Higher Education Inquirer : August 2025

Friday, August 1, 2025

Juiced: How HEI Uses AI—and Why Humans Still Matter

At the Higher Education Inquirer, we report on the structures that shape—and often distort—American higher education. We focus on debt, power, labor, and policy. We also use tools that help us do that work better. Artificial Intelligence is one of them. This article explains how we use AI, what concerns it raises, and why our work remains human-centered.

AI helps us review large volumes of documents, spot patterns in legal filings and government data, and summarize long reports. It helps us write more clearly and publish more regularly. It’s a tool—fast, tireless, and useful when used with care.

But we don’t trust it blindly. AI is being used in journalism and education in ways that often sidestep accountability. It generates articles, grades essays, writes marketing material, and shapes student profiles. In doing so, it introduces errors, reinforces bias, and reduces complex decisions to code. It can create false citations, misidentify sources, and spread misinformation.

AI is also replacing workers. In journalism, it’s cutting out editors and reporters. In education, it’s being sold as a cheaper alternative to faculty and staff. These changes don’t just affect paychecks. They affect trust, accuracy, and depth of understanding.

There are environmental costs too. AI requires large amounts of energy and water. Data centers draw on power grids and aquifers, often in areas already dealing with scarcity. Universities and media companies using AI at scale contribute to this footprint, even while promoting sustainability elsewhere.

There’s also the issue of psychological stress. AI-generated content is flooding screens. The volume of material, much of it shallow or repetitive, can lead to overload and distraction. Readers struggle to filter what matters. Attention suffers. The noise grows.

That’s why we still do the core of our work by hand. We write, edit, and fact-check each piece. We ask questions AI can’t: Who gains? Who loses? What’s the history? What’s being left out?

We don’t treat journalism as a technical task. It involves judgment, memory, and responsibility. AI can assist with certain parts of the process. It cannot replace what matters most.

We use AI because it helps us get more done. But we use it carefully. We know how technology can be misused in education and media. And we know the limits of what machines can do.

Sources:

American Press Institute, “How AI is Changing the Newsroom”
Columbia Journalism Review, “AI and the End of News as We Know It?”
Mozilla Foundation, “The Ethical Risks of Generative AI”
U.S. Department of Education, “Use of AI in Higher Ed: Opportunities and Concerns”
MIT Technology Review, “AI’s Carbon Footprint Is Bigger Than You Think”
Nature, “The Environmental Toll of AI”
American Psychological Association, “The Impact of Digital Overload on Mental Health”

The Higher Education Inquirer is an independent, human-run publication investigating power and inequality in U.S. higher education.

Homeschooling: A Double-Edged Sword in a Fraying Social Fabric

Homeschooling in the United States has grown from a fringe practice to a mainstream alternative. Once the province of religious conservatives, it has attracted a broader swath of parents concerned about public school violence, bullying, ideological conflicts, and academic mediocrity. And in many measurable ways, homeschooled students outperform their peers—scoring higher on standardized tests, graduating college at higher rates, and often entering adulthood with strong self-discipline and intellectual curiosity.

But beneath these achievements lies a paradox that cuts to the heart of a fracturing nation: as homeschooling helps individual children flourish academically and emotionally, it can also disconnect them from the broader social fabric—deepening polarization, stunting civic empathy, and feeding the cultural fragmentation that defines American life in the 21st century.

The Academic Edge

The academic upsides of homeschooling are hard to deny. Without the bureaucratic inertia and overcrowding that plague public schools, many homeschoolers benefit from personalized learning, flexible pacing, and curricula tailored to their interests and needs. Parents can eliminate distractions and foster deeper learning, especially when equipped with time, resources, and support. In a nation where school quality is still determined largely by zip code, homeschooling offers a lifeline to many families seeking a more enriching or ideologically aligned education.

The explosion of online learning tools, microschools, co-ops, and hybrid models during and after the COVID-19 pandemic has further accelerated this trend. Homeschooling is no longer an isolated endeavor—it’s become a well-networked ecosystem.

The Social Price

But as homeschooled children retreat from traditional educational spaces, they often lose something harder to quantify: direct engagement with people who are different from them—ethnically, economically, politically, and religiously. Public schools, for all their flaws, are among the last institutions in American life where such cross-cutting interactions happen routinely. They are imperfect but vital laboratories for pluralism, places where children learn to coexist, argue, reconcile, and sometimes just tolerate.

