Tag: Events

Trustees at Nassau Community College are poised to file a lawsuit after the State University of New York’s Board of Trustees denied their presidential pick.

At a special meeting on Sunday, the Nassau Community College Board of Trustees unanimously voted to allow the board chair to file a lawsuit challenging the SUNY board’s decision, with one board member absent, Newsday reported. Earlier this month, SUNY trustees voted unanimously, with three members absent, to reject Maria Conzatti, who has run the college as interim or acting president for almost four years. A SUNY official told Newsday it was the first time the system’s board disapproved a presidential nominee.

The resolution voted on asked that Conzatti’s appointment by Nassau Community College’s board be “disapproved” with no further explanation.

“SUNY is committed to excellent leadership for all of our campuses and the success of our students, and we will vigorously defend ourselves against any frivolous lawsuit,” a spokesperson for the system said in a statement to Inside Higher Ed.

The college’s Student Government Association also passed a measure on Monday expressing “gratitude and appreciation” for Conzatti while also acknowledging the SUNY board vote and encouraging the college to “conduct an equitable, transparent and expeditious search for a new permanent president.”

The conflict comes amid broader tensions between the college’s faculty union and the administration over the consolidation of academic departments and a union contract that expired in August, among other issues. The union sued the college last year arguing the elimination of 15 department chairs violated state regulations, but a judge dismissed the case. The union has since appealed.

Nassau has also reported less-than-optimal student outcomes in recent years. It has the lowest two-year graduation rate and second lowest three-year graduation rate among community colleges in the SUNY system, 9.4 percent and 23.6 percent respectively.

Colleges and universities sit on a large wealth of data, ranging from student attendance and interactions with learning management systems to employment and earnings data for graduates. But uniting legacy systems and having responsive data remains a wicked problem for many institutions.

This year, Central New Mexico Community College is deploying a new AI-powered predictive analytics tool, CampusLens, part of CampusWorks, to improve data visibility in student retention, early alerts and career outcomes.

In the latest episode of Voices of Student Success, host Ashley Mowreader speaks with Tracy Hartzler, president of Central New Mexico Community College, to discuss the risks with taking on new tools, the college’s approach to change management and the need for more responsive data.

An edited version of the podcast appears below.

Q: Can you introduce yourself, your role and your institution?

A: My name is Tracy Hartzler. I’m president of Central New Mexico Community College. We’re located in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We serve three counties around us, and our population is about 900,000 residents in our area, so it’s about half the state of New Mexico who lives in our service area, but it’s an incredibly diverse area.

We have a significant population of Hispanic, Latino students. We have a large population of Indigenous students, as well. We are the largest undergraduate institution in the state, and that’s distinct because we only issue or grant certificates and associate degrees. We are not a bachelor’s degree–granting institution, so our focus really is on those students who are seeking entry into college—whether that’s our dual credit students who are still in high school—but also those who are returning for upskilling. They’ve already earned their bachelor’s degree or degrees, and they’re coming back for some hands-on or applied skills, or those who are getting back into education and training because they’re looking for greater financial stability.

Like so many other colleges, we know we want to learn from others, and so we’re really proud that we work with many of our other colleges across the state of New Mexico, but we certainly engage in conversations with leaders and schools who participate in American Association of Community Colleges who are part of the global community college leader network.

But we’re really pleased and we’ve been really pushed by our peers who are members of the Alliance for Innovation and Transformation—group of higher education institutions, there’s about 60 of us—with some other thought partners to really help us think how we can best leverage technology and change our processes and deliver better education and training for our students and better serve our employers.

We also are relying on lessons learned from those outside of higher education, so whether it’s in hospitality, healthcare, manufacturing and others. So while we know we have great work to do in New Mexico, and we are incredibly fortunate to work with strong partners who tell us what they want and how we can best serve them, we certainly look to other schools and other organizations to help us make those transitions faster so we can better serve our community.

Q: From my vantage point, it seems community colleges are often some of the most nimble when it comes to learning from other institutions.

A: Absolutely. You know, it’s great to be scrappy. I think we and here at CNM, we certainly punch above our weight. We are excited to take on new challenges. We are, frankly, fortunate to be able to move faster. So, if something doesn’t work, we can pivot away from it entirely or continue to revise it. And frankly, the urgency to do so is really placed on us by our employer partners, our community partners and our students. They really are pressing us to be responsive to them because they don’t have time to waste, and they certainly don’t have resources to waste. So, we really step in. And again, I don’t think CNM is unique in that we all respond to the need as quickly and as best we can.

Q: We’re talking today about a new AI-powered predictive analytics tool that you all implemented. Historically, what has been the college’s retention and persistence strategy? What are some of the challenges you have seen when supporting students?

A: Before the pandemic, we were able to and we were participating in a lot of futures work: What do students need? What do they need now? What do employers need in the future? Which, at that time, seemed so far off, and so we were already on a journey again, whether it was working with AFIT or others to help us better identify what we needed to do and how we needed to change to better meet our student and our employer needs.

We knew that that would include certainly technology and leveraging technology, but we also knew it would mean changing how we do things, how we schedule, how we use the data in our systems. And we also knew we have a tremendous amount of information. We have a lot of data, but like so many other places, it’s in seven legacy systems. And we have over 100 applications that help our data systems talk to each other, to generate reports that our staff use, and it’s incredibly challenging to wrangle this data in a way that is useful, that helps us drive and drive change again.

Most of the data is legacy data. It’s what happened last year, and how do we think that’s going to improve? What are we doing now to then improve performance a year ahead, and then we hope that what we do over the next year meets the need, but it takes us too long to really react.

So, we were looking for ways to take the assets we have—which includes our incredible faculty and a number of our leaders and our office of data strategy and some of our contractors, like CampusWorks and consultants—to help us wrangle this data in a way that helps us be data informed in a time-sensitive way.

We had a lot of processes in place that were helping us to do that. A lot of our steps were manual and creating reports, and it really slowed down what our frontline advisers and navigators and employment advisers really were able to do, because we were requiring them to do so much manipulation with the data then to be able to identify what they should do once they got this great report.

So, we were looking for ways to leverage technology. And again, the pandemic happens. We’re increasingly dependent on our systems, using them to greater degrees than we had before, including our learning management system. We are also undertaking a transition conversion from our old student information system to a new student information systemin Workday. We’re making all these changes and upgrading technology, and frankly, AI is coming along that’s really dramatically changing how we work, or could change how we work. We’re trying to figure out a better way to wrangle all these opportunities.

We were so excited to learn about CampusWorks and their product, CampusLens, because we think that tool will help us leapfrog, not only the tool but the experts that that CampusWorks brings to the table to help us to analyze data and develop tools that will help our frontline staff much more quickly and easily identify how they can help students. To register from class A to B, to help them identify all the predictors that say, if the student’s missing one assignment or they haven’t attended class, here are the automatic prompts for you as an adviser or navigator—or if you choose to automate that process you can. But really, how can we help individuals—our employees—still help and better connect with students to keep them on the track of success?

It certainly can also help us schedule, help our faculty and all of our associate deans who do incredible jobs trying to figure out ways to schedule our incredible programming to be most effective for students. Some of this information that we’ve had in different places, when it comes together in a product like CampusLens, will help us generate these tools so that we can we can more quickly assess our situation and better adapt, test, try and iterate ways to better, like I said, schedule classes, schedule our work-based experiences, help our employers predict the number of graduates who are going to come out of our programs at any given time.

When we have employers come to us with dramatic needs, you know, they need 1,000 technicians over three years, well, what do we need to do to scale and ramp up our programming to meet that need?

I’m excited that we have a tool that will help us do that, instead of the army of staff and technical staff that I would have to try to find to help us do that in an efficient way. That’s why a product and a team, a quality, curious and an innovative team at CampusWorks to help us work through some of these projects.

Q: How does the tool work logistically? What are you excited about when it comes to the capabilities of CampusWorks and CampusLens?

