FIRE's 2027 College Free Speech Rankings: What Actually Moves a School's Score

Texas A&M holds a green light rating for its speech policies and still fell from 47th to 192nd in this year's College Free Speech Rankings. Harvard climbed from 245th to 71st without changing a single policy, a sign that how leadership responds to speech controversies matters more than what is written in the handbook. In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Dr. Sean Stevens, Chief Research Advisor at FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. The conversation covers the seventh annual College Free Speech Rankings and why institutions with strong written policies can still see their free speech climate collapse. Stevens, a social psychologist specializing in political psychology and survey methodology, directs the rankings, which this year surveyed students at 261 institutions across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. He explains how the rankings score student self-censorship, comfort expressing ideas, political tolerance, and trust in administration, and how deplatforming attempts and punishments of faculty and students can weigh on a school's score for up to five years. This conversation is especially relevant for presidents, boards, provosts, and enrollment executives evaluating how their institution will respond to the next campus speech controversy or external pressure to censor. Topics Covered Why a green light policy rating does not protect an institution's free speech ranking How the rankings separate trait-based self-censorship from campus climate How speech controversy penalties are graded by severity and decay over four to five years The corporate HR model of managing speech controversies and the mixed messages it sends Syllabi review, course cancellations, and preemptive compliance with the DEI executive order The impact of the Charlie Kirk assassination on student attitudes toward violence and self-censorship FIRE's upcoming surveys of faculty, international students, and college administrators Real-World Examples Discussed Texas A&M's drop to 192nd after the firing of a senior lecturer and demotion of a dean following a student complaint Texas State University's fall of 147 places to a bottom-three finish Harvard's rise from 245th to 71st with no policy reform, driven by gains in student trust in administration UC Davis posting the largest improvement through policy reform and the decay of past penalties Barnard College and Columbia University moving up from the bottom two spots Dartmouth College and the University of South Carolina changing culture quickly under new leadership Three Key Takeaways for Higher Education Leadership State the institution's position on free speech and academic freedom clearly, then follow it when a controversy hits. Written policy without enforcement costs more than it protects. Stand up to pressure to censor, whether it comes from campus groups or state and federal government. Student trust in administrative resolve is a scored component that can move within two survey cycles. Build the capacity for difficult conversations through faculty modeling in the classroom and a substantive First Amendment module at student orientation. Read the transcript: https://changinghighered.com/college-free-speech-rankings-leadership/ #FreeSpeech #AcademicFreedom #HigherEducation #HigherEducationPodcast

Student loan default and repayment rates have continued to be calculated through years of dormant collections, and some institutions could soon face single-year default rates high enough to threaten their Title IV eligibility. That risk is arriving alongside final OB3 rules, sweeping accreditation proposals from the AIM negotiated rulemaking, and midterm elections that will reshape every committee governing higher education. In this Washington Update episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Tom Netting, President of TEN Government Strategies. The conversation covers the federal regulatory and political changes that put institutional Title IV eligibility at risk and how the 2026 midterms could change them. Netting has advocated before Congress, federal agencies, and state governments for more than 35 years on behalf of private institutions of higher education. He walks through the final OB3 rules on earnings accountability and graduate and professional loan limits, the AIM Neg Reg proposals on transfer of credit and accreditor independence, the diffusion of the Department of Education across other agencies, and the committee-by-committee stakes of the midterm elections. This conversation is especially relevant for presidents, boards, provosts, and enrollment executives evaluating their institution's exposure to default rate penalties, accreditation changes, and the next round of negotiated rulemaking. Topics Covered Why default and repayment rates calculated during dormant collections threaten Title IV eligibility The OB3 earnings accountability metric and the Department's push for early implementation Litigation over graduate and professional loan limits and the exclusion of nursing AIM negotiated rulemaking proposals on transfer of credit, outcomes assessment, legal compliance, and accreditor independence How the midterm elections could reshape the Senate HELP, House Education and the Workforce, Veterans' Affairs, and Appropriations