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The University of California, Los Angeles, was the first university to openly propose using facial recognition software for security surveillance. Now it's the first to openly drop that plan. But whether other colleges are using the technology behind closed doors remains to be seen.

UCLA first floated the plan last year as part of a larger policy about campus security. Students voiced concerns during a 30-day comment period in June and at a town hall on the issue in late January.

Fight for the Future, a national digital rights advocacy organization, launched its own public campaign against the UCLA administration's consideration early this year, in partnership with Students for Sensible Drug Policy.

“This victory at UCLA will send a pretty strong message to any other administration who is considering doing this,” said Evan Greer, deputy director of the organization. “It’s not going to be worth the backlash.”

As part of the effort, Fight for the Future ran its own experiment. The group ran over 400 photos of UCLA athletes and faculty members through Amazon’s facial recognition software. They found 58 of those photos were incorrectly matched with photos in a mug-shot database. The majority of those false positives, the organization said, were of people of color. Some images the software claimed were the same person with “100 percent confidence.”

Fight for the Future had planned to release the results of the experiment to a news outlet, Greer said, but when that publication contacted the university, the response was swift. Within 24 hours a UCLA administrator wrote Greer to say the university was no longer considering using the software.

“We determined that that the potential benefits of the technology were limited and vastly outweighed by the community’s concerns,” a spokesperson for UCLA said via email.

The university had not identified a specific software or made any concrete plans to deploy it, he said. The administration is now working to explicitly prohibit facial recognition software.

The Problem With Facial Recognition

The problems with the software are multifaceted, Greer said. It’s well documented that the current technology doesn’t always work as intended. It’s routinely bad at identifying women and nonwhite people.

That means those groups are more likely to face both the annoying aspects of being misidentified (like being locked out of a dorm) and the dangerous ones (like being wrongly accosted by police).

The technology is also susceptible to hacking.

“The scan of your face is a unique identifier, like your Social Security number,” Greer said. “But if your Social Security number gets breached, you can get a new Social Security number. If a scan of your face gets breached, you can’t get a new face.”

Amelia Vance, director of youth and education privacy at the Future of Privacy Forum, said concerns around facial recognition should be particularly troublesome for higher education institutions. The systems are often particularly bad at correctly identifying children and young adults, she said. The software can cost millions of dollars and -- given that many episodes of violence are committed by students who attend those colleges -- is ineffective against violence.

“We just don’t have that much training data on children and on young adults,” Vance said. “This technology right now is not ready for prime time.”

Her organization has proposed a moratorium on facial recognition in public schools.

UCLA said it would consider using facial recognition in a “limited" capacity. One draft of the policy shared online by the student group Campus Safety Alliance said the technology would only be used “to locate a known individual for legitimate, safety or security purposes related to individuals who have been issued an official campus stay away order, court ordered restraining order, law enforcement bulletin or who pose a threat to one or more members of the campus community.”

That draft said a human being would need to examine the match before an official determination of someone’s identity could be made.

But Greer said that "limited" capacity -- security surveillance -- is one of the more concerning uses of the software.

“We’ve seen a few other schools that were trying to dabble with this technology,” she said.

Two other institutions in the state -- Stanford University and the University of Southern California -- had floated using facial recognition as part of their food service or dorm security. Students there would have been able to scan their faces to get into a dorm or pay for a meal.

While those uses normalize facial recognition and should be stopped, Greer said, they don’t ring the same alarm bells that surveillance uses do.

It’s possible that in the future the technology will improve, becoming more accurate and more secure.

For Vance, that’s one reason why her organization has called for a moratorium instead of an outright ban.

But to Greer, the possibility that the technology could become 100 percent accurate is even more frightening.

“That’s a world where institutions of power have the ability to track and monitor their people everywhere they go, all the time. That is a world where there are zero spaces that are free from government or societal intrusion, which is basically a world where we can’t have new ideas,” she said. “We really need to think about this not just as an issue of privacy but as an issue of basic freedom.”

If facial recognition software had been ubiquitous a few decades ago, she said, social movements like the LGBTQ rights movement may never have occurred.

“In the end it’s not really about safety -- it’s about social control.”

What’s Already Happening

UCLA chose to be open about considering facial recognition and solicited comments from students. For that, the university should be applauded, Vance said.

But that’s not necessarily happening everywhere.

“I would be absolutely unsurprised if multiple universities had adopted it and we just don’t know about it,” Vance said. Safety and security offices often act independent of other university administrators and may not be transparent about a new security measure.

Fight for the Future currently has a campus scorecard for facial recognition, keeping track of which colleges have pledged not to use the software. Though about 50 universities have told the organization they will not implement the technology, Greer said, many have said nothing at all.

“It is absolutely possible that there are other schools in the country that are already using this technology, they just haven’t told anyone about it,” she said.

The software is already in use by numerous municipal police departments and airports as well as at least one public school district. The Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown University Law Center found in 2016 that half of American adults are in a law enforcement facial recognition network.

Facial recognition software companies already are marketing to universities and K-12 schools.

“There are really no laws in place that would require private institutions, for example, to even disclose to their students that they’re doing this,” Greer said. “We really do need policies in place so that it’s not up to school administrators.”

Vance pointed out that university leaders and policy makers often bemoan that a younger generation doesn’t care about privacy.

“They clearly do care about privacy,” she said. “And this is a step too far.”

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Students with similar test scores but different household incomes attend selective colleges at different rates, according to the latest report from Opportunity Insights, a group that has published groundbreaking research on how colleges may affect students' income mobility.

But the results contained some surprises. For example, middle-class students attend elite institutions at rates lower than students from the lowest income quintile.

Researchers Raj Chetty, John Friedman, Emmanuel Saez, Nicholas Turner and Danny Yagan looked at how the fractions of students who attend these elite colleges varies based on parental income, using only students who scored exactly 1400 on the SAT. That is the median score for students at "Ivy-plus" colleges, which includes the Ivy League, Duke University, Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago.

The same researchers previously created mobility report cards for colleges to assess their students' upward income mobility. That report found great variability in low-income students' enrollment across colleges. But it also found that earnings outcomes are similar for students from low- and high-income families at any given college. And while some colleges had high mobility rates, access for low-income students at those colleges has fallen since 2000.

Building on their previous report, researchers found that students whose parents were from the lowest income bracket made up 7.3 percent of students with a test score of 1400 who attended Ivy-plus colleges. That was slightly below the average for all income groups. Students whose parents had the highest incomes made up a larger share, at about 10.8 percent, which was above the average for all groups.

But the students whose parents' incomes are in the middle attended Ivy-plus colleges at rates much lower than the average, between 4.4 percent and 4.7 percent. This means that middle-class students are underrepresented at elite colleges, and the report refers to them as the "missing middle."

Previous studies, such as one by the American Enterprise Institute, have also found that the share of students from the middle class at the most selective colleges in the nation has been declining over time.

It can be hard for middle-income families to afford higher education, particularly at private nonprofits, because their expected family contributions can be in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, said Bill Hall, founder and president of Applied Policy Research Inc. Hall's company advises private nonprofit institutions on admissions and enrollment.

"There's not a lot of discretionary income for middle-income families," he said.

Older generations say that families today aren't willing to sacrifice for their children's education like they once were, Hall said. Whether it's possible for middle-income families to afford elite colleges or not, rising tuition costs are pushing them toward flagship public institutions.

Hall sees the new study as an alert about what private and more elite institutions will have to do to stop the middle-income population from going elsewhere. And, he said, everyone at those institutions is talking about this issue, not just admissions staff.

"Most of them will acknowledge, why did we ever get ourselves in a position where we have $50,000 tuition?" he said.

The movement toward tuition resets, where colleges slash sticker prices but not necessarily their net prices, is also a sign of colleges trying to make a change to help students who aren't high income, Hall said. Middle-income students stand to gain the most from those efforts, he said.

