Tag: U.S

Which U.S. Colleges Spend the Most on Student Support? (Studocu)
[Editor’s note: The Higher Education Inquirer is presenting this press release for information only. This is not an endorsement of the organizations mentioned in article.]
- Ivy League institutions like Yale, Harvard, and MIT top the list, spending over $100K per student on academic support.
- Yale University leads in both categories, investing $225K per student in academic support and $53K in student services.
- A modest but consistent correlation was found between student support spending and graduation rates, particularly among top-tier institutions.
A new report by Studocu highlights the U.S. colleges investing most heavily in academic and student services and explores whether that support is linked to graduation outcomes.

Drawing on the most recent fiscal year data from IPEDS (2023), the study found a positive relationship between support spending and graduation rates, suggesting that per-student spending on departments which directly support student learning and wellbeing improve outcomes.

The analysis covered over 1,000 degree-granting institutions across the United States, each enrolling more than 100 undergraduate students. Financial data was compared against graduation rates to uncover trends in institutional spending.

The findings show that top-tier schools like Yale, Harvard, and MIT spend significantly more per student than the national average:

National average for academic support: $2,933 per student

National average for student services: $4,828 per student

Top Institutions on Academic Support per Student

Top Institutions on Student Services per Student

When comparing graduation rates to institutional spending, the study found:

A 0.259 correlation between academic support spending and graduation rates

A 0.23 correlation between student services spending and graduation rates

While the correlations indicate a positive relationship between support spending and graduation rates, it’s important to note that other factors also play a role.

However, the findings still suggest that well-funded student support services may provide meaningful benefits especially for students who might otherwise might have failed.

About Studocu:

StuDocu is a student-to-student knowledge exchange platform where students can share knowledge, college notes, and study guides.

Methodology

Institutions were selected based on the following criteria:

Enrollment of over 100 undergraduate students

Offering degree-granting programs

For multi-campus institutions, the largest campus was used

Institutions were divided into tiers:

Tier 1: This typically includes Ivy League schools (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc.), as well as other top-tier highly selective institutions such as Stanford, MIT, and Caltech.

Tier 2: This category can include strong public universities, well-regarded liberal arts colleges, and other private universities. Examples might include schools like NYU, the University of Michigan.

Tier 3: These institutions are often regional colleges and universities.

Community colleges and technical colleges were not included in the study.

Spending was calculated per undergraduate student, and graduation rate was used as the primary indicator of academic success.

Sources

Data for this analysis was obtained from the IPEDS, including:

Graduation rates

Undergraduate enrolment

Academic support and student services expenditures

Caveats

Financial data is current through the 2023 fiscal year * the latest available data

Institutional reporting standards may vary, between public, private non-profit, and for-profit institutions
Source link
May 25, 2025
U.S. Universities Eye Branch Campuses as Way to “Survive Trump”

Establishing branch campuses abroad—often used as a crisis mitigation strategy—could become more important for U.S. universities facing increasing threats at home, but scholars are divided on their likelihood of success.

Illinois Institute of Technology has announced that it is to build a campus in Mumbai, while Georgetown University, one of six U.S. universities with satellite campuses in Doha, recently renewed its contract in Qatar’s Education City for another 10 years.

Research-intensive colleges and universities in the U.S. are faced with “new and profound uncertainties” over future funding and the strength of their endowments under the Trump administration, said Geoff Harkness, formerly postdoctoral teaching fellow at Northwestern and Carnegie Mellon Universities’ Education City campuses.

“This means that R-1 institutions will have to seek alternative sources of revenue, including partnering with nations in the Middle East. For Georgetown, which has a long-established branch campus at Education City, the renewal was a no-brainer in 2025.”

It comes just a year after Texas A&M closed its campus in Education City, citing “instability” in the region. However, academics said the decision was more likely a reflection of growing pro-Israel politics in the U.S. and unease with Qatar’s role mediating for Hamas in the Gaza conflict.

Harkness, now associate professor of sociology at Rhode Island College, said the Israel-Palestine conflict put Qatar in a difficult position but warned that Texas A&M could regret its decision to leave from a fiscal perspective.

“The nation’s vast resources and relative political moderation make it an appealing partner for U.S. colleges and universities, particularly in light of current economic uncertainties.”

Although not all partnerships are as lucrative as those with the Qatar Foundation, research by Jana Kleibert, professor for economic geography at the University of Hamburg, found that uncertainty around Brexit triggered U.K. universities to explore opening campuses in continental Europe—as Lancaster University did in Leipzig, Germany.

“Branch campuses are often used as a crisis mitigation strategy by universities,” she said.

“In this sense, it is no surprise to me that in situations of financial and geopolitical turbulence, branch campuses become more attractive to decision-makers at universities.”

