Tag: transparency

  • Transparency, collaboration, and culture, are key to winning public trust in research

    Transparency, collaboration, and culture, are key to winning public trust in research

    The higher education sector is focussing too much on inward-facing debates on research culture and are missing out on a major opportunity to expose our culture to the public as a way to truly connect research with society.

    REF can underpin this outward turn, providing mechanisms not only for incentivising good culture, but for opening up conversations about who we are and how we work to contribute to society.

    This outward turn matters. Research and Development (R&D) delivers enormous economic and societal value, yet universities struggle to earn public trust or support for what they do. Recent nation-wide public opinion research by Campaign for Science and Engineering (CaSE) has shown that while 88 per cent of people say it is important for the Government to invest in R&D, just 18 per cent can immediately think of lots of ways R&D benefits them and their family. When talking about R&D in public focus groups, universities were rarely front of mind and are primarily seen as education institutions where students or lecturers might do R&D as an ancillary activity.

    If the university sector is to sustain legitimacy – and by extension, the political and financial foundations of UK research – we must find new ways to make our work visible, relatable, and trusted. Focusing on the culture that shapes how research is done may be the most powerful way to do this.

    Why culture matters

    Public opinion is not background noise. Public awareness, appetite and trust all shape political choices about funding, regulation, and the role of universities in national life. While CaSE’s work shows that 72 per cent of people trust universities to be honest about how much the UK government should invest in R&D, the lack of awareness about what universities do and how they do it leaves legitimacy fragile.

    This fragility is starkly illustrated by recent polling from More in Common: when asked which government budgets they would most like to see cut, the public didn’t want funding cuts for R&D, yet placed universities third on the list for budgets that they would be happy to be cut (alongside foreign aid and funding for the arts).

    Current approaches to improving public opinions about research in our sector have had limited success. The sector’s instinct has been to showcase outputs – discoveries, patents, and impact case studies – to boost public awareness and build support for research in universities. But CaSE polling evidence suggests that this approach isn’t cutting through: 74 per cent of the public said they knew nothing or hardly anything about R&D in their area. This lack of connection does not indicate a lack of interest: a similar proportion (70 per cent) would like to hear more about local R&D.

    Transparency

    Evidence from other sectors shows that opening up processes builds trust. In healthcare, for example, the NHS has found that when patients are meaningfully involved in decisions about their care and how services are designed, trust and satisfaction increase – not just because of outcomes, but because people can see and influence how decisions are made.

    Research from business and engineering contexts shows that people are more likely to trust companies that are open about how they operate, not just what they deliver. Together, these lessons reinforce that we should not rely on showcasing outputs alone: legitimacy comes from making visible the processes, people and cultures that underpin research.

    Universities don’t just generate knowledge; they develop the individuals who carry skills and values into the wider economy. Researchers, technicians, professional services staff and others who enable research in higher education bring curiosity, collaboration and critical thinking into every sector, both through direct collaboration and when they move beyond academia. These skills fuel innovation and problem-solving across the economy and public services, but they can only develop and thrive in supportive, inclusive research cultures. Without attention to culture, the talent pipeline that government and industry rely on is put at risk.

    Research culture makes these processes and people visible. Culture is about how research is done: the integrity of methods, the openness of data, the inclusivity of teams, the collaborations – including with the public – that make discoveries possible. These are the very things the public are keen to understand better. By opening up the black box of research and showing the culture that underpins it, we can make university research more relatable, trustworthy, and visible in everyday life.

    The role of REF in shifting the conversation

    The expansion of the old Environment element of REF to encompass broader aspects of research culture offers an opportunity to help shift from an inward to a more outward looking narrative and public conversation. The visibility and accountability that REF submissions require matters beyond academia: it gives the sector a platform to showcase the values and processes that underpin research. In doing so, REF can help our sector build trust and legitimacy by making research culture part of the national conversation about R&D.

    Openness, integrity, inclusivity, and collaboration – core components of research culture – are values which the public already recognise and expect. By framing research culture as part of the story we tell – explaining not just what our universities produce but how they produce it – we can build a stronger connection with the public. Culture is the bridge between the abstract notion of investing in R&D and a lived understanding of what universities actually do in society.

    Public support for research is strong, but support for universities is increasingly fragile. Whatever the REF looks like when we unpause, we need to avoid retreating to ‘business as usual’ and closing down this opportunity to open up a more meaningful conversation about the role universities play in UK R&D and in the progress of society.

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  • Congress Tackles College Cost Transparency

    Congress Tackles College Cost Transparency

    Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-LA, advocated for his own legislation, the College Transparency Act, as potential solution to the issue.

    Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty Images

    After passing a sweeping higher ed overhaul in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Congress now has its sights set on reforming college cost transparency. In a hearing Thursday, members of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions questioned experts on how to make college pricing—and how costs compare to student outcomes—more understandable to families.

    “You don’t buy a car without comparing prices, quality and finance options. The same is true for buying a home. Why can we not do this for higher ed?” asked Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican who chairs the committee and recently issued a request for information about the cost of higher education.