The report from Opportunity Insights analyzed what would happen if students with comparable test scores attended selective colleges at the same rate, regardless of their parents' incomes. Researchers found that economic diversity would "rise significantly" in this scenario. The fraction of students in the bottom income quintile who attend selective colleges would rise from 7.3 percent to 8.6 percent. Those in the middle would get a boost of about 10 percentage points at selective colleges, from 28 percent to 38 percent.

Providing low-income students with an admissions boost similar to what children of alumni receive at elite private colleges would increase the share of those students at those colleges as well.

At Ivy-plus institutions, this would push the share of low-income students up to 25.8 percent. The scenario used is similar to the preference legacy students, recruited athletes and students who are members of underrepresented minority groups receive during admissions at elite colleges.

If changes were made, it could have a large impact on income mobility, according to the researchers.

The gap in chances of reaching the top income quintile among college students from the bottom- versus the top-quintile families would decrease by 15 percent if all students with similar test scores attended elite colleges at the same rate, regardless of their families' incomes.

If lower-income students were given an advantage similar to legacy students, that gap would decrease by 25 percent.

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Institutional review boards are a constant subject of complaints from scholars about delays or limits placed on research -- even if they understand that a given IRB may only be following the rules. Sarah Babb, a professor of sociology at Boston College, tells the story of IRBs in a new book, Regulating Human Research: IRBs From Peer Review to Compliance Bureaucracy (Stanford University Press). She responded to questions via email about her new book.

Q: How are IRBs different today from when they were first created?

A: When the first proto-IRBs emerged within National Institutes of Health in the 1950s, they looked a lot like peer-review committees: NIH researchers would sit on panels to consider the ethics of their colleagues’ research proposals. Even after the 1974 regulations and two rounds of revisions (in 1981 and 1992), most IRBs were mostly run pretty much as faculty committees, but with “nonscientist” members and some federal paperwork. The faculty volunteers weren’t very good with the paperwork, but since the feds hardly ever checked, it wasn’t a big issue.

Nowadays, most research is being reviewed by IRBs that look a lot more like “bureaucracies” in the Weberian sense. They have hierarchies, job ladders and an elaborate division of labor, kind of like an assembly line. And they are run by paid administrators with specialized regulatory expertise. The most bureaucratic of all are the for-profit “independent” IRBs, which compete for clients based on their ability to provide rigorous regulatory compliance with maximum speed. Independent IRBs don’t have faculty “volunteers” -- academics are paid per review to serve on particular boards. Everything else is handled by administrators. Today, most biomedical research is reviewed by these for-profit boards.

Q: You talk about how academic research is increasingly commercialized. Have IRBs responded to that change? How should they respond?

A: I would rather say that IRBs have been shaped and transformed by commercialization. Most biomedical research today is sponsored by private firms -- mostly (but not entirely) outside of academic institutions. Commercial studies mostly involve multiple research sites. Imagine 20 different clinics, all recruiting participants for the same study. But federal IRB regulations are set up around a local review model. This has always posed a problem for commercial sponsors, because clinics don’t have IRBs, and even if they did, you wouldn’t want 20 IRBs coming up with 20 different decisions.

Recognizing this problem, back in the 1980s the Food and Drug Administration put a loophole in its rules saying you could outsource IRB reviews instead of relying on a local board. In response, independent review boards were founded to serve commercial research sponsors. But more recently, even government-sponsored studies have started going over to the for-profit IRBs. This is because they are extremely efficient and very good at reviewing multisite research (which is now the dominant model throughout the biomedical field). Traditional IRBs have been losing staff positions. To get a competitive edge, many have emulated some of the practices of for-profit IRBs.

So in a way, the whole IRB world has become commercialized. In my book, I argue that this is an American pattern, where our inability to rationalize public systems leads to the emergence of markets and private “workarounds.” It’s interesting to contrast this with how they do it in the U.K., where they decided decades ago that the best way to deal with multisite studies was to have a single government-sponsored portal that everybody goes through. The British don’t have for-profit ethics review because it isn’t needed.

Q: Your book talks about how IRBs have become “compliance bureaucracies.” Was this inevitable?

A: The reason IRBs became compliance bureaucracies is that compliance is a lot of work. The regulations are complicated and confusing. There are actually two sets of IRB regulations, run out of two different federal offices, and [they are] not entirely consistent. Over time there have been a bunch of other ancillary regulations to keep track of -- HIPAA, conflict of interest and so on. The regulations are ambiguous, and federal offices don’t have the mandate or the resources to set precedents by ruling in particular cases. What regulators do (although less lately) is audit IRBs to make sure they have meticulously followed and documented mandated procedures -- for example, that they considered each of the criteria for waiver of documentation of informed consent. This means that IRBs have to generate and store mountains of procedural paperwork. Over all, it’s a big job -- one that calls for the attention of full-time specialists.

I found that there was a turning point at the end of the 1990s, when Senator [Edward] Kennedy and others were calling for a comprehensive rationalization and centralization of the federal system. Unfortunately, there was too much opposition from Congress and vested interest groups. But I suspect that if Kennedy’s plan had gone forward, you wouldn’t have seen the same growth in compliance bureaucracy: it would have centralized a lot of the interpretive and administrative work, similarly to the way you see in the U.K. today.

Q: Some argue that IRBs cannot simultaneously review the biological sciences and the social sciences. Should universities have separate IRBs?

A: This is a really great question. My impression is that it is really common to have separate IRBs for social and biomedical research, but that this doesn’t necessarily address the problems social researchers encounter with the IRB process.

Our problem is twofold: first, the regulations were designed around the routines of experimental research; and second, academic administrators tend to respond to risk and uncertainty with “hypercompliance” -- going beyond what the regulations require or intend. Imagine an anthropologist doing ethnography somewhere in an Indian village, trying to go through a three-page informed consent form (including all kinds of legalistic and regulatory language) with each person he interacts with. And then imagine that every time he slightly changes his research design, he needs to wait for his IRB at home to reapprove the changes. It sounds absurd, but this was a common experience at the beginning of the 2000s -- and I suspect that it still happens today.

What really has helped social researchers like me is something called the “flexibility movement,” a recent initiative among some IRB administrators to move away from hypercompliance. If you’ve noticed your IRB getting a lot more social research-friendly recently, you probably should be thanking the flexibility movement.

Q: What can universities do to improve the functioning of IRBs?

A: There’s a whole industry of IRB consultants and accreditors that are better qualified than I am to answer that question. But as a sociologist, I have the luxury of thinking about the big picture. What we have in the United States today is a highly decentralized and commercialized ethics-review system; recent revisions to the IRB regulations reinforce this. Because it generates high administrative costs, our system has created a sort of marketplace in ethics review, in which a small number of for-profit boards compete for clients based on their efficiency. This is a very weird way of handling ethics review, and very different from the way they do it in other wealthy democracies.

The advantage of our American system is that it can’t be easily dismantled by anti-regulatory politicians. But one disadvantage is that it creates potential conflicts of interests: you have researchers and sponsors shopping in a marketplace of IRB services and paying the board they select to regulate them. We haven’t had an outbreak of research scandals since the 1990s. I really hope that we don’t look back on this time as the calm before the storm.

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• American International College is starting an M.S. in cannabis science and commerce.
• Eastern Michigan University is starting a bachelor of science in civil engineering.
• Indiana University at Bloomington is starting a bachelor of fine arts in cinematic arts.
• Manhattanville College is starting a nursing school, which will offer a bachelor of science in nursing for traditional students and one for those who already have another bachelor's degree.
• Moravian University is starting a data science track within the computer science major.
• Spalding University is starting a doctor of social work program.
• Trine University is starting a bachelor of science in mechatronics and robotics.
• University of Texas at El Paso is starting a graduate certificate in nonprofit administration and governance.