University leaders hope that overseas campuses can contribute financially to the well-being of the overall institution, either through direct transfers from these sites to the main institutions or through accessing a broader pool of students, said Kleibert.

Recent figures show that U.S.-Chinese collaborative campuses have experienced record-breaking application numbers from both domestic and international students over the past few years.

Illinois Tech began planning its Indian outpost long before President Trump’s unprecedented assault on the U.S. higher education system. But Nigel Healey, professor of international higher education at the University of Limerick, said Trump’s culture wars could increase the “push factors” toward overseas expansion in the future.

“In the medium to long term, branch campuses may offer elite U.S. institutions an alternative way of maintaining their internationalization, accessing international talent and maintaining a global profile at a time when Trump is fostering a new national culture of xenophobia and isolationism,” he said.

However, he warned that the risks of being pushed into a strategy by suddenly changing political winds is that poor, reactive decisions might be made.

“The winds may change in the opposite direction, leaving the institution with a branch campus that is suddenly a white elephant.”

Philip Altbach, professor emeritus at Boston College, agreed that there are significant risks in establishing branches overseas and that they are not a high priority for elite universities right now.

“In the current situation of total instability in U.S. higher education due to the Trump administration, U.S. universities will not be thinking much about branch campuses but about their own survival.”

Although partnering with many countries may be politically safe, he said universities are unlikely to want to risk making “controversial political moves in the current environment.”

“Top U.S. universities are more interested in establishing research centers and joint programs overseas that can help their research and be a kind of embassy for recruiting students and researchers for the home campuses.”

And Kevin Kinser, professor of education and head of the department of education policy studies at Pennsylvania State University, said overseas partners are not free from scrutiny from the White House.

“The turmoil in the U.S. also includes scrutinizing foreign donations, contributions, collaborations and investments. Looking overseas does not create a safe haven for current federal attention.”

As a result, he said, Texas A&M may have gotten ahead of the narrative on foreign activities by universities by quitting Education City when it did.

Source link

May 16, 2025
Illinois Tech Establishes First U.S. Campus in India

On Wednesday, the Illinois Institute of Technology announced it had reached an agreement with India’s University Grants Commission to establish a branch campus in Mumbai, opening to students in fall 2026. It will be the first degree-granting U.S. institution on Indian soil and Illinois Tech’s first international branch campus.

For decades, a complicated legal and tax system prevented U.S. institutions from opening campuses in India. Then, in 2020, the Indian government issued a new National Education Policy paving the way, officials promised, for a much easier pathway to fruitful academic partnerships.

India is a major growth market for U.S. higher education; this year the country surpassed China for the first time as the top origin country for international students in the U.S. Establishing a beachhead in India could help institutions carve out a dominant space for themselves in the lucrative international recruitment market, especially since the vast majority of Indian international students come to the U.S. for postgraduate study.

When the Indian government announced the NEP 2020 plan, officials envisioned the “top 100 universities in the world” setting up shop in the country. So far, that hasn’t happened.

Illinois Tech is not a globally renowned university; it’s not even one of the better-known institutions in Chicago. Its undergraduate population numbers only around 3,000 students, and the postgraduate population isn’t much larger. So how did it get ahead of name-brand research universities that have been dipping their toes in the Indian market, like Johns Hopkins and Rice?

Philip Altbach, professor emeritus at the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College and a longtime expert on academic internationalization, said American institutions have been hesitant even in recent years to invest in Indian branch campuses due to a mix of bureaucratic complications and uncertain financial returns.

“There hasn’t exactly been a rush to the gates in India from American institutions, and I don’t think there’s going to be anytime soon,” Altbach said. “The challenges of doing business there are still pretty high, and that puts a lot of foreign universities off.”

Illinois Tech president Raj Echambadi said his university is taking the long view. As the spending power of India’s burgeoning middle class grows along with demand for highly trained workers—especially in engineering and technology—he sees the Mumbai campus as an early investment in a partnership that will become central to American institutions’ global strategies in the years to come. His institution has already begun to see the importance of Indian students to their bottom line: The share of Indian master’s students has risen by nearly 75 percent over the past five years.

“The potential upside is huge, which means if you get in early the ride is going to be phenomenal,” he said. “In the next 25 years, we’re going to be catching that elephant’s tail.”

Illinois Tech had a head start on the competition: The institution has been active in the Indian education market since 1996, during a period of rapid technological innovation.

When demand for skilled workers in exploding fields like communications technology skyrocketed in the mid-1990s, Illinois Tech offered an early version of distance learning, shipping VHS-tape lessons to engineers in Bangalore who wanted to earn credentials that the Indian higher education system had yet to develop.

Now, Echambadi says, Illinois Tech is meeting new demands in a changing Indian economy; its Mumbai campus will offer 10 degree programs in growth fields like semiconductor engineering. It even has some built-in brand recognition: It’s known as IIT in Chicago, the same acronym as India’s main university system, the Indian Institutes of Technology.