committees Real-World Examples Discussed Borrowers who enrolled in 2017 or 2018 and have not made a single loan payment heading into 2026 Nursing programs left off the professional degree list, triggering litigation that has halted enforcement of the loan limits for those programs The House advancing ten bills to codify the Department of Education's dismantling while the Senate HELP Committee rejected the idea on a bipartisan basis Three Key Takeaways for Higher Education Leadership Model your default and repayment rate exposure now, because no regulatory accommodation exists yet for rates calculated during years without collections. Review transfer credit policies and program-level outcomes, because accreditors will be responsible for enforcing both under the AIM proposals. Do not wait for the midterms to change the rules, because the Department plans post-election negotiated rulemaking on change of ownership, administrative capability, and financial responsibility regardless of the outcome. Read the transcript: https://changinghighered.com/washington-update-title-iv-risk-midterms-neg-reg/ #HigherEducationPolicy #NegReg #ChangingHigherEdPodcast

Most institutions measure access at admission and affordability, then ration the experiences that actually change student outcomes to whoever finds them. The experiential learning that employers say they want gets delivered to honors cohorts and groups of thirty while everyone else gets the catalog. In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Dr. W. Brooke Elliott, Dean of the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois. The conversation covers how Gies scaled experiential learning from a selective offering into a curricular requirement across every program, and what it cost on the staffing, funding, and governance side to make it hold. Elliott is starting her third year as dean in her twenty-fourth year at Gies, where the land-grant mission is expressed through a purpose statement committing the college to expanding access to business education. Her operational focus is on what accessibility means after enrollment: whether the live client projects, consulting engagements, and immersions inside a degree are reachable by a large share of learners rather than a selected few. This conversation is especially relevant for presidents, boards, provosts, and deans evaluating whether to scale experiential learning beyond pilot programs and selective cohorts. Topics Covered Redefining accessibility to include the experiences inside the degree, not just admission and price How Gies sources 300 to 400 live client projects a year to place every junior on a team Why undergraduate employer projects are free, and how project sourcing functions as the recruiting pipeline The staffing model: a dedicated experiential learning office paired with internal learning designers Embedding experiential capstones inside online graduate programs serving roughly 7,000 students Investing in faculty AI capability for 18 months before changing the curriculum The iMBA governance precedent that made current innovation move quickly Real-World Examples Discussed Business 301, Business in Action, a junior-year course placing every student on a live client project, and Business 401, Crafting Your Purpose, sending seniors into their local and home communities Illinois Business Consulting, in its thirtieth year, and the Disruption Lab, which pairs Gies and Grainger College of Engineering students on technology problems sourced from inside the college International immersions redesigned into domestic and then virtual formats, including a virtual immersion with a partner institution in Japan Replacing programming-language modules in the undergraduate core with modules on using AI to program, and launching the MSBAi with a first cohort of 30 Students correcting their assumptions about John Deere and Caterpillar by working the companies' actual problems Three Key Takeaways for Higher Education Leadership Mission and purpose alignment only matters when it functions as a decision rule for resource allocation and program design. Learner-centric requires faculty first, because faculty deliver the experience. Invest in capability before expecting delivery. Leading authentically is what mobilizes people past what an org chart can compel, and disruption is where access expands if someone goes after it. Read the transcript:  Read the transcript: https://changinghighered.com/scale-experiential-learning-to-every-student/ #ExperientialLearning #HigherEducation #HigherEducationPodcast

