Tag: Whos

  • Who’s listening to the TNE student experience?

    Who’s listening to the TNE student experience?

    Transnational education (TNE) is an increasingly prominent feature in the UK higher education landscape. The sector now has more than 600,000 TNE students, who study outside the UK for awards made by UK providers. Growth in the number and diversity of TNE students shows no sign of stopping. This has implications for institutional strategy and for the UK’s global reputation. At the same time, it asks us to consider the quality of the TNE student experience.

    The 2024 HEPI report recommends practical ways to increase public understanding of the TNE student experience. These include: wider engagement with the Quality Assurance Agency’s Quality Enhancement of Transnational Education (QE-TNE) scheme; and greater use of external surveys of TNE students. Jisc’s new report focuses on the digital experience of TNE students and staff.

    Things rarely stay still for very long in the TNE world. What has changed in the six months between the two reports, and what can we learn now?

    • In April, the Higher Education Statistics Agency (part of Jisc) published the latest aggregate offshore record. There were 621,065 UK TNE students in 2022-23, an increase of 8 per cent on the previous year. The total number of TNE students has grown every year since the current record was established in 2019-20. This trend looks set to continue, with India attracting particular recent attention. The government’s revised International Education Strategy is expected to have a renewed emphasis on TNE growth.
    • Meanwhile, at home, higher education providers face financial headwinds, combined with a potentially unfavourable policy environment for international students in the UK. Is TNE part of the answer? TNE projects are notoriously complex and have long lead-in times, making the direct impact on a provider’s bottom line hard to gauge. But many providers recognise the long-term strategic value of TNE projects, and are ready to invest even at a time of financial uncertainty for the sector.
    • April also saw a change of mind by two regulators: the Office for Students in England, and Medr in Wales. They jointly paused the development of TNE data sets based on individual student records, a requirement that would have been excessively burdensome on providers. Instead, there will be an expanded aggregate offshore record, such as was already planned in Scotland and Northern Ireland. In the absence of more granular data, it is all the more important that we find ways to understand the quality of the TNE student experience.

    One aim of the HEPI report was to give a higher profile to TNE students in the policy agenda. This month’s Jisc report maintains the profile of TNE students by summarising the known digital challenges to global educational delivery from the perspective of 21 UK higher education providers. Digital is central to the success of all TNE students: whether learning in classrooms, dialling in or in asynchronous online modes of study. In every case, technology is woven throughout curriculum delivery and beyond. Jisc found that:

    • In aiming to deliver an equitable learning experience, we cannot assume that connectivity, digital resource access and prior digital experience in host countries is the same as in the UK
    • Intermittent access to the internet is common in many countries, often due to disrupted electricity supply. Technology infrastructure is especially vulnerable during times of extreme weather, natural disaster, civil unrest or war
    • Challenges associated with accessing digital resources and learning materials are common. They can be caused by software or publisher licensing restrictions, export control laws and/or host country restrictions
    • Significant fees can be charged for TNE student access to software or e-publications. This reflects how publishers define a student as ‘belonging’ to an institution
    • There are cultural differences in expectations related to how digital is used to support learning, teaching and assessment
    • Cultural differences also create challenges in understanding and adapting to UK academic norms associated with academic integrity, copyright, plagiarism, effective use of AI and assessment rubric
    • The digital skills and capabilities expected of HE students and staff can differ between countries and cultures

    The report also summarises how Jisc, Universities UK International, British Council and The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education are working together to support the sector to better understand the quality of the TNE student experience, and so support effective and successful global educational delivery.

    This month’s Jisc report is the first of two on the TNE student and staff digital experience. The second report will summarise the views of over 4,800 TNE students and 400 staff, across 50 instances of global delivery. It will be published in October 2025 and launched at the Universities UK International TNE conference.