“India can’t build universities fast enough to meet the growing demand,” Echambadi said. “That’s where we come in.”

Colleges Hang Back

Many colleges that wanted to explore opening a campus in India simply may have struggled to navigate the complex application system, even after the NEP was issued. Rajika Bhandari, a longtime international education strategist and the founder of the South Asia International Education Network, said the 2020 NEP took years to translate into practice.

“U.S. institutions have been trying to enter the Indian market for years, well before the NEP. But the Indian bureaucracy and strict regulations have always been a challenge,” she wrote in an email. “Even with the NEP, it has likely taken a while to implement aspects of the policy and actually get things going.”

Having a 30-year presence in India, Echambadi said, helped ease the process. He added that it helped that both he and Mallik Sundharam—Illinois Tech’s vice president for enrollment management and student affairs, who led the Mumbai project—are of Indian origin; both attended college there before moving to the U.S. for their graduate degrees. They said their understanding of their home country’s byzantine bureaucracy helped them navigate the system quicker than their competition.

Sundharam said there’s also a much more receptive attitude in India toward foreign universities and a simpler system. They applied to establish the Mumbai campus earlier this year, and the entire process, from submission to acceptance, took two months. More than 50 foreign institutions have applied to set up a campus in India this year.

“The Indian government has come a long way,” he said.

Altbach said U.S. colleges are more likely to establish joint degree programs with Indian universities than full branch campuses. Virginia Tech established the first of these in 2023, also in Mumbai. Other institutions, including Johns Hopkins and Purdue University, have stuck to research partnerships and exchanges. Rice, which was an early proponent of Indian-American higher ed collaboration, established a research center in Kanpur in early 2020, months before the new NEP was introduced. Altbach said he thinks branch campuses will remain the territory of “low- to midlevel research institutions” seeking to boost enrollment.

But Bhandari, an Indian immigrant and a close observer of the country’s booming education market, said Illinois Tech may be on the vanguard of a new push in academic internationalization.

As international enrollment in the U.S. staggers from President Trump’s policies to deport student visa holders and crack down on global academic partnerships, Bhandari said physical programs in growth countries like India will become increasingly important. There’s already evidence that Indian student mobility to the U.S. is on the decline: F-1 visa applications from India are down 34 percent from this time last year, according to a recent analysis by Chris Glass, a professor at Boston College’s Center for International Higher Education.

“Other universities are operating under the assumption that international markets will stay the same, but they won’t,” Sundharam said. “Students may not want to be mobile in five to 10 years. They will want quality higher education at their doorstep.”

Source link

May 8, 2025
European Governments Back Universities’ U.S. Recruitment Drive

European governments have sought to bolster their universities’ efforts to recruit international researchers, amid signs that an expected exodus in U.S.-based scholars is beginning.

On April 23, Norway’s education ministry announced the creation of a $9.6 million initiative, designed by the Research Council of Norway, to “make it easier to recruit experienced researchers from other countries.”

While the program will be open to researchers worldwide, the ministry said, research and higher education minister Sigrun Aasland suggested in a statement that the recruitment of U.S.-based scholars was of particular interest.

“Academic freedom is under pressure in the U.S., and it is an unpredictable position for many researchers in what has been the world’s leading knowledge nation for many decades,” Aasland said. “We have had close dialogue with the Norwegian knowledge communities and my Nordic colleagues about developments.

“It has been important for me to find good measures that we can put in place quickly, and therefore I have tasked the Research Council with prioritizing schemes that we can implement within a short time.”

The first call for proposals will open in May, Research Council chief executive Mari Sundli Tveit stated, with “climate, health, energy and artificial intelligence” among the fields of interest.

Last week, the French ministry of higher education and research launched the Choose France for Science platform, operated by the French National Research Agency. The platform will enable universities and research institutes to submit “projects for hosting international researchers ready to come and settle in Europe” and apply for state co-funding.

Research projects on themes including health, climate and artificial intelligence may receive state funding of “up to 50 percent of the total amount of the project,” the ministry said.

“Around the world, science and research are facing unprecedented threats. In the face of these challenges, France must uphold its position by reaching out to researchers and offering them refuge,” Education Minister Élisabeth Borne said.

The initiative follows efforts from individual French universities to recruit from the U.S.: The University of Toulouse hopes to attract scholars working in the fields of “living organisms and health, climate change [or] transport and energy,” while Paris-Saclay University intends to “launch Ph.D. contracts and fund stays of various durations for American researchers.”

Aix-Marseille University plans to host around 15 American academics through a Safe Place for Science program, announcing last week that almost 300 had applied. “The majority are ‘experienced’ profiles from various universities/institutions of origin: Johns Hopkins, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Yale, Stanford,” the university said.