When children are pulled from these spaces and educated in bubbles—whether those bubbles are built around fundamentalist religion, Silicon Valley libertarianism, anti-racism, or eco-anarchism—they may grow intellectually but lose connection with the lived experiences of others. This can reinforce ideological silos and breed a type of abstract moral superiority that has little bearing on the messy realities of shared life.

In extreme cases, some homeschoolers grow up unfamiliar with how public systems function, disconnected from civic obligations, and distrustful of anyone outside their subculture. These outcomes aren’t universal, but they are increasingly visible.

Cultural Separation in a Fractured Nation

Homeschooling is not the cause of America’s fragmentation, but it can be both a symptom and a driver. As Americans lose faith in public institutions—schools, libraries, local governments—they increasingly retreat into privatized, curated realities. This is mirrored not just in education but in media consumption, housing patterns, and religious affiliation.

In this context, homeschooling becomes less about education and more about control. Parents choose it to filter what their children learn about race, gender, history, and the state itself. While this autonomy can protect children from ideological indoctrination or violence in some cases, it can also produce generations less prepared to navigate social conflict or build coalitions across difference.

The long-term result may be a society in which people are better educated on paper but less able to engage constructively with anyone outside their bubble.

The Need for Reconnection

To preserve the benefits of homeschooling while mitigating its social costs, there must be intentional efforts to reconnect homeschoolers with civic life. This could include:

Encouraging participation in community-based extracurriculars that are ideologically diverse

Requiring basic civic education standards in homeschool curricula

Creating public forums and mixed-learning spaces where homeschoolers and public school students can interact

Supporting transparency and accountability in homeschooling laws, which vary wildly by state

America’s social cohesion is already on thin ice. If we are to build an educational system that promotes both excellence and empathy, we must find ways to bridge the distance between personalized learning and public life.

Otherwise, we risk raising a generation of high achievers who are strangers in their own country.

Sources

Ray, Brian D. "A Review of Research on Homeschooling and What Might Educators Learn?" Pro-Parenting Journal, 2023.

Reich, Rob. Education, Authority, and the Ethics of Homeschooling. Stanford University.

National Center for Education Statistics, Homeschooling data reports.

“Homeschooling Surge Continues Despite Schools Reopening,” Associated Press, 2024.

A Preliminary List of Private Colleges in Trouble

Private colleges in the United States—particularly small, tuition-dependent nonprofit institutions—are facing a mounting crisis that shows no sign of abating. Since 2020, dozens have closed, merged, or announced plans to shut down due to enrollment declines, unsustainable debt, and shrinking endowments. In 2025 alone, a growing number of private institutions have either declared their intention to close or been flagged as financially failing. The Higher Education Inquirer has compiled a preliminary and data-driven list of these institutions, including colleges that have shut down, plan to close, or have received failing financial grades from independent analysts.

According to Gary Stocker, founder of College Viability, the telltale signs of college failure are persistent and measurable. “When looking for at-risk colleges, the critical factor is trends. If enrollment and net tuition revenue are down for the past 5–10 years, it is highly unlikely that a turnaround is imminent or even possible,” Stocker explained. This insight reflects the compounding nature of decline in higher education finance. “One bad enrollment year negatively impacts a college for at least 4 years. Multiple bad enrollment years need to be followed by multiple really good enrollment years to have any chance of a financially successful recovery.”

That kind of recovery has proven elusive for a growing list of institutions:

Siena Heights University in Adrian, Michigan, will close after the 2025–2026 academic year. Founded in 1919, the Catholic university has seen enrollment drop by nearly a third in the past decade, leaving fewer than 1,900 students. The Board of Trustees deemed its long-term outlook unsustainable.
Limestone University in Gaffney, South Carolina, will close after Spring 2025. The school, burdened with $30 million in debt and dwindling enrollment (from over 3,000 students a decade ago to just over 1,600), failed to meet a $6 million emergency fundraising goal.
St. Andrews University in Laurinburg, North Carolina, ceased operations in May 2025 after failing to resolve long-standing financial deficits. With fewer than 1,000 students and a modest endowment, it could not survive post-pandemic pressures.
Eastern Nazarene College, near Boston, also announced it would close by year’s end. Enrollment declines and ineffective cost-cutting left the institution without viable options.
Fontbonne University, a nearly century-old Catholic college in St. Louis, Missouri, will shut down after summer 2025. Enrollment fell below 1,000 students, and efforts to sell assets and cut costs proved insufficient.
Northland College, in Ashland, Wisconsin, with fewer than 500 students, will also close in 2025. It had long struggled to maintain financial solvency.

