Brendan Cantwell:  So I’ve been thinking a lot about it very locally. That’s not really for here what I’ve been but what I’ve noticed around the country is that you have a situation where, the environment is fairly uncertain. So you, it’s hard to do, particularly if you wouldn’t enroll any serious number of international students.

It’s hard to do planning on tuition revenue. There’s been some real shift in the the landscape we just talked about. So here’s a link at the graduate level in terms of enrolling in new graduate programs, particularly professional programs or programs that ought to be considered professional.

Heather Shea: Welcome to Student Affairs Now, the Online Learning Community for Student Affairs Educators. I am your host, Heather Shea. This month we return to our current campus Context series. This episode was recorded at 5:06 PM on Monday, December 1st, 2025.

As we head into the final stretch of the semester, higher education is once again confronting rapid and overlapping shifts from declining international enrollment and heightened immigration enforcement to federal moves that could reshape access to graduate education, to deepening financial strain on campuses and major change in the world of college athletics.

This raises new questions about equity, compliance, and institutional accountability. Joining me are two of our correspondents to help unpack what’s happening. I’ll introduce them in just a moment. Student Affairs now is the premier podcast and learning community for thousands of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs.

For the past five years, we’ve been creating space for meaningful dialogue, professional reflection, and community connection across our field. Our monthly current campus context series pays particular attention to the issues unfolding in real time. The policy shifts, political dynamics and campus events that have immediate implications for our work and our students.

We release our regular episodes every Wednesday, and you can find us@studentaffairsnow.com, on YouTube or anywhere you listen to podcasts. As I mentioned, I’m your host today, Heather Shea. My pronouns are she, her and hers, and I am broadcasting from the ancestral, traditional and contemporary lands of the Anishinaabe three fires, Confederacy of Ojibwe, Ottawa, and Potawatomi Peoples, otherwise known as East Lansing, Michigan, home of Michigan State University, where I work.

Let’s get into today’s conversation. Back again this month are two of our five expert correspondents Dr. Felicia Commodore and Dr. Brendan Cantwell. Thank you both for being here today.

Felecia Commodore: Good to be here. Thank you. Thank you. Great to be here, Heather.

Heather Shea: Yeah. For those of you who are joining us for the first time Dr.

Commodore is an associate professor at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. She studies leadership, governance and the administrative practices that shape higher education with a particular focus on HBCUs, minority serving institutions and black women in higher ed. Dr. Brendan Cantwell, for those of you who are not familiar, is a professor in Ms.

U’S Hail program and studies how higher education, policy governance, and broader political and economic profession pressures affect colleges, universities, and the students that they serve. All right, so let’s dive in. We have four topics actually for today. This is switching things up. We may spend a brief amount of time on some and longer on others.

We’ll see how it all shakes out. But our first topic is international enrollment and immigration enforcement. We are seeing some sharp drops in international enrollment. This is not actually a brand new story, but as the fall data came out, this was one of the things that has sparked alongside some escalating immigration enforcement, including the recent detainment of a tenured faculty member.

This is creating real fear and instability for both international students and scholars. Brendan, tell us a little bit about how you are seeing these dynamics show up on campuses, what they mean for international student belonging and safety and as well as for faculty.

Brendan Cantwell: Yeah. Great question and thanks again for being having me here to think through some of this through the numbers that we’re seeing are a little bit confusing because it’s hard to know exactly how many international students are on campuses.

And campuses are not real clear about providing definitive numbers of up or down, but it looks like that. We are probably down, I think the number is 17% that people have been citing most recently. But again, it’s a little bit difficult to track in part because students the most reliable source of data come from from the federal government about visas that are issued and students who have graduated, but stay in the country on something called op, optional Practical Training, or OPT.

Have the same Visa as an international student. That number seems to be increasing or to be stable, whereas the number of new international students that is folks who are coming in for the first time to start courses that seems to be. Declining. And the net effect is fewer international students on our campuses, and of course OPT students, although they’re attached to their university their visa aren’t really students and they’re not paying tuition and that matters to campuses.

So it does seem like the immigration environment the xenophobia and the hostility that comes from the federal government and maybe even just the logistical challenges of getting visas has dampened international student enrollment across the us. If you are working in, supporting students on your campus, you may notice that there are fewer first and second year students from abroad and relatively more towards the back end of their program.

And I think that as things carry on, we’re likely to see a continued. Gradual decline or softening of that international student market. It’s not clear that times are particularly safe for those who are not students but who are faculty and who are not citizens of the United States. So as you mentioned, Heather, there was a, the detention of Vahid Abini who is a faculty member at the University of Oklahoma who is the political scientist studies politics of the Middle East, the political economy of oil, things like that.

And this faculty member was flying to DC to participate in annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association internal domestic flight. We’ve seen a couple of international students and faculty detained on internal domestic flights now. And was was detained, held for a few days and released this person had an H one B, which is a skilled worker visa that many.

