Discussions at the New Delhi event centered on India’s growing appeal as a destination for international students and a key partner for global institutions seeking to enhance their internationalisation strategies.
“In our recent visit to Sri Lanka, we saw over 3,000 students express interest to study in Indian universities due to them being affordable and providing high-quality education,” shared Pankaj Mittal, secretary general, Association of Indian Universities.
“Earlier, students from Sri Lanka were only looking at the US, UK, and Europe but that’s not affordable for them anymore, which is why they are focusing on India.”
Mittal stated that this phenomenon indicates a future where “India will prosper and become the destination where international students and educators will see potential.”
According to the Study in India portal, over 72,000 international students studied in India for the academic year 2024/25.
The rise in international students, especially from South Asia and Africa, has prompted the Ministry of Home Affairs to announce specialised visas dubbed the ‘e-student visa’ and ‘e-student-x visa.’
Additionally, a ‘G-20 talent visa’ has been announced for scientists, researchers, faculty members, and scholar academicians from G20 countries.
Elsewhere, reports suggest that IIT Madras is considering establishing a branch campus in Sri Lanka, joining other IITs in their plans for international expansion.
While international universities are making headlines concerning their expansion plans in India, Mittal highlighted that Indian universities are equally excited to collaborate with institutions abroad but need to find the right partners.
We are now handholding Indian universities to help them find the right partners and guide them on which areas they can collaborate in. Pankaj Mittal, AIU
“After the National Education Policy came into the picture, Indian universities are looking forward to more collaborations with international universities,” said Mittal.
“The only issue right now is that we need to help Indian universities, especially public ones, with capacity building. We are now handholding Indian universities to help them find the right partners and guide them on which areas they can collaborate in.”
Through its initiative ‘The Indian Network for Internationalisation of Higher Education’, which has 1,064 member Indian and international universities, AIU is helping Indian and international institutions advance their internationalisation strategies in India.
With a 17,000-strong student population, including over 210 international students, private institutions like UPES are partnering with top institutions across the world but want the benefits to be more ‘reciprocal’.
“Since the NEP, there have been a slew of regulations that are coming at a fast pace which are also overwhelming for us as Indian institutions,” said Ram Sharma, vice-chancellor, UPES.
“As an Indian institution we are pretty clear that we want the best for our students, which is why we have made it a policy to partner with the world’s top 100 universities, such as King’s College London, Edinburgh University, the University of Queensland, and more.”
Though joint and dual degrees are becoming major attractions in partnerships between Indian and international institutions, Sharma believes it’s not creating the same excitement among Indian students as expected.
“Except for our partnership with the University of Queensland, many of our partnerships have participation of less than ten students,” said Sharma.
“So now we are talking about a campus on campus model, wherein we can partner with a well-established existing institution and experiment with other models in light of increasing TNE interest.”
According to Rohit Kumar, director, international recruitment, partnerships, and mobility, University of York, a ‘culture of innovation’ that can benefit both Indian and international students can only be brought about by cross-disciplinary collaboration between the Indian education sector, international universities, and the Indian government.
“Dedicated funding streams are needed to strengthen research capabilities between institutions, while international universities entering India must actively engage with industry,” said Kumar.
Hi, everyone. This week I’m bringing you a dispatch from the Higher Education Climate Leadership Summit, hosted by the group Second Nature, where the Trump administration’s efforts to undo environmental action were very much top of mind. Thanks for reading. — Caroline Preston
WASHINGTON — Federal dollars for clean energy are disappearing. Environmental offices across the federal government are being dismantled. Universities are facing decisions about whether to scrub the words “climate change” from their projects in order to keep them funded.
Only a few weeks into Donald Trump’s second term, his attacks on climate action are already hindering universities’ efforts to curb their carbon emissions and minimize their harm to the planet, according to speakers at a conference I attended earlier this week hosted by the nonprofit group Second Nature.
Going forward, every higher ed institution needs “a Trump response plan,” said Gregory Washington, president of George Mason University, in Fairfax, Virginia.
Hundreds of college sustainability officers, university presidents, clean energy engineers, environmental researchers and others gathered for the event at a hotel blocks from the White House, where Trump has signed orders to “unleash” fossil fuels, sought to freeze clean energy funding, and overseen the removal of language on climate change from government websites.
Some takeaways from the conference:
Related: Want to read more about how climate change is shaping education? Subscribe to our free newsletter.
Universities need a plan to navigate the Trump administration. Colleges and universities should form rapid response teams to confront political threats, speakers said, and also find safety in numbers and advocate through coalitions. Institutions may also have to pick their battles and let some work go, said Washington. “They have a playbook,” said Shalanda Baker, the University of Michigan’s vice provost for sustainability and climate action, referring to the political actors trying to undo diversity, equity and inclusion, environmental justice and related work. “Let’s create a playbook — and let’s continue the work.”
Climate action is shifting. With a federal government hostile to climate action, higher ed can focus on making change alongside state and local governments instead. Universities can also partner with different types of organizations — health care systems, cultural institutions, businesses and others — to make progress. They might also consider forming alliances with institutions overseas.
