Tag: Events

We’re approaching the end of a year that was at various times frightening, difficult and downright ridiculous. We hope that, despite the struggles higher education faced this year, you can still find something to be thankful for this holiday season, whether it’s generous donors making big differences for small campuses, colleges striving to improve cost transparency, or institutions supporting their communities through tough times.

If not, maybe you can take some inspiration from the videos below.

Here are Inside Higher Ed’s favorite holiday greetings, from the wacky to the artsy to the classy, showcasing the talents and holiday spirit of students, staff and faculty across the country.

Quinnipiac University, Hamden, Conn.

This slapstick sketch depicts Quinnipiac’s mascot, Boomer the Bobcat, messily preparing to welcome community members to his abode for Christmas dinner. Despite mishaps like spilling a bowl of assorted vegetables all over the floor and whisking what looks like mashed potatoes so feverishly they go flying, Boomer ends up putting out a beautiful spread—roast turkey, green beans, deviled eggs and more—for his delighted guests.

University of Louisiana at Monroe

The ULM Chamber Singers bring us a stirring adaptation of the 12 Days of Christmas entitled, no surprise, the 12 Days of Finals. Among the listed gifts is “ten paddlers paddling,” referring to the campus’s unique access to Bayou DeSiard, where students can borrow a kayak for free and paddle around to their heart’s delight.

Salt Lake Community College, Salt Lake City, Utah

Salt Lake Community College brings us another musical video, this time in the form of a tribute to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. President Greg Peterson takes on the titular role, singing: “We’ve made the most of this beautiful year, full of big hopes and holiday cheer. It’s education for you—it’s SLCC.edu. Will you join us next year?” Fuzzy video filters take the viewer back to old-school PBS, making the homage all the more nostalgic.

The University of Texas, Dallas’s Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology

This video highlights an annual tradition in an animation business development course at UT Dallas. The students are asked to design a holiday card and their peers then vote on the 10 best cards in the class. The winners’ cards are then printed and sold to fundraise for the school’s Student Emergency Fund. “I’m glad that our class is helping people have the reassurance that they need that they’re safe on campus and that somebody’s looking out for them if something does happen,” one of this year’s participants said.

Gonzaga University, Spokane, Wash.

College holiday greetings love to get a little bit meta. In this greeting, Gonzaga president Katia Passerini realizes she has forgotten to write a poem for this year’s holiday video. Luckily, student Alexis Sandoval just so happens to have a Christmas poem prepared, saving the day. Different members from the campus community, from a security leader to the university chaplain, recite the poem, bidding viewers to “rejoice in faith, carry peace and love into a happy New Year.”

Moraine Valley Community College, Palos Hills, Ill.

In this feel-good sketch, President Pamela Haney tries to bake a sweet treat for the college’s leadership team, but is missing a few key ingredients, including kindness and dedication. Luckily, teams from across the campus come to the rescue, bringing Haney everything she needs to finish making the cake. As one administrator says, “it’s amazing what we can do when we all work together.”

Wellesley College, Wellesley, Mass.

This year, the women’s liberal arts college celebrated 150 years since it welcomed its first class in 1875. As part of that celebration, the holiday video this year compiled archival footage and images submitted by alumni of winters on campus over the past century-and-a-half. The video, which features students sledding, ice skating, skiing and playing in the snow, is set over a song composed for the Class of 1948’s junior class show, which bemoans leaving Wellesley’s campus behind.

Community College of Philadelphia

“My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music is everyone’s favorite non-Christmas Christmas song. Why has it entered the holiday songs zeitgeist? Who can say for sure, but I think we’re all glad it has. This particular rendition by CCP students and faculty sets the classic tune against a hip-hop beat and features a sick guitar solo.

University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Ala.

Uh-oh—President Peter Mohler is supposed to be helping write Christmas cards, but he’s nowhere to be found! This cheeky sketch shows that he’s shirking his responsibilities to do much cooler and more fun things, like play video games with students or shoot hoops with Big Al, the institution’s elephant mascot. Luckily, when his colleagues finally find him, he’s already finished the holiday cards. Crisis averted!

Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana

“What’s one Tulane memory you hope never melts away?” this video asks a gaggle of sweater-clad Tulane students. More than one note a once-in-a-lifetime Gulf Coast blizzard that shocked and delighted Tulane students this past January, with one saying it was “like a dream.” Others mention friends, sports championships and exploring the city of New Orleans.

Ask just about any federally funded researcher to describe 2025, and they use words like chaotic, demoralizing, confusing, destabilizing and transformational.

“It’s been a very destabilizing year [that’s made] people question the nation’s commitment to research,” Heather Pierce, senior director for science policy at the Association of American Medical Colleges, told Inside Higher Ed.

She expects 2026 to be a year of rebuilding and standard setting.

Speaking of the National Institutes of Health, which calls itself the world’s largest public biomedical research funder, Pierce said the research community is expecting more major regulation and written policy changes in 2026, which will shed more light on how grants will be funded, how much the federal government will invest in the research enterprise and what priorities will emerge from this administration.

If the administration’s attacks on federally funded research in 2025 are any indication, the federal government of 2026 will likely be just as willing to advance its conservative ideological agenda by controlling universities through the nation’s research enterprise. And while the administration may not let up in the new year, courts stymied some of its most sweeping changes in 2025 and may continue to be an obstacle in the new year.

Soon after President Donald Trump started his second term in January, the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Department of Education and numerous other federal agencies that collectively send billions in research dollars to universities, began freezing and terminating hundreds of grants. Many of the targeted grants—including projects focused on vaccines, climate change, and health and education disparities among women, LGBTQ+ and minority communities—were caught in the crossfire of Trump’s war against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and so-called woke gender ideology.

Not only would the terminations lead to the loss of jobs, staff and income, a lawsuit filed by a group of NIH-funded researchers in April predicted that “scientific advancement will be delayed, treatments will go undiscovered, human health will be compromised, and lives will be lost.”

The true damage comes from the betrayal, the sense of uncertainty and the loss of trust researchers have—or had—vis-à-vis with the federal government. That’s really hard to quantify.”

Scott Delaney, cofounder of Grant Witness

Terminated federal grants encompassed a wide range of research projects. Some of the casualties included funding to study the erosion of democracy, the effectiveness of work study, dementia, COVID-19, cancer and misinformation. Others supported teacher-training programs and initiatives designed to attract more underrepresented students into STEM fields.

“The premise of this award is incompatible with agency priorities,” read a letter the NIH sent to numerous researchers back in March, terminating their active grants. “[R]esearch programs based primarily on artificial and nonscientific categories, including amorphous equity objectives, are antithetical to the scientific inquiry, do nothing to expand our knowledge of living systems, provide low returns on investment, and ultimately do not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness.”

But it didn’t stop there.

The Trump administration also temporarily froze billions more dollars in federal research grants at a handful of the nation’s wealthiest, most selective institutions, including Harvard University, Columbia University and the University of California at Los Angeles, for allegedly failing to address antisemitism on campus and ignoring the Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action, among other allegations. (Most of the universities got their money back after cutting deals with the administration or via court orders.)

And because the NIH, NSF, ED and several other federal agencies also laid off thousands of workers, researchers with questions had far fewer resources to help them navigate changes to application and award processes.

By some estimates, the government disrupted upward of $17 billion in NIH grants alone this year, according to Scott Delaney, a former lawyer and Harvard University epidemiologist who the university laid off as a result of grant terminations.

Earlier this year, he cofounded Grant Witness, a website that has been tracking grant cancellations at the NIH, NSF and the Environmental Protection Agency. While both the NIH and NSF have since restored thousands of grants, Delaney said those and other restorations won’t be enough to repair the now-fractured relationship between faculty and federal funding agencies.

“The true damage comes from the betrayal, the sense of uncertainty and the loss of trust researchers have—or had—vis-à-vis with the federal government. That’s really hard to quantify,” he told Inside Higher Ed this month. “In the years ahead, there will be folks who don’t want to plan long-term research projects because they don’t know if their funds are going to get summarily yanked out from underneath them; folks who don’t want to continue their careers in academic research or train in academic research; trainees who would have had training grant support who don’t now and go do something else. And some researchers will just leave the country.”

