Tag: Events

A free community college program in Massachusetts for students aged 25 and older has led to a surge in enrollment at the state’s two-year institutions but has also put a significant strain on the system, particularly on the workload of financial aid and student support services staff.

The MassReconnect program led to a student roll increase of about 5,000 learners, or 8 percent, in fall 2023, the first semester after it was introduced, according to a report from the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education. Although the spring enrollment numbers are not yet finalized, system officials say applications were 30 percent higher than the same time period in 2023.

And as the number of students grows, so does the workload, and many of the system’s 15 community colleges are struggling to hire enough workers to keep pace with the expanding enrollment.

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“We are now dealing with what I would describe as an awesome problem,” said Nate Mackinnon, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of Community Colleges. “I describe this as a natural challenge that would occur with large, sudden increases anywhere.”

It’s not entirely unlike a problem the Massachusetts system and many other community colleges across the country faced before.

During the Great Recession of 2008, when millions of underemployed Americans returned to college to get additional education and learn new skills, many colleges, including some in the Massachusetts system, saw enrollments that exceeded their capacity.

“When the Great Recession really took hold, we were all of a sudden parking students in tennis courts because we ran out of parking spots,” Mackinnon said. “With that comes a requirement to grow our staff and support services for students to ensure that we can continue to focus on quality.”

The difference this time around is a tight labor market, stagnant wages and increasing costs of living in the state, which are all making it harder to fill the new positions. Despite administrators’ willingness to restore positions that were eliminated as a result of pandemic-related budget cuts, it has been difficult to find candidates to fill the vacancies.

The staff shortages also raise questions about the feasibility of universal free community college programs with no age limits, an idea that a handful of state higher education officials and lawmakers across the country have been considering. As they watch smaller free college programs boost enrollment, increase the number of degree holders in their states and address workforce development goals, these officials are asking if the programs could have the same effect on a larger scale.

Hoping for ‘A Little Break’

Financial aid officers and student success coaches at Massachusetts community colleges had to hustle to put together financial aid packages for the new students and make sure they have the supportive services they need to pass their classes and stay enrolled.

Jillian Glaze, president of the Massachusetts Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, said that although she is “super excited about the tremendous opportunities” ahead, there is “definitely a need for more hands.”

Glaze, who is also senior director of financial services at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston, felt lucky to have a “highly committed” staff, but she said last semester took a toll on her small staff of four financial aid counselors and one associate director.

“They did a lot of extra work to try and make sure that there weren’t any visible gaps,” she said. “Of their own choice, they worked extra hours on weekends to make sure that we were getting out aid packages as quickly as humanly possible.”

The program’s initial implementation was “successful” but not “ideal” for her staff, Glaze said. “I’m hoping that we’ll be able to get them a little break soon.”

Although there is sufficient funding and administrative support to hire additional employees, Glaze said finding people with the skills to fill the roles has been challenging.

“To be a qualified financial aid administrator takes a depth of regulatory knowledge that takes time and a lot of training to develop,” she said.

And the challenges extend beyond financial aid. Community college presidents and other higher education officials across the state are anecdotally reporting shortages in adjunct instructors, registrar officers and student success staff.

Different States, Different Challenges

Free college or promise programs have been popping up across the country over the past several years and have commonly contributed to relative spikes in enrollment, however, the surges range in velocity, as do the challenges.

Michigan introduced its free college program, Michigan Reconnect, in early 2021, but it did not experience nearly as large of a boom in enrollment as Massachusetts. Michigan’s community college enrollment rose by nearly 13,000 students, or about 5 percent, between 2020–21 and 2021–22, according to the state’s education database.

Even after another 3 percent boost in enrollment in 2022–23, and a current total of about 280,500 students, the system still falls almost 70,000 students short of the approximately 350,000 who were enrolled in 2017–18.

Erica Orians, vice president of the Michigan Community College Association, believes the shortfall is largely due to timing. When Michigan Reconnect launched, the state was “still really in the depths of the pandemic,” she said. And as a result, “I think that we saw less of a spike right away.” Although the community college system has not struggled to ensure staff counts kept pace with student roll numbers like Massachusetts, it has had high employee turnover and other challenges that have still made staffing a struggle.

“There’s a lot of new issues that colleges are facing that go beyond that academic counseling office,” Orians said. “You can’t ignore students’ mental health needs, because if those go unaddressed, those students are unlikely to continue to enroll.”

In Maine, where enrollment numbers soared after state lawmakers approved a free college program for recent high school graduates in 2022, the system struggled to hire new staff quickly enough to meet the demands of an increased population of students.

