Daily Briefing

Good morning, and welcome to Wednesday, January 8. Rick Seltzer wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Comings and Goings.

📧❓ Readers, submit your big questions for 2025: Chronicle journalists last week shared the questions we’re asking at the dawn of the year. Now we want to hear from you. Email dailybriefing@chronicle.com with your name, title, and question for the year. We’ll feature submissions in a future Daily Briefing.

A final message on college marketing

Three years after an investigation raised questions about Baker College’s marketing practices, student-debt levels, and career outcomes, the federal government penalized the Michigan nonprofit, report The Chronicle’s David Jesse and ProPublica’s Anna Clark.

The feds fined Baker College $2.5 million for “substantial misrepresentation” of its students’ career outcomes. The U.S. Department of Education announced the fine on Tuesday, saying students could be harmed by relying on the college’s marketing when making enrollment decisions.

• Baker also agreed not to make future misrepresentations, to inform students how to submit complaints to the Education Department, and to provide copies of its marketing materials for federal review for three years.

The charges against Baker read like a list of false-advertising claims critics have long levied against career-oriented colleges. The Education Department found that Baker:

• Published inaccurate and misleading career outcomes: College websites featured “career-outcomes rates” that seemed to be based on all graduates but were not. Emails advertised career-outcomes rates of greater than 90 percent without explaining that the rates included students going on to unpaid options like continuing education.
• Inflated a list of employers that hired graduates: Fourteen of more than 100 employers the college listed as hiring its graduates actually hired those employees before they enrolled at Baker.
• Misrepresented graduates’ earnings: Program pages showed median income and salary figures that were based on national averages, not data from the college’s graduates.
• Incorrectly calculated employment rates: Rates published for two culinary programs were 16 to 60 points higher than the accurate figures.

Baker maintains that it didn’t make any misrepresentations. Its deal with the department contains no admission of wrongdoing.

• The Education Department viewed Baker’s materials as containing “insufficient background or explanation,” President Jacqui Spicer said in a statement.

“This settlement demonstrates the department’s ongoing commitment to enforcing higher education laws and regulations and protecting students and taxpayers,” the department said in its announcement.

Former students were unimpressed. The announcement didn’t mention any restitution for former students who borrowed money or struggled to find jobs, they noted.

• “This seems like a slap on the wrist,” said one graduate of Baker’s Flint campus.
• “I am honestly shocked they are allowed to remain open and accredited,” said Bart Bechtel, a former student.

To be sure, Baker’s operating budgets have taken a hit, The Chronicle, Detroit Free Press, and ProPublica found in 2023. Revenue had dropped by a whopping $161 million over nine years to just $58 million. Enrollment plunged from a high of 45,000 students in 2011-12 to about 4,000.

But the college had built an endowment worth $362 million as of 2023. Cleamon Moorer Jr., a former administrator and faculty member, wondered how much punishment the fine of $2.5 million amounts to.

The bigger picture: The fine represents a last hurrah for the Biden administration, which promised to draw a hard line against deceptive college advertising and reminded colleges last year to be up-front with students. The incoming Trump administration isn’t expected to share that priority.

📱 Read the full story: Feds Fine Baker College $2.5 Million for Deceptive Marketing That Left Students With Debt and Regret

Quick hits

• UT-Austin president leaving for SMU: Southern Methodist University on Tuesday named Jay Hartzell as its next president, poaching the University of Texas at Austin’s leader to replace R. Gerald Turner, who’s stepping aside after a 30-year tenure that included rebuilding the Dallas university’s football program and landing the George W. Bush Presidential Center. Hartzell became UT-Austin’s president during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, then weathered several more storms. He kept the “Eyes of Texas” anthem despite its origins in minstrelsy, defended faculty tenure against skeptical elected officials, called state troopers to respond to pro-Palestinian protesters, and oversaw an institution that laid off employees to comply with a state ban on diversity, equity, and inclusion programming. (The Dallas Morning News, Southern Methodist University, The Chronicle)
• SUNY adds civic-discourse requirement: The State University of New York system on Tuesday announced civic-discourse studies will become part of its 30-credit general-education requirement starting with students who enroll in the fall of 2026. They’ll need to show skills including “the deliberation of ideas through reasoned inquiry that seeks new information and considers multiple points of view,” as well as the “ethical practice of advocacy, dissent, and dialogue.” (SUNY)
• DeSantis stocks U. of West Florida board: Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, appointed five new conservative members to the public institution’s 13-person Board of Trustees. Two of them live outside the state and have associations with the Heritage Foundation. One, Scott Yenor, has drawn criticism for saying career-focused women are “more medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome.” (Florida Politics, Tampa Bay Times, Idaho Statesman)
• Feds resolve Hopkins discrimination complaint: Despite receiving 99 complaints of shared-ancestry discrimination between October 2023 and May 2024, the Johns Hopkins University didn’t consider whether the reported incidents had created a hostile environment for students, the U.S. Department of Education said on Tuesday. The university agreed to review its responses to the reports, administer a climate assessment, and train employees. (U.S. Department of Education)

Where colleges see risk

The insurer United Educators is out with its latest annual poll of member colleges. Here are key findings to know from the survey, which reflects 194 institutions’ responses from August to December:

• Enrollment concerns eclipsed data security. Just over seven in 10 respondents called enrollment a top risk, up from 67 percent last year. Enrollment returned to its typical spot as colleges’ most-cited risk, sending data security to second place. This year, 56 percent of respondents named data security as a top risk, a sharp dip from 73 percent a year ago.
• Research universities aren’t as apprehensive about enrollment. They were also less likely to cite deferred maintenance. Instead, they tended to flag data security, athletics, and academic-research risks more frequently.
• Regulatory and legal compliance worries surged. Almost a third of respondents, 29 percent, named compliance as a risk. That’s up 8 percentage points at a time of heightened state and federal scrutiny.
• Opinions split on AI. Views of AI risk clustered at the high and low ends of a scale. Some institutions saw it as a major risk, others seem to view it as just another technology.

The bigger questions: Which high-priority risks can colleges successfully prevent from blowing up into major problems? What potential risks are they ignoring or downplaying?

Comings and goings

• Amanda Murdie, a professor and head of the department of international affairs in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia, has been named dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
• Reynaldo Anaya Valencia, a professor and dean of the Capital University Law School, has been named president and dean of the South Texas College of Law Houston.

To submit a new-hire announcement, email people@chronicle.com.

Footnote

The Footnote opened the week with Lake Superior State University’s annual list of overused phrases begging for banishment. Today, it’s a pleasure to complete a syzygy with Wayne State University’s batch of 10 underused words worthy of restoration into common parlance.

In fact “syzygy” deserves recognition as the most fun to type of this year’s underused words. But Wayne State’s given definition threatens to hamstring the term with limited applications, as the university explained it to be an astrological term used to describe the alignment of celestial bodies.

Fortunately, my old edition of Webster’s New World College Dictionary says syzygy can also mean “a pair of things, esp. a pair of opposites.” We don’t have to wait for the next eclipse to break it out, hence its appearance in the first paragraph here.

Now that you’ve been inured to sudden confrontation with uncommon words, I hope you’ll be ensorcelled by a shackbaggerly presentation of the remaining list. I considered using all 10 terms with care, only to hurkle-durkle until well after taking a tiffin. Vesper writing would leave me less than sonsy, so I’ll honeyfuggle you, dear reader, by coming clean about my mad rush to finish quickly. I wouldn’t want you to think of me as a scaramouch.