Tag: Events

Rutgers Administrators Agree to Most Protester Demands

Protesters at Rutgers University began to voluntarily disassemble their tents on the Voorhees Mall shortly before 4 p.m. Thursday after university officials agreed to eight of their 10 demands, according to local reporters.

President Jonathan Holloway had set a 4 p.m. deadline for the encampment to be cleared.

“Buildings surrounding Voorhees Mall are the site of hundreds of exams during the finals period, and students are rightly concerned about their ability to take exams in this environment,” the president wrote. “If the protesters do not comply and disperse … they will be considered to have trespassed.”

Among the concessions administrators made were to establish an Arab cultural center on each Rutgers campus, provide more Middle East studies faculty and academic programs and offer amnesty to all pro-Palestinian protesters on campus. The only two demands they did not agree to were full divestment and the termination of a partnership with Tel Aviv University, which will be further discussed in a later meeting.

Protest organizers stressed, however, that if the future meetings do not result in what they want, they will return and rebuild their encampment.

—Jessica Blake, 5:45 p.m.

In Pictures: Campus Protests

Protesters Leave Portland State Library but Standoff Continues

The Portland State University library has been cleared of all pro-Palestinian protesters, according to the Portland Police Bureau. But the standoff continues, with protesters outside the building blocking a van full of detained demonstrators from leaving the premises.

A video from The New York Times shows activists yelling, “Let them go,” as officers shove the crowd in an attempt to clear an exit pathway. Two protesters were arrested outside the library this morning, according to a social media alert from police. By 11 a.m., a total of 12 people had been arrested in and around the library; four were students.

The confrontation with police occurred after negotiations between university officials and protesters, who had seized the library on Monday, fell apart Wednesday. Demonstrators were given one last chance to exit the building voluntarily Thursday morning before law enforcement officials broke through the barricade.

Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, a Democrat, condemned the damage protesters inflicted on the library.

“I have absolutely no tolerance for discriminatory harassment, violence, or property damage. This includes the acts of vandalism seen this week at the Portland State University library and against nearby businesses,” she said in a statement Thursday.

The actions contradict “Oregon values” and threaten everyone, she added. “The state is prepared to exercise the full extent of the law.”

—Jessica Blake, 3:15 p.m.

Rutgers Postpones or Relocates Final Exams

Rutgers University abruptly postponed or relocated final exams scheduled for Thursday in anticipation of escalated protest activities on campus.

The first announcement, at about 8 a.m., postponed all exams scheduled before noon. The second, released four hours later, added that all afternoon exams would be held, but in locations removed from the College Avenue area of campus, where protesters have been encamped for four days.

According to NorthJersey.com the decision followed an Instagram post published Wednesday night by Students for Justice in Palestine, the group leading the demonstration, which called for an “emergency protest” and urged university leaders to cancel finals entirely.

“No school when Gaza has no schools,” the post read. “Bring everyone you know to the liberated zone at 7 a.m.”

It remained unclear what Rutgers will do about the remainder of the exam period, which is scheduled to run through May 8.

—Jessica Blake, 2:30 p.m.

Police Storm UCLA Encampment

After being widely criticized for failing to respond to a brawl between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli protesters on Tuesday night, UCLA administrators went full force Wednesday, deploying more than 250 militarized state highway patrol and local police officers to dismantle an encampment on Royce Quad.

Under cover of darkness, officers in body armor, helmets and face shields, with batons in their hands, approached the barricade surrounding the pro-Palestinian group. A chaotic back-and-forth ensued for nearly an hour, as the protesters’ wall of plywood boards, shipping pallets and metal gates stood strong. Finally, at about 3 a.m., officers breached the barrier, videos show.

They gave protesters one last dispersal warning—leave or face arrest. But the demonstrators stood their ground, linking arms and spraying fire extinguishers in an attempt to fend off law enforcement. The sound of guns being fired can be heard as troops overpower the demonstrators, tearing down the camp, zip-tying students’ wrists and pulling them away from the encampment with force.

A law enforcement spokesperson told The New York Times that all weapons utilized were “nonlethal,” including rubber bullets, flash-bang devices that emit loud noises and flashes used to get people’s attention.

Images this morning show a field of ruin, remains of what was once a bustling encampment scattered across the lawn. The few tents still standing are tattered, lying limply in pieces.

According to reports from The Los Angeles Times more than 200 people were arrested. It’s not clear how many were UCLA students.

—Jessica Blake, 1:00 p.m.

Biden: ‘Order Must Prevail’

In his most extensive remarks to date on the pro-Palestinian protests roiling campuses nationwide, President Biden said he would protect free speech and the right of Americans to protest peacefully, but that the recent demonstrations have been far from peaceful.

“You have the right to protest, not the right to cause chaos,” he said.

Speaking from the White House, Biden said the events convulsing many campuses test two fundamental American principles: the rights to free speech and peaceful assembly, and the rule of law—both of which must be upheld.

“We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent,” he said. “But neither are we a lawless country. We are a civil society and order must prevail.”

Biden added that while dissent is essential to democracy, it “must never lead to disorder or denying the rights of others to finish their semester or college education.” There’s no place in America for antisemitism, Islamophobia or discrimination against Arab-Americans or Palestinian-Americans, he said.

The president didn’t discuss the recent police crackdown on student protesters at some institutions, though he did say that the National Guard should not be sent to campuses, as some Republican lawmakers have called for.

—Katherine Knott, 12:00 p.m.

Updates on Campus Protests, May 1

Updates on Campus Protests, April 30

This month’s episode of The Key podcast explores a vexing question: How might policy makers and college leaders go about showing that getting a postsecondary education pays off for later in life?

The episode features a conversation with Zakiya Smith Ellis, a principal at the education policy consulting firm Education Counsel and former senior Obama education aide and secretary of education in New Jersey.

Ellis shares her thoughts on how we’ve gotten to the point where we are assessing college value primarily by looking at individuals’ financial outcomes, whether we’re asking the right questions about the benefits of college-going and what institutional leaders should be doing to make sure their academic programs are serving students well.

Click here to listen to this week’s episode, and find out more about The Key here.

All 57 University of Texas at Austin students who were arrested for trespassing during a pro-Palestinian protest on campus Wednesday have had their charges dropped by the county attorney’s office, the Austin American-Statesman reported.

Defense lawyers found problems with the probable cause arrest affidavits, documents police use to prove an arrest was warranted; Nouha Ezouhri, an attorney with the Travis County public defender’s office who helped file jail release forms for the arrested students, said that it looked as though the institution’s police had “copied and pasted” the language from one affidavit to the next. County Attorney Delia Garza, whose office prosecutes misdemeanor charges, agreed that the documents contained “deficiencies.”