David Daigler, president of the Maine Community College System, said after the Free College Scholarship program was adopted, he tried to “get the oars in the water before students showed up.” He anticipated a tidal wave of new students and allocated $1 million for additional staffing for the system’s seven colleges. But by the time students arrived on campus in the fall, most of the system’s colleges still lacked the staff needed to keep pace with enrollment, he explained.

“I don’t want to leave you with the impression that everybody was hunky-dory—everyone’s a little bit stressed,” he said. “But there was the ability to anticipate, prepare and sort of cushion the blow.”

Is Expansion Feasible?

Despite the increased workloads and staffing problems that come with free college programs, some education officials and lawmakers in Michigan and Massachusetts are considering removing the age limits and making community college free for all.

Pam Eddinger, president of Bunker Hill, said the challenges her campus and others in the system have experienced are “typical growing pains” necessary to achieve something that’s been “a dream for so long.”

“I think the colleges have lived in a state of precarity for so long that when something like this comes, it’s almost a second reaction to say, ‘Oh, and now we need to expand capacity,’” Eddinger said.

She is confident the system is prepared to become universally free, noting that if the concept were to pass in the current state legislative session and be implemented in the fall, college leaders will have had a full year to measure MassReconnect’s outcomes and make adjustments.

“We’re ready,” she said. “We need to think about this as not just Massachusetts’s own bubble. This has happened in more than 30 states across the country … so it is not like we’re doing this on a blank canvas.”

But Mackinnon of MACC says that there is a long way to go before the system is ready.

“It’s clear there’s a desire to get to a point where community college is free for everyone in Massachusetts, and we are excited to embrace that,” he said. “However, that will also need to include an investment in our faculty and staff compensation, as well as addressing critical infrastructure concerns.”

The state Legislature has distributed $1.5 million across the 15 colleges so far to assist in increasing capacity. But a recent report by the community college association suggests that it will take a lot more state dollars to ensure the system is ready for a universally free college program.

“At a time when inflation is what it is, and people can get pretty good money doing a lot of different things, a starting faculty salary of around $55,000 in a place like Massachusetts—it’s just not sustainable,” Mackinnon said.

The report estimates the system would need an additional $90 million in annual state funding to cover compensation. Other costs, including building maintenance and other “critical infrastructure concerns,” could raise the total to $170 million annually, the report said.

“Our colleges have a significant backlog of deferred maintenance,” Mackinnon said. “We want to be sure that we are ready to welcome all students who want to attend community college with the high-quality, first-class facilities that they expect and deserve.”

Across the nation, we continue to see proposed legislation that directly targets higher education and scholars. In the coming months, at least 14 states will grapple with bills that impede faculty members from performing their usual work by, for instance, banning the teaching of certain topics or circumscribing how the faculty goes about hiring and retaining people in their own departments. Such legislation could significantly hinder the work of faculty members as well as their recruitment and retention.

These bills primarily impact faculty of color or those of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Many of them seek to restrict or remove diversity hiring initiatives that work to create a more level playing field for applicants who might not have been previously afforded the same educational, professional development or advancement opportunities due to lack of access to resources and networks.

While some bills proposed over the last year have failed—like HB 7 in Alabama, which would have directly targeted classroom content—others have passed that use vague, overly broad language to restrict how faculty can create classroom environments where everyone feels welcome. Such is the case with SB 17 in Texas, which is now in effect as of Jan. 1. And even when these bills do not formally become law, faculty members of color still feel pressured to make changes, and many are leaving their institutions or higher education altogether because of it.

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Yet most people are unaware of what’s truly at stake for all of us in higher education when faculty members of color make the difficult decision to depart. It is not just students of color who lose out. We all lose out.

Faculty members of color provide many benefits to all students, the institution and the broader society. For starters, the mere presence of faculty of color on a college campus can increase the sense of belonging and academic success among students of color. Faculty members of color are more likely to include classroom content that recognizes the knowledge and experiences of various racial and ethnic groups. And after engaging with such content, white students are more likely to work to help resolve racial and cultural issues. Such outcomes are crucial for sustaining our democracy, particularly as state populations become increasingly racially and ethnically diverse.

Additionally, through their teaching, research and university service or volunteering, faculty members of color cultivate critical thinking and innovation, encourage civic engagement, and intentionally engage all students in meaningful conversations about how to redress national and global societal inequities. Compared to other faculty members, faculty members of color are also more likely to intentionally include diverse perspectives in course content, use student-centered teaching approaches and interact more with all their students to ensure they get the most out of their classes to be successful leaders after graduation.