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The change follows alerts that the board├ó┬Ç┬Ös new bylaws, which were passed in October, posed a ├ó┬Ç┬£grave risk.├ó┬Ç┬Ø But the regents kept a similar authority on the books.

Students in the UK are increasingly living in┬áprivate sector halls of residence. Numbers rose by around 10,000 in 2018/19 ÔÇô to a total of almost 160,700 ÔÇô up 7% from 2017/18 figures. It’s a result of student demand, enrolment increases and educators wanting to focus on education ÔÇô and private accommodation providers anticipate further growth, they say.

Annual HESA statistics showed that the latest total of students in private sector halls of residence marked a 36% increase from 2014/15 numbers.

“Amenities and communal spaces are key things students consider when choosing university accommodation”

Investors seem to be taking note ÔÇô┬áa report has suggested┬átransaction values in student housing could exceed ┬ú7.5 billion over the next 12 months.

While figures include both domestic and international students, providers have indicated they are buoyed by an increase in international student numbers in the UK, with students opting for better amenities and comfort over traditional university accommodation.

Founder and director of student accommodation search engine www.Mystudenthalls.com, Dan Roberts, explains that the purpose-built student accommodation demand surge is due to changing priorities for students.

“In the past few years, we have seen a surge in demand for PBSA ÔÇô particularly when it comes to international students studying in the UK,” he notes.

“[Students]┬áare now looking for more than just a place to sleep and instead want a home away from home, where they can accommodate their wider lifestyle with amenities that suit them,”┬áRoberts tells┬áThe PIE News┬áÔÇô adding that services include on-site┬áeateries, gyms, dedicated study areas and cinemas.

“Providers are now creating unique and vibrant student communities, not just “student accommodation”,” he says.

Students hold those high-quality facilities in high regard, according to CEO of Student Roost Nathan Goddard.

Aiming to┬ácreate a “united community” for all students, Student Roost hosts┬áregular events to celebrate┬ácultural days to give “international students an opportunity to share their traditions, but for them to learn and experience local celebrations too”.

“This is something we pride ourselves on and students appreciate experiencing different cultures and customers ÔÇô which enriches their time at university,” he says.

“Amenities and communal spaces are key things students consider when choosing university accommodation so they can enjoy and make full use of where they live.

“PBSAs offer students everything they need under one roof… so their homes are spaces to live, work and socialise in,”┬áGoddard says.

Photo: Student Roost

PBSAs offer much more flexibility, Goddard continues. “Student Roost pioneers a customer-centric approach which allows students to choose their contract length, room type, and tailor their payment plan.”

Additionally, international students are attracted to Student Roost’s offering due to the┬ásteps it has taken to make the moving in process as “smooth as possible”, he adds.

International students are not required to have a UK-based guarantor and by working with international agents, the booking process for Student Roost properties is simplified, he notes.

“We cater to international students by allowing them to move in earlier or extend their tenancy as required. There is also a flexible cancellation policy for students whose studies are dependent on successful visa applications.”

Additionally,┬áStudent Roost has multi-lingual speakers to “help integrate international and domestic students”.

“International student flows show no signs of slowing, so we confidently predict an increase in the numbers of international students as our number of Roosts increase across the UK,”┬áGoddard adds.

With non-EU international students representing 69% of its residents, GCP Student is also seeing increased demand from overseas students.

Gravis Capital Management Limited director, Nick Barker, has previously noted that the company is “well-positioned┬áto benefit from the severe shortage of supply for private student accommodation coupled with increasing numbers of international students choosing to study in London”.

“One thing we’ve noticed is the growth in applicants from China and India has been propelled lately,”┬áBarker notes.

“The two year post study visa news helps and puts the UK on an equal footing to other top English taught university destinations,” he says, adding that current US-China relations have also “made the UK more attractive” for international students.

CRM Students┬áÔÇô with 25,000+ beds across 60+ UK sites ÔÇô sees┬áPBSA as a “more simple option and one which provides more safety and security, as well as more facilities than traditional off-street housing”.

The company says the increase in the “proportion of international students choosing PBSA has coincided┬áwith an increase in international students seeking a UK degree”.

This rise has also occurred at the same time as more PBSA stock is being delivered into the market, hence the dramatic 7% increase as seen in the recent HESA data, the company notes.

CRM is more demand from both domestic and international students, according to its CEO Stewart Moore.

“Over 50% of CRMÔÇÖs students are from overseas and we see no end to this,” he tells┬áThe PIE.

“The UKÔÇÖs universities continue to be amongst the best in the world, the experience of being a student in the UK is second-to-none and the recent changes to the immigration status of recent graduates mean that the UK will continue to attract students from beyond our own shores,” Moore adds.

“We remain positive that the number of internationals choosing to live with us will rise over the foreseeable”

He also states “PBSA in the UK is a well-established market and one which provides international students with a wide-range of price points, offered in a safe and secure environment”.

“Brexit and other global factors can still cause some ripples to the number of students entering the UK, but with PBSA being the accommodation of choice for this group, we remain positive that the number of internationals choosing to live with us will rise over the foreseeable future.”

Managing director of Britannia Student Services, Michele da Silva, says there is┬áa “definite upward trend in international students, at the point of the first enquiry, requesting private halls of residence over the traditional homestay”.

Britannia provides┬áhalls of residence, homestays, shared apartments and houses. The increase is “borne out in the industry by a large number of new PBSA, which┬áhave been built in the last two-three years”, da Silva suggests.

“Developers are responding to student expectation and demand by constructing private halls that compete with each other on high standards, choice of room types and additional facilities offered,” she says.

The UK student housing market reached ┬ú5.2 billion in 2019 ÔÇô the second-highest year on record after 2015 ÔÇô according to the┬áJLL UK Living Capital Markets Q4 Report.

Transactions in 2019 were however bolstered by┬átwo key deals ÔÇô the ┬ú2.2bn Unite acquisition of Liberty Living and the potential IPO sale of iQ, with an expected price of in excess of ┬ú4 billion, the report reveals.

“Student housing is the big Living investment story of 2019, and with some significant new opportunities about to break into the market, we donÔÇÖt expect a slowdown any time soon,”┬áSimon Scott, lead director, UK Living Capital Markets, JLL says.

While da Silva notes that homestays are still a popular choice of accommodation, international students are also showing a marked preference for private halls.

“They are likely to be more centrally located and many offer a private bathroom (rare in homestays) and self-catering cooking facilities,” she said, adding students enjoy “the independence of living in a private hall”.

Demand for group accommodation for under 18s during summer months in private halls of residence is also increasing, she adds.

Lack of capacity means that┬áuniversities tend “only to be able to provide housing for first-year students”, while private options are more flexible.

“We have always been in a position to offer a choice of year-round accommodation to international students ÔÇô through our own inventory in private halls and our own residences such as Britannia South Bank in Southwark and a 134-bedroom student hotel, Britannia Study Hotel, in Brighton,” da Silva explains.

According to Chief Relationship Officer at Unilodgers, Vincenzo Raimo, it is clear more students are demanding better accommodation than the Houses of Multiple Occupancy sector has provided.

However, the proportion of students in private sector halls remains small compared with those in HMOs, he highlights.

“With the expected growth in the university sector over the coming decade more private halls are going to be needed to keep pace with demand,” he says.

“The uncertainty that universities face in terms of future income and the desire to increasingly focus on core academic services means that most donÔÇÖt have access to the resources to build their own accommodation to meet growing demand.”

“More private halls are going to be needed to keep pace with demand”

Partnerships which PBSA and universities are developing are “vital if universities are to meet future demand in terms of both volume and quality”,┬áRaimo adds.

Raimo says that the number of users of the┬áUnilodgers┬ásite has “grown massively over the past few months” , with growth┬ádriven in part┬áby the “increasing attractiveness of the UK compared to other destinations”.