    The hearing follows a House hearing in September on the same topic—and including one repeat witness, Justin Draeger, senior vice president of affordability for Strada Education Foundation.

    Cost transparency has long been a pain point for both students and institutions, who have attempted to clarify via marketing campaigns, improved price calculator tools and tuition resets that their costs of attendance are often lower than their sticker price would indicate. Students, meanwhile, struggle to find reliable information about the costs of their prospective institutions, leaving them without the financial information they need to decide what institution to attend.

    Now, Congressional Republicans are taking notice—and are tying efforts to improve affordability and cost transparency in with their existing focus on the return on investment for students and taxpayers.

    At Thursday’s hearing, lawmakers and witnesses alike stressed how little information is available to students about the price of college, with research showing that most students overestimate the price of a public college education. Witnesses also brought up parents’ and families’ confusion about aid offer letters, which the Government Accountability Office has found often understate or fail to include the net price students will actually be paying.

    Cassidy stressed the need for transparency as it relates to outcomes and return on investment. Students should be able to compare graduation rates and projected incomes of earning a degree at two different institutions, he said, to give families an accurate picture of what they’re paying for when they pay tuition.

    The two Democratic witnesses, meanwhile, argued that college cost transparency is ineffective without also focusing on college affordability—something that is being worsened not only by increasing tuition costs but also by the larger cost-of-living crisis. Nontuition costs, said Mark Huelsman, Director of Policy and Advocacy at The Hope Center for Student Basic Needs, make up the bulk of the cost of attendance. He added that if student aren’t able to afford food or housing, that can severely impact their ability to succeed in college.

    “I urge this committee not just to find ways to increase clarity, but to do everything in its power to lower the price that students pay,” he said.

    Bipartisan Solutions?

    Legislators pointed toward several potential legislative solutions that they said had support on both sides of the aisle. That list included Cassidy’s College Transparency Act, a bill that would provide more detailed information on costs, academic outcomes and career outcomes of specific programs and majors. Cassidy has championed the bill for years, alongside Sen. Elizabeth Warren, CTA’s other lead author, but Rep. Virginia Foxx opposed the measure when she led the House education committee. Foxx, who ultimately proposed her own effort to track students’ outcomes, resisted CTA due to privacy concerns. Cassidy noted during the hearing that the bill includes strict data security standards.

    Meanwhile, Sen. Jon Husted, an Ohio Republican, also touted his bill with fellow Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama—the Debt, Earnings, and Cost Information Disclosure for Education Act—which would make changes to the Department of Education’s College Scorecard. It would require the resource to include information on average loan amounts in a given academic program, as well as default rates, how long it takes graduates to pay off their loans and how that debt compares to their earnings.

    That information would help prospective students “know exactly what they’re getting themselves into before they make a decision to make a huge, huge investment,” Husted said.

    Witnesses enumerated their own cost transparency wish lists.

    Draeger said, among other things, that the federal government should regulate financial aid offers to use straightforward and standardized language. Huelsman, on the other hand, argued that the “simplest way, and the most powerful way” to make college costs transparent is to make college tuition- or debt-free. He also said that the Trump administration appears to be working against, not toward, cost transparency in higher ed.

    “Many of the bipartisan reforms being discussed today require staffing capacity at the Department of Education that frankly, at this moment, do not exist, including at the Institute for Education Sciences,” he said. “Meanwhile, the Trump administration has worked to dismantle the CFPB, which provides oversight and essential information to borrowers, and conducts essential research on the student loan market. Sadly, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act takes us in the wrong direction on both affordability and transparency.”

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  • Transparency and truth in communications

    Transparency and truth in communications

    Key points:

    Dear Superintendent,

    Your job now requires a new level of transparency that you are reluctant to provide. This media crisis will burn for several more days if we sit silent. We are in a true leadership moment and I need you to listen to your communications expert. I can make your job easier and more successful.

    Signed,

    Your Communications Director

    As superintendents come under more political fire and frequent negative news stories about their school districts circulate, it is easy to see where the instinct to not comment and just focus on the work might kick in. However, the path forward requires a new level of transparency and truth-telling in communications. In fact, the work requires you to get out in front so that your teachers and staff can focus on their work.

    I recently spoke with a school district facing multiple PR crises. The superintendent was reluctant to address the issues publicly, preferring one-on-one meetings with parents over engaging with the media or holding town hall-style parent meetings. But when serious allegations of employee misconduct and the resulting community concerns arise, it’s crucial for superintendents to step forward and take control of the narrative.

    While the details of ongoing human resources or police investigations cannot be discussed, it’s vital to inform the community about actions being taken to prevent future incidents, the safeguards being implemented, and your unwavering commitment to student and staff safety. All of that is far more reassuring than the media reporting, “The district was not available for comment,” “The district cannot comment due to an ongoing investigation,” or even worse, the dreaded, “The school district said it has no comment.”