Those contributions are integral in fulfilling university goals. Most university missions focus on problem-solving and critical inquiry, intended to create prepared citizens who make society better over all. More so than other academics, faculty members of color facilitate these desired outcomes through their research, teaching and service. Ultimately, without faculty members of color, colleges and universities can’t fulfill their missions.

As a former fellow for the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, I interviewed many faculty members of color who have had to make difficult decisions about their employment. From September 2022 to May 2023, I spoke with more than 20 faculty members who teach courses or conduct research focused on race and, of those, 13 were people of color.

One of them was Ralph (a pseudonym), who was untenured when we spoke. Ralph felt that many administrators and faculty colleagues were not taking the legislative bills and their consequences seriously. He felt gaslighted, as many people were making light of and brushing off his very real and serious concerns. Ralph saw this especially to be the case among white administrators and faculty members, as they were the ones most likely to not be as directly impacted. Many of them didn’t have any formal responsibilities related to fostering racial inclusion or didn’t teach courses that touched upon race or racism, so they didn’t see the need to speak up or push back against the bills.

This silence among the university president, provost, deans, department chairs and white colleagues spoke volumes to the faculty members of color, like Ralph, whom I spoke with. In part because of this lack of support that left them feeling disregarded, nine of the faculty members of color told me they were actively looking for other jobs, had secured a job at another university or had ultimately decided to leave higher education altogether.

Many of those faculty members are passionate about the work they do at their institutions, so such decisions were not easy or simple for Ralph and the others to make. Ralph ultimately decided to leave his institution for another, and his work environment and leadership were large factors in that decision. Many faculty members made these choices as a way to survive and prioritize their own well-being and the well-being of their families during a time when some had received death threats just for teaching a class with the word “race” in its title.

Despite the very serious circumstances that faculty members of color like Ralph currently face, most college presidents and senior leaders remain quiet and refuse to speak out in support of their faculty members, especially those of color. Many leaders are probably fearful of going against what state officials are directing college and universities to do, so as not to draw unnecessary attention that could lead to negative consequences, such as a loss of funding. Other leaders, like those in Utah, have stayed silent to “refrain from taking public positions on political, social, or unsettled issues that do not directly related to the institution’s mission, role or pedagogical objective,” as directed by the Utah Board of Higher Education.

But the relentless assault on faculty of color does, in fact, directly relate. Senior university leaders should be speaking out in a way that centers faculty members of color and the many contributions they bring to their higher education institution and the broader society. This is one tangible way to support retaining them amid all the external political pressures. Colleges and universities already struggle with recruiting and retaining faculty of color, and the proposed bills, if passed, will only make matters much worse.

Without leadership support and mission-driven institutional responses, faculty members of color will most likely continue to be dehumanized and neglected, forcing many of them to leave academe. It is vital for higher education leaders to acknowledge and speak out about the importance of faculty members of color. They not only make their college or university more effective, but they also help to transform society for the better. At this crucial time for higher education, we need presidents and provosts to step up and publicly acknowledge and support faculty members of color and affirm their important role. Otherwise, the exodus of faculty members of color will only continue to increase, and we will all be worse off for it.

While working with a student recently in a writing session, one of us, Christin, encouraged using a writing technique that emphasizes discovery. Faced with the student’s uncertainty, she asked, “Do you trust me to lead you through the writing process?”

Trust: it is a crucial component of any one-on-one student appointment. Whether it’s helping students learn effective time management in a study skills appointment or productive writing strategies in a writing appointment, all academic support staff know the drill. Our services are only as good as the trust we’ve built with the student. While essential to the work we do, trust can be hard to quantify.

After spending 22 years, collectively, in faculty and academic support positions, we have come to believe that trust looks like a room built through discovery and intentional learning partnerships.

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Layers of Trust

Based on our experience, we believe there are three layers of trust to build in one-on-one appointments.

1. Earning the student’s trust in the staff member.

In Mitch’s early days as a learning consultant, he had to fight the urge to point out his degrees hanging on the wall or the impulse to regale students with stories of the many papers he wrote in his graduate studies. Instead, Mitch discovered that to establish the student’s trust in him, he actually needed to focus on them. Why are they meeting with you? What events or experiences caused them to come here? What are they hoping to get out of this process? Sometimes the answers are straightforward and sometimes not so much. Regardless, we find that putting in the effort to individualize the appointment to the needs of the student can go a long way to establish their trust in us.

2. Trusting the student.

Staff can fall victim to believing a student is guilty before proven innocent in terms of academia. For example, does a student really need an extension because they were sick? Or were they just lazy? Does a student not understand the material? Or do they just not like their professor? Repeatedly, examples such as these seem to find their way around campus. We wonder if these narratives do more harm than good under the guise of being realistic. We urge academic support staff to allow themselves to trust the student—trust in their ability and/or desire to seek out new information, build positive academic habits, and learn new skills. Or maybe simply trust that the struggles, challenges and hardships detailed in appointments are not exaggerated to get something from you or your office.

