AUSTIN, Texas, Sept. 3, 2025 — The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a lawsuit today to stop enforcement of a new, unconstitutional law that turns every public university in Texas into a speech-free zone starting at 10 p.m. every day. FIRE is suing the University of Texas System on behalf of student musicians, journalists, political organizers, and religious students who span the ideological spectrum, all of whom the new Texas law threatens to silence.
“The First Amendment doesn’t set when the sun goes down,” said FIRE senior supervising attorney JT Morris. “University students have expressive freedom whether it’s midnight or midday, and Texas can’t just legislate those constitutional protections out of existence.”
In 2019, Texas was a national leader in protecting student speech, passing a robust law enshrining free speech on public university campuses. But after a series of high-profile protests over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2024, the Texas legislature reversed course and passed Senate Bill 2972, transforming the speech-protective 2019 law into one mandating that the state’s public universities and colleges impose a host of sweeping censorship measures.
FIRE’s lawsuit is challenging two major provisions of the law, which went into effect on Sept. 1. The first requires public universities in Texas to ban all “expressive activities” on campus between the hours of 10 p.m. and 8 a.m., which the law defines as “any speech or expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment.”
That is a shocking prohibition of protected speech at public universities. Under the new law, universities now have the power to discipline students at nighttime for wearing a hat with a political message, playing music, writing an op-ed, attending candlelight vigils — even just chatting with friends.
“This law gives campus administrators a blank check to punish speech, and that authority will inevitably be used to target unpopular speech,” said FIRE attorney Adam Steinbaugh. “Administrators have plenty of ways to prevent disruptive conduct that do not involve such a broad censorship mandate.”
FIRE is also challenging the law’s mandate that universities ban student groups from a host of protected expression during the last two weeks of any semester or term, including inviting guest speakers, using amplified sound, or playing a drum. The Fellowship of Christian University Students at UT-Dallas, for example, would be unable to invite an off-campus minister to lead a prayer during finals.
“Our organization gives students on campus a place to worship with one another and hear from Christian leaders,” said FOCUS committee chair Juke Matthews. “For many of them, this is their church away from home. This law would yank away part of their support system right at the most stressful time of the term.”
If state officials and campus administrators want to regulate disruptive speech, the First Amendment demands that they narrowly tailor any such regulation. But Texas’ blanket ban makes no distinctions about the noise level or location of the expression. The Texas law would permit a tuba concert during finals weeks, but not one with drums. And the law exempts “commercial speech” from its sweeping bans on speech. So Texas students are free to advertise t-shirts featuring the First Amendment after hours… but could face discipline for wearing them.
FIRE is suing on behalf of a diverse group of students and student organizations whose speech the new Texas law will harm. Along with the UT-Dallas chapter of FOCUS, other plaintiffs include:
Young Americans for Liberty is an Austin-based national grassroots organization for students who want to advance the cause of liberty. Many of their student members at Texas universities engage in protests, petitions, and “Free Speech Balls” that traditionally take place during evening hours. FIRE is also representing an individual YAL member who attends UT-Austin and would personally face punishment for inviting YAL speakers in the final weeks of term or for sharing his political opinions at the wrong hour.
The Society of Unconventional Drummers is a registered student organization at UT-Austin that puts on performances throughout the term, including at the end of each semester. Texas’s arbitrary rule banning percussion the last two weeks of any semester would force the students to cancel one of their most popular shows.
Strings Attached is a student music group that holds public performances on UT-Dallas’s campus, including in the final two weeks of term. Some of their concerts take place after hours or during the day with sound amplification, both of which could fall afoul of the Texas law’s sweeping bans.
The Retrograde is a new, independent student newspaper that serves the UT-Dallas community. Whether it’s writing a story, emailing sources, editing a column, much of its staff’s newsgathering and reporting necessarily happens after Texas’ 10 p.m. free speech cutoff.
“Under these new rules, we’re at risk of being shut down simply for posting breaking news as it happens,” said Retrograde Editor-in-Chief Gregorio Olivares. “With that threat hanging over our heads, many student journalists across the UT system face the impossible decision between self-censorship and running a story that criticizes the powers on campus.”
FIRE’s clients will ask the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas to issue a preliminary injunction to prevent UT’s new speech bans from taking effect. The defendants in the lawsuit include the members of the UT System Board of Regents, UT System Chancellor John M. Zerwas, UT-Austin President Jim Davis, and UT-Dallas President Prabhas V. Moghe.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to defending and sustaining the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought—the most essential qualities of liberty. FIRE recognizes that colleges and universities play a vital role in preserving free thought within a free society. To this end, we place a special emphasis on defending the individual rights of students and faculty members on our nation’s campuses, including freedom of speech, freedom of association, due process, legal equality, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience.
CONTACT:
Alex Griswold, Communications Campaign Manager, FIRE: 215-717-3473; [email protected]
The higher education landscape is undergoing a profound transformation shaped by rapid technological advancements and shifting student expectations. The 2025 U.S. Student Wellbeing Survey, conducted by Studiosity in partnership with YouGov, offers in-depth insights into student behavior, particularly their growing reliance on AI tools for academic support.
The report states that 82 percent of U.S. students have used AI for assignments or study tasks. This trend is even more pronounced among international students, with 40 percent reporting regular AI use compared with 24 percent of domestic students. The findings make clear: AI is no longer emerging—it’s central to the student academic experience.
While student use of AI is high, only 58 percent of respondents feel their universities are adapting quickly enough to provide institution-approved AI tools, a figure that shows minimal improvement from 2024 (57 percent). Furthermore, 55 percent of students now expect their institution to provide AI support, reflecting shifting priorities among students. This year, “confidence” overtook “speed” as the main reason students prefer institution-provided AI tools, underscoring the demand for reliable and ethical solutions.
The data also highlight heightened stress levels linked to AI use, with 66 percent of students reporting some level of anxiety about incorporating AI into their studies. Students voiced concerns about academic integrity, accidental plagiarism, and cognitive offloading. One student said, “AI tools usually need a well-detailed prompt. Most times AI gets outdated data. Most importantly, the more reliable AI tools require payment, which makes things unnecessarily hard.” This highlights an equity issue in AI use, as some students reported paying for a premium AI tool to get better results. Those experiencing constant academic stress were more likely to report regular AI use, suggesting a need for support systems that integrate human connection with technological assistance.