In addition, some of the Trump administration’s research funding proposals have stoked worry this year about the long-term sustainability of the nation’s academic research enterprise.

Numerous agencies—including NIH, NSF and Department of Energy—have attempted to cut university reimbursement rates for indirect research costs. Higher education and science advocates characterized such policies as “shortsighted and dangerous,” and said it would hamper university budgets, hurt the economy and stymie scientific progress. Although federal courts have since blocked the rate caps, the mere anticipation of such policy changes led some universities—including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Northwestern University—to freeze hiring and, in some cases, graduate admissions.

But by September, the NIH said it was on track to spend its full $47 billion budget by the end of the fiscal year that month.

However, the NIH awarded 3,500 fewer competitive grants this year with the biggest declines at the Institutes of minority health, nursing, human genome, alcohol abuse and alcoholism and mental health, according to The New York Times. Those changes are part of the White House’s plan to streamline scientific funding by eliminating wasteful spending and cutting “woke programs” that “poison the minds of Americans.”

As 2025 fades into 2026, the federal research funding picture isn’t looking as bleak—at least not on the surface.

A flurry of litigation from universities, individual researchers, trade associations and labor unions prompted several federal agencies to reinstate some research grants.

All things considered, 2025 “could have been worse, but it was still awful,” Delaney said, noting that there are still thousands of grants in limbo at the NSF, DOE and numerous other agencies beyond the NIH.

“So many people fought so hard—some of them sacrificed their jobs inside these federal agencies—and they succeeded in many ways. To tell a story that doesn’t include both their sacrifice and their success discredits what was a Herculean and heroic effort for scientists, many who have never spoken up in a political way before this year,” he added. “But it’s also important to emphasize that this fight isn’t over, and we need to keep fighting. It can get worse.”

‘Not Insulated From Politics’

Katie Edwards, a social work professor at the University of Michigan, is one of the researchers who sued the NIH. In March, the agency canceled six grants she was using to research mental health and violence prevention among marginalized young people, including Indigenous and LGBTQ+ youth. Valued at $10 million, the grants supported roughly 50 staff, community collaborators and trainees and put them all at risk of losing their jobs.

“For many trainees—especially those who are LGBTQ+ or people of color—the message they internalized was painful: that research on their communities is ‘ideological’ or expendable,” Edwards wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “The emotional toll of fighting for and protecting staff, reassuring community partners, and trying to navigate a constantly shifting federal landscape has been immense.”

University of Michigan

Although her grants have since been reinstated—albeit some with reduced dollar amounts, administrative delays and anti-DEI language in the notice of award—and her team has resumed their work, this year has forever changed her perspective on research.

“This year made clear that science is not insulated from politics—and that researchers must be prepared to defend not only their projects, but the people those projects exist to serve,” Edwards said. “Federally funded research with marginalized communities requires constant vigilance, strong partnerships, and collective resistance. We cannot simply adjust our science to political winds when real communities rely on this work.”

But not every researcher who appealed a grant termination got their money back.

In March, the Education Department informed Judith Scott-Clayton, a professor of economics and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, that it was cancelling her six-year grant to examine the impact of receiving federal work-study funding on enrollment and persistence among low-income students four and a half years into the grant.

Teachers College appealed the decision in April, but the government rejected it in September, stating that Education Department grants were specifically excluded from Columbia University’s settlement with the Trump administration. Support from a private foundation allowed Scott-Clayton and her team to resume their research this November, but she told Inside Higher Ed that the disruptions to research have been “extremely unsettling and demoralizing.”

And she’s not certain that 2026 will be any better.

“Even though I believe in the value of what I do, self-doubt can flare up when an authority as significant as the federal government formally declares your work to be a waste of resources,” she said. “I am not sure what the future of our field looks like if our federal government no longer values research evidence. And I am not sure what our society looks like if the federal government can make decisions so arbitrarily without any consequences or constraints.”

New Year, Old Concerns

This year is ending with unresolved questions about what the Trump administration’s research policies will ultimately be, and how much the federal government will fund research. Pierce at the Association of American Medical Colleges said she expects next year will provide answers.

Joanne Padrón Carney, chief government relations officer for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), said “I think the [the Energy Department’s] Genesis mission and the prioritization of artificial intelligence and emerging technologies is going to be a key driver in—I guess you could say—filling in the cracks of the foundation of the research enterprise that has been kind of hit by this earthquake in the past year.”

Wesley Lapointe/The Washington Post via Getty Images

The continuing resolution that ended the historically long federal government shutdown in November expires Jan. 30, and Congress is leaving town for the holidays without passing funding bills for some major science funding agencies, including the NIH, NSF and Energy.

Trump proposed slashing about $5.2 billion from the NSF. But House appropriators have suggested cutting $2.1 billion, while senators only put forth axing $60 million, according to an appropriations debate tracker from the AAAS. And while the president proposed cutting nearly 40 percent from the NIH—$18.1 billion—the House and Senate have instead suggested increasing its funding by roughly $1 billion, the tracker shows. That pushback from Congress is promising, advocates say.

And colleges and universities are still waiting for federal research funding agencies to set indirect cost reimbursement caps, after litigation blocked their plans to set the limit at 15 percent. The forthcoming OMB guidance setting those caps is also supposed to help agencies implement Trump’s controversial August executive order directing “senior appointees” to take charge of awarding, denying, reviewing and terminating new and already awarded grants. Among other changes, that order also said grants can’t “promote” racial preferences or “the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic,” and that they “should be given to a broad range of recipients rather than to a select group of repeat players.”

Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

Further, the NIH is eyeing ways to reduce how much of its grant dollars researchers can use to pay scientific journals to publish their work. The proposed options ranged from limiting how much could be spent per publication or capping the percentage of a grant that can go toward publishing fees overall, to no longer funding publication costs whatsoever. The NIH said in the summer that it planned to make whatever policy it chose effective early next year, but it only recently released the public comments, and an agency spokesperson said he couldn’t provide a definitive implementation timeline.

Just this week, Science published a memo showing that NSF is scaling back its reviews of grant proposals, citing its “significantly reduced” workforce and a need to expedite approvals and denials to address a “significant backlog of unreviewed proposals and canceled review panels” from the government shutdown. The memo also said NSF program officers are “expected to maximize their use of available automated merit review tools, especially tools that identify proposals that should be returned without review.”

And the NIH ordered staff last Friday to start using a “computational text analysis tool” to scan current and new grants for words and phrases that may mean they’re misaligned with NIH priorities. Staff were told to look out for terms such as “health equity” and “structural racism.” How this and the NSF policy changes will work in practice remains to be seen.

The educational improvement research field also awaits word on the future of the congressionally required Institute of Education Sciences (IES), which the administration gutted early this year amid its ongoing push to dismantle the larger Education Department. IES is the federal government’s central education data collection and research funding agency. Education secretary Linda McMahon hired a special adviser to “re-envision” it, but the plan hasn’t been released.

Overall, Pierce said 2026 “will continue to be a challenging year, especially for those researchers, institutions and trainees that have seen their grants terminated.” But she noted medical research is marked by passion for improving the nation’s health.

“It’s an incredibly resilient field,” she said.

The suspect wanted in connection to a mass shooting at Brown University that killed two students and injured nine was found dead in a storage unit in Salem, N.H., authorities said at a news conference Thursday night.

They identified Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, 48, a former Brown student and Portuguese national, as the man they say barged into an engineering classroom at Brown last Saturday and opened fire on students attending a review session. Valente died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

“We are 100 percent confident that this is our target and that this case is closed from a perspective of pursuing people involved,” Rhode Island attorney general Peter Nerhona said.

Officials said they believed Valente was also connected to the murder of MIT nuclear physicist Nuno Loureiro earlier in the week. The same rental car had been spotted near Brown and outside Loureiro’s home, authorities said.

Loureiro was shot at his home Monday night and died at the hospital the next day. His home in Brookline, Mass., is about 50 miles from Brown. Authorities said that in the 1990s, Valente had attended the same university in Lisbon as Loureiro.

Brown President Christina Paxson said at the press conference that Valente had been a student at Brown in the early 2000s but withdrew. She noted that he was a physics student and had likely spent a lot of time in the Barus and Holley science building, where Saturday’s shooting took place.