    Building trust with proactive communication

    A district statement or email doesn’t carry the same weight as a media interview or an in-house video message sent directly to community members. True leadership means standing up and accepting the difficult interviews, answering the tough questions, and conveying with authentic emotion that these incidents are unacceptable. What a community needs to hear is the “why” behind a decision so that trust is built, even if that decision is to hold back on key information. A lack of public statement can be perceived as indifference or a leadership void, which can quickly threaten a superintendent’s career.

    Superintendents should always engage with the media during true leadership moments, such as district-wide safety issues, school board meetings, or when the public needs reassurance. “Who Speaks For Your Brand?” looks at a survey of 1,600 school staff who resoundingly stated that the superintendent is the primary person responsible for promoting and defending a school district’s brand. A majority of the superintendents surveyed agreed as well. Promoting and defending the district’s brand includes the negative–but also the positive–opportunities like the first day of school, graduation, school and district grade releases, and district awards.

    However, not every media request requires the superintendent’s direct involvement. If it doesn’t rise to the severity level worthy of the superintendent’s office, an interview with a department head or communications chief is a better option. The superintendent interview is reserved for the stories we decide require it, not just because a reporter asks for it.  Reporters ask for you far more than your communications chief ever tells you.

    It is essential to communicate directly and regularly with parents through video and email using your district’s mass communication tools. You control the message you want to deliver, and you don’t have to rely on the media getting it right.  This is an amazing opportunity to humanize the office.  Infuse your video scripts with more personality and emotion to connect on a personal level with your community. It is far harder to attack the person than the office. Proactive communications help build trust for when you need it later.

    I have had superintendents tell me that they prefer to make their comments at school board meetings. School board meeting comments are often insufficient, as analytics often indicate low viewership for school board meeting live streams or recordings.  In my experience, a message sent to parents through district alert channels far outperforms the YouTube views of school board meetings.

    Humanizing the superintendent’s role

    Superintendents should maintain a consistent communications presence via social media, newsletters, the website, and so on to demonstrate their engagement within schools. Short videos featuring interactions with staff and students create powerful engagement opportunities. Develop content to create touch points that celebrate the contributions of nurses, teachers, and bus drivers, especially on their national days of recognition. These proactive moments of engagement show the community that positive moments happen hourly, daily, and weekly within your schools.

    If you are not comfortable posting your own content, have your communications team ghostwrite posts for you. You never want a community member asking, “What does the superintendent do all day? We never see them.” If you are posting content from all of the school visits and community meetings you attend, that accusation can never be made again. You now have social proof of your engagement efforts and evidence for your annual contract review.

    Effective communication is a superintendent’s superpower. Those who can connect authentically and show their personality can truly shine. Many superintendents mistakenly believe that hard work alone will speak for itself, but in today’s politically charged landscape, a certain amount of “campaigning” is necessary while in office. We all know the job of the superintendent has never been harder, tenure has never been shorter, and the chance of being fired is higher than ever.

    Embrace the opportunity to engage and showcase the great things happening in your district. It’s worth promoting positive and proactive communications so that you’re a seasoned pro when the challenging moments come. There might just be less of them if you get ahead.

    Latest posts by eSchool Media Contributors (see all)

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  • Transparency Now or Regulation Later

    Transparency Now or Regulation Later

    Doctors predicted Wayne Frederick, the president of Howard University, wouldn’t live past 8. Now he’s 54. Frederick came to the U.S. from Trinidad and Tobago with a dream of finding a cure for his disease, sickle cell anemia, but detoured into higher ed administration.

    At an event hosted by the American Council on Education at Howard University this week, Frederick said CRISPR gene editing, a technology developed in academia, made his dream a reality. Finding cures to debilitating diseases is one of “the intangible things that higher ed does to change lives,” he said.

    Higher ed has changed lives in thousands of other ways; institutions are the largest employers in 10 states; colleges have helped regenerate many of America’s Rust Belt centers. Higher education is undeniably a public good. But as concerns grow about the affordability of college, do Americans care?

    In the ACE event’s discussion about the economic impact of higher ed, Alex Ricci, president of the National Council on Higher Education Resources, pointed out that despite college’s role in local and regional economies, the debate about the value of higher ed comes down to whether one thinks the benefit to the individual is greater than to society as a whole. “Many colleges and universities see themselves as a benefit shared broadly by society. Most Americans—especially those carrying thousands of dollars in student loan debt—see it as a transaction where the individual is the primary beneficiary or victim, depending on the student’s long-term outcomes,” he said.

    Regardless of whether you think higher ed is a public or private good, institutions are losing the value debate. In recorded remarks for the discussion, Representative Burgess Owens, a Utah Republican, chairman of the House subcommittee on higher education and workforce development, said, “Higher education should be about value, not just prestige.” He also presided over the “No More Surprises: Reforming College Pricing for Students and Families” hearing last month where lawmakers examined ways to make college costs more transparent.

    The lack of transparency on the cost of college can be life-altering for students and poses existential risks for colleges. Inside Higher Ed’s 2025 student survey found that three-fourths of the 5,000 respondents encountered some surprises in the cost of their education. These surprises can derail education journeys. One in five students said that an unexpected expense of $500 to $1,000 would threaten their ability to persist. Bad surprises also harm colleges: Students say that the lack of affordability is the biggest driver of declining public trust in higher education.

