Any given calendar year is full of its worries and concerns. But, when higher education experts were asked to reflect on 2024, each described a year loaded with exceptional pressure and stress.
From a spring full of student protest to the ending of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) measures in some states, the list of stressors is only likely to increase as time marches into 2025. Experts urge higher education leaders, faculty, and staff, to brace themselves with community while having hard conversations about their purpose and place in society and to decide where they stand on issues of shared governance.
“The world and the U.S. are changing rapidly with deep, cultural divides. I think these divides are taking a toll on students and faculty alike,” says Dr. Marybeth Gasman, Samuel DeWitt Proctor Endowed Chair in Education and associate dean for research in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University. “They are stressed, low energy, some are afraid, and they are less hopeful.”
Dr. Marybeth Gasman
Ultimately, geographic location will make the difference in access to and completion of postsecondary education in America, and as the Trump administration moves into the White House, experts predict more chaos, more confusion, and more challenges to higher education.
Experts agree that those most likely to take the brunt of administrative changes will be the poor and impoverished. But they also agree that everyone involved at an institution, from board of trustee members to the students, have a role to play and the power to protect educational goals and aspirations. They urged stakeholders to stay as invested and involved as possible.
Dr. Felecia Commodore, an associate professor of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, says two of the biggest events of 2024 were the ramifications of the Supreme Court June 2023 decision to end the consideration of race in admissions, and “the ways in which DEI initiatives were dismantled almost overnight.”
The Supreme Court’s ruling saw a deep decrease in Black student enrollment at some elite institutions. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) saw its Black enrollment decrease by 13% from its average. Since 2013, over 80 anti-DEI bills have been introduced in 28 states, and 14 have been signed into law. States with restrictions on DEI programming include Texas, Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina, and more.