The research emphasizes actionable strategies for universities:
Develop or purchase institution-backed AI tools with clear ethical guidelines.
Provide transparent and consistent policies to help students understand how to use AI responsibly.
Integrate AI support with existing academic services to preserve human interaction and peer engagement.
Ensure equitable, affordable access to AI technologies to avoid exacerbating existing inequalities.
As students navigate an increasingly AI-driven academic environment, universities must step into a leadership role. Providing ethical, institution-approved AI tools isn’t just about keeping pace with technology; it’s about safeguarding learning, reducing stress, and fostering confidence in academic outcomes. The 2025 survey makes one thing clear: students are ready for universities to meet them where they are in their AI use, but they are asking for guidance and assurance in doing so.
To download a copy of the USA report, click here. For global reports and surveys, including cross-institutional meta-analyses and educator surveys, click here.
If you have any questions or comments about this blog post, please contact us.
In the midst of a global crisis in social relations, spiralling levels of harassment, scapegoating and online and interpersonal hostility have become routine, especially for members of minoritised and stigmatised communities.
As microcosms of wider society, university spaces are not immune to these social, cultural and political tensions. Yet the ways prejudices play out in higher education often go under-explored. As a result, many students feel unsafe and unsupported at a time when multiple points of crisis have exposed student communities to a heightened risk of harassment.
In response to these mounting pressures, the OfS has emphasised the urgent need for action. From August 2025, new requirements will compel institutions to actively address harassment and sexual misconduct. However, current discussions too often overlook the full spectrum of harassment. Non-sexual forms of hostility—such as racist, disablist, homophobic, and transphobic harassment—frequently remain at the periphery of institutional priorities.
Our current research, due to be completed in July 2027, addresses this gap. It takes an inclusive, victim-centred approach to examining all forms of harassment. By investigating the barriers students face in accessing effective support and understanding their lived experiences of violence, microaggressions, and exclusion, the study will generate critical insights to help universities create truly safe and supportive environments.
The importance of self-definition
A crucial aspect of this research is that harassment cannot, and should not, be narrowly defined by institutional standards or legislation alone. This is why allowing students to define what constitutes as harassment to them is so important.
Self-definition acknowledges that students are best placed to interpret the behaviours that harm them, informed by their unique identities, cultural contexts, and lived experiences.
This approach moves beyond rigid, exclusionary notions of who experiences harassment and in what form. It acknowledges the subjective and often complex nature of harassment and fosters empathy and inclusivity. For instance, a seemingly minor microaggression may carry significant emotional weight for a student facing intersecting disadvantages. Equally, behaviours such as online victimisation, sustained name-calling, or subtle exclusion may not fit traditional definitions of harassment, yet they can deeply impact an individual.
Our 2020 pilot study at the University of Leicester embraced this framework of self-definition. Students identified more than a dozen identity characteristics as a motivating factor in their victimisation. Amongst some of the more often discussed identity characteristics, students spoke about how their political views, subcultural status, accent, dress and appearance, and their status as a mature student were also reasons they felt they were targeted.
The emotional, behavioural and educational impacts of targeted harassment were diverse, far-reaching and profoundly damaging to their student experience.
Self-definition does not mean abandoning clear policies or legal obligations. Instead, it complements existing frameworks by placing student voices at the centre of institutional responses. By understanding often ‘hidden’ and under-acknowledged forms of harassment, universities can build more holistic, evidence-based systems to support victims. For instance, reporting systems should allow students to disclose harassment that targets multiple aspects of their identity – for example, a student who is both Black and gay, or a student who is Muslim and disabled. Staff training can then focus on recognising these nuanced impacts, ensuring that responses are handled with cultural sensitivity and empathy.
Working across institutions
Sector-wide progress has been hindered by fear of reputational damage, a culture of conservatism, and, in some cases, a continued denial of the problem entirely. Where reliable research on harassment within HE exists, it generally focuses on one particular institution or just a single form of harassment. Our approach is different.
We are working across five participating higher education institutions (HEIs) in England, purposefully selected for their very different geographical locations, student demographics and institutional profile. By working cross-institutionally and through our continued collaborations with OfS and Universities UK, we can maximise the impact of our findings and shift the narrative surrounding harassment and sexual misconduct. Rather than being perceived as an issue confined to a handful of “bad apple” universities, this approach acknowledges that such problems exist across the sector and require a unified response.
This technique should also help to reduce fears of reputational damage, as it frames the issue as a systemic challenge rather than a localised failure. It also fosters a culture of accountability and continuous improvement, showing that universities are committed to addressing misconduct comprehensively rather than reacting defensively after incidents occur.
Working with a range of HEIs in this way allows us to produce a suite of student-informed resources that can be tailored to individual HEIs. The insights gained from our research will not merely reflect existing challenges; they offer a roadmap for compliance with OfS conditions and for creating transformative, lasting change. By prioritising inclusivity and evidence, institutions can fulfil their obligations while fostering safer, more equitable spaces for all students.
To find out more, please reach out to the research team at [email protected]
As summer draws to a close, the UK finds itself in the grip of growing public frustration over the slow processing of asylum claims and the perceived misuse of the student visa system. With over 111,000 asylum applications recorded in the year to June 2025 – the highest number ever recorded in the UK – the pressure is growing on the UK government, local councils and public services to reduce both processing times and the cost of housing asylum seekers.
Currently, the UK is facing a backlog of more than 106,000 asylum cases, including 51,0000 appeals, with average wait times stretching to 53 weeks. The use of hotels to accommodate asylum seekers – originally a temporary measure introduced by the last government – has become a flashpoint for anti-migrant protests nationwide.
Spotlight on international education
As the asylum debate intensifies, UK universities are increasingly being drawn into the spotlight. This is largely due to recent Home Office data revealing that 16,000 student visa holders claimed asylum in 2024 – more than any other visa category. Nearly 40% of these individuals had entered the UK legally from countries including Pakistan, Nigeria and Sri Lanka.