    College cost transparency has been a government priority since the Obama administration, but never has public trust in higher ed been so low or institutions so vulnerable to government overreach. Republican lawmakers have seized on the problem of college affordability and cost transparency and are looking for bipartisan solutions. In May, Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, introduced the Understanding the True Cost of College Act 2025, which calls for standardization of financial aid offers so students understand in simple terms what the direct costs, indirect costs and net price of college will be. Last month the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions formally requested information from the sector on ways to improve transparency, lower costs and ensure a college degree is valuable to students.

    Some colleges sense the urgency of the moment and are taking action on affordability. More are offering free tuition to households earning as much as $200,000 a year. Last month Whitworth University made a radical decision to stop tuition discounting and decrease its annual sticker price from $54,000 to $26,900. At the same time, a recent study found that tuition discounting is on the rise among public four-year institutions. But tuition discounts create more confusion around the true cost of college.

    A reasonable question to ask is: Why are only 730 colleges members of the College Cost Transparency Initiative? If higher ed stakeholders wanted to win the value debate, they would listen to lawmakers—and students and their families—and act on affordability and cost transparency. Otherwise, policymakers will do it for them. By demonstrating their impact for individual students, colleges can make a compelling case for their broader societal value.

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  • How To Teach With AI Transparency Statements – Faculty Focus

    How To Teach With AI Transparency Statements – Faculty Focus

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  • Bringing Real Transparency to College Pricing

    Bringing Real Transparency to College Pricing

    In today’s unpredictable higher education marketplace, TuitionFit, created by Mark Salisbury, offers something that colleges and universities have refused to provide—clear and honest information about what students actually pay. By gathering and anonymizing financial aid offers that students submit voluntarily, TuitionFit makes visible the hidden world of tuition discounting, where sticker prices are inflated but rarely reflect reality.

    The statistics show just how broken and confusing the system has become. For the 2024–25 academic year, private nonprofit colleges awarded institutional grants that equaled 56.3 percent of the published sticker price for first-time, full-time undergraduates and 51.4 percent for all undergraduates. In other words, more than half of published tuition is an illusion. Despite average published tuition of $11,610 at public four-year in-state colleges and $43,350 at private nonprofit institutions, the real net tuition and fees that students pay is far lower. At public four-year schools, inflation-adjusted net tuition has fallen from $4,340 in 2012–13 to $2,480 in 2024–25, while net tuition at private nonprofits has gradually declined from $19,330 in 2006–07 to $16,510 in 2024–25. Families who see terrifying sticker prices often don’t realize that the average all-in, post-aid cost of a four-year degree is closer to $30,000.

    These numbers also reveal deep inequities. At very selective private institutions in 2019–20, low-income students paid about $13,410 after aid, while wealthier peers often paid nearly $39,250. Such disparities are rarely explained by colleges themselves, who prefer to mask their discounting practices with vague averages and opaque award letters.

    This is why TuitionFit is so important. Instead of navigating by distorted averages or marketing spin, students and families can see what peers with similar academic and financial profiles are actually paying. That knowledge provides leverage in negotiating aid offers and choosing institutions that will not leave them with crushing debt. In an era when sticker prices continue to climb while net prices quietly decline, TuitionFit brings clarity at the individual level.

    The Higher Education Inquirer commends Salisbury and TuitionFit for providing a measure of transparency in a system that thrives on opacity. While it cannot by itself resolve the structural inequities of American higher education finance, it arms students and families with something they desperately need: the truth.

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  • Embracing Transparency After a Rankings Scandal

    Embracing Transparency After a Rankings Scandal

    It’s college rankings season again, a time of congratulations, criticism and, occasionally, corrections for institutions and the organizations that rate them.

    Typically U.S. News & World Report, the giant of the college rankings world, unranks some institutions months after its results are published over data discrepancies that are usually the result of honest mistakes. But in rare instances, erroneous data issues aren’t mistakes but outright fraud. And when that happens, it can result in soul-searching and, ideally, redemption for those involved.

    That’s what happened at Temple University, which was rocked by a rankings scandal in 2018, when it became clear that Moshe Porat, the dean of Temple’s Richard J. Fox School of Business and Management, had knowingly provided false data to U.S. News for years in a successful effort to climb the rankings. Temple’s online master of business administration soared to No. 1—until the scheme was exposed. U.S. News temporarily unranked the program, the U.S. Department of Education hit Temple with a $700,000 fine and Porat was convicted of fraud.

    Since then, Temple has worked hard to restore its reputation. In the aftermath of the scandal, officials imposed universitywide changes to how it handles facts and figures, establishing a Data Verification Unit within the Ethics and Compliance Office. Now any data produced by the university goes through a phalanx of dedicated fact-checkers, whether it’s for a rankings evaluation or an admissions brochure.

    A Culture Shift

    Temple’s Data Verification Unit was introduced in 2019 amid the fallout of the rankings scandal.

