers need and start a surprising number of their own companies in the United States.
Sean Luther, head of InnovatePGH, at one of the organization’s co-working spaces. One reason tech companies have come to Pittsburgh “is because of those non-native-born workers,” Luther says. Credit: Nancy Andrews for The Hechinger Report
“The high-tech engineering and computer science activities that are central to regional economic development today are hugely dependent on these students,” said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies technology and innovation. “If you go into a lab, it will be full of non-American people doing the crucial research work that leads to intellectual property, technology partnerships and startups.”
Some 143 U.S. companies valued at $1 billion or more were started by people who came to the country as international students, according to the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonprofit that conducts research on immigration and trade. These companies have an average of 860 employees each and include SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania.
Whether or not they invent new products or found businesses of their own, international graduates are “a vital source” of workers for U.S.-based tech companies, the National Science Foundation reported last year in an annual survey on the state of American science and engineering.
Dave Mawhinney, founding executive director of the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon University, with Saisri Akondi, an international graduate and co-founder of the startup D.Sole. “There still is a part of the population that asks, ‘What are you doing here?’ ” says Akondi. Credit: Nancy Andrews for The Hechinger Report
It’s supply and demand, said Dave Mawhinney, a professor of entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon and founding executive director of its Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship, which helps many of that school’s students do research that can lead to products and startups. “And the demand for people with those skills exceeds the supply.”
That’s in part because comparatively few Americans are going into fields including science, technology, engineering and math. Even before the pandemic disrupted their educations, only 20 percent ofcollege-bound American high school students were prepared for college-level courses in these subjects. U.S. students scored lower in math than their counterparts in 21 of the 37 participating nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on an international assessment test in 2022, the most recent year for which the outcomes are available.
One result is that international students make up more than a third of master’s and doctoral degree recipients in science and engineering at American universities. Two-thirds of U.S. university graduate students and more than half of workers in AI and AI-related fields are foreign born, according to Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
“A real point of strength, and a reason our robotics companies especially have been able to grow their head counts, is because of those non-native-born workers,” said Luther, in Pittsburgh. “Those companies are here specifically because of that talent.”
International students are more than just contributors to this city’s success in tech. “They have been drivers” of it, Mawhinney said, in his workspace overlooking the studio where the iconic children’s television program “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” was taped.
Jake Mohin, director of solution engineering at a company that uses AI to predict how chemicals will synthesize, uses a co-working space at InnovatePGH in Pittsburgh’s Innovation District. Credit: Nancy Andrews for The Hechinger Report
“Every year, 3,000 of the smartest people in the world come here, and a large proportion of those are international,” he said of Carnegie Mellon’s graduate students. “Some of them go into the research laboratories and work on new ideas, and some come having ideas already. You have fantastic students who are here to help you build your company or to be entrepreneurs themselves.”
Boosters of the city’s tech-driven turnaround say what’s been happening in Pittsburgh is largely unappreciated elsewhere. It followed the effective collapse of the steel industry in the 1980s, when unemployment hit 18 percent.
In 2006, Google opened a small office at Carnegie Mellon to take advantage of the faculty and student expertise in computer science and other fields there and at neighboring higher education institutions; the company later moved to a nearby former Nabisco factory and expanded its Pittsburgh workforce to 800 employees. Apple, software and AI giant SAP and other tech firms followed.
“It was the talent that brought them here, and so much of that talent is international,” said Audrey Russo, CEO of the Pittsburgh Technology Council.
Sixty-one percent of the master’s and doctoral students at Carnegie Mellon come from abroad, according to the university. So do 23 percent of those at Pitt, an analysis of federal data shows.
The city has become a world center for self-driving car technology. Uber opened an advanced research center here. The autonomous vehicle company Motional — a joint venture between Hyundai and the auto parts supplier Aptiv — moved in. So did the Ford- and Volkswagen-backed Argo AI, which eventually dissolved, but whose founders went on to create the Pittsburgh-based self-driving truck developer Stack AV. The Ford subsidiary Latitude AI and the autonomous flight company Near Earth Autonomy also are headquartered in Pittsburgh.
Among other tech firms with homes here: Duolingo, which has 830 employees and is worth an estimated $22 billion. It was co-founded by a professor at Carnegie Mellon and a graduate of the university who both came to the United States as international students, from Guatemala and Switzerland, respectively.
InnovatePGH tracks 654 startups that are smaller than those big conglomerates but together employ an estimated 25,000 workers. Unemployment in Pittsburgh (3.5 percent in April) is below the national average (3.9 percent). Now Pitt and others are developing Hazelwood Green, which includes a former steel mill that closed in 1999, into a new district housing life sciences, robotics and other technology companies.
In a series of webinars about starting businesses, offered jointly to students at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon, the most popular installment is about how to found a startup on a student visa, said Rhonda Schuldt, director of Pitt’s Big Idea Center, in a storefront on Forbes Avenue in the Innovation District.
One of the co-working spaces operated by InnovatePHG in the Pittsburgh Innovation District. Credit: Nancy Andrews for The Hechinger Report
Some international undergraduates continue into graduate school or take jobs with companies that sponsor them so they can keep working on their ideas, Schuldt said.
“They want to stay in Pittsburgh and build businesses here,” she said.
There are clear worries that this momentum could come to a halt if the supply of international students continues a slowdown that began even before the new Trump term, thanks to visa processing delays and competition from other countries.
The number of international graduate students dropped in the fall by 2 percent, before the presidential election, according to the Institute of International Education. Further declines are expected following the government’s pause on student visa interviews, publicity surrounding visa revocations and arrests and cuts to federal research funding.
Rhonda Schuldt, director of the Big Idea Center at the University of Pittsburgh. International students “want to stay in Pittsburgh and build businesses here,” Schuldt says. Credit: Nancy Andrews for The Hechinger Report
It’s too early to know what will happen this fall. But D. Sole co-founder Saisri Akondi has heard from friends who planned to come to the United States that they can’t get visas. “Most of these students wanted to start companies,” she said.
“I would be lying if I said nothing has changed,” said Akondi, who has been accepted into a master’s degree program in business administration at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business under her existing student visa, though she said her company will stay in Pittsburgh. “The fear has increased.”
This could affect whether tech companies continue to come to Pittsburgh, said Russo, at least unless and until more Americans are better prepared for and recruited into tech-related graduate programs. That’s something universities have not yet begun to do, since the unanticipated threat to their international students erupted only in March, and that would likely take years.
Audrey Russo, CEO of the Pittsburgh Technology Council. If the number of international students declines, “Who’s going to do the research? Who’s going to be in these teams?” she asks. Credit: Nancy Andrews for The Hechinger Report
“Who’s going to do the research? Who’s going to be in these teams?” asked Russo. “We’re hurting ourselves deeply.”
The impact could transcend the research and development ecosystem. “I think we’ll see almost immediate ramifications in Pittsburgh in terms of higher-skilled, higher-wage companies hiring here,” said Sean Luther, at InnovatePGH. “And that affects the grocery shops, the barbershops, the real estate.”
There are other, more nuanced impacts.
Mike Madden, left, vice president of InnovatePGH and director of the Pittsburgh Innovation District, talks with University of Pittsburgh graduate student Jayden Serenari in one of InnovatePGH’s co-working spaces. Credit: Nancy Andrews for The Hechinger Report
“Whether we like it or not, it’s a global world. It’s a global economy. The problems that these students want to solve are global problems,” Schuldt said. “And one of the things that is really important in solving the world’s problems is to have a robust mix of countries, of cultures — that opportunity to learn how others see the world. That is one of the most valuable things students tell us they get here.”
Pittsburgh is a prime example of a place whose economy is vulnerable to a decline in the number of international students, said Brookings’ Muro. But it’s not unique.
“These scholars become entrepreneurs. They’re adding to the U.S. economy new ideas and new companies,” he said. Without them, “the economy would be smaller. Research wouldn’t get done. Journal articles wouldn’t be written. Patents wouldn’t be filed. Fewer startups would occur.”
The United States, said Muro, “has cleaned up by being the absolute central place for this. The system has been incredibly beneficial to the United States. The hottest technologies are inordinately reliant on these excellent minds from around the world. And their being here is critical to American leadership.”
Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, [email protected]orjpm.82 on Signal.
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Drat. I missed getting to officially contribute to the votes for this year’s Top 100 Tools for Learning, collected and analyzed by Jane Hart. I’m still going to write mine up, as I do like to reflect on the tools I’m relying on for my own and others’ learning, but I’ll need to wait until 2026 to get back into the mix of having my votes reflected in the grand total.
I used to be more regular with my votes, but did miss a few along the way. Here are my past Top 100 Tools for Learning: 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022, and 2024. I avoid looking at the prior year’s lists until I have identified my votes for current year.
This year, given that I missed the deadline for submitting my top ten list, I’m using a longer format than normal and structuring this reflection on Harold Jarche’s personal knowledge (PKM) framework, since so much of my learning is centered on it:
Seek > Sense > Share
Throughout all of my days, I’m plugged into intentional ways of seeking knowledge, wisdom, and sources of curiosity. In a way, sense-making is a part of my way of being, especially on those days when I allow myself to slow down enough for the deeper insights. Finally, I’m someone who delights in fueling my curiosity and imagination even further by sharing what I’m learning and inviting others to do the same.
Curious to learn more about personal knowledge mastery? My absolute favorite source for more than a decade now is Harold Jarche, who defines PKM as:
Personal knowledge mastery (PKM) is a set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world and work more effectively. PKM keeps us afloat in a sea of information — guided by professional communities and buoyed by social networks. – Harold Jarche
Seeking is finding things out and keeping up to date. Building a network of colleagues is helpful in this regard. It not only allows us to “pull” information, but also have it “pushed” to us by trusted sources. Good curators are valued members of knowledge networks. – Harold Jarche
Overcast
Not a day goes by that I don’t use Overcast, my preferred podcast catcher. On my iPhone, it is always my most used app on any given week.