3. Ensuring the student has self-trust.

This may sometimes be the most challenging to foster: every day we meet with a variety of students, from different fields and years. What we have come to notice is that sometimes a student has given up on themselves before even finishing the appointment. Maybe it is due to challenges they have already overcome in their academic journey or maybe because they haven’t developed a growth mindset, but the pinnacle of our work is ensuring a student trusts themselves to grow as a learner. Whether we are covering a writing strategy or studying strategy, we often provide the opportunity for students to practice the techniques in our appointments. Maybe that involves going through a journal article to practice the strategy of previewing, or maybe it involves practicing a new note-taking template with their assigned readings for the week. Regardless, we hope that by allowing students to try something new, or maybe even fail in the safety of our office, they can build a level of self-trust that will transform their learning journey.

A Metaphor for Building Trust

As we work to facilitate these layers of trust with students, we have found the following metaphor of a room (and its accompanying learning-partnership theory) to be useful. It wasn’t until completing his master’s of education that Mitch realized how much his guitar teacher had taught him about the practice of learning. When he told his teacher how much his methods had meant, his teacher’s response was immediate: “Son, I just unlocked the door and turned on the lights. You did everything else.”

As academic support staffers, we believe that Mitch’s guitar teacher’s metaphor of a learning room is a useful frame for what we do with students, because at the end of the day, the onus is on the student to achieve their academic goals. We are simply guides on this grand tour of learning.

When a student meets with us, we unlock the door to a room they are either trying to avoid or are not confident about entering. We introduce them to any number of academic skills strategies they may need for studying, reading or writing. By doing so, we turn on the lights, allowing the students to discover all the tools at their disposal. For the sake of this metaphor, it’s at this point the student explores the room on their own. Maybe they’re searching for better note-taking strategies and they decide to explore the Cornell Note-Taking System. If it works, that’s great. But if they find it’s not suited for them, we are there ready to provide counsel and encouragement. At the end of the day, the student is an active agent in their own exploration and discovery.

Learning-Partnership Model

At the core of the metaphor of the room, we find the learning-partnership model, a theory and practice articulated by Marcia Baxter Magolda. In this model, Baxter Magolda balances challenge and support with three assumptions and three principles about learning. These assumptions and principles work double time to not only empower students in their learning journey but push them beyond their comfort zone and into what Lev Vygotsky calls the “zone of proximal development.” In other words, the learning-partnership model supports students but also stretches them into the growth zone—the zone where good things happen.

The three assumptions challenge the student to grapple with the complex and socially constructed nature of knowledge. Reality isn’t what they thought, perhaps, but they have the autonomy to make meaning in the face of such relativism and ambiguities. Learning partners challenge students to find the internal resources to make decisions, face uncertainty, and move forward intentionally.

On the other side, the three principles ground these challenges in a supportive stance. Learning partners affirm the student’s capacity to know and make meaning. They ground the learning in the student’s lived experiences, and they work with the student to parse difficult material, so the student isn’t alone.

Those of us working in academic skills support may find Baxter Magolda’s model particularly helpful as we enter the literal and figurative learning room with our students. When students sit across from us riddled with anxiety, overwhelmed in the face of academic culture and feeling alone, these three assumptions and principles help us to navigate the three layers of trust outlined above.

Final Takeaway

Like so many academic support professionals, we do what we do because we believe in the joy of learning. The greatest reward in our jobs is seeing a student’s eyes light up during a one-on-one appointment. We know this light is only possible when we build layers of trust that allow the student freedom to step into the room and learn through discovery. But that is only half the story. In the end, it’s not just the student learning to trust themselves through the process of discovery—we are, too.

American University administrators have banned all indoor protests in a move they say is intended to promote inclusivity and signal a clear intolerance of antisemitism on campus.  

Sylvia Burwell, the university’s president, said in a Jan. 25 letter to the campus that the decision was made in response to “recent events and incidents on campus [that] have made Jewish students feel unsafe and unwelcome.”

She explained that the incidents necessitated unequivocal measures.

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“When our students’ safety, their sense of belonging, or their connection to our community are disrupted by discrimination or hateful behavior, we are committed to taking swift action to support them and address the problem, “ she wrote.

The protest ban comes on the heels of a complaint filed by multiple Jewish advocacy groups to the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, asserting that the Washington, D.C., institution is a hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students.