International scholars and faculty are hired on, typically they transfer into a, they, you can from a green card, you can apply from a H one B, you can apply for a green card, become a permanent resident. This was a permanent member of the academic community at the University of Oklahoma. And so it’s pretty, it’s that kind of detention, harassment, intimidation mistaken, not mistaken deportations.

Those sorts of events are only going to make the environment for international students and scholars more difficult. I anticipate it’ll make people feel pretty insecure and unwelcome. And that has a lot of implications for our campuses. It potentially. The, may have some implications, financial implications, right?

In terms of tuition revenue, it has implications for our ability to recruit strong faculty from wherever they happen to be. It has implications for graduate programs in many particularly STEM disciplines. Sometimes a majority of doctoral students can be international students.

And so it has some real implications for our capacity to maintain strong, vibrant graduate programs. And I think on top of all that is the human question and the way people are feeling, their sense of security, their ability to maintain their mental health and and be members of the campus community.

And so all of that is likely showing up for you. And I would not be surprised if you’re already seeing and experiencing the fallout from that.

Heather Shea: Yeah. Felicia, what would you add and any specific immediate steps that you think student affairs folks can do to help support their international community?

Felecia Commodore: Yeah. I think in addition to what Brendan shared, I just think also I think we’re. Not thinking about the economic impact of not having international students or having a less lesser international students and less international faculty. These are people who, rent apartments by homes contribute to the local economy around institutions who help generate whether it’s through grant dollars or bringing in students, right?

They, there’s some kind of revenue that is usually generated from their work. And there’s outside of tuition dollars, which I think we often talk about, there’s even a larger economic impact, particularly at institutions that have sizable. International student populations you really can see the impact of that.

I, I liken it to when I was a freshman to telling my age here in college we started, I was on a quarter system. We started right after nine 11 that September. And so many, as, there were all these tensions around middle Eastern folks folks who were presumed to be Muslim. And so I can remember like a significant, maybe a third of our dorm for freshman year didn’t show up, right?

And the impact that has on planning on classes on dorm rooming and fees and all of these things that your institution has planned its operating budget on, right? And just thinking about that. And then we were in a city, so apartments that leases that probably were broken and all of these things.

And aside from the problematic portion academically and as academic community, it presents, but the economic impact it presents. I think as far as like first steps or immediate steps, I think one of the very basic things that I think is necessary is for us to as colleagues and as support staff and as student affairs leaders to really actually understand, international student, international faculty the policies that they have to navigate and their experiences. I can say, I’ll speak for myself. It wasn’t until I had a student who was a GA that was an international student, that I really began to understand their unique challenges because of these policies and these forms and all of the things that they have to go through as well as my colleagues.

And so I think even just making sure we have the knowledge that we need to have about these things so we can support students and our colleagues. Because I think often it’s not something we think about beyond like a visa. But it’s so much more than that. And even if, I had a student who got swept up in the deportation announcements and it’s saying you have to be de deported or you have to deport and then saying, no, we’re just kidding.

And the kind of mental strain that puts on a student financial strain. And I don’t know that we’re always aware of that as we should be. So just really, I think the first step is getting the knowledge that you need about all of these things so you can really support folks.

Heather Shea: Yeah. Thank you. That is really well said.

I think, I think it’s not necessarily common knowledge. And I will say, I think on a lot of campuses, if you have an international student office or international students and scholars office, we just refer over to there. Yeah, exactly. Those folks are also facing, the complexities of each individual situation.

Yeah, just the steps they have to navigate. And I particularly like what both of you said about, how this is gonna impact their sense of belonging and safety. And just in general what we can do broadly to help ensure that if that’s even possible at this moment with the threats, right?

Yeah. We’re gonna pick up the topic of budgets as well in a moment. But I wanna turn to the second topic, which has to do with a redefinition of a professional degree. I track this partially because of my interest in women and gender studies and the ways in which certain degrees femini, more feminized degrees are

Felecia Commodore: are

Heather Shea: classified as no longer professional. And I don’t know that I fully realized the financial aid implications. I’m really interested in how this new definition could potentially restrict borrowing for students in high need fields, and particularly those that won’t necessarily also make a lot of money once they’re, once they graduate.

So Felicia, can you talk a little bit about what’s the driving force? Behind this enrollment, like shift almost overnight. And then how does this kind of impact the students and also graduate programs that serve them?

Felecia Commodore: Yeah, I think this is a great question. I would, I wanna preface with, I think there’s the tinfoil hat part of me that has an idea of what what the motivation here is.

And then I think there’s the, what we’re being given right. As rationale. So I’ll start with the, what we’re being given as rationale. I think from what I’ve read this concept of if these degrees are really quote unquote professional, and I think there’s a connection between earning potential and what we consider professional.

And not professional. So these are, a lot of these these fields or these areas are areas that, and I wanna be clear, some of them can end you up in high earning jobs, but many of them will not give you the earning potential that will match the amount of money that you had to take out for loans.