However, the police could revise the affidavits and press charges against the protesters as far as two years out from the date of the arrests.

Richard Cordray, the chief operating officer of Federal Student Aid, is leaving the agency after facing calls from Congressional Republicans to resign over the botched roll-out of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.

Cordray will lead the agency through the end of June, “in order to oversee the completion of key priorities within the organization,” the Education Department said in a news release late Friday morning. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona praised Cordray’s leadership of the agency as “consequential.”

Friday’s announcement comes as the department works to fix a variety of issues with the new FAFSA and grapples with the fallout. Cordray’s departure will also add to the leadership churn at Federal Student Aid, an agency within the department that manages the FAFSA and student loan programs. Cordray is the third person in seven years to serve as chief operating officer of Federal Student Aid, an ostensibly nonpolitical job that’s become increasingly politicized in recent years with leadership of the agency changing with each new presidential administration.

“Over my tenure, we provided student loan forgiveness to more than 4,000,000 borrowers and their families; made it easier for people to apply for and manage federal student aid; and took strong actions to hold schools accountable for defrauding students,” Cordray said in a statement. “I have agreed to stay on for an interim period to help with the transition.”

Cordray’s three-year appointment ends in early May, and he decided not to continue for another term, according to a department official.

A former Ohio attorney general and former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Cordray took over the Office of Federal Student Aid in May 2021. As chief operating officer, he oversaw the restart of student loan payments, the Biden administration’s debt relief efforts and other projects. As the scale of the FAFSA fiasco became clear, Congressional Republicans laid the blame at his feet and called for his ouster.

“It’s time for Cordray to go and for the department to wake up and realize that blindly following Biden’s agenda is irreparably damaging student success,” Representative Virginia Foxx, the North Carolina Republican who chairs the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, said earlier this month.

The Education Department said earlier this month that it was not the time to point fingers.

Cardona said in a statement that he was grateful for Cordray’s three years of service, “in which he accomplished more transformational changes to the student aid system than any of his predecessors.” The statement specifically highlighted changes to fix the Public Service Loan Forgiveness as well as income-driven repayment programs. Cardona noted that Cordray also revitalized the FSA Enforcement Unit.

“It’s no exaggeration to say that Rich helped change millions of lives for the better,” Cardona said.

One project left off the list of Cordray’s accomplishments? FAFSA.

When the Einstein College of Medicine announced in February that a former faculty member donated a historic $1 billion to the institution to eliminate tuition for every student, leaders at the New York medical school lauded the gift’s potential to help diversify the physician workforce.

Removing Einstein’s nearly $60,000 per-year price tag “radically revolutionizes our ability to continue attracting students who are committed to our mission, not just those who can afford it,” Dr. Yaron Tomer, dean of the medical school, said in a press release. “We will be reminded of the legacy this historic gift represents each spring as we send another diverse class of physicians out across the Bronx and around the world to provide compassionate care and transform their communities.”

When Einstein becomes tuition-free next academic year, it will join a small but growing list of other medical schools that already have tuition-free programs, including the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University, New York University Grossman College of Medicine and the Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine.

Other medical schools, including those at Columbia, Emory and Harvard Universities, have begun waiving tuition for some students based on financial need and merit in recent years.

While some experts in the medical field have applauded the financial relief these tuition-free medical schools provide, they’re skeptical that free tuition alone has the power to increase the racial diversity of medical school student populations or the overall number of doctors of color.

Although a wide body of research shows patients have better health outcomes when treated by a doctor of the same race or ethnicity, the racial diversity of the physician workforce doesn’t reflect the diversity of patients.

While white and Asian doctors are overrepresented in the field, Black and Hispanic doctors are underrepresented: About 14 percent of the total U.S. population is Black, but just 5.7 percent of active physicians are Black; 19 percent of the U.S. population is Hispanic, but just 6.9 percent of doctors are Hispanic, according to 2021 data from the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC). And despite Native Americans composing around 3 percent of the population, Native doctors make up about 0.4 percent of the physician workforce.

Financial barriers are certainly one piece of the picture.

It is well documented that Black, Hispanic and Native students are more likely than white students to come from low-income families. And that can make some students of color hesitant to take on more than $200,000 in debt, which is the norm for the average medical student, and commit to years of additional schooling before earning an attending physician’s healthy salary.

However, experts say it will take more than the largesse of a few deep-pocketed philanthropists to diversify the pipeline of aspiring doctors, especially as some state and federal lawmakers are adopting legislation banning diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

“Unless there’s other programmatic changes that would increase the total pool of students, the numbers won’t change,” said Dr. Billy Thomas, a neonatologist who served as the first vice-chancellor for diversity and inclusion at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. “And if all of these DEI efforts are dissolved, then the number of minority students who can even apply to medical school is going to go down.”

That’s what happened after California voted to ban affirmative action in 1996, 27 years before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admissions nationally. By the late 1990s, the number of Black and Latinx students matriculating into California medical schools fell to historic lows (5 and 10 percent, respectively), according to a report from the Latinx Center for Excellence at the University of California at San Francisco.

But despite the ban on race-conscious admissions, things didn’t stay that way.

California medical schools have since launched numerous programs designed to attract students from underrepresented communities using strategies such as targeted recruitment, mentoring and advising. By 2019, 17 percent of students enrolled in a public medical school in California were Latinx and 11 percent were Black.

And all of that happened without the schools becoming blanketly tuition-free.

“There’s no singular solution to getting more qualified applicants in medical school,” said Julie Fresne, senior director of student financial and career advising services at the AAMC. “We need to start a lot earlier in helping students get to where they need to be and understand they can have a career in medicine and afford to go to medical school.”

Fresne said it’s too soon to tell if the roughly 10 medical schools with free tuition programs, several of which are housed at well-endowed private universities, are moving the needle on diversity. But the reality is that the majority of the 150-plus medical schools in the U.S. are reliant on tuition to run their programs and “it would be difficult for most medical schools to go tuition-free without a big gift,” she said.

Although applications to NYU’s medical school jumped nearly 50 percent—and more than 100 percent for underrepresented minorities, including Black, Latino and Native students—after it went tuition-free in 2018, it still only accepts around 2.7 percent of applicants.

