Tag: Higher

As my grandson begins the college application process, he recently asked, “Why do I have to take all this liberal arts stuff? I want to design computer games. What do English literature and history have to do with computer programming?”

But it’s not just my grandson who is asking questions like this. Parents also want to know what the liberal arts have to do with their child getting a high-paying first job so that they can pay off their college loans. And that stands to reason. College has gotten very expensive, with tuitions increasing rapidly since the early 2000s. At the same time, many colleges that once were bastions of the liberal arts and sciences have increasingly become defined by vocationalism. Some colleges have dropped the liberal arts and sciences almost entirely. Computer programming is in. Comparative literature is out.

While nothing is wrong with majoring in a vocational discipline like computer science or accounting, I want to argue here that all students, whatever they plan to do in life, will need a healthy dose of the liberal arts and sciences to make it through life. Why do I say this? Because going to college is not just about getting a well-paying first job—or other well-paying jobs after that. As many experts have said, it’s also about developing core skills like reading, writing and mathematics; about learning what it means to live in a free and democratic society; about appreciating the performing and musical arts; and about understanding the principles of science and numeracy. These competencies are just a few of the countless ones that are developed largely by studying the liberal arts and sciences—competencies that, perhaps most important, all students will need and that will apply far more throughout their entire lives than narrow vocational skills.

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Indeed, this understanding came home to me in an affecting and very personal way after I had retired, following several decades serving as a college professor and administrator. I came to the stark realization upon retiring that I was now … nothing! I no longer had any major responsibilities, only plenty of leisure time on my hands. And then, when I thought that my intellectual and productive life was over, memories of many of the liberal arts courses I took as a college freshman 47 years before came to my aid.

Let me explain.

During my freshman year, in 1961, I took a required general education liberal arts course entitled Western Civilization. As we read Homer, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle and Herodotus, I struggled to stay awake in class. I didn’t see what relevance Plato and the others had to the era in which I lived or, indeed, to the future. After almost flunking, I vowed never to take a course like that again. Fast-forward 47 years. Just as I was preparing to retire as a college president, I experienced growing shame and embarrassment that I had blown off my Western Civilization course freshman year, especially since many of the books I had read not only served as the basis for what I had taught as a history professor, but also because many of them have become extremely relevant to the political turmoil taking place in the world in which I now lived.

As a retired academic, I wanted to prove to myself that I could have done better. It was simply a matter of pride. So, at the invitation of Chris Nelson, a friend who was president of St. John’s College, the “Great Books” school in Annapolis, Md., I did an utterly crazy thing and enrolled at his institution. I took the first-year seminar, rereading many of the classics I had stumbled over during my first real freshman year. I had a blast and ended up writing a humorous book about the experience entitled Racing Odysseus: A College President Becomes a Freshman Again (University of California Press).

Another freshman-year liberal arts and sciences course I took in 1961 was Introductory Biology, as part of my science requirement. At the time, I had absolutely no desire to go into medicine or become a scientist. So I wondered why I was required to take this course. “What does biology have to do with anything in my future life?” I asked myself, anticipating my grandson’s question many years later.

I took the course, did reasonably well in it and then moved on, taking no more science for the duration of my university career. Now in retirement 47 years later, I had an opportunity to join my family for a cruise to the Galapagos Islands in Ecuador, where Charles Darwin, the naturalist and biologist, developed the theory of evolution.

Just before departing for our cruise, I remembered freshman-year biology where we studied (among other things) selections from Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. I dusted off a copy I had saved through the years, borrowed from the library a copy of the diary he kept of his voyage to the Galapagos on HMS Beagle and packed both books in my suitcase. Early every morning, along with a growing number of fellow passengers collected around me, I stood on the prow of our ship and read out loud sections of Darwin’s diary as we passed by San Cristobal, Floreana, Isabela and Santiago—the islands Darwin knew so well. The intro biology course I was required to take freshman year now came to life for me and made our trip to the Galapagos uncommonly special.

Finally, another freshman-year liberal arts course I took was Introductory Spanish—again, only because it also was required. But now, well into my retirement, my Episcopal church became involved with a sister congregation in Cuba, with the result that my interest in Spanish—long dormant if not completely suppressed—was immediately revived. Over the next three years, I accompanied my Spanish-speaking wife on several expeditions she led to Havana and Santa Cruz del Norte, where our sister church was located. But because I could not speak or read Spanish, I missed out on so much.

So when COVID hit in 2020 (and with even more time now on my hands) I signed up for an adult beginner’s course in Spanish at our local high school. I also read everything I could get my hands on about Cuba, its history and culture. And between travel to Cuba, my Spanish course and what I was reading, I became an important part of our church’s outreach activities in Cuba and am still very much involved today. And it all stated inauspiciously in freshman Spanish, a language I never thought I would ever have to use.

The point I’m trying to make here is that I’ve learned firsthand that curtailing or eliminating altogether the liberal arts and sciences from a student’s college education simply because they don’t seem relevant to getting a good job is extremely shortsighted. It is shortsighted because a major purpose of an undergraduate education is to open a student’s mind to the arts, literature, science and foreign languages and cultures for the simple reason that (as happened to me) throughout their lives they will actually use what the liberal arts and sciences taught them—sometimes, even especially, after they have retired.

Today, in the ninth decade of my life, I fill my days exploring all the things to which my liberal arts education introduced me so long ago. I’m happy to find that education continuing to pay off as much or perhaps even more than ever for me right now—and hope and believe that will be the case for every college graduate throughout the years who’s had exposure to the liberal arts and sciences.

On Sept. 27, the Kansas Board of Regents released encouraging news: overall enrollment in the state’s community colleges, universities and other public higher education institutions grew 2 percent from last fall, according to preliminary numbers. 

The same day, the University of Kansas released triumphant news: it achieved its highest enrollment in 13 years and its largest-ever freshman class, which grew 18 percent from last year. Kansas State University, meanwhile, saw only 0.1 percent increase in its overall enrollment. But that was its first increase since 2014.

The Board of Regents’ data did show that three smaller public universities lost students. For two of these, the drops were modest: 2.2 percent fewer students at Pittsburg State and a less than 1 percent dip at Fort Hays State.

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But then there was Emporia State University. Its enrollment plummeted 12.5 percent from last fall.

The raw number of lost students sounds even more ominous: 666. Emporia State now has 4,658 students, down 23 percent over the past decade.

Is Emporia State paying for its sins—sins, at least, in the eyes of tenure supporters?

About a year ago, Emporia State gained infamy among professors for abruptly informing 33 employees—30 of whom were faculty members, including 23 tenured professors—that they were losing their jobs. The fallout, and news coverage of that fallout, continues.

The American Association of University Professors publicly censured Emporia State’s administration, saying, “Unsatisfactory conditions of academic freedom and tenure have been found to prevail” at the university.

The AAUP has said that, under its recommended policies, universities can terminate tenured faculty members “under extraordinary circumstances because of a demonstrably bona fide financial exigency,” defined as “a severe financial crisis that fundamentally compromises the academic integrity of the institution” and can’t be solved in another way.

The association says faculty members should have input on whether a financial exigency exists, and that there should be due process, including a hearing before a faculty committee, for professors proposed to be laid off as a result. The AAUP stated in an investigative report that Emporia State didn’t declare financial exigency in this way and didn’t provide due process for those terminated.

From 2016 to 2020, Emporia State’s enrollment bobbed up and down between roughly 5,700 and 5,900. But enrollment dropped to 5,615 in 2021 and, last fall, it dropped to 5,324.

Officials cited enrollment declines and associated revenue drops for spurring the cuts in the first place. A dean said the university had previously chosen “to kick the can down the road,” forcing current leaders to act quickly to avoid many more possible layoffs.

But the 5 percent drop in enrollment between 2021 and 2022 more than doubled between 2022 and this fall, after the publicity around the cuts. The Kansas Reflector, which previously reported on the enrollment plunge, has covered the developments.

Ousted faculty members continue battling the university through the Kansas Office of Administrative Hearings and state court. Over the summer, 11 tenured professors who were terminated sued the university and the state Board of Regents in federal court.

Does any of this have to do with why Emporia State lost more than a tenth of its students in a single year? Gwen Larson, spokeswoman for the university, told Inside Higher Ed Monday she didn’t know whether university leaders had looked into that question.

“We actually don’t have any data about that particular supposition,” Larson said. “We understand why so much attention has been focused on the actions we took last fall but, over all, we are trying to rightsize Emporia State University for the future.”

But in a follow-up email Tuesday afternoon, Larson wrote, “Certainly, the changes we made last fall have impacted enrollment. We have completely changed our academic structure, we canceled some programs, we added some programs. We are in the middle of a transformation and are rebuilding our entire institution. Change takes time. We expected enrollment to be down.”

She wrote that the university expected an enrollment drop of 10 to 14 percent and “anticipates an additional single-digit drop in fall 2024 and stabilization in fall 2025.”