And from there’s an argument to be made that we should classify these programs in a way that lowers the amount of money you can take out of them. So you’re not in so much debt when you get a job that does not pay for the amount of money that you took out. And so folks who are supporting or cheering this on are saying, oh, this is great for students, right?

Because they’re not lured into taking more money out than they can afford. They’ll ever be able to afford to pay back. Now, this is where I get a little tinfoil hash. I think the challenge for those of us who think critically about policies is when we look at the when we look at the degree programs that were moved into to or out of the professional classification they tend to be programs or fields where you have a overrepresentation of women and you have a overrepresentation of people of color, right?

And so when we think about. Generally speaking that women and people of color, and particularly women of color tend to be the large, take out larger loans or have to take out tend to have to take out more financial aid by targeting programs where those folks are represented and lowering what they have available to them.

There could be a ripple effect of those persons not pursuing higher education degrees at the same rate that they were because they were, there were so many in these areas and they just won’t be able to afford it. And so there are those who push against this saying this is a way of using policy to create less access for women and people of color to higher education and to, higher education that leads to a particular type of gainful employment that can aid in your social mobility. I think I, I tend to fall on the ladder even though I can see the argument made for the former. Yeah. I think what is challenging for those of us who are in academia and who also understand these fields is that these are also to say these fields are not professional.

Yeah. Is challenging when these are all fields where you need certifications, you need to get licensing, you have to have praxis hours, you have to have all of these things. Whereas if I get my sociology degree, I don’t have to do any of that. So it would seem that fields where I have to get licensure would be professional.

So it begs the question of how we are using these words and definitions. I think what has really stood out to me, other than that element of the gender and, racialized kind of impacts. Is that also if we look at where we see a higher concentration of folks getting these degrees? It’s our high access institutions, it’s our regional publics, it’s our community colleges.

It’s it’s our HBCUs and our MSIs. These are also programs, if we wanna get down to the nitty gritty, when we look at smaller liberal arts institutions, they have in past years used do having professional degrees or graduate degrees in these areas as revenue generators to help support, the, our undergrad, their undergraduate education offerings because of their tuition sensitivity. So these professional offering, these professional programs for people who need to take them at night, take them online, things like that, have often helped liberal arts colleges in the past 10 or 15 years sustain themselves fiscally where there may see enrollment drop and tuition money drop from the undergraduate level, right?

So when we think about that and we think about, we lower the loan limit, right? Which means there’ll be less money going to these institutions, possibly leading to a lower enrollment. So that also is less money. It is also a way that could really financially and fiscally strain, high access institutions, regional publics, like I said, MSIs, small liberal arts institutions.

And so that aren’t heavily resourced. And so again, the question becomes, is this a kind of backdoor way for policy to create less access for people, especially under resourced people first generation, lower income, lower SES for, to access higher education and in turn have social mobility.

Heather Shea: Yeah. As a daughter of a teacher and also recognizing how important getting a graduate degree was for my mother and how impactful that was to me when she achieved that as a high school student when I was a high school student I don’t know that I would be where I am had I not seen my mom go through that too.

So I think it has a generational, potentially generational absolutely. Impact as well. Brenda, what are your thoughts? And I’m really curious about where are we in the policy like game with this? Because it, if I understand, it’s in the like commentary stage of policy. Here, happy to hear what you have to say about professional degrees.

Brendan Cantwell: The, these loan, these new loan limits that differentiate between professional and non-professional degrees are a result of the big beautiful bill. And that then sent the rulemaking process. So the law says professional versus non-professional. There are different loan limits, and now it goes to the Department of Education to figure out what is professional, what is not professional.

And they convened something called negotiated rulemaking, which is a well established process in in, in US higher education policy where the department convenes stakeholders to come together and come up with this list of programs that would count. Then there’s public. Commentary. And then that rule becomes the guidance that is more or less law, right?

That it enforces. Now even without a change in law, a different administration could have a different rulemaking session come up with different guidance. And so it could shift a little bit and it could indeed shift a little bit after, the public feedback. This is one thing that I’m surprised how much it is broken through to the public because the pretty arcane, it’s a pretty arcane policy question, but at Thanksgiving, my, my mother asked me about it. She was like, what is going on with this? Why is nursing excluded? Why? And she had been reading about it in the newspaper be, which is unusual and I think it’s not unusual that she was reading the newspaper, but unusual that our clean higher ed policy stuff was like in, in the national newspaper.

And I think people are really interested in it because of all of the other stuff that is going around in the Trump administration’s, very aggressive and and in, unprecedented approach to higher education. And so this is, of the things he’s done, this is like among the most normal and like legitimate of them in some ways, right?

Yeah. But it’s under a ton of scrutiny because of the whole environment and everything else. And and that’s the, and not to say that there, there are the real concerns that you know Dr. Commodore brought up about how we define who’s eligible for, which programs, what that.

