“Campus Thuggery Is No Way to Cultivate Citizens.” Hear, hear! We couldn’t agree more with this statement from Rick Hess in a recent Education Next blog post. So we were surprised to see Hess describe an essay we wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education as a “defense” of “campus disorder.” In our essay—written in part in response to a prior Hess piece—what we actually defended was the right of students to participate in peaceful protests. We also argued that preparing students to be engaged citizens has been central to the mission of higher education for more than a century, and that political activism can help students develop important citizenship skills.

Hess describes us as “chaos apologists” who “appear oddly indifferent to the value of what happens in their classrooms.” This is a case of mistaken identity, a misapprehension that fails to take into account one of our essay’s most consequential points: There is no single, unifying set of rules for campus speech. Different regulations and norms apply in different campus contexts.

As professors at a small liberal arts college, we are deeply committed to teaching. The classroom is the nerve center of campus life. It’s a space devoted to the dissemination of knowledge and the development of critical thinking skills. As such, shouting, personal attacks and political sloganeering have no place in the classroom. Civil discourse is the name of the game. And the game is governed by the rules of academic freedom where expertise, evidence, and reason should prevail over gut feelings and grandstanding.

The quad, however, is more akin to a public square than to a seminar room. (It really is a public square at public universities where the First Amendment pertains.) We must tolerate a much wider range of speech on the campus green than in the classroom. Some of it will be misinformed, intemperate, or offensive, especially when it comes to student protests. It isn’t possible to stake out a public position on highly contentious issues such as Israel-Palestine without causing a stir and ticking people off. But that’s a price college leaders must be willing to pay if they are genuinely committed to free expression. As the Chicago Principles explain, “concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community.”

Hess has a hard time imagining how protesting students can draw attention to their cause while also following basic ground rules. He seems to believe that allowing room for passion and provocation inexorably leads to chaos, disorder, and illiberalism. His characterization of the Gaza protest movement is one-sided and unrelentingly bleak. “As practiced today,” Hess writes, “campus protests feature a lot of appetite, id, and ego.” He goes on:

[T]hey’re histrionic affairs rather than considered ones. They’re about spectacle rather than contemplation. Indeed, they seem calculated to stymie reasoned discourse and serious inquiry, which makes them rather a poor fit for serious institutions of higher education.

“Historically,” Hess concludes, “learning to be a part of a masked, faceless mob has been a recipe not for cultivating democrats but for producing jack-booted thugs.”

Have we seen adolescent histrionics at some of the student protests? Yes. Protesters are college students after all. Have there been deplorable, antisemitic outbursts? Yes. And they should be taken seriously and publicly condemned. What about broken windows and other property damage? In a handful of cases, yes. And the perpetrators should be punished, accordingly.

But the vast majority of demonstrations have been peaceful. To the extent that protests have been marred by violence, almost all of it has been inflicted by police (as was the case at UT Austin, Indiana University, City College of New York, Dartmouth, and many other schools) and by counter-protesters (as was the case at UCLA). The heavy-handed responses on the part of college leaders have been shameful. Too many administrators have been too quick to abandon dialogue and negotiation in favor of riot police, pepper spray, rubber bullets and zip ties.

Students can and have made their presence known—through marches, demonstrations, and encampments—without disrupting essential college operations. On almost all of the campuses where there have been pro-Palestinian protests, dorms, cafeterias, libraries, and academic buildings have remained open and accessible. Classrooms have not been overtaken by unruly mobs. Students have done all the usual academic things: attending classes, writing papers, and taking exams. On May 23, hundreds of students walked out of Harvard’s commencement. They chanted, waved Palestinian flags, expressed their views, and were gone after a matter of minutes. They didn’t shout anyone down or derail the ceremony.

A few weeks ago, students on our own campus set up an encampment on the lawn next to the college chapel. It has drawn attention but has not interfered with the daily work of the college. One of us (Amna) has visited the encampment several times with her young children and can attest to the peaceful, welcoming atmosphere. Along with the tents and the placards, there is a mini-library with books about the Israel-Palestine conflict. Students have organized teach-ins and engaged in respectful dialogue with critics from inside and outside the college. They have not only educated themselves about the Middle East but have also learned a great deal about higher education, from what trustees do to how endowments are managed. They are taking the knowledge from this crash course in navigating institutional bureaucracies to try and make a difference in the world. Whether you agree with their politics, students are practicing the kinds of citizenship skills that are essential to democratic life.

Hess appears to believe that student activism is incompatible with the academic mission of colleges and universities. But this position disregards the fact that classrooms and quads are distinctive spaces governed by different rules. Classrooms are sites of learning and inquiry where civil discourse and evidence-based argumentation take precedence. They hold pride of place on campuses, and their basic integrity should be fiercely protected. Campus greens, in contrast, are public spaces where speech is not subject to the same constraints. Here, students can learn how to join the civic arena, which for better or worse, is often fraught and contentious.

Citizenship in the United States is a big tent that requires lots of different skills in different contexts. Political protest is just one of its many aspects. There’s a time for listening, discussion and considered deliberation. There’s also a time when the “fierce urgency of now,” in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s memorable words, calls for “direct action” like marches and sit-ins.

As long as protesters are not targeting classroom instruction and directly hampering the learning of their peers, their actions are squarely within the realm of exercising their civic rights. If colleges and universities are to remain true to their dual mission of training thinkers and citizens, the space for non-violent political activism on campus must be protected. As legal scholars John Inazu and Bert Neuborne have noted, “the freedom to assemble peaceably remains integral to what Justice Robert Jackson once called ‘the right to differ.’” If there is one place where “the right to differ” should be protected, it’s institutions of higher education, where disagreement and debate ought to be the coin of the realm.

Amna Khalid is an associate professor of history at Carleton College. Jeffrey Aaron Snyder is an associate professor in the department of educational studies at Carleton College.

Columbia University canceled in-person classes yesterday after weekend protests that the Biden White House termed “unconscionable and dangerous.” The New York Police Department ultimately arrested more than a 100 protesters who’d been part of the unruly mob chanting “Hamas, we love you, we support your rockets too!” and had turned Columbia’s campus into something that looked like a makeshift homeless encampment. The chaos was striking but hardly a one-off. Similar performances have erupted across the country, usually without consequence. That made the arrests at Columbia notable. It also punctuates a recent trend in which leaders at other institutions—including Vanderbilt University, Washington University in St. Louis, and Pomona College—finally did something they should have done long ago: mete out consequences to the bullies who are occupying campus buildings, sparking violence, vandalizing property, and threatening their peers.