Kim Simons, a biochemistry and chemistry professor who is Emporia State’s Faculty Senate president, said, “I don’t think an analysis has been done, so we don’t know for certain” whether the cuts and controversies might have changed prospective students’ minds about coming to the institution. He noted that it’s hard to ask students who didn’t enroll why they didn’t, but he thinks the faculty and academic program cuts are “reasonable possibilities.”

A Board of Regents spokesman didn’t return requests for comment this week on why Emporia State’s recent enrollment diverged so much from other institutions’.

Larson proffered that the drop in Emporia State’s graduate students—who accounted for about half of the 666-student drop, and who represent about half the university’s overall enrollment—could be due to lower demand among students for online career advancement programs amid a labor shortage in an improved economy.

“We’re investing in what we believe, from analysis, will be growing career paths, plus what our students are telling us they want based on what they are enrolling in,” she said.

Unavoidable Decline?

While Emporia State made headlines for the way it ignored tenure in slashing faculty jobs, it’s certainly not the only regional public university in the past decade to jettison tenured faculty members in making significant position and program cuts.

Universities often put a positive spin on cuts, saying they’re about investing in growing programs rather than settling for a smaller institution. So how have other universities fared since axing employees and degree offerings? Anecdotes point in different directions.

In 2015, the AAUP censured the University of Southern Maine after it eliminated four academic programs and more than 50 tenured and nontenured faculty positions, all without declaring financial exigency. (On Wednesday, the university said it actually cut six programs in 2015.) The previous year, the university had backed off some proposed cuts after national blowback, but then it charged ahead and proceeded to cut between one-fifth and one-sixth of its full-time faculty.

Southern Maine’s enrollment has continued declining, from more than 10,000 in 2014–15 to 7,915 last fall.

But enrollment has also dropped at institutions that backed off from big cuts. Unlike Southern Maine, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point abandoned its controversial 2018 plan to end 13 majors and possibly lay off tenured faculty—the chancellor at the time said other budget reductions, along with resignations and retirements, eliminated the need for layoffs.

Nevertheless, UW Stevens Point’s enrollment continued to slide. Around the time of the controversy, its numbers shot up from 8,208 in fall 2017 to 9,107 in fall 2018 (two colleges merged into it in 2018) but then plummeted the next fall to 8,325. Enrollment continued shrinking through fall 2022, when UW Stevens Point had about 8,000 students. A University of Wisconsin spokesman said Stevens Point’s “estimated preliminary enrollment” for this fall, based on first-day enrollment figures, is 8,256.

Western Illinois University, by contrast, has had a long history of cuts, drawing media coverage and protest rallies. In December 2015, officials said they planned to cut 50 faculty positions. In June 2016, its Board of Governors approved cutting four degree programs. Enrollment dropped from 11,094 in fall 2015 to 10,373 in fall 2016 and continued plummeting.

By fall 2019, Western Illinois had 7,624 students. In spring 2019, the university announced more than 130 employee layoffs, including 29 faculty members, citing financial challenges from enrollment loss and other issues. Enrollment fell a little for the next two years but then recovered in 2022 to 7,643, the latest year for which data are available.

Donald A. Resnick, a global higher education consultant who previously served as the New School’s chief enrollment officer, among other roles, said press coverage could contribute to a loss of confidence in an institution among students, family members, guidance counselors and others who influence enrollment choices. And with upset university employees “in relatively small locales” where “people know each other, you’re going to have this general tentacle-ing of an understanding of an environment of discontent,” he said.

However, Resnick said that, unless institutions survey students who were admitted but didn’t enroll as to why they chose not to, “it’s incredibly hard to prove cause and effect.”

“Every individual circumstance needs to be looked at just that way: individually,” Resnick said. “Many times, institutions don’t do enough research into the whys.”

So why the drop at Emporia State?

“I wish we were better about creating tools to be able to track data like that, instead of just grasping at straws,” said Mallory Bishop, vice president of Emporia State’s Faculty Senate. She said students may feel general negative “vibes” about the university, yet they may not be following traditional media enough to know the degree of the university’s “turmoil.”

Robert Zemsky, a University of Pennsylvania professor who studies higher education, said he doesn’t know much about Kansas. He spoke to bigger trends.

“There’s a general devaluing of higher education except at the very top of the market,” Zemsky said. “The big are getting bigger, and the rich are getting richer, and everybody else is in trouble.”

The 25,470-student University of Kansas—a member of the prestigious Association of American Universities research institution group—sure seems to be doing better this fall than Emporia State. But the University of Kansas has also been mulling program cuts in recent years.

And there is a flagship in another state that’s recently made headlines for slashing faculty positions and degree offerings: West Virginia University.

Will those cuts and the public attention mean an even bigger enrollment decline next fall for WVU, which has been seeing drops every year for a decade? WVU, echoing the other institutions that have made cuts, has said it wants to invest in growing programs after cutting low-enrollment ones.

Rose Casey, an assistant professor in WVU’s English department, raised concern at a Monday Faculty Senate meeting that “every single [employee] I know is on the market. I’ve literally never encountered that before here.”

“And, in addition, every Ph.D. student I know is applying for other Ph.D. programs, because people are terrified about staying because of the long-term consequences of the instability we’re going through right now,” Casey said, “and the absolutely massive reputational damage that has been caused by the extent of these cuts and the way they’ve been carried out.”

Bishop said she thinks there’s a lot of value in figuring out why enrollment dropped at Emporia State, both for the university itself and for others who might see its cuts as a “model.” Everyone on campus lost something, she said, including leadership.

“It just really, fundamentally, hurt people,” she said, “and I think we need to put more attention there as well.”

We last caught up with Cindy Cogswell back in 2016. At that time, Cindy was a postdoctoral fellow for assessment and evaluation at Dartmouth College. Since 2022, Cindy has served as director of data strategy at New York University for global programs, student affairs and university life.

Q: Tell us about your role at NYU. What sort of work does a director of data strategy do?

A: Thank you, Josh, for the chance to catch up and share some of my career’s evolution!

As director of data strategy, I help leverage institutional data to the benefit of our students. Practically, this looks like strategizing and identifying where data exists that can be used by staff in Student Affairs to inform the work they do for and with students. And, conversely, I serve as the liaison to central IT, IR, Data Governance and more to connect with the work they are doing and relay back to my colleagues updates and information.

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Some of my current projects include leading the creation of a system of record for parent/family data, being involved in an effort to link systems together via a Student 360 approach and running a data camp for staff with my data analyst to help attendees know how to look at their own data and learn basics in Tableau.

Q: Can you share how your training and previous roles prepared you for your current leadership position at NYU?

A: Absolutely. This work has built on experiences, expertise and knowledge gained across all of my professional work. Thinking linearly, my work at the Center for Postsecondary Research at Indiana University has served as a baseline for a) centering on the student and b) looking at a 35,000-foot view of trends, strategies and ways to unstuck change at colleges and universities. This has helped me at NYU because of the sheer scale of campus—we have 60,000 students, three degree-granting locations and 12 sites.

From my internship with the Higher Learning Commission, I carry with me an awareness of what is crucial to do well by our students and stakeholders, which practically helps me prioritize. Holistically, from my doctoral coursework at Indiana and my postdoc at Dartmouth College, I show up as a researcher. Dartmouth had a scholar-teacher model, and while I’m not a full-time faculty member, I try to show up as a scholar-practitioner by asking questions like, who else has experienced this phenomenon? What can we learn from others? What methodology best fits our learning needs in this space?

And, most recently, drawing from being a director of strategic planning and assessment for student affairs at Ohio University, I was part of a few projects that helped me see what data strategy work is [and] gave me experience leading a campuswide effort, and these have helped prepare me tremendously for what I get to do now.

Q: What advice do you have for academics interested in a career in postsecondary evaluation, research and data?

A: If you’re interested but not yet involved, get experience in this work. Check with your college or university’s assessment, institutional research and/or data governance staff to see if there is a way you can get involved. Conduct an informational interview and ask if there is a project or an upcoming RFP that you could observe or get involved with.

I am happy to connect with readers as well!

All of us have our own markers that tell us fall is here. It might be apple or pumpkin picking, cooler days and nights, or the arrival of the college and professional football seasons. For those of us in the college counseling world, the National Association for College Admission Counseling conference is a line of demarcation between the start of the academic year and the onset of recommendation-writing season, which will consume our waking hours, and perhaps our dreams, for the next couple of months.

The release of the U.S. News rankings has never been on that list for me. I neither look forward to nor pay attention to the rankings in most years, and I’m always annoyed by the annual local newspaper stories highlighting how universities and colleges in my state have moved up or down the rankings. Is that really news?

There were, however, two noteworthy events arising out of this year’s rankings release. The first was a change in the methodology used in compiling the rankings, described by U.S. News as “the most significant methodological change in the rankings’ history.” U.S. News is placing greater emphasis on outcomes related to social mobility—on graduating students from all backgrounds, with manageable debt and set up for postgraduate success—while removing class size, the percentage of faculty with terminal degrees, alumni giving, high school class rank and the proportion of students taking on federal loans as ranking factors.