Debates are raging about whether to avoid “trigger words” like “climate change.” Some speakers, including George Mason’s Washington, talked about how, with certain audiences, universities should avoid language that the administration objects to, including “climate change” and “zero carbon.” “It has to be about saying the right things to the right people so you can salvage and maintain the programs you have and continue to move forward on your mission,” he said. Others disagreed, arguing that changing the language in a proposal wouldn’t stop government staff from investigating the work programs actually do. “We have a clock over our heads. We need to stand in the work, and call it what it is, which is that we are trying to avert catastrophic climate change,” said Baker of the University of Michigan.
The threats are very real, not hypothetical. Dana R. Fisher, director of the Center for Environment, Community and Equity at American University, talked about how she was told in the last few days by people reviewing a government-funded project that unless she changed its focus from climate action to disaster recovery, it might not have a future. She noted that the American Climate Corps, a Biden-era program to deploy people into jobs related to fighting climate change, blinked out of existence after Trump took office. “We need to be realistic about what persistence and resistance looks like in channels like these if external forces will be shutting our work down,” said Fisher. She added, “The question I have for all of you is what are our universities going to do to protect us? Do I change the entirety of my website? What do I do about all the people funded for these grants who are now at risk of losing their jobs and their health care?”
Universities are complicit in climate change. Several speakers noted that universities have done far too little for too long on climate change, and their financial ties to fossil fuel companies are one reason. Jennie Stephens, professor of climate justice at the National University of Ireland Maynooth, said that universities’ complicity in climate change was one reason why she left U.S. academia for an institution overseas. “The fossil fuel industry and profit-seeking interests have captured academia,” she said, adding that as a result there aren’t research centers designed to help society move away from fossil fuels. She added, “We need to reclaim and restructure these institutions for bigger change.”
Students are tired of university inaction. “A lot of students are frustrated right now,” said Sydney Collins, a 2023 graduate of the University of Connecticut who is now a sustainability coordinator there. “A lot of students say it’s been bad and we’ve been terrified and you haven’t been listening. … And how dare you look at us now and say there’s nothing we can do. You haven’t been doing that work previously.” Fisher, of American University, said that anxiety, not anger, can motivate people to action, and that many people were outraged right now. To make change, she said, people need to think about “insider” and “outsider” strategies, and how students can sometimes be effective “outsider” voices pushing universities to change.
Still, campus climate action has accelerated, even in red states. The event celebrated higher education institutions that have had success in reducing their emissions and fighting climate change. Among those recognized was Central Community College in Hastings, Nebraska. One of its seven centers and campuses runs entirely on wind energy, another entirely on solar. In 2019, the college started a wind, solar and battery storage program to prepare students for jobs in those industries. The program has a 100 percent job placement rate, with students graduating into jobs that typically pay between $28 to $32 an hour, according to Taylor Schneider, the college’s energy technology instructor. Ben Newton, the college’s environmental sustainability director, said the college has had success in maintaining support for the program even in a state where opposition to wind energy is widespread because people see the financial and employment benefits. Newton said he’s accustomed to tailoring his messages for different audiences — for example, describing the specifics of climate science in a sustainability class he teaches and focusing more on resilience in the face of extreme weather events with administrators and others.
Higher ed needs new ways of measuring climate action. Second Nature, which encourages universities to make commitments to carbon neutrality, has been working to update those commitments to take into account different areas of work (like governance and education) and establish that neutrality is a milestone not an end point. That’s a step in the right direction, say some observers. “I don’t think it takes a lot of thought in the climate space to realize we can’t solve the climate crisis by paying everyone else to reduce their emissions,” said Alexander Barron, an associate professor of environmental science and policy at Smith College, who has argued that under the existing climate commitment model universities rely too heavily on purchasing offsets to meet their climate goals.
Going beyond neutrality requires all-in approaches. University officials talked about their strategies for moving beyond net neutrality and further reducing carbon emissions. Tavey Capps, executive director of climate and sustainability at Duke University, described the university’s efforts to ensure that all 10 of its schools — the divinity school, the law school, the business school and others — are engaged in and committed to climate action. Aaron Durnbaugh, director of sustainability with Loyola University of Chicago, talked about how climate action aligned with the Jesuit institution’s social justice mission. “We’re thinking about how we can ensure that more money goes back into communities,” he said, noting that the university had had some success by partnering on a solar project that provided unionized jobs for residents of nearby counties. “What does a Catholic heat pump look like? What does an equitable electric vehicle purchase look like?”
While many in attendance were reeling at the pace of the Trump administration’s anti-clean energy blitz, they also noted that there would be more to come. “They are just getting started,” said Fisher of American University.
“We have to stand in this moment,” said the University of Michigan’s Baker. “We have to be the tip of the spear and be courageous. I have a good job, but I’m willing to put myself out there.”
She added: “There are no safe harbors.”
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965 or preston@hechingerreport.org
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
The second term of Donald Trump has officially begun, but despite all the things he’s unveiled in the past several weeks, we don’t know fully what his policies are going to be over the next four years.
That is in part because Trump himself is a very erratic figure who says things that are nonsensical, even by his own standards. And also because while there are documents such as Project 2025 which were created by Trump’s ideological allies in the reactionary movement, that document itself is not particularly detailed in a number of ways.