Watching Columbia’s calamity unfold over the past several days, I couldn’t help but recall an earlier episode in the university’s history: the open letter penned to the institution’s then-president in 1968 by Mark Rudd, the campus head of Students for a Democratic Society, the day before Columbia’s famed student uprising. As Rudd so succinctly put it at the time: “Up against the wall, motherf—–, this is a stick-up.”

As practiced today, campus protests feature a lot of appetite, id, and ego. Taking their cue from the cultural memory of Rudd and his fellow ‘60s-era showmen, they’re histrionic affairs rather than considered ones. They’re about spectacle rather than contemplation. Indeed, they seem calculated to stymie reasoned discourse and serious inquiry, which makes them rather a poor fit for serious institutions of higher education. And yet, many faculty who privately fret about all this prove to be strangely reluctant to speak up. Far worse, other scholars seem bizarrely untroubled about the impact of campus chaos on the work of teaching and learning. Indeed, the chaos apologists appear oddly indifferent to the value of what happens in their classrooms.

Even as the Vanderbilt drama played out, a couple of Carleton College professors—Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder—got around to taking umbrage at a column I’d written late last year (academic timelines, you know). They penned an extended essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education in defense of, well, campus disorder. You see, they were troubled by my suggestion that “the historic purpose of campus free speech is not to provide banner-waving protesters with a bucolic backdrop, but to facilitate the unfettered pursuit of truth and understanding in teaching, learning, and research.”

To their minds, my observing that “there’s nothing particularly educational about the protests, letters, and rallies” makes me a member of the “shut up and study” crowd. In the end, after many, many words, Khalid and Snyder circle back to snipe at a point that I’d thought might provide a bit of viewpoint-neutral common ground for those committed to free inquiry: that the overriding purpose of campus free speech is to safeguard “the freedom to inquire in classrooms, not the freedom to wave banners on the quad.”

Khalid and Snyder really don’t like that idea, insisting, “We reject the notion that the only worthwhile demonstrations on campus are those that take place in science labs.” Umm. Okay, then. Khalid and Snyder proceed to explain that colleges have a “dual pedagogical mission” that involves cultivating “critical-thinking skills” and “informed, engaged citizens,” and that therefore . . . well . . . honestly, this is where things get murky. They offer a lot of verbiage but not a lot of illumination.

Arguing that students learn citizenship by protesting (or by watching others do so), Khalid and Snyder insist that therefore, colleges should welcome this stuff. They decry institutions that have “tightened rules for student demonstrations,” explain that “political protests are designed to ruffle feathers,” and assert that “the whole point of a demonstration is to make a lot of noise and snap people out of their indifference.” But then the message gets muddled. They go on to vaguely allow that “some basic ground rules must be followed”—including no “targeted harassment,” no “heckler’s veto,” and an allowance for time, place, and manner restrictions. The various contingencies seemingly complicate their celebration of noise-making and feather-ruffling.

But let’s set all that aside and focus on Khalid and Snyder’s insistence that preparation for citizenship entails students “having [their] voice heard,” “advocat[ing] for positions dear to their hearts,” and learning “tactics,” “strategies,” and “when and how to make alliances and compromises.” They’ve certainly captured an element of citizenship, even if it’s not clear why any of it (especially the tactics, alliances, and compromises) requires sit-ins or campus disruption.

Look, as I’ve said many times, saying “I want!” is actually the easy part of citizenship. It’s an impulse that comes pretty naturally, one that we all hone as toddlers and teenagers. I’m skeptical that the best preparation for citizenship is helping college kids channel adolescent egotism.

Indeed, it seems odd to suggest that our civil troubles are the product of insufficiently indignant dissent. In a landscape pocked by hyperbolic social media, pro-terrorist theatrics on campus, and performative MAGA lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives, do we really think America’s problem is a lack of activism?

As a one-time high school civics teacher, I wholly embrace the need to prepare students for democratic citizenship. But participation in a democracy is about a lot more than activism and voting. It’s also about responsibility, respect for rules, patience, wisdom, and a willingness to work with those who see things differently.

These are the democratic habits that students should be learning in classrooms, seminars, and public forums. These are sober, individual virtues; they’re learned not by becoming part of a slogan-chanting mob but by individuals having the opportunity to absorb, listen, discuss, and reflect. (I know, I know. You can practically smell the hegemonic oppression . . .)

Colleges which took these virtues seriously would equip students for activism that’s more grounded, informed, and self-aware—and, quite possibly, more likely to yield an impact that transcends social media. But there’s nothing about higher ed today that’s reassuring on that count. Worse, the rallies, occupations, and attendant bullying have corroded the kinds of thoughtful exchanges that promote healthy citizenship.

We cultivate citizens by helping youth listen, learn, reflect, and then speak their minds as autonomous individuals. Democratic citizens should learn to think and speak independently, for themselves. Teaching students to spew vitriol from the safe anonymity of a smartphone or a mob is the very antithesis of that.

Historically, learning to be a part of a masked, faceless mob has been a recipe not for cultivating democrats but for producing jack-booted thugs. Up against the wall, motherf—–, indeed.

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”

My Uber driver had on talk radio as I got into the car. They were talking about President Biden’s wonderful plan to forgive billions in student debt.

“Boy, that’s exciting stuff, isn’t it?” I marveled. “All those long-suffering borrowers are finally getting some relief.”

She looked up at me in the rearview mirror. “You think it’s a good thing, huh?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said. “And not just me! I mean, Representative Bobby Scott says it’ll ‘be lifechanging for millions of student loan borrowers.’ AFT president Randi Weingarten says the president is determined ‘to remove the shackles of student debt’ in order ‘to improve people’s lives.’”

My driver didn’t seem to share my bliss. “They chose to take these loans, didn’t they?” she asked.

“Well, yes, but—”

“So they could go to college or get those fancy graduate degrees to make more money than us working types, right? Meanwhile, my friends who go to college are using their loans to help pay for rent, internet, smartphones, meals . . . the stuff the rest of us pay for on our own.”

“Yes, but I don’t think you quite understand—”

“Have you ever bought a car or a house?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “Why?”

“I pay for this car,” she said. “I paid for community college. These people borrowed money to go to college. They promised to pay it back. Why am I supposed to pay their bills, too?”

“Look, I don’t think you quite get it,” I said. “I mean, ParentsTogether has written about Crystal Payne, who has $80,000 in student loans. Her payments take up ‘a big chunk of her paycheck.’ She says that it’s ‘disheartening’ to have to pay the bill rather than ‘things like play therapy or other enriching activities for her son.’ You see?”