A: It helps us better, frankly, use staff time to keep students and others on the right track—on the track that they’ve chosen, by the way.

What is most exciting, at least for us with CampusLens, is their Career Lens. So all institutions, all community colleges, are focused on many phrases, but all go to the federal emphasis, or your statewide emphasis on return on investment. What is the value that a learner gets from your program that can be defined a lot of ways. It could be defined by wages, wages a year out, it could be defined for many years out from completing a certificate or degree. It looks at what’s your job in a particular program. We know the federal government, whether when they’re leading the rules around rule-making for Workforce Pell, we know that those regulations are going to help us require that we analyze our programs for results. Will these programs allow students to be eligible for federal assistance?

We know that we can use all of this data and CampusLens is going to be able to help us identify which programs are eligible for Workforce Pell, what are the wages? It’ll help us report out the successes of our programs, or, frankly, identify those programs where wages are not at the median level. What do we need to do, then, to repackage or reschedule or build up some of our programs to meet the wage requirements that we want individuals to accomplish, to achieve and earn, but also that will meet some of our federal standards?

So, I’m really excited about the workforce component of this, which is really what we’re all looking for. All of us [higher education leaders] want, I’d say, a silver bullet when it comes to unifying this data and being able to tell the story and being able to design programming is responsive and frankly to be able to tell our stakeholders, whether they’re legislators or federal government agencies giving us funding for workforce training, what are the outcomes? That’s so important that we’re able to show and tell the story with really valuable data? And I’m excited that CampusLens allows us to achieve that.

Q: How have you all been thinking about AI as a tool on campus, what are those conversation looking like with your staff and employees?

A: I want to start with our governing board. CNM is governed by a seven-member elected governing board, and our governing board represents geographic areas in our community. They are focused on how we are best serving our students, our employers and our community members and what does that mean for technology? Is the college investing in programming and the right tools? Are we getting the greatest benefit from the tools we’ve purchased? That also includes the question of, how are our faculty and staff using the tools to better help our learners?

We talked about retention and persistence and how we use data, but it takes training and professional development to be able to use the tools to the greatest advantage. And of course, this is all in service to our learners and our employers. So it starts with our leadership, and then it flows through.

I don’t think we’re any different than a lot of other colleges. We’ve looked at our policies, and we’ve built on our existing academic integrity policies around AI use, and we have faculty policies on how they describe and expect use, or have authorized use, if you will, approved use, embedded use of AI in their coursework, in their programs. We have policies in place.

We also have done some pilot work. We’ve created a fund for individuals to come to a group around data, frankly, out of our data governance team and our IT team to be able to pitch ideas for three-month sprints or pilots, and they report back. What was the result? What did we learn? Is it something we should scale

I will say many of those pilots are both on the business side or the operation side of the college, but also on the student and teaching and learning side. So that’s really interesting. We look forward to some of those first official pilots coming forward in the next month or so.

What I’m most excited about, though, is the systemic use of AI across the institution. I appreciate the pilots get us excited and interested. It gets people familiar with tools as they evolve and change. But how do we embed AI into our systems work? That’s why I’m excited about CampusLens.

You can only have so many pilots and scale up pilots, and you can read how many articles that tell you and advice pieces from Gartner to McKinsey to whatever source you may choose that help you try to identify how to scale up pilots. But I wanted something that was going to help us leapfrog that, and frankly, CampusLens allows us to do that with a multi-year co-development opportunity to help us focus on the student journey, but really in a systemic way, look at all of our data sources and our use and all of even our new systems like Workday that help us to leverage a tool that sits above our data sources. We’ll learn the operational side of this as we go on. But I’m really focused on students, and this was the easiest way to take a risk at a systemic change with a trusted partner who has incredible expertise, as we’ve known for years, and our relationship with them to help us take that leap, to help us implement a system-wide approach to using AI and how that can change and enhance all the human work that we do with our students.

It’s not necessarily about eliminating the human touch to what we do. It’s about helping our advisers and our navigators and our faculty members and our intern placement officers, helping them do their work more successfully, always evaluated by student satisfaction, student placement, employer satisfaction and the like.

I appreciate pilots, there’s a great role for them. And I really appreciate that we are able to take a systemic swing at this work.

Q: You used the work risk earlier applied to taking on this system, what do you consider the risks or challenges of this process?

A: There’s always a risk in the investment you’re making initially and the ongoing risk. The risk is not only the contract for the service, hiring the expertise and hiring a partner who’s been affiliated and connected to higher education for decades, who understands students, understands institutional requirements and for compliance and integrity and data governance and permissible uses. Working with a partner that has that basic understanding is critical. That mitigates your risk immediately.

The financial risk is always: Are we chasing AI attachments to every system we have, or are we helping to right size those to be able to leverage a holistic or a system-wide, comprehensive AI-aided business analytics or business intelligence tool? That’s a very different approach then again, enhancing all of the six legacy systems I have, plus using one system or one tool to be able to do that intelligence work. That’s a risk, and that’s something different that we’ve had to navigate.

I don’t underestimate the time and challenge and excitement of staff in using technology, that can be seen as a risk. There’s a real temptation, and I see it almost daily, to just lift what we do currently in our old systems and shift it to a new system and just be satisfied with going faster or generating a nicer looking report. It’s not what we wanted and that is so not what we can do in higher ed. We are called to be more innovative and to really use our information differently. And this tool will allow us to do that in terms of really getting to the intelligence side of predictive analytics.

That’s always seen as almost a holy grail for us, and to see that it’s within reach now, that’s worth the risk for us. We’ll be able to see the analytics and the predictive analytics that we were at one time working on a project, and we thought we might get there in two or three years. The fact that I can probably do this by the end of this academic year is really important for us. And by the way, not just see some results at the end of this academic year, but know that it’s going to be iterative and evolve, so that we’re going to continue to see growth and change and adaptation and be a part of that shaping is really important to us.

I think I mean the risk is time, resources, and security, and we face those all the time. But I will dare say the risk is also not doing anything. If we aren’t moving in this direction, you are risking putting resources, and particularly too much money and technologies that you still have to reconcile in some way. You risk, frankly, burning out your staff by adding another dashboard they’ve got to learn instead of one that’s much more comprehensive. You’re still going to have them look at 10 different screens to come up with all the information they need to advise one student. So, you don’t want to burn out your staff. You actually need them to be more efficient and effective and spend time with the student in a different way.

The risks of not taking a step like this are substantial, because the world will continue. Students will still demand more, and they always demand more to make their work easier, which means our work can be a little bit harder, and employers are expecting us to be responsive. So if you don’t act and take certain risks, you’re either irrelevant or your students are unprepared for the world that they’re going to be entering, and we just don’t have time for that. That’s just not an option.

Q: I appreciated your comment on the risks of using a new tool to do the exact same thing. We know that faculty and staff are often crunched for time and ensuring that we’re creating new systems that are evolutionary and actually creating efficiencies for everyone involved is important.

A: Yeah, and that’s scary. It does mean that we will be changing how we work. It means we will be removing some of the guesswork of whether our efforts will work. We can see whether, if I move certain levers in a student journey, does this really make the difference? Does it really move the needle, not only for that student, but maybe very similarly situated students?

It’s really important. This will change how we work. We’ll be asking our employees, my colleagues, to think differently and do their work differently, because they’ll have more information available to them with suggestions on how to act, so they don’t have to always consider and frankly, reinvent the wheel. That’s really important, but I don’t underestimate what that change looks like, because when you have expertise in old systems or even evolving systems, and that expertise can be threatened or seem to be threatened, then we have to navigate that, and again, always make sure we’re serving our students and doing it the best way we can.