You know what that implies about the politics of professions and access and the gender and racialized nature of that. That’s all very real. But that, those concerns while amplify under the Trump administration are not new to the Trump administration. That kind of stuff is structural and, but like our attention to it is really heightened, not just our attention to it, but the public attention to it.

Felecia Commodore: Yeah. And can I add something here too, because I think Brenda and said this in it, and it, and I think this is important, so about it breaking through in a particular type of way in which like, we don’t usually see higher ed policies break through. But I, so I grew up in rural rural area, rural Maryland, and one of, I use, I joke about my school made cops, teachers, and soldiers like that were the three things that people went into.

And and I say that to say and I would add nurses, right? We had an, we had a nursing course you could take, you could get licensed before you got outta high school. I think what some of these jobs and is, are the reasons it broke through, is because areas like rural areas, small towns, these are good jobs in those areas.

These are teachers, nurses and there’s more of those folks there than we realized social workers. And I think it broke through because these, in those areas, these are the professions. That people use again to reach that social mobility or to take care of their families. And I think we we don’t always think about that.

But you match that with the closing of hospitals in rural areas, the continual defunding of schools in these like lower income rural areas. And so now you’re saying that all I wanted to do was be a teacher like my mom and like my grandma. All I wanted to do was do nursing because in my family that’s a good job.

And that’s how I can take care of myself. And now. I can’t get enough, I won’t be able to have enough money to do that. And I think it, I think we forget that these professions are, help run the economies in those types of areas and that they are generational jobs in those types of areas.

Where I grew up you see a family that were teachers and school bus drivers. Like it was a big part of it. And so I all, I do wonder if that’s one of the reasons it broke through is because it wasn’t just, we’re talking about grad school, right? We’re talking about over there at the college.

These are jobs my, I was looking forward to doing or I was in my, vo-tech program at my high school so I could go get a good job. And now I may be limited in that and I wonder if that is one of the reasons it broke through.

Heather Shea: Yeah. I love the, what did you talk about with your family, during the holidays?

Kind of discussion because I think that whenever there’s things that do emerge within the national landscape that impact higher ed. One, my, my parents always like, Heather, what do you think about this? And I’m like, I don’t have any knowledge in that area, but I’m happy to share my thoughts.

So it’s cool that your mom happened to mention it to you. You’re like, oh, here’s how this happens. I do think though it’s interesting because we are really focused in higher ed on the workforce development component, right? There’s been this shift, and we were just discussing this earlier on a different episode from.

The focus on liberal education. We’re developing the mo, the mind and the critical thinking skills and all of that to the shift towards work, workplace development, and that yet all of these, Jo, all of these degree programs are, as you say, Felicia the good jobs. So it seems like they’re working at cross purposes which is definitely confusing.

So we’re gonna go from that to now. Topic three, I dunno, how we’re these transitions? I, if I have a, one thing to say about my facilitation of this particular episode, the transitions are not easy between these topics. Wait until you get to the fourth one. Perfect. Because simultaneously.

Campuses across the country are cutting budgets, and we have staff who are being laid off at a rapid pace. And this is particularly impacting student facing services reshaping day-to-day campus life. And so Brendan, I’d love to have you kick it off and what are you hearing about how campuses are navigating these cuts and how are they are impacting those who are on the front lines?

A lot of whom are our viewers and listeners.

Brendan Cantwell: What I’m hearing is awfully local and I won’t get too much into that.

Heather Shea: Two of us are at one institution, so

Brendan Cantwell: Yeah. Yeah. And I’m on a committee that’s involved. We’re going through a round of budget,

Felecia Commodore: Rescissions,

Brendan Cantwell: and I’m on a committee that’s making some advice to the dean about how that could work.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about it very locally. That’s not really for here what I’ve been but what I’ve noticed around the country is that you have a situation where, the environment is fairly uncertain. So you, it’s hard to do, particularly if you wouldn’t enroll any serious number of international students.

It’s hard to do planning on tuition revenue. There’s been some real shift in the the landscape we just talked about. So here’s a link at the graduate level in terms of enrolling in new graduate programs, particularly professional programs or programs that ought to be considered professional.

So there’s that uncertainty. So tuition has been. Flat or declining, more or less since COVID. And a actually even a little bit longer than that. So there’s a lot of conversation about how tuition prices just keep spiral spiraling up and up. And in more recent years, that’s actually not true.

And so campuses have not had the ability, whether it’s market power because people are just unwilling to pay higher tuition or whether it’s political pressure to increase tuition. And there’s not really the capacity to increase tuition a lot more right now. State budgets, which on the whole they’ve been, up and down and quite varied.

Have been are now gonna face some, a bit of a squeeze as the economy appears to be softening a little bit. And and because a bigger share of state budgets are gonna have to go to healthcare because again, that changes to the big beautiful bill. Yeah. And that leaves campuses feeling in in a period of uncertainty and many are probably facing real deficits.