“Last month users searching for private halls on Unilodgers web site increased by more than double over the same period last year with particularly large increases seen from India growing almost three times in January 2020 compared to January 2019,”┬áRaimo┬áadds.

The post UK private sector accommodation heats up appeared first on The PIE News.

Global test provider ETS has launched instant scores for TOEFL iBT reading and listening exam sections to give test takers early performance indicators, which will help with identifying whether a student will need to resit exams.

As of February 15, students have been able to see “unofficial” scores for the reading and listening sections immediately upon conclusion of the test, becoming┬áthe only English-language assessment that provides students scores instantly.

“ETS wants to ensure the testing experience is as convenient and flexible as possible”

“Our commitment to students and institutions drives the changes and enhancements weÔÇÖve implemented over the last several months,” said Srikant Gopal, executive director of the TOEFL Program.

“ETS wants to ensure the testing experience is as convenient and flexible as possible for students while maintaining the rigorous standards of a fair and unbiased assessment that institutions rely on as a valid measure of academic English-language proficiency,” Gopal continued.

The instant scores mean students can make decisions about reporting scores or retaking the test, he explained.

“If students are unsatisfied with their performance on these two sections, they can choose to cancel their scores at the end of the test, which prevents these scores from appearing on their official score report as well as from going to the institutions that they selected to receive their scores.”

ETS is seeking to give students┬á“the opportunity to make decisions about retesting sooner”, Gopal said, which is helpful for those┬áup against deadlines during application season.

In September 2019, ETS reduced the retest waiting period for the TOEFL iBT from 12 to three days.

“Having the opportunity to view these scores immediately also provides students with instant validation of their performance, especially after working hard to prepare for the test and working diligently to complete it,” Gopal added.

Although the┬á“unofficial” scores provide early performance indicators, full scores will still be available approximately six days following the test.

“We anticipate that in almost all cases, the unofficial reading and listening scores that students will see upon completing the TOEFL iBT test will be the same scores that students will see on their official score reports,” Gopal explained.

“However… we do additional quality checks before they can be considered official scores.”

The speaking section of the test remains unchanged, and will continue to be scored┬ácentrally by anonymous human raters as well as AI technology “to ensure fairness and reliability”,┬áGopal added.

Additionally, ETS has reduced the time needed to register online for tests from four to two days in a bid to make online registration more convenient.

“We understand that students worldwide will face deadlines and unexpected circumstances that may require them to make decisions later in the process,” Gopal said.

“WeÔÇÖre confident this updated policy will provide ample opportunity for students to register at a time that is most conducive to their schedules.”

In 2019, ETS launched a mobile app for test-takers on the go, as well as its MyBest Scores. It also shortened the time of the TOEFL iBT test by 30 minutes to a total of three hours.

The post ETS announces instant access TOEFL iBT scores appeared first on The PIE News.

The latest National Survey of Student Engagement found that, over the last decade, more first-year students reported discussing careers and other topics unrelated to coursework with faculty members.

ÔÇ£STOP THE INVASION! No pipelines on stolen native land!ÔÇØ So chanted dozens of protesters on a chilly afternoon this week in Vancouver. With placards in hand, they blocked traffic on a busy thoroughfare, doing their part to ÔÇ£shut down CanadaÔÇØ. That has become the rallying cry against the Coastal GasLink pipeline, a C$6.6bn ($5bn) project which will transport natural gas 670km (420 miles) across British Columbia to the Pacific coast, where a liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant is under construction.

The pipeline is an ÔÇ£invasionÔÇØ, detractors say, because about a quarter of its route passes through land traditionally belonging to the WetÔÇÖsuwetÔÇÖen, a First Nations people. Since early February, when police broke up a blockade (with an injunction to do so) local disputes have escalated to national unrest. Allies of the WetÔÇÖsuwetÔÇÖen have organised copycat demonstrations far away from the pipeline itself.

None of this has scuppered the plans, but it has disrupted the economy and embarrassed the Liberal government. Canadian National Railway (CN) shut down lines in the east of the country and temporarily laid off about 450 workers; Via Rail, a passenger service, is doing the same to nearly 1,000. Food, heating fuel, farm exports and commodities are gridlocked. Cars and ships have been unable to get through bridges, ports and the...

AT HIS campaign headquarters on Artigas Boulevard, named after UruguayÔÇÖs founding hero, the man who hopes to be its next one was energised. Luis Lacalle Pou, the countryÔÇÖs conservative president-elect, is 46 years old but looks younger, with floppy brown hair, no jacket and sleeves rolled up. Days ahead of his swearing-in on March 1st, in an interview with The Economist, Mr Lacalle Pou set out a wide range of plans, from relaxing immigration rules to cutting public spending. But what obsessed him most of all was tackling a recent surge in crime (see chart). He lamented that just down the road were ÔÇ£no-go areasÔÇØ overrun with violence. ÔÇ£ItÔÇÖs time to take back the streets,ÔÇØ he said, ÔÇ£by force if need be.ÔÇØ

The first step was to take back power. Last November, in a run-off, Mr Lacalle Pou narrowly defeated Daniel Mart├¡nez, the candidate of the Broad Front, a leftist coalition that had ruled Uruguay for 15 years. (The last president from Mr Lacalle PouÔÇÖs National Party was his father, in the 1990s.) The Broad Front had maintained economic and constitutional stability, and liberalised marijuana use and same-sex marriage. But it also presided over sharp rises in public employment, the fiscal deficit and violent crime. The homicide rate in Uruguay, a traditionally safe country of about 3.5m, shot up by 46% in 2018, to...

The former vice-president of Amity University Dubai, Mariam Sheikh, has received a lifetime achievement award for her work with foreign universities in the UAE. 

The prize was given at the International Inspirational Women Awards 2020, an event organised by Indian not-for-profit organisation the GISR Foundation.

ÔÇ£I strongly believe in the development of society through education”

Sheikh has spent the last 35 years helping to set up international universities in Dubai, where she specialised in student recruitment. She was amongst 81 other women who were awarded for their contributions towards society. 

ÔÇ£Our visionary leadership that supports women 100%, believes that for a society to be productive, it has to utilise the talents and capabilities of women who represent around half of the UAE population,ÔÇØ she told The PIE News.┬á

ÔÇ£I strongly believe in the development of society through education ÔÇô its value system ÔÇô to leave a profound legacy for the future generation.┬á┬á

ÔÇ£I am of the opinion that international exposure and amalgamation of various cultures will help to create a tolerant and peaceful global society that will be progressive and will establish a future,” she added.

Sheikh started her career in education in the early 1980s, when she ran a Nursery school.  She then went on to head a number of schools before moving into higher education in UAE.

She sponsored a foreign campus for Canada’s University of New Brunswick at Knowledge Village – a move that prompted other foreign universities to set up campuses in Dubai.┬á

Sheikh then worked with institutes including The Canadian University of Dubai, Heriot Watt University from Scotland and Amity University of India in Dubai, where she contributed to the development of their foreign campuses.

She told The PIE┬á that she was┬áÔÇ£so proud and grateful to see that my work has been noted and that I am being commended publicly for it.ÔÇØ

IIWA was set up to celebrate the commitment, courage and confidence of exceptional women across dimensions and geographical boundaries.

A number of women were honoured at the awards in categories including Woman CEO of the Year, Woman Change-maker of the Year and Best Woman Performer in Woman Rights.

Balvinder Shukla, who is the current vice-chancellor at Amity University, spoke at the event, telling the audience┬áthat women are change-makers who would bring about “change in the society, country and the world”.

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In a survey, two-thirds of Chinese student-recruitment agents said they expect the number of students from China who study abroad to decline in the next year; and other news in global higher ed. 

As Chinese banks sterilise cash to try and prevent the further spread of coronavirus and bars deliver happy hour drinks to customers in lockdown, many agents are preparing for ÔÇ£a decline in students going abroad this yearÔÇØ, according to a survey from the Beijing Overseas Study Service Association.