This technology, the tools, the guidance and the continued evolution will, I think, go a long way toward mitigating that fear. When I brought this option for CampusLens to my team, I made sure my team kicked the tires. This wasn’t a president’s folly. It was sincere, deliberate vetting by many individuals across the college to say, is this the right approach? What are our questions? What are our fears? What’s my role? Will it really better serve our students, and what does that look like with professional development? How do I use this team of experts that I’m not used to working with? How are they going to integrate and challenge us and help us do our work? So there were a number of challenges in the five or six months that it took us to ascertain whether this is the right approach for us, and I appreciate that it’s a collaborative effort, and that that is continuing as we talk about change management and the work that we have to test the tool and move it out in the college.

Q: Where are you all at in this change process? What are you looking forward to as the next step?

A: We’re still early in our stages of implementing CampusLens. Much of what we hope for centers arounds adoption and effectiveness and we really hope for a long-term operational integration. Again, my interest is not only in pilots, but in helping us make systemic change and better leveraging all the legacy data sources that we have.

What we are hoping to see in the next 12 months would be how we move from tracking legacy data and focusing on what has happened to helping us think about what is likely to happen based on the data we see. So again, shift in mindset from always reporting out past data, old data, lagging data to what do we think will happen? And then how do we change behavior to improve what we think will happen or change the trajectory, if that’s what we want to do? I think it’s really important for our community, for us to continue to test the model, the tool and the logic, so it’s going to continue to be refined. I know that as we go through over time, we will continue to improve, refine, revise the model so that it better reflects what our community here in Central New Mexico needs and what our students need.

We’re early in the stages. What I’ve seen so far is exciting, and it’s what we wanted to accomplish, and this tool is going to help us accomplish it, I think, sooner, and to be able to test our work sooner.

We bet your colleague would like this article, too. Send them this link to subscribe to our newsletter on Student Success.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained a University of Oklahoma professor Saturday while he was on his way to a conference.

Vahid Abedini, a professor of Iranian Studies, was stopped and detained while he was boarding his flight to attend the Middle East Studies Association conference in Washington, D.C. He was released Monday night, according to a LinkedIn post.

“I’m relieved to share that I was released from custody tonight. It was a deeply distressing experience, especially seeing those without the support I had,” Abedini wrote on LinkedIn early Tuesday morning. “My sincere thanks to my friends and colleagues at the University of Oklahoma, the Middle East Studies Association, and the wider Iran studies and political science community for helping resolve this.”

Abedini did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for comment. According to Joshua Landis, Abedini’s colleague and co-director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, Abedini has an H-1B visa.

“ICE arrested our beloved professor Vahid Abedini,” Landis wrote on X Monday. “He has been wrongfully detained because he has a valid H-1B visa—a non-immigrant work visa granted to individuals in ‘specialty occupations,’ including higher education faculty. We are praying for his swift release.”

Reached for comment, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed: “This Iranian national was detained for standard questioning. He’s been released.”

Abedini’s detention makes real the fears of many foreign and American academics who are rethinking or boycotting travel to academic conferences in the U.S. due to concerns about wrongful arrests by immigration enforcement.

In a statement, the MESA Board of Directors said they were “disturbed” to learn of Abedini’s detention and “deeply concerned” about the circumstances. The University of Oklahoma declined to comment on the situation.

As Duke University navigates a $108 million federal research funding freeze and multiple investigations by the Trump administration, administrators want faculty to avoid talking to the media about institutional operations, The Chronicle, Duke’s student newspaper reported Monday.

According to an August email obtained by The Chronicle, Jenny Edmonds, associate dean of communications and marketing at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy, encouraged faculty to “continue to engage with the media to disseminate [their] research as [they] have always done,” while also cautioning that “media attention to institutions of higher education and discussions about institutional responses to policy changes have become more prominent than ever.”

“In this moment in particular, questions about Duke and current events are being answered by Frank Tramble and his team,” Edmonds wrote. “If you are contacted by the media about overarching issues confronting the University, please forward the requests to [Sanford’s Senior Public Relations Manager Matt LoJacono] and me.”

Although it wasn’t a universitywide directive, The Chronicle obtained emails that show some other departments also gave their faculty similar instructions to route media requests through the university’s central communications channels.

At an Academic Council meeting in October, Duke’s president, Vincent Price, and council chair, Mark Anthony Neal, commended faculty members for not speaking to a New York Times reporter; the reporter had visited the campus while working on a story about the Trump administration targeting Duke’s diversity, equity and inclusion program.

“It was pretty amazing that [the reporter] actually got no commentary from Duke officials and Duke faculty,” Neal continued. “Even if it wasn’t overtly communicated to the community, the community understood the stakes of that mode of inquiry.”

At that meeting Price also called Trump’s higher education compact—which would allegedly give universities preferential funding in exchange for making sweeping institutional policy changes— “highly problematic,” according to The Chronicle. Despite public pressure, Duke hasn’t officially rejected the terms of the compact.

This week is Thanksgiving in the United States, a time when many of us come together with family and friends to express gratitude for the positive things in our lives. The holiday season can also be a challenging time for those who are far from family and grappling with the prevalent loneliness of our modern era.

Perhaps worse than missing the company of others over the holidays is being with family who hold different views and beliefs from your own. The fact is, though, that when we come together with a large, diverse group of people at events we are bound to find a variety of viewpoints and personalities in the room.

People are complex and messy, and engaging with them is often a lot of work. Sometimes it seems easier to just not deal with them at all and “focus on ourselves” instead. Similarly, the vast amount of information available online often leads many graduate students and postdocs to think they can effectively engage in professional development, explore career options and navigate their next step on their own. Indeed, there are many amazing online tools and resources to help with a lot of this but only by engaging other people in conversation can we fully come to understand how various practices, experiences and occupations apply to us as unique beings in the world. Generic advice is fine, but it can only be tailored through genuine dialogue with another person, though some believe they can find it in a machine.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology has accelerated since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 and now many people lean on AI chatbots for advice and even companionship. The problem with this approach is that AI chatbots are, at least currently, quite sycophantic and don’t, by default, challenge a user’s worldview. Rather, they can reinforce one’s current beliefs and biases. Furthermore, since we as humans have a tendency to anthropomorphize things, we perceive the output of AI chatbots as “human” and think we are getting the type of “social” relationship and advice we need from a bot without all the friction of dealing with another human being in real life. So, while outsourcing your problems to a chatbot may feel easy, it cannot fully support you as you navigate your life and career. Furthermore, generative AI has made the job application, screening and interview process incredibly impersonal and ineffective. One recent piece in The Atlantic put it simply (if harshly): “The Job Market is Hell.”

What is the solution to this sad state of affairs?

I am here to remind readers of the importance of engaging with real, human people to help you navigate your professional development, job search and life. Despite the fear of being rejected, making small talk or hearing things that may challenge you, engaging with other people will help you learn about professional roles available to you, discover unexpected opportunities, build critical interpersonal skills and, in the process, understand yourself (and how you relate with others) better.

For graduate students and postdocs today, it’s easy to feel isolated or spend too much time in your own head focusing on your perceived faults and deficiencies. You need to remember, though, that you are doing hard things, including leading research projects seeking to investigate questions no one else has reported on before. But as you journey through your academic career and into your next step professionally, I encourage you to embrace the fact that true strength and resilience lies in our connections—with colleagues, mentors, friends and the communities we build.

Networks enrich your perspectives, foster resilience and can help you find not only jobs, but joy and fulfillment along the way. Take intentional steps to build and lean on your community during your time as an academic and beyond. Invest time, gratitude and openness in your relationships. Because when you navigate life’s challenges with others by your side, you don’t just survive—you thrive.

Practical Tips for Building and Leveraging Networks

For graduate students and postdocs, here are some action steps to foster meaningful networks to help you professionally and personally:

Tip 1: Seek Diverse Connections

Attend seminars, departmental events, professional conferences and interest groups—both within and outside your field.

Join and engage in online forums, LinkedIn groups and professional organizations that interest you. Create a career advisory group.

