Tag: Jobs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We could lose a lot—and lose it forever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An edited version of the podcast appears below.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is the solution to this sad state of affairs?

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

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

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

Practical Tips for Building and Leveraging Networks

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

Tip 1: Seek Diverse Connections

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

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

Tip 2: Practice Gratitude and Generosity

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

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

Tip 3: Be Vulnerable and Authentic

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

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

Tip 4: Leverage Formal Resources

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

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

Tip 5: Make Reflection a Habit

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

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

Tip 6: Cultivate Eulogy Virtues

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

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

Strategies for Overcoming Isolation

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

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

Networking to Launch Your Career

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

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

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

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

To the editor:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Students Get Career, College and Life Advice From Social Media

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take Action

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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