Workforce readiness is usually framed as a funding and program-design problem. In some states and at some institutions, the funding and the employer willingness already exist, and what is missing is a structure on the institution's side that can take the offer and act on it. In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Brad Griffith, president of Buckeye Innovation, a central Ohio technology firm building custom software for nonprofits, local governments, and growing organizations. The conversation covers where the public-private partnership between employers and institutions breaks down, and what leaders can change on their own side of it. Griffith serves on a curriculum advisory committee at Central Ohio Technical College, hires apprentices through Columbus State Community College's IT Flexible Apprenticeship program, and ran six state-reimbursed interns this past summer. He guest lectures in a justice tech program at Ohio State and has helped commercialize university-developed technology, including a job-matching tool that came out of the OSU Wexner Medical Center. This conversation is especially relevant for presidents, boards, provosts, deans, and career services leaders evaluating whether their institution can absorb employer, donor, and state investment in experiential learning at the speed those partners operate. Topics Covered State wage reimbursement programs for employers who host interns, and how the Ohio application and reimbursement process works in practice Donor-funded and institution-funded internship placements at outside employers Internal curriculum approval sequencing versus accreditor review as the source of curricular delay Writing course descriptions broadly enough that faculty can change technologies without reopening formal approval How curriculum advisory committees give two-year and technical colleges a structured way to bring in employer input Career fair pricing and participation structures that can screen out smaller local employers The start-to-finish work cycle, from conceptualizing a problem through launch and post-launch support Why commercializing university research calls for a different capability than developing it Real-World Examples Discussed VocFit, a job-matching tool for individuals with developmental disabilities developed at the OSU Wexner Medical Center, moved from mailed paper surveys and manual spreadsheet matching to deployed software now demonstrated in Italy and partnered with Cincinnati Children's Hospital and Colorado State University A University of Richmond student whose internship at an Ohio company was funded by his own institution An Ohio State justice tech program pairing engineering with the Moritz College of Law, where four student project teams on four technology stacks raised a real long-term support constraint Central Ohio Technical College's community advisory committee, which reviews courses and syllabi and names the skills employers see missing in graduates Apprenticeships through Columbus State Community College serving working adults changing careers, some with employer-funded certificates and stipends Three Key Takeaways for Higher Education Leadership Invite businesses in and build structures where outside perspectives are represented, including advisory boards and standing invitations for employers to participate. Make sure students graduate with real project work they can show, on a publicly visible portfolio rather than a transcript reference to coursework. Embrace AI while teaching its limits alongside its capabilities, so graduates can judge where it belongs, where it does not, and how to use it as a thought partner. Read the transcript: https://changinghighered.com/employer-engagement-in-higher-education/ #WorkforceReadiness #HigherEducation #PublicPrivatePartnership #ChangingHigherEdPodcast

Private colleges under enrollment pressure get told to diversify revenue. The venture that follows usually either fails to earn or drags the institution away from the academic identity families were paying for. In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Dr. Brooke Barnett, President of Rollins College. The conversation covers how a tuition-dependent private structures a diversified budget model without compromising the curriculum that gives its degree value. Barnett walks through the Innovation Triangle, a three-part portfolio Rollins spent more than a decade and $200 million building. The parts run on deliberately different economics: a boutique inn whose net proceeds fund student scholarships, an art museum relocating into the Winter Park community that charges no admission and is designed to draw no institutional funds, and the Rick Goings Institute, a cross-sector executive education venture built around AI readiness informed by the liberal arts. She separates declining willingness to pay among full-pay families from rising ability-to-pay pressure driven by demographic shift, and explains why the instruments that address them are not interchangeable. She also details how Rollins applies its own pedagogical method to institutional AI decisions, refusing technophilia and technophobia as the same kind of failure. This conversation is especially relevant for presidents, boards, provosts, and enrollment executives evaluating whether to launch non-tuition revenue ventures and how to structure them so they reinforce rather than dilute institutional identity. Topics Covered Separating willingness to pay from ability to pay, and why each requires a different instrument The Innovation Triangle and why only two of its three assets are expected to generate revenue How the Alfond Inn functions as a hotel, a rotating contemporary art collection, and a scholarship engine at once Positioning executive education as an extension of the curriculum rather than an unrelated business line Why 80 years of adult learning and graduate business capacity cannot be replicated inside a single budget cycle The Gateway and the pragmatic liberal arts tradition traced to John Dewey's 1931 conference at Rollins Applying liberal arts inquiry to institutional AI decisions, and protecting the cognitive struggle that produces