Tip 2: Practice Gratitude and Generosity

Thank peers and mentors regularly—showing appreciation strengthens relationships, opens doors and creates goodwill.

Offer help, such as reviewing your peers’ résumés, sharing job leads or simply listening. Reciprocity is foundational to strong networks.

Tip 3: Be Vulnerable and Authentic

Share struggles and setbacks. Vulnerability invites others to connect, offer advice and foster mutual support.

Be honest about your goals; don’t feel pressured to follow predefined paths set by others or by societal norms.

Tip 4: Leverage Formal Resources

Enroll in career design workshops or online courses, such as Stanford University’s “Designing Your Career.”

Utilize university career centers, alumni networks and faculty advisers for information and introductions.

Tip 5: Make Reflection a Habit

Set aside time weekly or monthly to review progress, map goals and consider input from your network.

Use journaling or guided exercises to deepen self-insight and identify what you want from relationships and careers.

Tip 6: Cultivate Eulogy Virtues

Focus not just on professional “résumé virtues,” but also on “eulogy virtues”—kindness, honesty, courage and the quality of relationships formed.

These provide lasting meaning and fuel deep, authentic connections that persist beyond job titles and paychecks.

Strategies for Overcoming Isolation

Graduate students and postdocs are at particular risk for isolation and burnout, given the demands of research and the often-solitary nature of scholarship. Community is a proven antidote. Consider forming small groups with fellow students and postdocs to share resources, celebrate milestones and troubleshoot professional challenges together. Regular meetings can foster motivation and accountability. These can be as simple as monthly coffee chats to something more structured such as regular writing or job search support groups. And, while online communities are not a perfect substitute for support, postdocs can leverage Future PI Slack and graduate students can use their own Slack community for help and advice. You can also lean on your networks for emotional support and practical help, especially during stressful periods or setbacks.

Another practical piece of advice to build your network and connections is volunteer engagement. This could mean volunteering in a professional organization, committees at your institution or in your local community. Working together with others on shared projects in this manner helps build connections without the challenges many have with engaging others at purely social events. In addition, volunteering can help you develop leadership, communication and management skills that can become excellent résumé material.

Networking to Launch Your Career

Through the process of engaging with more people through an expanded network you also open yourself up to serendipity and opportunities that could enhance your overall training and career. Career theorists call this “planned happenstance.” The idea is simple: By putting yourself in community with others—attending talks, joining professional groups, volunteering for committees—you increase the odds that unexpected opportunities will cross your path. You meet people who do work you hadn’t considered, learn about opportunities before they’re posted and hear about initiatives that need someone with your skills earlier than most.

When I was a postdoc at Vanderbilt University, I volunteered for the National Postdoctoral Association (NPA), starting small by writing for their online newsletter (The POSTDOCket), and also became increasingly involved in the Vanderbilt Postdoctoral Association (VPA). These experiences were helpful as I transitioned to working in postdoctoral affairs as a higher education administrator after my postdoc. Writing for The POSTDOCket as a postdoc allowed me to interview administrators and leaders in postdoctoral affairs, in the process learning about working in the space. My leadership in VPA showed I understood some of the needs of the postdoctoral community and could organize programming to support postdocs. I have become increasingly involved in the NPA over the past six years, culminating in being chair of our Board of Directors in 2025. This work has allowed me to increase my national visibility and has resulted in invites to speak to postdocs at different institutions, the opportunity to serve on a National Academies Roundtable, and I believe helped me land my current role at Virginia Tech.

I share all this to reiterate that in uncertain job markets, it’s tempting to focus on polishing résumés or applying to ever more positions online. Those things can matter—but they’re not enough. Opportunities often come through both expanding your network and engaging with people and activities we care about. They can present themselves to you via your network long before they appear in writing and they often can’t be fully anticipated when you initially engage with these “extracurricular activities.” A good first step to open yourself up to possibilities is to get involved in communities outside your direct school or work responsibilities. Doing so will improve your sense of purpose, help you build key transferrable skills, increase your connections and aid in your transition to your next role.

Your training and career should not be a solitary climb, but rather a collaborative, evolving process of growth and discovery. A strong community and network are critical to your longterm wellbeing and success. And, in a world where setbacks and uncertainty are inevitable, connection is the constant that turns possibility into progress.

To the editor:

I’m not quite sure why you felt the need to publish the self-indulgent “Teaching as a Sacred Life” by Joe P. Dunn (Nov. 19, 2025).

It’s great that Joe is inspired by his teaching and is so passionate about it. Of course, most faculty who chose teaching are (or were) so inspired. So what merits the article? I guess that Joe is still teaching at age 80.

Yes, some people view retirement as a goal because they don’t like their jobs. But many faculty view their profession as a vocation, so why would they retire? One reason is because of diminished effectiveness. Ossified approaches, diminished cognitive capacity and so on are the unhappy, but inevitable, results of aging. The person experiencing these declines is generally not the best at noticing them, as they creep in so slowly that they’re most visible to outsiders or when accurately comparing to yourself from long ago. (A septuagenarian Galileo, when completing Two New Sciences, his seminal 1638 work in mechanics, was disheartened to find that it was hard for him to follow his own notes and thoughts from several decades earlier.)

Another reason to retire is to give the next generation a chance. Joe talks about the plentiful faculty jobs when he was young. There are many reasons why they’re no longer plentiful, but one of them is that there is no longer a mandatory retirement age. It was legal until 1993 for there to be a mandatory retirement age for tenured faculty (later than the general 1986 ban on mandatory retirement because lawmakers felt there were several valid arguments for a mandatory retirement age for tenured professors).

Many academics pour so much into their work that they don’t develop a strong identity outside of their job. They end up like Joe, not sure what they would even do in retirement. A broader push for a better work-life balance in higher education could go a long way toward helping people develop their complete selves, and would reduce the fear of retirement among academics. Plus, there are always positions emeriti that allow you to keep your hand in the intellectual world of higher ed without continuing to draw a paycheck that you no longer need and someone else does.

Speaking of viewing teaching as sacred, clergy retire. Heck, we’ve even had a pope retire. Faculty can figure it out too.

If you’re not a supporter of the progressive DEI agenda, you’re not career ready. That’s one of the messages that the National Association of Colleges and Employers, America’s leading professional association for career placement, is sending to students.

First established in 1956, NACE boasts a current membership of more than 17,000 dues-paying career services and recruitment professionals. Career counselors and others in higher education often cite NACE’s eight career readiness competencies to help students prepare for the job market and workplace.

I was planning to use the NACE competencies this semester in a class on how liberal arts education equips students for the professional world and was dismayed to find that partisan criteria had crept into this valuable resource. The list includes—alongside things like teamwork, effective communication and technological proficiency—a competency called Equity & Inclusion. According to NACE, this means that a prospective professional will “engage in anti-oppressive practices that actively challenge the systems, structures, and policies of racism and inequity.”

If you’re fully career ready, the group says, you will not merely “keep an open mind to diverse ideas and new ways of thinking.” You will also “advocate for inclusion, equitable practices, justice, and empowerment for historically marginalized communities” and will “address systems of privilege that limit opportunities” for members of those communities. In other words, you will subscribe to the view that American society is characterized by systemic racism and will work to break down America’s allegedly racist structure.

NACE defines “equity” in this light: “Whereas equality means providing the same to all, equity means recognizing that we do not all start from the same place and must acknowledge and make adjustments to imbalances.”

While these beliefs and attitudes might make someone a good fit at one of a diminishing number of “woke” corporations, they have little to do with career readiness in the ordinary sense of the term. Rather, the language NACE employs in its official materials implies a commitment to an ideological agenda that the organization has mixed into its definition of professional competence. NACE could be teaching students how to navigate the political diversity that characterizes most workplaces. Instead, through its influence in the college career counseling world, it is teaching them that acceptance of progressive orthodoxy on disputed questions of racial justice is a prerequisite for professional employment.