    At first, it gave rise to “friction points,” as university officials were required to go through new processes to verify data before it was disseminated, said Susan Smith, Temple’s chief compliance officer. But now she believes the unit has won the trust of colleagues on campus who have bought in to more rigorous fact-checking measures.

    “It’s been an incredibly positive thing for Temple and I think for data integrity over all,” Smith said.

    Initially, Temple partnered with an outside law firm to verify data and lay the groundwork for the unit. Now that is all handled in-house by a small team that works across the university.

    While Smith said “the vast majority of mistakes” she sees “are innocent,” her team is there “to act as a sort of backstop” and to “verify that the data is accurate, that there’s integrity in the data.”

    The Data Verification Unit also provides training on best practices for data use and dissemination.

    University officials believe placing the Data Verification Unit under the centralized Office of Compliance and Ethics—which reports directly to Temple’s Board of Trustees—is unique. And some say the process has created a bit of a culture shift as they run numbers by the unit.

    Temple spokesperson Stephen Orbanek, who joined the university after the rankings scandal, said running news releases by the Data Verification Unit represented a “total change” from the way he was accustomed to operating. And while it can sometimes slow down the release of certain data points or responses to media requests, he said he’s been able to give reporters more robust data.

    He also noted times when Temple has had to pull back on marketing claims and use “less impressive” statistics after the Data Verification Unit flagged issues with materials. As an example, he cited a fact sheet put out by the university in which officials wanted to refer to Temple as a top producer of Fulbright scholars. But the Data Verification Unit insisted that a caveat was needed: The statistic pertained only to the 2022–23 academic year.

    Ultimately, Orbanek sees the Data Verification Unit as a boon for a more transparent campus culture.

    “The culture has just kind of shifted, and you get on board,” Orbanek said.

    Other Rankings Scandals

    Other universities have been less forthcoming about fixing their own data issues.

    In 2022, a professor called out his employer, Columbia University, for submitting inaccurate data to U.S. News, which responded by unranking the institution for a short time. Following the scandal and accusations of fraud by some critics, Columbia announced the university would no longer submit data to U.S. News. Officials argued that the rankings have outsize influence on prospective students but don’t adequately measure institutional quality.

    Yet Columbia still publishes large swaths of data, such as its Common Data Set. Asked how the university has acted to verify data in the aftermath of the rankings scandal, a spokesperson wrote by email that data is “reviewed by a well-established, independent advisory firm to ensure reporting accuracy” but did not respond to a request for more details on the verification processes.

    The University of Southern California also navigated a rankings scandal in 2022. USC provided faulty data to U.S. News for its Rossier School of Education, omitting certain metrics, which helped it rise in the rankings, according to a third-party report that largely blamed a former dean.

    U.S. News temporarily unranked Rossier; graduate students sued the university, accusing officials of falsely advertising rankings based on fraudulent data. That legal battle is ongoing, and earlier this year a judge ruled that the case can proceed as a class action suit.

    Officials did not respond to a request from Inside Higher Ed for comment on whether or how USC has changed the way it verifies data for use in rankings or for other purposes.

    U.S. News also did not respond to specific questions about if or how it verifies that information submitted by institutions to be used for ranking purposes is accurate. A spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed, “U.S. News believes that data transparency and internal accountability practices by educational institutions are good for those institutions and good for consumers.”

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  • A 20-Year Reflection on Transparency and the Illusion of Access (Glen McGhee)

    A 20-Year Reflection on Transparency and the Illusion of Access (Glen McGhee)

    The cancellation of the latest NACIQI (National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity) meeting brought back bitter memories that refuse to fade. 

    It’s been twenty years since I traveled to Washington, DC—dressed in my best lobbying attire and carrying a meticulous roster of Department of Education staff—to visit the Office of Postsecondary Education (OPE) on K Street. My goal was simple, even noble: to seek answers about the opaque workings of accreditation in American higher education. What I encountered instead was a wall of silence, surveillance, and authoritarianism.

    I stepped off the elevator on the seventh floor of the Department building and signed in. Under “Purpose of Visit,” I wrote: Reform. I was calm, professional, and respectful. I asked to see the NACIQI Chair, Bonnie, hoping that she would be willing to speak with me about a system that, even then, was falling into disrepair. But what happened next still infuriates me.

    Within seconds, two armed, uniformed guards approached me. They didn’t ask questions. They gave an ultimatum: leave or be arrested.

    I eventually complied, descending into the lobby, still stunned. From there I began dialing—one by one—through the directory of names I had so carefully assembled. I called staffers, analysts, assistants, anyone who might answer. Not a single person picked up. I could feel the eyes of the guards watching me, one of them posted on the mezzanine like a sniper keeping watch over a public enemy. I was not dangerous. I was not disruptive. I was, however, unwanted.

    The next day, I turned to my Congressman, Allen Boyd, whose LA generously tried to intervene. His office contacted OPE, attempting to broker a meeting on my behalf. The Department didn’t even return his call. Apparently, a sitting member of Congress—who didn’t sit on a high-ranking committee—carried no weight at the fortress of federal education oversight.