learning Real-World Examples Discussed The Alfond Inn, a boutique hotel and living art museum with quarterly collection rotations, which had directed $10.8 million to the Alfond Scholars program as of early 2026 The Rollins Museum of Art, relocating off campus with donor and tourist tax support, free to the public and explicitly not a revenue generator The Rick Goings Institute, launching cross-sector executive programming this fall on a $10 million seed commitment Accelerated master's pathways including the Rollins MBA, serving a market seeking two degrees in a compressed timeline Incoming undergraduates serving with roughly 40 central Florida organizations before attending their first class A College of Liberal Arts AI certificate and a graduate business faculty summer spent rebuilding curriculum around AI Three Key Takeaways for Higher Education Leadership Concentrate capacity, attention, and financial resources on the students being served and the colleagues serving them. Identify the institutional assets that are genuinely distinctive, then protect and cultivate them rather than diluting them in pursuit of enrollment. Make the financial math work to support the aspirations. Doing more with less does not work; doing less with less requires the discipline to choose. Read the transcript: https://changinghighered.com/tuition-dependent-college-non-tuition-revenue-academic-mission/ #HigherEducation  #HigherEdLeadership #ChangingHigherEdPodcast

Institutions recruiting adult learners are inserting them into schedules, deadline policies, and course structures designed for 19-year-olds, then treating the resulting attrition as a student problem. The barriers doing the damage are recent design decisions, not fixed features of higher education, and several of them cost almost nothing to remove. In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Dr. Evan Kropp, executive director of distance education at the University of Florida's College of Journalism and Communications. The conversation covers what has to change structurally when adult learners stop being an enrollment contingency and become a population the institution designs for. Kropp oversees UF CJC Online and its Master of Arts in Mass Communication, a 36-credit online degree enrolling roughly 650 students. His operational focus areas include course design standardization, cost transparency, transfer and prior learning credit, and the translation of academic learning outcomes into professional language students can use. This conversation is especially relevant for presidents, boards, provosts, and enrollment executives evaluating whether to build degree completion and adult learner pathways at their institutions. Topics Covered Why the "I'm too old for a classroom" objection comes from 25-year-olds as often as from 65-year-olds, and what that means for online positioning How course learning outcomes can be reissued to students as resume language at the end of every course What lifelong learning costs an institution that treats it as an operating commitment rather than a slogan Why transfer and prior learning credit decisions are traditionally financial decisions, and what a competitive response time looks like The recurring time cost created when faculty design online courses independently Why deadline policies written to teach 19-year-olds accountability misfire on working adults How to build an AI curriculum by asking employers where they are deliberately not using AI Real-World Examples Discussed UF CJC Online converts course learning outcomes into resume bullet points, producing 100 to 120 curated items across the 12-course Master of Arts in Mass Communication sequence Master Access, which lets graduates of that degree audit unlimited courses from an 80-course catalog for $500 per year Standardized navigation across every online course in the program, eliminating the semester-start relearning cost created by 40 faculty designing independently Franklin University's transfer database of roughly 1,800 institutions, returning a transfer decision in five minutes instead of a week A rebuilt program financial page showing cost per class and cost by credit load for students paying as they go Three Key Takeaways for Higher Education Leadership Adult learners cannot serve as an enrollment patch for demographic decline. An institution that wants them has to redesign schedules, advising, onboarding, and technology support rather than recruiting into the existing structure. The value proposition has to be explicit at the course level, connecting the program to the credential, the specific skills, and the student's professional aspirations, rather than leaving that chain implied across a degree. Insufficient support is a primary reason adults quit the first time. Advising, financial aid, career services, technology support, and faculty training all need to be reconsidered for this population rather than inherited from the traditional model. Read the transcript: https://changinghighered.com/redesign-an-institution-for-adult-learners/ #HigherEducation #AdultLearners #DegreeCompletion