NACE also does a disservice to students by signaling that workplace political engagement is universally valued by employers. In fact, many companies discourage it, and with good reason. In most work environments, political advocacy is more likely to cause tension and division than it is to foster cooperation and trust.

As a college teacher and administrator, I’m especially troubled by the fact that NACE is conveying to students that their education should lead them to adopt a certain viewpoint on some of the most contentious political issues. The relationship between equity and equality, for example, is something that should be studied, discussed and debated in college, not taught as authoritative moral and political dogma.

More generally, the way NACE talks about diversity, equity and inclusion ignores—or perhaps disdains—the political disagreement that is a normal and natural part of life in a democratic society, including the workplace. The organization undermines its professed commitment to open-mindedness when it implies that all open-minded people must be capital-P Progressives on issues such as systemic racism and equitable hiring practices. Like many institutions in recent years, NACE appears to have given in to pressure from activist members and embraced the “antiracist” worldview, sidelining the principles of openness and neutrality that are, or ought to be, hallmarks of professionalism.

Notably, NACE indicates on its website that its equity and inclusion standard is under review. The organization cites recent “federal Executive Orders and subsequent guidance, as well as court decisions and regulatory changes, [that] may create legal risks that either preclude or discourage campuses and employers from using it.” This is encouraging. Better still would be for NACE to free itself from the ideological commitments that make its materials legally and politically risky in the first place. Let’s hope this venerable organization will get out of the business of DEI advocacy and focus on its core purposes of connecting students with employers and preparing students for professional life.

Higher ed, government and workforce leaders are discussing employability skills and work-based learning more than they ever have (at least, in my lifetime). So are students. Recent research shines a light on where and how students contemplate the connection between college and careers (particularly the increasingly influential role of social media) and what they expect. Marketers can leverage these consumer insights to influence both product and positioning to develop, implement and communicate work-integrated learning experience to meet student and workforce needs.

Students Get Career, College and Life Advice From Social Media

Seventy percent of young adults use social media to learn about careers, and it’s the top tool young adults use for self-discovery, despite a lack of encouragement from most adults and career navigators/counselors. Students talk about workforce skills when they talk to each other online about going to college—about 20 percent of these posts are about skills needed for jobs. They believe transferable skills are valuable to keep their career options open, particularly for those who don’t know what they want to do in their future careers. Specifically, they talk about:

• Relationship-building skills like networking, persuasive speaking and small group leadership
• Basic math and writing skills
• Study skills
• Interview skills

Forums are advice-seeking and experience-sharing platforms, and when students talk about needing workforce skills, they receive encouraging advice. Suggestions include using extra courses, academic services and resources to gain employability skills to help them find a job after graduation. Students are also encouraged to develop practical critical thinking and social skills because, in the words of those giving advice, “a degree doesn’t guarantee success.”

When students think about preparing for a job, they prioritize internships. In an analysis of over 600,000 forum conversations about college admissions Campus Sonar conducted to inform Jeff Selingo’s book Dream School: Finding The College That’s Right for You, internships were the most common form of workforce training discussed. When students make their college decision, they consider whether a campus provides them greater access to internship opportunities. Sometimes students interpret a rural campus as one without internship opportunities (which isn’t exactly true), and students consider if the campus gives them access to a connected network to find future internships and jobs. Another consideration is the value of an institution’s reputation with employers or intern hiring managers.

However, these conversations revealed that students don’t really know what happens in an internship or how to get one. So they use online forums to seek advice on obtaining an internship, leveraging it, securing a job after graduation and exploring alternative careers outside their major.

This is a storytelling opportunity for campuses. Specifically, to bridge the gap between current or recent interns and prospective and first-year students. Students who completed internships don’t have the chance to tell the students coming behind them what it’s like or how it helped them. This transition point is an excellent chance to engage recent interns to share their experiences directly with students or prospects to provide motivation and guidance in the peer-to-peer form students want. Using social media—the place where young people are seeking this advice—is crucial.

Students Need to Understand the Connection Between Curriculum, Skill Building and Careers

When considering college, students are already thinking about what comes next. Over 10 years of social listening research examining how students talk about college admissions, 62 percent of conversations focused on the postgraduation path. But when the connections between a college’s curriculum, employability skills and careers aren’t clear, students think the burden is on them to build the skills and chart their path.

This was particularly clear in Campus Sonar’s 2024 Rebuilding Public Trust in Higher Education social intelligence study, which found that 45 percent of peer-to-peer conversations about the value of college included cautionary advice that students may be on their own to make crucial connections between curriculum, skill building and careers.

Many colleges struggle to communicate these connections effectively. Here are two doing an excellent job.

• Kettering University in Flint, Mich. For 100 years, Kettering has focused on work-integrated learning with a curriculum that rotates students between the classroom and co-op work placements in 12-week intervals. Ninety-eight percent of their students are employed after graduation, and the ongoing integration of students in the workforce produces valuable student feedback, enabling curriculum shifts to keep up with ever-changing employer needs.

Kettering is historically focused on STEM, but the university recently launched the School of Foundational Studies, traditionally known as liberal arts. The core curriculum emphasizes a connected, human-centered approach and integrates a STEM focus with early professional development and ethical decision-making, preparing students to navigate complexity with intellectual agility. We know the liberal arts prepares students for the workforce, but Kettering is shifting the narrative and dropping the misunderstood phrase to put relevance and impact like ethical decision-making and intellectual agility front and center.

• Moravian University is another example. The medium-size, private, religiously affiliated institution created Elevate as part of its undergraduate experience. It’s a career readiness digital badging system to help students clearly see the pathways for developing and demonstrating skills in communication, critical thinking leadership and more. Elevate is part of Moravian’s distinctive and branded undergraduate student experience, which is a four-year pathway to a “successful future and a career you love.” The Elevate experience goes year by year and explains how students scaffold their experiences, learnings and badges and the support they get along the way.

Career navigation is a prevailing concept in this space right now and is critical in empowering students to truly navigate their own careers rather than expect the university to take them from A to B. Students need to become their own career navigator and be confident upon graduation that they have the navigation skills. Integrated curricula like those I’ve highlighted here achieve that outcome.

Not all campuses are equipped to develop a work-integrated curriculum independently, meaning the product offered to students may not yet be at the place where it can be positioned in a way that meets the current needs. An ecosystem of partners has developed over the last decade to help and is highlighted at workforce-focused higher ed events such as the Horizons Summit, SXSW EDU and ASU+GSV Summit.

For example, Riipen connects educators, learners and employers (particularly small businesses) to integrate short-term, paid projects into coursework—including remote work opportunities. Education at Work connects students to résumé-building, paying jobs at top national employers like Intuit and Discover to build durable skills and unlock career pathways within the organization. A strong relationship with your provost or career services office will ensure the marketing team is aware of the “product features” that are evolving on your campus to connect classroom to career.

Take Action

• Tell as many individual stories as you can to help students see themselves in your graduates, develop a sense of belonging and trust outcomes achieved by a peer. Tell the types of stories (or empower students/alumni to tell their own) that would be offered as positive anecdotes in social media (e.g., TikTok, Reddit). Recognizing that resources are finite and stories from “someone like me” are nearly always more influential than polished marketing content, social listening bridges the gap to identify and amplify stories students and alumni already share.
• Include program-level excellence in your brand narrative to more specifically connect curriculum and programming to careers. Support your claims with data (e.g., job placement, salaries, top employers), but don’t rely solely on statistics—always connect the data to stories.
• Emphasize support structures and peer-to-peer connections such as experiential learning programs, career services opportunities, paid internship support, peer internship mentoring, etc., so students don’t feel like they’re on their own to navigate their career path.

U.S. colleges and universities lead the world in interdisciplinary science research according to the Times Higher Education Interdisciplinary Science Rankings 2026 (THE is Inside Higher Ed’s parent company). 