BOSSA is ChinaÔÇÖs largest international education association and together with the China Overseas Study Service Alliance, it counts more than 300 agencies, education providers and organisations among its members.

The majority of Chinese students use an education agent, and BOSSA- COSSA agent members account for two-thirds of all Chinese students sent abroad, according to the association.

According to the survey, BOSSA members report that staff are continuing to work remotely and communicate with clients online or by telephone, with agencies taking a ÔÇ£wait and see approachÔÇØ to developments and closely following official reports and news from partner institutions.

“Reports of attacks on Chinese international students are most disconcerting to BOSSA”

ÔÇ£The epidemic has invariably caused 40%-60% of students to be directly affected in college applications, visa applications, and in-country exit and entry,ÔÇØ stated the survey report.

The main application issues reported by agents include incomplete materials due to the cancellation of standardised tests (35%), delayed school starts (28%), blocked travel (39%), blocked entry or exit (39%), blocked visa applications (38%) and blocked admission (8%).

Countries such as Australia have stopped processing visas for Chinese students, meaning some may have to defer their studies, while those heading to countries still issuing visas may experience delays due to the evacuation of embassy and consulate staff from China.

ÔÇ£BOSSA’s staff and members are closely monitoring visa centre closings, cancelled flights, banning of Chinese travellers, and associated national and global matters of the novel coronavirus affecting the health and safety of Chinese students abroad,ÔÇØ BOSSA spokesperson Jon Santangelo told The PIE News.

He explained that reports of verbal and physicals attacks on Chinese international students are most disconcerting to BOSSA and its agents.

“Hosting schools and universities need to communicate an awareness of challenges which may arise and offer sequential supportive actions to their students. These educators should also convey this information to their partnered recruitment agents,” Santangelo said, adding that BOSSA’s own Agent Expo has been postponed from March 19 to May 29.

The report also revealed that agencies believe almost 36% of students will change their plans with regards studying abroad due to the epidemic, while 66% say the total number of students studying abroad this year will decline.

In addition, more than 80% said they believe summertime short-term programs will be the most affected by the coronavirus outbreak.

ÔÇ£The main concern at this stage, having spoken to university partners, is the IELTS and pre-sessional English courses,ÔÇØ Billy Xu of Sower International Education Group told The PIE.

ÔÇ£A large number of Chinese students who join master’s programs will need to take pre-sessional English courses, and these vary from 10 to 30 weeks or even longer.”

“Hosting schools and universities need to communicate an awareness of challenges”

Xu said that in order to get a visa for the pre-sessional courses, students need to take the IELTS with UKVI exams, but now that IELTS tests are closed until April “there will be a foreseeable drop for this Autumn intake”.

For international students currently in China that cannot get abroad to their classes, some universities are trying to offer online options.

Some reports have suggested internet restrictions have been eased to help students access courses although others within China say there has been an increased crackdown on access to the non-Chinese websites and VPN usage.

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Renowned English language provider, International Language Academy of Canada has announced the acquisition of Canadian Tourism College and Sterling College in British Columbia.

The acquisition comes as part of the expansion of ILAC’s new higher education division, adding programs in tourism, hospitality, business and nursing to its offering.

“ILAC continues to focus on providing best-in-class English language learning”

The organisation currently offers a range of programs to young adults aged 16 to 18, adults 19+ and gap year programs across 10 campuses in both Toronto and Vancouver.

“The formation of ILAC Higher Education allows us to work with our public partner institutions to deliver qualifications that currently have high job demands in Canada,” said Feroz Ali, ILAC’s new president and chief development officer of the HE division.

“This will allow ILAC students to either pathway into our amazing public institutions or continue to allow their students within our higher education division,” he added.

“ILAC continues to focus on providing best-in-class English language learning and we believe this partnership complements our existing pathway partnerships, offering a wider selection of services to our students,” the organisation’s CEO┬áJonathan Kolber said.

The provider stated that the merger “existing post-secondary operations with CTC and Sterling College will increase ILAC’s ability to deliver program excellence while continuing to foster diversity on its campuses in Toronto and Vancouver”.

In 2019, private equity platform ONCAP┬áannounced an agreement with ILAC┬áto┬ácontinue the business’s growth, “both organically and through acquisitions”.

Ali further said that he was “delighted to join the governance and management team at ILAC to help realise its growth potential”.

“This is an incredible opportunity to be part of the changing landscape in international education in Canada,” he said.

The post ILAC acquires CTC and Sterling College appeared first on The PIE News.

The Department of Education continues to step up its scrutiny of universities receiving foreign gifts and contracts. In going after Harvard and Yale Universities last week, the department sent a clear signal it was serious about enforcing the law, which requires colleges to report all gifts and contracts involving foreign sources valued at $250,000 or more.

The Education Department's new investigations into whether Harvard and Yale comply with reporting requirements follow other investigations launched over the past year into the disclosure of foreign funding at Cornell, Georgetown, Rutgers and Texas A&M Universities as well as Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Maryland.

Department officials say the agency's efforts to enforce Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, which addresses disclosure of gifts and contracts, have led to the reporting of approximately $6.5 billion in previously undisclosed foreign money since last July 1.

Reed D. Rubinstein, the principal deputy general counsel at the department, has indicated that those efforts have "also revealed disturbing facts."

"One university received research funding from a Chinese multinational conglomerate to develop new algorithms and advance biometric security techniques for crowd surveillance capabilities," Rubinstein wrote in a Nov. 27 letter to the chairman of the U.S. Senate Permanent Committee on Investigations. "One university had multiple contracts with the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the People's Republic of China … Another university had a relationship with Kaspersky, a Russian company that has been banned from contracting with the U.S. Government."

College officials have pushed back, arguing that the Education Department's aggressive efforts may go beyond the scope of what the law requires. The college officials also say the department has taken an unnecessarily combative, rather than collegial, approach to enforcing a law that no one much paid attention to in the past.

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has not been swayed by the criticisms of the department's work.

“This is about transparency,” she said in a press release last week about the Harvard and Yale investigations. “If colleges and universities are accepting foreign money and gifts, their students, donors, and taxpayers deserve to know how much and from whom. Moreover, it’s what the law requires.”

She pointedly noted that the investigations have yielded results.

“Unfortunately, the more we dig, the more we find that too many are underreporting or not reporting at all,” she said in the release. “We will continue to hold colleges and universities accountable and work with them to ensure their reporting is full, accurate, and transparent, as required by the law.”

Many universities have in fact been lax in their reporting over the years. A 2019 report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found that nearly 70 percent of colleges that received $250,000 or more in annual funding from Hanban, the Chinese government entity that funds the Confucius Institutes located at various American colleges and high schools, failed to report the funding. An increasing number of universities have closed these centers for Chinese language education and cultural programming, in response to pressure from congressional lawmakers.

Karen Perat, a Yale spokeswoman, said the university failed to submit required foreign gift reports for the years 2014 to 2017, an oversight that she said was corrected in November.

“Yale believes its reporting is now current and complete,” Perat said. She said Yale is preparing a response to the department's request for further information.

"Yale takes very seriously the importance of ensuring that funding from foreign sources does not in any way compromise American interests, and it respects the Education Department’s requirements about reporting of such funding," Perat said. "Yale also believes that a signal strength of American higher education has long been the quality of its international relationships and collaborations, which have helped our universities produce exceptional scholarship and research and exceptionally prepared graduates, to the direct benefit of the American people."

Terry Hartle, the senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education, said the stepped-up enforcement of the reporting requirement, which was enshrined in law in 1986, is a new priority of the Trump administration. He said while colleges had stopped paying much attention to the law, the department bears culpability for the lax reporting, having never issued regulations to implement the law. He noted that the department only issued informal guidance in 1995 and 2004.ÔÇï

“There’s no doubt that colleges and universities need to put more emphasis on Section 117 reporting,” Hartle said. “Having said that, there’s also very little doubt that the Department of Education would prefer to have an issue rather than to fix a problem.”