Paxson wrote in an update Friday that the students injured Saturday were all improving; three had been released from the hospital and six remained in stable condition.

Officials said Valente entered the U.S. in 2000 on a student visa; he became a lawful permanent resident in 2017.

On Friday, the Trump administration announced it was suspending the green card lottery program through which Valente entered the country in 2017. The Diversity Immigrant Visa program, or DV1, allows some 50,000 people a year from low-immigration countries to participate in a random selection process for entry to the U.S.

Valente “entered the United States through the diversity lottery immigrant visa program (DV1) in 2017 and was granted a green card,” Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem wrote on X. “This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country. … At President Trump’s direction, I am immediately directing [United States Citizenship and Immigration Services] to pause the DV1 program to ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous program.”

This story was updated 12/19 with news about the condition of the injured Brown students and the Trump administration’s pause on a visa lottery program.

For nine years, Inside Higher Ed published an annual list of predictions known as the In-and-Out List, before taking a four-year hiatus. That ends now. In the last edition, IHE staff called 2020 “a year from hell” and a “rough year for higher ed.” 

Well, that was then. 

In many ways, 2025 pushed higher ed to the brink as the Trump administration found new ways to assert control over universities, crack down on international students and seek reforms long sought by conservatives. 

At the same time, financial issues continue to squeeze institutions’ budgets, state lawmakers are getting more involved in curriculum decisions, and bachelor’s degree holders are seeing worsening employment outcomes in part due to generative AI, which more universities are embracing.

As another year looms, colleges and universities are bracing for yet more upheavals as they try to navigate the new normal. Time—and 2026—will tell whether the sector is resilient enough to do so.

Below, we look at the rollercoaster that was 2025 and offer our own very loose predictions for what may lie ahead. Happy 2026.

It’s been a whirlwind year for higher ed—and for Inside Higher Ed. Yes, we rigorously covered President Donald Trump’s unprecedented attacks on higher education, and our readers seemed to appreciate our efforts; according to my (unscientific) analysis of our readership statistics, about 70 percent of our most-read articles this year were about the Trump administration.

But we’ve also found time, somehow, to keep up with our bread-and-butter higher education stories: how technology is changing college campuses, institutions’ financial struggles, academic freedom and free speech issues, student success, college costs and the value of a degree, the continued rise of career and technical programs, and even a few intriguing scandals.

To look back at the work we’ve done over this tumultuous year, we asked the members of our editorial team to share one of their favorite stories published this year. These are stories that may have flown under the radar, highlight a reporter’s unique strengths, or push the boundaries of what a higher ed news story can be. But most importantly, they’re stories that helped our readers make sense of the changing higher ed landscape during a year that was unlike any other.

Our Favorite Stories of 2025

Emma Whitford, faculty reporter: “Inside a Network of Fake College Websites” by Josh Moody and Kathryn Palmer

Josh and Kathryn’s investigation into a network of fake college websites built using generative AI, to me, represents the particular strengths of the small but mighty IHE newsroom. While a couple of the faux institutions had been flagged by officials, it was Josh’s curiosity and close attention to his beat that prompted his digging, which uncovered dozens more fake schools and the fake accreditors that endorsed them. The double-byline teamwork made the depth of reporting in this story possible while the newsroom simultaneously continued to churn out the news of the day.

Susan Greenberg, managing editor: “The Handwriting Revolution” by Johanna Alonso

In this story, Johanna looked at how one of most feared, criticized and occasionally, celebrated developments to upend higher education in recent years—generative AI—is changing how faculty teach and assess students. She spoke to a number of professors who are requiring handwritten assignments to ensure that students don’t use ChatGPT or other AI tools to cheat their way through class. The story is lively, timely and illuminating; it includes the voices of an array of faculty members and experts who share nuanced perspectives about the pros and cons of reverting to traditional handwritten assessments to evaluate students in the age of AI.

Ashley Mowreader, student success reporter: “Charlie Kirk: Hero of ‘Civil Discourse’ or Fount of Division?” by Ryan Quinn

One of Ryan’s many talents as a reporter is being able to take a hot topic in news coverage and deeply report on it to add layers of context, insight and inquiry that could otherwise be overlooked or misunderstood. This piece is exemplary of this type of reporting, peeling past the horror of Charlie Kirk’s murder to investigate what it means to be a figure of civil discourse.

Ryan Quinn, policy reporter: “Spending Soars, Rankings Fall at New College of Florida” by Josh Moody

This story cut through the well-worn conservative/liberal debates about what should be taught in higher ed and showed a truth that has been raising eyebrows across the political spectrum: New College of Florida was spending “more than 10 times per student what the other 11 members of the State University System spend, on average” and politicians were likely discussing closing it behind the scenes. The article also had great quotes, including a faculty member calling NCF’s approach to recruitment “kind of like a Ponzi scheme” and a former administrator saying “academically, Richard [Corcoran] is running a Motel 6 on a Ritz-Carlton budget.”

Sara Custer, editor-in-chief: “The ‘Death Spiral’ of Deferred Maintenance” by Colleen Flaherty

The editors at Inside Higher Ed have a running joke that deferred maintenance is my favorite topic because I get excited when the issue of crumbling brick facades or broken elevators comes up. I’m not a facilities nerd. I just agree with what F. King Alexander told Colleen Flaherty about deferred maintenance for this piece: “This is a huge issue that presidents have to deal with that nobody’s talking about.” The sector has rightly spent 2025 following the Trump administration, college closures and leadership controversies, but Colleen’s story is my favorite because it adds nuance to the conversations about higher ed’s financial health and is a reminder that too many colleges are one leaky roof away from closure. It’s also got a killer headline.

Josh Moody, business, finance and leadership reporter: “International Student Visas Revoked” by Ashley Mowreader

As the Trump Administration began revoking student visas, the indefatigable Ashley Mowreader worked to identify which institutions and how many students were affected, resulting in a widely-read map that was cited in legal filings and by numerous other publications. Inside Higher Ed tracked 1,800-plus students who lost their F-1 or J-1 status as the Trump administration cracked down on immigration. Our reporting helped contextualize the federal government’s broadside against international students and the many subsequent lawsuits via reporting that informed and illuminated and resulted in one of our (deservedly) most-read pieces of 2025.

Sara Weissman, nontraditional students and minority-serving institutions reporter: “Grief Fuels Growth of Turning Point’s Campus Footprint” by Kathryn Palmer

Charlie Kirk’s killing called for a deep, nuanced look at the movement he created, and that’s exactly what Kathryn delivered in this story. The feature was beautifully written and richly detailed. It took Turning Point USA students’ grief seriously while also drawing on a range of scholarly perspectives to add balance and provide context about the movement’s present and future. The story also offered valuable framing for our ongoing coverage about the ways the aftermath of Kirk’s shooting roiled campuses in the months that followed.

Katherine Knott, news editor: “How Trump Uses the DOJ as Tool of ‘Fear-Mongering’” by Jessica Blake

This piece from Jessica helped to illuminate how another federal agency was applying pressure to colleges and universities and what’s at stake for higher ed more broadly. Her reporting came after the Department of Justice played a role in the resignation of Jim Ryan, who was president of the University of Virginia and faced questions from federal investigators about how he handled diversity, equity and inclusion efforts on campus. The timely story took readers beyond the news of the day and behind the scenes into the tactics of the second Trump administration.

Kathryn Palmer, research, technology and innovation reporter: “Preserving the Past of HBCUs” by Sara Weissman

Sara’s story on the effort to preserve the history of HBCUs was timely, well-reported and beautifully written. It featured so many voices and presented HBCUs as institutions that illuminate the complexities of America’s history at a time when the federal government is moving to sanitize it. Her story showed how HBCUs are integral to telling the story of Black America and why it’s an important story to preserve. The historical photos put it over the top.