In Spain, meanwhile, Science Minister Diana Morant announced the third round of the ATRAE international recruitment program, with a budget of $153 million, which will run from 2025 to 2027.

The plan, designed to “attract leading scientists to Spain in areas of research with a high social impact, such as climate change, AI and space technologies,” offers scholars an average of $1.13 million to conduct research at a Spanish institution. Successful applicants currently based in the U.S., meanwhile, will receive an additional $226,000 per project.

“We are not only a better country for science, for those researchers who currently reside in our country, but we are also a better country for elite researchers who seek out the productive scientific ecosystem we have in Spain,” Morant said.

Source link

May 1, 2025
China Research Spending Outstrips U.S. Despite Faltering Economy

China continues to prioritize research and development despite the country’s slowing economy, with the drive for scientific self-sufficiency superseding economic development alone, according to analysts.

Recent figures from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development show China’s R&D spending grew at a faster rate in 2023 than it did in both the U.S. and E.U., as well as all OECD member states.

Growth in China reached 8.7 percent, compared with 1.7 percent in the U.S. and 1.6 percent in the E.U.

According to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, spending continued to increase in 2024, exceeding 3.6 trillion yuan ($489.9 billion) and up 8.3 percent year on year. This accounted for 2.68 percent of China’s gross domestic product in 2024, up 0.1 percentage point from the previous year.

It comes despite China’s wider economic slowdown, triggered in part by the collapse of the real estate sector in 2021, which is still struggling to recover.

Given these financial concerns, the growth in research spending is “quite a feat” and “an important indicator of where China is putting its priorities,” said Jeroen Groenewegen-Lau, head of the science, technology and innovation program at the Mercator Institute for China Studies.

The Asian superpower also now has to contend with the export tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump. However, analysts expect that R&D spending will continue to grow in spite of these economic barriers.

“When you look at some of the Asian economies, they tend to be countercyclical in their investment in research,” said Caroline Wagner, a professor specializing in public policy and science at Ohio State University. “When economies slow, they actually increase their spending on research.”

She said this is true of Japan and South Korea, which both exceeded the OECD average with growth of 2.7 percent and 3.7 percent in 2023 respectively.

“When they’re experiencing a little bit of a downturn, they actually spend more on research in the hopes that it will stoke the economy,” Wagner added.

Groenewegen-Lau agreed that China’s growth trajectory looks set to continue, with investment in basic research core to the country’s national development strategy.

“Even if the economy is not going very well, they can keep up this expenditure,” he said. “They’re kind of borrowing from the future” to “conquer all these technological bottlenecks.”

He continued, “It’s clear that science technology is maybe even more important than economic development in its own right. It’s like the economic development seems sometimes to be supporting the innovation machine.”

While these figures are made up of both government and corporate expenditure, there are concerns among China’s leaders that businesses aren’t investing as much as they should, particularly in basic research, according to Groenewegen-Lau.

“The current economic situation is such that we know that they’re investing less,” Groenewegen-Lau said. “So the central government is trying to make up for that.”

Universities and research institutes are likely to benefit from this, with investment in the sector rising.

In 2024, expenditure by China’s higher education institutes on R&D reached 275.33 billion yuan ($37.68 billion), an increase of 14.1 percent from the previous year. However, this still accounted for a minority of total expenditure, with HEIs making up 8.2 percent of the total, compared with enterprises, which made up 77.7 percent.

And, as China moves away from international engagement and toward self-sufficiency, a key challenge, said Wagner, will be ensuring it has the talent capabilities to go it alone.

“They have really been working on an imitative model, where they’re connecting with and imitating leaders, and now they’re trying to pull back and say, ‘We’re going to build our own national capacity,’ but you have to have enough [human] capacity in order to do that,” Wagner said.

“I think that’s one of the questions that is maybe still out there unanswered. Can you do that on your own?”

Source link

April 17, 2025
Title IX Case Against Maine Schools Headed to U.S. Department of Justice – The 74

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

The conflict between the state of Maine and the Trump administration over transgender student athletes reached a new pivot point on Monday. As the first of several deadlines set by the federal government has now expired, whether Maine can continue to allow trans athletes to participate in school sports appears likely to be decided by the courts.

Two separate federal agencies determined that Maine is in violation of Title IX based on the Trump administration’s interpretation of the anti-sex discrimination protection.

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights issued a final warning Monday to the Maine Department of Education regarding its noncompliance with a federal directive for allowing trans girls to participate in girls’ sports.

If the state does not propose an agreement that’s acceptable to the office by April 11, the case will be referred to the Department of Justice, the letter said.

