Tag: Events

David Foster Wallace was my generation’s answer to Hemingway but—on brand for Gen X—without any of the fun. My favorite Wallace work isn’t Infinite Jest, where you might get some of the jokes if you read the footnotes several times, but rather “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” a curmudgeonly account (originally published in Harper’s) of his first time on an “unbearably sad” cruise ship.

Here’s a highly abridged list of the many things that annoyed the sensitive artist: not being allowed to carry his own bag; men over a certain age wearing shorts; the steward remaking his bed every time he left his cabin for two minutes; “large, fleshy, red, loud, coarse, condescending, self-absorbed, spoiled, appearance-conscious, greedy” American tourists “waddling into poverty-stricken ports in expensive sandals”; and his table mate Mona, a spoiled 18-year-old Penn State–bound Floridian whose “special customary gig on … Luxury Cruises is to lie to the waiter and maître d’ and say that Thursday is her birthday, so that at the Formal supper on Thursday she gets bunting and a heart-shaped helium balloon tied to her chair, and her own cake, and pretty much the whole restaurant staff comes out and forms a circle around her and sings to her.”

Wallace’s account kept me landlocked until my father supposed a cruise would be a fun thing to do for the extended family. Not just any cruise, but the same line that made Wallace want to jump overboard (Celebrity). And it turns out, he was right (my dad, not Wallace). Having everyone cooped up on a colossus of the seas meant lots of fun and great memories. For example, exploring the ship with my brother, nephew and younger sons—Hal (14) and Zev (12)—and discovering a beautiful three-story bar occupying the entire stern of the ship: huge windows, radiant light, extravagant greenery. As we’re exploring the place, my nephew dares obviously underage Hal to try to order a drink. Always good for a dare or—better—a prank, Hal thinks for a moment, composes himself and walks straight up to an unassuming bartender.

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After the cruise, I began paying attention to the economics of cruising. For example, Princess Cruises just announced a new magic-themed cruise from Los Angeles to Mexico (staffed by magicians from L.A.’s famed Magic Castle): seven days for $699.

This astounding offer clued me in to the fact that cruise ships may not be that different from private colleges and universities. Writing in the latest National Affairs, former Department of Education official Dan Currell perused College Board data and noted that net tuition collected by private colleges has actually gone down over the last 15 years. Yes, list prices have skyrocketed, but so have “scholarships,” i.e., discounts, now approaching 60 percent.

Currell rightly calls out high list prices as harmful to low-income students who may be dissuaded from applying or matriculating and may end up paying far more than their fair share. He argues persuasively that states should enforce consumer protection laws forbidding misleading and deceptive practices. But Currell’s overall argument also suggests that, contrary to conventional wisdom, America’s private colleges may be a bargain on par with a seven-day $699 magic boat ride.

How does Princess make money at $100 per day? Per Hal, the answer is obvious: ONE ALCOHOL AT A TIME. The base price isn’t the end of the affordability story. Although Wallace may not have seen it (because he barely left his stateroom), another way cruise ships are like private colleges is that while they may not make much on the ticket, they’re Scrooge McDuck–like on other revenue sources. For cruise ships, that’s booze and tanzanite. For colleges, it’s room and board.

Student housing is increasingly unaffordable. The University of California, Los Angeles, for example, charges $8,475 for a terrible triple, up to $18,532 for a studio. The University of Miami has a bad double at $9,360 and a one-bedroom apartment for $24,940. Keep in mind, these are for the roughly 30-week academic year only. And as with drinks on a cruise ship, there are no discounts.

For as long as mammoth cruise ships have sailed the seas, student housing hikes have far outpaced the rate of inflation. Over the past 30 years, the average cost of a dorm room at a public four-year university rose 111 percent, after accounting for inflation, while rents rose 24 percent.

A Business Insider analysis of 10 flagship public universities found that they raised the cost of room and board by 25 percent over the past decade, higher than the rate of tuition increases (22 percent). And while dorm rooms still cost more in big cities, increases have been particularly pernicious at flagships like Alabama (+64 percent in 10 years), Virginia (+37 percent) and Wisconsin (+35 percent). As a result, for a growing percentage of institutions, student housing is a major revenue and profit center; at New York University, 10 percent of revenue comes from student housing and dining. And for a large number of students, nontuition costs represent the majority of expenses.

As colleges typically don’t require students to live on campus all four years, students have always tried to save by moving off campus. But at many institutions, that may no longer be possible. In recent years, rents have skyrocketed—up 14 percent nationwide from 2021 to 2022, but even more in college towns (State College, Pa.—32 percent; College Station, Tex.—29 percent; Ithaca, N.Y.—29 percent; Lawrence, Kan.—22 percent; Austin, Tex.—20 percent; Ann Arbor, Mich.—19 percent), and about as much in big cities with big universities (Boston—24 percent, New York—21 percent).

Last year, The Washington Post cited a Florida Atlantic University official who said the cost of local rentals “roughly doubled in the past year or 15 months.” The Hechinger Report profiled a University of California, Berkeley, student paying $2,800 a month for a bunk bed in a tiny loft. Meanwhile, InMyArea.com released a report showing that, in the most expensive college towns, you’d need to earn $72K a year to comfortably afford a bed to lay your weary head.

If there’s an epicenter of the student housing crisis, it’s the new home of Prince Harry and Meghan: the American Riviera, a.k.a. Santa Barbara. The University of California, Santa Barbara, has 25,000-plus students seeking space in one of America’s most expensive ski-or-sand communities—where property owners have little incentive to build or provide affordable housing—and only around 10,000 on-campus beds. It’s been a slow-motion train wreck. In 2010, the university committed to adding 5,000 beds. While it has since added 1,500, the big bet was a donor-funded 11-story mega-dorm that would have housed 4,500 at rates far below market.

The catch: most bedrooms would be in the massive building’s interior, sans windows and natural light. Local critics piled on, calling the building “dormzilla” and a “prison dorm.” They said that this “alien world parked at the corner of campus” would be, in the words of an architect who resigned from a university design committee in protest, “a social and psychological experiment with an unknown impact on the lives and personal development of the undergraduates the university serves.” Petitions demanding that the university abandon the effort—one by community members, one by UCSB architecture faculty—attracted nearly 20,000 signatures.

The project seems to have been abandoned earlier this year. The whole megillah took about a decade—a decade in which UCSB’s housing crisis has gotten worse. Meanwhile, more students are living in their cars, in garages or on friends’ couches. “It’s really common to have 13 students to a house,” commented one student.

Thirteen students to a house is more comedy than tragedy. The real tragedy is the housing crisis’s impact on the students who most need the leg up provided by UCSB and other universities. Adding to the problem, the financial aid formula at many universities doesn’t fully account for cost of living; a 2017 paper by Robert Kelchen, Sara Goldrick-Rab and Braden Hosch found that about 40 percent of four-year colleges use a cost-of-living estimate that’s at least 20 percent off from actual costs: 10 percent of institutions overestimate costs of living by at least 20 percent, while about 30 percent underestimate them. Artificially low cost-of-living estimates have the effect of limiting the amount students can borrow.

Ultimately, students struggling to afford a place to live are much less likely to graduate. According to one survey, 72 percent of students who’ve faced housing insecurity have considered dropping out.

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We’re not the only country with a student housing crisis. Canada’s also struggling, but largely because it has rolled out the welcome mat for an astonishing 900,000 international students—the equivalent of the U.S. enrolling more than six million international students, a sixfold or so increase that would pull every college out of the enrollment doldrums. Australia faces a similar dynamic.

“It’s very hard to find a neighborhood where you can put in a large-scale residence hall without getting tremendous resistance. Not in my backyard,” explains Northeastern University economist Barry Bluestone. In some states, NIMBY has been written into law, as in California, where the state’s Environmental Quality Act has kept universities like Berkeley from building new housing due to inherent college student noise—red tape the state finally cut through earlier this month.

But because NIMBYs protest every affordable housing development, American higher education’s best excuse is that the student housing crisis is a subset of a national housing crisis. The fact that large employers like school districts have been forced to take matters into their own hands and build new housing for employees is illustrative of our inability to build. America’s housing problems are a direct by-product of subservience to the loudest interest groups and a failure of vision and governance.

Nevertheless, U.S. colleges and universities are landowners and are theoretically capable of building. Their failure to do so is a failure of leadership, particularly for colleges in house-poor regions. College presidents, provosts, deans and trustees are guilty of letting the best be the enemy of the good, and their view of what the college experience should be—i.e., what it was when they were in school—clouds their judgment on how to solve this massive problem. Because when UCSB’s leadership went to college, most people hadn’t heard of Santa Barbara, let alone wanted to live there like Harry and Meghan. And if they did, they could work a minimum-wage job a few hours a day to pay for a place to live and surf some tasty waves.

Because our approach to student housing has been at sea, perhaps the solution is out at sea. Because you know what’s still getting built? Gargantuan cruise ships. So let’s have colleges offer students serial semesters at sea and begin housing students on cruise ships. Although it won’t work as well in Austin or Lawrence, Kan., it’s fine with me as long as the new college cruise dorms restrain themselves from trying to make money off students one alcohol at a time.

I started to read Gregg Barak’s Criminology on Trump (Routledge) not long after its publication last year but was interrupted by a sudden, complete collapse of the will. The problem was not the book itself, nor was it a one-time occurrence. I have roughly four dozen ebooks on the ex-president on my table, many of them thoughtful and informative—or so they seemed, right up to the point of no return. The very thing making serious books on the ex-president necessary creates a catch-22: his media presence is disproportionate and inescapable, the full-spectrum demands on one’s attention can suck almost all of the oxygen from one’s brain, and sacrificing the little that’s left to reading about him may feel like an imposition to be resented.

My experience with the Trump literature is unlikely to be unique, though there must be readers who devour the same material and crave more. In any case, the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office mug shot of the ex-president was the turning point that sent me back to Barak’s monograph for another round. (The author is professor emeritus of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University.)

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An initial prompting to revisit it came in July, when the judge in E. Jean Carroll’s civil case clarified that the jury’s verdict that Trump was liable for sexual abuse did indeed mean they found that he had committed rape, as ordinarily understood—his lawyers’ efforts to spin things otherwise notwithstanding. As with the FBI raid to retrieve classified documents illegally warehoused on his property, these developments showed the aura of immunity around Trump starting to collapse. Barak’s main concern in Criminology on Trump is how that aura persisted as long as it did while the man emitting it also radiated glee in his own ethos of criminality.

That means revisiting some well-trodden ground. Trump’s alleged pre-presidency business practices (“tax evasion, money laundering, nonpayment of employees, as well as the defrauding of tenants, customers, contractors, investors, bankers, and charities”) made him “the Houdini of white-collar crime,” as the author puts it. Trump’s time in office was a boon to his real estate holdings in ways that defied the Constitution’s emoluments clause. And so on. These are not revelations, and the details are of interest here mainly as background for understanding the criminological puzzle implied by Trump’s career.

Looking at things in terms of Robert Merton’s classic paper in criminological theory, Trump is the product of what the sociologist characterized as the “strain” of pursuing sanctioned cultural goals (in the U.S., money and prestige) within an established set of acceptable forms of behavior.

Merton identified a few general ways of responding to the tension between means and ends. The most common is conformity, i.e. an acceptance of the criteria of success as well as the restrictions on how it can be legitimately gained. The least common response is rebellion: a thorough rejection of both goals and norms. It’s not necessary to go through all the permutations on Merton’s grid, but he did identify the possibility of pursuing wealth, fame, etc. through abnormal or unaccepted means of doing so. That is one way to characterize crime, of course, though Merton gave it the curiously benign label “innovation,” since one generation’s transgressions may become another’s conformist behavior.