State and federal lawmakers have also been ramping up their scrutiny and criticisms of higher education leaders’ handling of antisemitism on their campuses since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas. The additional oversight has prompted some college presidents and other top administrators to be proactive by adopting or strengthening campus speech and protest policies and taking extra steps to protect and express support for Jewish students. The related ousters of the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania have undoubtedly been instructive.

Just two weeks ago, American announced curriculum changes to address antisemitism, Islamophobia and other forms of hate and bigotry. The university also introduced new training opportunities, through its Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab, for students and faculty to learn how to facilitate in-class discussions in contentious times.

Although Burwell’s letter does not provide a clear explanation of what qualifies as a protest, it states that any students, staff or faculty members who violate the new policy “are subject to disciplinary action.”

The new policy also requires clubs and organizations to be “welcoming to all students” and that posters displayed around the campus and university-sponsored events “promote inclusivity.” These new rules will be in effect at least through the end of the spring semester, at which point they will be reassessed, according to the letter.

A Suppression of Free Expression

The university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors released a statement in response to the new policy on Jan. 29, saying it was adopted “without a transparent process, faculty input, or meaningful community discussion of alternatives” and that it will have “the effect of suppressing and chilling expression.”

The statement also said the policy “is rife with vague and subjective terms” and gives administrators the ability to punish students under their own self-determined standards of what qualifies as “welcoming.”

“If a student wears a black armband, a historic symbol of student antiwar protest, to class, will the Administration punish the student?” it asks. “What if a student group collectively decides to wear symbols, statements, or depictions of a flag on a given day?”

Matt Bennett, American’s vice president and chief communications officer, declined to define what exactly qualifies as a protest. He said the guidelines laid out in the president’s letter align with the university’s broader freedom of expression policy, established in 2022 “as a collaborative exercise of faculty and staff and students, all members of the community.”

“This is about establishing time, place and manner of protests on campus,” he said, noting that the free expression policy has always allowed for such constraints. “Our teams will work with our community to address situations that may arise and apply the policy as we always have.”

Bennett said he understands some of the concerns about the protest ban, but there were “issues happening on campus” that needed immediate response.

“Our first priority is the safety and well-being of the community. And we need to take action to make sure that we are supporting that,” he said. “We can have dialogue; we can look forward together about how we move forward as we review these actions at the conclusion of the semester.”

The AAUP chapter contends that even if administrators clarified “protest” to mean only in-person gatherings for the purpose of dissent, it would still suppress “good-faith civic engagement.”

The faculty organization said it is committed to fighting bias and harassment on campus but that doing so should not come at the cost of limiting free speech.

“This new policy neither meaningfully advances equity nor creates accountability for bad actors; rather it makes all students less free in service of dampening political discourse,” the statement says. It “threatens the core functions of this university: inquiry and good-faith dialogue.”

PEN America, a free expression advocacy group, also voiced disapproval of the new policy.

“Clamping down on free expression in the name of inclusion is an insult to both ideals,” Kristen Shahverdian, senior manager of free expression and education, said in a statement. “Bans on all protests inside all buildings … will serve no purpose other than to limit the terms of open discourse at a time when dialogue is more important than ever.”

Pamela S. Nadell, director of the university’s Jewish studies program, praised the new policy in an email, saying that when protests “disrupt our educational mission,” that “curtails free speech.”

“Our new policy boldly achieves two goals. It enables the university to permit free speech in the public square and carry on with our mission of teaching and scholarship,” Nadell wrote.

According to an Instagram post by the university’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, a large group of students, faculty and staff marched on campus on Jan. 26 and demanded that Burwell and other members of her administration support Palestinian students and acknowledge “the ongoing genocide happening in Palestine.”

“President Burwell not only continues to neglect her Palestinian students and allies, but actively suppresses our voices and freedom of speech,” the post reads. “We will NEVER be silenced.”

The student government also took issues with Burwell’s letter, saying the policy “interferes with our rights as students and Americans” and contradicts the university’s tradition of “student activism, political participation, accepting challenges, and holding a change-making spirit.”

“As the Student Government of American University our role is to ensure that ALL students feel safe and represented on campus,” the executive board wrote in an email. “We have to address all hate crimes facing our student body right now, including BOTH Antisemitism and Islamophobia. Our Student Government will not address one issue without the other.”

Harvard Holds Similar Protocol

Harvard University also recently reminded its campus of a similar policy banning indoor protests. The policy, which was outlined in a new document titled “Guidance on Protest and Dissent,” did not add any new rules, but it emphasized and clarified that protests or other forms of dissent are not permitted in classrooms, libraries, dormitories or dining halls.