Meanwhile, a separate investigation by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ civil rights office that found Maine in violation of Title IX for “continuing to unlawfully allow” trans girls to compete in girl’s sports has been referred to the U.S. Department of Justice, according to a Monday social media post from the agency.

In a letter dated March 17, HHS had given Maine a deadline of 10 days to comply with federal guidance. Monday marked ten business days from that warning.

Both agencies determined that Maine had violated federal law after dayslong investigations that included no interviews, while typical investigations take months and are eventually settled with resolution agreements. The probes were launched after Gov. Janet Mills and President Donald Trump had a heated exchange over the state’s trans athlete policy. Millions of dollars in federal funding might be at risk, depending on how the cases proceed.

“We just need an answer at this point as to, ‘Does the Trump administration have the authority to do what it’s doing when it comes to fast tracking the removal of federal funds?’” said Jackie Wernz, a former OCR lawyer for the Education Department who now represents school districts nationwide in these types of cases.

“This is just unprecedented, and we’re not following the process that we’re used to. So I think it’s going to be really helpful for courts to start weighing in on whether or not they have the authority to do this.”

Meanwhile, Republican state lawmakers said in a news conference on Tuesday that they want the state to repeal trans students’ rights to athletics, locker rooms and bathrooms, and to roll back inclusion of gender as a protected class in the Maine Human Rights Act.

“The problem is that the term gender identity and the Human Rights Act is being interpreted way too broadly by the left,” said Senate Minority Leader Trey Stewart (R-Aroostook). “And what it’s saying is there’s no boundary between men’s and women’s spaces.”

Rep. Michael Soboleski (R- Phillips) said he is introducing a bill to remove consideration of gender identity from the act, and asked Democrats and Mills to support the legislation in order to avoid the risk of losing federal funding.

Earlier this year, Iowa became the first state in the nation to remove civil rights from a state law when its Legislature voted to remove gender identity from its civil rights act.

“This is not sustainable,” Stewart said. “We’re a poor state. We are heavily reliant on federal money. The governor needs to move on this.”

On March 19, the Department of Education’s civil rights office notified Maine of its noncompliance and proposed a resolution agreement that would require the state to rescind its support of trans athletes, which is currently required by the Maine Human Rights Act. A Cumberland-area school district and the Maine Principals Association, which runs student athletics, that were also found in violation have already refused to sign the agreement.

This development is part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to enforce Title IX provisions concerning gender and athletics. Earlier this year, the administration launched investigations in several other states for similar policies allowing trans athletes to compete in alignment with their gender identity.

Title IX, the federal law banning sex-based discrimination, does not reference trans people directly, but the Trump administration has interpreted Maine’s policy as discrimination against cisgender girls.

Rachel Perera, a fellow in the governance studies program for the Brown Center on Education Policy at national think tank The Brookings Institution, said the Trump administration’s interpretation of Title IX leaves room for questioning. If the policy goes to trial, she said federal courts may come up with a clearer interpretation.

“It’s going to be really important to see how Maine proceeds, because they’re sort of setting the tone in terms of these other states and other localities who are going to be trying to navigate these very same dynamics,” she said.

Maine Morning Star is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Maine Morning Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lauren McCauley for questions: info@mainemorningstar.com.

Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

Source link

April 3, 2025
Survey: Trump Policies Push 75% of Scientists to Consider Leaving U.S.

Survey: Trump Policies Push 75% of Scientists to Consider Leaving U.S.

kathryn.palmer…

Tue, 04/01/2025 – 03:00 AM

Byline(s)

Kathryn Palmer

Source link

April 1, 2025
Recruiting U.S. Scholars Can Protect “Threatened Research”

Universities should look to recruit researchers fleeing the U.S. amid dramatic funding cuts by the Trump administration because it could help protect vital scientific expertise from being lost, according to the rector of a leading Belgian university.

Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) has announced a host of new postdoctoral positions for international academics, stating that the institution “particularly welcomes excellent researchers currently working in the U.S. which see their line of research threatened.”

VUB and its sister university Université Libre de Bruxelles are offering a total of 36 grants to researchers with a maximum of eight years of postdoctoral experience, funded by the European Union’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions. The positions are not exclusively designed for U.S.-based researchers, VUB rector Jan Danckaert stressed, but are “open to all incoming researchers, whatever their nationality or their working place at the moment outside of Belgium.”

VUB chose to advertise the positions to scholars in the U.S., Danckaert explained, in the wake of drastic funding cuts by the Trump administration, with research fields under particular threat including climate, public health and any areas considered to be related to diversity.

“We also hear from colleagues in the United States that they are applying a kind of self-censorship in order to stay under the radar,” he said. “We believe that freedom of investigation is now under threat in the U.S.”