“There have been few if any legal rules,” writes Barak, “that [Trump] has not challenged or abided by while at the same time using and abusing the very same set of rules to protect himself.” He calls Trump “a classic Mertonian ‘innovator’ who ignores the legitimate means to success.” But by the criminologist’s own reckoning, Trump does more than disregard norms. He bends them to his own purposes—and if they break, well, that’s because they were no good in the first place. Barak refers to the criminological concept of neutralization, referring to the process by which offenders can rationalize their behavior in the interest of maintaining their self-image as basically decent and normal people. In particular, he writes, “white-collar offenders want to view themselves as moral and law-abiding people to assuage their guilty consciences or to satisfy their remorseful superegos.” It is a complex matter, the question of Donald Trump’s superego; that’s its own monograph, probably. But his political career has been defined by a lack of remorse.

There’s a paragraph in Criminology on Trump that feels like the key to—I don’t know, the ex-president’s career, the crisis of the republic or something. In 2004, after signing the contract to make The Apprentice, Trump spoke at the Museum of Television and Radio in Los Angeles. He admitted, Barak writes, that “he had been tentative about signing on with the reality TV show because of all the mobsters that frequent his place of work … More than a decade later, during one of his moments of public candidness, Donald stated what he would be more inclined to say privately or only to a group of his biggest donors: ‘winners team up with mobsters, losers don’t.’”

Once such statements would have been ruinous to anyone’s career, but Trump’s genius is that he learned to lean into them.

More than 1,200 University of Phoenix students will have their student loans forgiven after the Education Department found that the for-profit institution offered them “empty promises” about its partnerships with thousands of corporations, the agency announced Wednesday.

The department is discharging $37 million total for borrowers who applied for relief under the borrower defense to repayment rules, which allow students to seek relief if they’ve been misled or defrauded by their college. The affected students attended the for-profit university from Sept. 21, 2012, to Dec. 31, 2014.

The Federal Trade Commission spent years investigating whether a national ad campaign touting the university’s relationships with companies including Microsoft and AT&T was deceptive. Phoenix reached a $190 million settlement with the FTC in 2019 to resolve the investigation but did not admit wrongdoing. The borrower-defense discharges stem from the FTC’s investigation, according to the release.

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“The school told borrowers that a Phoenix degree would help ‘get your foot in a few thousand doors’ and that its corporate partners were ‘looking specifically at University of Phoenix students for hire instead of any other school,’ which also was not true,” the department said in a news release. The ad campaign ran for two years.

The department said it intends to recoup the cost of the discharges from Phoenix, which is currently for sale. The University of Idaho announced earlier this year that it would spend $550 million to turn Phoenix into a nonprofit institution under the control of an affiliated organization. That transaction hasn’t closed, so a senior department official said at a news conference Wednesday that the institution’s current owner is the University of Phoenix.

Senate Democrats recently raised concerns about the acquisition, questioning how Idaho planned to cover potential liabilities such as those created by borrower defense to repayment claims. Idaho president Scott Green wrote in response that the university won’t be the owner of Phoenix, which will be run by a separate nonprofit.

“These allegations do not reflect University of Phoenix we know today,” Idaho spokeswoman Jodi Walker said in a statement. “We value the student focus and vision University of Phoenix has today and stand by our commitment to affiliate.”

A University of Phoenix spokesperson “adamantly” disagreed with the department’s findings.

“The claims made by the FTC and the Dept. of Ed were never tested in court,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “With respect [to] the Borrower Defense to Repayment claims, the University of Phoenix takes student borrower complaints very seriously and has provided significant evidence to the Dept. of Ed refuting inaccurate, baseless, or incomplete claims. While the University is not against relief for borrowers who have valid claims, we intend to vigorously challenge each frivolous allegation and suspicious claim through every available legal avenue.”

In his new book, The Abundant University (MIT Press), Michael D. Smith, a professor of information technology and marketing at Carnegie Mellon University, examines how technology can transform higher education’s system of scarcity—in access, instruction and credentials—akin to the way streaming disrupters like Netflix overhauled the entertainment industry.

Smith spoke with Inside Higher Ed via Zoom. Excerpts of the conversation follow, edited for length and clarity.

Q: Why is higher education ripe for disruption at this point in time?

A: If you look at the coverage in the press, we’ve got a whole bunch of governments and firms who are saying, “I’m going to de-emphasize the traditional four-year degree.” What I find so interesting is they’re doing it because they want to create a more socioeconomically diverse workforce. And they can’t do that if they continue to rely on four-year degrees. That ought to be sobering and humbling for us. And I hope it’s something that would move us to action, to say, “I want to create opportunities for students who can’t afford my degree or who otherwise would be shut out because they didn’t go to the right high school. How can I do it within my existing business model? I can’t.”

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Q: In the book you mentioned MIT and Stanford adopting online programs; this month alone, I wrote about both Spelman College and the University of Texas System leaning more heavily into microcredential programs. Do you think more people will continue to make the shift?

A: I really think so. When I started writing this book in 2019, 2020, there was a lot of anger when I talked about it to faculty. I’m getting less of that anger as I think we are making the shift towards, “You know what, I do want to create opportunities for people who are shut out of the system, and if that means I need to suffer a little bit, I’m willing to do that.”

Q: Is there a suffering that comes with this?

A: That’s where we get to the hard part. The hard part of all this is: Do we still need 4,500 institutions of higher education to serve demand? If these new pathways just attract people who are otherwise left out of the university system, then it doesn’t threaten the existing system. But if some of the people who were going to traditional four-year colleges now say, “I’ve got a different path, and I’m going to take it,” that’s a threat. That’s a threat to our way of doing business, our way of educating students. And I think that is starting to happen. I’m talking to more and more friends whose children are looking at colleges and who are starting to look at, “Should I just go get an apprenticeship? And just go straight to the workforce?”

Q: There’s a long list of growing alternatives to the traditional four-year degree, from online-first institutions like Southern New Hampshire University to boot camp offerings like Code Academy and apprenticeship programs utilized by Google and IBM. Is all this enough? Or do you think every university should have a digital component?

A: I would love for there to be more diversity in what universities are willing to offer online and do it more creatively. Arizona State actually teaches organic chemistry online, and what they said was, “Hey, you know what? The first 13 weeks work perfectly well online. And then we’ll just bring the students on campus for a one-week intensive lab component.” And what they discovered is not only does that give an equivalent knowledge of organic chemistry, [but] the students who walk out of the one-week lab intensive walk out of it with a much stronger identity as scientists. It’s as good, and in some ways better, than what we were delivering before. And we can deliver it at a much lower cost.

Q: In some regards, though, it is more costly to the institutions. You brought up MIT seeing such high interest in its online course program it had to add an additional 200 virtual servers. But what about institutions that cannot afford the infrastructure?

A: It’s going to be hard for 4,500 institutions to afford the digital infrastructure you need to deliver these classes. It might be the case that you get a platform [such as Coursera] that puts the digital infrastructure in place, and we can plug our courses into it. That’s the more optimistic view.

The other view is we end up with Southern New Hampshire University, ASU—[institutions] that say, “We’re going to do most of this online; we’re going to bring you in person for part of your degree program.” Which of those two visions wins out? I’m not entirely sure. But what I’m trying to say is I don’t think we can stay here.

Q: There’s also the argument of the digital divide, that pushing for online courses will create an inequity for those in rural and other areas that have poor internet access. Your book didn’t address that, but do you have thoughts on it?

A: I didn’t address the digital divide directly. What I did say is … it’s not about creating a perfect system. It’s about creating something that’s better, more equitable and more open than what we’ve got today. And I think even if you factor in the idea that some people in very rural areas might not have the high bandwidth connectivity, I still think we could create something that’s much more accessible than what we’ve got today for a lot of people.

Q: Is there going to be a tipping point of, you have to adapt or you will fail?

A: I think we’re very close to the tipping point where if you don’t get on board, you’re going to be left behind. Now, to be 100 percent clear, I think the elites—Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, I hope Carnegie Mellon—we’re going to be just fine. I would love to see us do the creative things we’re seeing out of MIT, saying, “How can I do a better job of creating a more equitable access to my resources? I think I can use technology to do that.” I hope the elites won’t say, “Well, all I have to do is keep executing my business model. I’m going to be just fine.” I hope even we will say, “No, I’m not comfortable being a finishing school for the rich and powerful.”

Q: Some argue that if institutions that are highly selective widen their access with online courses, it can water down their brand.

A: That goes back to we’re trapped in a system based on scarcity. All of our incentives tell us, no, you want to make this as scarce as possible. That’s how you benefit. I would love for us to figure out a way to pivot to “How do I create abundance, while still protecting the business model?” To be totally honest with you, I think Harvard and MIT had it right. If you think about the early days of HarvardX and MITx, I think they figured out “We’re going to provide our courses online, we’re going to provide a different credential, but we’re going to protect our existing, valuable on-campus degree.” It’s just classic responding to disruption.

Q: You repeatedly stated in your book you aren’t advocating for an all-or-nothing approach with digital adoption and believe the brick-and-mortar institutions can exist alongside their more abundant offerings. Why?

A: It would have been easy to call this book “The Death of Higher Education.” And I probably would have sold more books. But I don’t believe that’s true. What I wanted to say is, let’s really embrace that we have a system based on scarcity and we want a system based on abundance. And the only way of getting from a scarcity-based system to a system based on abundance is by adopting new technologies. I know it’s scary; I know it’s going to hurt some of us. But I hope we can pivot from trying to protect ourselves to trying to say, “I’m willing to sacrifice some of my privilege so that these students who are left out of the system today can gain access.”

Fourteen thousand students dropped out of the Austin Community College District in Texas during the last two academic years. But the institution of more than 36,000 students has a plan to get some of them back.

Supported by a $770,765 Education Department grant, that plan involves reaching out to students and connecting them with career services, financial aid and other campus resources, along with re-enrollment coaching and advising services. By the end of next year, officials at the college aim to have a better idea of why students stop out, how to keep them in school in the first place and how to use campus resources more effectively to support them.

“Hopefully we get our students back—that’s the ultimate goal,” said Guillermo Martinez, associate vice chancellor of student engagement and academic success at Austin Community College.

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The college was one of five institutions that received the first round of federal money from the new Postsecondary Student Success Program, which funds evidence-based programs and strategies designed to improve outcomes for underserved students. Congress created the program two years ago and expanded it last year, but its funding for 2024 is uncertain as lawmakers work to pass a federal budget.

Advocates say the grant program is a needed investment at a time when the national college completion rate is just 62 percent and the number of students who have stopped out has increased to an estimated 40 million. Despite the divisions in Congress and funding constraints, higher education advocates are hopeful that Congress will continue to fund the program, which has bipartisan support, when it ultimately passes a budget this fall.

Despite representing a fraction of the federal budget for higher education, the program can provide a strong return on investment, advocates say, adding that this is an area where a little bit of money can go a long way.

For the next fiscal year, the Biden administration sought $165 million for the program. The Senate is planning to keep Student Success funding flat at $45 million, which likely would be the best-case scenario for advocates this budget cycle. The details of the House’s education budget haven’t been released yet, but House Republicans are eyeing a number of cuts to the Education Department.

“In this political climate, having it maintained at $45 million would be great,” said Tanya Ang, managing director of advocacy at Higher Learning Advocates, a nonprofit that works to improve outcomes for students.

A Focus on Evidence

President Biden called on Congress in May 2021 to create a $62 billion College Completion Fund as a way to increase retention and completion rates. That proposal eventually morphed into the Postsecondary Student Success Program, which Congress funded with $5 million in March 2022 as part of the fiscal year 2022 budget. Congress then increased the pot of money to $45 million for 2023.