Get ready to celebrate International Podcast Day on September 30. I’ve already got an episode queued up featuring Dominic Conroy & Warren Kidd to commemorate the event. Get your ears on and subscribe to Teaching in Higher Ed, if you haven’t already, using your favorite podcast app (search for Teaching in Higher Ed and hit subscribe/follow), YouTube, or Spotify.
While my backlog of episodes yet to be listened to is ridiculously long, Overcast’s playlists feature means I can tailor my audio consumption according to genre (news, technology, teaching, etc.), to my incoming priority/preferred podcasts, or to the queue list I have saved for the good stuff I want to get to when I have long drives or alone time.
Unread
While Overcast is for the spoken word, Unread is primarily for written pieces. Powered by real simple syndication (RSS), Unread presents me headlines of unread stories across all sorts of categories, which I can tap (on my iPad) to read, or scroll past to automatically mark as read. I use Unread in conjunction with Inoreader, which is a robust RSS aggregator that can either be used as an RSS reader, as well, or can be used in conjunction with an RSS reader, such as Unread. – From my 2024 Top 10 blog post (note: I only copied this text over after identifying what tools would be on this year’s list, as in I didn’t “cheat”).
One of the things I love about Unread is that I an perform the entire reading process with two thumbs (insert that joke/about “who has two thumbs and can…” and then add “operate Unread” at the end of it). I can browse the different folders/collections I have set up to skim headlines. When I want to read one of the stories associated with a given headline, I can go into it and read with just a tap. To get back out to the headlines, again, I just swipe right.
One big update that Unread 4.5 gave us is support for reading paywalled articles within the app. As of me writing this, I haven’t had a chance to experiment with that feature, but am excited to do so over this long, holiday weekend in the U.S. Anything I can do to reduce friction in my PKM system helps me be able to expand my possibilities for deeper learning.
YouTube
Once I found out that I could subscribe to new YouTube videos on my RSS reader, Inoreader, it changed how often I watch YouTube videos. That, plus subscribing to YouTube Premium, which means we get ad-free viewing as a family, makes me spending a lot more time with YouTube. I even have my own YouTube channel, which I occasionally post videos on. – From 2024 Top ten post
YouTube Premium continues to be a way of life for our entire family. If you watch a lot of YouTube and don’t have a means for watching ad-free, I can’t recommend it highly enough.
This past year, we added a Teaching in Higher Ed YouTube Channel. Each time an audio podcast episode gets posted on our hosting platform, Blubrry, it automatically gets shared on the channel. They used to not allow audio-only podcasts on the platform but made changes their rules such that now it is encouraged. In addition to listening to Teaching in Higher Ed, or watching an episode with Dr. Stephenie Cawthon accompanied by two ASL interpreters, you can also see other videos I’ve made this past year, such as:
Kindle App
I primarily read digitally and find the Kindle iPad app to be the easiest route for reading. I read more, in total, when I am disciplined about using the Kindle hardware, but wind up grabbing my iPad most nights. – 2024 Top 10 Post
Audible
New on the list for this year is Audible. I was attempting for a few months to better balance my daily news reading with sources that would give me a longer-term view of the world. As I write these words, I feel like I’m back to failing at this, but it was a good pursuit there for a while. Part of this attempt at balancing was made possible through listening to audio books in addition to podcast episodes.
Sometimes audio is better because it allows us to get more reading into our days. Other times, audio does something that the written word could never do. In the list below of some favorite audio boos from this past year, I’ll indicate with (best via audio book) at the end of the line if the audio book was particularly geared toward the audio medium.
Sensing is how we personalize information and use it. Sensing includes reflection and putting into practice what we have learned. Often it requires experimentation, as we learn best by doing. – Harold Jarche
StoryGraph
I decided to move off of Amazon’s Goodreads for my reading tracking this year and have been loving StoryGraph so far. I just wish more people were there to be friends with and share reading ideas. What I mostly use StoryGraph for is setting an annual reading goal and tracking my progress toward that. I also have quite a large queue of books I would like to read someday.
I understand that some people have a hard time finding something to read. This is not my problem. Trust me. I’ve got the what to possibly read thing down pat. But for those who are looking for suggestions, StoryGraph has that feature nailed, too. If anyone is on StoryGraph and wants to connect, my StoryGraph username is Bonni208 (as it is across most social networks that I’m on). Those curious about why the number 208 is significant to me, check out Teaching in Higher Ed Episode 208, where Dave helps me tell the 208 origin story.
Obsidian
Dave has been using Obsidian for years now and long-heralded the way that these types of note apps don’t lock you in, long-term. Using plain text (Markdown) documents that are stored where you want to keep them (not locked within the note service/subscription/app) means that Obsidian gets used as a way of viewing and adding to your plain text documents. That’s an oversimplification and one that meant I took longer than others to get to the party that is Obsidian.
One thing to know about Obsidian is that there is a learning curve. I would suggest not trying to go your own way on it, but instead to invest in some tools to help with your onboarding. I have three recommendations:
The MacSparky Obsidian Field Guide – This course takes you through how to get started with Obsidian and set up systems to use this note-taking powerhouse to fuel your capacity for learning and teaching.
Obsidian Starter Vault from Mike Schmitz – It can be hard starting from an entirely blank slate in Obsidian, so this starter vault can give you some content to work from and some tips for how to: “get more out of your notes and ideas effortlessly.”
LifeHQ from Mike Schmitz – If you want to go even further with a system built by someone else, you can check out this extensive, customizable vault. I purchased it and over time have found ways to combine how Mike uses Obsidian to something that works better for me, most notably to incorporate my own custom version of Johnny Decimal (which I call Bonni Decimal; Let’s just say it has some emojis in the mix, in addition to the decimals/numbers, which I find quite satisfying) and doesn’t attempt to incorporate task management the way Mike has, instead relying on my beloved OmniFocus Pro.
ChatGPT
Ok. Here goes. I use artificial intelligence, despite knowing that there are plenty of ethical reasons that people may choose not to use AI. I encourage anyone thinking about shaming me or others who use it to read Maha Bali’s post suggesting that we not jump straight to that binary way of thinking about peoples’ use of these technologies. I don’t use it without continually refining my knowledge of what it is and isn’t capable of… but I do find that to be effective in my job, I am required to use it. Additionally, to enable us to cost-effectively offer transcripts for our podcasts and otherwise make our materials more accessible, AI is a must there, too.
I list ChatGPT here, since that is my most frequently-used AI tool, as it relates to learning. I pay for the $20/month paid service and occasionally find myself needing to use the separate pay-as-you-go API key for nichè use-cases. I asked ChatGPT to use what it knows about me to list off the ways that I use it in my learning (seeking, sensing, and sharing), and here is an edited version of it’s bulleted output:
Seeking: exploring big questions about teaching, learning, and AI; summarizing complex articles or reports.
Sensing: refining my “messy”/“chicken scratch” notes into themes, comparing frameworks, and generating questions that deepen reflection and conversation (with colleagues, students, or even my own family).
Sharing: drafting polished communications – everything from faculty emails and strategic planning documents to podcast show notes and library fundraising blurbs.
Iterating: co-creating interactive materials (like Twine games, PollEverywhere prompts, or Canva copy) where I can ask ChatGPT to generate multiple versions until it “clicks.”
Blending Personal + Professional Contexts: whether it’s planning a weekly meal prep strategy, crafting conference questions, or designing playful activities for faculty, ChatGPT helps me weave learning into both my work and life.
It didn’t mention this, but I have been closely following Mike Caulfield‘s experimentation and research on what it can do using argumentation theory to come alongside us in our fact checking with his Deep Background GPT. There’s so much more I could say here, but I’ll save it for future posts.
Readwise
It is so easy to highlight sections of what I’m reading on the Kindle app and have those highlights sync over to a service called Readwise. The service “makes it easy to revisit and learn from your ebook and article highlights. – 2024 Top 10 post
I saw a video the other night which made mention of the ability to sync Readwise highlights with Obsidian (note taking tool) and that got me excited about that possibility. For now, I’ll be disciplined about placing that idea on my someday/maybe list and not going down the rabbit hole at this exact moment. Another thing on my someday/maybe list to look into more is Lance Eaton’s AI Practice: Building My Quote Collection.
Share
Sharing includes exchanging resources, ideas, and experiences with our networks as well as collaborating with our colleagues. – Harold Jarche
Raindrop
Much of my digital life revolves around digital bookmarking. I could have easily placed Raindrop in with sense making, as on an almost hourly basis, I find myself saving links and placing them in all the various collections (which are like folders) I have on Raindrop and applying tags. Whether I’m reading on my web browser, or via my smartphone or tablet, I can easily save bookmarks and have them accessible to me anytime in the future.
Just the other day, I was talking with a friend who is doing a lot of reflection and reading about loneliness and I asked if he had ever watched Andrea Dorfman’s How To Be Alone. He hadn’t and it was such a delight to be able to resurface that masterpiece and share it with him. I had an insight while watching it this time that since I have been spending more time working in our library lately that it seems like it may be the one place students feel more comfortable being alone than in other spots.
Another fun discovery, found within the deep crevasses of Raindrop was The Gap, by Ira Glass. “Your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you… Most everybody I know who does interesting, creative work, went through this phase for a few years…” Ira normalizes this gap of knowing what you’re doing could be better and being able to “fight your way through the gap.”
While most of my saved bookmarks (tags and collections) are private, I did decide recently to make an RSS feed and page with my saved links within an AI collection from Raindrop. This means that each time I save something related to AI on Raindrop, that anyone subscribed to that feed will have it show up in their RSS aggregator. Additionally, anyone who visits the page will see everything I’ve saved about AI within Raindrop. Candidly, as public as I am with the podcast and many other things, sharing this feed makes me a bit nervous, as I wouldn’t want people to think that I’m necessarily endorsing everything I’m saving. I’m pretty sure people would know that but given how polarizing the topic of AI can be, I still feel a bit nervous about this aspect of my sharing.