“It’s not so much about trying to attract the best US researchers to Brussels but trying to prevent fruitful lines of research from being abruptly cut off,” Danckaert said. While recruiting talent “would benefit our society,” he said, “it’s important that these lines of research can be continued without interruption, for the benefit of the scientific community as a whole and, in the end, for humanity.”

VUB has already lost U.S. funding for two research projects, one concerning youth and disinformation and the other addressing the “transatlantic dialogue,” Danckaert said. The grants, amounting to 50,000 euros ($53,800) each, were withdrawn because “they were no longer in line with policy priorities,” the rector said. “Now, we have some costs that will have to be covered, but that’s nothing in comparison to the millions that are being cut in the United States.”

European efforts to recruit U.S.-based researchers have faced some criticism, with the KU Leuven rector Luc Sels arguing that “almost half of the world population lives in countries where academic freedom is much more restricted,” while “the first and most important victims of Trump’s decisions”—such as the cancellation of USAID funding—“live and work in the Global South.”

“Should we not prioritise supporting the scientists most at risk?” Sels writes in a recent Times Higher Education comment piece, adding that “drawing [the U.S.’s] talented scientists away will not help them.”

Asked about these concerns, Danckaert said, “It’s true, of course, that the U.S. by no means has a monopoly on putting scientists under threat,” noting that VUB, alongside other Belgian universities, participates in academic sanctuary programs such as Scholars at Risk. “We try to provide a safe haven for scholars who are being persecuted in their countries, and this work doesn’t stop.”

As for fears of a potential brain drain from the U.S., the VUB rector said he was “by nature optimistic.” Recruiting U.S.-based researchers “is hopefully only a temporary measure to avoid some lines of research being abruptly cut,” Danckaert said.

“I believe this is a temporary difficult period for a number of scientists,” he continued. “We’ve always looked with high esteem to the quality of science done in the United States, and I’m confident that the climate in which science was prospering will come back.”

Source link

March 28, 2025
Banning DEI Is Catastrophic for U.S. Science (opinion)

Our scientific enterprise in the United States is the envy of the world. Top scientists from around the globe want to come to work here, specifically because of the environment that we have fostered over decades to support scientific innovation and intellectual freedom. Federal investment in research is one of the primary foundations upon which this extraordinarily successful system has been constructed.

It is not simply the dollar amount of federal funding that makes this system so successful. It is also about how we allocate and distribute the funds. Long before “DEI” was common parlance, we made robust efforts to distribute funds broadly. For example, instead of concentrating funding only in the top research institutions, as many other countries do, we created programs such as EPSCoR (1979) to direct funding to support research and development throughout the entire country, including rural areas. This was done in recognition that excellence in research can be found anywhere that and colleges and universities serving rural and impoverished communities deserve to benefit from and contribute to the economic and scientific engine that the federal government can provide.

The National Science Foundation also implemented Broader Impacts in its grant review process (originating in the 1960s and formalized in 1997). The goal of the NSF review criteria for broader impacts was to ensure that every federally funded project would have some benefit for society. These broader impacts could take a wide variety of forms, including but not limited to new tools and innovations, as well as efforts to grow the STEM workforce by supporting those historically and economically excluded from becoming scientists.

Diversity, equity and inclusion funding is one of the mechanisms that we use to continue this legacy of equity in federal funding of scientific research. This approach has also helped reduce public mistrust of science and scientists—a mistrust attributable to science’s historical abuses—by ensuring that the benefits of scientific progress are shared widely and equitably and by making the work of scientists more transparent and accessible.

Until fairly recently in history, science was primarily an activity for the wealthy. Training as a scientist requires many years of deferred salary, due to the extensive education and practical skill development needed to conduct independent research and start a laboratory. For those who make it through this training, research jobs can be scarce, and the salaries are not high, considering the highly specialized skills required and the high demands of the job. Many of the best and brightest minds have been excluded from the scientific process by this economic reality. Federal funding provides critical support for science workforce development, primarily through stipends and salaries for undergraduates, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. These stipends ease (but do not erase) the economic burden of training as a scientist.

When you hear “DEI in science,” this is largely what we are talking about. A vast portion of federal DEI funds in the sciences goes directly to support highly talented and accomplished trainees who have deferred their personal economic progress for the opportunity to contribute to science in the U.S. This wise national investment helps to ensure that our science workforce can recruit the most meritorious trainees, regardless of their economic backgrounds. Without these initiatives, our science workforce would be much smaller with a narrower set of perspectives. Our national investment in science training is not altruistic—it is the very reason why the U.S. is a global leader in science and technology. This leadership contributes to our nation’s safety and capacity to deal with the existential problems we now face.

The framework of DEI recognizes that systemic economic and social injustices are present in our society, due to historical and contemporary realities such as slavery, Jim Crow, genocide of Native peoples, redlining, a broken immigration system, educational and health-care disparities, and discriminatory practices in housing and employment against nonwhite, disabled and LGBTQ+ communities. These disparities have resulted in a lack of intergenerational wealth and resources among many communities in the U.S., leading to unequal access to scientific training and careers.