These figures have already prompted the government to introduce a new wave of visa reforms in its Immigration White Paper, including reducing the post-study work entitlement from two years to 18 months and imposing sanctions on universities with high rates of post-study asylum claims. From September 2025, UK universities may face fines, public naming or even temporary bans on international student recruitment if they fail to meet new compliance standards.
The risk of reputational fallout
For universities already navigating considerable financial pressures, the implications of these restrictions could be severe. Just one year’s intake of international students contribute almost £42 billion annually to the UK economy and represent a vital segment of enrolments across the sector. The growing association between universities and fraudulent asylum claims nevertheless risks undermining public trust and casting doubt on the integrity of university admissions processes.
This reputational risk also extends beyond domestic borders. If the UK is perceived globally as hostile or unpredictable in its treatment of international students, competitor destinations such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand may stand to gain from the UK’s inability to get its house in order and bring its asylum system under control. Moreover, the Graduate Route, once a cornerstone of the UK’s appeal to global talent, remains under constant threat of review, further fuelling uncertainty among prospective applicants.
Lessons for the academic year ahead
So, what should UK universities do in response to growing concerns about illegal immigration? First, universities must strengthen their admissions oversight. Higher education institutions must ensure robust financial and academic checks, particularly for applicants from high-risk regions, and be transparent about any shortcomings and plans for improvement to maintain government goodwill and reassure the public.
Second, universities must continue to support vulnerable students wherever in the world they may come from. Not all asylum claims are opportunistic. With the world around us changing apace, some students face genuine threats to their lives from political upheaval, persecution or conflict. This means universities should be prepared to offer legal guidance and pastoral support to those at risk and add legitimacy to the asylum claims of those in genuine danger.
Third, universities need to speak with a unified voice and collectively defend the value of international education. This includes countering populist narratives about fraudulent asylum claims and backdoor immigration with evidence-based accounts of how international students contribute to the economy, innovation and a flourishing society.
Finally, universities should be prepared to step up and engage with their local communities. The distinction between economic migrants, asylum seekers and international students is sadly all-too-often blurred in public discourse and populist rhetoric. Yet, with their strong and vibrant international communities, universities can help clarify these differences and highlight the positive contributions of their international students and staff, including through stories of civic engagement, volunteering and career successes.
Compliance calls
With no quick fixes to the asylum system in sight and public protests continuing as we head into the autumn, UK universities must not allow fear and frustration to erode the foundations of international education. While universities are not border agents, they do have a duty to comply with the systems that enable them to remain places of learning, inclusion and opportunity for people from across the world.
As we enter a new academic year, the challenge is therefore clear: UK universities must find ways to balance compassion with control, ensuring that future international admissions processes meet the expectations of both government and the society they serve.
Public colleges and universities in Illinois will now be required by law to supply contraception and abortion medication in the student health center or pharmacy, according to Illinois Public Media.
Democratic governor JB Pritzker signed HB 3709 into law Friday, requiring colleges to supply birth control and medication abortions starting this academic year. Only three other states—California, Massachusetts and New York—currently have similar laws.
The law was inspired in part by a student referendum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign regarding whether the university health center should offer medication abortions. About three-quarters of the more than 6,000 undergraduates who voted were in favor of the idea, but the university didn’t implement the idea, saying it didn’t have the expertise to provide abortions.
The governor also signed a bill increasing protections for abortion providers on the same day.
Paulina Cossette spent six years getting a doctoral degree with the goal of becoming a university professor. But it wasn’t long before she gave up on that path.
With higher education under political assault, and opportunities as well as job security diminished by enrollment declines, Cossette felt burnt out and disillusioned. So she quit her hard-won job as an assistant professor of American government at a small private college in Maryland and used the skills she’d learned to go into business for herself as a freelance copy editor.
Now Cossette is hearing from other newly minted Ph.D.s and tenured faculty who want out — so many, she’s expanded her business to help them leave academia, as she did.
Seemingly relentless attacks and funding cuts since the start of Donald Trump’s second presidential term have been “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said Cossette, who left higher education on the eve of the pandemic, in 2019. “I’m hearing from a lot more people that it’s too much.”
An exodus appears to be under way of Ph.D.s and faculty generally, who are leaving academia in the face of political, financial and enrollment crises. It’s a trend federal data and other sources show began even before Trump returned to the White House.
Nearly 70 percent of people receiving doctorates were already leaving higher education for industry, government and other sectors, not including those without job offers or who opted to continue their studies, according to the most recent available figures from the National Science Foundation — up from fewer than 50 percent decades ago.
As for faculty, more than a third of provosts reported higher-than-usual turnover last year, in a survey by Hanover Research and the industry publication Inside Higher Ed. That was before the turmoil of this late winter and spring.
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“People who can get out will get out,” said L. Maren Wood, director and CEO of the Center for Graduate Career Success, which works with doctoral and other graduate students at 69 colleges and universities to provide career help.
If the spree of general job-switching that followed Covid was dubbed “the Great Resignation,” Wood said, what she’s seeing now in higher education is “the Great Defection.”
Getting a Ph.D. is a traditional pipeline to an academic career. Now some of the brightest candidates — who have spent years doing cutting-edge research in their fields to prepare for faculty jobs — are leaving higher education or signing on with universities abroad, Wood said.
“It’s going to affect the quality of a student’s experience if they don’t get to study with those leading minds, who are going into private industry or to other countries,” she said.
“What’s the joke about those who can’t do, teach? You don’t want to be in a situation where the only people left in your classrooms are the ones who can’t do anything else.”
Parents sending children to college in the fall should know that they’ll be taking classes “with a faculty member who is worried about his or her research funding and who doesn’t have the help of graduate student teaching assistants. And that’s really going to impact the quality of your student’s experience,” said Julia Kent, a vice president at the Council of Graduate Schools, who conducts research about Ph.D. career pathways.
“The quality of undergraduate education is at stake here,” Kent said.
Even Ph.D.s who want to work in academia are being thwarted.
During the Great Recession and the pandemic — two recent periods when there were few available faculty jobs — doctoral candidates could continue their studies until things got better, Wood said. This time, the Trump administration’s cuts to research funding have stripped many of that option.
“This is way worse” than those earlier crises, she said. “Doctoral students are in panic mode.”