The first $5 million was awarded late last year, and the new grant cycle is just getting underway. The $45 million is expected to go to eight to 12 programs, with awards ranging from $3 to $7 million, according to an application notice. Historically Black colleges or universities, tribally controlled colleges or universities, minority-serving institutions and community colleges are eligible to apply, along with states or nonprofits that are partnering with those institutions. Grant proposals need to be backed by evidence or meet What Works Clearinghouse standards.

“The department believes that targeting funding to these [institutions of higher education] is the best use of the available funding because these institutions disproportionately enroll students from groups who are underrepresented among college completers, such as low-income students,” the notice says.

For the initial $5 million, more than 100 institutions applied for funding, highlighting the strong demand for the program, according to a fact sheet from the Institute for College Access and Success.

Michelle Dimino, deputy director of education at Third Way, a center-left think tank, said the federal government has historically focused on helping students make it to college, but the focus has shifted over the years to retaining and graduating those students. The Student Success program was the first federal funding effort of its kind focused on scaling up proven retention and completion initiatives.

“It shows recognition from the federal government that we need to invest in really ensuring that all students that enter higher education make it through to the degree or credential that they want, and that has positive effects for everybody,” she said.

The grant program is “one of the most exciting things” in higher education right now, Dimino said, because of its emphasis on evidence-based solutions and underserved students.

“It’s really unique in that regard to be investing in proven programs and practices that we know help more students get through to graduation,” Dimino said. “To be able to focus those efforts on MSIs and HBCUs and tribal colleges and community colleges, it’s really putting a lot of attention in exactly the right spots, and we know that it’ll have a positive impact because that evidence base is required to get there.”

Improving Outreach and Student Support Services

Austin Community College was notified of its grant late last year, and since then it has hired two staff members to work on the program, along with a consultant. The college also is contracting with InsideTrack, a company that specializes in coaching programs, to reach out to students who have stopped out and provide them with support.

The college’s goal is to reach out to 7,000 of the stop-outs. The other 7,000 will be considered a control group, allowing the college to run an experiment to see if its outreach, coaching, advising and other support systems actually work.

“There’s no way without the grant support that we would have been able to reach out to the 7,000,” Martinez said. “If we didn’t have the grant, we probably could have reached out to maybe 1,000 or 2,000 students.”

Martinez said college staff have already called 1,000 students, 30 percent of whom picked up the phone. About half said they want to return to college. Martinez said he wants to use the grant to better leverage data to learn more about students and how to help them.

“We struggle—not just at ACC but I think in higher ed—with knowing our students well enough to give them what they need,” he said. “I think what we’ve been trying to do a lot more lately is digging deep into understanding who our students that we serve today are and figuring out how we can best support them.”

The other institutions picked for the initial round of funding—Florida International University, Passaic County Community College in New Jersey, Orangeburg-Calhoun Technical College in South Carolina and Claflin University, also in South Carolina—are taking similar approaches.

Ang said that students who see the most success tend to receive a range of services that support not only their academics but also basic needs such as childcare or food, which the grant program can fund. She hopes that institutions and the Education Department will use a “chunk” of the $45 million to provide money directly to students to support their mental health or address food insecurity. That approach would be similar to how part of the COVID stimulus money provided to colleges and universities was used to provide aid directly to students and help them stay enrolled.

“We’re seeing significant challenges again with today’s students in higher education, and schools are maxed out as far as what they can do and the resources they can provide,” Ang said.

Kyle Southern, associate vice president for higher education quality at TICAS, said the grant funding can help expand access to programs that have a proven track record of improving outcomes for students and provide information about other interventions that could increase completion rates.

“This is really the kind of program that shows how the federal government can work best, which is to support innovative but also evidence-backed interventions that can enhance access and equity to improve outcomes and lead to better jobs and better lives for—hopefully down the line—hundreds of thousands if not millions more students,” he said.

Southern added that, while the funding is welcome, $45 million is “nowhere near the kind of investment that can or should be made in what we know works to improve completion rates for students nationwide.”

To protect current funding levels and advocate for more, Southern said elevating stories of students who’ve been helped by programs like Austin Community College’s will be crucial.

“The numbers are really important, but we’re talking about lives that have been fundamentally changed by often not a huge investment,” he said. “A lot of people are one car problem or an unexpected medical bill away from stepping away from higher education.”

We are former graduate students with nonlinear careers that led to our current roles as higher education administrators who advise graduate students. One of us, Joseph, is a humanist by training and builds initiatives for access, diversity and inclusion, and the other of us, Sonali, is a life scientist by training and guides professional development.

In our work, we often discuss what-ifs, primarily, “What if we knew in graduate school what we know now? Would that knowledge alleviate stress, foster well-being and increase agency in our past selves and, by extension, our current doctoral students?”

We also wonder whether our approach to Ph.D. training is narrow and shortsighted. In focusing mainly on research topics, students and their advisers can lose sight of the value of more philosophical concerns. Prioritizing the demands of scholarship also primes graduate students to solely focus on conducting research without reflecting on the bigger picture—without identifying or reframing research questions so as to make meaning out of their efforts. Devoid of a sense of purpose, graduate students may feel powerless and question the validity of their training, especially if it doesn’t align with narrowly defined success outcomes.

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In this article, we elaborate on how to clarify the purpose of your Ph.D. and gain agency in graduate school. We will each share some of our own experiences to highlight lessons learned and then provide actionable advice to graduate students.

Joseph’s Story

Socrates stated that an unexamined life was not worth living. As an undergraduate student, I took that to heart, and it motivated me to apply to master’s programs in English with the intention of becoming a teacher, researcher and leader. I received rejections from all but one institution, however, and ultimately decided not to accept my only offer. I didn’t know then that getting rejected during my first graduate application cycle would help me weave together a tapestry of diverse experiences to obtain and sustain my true goal: to live an examined life.

I did realize that I wasn’t motivated by getting into graduate school but rather by my curiosity. The decision to not take the safe choice and to follow a professional path of curiosity has taught me the importance of, first, highlighting my professional experiences in my application materials and, second, clarifying my research motive for myself.

Highlighting my professional experiences. As academics, we can forget how curiosity can be a strategy for intentionally highlighting our professional experiences. My CV tells the story of how I explored my curiosity instead of taking the typical academic path. For instance, I have a master’s in individualized studies. I achieved the rank of a tenured associate professor of English at a community college before I pursued a Ph.D. in English. Before entering the Ph.D. program, I presented at professional conferences and published two articles from my master’s thesis while serving in leadership roles committed to diversity and inclusive excellence. All those experiences laid the foundation for my current role as an associate dean.

Clarifying my research motive. Often, first-generation graduate students in the humanities, like myself, internalize the perceived wedge between our lived experience and the expectations of the academy. Crafting a balance between my lived experience and research has allowed me to be more purposeful as a researcher. The power of critical analysis, questions about the lived experience of Black people in the United States as well as abroad and the potential for human and institutional transformation all drive my research. While research is often taken as an individual pursuit, I am motivated as a humanities researcher to probe the connections between my lived experience and those of my cultural community.

Sonali’s Story

I’ve navigated three career fields: health care, scientific research and higher ed administration. I made a conscious choice to work in health care between my master’s and Ph.D. for several reasons. First, I was hungry for real-world application of my education.

Second, I was unsure whether I wanted to pursue a Ph.D. Two years into my work life, my interest changed. Inspired by curiosity of the process of scientific research with a focus on RNA biology, I embarked on Ph.D. training. In my graduate school application, I envisioned continuing research in biotech or biomedical fields after obtaining my doctorate.

I can’t recall whether—or what—I knew about the tenure-track faculty path when I started, but I was disinterested in it by the middle of my training. With the intent of a career in industry research, I strategically chose to do my postdoc at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City to gain exposure to applied biomedical fields and foster connections with industry professionals. However, a combination of serendipity, role models and lived experiences inspired me to change course again. I now intentionally train the next generation of scientists for success and leadership in diverse post-Ph.D. careers and connect talented scientists to complex real-world problems.

Upon retrospection, I identified a few common threads in my career. I only worked in start-up environments, and I moved fields because my interests evolved due to my lived experiences. Those patterns suggest that I find professional purpose from solving novel, innovative and diverse problems. Over time, I embraced that my changing interests point to my purpose: I am determined to solve problems that resonate with my personal and professional evolution.

The Purposeful Ph.D.

Even though we both have taken roads less traveled in our respective fields, we still use our graduate experiences and Ph.D. training and skills in our roles today as institutional leaders. In fact, as an international scientist, Sonali has to regularly convince the United States Customs and Immigration Services that her Ph.D. training is relevant to her career path in order to maintain visa status. Similarly, as a humanist diversity practitioner, Joseph regularly uses skills like textual and rhetorical analysis and critical thinking to advocate for institutional policies that ensure students’ success.

We both have learned that the purpose of a Ph.D. isn’t merely expertise in a niche field but rather training as a deep and critical thinker and a dynamic problem-solver. Ph.D. training equips us with tools to learn quickly and come up with creative ways to discover, invent or apply expanding knowledge while serving people and unlocking mysteries of the natural world.

Those skills can be used in any field. The real questions for a graduate student then are, what phenomenon or problem do you care about, and what are some creative ways to approach it?

Advice and Recommendations

Graduate students consistently communicate their lack of agency in connecting their purpose to their academic lives. We offer two primary pieces of advice.

Take the path of (re)discovering purpose. The Ph.D. is a long and arduous journey, and everyone questions at some point whether it was a wise choice. We believe you need to embrace a lifelong journey of self-discovery, primarily understanding your purpose and motivations to determine your positionality within your professional environment. The statement of purpose, where you painstakingly outlined your motivations when applying to graduate school, can help you do that. At different points in your Ph.D. training, you should revisit your statement to reflect on your journey and experience since then.

You should also summarize your purpose at different points of your training. In this piece, we’ve reflected on our purpose through retrospection, as it’s easier to spot past patterns. Introspection can be powerful, too, so continue to consider what aspects of your research and other issues excite you. If your research topic doesn’t connect to certain real-world issues that you care deeply about—like the climate crisis or racial injustice—explore other venues, opportunities and networks in the university ecosystem to learn and engage with those issues. In fact, expanding beyond your dissertation research field will make you a well-rounded scholar, as you can bring diverse perspectives to scholarship.

Cultivate a holistic view of graduate education to gain agency. Throughout your Ph.D. training, work to understand your professional environment in order to gain agency and devise strategies for effective structural change. That will enable you to distinguish between what you can change and what’s beyond your individual control. For example, follow this line of inquiry:

• How does your department function? What is the faculty-to-student ratio at your institution? This is important to gauge teaching expectations of graduate students.
• How is research funded in your field?
• What is the financial cost of graduate students and postdocs—stipends, benefits, tuition waivers and so on?
• What is the median time to degree completion in your department? What is the retention rate of students (those who complete the Ph.D. degree)?
• What are the career outcomes of graduates from your departments?

These data are publicly available either on university dashboards or on the NCSES academic institution profile. Such material knowledge will help you visualize the perspectives of your adviser and department and be able to discuss issues of concern most effectively with them.

You can bring change more effectively if you meet people where they are and are aware that systems can often breed unfairness and injustice at all levels. This is by no means excusing bad behavior of individuals but acknowledging shared burdens that require systemic change. Particularly if you feel minoritized and isolated in your department or organization, dynamic exploration beyond your dissertation research or primary job responsibilities can have a positive impact on your well-being and sense of belonging.

In conclusion, we both wish we spent more time unpacking our motivations and understanding systems during Ph.D. training. Consequently, we encourage graduate students to develop self-knowledge and to take a holistic view of professional environments. The combined lifelong habits of (re)discovering purpose and applying systems knowledge will equip you with agency throughout your professional lives. When you understand your and others’ motivations, you can intentionally manage people and your circumstances.