The claim, now made by our federal government, that a meritocracy can be achieved by ignoring these injustices is simply false and illogical. DEI is not only about diversity training and hiring practices. In the sciences, it is essential and existential to the goal of developing the most robust, talented and highly skilled science workforce in the world.

With Executive Order 14151, issued by the Trump administration, this funding is under attack, undoing decades of progress that have fostered some of the most talented and brilliant minds of our time. Rigorous training programs are being canceled, graduate students are losing their funding and the training of an entire generation of scientists is being jeopardized. Science will lose an extraordinary amount of talent, necessary for our nation’s industrial and economic leadership, because of this executive order.

Furthermore, this removal of funding is being enacted on the basis of identity, effectively endorsing a form of government-imposed segregation of science. Advancements in science are often determined by the demography of those doing the science, and a diversity of perspectives and research questions is necessary for scientific innovation. For example, sickle cell disease is chronically underfunded and underresearched, despite the severity of the disease, likely because it affects descendants of people from regions with high instances of malaria, including many African Americans. Indeed, some scientific breakthroughs and technologies may never materialize or be greatly delayed due to the exclusion of talented individuals on the basis of their identity. This is a fundamental threat to scientific progress and academic freedom.

The federal banning of DEI programs is a slap in the face to every person who has struggled to become a scientist in the face of systemic injustices. These trainees, past and present, have missed out on economic opportunities, deferred building their families and made many personal sacrifices so that they can create innovative solutions to our nation’s most pressing scientific and technological challenges. The creation of these DEI programs came from the extraordinary efforts of thousands of people, many of whom have overcome injustices themselves, working tirelessly across many decades so that the most meritorious and talented individuals all have an opportunity to succeed as scientists.

Referring to these efforts as “shameful discrimination,” as the Trump administration has now done, is a cruel attempt to destabilize the emotional well-being of everyone who has created and been supported by these essential programs. It is an example of blaming the victims of past and ongoing injustice for their plight in society, rather than working to dismantle the systems that perpetuate inequality and limit access to a fair and just future, where a true meritocracy in science becomes possible.

We believe that the efforts to ban, diminish and misrepresent DEI and diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs should be immediately stopped and reversed to avoid the most serious negative impacts of these new policies. Removal of DEI programs will demoralize and disincentivize an entire generation of scientists in training. It will greatly reduce the scientific workforce and remove top talent from our training programs as funding mechanisms are dismantled.

Our graduate students, undergraduates, postdoctoral fellows and other early-career scientists are those most greatly impacted by the removal of this support. This will severely jeopardize the status of the U.S. as a global leader in science, and the catastrophic impacts will be felt for decades. We stand by those most affected by the DEI ban, especially our trainees, and we demand an immediate reinstatement of DEI funding.

We are speaking out using the speech and intellectual freedoms afforded to us by the U.S. academic system and the U.S. Constitution. We are calling on our institutions to stand with us in defense of DEI in science. Institutions and professional societies must reaffirm their own commitments to DEI. Some institutions have already made strong statements of reaffirmation of these values, but others have begun to remove their internal and external DEI initiatives pre-emptively. We understand the need for institutions to protect their employees and students from adverse consequences, but we argue that the consequences of dismantling diversity programs are much greater for our communities, as these steps usher in a new era of segregation in science and academia.

We urge the public, our lawmakers and politicians to stand with us. We believe that DEI is foundational to science and an attack on DEI is an attack on the core of science itself in the United States.

Joseph L. Graves Jr. is the MacKenzie Scott Endowed Professor of Biology and the director of the Genomic Research and Data Science Center for Computation and Cloud Computing at North Carolina A&T State University.

Stacy C. Farina is an associate professor of biology at Howard University.

Parvin Shahrestani is an associate professor of biological science at California State University, Fullerton.

Vaughn S. Cooper is a professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at the University of Pittsburgh.

Gilda A. Barabino is president and professor of biomedical and chemical engineering at Olin College of Engineering.

Source link

March 26, 2025
Trump signs executive order that aims to close U.S. Department of Education

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.

President Donald Trump has signed a much anticipated executive order that he said is designed to close the U.S. Department of Education.

The order Trump signed Thursday tells Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities” to the “maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.” At the same time, the order says McMahon should ensure “the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”

Despite polling to the contrary, Trump said in his speech Thursday that closing the department is a popular idea that would save money and help American students catch up to other countries. He also said his order would ensure that other federal agencies take over major programs now housed at the Education Department, like those for students from low-income backgrounds and students with disabilities.