“She borrowed a lot of money for college and doesn’t want to pay it back. So? Trust me, I don’t want to pay my car payment.”

“Don’t you think she deserves a break?” I asked. “She didn’t get what she wanted out of college.”

“Well, then her college can repay the loans,” she said. “They’re the ones who got the $80,000.”

“That’s not how it works,” I said. “MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow has pointed out that this is really about Republicans wanting ‘banks to make more money off people who took out loans to go to college.’”

“That’s not true,” she said. “The talk radio people were just saying that the Democrats got the banks out of student lending back when Obama was president. This isn’t about banks; it’s about whether taxpayers have to pay someone else’s loans.”

“That’s not a very sophisticated take,” I said. “After all, the New York Times explains that the president’s plan ‘could help rally support among young voters.’ The people who owe this money really don’t want to pay it back. And this could help Biden beat Trump, a dangerous authoritarian who doesn’t respect the law and wants to use government to reward his friends.”

“But Biden’s ignoring the law and giving away half a trillion dollars to buy votes. Isn’t that just the sort of thing they’re warning that Trump would do? Why is it okay when Biden does it? After all, I remember hearing both Biden and Nancy Pelosi admitting the president didn’t have the power to do this—right up until Biden did it.”

“You’re missing the point,” I said. “A lot of people drop out or pay too much for a graduate degree. They feel like they got ripped off. And, heck, fewer people might go to college if they have to pay for it.”

“So?”

“Well, we want people to go to college,” I said.

“Who does?”

“We do,” I said. “College makes us better citizens and better people.”

“Really? I drive a lot of different people, and I’ve never thought those who went to college are better. They’re just more impressed with themselves. From what my friends tell me, college sounds like it’s mostly about sleeping late, taking easy classes, and scrolling on phones. How is that supposed to make you a better person, anyway?”

“I just don’t think you appreciate the stress these borrowers are under,” I said.

She looked puzzled. “Didn’t the radio say that the people who borrowed this money already got a pandemic ‘pause’? That they didn’t have to make any payments for three years?”

“Sure,” I said. “And that’s—”

“And there was zero-interest. And credit was given as if they had made payments?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “And that’s—”

“So, they already got over $200 billion in free money. Meanwhile, the rest of us still had to make our car payments and mortgage payments.”

“That’s why it’s so unfair to ask people to repay it now,” I said. “You see, they’ve gotten used to having that money to spend. They’ve spent it on clothes, vacations, and ‘play therapy.’ It’s inhumane to insist they suddenly start repaying those loans now.”

“Since I didn’t borrow $80,000 for college, maybe I’m not smart enough to understand,” she said, “but this sounds nuts. We gave these people a huge break and now, instead of saying thanks, they say that’s why we need to give them even more. What a bunch of deadbeats.”

“I don’t think you’re showing a lot of empathy,” I said.

“You know, I used to be in a bad relationship with a deadbeat,” she said. “It worked this same way. I thought I was being empathetic. But my therapist helped me see I was really being an enabler.”

We looked at each other through the rearview mirror.

“Let me ask you this,” she said finally. “If people don’t expect to repay their college loans, aren’t they likely to borrow more? And won’t colleges just go ahead and raise prices even higher? I mean, if the government was going to pay your Uber fare, you wouldn’t really care how much it cost.”

I was troubled by her callousness. I suggested she should try to be more compassionate.

“Maybe so,” she said. “But it seems like Biden’s trying to play me for a sucker. That’s not my idea of compassion.”

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”

An Excerpt from Miguel Cardona’s best-selling memoir, Reign of Confusion: My Years of Making It Rain at the U.S. Department of Education (Berkshire House, 2028), pp. 143–144.

Chapter 9: My Free College Plan Comes Together

While pouring money on K–12 schools was a lot of fun, I’m proudest of the plan I devised to deliver “free college” on a scale that no one had previously thought possible.

The White House was still smarting from the collapse of Build Back Better. And some MAGA apologists in the press were claiming the $200 billion in K–12 pandemic aid hadn’t been well spent. So, we knew we wanted to avoid relying on Congress or being accountable for funds.

The president had me over to the Oval. He looked at me coolly, his youthful energy unmistakable. “Our people are angry. We need to give them more stuff,” he said. “Can you make free college happen? That would get all those Warren-lovers off my back!”

He paused. “Well? Can you do it?” he asked, his manly vigor evident in every word.

“Yes, sir,” I promised. “After all, I think it was Ronald Reagan who said, ‘We’re from the government, and we’re here to help.’ You can count on me.”

After the meeting, I talked to a senior White House aide. She shared her dream that, one day, government would get past this weird fixation on balance sheets. Her eloquence haunts me still. “I cry each and every night,” she said, “for the precious souls pressed into capitalist servitude as journalists, attorneys, and DEI trainers, their sacred selves disfigured by debt.” She insisted that I find a way forward. By the time I got back to 400 Maryland, I was fired up!

The White House made it clear that I’d have a free hand, so long as I kept harassing charter schools and making the teachers’ unions happy. And I took full advantage. Our senior staff said we didn’t have the votes to pass anything through Congress, thanks to those MAGA Republicans. And our lawyers said we didn’t have a legal path forward. That’s when I just cracked my knuckles and thought, “This is why I’m here.” It was time to use my old central-office guile.

We needed to bypass obstacles like Congress, law-making, and budgets. Over the next few weeks, a three-step plan took shape.

Step one: My team found a couple sentences in the 20-year-old HEROES law, written to give military personnel a break on student loans when they were deployed post-9/11. Well, we took those phrases, pretended they applied to the pandemic (which was still, totally, completely raging), and said borrowers wouldn’t have to repay $500 billion in student loans. MAGA Republicans sued, the MAGA Supreme Court had to stop us, and the game was afoot.

Step two: Once we’d planted the idea that we could give out free money, we set out on two parallel paths. We started “forgiving” borrowers on a piecemeal basis. A few billion dollars here and there didn’t seem all that newsworthy compared to our HEROES ploy, but it let the president keep sending emails to borrowers telling them he was giving them free money. (That made the president very happy.) Meanwhile, we rewrote Income-Driven Repayment to quietly turn student lending into a vast new entitlement, one that would eventually let us give away trillions of dollars without worrying about Congress or budgets.

Step three: Congress had ordered us to simplify the federal financial aid form (better known as FAFSA). If this worked too smoothly, there was a risk it might strengthen faith in the old-fashioned system. So, we dragged our feet rolling it out as long as we could and then, when we had to move, we made sure that nothing worked. All the while, we kept changing the rules on the loan servicers and blaming them for any headaches. By the end, only MAGA types still thought people should pay for college and that loans could or should be repaid.