Unlike American’s new statement, Harvard’s guidelines allow the leaders of the individual schools to make “explicit exceptions.”

John K. Wilson, co-editor of the AAUP’s “Academe” blog and a former fellow at the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, wrote in a recent blog post that although colleges can restrict and punish “certain kinds of protests,” they should never ban protests themselves.

He noted that as a private university, Harvard is not legally obligated to protect free speech, but it is “morally obligated to strive to be among the best universities at free speech” if it wants to maintain its status as a respected institution.

“The fact that Harvard’s top officials fail to make this fundamental distinction suggests that their goal is not to prevent disruption but to silence protest,” he added. “Harvard is under tremendous pressure from wealthy donors and powerful politicians to censor criticism of Israel. But that’s no excuse for violating the rights of everyone in its community.”

The total student debt in the United States, which is around $1.7 trillion and growing, is being fueled in part by borrowers who left college before earning a degree or credential and can’t afford to repay their student loans, according to a new report.

The report, released today by the Higher Education Advisory Group and the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, delves into the extent to which completing a degree or stopping out influences debt repayment. The authors of the report used U.S. Department of Education data to analyze 3.9 million borrowers across 1,949 institutions who took out loans between 2013 and 2015 and compared it to how much those borrowers cumulatively owed four years later, between 2017 and 2019.

“Entering college is important, but access itself is just not enough,” said Michael Itzkowitz, founder and president of the HEA Group and author of the report. “We need to make sure we have good outcomes for students to ensure they graduate, get a decent-paying job, enter the workforce and are able to pay off their loans.”

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That’s harder to do for the roughly 39 million people who have some college credits but no degree or credential. The vast majority of people with a college degree are better off financially than their peers who didn’t pursue higher education, according to a 2023 analysis from the Institute for Higher Education Policy.

The new report from the HEA Group supports that finding.

After four years, noncompleters owed a total of nearly $1 billion more (from $14.9 billion to $15.8 billion) than the amount they initially borrowed, which reflects borrowers who don’t make high enough payments to keep up with accumulating interest on their federal loans, according to the report. By comparison, borrowers who completed their degree or credential owed $3.3 billion less (from $53.2 billion to $49.9 billion) than what they initially borrowed.

“This shows that many who do go and complete their credential have the ability to pay back their loans. They ultimately earn more as they get higher and higher degrees,” Itzkowitz said. “Those who go but never complete are shown to oftentimes earn less and have trouble paying down their loans. This puts them at a higher risk for default, which is the worst-case scenario.”

He said the data points in the report provide more evidence that institutions and the government agencies that support them should focus on both getting students into college and helping them graduate.

“This will prepare their students to be more likely to enter and succeed in the workforce,” he said.

The analysis also found that the likelihood of loan repayment varies by institution type attended and credential earned by borrowers.

Overall balances for borrowers who attended and completed degrees at four-year institutions dropped by 8 percent (from $44.8 billion to $41.2 billion) four years after taking out loans, whereas the overall balances of borrowers who attended those same institutions but didn’t graduate increased by 6 percent ($10.1 billion to $10.7 billion) in the same time frame.

However, the difference between what completers owed versus noncompleters was not nearly as stark for borrowers who attended two-year colleges or certificate programs. And balances increased in all cases after four years: at two-year institutions, total debt for noncompleters increased by 8.6 percent, whereas it increased by 1.8 percent for completers.

And while the market for microcredentials is booming, the total amount owed for borrowers who attended certificate programs, regardless of whether they completed or not, increased by 7 percent.

“This could reflect lower potential earnings after earning a certificate, the high cost of doing so or both,” Itzkowitz said. “When certificate or short-term programs work well, they’re one of the fastest paths to economic mobility … These are also some of the riskiest credentials. While some of them work well, there’s also a disproportionate amount that leaves the majority of students earning even less than the typical high school graduate while also saddling them with debt.”

Borrowers who completed degrees at public and private nonprofit institutions owed less over all after four years, whereas those who didn’t graduate owed more in total.

But at for-profit institutions—many of which have had trouble with the U.S. Department of Education over misrepresenting the cost and quality of their academic programs to a disproportionate number of low-income students—all borrowers, regardless of completion, had higher overall loan balances (13 percent higher for noncompleters; 11 percent for completers) after four years.

“For-profit institutions have been heavily concentrated in granting certificates,” Itzkowitz said, suggesting that “it may be the concentration of where they’re focused that is leading to a pricier education that ultimately leads to a lower salary and the inability of students to pay down their loans over time.”