Most institutions in a crisis don't believe they're in one. The word calls up a scandal with a camera crew outside, and nothing on this week's agenda looks like that, so the answer is often no. In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Evan Nierman, founder and CEO of Red Banyan, a strategic communications firm built around high-stakes rapid response. The conversation covers why a crisis is any circumstance with the potential to negatively impact reputation and/or revenue, and what that definition changes for colleges and universities. Nierman explains why the old instinct to stay quiet and avoid giving oxygen to a fire now cedes the battleground to whoever is willing to characterize your institution, how most colleges can pinpoint their likeliest crises well before one arrives, and why the day-to-day spokesperson should usually be a trained communications professional rather than the president. This conversation is especially relevant for presidents, boards, provosts, and communications leaders deciding whether to respond publicly, and when. Topics Covered The broader definition of a crisis and why institutions may not recognize one before it escalates How hyper-connectedness, self-selected news, and hyper-partisanship changed the response calculus When to respond publicly instead of leaving well enough alone Why the bulk of crisis work happens before the crisis Who belongs on the core crisis response team, and when to bring in outside expertise Why the day-to-day spokesperson should usually be a trained communications professional Why Nierman says PR is dead, and what powering reputation means in its place Guilt by association, due process, and how colleges can center their institutional values Why institutions should teach students and faculty to use AI effectively instead of treating it primarily as a cheating problem Examples and Emerging Risks Discussed College presidents dragged before Congress over antisemitism on campus A George Washington University commencement speech, and the dean's response to it Colleges taking fire because donors' names surfaced in the Epstein files Deepfake cases where recordings exist of conduct that never happened Public opposition to AI data center construction Three Key Takeaways for Higher Education Leadership Reputation is the institution's single most valuable asset; protect it, preserve it, and invest in powering it The time to deal with a crisis is before you have one, with a detailed plan, media-trained people, and set procedures When it comes, be strategic and be speedy, even though that runs against the pace academia normally moves Read the full episode summary and transcript: https://changinghighered.com/higher-ed-crisis-communications/ #CrisisCommunications #HigherEducation #HigherEducationPodcast

Applications keep climbing while the class comes up short. The gap sits in the phase most institutions treat as the finish line: what happens after the acceptance letter goes out. In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Mike McGetrick, Vice President of Spark451, which he co-founded. Spark451 is a Jenzabar company. The conversation covers why enrollment falls short when admissions and marketing are both performing. Drawing on twenty-five years in university marketing, branding, and enrollment marketing, McGetrick explains what Spark451's focus groups revealed about when families actually begin their due diligence, how summer melt stopped being passive attrition, and why a communication architecture addressed to the seventeen-year-old may be reaching nobody at all. This conversation is part two of two and is especially relevant for presidents, boards, provosts, and enrollment executives evaluating whether their shortfall is an execution problem or a misallocation problem. Topics Covered Why the yield phase, not the top of the funnel, determines the class The mechanism now driving melt rates up across institutions How parents have moved from influencers to operators of the enrollment process Why marketing fifty-five graduate programs is a different job than marketing one university The four Ds behind a branding engagement: discover, define, design, develop Where agentic AI belongs in admissions and why retention may be the bigger opportunity Real-World Examples Discussed A parent whose student opened nothing until the admission letter arrived Waitlist offers in June pulling students who deposited elsewhere in May NYU issuing a common brand while expecting each school to hold its own voice Admissions calls arriving after seven in the evening with no one to take them Three Key Takeaways for Higher Education Leadership Enrollment is institutional strategy, not a departmental assignment; portfolio, pricing, experience, retention, and reputation all shape demand Defining your value is the easy half; building and maintaining the evidence that proves it is the work Students experience one institution even when it operates as twenty departments, so the promise has to run as a single operating system Read the transcript: https://changinghighered.com/enrollment-falling-short-admissions-and-marketing/ #EnrollmentManagement #HigherEducation #HigherEducationPodcast