American institutions occupy six of the top 10 slots on this year’s table. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is first for the second year in a row, followed by Stanford University in second, also retaining its 2025 position. The California Institute of Technology rose one spot to third place, and the University of California, Berkeley, debuts on the list in fourth position. 

Duke University dropped from fifth to sixth rank this year, and the Georgia Institute of Technology appears on the list for the first time, coming in seventh. 

On a country level, nearly a quarter of the top 100 institutions in the ranking are from the US, more than any other nation. 

Launched in 2024 in association with Schmidt Science Fellows, the rankings were created to improve scientific excellence and collaboration across disciplines and to help universities benchmark their interdisciplinary scientific work

THE broadened the interdisciplinary scope of research for this year’s list to cover any project that comprises multiple scientific disciplines or one or more scientific disciplines combined with the social sciences, education, psychology, law, economics or clinical and health.

The U.S.’s performance in the rankings is driven by high scores for outputs metrics, which include the number and share of interdisciplinary science research publications, the citations of interdisciplinary science research, and the reputation of support for interdisciplinary teams. 

“For more than 80 years, research universities have advanced our understanding of the world, leading to dramatic improvements in health, economic prosperity, and national security. That work fundamentally is done best when people ideate and collaborate without regard for disciplinary boundaries within and between scientific areas,” Ian A. Waitz, vice president for research at MIT, said in a statement. 

“Scientific research that breaks down academic silos and crosses traditional disciplines is increasingly understood to be essential for the next generation of big breakthroughs and the key to solving the world’s most pressing problems,” said Phil Baty, THE’s chief global affairs officer.

“The world’s biggest challenges are highly complex and require cutting-edge knowledge and fresh ideas from a wide range of specialisms.”

Some people dream about retirement as heaven; I see it as hell. I do not wish to retire. I am only 80 and have been a college professor for a mere 56 years. I’m a workaholic and I have every reason to continue. My office is my Shangri-La. In a small space, it is a mini-museum of an entire career—2,000 books, plaques for well beyond a dozen teaching and scholarship awards, many photographs, travel mementos from around the world, and artifacts of every kind. All organized and I know where everything is. I look around and remember. And there is much to remember. Students from across the institution sometimes drop in just to marvel at what this office says about a career. I once wrote an article on one’s office as a teaching tool.

I’m a fairly ordinary guy. My degrees would not raise any eyebrows—undergraduate from a directional-named tertiary regional university, Ph.D. from my home-state Midwestern university. A tour in Vietnam and church-related travels all over the globe add some zest. I have had some successes in the academic world—books, lots of articles, some wider recognition and campus leadership roles. I’ve been department chair for 35 years; “it is a small place.” I’ve had some offers all the way up to a presidency inquiry. I’ve spurned them all. 

I am a teacher, the highest calling in this human existence and at a place best suited for my practice. A colleague called our role “a slice of heaven breaking into this earthly realm.” He was right. It isn’t what I do; it is who I am. Back when I began graduate school, jobs in my discipline were plentiful. My early predecessors scrambled for prestigious appointments and got them. I declared from day one that what I wanted was a small liberal arts college where I could affect students’ lives. Some accused me of low aspirations. My adviser proclaimed, “You can do better than that.” However, things changed for historians dramatically in the mid-1970s, and the opportunities, prestigious and other, dried up. But I was fortunate; my desires came about.

Teaching is about mentoring students. And I have had my share. Of the majors, at least, I remember almost all of them, now in the upper hundreds. They have done well. I’m committed to that. I remember from my first year, my first high-profile student received a prestigious national Ph.D. award. I was ecstatic. She retired many years ago as a prominent scholar and provost. And I am just as enthusiastic about the several graduates from this past spring who went on to top graduate and professional schools and good career opportunities.

I am proud to hope that I have played a role in their becoming. If it is my fortune, they will join the ranks who check in periodically, send cards and letters, get married (and divorced), have kids, and come by to see me occasionally. Maybe it is just to confirm if the old man is still alive. I have several second-generation majors and a couple of third-generation ones—again, “it is that kind of place.” I have stories about their parents and grandparents, a bit disconcerting to their elders. I’m a storyteller and I have an almost inexhaustive supply. I’ve lived a lot of life, and this is a tool to employ in speaking to new generations of students. We travel quite a bit, and every place we go, every book read, movie watched, indeed every experience, I approach didactically. How does this become part of my classroom and student learning?

I’ve heard the cliché that we should teach learning to think, not what to think. Yes, but we also have a greater responsibility. I’m not tolerant enough to accept that genocide is OK, rape is just fine or that the world is flat and John F. Kennedy is alive in a hospital in Dallas. That is the antithesis of intellect. I have little patience for conspiracy theorists or patent immorality, even if there is a lot of both going around. Our goals must be higher, our expectations more worthy.

But it isn’t just about the students. I’ve hired several department members, selected to perpetuate the purposes we want to achieve. My job is to model the norms and culture that have made us successful and for my colleagues to achieve their best selves. The greatest tribute that I have received in my career was from a now-deceased member of the department who proclaimed, “His greatest strength as a leader is that he is so deeply committed to our success that he is just as pleased to see our work succeed as he is to see his own work succeed.” I hope that I have lived up to that high accolade.

I do not enjoy summer, because my colleagues and our students are not around much. No hanging out in the office talking about everything from books, politics, philosophy, culture, teaching and maybe a little gossip. I find it hard to come to grips with what a full year would be as an extended summer. I can only read and write so many hours a day, especially if I can’t see it manifest itself in the classroom. I’ve been at this long enough to know that no matter your stature, when you are gone, your shelf life is short. In four years, or three, in many cases today, you are just a name that the ever-cycling group of current students may or may not have heard about, but in any case, you aren’t impacting them directly.

Everything about this academic life hasn’t been idyllic. Pay may have been less than ideal, frustrations exist, challenges are around every corner and today the very existence of my discipline, type of institution and indeed the liberal arts are under threat from forces internal and external.

I know that someday my portion of the quest will come to an end. Health is precarious, the mind fragile, life full of the unsuspected. I’ve witnessed that from 50-plus years of colleagues. I know my vulnerabilities—back surgeries, hearing and creeping infirmities. Things can change in the blink of an eye. But as long as mind and body cooperate, I remain a teacher, the highest calling with which we mortals are graced. It is my slice of heaven, and, as for my students and my sacred department office space, I do not want to give up either prematurely.

The economy is uncertain, but eight in 10 undergraduates somewhat or strongly agree that their college is preparing them with the skills, credentials and experiences they need to succeed in today’s job market. At the same time, most students are stressed about the future. Their biggest stressors vary but include not being to afford life after graduation, not having enough internship or work experience to get a job, and feeling a general pressure to succeed. That’s all according to new data from Inside Higher Ed’s annual Student Voice survey of more than 5,000 two- and four-year students with Generation Lab.

What can colleges do to help? The No. 1 thing Student Voice respondents want their institution to prioritize when it comes to career readiness is help finding and accessing paid internships. No. 2 is building stronger connections with potential employers. Colleges and universities could also help students better understand outcomes for past graduates of their programs: Just 14 percent of students say their college or university makes this kind of information readily available.

Shawn VanDerziel, president and CEO of the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), said there’s “no doubt that the college experience equips students with a lifelong foundation for the general job market,” so it’s “heartening to hear” they have confidence that their academic programs are setting them up to succeed.

The challenge, however, “often becomes putting that learning and experience into the job market context—translating and articulating the experience that is meaningful to employers,” he added.

Beyond helping students frame what they’ve learned as competencies they can clearly communicate to prospective employers (who are increasingly interested in skills-based hiring), colleges also need to scale experiential learning opportunities. NACE has found that paid internships, in particular, give students a measurable advantage on the job market, and that Gen Z graduates who took part in internships or other experiential learning opportunities had a more favorable view of their college experience than those who didn’t. These graduates also describe their degree as more relevant to their eventual job than peers who didn’t participate in experiential learning.