MORGANTOWN, W.Va.—Despite pleas from students, faculty members and academic organizations to change course, and despite student protesters disrupting its Friday meeting, the West Virginia University Board of Governors voted Friday to slash 143 faculty positions and 28 academic programs from its flagship Morgantown campus.

WVU will lose all of its foreign language degree programs and its math graduate degree programs, among other offerings.

Some students wept, and assistant math professor Ela Celikbas said “God bless WVU” and stormed out of the meeting room Friday morning as board members approved cut after cut. Only the student body president, the Faculty Senate president and another faculty representative consistently voted no.

Board members approved the reductions with no debate among them. Taunja Willis Miller, the chair, was the only vocal one; she responded to interrupting audience members and tried to continue the meeting after roughly 25 students, who had been sitting uncharacteristically silent on the floor with protest signs, leapt to their feet and began chanting, “Stop the cuts!” 

Student protesters had swelled the crowd in the small meeting room to more than 100, including board members, WVU officials and others. 

Just after the board members took their first voice vote to approve cuts to the first department, an audience member asked that they at least raise hands when voting. When Willis Miller resisted, someone said, “I would like to see some transparency,” and the students began their disruption.  

The chanting students eventually left the room, but Mai-lyn Sadler—a senior philosophy and political science dual major from southern West Virginia who has helped lead the opposition—re-entered and chanted through a megaphone.The Daily Athenaeum student newspaper reported that protesters were “physically pushed out” of the meeting room “by university personnel” when they tried to re-enter. Students and WVU officials disagreed on whether students were told that they had to leave the Erickson Alumni Center entirely; regardless, they ended up chanting outside the windows to the board room. 

Mountaineer fans yell “Eat shit, Pitt!” regarding the University of Pittsburgh, a football rival WVU plays Saturday. Among the protesters’ chants Friday: “Eat shit Gee!”

E. Gordon Gee, WVU’s president, first telegraphed deep cuts during a State of the University speech in March.

WVU’s enrollment has declined 10 percent since 2015, far worse than the national average. In April, WVU leaders, projecting a further 5,000-student plunge over the next decade, said they needed to slash $75 million from the budget. The provost’s office said it was gathering data over the summer.

On Aug. 11, the week before fall classes began, WVU revealed the scope of its preliminary recommendations, which started a scramble by professors, the students’ union and others to raise national alarm and stop the cuts. Faculty members said they felt excluded from the process.

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Attention came from national media and national groups, such as the American Association of University Professors and the Modern Language Association—one of multiple groups that called the proposed cuts “unprecedented” or “drastic.” During WVU’s official appeal process, the university withdrew some proposed faculty cuts and program eliminations, such as the suggestions to nix the master’s degrees in creative writing, acting and special education.

Attendees of the University Assembly—a rarely summoned body of all full-time WVU faculty members, with certain exceptions—also overwhelmingly approved a no-confidence resolution in Gee and a request that the university immediately freeze this “Academic Transformation” process.

WVU administrators proceeded with most of their original proposals. They took them to the board Friday, and the board, after hearing three hours of opposing public comments the day before, adopted them.

The university is eliminating all its foreign language degrees, which include bachelor’s degrees in French, Spanish, Chinese studies, German studies and Russian studies, along with master’s degrees in linguistics and TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages).

WVU previously said it would also eliminate all its foreign language minors, then raised Spanish and Chinese as possible exceptions, saying the university would still offer courses in those two languages. There was one relevant change on Friday: the board saved two faculty positions in the department of world languages, literatures and linguistics. WVU officials said that might mean more non-degree language offerings.

“We do not have that answer yet,” said Mark Gavin, associate provost for academic budget, facilities and strategic initiatives, in a news conference after the vote. He said the university needs to understand the demand and the workloads involved.

The current minors allow students to study Arabic, Italian and Japanese. Those will all be eliminated. The languages and literatures department will go from 24 faculty members to seven.

The university will also end its master’s in public administration program, along with its master’s degree in higher education administration and its Ph.D. in higher education. During the meeting, Gavin said the higher education graduate programs were “not serving a specific state need,” eliciting laughs from some in the audience.

There are also cuts in the arts, though the board saved one faculty position each in art and music.

The university is also eliminating its current graduate degree offerings in mathematics, though it says the School of Mathematical and Data Sciences has been given “approval to begin the intent-to-plan process” for replacement master’s and doctoral degrees. Sixteen faculty positions will be eliminated in that school, a third of the current faculty.

The replacement math graduate programs aren’t guaranteed. “There’s a lot of work that needs to be done between now and then to show that we can produce such a curriculum, that we have the people to deliver it and that there’s an audience for it,” Maryanne Reed, the provost, said at the news conference in response to a question from Inside Higher Ed.

University officials have said these and other cuts will take effect at various times, as WVU provides individual employees notices of planned termination, and as professors finish teaching graduate students in discontinued programs and undergraduate students who have accumulated at least 60 credit hours toward their degrees. Those with fewer credit hours have no guarantee they’ll be able to finish their intended degrees at WVU.

Some faculty members may lose their jobs as soon as May.

Olivia Dowler, a senior triple-majoring in history, Spanish and philosophy from Weirton, West Virginia, began crying as the board approved the cuts. 

“I’m grateful that I have the fortune to be taught out, but that’s not the case for everybody,” Dowler said after the meeting. She said she likely wouldn’t have looked at coming to WVU without the Spanish offering. 

“Just knowing that it’s taking away opportunities from this state and the people that I love, whenever I’ve had these opportunities, just really hurts me,” she said, “along with seeing the faculty that have given and sacrificed everything for us just being cut, and discarded.” 

This story has been updated.

MORGANTOWN, W.Va.—Christine Hoffman, as assistant chair of West Virginia University’s English department, had some sharp words Thursday for WVU’s Board of Governors.

“It’s my understanding that you’ve already stated your support for the dismantling of WVU as a public institution, and there’s little anyone can write or say today to change your minds,” Hoffman told the board. The board was hearing public comments the day before it votes on proposed cuts to faculty members and academic programs.

“So I want to tell you how you changed my mind last week, when, minutes after we took our no-confidence vote, you dismissed the informed perspectives of 797 WVU faculty,” she said into the microphone. “You changed my mind about the possibility of staying here long term.”

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The proposed cuts have captured academics’ attention nationwide, with some calling it a gutting of higher education that could serve as an inspiration for other universities to follow suit. The American Association of University Professors is among multiple organizations to have raised alarm.

Hoffman, a tenured associate professor, told the board that she doesn’t know whether she’ll be among those laid off. But she said she did know something.

“I do know that there is no future for me at an institution run with such callousness, such incompetence and such reckless disregard for its own employees,” she said. “I also know I’m far from alone in arriving at this conclusion.”

The University Assembly—a rarely summoned body of all full-time WVU faculty members, with certain exceptions—did vote 797 to 100 last week to approve a resolution expressing no confidence in E. Gordon Gee, WVU’s president. It also approved, 747 to 79, a request that the university immediately freeze this “Academic Transformation” process.

Rob Alsop, WVU’s vice president for strategic initiatives, said 147 faculty positions will be eliminated from the flagship campus here, alongside 28 academic programs, if the board approves the final recommendations of the “Academic Transformation” process.

Taunja Willis Miller, the board’s chair, immediately responded to the University Assembly’s votes by defending Gee and the program-review process. Then, on Tuesday of this week, Willis Miller, her vice chairman, Gee, five past board chairs and the chairs of the separate alumni association and foundation boards signed what they titled an “An Open Letter from WVU to the People of West Virginia,” further defending the proposed cuts.

“Our goal is to create a more focused academic portfolio aligned with student demand, career opportunities and market trends,” they wrote.

During the roughly three hours of public comments Thursday, each of about 50 speakers was allotted two minutes to address the board.

Ryan Quinn / Inside Higher Ed

Many pushed past the limit, over Willis Miller’s objections, excoriating the board and university for the proposed cuts and lamenting what they may mean to the state’s future. Of the board members, only Willis Miller spoke Thursday.

“Your open letter this week promises that WVU will maintain a strong liberal arts curriculum,” Hoffman said. “I wonder who you think is gonna stick around to do that work in this environment that you’re creating?”

Hoffman stressed the importance of a university offering a variety of programs. She said she went to the University of Missouri at Columbia, “the best journalism school in the country.”

“I knew I wanted to study journalism—and I kinda hated all of my journalism classes,” she said. “But I was at this great big university that gave me all these choices, and that meant everything … When you talk about these cuts, you’re talking about taking away those choices for students that they don’t even know they wanna make yet. We have to give them that opportunity.”

One of the recommended cuts that elicited national attention was eliminating all foreign language degree offerings, including French. Willis Miller herself started at WVU as a French major before changing to political science and graduating with a French minor. After Thursday’s public comment session, she told Inside Higher Ed that she still would have come to WVU even without that offering.

“I came to WVU because it was my state university and I got a scholarship,” she said. She said French was “not instrumental, and I’ve never used it in my daily life. It’s a beautiful language.”

Madison Santmyer, the student body president and a Board of Governors member, told board members Thursday that the student government adopted a resolution Wednesday opposing the cuts and calling for continuing to offer at least Spanish and Chinese bachelor’s degrees.

WVU’s proposed compromise, which it offered after foreign language faculty appealed, is to just teach courses, and perhaps offer minors, in only those two languages.

The American Council of Learned Societies released a statement Monday saying, “The path WVU is treading is unprecedented for a public flagship and dangerous for American higher education and society.”

Current and past WVU leaders and West Virginia’s Republican political leaders have closed ranks since the no-confidence vote, defending what the university seems poised to do on Friday. But the specter of a public, flagship, land-grant, R-1 (“very high research activity”) institution in a poor state making such cuts, and laying off tenured faculty in the process—all while denying that it’s in a budget crisis—has raised national alarm ever since the preliminary recommendations were unveiled Aug. 11.

“It is quite apparent that this is opposed by all facets of the WVU community,” Christian Rowe, a history master’s degree student and substitute teacher in the local public school district, told the board Thursday. “Our student walkout was covered in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. The faculty voted overwhelmingly no confidence in Gordon Gee and his transformation … If you go through with this, never again can this body say that they are listening to anyone but themselves and out-of-state consulting companies that only seek to shake down the people of West Virginia and turn a profit.”

Miles Case, a third-year student majoring in environmental geoscience and a Morgantown native whose father attended WVU’s law school, told the board that “by blatantly misleading the public, and disregarding student protests, a vote of no confidence and the voices of the community, you have done nothing but successfully draw the eyes of the nation on us.”

“President Gee, you were correct when you said that higher education is under attack,” he said. “But I think you forgot to mention that you were the one who is attacking it.”

That was one of many statements that elicited cheers and applause from the audience and gaveling from Willis Miller. About half an hour into the meeting, she asked the crowd—which numbered around 200 at the start—to stop being so loud.

“They’re having a meeting next door,” she said. Immediately the crowd laughed, clapped and cheered louder.

“I was asked to ask you just to clap a little softer,” she said, eliciting more cheers and claps. “We won’t tolerate disruption; you guys are interfering with the next speaker’s time.”

AAUP Raises Concern, Politicians Not Coming to Rescue

The American Association of University Professors sent a letter to Gee and Willis Miller Thursday—an initial step in a process that could lead to an AAUP investigation and the placement of WVU on AAUP’s list of censured institutions. That list warns scholars and the public that “unsatisfactory conditions of academic freedom and tenure have been found to prevail.”