The same deep federal cuts mean doctoral candidates in science, technology, engineering, math and other fields can’t complete the research they need to be eligible for what few academic jobs do become available.
“You’re basically knee-capping that younger generation, which undermines the intergenerational dynamism that takes place in higher education. And that trickles down into the classroom,” said Isaac Kamola, an associate professor of political science at Trinity College and head of the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom at the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP.
Doctoral candidates early in their programs are questioning whether they should stay, said Wood. That could reduce the supply of future faculty. So will the fact that some universities have reduced the number of new Ph.D. candidates they will accept or have rescinded admission offers, citing federal budget cuts. Fewer prospective candidates are likely to apply, said Timothy Burke, a professor of history at Swarthmore College who has written about this topic.
“Our graduating students right now are thinking differently about what it means to start a doctorate,” Burke said.
Meanwhile, he said, “all the things that were dismaying to many faculty of long standing just feel worse. People who would have been totally content to stay put, whose prospects were good, who had good positions, who were more or less happy — now they’re thinking hard about whether there’s a future in this.”
That means undergraduates could experience fewer available classroom professors and teaching and graduate assistants or the “only tenuous presence of faculty who are thinking hard about going somewhere else,” he said. “There are going to be programs that are going to be shut. There are going to be departments running on fumes.”
The route to a university faculty job has always been hard. Finishing a doctoral degree takes a median of nearly six years, according to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences — nearly seven in the arts and humanities.
Doctoral students who manage to finish their programs have always had to fight for faculty positions, even before institutions announced cutbacks and hiring freezes.
Universities enroll far more doctoral candidates, to provide cheap labor as teaching and research assistants, than they will ever hire. The number of doctoral degrees awarded rose from 163,827 in 2010 to an estimated 207,000 this year, the National Center for Education Statistics says — a 26 percent increase, during a period in which the number of full-time faculty positions went up at less than half that rate.
With colleges and universities under stress, still more doctoral candidates now face the prospect of spending years “training for a career that isn’t actually available,” said Ashley Ruba, a Ph.D. who left higher education to work at Meta, where she builds virtual reality systems.
“If you told someone going to law school that they couldn’t get a job as a lawyer, I don’t think they’d do it,” said Ruba, who is also the founder of a career-coaching service for fellow Ph.D.s called After Academia.
People already in faculty jobs appear equally on edge. More than 1 in 3 said in a recent survey that they have less academic freedom than in the past; half said they worry about online harassment.And faculty salaries have been stagnant. Pay declined for the three years starting with the pandemic, when adjusted for inflation, the AAUP reports, and has still not recovered to pre-pandemic levels.
People with Ph.D.s can earn more outside academia — an average of 37 percent more, one study found. Employers value skills including active learning, critical thinking, problem-solving and resilience, which is “everything you learn in a doctoral program,” Ruba said.
The proportion of faculty considering leaving their jobs who are looking for work outside of academia has spiked. Before the pandemic, it was between 1 and 8 percent each year. Since then, it has been between 11 and 16 percent, according to R. Todd Benson, executive director and principal investigator at the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, or COACHE. The figure comes from surveys conducted at 54 major universities and colleges.
A Facebook group of dissatisfied academics, called The Professor Is Out, has swelled to nearly 35,000 members. It was started by Karen Kelsky, a former anthropology professor who previously helped people get jobs in academia and now coaches them on how to leave it.
“It’s difficult to overcome the stereotype of a university professor, which is that they’re coddled, they’re overprivileged, they’re arrogant and just enjoying total job security that nobody else has,” said Kelsky, who also wrote “The Professor Is In: The Essential Guide to Turning Your Ph.D. Into a Job,” a second edition of which is due out this fall.
Today, “they are overworked. They’re grossly underpaid. They are being called the enemy. And they’re bailing on academia,” she said.
“Every time I talk to a tenured professor, they tell me how miserable they are and how desperate they are to get out,” said Kelsky. “And there’s no way this isn’t having real-life, tangible impacts on the quality of education students are getting.”
Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, [email protected]orjpm.82 on Signal.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
HEPI Director, Nick Hillman OBE, takes a look at why today’s landmark report on student maintenancefrom HEPI, TechnologyOne and the Centre for Research in Social Policyat Loughborough Universityis so important.
Later today, HEPI will be hosting a free webinar with UCAS on this year’s admissions round – see here for details and to register for a free place.
A recent Wonkhe article by Will Yates of Public First noted, ‘It really was not that long ago that maintenance grants were the norm and student life was cheap and cheerful.’ We probably all know what he means.
When I went to the University of Manchester 35 years ago, I had no tuition fees and got to collect a grant cheque even though my parents were in secure middle-class jobs. Since then, life has become harder financially for students. Costs have gone up and grants have disappeared (in England). Meanwhile, the student body has diversified to include more people from disadvantaged backgrounds.
As if battling with the impact of COVID on their secondary schooling was not enough, today’s students face big financial obstacles. During my nine years as a Trustee of the University of Manchester (which sadly came to an end last month), I regularly ascended those same stairs I used to climb to collect my physical grant cheque in order to attend Board meetings at which we would discuss student poverty and its impact.
Will Yates’s conclusion needs qualifying of course. Just as it is true that there are today many poor pensioners alongside all the well-off ones who have cleaned up thanks to intergenerational inequities, so there have always been some students who struggled to survive on the maintenance support they received. I recently stumbled across the following exchange in Hansard from 1969, for example, on whether parents were making up the income of their student offspring in the way they have long been supposed to:
Mrs. Shirley Williams:I appreciate that students who do not receive the full parental contribution often suffer hardship. My Department recently wrote to local education authorities asking them to ensure that parents were made aware of the importance of making up the student’s grant. But I do not think it would be desirable or practicable to impose a legal obligation on parents to make their contributions. (Source: Hansard, 30 January 1969)
Plus ça change… Aside from the reference to local education authorities (which no longer have a role in student maintenance), the answer could have come from pretty much any one of the last seven decades.
These issues are topical in part because the threshold at which parents are expected to start contributing to their adult student offspring’s living costs has not increased for over 15 years – it was set at £25,000 for England by Gordon Brown (six Prime Ministers ago…). So parents in English households on just over £25,000 a year are expected to cough up – the situation is even worse elsewhere (just over £19,000 in Northern Ireland).