The average student admitted to NYU’s medical school in 2023 had a near-perfect undergraduate GPA and high MCAT scores, while only 7 percent of them were the first in their families to attend college, according to the medical school’s website. While its website also says 24 percent of those student were from “groups underrepresented in medicine,” Black enrollment has been on the decline since the medical school went tuition-free, STAT News reported earlier this month.

Between 2019 and 2022, Black medical students at NYU averaged just under 11 percent, down from 14 percent in 2017. The number of medical school applications from Black, Hispanic and other underrepresented groups has fallen nationally partly because of the high cost of tuition, but also because these applicants are less likely to be admitted due to “entrenched issues of racial and socioeconomic disparities in medical school admissions” according to STAT.

But because so few medical schools offer free tuition—and so many students want to become doctors without taking on substantial debt—the applicant pool to those select few programs expands, and in turn becomes even more competitive.

“Those who have the highest grades may be more likely to get in,” said Norma Poll-Hunter, senior director of workforce diversity for the AAMC. “This is where holistic review is very helpful because it helps institutions focus on their mission.”

Holistic Review

Holistic review—or de-emphasizing standard assessments such as test scores and giving more weight to an applicant’s life experiences and attributes—is one of the approaches the Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine in northeastern Pennsylvania takes in reviewing applications for its tuition-free programs.

“We prioritize the admission of students who have grown up in rural communities because that’s our intention of service,” said Dr. Julie Byerley, dean of the medical college. “It’s common for applicants to say the right things. But we look for the applicant who really lives the right thing and is genuine in their desire to fulfill the mission and dreams we have for our program.”

Of the 118 students who started medical school at Geisinger this school year, 38 were socioeconomically disadvantaged, 16 were from groups underrepresented in medicine and 17 were first-generation college students.

According to data from the AAMC, white and Asian students still dominate the student body; of the 472 students enrolled at the medical school during the 2023–24 academic year, 18 were Black, 25 were Hispanic and none were Native.

Geisinger, which graduated its first class of 57 students in 2013, used to clear the debt of all admitted students as long as they returned to work in the Geisinger Health System for four years after completing a residency. The school has since narrowed its loan forgiveness program, which is now only available to students pursuing psychiatry and adult primary care, two of the most in-demand specialties.

Getting into medical school is just one of the first steps toward becoming a doctor. And Black, Hispanic and Native students are more likely to stop out of their programs than their white peers, according to a 2022 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

In an effort to help students make it through the rigors of medical education, Geisinger offers additional supports such as multiple advisors for each student and community-based education and programming through the Office of Health Equity and Inclusion.

The college also has a pathway program aimed at preparing K-12 students for future success in the health professions. Advisers from the medical school stay in touch with students in the program throughout their undergraduate years and help them apply to medical school. Of the 115 students graduating from Geisinger this year, 27 participated in the pathway program.

“The personal relationships and being known help students the most to get over those difficult feelings that come with being the first in their family to attend or being a distinct minority in the student population,” Byerley said.

While such efforts may help underrepresented students get through medical school, that hasn’t stopped some conservative lawmakers from trying to dismantle DEI initiatives at colleges and universities across the country.

North Carolina Congressman Greg Murphy, who is also a practicing urologist, proposed a bill last month prohibiting federal funding, including student loans, for medical schools with diversity, equity and inclusion-related policies and requirements.

Diversity and DEI Bans

In spite of these politicized efforts, Idia Binitie Thurston, associate director of the Institute for Health Equity and Social Justice Research at Northeastern University, said institutions should not abandon their diversity goals.

In a recent paper she co-authored for the JAMA Health Forum, Thurston outlined 13 strategies for increasing racial and ethnic diversity in the academic health sciences, which, in addition to financial support, includes pathway programs, holistic application review and mentoring programs.

While most medical schools don’t have donors who can write a $1 billion check and wipe away tuition, outside funding sources, such as grants, can still play a role in developing more targeted programs aimed at preparing underrepresented students for a medical career.

“The role of organizations funding this work is critical, especially because of the cancellation of DEI offices at institutions,” Thurston said. “If funders have grants they’re offering that can fund these pathway programs, that’s one of the most important things because funding helps to drive change.”

Thurston’s brother, Dr. Odion Binitie, an orthopedic surgeon at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, is one of a small percentage of Black physicians in his field. On his path to becoming a surgeon, he became a mentee of the only Black professor at the University of South Florida’s medical school.

“Having his support was definitely beneficial. When I decided I wanted a career in surgery, I went to him and he directed me toward a surgeon who I eventually started working with,” said Binitie, who now serves as a mentor in a local pathway program designed to equip underrepresented and disadvantaged K-12 students for careers in medicine.

“It’s part of the reason I want to pay it forward,” he said.

There were no tuition-free options when Binite was applying to med school and he was prepared to take out loans.

Like most applicants, he applied to numerous medical schools to increase chances in a highly competitive process, including the Howard University College of Medicine, one of four medical schools at a historically black college.

Black medical students who attend HBCUs report higher degrees of confidence in their academic abilities and a greater sense of belonging than their peers who attend predominantly white medical schools, according to a 2022 study in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

As of 2019, about 10 percent of Black doctors graduated from medical schools at HBCUs, according to the AAMC.

“If you’re one of a few Black or Brown students in your medical school and you’re not doing well, you may be less likely to go to an advisor because you don’t want to get singled out as the only Black person not doing well,” Binitie said. “At an HBCU, you don’t feel singled out as the only minority in the class, and you may be more willing to seek support.”

But Binitie didn’t get into Howard’s medical school; Only around 3.7 percent of applicants do. Instead he went to the University of South Florida’s medical college after he got a scholarship and connected with the Black professor who became his mentor during the interview process.

He is encouraged that tuition-free programs are helping some medical students graduate without substantial debt. But Binitie, who has experienced his share of racial microaggressions during his career, says it will take more than money to diversify the physician workforce.

“If it’s still the same group of students coming in, it may not increase the diversity of the students,” he said. “I’m not aware of money fixing anything when it comes to diversity.”

Just over half (55 percent) of college students receive advising on courses and course sequences and less than that (52 percent) have been advised on degree progress, according to a 2023 Student Voice survey by Inside Higher Ed and College Pulse.

Advising plays a key role in helping students persist and graduate—and a lack of quality advising can increase time to degree, wasted credits and frustrated learners.

In 2023, the University of Central Florida modified its advising and coaching model into a singular role, centralizing staff under one umbrella and modifying job descriptions for staff. Starting this fall, all students will be assigned an academic success coach who will provide assistance with course registration and degree mapping and also assist with personal challenges students face in their academics.