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  • ‘Who’s going to want these jobs?’: How the role of college president is changing

    ‘Who’s going to want these jobs?’: How the role of college president is changing

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    In early June, the governing board of Florida’s university system surprised the higher education sector when it rejected Santa Ono as the sole finalist for the presidency of the University of Florida. Ono had faced backlash — led by conservative activist Christopher Rufo — over his past embrace of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts while head of the University of Michigan. 

    Later that month, University of Virginia President Jim Ryan abruptly stepped down after the U.S. Department of Justice pressured him to resign over the institution’s diversity efforts. Ryan said he wouldn’t fight to keep his job when staying would have cost the institution research funding and student aid and hurt international students. 

    The duties of the modern college president extend far beyond keeping their institutions viable.  For decades, how the head of a college is selected and who fills the position has been steadily shifting. Now, whoever assumes the role will likely take vitriol from both the public and policymakers.

    James Finkelstein, professor emeritus at George Mason University’s public policy school, researches leadership in higher education. We spoke with him about the changing role of the college president, the increased influence a presidency faces from both the political and private sectors and what that means for higher ed in the long run.

    This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

    HIGHER ED DIVE: How does one become a college president? And has that changed in recent decades?

    James Finkelstein, professor emeritus in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University

    James Finkelstein, professor emeritus at George Mason University

    Permission granted by Judith Wilde

     

    JAMES FINKELSTEIN: The traditional route would start with becoming an assistant professor. You get tenure next, and then you may start to move up the administrative ranks. The most common path was to go from provost to president. For now, that’s still the most common path, but it’s on the decline. 

    The problem is, provosts don’t fundraise. Deans do. And the No. 1 qualification that a board now looks for in a university president is their ability to raise money.

    Given that shift in priorities, how do college boards pick their institution’s next presidents?

    My colleague, Judith Wilde, and I have studied this process extensively, and boards are increasingly relying on executive search firms.

    We found that only 2% or 3% of presidential classified ads mentioned a search firm in 1975. Today, it’s almost 100%. And based on the data, that change has also correlated with the beginning of the decline in the length of university presidents’ tenure.

    Search firms do the initial screening and determine for the board which candidates are really viable. But very few of the search firm senior executives have any real experience in higher education and their No. 1 responsibility as fiduciaries is to return profit to investors. 

    From there, the board picks from the candidates highlighted by the search firm? What do they look for?

    Yes. People tend to look for candidates who look like them. And boards are not primarily made up of academics — the only thing most board members know about a university is that they got a degree from one. You’re seeing a lot more political types on the boards, as is the case in Virginia, or corporate types.

    It’s interesting, corporations don’t turn to universities for their leadership. They don’t select a college president to run them. The former president of TIAA [Clifton Wharton Jr.] was the only university president to become a CEO of a Fortune 500 company — and he led a company designed to serve universities.

    But many universities, at least 10% or so, will select a corporate executive to lead them.

    If boards expect university presidents to behave more like corporate executives than leaders of an educational, social and cultural institution — someone who serves the public — then the next generation of university leadership is going to look very different. You’re going to see a different kind of person be not only sought after but interested in these jobs because they think they can take their private sector skill set directly into higher ed.

    In recent years, the presidential compensation packages at some colleges have mirrored those of Fortune 500 CEOs. In 2022, Ben Sasse received a notably lucrative package when he was hired to lead the University of Florida, as you and Judith have discussed. What effect does that shift have on colleges?

    When I was an undergraduate, the university president probably wore a tweed sport coat with leather patches on the elbows. And the patches weren’t there to make a style statement; it’s because the elbows were worn out. If he had a car — and it was far and away “he” when I was in school —  it was a car from the university’s car pool that was several years old. 

    And in the past, presidents maintained some academic interests. They taught. They were visible on campus. 

    Now, university presidents drive expensive cars and are more likely to associate with people outside the university than faculty inside the university.

    Our sector does not enjoy the reputation with the public that it used to. There are all sorts of questions now about the value of a college degree. People generally think faculty get paid a lot of money and don’t do very much.

    More than anything, presidents today are facing the question of if there is a way to win back that trust.