AAUP’s letter pointed to its central 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure. The letter said that, under standards derived from that statement, terminating tenured professors “may occur under extraordinary circumstances because of a demonstrably bona fide financial exigency,” defined as “a severe financial crisis that fundamentally compromises the academic integrity of the institution as a whole” and can’t be solved in another way.

Michael DeCesare, senior program officer in the AAUP’s Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure and Governance, said AAUP standards call for faculty input on whether a financial exigency exists—and for due process, including a hearing before a faculty committee, for faculty members proposed to be laid off as a result.

“Importantly, in that hearing, the burden rests on the administration to prove the condition and the extent … of the financial exigency,” DeCesare told Inside Higher Ed.

But WVU has denied that it’s in a financial crisis.

“We are not facing a budget crisis,” says this week’s “Open Letter from WVU to the People of West Virginia” from the current and former board chairs. “Instead, the university is dealing with a $45 million structural budget shortfall that represents 3.75 percent of the overall budget. The university must prioritize resources to those areas that can provide for growth.”

Alsop, the vice president for strategic initiatives, discussed the budget with state lawmakers earlier this week. A presentation slide behind him said, in all caps, “Rumors of Our Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated.”

After the meeting, Gee told Inside Higher Ed that “under our board rules, we have tremendously robust due process programs.”

“Secondly of all, this is about program reconfiguration and elimination, and I think that the notion that you have to declare financial exigency to make changes is not something that is consistent with our board rules, nor do I believe that that is consistent with what we should be doing at universities,” Gee said. “We need to make changes.”

Whatever the case, West Virginia lawmakers aren’t springing to the rescue, despite criticism of their funding levels for WVU. Governor Jim Justice has said that the state had a $1.8 billion surplus last fiscal year.

Justice, a Republican, is running for Democrat Joe Manchin’s U.S. Senate seat next year. Manchin may run for U.S. president or, according to speculation, become WVU’s president. Gee said he’s leaving the role in 2025.

“I do not think there is an appetite from the standpoint of the leadership in the Legislature at this point in time to basically bail out, you know, WVU,” Justice told media Wednesday. “I think the situation is that, first and foremost, we, at least at this time, need to be there, you know, in a back-fall situation. But at the same time, what we really need to do is let WVU have the time to get their house in order.”

“What has happened is some level of bloating, you know, in programs and things that maybe, just maybe, we ought not be teaching at WVU,” the governor said. “But with all that being said, I have all the confidence in the world in President Gee and the Board of Governors that WVU will get their house in order.” The WVU Board of Governors is mostly comprised of Justice appointees.

Justice said that using one-time money without getting the “house in order” could send the university “tumbling down” in the future.

Students told the Board of Governors that it’s tumbling down now.

Elise Vuiller, a first-generation student from West Virginia’s Northern Panhandle studying American politics and policy, told the board that Gee isn’t from Appalachia and isn’t fighting for its students.

“I was never made aware of how to apply for college. WVU never once visited my high school,” she said. “And I received a coupon for a free application, and that’s why I’m here. This was my only option, and I applied nowhere else.”

“They think we’re dumb and unmotivated to get an education,” she said of outside-the-state influences. “And they think they’ll keep us dumb so they can continue to rob from us. But I say this with all love in my heart, one thing I don’t need this degree for is to smell shit, and all I smell are a bunch of pigs, and you’re posing as Mountaineers.”

Mary C. Wright’s new book, Centers for Teaching and Learning: The New Landscape in Higher Education (Johns Hopkins University Press) was born out of a fairly simple question: Just how many centers for teaching and learning are there at U.S. universities?

But the question revealed a larger lack of information about CTLs—how they are run, what they aim to accomplish, what strategies they use to achieve those aims and more. Analyzing information about more than 1,200 CTLs across the country, Wright, associate provost for teaching and learning and executive director of the Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning at Brown University, provides a sweeping overview of the nation’s CTLs, emphasizing how the landscape has changed since the last major study of the centers took place a decade ago.

She spoke with Inside Higher Ed by phone about those changes and what they suggest about larger trends in postsecondary education. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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Q: In the beginning of the book, you talk about a revelatory faculty development course you took and how it sent you on the path to work in CTLs. What was so impactful about that course, and how does it still inform your work today?

A: What was most impactful is that I learned about the field of faculty development, as it was called then, which was certainly something that I had not known about as an undergrad, let alone a graduate student. So, it was very helpful then to be introduced to the field and have the course taught by the director of the first Center for Teaching and Learning in the country. After the course, I got connected with the director and started to do an internship in the center, so it was helpful on an intellectual and on a practical level to help me get those networks.

In terms of things that I continue to use, it’s funny, because a couple years ago, I found a paper that I had written for the course. It was based on the literature: what are characteristics of an effective Center for Teaching and Learning director. But I think many of the strategies I learned from writing that paper and from taking that class I continue to employ today. These include things like staying connected to the institutional mission and being responsive to that. Being aware of the resources that we need to do our work effectively—sometimes these are budgetary, but this also includes access to information and connections to keep priorities—and then finally, staying connected to the research, so evidence-based practice is certainly something that continues to influence my work.

Q: The book goes through different CTL models [referred to as “theories of change”], but doesn’t make an argument about which is the most effective. Can you tell me why you chose that approach and your thoughts on what the most successful models are?

A: In the book, I highlight what I call four strategies or theories of change about how centers do their work, and I borrow these metaphors from a sociological article.

I note that these are four ways that I saw expressed in centers’ statements of purpose about how they achieve their aims. So, in a “hub,” which is the most frequent, centers seek to work as a connector, bringing instructors and students together across a college or university, for example, in dialogue and collaboration, or to centralize resources. You see this in the name of the Center for Teaching and Learning. I talk about “sieve” also being a common change strategy to use, [which] employs evidence-based practice. “Incubators” focus on development and growth orientation, often of individuals. You might see this exemplified in one-on-one consultations or new faculty orientations, but also in programs such as grants where we’re trying to incubate innovative ideas. Then the fourth but least exemplified change strategy is “temple,” to try and promote a space for recognition and reward of teaching and learning.

I do not evaluate those four approaches. I think they all can be effective. What I do say, though, that is important is to think about alignment of a center’s programs—or what I call tactics—with those change strategies to make sure that we’re achieving what we hope we’re achieving. I point out some areas of alignment and some areas of misalignment.

Q: Do you feel that the mission of the university over all contributes to whether a center would be best suited by one of those theories of change?

A: I think that’s often part of the strategic planning process that a center needs to undertake. What I argue is that a new center might want to employ fewer [theories of change] than a more established center to help get that work done. What we see is most frequently new centers tend to begin in the hub strategy, which makes a lot of sense, because you’re trying to make connections and get your center up and running. We also see that institutional type has some influence as well. Not surprisingly, at research universities, we see a high use of the sieve strategy to employ research in the service of teaching and learning. That approach is also common in medical and health contexts as well.

Q: You talk a lot about the changes to CTLs over the past decade. How do you feel those changes reflect the broader currents in higher education?

A: One of the changes I talk about is the rise in student learning aims among CTLs. I do think this is reflective of a greater emphasis in higher education on student success and equitable student learning outcomes. I think centers are being responsive to that call by the rise of that aim and promoting that in their work.

I [also] talk about integrative emphases in centers. So, over time, centers have gone beyond sort of the traditional teaching and learning focus and now, organizationally, are also taking on responsibilities focused on digital teaching and learning, assessment, writing and faculty professional learning, such as leadership and research development, and then, less frequently, service learning and community engagement. This has been a change in the work of the centers that I think has been helpful for promoting centers’ work. But I noticed that, over time, staffing resources have not increased proportionately, and so I think that also creates tensions for centers and their work as well.

Q: Do you have any message for institutions about why it’s important to support and not overburden those centers?

A: We know from the literature that an effective center can have a huge impact on the experiences of undergraduates, graduate students and faculty. We see in the literature that there’s strong evidence supporting the impact of centers’ work on student learning, student success, equitable outcomes. For faculty, this work is connected to retention, satisfaction, productivity. For grad students, we see it’s also connected to success in the academic job market and subsequent success in a faculty position.

In light of what the research suggests a center can do, I think it’s helpful for senior leaders, then, to think about how to partner with centers to think strategically about what should be on the plate and what should be off, as well as the resources needed to support that work.

Long-standing tensions over a controversial California law are resurfacing as COVID emergency relief funds for higher education dry up. The legislation, enacted in 1961 and known as the “Fifty percent Law,” requires community colleges to spend at least half their budget on instructional costs.

Unique to California, the law is beloved by faculty members—who say it prioritizes smaller classes and full-time instructors—and disdained by many administrators, who argue that it prevents them from funding other vital programs, including food and housing supports to meet students’ basic needs, new technology, and student advising.

“It pits staff and administration against faculty, which is what we don’t want,” said Kindred Murillo, a longtime California community college administrator who recently retired. “We want everybody working together for the benefit of students.”

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The two sides have been debating the funding model for over a decade, but growing financial pressures have injected new urgency into the discussion.

“We’ve heard from colleges for many years, but especially more recently, that the law can be a constraint in meeting the very real obligations and needs of their students,” said David O’Brien, the California Community Colleges’ vice chancellor for government relations.

In some ways, the pandemic allowed a temporary appeasement of the dispute. While it brought more attention and demand to community colleges’ noninstructional programs, it also provided emergency relief funds, which were exempt from the Fifty Percent Law. That meant college leaders could invest in expanding wraparound services for students while still upholding the law and maintaining instructional funding.

But the spending deadline for federal COVID relief funds passed in June, and state provisions will dry up in the next two years, which many community college officials believe will create new hardships going forward.

For one thing, community colleges have largely relied on the COVID money to help fund the development of one-stop basic needs centers, which the state Legislature began mandating two years ago. When that support ends, institutions will still have to account for running the centers.

“The basic needs coordinator has to be an identified staff member at each college who’s responsible for coordinating all the basic needs efforts, but that again, counts against the Fifty Percent Law,” O’Brien said. “That’s somebody whose salary is going to be considered as an administrator.”

An ‘Antiquated Anathema’

Administrators argue that the original law didn’t account for all the social services colleges are called on to provide today.

“If you talk to almost any college president or chancellor … They’ll point to the Fifty Percent Law as antiquated, anachronistic and anathema to all the evidence about what’s needed for student success,” said Larry Galizio, president and CEO of the Community College League of California, which supports locally elected trustees and community college CEOs.

COVID may have “accelerated” the demand for noninstructional social services, but administrators across the state said struggles to fund those services predate the looming drop-off of pandemic relief funds.

“All of those expenditures, which are absolutely needed and required for student success, are hamstrung by this law, which says your general fund has to expend at least 50 percent on direct instruction, which is so narrowly defined,” Galizio said. “You could take the COVID money out of the picture and you would still have a completely illogical, irrational law that hinders colleges.”

In a state where 35 percent of community college attendees are first generation and 64 percent are classified as “economically disadvantaged,” according to the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, support for basic life needs is becoming a standard expectation.

Ricky Shabazz, president and CEO of San Diego City College, said he’s turned to grants—which are not impacted by the Fifty Percent Law—as an alternate way to fund noninstructional support services such as mental health and housing crisis counselors. Those positions didn’t exist when the law was first written.

“It’s thrust us into a place where we have to write grants in order to bring in the revenue or the resources so that we don’t find ourselves out of alignment with the Fifty Percent Law,” Shabazz said. “These folks impact a student’s success on the instruction side. So very simply, it needs to be updated.”

Several administrators said that they would be open to increasing the budgetary percentage for instructors if more nonclassroom staff were included. Shabazz said he’d accept a requirement that staff currently labeled as “noninstructional” teach at least one course in order to be adopted under the categorization.

“That’s the middle ground without entirely blowing up the Fifty Percent Law,” he said.