The new initiative is designed to improve retention and graduation rates across the college as well as raise morale and energy among the advising team.

What’s the need: In the past, academic advisers were decentralized under each college at UCF, allowing every advising unit to practice its own approach and unequally distributing caseloads depending on the number of students enrolled.

“Students’ experiences across the colleges as [they] related to advising, [they were] just all over the place,” explains DeLaine Priest, associate vice president for student success initiatives at UCF. “We were looking for an opportunity where we could have a standard student experience across the campus.”

Students could wait up to two hours for walk-in appointments at advising offices and four-year graduation rates have hovered at 54 percent for first-time, full-time students and at 50 percent for three-year graduation rates for transfers.

An internal review also showed adviser caseloads could be extremely high in some colleges (anywhere from 1:200 to 1:2,000) and staff compensation was below market value, resulting in high turnover in an office that is critical to the student lifecycle.

Beyond needing to improve the workload and pay, UCF leaders identified an opportunity to improve relationships between advisers and students, moving from a transactional interaction to a more interpersonal one.

UCF has offered success coaching since 2016 for its online learners and later for its transfer students, but the service was separate from advising and housed in its own office. With the restructuring, advising and coaching staff assume the same role and are merged into one office, reporting to the Division of Student Success and Well-Being.

How it works: As of this semester, there are no longer advisers or success coaches, only academic success coaches who work with students.

“We are impacting students from start to finish,” says Jennifer Sumner, assistant vice provost of academic and student digital initiatives. “That coach will be with that student all the way through graduation, working differently with them, building relationships with them and helping to keep them on that path, on that journey, all the way through their entire UCF experience.”

As coaches, staff will be responsible for proactive outreach to students with the hope that students will see their adviser not as a gatekeeper to courses but as someone who helps them with whatever they need to be successful, Sumner says.

Each coach will have a maximum caseload of around 490 students, which is still high but nowhere near the levels advisers were handling prior, Sumner says.

“One of the beauties of the model [is] we’re now able to be nimble with how we move those staff; it’s not like we’ve got to hire for a particular college … I’m able to now move a coach from this college that may have a very low ratio to this college that had a very high ratio,” Sumner says.

UCF plans to hire 14 new staff members to help meet this need, in addition to the restructured staff.

Investing in talent: Academic advisers and success coaches receive cross-functional training, learning the role and responsibilities of the other position to equip them for the new role. All staff complete UCF’s Higher Education Coaching Academy and learn to use a centralized customer relationship management system to collect unified student data, as well.

With the role changes come salary adjustments for all existing staff and a new minimum salary for new hires, funded by a $3.5 million investment from the provost’s office, says Paul Dosal, senior vice president for student success.

“We did this to improve the quality of our services to students, not to save money,” Dosal says. “We’ve invested more in this effort because we want to become more efficient.”

Advisers and coaches assume new titles based on their level of seniority. For example, Advisor III and Success Coach III titles are now Senior Academic Success Coaches.

What’s next: The process change started in October 2023 and finished in March 2024 when staff completed training on policies, procedures and other information, just in time for orientation this summer.

The university will build a website and start issuing communication to incoming and continuing students in the near future, letting them know about the change and getting them familiar with new processes. Online and transfer students are already familiar with working with coaches, so Sumner anticipates a smooth transition.

The university will be tracking timely graduation for first-time students and transfers, as well as other data to gauge effectiveness, including phone wait times and the number of walk-ins to measure demand and if students are having proactive services (they shouldn’t have to walk-in if staff are reaching out, Priest explains).

Administrators also hope to increase the number of students who are indicating intent to graduate each term and decrease the number of students changing their majors, because sticking with a major helps lead to timely graduation.

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After several delays, the Biden administration finally released its final rule overhauling Title IX this morning, kicking off what will likely be a frantic few months as colleges race to update their policies in time for the coming academic year. Colleges and universities have until Aug. 1 to comply.

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 protects students in all levels of education from sex-based discrimination. The new regulations, which appear similar to what was proposed in June 2022, significantly alter how colleges and universities respond to reports of sexual harassment and assault and expand protections for LGBTQ+ and pregnant students.

Other changes make it easier for victims to report sexual harassment and end the current requirement that colleges hold live hearings with an opportunity for cross-examination to allow those accused to confront their accusers. The 1,577-page regulations released Friday are here.

These new measures will strengthen vital protections for students, White House and Education Department officials said at a news conference Thursday evening. The final regulations will apply to complaints of sex discrimination regarding alleged conduct that occurs on or after Aug. 1.

“For more than 50 years, Title IX has promised an equal opportunity to learn and thrive in our nation’s schools free from sex discrimination,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement. “These final regulations build on the legacy of Title IX by clarifying that all our nation’s students can access schools that are safe, welcoming and respect their rights.”

The final regulations will usher in a new era for Title IX, an area of civil rights law that has become politicized and the subject of significant changes that ebb and flow depending on which administration is in charge. Colleges and universities are hoping that this latest rule will put an end to the back and forth that’s marked the last decade.

“It’s our fervent hope that this won’t change again in four years,” said S. Daniel Carter, the president of Safety Advisors for Educational (SAFE) Campuses who consults with universities on campus safety.

Carter added that he asked the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, which wrote the new regulations, to “issue a rule that can stand the test of time.” Whether that’s the case with this new rule, he said, will depend on how it balances the interests of those who file Title IX complaints, the parties accused of misconduct, and the college and university administrators required to adjudicate the complaints.

This set of regulations replace the Trump-era Title IX rule issued in May 2020, which overturned a swath of guidance issued during the Obama administration that was aimed in part at forcing colleges to respond more promptly to reports of sexual misconduct.

Gender justice and survivor advocacy groups, survivors of sexual assault, Democrats and others spent years criticizing the current rules, saying they are difficult to navigate and created barriers for students who want to file a complaint or receive support from a university’s Title IX office.

Rewriting the Title IX regulations has been a priority for the Biden administration and has been in the works since spring 2021. However, the rewrite proved difficult to do quickly. The final rule was initially expected in May 2023, then pushed back to October and then delayed again until March 2024. Before issuing the final rule, Education Department officials had to review and respond to more than 230,000 comments.

“This new rule will ensure survivors no longer face retaliation from their institutions for reporting sexual harassment or live under a Title IX that privileges accused perpetrators over students who were sexually assaulted,” said Tracey Vitchers, executive director of It’s On Us, a national organization working to combat campus sexual assault. “With the updated regulations, students will have tools to hold their institutions accountable for failing to comply and violating their civil rights.” Since the rules were first proposed, critics have decried the roll-back of the Trump rules, arguing it was unnecessary and would infringe on the rights of students accused of misconduct. Republicans and other critics also took issue with the decision to expand Title IX protections to include LGBTQ+ students.