Our strategy worked like a charm. It left no money for something like an expanded Pell Grant, ensuring that Congress couldn’t address college costs in some boring, bipartisan fashion. It signaled that loan repayment was an unreasonable expectation, smashing the hoary, inequitable belief that students should pay for college. It encouraged students to borrow more money and community college students to become borrowers. And it infuriated those MAGA Republicans, making sure they wouldn’t compromise on something that might hem us in.

By the time I left office, we were on a glide path to free college in pretty much everything but name—for colleges private and public, for undergrads and graduates, for living expenses as well as tuition. Some observers said it looked like I was playing four-dimensional chess. When others said I seemed too confused for this to be any kind of purposeful master plan, I’d just smile and say, “Confused is as confused does.”

Today, I’m often asked how I got it done—how I poured new dollars into higher ed, boosted President Biden with his base, taught Americans to view student loans as a cash grab, and did it all without worrying about Congress or what the law said. My answer? “That was my job.” And it really was the job of a lifetime.

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”

I really thought everyone would cheat.

Halfway through the semester, I asked my students to tell me (through an anonymous survey) how they used ChatGPT in their other college courses. In my own class I had worked hard to show them how AI could be their TA: helping them brainstorm ideas, organize their writing, and focus and clarify their thinking around complex issues. That’s what a good cognitive apprenticeship is all about. But in my students’ other courses, well, all bets were off. Put simply, ChatGPT offers students the perfect shortcut to doing their work.

That’s why I was shocked by their responses. “I use it the same way we use it for this class,” one student wrote. “It’s weird but useful getting to learn how to use ChatGPT as a tool and guide rather than a way to complete your work,” another commented. “I use ChatGPT to give me ideas when I struggle with what to write,” a third student said. Overall, about 80 percent of my students used some form of AI, yet only about 20 percent said they’d used it to cheat, as in having ChatGPT write all or most of their assignments for them. I realized most of my students used ChatGPT as an aid to, rather than a replacement of, their learning. In essence, they’re using it as a mentor.

Call me naïve, but I am incredibly excited by this. In an age of depersonalization and massification in higher education, I strongly believe students are desperate for personalized mentoring; indeed, research tells us that “mentoring may serve in a catalytic capacity” for enhancing critical thinking.

The problem, of course, is how do I, a single instructor, provide one-on-one guidance to a roomful of 30 or 150 students? Forget about it. Yet I want to suggest that if faculty can actually embrace AI in higher education (rather than reject it), ChatGPT could become a powerful tool to help faculty offer a high-quality education to all of our students.

However, that is a big “if.”

“Critical thinking”—which has been defined as “reasonable reflective thinking focused on deciding what to believe or do”—is actually really hard to teach. I can’t just plug-and-play the right answer into my students’ brains. Students need time and practice to figure out complex stuff, whether it’s chess or ethical dilemmas. Luckily, cognitive science research tells us that “given favorable learning conditions for deliberate practice and given the learner invests effort in sufficient learning opportunities, indeed, anyone can learn anything they want.”

But fostering high-quality learning requires high-quality teaching. I can’t just lecture at my students; rather, teaching complex subject matter requires a combination of dialogue, authentic engagement, and mentoring. The science of learning has given us lots of strategies to foster powerful conversations and engage in case studies, problem-based learning, and other authentic real-world practices. But as for mentoring? Until ChatGPT came along, I was stuck.

Listen, therefore, to what another one of my students wrote: “I use ChatGPT as my TA and for it to give me extra help with brainstorming different ideas, like I would with any other person.”

Dear reader, let that sink in: “like I would with any other person.”

Let me be clear: I am not trying to anthropomorphize ChatGPT or pretend that it can solve all of the woes of higher education. Rather, I think we are at a crossroads with AI.

One path makes it easier and easier for all of us in higher education—faculty and students—to fall into a vicious downward spiral of performative spectacle: we pretend to teach (by lecturing) and they pretend to learn (by letting AI do the work for them). If you think the value of higher education is questioned now, well, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

But there is the potential for another path, one where my students begin to accept that ChatGPT can indeed, like any other person, mentor and help them learn to think carefully and critically. And so, I—and the rest of higher education—must step up and show them the way down that path. There are no shortcuts here.

Dan Sarofian-Butin was the founding dean of the Winston School of Education and Social Policy at Merrimack College and is now a professor of education there.

Over the past few weeks, I did a couple plenary sessions at big education conferences (a higher ed gathering and a convening of state school leaders). I came away reminded why it feels like the education community has so much trouble talking to red America.

A bit of context: For the higher ed thing, a friend cajoled me into joining the kick-off panel, which was otherwise comprised of conference honorees. The topic was the current landscape of higher ed, and I was recruited when they realized the panelists were mostly in agreement on the issues of the day. As for the state gathering, they’d asked Pedro Noguera and me to discuss our book In Search of Common Ground.

Anyway, I came away frustrated as hell. So, what got me so grouchy?

For starters, given that I was asked (in both cases) to model respectful discourse across the right-left divide, I found it odd that each session began with me forced to sit through close to half an hour of politicized progressive cant.

The higher ed thing started with encouragement to stand together against those narrow-minded right-wingers who mindlessly hate higher education and want to gut DEI. The December 5 congressional hearing in which the presidents of MIT, Harvard, and UPenn showed themselves to be lawyered-up hypocrites was mentioned, but not as an embarrassment for higher ed. Rather, it was evidence of the right’s devious, vicious agenda. Talk about an ironic prelude to a session nominally devoted to understanding the crisis of public confidence in higher ed.

The state gathering featured the state chief turning a scheduled three-minute introduction into 20 minutes of campaign-style histrionics. Parental concerns about schools cutting them out of the loop regarding their kids’ gender identity? Just a matter of “anti-LGBT+” bigotry. Parents expressing opposition to elementary school libraries stocking potentially pornographic materials? Just more right-wing “book banning.” He didn’t get around to chronic absenteeism, chaotic classrooms, or dismal student achievement, but he did make time to brag about increased spending. By the time the warm-ups had ridden roughshod over their theoretically tightly scripted schedule, our session (billed at 60 minutes when they’d asked me to fly out) wound up running a terse 26 minutes. If I was part of the gang, I might’ve laughed all this off. As someone conscious throughout of being an outsider, it all seemed to send a clear but subtle and—I’m fairly sure—unintended message.