It Shouldn’t be ‘an Either-Or’

But faculty representatives worry that any changes to the law, especially those made without adjusting the percentage set aside for instruction, will encroach on teaching and lead to administrative bloat.

“We recognize that students need wraparound services … there are lots of things that we do for our students now that maybe we didn’t do 20 or 30 years ago,” said Wendy Brill-Wynkoop, president of the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges (FACCC). “Success doesn’t happen just in the classroom, but it’s not going to happen without education. That’s still our primary goal.”

Brill-Wynkoop said that if the Fifty Percent Law were eliminated, institutions would need to cap class sizes and set strict requirements for the minimum number of full-time instructors and maximum number of administrators.

Evan Hawkins, executive director of FACCC, suggested that colleges could supplement some of the support services they provide and cut costs by better connecting students with preexisting local welfare services.

“It doesn’t seem like it should be an either-or. It shouldn’t be that in order to ensure that our students have their basic needs met, faculty need to have larger class size or more of them need to be part-time,” Hawkins said. “I think we can do better than that.”

He also noted that some problems could be solved if California’s community colleges received funding equitable to the state’s public four-year institutions. The University of California, for example, received $15,151 in general fund state support per student in the 2022–23 academic year, whereas each community college only received $11,360.

“If our per-student funding rate was the same as UC, we could do all that we needed to,” Hawkins said.

Grappling With a Question

Several work groups commissioned by the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office over the years have looked into options for changing the Fifty Percent Law, but none has ever developed a concrete alternative plan, according to Brill-Wynkoop.

The most recent work group, which released its final report in 2019, suggested that redefining what’s included in instructional costs—adding librarians’ and counselors’ salaries, for instance—would also require re-evaluating what percentage of the budget is allocated. But it did not determine what that percentage should be.

The state Legislature is also currently conducting an audit of 10 community college districts’ compliance with the Fifty Percent Law, sponsored by a faculty union group, California Community College Independents, and approved in June. The results are expected to come out some time next year.

O’Brien described “a very lively” bipartisan discussion among legislators at a committee hearing on the audit, where they grappled with the question “Should we just look at this 1961 law that dates from when John F. Kennedy was president … as the barometer of whether our colleges are meeting their obligations? Or should we have a higher standard?”

The Florida Board of Governors voted Friday to ask the state attorney general to weigh in on the Florida Atlantic University presidential search, which has been suspended for alleged anomalies. 

The board voted to seek a legal opinion on the use of a survey that sought demographic information about applicants, including questions on sexual orientation and gender identity. The voluntary survey was conducted by AGB Search, the firm hired to find FAU’s next president. 

Specifically, the board is asking the attorney general to weigh in on whether the use of the survey—which was not factored into the selection of finalists—failed to comply with state public records laws, according to a description of the agenda item in board documents.

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The move comes amid growing concern about political influence and interference in Florida presidential searches. Republican politicians have been hired in executive roles at the University of Florida, New College of Florida and South Florida State College, and Governor Ron DeSantis was pushing Randy Fine, a state Republican lawmaker, for the FAU job.

The FAU search was suspended shortly after three finalists, excluding Fine, were named in July.

State University System chancellor Ray Rodrigues, a DeSantis ally and former GOP lawmaker, objected to the use of the survey in FAU’s search and an informal straw poll to rank candidates. University officials and AGB Search have both defended the integrity of the search.

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear,” wrote H. P. Lovecraft in the 1920s, “and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” Readers of his treatise Supernatural Horror in Literature were assured that “few psychologists [would] dispute” his claim, although he cited no research to back it up. 

Yet this was not mere carelessness. Lovecraft’s speculations were in line with ideas about “the primitive mind” found in the scholarship of the day. Early humankind’s uncomprehending terror of a threat-filled world inspired superstition and religion (more or less synonymous terms in this boilerplate evolutionary narrative). But our species’ advantage in the struggle for survival was the ability to gather and transmit knowledge, however slowly, and thereby develop a degree of understanding and control over natural phenomena. Civilization was a relatively secure island of rational order, of understanding and control over natural phenomena, inconceivable to our cave-dwelling ancestors.

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Lovecraft, in defending what he called “a literature of cosmic fear,” accepted this grand narrative in principle while also insisting that the island was a tiny speck in a universe unimpressed by its sovereignty. “Minds sensitive to hereditary impulse,” he wrote with his characteristic eldritch flourishes, “will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globes in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.”

I take it that Arash Javanbakht, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist and director of the Stress, Trauma and Anxiety Research Clinic at Wayne State University School of Medicine, is holding the fort on that tiny island. His book Afraid: Understanding the Purpose of Fear and Harnessing the Power of Anxiety (Rowman & Littlefield) opens by acknowledging fear as “one of the most deeply rooted biological mechanisms that has evolved over hundreds of millions of years in the brains and bodies of animals and humans with one key mission: to increase our chance of survival.” It is hardwired into human physiology in ways it is sometimes possible to override but never to turn off for good. (At least not deliberately: damage to the brain can destroy the capacity for fear, at great danger to the organism.)

But dismissing fear as primitive or celebrating its inescapability are about equally far from his approach. The laboratory and clinical research that Javanbakht discusses is marshaled to understand and mitigate the dangerous aspects of human fearfulness. Real, raw fear “regresses us to a more primitive, rigid, and less flexible level,” he writes, “and rigidity is generally the opposite of creativity.” That said, our capacity to find entertainment in imaginary horrors is a sort of evolutionary luxury—an exercise of the power to feel in control, that “may also put fears and anxieties of modern life into context.”

The author goes over the relevant physiological basics, particularly the role of neurotransmitters and the grounding of what he calls “the fear system” in regions of the brain (the amygdala and hippocampus in particular). The sympathetic and parasympathetic neurons “both have extensive reach to most important organs, and often function opposite to each other in each of these organs.” Responding to perceived threats outside the body, the sympathetic nervous system narrows the behavioral options to fight, flight, or freezing in place, so as not to draw attention. The parasympathetic nervous system “organizes the internal maintenance and metabolic behaviors such as activities of the gastrointestinal system, bladder, and salivation,” all of them “energy-consuming functions that are not a priority during a life-threatening situation when it is better to direct energy, oxygen, and blood away from them.” The parasympathetic system is also involved in shutting down the fight-or-flight response; this causes freezing or fainting. (The evolutionary advantage of fainting is hard to imagine, and it goes unexplored.)

Some fear responses may have a genetic component, as suggested by a study in which 8- to 14-month-old infants were shown mixed pairs of pictures of snakes, frogs and flowers. Their attention went most quickly to the snakes; likewise, they responded more quickly to an angry human face than to a happy one. More interesting, I think, are Javanbakht’s reports on learned fear, including forms that might be called contagious. Pregnant rats given an electrical shock when exposed to the smell of peppermint understandably became fearful of its scent. They were exposed to peppermint again later, while tending to their offspring; the latter had an avoidance reaction to the smell despite never having been shocked. A variety of other experiments show what sound like fear reactions communicated nonverbally between human subjects.

What Lovecraft called “fear of the unknown,” Javanbakht defines, rather, as anxiety—with fear, in the strict sense, being a reaction to known (or at least distinctly perceived) external threats. “Anxiety, on the other hand,” he explains, “is a response to an unknown and vague threat, often has an internal source, and involves a diffuse sense of apprehension.” This distinction in place, the author goes on to pair them together, often enough, as if varieties of a common dynamic; the neurotransmitters involved overlap. And both fear and anxiety have a close and tangled relationship (sometimes as causes and sometimes as responses) to aggression and violence.

Little surprise that Javanbakht finds numerous occasions to connect his field of expertise to recent developments in news from around the world. In particular, the evidence of intergenerational transmissions of fear, anxiety and trauma make for unhappy implications. Yet the author’s tone is almost always energetic, even jaunty. Perhaps that is easier than dwelling at length on the implications of what he’s describing.

Many students learn valuable on-the-job experience as employees of their institution, but connecting their work to future goals and classroom outcomes can be a challenge for higher education practitioners. A recent survey of hiring managers found 52 percent believe experience is the most important factor in hiring decisions for recent graduates, making it more critical to connect co-curricular and curricular learning.

The University of Iowa launched a program in 2009 to support students in identifying their workforce skills developed on campus in student employment. Iowa GROW—short for “guided reflection on work”—is a trademarked intervention adopted and adapted by hundreds of other institutions to help students make meaningful connections between their jobs and learning through regular conversations with supervisors.

The conversations help students build confidence in their co-curricular learning and connect job functions with their desired career after graduation while creating mentoring relationships with older adults at the college.

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What’s the need: Student employees are sometimes able to identify the “real world” skills they learn on the job like time management, conflict resolution and balancing priorities. However, research shows students have a harder time connecting their jobs to their classroom learning. Supervisors can help bridge the knowledge gap between schoolwork and other work.

The University of Iowa’s division of student life wanted to enhance student employees’ experiences within the department, and Sarah Hansen, associate vice president of student life, so staffers dug into the research to find what would be meaningful and doable within the campus context.

How it works: In an Iowa GROW conversation, supervisors pose four questions to employees:

1. How is this job fitting in with your academics?
2. What are you learning here that’s helping you in school?
3. What are you learning in class that you can apply here at work?
4. Can you give me a couple of examples of things you’ve learned here that you think you’ll use in your chosen profession?

“They are really specific—they’re focused on transfer of learning across contexts, so back and forth between work and academics because we [division of student life staff] are here to support the academic experience,” Hansen says. The questions also tie into transferrable skills and NACE’s career competencies.

Supervisors have guided conversations with students twice during each semester that they’re employed and can adapt or add questions based on the student’s length of employment or year in college. For example, a supervisor might ask a senior what their role has taught them about workplace culture that will help them in selecting a full-time position after graduation.

Time is always a concern for supervisors, but the intervention is structured so it can happen without much disruption during the workday (like at a produce prep section or while sorting papers) or in a small group setting with multiple students. There’s also a QuickStart version of the Iowa GROW questions to help a supervisor get more comfortable talking with a student about their skills and life goals.

The interventions were designed to be doable and meaningful within the context of the institution, Hansen explains. Many institutions host professional development workshops or sessions for employees, but Iowa’s goal was to embed metacognition into the experience rather than teach specific skills.

The outcomes: Students participating in Iowa GROW conversations have been more likely to believe their employment gave them career-related skills and helped them gain problem-solving abilities, communication skills and general work habits.

For example, in a 2021 survey, 91 percent of student employees who participated in GROW believed their job helped improve verbal communication skills, but only 83 percent of non-GROW employees said the same. Most student employees on campus participate in GROW conversations, but the fluidity of student employment timelines and supervisor turnover makes it difficult to capture all students, Hansen explains.

Student employees at Iowa have retained at a higher rate than their peers since 2012, particularly among underrepresented racial or ethnic minorities and first-generation students. The intervention develops relationships between supervisors and students, creating a sense of accountability and responsibility within students’ roles and creating a mini mentorship.

“It has all of the elements of good mentoring in that it’s context specific, it’s ongoing, it’s meaningful, and so we may not call it that, but it really is,” Hansen says.

Campus partners have also been onboard with the program, looking at the data and their own goals of student learning, Hansen says.

Looking ahead: Since 2009, Iowa GROW has expanded to include the majority of student employees on campus at the University of Iowa, training and retraining supervisors as needed to hold conversations.

Over the years, Iowa GROW has been used and adapted at various institutions. The program fits in most contexts, regardless of size, location or student population, Hansen says.

Terri Schnelle serves as the director of projects and partnerships, managing the day-to-day work of supporting other institutions in GROW and developing additional resources.