But one thing we can be sure is going to happen in the second Trump administration is that he will conduct a full-scale assault on America’s colleges and universities. As a candidate, he did promise to create taxes on private university endowments. And he also talked about removing the funding for universities that don’t bow to his various censorship demands.
Unlike a number of other Trumpian boasts and threats, he is very likely to follow through on these ones because Republicans in a number of states and localities have enacted many of the policies that Trump has talked about doing on the campaign trail.
Every leader’s weaknesses are clear before they rise to power if you look in the right places. We knew Gordon Brown’s seriousness could merge into tantrums long before the revelations about throwing phones at staff came to light, and we knew Boris Johnson’s joie de vivre hampered an eye for detail long before he caught the ball ‘from the back of the scrum’ and entered Number 10. If Nigel Farage ever makes it to the top job, as ever more people seem to be predicting, no one will be able to claim his destructive approach to politics was previously hidden.
Similarly, this new biography of Trump written by two New York Times journalists proves the US President’s weaknesses were evident beneath the bluster throughout his long business career in hotels, casinos and golf courses. If the authors are right, Trump has long been prone to taking big risks on a hunch, to acting litigiously and to seeking credit for things that aren’t his doing. The title suggests he was a Lucky Loser, though perhaps that is just an uncharitable way of saying he was a big winner against the odds.
As a businessman, the book shows how Trump began lucky, with ‘the equivalent of half a billion dollars from his father’, and ended lucky, with ‘another half billion as a reality television star’. These allowed him to take on huge debts, aided by paying as little tax as possible and reclaiming what tax he had paid whenever he could (as during Obama’s Great Recession recovery programme).
Trump’s dollars from the TV show ‘The Apprentice’ came not so much from appearance fees as from his right to half the profits from any sponsorship deals and from lending his name to all sorts of businesses attracted by his TV success, from health supplements to early video phones. These enabled him to keep afloat. But there were many lows to Trump’s business career and a number of his big projects declared bankruptcy in the 1990s and 2000s, leading the two authors to conclude, ‘He would have been better off betting on the stock market than on himself.’
If there’s one person responsible for Trump’s rise to the top, it is Mark Burnett, a British Falklands veteran who is now the United States Special Envoy to the UK. Burnett invented the TV programme ‘Survivor’ before creating an urban equivalent in The Apprentice (and later also creating ‘The Voice’). And if there’s one thing responsible for Trump’s rise it seems to be vanilla-and-mint Crest toothpaste as Proctor & Gamble were the first mass consumer company to do serious sponsorship of The Apprentice. They paid $1.1 million to get the contestants to come up with a new toothpaste, thereby drawing attention to the actual new vanilla-and-mint product sitting on shop shelves.
Ostensibly, this all has little to do with higher education. But Trump University (also known as Trump U) is one of the most notable of all the current US President’s past projects and one of the ventures undertaken just before he stood for the Presidency for the first time. Trump not only lent his name to the project, he also invested millions of dollars in return for 93% of the business –like Victor Kiam, he liked it so much he bought the company. But the authors of this book conclude the whole thing was a disaster from start to finish.
Beginning as a way to sell recorded lectures to small and medium-sized businesses, Trump University quickly moved into get-rich-quick in-person seminars. The Trump Elite Gold programme had a fee of $34,995 (about the same as the entire cost of a three-year degree in England or Wales). Prospective learners were told, ‘There are three groups of people … People who make things happen; people who wait for things to happen; and people who wonder, “What happened?”’ If you wanted to be in the first group, you were encouraged to open your wallet or else borrow the necessary fee.
One failed applicant for The Apprentice, Stephen Gilpin, found himself tapped up to work for Trump U but later wrote an exposé that claimed, ‘the focus for Trump University was purely on separating suckers from their money.’ At the time, Trump said he hand-picked the instructors, but he did no such thing. The whole venture ended up in three major lawsuits, which were settled just as Trump became President for the first time.
In the end, the story of Trump University confirms a truism: it is vital to protect the use of the term ‘University’ and to police it actively and in real time. The book serves as a reminder that – as Jo Johnson has argued persuasively on the HEPI blog – pausing new awards for University Title means the Office for Students is giving less attention to this area than it should.
It is ironic that the global leader of right-wing populism should not only have sought to establish his own ‘University’ but that, having done so, it should embody in such exaggerated form all the negatives that populists tend to ascribe to traditional universities: poor value for money; an unoriginal curriculum taught by ill-trained staff; and insufficient personal attention to students. However, if a new book being published today attacking UK and US universities, Bad Education: Why our universities are broken and how we can fix them by Matt Goodwin, is any guide to populism more generally, then the failure of Trump U has not deterred the attacks on places that actually do have the legal right to call themselves a ‘University’.
Goodwin starts with a chapter called ‘Why I decided to speak out’ though it could just have easily been called ‘The grass is always greener’ or ‘Looking back with rose-tinted spectacles’. The book’s core argument is that:
the rapid expansion of the university bureaucracy, the sharp shift to the left among university academics and the politicization of the wider system of higher education have left universities in a perilous state.
As a result, Goodwin argues, ‘our universities are not just letting down but betraying an entire generation of students.’