In both convenings, I felt less like I was at a big-tent gathering of educators than that I was crashing a local Democratic Party meet-up. There wasn’t even a token bit of right-friendly rhetoric: nary a “liberty,” “belt-tightening,” “personal responsibility,” “rigor,” or “reasonable people will disagree about these things” to be found among the welcoming blather. And yet the organizers of each affair went out of their way to tell me that they had right-leaning members in attendance, wanted to ensure that those members felt valued and heard, and expressed their intention to demonstrate what it looks like to help members lead in these polarized times.

All of which left me confused. Did they not recognize how political all this opening jabber felt? Did they deem these opening remarks pro forma, as if sharing left-wing talking points at an education convening is like singing the Star-Spangled Banner before a big game? Did they imagine that conservative concerns are so manifestly insincere that even right-wingers don’t really believe them? In any event, it was discomfiting. It was rather as if I had launched one of the common ground dinners I host—with guests from the teacher unions, Biden appointees, and such—by asking a Trump apologist to toss out 15 or 20 minutes of right-wing red meat.

And keep in mind that this was all preamble for sessions in which they’d gone to some considerable effort or expense to bring me in, explicitly to model thoughtful engagement across our divides. In these cases, though, I’ll admit that (by the time I’d nodded through all the darts tossed at my views and values) I was less primed for good-faith engagement than I would’ve liked. And that’s the real issue.

Look, perhaps there aren’t actually any conservatives in those rooms. Or if there are, perhaps they are so cowed that they just accept this state of affairs as their lot. Either way, the groupthink was stifling. I hate to think how it goes when a brand-name right-winger isn’t about to go on stage. And none of this was conducive to helping educators learn how better to navigate or bridge good-faith differences.

As I’m always telling my young staffers, talk is cheap. What we do is what matters. That’s how we show what we value. And that’s what made these events instructive. I came away freshly reminded of three things that I’ve long noted. First, for all the talk about wanting to engage across difference, I’m not sure how many in education really mean it. Second, groupthink has settled so thickly in the power centers of K–12 and higher education that many in those worlds don’t even see it. Third, little things matter when it comes to building bridges or forging trust with those from outside one’s charmed circle.

I don’t know if those inside such ideological bubbles are able to acknowledge them or, if so, willing to do anything about them. If they can’t or won’t, though, I can only hope that eventually they’ll realize they’re speaking, at best, to only half the nation.

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”

Recently, I offered a not-so-sophisticated explanation for the histrionics we’ve seen at elite colleges: too many students are simply aimless, lonely, and bored. Well-meaning concern about the mental and emotional state of college students today has fueled a lot of affirmation and hand-holding. But much of this may ultimately be counterproductive, exacerbating fragility rather than supporting well-being.

After all, on the merits, it’s hard to look at elite college students and conclude they’re overworked or overstressed. As I note:

Last winter, in a survey of four-year-college students, 64 percent said they put “a lot of effort” into school. Yet even among these self-described hard workers, less than a third said they devote even two hours a day to studying. In 2010, economists Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks calculated that in 1961 the average full-time student at a four-year college studied about 24 hours per week; by 2003, that was down to 14 hours. We’ve normalized a college culture in which students believe that 20 or 25 hours of class and study time combined constitutes a full week.

And yet, while workloads are down, grades are way up. Although the editorial board of the Harvard Crimson has fretted that Harvard’s students are subject to the “absurd expectation of constant productivity,” grade inflation has been pervasive at selective colleges in recent decades. (Harvard’s average GPA climbed from 3.0 in 1967 to 3.8 in 2022). And elite college students know that, once admitted, they needn’t worry about earning a diploma—since their institutions brag about their 96 percent completion rates.

Maybe students at selective colleges are busy with jobs? Well, in the 1980s, 40 percent of America’s college students worked full-time. By 2020, that figure had fallen to one-in-ten. Meanwhile, the Surgeon General has warned that Americans are lonely and isolated, particularly those ages 15 to 24, who’ve seen in-person time with friends plunge by 70 percent since 2003—down to 40 minutes a day in 2020.

If students aren’t studying, working, or hanging out with friends, what exactly are they doing? That’s the question. For one thing, college-age youth spend an extraordinary amount of time online, swiping through videos and scrolling social media.

The anomie we see at elite colleges is less evident at regional institutions and community colleges where students are busier: They’re far more likely to attend part-time, live at home, be older, and have kids or jobs. Among community college students, nearly a third work more than 30 hours a week, and 15 percent have two or more jobs. At these institutions, students are far less likely to be demonstrating on a manicured quad than juggling transportation and childcare.

The funny thing is how much of an open secret these dynamics are. A slew of faculty wrote me after the piece appeared, offering some version of “Yup!” and their own experiences. As one veteran professor wryly related,

For a quarter century, I’ve taught a big-enrollment course in introductory psychology. A student came to see me during my office hours in early November. She’d flunked the first mid-term on October 13 and the second mid-term on October 31. Here’s the core of the conversation:

Student: After I got an F on the first mid-term, I put in a “superhuman” effort studying for the second mid-term.

Professor: How much time did you actually devote to this class? Don’t include the time you attended the class or the time you spent reading the textbook for the first time. How much total additional time did you spend from October 13 to October 31 studying?

Student: About three or four hours.

As an educator and employer, I’ve typically found that most people have a latent desire to be challenged and engaged. But that requires clarity regarding expectations and norms. Otherwise, hard work can feel pointless, nerdy, or like a sucker’s bet. If students aren’t finding fulfillment through academics, work, or friendships, they’ll seek it out some other way, such as hurling themselves into performative protest (whether they understand their cause or not).

What should we do about all this? I offer some thoughts in the longer essay. But the place to start seems pretty clear: resetting the culture of selective colleges. Today, student evaluations and faculty rating sites reward professors for assigning less work and granting easy As. “Students struggle to win admission to elite schools. Once they arrive, however, they hunt for professors with low expectations,” George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan noted in The Case Against Education.

We need to reset expectations and incentives for students and faculty alike. How about this? For full-time college students, studying and classes should constitute a 40-hour week. Course-taking and workloads should be modified accordingly. Heck, that might even let students finish faster, which could do much to help rein in the cost of college.

 

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”

Americans are fed up with politicians. Understandably so, given the climate: inflation, investigation, recrimination, deterioration, polarization.

In 2016, voters rejected a former senator and secretary of state and instead chose Donald Trump, a reality television star/businessman who had never before served in government. Going into 2024, the impulse to turn to a non-politician-candidate is again strong. Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman has been pushing the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon. Another businessman, Vivek Ramaswamy, has entered the race and is getting some traction, outpolling senators and governors and even Vice President Pence. An environmental activist, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has been polling well, too; he has lots of politicians in his family, but the presidency would be his first elective government office.