    This most recent overstepping by US ED—unilaterally postponing NACIQI’s Summer 2025 meeting—reminds observers of how limited the oversight provided by NACIQI really is. It is, apparently, nothing more than a performative shell that fulfills ceremonial functions, and not much more.

    I would argue that this latest episode reveals that NACIQI is less an independent watchdog and more a ceremonial body with limited real power, and so my view differs somewhat from David Halperin, because he sees more substantive activity than I do.

    The history of ACICS (Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools) and SACS (Southern Association of Colleges) appearing before NACIQI illustrates how regulatory capture can manifest not only through industry influence, but also through bureaucratic design and process control. The OPE’s central role, combined with NACIQI’s limited enforcement power, has allowed failing accreditors to retain recognition for years, even in the face of overwhelming evidence of noncompliance and harm to students.

    The illusion of accountability has long been a feature of the accreditation system, not a flaw. NACIQI meetings, when they occur, are tightly scripted, with carefully managed testimony and limited public engagement. The real decisions are made elsewhere, behind closed doors, often under the influence of powerful lobbying groups and entrenched bureaucracies that resist transparency and reform at every turn.

    Despite the increasing scrutiny on higher education and growing public awareness of student debt, poor educational outcomes, and sham institutions, the federal recognition of accreditors remains an elite-controlled process. It is a closed loop. Institutions, accreditors, and government officials all play their roles in a carefully choreographed performance that rarely leads to systemic change. The result is a system that protects institutions at the expense of students, particularly the most vulnerable—low-income, first-generation, and minority students who are often targeted by predatory schools hiding behind federal accreditation.

    This is the reality of the U.S. Department of Education’s accreditation apparatus: inaccessible, unaccountable, and increasingly symbolic. NACIQI, far from being an independent advisory body, has always functioned as a ceremonial front for political appointees and entrenched interests. It is, as I see it, just another arm of Vishnu—multiplicitous, all-seeing, but ultimately indifferent to critique or reform. Whether it’s chaired by a bureaucrat or a former wrestling executive like Linda McMahon, the outcome is the same: the process is rigged to exclude dissent and suppress scrutiny.

    And yet, pundits today still fail to grasp the implications. They speak of accreditation as if it were a technocratic process guided by evidence and integrity. They act as if NACIQI were a neutral arbiter. But I know otherwise, because I was there—thrown out, silenced, and treated like a trespasser in the very institution that claims to protect educational quality and student interest.

    This is more than personal bitterness. It’s about structural rot. When critics are expelled, when staff are muzzled, and when public servants ignore elected representatives, we are not dealing with oversight—we are witnessing capture. Accreditation in this country serves the accreditors and the institutions, not students, not taxpayers, and certainly not reformers.

    Two decades later, the anger remains. So does the silence.

    Sources:
    Department of Education building directory and procedures (2005)
    Congressional Office of Rep. Allen Boyd (archival record, 2005)
    Public notices regarding NACIQI meeting cancellations (2024–2025)
    David Halperin, Republic Report

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  • A New Tool to Improve College Cost Transparency

    A New Tool to Improve College Cost Transparency

    Phillip Levine, an economics professor at Wellesley College, has been studying college financial aid and students’ higher ed spending habits for more than a decade. When his children first started applying to college about 15 years ago, he was amazed by how difficult it was to get a clear answer on how much it was really going to cost them—and he was a trained economist.

    Imagine, he thought, how the average family felt reading through interminable webpages and offer letters explaining the detailed price breakdowns, differences in tuition and fees, added expected costs, and loans versus grants. Then he tried to imagine how parents who’d never gone to college might feel.

    Since then, Levine has worked on a number of college cost transparency initiatives. His most recent project is the Instant Net Price Estimator, a streamlined digital tool that he hopes will make it easier for colleges to break through the noise and deliver a clear estimate to families.

    As public skepticism about the value of a postsecondary degree grows and $100,000 sticker prices make front-page news, colleges are in the market for a simple way to let families know that their degrees can be affordable. Washington University in St. Louis became the first institution to adopt the tool and served as a kind of pilot program this application cycle. Interest from colleges has grown swiftly: This fall, an additional 19 institutions will introduce Levine’s calculator on their websites, and he anticipates that number will triple next academic year.

    Levine spoke with Inside Higher Ed about his new tool, how low-income students get stuck in the financial aid “funnel” and how colleges can be better communicators in a time of widespread public distrust of higher ed. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

    Q: Walk me through the genesis of this idea. What were you hoping to achieve?

    A: I don’t think it’s a state secret that college pricing is complicated. If you go to any college website and look at the financial aid webpage, there’s tons of stuff there trying to explain how much they charge, but they overshoot it in terms of what people are looking for. You’re taking a high school kid and their family and giving them a Ph.D.-level course in financial aid. Not surprisingly, they don’t usually get it.