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The other is the reaction to the new rankings on the part of colleges and universities whose rankings dropped as a result of the changes in methodology. The most prominent of those was Vanderbilt University, which saw its ranking among national universities drop from 13th to 18th.

On the morning the rankings were released, Vanderbilt chancellor Daniel Diermeier and provost C. Cybele Raver sent an email to students, faculty and alumni addressing the drop in rank. The statement was a little over-the-top, leading a columnist for Vanderbilt’s student newspaper, The Hustler, to label the email “damage control.”

Vanderbilt’s leaders described the new rankings methodology as “disadvantaging many private research universities while privileging large public institutions.” Their statement took issue with U.S. News’s new emphasis on social mobility: while acknowledging that social mobility is an “important consideration, to be sure,” they argued that it is nevertheless misleading for U.S. News to “commingle this policy concern with measures of educational quality.”

They also argued that the metrics used in the old methodology were better measures of “quality,” and they described the changes as reflecting “incompetence and lack of rigor” on the part of U.S. News.

There’s a lot to unpack here.

Let’s start with the changes in U.S. News’s methodology. For years the rankings have justifiably been the subject of criticism, with one of the major beefs being that U.S. News focuses on input factors rather than output factors. The methodology change is an attempt to respond to that criticism, and U.S. News deserves credit on that front.

The bigger question, though, has always been whether the metrics used in the rankings actually measure what they are purported to indicate. For years admissions selectivity was a major metric. But does admissions selectivity tell us anything about academic quality? The belief that “the harder a place is to get in to, the better it must be” is a suburban legend.

Or take the alumni giving rate, one of the metrics removed this year. U.S. News used to suggest that it measured alumni satisfaction, but doesn’t it really measure the effectiveness of an institution’s development arm?

So is the focus on outcomes and measures of social mobility a better approach? That’s actually two different questions.

A spokesperson for U.S. News told Inside Higher Ed that outcome measures like student debt and postgraduate income are more important indicators of value. That would seem to beg the question of why it has taken U.S. News until now to put more emphasis on those factors while eliminating others.

It also raises the question about whether U.S. News is fundamentally changing what the rankings are intended to measure. Student debt and postgraduate income may be important indicators of “value,” but is that the same thing as academic quality? That’s at the heart of Vanderbilt’s criticisms.

The broader question is whether social mobility should be one of the overriding goals of colleges and universities. I think the answer is yes. Higher education has a responsibility to society to be an engine of access and opportunity for traditionally underrepresented groups. Research like that done by Raj Chetty and his co-authors demonstrates that what U.S. News calls America’s “best” colleges aren’t distinguishing themselves on the social mobility front.

Let’s turn to Vanderbilt. The statement issued by the chancellor and provost comes across as tone-deaf, but we all know that they were likely bombarded with panicked emails from alumni and parents asking what’s happening in Nashville that has led to a drop from 13th to 18th in the rankings.

The answer, of course, is that the change in ranking is a function of the change in methodology. Vanderbilt is just as good a place as it was a year ago, and one of the flaws in the U.S. News rankings is their false precision. How much difference is there between institutions five places apart? I wish Vanderbilt had stuck with that line of argument rather than attacking the new rankings methodology as “flawed,” marred by “incompetence and lack of rigor.” The same charges could have been made with the old methodology.

I find myself sympathetic to Vanderbilt’s argument that the data on indebtedness and postgraduate earnings are incomplete because U.S. News sources them from the Department of Education’s College Scorecard. That scorecard only reports those metrics for students receiving federal aid, so in Vanderbilt’s case it leaves out two-thirds of its graduates.

On the other hand, I am particularly bothered by Vanderbilt’s characterization of the new methodology as “privileging large public institutions” with higher percentages of Pell Grant recipients and first-generation students. Any methodology is going to advantage some institutions and disadvantage others, but the use of the word “privileges” is too strong, too emotional and plain wrong.

Vanderbilt is in some ways a victim of its own success. It is among a group of nouveau riche institutions that have become dramatically more selective over the past 30 years. In the 1990s, Vanderbilt admitted 65 percent of its applicants (per, ironically, the 1993 edition of the U.S. News ranking), whereas today that number is under 10 percent. Is Vanderbilt that much better today? Probably not. Has that success led to institutional hubris? Perhaps.

The statement by Diermeier and Raver is also a reflection of the new definition of “American exceptionalism” exemplified by politicians like Donald Trump and Kari Lake, where you take exception to any result that doesn’t go your way.

The reality, of course, is that neither input factors nor output factors come close to measuring what is most important about a college education—the experience a student has in and out of the classroom while in college. That’s extremely difficult to measure, but trying to rank colleges without that component is like trying to rank “America’s Best Churches” without taking into account spirituality.

Is there any way to fix that, to determine just how much value a particular college or university adds?

I’d like to suggest an experiment. Author Malcolm Gladwell has suggested that prestigious colleges are “selection effect” institutions rather than “treatment effect” institutions, with their prestige reflecting whom they are able to select rather than what value they add. I’d love to see a higher education version of the movie Trading Places, with a university like Vanderbilt trading its student body with that of a college that is much less selective and much more socioeconomically diverse. Would the outcomes be any different?

More than 200 colleges and universities are eligible to receive federal funding designated for institutions with large numbers of Asian American, Native American and Pacific Islander students this year, but the majority are not applying.

Just 32 of 192 eligible institutions received this funding last year, according to a report from the Postsecondary National Policy Institute.

Experts say a lack of knowledge about the Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander–serving institutions, or the federal designation AANAPISI—it formally became the newest of the 11 minority-serving institution designations in 2007—and its competitive nature contribute to this disparity.

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But perhaps the biggest barrier to accessing AANAPISI grants is in the bureaucratic process of distributing funds for minority-serving institutions, or MSIs, which puts some restrictions on institutions that qualify for multiple designations.

That’s because, as colleges serve an increasingly diverse population of students, many AANAPISIs are also eligible to apply for money earmarked for other MSI categories. In many cases, federal policy prevents a college from claiming money for both designations at the same time. And since AANAPISI is the newest and one of the least-funded designations, college leaders are more likely to apply for money under one of the more well-known, better-funded MSI designations.

To be eligible for AANAPISI funding, at least 10 percent of a college’s student body must be Asian American, Native American or Pacific Islander, according to federal guidelines.

“Because institutions are faced with choosing one grant over another, we fear that Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students will continue to be left behind in the higher ed student equity and student success agenda,” said Rowena M. Tomaneng, president of San José City College and head of the board of Asian Pacific Americans in Higher Education. “This barrier also pits MSIs against one another and may negatively impact campus climate within dual designated institutions.”

U.S. senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii introduced a bill in 2015 that would have eliminated this policy barrier, but it never moved out of the Senate.

Federal Recognition

But a recent effort by the Biden administration to raise awareness about AANAPI-serving institutions is bringing renewed attention to how that funding can help students—and the barriers that often prevent eligible colleges from accessing it.

Two weeks ago, President Joe Biden issued a proclamation declaring Sept. 24–Oct. 1 AANAPISI Week. He reiterated his commitment to “strengthening these critical institutions” while touting a $5 billion investment (via the American Rescue Plan) in AANAPISIs. According to a White House news release, the money went toward emergency financial aid for students and other efforts “to help students stay enrolled, lower costs, keep faculty and staff employed, and slow the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Erika L. Moritsugu, deputy assistant to the president and the White House’s senior liaison on Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander matters, said in an email, “The proclamation is a testament of this commitment and the role of the Administration to uplift the vital role of Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs), providing a critical pathway to higher education for millions of Americans and to secure safety and stability in the middle class.”

Moritsugu added that Biden sees and values the contributions of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, who “represent a diverse constituency of over 50 ethnicities with a variety of identities, cultures, histories, and backgrounds; many of [whom] are indigenous, first in their families to graduate college, and those underrepresented students who have faced a legacy of discrimination in our nation.”

The attention brought on by Biden’s proclamation is welcomed by the AANAPISI community, which wants more funding to expand access to higher education. More than 20 million Americans identify as Asian American, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That number is expected to double by 2060.

“It’s supporting the visibility we need,” Tomaneng said of the proclamation. “When the public is receiving information about the historical contributions and ongoing challenges and barriers our communities face—not just in education but across other sectors—it goes a long way to advancing our efforts to make change.”

Since AANAPISI funding first became available about 15 years ago, Tomaneng has worked on writing federal grants designed to serve students in that demographic.

As of fall 2020, AANAPISIs enrolled 412,680 Asian American and Pacific Islander students, who made up 21 percent of those institutions’ total enrollment, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Funding Helps Outcomes

Prior to taking the helm at San José City College, Tomaneng was the associate vice president of instruction at DeAnza College, another community college in California, where close to 40 percent of the student body is Asian. Tomaneng helped secure AANAPISI funding for DeAnza that supported a learning community program called Impact AAPI, which provides academic support for students and a culturally conscious curriculum facilitated by the Asian American and Asian Studies Department.