Johanna Alonso, admissions and enrollment reporter: “Texas Ban on Transgender Course Content Sows Chaos” by Emma Whitford

No one in the history of hitting the ground running has ever hit the ground running quite like Emma Whitford did when she came on as Inside Higher Ed’s faculty reporter this past September. Since then, Emma, who had previously worked at IHE from 2019 to 2022, has covered near daily clashes between faculty and administrators with persistence, precision and clarity. This story about verbal policies banning professors from teaching about gender identity in Texas perfectly encapsulates her incredible ability to root out the truth of complex controversies. From there, she continued to follow this story for weeks as more information came out about the nature of the ban and as faculty questioned the legitimacy of the verbal policy. The saga also demonstrates conservative leaders’ continued efforts to erode academic freedom, which has been a significant theme for the past several years and will surely continue into 2026.

Jessica Blake, federal policy reporter: “Florida Universities Sign Agreements With ICE” by Josh Moody

This was a great scoop that Josh gathered by going back to the basics of journalism and making a public records request. And as someone who completed a bachelor’s degree while working part-time for Investigative Reporters and Editors, I’m a sucker for any story rooted in FOIA. He took an event that was making headlines throughout Florida and across the country and advanced the story, giving readers a behind-the-scenes look at which universities were striking agreements with the Trump administration and how.

Colleen Flaherty, senior editor for special content: The First 100 Days newsletter, Day 88 by Katherine Knott

We were supposed to avoid federal policy pieces due to the onslaught of those this year. But assuming that guidelines are more like suggestions, I have to go with this edition of After the First 100 Days, our weekly federal policy news roundup, by singular news editor Katherine Knott. Back in April, when the newsletter was still called the First 100 Days, the White House was targeting higher ed with such speed and force that it was unnervingly unclear how far things would go. Then came Day 88—or, as Katherine wrote—what “will be remembered as the week that Harvard said no and higher ed started to fight back.” It was a crucial moment for higher ed in 2025, and Katherine’s weekly analyses have otherwise become crucial reading for me. After the 100 Days is an IHE membership perk but I promise this isn’t a sales ploy, hence the gift link!

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will close its area studies centers in 2026, faculty members within the centers told Inside Higher Ed.

The six centers—the Center for European Studies, the African Studies Center, the Carolina Asia Center, the Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies, the Institute for the Study of the Americas and the Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies—are all expected to close at some point next year.

“Our leadership team is taking a thoughtful and targeted approach, looking into areas that can be streamlined for greater efficiency, strengthening our operations while meeting our fiduciary responsibility to the people of North Carolina,” the UNC media relations department said in a statement. “A number of factors were taken into consideration while evaluating Centers and Institutes and some programs have been identified to be sunset [sic] in 2026. The list is not finalized at this time.”

Further updates will come after the January Board of Trustees meeting, the spokespeople said.

In a “budget reductions update” to the board’s finance and infrastructure committee in November, university officials said they planned to save $7 million in annual spending from “centers and institute reductions” made over several years, with a goal of $3 million in budget reductions before the end of this fiscal year in June 2026. A total of 14 centers and institutes will be decommissioned, according to the presentation.

The higher ed sector underwent rapid change in 2025, as leaders navigated new and evolving federal and state policy, emerging technologies and shifting employer expectations for graduates, all while responding to the diverse and pressing needs of students.

For practitioners, faculty, staff and administrators looking to impact student success in the new year, Inside Higher Ed identified 26 data points that outline the major trends of 2025 and those to watch out for in 2026.

1. 80 percent of college students rate the quality of their education as good or excellent, up 7 percentage points from 2024.
2. 83 percent of the class of 2023 remained enrolled for two terms and the national persistence rate rose to 77.6 percent, up from 74.8 percent in 2019.
3. Two-thirds of Americans say a four-year degree isn’t worth the cost because graduates leave without a specific job and with large amounts of debt.
4. Nearly 10 percent of incoming first-year students speak a first language other than English; of these students, approximately half are U.S. citizens.
5. One-third of students said they’re thriving, reporting high levels of success in relationships, self-esteem, purpose and optimism.
6. 15 percent of colleges are using AI for student advising and support; an additional 26 percent use genAI for predictive analytics in student performance and trends.&
7. 70 percent of Americans believe higher education is “going in the wrong direction” due to high costs, poor preparation for the job market and ineffective development of students’ life skills.
8. 62 percent of students said they have “very high” or “somewhat high” trust in their college or university; 11 percent rate their trust as “somewhat low” or “very low.”
9. 23 percent of stop-outs said they won’t re-enroll because they can’t afford upfront costs; 15 percent said they are already too burdened by student debt to re-enroll.
10. 45 percent of students want colleges to encourage faculty members to limit high-stakes exams to improve their academic success; 40 percent want to see stronger connections between classroom learning and their career goals.
11. 36 percent of students have not participated in any extracurricular or co-curricular experiences while in college; an additional 39 percent say they’re very involved in at least one activity.
12. 71 percent of students have experienced financial trouble while enrolled in college, and 68 percent said they ran out of money at least once since the start of the year.
13. 43 percent of students say they study in the evening, while 18 percent said they study at night.
14. 84 percent of students say they know when and whether to use generative artificial intelligence to help with their coursework; the majority attributed this knowledge to faculty instruction or syllabi language.
15. 24 percent of parenting students said they missed at least one day of class in the past semester due to a lack of childcare.
16. 71 percent of students said it was acceptable to shout down a speaker to prevent them from speaking on campus; 54 percent believe it’s acceptable to block other students from attending a campus speech.
17. International enrollment declined 1 percent in fall 2025, with 17 percent fewer new students coming to U.S. campuses this past fall.
18. As of August, 37 percent of students said federal actions to limit diversity, equity and inclusion have had no real impact on their college experience.
19. 57 percent of students said cost of living is “a major problem,” for college students today; 55 percent said mental health issues are a major problem, as well.
20. 49 percent of high school students who didn’t apply for FAFSA said they didn’t believe they qualified for aid.
21. 59 percent of Americans are in favor of awarding green cards to foreign students who graduate from American universities so they can work in the U.S.
22. 87 percent of Gen Z said they feel unprepared to succeed at work due to limited guidance, unclear paths to career from school and uncertainty about which skills matter most.
23. Two-thirds of college presidents are concerned about student mental health and well-being.
24. Only 44 percent of students say they know some information about post-graduation outcomes for alumni of their college or university; 11 percent say they’re not sure where to find this information.
25. 67 percent of students said they don’t use AI in their job searches; 29 percent said they avoid it because they have ethical concerns about using the tool.
26. 94 percent of employers think it’s equally important for colleges to prepare a skilled and educated workforce and to help students become informed citizens.

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The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) is publicly expressing concern about the Education Department working with Palantir, a controversial artificial intelligence and data analysis company that serves the U.S. military and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The AAUP says it learned of the partnership when FedScoop reported that it noticed a message referencing Palantir on the website foreignfundinghighered.gov Dec. 4. An hour later, the website showed “a login page with the Palantir logo,” and, a couple of hours after that, “the Palantir logo was replaced with an Education Department logo,” the outlet wrote.

Foreignfundinghighered.gov tracks foreign gifts and contracts data for higher ed institutions. If a foreign source provides a college or university more than $250,000 in a year, Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965 requires the institution to report the payment to the federal government.

In an email to Inside Higher Ed, the Education Department described Palantir’s involvement in the past tense. It said Palantir was involved with the foreign funding portal as a subcontractor for Monkton, a company that has long handled privacy and data issues for the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security.

“After soliciting feedback from institutions of higher education, the Trump Administration has upgraded the portal to make it easier for colleges and universities to report their foreign gifts and contracts as required,” Julie Hartman, the Education Department’s press secretary for legal affairs, said in a statement.

The AAUP held a news conference Wednesday raising concern about Palantir’s past work and about critical statements that Palantir leaders Alex Karp and Peter Thiel had made about higher ed.

“We want transparency,” AAUP president Todd Wolfson told reporters. “We want to know what Palantir is doing on this contract and we want to know how much they stand to make.” He said it “seems to be yet another front aimed at surveilling and criminalizing our colleges and universities,” and could indicate a “shift toward treating higher education not as a public good, but as a security threat to be monitored.”

The department didn’t tell Inside Higher Ed how much Palantir is being paid. Hartman said “universities’ clear disclosure and public transparency requirements have been in statute for decades,” adding that the AAUP’s “baseless assertion that the portal is a ‘politicized punitive action’ demonstrates their utter disregard for the rule of law.”