These closures are not isolated events. According to BestColleges.com, more than 80 private nonprofit schools have closed or merged since the start of the pandemic, with nearly 50 shutting down entirely. Financial fragility is widespread and accelerating.

A broader snapshot comes from Forbes' 2024 “College Financial Grades,” which assessed over 900 private nonprofit colleges using data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). These institutions were rated on metrics including endowment per student, operating margin, admissions yield, and return on assets. In the 2024 analysis, 182 colleges received a D grade—up from only 20 in 2021.

Among the D-rated schools were:

Anderson University (IN) – Financial score: 1.435
Bethel University (IN) – Financial score: 1.223
Simmons University (MA)
Nichols College (MA)
Faulkner University (AL)
Spring Hill College (AL)

While not all of these schools are closing immediately, a D grade suggests serious financial vulnerability and potential for closure, merger, or drastic restructuring.

Another dimension of risk lies in overdependence on international tuition. A Forbes 2025 report identified 16 private colleges highly reliant on foreign students. Among them were Hult International Business School in Boston and St. Francis College in Brooklyn. With visa restrictions and geopolitical uncertainty, these colleges face added instability.

Some colleges have sought short-term survival strategies. Albright College in Pennsylvania, once identified as distressed, reported a small operating surplus in 2025 after selling off real estate and trimming staff. However, analysts and faculty remain skeptical, seeing this as a stopgap that may not resolve underlying issues.

Other closures underscore how quickly institutions can collapse:

Union Institute & University closed in 2024 and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2025, citing more than $28 million in liabilities.
University of Saint Katherine abruptly shut down in Spring 2024 due to a cash crisis.
Paier College, an art school in Connecticut, lost accreditation and will not reopen.

These are not just institutional failures—they are signs of a broader structural contraction in U.S. higher education. Elite universities continue to thrive, but a parallel system of small, regionally based, tuition-driven colleges is eroding. Demographic decline, operational overhead, and public skepticism are converging to create a perfect storm.

Gary Stocker’s warning—based on years of viability research—deserves close attention. Institutions that cannot demonstrate clear upward trends in enrollment and revenue are unlikely to survive, even with aggressive intervention.

The Higher Education Inquirer will continue to update this list and monitor developments as the crisis unfolds.

Sources
Gary Stocker, Founder of College Viability
https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/closed-colleges-list-statistics-major-closures
https://apnews.com/article/d4851555bd0fb360a92dee84a2d93140
https://www.ourmidland.com/news/article/siena-heights-catholic-university-saints-20402839.php
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Andrews_University_(North_Carolina)
https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/10/15/182207/more-colleges-set-to-close-in-2025-even-as-ivy-plus-schools-experience-application-boom
https://www.collegetransitions.com/blog/college-closures-and-mergers
https://bryanalexander.org/horizon-scanning/campus-cuts-mergers-and-closures-from-spring-2025
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/nri/study/trumps-visa-policy-threatens-16-us-colleges-dependent-on-international-students/articleshow/122015680.cms
https://www.spotlightpa.org/berks/2025/07/higher-education-albright-college-financial-crisis-survival-plan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Institute_%26_University
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Saint_Katherine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paier_College
https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawhitford/2025/03/07/forbes-college-financial-grades-2025-americas-strongest-and-weakest-schools
https://deepthoughtshed.com/2024/12/29/colleges-most-likely-to-close-based-on-2024-forbes-financial-health-failing-grades
https://talk.collegeconfidential.com/t/forbes-2024-financial-grades/3672040
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/matt-spivey-22635436_colleges-most-likely-to-close-based-on-activity-7281304623183810560-2hCs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QljCVUn3tyc

Higher Education Inquirer Surpasses 1 Million Views, Including More Than 200,000 in July 2025

The Higher Education Inquirer has reached a major milestone: more than 1 million total views since its founding, with over 200,000 views in July 2025 alone—a record-breaking month for the independent investigative site. This surge in readership reflects growing public concern with the state of U.S. higher education, especially at a time of increasing economic precarity, political unrest, and institutional dysfunction.

As corporate media outlets continue to downsize or ignore coverage of student debt, credential inflation, predatory schools, and the exploitation of academic labor, readers are seeking more critical, independent voices. HEI, which has long focused on underreported stories within the higher education-industrial complex, is becoming a go-to resource for policymakers, whistleblowers, journalists, and everyday people trying to make sense of the education economy.