MOREHEAD, Ky. — The summer after ninth grade, Zoey Griffith found herself in an unfamiliar setting: a dorm on the Morehead State University campus.
There, she’d spend the months before her sophomore year taking classes in core subjects including math and biology and electives like oil painting.
For Griffith, it was an opportunity, but a scary one. “It was a big deal for me to live on campus at the age of 14,” she said. Morehead State is about an hour from her hometown of Maysville. “I was nervous, and I remember that I cried the first time that my dad left me on move-in day.”
Her mother became a parent as a teenager and urged her daughter to avoid the same experience. Griffith’s father works as a mechanic, and he frowns upon the idea of higher education, she said.
And so college back then seemed a distant and unlikely idea.
But Griffith’s stepsister had introduced her to a federal program called Upward Bound. It places high school students in college dorms during the summer, where they can take classes and participate in workshops on preparing for the SAT and financial literacy. During the school year, students get tutoring and work on what are called individual success plans.
Upward Bound students test the robots they built in their robotics class – evaluating for programming and mechanical issues. Credit: Photo courtesy of the Upward Bound Programs
It’s part of a group of federal programs, known as TRIO, aimed at helping low-income and first-generation students earn a college degree, often becoming the first in their families to do so.
So, thanks to that advice from her stepsister, Kirsty Beckett, who’s now 27 and pursuing a doctorate in psychology, Griffith signed up and found herself in that summer program at Morehead State. Now, Griffith is enrolled at Maysville Community and Technical College, with plans to become an ultrasound technician.
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TRIO, once a group of three programs — giving it a name that stuck — is now the umbrella over eight some dating back to 1965. Together, they serve roughly 870,000 students nationwide a year.
It has worked with millions of students and has bipartisan support in Congress. Some in this part of the Appalachian region of Kentucky, and across the country, worry about students who won’t get the same assistance if President Donald Trump ends federal spending on the program.
Students Zoey Griffith, left, and Aniyah Caldwell, right, say the Upward Bound program has been life-changing for them. Upward Bound is one of eight federal programs under the TRIO umbrella. Credit: Michael Vasquez for The Hechinger Report
A White House budget proposal would eliminate spending on TRIO. The document says “access to college is not the obstacle it was for students of limited means” and puts the onus on colleges to recruit and support students.
Advocates note that the programs, which cost roughly $1.2 billion each year, have a proven track record. Students in Upward Bound, for example, are more than twice as likely to earn a bachelor’s degree by age 24 than other students from some of the nation’s poorest households, according to the Council for Opportunity in Education. COE is a nonprofit that represents TRIO programs nationwide and advocates for expanded opportunities for first-generation, low-income students.
For the high school class of 2022, 74 percent of Upward Bound students enrolled immediately in college — compared with only 56 percent of high school graduates in the bottom income quartile.
Upward Bound is for high school students, like Griffith. Another TRIO program, Talent Search, helps middle and high school students, without the residential component. One called Student Support Services (SSS) provides tutoring, advising and other assistance to at-risk college students. Another program prepares students for graduate school and doctoral degrees, and yet another trains TRIO staff.
A 2019 study found that after four years of college, students in SSS were 48 percent more likely to complete an associate’s degree or certificate, or transfer to a four-year institution, than a comparable group of students with similar backgrounds and similar levels of high school achievement who were not in the program.
“TRIO has been around for 60 years,” said Kimberly Jones, the president of COE. “We’ve produced millions of college graduates. We know it works.”
Yet Education Secretary Linda McMahon and the White House refer to the programs as a “relic of the past.”
Jones countered that census data shows that “students from the poorest families still earn college degrees at rates far below that of students from the highest-income families,” demonstrating continued need for TRIO.
McMahon is challenging that and pushing for further study of those TRIO success rates. In 2020, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that even though the Education Department collects data on TRIO participants, “the agency has gaps in its evidence on program effectiveness.” The GAO criticized the Education Department for having “outdated” studies on some TRIO programs, and no studies at all for others. Since then, the department has expanded its evaluations of TRIO.
East Main Street in Morehead, Kentucky, just outside of Morehead State’s campus. Credit: Michael Vasquez for The Hechinger Report
During a Senate subcommittee hearing in June, McMahon acknowledged “there is some effectiveness of the programs, in many circumstances.”
Still, she said there is not enough research to justify TRIO’s total cost. “That’s a real drawback in these programs,” McMahon said.
Now, she is asking lawmakers to eliminate TRIO spending after this year and has already canceled some previously approved TRIO grants.
“What are we supposed to do, especially here in eastern Kentucky?” asked David Green, a former Upward Bound participant who is now marketing director for a pair of Kentucky hospitals.
Green lives in a region that has some of the nation’s highest rates of unemployment, cancer and opioid addiction. “I mean, these people have big hearts, they want to grow,” he added. Cutting these programs amounts to “stifling us even more than we’re already stifled.”
Green described his experience with TRIO at Morehead State in the mid-1980s as “one of the best things that ever happened to me.”
He grew up in a home without running water in Maysville, a city of about 8,000 people. It was on a TRIO trip to Washington, D.C., he recalled, that he stayed in a hotel for the first time. Green remembers bringing two suitcases so he could pack a pillow, sheets and comforter — unaware the hotel room would have its own.
He met students from other towns and with different backgrounds. Some became lifelong friends. Green learned table manners, the kind of thing often required in business settings. After college, he was so grateful for TRIO that he became one of its tutors, working with the next generation of students.
TRIO’s all-encompassing nature makes it unique among college access programs, said Tom Stritikus, the president of Occidental College, a private liberal arts college in Los Angeles. He was previously president of Fort Lewis College, a public liberal arts school in Colorado with a large Native American student population. At both institutions, Stritikus said, he witnessed the effectiveness of TRIO’s methods, which he described as a “soup to nuts” menu of services for at-risk students trying to be the first in their families to earn degrees.
After participating in the Upward Bound program, David Green has had a successful career, becoming a community leader in his hometown of Maysville, Kentucky. Credit: Michael Vasquez for The Hechinger Report
Jones, of the Council for Opportunity in Education, said she is cautiously optimistic that Congress will continue funding TRIO, despite the Trump administration’s request. The programs serve students in all 50 states. According to the COE, about 34 percent are white, 32 percent are Black, 23 percent are Hispanic, 5 percent are Asian, and 3 percent are Native American. TRIO’s guidelines require that a majority of participants come from families making less than 150 percent of the federal poverty level. For a family of four living in the contiguous United States, that’s a max of $48,225 a year.
In May, Rep. Mike Simpson, an Idaho Republican, called TRIO “one of the most effective programs in the federal government,” which, he said, is supported by “many, many members of Congress.”
In June, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican from West Virginia and a former TRIO employee, spoke about its importance to her state. TRIO helps “a student that really needs the extra push, the camaraderie, the community,” she said. “I’ve gone to their graduations, and been their speaker, and it’s really quite delightful to see how far they’ve come, in a short period of time.”
TRIO survived, with its funding intact, when the Senate appropriations committee approved its budget last month. The House is expected to take up its version of the annual appropriations bill for education in early September. Both chambers ultimately have to agree on federal spending, a process that could drag on until December, leaving TRIO’s fate in Congress uncertain.
While lawmakers debate its future, the Trump administration could also delay or halt TRIO funding on its own. Earlier this year, the administration took the unprecedented step of unilaterally canceling about 20 previously approved new and continuing TRIO grants.
At Morehead State, leaders say the university — and the region it serves — need the boost it receives from TRIO: While roughly 38 percent of American adults have earned at least a bachelor’s degree, in Kentucky, that figure is only 16 percent. And, locally, it’s 7 percent, according to Summer Fawn Bryant, the director of TRIO’s Talent Search programs at the university.
Summer Fawn Bryant, center, is director of TRIO’s Talent Search programs at Morehead State University in Kentucky. She stands with former TRIO students Alexandria Daniel, left, and Blake Thayer, right. Credit: Photo courtesy of Summer Fawn Bryant
TRIO works to counter the stigma of attending college that still exists in parts of eastern Kentucky, Bryant said. A student from a humble background who is considering college, she said, might be scolded with the phrase: Don’t get above your raisin’.
“A parent may say it,” Bryant said. “A teacher may say it.”
She added that she’s seen time and again how these programs can turn around the lives of young students facing adversity.
Students like Beth Cockrell, an Upward Bound alum from Pineville, Ky., who said her mom struggled with parenting. “Upward Bound stepped in as that kind of co-parent and helped me decide what my major was going to be.”
Cockrell went on to earn three degrees at Morehead State and has worked as a teacher for the past 19 years. She now works with students at her alma mater and teaches third grade at Conkwright Elementary School, about an hour away.
In a few years, 17-year-old Upward Bound student Isaac Bocook plans to join the teaching ranks too — as a middle school social studies teacher. Bocook said he was indecisive about what to study after high school, but he finally figured it out after attending a career fair at Morehead State’s historic Button Auditorium.
Upward Bound students visit the Great Lake Science Center in Cleveland for the end-of-summer educational trip. Credit: Photo courtesy of the Upward Bound Programs
Bocook lives in Lewis County, with just under 13,000 residents and a single public high school. At Morehead State’s TRIO program, Bocook met teenagers from across the entire region, which he said improved his social skills. TRIO also helped him with all kinds of paperwork on the pathway to adulthood. Filling out financial aid forms. Writing scholarship applications. Crafting a resume.
“I’m just truly grateful to have TRIO, as sort of like a hand to hold,” Bocook said.
His need for guidance is similar to what students at Morgan County High School in West Liberty, Kentucky, experience, said Lori Keeton, the school guidance counselor. The challenge facing these first-generation students, she said, is that “you just simply don’t know what you don’t know.”
As the sole counselor for 550 students, Keeton doesn’t have time to help each student navigate the complex college-application process and said she worries that some of her students will apply to fewer colleges, or no colleges at all, if TRIO disappears.
TRIO’s Talent Search program serves about 100 students at her high school, and roughly another dozen are part of Upward Bound. Each program has a dedicated counselor who visits regularly to guide and assist students.