Hartle explained that higher education leaders have been eager to meet with department officials to discuss compliance but said their requests for meetings have been refused.

"We are very anxious to fully and completely comply with the letter and spirit of Section 117," he said. "The Department of Education could facilitate this enormously by engaging in conversations. They refuse to do that."

Instead, the department "has indicated that its approach to collecting data on 117 will be based on investigations rather than collaboration to get the data," Hartle said.

An Education Department official suggested the reporting requirements are not that complicated. 

"The facts do not provide the Department with a reasoned basis for concluding that Section 117 reporting is too complicated or difficult for higher education, with all of its intellectual and financial resources, to manage," the official said via email.

The Harvard and Yale Investigations

The department’s investigations into Harvard and Yale are notable for their expansive scope and focus on two of the country's most elite institutions.

In its letter to Yale, the Education Department asks for “all records of, regarding, or referencing gifts, contracts, and/or restricted or conditional gifts or contracts from or with a foreign source to the Institution” since August 2013, including “true copies” of contracts and donor agreements.

The letter also requests “a list of each program, activity, and/or person at the institution (e.g., an Islamic law program, a Confucius Institute, a research scientist funded in whole or substantial part by a foreign corporation, a foreign graduate student studying physics under a scholarship or other contractual arrangement with a foreign government, a fellow in a cultural studies program created by endowment or other gift by a foreign national) that is in whole or in substantial part directly funded or supported by and/or employed due to a gift, contract and/or restricted or conditional gift or contract with or from a foreign source” from Aug. 1, 2013, to the present.

Another line item asks Yale to list all gifts and contracts that have benefited specific entities of the university, including the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School, the Jackson Institute of Global Affairs and the Kerry Initiative, a program founded by John Kerry, former secretary of state under President Obama. The letter asks throughout for information about "all" gifts and contracts, not just for those at or above the $250,000 threshold that typically triggers a reporting requirement.

"The letter speaks for itself," the Education Department official said. "We are requesting records of all foreign gifts and contracts, regardless of size."  

"Taking the words on the page at face value, it seems to me to be a dramatic expansion of the kinds of things that are typically reported or required to be reported under the statute," said Alex Hontos, a partner at the law firm Dorsey & Whitney, which represents a number of large academic institutions in government enforcement matters.

The letter to Harvard makes similarly expansive requests. The Education Department says in its letter it is “aware of information suggesting Harvard University lacks appropriate institutional controls and as a result, its statutory Section 117 reporting may not include and/or fully capture all reportable gifts, contracts and/or restricted and conditional gifts or contracts from or with foreign sources.”

The department cites as evidence for the alleged lack of appropriate controls the arrest last month of Charles Lieber, a Harvard professor and chair of the chemistry department, who was accused of failing to disclose payments of $50,000 a month he received in return for his participation in a Chinese government-sponsored talent recruitment program. The department's letter also cites a statement Harvard issued in September about a review of donations it received from the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, in which Harvard president Lawrence S. Bacow noted that Harvard's "decentralization makes such a review more complicated than it would be at some other institutions."

Harvard said last week that it is reviewing the Education Department’s notice of investigation and preparing a response.

Sending a Message

Meanwhile, the Education Department posted a notice in the Federal Register on Feb. 10 of a new form it proposes to use to collect information from universities about the foreign gifts and contracts they receive.

ACE and 29 other higher education groups had raised concerns that an earlier version of the proposed information collection request, or ICR, exceeded the scope of the department’s information-collecting authority under Section 117.

ACE said that while the Education Department has since “backed away from some of the more problematic provisions in the original ICR,” the association continues to have concerns.

“The new ICR … still includes the requirement to submit the names and addresses of anonymous individual donors, a provision ACE and others in the higher education community oppose,” ACE said in a Feb. 11 statement. “ED says it will protect the identity of such donors, but it is not clear that promise of confidentiality can be kept once the documents are in federal possession. ACE also opposes the requirement of supplying to ED true copies of contract and gift agreements that ED will now address under a separate rulemaking process, due to concerns over maintaining the confidentiality of these documents.”

Several universities investigated by the department said they had improved their processes for tracking and reporting gifts and contracts from foreign sources.

"In response to our recent review under the U.S. Department of Education, Rutgers has improved and clarified our procedures to ensure compliance with our foreign gift and contract disclosure requirements. All gifts received and contracts executed with foreign sources are reported semi-annually in accordance with the specified reporting timelines, deadlines, and financial thresholds," Rutgers said in a statement.

MIT said it identified ways to improve its foreign gift and contract reporting process more than a year ago.

"MIT’s reporting since January 2019 has been based on these improved processes," the university said in a statement. "The Institute is committed to working constructively with federal officials to address the department’s questions.”

Meanwhile, Texas A&M said it had actually overreported its foreign funding to the department by more than $2 million.

"Texas A&M has been praised by federal leaders for our fervent commitment to protecting our institution from intellectual property theft and undue foreign influence," a spokeswoman said.

It seems clear the federal scrutiny of gifts and contracts will not be going away any time soon. International collaborations in general -- and collaborations with China in particular -- are coming under increased scrutiny from lawmakers, who have raised alarm about the risk of foreign actors stealing research funded by American tax dollars. To a large degree, the newfound scrutiny of universities' foreign collaborations has been bipartisan in nature.

Indeed, U.S. senators Rob Portman, the chairman of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and a Republican, and Tom Carper, the ranking member of the committee and a Democrat, issued a joint statement praising the Education Department's investigations last week.

"The fact that $6.5 billion in foreign gifts to U.S. institutions went unreported until now is shocking and unacceptable," they said. "We would urge the Department to also work with institutions to improve the reporting process to increase transparency and ensure that U.S. schools are in compliance going forward."

The Education Department official said DeVos is the first education secretary to hold colleges accountable for reporting.

"First, this is an issue of national security because, among other concerns, foreign money (from governments, government-run corporations/NGOs, and individuals) may come with 'strings attached' that compromise academic freedom," the official wrote. "These money streams raise serious questions about academic program/research integrity and the security of intellectual property. Second, colleges and universities are heavily subsidized by the American taxpayer. They must be held accountable [to] our American students, parents, and taxpayers, as well as the U.S. government, for complying with our laws, including transparency laws. Third, the vast underreporting in what is a very basic regulatory system suggests a potentially serious lack of internal financial controls -- this is very concerning in light of the fact that colleges and universities have extensive federal audit requirements and their failure or decision not to track foreign money could be a symptom of problems elsewhere as well."

Hontos, the lawyer with Dorsey & Whitney, said colleges, universities and academic research institutions should be prepared for such heightened scrutiny going forward.

"Certainly, if the United States government is going after Harvard and Yale and doing it in an open way, posting these kinds of open letters on a website and making a big splash about it, that’s really an effort by the government to send a message -- and that message is supposed to be heard throughout academia," he said.

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When college mental health care providers and students talk about campus mental health resources, two very different perspectives emerge.

Students who have experienced mental illnesses themselves see the availability of on-campus services as one of the core responsibilities of the institutions they attend. They believe that if those services aren’t being utilized or are found by students to be inadequate, it’s up to the college to adjust.

College-based mental health providers consider themselves central to student well-being and academic achievement. They want to help as many students as possible but say the need for services well exceeds what their centers are funded to provide.

Where these positions converge and diverge has become the latest challenge for many colleges across the country facing increasing demands and skyrocketing costs for student mental health services.

For example, American University officials recently attempted to call attention to the number of missed appointments at its counseling center due to late cancellations and no-shows. Some students took offense at what they felt was an example of the university blaming students for the center's failures.