It also creates, and so you that there’s, those are the realities and you have to make some reductions. It also, this is an environment where campus. Leaders, boards and executives can also take advantage of those pressures to do things that they want to do that might have been otherwise more challenging to accomplish.

Yep. Or to justify creating some latitude for them and having more discretion and control over the budget because they might need it to respond to an emerging issue that, that actually could happen. And so what I think that we’re seeing is a combination of real financial pressure that is particularly intense for research institutions with large graduate programs and which have felt the direct effects of the research funding cuts.

And so there’s that there’s real pressures combined with the, what administrations are choosing to do to take this. What’s the old, the cliche never let a crisis go to waste. Yeah. To reorganize. Yeah. And, so that means that I think a lot of people are working in areas where they once felt fairly secure or maybe that it was a growth area.

And now things seem a little bit uncertain. Yeah. You think about the student service work, student affairs works, student mental health, student success work. A few years ago there was a great deal of emphasis on, on, on student success and student wellness. And it’s not that emphasis has gone away in the profession, but there’s now political scrutiny towards it.

Particularly student affairs work, which is sometimes crudely lumped together as DEI work. Yeah. And under un, under political pressure, we’re seeing legislation sometimes it’s not passed or it is passed and it’s not really enforceable, but we’re seeing efforts by legislatures to restrict the amount of money that campuses spend on administrative services, which would include student affairs work.

So the state of Michigan, for example, in its budget and its higher ed appropriation tucked in this little line saying that no more than 10% of the state appropriation could be used for administration. And that would mean serious restrictions on funds for people working in student affairs. Now, when Gretchen Whitmer signed.

The bill she made a signing statement saying, this is unenforceable ignore this. And right now, if you are at one of the 15 Publix in Michigan, you don’t have to worry about that. But around the country, what we’re seeing is states being more and more skeptical of that kind of work and putting strings attached to Yeah.

To budgets and campus leaders seeing that saying, aha I should proactively respond to this because I want to fend off a challenge, or I can use this to do something else I wanna do.

And so that’s, that, that’s my, my, my thoughts on, on, on the budget picture at a high level.

Heather Shea: Yeah. Felicia, what else would you add and how can we equip. Those folks who are watching, in particular for advocating for the maintaining essential services, right?

Felecia Commodore: Yeah,

Heather Shea: we all know that college is more than going to class. And it’s the other 85% of your time that

Felecia Commodore: yeah,

Heather Shea: students are out doing things like we need to maintain the connection and the support that exist within those spaces.

So your thoughts?

Felecia Commodore: Yeah. So a couple of thoughts. One, I’ll start with the more straightforward one. And that is, I just think that and I don’t think this is new, but I think it’s going to be more, more necessary now than ever is that directors of programs leaders of divisions are going to need to be able.

To show the return on investment, they’re going to be able, they’re going to need to be able to talk in numbers as impact. I and I know that can be challenging for us in higher ed. Sometimes we want and not, and I’m a qualitative researcher, so I’m all for the story. But I think that when we’re talking about the kind of budget situation we’re gonna be in, you’ve got to make those stories make dollars and cents.

And so I think that’s gonna be really important. And thinking of how you tell the story and make the case. In the language of whoever it is you’re trying to convince to continue to invest in the these services. And that may be linking it to outcomes that may be linking it to strategic planning.

It may be linking it to state goals. I just think that’s gonna be very important. The other thing I’ll say is, and this kind of pairs well with Brendan’s point of like never waste a crisis, is that I think for the last, and I’m probably being generous, 10 years or so, there has been a push for more entrepreneurial activity at the division level, at institutions and at the unit level.

I think this moment is going to exacerbate that. I think deans are going to be many fundraisers now. I think that you, there’s going to be even more. We saw with the different budget models where now a lot of us are adopting you eat what you kill for lack of a less descriptive kind of thing.

I think that’s going to get worse. I think it’s going to be you can have whatever you want. If you figure out how you’re gonna raise the money to get it how are you going to make revenue in your division, in your unit to get these things that you want? And so I think folks need to be prepared for that.

I think it’s gonna be like you, if you want. To, have certain things or make a case for yourself. You’re gonna have to go out there and get down in the dirt and get the money yourself, and we’re gonna reward you for that. I think there’ll be rewards for entrepreneurial activity. But I think there’s going to be come more and more arguments that, hey, we’d love to keep your unit, but you all haven’t brought any money in.

So it is what it is. And I just think along with all the other things we needed to know how to do as leaders on campuses. Now we’re gonna know how to have, we’re gonna need to know how to make money, which connects me to the other point. I think we’re, I am, I won’t say a think, I’m not sure, but I am I feel like.

I see it already, and I’ve been thinking about this and I’ve shared it with my students. I think we’re about to see a much more marriage between philanthropist, big business and units on campus. Where I think before we more so saw that at a larger university level where we saw big donations and it mi it might’ve went to a college or it might’ve went to the university and got dispersed out.