Sherry Adkins, an eastern Kentucky native who attended TRIO more than 50 years ago and went on to become a registered nurse, said efforts to cut TRIO spending ignore the long-term benefits. “Do you want all of these people that are disadvantaged to continue like that? Where they’re taking money from society? Or do you want to help prepare us to become successful people who pay lots of taxes?”
As Washington considers TRIO’s future, program directors like Bryant, at Morehead State, press forward. She has preserved a text message a former student sent her two years ago to remind her of what’s at stake.
After finishing college, the student was attending a conference on child abuse when a presenter showed a slide that included the quote: “Every child who winds up doing well has had at least one stable and committed relationship with a supportive adult.”
“Forever thankful,” the student texted Bryant, “that you were that supportive adult for me.”
Contact editor Nirvi Shah at 212-678-3445, securely on Signal at NirviShah.14 or via 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.
Paulina Cossette spent six years getting a doctoral degree with the goal of becoming a university professor. But it wasn’t long before she gave up on that path.
With higher education under political assault, and opportunities as well as job security diminished by enrollment declines, Cossette felt burnt out and disillusioned. So she quit her hard-won job as an assistant professor of American government at a small private college in Maryland and used the skills she’d learned to go into business for herself as a freelance copy editor.
Now Cossette is hearing from other newly minted Ph.D.s and tenured faculty who want out — so many, she’s expanded her business to help them leave academia, as she did.
Seemingly relentless attacks and funding cuts since the start of Donald Trump’s second presidential term have been “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said Cossette, who left higher education on the eve of the pandemic, in 2019. “I’m hearing from a lot more people that it’s too much.”
An exodus appears to be under way of Ph.D.s and faculty generally, who are leaving academia in the face of political, financial and enrollment crises. It’s a trend federal data and other sources show began even before Trump returned to the White House.
Nearly 70 percent of people receiving doctorates were already leaving higher education for industry, government and other sectors, not including those without job offers or who opted to continue their studies, according to the most recent available figures from the National Science Foundation — up from fewer than 50 percent decades ago.
As for faculty, more than a third of provosts reported higher-than-usual turnover last year, in a survey by Hanover Research and the industry publication Inside Higher Ed. That was before the turmoil of this late winter and spring.
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“People who can get out will get out,” said L. Maren Wood, director and CEO of the Center for Graduate Career Success, which works with doctoral and other graduate students at 69 colleges and universities to provide career help.
If the spree of general job-switching that followed Covid was dubbed “the Great Resignation,” Wood said, what she’s seeing now in higher education is “the Great Defection.”
Getting a Ph.D. is a traditional pipeline to an academic career. Now some of the brightest candidates — who have spent years doing cutting-edge research in their fields to prepare for faculty jobs — are leaving higher education or signing on with universities abroad, Wood said.
“It’s going to affect the quality of a student’s experience if they don’t get to study with those leading minds, who are going into private industry or to other countries,” she said.
“What’s the joke about those who can’t do, teach? You don’t want to be in a situation where the only people left in your classrooms are the ones who can’t do anything else.”
Parents sending children to college in the fall should know that they’ll be taking classes “with a faculty member who is worried about his or her research funding and who doesn’t have the help of graduate student teaching assistants. And that’s really going to impact the quality of your student’s experience,” said Julia Kent, a vice president at the Council of Graduate Schools, who conducts research about Ph.D. career pathways.
“The quality of undergraduate education is at stake here,” Kent said.
Even Ph.D.s who want to work in academia are being thwarted.
During the Great Recession and the pandemic — two recent periods when there were few available faculty jobs — doctoral candidates could continue their studies until things got better, Wood said. This time, the Trump administration’s cuts to research funding have stripped many of that option.
“This is way worse” than those earlier crises, she said. “Doctoral students are in panic mode.”
The same deep federal cuts mean doctoral candidates in science, technology, engineering, math and other fields can’t complete the research they need to be eligible for what few academic jobs do become available.
“You’re basically knee-capping that younger generation, which undermines the intergenerational dynamism that takes place in higher education. And that trickles down into the classroom,” said Isaac Kamola, an associate professor of political science at Trinity College and head of the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom at the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP.
Doctoral candidates early in their programs are questioning whether they should stay, said Wood. That could reduce the supply of future faculty. So will the fact that some universities have reduced the number of new Ph.D. candidates they will accept or have rescinded admission offers, citing federal budget cuts. Fewer prospective candidates are likely to apply, said Timothy Burke, a professor of history at Swarthmore College who has written about this topic.
“Our graduating students right now are thinking differently about what it means to start a doctorate,” Burke said.
Meanwhile, he said, “all the things that were dismaying to many faculty of long standing just feel worse. People who would have been totally content to stay put, whose prospects were good, who had good positions, who were more or less happy — now they’re thinking hard about whether there’s a future in this.”
That means undergraduates could experience fewer available classroom professors and teaching and graduate assistants or the “only tenuous presence of faculty who are thinking hard about going somewhere else,” he said. “There are going to be programs that are going to be shut. There are going to be departments running on fumes.”
The route to a university faculty job has always been hard. Finishing a doctoral degree takes a median of nearly six years, according to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences — nearly seven in the arts and humanities.
Doctoral students who manage to finish their programs have always had to fight for faculty positions, even before institutions announced cutbacks and hiring freezes.
Universities enroll far more doctoral candidates, to provide cheap labor as teaching and research assistants, than they will ever hire. The number of doctoral degrees awarded rose from 163,827 in 2010 to an estimated 207,000 this year, the National Center for Education Statistics says — a 26 percent increase, during a period in which the number of full-time faculty positions went up at less than half that rate.
With colleges and universities under stress, still more doctoral candidates now face the prospect of spending years “training for a career that isn’t actually available,” said Ashley Ruba, a Ph.D. who left higher education to work at Meta, where she builds virtual reality systems.
“If you told someone going to law school that they couldn’t get a job as a lawyer, I don’t think they’d do it,” said Ruba, who is also the founder of a career-coaching service for fellow Ph.D.s called After Academia.
People already in faculty jobs appear equally on edge. More than 1 in 3 said in a recent survey that they have less academic freedom than in the past; half said they worry about online harassment.And faculty salaries have been stagnant. Pay declined for the three years starting with the pandemic, when adjusted for inflation, the AAUP reports, and has still not recovered to pre-pandemic levels.
People with Ph.D.s can earn more outside academia — an average of 37 percent more, one study found. Employers value skills including active learning, critical thinking, problem-solving and resilience, which is “everything you learn in a doctoral program,” Ruba said.
The proportion of faculty considering leaving their jobs who are looking for work outside of academia has spiked. Before the pandemic, it was between 1 and 8 percent each year. Since then, it has been between 11 and 16 percent, according to R. Todd Benson, executive director and principal investigator at the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, or COACHE. The figure comes from surveys conducted at 54 major universities and colleges.
A Facebook group of dissatisfied academics, called The Professor Is Out, has swelled to nearly 35,000 members. It was started by Karen Kelsky, a former anthropology professor who previously helped people get jobs in academia and now coaches them on how to leave it.
“It’s difficult to overcome the stereotype of a university professor, which is that they’re coddled, they’re overprivileged, they’re arrogant and just enjoying total job security that nobody else has,” said Kelsky, who also wrote “The Professor Is In: The Essential Guide to Turning Your Ph.D. Into a Job,” a second edition of which is due out this fall.
Today, “they are overworked. They’re grossly underpaid. They are being called the enemy. And they’re bailing on academia,” she said.
“Every time I talk to a tenured professor, they tell me how miserable they are and how desperate they are to get out,” said Kelsky. “And there’s no way this isn’t having real-life, tangible impacts on the quality of education students are getting.”
Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, [email protected]orjpm.82 on Signal.
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.
President Donald Trump wants to collect more admissions data from colleges and universities to make sure they’re complying with a 2023 Supreme Court decision that ended race-conscious affirmative action. And he wants that data now.
But data experts and higher education scholars warn that any new admissions data is likely to be inaccurate, impossible to interpret and ultimately misused by policymakers. That’s because Trump’s own policies have left the statistics agency inside the Education Department with a skeleton staff and not enough money, expertise or time to create this new dataset.
The department already collects data on enrollment from every institution of higher education that participates in the federal student loan program. The results are reported through the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). But in an Aug. 7 memorandum, Trump directed the Education Department, which he sought to close in March, to expand that task andprovide “transparency” into how some 1,700 colleges that do not admit everyone are making their admissions decisions. And he gave Education Secretary Linda McMahon just 120 days to get it done.
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Expanding data collection on applicants is not a new idea. The Biden administration had already ordered colleges to start reporting race and ethnicity data to the department this fall in order to track changes in diversity in postsecondary education. But in a separate memorandum to the head of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), McMahon asked for even more information, including high school grades and college entrance exam scores, all broken down by race and gender.
Bryan Cook, director of higher education policy at the Urban Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C., called the 120-day timeline “preposterous” because of the enormous technical challenges. For example, IPEDS has never collected high school GPAs. Some schools use a weighted 5.0 scale, giving extra points for advanced classes, and others use an unweighted 4.0 scale, which makes comparisons messy. Other issues are equally thorny. Many schools no longer require applicants to report standardized test scores and some no longer ask them about race so the data that Trump wants doesn’t exist for those colleges.
“You’ve got this effort to add these elements without a mechanism with which to vet the new variables, as well as a system for ensuring their proper implementation,” said Cook. “You would almost think that whoever implemented this didn’t know what they were doing.”
Cook has helped advise the Education Department on the IPEDS data collection for 20 years and served on technical review panels, which are normally convened first to recommend changes to the data collection. Those panels were disbanded earlier this year, and there isn’t one set up to vet Trump’s new admissions data proposal.
Cook and other data experts can’t figure out how a decimated education statistics agency could take on this task. All six NCES employees who were involved in IPEDS data collection were fired in March, and there are only three employees left out of 100 at NCES, which is run by an acting commissioner who also has several other jobs.