The program at DeAnza was a success, according to a 2014 report from the National Commission on Asian American and Pacific Islander Research in Education, which analyzed the results of some of the first AANAPISI-funded programs. Compared to students who didn’t participate, DeAnza’s Impact AAPI students were more likely to transition from remedial to college-level English courses, get passing grades in them and earn associate degrees.

Improved academic outcomes for low-income Asian American and Pacific Islander students at most of the colleges with AANAPISI funding—including increased persistence, degree attainment and transfer to four-year institutions—provide “evidence for the impact of federally-funded campus programs,” the report said.

Nearly 10 years later, DeAnza is still operating the Impact AAPI program, though the college has since taken over much of the program’s funding.

“Colleges have a responsibility here, too,” Tomaneng said. “These programs should be institutionalized beyond the life of a grant.”

But since leaving DeAnza, she’s seen how AANAPISI funding to start up such programs can be challenging for colleges to get in the first place.

‘Legislative Issue’

San José City College is eligible for both Hispanic-serving and AANAPISI funding. But since it already received several HSI-designated grants, the college was ineligible to apply for some of the biggest AANAPISI grants.

The U.S. Department of Education awarded a total of $16,367,591 in AANAPISI grants in fiscal year 2023 under Title III, Part A of the Higher Education Act, which outlines grant eligibility criteria. However, the law says that colleges that already have an MSI-designated grant under Part A (or Title V in the case of HSIs) can’t apply for another MSI designation under Part A, even if they meet the demographic criteria.

There are some workarounds, however.

Colleges that have already accessed one Part A grant but meet the demographic requirements for another MSI designation can apply for additional money under Title III, Part F. But Part F funding for AANAPISIs is significantly less than what’s set aside for Part A: in fiscal year 2023, the Education Department awarded $4,581,199 in AANAPISI grants under Part F, less than a third of its Part A awards.

“Schools have to decide which one they want to apply for and get money from,” Mike Nguyen, an assistant professor of education at New York University, said of the designation restriction. “That’s a legislative issue. Congress needs to pass a law to break down that barrier.”

The choice often comes down to how likely an institution is to receive the funding, which is typically greater for other MSI designations than it is for AANPISIs. While the U.S. Education Department awarded just under $21 million in total grants for AANAPISIs last fiscal year—up from $8 million in 2019—it awarded $227.7 million through its Developing Hispanic-Serving Institutions Program, which excludes any institution that already has a Title III, Part A grant from applying.

“Hopefully Congress will address this, because schools are multicultural,” Nguyen said. “They’re not made up of just one particular racial group.”

‘Model Minority Myth’

Limited public understanding of the nuances of minority student populations has also driven misperceptions that Asian American and Pacific Islander students don’t need money from the federal government to succeed in college.

“There’s this model minority myth,” Nguyen said. “Yes, there are Asian Americans that do well in school. But there are specific communities within these two racial groups that have similar educational challenges like other communities of color. They needed an MSI designation to serve and support them.”

There are close to 50 different ethnicities, including people who speak some 300 different languages, within the broader population of Americans who identify as Asian American and Pacific Islander. Within those communities, there are also major divides in income levels and educational attainment, according to a 2022 report from the Postsecondary National Policy Institute.

For example, 22 percent of Burmese, 26 percent of Laotian and 28 percent of Pacific Islander adults over the age of 25 had completed an associate degree or higher. In comparison, 64 percent of Japanese, 65 percent of Korean and 80 percent of Indian adults had finished an associate degree or higher.

Before the AANAPISI designation was created, those nuances were lost among clustered data, said Jacqueline Mac, an assistant professor of higher education at Northern Illinois University.

“There would be nationwide reports on how Asians were doing just as well as our white students, and the conversation would stop there,” Mac said. “But community advocates and policy makers knew that wasn’t true. They knew the constituents; they knew the anecdotes.”

For example, Southeast Asian communities include people (or their descendants) who fled from their home countries to escape war—or genocide in the case of Cambodians—and are more likely to face socioeconomic barriers to higher education than their peers with East Asian roots.

Mac said Biden’s proclamation of AANAPISI week is an important step toward highlighting those differences.

“It recognized a designation that a lot of people thought was unnecessary because of the model minority myth,” she said. “That umbrella category really masked and actually did a lot of damage to communities that didn’t have good access to education or experience the same kind of educational success.”

Even still, Mac said those stereotypes about Asian American students persist.

She cited the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling outlawing race-conscious admissions, which sided with a group of Asian American applicants who sued Harvard University for allegedly discriminating against them in admissions decisions.

“Asian Americans were used as the group to say, ‘This is why affirmative action doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do,’” Mac said. “It’s an example of what happens when there’s this societal misunderstanding of whole groups, and that group being used to dismantle racial equity policies.”

Culturally Responsive Programs

Caitlin Ho, director of the AANAPISI Project at the City University of New York’s Hunter College, where 30 percent of students are from Asian backgrounds, said creating a higher education community environment where students can process anti-Asian rhetoric is another reason why AANAPISI funding is critical to student success.

The program has existed for several years and uses federal grant money to connect students with academic support, provide research opportunities and mental health supports, and train faculty and staff on how to best support students in a culturally responsive way.

When some of those students were harassed or assaulted during the pandemic because of anti-Asian bias fueled by incorrect public perceptions that Asian people were the source of the novel coronavirus, the program was there to help.

“Students were scared to leave their houses,” Ho said. “We had some programming to let students check in. But we also brought in the Asian American Studies Department to contextualize the fact that, unfortunately, anti-Asian racism is not new. It comes from a long history of how Asian Americans were just not seen as belonging.”

Ho said some of the colleges in the CUNY system have reached out to Hunter for help with supporting Asian American students, but “a lot of them are more aware of their HSI status than their AANAPISI status.”

Despite some of the restrictions on accessing federal funding for more than one MSI designation, Ho encourages other college to apply for whatever AANAPISI funding they can. “Those dollars would allow them to do this really rich programming and create visibility for Asian American students on their campuses.”

Today on the Academic Minute, part of SUNY Polytechnic Institute Week: Adam McLain, associate professor of biology, travels to Africa to observe one of the natural world’s many secrets. Learn more about the Academic Minute here.

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The National Collegiate Athletic Association on Thursday reversed an earlier ruling that had made a football player transferring to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ineligible to compete. That isn’t remarkable: the NCAA makes such rulings regularly. But the language it used in announcing the decision was.

The NCAA said in its statement Thursday that the association had received “new information” this week—information that “had not been made available by UNC previously, despite the school’s multiple chances to do so”—that led it to reverse its decision last month to declare Tez Walker ineligible, drawing harsh criticism from UNC officials. The team’s coach, Mack Brown, said at the time, “Plain and simple, the NCAA has failed Tez and his family and I’ve lost all faith in its ability to lead and govern our sport. They’ve messed so many things up as it relates to college football, and now their failures have negatively impacted the life of one of our own. Shame on you, NCAA.”

The association shot back, at one of its own members, Thursday. “It is unfortunate that UNC failed to provide this important information previously,” Charlie Baker, the NCAA’s first-year president, and Jere Morehead, the University of Georgia president who heads the association’s Division I board, said. “UNC’s behavior and decision to wage a public relations campaign is inappropriate and outside the bounds of the process UNC’s own staff supported. Had the UNC staff not behaved in this fashion and submitted this information weeks ago, this entire unfortunate episode could have been avoided.”

The NCAA did not say what the new information was or whom it came from. But Baker and Morehead added, “While we must be careful not to compromise a student-athlete’s right to privacy when it comes to sensitive issues, we want to assure the Division I membership and everyone watching how the new transfer rules are applied, that this meets the new transfer waiver standards.”

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The Broward College Board of Trustees named Henry Mack, Florida’s former senior education chancellor and a close ally of Governor Ron DeSantis, as interim president of the college, a week after the abrupt departure of former president Gregory Haile. 

Elsewhere in the state, New College of Florida elevated DeSantis ally Richard Corcoran from interim president to president after a six-month search that produced two other finalists.

“We want to extend our gratitude to the presidential search committee, who conducted a robust nationwide search to bring us candidates that would capably guide New College into the future,” said board chair Debra A. Jenks in a press statement. “With the selection of President Corcoran, New College is poised to continue on its path of becoming the best liberal arts institution in the nation.”

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Mack, who most recently worked as an education lobbyist, fits the new profile of public college presidents in DeSantis’s Florida: a politically connected figure with a government background but little experience in higher education administration. While Mack was a finalist for the presidency of Florida Gulf Coast University in a failed search this summer, he has never led a college or university before. The two other finalists were both former longtime Broward employees, according to The Miami Herald.

Broward, located in Fort Lauderdale, is the second-largest institution in the State University System of Florida; despite its status as a college rather than a university, it has a student population of more than 56,000.