Digital transformation aside, most enrollment problems get diagnosed as marketing problems. This conversation argues they are usually positioning and pricing problems that marketing gets handed after the fact. In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Mike McGetrick, Vice President at Spark451, a Jenzabar company he founded, and an instructor of digital marketing at New York University, about why institutional sameness has become an enrollment liability and what it takes to build a position an institution can actually deliver on. McGetrick walks through the three prices every college carries at once, the analytics diagnostic that reveals whether a sticker price is ending conversations before value is ever communicated, and the difference between positioning and brand. The centerpiece is a mid-size New York university that reset published tuition from $60,000 to a mid-$20,000 sticker price, unified its programs under a single position, and recorded a 20% enrollment increase across two cycles. This conversation is especially relevant for presidents, boards, chief marketing officers, and enrollment leaders trying to determine whether their enrollment shortfall is a messaging failure or a strategy failure. It is part one of two; part two takes up enrollment marketing in depth. Topics Covered Why higher education has a confidence and clarity problem rather than a marketing problem How enrollment shifted from a traditional funnel to prolonged risk assessment, with students weighing 12 or more schools The inversion of admissions: the student now evaluates the institution Sticker price, individualized net price, and perceived price, and why marketing usually addresses only two Institutional sameness and why undifferentiated truth produces no position The difference between an attribute and a benefit in student-facing messaging Positioning versus brand, and why neither can be invented Which KPIs actually indicate whether a repositioning worked Real-World Examples Discussed A tuition page functioning as a website's largest exit page, signaling the sticker price is scaring families off during discovery A tuition reset from $60,000 to the mid-$20,000s built around an affordability and wellness promise, producing a 20% enrollment increase over two years Unity Environmental University as a case of narrow focus told exceptionally well Free tuition thresholds at elite institutions and what they do and do not solve for the rest of the sector World-class research faculty as an attribute, rewritten as a student benefit Three Key Takeaways for Higher Education Leaders Run the exit page diagnostic before approving another campaign budget; price opacity buys applications and costs trust. If your positioning language could be lifted onto three competitor websites unnoticed, you have not established a position. A brand promise dies at the operational layer, so track net tuition revenue per student to confirm enrollment gains are strengthening the institution. Read the transcript: https://changinghighered.com/https://changinghighered.com/higher-ed-marketing-positioning-enrollment/ #HigherEducation #HigherEdMarketing #ChangingHigherEdPodcast

The same students who say college costs too much are overwhelmingly saying it was worth it, and that contradiction is the key to the entire public confidence debate. In Gallup-Lumina polling cited in this episode, 93 percent of bachelor's students called their degree a worthwhile investment. The doubt is about price, not the education, and generative AI has raised the stakes for confusing the two. In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Dr. Christa Acampora, philosopher and Dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia, where she is leading the integration of AI into the curriculum, about the purpose of liberal arts education in the age of AI. Acampora argues that the purpose of higher education is human formation, making people capable of authoring their own lives and helping to govern a free society, with preparation for good work as part of that purpose rather than a substitute for it. She and McNaughton separate the public's doubts about cost from the question of value and discuss how UVA is making student formation visible through its first-year learning experience, the Commonplace Book, and an AI Literacy and Action Lab. Topics Covered Why the public's doubts about a degree center on price and debt, a different question from whether the education was worth doing What AI's capacity to produce competent outputs reveals about what higher education has rewarded World Economic Forum survey findings discussed in the episode on redesigning work and finding people with judgment who can adapt Whether institutions that teach students how to think are helping students recognize that learning in themselves UVA's first-year course sequence built around big human questions, the Commonplace Book, and the AI Literacy and Action Lab How students describe their own use of AI and their concerns about evaluating its outputs Three Key Takeaways for Higher Education Leaders Reframe the case for higher education around formation, for the individual and for society, rather than transferable skills that machines can now perform. Keep cost and value separate: address cost and price transparency directly, and make the value case with confidence, not apology. Make formation visible early and often through pedagogy and instruments that let students see their own growth. This episode offers perspective for presidents, provosts, and board members on articulating and demonstrating the value of a liberal education as AI capabilities continue to change. Read the transcript: https://changinghighered.com/purpose-of-liberal-arts-education-in-the-age-of-ai/ #HigherEducation #LiberalArts #ChangingHigherEdPodcast