An Education Department official, who did not want to be named, denied that no one left inside the Education Department has IPEDS experience. The official said that staff inside the office of the chief data officer, which is separate from the statistics agency, have a “deep familiarity with IPEDS data, its collection and use.” Former Education Department employees told me that some of these employees have experience in analyzing the data, but not in collecting it.
In the past, there were as many as a dozen employees who worked closely with RTI International, a scientific research institute, which handles most of the IPEDS data collection work.
Technical review eliminated
Of particular concern is that RTI’s $10 million annual contract to conduct the data collection had been slashed approximately in half by the Department of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE, according to two former employees, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation. Those severe budget cuts eliminated the technical review panels that vet proposed changes to IPEDS, and ended training for colleges and universities to submit data properly, which helped with data quality. RTI did not respond to my request to confirm the cuts or answer questions about the challenges it will face in expanding its work on a reduced budget and staffing.
The Education Department did not deny that the IPEDS budget had been cut in half. “The RTI contract is focused on the most mission-critical IPEDS activities,” the Education Department official said. “The contract continues to include at least one task under which a technical review panel can be convened.”
Additional elements of the IPEDS data collection have also been reduced, including a contract to check data quality.
Last week, the scope of the new task became more apparent. On Aug. 13, the administration released more details about the new admissions data it wants, describing how the Education Department is attempting to add a whole new survey to IPEDS, called the Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement (ACTS), which will disaggregate all admissions data and most student outcome and financial aid data by race and gender. College will have to report on both undergraduate and graduate school admissions. The public has 60 days to comment, and the administration wants colleges to start reporting this data this fall.
Complex collection
Christine Keller, executive director of theAssociation for Institutional Research, a trade group of higher education officials who collect and analyze data, called the new survey “one of the most complex IPEDS collections ever attempted.”
Traditionally, it has taken years to make much smaller changes to IPEDS, and universities are given a year to start collecting the new data before they are required to submit it. (Roughly 6,000 colleges, universities and vocational schools are required to submit data to IPEDS as a condition for their students to take out federal student loans or receive federal Pell Grants. Failure to comply results in fines and the threat of losing access to federal student aid.)
Normally, the Education Department would reveal screenshots of data fields, showing what colleges would need to enter into the IPEDS computer system. But the department has not done that, and several of the data descriptions are ambiguous. For example, colleges will have to report test scores and GPA by quintile, broken down by race and ethnicity and gender. One interpretation is that a college would have to say how many Black male applicants, for example, scored above the 80th percentile on the SAT or the ACT. Another interpretation is that colleges would need to report the average SAT or ACT score of the top 20 percent of Black male applicants.
The Association for Institutional Research used to train college administrators on how to collect and submit data correctly and sort through confusing details — until DOGE eliminated that training. “The absence of comprehensive, federally funded training will only increase institutional burden and risk to data quality,” Keller said. Keller’s organization is now dipping into its own budget to offer a small amount of free IPEDS training to universities.
The Education Department is also requiring colleges to report five years of historical admissions data, broken down into numerous subcategories. Institutions have never been asked to keep data on applicants who didn’t enroll.
“It’s incredible they’re asking for five years of prior data,” said Jordan Matsudaira, an economist at American University who worked on education policy in the Biden and Obama administrations. “That will be square in the pandemic years when no one was reporting test scores.”
‘Misleading results’
Matsudaira explained that IPEDS had considered asking colleges for more academic data by race and ethnicity in the past and the Education Department ultimately rejected the proposal. One concern is that slicing and dicing the data into smaller and smaller buckets would mean that there would be too few students and the data would have to be suppressed to protect student privacy. For example, if there were two Native American men in the top 20 percent of SAT scores at one college, many people might be able to guess who they were. And a large amount of suppressed data would make the whole collection less useful.
Also, small numbers can lead to wacky results. For example, a small college could have only two Hispanic male applicants with very high SAT scores. If both were accepted, that’s a 100 percent admittance rate. If only 200 white women out of 400 with the same test scores were accepted, that would be only a 50 percent admittance rate. On the surface, that can look like both racial and gender discrimination. But it could have been a fluke. Perhaps both of those Hispanic men were athletes and musicians. The following year, the school might reject two different Hispanic male applicants with high test scores but without such impressive extracurriculars. The admissions rate for Hispanic males with high test scores would drop to zero. “You end up with misleading results,” said Matsudaira.
Reporting average test scores by race is another big worry. “It feels like a trap to me,” said Matsudaira. “That is mechanically going to give the administration the pretense of claiming that there’s lower standards of admission for Black students relative to white students when you know that’s not at all a correct inference.”
The statistical issue is that there are more Asian and white students at the very high end of the SAT score distribution, and all those perfect 1600s will pull the average up for these racial groups. (Just like a very tall person will skew the average height of a group.) Even if a college has a high test score threshold that it applies to all racial groups and no one below a 1400 is admitted, the average SAT score for Black students will still be lower than that of white students. (See graphic below.) The only way to avoid this is to purely admit by test score and take only the students with the highest scores. At some highly selective universities, there are enough applicants with a 1600 SAT to fill the entire class. But no institution fills its student body by test scores alone. That could mean overlooking applicants with the potential to be concert pianists, star soccer players or great writers.
The Average Score Trap
This graphic by Kirabo Jackson, an economist at Northwestern University, depicts the problem of measuring racial discrimination though average test scores. Even for a university that admits all students above a certain cut score, the average score of one racial group (red) will be higher than the average score of the other group (blue). Source: graphic posted on Bluesky Social by Josh Goodman
Admissions data is a highly charged political issue. The Biden administration originally spearheaded the collection of college admissions data by race and ethnicity. Democrats wanted to collect this data to show how the nation’s colleges and universities were becoming less diverse with the end of affirmative action. This data is slated to start this fall, following a full technical and procedural review.
Now the Trump administration is demanding what was already in the works, and adding a host of new data requirements — without following normal processes. And instead of tracking the declining diversity in higher education, Trump wants to use admissions data to threaten colleges and universities. If the new directive produces bad data that is easy to misinterpret, he may get his wish.
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.
The key to a great news story is a great interview. But all your work getting that interview will be wasted if you don’t have great notes.
When I first started out as a journalist, people didn’t always record their interviews. I rarely used a recorder. I found that it did something to my brain. Part of my brain would be worried that the recording wasn’t working.
When I became an editor, I found that I could tell when a reporter had used a recorder. The quotes in the story were often too long or too flat — they lacked something, maybe emotion or emphasis.
When you interview someone without taping it, you have to listen carefully. There isn’t any backup. And because it is difficult to take down everything someone says word for word, your brain works with your ears and your hand to take down what is most important – the essential facts and details, the emotion, the surprising things someone says.
If you have recorded that same interview, you won’t be doing that. You know you have a backup. And when you go back and listen to the recording, something is different. The statements all flatten out and you end up putting in the story what sounds most explanatory or most impressive. In other words, you can’t tell what was most interesting when you were sitting there or on the phone.
A recording is not enough.
These days it is standard practice to record interviews, if for no other reason than we need the audio for podcasts or audio clips.
But for a great story and to be a great storyteller you should master the art of notetaking. When doing an interview forget that the recorder is on. Imagine it isn’t working (and it might not be working!) So here are some tips for taking notes:
First, don’t try to take down every word. Instead, listen for what is important.
“Quotes can be short,” said News Decoder Educational News Director Marcy Burstiner.
Don’t try to write everything down word for word. It’s OK to paraphrase. Put quote marks only around actual quotes. If you didn’t put quote marks around something in your notes DON’Tput the quote marks in your story.
Master shorthand.
Second, create your own system of shorthand.
Shorthand is a system of writing in a code that allows you to take down words fast and accurately. There are some standard ways of doing that and courses to teach you how. It was developed for stenographers. Before recorders came along, offices employed people to take down dictation. The boss would dictate letters and reports to their secretaries who would then type them up. But you can create your own system of shorthand.
For example, instead of writing down the person’s name every time they start talking (when you are talking to multiple people at the same time) use their initials. You can also lv out the vwls of common wrds.
U can write in text message 4mat b/c that also wrks. I am not a fast writer so I came up with my own system early on in my career. I put ?? when I’m not sure what the person said but I don’t want to interrupt them. I put ** when I want to go back to it to follow up. I circle words or underline themwhen I sense it is important.
For something outrageous I write !!
Take lots and lots of notes.
Writing down words and ideas cements them in your mind.
Finally, use a pen and paper. There are a number of reasons to do this. If you are interviewing someone in person and you try to take your notes on a laptop or tablet, your head will be down half the time and you can’t circle stuff easily.
Second, there is some science behind the notion that we retain information better when we write things down hand to paper.
As a journalist, I was a messy note taker. That piece of paper in the photo image at the top of the story is an actual page of notes I once took. If I had time before I had to submit my article I would take the effort to type my notes onto a Word or Google Doc. Later I fell in love with spreadsheeting and would type my notes into a Google Spreadsheet, which would allow me to match up information with information from other interviews and sort them. This became handy when I was doing a story that involved a lot of interviews and complicated information.
When going to interviews I sometimes forgot a notepad and would have to grab paper anyway I could. I’ve taken notes in the margins of flyers and brochures and on the backside of stuff I got in the mail.
But the best practice is to always keep a notepad on you, just as photographers always keep a camera on them.
Finally, when you are ready to start writing, write from your notes first before going to the recording. Use the recording to make sure you got your quotes right and that you paraphrased what the person said correctly. Trust that your brain and your ears and your hand will have taken down the best information and the most engaging quotes.
Questions to consider:
1. Why take notes if you are recording an interview?
2. What is the difference between quoting someone and paraphrasing something they said?
David John Baer McNicholas sleeps every night next to a bomb.
The worst thing about being homeless is the weather, he says. Santa Fe gets so cold that sometimes diesel fuel turns to gel. At those temperatures, frostbite hits in minutes.