She said, “the Trump Administration is ending the secrecy surrounding foreign dollars and influence on American campuses.” Palantir spokespeople didn’t return Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment.

For humanities faculty, the past five years have felt like a relentless assault on our ability to do our jobs. We have endured COVID, generative AI, budget cuts, and bitter fights over the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and Israel’s war on Gaza. At times it has been a challenge to remain human, let alone humanistic: to calm the nervous system enough to read a book, refine an argument, or show up for our colleagues and our increasingly fragile students. Now we are facing the Trump administration’s effort to gut-renovate our universities under the pretext of “combatting antisemitism.” With local enablers paving the way, that destruction may yet succeed.

In February of this year, a few colleagues and I co-founded a group called Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff (CJFS), which now has more than 200 members on more than two dozen campuses. Our group, which is predominantly made up of academics at Massachusetts colleges and universities but includes members from across New England, is one of several such efforts nationwide that have coalesced into a new National Campus Jewish Alliance. We recognize that Jewish safety is inseparable from the safety of all people, and we work to foster academic environments that reduce antisemitism by treating educators as partners, not as suspects. I’d like to share a few examples of what this looks like in practice.

Fearmongering Versus Tea

As a Jewish professor of Arabic at Boston University, I mentor students with many different identities: Arab, Jewish, both or neither. After Oct. 7, 2023, I watched them struggle to metabolize the horrors in Israel and Gaza. They identified with various “sides” of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; what they shared was a sense of helplessness and a hunger for facts and insights beyond those found on Instagram. They needed contact with solid reading material, with trusted adults and, above all, with each other. My colleagues and I were in pain too. By mid-October, a few of us began meeting to discuss how to nurture a respectful and humane campus climate for ourselves and our students.

As we looked around for helpful approaches, we noticed one very unhelpful one: Keep people constantly triggered so their brains can’t process new information or perspectives.

Instead of trying to lower the temperature after Oct. 7, one influential institution on our campus immediately began stoking fear of antisemitism. On Oct. 18, they sent out an email telling students to record and report all instances of “antisemitism and anti-Zionism.” They encouraged students to submit videos and screenshots of their classmates. They conflated antisemitism and anti-Zionism, strongly implying that criticism of Israel’s government threatened the identity and even the safety of Jewish students at BU. They ignored the inconvenient facts that a great proportion of anti-Zionists at BU are Jewish and that nationwide, plenty of Israel supporters are antisemitic. Even worse than this bad-faith conceptual stew was the subtext. We know you’re scared. We know you feel everyone hates you. Although this university has 4,000 Jewish undergraduates, you’re basically alone and unsafe here. But don’t worry; we have your back. This gaslighting maneuver only stoked the anxieties it purported to calm.

What my colleagues and I did instead was much smaller in scale. Four tenured humanities professors (all moms, as it happened) started gathering students for tea. We chose to work together because we did not agree about what was happening or should happen in the Middle East, but we respected and liked each other. Each of us personally invited a few students, for a total of about 12 per gathering. This was not an advertised event but a series of private teas. My colleagues brought concerned Muslim and Arab students, liberal Zionist students, and eventually some leaders of BU Students for Israel and the Hillel. I invited Arabic learners from various backgrounds and some pro-Palestinian students I knew, including some leaders of Students for Justice in Palestine. (Others, who had been doxxed, were scared to come.) We brought substantial and slightly awkward snacks, things like pistachios, clementines and pomegranates to keep people’s hands busy. We sat around in armchairs, more conversation circle than summit meeting. And we made one ground rule: For these 90 minutes you can’t talk about the region, which we can’t fix, but only the BU campus, which we share.

When we passed a timer around the room, giving every student and faculty member 60 seconds to say what was on their minds, everyone heard at least one thing they didn’t expect. One male Jewish student who sometimes wore a kippah and sometimes didn’t told of how differently people looked at him in those two situations. The Muslim women—hijab-wearing or not—understood. As trust grew, students felt comfortable asking each other questions like, “Why do people tear down posters of Israeli hostages?” or “Why did your group blast disco music over our die-in?”

The last tea occasioned two tiny breakthroughs. One student suggested BU’s “Jewish trustees and donors” were blocking the student movement to divest from Israel. Really? Together we checked the website: In fact, two of our most senior trustees are Arab. The student was taken aback, changing her view without ever being accused of antisemitic bias; everyone learned something. Later, a Palestinian student asked a pro-Israel Jewish student what the word “Zionism” meant to him. He began defining it, starting with “the right of the Jews to have self-determination in their ancestral homeland, Eretz Yisrael.” As she looked confused, he blushed and stammered, using more Hebrew words she didn’t understand. Finally he stopped: “I’m sorry, I’ve never had to explain this before. I’ve always been in Jewish schools or camps or Hillel or places where everyone just understood what Zionism means.” The conversation moved on. The next day he and his roommate came to my office to worry that he had not “represented his side” well enough; we talked for an hour; I assured him that he represented only himself, a student trying to learn and figure out what he believed. I doubt his politics changed, but the moment of aporia made everyone more human. When CJFS organized a Freedom Seder the next April, both he and his roommate came.

Administrators have asked us how to scale up this effort. My long-term hope is to train students and colleagues to be peer educators in their own networks. But it would need to start small, with faculty and staff who trust each other. There are no shortcuts.

Policing Versus Conversing

Such efforts may soon be complicated by a harmful state-level effort by the politicians and legacy Jewish groups who make up the Massachusetts Special Commission on Combatting Antisemitism, which was established by the state legislature in 2024 and has been touted as a model for other states.

The Commission furthers a nationwide plan to advance a program of what is fair to describe as “Don’t Say Palestine” policies. It aligns with the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) state-by-state Jewish Policy Index, which calls for such commissions, and follows the exact playbook of the Israel advocacy group ICAN (the Israeli-American Civic Action Network), which aims to bring hyperlocal pro-Israel advocacy to cities, towns and school boards, especially in blue states. A Massachusetts state senator has praised ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt for encouraging the establishment of the commission; ICAN has boasted of its influence on the process.

One reason our group, Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff, has grown so fast is that everyone can see the Trump administration weaponizing antisemitism to attack universities and degrade civil rights. But another reason is anger at this state-level commission right here in our beloved Massachusetts, which has taken its eye off actual antisemitism and focused instead on policing discourse about Israel.

The Commission conflates Jewishness with Zionism, pushing the incoherent and dangerously vague International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism and other sloppy ideas. But a deeper problem is its punitive approach, which focuses on policing a boundary of what is and isn’t antisemitic. In its 13 months of hearings, the Commission has modeled the punitive approach by attacking educators, publicly haranguing the (Jewish) president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) for two hours last February over some materials on an MTA website. In its final report, released in November, the Commission aims to institutionalize the punitive approach by creating a mechanism through which members of the public can report “problematic curriculum” in K-12 schools, as well as an anonymous reporting system for suspected acts of bias in K-12 schools “which may not rise to the level of a hate crime.” If adopted in any city or town, these measures will create an unpedagogical climate where teachers are afraid to teach and students hesitate to speak up in class: No one wants to be reported as an antisemite, even if the charge is disproven later. At best, such a climate will only drive anti-Jewish bias underground; at worst, because schoolchildren and college students are sensitive to hypocrisy, it will spark resentment and feed an anti-Jewish backlash. Several Concerned Jewish colleagues have written movingly on this commission’s dangers; CJFS has released a Shadow Report detailing its faulty assumptions and missteps.

The question is what to do instead. What is a humane, pedagogical response to rising tensions and the ambient normalization of bigotry in all forms? Again, learning can happen only in an environment of respect and trust.