In a February interview with the London-based City Journal, Mack espoused a view of higher education aligned with the philosophy underpinning much of Florida’s Republican-led overhaul, from the state system’s acceptance of the controversial Classic Learning Test to curriculum changes at the New College of Florida. 

“We are combating the infiltration of postmodernist philosophy as the guiding philosophy of public higher education here,” he said. “It has become an education system that often compels or cultivates the treacherous belief that students should be taught to either hate others based on race, or that the free society we are so fortunate to enjoy is inherently racist.”

Mack will take the helm at Broward following a month of turbulence kicked off by Haile’s resignation on Sept. 13. Haile has not publicly commented on the reasons for his departure, saying only that he would let his resignation “speak for itself.” 

Two lawsuits filed by California community college professors take aim at rules recently instituted by the state’s community college system intended to ensure employees uphold diversity, equity, inclusion and access principles.

The professors say the rules infringe on their First Amendment rights and require them to incorporate ideologies they don’t support in their work or risk losing their jobs. District and system leaders argue the regulations don’t curtail professors’ free speech and are a valid expression of the system’s values as it tries to better serve a diverse student body.

The rules, which were proposed by the chancellor’s office and took effect in the spring, set “a DEIA competency and criteria framework that can serve as a minimum standard for evaluating all California Community College employees,” according to a May 2023 memorandum from system leaders offering guidance on the rules. Districts have until Oct. 13 to incorporate the rules into their own employee review policies.

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The chancellor’s office published three guidance documents to demystify the regulatory changes, including a list of criteria for employees to meet the standards, an explanation of how these principles can be incorporated into the classroom and a glossary of relevant terms, including words such as “intersectionality” and “antiracism.”

“The evaluation of district employees must include consideration of an employee’s demonstrated, or progress toward, proficiency in diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility … competencies that enable work with diverse communities,” the memo reads. “District employees must have or establish proficiency in DEIA-related performance to teach, work, or lead within California community colleges.”

The lawsuits taking issue with the rules quickly emerged. One was filed by a Bakersfield College professor and another by a group of professors working at colleges in the State Center Community College District in the Fresno area.

Daymon Johnson, a history professor at Bakersfield College, represented by the Institute for Free Speech, an advocacy organization, filed an amended lawsuit against Bakersfield College and Kern Community College District administrators in June alleging they penalized him and other professors for espousing conservative political and social values and chilled his free speech. The lawsuit suggests college and district leaders were acting on the system’s mandate and asks that administrators be prevented from investigating or disciplining Johnson for expressing his opinions and that the systemwide rules be struck down as unconstitutional.

Johnson is the faculty lead for the Renegade Institute for Liberty, which describes itself as a faculty coalition at Bakersfield College “dedicated to the free speech, open inquiry, critical thinking to advance American ideals within the broader Western tradition of meritocracy, individual agency, civic virtue, liberty of conscience and free markets.” His predecessor in that role, Matthew Garrett, was fired from Bakersfield in April. Garrett believed he was terminated for expressing right-leaning views. Administrators denied this and charged him with a list of offenses outlined in a lengthy report, including “immoral” and “unprofessional” conduct, “dishonesty,” and “unsatisfactory performance.”

Johnson wrote in a declaration to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California that the Kern Community College District investigated a colleague’s complaint about a comment he posted on the institute’s Facebook page, causing him to have retired professors take over managing the page.

“Fearing retribution by Bakersfield College officials should I speak my mind on social and political matters, I self-censor,” Johnson said in his declaration.

Alan Gura, lead counsel and vice president for litigation at the Institute for Free Speech, said it’s already “concerning when you have a college professor who is afraid for his job because the school has decided that … making political statements, speaking one’s mind is suddenly considered to be unprofessional conduct, qualified grounds for termination,” but the systemwide rules show “the school adopting an official ideology where everything must be conformed to this new religion DEI,” which he called a “political cult.”

A spokesperson for the Kern Community College District said Johnson’s claims are “without merit.”

“Kern CCD values the diversity of perspectives among its faculty and student body and operates within the guidelines of our Board’s policies and procedures, the California Education Code and state regulations, faculty contracts, and other legal authority,” the spokesperson said in a written statement. “Our goal is to emphasize professional teaching and learning outcomes to support all students’ success and completion. We believe this lawsuit is without merit and Kern CCD plans to vigorously defend itself.”

Leaders of the California Community College system also pushed back against Johnson’s claims. Legal representatives for Sonya Christian, chancellor of the system, released a memo responding to the lawsuit and arguing that the rules shouldn’t be suspended.

“The challenged regulations do not violate Johnson’s First Amendment rights for at least two reasons: (1) the regulations do not restrict Johnson’s speech, but rather express the Board’s own principles regarding diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility; and (2) the regulations are constitutionally permissible non-discrimination policies,” not intended to “target speech” but to remove barriers for student groups historically underrepresented in higher education, the memo reads.

A Second Challenge

Meanwhile, six professors at colleges in the Fresno area, represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a campus free speech organization, sued leaders of the State Center Community College District and the community college system regarding the rules in August. The lawsuit alleges that a district faculty union contract, based on the chancellor’s office guidelines, forces professors to espouse and enact ideologies in their teaching they may not hold. The contract asks faculty members to submit a written evaluation of their job performance as a part of their review process in which they “demonstrate an understanding of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) competencies and anti-racist principles, and how they have put those principles into practice to improve equitable student outcomes and course completion.”

Bill Blanken, a chemistry professor at Reedley College and one of the plaintiffs, said it doesn’t make sense to him to incorporate ideas about diversity, equity and inclusion into his chemistry curriculum or teaching practices, so he doesn’t plan to comply. But he’s coming up on an evaluation period in the spring and fears he’ll lose his job.

“What’s the anti-racist, DEIA perspective of the atomic mass of boron?” Blanken said. “It’s preposterous … I think that my job is at risk. Because I don’t agree with this ideology, and I’m not going to do something that I find inappropriate, and I don’t agree with it. I’m going to continue to teach chemistry as it should be taught.”

Jill Wagner, a district spokesperson, responded that the district will defend its “implementation of the diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) regulations at the center of this litigation, which were revised following the Faculty Collective Bargaining Agreement for the District.”

“The DEIA regulations are the result of a collaborative effort, with the State Center Federation of Teachers, which was ratified in April 2023 by the majority of the association and formally approved by the Board of Trustees in May 2023 to be implemented by colleges come October 2023,” she wrote in a statement. “DEIA initiatives have sparked many important conversations spanning decades, and as this issue continues to evolve, efforts to address will continue to be at the forefront. The District now and forever will be a welcoming place for a diverse population, with a commitment to access and inclusion.”

National Trends

Blanken views the lawsuit as bigger than a group of community college professors facing off against the leaders of their state system. He believes many professors across the country have the same concerns about their academic freedom as colleges and universities have rapidly adopted diversity, equity and inclusion efforts since 2020. He also noted that California is seen as a bellwether state, ahead of broader national trends, adding significance to the case.

The country has a “clash of ideologies” right now, he said.

Daniel Ortner, the FIRE attorney representing the group, said his organization saw a “big uptick” in instances where professors reported being “silenced” or “disciplined” for “speech that would have been protected and is often about topics related to DEI.”

Shaun Harper, founder and executive director of the Race and Equity Center at the University of Southern California, doesn’t believe the rules impinge on professors’ free speech or academic freedom.

“I’m a tenured professor who has long enjoyed his academic freedom,” Harper said. “It’s precious to me … My academic freedom does not give me license to teach in a way that fails to be inclusive and responsive to the diversity of students who are in my classroom … That privilege doesn’t give a blank check to be negligent or unresponsive.”

He doesn’t see academic freedom as precluding a college or system from having goals it holds employees to and said he’s unaware of “another industry where employees get to opt out of what their employer has deemed important and essential to the business.”

Harper added that students also “deserve the freedom to learn” the topics these professors seem reticent to include in their classrooms.

“They have the freedom to learn about cultures and groups and histories and so on beyond their own,” he said. “They should have the freedom to learn the truth about our democracy and the truth about America’s racial past and present.”

He believes these lawsuits are part of a broader national backlash to diversity initiatives, as laws seeking to limit diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and the teaching of American racial history in public higher education proliferate in states such as Texas and Florida. He noted that California has a national reputation as a bastion of “notoriously liberal” politics immune from these trends, but the state is more politically and ideologically diverse than people realize and is in the throes of the same challenges to diversity work as the rest of the country.

“We’re seeing this here—just imagine how intense it is in more conservative states,” Harper said.

Ortner said FIRE has also been challenging the Stop WOKE Act, the Florida law that seeks to limit how race and gender are taught in public higher ed institutions and schools. He sees the lawsuits by California community college professors as part of the same fight.

The Florida law would make it so that “professors can’t teach antiracism, intersectionality, these concepts,” while the California community college system’s DEIA rules insist they do, he said. “The state of California or the state of Florida can’t come in and force professors to endorse their viewpoint or ban them from expressing ideas to the contrary. That’s really what it’s about.”

Two professors at the University of Pennsylvania have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on developing COVID-19 vaccines.