Sarah Sattelmeyer, project director for education, opportunity and mobility in the higher education initiative at New America, said the data in the HEA Group’s report reiterate support for initiatives, such as the Postsecondary Student Success Grant program, that provide resources for colleges to implement evidence-based programs to improve student retention and completion.

She added that reducing debt will also require a “strong accountability infrastructure, including things like a strong gainful-employment rule that ensure schools are providing high-value programming and not leaving students worse off and without a return on their higher education investment.”

Starting in 2026, a new federal rule will require students who enroll in academic programs that leave graduates with unaffordable debt to sign a disclosure notice.

Jason Delisle, a senior policy fellow at the Urban Institute’s Center on Education Data and Policy, said the data in the report make the strongest argument for completing a bachelor’s degree compared to two-year degrees and certificates.

“We really only see significant differences between completers and noncompleters among bachelor’s degree recipients,” he said. “Finishing that credential seems to align with better loan repayment statistics, unlike the other credentials. That’s more good news for bachelor’s degrees, which runs counter to the negative public perceptions around bachelor’s degrees.”

Generative AI seems to be everywhere we look. I’ve seen some universities take incredibly conservative positions over the last year, while others have fully embraced a new era and, of course, many are in between.

As our network of academic innovation officers and units continues to grow, I was curious how generative AI is showing up in the context of these centers, which have increasingly been charged with guiding and supporting a university’s academic strategy through periods of potentially disruptive change.

I spoke to my friend James DeVaney, associate vice provost for academic innovation and founding executive director of the University of Michigan’s Center for Academic Innovation, about a new initiative, how his center is exploring gen AI as a team and where we might go from here.

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Q: Your center is often viewed as a prominent change agent in our academic innovation network. Is there an initiative focused on gen AI that you are working on that you find particularly exciting or transformational?

A: Very soon we are going to have an entire catalog of gen AI courses available through Michigan Online. But I should back up for a minute. We spent quite a bit of time over the summer and fall thinking about gen AI in the context of serving our learning community, upskilling our own team and proactively participating in our broader higher education ecosystem. With respect to our learning community—which includes nondegree learners around the world, students in our degree programs and faculty and instructional teams working closely with our center—we’ve been focused on how gen AI might enrich our educational offerings and how to best ensure equitable access to new knowledge and tools. We believe there’s a real opportunity to further strengthen our ability to connect and empower learners everywhere to reach their full potential throughout their lives.

This month we completed a call for proposals encouraging University of Michigan faculty to create online courses designed to “prepare learners for success in an era of artificial intelligence in the workplace.” We are thrilled with the results. We approved 36 new online courses in this round, which we will develop at our new facility in Ann Arbor between now and July. This means that in very short order we will have nearly 50 open online courses available to learners on campus and around the world to help them understand and apply gen AI knowledge and tools and adopt responsible gen AI practices.

In designing this initiative, we specifically sought breadth. We’ve seen several great courses launched in the last few months that provide important overviews and introductions to new tools and technologies, including our own Generative AI Essentials course and courses from institutions like Vanderbilt University and organizations like DeepLearning. Continuing this trend, we will create a suite of introductory courses for everyone. But we are also creating courses to support learners in particular fields like law, music, business and engineering. And we are creating courses for early-career professionals, managers and supervisors, and organizational leaders. Sixteen faculty from eight different colleges are joining us to create this round of courses. Motivated learners and organizations looking to support their employees are in for a real treat.

There is still a lot of important work to do, but we can see a path to a very near future state where learners anywhere from any field can look to Michigan to level up their understanding of gen AI and their ability to make important decisions in the interest of individuals, teams, organizations and society. So to clearly answer your question, given the stakes of supporting human upskilling and workforce development in an age of gen AI, it’s easy to be excited about this initiative. Michigan has consistently created incredibly high-quality online courses. We’re now turning up the dials further on volume, interdisciplinarity and speed to market. If we manage to stay focused, I think creating this empowering space for understanding, shaping and using gen AI responsibly has a real shot at transformational outcomes as well.

Q: It’s great to see that you’re creating an inclusive opportunity for learners to prepare for this new era. What about your own team? How are you preparing yourselves for gen AI?

A: That’s right, the door to the carpenter’s house doesn’t need to be broken. While I would argue that our center and units like it at peer institutions are particularly comfortable with ambiguity and adapting to change, this moment feels different to me. I struggle to find a ping-pong, tug-of-war, whiplash-like metaphor that quite captures the feeling of the last 12 months as the euphoria of one new gen AI use case is replaced by thoughts of its implications and again redirected toward the next use case. It’s exhilarating and exhausting.