Perhaps the different kind of leadership really needed to cure the country of its current malaise, though, doesn’t come from business or from environmental activism but from academia, which puts a premium on consensus and community-building. Success at the helm of a modern university features, in the best cases, a combination of intellectual rigor, innovation, listening, navigating diversity, sophisticated data analysis, decisive strength, awareness of the competitive landscape, civil negotiation of differences, and rootedness in values—all things we could use in Washington.

A politician with 65 percent of the vote is winning in a landslide. By contrast, a university president who has lost the support of 35 percent of the faculty, students, or members of the board of trustees is in big trouble. The recent resignations of the president of Stanford University, Mark Tessier-Lavigne, and the president of Texas A&M, M. Katherine Bank, attest to that. In national politics, unlike at universities, weakened leaders don’t typically leave; they linger on, until term limits kick in or they lose an election.

There are precedents for the elevation of presidents from colleges to the White House. After Dwight Eisenhower was a five-star general and the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II, he served as president of Columbia University until January 1953, when he moved into the Oval Office. Woodrow Wilson was president of Princeton University, then governor of New Jersey, before getting elected president. Eisenhower presided over what historians describe as the “age of consensus,” while Wilson championed the League of Nations, aimed at global peacekeeping. Shortcomings of both the Eisenhower and Wilson administrations in Washington are clear in retrospect, but the themes—consensus, nonviolent dispute resolution—remain relevant.

Who are the visionary higher-education leaders of today?

High-Tech Growers

The high-tech growth that has been driving recent financial market returns is also a theme in higher education. The president of Northeastern University in Boston, Joseph Aoun, is so ahead of the curve that he published a book, Robot-Proof, about “higher education in the age of artificial intelligence” in 2017, years before the ChatGPT breakthrough. After taking office in 2006, Aoun shut down the school’s football team and opened more than a dozen satellite campuses, including in London, Toronto, Vancouver, California, Virginia, Seattle, Charlotte, and Portland, Maine (and opening in fall 2023: Miami). Families appreciate that the co-op work experience, part of a Northeastern education, puts students on a path to a paying job. Speaking to graduates this year, Aoun emphasized humane qualities: “For the foreseeable future computational power cannot express empathy. Microprocessors cannot comfort the afflicted.”

Scott Pulsipher, president of Western Governors University, recognized that with much of the higher-education action moving online, one way to broaden the university’s appeal was to make course content more accessible, less costly, and attractive to non-traditional students. A Harvard MBA who spent 20 years working for Amazon and other consumer-focused tech companies, Pulsifer has guided Western Governors to serve more than 200,000 students, graduating between 45,000 and 50,000 a year. He told the House Education and the Workforce Committee earlier this year that when he attended his first WGU commencement, many of the graduates “were in their thirties and often accompanied by both parents and children.”

Paul LeBlanc’s parents didn’t graduate high school, let alone college. His father worked in construction as a mason, his mother in a factory stitching car tops. They earned extra money cleaning houses, LeBlanc writes in his 2021 book Students First. LeBlanc himself paid his way through Westfield State College and Framingham State College by working construction in the summers. “It’s the classic American story of immigration, opportunity, and economic and social mobility,” he writes. Since 2003, when LeBlanc took over as president, Southern New Hampshire University has grown to more than 160,000 students from 2,800. Four-year tuition for an online bachelor’s degree in business administration is $39,600.

At Arizona State University, President Michael Crow doubled the enrollment from the 55,491 it was at when he took over as president in 2002. He also expanded the school’s racial and ethnic diversity dramatically, even after a state referendum banned the use of race as a factor in admissions.

Presidents from Politics

Ben Sasse resigned from the U.S. Senate to become president of the University of Florida. Sasse—a Harvard graduate who got his Ph.D. in history from Yale—only arrived in February 2023, but he’s already making some newsworthy hires. He brought economist Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach in as associate provost and senior advisor for academic excellence, and he lured William Inboden, a biographer of Ronald Reagan, from the University of Texas. While serving in the Senate, Sasse wrote a whole book about the idea of “community, friendships, and relationships” as the antidote to the crisis of loneliness and deaths of despair.

Mitch Daniels, as president of Purdue from 2013 through January 1, 2023, froze tuition for 11 years, saving families more than $1 billion. He experimented with income-share agreements that let students pay for Purdue with a percentage of their future earnings. He also expanded Purdue’s internet-based offerings, acquiring Kaplan University from Graham Holdings Company. Daniels came to Purdue with government experience, having served two terms as governor of Indiana and as director of the Office of Management and Budget during the administration of President George W. Bush. Richard Vedder, an economist and longtime critical observer of higher education, describes Daniels as “not only competent but kind and considerate.”

Also worth mentioning: a former lieutenant governor of Massachusetts during Mitt Romney’s administration, Kerry Healey, who championed women entrepreneurs during a six-year stint as president of Babson College.

The Ivy Leaguers

Before becoming president of Brown University, Christina Paxson served stints at Princeton as dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and as chairman of the Department of Economics. Her academic work focuses on social policy, especially involving children and health. She dealt with Washington and Congress on multiple issues, including a term as chairman of the Association of American Universities. Like Daniels, she was an early advocate of bringing students back to campus during the pandemic. At Brown, she has improved the campus climate in part by deliberately cultivating religious life. In a February 2022 interview with Bloomberg, she said that religion was an elemental part of the diversity she was seeking in recruiting incoming classes. She’s followed through with a broad range of initiatives that have made Brown, once a battleground, increasingly tolerant.

Also worth mentioning: Richard Levin led Yale through a growth spurt from 1993 to 2013, then was CEO of Coursera, an online education company that says it has served more than 113 million learners.

The Southerners

Much of the population growth and economic vitality in America has been moving southward. Higher education is no exception. Since taking over as president of Tulane University in 2014, Michael Fitts has doubled the endowment, renovated the campus, and made undergraduate admissions more selective. Star author and journalist Walter Isaacson joined the history faculty. Fitts talks about values in a countercultural way. “Malice and spite have infected politics, entertainment, and public discourse,” Fitts said in his 2023 commencement speech. “But that doesn’t mean it’s the right way to live your life,” Instead, he advised, “Cultivate kindness wherever you go.”

At Paul Quinn College, a historically Black college in Dallas, Texas, President Michael Sorrell took a page from Aoun’s playbook, eliminating the football program. He turned the field into an urban farm, growing spinach and sweet potatoes. The school’s graduation rate has improved, and, in part because of a program that combines work and school, students are taking on less debt. Sorrell talks about “the four Ls of Quinnite Leadership: leave places better than you found them, live a life that matters, lead from wherever you are, love something greater than yourself.”