The recent HEPI / Advance HE Student Academic Experience Surveyshows over two-thirds of full-time undergraduates now do paid work during term time, and often at a dangerous number of hours (‘dangerous’ in the sense of impacting their academic work). So what has changed is the proportion of students who feel wickedly under-resourced financially.
The biggest lie told about students today is that they are pathetic ‘snowflakes’ who melt on contact with real life; in fact, when financially challenged, they tend to confront the problem head on by going out and finding paid work. Norman Tebbit would have been proud.
While my generation of students were debating or politicking or going to gigs, today’s students are more often serving those who do have the money to go out. In the UPP Foundation / Public First research that Will Yates was writing about, the students said they thought ‘it was them (rather than the university, the government, the OfS or any other body) who took responsibility for ensuring that they could afford to study and socialise.’
In my view, one of the very best projects we do at HEPI is the HEPI / TechnologyOne Minimum Income Standard. This is completely different to the student money surveys that ask students what their income is and how they spend it. Those are useful but only up to a point because what if the income is not enough? Knowing I have X pounds and spend X pounds is only of modest value if I actually need 2X pounds in order to afford the bus to campus, join my favourite student society and buy personal healthcare items (on this, see HEPI’s recent report by Rose Stephenson on menstruation and learning).
So the Minimum Income Standard starts with a blank sheet of paper plus a tried-and-tested methodology developed by the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University to consider how much students really need to live with dignity – the calculation is not for a plush lifestyle nor a monastic one, but rather for a fairly basic-but-safe one and is based on the extensive experience of the research team as well as detailed focus groups with multiple students around the UK.
This year, the second such study dwells upon first-year students in Purpose-Built Student Accommodation (university halls and privately-owned student accommodation blocks). So it supplements last year’s study of second and third-years in shared ‘off-street’ housing. (In my view, it should really be called ‘on-street’ housing as it tends to be on normal residential streets, but I digress.)
While TechnologyOne have generously funded this vitally important work, I must stress that neither they nor HEPI have had any editorial control over the core central numbers, which are entirely Loughborough’s work and based on what students have told them. HEPI’s input has included feeding in supplementary figures for accommodation costs , with the help of Student Crowd and Students, and thinking through the possible policy consequences of the research.
The top-level finding is that first-year students living in halls need £418 a week – over £20,000 a year and double the maximum maintenance support package in England. Even if a student (in England, living away from home and studying outside London) is in receipt of the maximum maintenance loan, they need to work 20 hours a week throughout the year to earn enough money to hit the Minimum Income Standard. Remember, these are people on full-time courses. As a society, we are now expecting people to do full-time study and half-time paid work and then we wonder why young students struggle to feel a sense of belonging to their institution…
People should look carefully at the methodology and conclusions to see if they agree with them. As a think tank, our job is to make people think; we can identify the main challenges and propose solutions but we are not a lobby group, so we would never claim we have all the answers. There may be elements of the Minimum Income Standard for Students that people want to pore over, challenge and improve.
Some of the issues people may want to consider on the back of the MISS include:
As the report makes clear, student life is generally a temporary phase that lasts no more than three or four years. So is it reasonable to apply the same methodology as is used for defining the basic minimum income for someone in work or in retirement? It is valid, in my view, because three years still represents a substantial proportion of a young person’s life up to that point and undergraduate study is often the first period of real independence for people – plus some other phases of life for which the minimum income methodology has been applied are also not always very long term. For example, someone on a ‘living wage’ is likely to hope to rise above it in due course as they gain experience. Besides, in one sense, no phase of life is permanent.
A second important question is whether letting students define their own minimum standard of living via focus groups will always tend towards larger monetary sums. The Minimum Income Standard for Students assumes students are likely to have gym membership, a short UK holiday and other costs (like wireless headphones, a modest alcohol budget and food for takeaways) that some people may deem to be non-essentials or at least not things that should be subsidised by taxpayer-funded income-contingent student loans (though, on the other hand, we only include very small sums for study-related costs). The MISS also includes some costs than some people might deem relevant only to a minority of students (such as paying to store items between terms). But the MISS is about having enough money for every student to live reasonably, with dignity and safety; it is not designed to be a ‘bare minimum’ or to represent the lifestyle of an ascetic. This is one of a number of reasons, further explored below, why we studiously avoid ever saying we think the Government should automatically set the maximum maintenance package at exactly (or even roughly) the level of the MISS. Moreover, students are not spendthrift – one interesting change this year compared to last, for example, is that they no longer deem a TV Licence as a must-have item so it has been removed from the calculation.
What we call a ‘minimum’ is also an ’average’; some cities are notably more expensive than others – London aside, we generally ignore this in the calculation and so the MISS might look too high or too low depending on where someone is studying and their own personal circumstances. For example, this means some of the freebies – such as prescriptions and bus travel – enjoyed by many Scottish students are ignored.
Should we be looking to reduce costs by giving applicants and students better information? A modest amount of the first-year premium (the extra costs that first-years seem to accrue) comes from being unused to budgeting and feeding themselves. The MISS for first-year students even includes a small additional sum for the first 12 weeks while students settle down and get used to things like eating up food before it goes off. Would better information of the students are crying out for fix at least some of the need for this? Similarly, would better information on the different consequences of different accommodation preferences shape better decisions, which in turn could shape the supply of student accommodation, and lead to a reduction in the MISS?
One particular policy challenge is explaining how any extra student maintenance support that could be offered now or later is likely to be spent in practice. Ministers will be less likely to give students improved maintenance packages if they think they will be entirely swallowed up by higher rent levels. One real challenge here, as so often, is that student accommodation tends to fall through the cracks in Whitehall, so it is not always clear who should be approached for these conversations.
Above all, HEPI is a policy body so for us the key question is always: what are the possible policy ramifications? On this, and notwithstanding the important fact that the report gives a clear indication of a preferred direction of travel, we are still working them out.
For example, the report concludes that the maximum maintenance package is only half of what students need to live. It clearly needs to be higher and available to more people. It would be absurd (literally absurd) to think parents could easily fill in the gap from their take-home pay unless they are on very good salaries indeed. It is similarly absurd, however, to think the Government can easily fill the whole gap, given the fiscal situation and the much larger number of students than in the past.