He notes that, as the number of EDI (Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion) champions has gone up, some types of diversity, such as diversity in academic thought, have gone down. But Goodwin is a political scientist rather than a historian and the problems he identifies are not as new as he makes out. Far-left students used to disrupt Enoch Powell, Keith Joseph and Leon Brittan when they spoke on campus; now they try and block Helen Joyce, Kathleen Stock and Jo Phoenix. The issue of whether such individuals should be allowed to speak even if some people on campus will be ‘offended’ are the same. The recourse to legislation in response is the same too: the rows of the 1980s led to the Education (No. 2) Act (1986) and the rows of today led to the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act (2023).
Notably, Goodwin’s views seem to have changed even more over time than the institutions he criticises. Two decades ago, Goodwin was a progressive studying for a PhD under Professor Roger Eatwell, an expert in fascism and populism at the University of Bath, after which he moved to Manchester and Nottingham, where he worked with political scientists like Rob Ford and Philip Cowley, and thereafter to Kent. These days, Goodwin has not only given up his professorship but is found speaking at Reform UK meetings while accepting a job as a GB News presenter.
And while Goodwin says his book has been 20 years in the making, it reads like it was 20 weeks in the writing. That is not meant to be rude for the piece is pacey, personal and polemical – and all the more readable for that. But while it is based in part on others’ research – including pieces of HEPI output – it generally draws from just one well: the place inhabited by Eric Kaufman, Jonathan Haidt and Niall Ferguson. The dust jacket includes endorsements from Douglas Murray, Claire Fox and Nigel Biggar among others.
Goodwin’s pamphleteer-style of writing ensures his text has little in common with the meticulous research on recent university history by Mike Shattock or Roger Brown and Helen Carasso or Steve Jones (who will be writing his own review of the book for HEPI in due course). Nonetheless, whisper it quietly but – whether you like his general approach or not, whether you like his new acquaintances or not and whether you like his writing style or not – Matt Goodwin may have something of a point.
Universities do not always welcome or reflect the full diversity of viewpoints in the way that perhaps they should, given their business is generating and imparting knowledge. It has been said many times before by others, so it is far from original, yet that doesn’t make it false. Goodwin quotes the US economist Thomas Sowell: ‘when you hear university academics talk about diversity, ask them how many conservatives are in their sociology department.’ It seems a fair question.
But grappling with that is not easy. The best answer, Goodwin argues, is a muscular response. Rather than leaving it to the sector to resolve its own issues, he wants to see hard-nosed interventions from policymakers and regulators:
only government action and new legislation, or pressure from outside universities, can change the incentive structures on campus. This means adopting a proactive rather than a passive strategy, making it clear that the individual freedom of scholars and students is, ultimately, more important than the freedom or autonomy of the university.
At the very end, Goodwin even argues someone should ensure ‘all universities be regularly audited for academic freedom and free speech violations’, with fines for any that transgress. Yet that begs more questions than it answers: we don’t know who would do the audit or what the rules for it would be.
So there is a paradox at the heart of Goodwin’s critique. He ascribes the problems he sees to flaws in the ‘system’ whereby the number of university administrators, institutions’ central bureaucracy and the pay of vice-chancellors have all increased rapidly. But such changes have often reflected:
external influences, such as the increase in the regulation of education (in response to scandals of the Trump U variety);
the need to have flattering statistics (such as to present to the Treasury in the battle for public resources); and
recognition that the old ways of working are not going to root out inappropriate behaviours (for example, sexual harassment).
Perhaps making universities more accountable to regulators and policymakers will make them bastions of free speech in the way Goodwin hopes, but might it not just clog up the lives of academics even more?
Reprinted with permission of ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION. All rights reserved.
Australia’s universities are some of the most prestigious and highly-ranked in the OECD. Yet the sector is arguably in crisis.
It narrowly escaped a potentially devastating hit to the $47.8 billion in annual revenue generated by international education, with proposed international students caps only just scuppered in parliament’s last sitting fortnight of the year.
But it is again being rocked by headlines around “wage theft” and millions of dollars wasted on consulting fees by some of our biggest universities.
A damning report by the National Tertiary Education Union has labelled this a “crisis of governance” constituting “reckless spending’’ by “the overpaid executive class”.
Ouch.
Yet Australia’s education system is strong by global standards, ranking third globally, and is home to several prestigious universities that consistently rank among the best in the world.
It is unlikely that a sector built on advancing human potential has solely reached this point by maliciously setting out to hurt its own backbone – its faculty.
Rather, systemic problems often indicate structural sectoral flaws, and ineffective means to address them. And Australia’s university system is not immune by any means.
A legacy issue of systemic complexity
We cannot know with certainty if there are indeed some bad actors in this story. Possibly.
But what is undeniably evident are the range of sectoral factors contributing to the sector’s longstanding history of poor record-keeping, including the challenges posed by its complex workforce structure.
Payroll compliance in universities is highly complex due to the combination of intricate awards, unique enterprise agreements, and a history of poor record-keeping.
For instance, universities rely heavily on casual staff, working under often-opaque arrangements. Compensable tasks such as marking essays or tutorial attendance are governed by intricate rules or piece-rate agreements, complicating the tracking of hours and payment.
These layers of complexity create incomplete and inaccurate timesheet data, making it nearly impossible for a human to verify when employees worked and whether they were paid correctly.