As president of Georgia State University from 2009 to 2021, Mark Becker helped to increase the six-year graduation rate by 23 percentage points while also reducing the average time to earn a degree by almost a full semester, saving students $21 million in tuition each year, the school says. Becker, now president of the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities, has a doctorate in statistics, and GSU used predictive analytics and data to drive student success. A merger in 2016 with Georgia Perimeter College made GSU the largest university in the state.

The Northern Pandemic Leaders

For all the action in the South, some Northern schools and their leaders are also holding their own, handling the Covid-19 pandemic with unusual character. At Colby College in Waterville, Maine, President David Greene attracted national attention in spring 2020, when amid a national economic downturn, he launched a campaign to get a job for every one of the college’s 500 graduating seniors. “I am not aware of another college ever taking on such an ambitious effort for a graduating class, but we do things differently at Colby,” Greene said. “We know we are on this journey together, and we look out for one another along the way.” Greene, like Aoun, was early to the artificial intelligence trend; Colby launched the Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence in 2021. Applications for admission to Colby have soared to nearly 18,000 in 2023, up from about 5,000 in 2014. In 2022, the college acquired two islands off the Maine coast, totaling 500 acres; Greene said they’d become “laboratories for important research and places of quiet reflection and artistic creation.”

The president of Colgate University, in Hamilton, New York, Brian Casey, moved into a small college dorm room with no air conditioning for a required 17-day quarantine at the start of the fall 2020 semester. It made the point that both the students and the campus elites would be subject to the same pandemic rules. “It was actually kind of joyful. I was with the students and we were going through something together,” he told CNN, making a point about “common purpose. We’re saying we can only do this if we all do this together.” Casey is halfway to the goal of raising $1 billion for the university.

American higher education is far from perfect. Survey data such as a recent Gallup poll show public trust in higher education trending downward especially among Republicans. Even after the decline, though, the polls found that Americans still have more confidence in higher education than in many other institutions, which are also seeing declining levels of trust. The headlines focusing on research fraud, racial preferences, and student debt are obscuring a more positive story. On a number of campuses, civility and community are on the rise, and there seem to be green shoots of optimism poking through. Harvard; Stanford; St. Philips College in San Antonio, Texas; Santa Fe College in Gainesville, Florida; and California State University in Bakersfield are running an “Intercollegiate Civil Disagreement Partnership Fellowship.” There’s a bottom-up aspect of this, too, driven by student yearning for authenticity in an age of algorithms. The Wall Street Journal detects what it calls a “surprising surge of faith among young people.” Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky, attracted 50,000 people to a two-week-long Christian revival.

College campuses, of all places, might help America shift the tone for the better. It could come through the presidents and faculty getting involved in government service in Washington, refreshing the tired political talent pool, either via the major parties or by the No Labels movement. Or it may arrive if students educated in some of these institutions take away not only the substance of what they learned but also something of the spirit.

Ira Stoll is editor of FutureOfCapitalism.com. He was managing editor of Education Next from 2019 to 2023.

Joe Biden made two years of free community college a centerpiece of his presidential campaign in 2020, but Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia joined with Republicans to prevent the idea from being written into federal law. The Republican takeover of the House in the 2022 midterm elections is widely seen as making it even harder for Biden to win legislative victories. But just days after the election, community college’s most influential backer in the Biden administration—First Lady Jill Biden, a community college professor herself—was out touting the issue as fertile terrain for a bipartisan compromise.

“Joe and I will never stop working to ensure that all Americans can access community colleges and the career pathways they deserve,” Biden said in remarks prepared for delivery at the College Promise Careers Institute. “I have so much hope for what we can get done. Because this isn’t a red or blue issue. It’s an American issue. College Promise has worked with leaders from both sides of the aisle and across the country. We’ve seen successful programs in Republican states and Democratic cities and everything in between. This is one area where we can make real, bipartisan progress.”

For the Bidens to get free community college through Congress as national policy may be a long shot, but it is accurate that variations on the idea have been tried in states and other jurisdictions with both Republican and Democratic leadership. Tennessee, for instance, under the leadership of Republican Governor Bill Haslam, became the first state to offer free tuition at all in-state community colleges with the establishment of its Tennessee Promise initiative in 2016. These initiatives, commonly referred to as Promise programs, provide graduating in-state high school students with scholarships to help fully fund the cost of tuition at public 2- and 4-year institutions. Most programs do so by providing last-dollar funding, covering the remaining cost of tuition that students owe after factoring in federal Pell grants, other state awards, and the financial aid packages that schools offer.

The Bidens and other Promise program champions often cite two key benefits of free community college initiatives. The first is a spark to help boost declining postsecondary enrollment rates across the nation. The second is an improvement in the educational attainment rates and, in turn, the upward mobility levels of low and middle-income families.

But early evidence shows that these programs have largely fallen short of their promise to serve and uplift students from low-income backgrounds. New York State launched its Excelsior Scholarship program in 2017 to provide students from households that earn less than $125,000 a year an opportunity to attend college tuition-free at any CUNY or SUNY school. The state government estimated that 940,000 students from low and middle-class families would be eligible to receive this new aid. According to a CNBC report, however, less than 73,000 students have received the scholarship in the five years since the program’s inception, which constitutes less than 8% of the eligible population. A May 2022 report by the Urban Institute found about 32 percent of all funding has gone to students with family incomes below $70,000. By comparison, over 40% of students across New York State and nearly 60% of students in New York City are from households with incomes below $70,000, according to a statistical profile of New York’s K-12 education system issued in 2020 by the Manhattan Institute’s Ray Domanico. Students from the lowest-income brackets, who need funding the most, are receiving a disproportionately small share of the pie.

One reason low-income students are avoiding the Excelsior Scholarship and other similarly structured Promise programs is that many programs only cover tuition and fail to extend any aid toward covering other costs associated with attending college. A senior studying computer science at SUNY Stony Brook, Aneek Barua, initially used the Excelsior Scholarship to fund the remaining $3,535 he owed in tuition each semester after factoring in other grants and awards. However, even with the scholarship, he was still required to pay around $1,000 in mandatory school fees that are allocated toward funding the school’s athletic programs, technology labs, campus transportation, and student activities, among other purposes. On top of this, Barua had to fund his own housing and meal plan, which totaled around $6,000 a semester. While he was able to find a way to make ends meet through a mix of external scholarships, part-time work, and the federal work-study program, he was able to significantly reduce the amount of stress that he endured in doing so by switching over from the Excelsior Scholarship to primarily relying instead on the NYS Tuition Assistance Program. With greater TAP funding, which, unlike the Excelsior, did not preclude non-tuition costs, Barua was able to cover both the outstanding tuition amount and a significant portion of the $1,000 in mandatory school fees.