Iowa is also adapting the program to better equip supervisors for GROW conversations. With rising concerns around student mental health, program leaders hope to better guide and support staff as they engage in difficult topics with their employees.

If your student success program has a unique feature or twist, we’d like to know about it. Click here to submit.

When Katrina McChesney received an email from an Australian university she had “never heard of” about free research master’s and doctoral degrees for Antipodean citizens, she assumed it was a scam.

At the time, the Kiwi teacher was working on an educational reform project in the Middle East. An academic back home reassured her that it was a legitimate proposal. She gave little thought to whether she really wanted a Ph.D., let alone which university or supervisor would be best. “I just fell into it.”

She started a master’s program and, when things went well, switched to a Ph.D. “I was enrolled at an Australian university, but I lived in the Middle East for the first half and then moved back here to New Zealand,” said McChesney, now a senior lecturer in education at the University of Waikato. “I lived in 11 houses in two hemispheres. I had a baby in the middle of it. The first time I went to my university was to graduate.”

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This scenario is not all that unusual, according to the preliminary findings of an international research project into the experiences of doctoral candidates who study by distance.

A survey conducted by McChesney and colleagues in England, South Africa and Australia elicited responses from 521 current and former Ph.D. students in 42 countries. It revealed a hodgepodge of approaches, from partly online study a stone’s throw from the host university to fully remote learning on the other side of the planet.

While three-quarters of respondents had undertaken three-fifths or more of their studies off campus, one-sixth had been off campus for the entirety of their programs. And while 84 percent had studied in the same countries as their universities, 10 percent had spent the whole time abroad.

Most respondents came from social science disciplines and particularly education, reflecting the researchers’ professional networks but possibly also a comparative dearth of distance doctoral students in laboratory-based courses. Nevertheless, about one-fifth of responses came from people in the sciences.

McChesney said the figures—set to be published in full next year—reflect the heterogeneity of a largely overlooked cohort. “Institutional understandings of who distance doctoral students are, and what they need, are a bit out of date. They’re kind of invisible in the statistics. We haven’t been able to find any reported data.”

While the pandemic forced people off campus, distance doctorates were “not a new post-COVID thing.” A subset of Ph.D. candidates had “always” studied remotely because of work obligations, caretaking responsibilities or sheer distance from their universities. “We know that people do doctorates from prison. Doctorates are being done [in] places like Antarctica. I have this hunch, which I am yet to prove, that somebody must have worked on their doctorate from space,” McChesney said.

COVID triggered new practices in any number of workplaces. “That’s happening for doctoral students, too, but it’s happening quietly because doctoral students are independent and … do their own thing.” But universities were struggling to recognize the phenomenon, hampered by “institutional inertia” and a sense that “doctoral programs have always looked a particular way.”

“Until now, most of the responsibility has sat with students. It’s on you to make it work. Universities have said, ‘Here are the ways you can communicate with us and access our services.’ There hasn’t been that sense of, ‘We as an institution are responsible to make sure our provision serves all of you,’” McChesney said.

McChesney did not choose her supervisor, and her Ph.D. topic “emerged by accident” as an extension of her work at the time. As it happened, “my supervisor was wonderful … but she was really all that the university offered me.”

The university promoted itself as a specialist in distance doctoral education. “Occasionally a librarian would scan a chapter if it wasn’t digitally available. But really, I spent most of my doctorate getting increasingly annoyed at … emails advertising these wonderful networking events, professional development opportunities, workshops, speakers, seminars—all of which required you to be on campus in [another] country.”

Despite such frustrations, the survey elicited many positive stories. “A lot of doctoral students became distant students by accident, because of COVID, and found that it was really great for them.” McChesney said her team rejected the “deficit discourse” of distance study as a “second-best” option. “We think it should be tackled from an inclusion and equity lens in terms of good institutional provision,” she said.

“Financial constraints … caring responsibilities, health and mobility, anxiety, trauma—all of those sorts of experiences are perhaps particularly highly represented in an off-campus cohort. Universities … wanting to be part of the equity drive in higher education can’t [overlook] off-campus students.

“Offering a really strong distance doctorate pathway [has] got to be a good marketing opportunity. There are students out there who want to do doctorates. Be the best at looking after them, and students will come.”

Did you know that 37 percent of the Harvard Class of 2025 attended private schools or that the figure at Princeton was 40 percent, at Brown, 41 percent, and at Dartmouth, 44 percent?

Note: Those figures don’t include the 10 to 30 percent of Ivy Leaguers who are international students, many of whom also attended pricey private schools.

To put those figures in context, nationwide, just 10 percent of high school students attend private schools.

In 2021, The Atlantic calculated that “Dalton has sent about a third of its graduates to the Ivy League. Ditto the Spence School. Harvard-Westlake, in Los Angeles, sent 45 kids to Harvard alone. Noble and Greenough School, in Massachusetts, did even better: 50 kids went on to Harvard.”

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The article’s author noted that “Among the top 25 feeders to Princeton, only three are public schools where 15 percent or more of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch,” and that a Lawrenceville School graduate was seven times more likely to go to Princeton than a student from New York City’s ultraselective Stuyvesant High School, where 45 percent of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Over half of the low-income Black students at elite colleges attended top private schools.

The Wall Street Journal describes a major contributor to the prep-school bias: “‘aristocratic’ sports recruits feed pipeline between private schools and Ivy League”: “About two-thirds of athletes on Ivy League rosters [are] in so-called aristocratic sports such as crew and lacrosse” or squash or water polo.

Just in case you took the Labor Day weekend off, there were a lot of interesting news stories that you may have missed.

For example, an accreditor approved a bachelor’s degree program that requires as few as 90 credit hours. This decision raises a lot of questions that Robert Kelchen, among the most perceptive and thoughtful commentators on the higher education scene, comments on his website. Here are some of the questions he raises:

• Will other accreditors be pressured to follow suit?
• Will the Biden administration’s Education Department step in?
• How will this affect transfer students or the cross-subsidies that departments depend on?
• Will the effect be confined to adult-serving institutions?

As someone who graduated in three years, thanks to AP courses, and who spent my third year full-time on an independent research project, I should be the last to criticize a more compressed pathway to a degree. But I had a level of faculty mentoring and research funding that few students receive today.

Three-year degrees can save families thousands of dollars. But it’s hard for me not to see this as a giant leap toward a devalued degree. At one end, we’re witnessing the growth of dual-degree/early-college courses of uncertain quality taught by instructors without a terminal degree. Now it will be increasingly possible to graduate with fewer electives.

I view this as a logical, inevitable outgrowth of a cafeteria approach to a college curriculum. After all, if a degree consists of a random collection of courses without any logic or coherence, why shouldn’t some classes be jettisoned?

The New York Times featured two articles that speak to a number of hot-button issues that grow out of the increasing diversity of today’s student body and the shifts in students’ and parental expectations about colleges’ responsibilities, campus concerns about legal liability, evolving cultural norms and shifting power dynamics among students, administrators and faculty.

One piece, a classic example of late-summer clickbait, looks at how college dining halls are responding to a surge in students with food allergies and requests for special diets for religious, dietary or health reasons.

That piece focuses, predictably, on name-brand institutions, and the readers’ comments are fascinating if not surprising. Many readers are dismissive, decrying coddled, entitled students and citing this as a contributor to the high price of a college education. Others emphasize the dangers posed by food allergies and colleges’ legal and moral obligation to accommodate students’ diverse needs, especially at institutions where meal plans are mandatory and dorm kitchens are unavailable.

What the article doesn’t discuss is the trend at many schools—including my own—to rely increasingly heavily on various fast food outlets to feed students. This trend, in my view, combines the worst of all worlds: campus commercialization; high-fat meals low in nutrients and almost totally lacking in fruit, vegetables and fiber; and the elimination of the dining halls where diverse students socialized and interacted.

The second piece reports on a shift in Yale’s mental health policies that had previously required students struggling with suicidal thoughts or clinical depression to withdraw without a guarantee of readmission and with the loss of their campus health insurance. This shift makes a lot of sense to me.

Unfortunately, this piece doesn’t really grapple with profoundly thorny issues that campuses face involving confidentiality, due process, notification, reporting requirements and access to support services. For example, what are colleges’ responsibilities to roommates, residence advisers or faculty when a student is experiencing a severe mental health crisis? Can colleges compel a student to undergo treatment as a condition of enrollment? How can a campus determine if a student’s behavior puts others at risk?

Then, there was an article Inside Higher Ed published from Times Higher Education about how wealthier universities in Australia are thriving while other institutions falter. A similar piece could, of course, have been written about the United States, where we are also seeing a flight toward more prestigious, better resourced institutions with higher graduation rates, which is intensifying higher ed’s stratification.

One result: many regional comprehensives—the four-year institutions that serve the most diverse and disadvantaged student bodies—are experiencing declining enrollment even as many flagship campuses enroll their largest entering classes ever. The divide in resources, students’ academic qualifications, faculty salaries, breadth of programming and student access to academic support services, cutting-edge technologies and mentored research opportunities, internships and other high-impact practices is widening.

Another result: many community colleges rely, more and more heavily, on early-college/dual-degree courses as a source of revenue and enrollment. Currently, high schoolers make up a fifth of community college students.

Jeffrey Selingo reports that while over 85 percent of students at private nonprofit colleges receive financial aid (largely because of discounting), the figure at public institutions is about 69 percent, with nearly a third of students paying full freight, which means, of course, that many families are highly sensitive to any increase in tuition and fees.

At the institutions where I taught, administered or studied, here are the most recent figures for the average net cost of attendance per year, including grants and scholarships.

• Houston $13,798
• Hunter $2,124
• Oberlin $34,498
• Texas $17,519
• Yale $16,341

A very striking range, wouldn’t you say? And the range depends heavily not only on institutional resources but on state and local-level public policy decisions.

Then, there was a fascinating piece by Joshua Kim on Boston University’s $24,000 online M.B.A. program. As a program alumna explained, “the program was created in response to what he called ‘artificial scarcity.’ There is no reason low-cost, high-quality online degree programs cannot be done by the world’s most elite schools at scale.” The interviewee goes on:

Bravo to BU for rising to the occasion.

May other institutions, including my own, take similar steps to broaden access to a meaningful credential and institute—or better yet, require—immersive, highly interactive pedagogies in online courses that incorporate team-based simulations and project-based learning and that act like a true learning community.

Let me conclude with one last article that you might have missed. In an essay entitled “Americans Are Losing Faith in the Value of College. Whose Fault Is That?” Paul Tough, the author, most recently, of The Inequality Machine: How College Divides Us, argues that “the new economics of higher ed make going to college a risky bet.”

As I read his article, I kept wanting to shout out: we mustn’t be overly nostalgic about the “good old days.” There wasn’t a magical past, say, in the 1950s or earlier, when college wasn’t socially and economically class related. We need to remember how uncommon college attendance was just six decades ago, when just 64 percent of young people graduated from high school and 45 percent of those enrolled in college and fewer than 8 percent of Americans had a college degree. Back then, even going to a state institution was often a stretch. It certainly was for my parents.

(As my “Higher Ed Gamma” partner, Michael Rutter, points out, higher ed attracts a lot of articles like Tough’s that resemble those you might read in Rolling Stone about the post-Napster collapse of the music business … and how in the “good old days” artists made money, concerts were cheaper, fans were better and the music was much, much better and non–Auto-Tuned. But don’t fool yourself. It doesn’t take much digging to discover that the music industry back then was often corrupt, sexist and exploitative of artists who had little recourse when their talent was abused.)

To be sure, our current system of paying for a college education is broken, and like so many things in this country, higher ed has suffered from utter underinvestment in infrastructure, political maneuvering and neoliberal corruption of college’s mission and purpose.