North Carolina representative Virginia Foxx, the Republican chair of the House Education and Workforce Committee, said in a statement that the Education Department has placed Title IX “on the chopping block.”

“The rule also undermines existing due process rights, placing students and institutions in legal jeopardy and again undermining the protections Title IX is intended to provide,” she said.

The White House and Education Department shared a fact sheet and news release Thursday evening ahead of the final rule’s release Friday morning. Here’s what you need to know about the key changes and what’s ahead:

New Definition of Sexual Harassment

Several key changes under the new rules will bring more types of actions and incidents under colleges’ Title IX jurisdiction. Currently, the standard for sexual harassment is that the conduct is considered “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive,” but the Biden administration would lower the standard to “sufficiently severe or pervasive.”

Additionally, colleges and universities will be responsible for addressing conduct that’s off-campus or outside the country—both of which are outside institutions’ jurisdiction in the current rules.

The broader standard and these changes in the rules could lead to a spike in reporting of incidents, some experts have said in recent months. Some colleges have reported receiving fewer Title IX complaints from students over the last four years, though there’s no national database tracking that. Experts predict an increase in Title IX complaints once the rule takes effect, and that was echoed on the press call Thursday.

“This rule is designed to encourage reporting,” a senior administration official said.

Emma Grasso Levine, senior manager of Title IX policy and programs at Know Your IX, a survivor- and youth-led project of the nonprofit Advocates for Youth, said the new definition is a key change in the new rule and will help more students get the resources and support they need.

The current standard, she said, has put the burden on students “to prove that what they have experienced has been bad enough to warrant a response from their school.”

Expanded Protections

The new rule clarifies that the sex discrimination protected under Title IX includes discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, and extends new protections to students and employees who are pregnant or parenting.

Republicans have criticized the sexual orientation and gender identity provision as a “stunning affront to the purpose of Title IX.”

“This final rule dumps kerosene on the already raging fire that is Democrats’ contemptuous culture war that aims to radically redefine sex and gender,” Foxx said in the statement.

LGBTQ and gender equality advocates have said the expanded definition is a critical protection and wanted the department to go further.

Much to the disappointment of LGBTQ advocates, the final rule doesn’t include a proposal released a year ago that would prohibit blanket bans barring transgender students from participating in the sport consistent with their gender identity. Media reports have indicated that the department isn’t planning to release the controversial rule governing Title IX in athletics until after the election this fall. A senior administration official said Thursday that the process for the athletics rule is ongoing, noting that it was released nine months after comments closed on the broader Title IX rule.

Return of the Single-Investigator Model

When colleges do investigate Title IX complaints, they’ll have more flexibility to determine the best way to approach those investigations and the adjudication process.

Currently, institutions are barred from using the so-called single investigator model in which one person investigates, adjudicates and issues any sanctions against those accused of sexual misconduct. They’re also required to allow advisers to cross-examine the complaining and responding parties along with any witnesses during a live hearing. Ending the single-investigator model and requiring cross-examination were key changes in the 2020 rules aimed at ensuring those accused of misconduct have due process rights.

But the Biden administration, which has said it’s aiming to ensure that procedures to investigate and resolve complaints are fair to all involved, will allow colleges to use the single-investigator model again and won’t require cross-examination—a move that concerns due process advocates. For sex-based harassment complaints involving a student, colleges must have a process that includes either questioning by the investigator or decision-maker during individual meetings or questioning by the decision-maker in a live hearing, according to the fact sheet.

Carter, the campus safety consultant, said the single-investigator model is “not sustainable” and “won’t stand the test of time.”

“Everyone needs someone they are accountable to,” he said.

Tyler Coward, lead counselor for government affairs at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech and civil liberties advocacy organization, said in an interview earlier this week that the 2020 regulations were a “huge win” for due process rights, which are protected through live hearings and cross-examination by a student’s adviser.

“The adversarial nature where you get to cross-examine witnesses, the right to have an attorney actively be present and make opening closing statements … those sorts of things really help ensure that students aren’t being railroaded,” Coward said.

The return or encouragement of the single-investigator model, he said, does not balance the rights of both parties in a Title IX process.

“There’s no balance and trust in a system where one person has all that power,” he said. “It just can’t be done.”

A senior administration official told reporters that the rule provides a fair process and protections for all involved, outlining the parties’ equal access to notice, evidence and supportive services.

“It’s detailed about what equity means at every stage for every party,” the official said.

What’s Next

Levine at Know Your IX said that while she’s thrilled that the administration has taken a step in the right direction to restore students’ civil rights, it’s up to college administrators to act quickly to implement and enforce the new regulations.

“Student survivors of sexual violence, LGBTQ+ students, and pregnant and parenting students cannot afford to suffer any longer under policies that jeopardize their right to an education,” Levine said in a statement.

Colleges and universities have a little over three months to update their policies and processes and train staff on those new systems. The work will be similar to what happened in summer 2020, albeit without a pandemic looming over institutions. To help K-12 schools and postsecondary institutions come into compliance quickly, the Education Department is sharing resources for drafting Title IX nondiscrimination policies, notices of nondiscrimination, and grievance procedures.

The new Title IX rule is likely the most significant change to an established rule in higher education, said Carter, and based on the sheer bulk of work, it will be difficult for institutions to carry out their new policies on the department’s timeline, which is similar to 2020.

“It takes decades for some of these rules to be institutionalized, and now we’re turning it around in four years,” he said. “That is not easy.”

When, at the beginning of the spring semester, I asked my upper-division undergraduates about their majors, almost all described fields of study that bore scant resemblance to those that existed when I went to college.

The architecture students were studying sustainable and green architecture, resilient urban planning to withstand environmental stresses and natural disasters, and parametric and computational design, using algorithms and computational techniques to generate design solutions responsive to an environment and various functional requirements.

The biology majors were working on synthetic biology and CRISPR and genetic editing and the neurobiology of mental health.

The business students were learning about the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to automating business practices, enhancing decision-making, and personalizing marketing and customer service; social entrepreneurship: and blockchain applications beyond cryptocurrencies to supply chain management, secure transactions and contract automation.

The chemists were studying green chemistry, nanochemistry and synthetic biology for chemical production.