    I think about the admissions process like a funnel: You give me a little information, I’ll give you a basic answer that’s pretty imprecise. You give me more information, I’ll give you a better answer that’s a little more precise. You can keep going down the process until eventually, you know, ultimately you fill out the FAFSA or the CSS Profile.

    To maximize access, that funnel needs to have a very wide mouth at the top; in financial aid language, what that means is you need to communicate extremely quickly to as wide an audience as possible that college is not $100,000. It doesn’t even matter exactly what it is. But if you can’t get people off of the ledge at the $100,000 number—the mainstream media puts out stories all the time that college costs a million dollars a year, so their perception is that it’s extremely expensive. All you want them to do at the beginning stages is to be like, “Hey, maybe this is something I can afford.” Then you need to lead them through the rest of the funnel.

    Phillip Levine

    Ultimately, the financial aid process really is complicated because we have this concept of what a family can afford to pay, and there’s no right answer to that question, but we have all these complicated formulas that are trying to find it anyway. Over time, colleges have been trying to do a better job of getting past that point, just not very successfully. What I’ve been working on for the last 10 or 15 years is to make an easier entry point, and this tool is even higher up the funnel than what I’ve been working on in the past.

    It takes three seconds to get a sense of what college is going to cost you, and in particular to get you over that hurdle that it’s probably not $100,000. My goal is within a matter of literally a few seconds to give people a sense that college is very unlikely to be as expensive as they fear. And then you can start having a more substantive conversation. Otherwise, you close the door on the poor kids, way before they’re into the process.

    Q: Colleges have been trying to do this kind of thing on their own for a while. What makes your tool an improvement on institutional efforts?

    A: Colleges understand that this is a problem. But to be quite honest, the only people who actually understand the way the financial aid system works are the people in the financial aid office, and they don’t speak English, so to speak. It’s an unbelievably complicated process, very complex, and now they have to explain it to a regular person, and they can’t do that. It’s not their fault; they try, they’re just not successful. There’s a handful of people in the admissions office who understand it, too, but not many. And once you get past those two audiences, nobody else at the college understands it, including the public affairs people.

    I got started on this because when my kids were looking at colleges, I just wanted to know whether I was eligible for any financial aid, yeah. And I realized how unbelievably hard it was to figure it out. Back then [around 2010] it was actually impossible to figure out. Things have evolved a lot since then.

    Q: Like you said, there are other tools out there now. What makes this one different?

    A: I’m just trying to push it to the next stage of development. I’m an economist; I can speak geek as well as anyone. But as I started doing this, I’m learning more and more about how you sell a product, which is basically what you’re doing with college cost. I’m realizing how little time you have to communicate a message.

    I’m in a weird position, because I’m doing the research on the pricing issues, and I’m developing the tools. It was in one of the Brookings [Institution] papers I wrote when these ideas were just kind of coming together and we were thinking about how you do the graphics. And it just kind of came together that we can visually display this information in a simulator, what I really refer to as a simple game. So I thought, if I can do it for a Brookings paper, why can’t I do this for a school or a family? And about that time, Washington University [in St. Louis] came to me looking for assistance on some other issues, and I pitched this to them, and they bought into it. So they paid for the development, and it’s been up and running there since December. If you go to most schools’ webpages, including my own, there’s stuff there, but you gotta read forever. And you know as well as I do that nobody reads that much anymore.

    That’s what I’m trying to accomplish with this: just get the ball rolling with something that speaks to where students are.

    A chart showing price

    A demo version of Levine’s Instant Net Price Estimator, which can be customized to fit colleges’ specific needs and profiles.

    Screenshot from myintuition.org

    Q: I assume the calculator doesn’t factor in things like merit aid?

    A: You want it as simple as possible. So you just slide your input and it essentially just tells you what the average cost is going to be for you based on income, and tells you the range, which may be very broad. At Washington University, they don’t give a lot of merit aid, so, like, it would not be a big deal there, but at schools that do a lot of merit aid, that range could also include merit. They can factor that into the calculator.

    But mainly, you just want the light bulb to go off of, “Oh, maybe I can afford this.” And then maybe they’re willing to go spend some time reading instead of getting scared off right from the start. Their initial instinct is, there’s no way I can afford to go to Washington University. And it’s the school’s job in terms of marketing to communicate to people. The problem, in my mind, is that the door is closed so early for so many people that you need to be able to just let them get through that first door in the process. There’s still a lot of hurdles you have to get through after that, yeah, but if you don’t make it through the first one, you don’t even approach any of the others.

    Q: There’s been legislation introduced at the federal level and passed in many states to mandate that colleges take certain steps toward cost transparency. Do you think there’s a good understanding of what that takes among policymakers?

    A: Clearly, policymakers have figured out that transparency is an issue, and they’re right. But their intentions are often better than their proposals. The net price calculator law [a federal law mandating institutions include a price calculator on their websites by 2011], for instance, was very well intended. But it’s easy to see the big picture problem; to then come up with a solution that actually works, you have to have a little bit more inside baseball. The net price calculator law is a perfect example. It was so well intended, they completely had the right idea, and they blew it. I obviously don’t know all of the details of all the different state laws, but I’ve seen proposals, and generally I look at them and go, right idea, wrong solution.