Most Viewed Stories in July 2025

A few standout articles reveal key themes that are resonating with readers:

1. "Camp Mystic: A Century of Privilege, Exclusion, and Resilience Along the Guadalupe"
Views: 8,730
This deeply researched piece on the elite girls’ camp in Texas struck a nerve with readers interested in the intersection of inherited wealth, segregation, and performative philanthropy. Camp Mystic serves as a metaphor for the parallel institutions that shape American leadership in quiet, exclusive ways—far from public scrutiny.

Trend: Growing interest in how generational wealth and private networks perpetuate elite power and influence, especially through educational institutions.

2. "The Big Beautiful Bill”: A Catastrophic Blow to College Affordability
Views: 1,290
This analysis of new legislation affecting federal student aid programs explores how a bill dressed in populist language has real consequences for working-class and middle-income families. Readers responded to its dissection of policy doublespeak and the structural defunding of public education.

Trend: Rising awareness of how both major political parties contribute to the erosion of affordable education—often under misleading rhetoric.

3. "Santa Ono: Take the Money and Run"
Views: 956
A pointed critique of University of Michigan President Santa Ono’s high salary and revolving-door administrative career drew in readers frustrated by bloated leadership pay and lack of institutional accountability.

Trend: Increased public scrutiny of university presidents and boards of trustees, especially at elite institutions.

4. "List of Schools with Strong Indicators of Misconduct, Evidence for Borrower Defense Claims"
Views: 943
This database-style article provided a valuable resource for former students, journalists, and attorneys. By documenting schools with troubling records, it supported those filing Borrower Defense to Repayment claims and highlighted the ongoing fallout from the for-profit college boom.

Trend: Continued demand for actionable consumer information amid the Biden Administration’s limited and politically fraught debt relief efforts.

5. "Degrees of Discontent: Credentialism, Inflation, and the Global Education Crisis"
Views: 900
This global take on the failures of credential-driven economies resonated with a wide audience—from jobseekers with degrees they can’t use to educators struggling to make sense of shifting academic value.

Trend: A philosophical and economic reckoning with credentialism, especially as degrees lose value while tuition and debt skyrocket.

6. "Layoffs at Southern New Hampshire University"
Views: 826
Coverage of SNHU, a major player in online education, shed light on the darker side of "innovation": layoffs, overwork, and instability for faculty and staff.

Trend: Growing doubts about the long-term sustainability and labor ethics of the online education model.

7. "Universities Brace for Endowment Tax Hike, Rethink Investment Strategies"
Views: 687
A timely piece on elite university endowments caught the eye of readers interested in how wealth hoarding and financial engineering are baked into modern academia.

Trend: Rising critiques of nonprofit tax loopholes and the financialization of higher ed.

8. "Liberty University in Black and White"
Views: 684
This critical examination of Liberty University’s public image, internal contradictions, and links to right-wing political power explored how Christian nationalist ideology operates through higher education.

Trend: High interest in the political roles of conservative religious institutions and their ties to the culture wars.

9. "Corruption, Fraud and Scandal at Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD Whistleblower)"
Views: 615
A whistleblower-centered article on LACCD corruption revealed widespread misuse of funds and institutional cover-ups, especially in facilities projects.

Trend: Rising demand for investigative journalism focused on local corruption in publicly funded institutions.

10. "Agency Information Collection Activities…Borrower Defense to Loan Repayment Universal Forms"
Views: Not Yet Indexed
While bureaucratic in title, this article was shared among policy experts and debt activists for its breakdown of how regulations—and public comment periods—impact real people trying to discharge fraudulent debt.

Trend: Readers are becoming more engaged in regulatory policy and more skeptical of federal agencies' ability or willingness to protect consumers.

What Readers Want

What these stories show is a distinct pattern: readers want more accountability, more transparency, and less propaganda from the education system that has long promised prosperity and delivered precarity. They’re fed up with bloated administrative salaries, empty credentials, elite hypocrisy, and legislative betrayal.

Thanks to grassroots support and collaborations with students, whistleblowers, and journalists, the Higher Education Inquirer continues to grow in both reach and relevance.

As we pass 1 million views, we’re not just marking clicks—we’re tracking the pulse of a system in crisis. And we’re not done yet.

The Nursing Shortage Hoax: Burnout, Exploitation, and the Real Crisis in American Healthcare

For decades, the American public has been bombarded with headlines warning of a “nursing shortage.” News outlets, healthcare lobbyists, and policymakers routinely echo the claim that there simply aren’t enough nurses to meet demand. The implication is clear: if only we could train more nurses, our healthcare system would recover.