In The Martian, Matt Damon’s character Mark Watney uses a radioactive isotope to keep his rover warm. In the Martian landscape of New Mexico’s Chihuahuan Desert, McNicholas keeps his van warm with a rusty five-gallon propane tank hissing beside his bed.
It’s not just the cold of the desert at night, either. Santa Fe is also the highest state capital in America, at 7,000 feet above sea level. That’s higher than the base lodge at most ski resorts. To stay warm, he keeps a pile of old covers and shirts in his van. A top from TJ Maxx. A blanket from a friend. An oversized green-and-black fleece from his sister who died of cancer.
But in the thick of winter, it’s nowhere near enough. So he fires up the heater hooked to the propane tank beside his bed. Burning an open flame inside a flammable structure filled with combustible fuel isn’t exactly safe, so he keeps a carbon-monoxide detector on his pillow. It’s a thin safeguard since these alarms can, and do, fail. But it’s better than nothing. To avoid freezing to death, he has to risk burning alive.
Summer brings no relief either. “The average temperature in the van during summer is about 110 degrees,” he says. “There’s only so much shade in Santa Fe, especially considering most people don’t want you parking near them.”
And if the weather doesn’t get you, there are a hundred other little things about being homeless that surely will. For one, his van is tiny, and he’s tall. Cooking involves a camp stove that makes his clothes stink of grease, increasing the risk of fire, and turning his van into a dripping sweatbox. Not to mention, the constant anxiety of knowing his belongings are not safe. Or that his home could be towed. Or having to move multiple times a day to avoid such an outcome. Or having to pee into a plastic bottle every night. Or having to find a place to dump the bottles every morning.
“I go to bed every night thinking, this could be it,” he says, reflecting on how his propane tank might blow up and kill him in his sleep. “I might not wake up.”
He adds, after a pause, “All my troubles would be over.”
The moment of truth
McNicholas is a student journalist who studies creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, and he is on track to graduate this spring with a 4.0 GPA. He often writes about life on the road. His poem “Flatbed,” which earned the 2022 Betty and Norman Lockwood Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, captures a cross-country adventure he took with his father when he was 15.
In New Mexico, over half of students face food insecurity. When a whistleblower at IAIA uncovered evidence that school officials might have misused a $50,000 grant meant to support campus food pantries, McNicholas thought it was clearly newsworthy. When students claimed school officials retaliated against the whistleblower who raised the alarm, he published their allegations.
This was groundbreaking journalism. Food scarcity in Native American communities is a dire problem, so a food-pantry scandal at the nation’s top indigenous arts college is a five-alarm fire. Native Americans are twice as likely to face food insecurity compared to white Americans, and sometimes three times higher. In fact, the entire Navajo Nation, which overlaps New Mexico, is considered a food desert.
But instead of being celebrated for such journalistic work, David McNicholas was fired. Put on probation. Evicted. Homeless.
One of the two anonymous student submissions published in The Young Warrior
McNicholas’s clash with IAIA leadership began in 2024, after he published two anonymous submissions in his student-run zine The Young Warrior. One piece accused school officials of bullying a beloved student advisor, Karen Redeye, out of her job. Redeye herself later confirmed this, writing:
I resigned from IAIA due to repeated lack of support from my superiors, maltreatment and bullying from my direct supervisors. It elevated to the point of affecting me physically and my workspace did not provide me emotional safety … I loved my job but it became a hostile workplace and I could not continue on with my position.
The second piece accused Dean of Students Nena Martinez of misappropriating the $50,000 food-security grant. After publishing, McNicholas says he received a flood of thanks and support from his fellow students. Many of them, like McNicholas, depended on the food pantry for survival.
But the administration was not so grateful. They hit back hard, claiming McNicholas was “bullying” university staff. They opened a formal investigation with consequences sure to follow.
“Oh shit,” McNicholas remembers thinking at the time. “They’re going to throw everything at me.”
Learning to hide
“Wonder” by McNicholas’ mother Mary Alice Baer, depicting her son
I grew up in the 1980s near the poverty line, raised by a single mom. The McNicholas residence was a one-car garage with a few rooms tacked on the back in Newington, New Hampshire. Mom was an artist who scraped by doing cleaning jobs. She struggled with alcoholism. Dad was absent until I was 12, but sent $150 a month in child support. Mom didn’t really cook, but she could make a pot of beans. Most nights, we ate TV dinners. It was more than some folks had.
I had undiagnosed autism as a kid, so as you can imagine, school was hell. I learned to keep my mouth shut or get beaten up. Most of the torment from my peers was psychological. I was terrified and lonely. But work was different. In high school, I worked part-time at Market Basket, on the front end. Got hired as a bagger, promoted to keyholder within a day. I found it easier to talk to the cashiers and baggers my age because there, our roles were clearly defined.
Life at school was harder. Blending in became its own kind of hobby. I spent years studying people like an anthropologist, trying to fit in. And I spent years ostracized and harassed for being different. But every year, I got better at hiding myself.
I had traditional hobbies too, you know. I liked computers. I even thought I might study computer science. But I changed my mind at the close of senior year because I knew I had to study people more if I was ever going to have a normal life.
I could only take so much. I started drinking and ended up living in parking lots, storage closets, and couch-surfed for over a decade. But eventually I got sober, bought a house, even started a business. The startup life was too stressful, though. I lost everything — except my sobriety. I entered IAIA to study creative writing. I did my first two years at IAIA while living in my van. In my third year, I moved into the dorms. It was a chance at more stability. And life began to make sense.
I entered at 42, while my peers were mostly 19, so there wasn’t the same pressure to make friends. I contextualize my social life at IAIA as work. Most of my peers are half my age and I am a trusted mentor. These clearly defined roles make me comfortable. Around this time, I was diagnosed with autism, and that helped make sense of things. I also started The Young Warrior, and people liked it. I was part of a community.
When I got into trouble for publishing those pieces, I did what I always do. I tried to study my way out of the problem. I went to the archives and read about old IAIA publications. I read Dean Spade’s “Mutual Aid” and FIRE’s “Guide to Free Speech on Campus.” I studied other undergrad publications and wrote an official proposal and operations manual for what I hoped would be the new Young Warrior.
But overall, life was going well. I haven’t had a drink or drug in 13 years. IAIA has been a huge part of my continued sobriety. And my creative studies have given me the space to unpack the person I hid away so long ago.
Going public
Anticipating housing sanctions barring him from his dorm room, McNicholas left campus before they were formally applied and started living out of his van. But the school’s vicious overreaction in moving to evict him only convinced him it was trying to cover something up. In addition, McNicholas says when Dean of Students Martinez heard the allegations about school officials robbing the food pantry, she simply dismissed the need for food pantries to begin with. According to him, she said, “Students have meal plans. They don’t need food pantries.”
But that explanation didn’t sit right with McNicholas, who lives below the poverty line and depends on food pantries to survive. The situation escalated, he says, when the administration denied that the grant even existed. On March 21, 2024, after McNicholas, acting as press officer for the Associated Student Government (ASG), re-posted an image on Instagram summarizing the scandal, Provost Felipe Colón emailed ASG officers:
It has come to my attention over the last 24 hours that in response to the resignation of Student Success Adviser, Karen Redeye, several students, including members of ASG, have been involved in bullying, defamation, and possibly legally actionable slander and liable [sic] against members of the IAIA staff.
He then suggested that the ASG officers invite him to discuss “Karen’s departure, and particularly to receive information about the pantry grant fund and re-stocking process which has been repeatedly and grossly misrepresented.”
When McNicholas and other ASG members met to discuss the matter with Colón, McNicholas didn’t come empty-handed. An anonymous source had already given him a photocopy of the grant-award letter for $50,000. But when Colón denied the existence of the grant, and McNicholas brandished the proof, Colón tried to explain it away.
Not only that, but university President Robert Martin later threatened to sue them all.
McNicholas was floored. But given the school’s history, he wasn’t surprised. IAIA has a pattern of silencing critics — especially those trying to improve the school’s performance where it falls glaringly short. During a faculty meeting with the Board of Trustees in February 2022, former sculpture professor Matthew Eaton cited an academic paper by a former IAIA department head that showed a staff turnover rate of 30%. According to McNicholas, “They came down on him hard.”
Colón told Eaton he had embarrassed Martinez and demanded that Eaton write a public apology. Eaton wrote the coerced apology and quit the next day. In it, he said citing the high turnover rate was “disparaging” to Martinez as well as “a direct assault” against her.
But McNicholas’ main concern was for his fellow students. The lack of food, coupled with legal threats and the intense stress of having to deal with an administration that appeared to prey on its students rather than support them, had taken an emotional toll on him and his peers. And that toll was beginning to show.
David McNicholas on IAIA campus
One day, the ASG called yet another meeting to discuss the situation, but this time they only invited ASG members because the students feared they couldn’t trust their own advisors. When the meeting began, the ASG president showed up in tears. She had just come from a one-on-one meeting with President Martin, who had delivered shocking news — the school was seriously considering suing ASG and her over the bad publicity.
“She came to us and said, ‘They told me to fix it,’” McNicholas says. “She was in tears. And that made me mad.”
At the next ASG meeting, now that the existence of the grant was proven, Colón changed his tune. McNicholas says, “He showed up and said, ‘Oh, you know what? I did some looking, I researched it, and I think I found the grant that you guys were talking about. And I’d like to come and explain how it was spent.’”
“I was like, yeah,” says McNicholas, “I bet you do.”
McNicholas was unable to attend the meeting, but he got the sheet Colón handed out, which showed budget-to-actual figures. When pressed to release the ledger, however, Colón claimed bank statements might not go back that far. “We’re talking a year,” says McNicholas, “maybe two at most. I think he thought he could get away with that because he was in a room full of 19-year-olds. If I’d been there, I would’ve pushed back.”