The discoveries by Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman “were critical for developing effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 during the pandemic that began in early 2020,” the panel that awards the prizes said Monday. “Through their groundbreaking findings, which have fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system, the laureates contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times.”

Karikó is a professor at Szeged University, in Hungary, and an adjunct professor at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine. Weissman is the Roberts Family Professor in Vaccine Research and director of the Penn Institute for RNA Innovations.

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Educational Testing Services, a pioneer of standardized testing and the longtime administrator of the SAT, is laying off 6 percent of its 2,500-plus employees, according to an internal video announcement from CEO Amit Sevak obtained by Inside Higher Ed earlier this week.

An ETS spokesperson confirmed the layoffs, which were announced this morning, and said their impact would be “global and company-wide,” affecting staff at both the central complex in Princeton, N.J., and at the company’s four satellite offices.

The spokesperson declined to give the exact number of employees who would be let go, but given the organization’s size, 6 percent would amount to around 150 people. It is at least the fifth round of layoffs at ETS in the past three years, judging from a 2021 article that detailed an earlier layoff announcement under the previous CEO.

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“We need to rethink how we serve our customers and align ourselves to new ways of working, re-evaluate our skills and staffing to make sure we have what we need to move forward, and to continually, effectively and efficiently manage our financial health,” Sevak, who took the ETS helm in 2022, said in the video announcement. He added that he would hold a companywide town hall on Oct. 11 to discuss the restructuring and the organization’s financial health.

In addition to administering the SAT—which is designed and owned by the College Board—ETS owns the Graduate Record Examination, or GRE, the standard postbaccalaureate admissions exam, as well as the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), the primary exam used to assess international students’ preparedness for English-language programs in the U.S.

The layoffs, and the broader concerns about the organization’s financial sustainability and strategic planning, reflect a deeper turbulence shaking the standardized testing industry—of which ETS was a pioneering titan. It remains the largest private educational assessment organization in the world.

“The changing needs of our customers and the shifting demands of our business are the driving forces behind today’s difficult yet necessary decisions,” Sevak said in the video.

Results from a recent anonymous employee engagement survey that were shared with Inside Higher Ed show a general dissatisfaction with ETS’s leadership and organizational vision even before the layoffs.

“I understand that leading ETS at this time of great change is a challenge,” one employee wrote. “But we still lack a coherent, actionable strategy, and leadership seems completely out of touch with the organization and its people, to the point of it seeming disrespectful.”

Failure to Adapt?

Sevak began his video message by saying, “ETS is in the midst of a transformation.”

The same could be said of the standardized testing landscape as a whole.

A growing number of institutions have abandoned standardized test requirements; all but three public university systems in the country have adopted test-optional policies, for instance. And while the number of SAT takers has fluctuated in recent years, GRE participation is down drastically, dropping from 541,750 in 2017 to 341,574 in 2021, as a cascade of graduate programs have eliminated their GRE requirements.

Other changes in the admissions space, particularly the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling striking down race-conscious admissions, may also have a major impact on testing. Critics of the ruling—including the Department of Education in a report released Thursday—have recommended eliminating or downgrading standardized test scores in the application-review process as one race-neutral way to offset the end of affirmative action.

Akil Bello, senior director of advocacy and advancement at FairTest, which opposes testing requirements, said the normalization of test-optional admissions has had a demonstrable impact on the business models of test providers—especially those that haven’t adapted to the new landscape.

“It’s unquestioned that there have been significant rounds of layoffs at ACT, College Board and now ETS,” Bello said. “It’s not unreasonable to conclude that the undergraduate test-optional movement, as well as the GRE exit movement, has significantly impacted their bottom line.”

ETS has experienced its own series of changes, many of them detrimental to the bottom line. Founded in 1947 in partnership with the College Board to promote the use of the then nascent SAT, the organization has since lost contracts to administer popular tests like the LSAT and MCAT.

“ETS is particularly fascinating because they once owned the rights to administer and sell all these tests,” Bello said. “Since the ’90s, it has lost most of them one by one.”

In 2004, a minor schism between ETS and the College Board led the latter to shift from ETS to Pearson as its main test scorer; 10 years later, that rift deepened when the College Board opted to bring test development, formerly ETS’s purview, in house.

ETS’s contract with the College Board to administer the SAT is up for renewal next June. When asked via email whether it was likely to renew the partnership, a spokesperson for College Board said the company doesn’t comment on vendor relationships.

An ETS spokesperson said that while there is “no one reason” causing the layoffs, the assessment sector’s rapid transformation has led the organization to re-examine its core offerings.

“We are keenly aware of the challenges currently impacting education and assessment organizations alike, and that the landscape is poised to continue evolving, which is why we’re hyper focused on how best to support our customers in the future,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.

ETS has branched out from the traditional testing realm recently, partnering with the Carnegie Foundation in April to design an evaluation for competency-based learning, which many viewed as an acknowledgment by the two architects of the assessment infrastructure that it was crumbling.

Michael Nettles, a veteran psychometrist who served as an educational adviser to former president Barack Obama, was senior vice president for policy evaluation and research at ETS for nearly two decades before he left under ambiguous circumstances in January. While he declined to comment on the record about his reasons for leaving or the organization’s recent trajectory, he did say that the standardized testing sector has changed tremendously over the course of his long career within it.

“I’ve worked in this field for 40-plus years now, and it’s always been changing, and right now it’s especially true, because the college-going population is changing and getting more diverse,” he said. “The question of what tests are being used and how valuable they really are to individuals and institutions is actively being debated, and it’s a dynamic time in that sense.”

‘We Know the Score’

While Sevak repeatedly referred to the importance of ETS’s “financial health” in his video announcement of the layoffs, the spokesperson insisted that the organization “continues to maintain a strong product portfolio.”

But responses from the employee engagement survey obtained by Inside Higher Ed show a distinct lack of confidence in the organization’s leadership and business strategy. Thirty-nine employees discussed their negative experience at ETS, taking specific aim at the leadership team, “confusing” internal communications and high staff turnover.

“There is a general consensus across the company that Sr Leadership is not honest with staff, there is no real strategy, and decisions are being made that go against supporting data,” one employee wrote.

Employees described Sevak and the rest of the ETS leadership team—which one respondent likened to a “revolving door”—as “chaotic and disconnected,” “ineffective,” and “condescending.” They expressed worry about the near-constant threat of downsizing and the lack of coherent or realistic vision for the company’s future.

“Everyone is working under the constant possibility of having their job eliminated or outsourced,” one frustrated employee wrote. “We’ve gone through so many staff reductions over the past year that it is demoralizing staff … Many people have left ETS, and many of those who remain at ETS are looking for jobs.”

An ETS spokesperson did not respond to questions about the employee engagement survey in time for publication.

Bello said that as standardized tests have become a less normalized part of college admissions, the organizations that own and administer them have had to invest more heavily in marketing them as consumer products.

The decrease in test takers, combined with a boom in competitors—from an array of language assessments for international students, including one from Duolingo, to undergraduate alternatives like Cambridge and the Classic Learning Test adopted in Florida earlier this month—have forced testing organizations to compete more actively for market share.

ETS, Bello said, has been especially aggressive in this pivot. This year the organization dramatically shortened the length of its marquee assessments, the GRE and TOEFL, cutting each in half without reducing price—a move he believes is an attempt to sell its products to student consumers.

“What concerns me is the more they’re acting as businesses, the less they’re acting as educational institutions,” Bello said.

Some say there’s reason to be cautiously optimistic about the traditional testing model ETS helped bring into being. Nettles believes there are “still loyal users” but that some degree of adaptation is increasingly inevitable and flag bearers like ETS are going to have to lead the way.

“The assessment companies are still leading much of the business and, you know, much of the focus as a consequence of that, and so seeing how they respond is going to be really important over the next few years,” he said.

But ETS employees wrote in the engagement survey that the organization has not been adequately responsive to changes in the sector. One disgruntled employee wrote that leaders should “adjust their expectations to the reality of the markets we operate in” and communicate more openly with that reality in mind—namely, the free-falling supremacy of ETS in the testing field and the diminished importance of testing in general.

“Leadership needs to be more respectful of the opinions of the people who have been in this market for 20 years,” the employee wrote. “We know the score better than you think.”

Less than a year after Clemson University first installed free period-product dispensers in all the restrooms—men’s, women’s and gender-neutral family facilities—in the R. M. Cooper Library, the institution has quietly removed them from the men’s restrooms.

The dispensers disappeared soon after the Clemson College Republicans published a post on X mocking them.

“If you weren’t aware already, Clemson University has tampon/pad dispensers in the MEN’S restrooms located in Cooper Library. We truly live in [clown] world,” the post said, using the clown emoji in place of the word.

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A few days later, the dispensers were gone; Trevor Tiedeman, the chairman of the College Republicans, told Inside Higher Ed that April Cromer, a Republican state legislator, had seen the post and met with the university’s president to demand they be removed. Tiedeman said the holes left by the removal have since been refilled and painted over.