But this narrative is a dangerous hoax—one that obscures the root causes of the crisis in nursing and shifts blame from hospital administrators, healthcare corporations, and public officials to workers and schools. The real problem isn’t a lack of nurses. It’s that too many nurses are burned out, disrespected, and driven from the profession by the very institutions that claim to need them.

Supply Exceeds Demand—Until the Budget Shrinks

According to the National Council of State Boards of Nursing (NCSBN), there are over 5 million licensed registered nurses in the United States. But only about 3.1 million are employed as RNs. Thousands more work in non-nursing roles because they can't find hospital jobs that pay a living wage—or because they’ve left frontline care for their mental health.

Meanwhile, colleges and universities have ramped up nursing programs, often with hefty tuition costs. For-profit nursing schools and online diploma mills have further expanded the pipeline, in part due to government pressure to "solve" the shortage. Yet the jobs nurses are entering—or leaving—are grueling, underpaid, and too often unsafe.

The real issue is retention, not recruitment. And the people driving nurses away know exactly what they’re doing.

The Burnout Epidemic

Nurse burnout has reached catastrophic levels. A 2023 report by the American Nurses Foundation found that over 60% of nurses report symptoms of burnout: emotional exhaustion, depression, depersonalization, and a sense of futility. Nearly one in three consider leaving the profession entirely.

The reasons are no mystery:

Chronic understaffing, often intentional, means nurses are responsible for too many patients at once—sometimes double or triple safe ratios.
Mandatory overtime and unpredictable shifts prevent recovery and family life.
Violence against nurses has increased, with minimal support from hospital leadership.
Moral injury is common: watching patients suffer due to insurance denials, lack of staff, or profit-driven policies.

Hospitals—especially those owned by private equity firms and mega-health systems—maximize profits by minimizing labor costs. That means keeping staffing levels dangerously low and leaning on travel nurses, gig workers, and new grads instead of building a sustainable workforce.

A Manufactured Crisis for Policy and Profit

Why perpetuate the "nursing shortage" myth? Because it serves multiple powerful interests:

Hospitals and health systems use the shortage narrative to justify importing nurses from abroad under temporary work visas, often under precarious conditions.
Politicians use it to avoid deeper conversations about working conditions, safe staffing laws, or universal healthcare.
Education providers, especially for-profits, profit from the flood of new enrollees chasing stable careers—often leaving with crushing debt.
Tech firms and “innovative” hospital administrators push AI tools and robotic solutions, promising to replace or "augment" nurses instead of investing in human care.

The supposed “shortage” also justifies anti-labor rhetoric. When nurses organize, strike, or demand safe staffing, they’re cast as selfish or unrealistic. After all, shouldn’t they just be grateful to have jobs in a system that’s desperate for them?

Calling the Bluff

If there were a true shortage, we would see rising wages, sign-on bonuses, and long-term benefits. Instead, we see hospital administrators earning millions while bedside nurses struggle with burnout, PTSD, and poverty.

If there were a true shortage, hospitals wouldn’t fight tooth and nail against safe staffing legislation, like the kind passed in California. They’d welcome rules that make the work sustainable.

If there were a true shortage, we wouldn’t be flooding the system with underprepared students while bleeding experienced nurses.

And if nursing education was truly about solving the crisis, we would be making it free, community-based, and integrated with healthcare reform—not driven by predatory institutions or private equity.

Toward a Real Solution

The future of nursing—and healthcare—depends not on how many nurses we can mint from expensive degree programs, but on how we treat the ones we already have. Solutions must start with:

Mandatory safe staffing ratios, nationally.
Debt relief for nurses and free public nursing education.
Mental health support and trauma-informed care for care workers.
Union protections and fair contracts to reduce turnover and improve morale.
Accountability for hospital administrators and investors who prioritize profits over people.

It’s time to end the charade. The nursing shortage is not a natural disaster—it’s a policy choice. And it’s killing both nurses and patients.

Sources:

National Council of State Boards of Nursing (NCSBN), 2024 Workforce Report
American Nurses Foundation, Pulse on the Nation’s Nurses Survey Series
National Nurses United: Safe Staffing and Workplace Violence Reports
Center for Economic and Policy Research: "The Real Cause of the Nursing Crisis"
The Guardian, “Private Equity and the Hollowing Out of U.S. Healthcare” (2023)

If you’re a nurse, nursing student, or former nurse with a story to tell, reach out to us at the Higher Education Inquirer. We’re listening.

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