    Q: Have there been any good policy solutions?

    A: The College Cost Transparency Initiative. It’s much better if the schools can fix this problem on their own, because they know what they’re doing. It’s a tiny step, and you have to already apply and get accepted before you get your letter. And then it tells you, in a more clear way than it used to. It’s lower on the funnel, really at the bottom. But it’s a good step.

    [Levine later clarified that he sat on the technical advisory committee for the CCTI.]

    Q: Has there been a lot of interest in your instant price calculator from other colleges? And what kinds of colleges seem to be most invested in these transparency efforts?

    A: Nineteen more colleges will roll it out in the fall. It’s a small range right now, from relatively wealthy to very wealthy. I think at the very high end of higher ed, the Ivies and such, where they have a lot of money to spend on financial aid, they’re trying to increase access in a very direct way. It is good for them to enroll more lower-income students from a public relations perspective. And I think every school wants to do the right thing. But as you stray from the very top of the spectrum, there’s also an interest in simply increasing enrollment, where they don’t want to be turning away students because they think they can’t afford it when they can. They’re just looking for more students, especially because there’s fewer kids. So the ability to open the door to as many kids as possible at this moment has appeal.

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  • Effective academic support requires good data transparency

    Effective academic support requires good data transparency

    Academic support for students is an essential component of their academic success. At a time when resources are stretched, it is critical that academic support structures operate as a well-oiled machine, where each component has a clearly defined purpose and operates effectively as a whole.

    We previously discussed how personal and pastoral tutoring, provided by academic staff, needs to be supplemented by specialist academic support. A natural next step is to consider what that specialist support could look like.

    A nested model

    We’ve identified four core facets of effective academic support, namely personal tutoring (advising/coaching/mentoring etc), the development of academic skills and graduate competencies, all supported by relevant student engagement data. The nested model below displays this framework.

    We also suggest two prerequisites to the provision of academic support.

    Firstly, a student must have access to information related to what academic support entails and how to access this. Secondly, a student’s wellbeing means that they can physically, mentally, emotionally and financially engage with their studies, including academic support opportunities.

    Figure 1: Academic support aspects within a student success nested model

    Focusing on academic support

    Personal tutoring has a central role to play within the curriculum and within academic provision more broadly in enabling student success.

    That said, “academic support” comprises much more than a personal tutoring system where students go for generic advice and support.

    Rather, academic support is an interconnected system with multiple moving parts tailored within each institution and comprising different academic, professional and third-space stakeholders.

    Yet academics remain fundamental to the provision of academic support given their subject matter expertise, industry knowledge and their proximity to students. This is why academics are traditionally personal tutors and historically, this is where the academic support model would have ended. Changes in student needs means the nature of personal tutoring has needed to be increasingly complemented by other forms of academic support.

    Skills and competencies

    Academic skills practitioners can offer rich insights in terms of how best to shape and deliver academic support.

    A broad conception of academic skills that is inclusive of academic literacies, maths, numeracy and stats, study skills, research and information literacy and digital literacy is a key aspect of student academic success. Student acquisition of these skills is complemented by integrated and purposeful involvement of academic skills practitioners across curriculum design, delivery and evaluation.

    Given regulatory focus on graduate outcomes, universities are increasingly expected to ensure that academic support prepares students for graduate-level employability or further study upon graduation. Much like academic skills practitioners, this emphasises the need to include careers and employability consultants in the design and delivery of integrated academic support aligned to the development of both transferable and subject-specific graduate competencies.

    Engaging data

    Data on how students are participating in their learning provides key insights for personal tutors, academic skills practitioners and colleagues working to support the development of graduate competencies.

    Platforms such as StREAM by Kortext enable a data-informed approach to working with students to optimise the provision of academic support. This holistic approach to the sharing of data alongside actionable insights further enables successful transition between support teams.

    Knowing where the support need is situated means that these limited human and financial resources can be directed to where support is most required – whether delivered on an individual or cohort basis. Moreover, targeted provision can be concentrated at relevant points over the academic year. Using engagement data contributes to efficiency drives through balancing the provision of information and guidance to all students. The evidence shows it’s both required and likely to prove effective.

    Academic support is increasingly complicated in terms of how different aspects overlap and interplay within a university’s student success ecosystem. Therefore, when adopting a systems-thinking approach to the design and delivery of academic support, universities must engage key stakeholders, primarily students, academic skills practitioners and personal tutors themselves.

    A priority should be ensuring varied roles of academic support providers are clearly defined both individually and in relation to each other.

    Similarly, facilitating the sharing of data at the individual student level about the provision of academic support should be prioritised to ensure that communication loops are closed and no students fall between service gaps.

    Given that academic support is evolving, we would welcome readers’ views of what additional aspects of academic support are necessary to student success.

    To find out more about how StREAM by Kortext can enable data-informed academic support at your institution, why not arrange a StREAM demonstration.

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