While paid internships remain the gold standard for experience, student demand for them vastly outstrips supply: According to one 2024 study, for every high-quality internship available, more than three students are seeking one. Other students can’t afford to leave the jobs that fund their educations in order to take a temporary internship, paid or unpaid; still others have caring or other responsibilities that preclude this kind of experience. VanDerziel said all of this is why some institutions are prioritizing more work-based learning opportunities—including those embedded in the classroom.

Many institutions are “working toward giving more of their students access to experiential learning and skill-building activities—providing stipends for unpaid experiential experiences and ensuring that work-study jobs incorporate career-readiness skills, for example,” he said. “There is positive movement.”

One note of caution: Colleges adding these experiences must ensure that they have “concrete skill-building and job-aligned responsibilities in order to maximize the benefits of them for the students,” VanDerziel added.

Here are the career readiness findings from the annual Student Voice survey, in five charts—plus more on the experience gap.

1. Program outcomes data is unclear to students.

Across institution types and student demographics, a fraction of respondents (12 percent over all) say they know detailed outcomes data for their program of study. A plurality of students say they know some general information. Just 14 percent indicate this information is readily available.

outcomes-1h0n25opyx3xz4p
View online

2. Students remain lukewarm on career services.

Similar to last year’s survey, students are more likely to describe career services at their institution as welcoming (31 percent) than effective (17 percent), knowledgeable about specific industries and job markets (15 percent), or forward-thinking (9 percent). Career centers across higher education are understaffed, which is part of the reason there’s a push to embed career-readiness initiatives into the curriculum. But those efforts may not be made plain enough, or come across as useful, to students: Just 8 percent of respondents this year indicate that career services are embedded in the curriculum at their institution. Double that, 16 percent, say that career services should be more embedded in the curriculum. Three in 10 indicate they haven’t interacted with career services, about the same as last year’s 30 percent.

3. Students still want more direct help finding work-based learning opportunities.

Also similar to last year, the top thing students want their institution to prioritize regarding career readiness is help finding and accessing paid internships. That’s followed by stronger connections with potential employers and courses that focus on job-relevant skills. A few differences emerge across the sample, however: Adult learners 25 and older are less likely to prioritize help finding internships (just 26 percent cite this as a top need versus 41 percent of those 18 to 24); their top want is stronger connections with potential employers. Two-year college students are also less likely to prioritize help finding internships than are their four-year peers (30 percent versus 41 percent).

4. Most students are worried about life after college, but specific stressors vary.

Just 11 percent of students say they’re not stressed about life postgraduation, though this increases to 22 percent for students 25 and older and to 17 percent among community college students. Top stressors vary, but a slight plurality of students (19 percent) are most concerned about affording life after college. Adult learners and community college students are less likely than their respective traditional-age and four-year counterparts to worry about not having enough internship or work experience.

5. Despite their anxiety, students have an underlying sense of preparation for what’s ahead.

Some 81 percent of all students agree, strongly or somewhat, that college is preparing them with the skills, credentials and experiences they need to succeed in today’s job market. This is relatively consistent across institution types and student groups, but the share decreases to 74 percent among students who have ever seriously considered stopping out of college (n=1,204).

The Widening Experience Gap

Students increasingly need all the help they can get preparing for the workforce. For the first time since 2021, the plurality of employers who contributed to NACE’s annual job outlook rated the hiring market “fair,” versus good or very good, on a five-point scale. Employers are projecting a 1.6 percent increase in hiring for the Class of 2026 when compared to the Class of 2025, comparable to the tight labor market employers reported at the end of the 2024–25 recruiting year, according to NACE.

Economic uncertainty is one factor. Artificial intelligence is another. VanDerziel said there isn’t meaningful evidence to date that early-talent, professional-level jobs are being replaced by AI, and that even adoption of AI as a tool to augment work remains slow. Yet the picture is still emerging. One August study found a 13 percent relative employment decline for young workers in the most AI-exposed occupations, such as software development and customer support. In NACE’s 2026 Job Outlook, employers focused on early-career hiring also reported that 13 percent of available entry-level jobs now require AI skills.

The August study, called “Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence,” frames experience as a differentiator in an AI-impacted job market. In this sense, AI may be widening what’s referred to as the experience gap, or when early-career candidates’ and employers’ expectations don’t align—a kind of catch-22 in which lack of experience can limit one from getting the entry-level job that would afford them such experience.

Ndeye Sarr, a 23-year-old engineering student at Perimeter College at Georgia State University who wants to study civil and environmental engineering at a four-year institution next fall, believes that her studies so far are setting her up for success. Earlier this year, she and several Perimeter peers made up one of just 12 teams in the country invited to the Community College Innovation Challenge Innovation Boot Camp, where they presented RoyaNest, the low-cost medical cooling device they designed to help babies born with birth asphyxia in low-resource areas. The team pitched the project to a panel of industry professionals and won second-place honors. They also recently initiated the patenting process for the device.

“This has helped me have a bigger vision of all the problems that are happening in the world that I might be able to help with when it comes to medical devices and things like that,” Sarr said, adding that faculty mentorship played a big role in the team’s success. “I think that’s what we’re most grateful for. Perimeter College is a pretty small college, so you get to be in direct contact with most of your mentors, your professors, which is very rare in most settings. We always get the support we need it anytime we’re working on something, which is pretty great.”

RoyaNest was born out of a class assignment requiring students to design something that did not require electricity. Sarr said she wishes most courses would require such hands-on learning, since it makes class content immediately relevant and has already helped put her in touch with the broader world of engineering in meaningful ways. This view echoes another set of findings from the main 2025 Student Voice survey: The top two things students say would boost their immediate academic success are fewer high-stakes exams and more relevant course content. And, of course, there are implications for the experience gap.

Sometimes you can even be in your senior year, and you will be like, ‘I don’t think I have all these skills!’ Even for an entry-level job, right?”

—Student Ndeye Sarr

“Mostly it’s like you go to class, and they will give you a lecture because you have to learn, and then you go do a test,” Sarr said of college so far. “But my thinking is that you can also do those hands-on experiences in the classroom that you might have to do once we start getting into jobs. Because when you look at the job descriptions, they expect you to do a lot of things. Sometimes you can even be in your senior year, and you will be like, ‘I don’t think I have all these skills!’ Even for an entry-level job, right?”

This challenge also has implications for pedagogy, which is already under pressure to evolve—in part due to the rise of generative AI. Student success administrators surveyed earlier this year by Inside Higher Ed with Hanover Research described a gap between the extent to which high-impact teaching practices—such as those endorsed by the American Association of Colleges and Universities—are highly encouraged at their institution and widely adopted (65 percent versus 36 percent, respectively). And while 87 percent of administrators agreed that students graduate from their institution ready to succeed in today’s job market, half (51 percent) said their college or university should focus more on helping students find paid internships and other experiential learning opportunities.

In addition to the national innovation challenge, Sarr attended the Society of Women Engineers’ annual conference this year, where she said the interviewing and other skills she’s learned from Perimeter’s career services proved helpful. Still, Sarr said she—like most Student Voice respondents—worries about life postgraduation. Top concerns for her are financial in nature. She also feels a related pressure to succeed. Originally from Senegal, she said her family and friends back home have high expectations for her.

“You pay a lot of money to go to college, so imagine you graduate and then there’s no way you can find a job. It’s very stressful, and I am from a country where everybody’s like, ‘OK, we expect her to do good,’” Sarr said. But the immediate challenge is paying four-year college expenses starting next year, and financing graduate school after that.

“I want to go as far as I can when it comes to my education. I really value it, so that’s something I am very scared about,” she said. “There’s a lot of possibilities. There are scholarships, but it’s not like everybody can get them.”