    While college presidents are grappling with that question, though, they are also watching their positions become increasingly precarious. One recent example is Santa Ono, who had been set up as Sasse’s replacement. Traditionally, the vote from the Florida universities’ governing board would have been pro forma. What shifted the tides and left Ono out of a job?

    Ono was targeted by the Chris Rufo machine. You can go back and read Rufo’s interview with Politico and listen to his interview with The New York Times — he’s very public about his strategy to delegitimize leaders in higher ed. His team made a decision early on that they wanted one of their own in Florida. And Ono wasn’t it.

    Having watched the entire governing board meeting in Florida, my professional assessment is that I’ve never seen a president or someone of Ono’s stature so ill-prepared and give so poor a performance on every level.

    Whoever prepared him, didn’t. And if they did, they weren’t preparing him for the right thing. It was much like what happened to the college presidents who testified at congressional committee hearings. Ono wasn’t completely prepared that he was going to be essentially cross-examined by a former state legislator. 

    By that point, Ono had already announced his departure from the University of Michigan, leaving a highly debated track record on diversity efforts and the handling of student protests in his wake. Does he stand a chance of getting another job heading a university?

    About 75% of presidents are what we call one-and-done — they report they’ll hold one presidency, and that’s more than enough. The Gordon Gees of the world are the exception, not the rule.

    Ono was, in my view, the modern-day equivalent of [former West Virginia University President] Gordon Gee. He’s the professional president who developed a public persona. He developed it at the University of Cincinnati, refined it at the University of British Columbia, and then brought it to Michigan.

    But I’ve talked to people at Cincinnati and Michigan. The truth of the matter is, he wasn’t well-thought of by the faculty. And he burned out very quickly in Michigan.

    Ono shouldn’t be the model for the modern university president. Personally, I don’t think that he’s going to get another presidency after the Florida situation, at least not for a while. 

    Is the role of president still a consequential one? Do the heads of colleges wield influence in the same way they have in the past?

    Who the president is makes a difference. They set the tone of the institution in many ways. But presidents today can exercise less independent leadership than they did in the past — they’re being put on a shorter and shorter leash. 

    There are so many different constituencies that they’re having to serve, and a lot of those constituencies are in conflict with each other.

    Some presidents are engaging in what people call anticipatory compliance.

    “In order to avoid these conflicts,” the thinking goes, “I’m going to get one step ahead.” Sadly, what that means is that when the board intervenes, they want even more.

    Is there a world where that kind of interference becomes so unpleasant that it renders the job unpalatable? 

    I think for many serious potential candidates, the answer is yes. It doesn’t matter whether you’re being paid $1 million. Or if you have two country club memberships, a big car, a big house and staff, and all of that. These jobs have always been 24/7, 365. And the scrutiny is exponentially worse now. 

    The real question is: Who’s going to want these jobs? That’s part of the plan of critics of higher education. They want to drive people out so they can replicate what they’re doing in Florida and appoint political loyalists who have no experience in higher education.

    Even though conservatives are critical of what they see as judicial activism, they have been extraordinarily active on college boards, working to influence curriculum and promotions and tenure.

    The current climate changes things for all trustees, even those who don’t align with this thinking. Regardless of their backgrounds, no board will want to appoint a president who is going to put at risk all of their research funding. And the Trump administration has shown that it is willing to use any lever it has to bring these institutions under its thumb. Look how quickly Jim Ryan was gone from UVA.

    As you mentioned, presidents are serving increasingly shorter tenures, instead of holding the position for life, or at least until retirement. Beyond a loss of leadership consistency, does this turnover hurt colleges?

    Take Jim Ryan as an example. He’s 58 years old. 

    I assume the terms of his contract were renegotiated when he left, but based on my analysis of his 2022 contract, the university has a future liability of almost $17 million to him. He would actuarially retire from teaching in 15 years, and in 2038, his base salary would be over $1 million a year for teaching at most two courses a semester.