Daniel Solomon, a senior at Clemson University who founded ÔÇïYou’re Not Alone, a peer support group on campus for students who struggle with mental illness or who have family members or friends that do, said he could relate to AU students' frustrations.

Students make sacrifices to go to college and in return expect the institution to take care of them, he said.

“It all has to go back to providing more resources. That in and of itself would solve all the issues,” Solomon said. “If universities are going to bring smart, well-educated students to their campus and provide them with an education and also make us pay for our health bills, then it’s their responsibility to keep us healthy.”

Shivani Nishar, a student at Brown University, is co-coordinator of its chapter of Project LETS, a national organization that works to decrease barriers to mental health resources on campuses.

“The blame or responsibility should never be on the student, especially a mentally ill student,” Nishar said. If a student doesn’t show up to a scheduled counseling appointment, it’s the university’s responsibility to “work out the logistics,” she said.

But counseling center directors believe students should view campus mental health services as a shared resource and a shared responsibility.

“It’s not totally fair to expect in any mental health service that I can be seen as much as I want to be and as quickly as I want to be,” said Peter LeViness, director of counseling and psychological services at the University of Richmond.

Counseling resources are a two-way street, said Ben Locke, executive director of the Center for Collegiate Mental Health at Pennsylvania State University.

“Big picture, it’s important for institutions and the services they provide to have a both-and conversation, where the students are an integral part of that service and making the service successful and being responsible consumers of expensive services,” Locke said.

The average annual operating and salary budgets of counseling centers at institutions with more than 10,000 enrolled students exceeded $1 million, while those with 35,000 students or more reached $4 million from 2017 to 2018, according to the most recent 2018 survey of 571 counseling center directors conducted by the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors, or AUCCCD. The average total annual budget for counseling centers recorded in the association survey increased by more than $112,000 from 2016 to 2018, rising to $1,059,324.

Yet demand continues to outpace the supply of services universities are struggling to provide, said LeViness, who also coordinates the AUCCCD survey. As a result, center directors are taking a hard look at how resources can be wasted, including by the very students they are meant to help.

When American University sent an email to students listing the hours lost in psychiatric services due to appointment no-shows, some students found the email “hurtful” and felt it blamed them for the gaps in the mental health services provided by the university.

AU has been attempting to improve those gaps in services as part of its strategic plan, said Traci Callandrillo, assistant vice president for campus life. She said the idea to share information with students was well-intentioned.

“When it comes to health-care agencies, being able to be clear that we’re doing the best that we can in how the resources are being utilized is an important part of us being good stewards of resources for the community,” Callandrillo said.

The email listed data from the fall 2019 semester: one-fifth of all counseling center appointments were no-shows or late cancellations, or the equivalent of five no-shows each day. And there were 48 missed appointments with psychiatrists at the student health center. Similarly sized institutions (10,000 to 15,000 total enrollment) had a no-show rate of 9.2 percent for talk therapy appointments from 2017 to 2018, according to the AUCCCD survey.

Students have been complaining about the wait time for initial consultations at the counseling center in forums with administrators, said Jeremy Ward, speaker of the student government’s undergraduate senate. So when students received the email from Fanta Aw, vice president of campus life and inclusive excellence, it caused a “flare-up,” Ward said.

“We do not know why the administration felt the need to express what comes off as complaints about students, and we do not believe that telling students that their behavior is the problem will do anything to improve mental health services on campus,” the student government executive board said in a statement.

Conversations about wait times and appointment availability at American’s counseling center were “certainly” happening when she was a student, said Kelly Davis, a 2015 AU graduate and director of peer advocacy supports and services for the Collegiate Mental Health Innovation Council, an elected group of students who lead mental health initiatives on their campuses and identify trends and best practices. She said the email was “tone-deaf” and “discounts the fact that no-shows are pretty common across all health concerns.”

“If you’re offering a service that people are not utilizing, most businesses would not blame the customer,” Davis said. “There’s a whole lot of reasons that someone wouldn’t show up for an appointment, and that can be like a kick while you’re down. Not only are you not showing up, you’re preventing others from getting help.”

But when a student does not show up for an appointment or cancels too late for the appointment time slot to be given to someone else, that’s time that another student could have been seen, Aw said in her email. Wait times at counseling centers increase when there are more no-shows, LeViness said.

“It’s an unfortunate loss of resources in any case, and if you want to think of it in terms of cost, it’s even more costly for psychiatric appointments, in terms of the units and time that person is being paid,” LeViness said.

Seventy-two percent of 400 university presidents reported in a 2019 American Council on Education survey that they were spending more funds now on mental health initiatives than three years ago. ÔÇï

Psychiatric appointments, which are usually with medical doctors, are typically two to three times more expensive per hour than meeting with a counselor or therapist, who are not medical doctors, and they’re also more coveted, because of how limited they are at any given center, Locke said. More than half of the institutions in the 2018 AUCCCD survey had no psychiatric provider, a licensed medical doctor or nurse practitioner who could diagnose and care for students with psychological disorders. American has both a full-time psychiatrist and a nurse practitioner, said Lisa Stark, assistant vice president for communications.

“In the world of health care and mental health care, big picture, that’s in some ways a cost of doing business,” Locke said. “But if a large percentage of appointments are just simply no-shows or late cancellations, and they can't be reused for other students … that represents a financial investment that's unused.”

University medical centers are looking for ways to reshape their structure to mitigate no-shows, such as relying more on a walk-in appointment model and sending students reminders about scheduled appointments, Locke said.

When there are no-shows at the University of South Florida’s counseling center, the counselor is put “on call” so if a student walks in, they can be seen, said Scott Strader, director of the center. South Florida was recognized as a leading university for its quality of and investment in mental health care in 2018 by the nonprofit Active Minds, a youth mental health research and advocacy organization. Having clinicians available for initial consultations on a same-day basis allows students to show up when they are feeling most motivated to seek help, Strader said.

“As we look at the demand for services, maximizing the clinical availability of time is very important, and a lot of us are focused on how our providers’ time is maximized,” Strader said. “That is a way to kind of offset the no-show issue. Students can get an immediate touch point with a provider. They might not need a follow-up, and if they do, we put them in that initial provider queue and wait a couple of weeks.”

The South Florida center’s no-show rate is between 7 and 8 percent for scheduled appointments, Strader said, lower than the national average for talk therapy appointments, according to the AUCCCD survey. The South Florida center also saw a significant decline in no-shows when it increased its fee for missed appointments from $10 to $15 in 2017, Strader said.

The University of Oregon, which also won Active Minds’ Healthy Campus Award in 2018, charges a $25 fee for no-shows, said Alisia Caban, the associate director of the Oregon center. Oregon informs students about the fee up front and explains to them that the center is an important, utilized resource, Caban said.

American does not want to charge students for missing counseling appointments because it can be a barrier for people who can’t afford the fee, but it does charge a $20 no-show fee for psychiatric appointments, said Callandrillo, the campus life official. She said the university will continue to receive feedback from its wellness council and campus as a whole about “how we as an institution are meeting those needs and understanding the expectations.”

Despite her criticism of American’s data-sharing email, Davis, the alumna, praised the university's willingness to engage in dialogue about the no-show problem.

“There is an inherent power imbalance between those who use the services and those who provide it,” Davis said. “There’s a shortage of resources, there’s a lack of investment in campus mental health, and from their perspective, if they’re putting in resources they don't’ think people are utilizing, that’s frustrating … The answer isn’t to blame the consumer of the service. It’s to try and be creative in how you get better outcomes.”

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Students' calls for institutions to stop supporting the fossil fuel industry and start investing in more eco-conscious companies have been ongoing for years but don’t show any signs of dying down.

Just last week, students at Cornell University staged a mock wedding between a six-foot-tall cutout of the university’s clock tower and a cardboard businessman wearing a hat inscribed with the words “big oil,” as part of a series of continuing protests. Administrators at Cornell did not promise to change their investment portfolio in response to student activism, but the issue of fossil fuel divestment will be considered by the institution’s shared governance groups, they said. This pledge, however, came with a warning that divesting from oil, coal and gas companies would take many years and “could have significant economic costs for the university.”