So what level of paid employment is it reasonable to assume students might do (and in holidays or term-time or both)? Or should students opt for a more basic standard of living (no en suite perhaps or more shared rooms, as in the United States)? Or should more students live at home as commuter students but at the cost of experiencing a full traditional student experience? These are difficult questions and, again, the answers will be different in different cases. Nonetheless, we welcome all thoughts in response.
As I sometimes say when speaking in schools, if and when it comes to my own children going to higher education, I will tell them three things:
good social spaces are more important than things like en suite facilities – if you are living a full student lifestyle, you may spend less time in your room than you originally expected;
taking a temporary full-time job in the holidays is generally preferable to doing a high number of hours of paid employment during term time, if you’re lucky enough to have the choice; and
in general, it tends to be better not to be a commuter student, unless there are specific individual reasons for being one.
Yet like most parents, I will also have to accept they will take what I say with a large pinch of salt and then find their own way.
How SEO for Universities Powers Sustainable Enrollment Growth
There’s a good chance you landed on this article after typing a question or a set of keywords into a search engine. That’s because we optimized this article for said search using search engine optimization (SEO) strategies. As a university marketer, you should be doing the same thing to reach prospective students.
Today’s recruitment landscape is digital, and a search engine query is often the first and most critical step a prospective student takes toward enrolling. SEO for universities is a central driver of discoverability, engagement, and application starts.
By employing higher education SEO tactics and investing in strategic, search-focused marketing, institutions can build sustainable enrollment pipelines. But how do you build an SEO strategy that goes beyond plugging keywords into program pages?
In this article, we’ll cover:
Why search is the cornerstone of student decision-making.
How SEO aligns with every stage of the enrollment funnel.
How universities can improve their rankings, engagement, and lead quality.
Why higher education SEO efforts deserve long-term strategic investment.
Why Universities Use SEO Strategies for Enrollment Growth
In an increasingly competitive enrollment landscape, SEO offers higher education institutions a sustainable, cost-effective foundation for long-term growth. Unlike time-limited paid campaigns, SEO builds momentum and equity over time, positioning your institution in front of prospective students at the exact moment they’re looking for options.
Today’s Students Start With Search
Before a prospective student ever talks to an admissions counselor or clicks on an ad, they almost always begin with a Google search. In fact, a majority of students report using search engines as their first step in looking for college and university options, according to recent research from EAB and Modern Campus.
If your institution doesn’t show up organically on the first page of results, you’re not in the conversation.
What makes organic search results particularly powerful is the trust factor. While ads can drive visibility, organic rankings signal authority, relevance, and credibility, especially in the eyes of Gen Z prospects, who are increasingly ad-skeptical and research-savvy.
Additionally, mobile-first behavior and voice-assisted searches for terms such as “best online MBA program in Texas” or “affordable RN to BSN degree near me” raise the stakes for technical SEO. A university’s site must not only be optimized for keywords but also be fast, intuitive, and responsive to be able to meet students where they are: on their phones, on the go, and expecting answers immediately.
Long-Term ROI of Organic vs. Paid Media
SEO is an investment, not a line item. While a paid search ad can generate quick visibility, it’s fleeting, as your ad disappears the moment the budget runs dry. But SEO creates a compounding return. Each blog post, landing page, and FAQ that’s optimized for student search behavior becomes an evergreen asset that continues working long after it’s published.
Over time, this strategy leads to a lower cost per inquiry compared to paid media. And, more importantly, SEO brings in better-qualified leads from students who find your programs through specific, intent-driven queries. They are more likely to be engaged, aligned with your offerings, and prepared to convert.
Mapping SEO to the Student Enrollment Journey
To maximize the impact of SEO for your university, you need to guide prospective students through a decision-making journey that’s often long, nonlinear, and filled with questions. The most effective SEO strategies map content to each stage of the enrollment funnel, from first touch to final application.
Awareness Stage Content
At the top of the funnel, students are exploring their options. They’re not searching for your university by name. They’re asking broad, future-focused questions such as “What degree do I need to become a UX designer?” or “What are the best jobs in environmental science?” This is where search-driven blog content plays a critical role.
By creating optimized articles with titles such as “Top Degrees for a Career in UX Design” or “10 Top Environmental Science Jobs in the Next Decade,” an institution can capture early interest from prospective students who haven’t yet narrowed their choices. These types of pieces not only build organic traffic to your site but also establish your institution as a thought leader in career-aligned education.
SEO-optimized pages that provide detailed degree overviews and career outcome lists can further reinforce your institution’s relevance while helping students begin to connect their goals to your academic offerings. Remember: This stage is about visibility and value, not a hard sell.
Consideration Stage Content
Once students have a clearer sense of their path, they shift into the consideration phase, digging deeper into specific programs and comparing schools. They want evidence of factors such as faculty expertise, curriculum relevance, and positive student experiences.
This is where midfunnel content shines.
Detailed faculty bios, curriculum guides, and sample course descriptions — each optimized for key search phrases — can improve your search rankings while offering meaningful substance to prospective students. For example, a student researching “online master’s in public health with epidemiology focus” should land on a program page that mirrors those terms and provides them with real answers.
Video content, especially when paired with keyword-rich titles and descriptions, helps tell the story of your institution in a more human, engaging way. Students’ testimonials, day-in-the-life videos, and faculty spotlights can also help move students from interest to intent, especially if that content is discoverable via search.
Conversion Stage Content
As prospective students near a decision, they seek clarity and confidence. They’re looking for reassurance that they can take the next step, and that it’s the right one. Conversion-stage SEO content should answer students’ practical, high-intent queries about your institution, such as “how to apply to [University Name],” “[University Name] financial aid for graduate students,” or “[University Name] application deadlines for fall 2026.”
For institutions with campus-based programs, locally oriented SEO becomes critical at this stage. Optimizing for geographic search terms, such as “colleges in Chicago with data science programs,” ensures you show up in local map packs (the local business listings that appear with a map in location-based Google searches), directory listings, and mobile searches.
It’s about being visible and accessible right when students are ready to act.