    The people who are actually doing most of the teaching at UVA in 2038 won’t be tenured or tenure track. They will be contingent faculty who are barely able to scrape together a living.

    If you put $10 million in a scholarship fund at UVA, would that be a better investment than keeping Ryan on the faculty? The answer is a no-brainer.  

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  • Who’s really falling behind within boys’ underachievement?

    Who’s really falling behind within boys’ underachievement?

    The recent “Boys Will Be Boys” report from HEPI is the latest in a long-running series of warnings about a male crisis in education.

    Boys and men are underperforming relative to girls and women, we’re told, and the gap grows wider each year.

    While it’s true that men, overall, receive fewer “Good Degrees” (Firsts or 2:1s) than women – by a margin ranging from 3.3 to 5.1 percentage points over the last eight years – this isn’t true for all men.

    In fact, gay male students have consistently outperformed not only their heterosexual male peers but, in several years, even heterosexual women. In 2022–23, 82.6 per cent of gay men achieved a Good Degree, compared with 73.6 per cent of men overall and 78.5 per cent of women.

    The attainment gap looks very different when you stop treating men as a monolith, and this is evidence of exactly why we need to start resetting our mindsets around attainment gaps.

    The data I draw on aren’t publicly available on the Office for Students (OfS) data dashboard, these were obtained via a Freedom of Information (FOI) request as part of my doctoral research into the “LGB attainment premium” — a term I use to describe the consistent pattern of lesbian, gay and bisexual students, outperforming their heterosexual peers in terms of degree outcomes

    The absence of routinely published, intersectional data means sweeping assumptions are often made about entire groups, treating men or LGBTQ+ students as though they share a single educational experience. My research looks to understand not just why these attainment gaps exist, but what they reveal about identity, inclusion, and academic culture in higher education.

    Who do we forget when we generalise men?

    It’s politically expedient to speak of male underachievement in broad stroke terms, but such generalisations smooth over differences among men of various class, cultural, ethnic, or – as my research shows – sexual identities. While the HEPI report does highlight intersecting disadvantages briefly, it doesn’t probe into whether there are any advantaged male groups: in this case, gay men.

    If policies and institutional strategies focus on fixing men, – or any group for that matter – higher education risks investing in universal interventions that don’t serve those already thriving. Gay men have faced systemic barriers for generations and still do – however, gay men are, on average, performing well academically in higher education.

    The HEPI report references an article commissioned by Civitas and written by Jo-Anne Nadler, which claims that 24 per cent of parents believe boys are made to feel ashamed of being male at school.

    The article argues that “critical social justice” is undermining schools, and positions inclusive practices — including the visibility of LGBTQ+ identities — as part of the problem. The piece presents anecdotal examples without broader data context and treats a wide range of educational themes (from decolonisation to queer theory) as a singular ideological threat.

    The danger with this kind of framing is that it obscures more than it reveals. It flattens the experiences of boys and men into a single story of victimhood, without exploring where success is happening, or why. When discussions about identity and education are reduced to culture war talking points, we lose sight of the more meaningful, evidence-led questions: what works, for whom, and how can we build on that?

    Hearing from the students themselves

    In April 2025, I ran survey with 113 LGBTQ+ respondents at a small arts university, asking undergraduate and postgraduate students about their experiences of academic confidence, belonging, and campus culture. This aimed to question why an academic premium may exist for some marginalised groups.

    Within the survey, one recurring theme stood out for gay men: a sense of needing to work twice as hard to be recognised, validated or to compensate for years of marginalisation. For some respondents in the survey, academic success functioned like armour. A rebuttal against stigma they’d faced.

    This echoes findings from the United States, where researchers John Pachankis and Mark Hatzenbuehler (2013) identified a similar pattern among sexual minority men, referring to it as the “Best Little Boy in the World” hypothesis — the idea that gay men may overinvest in achievement-related domains as a deflection of the stigmatisation that has come from their sexuality.