In all this, what got under his skin the most, he says, was how the school treated his fellow students, such as the girl who had posted the original Instagram summary of the scandal. “I can’t stand that they did the same thing [they did to me] to a 19-year-old freshman for making an Instagram post,” he says. “They kicked that person out, kept their money, and made a 19-year-old student homeless. As far as I’m concerned, that’s unconscionable.”
IAIA’s anti-bullying policy
Meanwhile, Colón concluded his investigation, finding McNicholas guilty of violating IAIA’s highly restrictive anti-bullying policy, which broadly bans “unwanted, aggressive behavior” and includes constitutionally-protected expression as examples of prohibited conduct. That is, he accused McNicholas of bullying administrators by publishing claims that those administrators had bullied others. McNicholas later successfully appealed his ban from campus housing and recovered about $2,000 in lost fees, but much of the damage was already done. Given this victory, he could move back into housing this upcoming semester, but continues to live in his van where IAIA can’t kick him out.
The sanctions against him not only sent him back to homelessness, but cost him work too, including a federal work-study opportunity that should have been protected from administrative meddling. “I was hired to be an orientation mentor at the end of last summer,” says McNicholas. “And the day before I was going to start, I got a call from the director of that program who said, ‘Yeah, you can’t participate because you’re on institutional probation.’”
Finding himself ruthlessly targeted by the administration, McNicholas turned to the press. Teaming up with a few peers, they went to the Santa Fe Reporter, and the article that followed made an immediate impact. “When that article came out,” he says, “both the interim director and dean of students were gone within days. Like, they were gone.”
Breaking through
After the Santa Fe Reporter exposé and the ensuing leadership shakeup, the food pantry underwent a striking transformation. The 20-foot-long conference table in the Student Success Center, once a barren surface lined with unused cans of tomatoes, is suddenly overflowing with fresh groceries. McNicholas’s journalistic work, for which he was evicted from campus housing, has not only been vindicated, but has helped make his campus a better place.
As for himself, McNicholas is about to enter his fifth and final year at IAIA. He is applying to MFAs this fall and says he hopes all this doesn’t affect his chances. “But,” he adds, “I chose to stick up for my community — and to incur the costs of doing so.”
That said, he remains shaken by the experience. “The school administration violated my rights and treated me like a criminal, offering no meaningful due process, and protecting themselves over the community at every turn.”
Indeed, IAIA has offered little in the way of accountability. The school has refused FIRE’sdemands to clear McNicholas’s disciplinary records or those of any other student punished and threatened for speaking out, including the ASG president. It has also failed to revise its vague and censorial anti-bullying policy, still found in the publicly-available student handbook — leaving open the possibility of IAIA silencing other students the same way they did McNicholas. On top of all this, IAIA leadership has also failed to offer any legal or moral justification for its actions.
Following President Martin’s retirement this July, one can only hope that the newly minted president, Shelly C. Lowe, breaks from his administration’s legacy of censorship and authoritarianism. IAIA’s crackdown on student dissent must be challenged. Oversight from the school’s Board of Trustees and the Bureau of Indian Education is essential to help push IAIA in the right direction. Because no student should ever be left homeless for telling the truth.
Each night, McNicholas returns to his van. On cold nights, the propane tank hisses beside him, threatening him in whispers. On hot nights, he lies there sweating. But he remains unshaken. In one of his poems, McNicholas describes chopping through six feet of ice, the water “fixed like concrete,” his hands burning in the cold “with thin gloves or nothing.” It’s a searing image. McNicholas is nothing if not resilient.
“I want my uncredited legacy to be a small part of the student handbook,” he says, “enshrining the right to free speech that we all fought for.”
Student ambassadors are more than just friendly faces on a campus tour; they’re living, breathing stories of what it’s really like to study at your institution. Whether they’re current students or recent alumni, they give prospects something no brochure or ad campaign can match: authenticity.
Today, that authenticity is going digital. Many institutions are now recruiting digital student ambassadors who meet prospects where they already spend most of their time, on social media, in live chats, and across online communities.
So, why does this matter? Because ambassadors humanize your school’s brand. They answer questions honestly, share glimpses of daily life, and help prospects picture themselves as part of the community. For Gen Z, especially, that peer-to-peer connection is gold. A relatable student voice can often be far more persuasive than a polished marketing message.
As we’ll see, many of the qualities and characteristics of a student ambassador remain constant, but success in the digital realm also requires some special skills. Let’s start with the basics – what exactly does a student ambassador do, and how would we describe this role?
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What Is a Digital Student Ambassador?
How would you describe a student ambassador? A student ambassador is a representative of their institution who shares authentic experiences, supports prospective students, and fosters a welcoming community. They act as a bridge between the school and its audience, answering questions, giving insights, and promoting campus culture through personal interaction, events, and digital engagement.
On digital channels, these ambassadors take on a new kind of role: becoming micro-influencers for your school. They showcase campus moments on Instagram Stories, upload vlogs to YouTube, or join discussion threads to help someone halfway around the world decide whether your school is the right fit.
And here’s where “digital” makes the difference. Traditional ambassadors focus on in-person tours, open houses, and campus events. Digital ambassadors bring that same personal touch into the online world. They host live Q&As, post blogs or videos, and respond to inquiries on platforms like Unibuddy, connecting with prospects who may never set foot on campus before applying. For international or out-of-town students, these online connections can be the deciding factor. The best blend is the warmth of a welcoming peer with the creativity and consistency of a skilled content creator.
Digital Student Ambassador Responsibilities:
Welcoming and Touring Visitors: Ambassadors guide campus tours, share personal stories, and help visitors envision themselves as part of the community. They may host “shadow days,” lead Q&A panels at open houses, or ensure new students feel at ease during orientation.
Outreach and Communication: Many connect directly with prospects through calls, emails, and social media. They answer questions, follow up with applicants, or even make congratulatory calls to admitted students. Some take over institutional Instagram accounts or host live Q&A sessions, providing candid insights into academics, housing, and student life.
Event Support and Promotion: Ambassadors often help plan and run recruitment events, student panels, and webinars. They may work with faculty to coordinate workshops or invite speakers from student services, bringing a student-led energy to every event.
Content Creation and Storytelling: Today’s ambassador programs frequently include content production. Students might write blogs, create videos, or manage social media takeovers to highlight campus life.
Peer Advising and Support: Beyond recruitment, ambassadors mentor new and younger students, answer parent questions, and direct peers to campus resources. In certain settings, such as K-12 schools or community programs, they may lead workshops or classroom discussions.
Bridge Between Students and Administration: Ambassadors also act as liaisons, communicating student feedback to staff and reinforcing institutional values within the student body. This two-way role supports a stronger campus culture and understanding.
Ultimately, the role is about representing the school’s values and culture through genuine, student-to-student engagement. As one Higher Education Marketing advisor explains, “Students want to see themselves in your school’s marketing material”, and ambassadors make that possible.
Whether volunteer or paid, ambassadors gain significant benefits: leadership and communication skills, valuable networking, and a stronger sense of belonging. Many describe the experience as a highlight of their education, one that builds confidence and allows them to give back to their community.
The Rise of the Digital Student Ambassador
The student ambassador role isn’t new, but the way it’s delivered has changed dramatically. Today, many of those warm, peer-to-peer conversations that once happened during campus tours now take place entirely online. That’s where the digital student ambassador comes in.
What is a digital ambassador? A digital ambassador is a student representative who promotes their institution online through social media, live chats, and virtual events. They share authentic experiences, answer questions, and create engaging content, helping prospects connect with the school community, even if they can’t visit campus in person.
The job is the same at its core: share genuine student experiences and help prospects imagine themselves at your school. But instead of shaking hands at an open house, digital ambassadors are hosting live virtual tours, answering questions in chat rooms and giving followers a real look at campus life through Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube. For many prospects, especially those researching from halfway around the world, this might be their very first interaction with your institution. That’s why the role is so powerful. Here are the top characteristics of a student ambassador:
Communication That Connects Through a Screen
Speaking to a room is one thing. Making someone feel welcome through a camera or a line of text is another. Digital ambassadors need to master both. They know how to keep responses clear, friendly, and relatable, whether that’s through a quick message in a DM, a 30-second Instagram Story, or a thoughtful blog post. They understand tone, timing, and even how the right emoji can make an online exchange feel personal.
Self-Motivation in a Flexible Role
Unlike traditional ambassadors who work during scheduled tours or events, digital ambassadors often manage their own hours. They might respond to a question late in the evening, keep up with multiple conversations across platforms, or check in with an international prospect in a different time zone. That means self-motivation is of extreme importance. The best digital ambassadors don’t wait for prompts. They’re proactive about reaching out, following up, and making sure no question goes unanswered.
Tech-Savvy and Adaptable
A digital ambassador’s toolkit can change from one day to the next. One moment they’re editing a TikTok video, the next they’re co-hosting a Facebook Live Q&A or answering questions in a university’s custom chat app. They’re comfortable switching platforms, solving small tech issues, and adapting quickly when something unexpected happens. They also understand how to use each channel’s strengths to create the most impact, whether that’s a quick selfie video for a personal touch or a detailed written reply for complex questions.
Bringing Energy Online
Here’s the challenge: online, you don’t have the buzz of an in-person conversation to carry you. That means enthusiasm has to work harder. The best digital ambassadors make their passion for the school shine through in every message, video, or post. Research backs this up: positive, genuine interactions between current and prospects are one of the biggest drivers of enrollment conversions.
To recap, what makes a good ambassador? A good ambassador is authentic, approachable, and knowledgeable, with strong communication skills. They represent their institution with enthusiasm, build trust through genuine connections, and adapt easily to different audiences and platforms, ensuring every interaction leaves a positive, lasting impression.
In essence, a digital student ambassador is more than a student with social media skills. They’re a trusted peer, a skilled communicator, and a tech-savvy connector who can make a prospect feel seen, heard, and excited, no matter the distance. Schools that invest in them aren’t just extending their reach; they’re deepening their influence from the very first interaction.
Key Qualities of a Great Student Ambassador
What separates a good student ambassador from a truly exceptional one? Whether they’re greeting visitors in person or connecting with prospects online, the standouts share a set of defining qualities that make them unforgettable.