Let’s take an example of casual classroom antisemitism. In March 2024, my Core Curriculum class was reading Foucault and discussing the Panopticon surveillance regime. When the talk turned to Internet culture and public discomfort with social media, one normally tuned-out student suddenly piped up: “The Jews want to ban TikTok. They’re against its pro-Palestine content.” The Jews. Because we all automatically love Israel and hate free speech? Luckily, I was the teacher; I could explain why it was incorrect to say some entity called “the Jews” either wanted or were able to control social media. I could cite a 2020 Pew research poll saying 41 percent of Jewish Americans are emotionally unattached or weakly attached to Israel. (Among secular Jews, that figure is 67 percent.) I could point out that the great majority of Israel’s U.S. supporters are not Jewish at all: One Evangelical lobby group, Christians United for Israel, claims ten million members, 2.5 million more than the total number of Jews in America. If this discussion happened today, I could cite a survey from The Washington Post finding that about 4 in 10 American Jews believe Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. And because I feel safe in my classroom—because my university does not endorse the conflation of Jewishness with Zionism—I could personally vouch that many Jewish people disavow nationalism altogether.

Now, let me share an example of misperceived classroom antisemitism from my 40-person general education course, War in Arabic Literature and Film. The course confronts some difficult material set in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Israel-Palestine. We learn how war can harden sectarian identifications and gender roles. We read some American and Israeli authors as sidelights. We do a lot of social-emotional scaffolding and role-taking; students sit in small discussion groups, and I collect exit notes.

One student, a self-described “proud Zionist,” was a wonderful presence in the course’s fall 2024 first run. But one day she was crying after class, and her exit note said: “I loved this course and was about to recommend it to all my Jewish friends, but now I can’t, because I feel today’s discussion was antisemitic.” That day’s session had focused on Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir, a stunning Israeli film about Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, paired with a student presentation on Edward Said’s classic essay, “Permission to Narrate.” (Incidentally, Waltz violates the IHRA definition of antisemitism, comparing the Sabra and Shatila massacre to Auschwitz.)

I caught up with my student and we talked for an hour in the street and in my office. Raised to sincerely experience criticism of Israel as antisemitic, she felt hurt by the student presentation. I did not try to tell her about Edward Said’s humanistic outlook, deep empathy for Jewish victims of the Holocaust, or anything else. Instead, trusting her seriousness and troubled by her distress, I suggested: What if she was upset not by the reading material, but by the frame? Would she have preferred me to assign the Said essay as a primary source to analyze rather than an authoritative secondary source for a presentation? She said yes, that would be different. I offered to revisit that part of my syllabus the following year, empowering students to talk back to Said if they wished. She contributed enthusiastically to class for the rest of the semester.

I am so grateful that this brave young woman shared her concerns with me rather than running to a dean, a “problematic curriculum” hotline, or a politico-religious organization, as students are being urged to do. By talking to each other honestly like intelligent adults, we both learned something.

These experiences have convinced me that policing “antisemitic” speech about Israel is not only unjust but deeply counterproductive: it breeds suspicion between well-meaning people, making it harder for us to unite when genuine neo-Nazism rears its head. You can’t stamp out antisemitism, fear of Palestinians, or any other prejudice; only slow heart-changing conversations can melt it away. So, to foster a campus climate of real inclusion, we need to convene and converse, not record and report. The details are tricky, but teachers and students can figure them out together. Our administrations and governments just have to give us the respect, job security and academic freedom to do so.

The last time we caught up with Suzanne Dove in September of 2024, she was serving as the assistant vice president, strategy and innovation at Bentley University. This past May, Suzanne started a new role as Chief Education Solutions Officer in the Center for Academic Innovation (CAI) at the University of Michigan (U-M). Now, a few months in her new role, I thought this would be a good time to check in with Suzanne.

Q1: Tell us about your new job. What does a Chief Education Solutions Office do? Where does your role fit in with CAI and U-M as a whole?

A: At the Center for Academic Innovation, my role as the inaugural Chief Education Solutions Officer (or CESO) is to open a new learning innovation horizon for the Center and help U-M achieve its next tier of educational impact. I do this by creating sustainable strategic partnerships that enable us to serve workforce and talent development needs of external organizations. 

CAI has long been known for offering well-designed, U-M faculty-led online courses to millions of learners and thousands of organizations. This breadth gives us an advantage: Our teams have developed tacit knowledge as well as processes to stand up and scale successful programs ranging from MOOCs on platforms, like Coursera, to U-M online degree programs to innovative short-form offerings and integration of advanced technology into hybrid, online and residential learning. 

With Michigan Online giving us even more flexibility, we can go further. We are positioned to partner directly with organizations that need high-quality workforce and talent development and offering features that both learning and development leaders and adult learners value, such as cohort-based learning, live sessions with U-M faculty, and customized content.

Like any new leadership role, a big part of my job is setting strategic priorities and putting the right operational structures in place. Equally important, if not more so, is building strong, collaborative relationships across three overlapping circles.

The first is CAI itself, a community of experts in online learning, project management, marketing, media production, ed tech and more who make it possible as I build the Education Solutions team to engage with external partners and craft relevant offerings that fit their needs. The second is leaders and faculty across U-M, many of whom are excited about expanding the university’s reach to nondegree learners and appreciate how our team brings market insights and industry relationships. The third circle is external organizations that are serious about upskilling their employees and are challenging the status quo around professional development and work-based learning.  The partnerships I’m most energized by are those that challenge us to design innovative learning solutions that benefit learners, their organizations and the university. For a thriving workforce in a rapidly shifting landscape, we need to move boldly.

Right now, my day-to-day focus is on three things, in collaboration with other teams within CAI: building a strong partnership pipeline, making sure there’s a good fit between partners’ needs and CAI’s offerings, and ensuring we can deliver these solutions efficiently through Michigan Online. There’s a considerable operational component with any new endeavor and I’m really excited about that right now—it’s what gets me going in the morning! For example, how can we enhance traditional partnership development practices using generative AI? What new insights can we draw by digging into our existing data with an organizational lens? etc.

Q2: Knowing you for a good number of years now, I know that you’ve worked hard to develop as an academic innovation leader. What was it about this particular role at U-M that inspired you to make this big professional (and personal) move?

A: The University of Michigan’s Center for Academic Innovation (CAI) has earned a reputation as a national leader in shaping the future of lifelong learning. I could not imagine a better place to take this next step in my career. I feel grateful to have the support of my family and friends—they have been an invaluable source of encouragement and have been almost as excited as I am about the move! From the beginning of the interview process, I could tell that my new colleagues at CAI take organizational culture seriously and, as I have been onboarding, the CAI team has gone out of their way to extend a warm welcome, offering concrete guidance to help me succeed and just being incredibly helpful as I navigate the move to Ann Arbor.     

I’ve always relished the challenges of sharpening an impactful idea, taking it from conception to development and experimentation to scale and sustainability. As I’ve settled into this role, I have found that CAI “on the inside” matches the external image I had formed before I joined the organization. I’m impressed by the strong leadership vision and strategic mindset of my colleagues on the Center’s senior leadership team as well as the interest in ideation and experimentation, the deep expertise and operational excellence at every level on the various teams that make up the Center.

Creating the CESO role came from a clear commitment to an idea that has taken root at many U.S. universities in the past several years: that higher education institutions should serve not just degree-seeking students but also workforce development demands of our regions and talent development needs of external organizations more broadly. Trouble is, universities tend to be decentralized, and it can be a struggle to coordinate across different units with overlapping missions. So, when it comes time to execute on this vision, success may occur in pockets, but scaled solutions can hover out of reach. I was energized by the opportunity to step into the CESO role at CAI, where scale and global reach are part of our core value proposition.

Q3: What career advice do you have for other non-faculty educators interested in growing into a leadership role? What skills, experiences and networks have been most valuable to you across your higher education career?

A: We already talked about the importance of mentors and sponsors in our last conversation, so I won’t repeat myself on that topic. Another important lesson is to tend your network. I know the term “networking” often carries a transactional connotation that can be off-putting to mission-driven folks who value community. But in fact, I think of the network of academic innovators I’ve been lucky enough to work with as a community or web, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Here are a few strategies I’ve found helpful when investing in that network:

• Is there a former colleague you’ve fallen out of touch with? Set a monthly or quarterly reminder to reach out to three people you’ve worked with in the past (holidays are a great opportunity to reach out and let someone know you’re thinking of them!). Share an article or a joke that reminded you of them, ask for their help in a small way and offer your help in return, ask about something important in their lives, or just let them know you thought of them.
• Cross-functional committees or cross-institutional organizations or conferences can be a great way to meet people and hear perspectives you wouldn’t ordinarily encounter. Sometimes, a few people discover a mutual interest and want to continue the conversation outside the committee or conference. Can you make a move that will help make this happen? Maybe you offer to compile email addresses of those who’d like to continue the conversation, maybe you’re even willing to organize a few virtual meetings so the group can come together. These types of small but visible investments will be valued by your peers and help you build your network.