    Overperformance makes even more sense when placed in a wider economic context. The HEPI report does recognise that men, despite their academic underperformance, still earn more than women in the workplace. The picture is similar also for LGBTQ+ workers in both the United States and United Kingdom – gay men typically earn less than heterosexual men. Therefore, if the playing field is never truly even, it makes sense that those facing stigma would push themselves harder to compete in an biased labour market.

    Inclusive cultures – benefitting whom?

    My initial survey data suggests that inclusive campus cultures make a tangible difference. Students spoke positively about visible LGBTQ+ inclusion efforts — from staff wearing pride pin badges and inclusive posters, to active student societies and lecturers openly sharing their experiences. These small but meaningful signals were consistently linked to a stronger sense of belonging and academic attainment.

    But this sense of inclusion was not experienced equally. Many queer, gender non-conforming and transgender students reported that practices such as deadnaming or misgendering created a sense of exclusion, with knock-on effects for their mental health and academic performance.

    While there is an observed attainment premium for lesbian, gay and bisexual students , the trend does not extend uniformly across all LGBTQ+ groups, where queer and transgender student typically receive less good degrees. However, this picture is changing. The attainment gap for transgender students, and those whose gender is not the same as the one assigned at birth, narrowed from 6.2 percentage points in 2015–16 to just 1.5percentage points in 2022–23.

    A similar trend is visible among students who identify as “other” as their sexual orientation, whose attainment gap shrank from 14 per centage points to 2.5 per cent in the same period. In other words, identity-based initiatives — often dismissed by critics as woke or virtue signalling — may, in fact, be delivering measurable academic benefits for marginalised groups.

    Calling out the blind spots in policy and practice

    My aim is not to ignore the fact male attainment has slipped back to its pre-pandemic low, or the broader need to support men’s success in higher education. There seems to be an impression that there is an emerging story of who feels they must try hard, and those who know they can afford not to. It’s the tortoise and the hare, however in this version, the hare still wins. The race is rigged.

    The question needs to be – how can the sector make the race worth running for everyone?

    The route to more effective policy is to look at men’s attainment through a finer lens – disaggregate by sexuality, race, socio-economic status, disability, and more to uncover more accurate insights. Data on gay male attainment makes it clear this isn’t just a male–female divide, and while higher performance might seem like a positive story, my initial findings, along with research by Pachankis and Hatzenbuehler, suggest that overcompensation often comes with steep costs, including burnout and persistent stress.

    The HEPI report suggests that the solution may lie in assessments. In their report, they explain that men tend to perform less well in coursework-based assessments compared to exams, particularly when compared with women.

    Through my FoI request to OfS, I was able to analyse attainment data by discipline and sexuality. The data shows that disciplines such as creative arts, education, and social sciences , all of which typically favour coursework over exams, are where the gay male academic premium is most typically pronounced.

    Conversely, fields like environmental sciences, engineering, and architecture, which may lean toward exams or technical assessments, show lower attainment premiums for gay men. However, in stark contrast to this, the largest gay male attainment premium (9.68 percentage points) appears in natural and mathematical sciences – a field typically associated with exams. This suggests that while assessment style and disciplinary culture may influence outcomes, they are only part of the picture.

    This could suggest that success in these disciplines might not indicate that the environment is more inclusive — but rather, that some gay men are excelling despite those barriers. This reinforces the need to avoid simple causal explanations, and to examine how identity, culture, and assessment interact in complex and sometimes surprising ways.

    Moving beyond the monolith

    While it’s convenient to lump all men into a single underachieving group, the data and lived realities show a much more complex picture than what the HEPI report offers. Yes, men overall attain fewer good degrees than women, but gay men outscore both heterosexual men and, in some cases, women.

    Nikolai Elkins If the sector is actually interested in improving outcomes for all students, it can’t continue to rely on these broad narratives. Policymakers and universities need to dig into data, disaggregate by other identity factors, and examine which practices foster an environment where everyone can thrive.

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