Our team is doing its best to learn with and from each other. And the more we do it, the less it feels like our heads are on swivels. Looking inward, we’re asking ourselves, in what ways might gen AI help us streamline our operations? And what new skills do we need to acquire to best anticipate the future of higher education and support our constituents?

Practically speaking, we launched a gen AI task force on a sprint in the fall which led to great insights and several foundational recommendations for our center. Importantly though, it initiated an honest conversation. It doesn’t much matter that we couldn’t exactly say where things were heading. If our mission is to “collaborate across campus and around the world to create equitable, lifelong educational opportunities for learners everywhere,” it’s our obligation to make sense of emerging technologies that impact our ability to best serve our constituents.

Our time-bound task force has since been replaced with a more permanent gen AI council, which includes representatives from each of our teams. Three of our initial recommendations have already been implemented. First, we launched and completed the aforementioned call for proposals. Second, we designed and delivered a gen AI boot camp for our 100-plus staff. At our centerwide all-hands meeting earlier this month, we launched a friendly competition between teams (e.g., learning experience design, marketing, software development, etc.) to develop GPTs to support their regular workflows and responsibilities. We’ll be refining these approaches throughout the semester and putting new ideas into practice.

Third, our operations and policy team has adopted a new review process to carefully evaluate third-party vendors and tools that incorporate gen AI in their offerings. Every company I know has dramatically changed its pitch deck and narrative over the last year. Some actually made substantive adjustments to their products and models, while others have made cosmetic adjustments. Our team needs to be able to tell the difference and also determine relative risk and opportunity in either instance.

As the year unfolds, we will incorporate what we learn together as an organization into our team [objectives and key results] and our individual professional development plans for the year ahead. There are clearly opportunities for each of us to acquire new skills, whether one is primarily an individual contributor, a team supervisor or an organizational leader.

As the leader of this center, I’m neither expressing full-throated optimism nor risk-averse incrementalism. I certainly didn’t see gen AI coming. But it’s clear this is a moment. And our stakeholders have come to depend on our team to provide guidance through periods of change. We embrace experimentation, collect evidence and develop new practices. Gen AI has the potential to extend U-M’s reach and impact. We’ll be in the best position to discern possible, probable and preferred futures if we embrace the (often scary) need to upskill ourselves.

Q: Given the always-evolving landscape of higher education, combined with its traditions and norms, in what ways do you think generative AI will contribute to shaping its future? Where should we go from here?

A: First of all, I love that you referenced “our academic innovation network” in your first question. When we look back over the last decade, our academic innovation peers have initiated and accomplished an incredible amount of positive organizational and ecosystem-level change. We’ve seen new structures emerge and evolve across a range of universities. Networking across universities with folks responsible for similar portfolios was a pretty lonely sport a decade ago. Now I meet a new academic innovation officer on what seems like a weekly basis.

So while, sadly, I don’t have a crystal ball, I do know how to prepare. And preparing with friends turns out not only to be more fun but yields better results.

I can think of three “what does it all mean” moments from the last decade or so. We welcomed the year of the MOOC in 2012, and for certain stakeholders within higher ed, it provided the excitement that comes from relaxing constraints and reconsidering what’s possible. In 2020, people everywhere were rocked by the pandemic, which provided the feelings of doom that come from societal trauma and reconsidering what might be taken away. At present, we are jolted by gen AI, which has been compared to electricity and air, and people across higher ed and people everywhere are torn between reconsidering what’s possible and what might be taken away.

As I think about where we should go from here, I start with where I hope we’ll go. I assume we want gen AI to improve teaching and learning, improve the ways we work and collaborate and improve our lives. But we can’t assume this will just happen, right? We had a prominent ed-tech CEO join us for a conversation on campus recently, and he said he kind of wished we could just pause for a year to make sense of what’s happening. Not the response we’ve come to expect from the press-ahead ed-tech community.

But can you blame him? This feels like an epic trust fall at a company retreat, except the retreat is attended by absolutely anyone on the street who wants to show up, no one explains the rules before you’re leaning backward off the edge of the raised platform and you’re left wondering who or what is going to decide whether to catch you.

Gen AI currently looks like it could have an impact on everything, so, again, without a crystal ball, I’ll focus from my particular vantage point in higher ed. We need to experiment carefully, we want to ensure equitable access and we want to contribute to a standard of responsible AI use across higher education. This calls for more targeted grant funding focused on applications in teaching and learning. It calls for more strategic and collaborative partnerships between industry and higher ed. And it calls for rapid standardization of contractual terms and policies that promote responsible AI practices.

Apologies that my responses are neither brief nor were they packaged as haiku. I couldn’t bring myself to edit with ChatGPT. For better or worse.