This year, two of my most treasured academic innovation colleagues passed away suddenly. They were two of the people I would call on to help me sharpen an idea, to offer support when I was feeling discouraged, or to share in the excitement of a successful experiment. I miss them every day, and it reminds me about the importance of community, not just for learners but for learning innovators. So I guess my best career advice today is, keep nurturing your network.

Imagine you are the parent of an incoming college student who wants to study theology, ranked among the lowest-paid majors after graduation. You’re proud of their conviction, but also anxious because friends and family keep reminding you that theology is a major for which career prospects are uncertain at best. Then, in the thick of college decision season, you learn that the college your child is considering offers something called “degree insurance”: If your graduate doesn’t earn above a set threshold, the program will step in to cover part of the gap.

The promise is meant to ease parents’ and students’ fears. Yet, it raises a deeper question: Why would a college degree, still the surest path to economic advancement and long-term financial stability, suddenly require insurance at all?

Across the country, colleges and universities are rolling out a new suite of financial products targeting undergraduates, marketed as “loan” and “degree” insurance. Loan repayment assistant programs (LRAPs), sometimes also called loan repayment guarantees, are a form of loan insurance that protect students against default: If a graduate doesn’t earn above a certain threshold, their student loan payments are reimbursed to a certain amount. Degree insurance is a mechanism akin to public “wage insurance” programs, where if a graduate makes less than the average income in their field adjusted for regional differences, the insurance would “top up” the difference in wages for a period of time.

These two tools have distinct origins and underlying rationales. Loan Repayment Assistance Programs (LRAPs) originated in Yale Law School in the 1980s, and spread to other law schools, as the rising cost of legal education began to deter graduates from pursuing lower-paying public interest careers. While they began as internal sources of funding, the privatization of LRAP offerings and search for profit have pushed the industry to expand into new markets, namely undergraduate education. Indeed, Ardeo Education Solutions, an early and prominent player in this sector, was founded by Yale Law graduate Peter Samuelson, who himself benefited from Yale’s loan assistance program. Ardeo positions itself as reassuring families about the risks of taking on debt in order to pay for undergraduate education, “increasing access to the life-changing impact of higher education,” and freeing students from having to choose “between their passions and a paycheck.”

Degree insurance products take a different approach. Degree Insurance, which counts Augustana College in Illinois as a client, draws on the cultural cachet of the American dream to market itself as an income equalizer; its flagship product, “American Dream Insurance,” guarantees “equal pay for equal study,” where “no graduate will have to earn less than their peers, regardless of race or gender, because everyone will have the same safety net.” This is insurance against the uncertainties and inequalities of the labor market as well as against individual weaknesses of any particular candidate.

While the current scope and reach of this sector is challenging to assess, Ardeo Education advertises that it’s provided LRAPs to more than 30,000 students at more than 200 American colleges and universities. Participating institutions range from a number of small, faith-based colleges like Lyon College and MidAmerica Nazarene University to a public research university like Eastern Michigan University. Eligibility for repayment assistance usually requires graduation from the offering institution, full-time work (30+ hours/week), and staying below the income cap.

The extension of LRAPs and degree insurance into undergraduate programs represents a new dimension of risk management in higher education, which has gone through several phases since it began in earnest in the late 20th century when colleges and universities started responding to increased personal injury and campus safety litigation. These risk management programs, tailored to protect institutions, eventually expanded to include Title IX, Occupational Safety and Health Administration requirements, environmental regulations, reputation management, crisis communications, cybersecurity and, most relevantly for this topic, financial sustainability. Loan and degree insurance represent the latest iteration of such efforts.

For now, colleges typically pay for these programs, though it is unclear how much of the cost is passed on to students through tuition. How students are selected for inclusion in these programs is also opaque. Institutions are free to determine which students and majors are offered the program. Augustana College’s website, for example, says that it offers degree insurance at no direct cost to the student, but participation is on an invitation-only basis.

There are, of course, reasons to defend these programs. Scrutiny of the student loan system, which has resulted in a student debt crisis, has intensified across the political spectrum, as policymakers from both parties recognize the harm it has caused (even as they disagree on the solutions). LRAPs and degree insurance may decrease the rate of loan default and reassure low-income families who were unable to save for college and are averse to taking on loans to pay for college.

In an environment marked by increasing competition for students, admissions professionals see offering LRAPs and degree insurance as a competitive advantage. Loan repayment and degree insurance plans also encourage students not only to enroll in college in general but to pursue degrees with more challenging career prospects, which are also often the ones at risk of being cut due to low enrollment. This is increasingly relevant given the almost daily news of program closures.

The arrival of these financial instruments is perhaps an understandable response to the rising cost of a college education, increased competition for students, overall wage stagnation and shifting public views about the purpose, value and outcomes of higher education. The adoption of these tools, however, is not simply driven by the current circulation of the idea of college education as a risk; it also further reinforces that view.

These programs are not simply a new and neutral financial option for students. By extending the logics of institutional risk management to the economic futures of students, these tools cement the troubling, and potentially self-defeating, idea that a college degree itself is a financial risk requiring protection rather than the most reliable path to upward mobility and a critical component of our continued economic and cultural prosperity. Their adoption by colleges and universities is a reflection of the “short-termism” that has increasingly marked higher education strategy. As more institutions inevitably adopt these programs, it is unclear how long they will remain a competitive advantage. Furthermore, as the trend spreads, we may see the labor market respond, with employers lowering entry-level salaries even further as they take into account insurance payouts. Indeed, like many aspects of higher education today, it feels like a race to the bottom.

Comparisons between insurance products and other forms of income or employment assurances are difficult to make. Should families prioritize colleges with strong outcomes (e.g., graduation rates upward of 70 percent and reassuring post-graduation employment statistics), robust alumni networks, or loan and insurance programs? It is also too early to tell what the consequences of transferring the risk to third parties, a common higher education risk management strategy, might be for students and institutions in the long term. And, it further financializes education, such that in the process of character formation, managing risk, rather than other values or logics, becomes central to identity.

Colleges and universities might want to ask themselves whether treating college degrees as a risk serves their long-term interests. Loan and degree insurance products may deliver short-term enrollment gains, ease families’ anxieties, and even encourage students to pursue majors often viewed as less “marketable.” In the long-term, however, these strategies relieve the pressure to address underlying structural challenges such as rising costs, stagnant wages and a flawed loan system. Ultimately, they undermine our ability to make the case for higher education as a public good, thus putting the future of the entire endeavor at risk.

In a long, passionate, well-reasoned, thoroughly evidenced cri de coeur published at Current Affairs, San Francisco State professor Ronald Purser declares, “AI Is Destroying the University and Learning Itself.”

That attention-grabbing headline is a bit misleading, because as Purser makes clear in the article, it is not “AI” itself that is destroying these things. The source of the problem is human beings, primarily the human beings in charge of universities that have looked at the offerings from tech companies and, failing to recognize the vampire prepared to drain their institutions of their life force, not only invite them across the threshold but declare them their new bosom buddies.

Dartmouth University recently announced a deal with Anthropic/Amazon Web Services that university president Sian Beilock declared “is more than a collaboration.” The promises are familiar, using AI “to augment—not replace—student learning,” as though this is something we know how to do, and that this is best explored en masse across all aspects of the university simultaneously, rather than through careful experimentation. I think I understand some of the motivation to these kinds of deals—to seize some sense of agency in uncertain times—but the idea that even an institution as august as Dartmouth with such a long history in the development of artificial intelligence will be “collaborators” with these two entities is wishful thinking, IMO.

Purser’s piece details much of what I’ve heard in my travels from institution to institution to speak and consult on these issues. There is a lot of well-earned angst out there, particularly in places where administrations have made bets that look like a Texas Hold’em player pushing all in on a pair of eights. No consultation, no collaboration, no vision beyond vague promises of future abundance. A recent AAUP report stemming from a survey of 500 of its members shows that one of the chief fears of faculty is being sidelined entirely as administrations strike these deals.