I think now we’re gonna start, I think we’re opening the door for what I joke with my students, like College of Education by Louis Vuitton. Like I think there’s going to be more opportunity for like direct. Getting direct sponsorship or direct money, and that could be good or bad depending on what that looks like.

But I just saw I can’t remember the institution, they just renamed their college education, like the Hyundai College of Education. I think we’re going to see more of these direct connections with industry that has a direct, that could get a direct return on investment from dumping money into programs interventions things.

And, we’ve already seen that stuff with Google and Apple and they, and I think it’s going to get even more drilled down. And again, I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but I do think it’s a thing that we should prepare for. The big branding of higher education.

Heather Shea: This is having my, this is making my head spin a little bit in terms of I need to now go and find some of these like camp campus examples. ’cause I think it’s complicated, right? We are right. Not only treating students as consumers, which in the marketplace of higher education, that their dollars also really matter, but also then selling their attention on your campus to corporate donations.

But with, without funding coming from the state or from, an ability to raise tuition, where else are we gonna get the money, right? It’s a fascinating conundrum to be, to be in speaking about big money in the episode of really bad transitions, I’m now gonna move towards athlete compensation.

The name, image and likeness, athlete compensation landscape has shifted. There are also several high profile athletic settlements. All of this is reshaping finances, how we think about and actualize Title ix and what does this mean for institutional accountability. Felicia, I think you drew the short end of the stick for kicking us off on this topic.

Felecia Commodore: Yeah and I would put my dis I put my disclaimer that this I know just enough to be dangerous. And a lot of it comes from talking to my friends in athletics. So yes, I would encourage everyone to go find your nearest athletic friend and talk to them to get more details. But so it’s interesting, right?

Because I think when we think of, nIL and all these new policies coming down from the NCAA and the judgments coming down, there’s from an equity standpoint, it’s a win, I think. Like we, we think about, exploitation of labor exploitation of students and being able to make money off of when and off of what in the past has made money off of you.

And yeah. So I wanna make sure I’m clear on that. I think from an equity standpoint for the individuals, this has been a good thing from an institutional standpoint. It’s challenging because we know that there are only two or three maybe sports that are actually revenue generating.

But. Student athletes are expecting these kind of NIL deals offers from all of their sports, regardless of their revenue generating or not. And whereas most schools, softball is probably not a revenue generating sport, but you see a softball player at Oklahoma get a million dollar NIL deal it changes the market, right?

It shifts the market. And so because athletics really is, has to think about in institutions where it’s a core part of their programming and their identity it becomes they have to be competitive for talent. And now you have to have money to be in the game. Yes, you do. And so the question is if we only have one or two sports that are generating revenue, where are we getting this money?

So I think that’s one thing. I think you are. Also forcing, we’re forcing institutions to become creative. And how they get this money. And so I, I’ve seen a number of institutions where you have athletics in its own creating its own foundation. So that they can funnel money through the foundation and not through the school.

And so what does that mean when we have a foundation for the school, a foundation for athletics? You have regular development office. How is this bifurcating kind of the money all over campus? How is it being distributed? And then even with athletics, how is that money being distributed? And we think about things like Title ix.

Are there programs that are gonna have to get cut simply because they don’t have the money to be competitive in them? Or we can’t have the money to spread around anymore and then we have to cut other programs because we have to adhere to the Title IX kind of policies? I think it’s, when you talk to athletics administrators, this has been.

These judgements have been really challenging. And then I think I think faculty tend to get bristly around athletics. But I think it also impacts us because there, there are instances where these donors, these big donors, development has been able to negotiate student worker jobs graduate assistantships different scholarships that are academic through, through, through these larger athletic donations.

So if we are now just trying to get them to donate for, to, so we can pay these coach, these assistant coaches and staff and student athletes, does that go away? Do, are we gonna see the restructuring of these gifts where we forget about those things that we were used to bake in? To, to the gift to help the institution academically.

There’s a lot of questions to be had and and then from a student affairs approach there’s another level of development, student development and advising mental health that we have to think about when. These students are they were already working like employees, but now we’re talking about having students on your campus that might be multimillionaires for the and never seen this type of money in their life before.

Who’s helping them navigate that? They’ve got agents now what? Navigating yourself as an entity and a brand and a business at 19 years old how do we make sure that they’re mentally well? How do we make sure that they’re not being, still not being exploited even more? Because now we really feel like we need to push you because we’re paying you this money.

But how, what does it mean when my student athlete makes more than their coach? Who are they listening to? Does that put, create weird developmental dynamics for folks who are supposed to be helping with your kind of actual development? I think these are all things that are, we have to discuss and think about.

And for institutions that we already know, athletics in general is usually a debt creator for institution. It is not a money creator. This is going to create even more issues around how do we not tank out from athletics.

Heather Shea: Yeah. Yeah. And I adding to that, sports betting and the Oh yeah.

Prevalence of sports betting, advertising related to your athletics department, the transfer portal, the remaking of conferences, and how convoluted, there’s no regional conferences anymore. Yeah I think that this is a fascinating conversation. I know, like next to nothing. About it just am interested.