As for the engineering majors, their focus was on biomedical engineering, including techniques such as tissue engineering and organ regeneration to replace or regenerate human cells, tissues or organs; robotics and autonomous systems; and the Internet of Things, the extension of internet connectivity into physical devices and everyday objects, allowing them to be remotely monitored and controlled.

Those in fashion were focusing on sustainable and ethical fashion, biodegradable materials, non-Western fashion traditions, smart and performance-enhancing fabrics, the psychology of fashion, and fashion law and intellectual property.

Not surprisingly, the math majors were concentrating on data science and big data analytics, but also on mathematical biology to solve biological problems, such as modeling ecosystem dynamics or disease spread, and cryptography, the mathematics of securing data, including the creation of secure communication techniques and encryption protocols.

For those in pharmacy, there were personalized therapies, biopharmaceuticals, advanced drug delivery systems, nano-formulations, AI in drug development, telepharmacy, tissue engineering, regenerative medicine, and pharmacogenomics, the study of how genes affect a person’s response to drugs.

Those in social work were studying trauma-informed care, digital social work, and integrated health care that addressed both physical and mental health holistically.

Those majoring in theater were focusing on digital projection technologies, sustainable and adaptable scenic design, integrated lighting design, virtual reality sets, digital theater, immersive theater, and theater for social change.

These students recognize that the future will be a very different world than the one I encountered.

No one supports a liberal education more strongly than me. But I also know that most of the cutting-edge jobs of the near future lie far outside the majors I am familiar with.

Some growth areas are obvious. These include artificial intelligence, algorithmic development, data science, information security, machine learning and supply chain management. But other academic areas of innovation lie outside those highly touted fields.

• In biomedicine: Bioengineering and biogerontology.
• In design: Accessibility, interactive experience design, and UX design.
• In sustainability: Catastrophic risks and disaster management, climate change mitigation, conservation biology, ecocentric design, energy and environmental economics, energy modeling, environmental engineering, and hydrology.

What’s notable about all these fields is that:

1. Most undergraduates and their parents, as well as faculty, advisers—and even career service specialists—don’t know that these possibilities exist.
2. In many cases, undergraduates can only study for these jobs at technology institutes or flagship and land grant universities or elite privates—not at the institutions that serve the most students: regional and urban public universities, smaller privates, and liberal arts and religious colleges.

Certainly, many community colleges do prepare folks for lower-paid jobs in these cutting-edge fields. Some universities, including Boise State and the University of Texas at Dallas, have established schools in innovation and design, or arts, technology, and emerging communication that offer specialized training animation and simulation, app, and video-game development.

But most colleges and universities lack dedicated, well-staffed programs in bioengineering, climate or atmospheric science, data science, ecosystem management, environmental earth science, materials science, new media or symbolic systems.

Most of higher ed is, alas, about perpetuating what’s already there and sustaining the existing hierarchy, and many emerging fields are scoffed at by established faculty.

Ironically, at many institutions there are more new programs in the humanities—in Asian diasporan studies, disability studies, ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, human rights, Jewish studies, Latinx studies, performance studies, and race and indigeneity—than in the STEM fields that are poised to transform life as we know it.

The need to prepare students for tomorrow’s employment landscape strikes me as an academic, educational and societal challenge that we ignore at our peril. It’s not enough to cobble together new majors, minors, and interdisciplinary programs by redeploying existing faculty who lack expertise in the cutting-edge fields.

The barriers are financial, curricular, cultural and political.

Developing cutting-edge programs requires significant investment in state-of-the-art equipment, laboratories and computing resources, while recruiting and retaining high-priced faculty who are experts in fast-evolving technological fields.

The rapid evolution of technologies in fields like AI and machine learning means that academic curricula can quickly become outdated. Keeping pace with industry standards and technological advancements requires constant curriculum review and revision, a logistical and financial challenge.

Providing students with real-world experience through internships or practical projects can be difficult due to competition for placement in top companies or the geographical location of the institution relative to industry hubs.

Rapidly growing interest in fields such as data science and AI means institutions must find ways to scale their programs to accommodate more students without diluting educational quality.

In addition, ensuring that students from diverse backgrounds have access to these cutting-edge fields requires proactive outreach and support structures that are difficult to implement effectively.

Among the biggest challenges is cultural and institutional resistance, because, except at the wealthiest institutions, strategic investments in new areas inevitably come at the expense of more traditional areas of study.

What can be done? Here’s my advice.

1. Work with your state workforce commission, job market analytics firms such as Lightcast and cutting-edge employers to find out what lies ahead, what the bottlenecks are and what kinds of training and preparation future employees will need.
2. Whether through workshops or other orientation programs, make sure entering students learn about the full range of academic opportunities on your campus and how these align with job market trends experience.
3. Identify students who, with sufficient support, can succeed in certain cutting-edge fields and encourage them to pursue that direction by establishing field-specific learning communities, implementing supplemental instruction and offering bridge programs in especially challenging high-demand fields of study.
4. Think seriously about how gen ed courses can better connect with these emerging fields, and incentivize faculty in the humanities and social sciences to create courses that align with shifting student interests.
5. Bring in professors of the practice, coax grad student to teach relevant courses, partner with companies, medical schools and hospitals and other experts to offer internships, and adopt course-sharing to expand curricular offerings in the fast-growing areas of innovation.
6. Consider moving to a 3+1 or a 4+1 model where students get grounded in STEM and the other liberal arts, and then get a focused year on what’s coming around the bend.

The future of American higher education must reflect a dual commitment: preserving the rich foundations provided by the humanities while simultaneously expanding in new fields that build on advanced mathematics and data analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning, design thinking, sustainability, technology, and the frontiers of the natural and social science.

We need to make this kind of advanced and innovative education accessible to a broad range of diverse students. Doing so is not beyond our capabilities, but will require creative leadership, curricular innovation and a heightened institutional commitment to student support.

Addressing the challenges we face will require creative leadership that can envision and successfully implement a future-oriented curriculum, a cultural shift that accepts the necessity of institutional, curricular and pedagogical transformation, and partnerships and collaboration with industry and other universities.

All this is easier said than done, but it is essential if higher education is to be the kind of dynamic and inclusive driver of innovation that this society needs.

It’s very easy, at this moment, to be depressed about the state and fate of this nation’s campuses. When I read the higher ed press, all I see are seemingly insurmountable challenges involving costs, grade inflation, declining academic standards and campus divisiveness.

But instead of getting caught up in the moment, look to the future that my students are already encountering. This is a future in which advanced mathematics and data analytics, the frontiers of engineering, science, and technology, heightened interest in sustainability and equity, and fresh insights into human psychology and the sociology of organizations and group and individual behavior are creating radically innovative fields of study.