This uninvited guest has thrown much of what we would consider the core purpose of the university in doubt. As Purser says, “Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to grade them, degrees become meaningless, and tech companies make fortunes. Welcome to the death of higher education.”

While Purser’s account is accurate to a degree, I also want to say that it is not complete. As I wrote a couple of months ago, there are also great signs of progress in terms of addressing the challenges of the moment. The kind of administration and institutional carelessness that Purser documents is not universal, and even under those conditions, faculty and students are finding ways to do meaningful work. Many people are successfully addressing what I’ve long believed is the core problem, the “transactional model” of schooling that actively dissuades students from taking the required risks for learning and personal development.

One of the most frequent observations I’ve made in doing this work is that many, perhaps even most, students have no real enthusiasm for an AI-mediated future where their thoughts and experiences are secondary to the outputs of an LLM model. The fact that they find the model outputs useful in school contexts is the problem.

I was greatly cheered by this account from Matt Dinan, who details how he built the experiences of his course from root pedagogical values in a way that clearly signals to students the importance of doing the work for themselves, the importance of their thoughts and the sincere belief that taking a risk to learn is worth doing and well supported.

What we see is that success comes from giving instructors the freedom to work the problem under conditions that allow the problem to be solved. Note that this does not de facto require a rejection of AI. There’s plenty of room for those more interested in AI to explore its integration, but it does mean doing more than signaling to faculty and students, “You’re going to use AI and you’re going to like it.”

Much of what Purser describes is not only the imposition of AI, but the imposition of AI in a system that has been worn down through austerity measures over many decades, leaving it vulnerable to what is nothing more than an ideology promising increased efficiency and lower cost while still allowing the institutions to collect tuition revenue. This thinking reduces the “value proposition” of higher ed to its credentialing purpose.

I know that the popular image of colleges and universities is that they are slow to change, but I have actually been surprised at the speed at which many institutions are making this AI future bet, particularly when we don’t know what future we’re betting on.

Applying the tech ethos of “move fast and break things” to education has gained some traction because there is evidence to point toward and say, “This thing is already broken, so what do we have to lose?”

We could lose a lot—and lose it forever.

I remain open to the idea that generative AI and whatever comes after it can have positive effects on higher education, but I am increasingly convinced that when it comes to the experiences of learning, we know very little as to how this should be done. As Justin Reich wrote recently at The Chronicle, “stop pretending you know how to teach AI.”

We shouldn’t abandon the things we do know how to teach (like writing) while we experiment with this new technology. We shouldn’t dodge the structural barriers that Ronald Purser outlines in his piece, hoping for an AI savior around the corner. This isn’t what students want, it’s not what students need and it is not a way to secure an ongoing value proposition for higher education.

Two months after legal teams at University of North Carolina system campuses split over whether syllabi are considered public documents, system president Peter Hans announced plans to adopt a new policy that will answer an unequivocal yes.

Starting as early as next fall, faculty members at UNC institutions will be required to upload their syllabi to a searchable public database, according to a draft of the policy provided to Inside Higher Ed by student journalists at The Daily Tar Heel. These public syllabi must include the course name, prefix, description, course objectives and student learning outcomes, as well as “a breakdown of how student performance will be assessed, including the grading scale, percentage breakdown of major assignments, and how attendance or participation will affect a student’s final grade.” Faculty must also include any course materials that students are required to purchase.

“Public university syllabi should be public records, and that will be the official policy of the UNC System,” Hans wrote in a Thursday op-ed in the News & Observer. “We are living through an age of dangerously low trust in some of society’s most important institutions. While support for North Carolina’s public universities remains strong and bipartisan, confidence in higher education generally has dropped in recent years, driven by concerns about value and a perception that some colleges and universities have drifted from their core mission.”

The system is currently seeking feedback on the draft policy, a system spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed, and “after receiving input from elected faculty representatives and other stakeholders, the system office will revise the draft as needed.” Only Hans, and not the Board of Governors, will need to approve the policy.

In October, system campuses disagreed over whether to give up syllabi in response to a broad public records request by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. Alongside other conservative groups, the Heritage Foundation has used open records laws to gather information on and expose public university faculty members who teach about race, gender, sexuality and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Syllabi that include classroom policies, required readings and instructor’s names are particularly valuable to conservative critics. The UNC system flagship in Chapel Hill determined that syllabi are not automatically subject to such requests. But officials at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro declared the opposite.

“Having a consistent rule on syllabi transparency, instead of 16 campuses coming up with different rules, helps ensure that everyone is on the same page and similarly committed heading into each new semester,” Hans wrote in his op-ed.

The Florida Board of Governors recently enacted a policy that makes syllabi, required or recommended textbooks, and instructional materials available online and searchable for students and the general public for five years. Indiana, Texas and the University System of Georgia also maintain similar rules.

Belle Boggs, an English professor at North Carolina State University and president of the North Carolina American Association of University Professors chapter, is worried that many professors, busy with end-of-semester grading, are unaware of the forthcoming policy; administrators have yet to send out any formal announcement of the rule, Boggs said. But many of those that do know of it are pushing back. A petition started by the North Carolina AAUP chapter has garnered more than 2,100 signatures as of Thursday afternoon. The group plans to deliver it in person to Hans on Friday.

The draft policy does not explicitly require instructors to list their names on their syllabi and states that “nothing within this regulation shall be construed to require a publicly available syllabus to include the location or time of day at which a course is being held.” This stipulation provides little comfort to faculty members, Boggs said.

“As many of us have noted, there are many of us who are the only faculty who teach a particular class, and it is very easy to find out when our class is and where our classes are,” she said. “That does not make me feel safer.”

Hans acknowledged critics’ weaponization of syllabi in his op-ed.

“There is no question that making course syllabi publicly available will mean hearing feedback and criticism from people who may disagree with what’s being taught or how it’s being presented. That’s a normal fact of life at a public institution, and we should expect a vibrant and open society to have debates that extend beyond the walls of campus,” Hans wrote. “It’s awful that we live in a time when healthy discussion too often descends into outright harassment. We will do everything we can to safeguard faculty and staff who may be subject to threats or intimidation simply for doing their jobs.”

The new policy would also classify syllabi as “work made for hire,” which makes the institution—not the syllabus’s creator—the copyright owner of the syllabus, according to U.S. copyright law.

“As such, instructors do not retain personal copyright in these materials, and syllabi owned by a public agency generated in the course of public business, are not copyrightable in a manner that would exempt syllabi from public access to these records, consistent with state and federal public records laws,” the draft policy stated.

The N.C. AAUP has focused its efforts on publicizing faculty safety concerns, but the work-made-for-hire provision is also worrisome, Boggs said.

“That causes severe damage to academic freedom and how much control we have over our classes,” she said. “It may also make many faculty not want to work here, because the syllabi that they teach from or the syllabi that they’ve honed over decades in other places … [will belong to the university].”

The legal battle over whether Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin’s university board appointees will take their seats is over after a judge set a trial for 2026, Virginia Business reported. Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger will assume office next month, rendering the lawsuit moot.

The case will be dismissed, shutting down an effort to install the Republican governor’s board picks, many of whom had previously worked for or donated to the GOP and were rejected by Virginia Democrats. Now Spanberger, a Democrat, will be able to name 22 board members that otherwise would have been appointed by Youngkin, giving her the opportunity to shift the political balance of boards away from the right.

Youngkin and Attorney General Jason Miyares had sought to expedite the legal fight by asking Virginia’s Supreme Court to review a lower court ruling that determined that blocked board picks could not take their seats. Youngkin has argued the board appointments must be rejected by the full Senate, not just the Democrat-led Privileges and Elections Committee, which voted down multiple picks.

However, Virginia’s Supreme Court declined to hear the case, remanding it to a lower court. 

Spanberger and state Democrats are expected to quickly fill multiple vacancies that have left boards hobbled, including at George Mason University, which does not have a quorum. GMU’s board met recently, despite the lack of a quorum and legal questions about their ability to do so.

Youngkin’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Inside Higher Ed.