And so the resulting payroll errors aren’t just mistakes – they represent a systemic failing with devastating consequences all round.
Underpaid employees face reduced morale, a loss of trust in their employers, and financial stress that often disproportionately affects the most vulnerable. Menwhile, the underpaying universities risk potentially enormous fines and suffer from deep reputational damage, as has been demonstrated recently.
Worse still, is the fact that attempts at resolving these issues are also failing, because they represent nothing more than curative and labour-intensive bandaid “solutions”.
For instance, many universities, after spending millions on consultants to recalculate and backpay impacted employees, have now shifted to hiring large internal teams to manage ongoing compliance efforts.
These teams are tasked with monitoring timesheet accuracy, tracking errors, and managing ongoing remediation efforts, seemingly indefinitely, as if fixing this problem should somehow just be “business as usual”.
Yet treatments should never be “business as usual”, because this is to accept that the problem will never be resolved.
Instead, systemic problems like this one require systemic solutions that assume eliminating the problem is indeed possible.
Fixing the system, not the symptoms
For this to occur, Australia’s tertiary education sector must urgently stop outdated and cumbersome legacy practices and instead embrace preventative long-term solutions that rebuild trust, and support fair and accurate pay for all employees.
In practice, this would involve the adoption of advanced compliance tools and technologies that enable payroll teams to efficiently and accurately monitor payroll end-to-end. This allows teams to rapidly identify errors before, not after, a pay run, and drastically reduce the need for constant manual interventions.
Introducing independent oversight by risk and compliance teams will also help to reduce the risk of a “marking your own homework” approach by human resources and payroll teams, bringing a fresh perspective to compliance checks.
Regular training to keep payroll and compliance teams up to date on changes in legislation, award conditions, and enterprise agreements are also a must in industries like education where payroll practices are complex and dynamic.
And, finally, all of these processes should be consistent across all schools and faculties to avoid disparities and confusion, and reduce errors caused by varying practices.
Any university with the courage to break from centuries of backwards-looking remediation practices and instead embrace a forward-looking, technology-based approach would not only demonstrate bold and refreshing leadership.
It would also help to create enormous goodwill for a sector in desperate need of positive news and, critically, potentially save millions in the process.
Fred van er Tang is chief executive of payroll compliance technology companyPaidRight.
In 2023, Korean video game company WeMade pledged to donate the equivalent of one billion Korean won ($695,988) in Wemix tokens—a cryptocurrency linked to the blockchain platform of the same name—to Seoul National University.
What seemed like a moment for celebration quickly descended into controversy, with the university eventually ceasing to accept cryptocurrency donations altogether.
So, what happened? Shortly after the donation was made, WeMade reportedly liquidated a large share of its coins, causing a significant currency devaluation and meaning SNU’s donation was no longer worth so much—a problem given that the funds had been earmarked for a specific project.
That wasn’t the only barrier. Under South Korean financial regulations, the university was also unable to open a corporate account for virtual asset exchange. With calls to change the law unanswered, the university was left holding a volatile currency it was unable to convert to cash.
Now Korean regulators are reportedly considering allowing the country’s universities to convert cryptocurrency for the first time—potentially opening a significant new fundraising stream for the country’s financially ailing sector.
Elsewhere, universities are already cashing in on the crypto craze, most notably in the U.S. In 2021, the University of Pennsylvania received $5 million in Bitcoin from an unnamed donor. A year later, Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, a leading blockchain, donated the equivalent of $9.4 million in USDC coin to the University of Maryland to fund public health research in the wake of the pandemic.
The Giving Block, a U.S.-based platform that facilitates cryptocurrency donations to nonprofit organizations, said that the higher education sector has been one of its “biggest growth areas” over the past two years, with Washington State University and Northeastern University among the company’s clients.
“There are several things driving this, like the booming crypto market and broader mainstream adoption, but the biggest driver for schools is simply following the money,” said Pat Duffy, its co-founder.
With analysts suggesting popular currencies like Bitcoin will continue to grow in value this year, spurred on by newly inaugurated Donald Trump’s crypto-friendly rhetoric, universities could be set to benefit—if they are prepared to manage the risks that come with the volatile landscape.
“For donors in the U.S., the biggest driver is the tax incentive,” said Duffy. “You can skip capital gains taxes on appreciated assets and still get a deduction for the full market value.
“The donor pays no taxes on their appreciated crypto, and neither does the school. Donors across the country are eliminating tens of millions of dollars in tax liability by choosing to give with crypto, and giving larger gifts … as a result.”
For universities, accepting cryptocurrency may also allow them to target their fundraising at a younger, tech-savvy market. “They can attract more people if they accept crypto payments,” said Nir Kshetri, professor of management at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
It’s not just donations where universities are capitalizing. Some, like Bentley University, have begun accepting tuition fees in cryptocurrency, with significant implications for international students.
In Nigeria, for example, converting the naira to the U.S. dollar to make fee payments can be a complicated process. For some, paying in decentralized cryptocurrency is simpler and faster, according to Kshetri.
However, a key risk for universities is the unpredictability of cryptocurrency markets, with fears compounded by the volatility of Bitcoin in recent years. While the market is recovering, crashes such as the one experienced in 2022 have left a lasting impact and made some universities wary.