The

Felecia Commodore: transfer portal is one. My colleagues who particularly do work around athletic advising and like the mental wellbeing of athletes are really concerned about the transfer portal. Because students could pop around year to year and never really get that foundation Yeah. That, that they need.

Or it they find, they, they’re not they don’t get through that cognitive dis dissonance that we know is important for development because the portal gives them a out. Yeah. If I’m uncomfortable, I’m gonna go somewhere else. And so there’s been some concerns I’ve seen from some of my colleagues and friends around how the transfer portal is impacting actual development of the students.

Heather Shea: Brendan, anything you’d like to add or share in this space?

Brendan Cantwell: I’m gonna, for once in my life bite my tongue. I, this is a complicated a topic that requires a about which lots of people have opinions if you turn on

Felecia Commodore: Yeah. Radio,

Brendan Cantwell: there’s a lot of people yelling about it. But I will say that I just don’t understand it well enough to have thoughts worth sharing here.

Felecia Commodore: Thank you. Thank you for, yeah. I wanna, can I share this one last thing? Yeah. I also think this is a very good example of higher ed not reading the tea leaves like we usually do, right? Like the fact that we had not considered. How we were financially or fiscally structured for having to maybe one day pay athletes and staff.

And now we’re like, oh, like these conversations have been happening since I was in school 20 years ago. Yeah. So the, so I think this is another example of we have to stop being reactive as a industry and start being proactive.

Heather Shea: Yeah. I think that brings us to the end of our four topics today.

We’re gonna end with some, just some rounds of final thoughts. So I’d love to hear from each of you what’s helping you stay grounded in your role and in the purpose of this work. Any adaptive practices or mindsets you think our student affairs professionals should probably try to embrace? And then anything that you are.

If you had to read the tea leaves, you see on the horizon for 2020 six. Where are we headed next? Brendan, do you wanna kick off final thoughts?

Brendan Cantwell: Sure. So I, my advice for staying grounded is not especially novel, but I’ve had to put myself on like an information diet so that I am taking in news a few times a day as opposed to constantly.

And I am making sure to consume a lot of thing as much as is as healthy. Just stupid tv sports, things that just allow me to enjoy something without having to think too much about it. Reading the tea leaves, I wanna I’ll give more than just this one. What to do in the short time, but one of the things that, struck me is a recent paper that came out a couple of economists and it’s published in the National Bureau of Economic Research that finds that demand for a four year, for four year education has been super stable. And growing even as prices have increased or especially as the perception of costs.

And so this crisis that people don’t wanna go to college anymore is a little bit overstated. That the fluctuation in enrollments has really happened at the community college and to a slightly lesser extent, the for-profit sector. And even then, it’s students who have historically been unlikely to be seeking a degree who aren’t attending.

It’s students who often used higher education as almost a form of unemployment insurance, where they would come in and take courses during economic downturns. They could get financial aid. It was a good way to prepare yourself for your next job, even if you weren’t going for a degree because the economy unemployment rates had been low for a long time.

And so while things feel like they are in crisis and they are this is also a remarkably stable social sector and the kind of churn that we’re experiencing in our lives on that matters a lot and that affects real people in bad ways. I’m not minimizing that or saying that doesn’t matter, but it does help me to step back and say, okay the stability of higher education in the long run is something that I am contributing to in my small way.

And this is one way that we can think about the value of our work in longer, long, longer longer horizon terms. I guess that’s my my, my thought.

Heather Shea: Great. Thanks Brendan. Felicia, what are your final thoughts? How are you staying grounded? What’s on the horizon?

What are adaptive things you wanna encourage people to take advantage of?

Felecia Commodore: Yeah, so I think staying grounded and this kind of very literal but also figuratively. And maybe I’m not doing it right now ’cause it’s snowing out, but touch some grass and what I mean is I think we are so in to Brendan’s point, we’re getting so much information, so much digital stuff.

We’re so isolated more than we ever were, we’re disconnected. Like we need to get back in touch with the natural world, like staying connected with other humans and remembering that you’re like part of a actual world. That doesn’t exist in these boxes and these screens. Oh. And getting to go out in your community and see people go down and see who’s at the college and the community college.

One of the things I’ve tried to do more, again, probably not now ’cause snowing, but just, I walk across campus to get coffee in the middle of the day and just getting outta my office and seeing students Yeah. Again like living and being undergrads on campus. And it takes you back to oh, like this is what’s real.

There are still students here, they’re still experiencing life. They’re still talking about what they’re gonna do on Thursday. Thursday like staying grounded in the reality of things. And not that we don’t need to have information, we don’t need to know what’s going on, but I think we have to be careful to not to not forget that we’re part of a real world.

Yeah. And those are, they’re real people out there. And not just us in our pundit kind of boxes and experiences. I think as far as what’s on the horizon, I posted a story today that I saw an inside higher ed, and you all know I’ve been on my soapbox about accreditation, but it is moving along.