Optimized admissions FAQs, application checklists, and explainers on cost, scholarships, and financial aid reduce friction and address students’ common concerns. These pages nudge students across the finish line.
Proven SEO Strategies for Universities
To truly move the needle on enrollments resulting from organic search results, universities need to go beyond the basics of content creation. SEO success in higher education relies on a layered approach that blends technical excellence, strategic content development, and an optimized student experience.
Technical SEO as a Foundation
No matter how compelling your content is, it won’t perform if search engines can’t access and interpret it. That’s why technical SEO is the critical first step in building your search visibility.
To help your site show up in search results, you need to fix problems such as broken links, too many redirects, slow-loading code, or pages that are hard for search engines to reach. Tools like Google Search Console and Screaming Frog can help you identify these hidden roadblocks.
One particularly valuable tactic for universities is adding schema markup — structured data tags — to your content, especially on pages with information designed to respond to high-intent queries, such as those containing academic program descriptions, faculty bios, and FAQs. With schema, search engines can better understand the structure and purpose of your content, making it eligible for rich results, such as showing up in featured snippets and accordions. That visibility boost often translates into higher click-through rates from searches.
Content That Matches Searchers’ Intent
Great university SEO content is as student-centric as it is keyword rich. The most effective universities use keyword research to inform their content strategy, ensuring that it aligns with the questions, concerns, and goals of prospective students.
This includes building program clusters, or content hubs, around key degree areas. For example, a hub for your Master of Science in Data Science program might include pages on career paths, curriculum breakdowns, faculty Q&As, students’ success stories, and downloadable guides — all linked together to establish topical authority.
Modern search results also reward content that demonstrates experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (EEAT). Universities are naturally well positioned to feature real instructors, cite data, and include named authors with academic credentials to increase their credibility with both students and algorithms.
Student Experience + SEO
The student experience is not separate from SEO. Google’s algorithm increasingly favors sites that provide clear, intuitive pathways to information, particularly on mobile devices.
For universities, that means streamlined site navigation and a logical content hierarchy that surfaces pages with key data such as program offerings, admissions steps, and tuition details within two or three clicks from the homepage. Critical content shouldn’t be buried beneath layers of institutional jargon or outdated menus.
Internal linking is another underrated but powerful tactic. By connecting related content — such as linking from a faculty bio to a program page, or from a blog post to an application checklist — you improve the crawlability of your site, increase the depth of information you provide on a topic, and keep students engaged longer.
The result? Higher page authority, better rankings, and more informed prospective students.
Treating SEO as a Strategic Enrollment Asset
In many universities, SEO is still siloed within the marketing team and treated as a narrow tactic for improving search engine rankings. But SEO should be reframed as a long-term, strategic asset that drives enrollment growth and informs data-driven decision-making.
Holistic Attribution Models
One of the biggest missed opportunities in SEO for universities is how it’s measured. Traditional models often rely on last-click attribution, a model that gives 100% of the credit for a conversion to the final touchpoint a student interacted with before taking action. This underrepresents SEO’s influence, particularly in a student journey that spans weeks or months and touches multiple channels.
Universities should adopt holistic attribution models that track assisted conversions, or interactions a student has with your marketing channels that contribute to their conversion, not just their final clicks. A search may not be the student’s last touchpoint, but it often plays a vital role in their early awareness or during their midfunnel research. Ignoring that role means underinvesting in a channel that silently drives consideration.
To see the full picture, it’s essential to align tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics with your customer relationship management (CRM) system. Mapping behaviors based on organic search results, like blog visits, program page views, or FAQ engagement, to downstream enrollment actions helps quantify SEO’s true impact and justify investment at the leadership level.
Collaboration Across Teams
Your SEO team shouldn’t live in a vacuum. They intersect with admissions, content strategy, web development, student experience, and even academic department teams. When these teams operate separately, SEO efforts stall. But when collaboration is intentional, the entire enrollment ecosystem benefits.
For example, admissions teams can surface real students’ questions to inform keyword targeting. Student experience teams can help optimize navigation for both search bots and prospective students. Academic departments can contribute subject-matter expertise to improve your pages’ EEAT and topical depth.
SEO-informed content planning — whether for a blog calendar, landing page update, or digital ad campaign — ensures every piece of your content is geared toward a discoverability goal. This strengthens your SEO’s performance and boosts the efficiency of your other marketing channels, from paid search ads to email nurture campaigns.
Preparing for What’s Next
The SEO landscape is evolving rapidly, and universities need to anticipate what’s coming, including search tactics driven by artificial intelligence (AI). With Google’s AI Overviews (also known as Search Generative Experience, or SGE), zero-click searches, and the growing prominence of featured snippets, institutions must rethink how visibility is defined.
Ranking No. 1 doesn’t guarantee clicks if the answer is shown directly in the search result. That’s why future-ready SEO strategies focus on content depth and authority. Winning in AI-driven search engine results pages requires comprehensive, well-structured content that answers layered queries, not just surface-level questions.
Institutions should also monitor how AI tools interpret their content and brand. Structured data, semantic markup, and content clarity all influence how your pages are represented in machine-generated summaries and voice search results.
Ready to Make SEO a Strategic Pillar for Your School?
SEO for universities isn’t a mere marketing tactic. It’s a foundational strategy for long-term enrollment growth, helping to future-proof your institution’s enrollment efforts in a volatile higher education market.
While SEO is critical, it’s also complicated, which is why Archer Education provides colleges and universities with the expert insights required to create a truly strategic SEO plan that integrates with other elements of your marketing strategy.
Contact us to learn more about how SEO can ignite your institution’s growth over the long haul.
Six months into his second term, President Donald Trump has forced changes at many of the nation’s wealthiest universities, some of which have shed hundreds of jobs amid federal funding issues and investigations.
While sector layoffs are so frequent that Inside Higher Ed has dedicated monthly coverage to rounding up such reductions, those actions are more common at small, cash-strapped colleges or state institutions reeling from budget cuts. But universities with multibillion-dollar endowments have been among those making the deepest cuts in the first half of 2025, often driven by freezes on federal funding that the Trump administration imposed with minimal notice.
Some universities have also cited the recently passed endowment tax increase as a factor in layoffs.