“Right now it’s at a peak, but who’s to say we won’t see a return to what we saw two years ago when the bottom fell out?” cautioned Bill Stanczykiewicz, director of the Fund Raising School at Indiana University Indianapolis’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.
According to Stanczykiewicz, best practice is to avoid holding on to cryptocurrency, even if it is predicted to increase in value. “What we say to fundraisers is if you get crypto, turn it into your national currency as quickly as you can,” he said, or use a platform like the Giving Block, which does this for you.
However, this approach isn’t universal. In Paraguay, Universidad Americana is less risk-averse than some, evaluating the market before converting any cryptocurrency payments.
Universities considering going down this avenue also need to consider the ethical aspects, said Stanczykiewicz, and whether such donations adhere to their institution’s values.
Specifically, the environmental impact of currencies like Bitcoin is a concern for some. However, Kshetri argued, the coin has already been mined prior to the donation—that is, the damage has already been done. “Just to transfer that Bitcoin from you to me consumes very little … electricity,” he said.
Whatever your ethical view, those interviewed for this article agreed on this: Cryptocurrency is here to stay and, for universities, it’s simply a question of how quickly they embrace it.
“Historically, it was regulatory uncertainty that made universities nervous about crypto acceptance and investing,” said Duffy. Today, he continued, in the U.S., “regulatory clarity and the political support we see on both sides of the aisle have cleared up those concerns.”
With countries like South Korea set to provide a regulatory green light, too, it may not be long before institutions around the globe follow in the footsteps of their U.S. counterparts.
2024 was a difficult year for UK higher education, particularly in the international arena.
Universities from all parts of the sector struggled to meet their overseas student recruitment targets in an increasingly competitive global market. Some international research collaborations – once encouraged by governments and funding councils – came under tighter scrutiny.
And many campuses were rocked by protests over the conflict in the Middle East. I have touched on the last of these issues in a previous Wonkhe article – but it is worth revisiting in the light of ongoing tensions.
Campus protests
There are wars underway in diverse parts of the world – last year saw serious loss of life in Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar and Yemen, to name only a few. However, nowhere attracts the attention of staff and students like the invasion of the Gaza Strip which followed the 7 October attack on Israel and the abduction of hundreds of civilian hostages.
Some argue that this is unfair or, at least, disproportionate – why has Israel faced so much criticism when other regimes have committed atrocities against civilian populations with no demonstrations on British campuses? While that is undeniable, it is also true that the Palestinian people in Gaza are enduring a horrendous situation; despite the recent ceasefire, tens of thousands of innocent lives have been lost and hundreds of thousands are still denied access to basic essentials. The anguish and concern expressed by staff and students in response to their plight are surely justified.
During 2024, that concern manifested itself in encampments across 30 or so universities. There were numerous marches, often organised in combination with civic gatherings. The public events tended to focus on demands that the government condemn the Israeli military action and use its influence to stop the war.
On campus, the centre of attention was slightly different, with pressure on university administrations not only to provide financial support for Palestinian scholars but also to disinvest in companies which supplied arms to Israel. This drew on a longer running campaign which argued that any investment in the arms trade is fundamentally immoral. The incoming Labour government’s withdrawal of some export licences has not changed the situation – the issue has become a rallying point for those who feel powerless to alleviate the suffering of innocent people in the war zone.
Formulating a response
The protests have put university managers under considerable pressure. Initially, administrators were reluctant to say anything, being anxious to avoid alienating different groups or to make individuals who had an affiliation with Israel feel under attack. UK senior managers were also aware of the deep divisions on some American campuses – several heads of institutions resigned after making infelicitous statements while navigating between radical student opinion and aggrieved benefactors.
Even so, quite quickly senior managers in British universities began to share ideas and formulate a common position. This generally involved voicing support for academic freedom and freedom of expression while calling on protestors to respect the position of others. There were nuances – some institutions banned flags or outlawed certain contentious slogans; several announced that they would not talk to activists until camps were disbanded. In the face of prolonged disruption, a few resorted to legal interventions to remove tented villages.
For the most part, though, UK universities engaged with all shades of opinion, facilitated peaceful protest and sought to foster rather than stifle debate. The monthly colloquies at meetings organised by Universities UK were supplemented by occasional reflective discussions at events elsewhere.
Like others, the University of Glasgow’s senior management and university court (the governing body) considered the ethical position as well as the politics of the situation. We communicated regularly with the wider community, reached out to activists and met with faith groups, student representatives, civic leaders and national bodies.
A key concern was to ensure that students (especially, in this instance, Jewish and Muslim students and staff) always felt welcome and safe on campus. We were one of the first institutions to call for the release of the hostages and a humanitarian ceasefire. The university issued regular reminders about good conduct but did not rush to take disciplinary action against individuals. When students occupied a building, senior managers met with the leaders; we permitted a peaceful demonstration outside the door of the governing body meeting. In response to Students’ Representative Council (SRC) and trade union demands, we undertook a widespread consultation on disinvestment in the arms trade.