There’s an odd tendency in Tough’s essay and his recent book to imply that colleges set out to exacerbate inequality. In fact, the rise of inequality in this society has been going on for decades, and even as the stratification of higher education reflects that reality, colleges have also fought against that trend, even though this has been an impossible battle for them to win.

It’s certainly the case that the elites have not done nearly enough to advance economic equality—and should be held to account. But we mustn’t forget that the United States, more than almost any other country, has made college for all not just an ideal, but to a striking extent, a reality.

Societies including Britain, India and South Korea and many others do in fact have educational systems that truly are about class structure or tracking as early as the end of primary school or the outcome of a single high-stakes test. Yes, Canada has an admirable model, but it also has a tiny population, less than that of California.

American colleges and universities have never been what Tough calls “deliberate actors” able to shape their destiny without being buffeted by the economy or legislation or other variables. What our campuses can—and must—do is act more like a collective entity and do everything possible to press this society to truly make a high-quality college education available to all. That means that every student should have affordable access to a teacher-scholar, high-impact practices and strong systems of wraparound supports.

The college-for-all ideal has, without a doubt, made teaching tougher. Today’s students are much more willing to voice their concerns and assert their rights. They’re more demanding, and a few are willing to punish faculty on teaching evaluations when their requests aren’t fulfilled or their grades sufficiently high.

Administrators do, at times, undermine professorial authority and fail to defend academic freedom and require instructors to alter the fundamental nature and even the rigor of our classes (for example, by eliminating breakout sections in large lecture courses). Some accreditors are failing to resist legislative pressure to degrade the quality of a college education.

The challenges we face are the inevitable outgrowth of a change that we should all applaud: a shift in the ethos of higher ed away from an education of an elite to an education accessible to all, irrespective of their family background, financial resources and special needs. That’s higher education’s democratic ideal.

Fulfilling that democratic mission will not be easy. But if we don’t strive to realize that goal, we betray our campuses’ public responsibilities and purpose.

In the dozen years we have co-edited the journal ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, we have read many external reports supplied by colleagues in our discipline. We have also written peer reviews for other journals ourselves. Throughout those experiences, we have been struck by a peculiar challenge presented by the reader report: the challenge of audience.

Peer reviews are commissioned and read by editors, but they are also sent to the author of the piece being reviewed. Because journal editors are the ones who request reader reports, it’s natural to assume they are the primary audience for your review. However, we would like to propose that you think of the author as your primary audience and write your report accordingly.

Why do we recommend this approach? It allows journals to act more like mentors than gatekeepers. If a reviewer imagines they are writing for the journal editor, they compose according to what they imagine the journal editor needs: a judgment about the quality of the article, including an answer to the big question of whether they should publish it or not. If the journal editor is your audience, it might be a virtue if your report is brief (journal editors are busy) or written in conceptual shorthand (you are, after all, writing to an expert in the field). Nor is it a problem if you choose to write caustically (you can all share the joke of what this author thought was publishable).

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At the same time, however, these qualities make a report not very useful or possibly even hurtful to the author of the submission. If, in contrast, the reviewer thinks they are writing primarily for the author, they will likely spend more time explaining what they see as the article’s strengths and weaknesses, shaping their explanations to what they think the author can absorb. It’s also much harder—although, of course, not impossible—to be dismissive.

Including the positive, shaping your suggestions to meet the writer where they are, adopting an encouraging tone—this all probably sounds familiar. A second reason we advocate that a reviewer write primarily to the author is because it enables the reviewer to take advantage of something they know a lot about: how to comment on students’ work. Everything you already know as a teacher about how to write helpful comments to students about their papers is relevant to the work you perform as a reviewer of journal articles. If you are recommending the journal reject an article—comparable to assigning a bad grade—it’s important to be encouraging, to identify strengths of the work as well as limitations, to give advice about how to improve the work and to think of an article as a work in progress. As with student papers, it’s also important to avoid overwhelming the author with recommendations.

Yet there’s one habit of mind we can slip into when giving feedback that isn’t always helpful to the author of the article you’re reviewing, who is after all a colleague and not a student: the sense that you know more than the author. You might be an expert in the field and well published yourself, but that knowledge of the discipline and how to write about it can turn into a liability if it encourages a patronizing tone. It can also be a problem if it makes you reject an article that productively and insightfully challenges your field’s paradigms or values.

For example, the article might focus on material that hasn’t been conventionally analyzed, or it might analyze familiar material in new ways. Rejecting this kind of article is one way that reviewers unwittingly disadvantage younger voices and minoritized authors who want to question the way things have always been done. Not every article that challenges a discipline is doing it well, but some of them are—and those kinds of challenging articles can have a huge impact by taking the field in new and productive directions. In other words, we think it’s important for reviewers to approach articles with the attitude that authors can teach them something, rather than the other way around.

General Suggestions

We recommend that you offer the author suggestions for improvement, whether you think that person can revise and resubmit or that the article has too far to go to be publishable at this time. Unless an article is nearly ready for publication, aim for a length of one to two single-spaced pages. A shorter report won’t offer the detail that an author is likely to find valuable in revising either for the present journal or another one. For the editor, a short report will also be unhelpful in reaching and conveying the decision about why an article was rejected or how the author needs to revise to get the article published.

That said, too long a report might indicate that a reviewer has lost sight of the big picture. In addition, the common advice to limit your suggestions to two or three larger conceptual or structural issues when providing feedback to students applies here, too: the author of an article likely can’t address more than that without writing an entirely new article. However, do point out things like factual errors and other smaller, nongrammatical problems you see.

You might be wondering whether our advice to offer the authors suggestions for improvement might be confusing for authors (and editors) whose articles you are recommending the editors reject. We assure you that rarely happens. We recommend including your final recommendation in your report, but even if you don’t, both author and editor can infer from the kind of recommendations you’re providing how far it is from being publishable at this time. A suggestion to integrate the work of one relevant scholar is very different from a suggestion that an author choose a scholarly conversation to engage with. If you’re still worried, many journals offer separate locations for indicating your final decision and writing comments that are for the editor’s eyes only.

This worry—that authors might be too encouraged—reveals how journals have traditionally functioned as gatekeepers. Certainly, one of the functions of a journal is to provide strong scholarship that will move a field forward. But to return to a point we made above, like many other journal editors, we want our journal to have another function: to serve as a site for the mentoring and nurturing of scholars, especially beginning or minoritized ones. Scholars will not submit just one article to one journal in their career; they will continue, if all goes well, to produce scholarship and develop as writers and thinkers. Similarly, the article you feel should be rejected will likely, if its author receives the right kind of feedback, be revised and sent to another journal—or if abandoned, the author will use your advice to shape their next article. We are all evolving writers, but our evolution can slow or even stop if we receive feedback that is caustic or points out only how we failed. The best feedback suggests a path forward as a writer and scholar.

A Reader Report Template

While we don’t think it’s the only way to write a report, we’d like to describe here some ways to give specific feedback in yours. Start with a one-paragraph summary of the essay’s argument, its contribution or potential contribution to scholarly discussions on the topic(s) and its other strengths. That achieves several things. It shows to the author that you understand what they’re saying, have read the essay carefully and recognize the contribution the author is making or hoping to make. If, in the author’s view, that paragraph does not do a good job summarizing the argument, it should indicate to them that they haven’t been as clear as they hoped. Such an opening establishes your authority and ethos to both the author and editor: it shows that you have read the article carefully, know the field and are generous as well as rigorous.

Alternatively, you might start with your overall recommendation (publish, decline the article or require revisions) and the main reasons behind it. Like the thesis in a student essay, the recommendation and main reasons serve to introduce and organize the details explained in the rest of the report.

If the article is not a straight acceptance, spend the body of the report on two or three higher-level recommendations, as well as any smaller suggestions you have. If you feel the author needs to integrate particular scholarship, it’s very helpful to name the titles you want them to consult.

Do not copyedit the article—among other problems, it will eat up a tremendous amount of your time. Rather, use your report to help the author clarify the stakes of the argument, strengthen the recognition and treatment of other relevant scholarship on the topic, and improve the support for the essay’s claims, the article’s structure and the ideas and concepts they (could) develop or apply.

The only reason to suggest line edits is if you see errors or gaffes you think a copy editor might not notice. To both author and journal editor, an excessive focus on minutiae suggests the reviewer has lost sight of the forest for the trees. Line edits come later in the process—after the article has been accepted but before it has been published.

If you opened your report with a summary of the essay, you might end the report with a recap of your recommendations for revision, although that’s not essential. Authors are likely to read reports several times, so restatement is probably unnecessary. The same is true for editors. Instead, you might close the report with your overall recommendation: accept, reject or revise and resubmit.

If instead you opened your report with your overall recommendation and the main reasons for it, no conclusion is necessary, although you might end on an encouraging note: what you learned from the essay, the importance of the topic and your eagerness to see the essay, a revised version or future work in print.

A Note to Authors

Heeding our own advice to write with authors primarily in mind, we’d like to end by suggesting to authors that thinking about reader reports in the way we have described might provide some emotional buffering against unkind reports. That unkind review might still contain useful advice about how to revise your essay, and we recommend taking that advice seriously, but you should also know that the writer of the report was likely thinking primarily about the editor when writing that review and not the author.

At many journals, including ours, such a report will raise red flags for the editor and might constitute the rare case when we do not send it to the author. We hope that this article will help prevent such reports in the first place.

The University of Utah has launched an investigation of its highly acclaimed women’s gymnastics program following allegations of verbal and emotional abuse of team gymnasts by head coach Tom Farden.

The university has turned to the Kansas City, Mo.–based law firm Husch Blackwell to conduct the review, according to The Deseret News. Current and former athletes, their parents, and Utah gymnastics staffers have been interviewed as part of the investigation.

The former student athletes, who spoke to The Deseret News on the condition of anonymity, are not alleging sexual abuse. They say Farden subjected them to verbal degradation and public shaming at practices and meets, isolating gymnasts from family and pressuring them to refrain from outside communication, and physical intimidation, including throwing objects in the gym and forcefully handling equipment.

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The Deseret News said Farden declined to comment about the allegations.

One former gymnast told The Deseret News that Farden was only focused on winning. 

“I felt like I was a thing, a business asset,” she said. “If you’re doing stuff that doesn’t look good for this business that he’s running, then he thinks you’re irrelevant.”

Other athletes as well as former coaches, however, defended Farden and praised his approach.

“He is as professional as they come and he is one of the best coaches out there in the sport of women’s gymnastics,” said Megan Marsden, Farden’s former co–head coach. “He’s one of the best technical coaches and he cares about the athletes.” 

An Oregon jury awarded nearly $4 million to a former Pacific University student who accused the institution of mishandling allegations of sexual assault against him, The Oregonian reported.

The university suspended Peter Steele, a doctoral student in psychology, in 2020 after a female student alleged that he physically and sexually assaulted her. Steele said their relationship was consensual.

Steele and his accuser settled competing claims against one another before his lawsuit against Pacific went to trial. He accused the university of failing to follow proper procedures in suspending and later expelling him over the allegations.

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A jury found that Pacific had not acted fairly or reasonably toward Steele and had deliberately caused him emotional distress. On other counts, however, the university prevailed; the jury found that Pacific had neither violated Title IX nor breached its contract with Steele.

“At every step in this situation, we followed our policies and procedures, and we did not discriminate on any basis,” Pacific spokesperson Blake Timm told The Oregonian, noting that the university was considering an appeal.

KC Johnson, a professor of history at Brooklyn College who studies due process in campus sexual misconduct cases, told the news site the $4 million jury award is the largest he’s seen for a student accused of sexual assault.

“Both the size of the jury’s verdict and the fact that there was actually a trial was really, really unusual in this particular area of law and policy,” Johnson said.