In addition to insufficient aid, many Promise programs impose additional burdens on students from the lowest-income brackets in the form of strict post-graduation residency requirements and administrative challenges. Under the terms of the Excelsior Scholarship, students must reside and work in New York State immediately after graduation for as many years as they received an award. For Barua, the residency requirement posed an additional challenge to his aspirations for achieving upward mobility because many of the high-paying software engineering jobs he was applying for were concentrated in other states like California and Washington. Even though abandoning the Excelsior Scholarship meant that his $7,070 in grant money would be converted into a loan he would have to pay back within the next 10 years, Barua decided that it was ultimately in his and his family’s best interest to incur the debt in favor of pursuing more lucrative tech jobs in other states that would enable him to realize his full future earning potential.

While the failure of Promise programs to steer funding toward the students most in need is concerning, it also, somewhat paradoxically, has at least one key silver lining. Namely, some of the current deterrents in place help to combat an unfavorable unintended consequence of Promise programs, whereby the promise of free tuition attracts low-income students to attend worse-performing colleges than they otherwise would have. Take, for instance, the case of Sergey Tsoy, a senior studying biology at the Macaulay Honors College in New York, part of the City University of New York. Tsoy graduated with high marks from a top test-in public school in New York City. Having seen the stress that paying off student loans placed on his mother, who attended college in the U.S. after immigrating just a few years before his birth, Tsoy made going to school for free a top priority in his college selection process. While Tsoy initially found free tuition from the Excelsior scholarship to be alluring and was content to go to school at a CUNY or SUNY of his choice, further research led him to discover that he, like Barua, would likely have to pay an additional thousands of dollars out of pocket in other non-tuition expenses and also be restricted to staying in New York for at least a few years after graduation. This realization prompted Tsoy to pursue alternatives, eventually leading him to look into and successfully apply to Macaulay, which is a lesser-known, highly selective honors college program that provides high-achieving students in the CUNY system with full-tuition scholarships. In addition to a full-ride and a rigorous academic program, Macaulay Honors provides Tsoy with a laptop computer, a personal academic advisor, an opportunity fund allowing him to study abroad for a semester, and 2 years of residency in campus dormitories. Ironically, the shortcomings in the institutional design of the Excelsior Scholarship pushed Tsoy into a program that provides him the resources and opportunities to realize his full potential as a student.

Some high-achieving, low-income students are not as fortunate as Tsoy, however, and, because of a lack of information or the overwhelming temptation of free tuition, do enroll in colleges that may limit their future earning potential and upward mobility levels. Take, for instance, the case of one first-generation, low-income 21-year old junior currently studying at the State University of New York at New Paltz. Having attended and performed very well at a public high school in New York City, the student chose SUNY New Paltz over Lehigh University primarily because of the free tuition he received as a result of the Excelsior scholarship. Although the decision seemed sensible and well considered to the student at the time, given his family’s financial situation, it also could be one that deflates his future earnings and outcomes. The median salary of a SUNY New Paltz graduate one year after graduation is $29,925, according to data from the U.S. Census, while the median Lehigh graduate starting salary is more than double that amount, at $59,200. While this student may end up outperforming the median graduate from New Paltz, the marked difference in earnings may indicate a larger gap in school quality and preparation for future success that often exists between many of the public institutions funded by Promise Programs and the private 4-year institutions that high-achieving students are capable of attending.

An academic study of the Adams Scholarship, a Massachusetts merit-based scholarship that functioned like a Promise program, found supporting evidence for this effect—receiving the scholarship actually decreased college graduation rates because it incentivized students to enroll in lower-quality public colleges in the state of Massachusetts rather than higher-quality private colleges that they otherwise would have attended, with quality defined as “a combination of graduation rates, academic skill of the student body, and instructional expenditures.” This is still the case today with low-income students who forgo higher quality education because of the short-term appeal of free tuition that Promise programs can offer. When I asked this SUNY New Paltz student directly where he would have gone if the Excelsior Scholarship did not exist, he answered, without much hesitation, “Lehigh.”

To better serve low-income students, Promise programs would have to implement more generous non-tuition funding, less stringent residency requirements, and improved operational efficiency. The Promise programs would also have to make those adjustments carefully, in a way that does not backfire by encouraging more low-income, high-achieving students to enroll in programs that limit their earning potential and upward mobility. Additional transparency about the cost-benefit analysis of applying for Promise programs, free consultations with college experts and financial aid officers, and more exposure of alternatives such as the Macaulay Honors College all represent simple, yet effective steps forward. Giving successful community college students guaranteed admission to a four-year school if they meet certain standards might also improve continuation rates. With those improvements, Promise programs might more fully fulfill their promise to low-income students and, in the words of First Lady Jill Biden, provide them with “the opportunities they deserve.”

Chris Ma is an undergraduate at Harvard College studying government and economics.

And here are the findings from a survey of incoming freshmen conducted by the Crimson, the student newspaper:

To those who would chalk the decline up to a lack of qualified applicants, or to a demographic decline in American Jewry overall, consider that between 2015 and 2022, the percentage of undergraduates who are Jewish at Brown, an Ivy League peer institution of Harvard, has climbed to 24 percent from 15 percent, according to the Hillel college guide.

Rosovsky’s family, according to the New Yorker article, comes from a village called Rosovo, near Minsk, in White Russia. Current Harvard president Lawrence Bacow’s father came to America from Minsk, as did my own maternal grandfather. Henry Rosovsky himself was born September 1, 1927, in the Free City of Danzig, after his family fled the Communists following the Russian Revolution. To avoid the Nazis, he moved to Brussels, then France, then Spain, then Portugal, then the United States, where he served in the Army during both World War II and the Korean War.

I came back to the office after the funeral to field a media query about a report that Harvard had the most antisemitic incidents of any campus during the 2021-2022 academic year. The Crimson, the student newspaper that in the spring editorialized in favor of a boycott of Israel, hasn’t yet published news of the antisemitism study. It only published an obituary of Rosovsky after I emailed a complaint about its absence. If Harvard isn’t careful, it is in danger of ending up like Minsk or Rosovo or Danzig: a place where Jews once flourished. It’d be an education, though not, alas, the sort Rosovsky designed.

Ira Stoll is managing editor of Education Next.