Despite vociferous calls from students and trade unions, Glasgow’s Court voted two-to-one against disinvestment; following a thoughtful discussion, a majority agreed with senior managers that it was morally right for the UK to have a defence sector and that this should be distinguished both from the conflict in the Middle East and from the question of which countries the UK sold arms to. In essence, the Court’s position was unchanged from 2020, when officers were instructed to write to government ministers calling for tighter restrictions on sales to countries which breached international law, or which had poor human rights records.
Towards reconstruction
The decision on disinvestment does not constitute the sum of our response to the situation in the Middle East. Alongside this, we have sought to build on Glasgow’s status as a University of Sanctuary through practical action in support of those suffering in Gaza and other conflict zones.
A key aspect of this was the conference we organised in December, in conjunction with Professor Sultan Barakat of Hamad Bin Khalifa University, on the post-war reconstruction of higher education in Gaza. With most university campuses in the area reduced to rubble, reconstruction might seem like a momentous task, but the event attracted nearly 200 registrations. It drew strong support from UK universities and significant engagement from colleagues based in the Middle East.
The conference delegates heard directly from victims of the conflict. They learned of its disastrous impact and considered academic analyses of aid interventions (often meagre and inadequate) as well as efforts to support students and academics to continue their studies. The attendees engaged in the difficult task of identifying how UK higher education can best support universities in the region to rebuild.
Key messages included the undying hunger of Palestinians in Gaza for higher education, their determination to create a better future and the belief that, with international support, all obstacles to reconstruction can be overcome. Scotland’s former First Minister Humza Yousaf (who gave a moving address in the main Glasgow synagogue following the 7 October attack on Israel) told the conference: “this is not about taking sides – it’s about being pro-humanity.”
The conversation will not cease – we intend to reconvene in Qatar and online in the spring, and to strengthen links with colleagues in key agencies, such as the Council for At-Risk Academics (CARA), who attended the conference. We will continue to draw support from a coalition of interests, including the UCU, whose local representatives actively supported the event.
In the coming semester, we anticipate further protest and vigorous debate at Glasgow over the correct response to the war in Gaza and its aftermath. The situation there remains desperate and the prospects for a lasting peace – for Palestinians, Israelis and Lebanese alike – are still very uncertain. But the events of the past few days should give us hope, and we in the higher education sector should do everything we can to advance the cause of peace and reconstruction. By identifying solutions to age-old problems, sharing our resources and giving practical assistance to colleagues in need, we can help make hope a reality.
By Adam Habib, Vice-Chancellor at SOAS University of London, and Lord Dr. Michael Hastings of Scarisbrick CBE, Chair of the Board of Trustees at SOAS.
The business model of English higher education is broken. We are not sure that this simple fact is sufficiently understood by all stakeholders in higher education. Do not mistake us: we all recognise the serious financial crises that most English universities are confronting. But this is not the same as understanding its causal features and what to do about it. The latest financial report from the Office for Students (OfS), released in mid-November, suggests 72% of English universities will be in deficit by the end of the academic year if they continue as is. It does not suggest much about how to address it. In fact, it does not even ask why the other 28% of universities are not in deficit. Is this because of their historical endowments or their specific student profile, or are they doing something the others are not?
But the OfS is not the only stakeholder reluctant to ask the hard questions: how we got here and what to do about it. This malady afflicts almost all other stakeholders. Let’s begin with the basics. Almost three decades ago, the British government committed to massifying education and ensuring that at least 50% of their school-leaving population had the privilege of going to university. The challenge was how to pay for it. They introduced fees, first as a small proportion of the actual cost in 2006, and then to cover the entire cost in 2012 (at least for Business degrees, Humanities and the Social Sciences). The popular backlash this generated, especially since almost all universities rushed to implement the maximum permitted fee, led the politicians to subsequently avoid increasing fees in line with inflation. The net effect was that within a few years, the actual cost of university education outstripped the fees.
The solution followed by most universities was to increase international fees and their intakes of foreign students. To attract more of these students, universities borrowed heavily, built shiny new facilities, expanded their pastoral services and grew their student numbers. This was assisted in part by the removal of student number caps on home students. Costs increased, and to cover these, more income was required, which led to even higher international fees and more foreign students.
All higher education stakeholders were complicit in this. The Government initially supported this solution because it obviated the need for more government subsidies and enabled foreign currency earnings. Vice-chancellors and higher education executives deluded themselves in thinking that the international postgraduate masters students came to the UK universities because of their institutions’ research reputations, even though survey after survey demonstrated that these students were increasingly attracted by the prospect of employment prospects and the post-study visa. Unions, both academic and professional service ones, acquiesced given that these international fees enabled higher salaries and subsidised greater research time for academics. There was even broader public support as it contained the fees for domestic students.
Until of course, a new breed of ethnically oriented right-wing politicians mobilised on the chauvinistic instinct of there being too many foreigners in Britain. This first manifested in Brexit, then China and subsequently all foreigner-bashing, and finally visa restrictions on dependents. The net effect was a dramatic fall in applications and enrolment of international students, with the ensuing financial crisis of universities in the UK. A positive spin-off of this state of affairs is that almost all stakeholders now recognise the flimsy fiscal foundation of universities. The negative feature is that it still has not generated an honest reflection and behaviour on the part of all stakeholders or a sufficiently deep deliberation on the business model of higher education in the UK and what to do about it.
