We Are Students First

At the Higher Education Inquirer, we don’t chase prestige. We don’t cater to elite donors, corporate sponsors, or political kingmakers. We don’t worship at the altar of endowments, football stadiums, or shiny branding campaigns. Our compass is set firmly toward truth, justice, and equity—guided by one unwavering principle: we are students first.

We are students of systems—unraveling the machinery of higher education that too often works against the very people it claims to serve. We study the credential mills, the loan sharks in nonprofit clothing, the unaccountable university bureaucracies, and the hollow promises of prosperity dangled before vulnerable populations. We investigate how institutions extract billions from working-class families while underpaying adjuncts and laying off staff. And we do it without fear or favor.

But we are also students in the human sense. We learn from whistleblowers, from former for-profit enrollees drowning in debt, from adjuncts scraping by without healthcare, and from young people who’ve had to abandon their dreams because the system was never built for them in the first place. We seek out the voices that elite media too often ignore—because those voices contain the lessons worth learning.

Unlike many outlets that write about students as case studies or marketing tools, we stand with them. We ask: Who gets excluded from access and opportunity? Who profits from their debt? Who benefits when college becomes more about brand than learning, more about sorting than liberating?

When we say we are students first, we mean we are always learning—about how inequality is produced and reproduced through policy, through finance, and through institutional neglect. We mean we are always listening—especially to those who’ve been burned by the system. And we mean we are always questioning—especially the orthodoxy that says “college equals success,” no matter the cost.

Being students first also means accountability. To ourselves, and to those we cover. We don’t pretend to have all the answers. We don't hide behind false neutrality. But we do our homework. We cite our sources. We follow the money. And we take sides—on the side of debtors, exploited workers, and the people pushed to the margins.

So when others ask where we stand in the crumbling landscape of higher education, our answer is simple:

At HEI, we are students first. And we stand with those the system has left behind.