VanDerziel of NACE said that, ultimately, “Today’s labor market is tough, and students know it. So it doesn’t surprise me that they are feeling anxiety about obtaining a job that will allow them to afford their postgraduation life. Many students have to pay back loans, are uncertain of the job market they are going to be graduating into and are concerned about whether their salary will be enough.”

A judge ordered federal agencies Friday to end their “blanket policy of denying any future grants” to the University of California, Los Angeles, and further ruled that the Trump administration can’t seek payouts from any UC campus “in connection with any civil rights investigation” under Titles VI or IX of federal law.

The ruling also prohibits the Department of Justice and federal funding agencies from withholding funds, “or threatening to do so, to coerce the UC in violation of the First Amendment or Tenth Amendment.” In all, the order, if not overturned on appeal, stops the administration’s attempt to pressure UCLA to pay $1.2 billion and make multiple other concessions, including to stop enrolling “foreign students likely to engage in anti-Western, anti-American, or antisemitic disruptions or harassment” and stop “performing hormonal interventions and ‘transgender’ surgeries” on anyone under 18 at its medical school and affiliated hospitals.

The administration’s targeting of the UC system came to the fore on July 29. That’s when the DOJ said its months-long investigations across the system had so far concluded that UCLA violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in its response to alleged antisemitism at a spring 2024 pro-Palestinian protest encampment.

Federal agencies—including the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and Department of Energy—quickly began freezing funding; UC estimated it lost $584 million. But UC researchers sued and, even before Friday’s ruling, U.S. District Court judge Rita F. Lin of the Northern District of California ordered the restoration of almost all of the frozen funding.

Friday’s ruling came in a case filed this fall by the American Association of University Professors, the affiliated American Federation of Teachers and other unions. Lin again was the judge.

“Defendants did not engage in the required notice and hearing processes under Title VI for cutting off funds for alleged discrimination,” she wrote.

“With every day that passes, UCLA continues to be denied the chance to win new grants, ratchetting [sic] up Defendants’ pressure campaign,” she wrote. “And numerous UC faculty and staff have submitted declarations describing how Defendants’ actions have already chilled speech throughout the UC system. They describe how they have stopped teaching or researching topics they are afraid are too ‘left’ or ‘woke,’ in order to avoid triggering further funding cancellations by Defendants. They also give examples of projects the UC has stopped due to fear of the same reprisals. These are classic, predictable First Amendment harms, and exactly what Defendants publicly said that they intended.”

Former University of Virginia president Jim Ryan has broken his silence concerning his abrupt resignation, accusing the Board of Visitors of dishonesty and complicity in his ouster, which came amid federal government scrutiny over the university’s diversity, equity and inclusion practices.

In a 12-page letter to the UVA Faculty Senate on Friday, Ryan wrote that he was “stunned and angry” over the board’s lack of honesty as it faced pressure from the federal government to force him out due to an alleged failure to dismantle DEI initiatives. Ryan also wrote that recent letters by UVA rector Rachel Sheridan and Governor Glenn Youngkin do not “present an accurate accounting of my resignation,” which prompted him to release his own statement.

Ryan accused Youngkin of playing a significant part in attracting scrutiny from the Department of Justice, first by handing down a resolution to the board drafted by his office that “was quite sweeping and filled with inflammatory rhetoric criticizing DEI.” Ryan wrote that the board passed a modified, “fairly mild” version of the resolution, which required UVA to dissolve its DEI office and “move all permissible programs to another institutional home.”

But after its passage, Youngkin declared on Fox News that “DEI is dead” at UVA. That statement, Ryan wrote, created confusion and overstated the reach of the resolution. As UVA began efforts to implement the resolution, Ryan wrote that Sheridan told him not to publicly announce any DEI changes, which he alleged created the perception of inaction and attracted the DOJ’s attention.

Ryan wrote that UVA soon received an inquiry about why it was slow to dismantle DEI.

“The letter asked us to explain why we hadn’t complied with the Board’s resolution, though it exaggerated the scope and nature of that resolution, suggesting—as had Governor Youngkin on television—that we were supposed to eliminate the entirety of DEI,” Ryan wrote. “It was unclear, and still is, why the United States Department of Justice would have the interest or authority to enforce a resolution of the Board of a state university as opposed to enforcing federal law.”

Ryan also questioned whether the board was truthful about the DOJ seeking his resignation or if it was a scheme concocted by members who wanted to remove him as their relationship soured.

In closing his letter, Ryan argued that he was committed to following the law and revising policies and practices that were flawed or “if there were persuasive, principled reasons to change course.” But he would not sacrifice UVA’s core values or his principles in doing so—especially if those changes were due to “prevailing political winds” or “the political ambitions of some,” he wrote. He added that both the board members and governor’s office had accused him of being stubborn, which was perhaps true and may have been the real reason for his exit.

“But stubborn and principled often look the same, especially to those who are unprincipled,” Ryan wrote.

Inside Higher Ed has uploaded Ryan’s full letter below.

Ryan’s letter follows a message Sheridan sent to the UVA Faculty Senate on Thursday. In that letter, Sheridan downplayed the pressure from the federal government to force Ryan out. While she acknowledged that the Department of Justice “lacked confidence in President Ryan to make the changes that the Trump Administration believed were necessary to ensure compliance,” she disputed the notion that his resignation was part of the agreement that the university recently reached with the federal government to pause investigations into DEI practices.

While Sheridan did not elaborate on specific threats from the Department of Justice, as Ryan alleged, she wrote that Trump administration officials “made clear that if the University did not chart a different course, the DOJ could and would expand its investigations into additional issues, subject other personnel to scrutiny, and pursue the cutoff of federal funding.”

The full text of that letter is available below.

Also on Thursday, Youngkin sent a letter related to Ryan’s departure to Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger, who has called for UVA to halt its ongoing presidential search until her board picks are in place. The Republican governor pushed back on his Democratic successor’s claims that Ryan was ousted as a result of federal overreach and accused her of interfering in the search. Youngkin also accused Ryan of “not being committed to following federal law.”

That letter has been uploaded in full below.

Board Under Fire

Ryan’s letter prompted a flurry of criticism of the board from faculty, lawmakers and others.

The UVA Faculty Senate passed a resolution Friday calling for greater transparency, a pause in the presidential search until the board “is at full complement with members confirmed by the general assembly,” and the immediate resignation of Sheridan and Vice Rector Porter Wilkinson.

Faculty members accused the board of making UVA a target.

“The rector, the vice rector, and others on the board conspired to oust Jim Ryan, and they made the decision to leverage pressure from the Department of Justice in order to enact that ouster,” Matthew Hedstrom, a religious studies professor, said in Friday’s Faculty Senate meeting.

Democratic state lawmakers also blasted the board in the aftermath of Ryan’s letter.

“Former UVA President Jim Ryan’s letter details a shocking abuse of power by the UVA Board of Visitors and collaboration between a Governor & [attorney general] who betrayed the state and schools they swore to protect so they could curry favor with MAGA extremists—this is far from over,” Virginia state senator Scott Surovell, the Democratic majority leader, wrote on X.

Surovell is among a group of Democratic lawmakers who have recently amplified pressure on UVA over Ryan’s resignation and the subsequent agreement it reached with the DOJ. Democrats, who have blocked multiple Youngkin board appointments this year—many of them GOP donors and conservative political figures—have accused UVA of a lack of transparency around Ryan’s exit and of giving in to “extortionate tactics” in striking a deal with the DOJ.

Ross Mugler, interim president and CEO of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, released a statement in which he argued, “What happened at UVA shows how deeply damaging it is when governing boards become extensions of political actors rather than independent fiduciaries.” Mugler also warned of potential harms to academic freedom, community trust and the long-term health of the university due to external political pressures.

“President Ryan’s detailed account of the pressures leading to his resignation reveals an alarming example of political and ideological interference in university governance,” he wrote.

Neither UVA nor Youngkin’s office responded to requests for comment from Inside Higher Ed.