Take, for instance, the stance of government. The Secretary of State for Education announced in the House of Commons on 4 November 2024 the first university fee increase for undergraduate students in eight years. Yet the Chancellor had increased the Employer National insurance a few days before from 13.8 to 15 percent. The net effect is a further loss of £59 million for universities in the UK from the 2025/26 academic year.
Neither is the debate in universities more imaginative on what to do about the financial crisis and the business model of higher education. University vice-chancellors and Universities UK have recognised the need to revert to greater public funding for higher education, although there is a broad recognition that this is an unlikely solution in the near future given the fiscal crisis of the state. They have suggested through individual vice-chancellor advocacies that universities would require the financial equivalence of £12,000 fees, but again, almost all recognise the political challenge of achieving this during a cost-of-living crisis. The reluctant fallback back? A retreat to international student fees by retracting or reforming the visa restrictions, thereby allowing for further increases in income from foreign students.
But this is just not a feasible solution for the long term. Higher education in the UK has priced itself out for ordinary international students looking solely for a higher education qualification. The only rationales for postgraduate master’s students accessing UK universities, given their high-cost structure, are either post-study employment or the learning of a specific qualification not available in alternative higher education settings. The former is increasingly becoming politically unfeasible, and the latter is not a sufficiently large market to financially sustain British universities.
This is in addition to the moral and commercial challenges of this business model. As we have suggested elsewhere, there should be serious objections to this model, which is effectively directed towards sucking out resources from countries far more impoverished than the UK, to essentially cross-subsidise domestic citizens. Moreover, it accelerates the brain drain, weakening institutional capacities and human capabilities in the majoritarian world at precisely the moment when such societies require an enhancement of capabilities to address the local manifestations of transnational challenges like climate change, pandemics, food insecurity and war.
Where to go from here, then? First, there is an urgent need for an honest conversation led by government without any smoke and mirrors on the fiscal latitude available to it and the consequences thereof for the financing of higher education. Second, there is a need for a thorough reflection on what has fiscally worked, and what has not in the recent past on the management and executive stewardship of universities in the UK. Third, there is a need for an honest discussion in universities on the fiscal viability of excessively small classes and unduly low staff-student ratios, 40% research time for all teaching and research contracts, and the importance of institutional differentiation in mandates and how these should speak to the former two elements. Finally, we need to think through the limits of cross-subsidising from international student fees and what new opportunities are opening up globally for fulfilling our institutional mandates.
One opportunity, that has not been sufficiently explored by British universities, is how to assist in the education and training of hundreds of millions of young people in the majoritarian world. This is an urgent necessity not only for the economic development of these societies but also for enabling societies across the world to manage the transnational challenges of our time, without which we may not survive as a human species. Obviously, this will not be possible on the existing cost structures or business models of higher education. But partnering with universities in the Global South, involving the joint development of curricula, co-teaching and co-assessment, could bring down cost structures of higher education. This could then feed into more reasonable fees being charged, thereby opening up new higher education markets for British universities. Cost structures could also be reconsidered in relation to scale. The more students there are within a program, limited to pedagogical requirements, the more cost per student is reduced, and the more competitive fees can become. New technologies involving online teaching and global classrooms, many of which were pioneered for our own students during the Covid-19 Pandemic, can make this equitable transnational teaching even more feasible.
Some forms of transnational teaching are already underway in UK universities. But these often take the form of online learning, overseas campuses and franchise models of higher education, all of which are only directed at obviating the financial challenges of British universities. While we would be reluctant to take rigid positions against these models – they may indeed be relevant in certain contextual circumstances – we do hold that the equitable partnership model identified above holds the pedagogical benefit of enabling learning that is both globally grounded and locally relevant. It also does not pit the financial security of British universities against that of universities of the majoritarian world. Essentially, these equitable teaching partnerships can pioneer one element of a new business model that enhances collaboration and mutual benefit for universities in the UK and the majoritarian world.
Such a model of higher education could also become part of the soft power arsenal of the UK. Increasingly, government has broached the idea of a global Britain. This would be a Britain recognised as a collaborative partner of other nations, enabling them to achieve their national objectives, while enabling itself to be economically competitive and socially responsive to both its own citizens and its international obligations. An equitable orientation to its higher education system would assist this strategic national agenda.
We are by no means suggesting that equitable transnational learning should replace all other forms of teaching in UK higher education. This would be unrealistic and, frankly, would violate the responsibility of British universities to be nationally responsive. Instead, we recommend that in the pursuit of a financially sustainable higher education system, a diverse set of income strategies – subsidy, domestic fees, international fees, ODL, executive education and equitable transnational educational partnerships – is required. This final strategy not only opens up a new higher education student market at a different price point but also enables us to square our imperative to be financially sustainable with our commitment to be socially and globally responsive.
The strategic challenge of managing higher education institutions in the contemporary era is the management of tensions between competing imperatives. It also requires thinking outside the box, innovating and finding new markets, and servicing these at new price points, while continuing to meet the social obligations implicit in the mandate of universities. This is what we believe is sometimes missing from the deliberations on making British universities financially sustainable. The debate can only be enriched and the recommendations made more robust if we are prepared to think beyond what we are comfortable with.