Menstrual Equity

Advocates for what’s often known as menstrual equity believe that anyone who has periods deserves access to period products. Some argue that given the high cost of such products, colleges should provide them for free. Though such activism has historically been connected to feminism and pushback against the “pink tax”—the idea that products for women cost more than equivalent products for men—the movement has grown more gender-neutral in recent years, acknowledging that transgender men, intersex people and nonbinary people can also get periods.

Brown University, for one, began putting free menstrual products in men’s restrooms back in 2016, earning notice in publications from Teen Vogue to The Daily Mail. Conservatives seized on the move as another example of the liberal agenda gone haywire; more than 21,000 people commented on a short article published by Breitbart News criticizing Brown’s decision to provide free pads and tampons in men’s bathrooms.

“If you’re attending a university that says males have periods … you need to rethink your choice of higher education,” one commenter wrote.

In recent years, colleges have become key battlegrounds over transgender rights, with some states passing bills to restrict trans students from playing on certain sports teams or using restrooms that don’t align with their gender assigned at birth. Though South Carolina does not ban trans students from using their preferred bathroom, the conflict over making period products universally accessible in a single building on one campus highlights just how deeply such antagonism has permeated campuses.

Menstrual product dispensers have also sprung up in men’s restrooms on campuses in other right-leaning states—including Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, Western Carolina University in North Carolina and the University of Utah—but it’s unclear if any college other than Clemson has backtracked on its decision to provide period products in men’s restrooms.

The removal of the dispensers at Clemson prompted mixed reactions. The College Republicans lauded the university for taking quick action on what they deemed a “ridiculous” concession to the institution’s LGBTQ+ community, according to Tiedeman.

“This is the type of stuff that’s pushing the narrative way further than it needs to go,” he said.

LGBTQ+ students and allies, on the other hand, have lambasted the College Republicans for going after what they argue is an extremely inexpensive and easy way to improve quality of life for transgender students. A Change.org petition, published on Sept. 19, asked the university to reinstate the dispensers; so far about 400 people have signed it.

“There’s no legitimate reason not to have menstrual products in the restroom,” one commenter wrote in support of the petition. “The group that spoke so vehemently against the presence of the menstrual products is an incredibly loud small minority. Clemson University actively working to make campus less welcoming to its transgender population reflects poorly on all of us, and will be taken into consideration by prospective students that I’m sure will be happy to take their tuition money elsewhere.”

Some students also criticized the university’s handling of the matter. Clemson put out no statement explaining why the dispensers were removed, according to David Snoberger, a graduate student who serves as the social media manager for Clemson’s Young Democratic Socialists of America group. Nor have officials responded to questions or requests to meet and discuss the dispensers’ disappearance.

“We have attempted to contact … folks within administration, to no avail,” he said. “There was no mass email. There was not a statement from the president. There wasn’t a statement from the dean of students or anything like that.”

In fact, Snoberger said, members of the YDSA who went to the library after hearing the dispensers had been taken down were initially told they were going to be cleaned and put back up; previously the machines had been vandalized with phrases like “Men can’t get periods” and “Society is fucked.”

One YDSA member even reported the situation to the Title IX office, but the director said nothing could be done because it wasn’t a specific incident of discrimination against a particular person or body, Snoberger said.

Asked for comment, a Clemson spokesperson sent a vague statement stressing that the women’s and family restrooms still contained dispensers: “The dispensers in the library restrooms were part of a pilot program with an external company which provides period products in restrooms. Those products are still available for free in all women’s and family restrooms in Cooper Library.”

‘Unauthorized’ Installations?

In a post on X about getting the dispensers removed, Cromer, the Republican legislator, called the devices “unauthorized” and said that Clemson president James P. Clements and Nicky McCarter, a member of the Board of Trustees, were “just as shocked as I was that these dispensers were in the men’s restroom.”

Some involved in getting the dispensers installed dispute the idea that they were not authorized. The library announced the initiative on its website last November in a now-removed post that said the dispensers were being made permanent after a pilot program that received “overwhelmingly positive” feedback.

According to Kaitlyn Samons, a former member of Clemson’s Graduate Student Government, the GSG paid for the installations with its own organizational funds, which come from graduate student fees. A library staff member had approached GSG about potentially funding a single dispenser in one bathroom, she said, but the group offered to place one in each restroom to improve accessibility.

“Women and men who have periods should not be forced to suffer in silence and stuff their underwear with toilet paper,” she said.

Samons said that the library’s dean, Chris Cox, signed off on the project, and she did not believe it required any further institutional approval. Cox did not respond to a request for comment.

Cromer did not respond to a list of questions from Inside Higher Ed, including one about why she thought the dispensers were unauthorized. Neither Clements nor a university spokesperson responded to a question about whether the president knew about the existence of period product dispensers in the library’s men’s bathrooms before Cromer informed him.

Snoberger, of the YDSA, suspects Cromer may not be the only politician involved in the dispensers’ disappearance. He believes their removal may have been encouraged by conservative members of the university’s board, including Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, a Clemson alum. Haley has made anti-transgender comments in the past, implying that trans girls playing on girls’ sports teams are to blame for high rates of suicide among young girls.

“It’s not out of the realm of possibility that Nikki Haley … or another trustee may be playing a part in swaying the rest of the board to have done that,” Snoberger said.

Haley did not respond to a request for comment, nor did multiple other members of Clemson’s board whom Inside Higher Ed attempted to contact.

At a time of national concern about campus safety after a recent spate of college shootings and gunmen confronted or thwarted on campuses, a lockdown two weeks ago at Lane College in Jackson, Tenn., has raised questions among some faculty and staff members about the safety of the campus and its preparedness for potential threats.

Administrators and campus security officials at the small, private, historically Black college say they took all the necessary steps to keep students and employees safe and informed after a student reported a suspicious man on campus who appeared to have a gun in his waistband.

The campus alert system sent out a text at 12:17 p.m. on Sept. 14 that announced a “campus lockdown” because of an individual in “the area of Jennie Hall possibly armed.” An all-clear message was issued at 1:40.

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Steaven Joy, Lane’s campus safety and security director, said a student called campus security and reported seeing a man with a gun in his waistband on the north end of campus. Joy said he sent out the campuswide alert telling people to go into lockdown mode and called the Jackson Police Department, which sent officers to the campus. Police and campus security officers did a sweep of the campus and didn’t find the individual; they determined there was not a present threat.

This was small comfort to some Lane College employees, who say a lack of information provided about the lockdown has made them worried about campus safety. A few faculty members said they plan to bring the incident up at an upcoming faculty meeting in October.

Paul Rivas, an assistant professor of history, said he didn’t find out about the lockdown until a colleague told him almost an hour into it. The text alert made no sound, and an email alert did not go to his primary inbox. He said some newer professors reported they didn’t receive the alerts at all.

Joy sent out an email that evening noting “some concerns about not receiving the E-2 campus alert” and that an earlier email “was sent out to faculty, staff, and students to sign up again due to new software” the university was using to send alerts.

Joy said the software was updated last year because the alert system was overloaded with contacts and needed a refresh, so employees and students were asked to sign up again.

Administrators “rely on the system, and the system has issues,” Rivas said.

Rivas also didn’t know the protocol for what to do during a lockdown. He said there have been two prior lockdowns he remembers during his 10 years at the campus, which he described as being located in a “high-crime area.”

While he’s sure training is available, “I don’t recall ever being in a training about what we’re supposed to [do],” he said. “We probably need to have some focused training and discussion there to get the campus involved, like the faculty, administration and security. The security guards, they’re good guys, but it’s a fairly big campus.”

The college’s website describes the campus as being on 55 acres, and according to data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, there were 1,010 students enrolled in fall 2022.

Other employees said they didn’t receive the lockdown alert or an all-clear message and heard about the lockdown during the actual incident from colleagues who had.

One employee, who asked to remain anonymous out of concerns about job security, said he signed up for the alert system during the lockdown and got no alerts after doing so, including the all-clear message. He described finding out about the lockdown only because a co-worker called to check in. The employee then scrambled to email and text students and colleagues to stay where they were and lock their doors after realizing not everyone was receiving updates.

While the college has policies for what to do in a lockdown, no follow-up message came from administrators after the incident reminding people of the protocol or informing them whether there actually had been a gunman on campus, the employee said.

Jackson Central-Merry Middle and High School, a neighbor of the college, posted on Facebook on the day of the lockdown that school officials had heard “an armed man was walking around Lane College campus,” and as a result, the school “took safety precautions and went on lockdown until it was cleared by the Jackson Police Department.”

No such messages appear on Lane’s Facebook page or X account.

The Lane employee noted there’s been little local news coverage about the incident and described the college as having a pattern of not publicizing issues that could hurt its reputation.

“They don’t want people to know about it,” the employee said. “Plain and simple … It’s putting people’s lives at risk to keep quiet about it. We had a thing that was supposed to work. It didn’t. It failed. Luckily no one got hurt, but you can’t just ignore it.”