“Beyond these core necessities, my administration will take all lawful steps to shut down the department,” Trump said. “We’re going to shut it down, and shut it down as quickly as possible. It’s doing us no good. We want to return our students to the states.”

The executive order represents a symbolic achievement for Trump, who for years has expressed a desire to close the department. Yet the president has already radically transformed the department without relying on such an order. McMahon announced massive layoffs and buyouts earlier this month that cut the department’s staff nearly in half.

Beyond the rhetoric, it’s unclear how exactly the order will impact the department’s work or existence.

By law, only Congress can eliminate a cabinet-level agency authorized by Congress; White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt seemed to acknowledge as much Thursday before Trump signed the order, when she said that the Education Department will become “much smaller.” And during his Thursday remarks, Trump expressed hopes that Democrats as well as Republicans would be “voting” for the department’s closure, although prominent Democratic lawmakers have blasted the idea.

The order does not directly change the department’s annual budget from Congress. And federal law dictates many of the Education Department’s main functions–changing those would require congressional approval that could be very hard to secure.

Still, Trump’s move to dramatically slash the department’s staff could impact its capacity and productivity, even if officially its functions remain in place.

At her confirmation hearing, McMahon promised to work with Congress on a reorganization plan. Project 2025, a prominent blueprint for conservative governance from the Heritage Foundation released before Trump’s second term, says that along with closing the Education Department, the federal government should move the department’s education civil rights enforcement to the Department of Justice, while the collection of education data should move to the U.S. Census Bureau.

In a statement on Thursday, McMahon said closing the Education Department does not mean cutting off funds from those who depend on them.

“We will continue to support K-12 students, students with special needs, college student borrowers, and others who rely on essential programs,” she wrote. “We’re going to follow the law and eliminate the bureaucracy responsibly by working with Congress and state leaders to ensure a lawful and orderly transition.”

The executive order could be challenged in court. Many of Trump’s efforts to remake the federal bureaucracy are already tied up in litigation, including the Education Department layoffs.

The executive order notes that the Education Department does not educate any students, and points to low test scores on an important national assessment as evidence that federal spending is not helping students.

“Closing the Department of Education would provide children and their families the opportunity to escape a system that is failing them,” the order says.

Trump order is triumph for department’s foes

The Republican governors of Florida, Texas, Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, Louisiana, Tennessee, Idaho, and Nebraska were present during the signing ceremony. Trump said they “badly” wanted the federal government to give their states more control over education.

“Probably the cost will be half, and the education will be maybe many, many times better,” Trump said. States that “run very, very well,” he said, could have education systems as good as those in Finland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway–countries that tend to outperform the United States on international reading and math tests.

The Education Department administers billions of dollars in federal assistance through programs such as Title I, which benefits high-poverty schools, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, which offsets the cost of special education services.

The department also administers financial aid for college students, shares information about best practices with states and school districts, and enforces civil rights laws. And it oversees the school accountability system, which identifies persistently low-performing schools to extra support.

States and school districts already make most education decisions, from teacher pay to curriculum choices.

Conservatives have wanted to get rid of the U.S. Department of Education since it was created by President Jimmy Carter and Congress in 1979, and Trump talked about doing so in his first administration. But those efforts never gained traction.

Conservatives say that for decades the department has failed to adequately address low academic performance. They also see the department as generally hostile to their political and ideological perspectives.

The executive order says that McMahon must ensure that “any program or activity receiving Federal assistance terminate illegal discrimination obscured under the label ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ or similar terms and programs promoting gender ideology,” a reference to policies intended to make schools more welcoming for students of color and LGBTQ students.

The department has moved to publicly target and root out diversity-focused practices in schools in recent weeks. And the department has already threatened to withhold federal funding from Maine for allowing trans athletes to compete on teams that match their gender identity.

Public education advocates say critical expertise will be lost and students’ civil rights won’t be protected if Trump further diminishes the department. They also fear that a department overhaul could endanger billions in federal funding that bolsters state and local education budgets.

They say they’re already seeing impacts from layoffs, which hit the Office for Civil Rights, Federal Student Aid, and the Institute of Education Sciences particularly hard.

Even before McMahon took office, the U.S. DOGE Service, the cost-cutting initiative run by billionaire Elon Musk, canceled hundreds of millions of dollars worth of research grants and contracts.

The Education Department already was one of the smallest cabinet-level departments, with around 4,100 employees, before the layoffs. With buyouts and layoffs, the department now employs just under 2,200 people.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

Related:
The ED is dead! Long Live the ED!
Linda McMahon is confirmed as education secretary–DOGE and a department overhaul await her

Erica Meltzer, Chalkbeat

Chalkbeat senior national reporter Kalyn Belsha contributed reporting.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Andrew Ujifusa is a story editor at Chalkbeat.

Latest posts by eSchool Media Contributors (see all)

Source link

March 21, 2025