And they just named some new folks to the like accrediting board that the people who make a decision of what accrediting agencies are considered legit or not. It’s very interesting. There’s a student on there. I don’t know, I don’t know if that’s good or bad, I’m just, it is. So I just think we need to be prepared for a version of an accrediting agency arms race.

I am hearing rumors and murmurs of all kinds of institutions getting together and trying to start accrediting agencies that are tailored to their institutions and their desires. And I think we’re, we’ve been, again, so used to the four or five regional accrediting agencies and a couple of private ones.

I don’t think we’re, I don’t, we need to get prepared for saying something we’ve never seen before where it’s just gonna be, I wanted to create an accrediting agency and we’re gonna create one and interesting to see what will be approved and what will not be approved and how that’s gonna impact how we measure institutional effectiveness moving forward.

And I think we really need to keep an eye on that, especially when we know that federal money will be attached to these accreditations. And I just think we’ve been paying attention to all the other stuff and they’ve been just very slowly, like moving along on this, in this this policy, which was in project 25, 20 25.

So that and I wanna say this though, and this is my little bit of weird hope, and I’m gonna use KFC as an example. So for the last maybe since, I don’t know, maybe 10 or 15 years, the people have been telling KFC that we wanted the original honey barbecue wings back. They took ’em away, we wanted them back.

They kept giving us these weird iterations of it, but it was not the original honey barbecue wings. And there was finally enough swell from the people matched with probably some economics going on that KFC finally brought back the original honey barbecue wings. And many of us are very ecstatic. And I use that example to say that we may not see it eventually, but I think we just have to stay the course and push and it may take time.

It may be different than how we expected it to happen. And it may look a little different than we, we were used to, but I think if we can band together and say, this is what we believe higher education to be and it’s purpose in this society, I think we, we can still affect change and we can still use the power of the people to make sure we’re doing what, what serves the will of the people.

Whether that’s honey barbecue wings or whether that’s funding policies. So I’m holding on to that kind of hope of the power of the people is still there.

Heather Shea: Yeah. Not had dinner yet, so I’m now imagining any barbecue wings and there’s a KFC Right on my way home. I, it’s it’s meant to be.

Yeah, I do think the groundswell of support, I, and I honestly I agree with you too, Brendan, that the institution of higher education is still a very secure place to, to be. And, to preemptively cut or react without that mandate is also a really complicated place to Yeah.

To be in as a student affairs person. Yeah. Thank you both. For those thoughts. I look forward to 2026 and I wanna say Felicia. The accreditation piece was topic number five. It didn’t make the cut this time. I had to, I’m always gonna bring it right back, bring it back to the accreditation.

Felicia I do think, and my sister-in-law works in institutional research accreditation unit and it is causing all kinds of panic. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, we’ll we will definitely pick that thread back up. ’cause if folks are in student affairs and they don’t understand why accreditation such a big deal, like we definitely also need to share that piece as well.

Thanks again. As we wrap up, I just wanna take a moment to say thank you to both Brendan and Felicia, but also to all of our listeners. We recently celebrated our five-year anniversary and we are continually reminded that this show exists because of you, the practitioners, the scholars and colleagues who join the conversations, share your insights share the stories and help us make sense of the shifting landscape.

Also huge thanks to Nat Ambrosey, our awesome producer. Thanks for all the behind the scenes magic that makes every episode possible. And this one particular, she will turn around in two days because we’re gonna release this one just a couple days after we record. As we discussed today, higher ed is changing quickly, sometimes faster than our institutions can keep up.

And these conversations really matter. We’d love to continue them with you. Please share your thoughts, post your comments. If you have a topic that you would like to see us try to unpack on current campus context, we are absolutely excited to hear your thoughts and you can email them to host@studentaffairsnow.com.

If this is your first episode and you haven’t yet already subscribed, you can get our episodes delivered to you weekly on Wednesdays with our newsletter. And you can also access our full archive for free, including every episode of current campus context at student affairs now.com. Thanks again to our listeners and viewers.

Thanks for being a part of this community. I’m Heather Shea. Let’s make it a great week. Bye bye everybody.

International enrollment declines and rising immigration enforcement

https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-professor-was-released-after-3-days-in-ice-detention-his-colleagues-fear-a-new-normal

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2025/11/25/survey-most-us-universities-saw-dips-intl-enrollment

Redefinition of “professional degree” and shifting federal loan eligibility 

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/student-aid-policy/2025/11/26/what-know-about-definition-professional-degree

Campus budget cuts, layoffs, and financial strain

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/business/cost-cutting/2025/11/07/october-brought-deep-cuts-multiple-campuses

The new NIL/athlete compensation legal framework & institutional liability in athletics 

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/ncaa-agrees-303-million-settlement-with-unpaid-college-coaches-2025-11-11

https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/46038391/northwestern-former-football-coach-pat-fitzgerald-settle-lawsuit