Cornell is far from the only institution to come under pressure from students to divest from fossil fuels. Activists rushed onto the field at the annual football game between Harvard and Yale Universities in December. Leaders at the two institutions have indicated that they do not support divestment, but the pressure is only increasing. Harvard Forward, a pro-divestment group, was recently successful in placing five candidates on the 2020 Board of Overseers election ballot. Harvard Forward's platform advocates for the university to divest all its assets from fossil fuels and develop more transparent investment guidelines.

Calls to divest from fossil fuels are often met with resistance from critics, who say such considerations will undermine investment returns. The fear that divesting from fossil fuels will yield lower returns is pervasive among university leaders, said Georges Dyer, executive director of the Intentional Endowments Network -- a membership organization for higher education institutions pursuing so-called sustainable investment strategies.

Student climate activists protested for four hours Thursday afternoon –– staging a “wedding” and blocking traffic –– urging Cornell to divest from fossil fuels.
https://t.co/8JC1bI83nO

— The Cornell Daily Sun (@cornellsun) February 14, 2020

The network published a report Wednesday highlighting research findings from academics and practitioners that show sustainable investment strategies, “in general, perform as well or better than traditional approaches.” Featured research findings include a July 2018 article published by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis and the Sightline Institute. The article acknowledges that fossil fuel companies have historically provided strong investment returns but says they stopped offering a significant advantage in the 2013 to 2018 period.

In addition to summarizing existing research, the report shares case studies of 11 institutions that are attempting to build environmental, social and governance, or ESG, factors into their traditional investment evaluations. In some cases, the changes were introduced as recently as six months ago and therefore do not provide a definitive long-term view. But the report indicates the early results are promising.

Institutions pursuing sustainable endowment investing strategies featured in the IEN report follow:

• Arizona State University
• Becker College
• California State University
• College of the Atlantic
• Rhode Island School of Design
• Hampshire College
• North Carolina State University
• Unity College
• University of New Hampshire
• University of California System
• Warren Wilson College

Arizona State University, for example, reported that its $100 million Sustainable, Responsible and Impact investment pool, established in July 2019, has outperformed non-ESG-oriented strategies since its launch. Jeff Mindlin, chief investment officer of the Arizona State University Foundation, acknowledged that it has been “too short a time frame to draw significant investment conclusions,” but he said he is encouraged by the performance of the fund as well as the “growing sophistication and availability of products in this space that allow us to build a portfolio that doesn’t need to sacrifice returns in order to align with our mission.”

The case studies are not intended to be a comprehensive review, “nor provide the definitive last word on this important area of study,” the report said. “But for endowment fiduciaries asking whether they can implement mission-aligned strategies without sacrificing financial returns, these examples demonstrate that it is possible to take a thoughtful approach … and maintain or improve investment performance.”

A working paper published in January by authors Christopher J. Ryan Jr. and Christopher R. Marsicano looked at hundreds of college and university endowments in order to compare the returns on funds that did not divest from fossil fuels versus those that did. The authors were not able to conclude that divestment has a discernible effect on endowment returns. The Independent Petroleum Association of America, which warns of great financial losses from divestment, said the analysis was flawed. Some universities have, however, recently announced plans to explore divestment -- Georgetown University announced plans to stop making new investments in fossil fuel companies earlier this month.

Dyer described the new report released Wednesday as the first to share real-world case studies of colleges implementing sustainable investing strategies and meeting financial performance targets.

“This is what university and college endowment professionals need to see in order to proceed with confidence,” he said. “It shows that endowments large and small can invest for a low-carbon, sustainable future, in ways that reduce risk, enhance returns and protect their reputations.”

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Polish academics have raised fears about government moves to create a committee to rule on alleged freedom of speech violations in universities, highlighting the involvement of a group of ultraconservative Roman Catholic lawyers in the proposed legislative changes.

Ordo Iuris, which describes itself as defending the Polish Constitution against “radical ideologies that aggressively question the existing social order,” said the ruling Law and Justice Party’s amendments to the controversial 2018 higher education law, to introduce clauses to protect freedom of speech in universities and to create a new committee to rule on alleged breaches, were “based on the draft” it submitted.

The proposed law change follows a high-profile free speech controversy at the University of Silesia in Katowice, where students complained that an academic had expressed homophobic and anti-abortion views during lectures.

┼üukasz Bernaci┼äski, a member of Ordo Iuris who is studying for a Ph.D. in law at the University of ┼üód┼║, said the organization had published a report in January describing key “violations” of free speech in Polish universities in recent years. Ordo Iuris, he added, “drafted a bill” that it presented to the minister of science and higher education, Jaros┼éaw Gowin, a former university rector who is also the deputy prime minister.

“The project met with great interest, so the ministry decided to start work on changing the law,” Bernaci┼äski continued. “Currently, the Ministry of Science and Higher Education has drafted a bill that is based on the draft submitted by Ordo Iuris Institute.”

The Silesia controversy had “a direct impact” on Ordo Iuris’s interest in the issue, he said. Students had been “outraged at the Christian concept of the family, taught based on scientific foundations and research,” he said.

“This means that there has been a dangerous precedent that may prohibit universities from presenting research on specific phenomena and prevent academic debate on these topics,” Bernaci┼äski said. The new committee on free speech “would issue nonbinding recommendations to university authorities,” he added.

A ministry spokesman said Ordo Iuris “did not participate in the preparation of the project” but rather was “one of many organizations and institutions … invited to participate during the open public consultation phase.”

Jaros┼éaw P┼éuciennik, professor of the humanities, cultural studies and religion, and former pro vice chancellor for education at the University of ┼üód┼║, said committee members would be “like disciplinary judges who will introduce a lot of stress on academics, who will be afraid of dealing with many issues because they will be afraid of losing their jobs.”

He added, “It’s a philosophy which can be described in two words: discipline and punish.”

P┼éuciennik feared the proposed law was a way to “allow expressions of views in academia,” potentially providing a platform in universities for those in the Catholic Church who campaign for a total ban on abortion, or for climate change deniers.

Ordo Iuris is “very radical” and “very proud of influencing people in Poland” and sees academia as a “liberal, leftist” bastion, P┼éuciennik said.

The ministry’s spokesman said the proposed law change “addresses many situations that indicate the need for intervention to protect academic freedom, including freedom of expression when teaching, research or a debate open to various scientific arguments is at risk.”

He said the ministry was “fully aware” of the concerns of some academics. “The representative bodies of the Polish academic community are actively involved in a dialogue with the ministry; we [are] all working constructively towards formulating an optimal legal framework,” he added.

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• David Barnett, interim provost and vice president, academic, at Lakehead University, in Ontario, has been named to the job on a permanent basis.
• David Fithian, executive vice president at the University of Chicago, in Illinois, has been appointed president of Clark University, in Massachusetts.
• Joseph Foy, dean of the College of Arts, Sciences and Letters at Marian University, in Wisconsin, has been chosen as vice president for academic affairs at Alverno College, also in Wisconsin.
• Manuel Gomez, associate provost and registrar at National American University, has been selected as vice president of academic affairs at Estrella Mountain Community College, in Arizona.
• Scott Hummel, executive vice president and provost at William Carey University, in Missouri, has been appointed president of Tusculum University, in Tennessee.
• Joy Johnson, vice president, research and international, at Simon Fraser University, in British Columbia, has been promoted to president and vice chancellor there.
• Ka Yee C. Lee, vice provost for research and a professor of chemistry, has been promoted to provost at the University of Chicago, in Illinois.

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The university said it had not suspended the students over their protest, which criticizes inaction on racist incidents on the campus, but for their sit-in.