Follow the example of Eugene Gant in Thomas Wolfe’s 1929 debut novel Look Homeward, Angel—the most poetic work of fiction ever written by an American—who, on the book’s last page, stands on a hill above his hometown and turns his eyes away from the place where he grew up and looks upward toward the “distant soaring ranges.”

In a labor market marked by high executive turnover and shortened leadership tenures, many organizations are recognizing the value of promoting from within. Internal CEO appointments hit a record high in 2023, and internal recruitment at all levels is increasingly central to strengthening organizational culture and succession planning.

If you are a newly promoted member of a senior leadership team in higher education, we offer our congratulations and a piece of advice: even as you hit the ground running, don’t rush past the benefits of newness that would ordinarily accrue to an appointee coming from the outside.

What does this mean for you, the newly promoted leader? Rising from within your institution, you bring many advantages. You’re familiar with its history, goals and challenges. You know the administrative systems and processes. But overreliance on familiarity carries risks and can foreclose valuable opportunities. If your college or university doesn’t provide mentoring or coaching for newly promoted leaders, consider creating your own onboarding, with the following practices as a guide.

Reinvest in relationships. Given your prior interactions with members of the senior team or their deputies, it might be tempting to assume you’ve already established a sufficient working connection with them. But newness in your role is a rare and valuable opportunity to get to know them and their work differently and more deeply—and vice versa.

Seek out regular informal meetings with your colleagues to ask questions. Be open with them about what aspects of senior team work might be new to you, such as board relations or institution-wide budgeting. Resist the idea that requesting get-to-know you time from busy administrators is an imposition; in most cases, it is a welcomed opportunity for them to reflect on the larger purpose of their day-to-day work and the insights they have gained in their own leadership journey. Moreover, the better you know one another, the more readily you can collaborate and offer mutual support.

Look with fresh eyes. You might not be new to the institution but the occasion of your promotion is a call to view it anew, clearly and expansively. The Zen tradition might characterize this practice as “beginner’s mind.” Such a mindset pays dividends to you and your college or university, especially as you join a senior team setting institutional direction and strategy. “In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities,” observed a noted Zen teacher, “but in the expert’s, there are few.” One of the gifts of being new is the freedom to ask “Why?” and “Why not?” with little risk of penalty or embarrassment. Embark on your new role from a place of possibility and commit to returning to it often.

Reframe wins and losses. Serving at the senior leadership level is less about leading the work than charting the course. The mindset required is less “Are we getting the work done?” and more “Are we doing the right work?” As a leader at this level, you are called to look broadly, institution-wide, at the full landscape of opportunities and threats, needs and constraints. In this context, your mindset around wins and losses will probably need to shift. You yourself might not have “won” the budget increase you requested for your division but, as part of the leadership team, you helped allocate institutional resources strategically to advance the institution’s work and secure its future.

Contribute to the collective intelligence. In an effective organization, only the thorniest issues come to the leadership table. (If they weren’t thorny, they’d be solved at more junior levels). Very few issues at the senior team level are straightforward or unidimensional. Those concerning, say, ways to expand diversity, equity and inclusion; communicating through crisis; or developing institutional strategy for AI require a team’s collective intelligence. Your strengths—and those of your colleagues—enhance the cognitive and strategic capacity of the whole team.

It might be tempting to think that you don’t need to give much mindshare to Thorny Topic X because it doesn’t have direct connection to your domain or area of expertise. Not true. You are on the senior team for more than your subject-matter knowledge; you’re no longer free to say “not it.” Make time to understand the issue and its context—then bring your best thinking to the table.

Nearly every notable action an institution takes, whether a policy change, an investment or divestment, a program launch or closure, has ripple effects in other areas. When you join a senior leadership team, you are called to care—and care deeply—about the whole of the institution. The buck stops at the senior table. You and your colleagues—collectively, “the administration”—rise and fall together. Onboarding yourself carefully to new relationships and new ways of thinking is vital. Doing so will ensure that you add value not merely because you know the place and its past, but also because you’re prepared to ask new questions to shape its future.

Boston University, three weeks into dealing with an ongoing graduate student worker strike, saw Residence Life workers join the walkout Friday.

In a news release, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 509 said it represents about 300 of these BU employees, who include resident assistants, graduate resident assistants and graduate hall assistants. The same SEIU local includes the Boston University Graduate Workers Union, which represents around 3,000 grad workers.

“As they join forces with graduate workers on strike, our union’s message is clear: We demand respect, fair treatment and dignity in the workplace for all workers at BU,” union president David Foley said in the release.

The grad workers went on strike March 25. Unlike that indefinite walkout, the union says the Residence Life strike is set to last four days.

The Residence Life workers’ current compensation is their housing, the union says. Now they’re demanding $15 an hour and expanded meal plans. Jasmine A. Richardson, an RA, said in the release that “housing as compensation does not acknowledge the critical role we fulfill around the clock at the university. Between unpaid training time and managing the high RA-to-student ratios, many of us are struggling to find financial and academic stability.”

The university emailed Inside Higher Ed a statement saying it’s “disappointed that the ResLife workers have decided to strike during bargaining their first contract.” Still, it said BU is “committed to the negotiation process and hope it will bring the strike to an end quickly.”

Ukraine will conduct random inspections of higher education institutions after an “abnormal increase” in the number of applications from draft-age men in 2022, according to the country’s State Service of Education Quality.

The government body, which monitors education standards and implements policy, said it had analyzed state data on men born between 1964 and 1994 who entered or returned to full-time education between 2021 and 2023. At present, higher education students are exempt from conscription.

In 2022, the year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and president Volodymyr Zelensky’s subsequent declaration of martial law, applications to higher education and professional pre-higher education (junior bachelor’s) programs spiked, increasing by 1,880 per cent.

Most conscription-age applicants chose low-cost courses with minimal entrance requirements, the state body said, with only a “small proportion” using their results from entrance examinations such as the External Independent Examination (ZNO) or National Multisubject Test (NMT) to enroll.

According to a statement from the agency, the rise in enrollments has increased pressure on university budgets and teaching staff, resulting in a “danger that the heads of certain higher education institutions will not comply with the requirements of the legislation regarding the organization of the educational process.”

The service said the increase in demand could result in “negative long-term consequences” for the quality of higher education. Announcing a “comprehensive monitoring study” to continue until the end of the academic year, the body said it would conduct random inspections of higher education institutions.