Logan Hampton, president of the college for the past decade, said campus security did everything possible to keep people well informed during and after the lockdown. He noted that campus officials held an exercise to test the college’s preparedness for an active shooter situation in July.

“There was immediate communication to everyone on campus that all took place on that same day,” he said. “There was the email communication, and security went around our campus, and they were going person to person, building to building, communicating.”

He acknowledged that some faculty members reported not receiving the alerts, and he believes it was because they didn’t sign up. He said security personnel quickly encouraged them to do so and then reset the alert system and sent a test message later that day to make sure it was working. He added that faculty and staff members have multiple avenues to bring their concerns to him and that he has an “open-door policy.” The complaints regarding transparency around the lockdown, or in general, were news to him, he added.

“I’m a bit flabbergasted that colleagues would not feel that we are being transparent in all that we do … I don’t want them to feel like I’m not listening to them and that they are not heard,” he said.

Another professor who didn’t receive an alert and thought faculty members were automatically signed up for them said a message from security didn’t feel like enough and that a more detailed follow-up explanation from the administration was warranted.

That “at least indicates to us that they know and to some extent care, even if it’s window dressing,” said the professor, who wanted to remain anonymous out of concerns about retaliation.

“It is fucking heartbreaking to hear my students tell me they don’t feel safe on campus,” the professor added. Their academic outcomes will be affected “if they’re not even feeling safe.”

A student, who asked not to be identified, learned that the campus was on lockdown from dorm mates who found out from other students.

“Most cases or lockdowns we have on campus are not notified instantly when a situation happens,” the student said in a text message. “If there is an email sent out, it will be brief and to let students know that the school is on lockdown.”

The student described feeling “concerned” and said other classmates are, too. The student spoke to campus security after the lockdown but felt those concerns were “disregarded.”

“I was more concerned for the younger students on campus,” the student said. “Our campus is very open to the general public and there are always local people walking onto our campus. A lot of times there are people that consistently drive through our campus.”

Another student, who also wanted to remain anonymous, said the campus could use more security personnel, but the lockdown didn’t worry her. The student hadn’t signed up for alerts and didn’t receive them but heard about the lockdown from friends in a group chat.

“I have complete faith in Chief Joy and the security staff,” the student said.

Rivas, the history professor, said he’s a fan of Hampton—Hampton officiated Rivas’s wedding on campus last year—and described Hampton as a leader open to feedback who has helped the college build stronger ties with its surrounding community.

“Lane College has a difficult job and mission,” he wrote in an email. “I do not agree with all of our policies, I am jokingly called the campus revolutionary. That said, I would have left if President Hampton had moved on. I joke in meetings I like being a revolutionary and pointing out what’s wrong, it is easier than fixing.”

Robert Mueck, a member of the domestic preparedness committee at the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators and associate director of public safety at Montgomery Community College in Maryland, said these kinds of communication problems during campus lockdowns are all too common.

He said text alert systems tend to send messages in batches, so not everyone receives them at the same time. He said students often look to faculty members for what to do during a lockdown, but those faculty members, caught up in teaching and research, rarely attend voluntary lockdown trainings offered by campus public safety personnel.

“That’s a challenge for everyone in higher education public safety,” he said.

Mueck said Montgomery Community College has a system where in addition to text messages and emails, all desktop computer screens on campus freeze and display a banner message about a lockdown. But he also noted that not all campuses have the resources to put in place the most robust security systems, and HBCUs like Lane tend to be underresourced.

He empathizes with Lane but also noted the importance of following up with students and employees after a security scare.

“You’ve got a campus community clamoring for information,” he said. And in the absence of a clear message, students and staff members tend to be “still kind of unsatisfied. So, you’ve got to be willing to step up and explain that … There should be some kind of communication that gives you a basic understanding [that] we had this incident, it was resolved—something that clarifies in the aftermath.”

“Redefining Postsecondary Value at a Time of Upheaval” is a new downloadable booklet from Inside Higher Ed. You may download the free print-on-demand booklet here.

On Wednesday, Oct. 25, at 2 p.m. Eastern, Inside Higher Ed’s editors will present a free webcast to discuss the themes of the booklet. You may register for the webcast here. 

This booklet was made possible in part by the advertising support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

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Light salsa music accompanies podcast host Douglas Lezameta as he introduces his latest episode. “Bienvenidos al podcast Pacific Oaks College, Hispanic-serving institution, ¡Tu sueño tu Realidad!” Lezameta says.

Pacific Oaks College, a Hispanic-serving institution in Pasadena, Calif., created a podcast to reach the Latino population on campus and in the surrounding community, illuminating services and resources available for student success as well as the testimonies of those who have reached their dreams.

The podcast name, which translates to “Your dream, your reality!” is part of a larger effort not just enroll to but also to serve Hispanic learners in distinct ways.

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The background: Pacific Oaks received a $2.5 million Title V grant from the U.S. Department of Education in 2020 to support its developing HSI identity. The five-year grant supports development of academic services, mentoring, faculty, curriculum and other resources.

Using the grant funding, Pacific Oaks created the Latinx+ Support Success Initiative for Latino and other underserved student groups at the college, including a physical success center, professional development opportunities, a speaker series, a new endowment fund and the podcast.

Pacific Oaks has a high success rate for its Hispanic students, but officials wanted to continue to engage, retain and graduate learners at an even higher rate, Pacific Oaks president Jack Paduntin says.

The need: Judy Castro, associate vice president of partnership at Pacific Oaks, developed the podcast with aims to support current students and members of the community who may be unfamiliar with this kind of insight into higher education.

The average student at Pacific Oaks is 36 years old, so most of the listeners are older adult students and their families or members of the community.

The podcast format also allows Pacific Oaks to engage with listeners on demand, whenever they want to listen on or off campus, Paduntin says.

How it works: The podcast opens with an introduction to Pacific Oaks, sharing its location, HSI designation and the grant funding for student success. During each episode, host Lezameta interviews a member of Pacific Oaks community about their experiences or expertise in higher education.

Topics covered thus far include college success as an immigrant, transferring from a community college to a four-year university, the differences in college degrees, financial aid, first-generation students and mentorship. Topic selection is “organic and authentic,” Paduntin says, with students and staff offering subjects that are important to them.

Episodes are recorded in English and Spanish, allowing listeners to decide their preferred language without sacrificing quality or content. Some guests, including Castro, have recorded in both languages, as well.

The podcast is hosted by Fusion Latina Network and available on multiple streaming platforms, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeart Radio and Google Podcasts. The podcast is advertised internally via email announcements and promoted on the college’s social media platforms, but listeners range from across the state and in cities outside of California, a sign to campus leaders that more than just Pacific Oaks students tune in.

With each episode, Pacific Oaks hopes to be consistent, relevant and engaging to its audience, Paduntin says.

The next steps: Pacific Oaks has two more years of grant funding, and the podcast is gearing up for its second installment of episodes, or its second season, as Paduntin puts it. With the success of its bilingual content, the podcast will also be available in more languages for the second season.

Analytics from the podcast’s platforms show that the three of the top five most popular episodes in Spanish, with “Anclados en la educación: la historia de un inmigrante” the most popular on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

For future episodes, college officials want to help bridge students’ dreams with workforce needs, like supporting California’s teacher shortage, or how their cultural background can be applied to their vocational goals, such as the marriage and family therapists’ Latinx family studies program.

Seeking stories from campus leaders, faculty members and staff for our Student Success focus. Share here.

Scholar and activist Ibram X. Kendi defended the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research, which he founded and directs, in a statement Friday after the center recently laid off more than half of its employees.

In the aftermath of the layoffs of 19 of the center’s 36 staff members, former employees have publicly slammed the center and accused it of having poor management, high turnover and underwhelming research despite tens of thousands of dollars donated to it since its 2020 launch. Boston University announced an inquiry into the center’s culture and grant management on Wednesday, The Boston Globe reported.

Kenneth Freeman, interim president of the university, said in an interview with BU Today that the inquiry isn’t a sign that the university is retreating from antiracist work, and “we are hopeful that CAR will emerge from this moment in a better position to sustainably pursue its scholarly work and antiracism teaching and policymaking.”

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Kendi called the layoffs “the hardest decision” of his career in a statement posted on X, formerly known as Twitter. He said the move wasn’t because of “financial distress” at the center but because the restructuring would better support the center “long-term.” He welcomed the university’s inquiry.

“I stand by my decision to take the long view for CAR, especially when racial and social justice organizations are under attack,” he wrote.

He said he plans for the center to pivot to hosting a residential fellowship program for “antiracist intellectuals, creators, and students” going forward.

He described the center as a “startup” that launched in the middle of COVID-19, which made “management and culture building more challenging.”

“Like many startups, we experienced rapid changes, and yes, we made missteps,” he said, adding that leaders of color and women tend to face heightened scrutiny. “But I want to live in a world where all leaders of new organizations are given the time to make mistakes and learn and grow.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: Is there a suffering that comes with this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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