Altogether the layoffs show a sector bracing for a new reality where research funding can be suddenly yanked away with little to no explanation and international and graduate student enrollment, once considered a cash cow, is under threat—prompting institutions in even the highest financial stratosphere to cut costs as they navigate changing policies and a president sharply critical of the sector.
Here’s a look at how the nation’s wealthiest universities are adjusting staffing levels due to an uncertain federal policy environment, research funding issues and a flurry of legal actions from the Trump administration that have forced concessions from multiple well-resourced institutions.
Thousands Out at Johns Hopkins
The Trump administration’s cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development hit Johns Hopkins University with $800 million in canceled funding, prompting the Baltimore-based institution to shut down numerous international programs and lay off 2,222 employees earlier this year.
The 2,222 job cuts are the deepest announced at any institution this year.
The layoffs, announced in March, span more than 40 countries. Of the jobs cut, 1,975 were located internationally, while another 247 were in the U.S., with the majority in Baltimore. JHU announced at the time that another 107 employees would be furloughed.
Duke University, which has an endowment recently valued at nearly $12 billion, made some of the deepest cuts of the year so far when officials announced in July that 599 employees had accepted buyouts. Another 250 faculty members are reportedly weighing buyout offers as well.
Following the first round of buyouts, university officials said layoffs will begin this month.
Duke officials announced the buyouts before the Trump administration froze $108 million in federal grants and contracts and opened investigations into alleged racial discrimination, accusing the university of emphasizing diversity over merit in hiring, admissions and other practices.
Deep Cuts at Northwestern
Earlier this year, the Trump administration abruptly froze $790 million in research funding for Northwestern University, reportedly with no explanation. That action occurred at about the same time that the federal government opened an investigation into alleged antisemitism on campus.
Northwestern, which has an endowment valued at more than $14 billion, responded by eliminating 425 jobs last month in an effort to shave 5 percent off of its staff budget. The move was preceded by a hiring freeze and other cost-cutting measures announced earlier this year.
President Michael Schill and other administrators wrote in a message to campus that the cuts were “in response to more than just the federal research funding freeze.” They also pointed to “rapidly rising healthcare expenses, litigation, labor contracts, employee benefits, compliance requirements and a suite of federal changes” that may harm international student enrollment.
The Ax Falls at Stanford
Stanford University plans to cut 363 jobs beginning this fall as part of an effort to shave $140 million off the general funds budget due to financial issues connected to federal policy changes.
Those cuts come after the university announced a hiring freeze in February.
Stanford has the fourth-largest endowment among U.S. universities, recently valued at $37.6 billion. But despite its deep pockets, the private research university is feeling the squeeze from the Trump administration, with officials writing in a state regulatory filing that the university anticipates “reductions in federal research funding” and an increase in endowment taxes.
Additionally, the U.S. Department of Justice launched an investigation into admissions practices at Stanford earlier this year, accusing the university of sidestepping a ban on affirmative action.
Nearly 180 Layoffs at Columbia
Few institutions have faced as much scrutiny from the federal government in recent years as Columbia University, which agreed to sweeping changes and yielded to demands from the Trump administration to overhaul admissions, disciplinary processes and academic programs. The university will also share admissions data and reduce the number of international students it accepts in an unprecedented agreement with the Trump administration that culminated in a $221 million settlement over allegations of antisemitism tied to pro-Palestinian campus protests.
Although the Trump administration will release some frozen research funds as a condition of the settlement, choking off federal dollars has already prompted cuts. Columbia announced in May that the university had laid off nearly 180 researchers amid its standoff with the federal government.
Columbia’s endowment was recently valued at $14.7 billion.
‘A Day of Loss’ at Boston U
Boston University announced plans last month to lay off 120 workers and eliminate another 120 vacant jobs.
Officials wrote in a letter to campus that “recent and ongoing federal actions and funding cuts are affecting our research enterprise as well as day-to-day operations” and creating “uncertainty” as BU grapples with inflation, declining graduate enrollment and other challenges.
“This is a day of loss for all of us,” officials wrote. “There is no way around this. We know our community may need time to adjust to these difficult changes. Yet, it is also a necessary step in ensuring our future.”
The University of Southern California cut 55 jobs last month, according to a state regulatory filing.
Officials announced in mid-July that layoffs were underway, though they did not specify the number of employees affected. USC also implemented a hiring freeze, halted merit-based pay raises, ended some vendor contracts and pulled back on discretionary spending and travel.
Interim president Beong-Soo Kim called the layoffs “painful” in a message to campus. He cited various financial concerns, including “significant shifts in federal support for our research, hospitals, and student financial aid” as well as potential declines in international enrollment.
“The ultimate impact of these changes is difficult to predict, but for a university of our scale, the potential annual revenue loss in federally sponsored research funding alone could be $300 million or more,” Kim wrote, adding these changes came on top of a pre-existing budget deficit.
USC’s endowment was recently valued at $8.1 billion.
Unspecified Cuts at Harvard
Harvard University, which is currently locked in a legal battle with the Trump administration over alleged antisemitism and other accusations, has also laid off employees this year. Harvard Magazine reports that multiple schools have reduced staff as a result of having federal research funds frozen.
However, Harvard has not released numbers and declined to provide an estimate to Inside Higher Ed. Union officials have said that layoffs could add up to hundreds of workers.
Harvard is the nation’s wealthiest university, with an endowment valued at nearly $52 billion.
Likely Layoffs at Brown
Following Columbia, Brown University struck a deal with the Trump administration last month, agreeing to certain changes in order to restore around $510 million in frozen research funding.
The federal government closed investigations into alleged antisemitism as part of the settlement. Brown also agreed to put $50 million over the course of a decade into workforce development in Rhode Island. Less than a week after the settlement, Brown officials announced that “some layoffs will be necessary” due to the “persisting financial impact of federal actions.”
Brown also enacted a hiring freeze in March, and nearly 350 jobs remain unfilled.
University officials wrote that they expected a $30 million hit to the 2026 fiscal year budget from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Trump’s far-reaching legislation that affected the sector in various ways, including increases to endowment taxes and limiting or eliminating some loan programs.
Speak to young university students today and a picture emerges of deep concern for justice, hunger for real-world connection, and an urgent desire to belong to something bigger than themselves.
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