More than two years since Russia’s invasion, the Ukrainian army is under significant strain, with 31,000 soldiers killed. Last week, Zelensky signed a controversial bill to drop the minimum draft age by two years, from 27 to 25.

Later this month, the Ukrainian parliament is expected to vote on another law that could see men completing second degrees no longer exempt from conscription.

ANDOVER, Mass.—The stagnation and disinclination to experiment that many critics believe is rife in higher education may loom over some gatherings of campus leaders. The College-in-3 event here this week wasn’t among them.

Several dozen college administrators, faculty leaders, accreditors and others gathered at Merrimack College to share progress reports on, and commiserate about, common roadblocks in their efforts to create three-year bachelor’s degrees.

The gathering was organized by the College-in-3 Exchange, which has been working for several years to encourage institutions to design and build academic programs that deliver faster, less expensive, and—ideally—better degree programs for learners. Most of the institutions in the fledgling consortium, striving to redesign their way to a more secure future, would do so by reducing the number of academic credits they require from the typical 120 to as low as 90.

Progress has been slow, despite the missionary zeal of its chief advocates, Bob Zemsky, one of America’s best-known scholars and analysts of higher education, and Lori J. Carrell, chancellor of the University of Minnesota Rochester. By the time of last spring’s gathering at Georgetown University, not a single one of the then-12 pilot programs had been approved by their accreditors and states to begin operating.

Last fall, the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities approved three-year bachelor’s degree programs developed by Brigham Young University–Idaho and its affiliate Ensign College. But the accreditor’s officials say they won’t approve any other programs until they see outcomes, which they have yet to specify, from the two experiments in Idaho.

No other regulators have followed suit, and some institutions, like Merrimack, have been through the wringer, having submitted multiple proposals to no avail, its leaders say.

“Every time we come in, they change the rules again,” Chris Hopey, Merrimack’s president, said of the New England Commission on Higher Education. (Despite its apparent caution, the New England accreditor has taken incremental steps. It released guidelines last month that, among other things, would require institutions seeking to offer bachelor’s degrees with fewer than 120 credits to add a prefix to the name—think “applied” or “accelerated”—that would make clear to prospective applicants that it isn’t a traditional bachelor’s degree.)

Signs of momentum have appeared in recent weeks. Indiana’s legislature approved a measure last month that would require all four-year public colleges in the state to develop three-year degree options by July 2025. U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, successfully tucked into a 2024 spending bill a provision that would let colleges use federal financial aid funds to try three-year degrees, through the Education Department’s “experimental sites” program.

And the College-in-3 group unveiled an ambitious new strategy at this week’s meeting that would identify a handful of regional “host” institutions that would each build and help sustain “clusters” of 50–75 colleges and universities that pilot three-year-degree experiments.

Perhaps the most promising development was unveiled at the tail end of this week’s meeting—and may have been spurred by it. Zemsky and Carrell had invited officials from the Northwest accreditor and of the nation’s largest accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission, to the event, to help them learn more about the efforts, and, almost certainly, to gently apply pressure on them.

The accreditors took their lumps, as one session that was purportedly designed for institutions to share their stories largely morphed into a gripe-fest about the barriers state laws and accreditation processes had placed in their way.

Soon after, Tom Bordenkircher, vice president of accreditation relations at the Higher Learning Commission, delivered welcome news: that after significant “study,” beginning in September, the agency will consider granting approval to any institution seeking to offer a “reduced-credit bachelor’s degree” in any program. There will be no pilot projects, he said, and no asterisks attached to the offerings.

“As of this morning, the gate has swung wide open at HLC,” Bordenkircher said.

The response was enthusiastic.

“I think this will force the hands of other [accreditors],” said Hopey of Merrimack. “This is going to be cascading. Everybody’s waiting for who does it first.”

How Change Happens in Higher Education

Like many potential innovations in higher education, this one has been gestating for a long while. Zemsky floated the idea 15 years ago in a series of articles and books, but “we got done in by the accreditors when we last tried this,” he said this week.

In the intervening decade, questions have only grown about higher education affordability, the value of college credentials and the sustainability of many institutions as the number of college-goers declines—and demographic declines loom.

That has resulted in shifts in the credentials learners are seeking (see this week’s data on dips in degrees awarded and increases in certificates granted by American colleges and universities this year) and a good bit of creative thinking by institutions about what academic credentials to offer and how to offer them.

But as is often true, given the fragmented nature of higher education and the lack of cross-institutional collaboration, innovation like this often happens in nooks and crannies—in one professor’s course, or one department’s major, or maybe in a partnership between two local colleges.

Multi-institution networks like the College-in-3 Exchange (and better-established ones such as Achieving the Dream and the University Innovation Alliance) can help ideas spread.

Zemsky’s and Carrell’s vision to create a community of practice to encourage experimentation with three-year degrees as a partial response to the concerns about affordability and value, driven particularly, they say, by a single statistic: “Currently half of all four-year American colleges and universities across the United States lose a quarter or more of their first-year students before their second year,” with low-income, minority and first-generation students faring particularly poorly. “This outcome is unacceptable and we who serve students pursuing higher education must lead the change. We need not just new, but dramatically different designs—to achieve dramatically different results.”

The work of that community of practice was on display in the conference room at Merrimack, where officials from institutions as diverse as Georgetown (private research university), Utah Tech University (a regional public institution that offers a range of credentials) and American Public University (a for-profit institution that serves many military service members) brainstormed about how they might commonly measure the outcomes of the three-year degree programs they’re developing. They broadly agreed they would need to identify metrics around credential completion, student debt, employment, the student experience and student learning,

Participants discussed the importance of advising, and how to bring faculty members along, though most said their professors were energized by the possibility of rethinking their work on behalf of students.

And they talked about money: the need to build support from foundations for this work, and the extent to which that influenced the decision to adopt a strategy in which “host” institutions can play the intermediary role that many foundations today favor when they’re working in higher education.

Merrimack is the first such host to sign on, and Hopey said matter-of-factly that he would recruit 75 New England colleges to participate, plus 50 corporate CEOs to advocate and build momentum for the three-year degree.

Zemsky and Carrell set themselves an audacious goal of hundreds of three-year degree pilots within a few years. Given the low rate of accreditor approval so far, that target may have seemed almost laughable before this week’s statements from the Higher Learning Commission.

By the end of the meeting, though, optimism was high. “A year ago, our conversation had a ‘Debbie downer’ tone to it,” Hopey said. “This conversation has taken a 180.”