Communication That Connects
Great ambassadors are master communicators. They’re equally skilled at chatting one-on-one with a shy high school student or presenting to a room full of parents. They don’t just speak; they listen. They pick up on unspoken concerns, ask clarifying questions, and tailor their responses so every prospect feels understood. In a digital context, this means writing with warmth and clarity; friendly enough to spark conversation, yet concise enough to respect attention spans. They adapt effortlessly: a casual tone on Instagram, a polished one in email, and an authentic voice in video.
Positivity That’s Contagious
An ambassador’s outlook shapes a prospect’s first impression of the school. The best ones radiate genuine enthusiasm, never forced, never “salesy.” Their love for the institution is real, and it shows in every conversation, every smile, and every story they share. Admissions teams often spot potential ambassadors by noticing who already volunteers for events or naturally promotes their campus. Enthusiasm is magnetic: when an ambassador talks about their favorite class or a beloved campus tradition, that excitement becomes impossible to ignore.
Initiative and Leadership in Action
True leaders don’t wait for instructions; they step in. Exceptional ambassadors are proactive, spotting the student standing alone at an event and striking up a conversation, or jumping in to answer an unanswered question in a group chat. They embody self-discipline, integrity, and the ability to make others feel welcome. For digital ambassadors, initiative is non-negotiable. They must work independently, manage their time, and seize every opportunity to engage.
Inclusivity and Empathy
Great ambassadors make every prospect feel like they belong. They’re culturally aware, sensitive to differences, and skilled at connecting across backgrounds. They know what it’s like to be the newcomer, uncertain, maybe even overwhelmed, and they respond with patience and understanding. Whether reassuring an international student about campus diversity or helping a first-generation applicant navigate the admissions process, they create an atmosphere of welcome and respect.
Professionalism You Can Count On
While the role is peer-driven and personable, it’s also a serious responsibility. Ambassadors represent the school’s brand, and reliability is key. That means showing up on time, honoring commitments, and maintaining a respectful, professional demeanor, even in casual interactions. Digital ambassadors, in particular, must be disciplined enough to manage their role without constant oversight, delivering the same level of professionalism online as in person.
Knowledge and Resourcefulness
Prospects ask everything: from residence life to program details to financial aid. Ambassadors aren’t expected to have all the answers, but they must be well-informed about the institution’s key offerings and know exactly where to find information when needed. The strongest ambassadors are resourceful problem-solvers, following up quickly and connecting prospects to the right campus contacts. This builds trust and leaves prospects feeling supported.
Digital Fluency (for Online Engagement)
For digital student ambassadors, tech skills aren’t optional; they’re foundational. They navigate social media platforms, live chat tools, and video conferencing software with ease, staying on top of online trends and knowing how to leverage each platform’s strengths. They understand digital etiquette, moderate discussions effectively, and troubleshoot minor tech issues without losing composure. In short, they bring creativity, adaptability, and technical confidence to the role, turning digital spaces into welcoming, interactive environments.
When you combine these student ambassador qualities: communication, positivity, initiative, inclusivity, professionalism, knowledge, and tech fluency. You get a student ambassador who doesn’t just represent the school… they embody it. They make every interaction feel personal, every prospect feel valued, and every conversation a step closer to enrollment.
Examples of Great Student Ambassador Programs
John Cabot University
John Cabot University, an American university in Rome, runs a robust student ambassador program that shows how ambassadors can touch many facets of campus life. John Cabot University’s ambassadors are actively involved in the orientation process, event planning, leadership, and student support.
Their profiles (complete with friendly photos and contact info) are featured on the school site to invite connections. This approachable public presence signals to new and prospective students that they have peer resources ready to help. John Cabot’s example underlines the importance of choosing outgoing, involved students – their ambassadors take on leadership in organizing events and mentoring newcomers, embodying the school’s warm, inclusive culture from the start.
Smaller career-focused colleges also leverage ambassadors. The Academy of Applied Pharmaceutical Sciences (AAPS) in Toronto uses student ambassadors in marketing-savvy ways by showcasing student and alumni success stories. AAPS regularly celebrates Student Success Stories: for example, posting when an alumnus lands a dream job in the pharmaceutical industry. These stories (often shared on AAPS’s website and social channels) let prospects “see themselves achieving their goals” at the college.
In essence, AAPS ambassadors become living proof points of outcomes, saying “look what our students achieve; you can join them.” Ambassadors share their journeys and tips (on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc.), adding authenticity to recruitment. The key is that AAPS selects enthusiastic storytellers proud of their field, so their posts come off as peer-to-peer endorsements of the college’s programs. This example shows that digital ambassador content doesn’t always mean live chats; even a series of student highlight posts with quotes and photos can serve as powerful testimonials.
Terry College of Business, University of Georgia (USA)
Business schools often rely on ambassadors to convey the program’s culture to applicants (for MBA or undergraduate business programs). The Terry College of Business at UGA has a team of Terry Ambassadors who exemplify leadership and community-building. Their mission statement: “Leading by example, ambassadors engage with students and alumni to build community within the college, increase understanding of opportunities available, and further the Terry legacy.”
This highlights how ambassadors at a business school not only assist with recruiting new students but also serve as connectors among current students and alumni – bridging different parts of the community. Terry Ambassadors are selected for attributes like strong academic records, interpersonal skills, and dependability. They uphold values such as integrity, respect, and servant leadership, acting as role models.
In practice, they host networking events, speak with prospective business majors about career opportunities, or welcome alumni back to campus. The benefit is two-fold: prospects get insiders’ perspectives on the program, and the ambassadors themselves gain networking and leadership experience (Terry explicitly notes ambassadors “develop a strong network of peers, alumni and professionals” as a benefit of the role. This example shows a slightly different angle – ambassadors not just for admissions, but for fostering pride and connections within a college community.
Specialized programs like language immersion schools use ambassadors. At Middlebury’s famed Language Schools, former students act as student ambassadors to share their experience with prospective enrollees.
For example, the Japanese Language School has student ambassadors listed with their emails so interested students can reach out to ask about the immersion program. These ambassadors answer questions like “What surprised you about your experience?” and “How much did your Japanese improve?”, giving honest testimonials about the intensive summer program. This helps prospects, who might be nervous about the immersion pledge, hear directly from peers who succeeded.
The ambassadors in this context need to be candid and reflective, able to articulate how they overcame challenges and why the program was worth it. Their enthusiasm for language learning and personal growth becomes a selling point for others. It’s a great example of how even non-traditional educational settings leverage peer ambassadors to build trust – after all, who better to convince someone to spend a summer speaking only Japanese than a student who did it and loved it?
Bishop O’Dowd High School
High schools also use student ambassadors, often in admissions tours or as “student hosts.” Bishop O’Dowd, a Catholic college-preparatory high school, actually has an army of nearly 400 student volunteers in its ambassador program – affectionately nicknamed the “Dragons” (after the school mascot). According to their admissions director, this large-scale program has been “transformative for the campus culture itself”. With so many students involved, it created “a culture of positivity and a willingness in students to truly engage” on campus.
Ambassadors at O’Dowd not only assist with tours and open houses, but by telling their personal stories to visitors, they have also become more reflective and positive about their own school experience. This is a powerful insight: a well-run ambassador program doesn’t just benefit the admissions office; it can fundamentally boost student morale and leadership school-wide. The key qualities for these youth ambassadors include being outgoing, responsible, and service-oriented – essentially, being proud “Dragons” who want to share that pride.
For younger students (high schoolers), being an ambassador also instills college and career-ready skills early on, such as public speaking and collaboration. Bishop O’Dowd’s example demonstrates how scale and inclusivity (hundreds of ambassadors representing all types of students) can amplify impact: every prospective family can meet a student who resonates with their child’s interests or background.
A great digital student ambassador is more than a smiling face on a brochure. They’re a communicator, a leader, a tech-savvy problem-solver, and, most importantly, a genuine student voice. They bridge the gap between your institution and prospects, turning formal marketing into an authentic human connection.
And the proof is in the results. When the University of Guelph launched its student social media ambassador program, engagement skyrocketed: 45% more interactions on Twitter and a 560% surge in Instagram likes, all in the first semester. Why? Because prospects trust real students sharing real experiences.
In conclusion, choose ambassadors who radiate positivity, connect easily with others, and navigate the online world with confidence. Give them the training they need, social media best practices, Q&A techniques, but don’t strip away their personality. Authenticity is their greatest asset, and when they’re free to speak in their own voice, it resonates far beyond what any scripted message can.
For students considering the role, here’s your sign to go for it. If you naturally talk about your school with enthusiasm, becoming an ambassador is simply channeling that passion into impact. You’ll build leadership skills, expand your network, and help future students feel at home before they even arrive.
In the end, the formula for a great digital ambassador is the same as for any ambassador: a sincere desire to help, connect, and inspire, supercharged by the reach of digital media. When schools and students partner in this way, everyone wins. Students grow as leaders, institutions gain their most credible advocates, and prospective learners get the authentic, peer-to-peer insight they crave. In an age where trust drives enrollment, investing in student ambassadors is investing in your most powerful recruitment asset: your own students.
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Question: How would you describe a student ambassador? Answer: A student ambassador is a representative of their institution who shares authentic experiences, supports prospective students, and fosters a welcoming community. They act as a bridge between the school and its audience, answering questions, giving insights, and promoting campus culture through personal interaction, events, and digital engagement.
Question: What makes a good ambassador?
Answer: A good ambassador is authentic, approachable, and knowledgeable, with strong communication skills. They represent their institution with enthusiasm, build trust through genuine connections, and adapt easily to different audiences and platforms, ensuring every interaction leaves a positive, lasting impression.
Question: What is a digital ambassador?
Answer: A digital ambassador is a student representative who promotes their institution online through social media, live chats, and virtual events. They share authentic experiences, answer questions, and create engaging content, helping prospects connect with the school community, even if they can’t visit campus in person.
