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In Wroclaw, Poland is a lively terraced house that reflects the youthful energy of the couple who owns it. Designed by Znamy się for the owners, and their two dogs, who love to cook, entertain friends, and play board games. Drawing inspiration from the whimsical world of Playshapes (wooden blocks that can be moved, layered, or combined), this modern home now boasts a fusion of structures, forms, and vibrant colors that bolster creativity, socializing, and play.
The new interior holds many elements that allow the owners to play with form. Moveable furniture sets the stage with shelves on wheels that enable the couple to create flexible arrangements and new spaces. The kitchen island is not only the place for food prep and cooking, it stores board games and houses water dispensers for their beloved dogs. The dining table’s top lifts to play games and work puzzles.
Geometric shapes and a strong palette of colors intertwine forming layered spaces rich in textures and visual intrigue. The inclusion of lots of wooden elements gives nod to Playshapes, while adding organic charm.
Three shelves set within a blue painted alcove hold a large selection of plants and objects for a touch of biophilia.
The square dining table lives under one of the hanging grids that holds plants. Similar gridded structures live alongside the wooden staircase adding a pop of color while providing safety for those climbing the stairs.
The bathroom features similar wooden cabinets as the kitchen island with geometric patterns adorning the fronts. An inset cabinet is painted a playful pink on the inside, pairing nicely with the black and white floor tile.
Photography by Migdal Studio.
Around 3% of people are estimated to be autistic and it is a lifelong disability. Most autistic people experience the sensory world differently, such as places being too loud or too bright. We also typically communicate in a more direct way than is usual.
In the UK, the Equality Act 2010 means that autistic people should receive reasonable adjustments – meaning organisations must make changes to how they provide their services to remove environmental and social barriers. Despite this, autistic people often experience society as highly disabling. We die between 16 and 30 years younger than non-autistic people, and have a suicide rate nine times higher.
Autistic people are often misunderstood by non-autistic people who fail to recognise how autistic people show empathy. This misunderstanding is embedded in many government bodies, which can result in dehumanising policies and services that do not meet autistic people’s needs.
We reviewed the evidence from a range of government and non-government research and reviews to understand how well autistic people fair in relation to government services. We looked at the areas described by William Beveridge, founder of the UK welfare state, as “the five giants”: health, education, employment, poverty and housing. Our findings, which focused on England and Wales due to differences relating to devolution, were bleak.
1. Health
Many government services designed to support autistic people are not available without diagnosis. However, in the UK, most autistic people aren’t yet diagnosed.
We found diagnosis waiting lists were long – for example, more then 20 months for people served by the Cardiff & Vale health board in south Wales. Across England, between June 2021 and 2022, the waiting list for an autism assessment rose from 88,000 people to more than 122,000.
Even with a diagnosis, autistic people often don’t receive healthcare that meets their needs. Some people don’t even tell doctors they are autistic, because they expect to be treated badly. Of those who have told their GP, more than 75% said their GP didn’t make any reasonable adjustments, such as allowing extra processing time during appointments.
Being expected to phone to book appointments is also difficult for nearly two-thirds of autistic people, yet many GP surgeries insist on phone calls to book appointments. Autistic people also report that clinical spaces are painfully bright, busy and loud, which can make it harder for us to explain what is wrong to the doctor.
2. Education
Autistic people often struggle in educational institutions because they rarely meet our needs. This can mean, for example, that autistic children are labelled as “troublemakers” by teachers, rather than disabled.
Despite autistic people accounting for only 3% of the population, around 80% of those sent to pupil referral units are autistic. This has lifelong effects, as only 8% of students with a “statement of special educational needs” or an education, health & care plan progress to university, compared with 50% of non-disabled people.
For autistic people who do make it to university, the disabled students allowance (DSA) should pay for extra costs – but less than one-third of eligible students get DSA. In addition, the support provided by universities is often poor quality or absent, leaving autistic students disadvantaged.
3. Employment
The UK’s Autism Act 2009 says that autistic people should be supported to be able to work. However, autistic people are less likely to be in work than non-autistic people.
Access to work is a UK government scheme to pay disabled people for the extra costs of working, but the application and claiming processes are complicated. Of the 42% of autistic adults who say they need help to access work, only 12% are getting it.
4. Poverty
Autistic people are more likely to live in poverty than non-autistic people. A 2009 report found one-third of autistic people in the UK were not in paid work or getting benefits. One reason for this is that the benefits designed to stop disabled people living in poverty, such as the personal independence payment (PIP), can be hard to apply for, especially for autistic people.
And for people who manage to apply for PIP, autism falls within the “psychiatric disorders” category, which means they are least likely to receive the award and most likely to lose their PIP upon renewal.
5. Housing
Around 12% of autistic people are homeless. As rent typically costs far more than the amount of money awarded in housing benefit, and autistic people are less likely to be in work or have access to benefits, they are more likely to struggle to pay for housing.
This can be made worse by the “bedroom tax”, which is when tenants in social housing have their benefit reduced if they have spare bedrooms. This affects single people under 35 especially, as they are only eligible for the shared accommodation rate. Autistic people can find it hard to live with other people due to their sensory needs, and there are few one-bedroom properties.
Autistic people who do not have somewhere to live are more likely to be placed in secure residential care, where they are subjected to similar confines to people in prison, by staff who may have limited understanding of autism. They can also be subjected to clinical “treatment” that has the same questionable origin as gay conversion therapy, and which guidance states should not be used.
The research supporting this approach, known as applied behaviour analysis (ABA), is often riddled with undeclared conflicts of interest. Those who experience ABA have been found to be more likely to experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Worse, some autistic people in residential care have experienced abuse by staff. In the most severe cases, autistic people have died due to abusive and/or negligent treatment while in residential care.
In every area of government services, we found policies that failed to account for known autistic needs. These failures have a cumulative impact throughout life. A lack of accommodations in education leads to less likelihood of securing accessible employment and greater reliance on benefits and social housing.
To improve this, the policy-making process needs to be made accessible to disabled people so that services meet our needs. This could include ensuring that consultation processes reach out to a broader range of autistic people, and then meet their needs to submit evidence.
It is also important that policy-makers put evidence from the autistic community ahead of evidence provided by non-autistic “experts” who fundamentally misunderstand autism, can have conflicts of interest, and thus can not speak on our behalf.
Autistic lives depend on it.
Aimee Grant receives funding from UKRI, the Wellcome Trust and the Research Wales Innovation Fund. We wish to thank Dr Gemma Williams and Richard Woods, co-authors of the chapter this article is based on.
Kathryn Williams receives funding for her PhD studentship from the Economic and Social Research Council. She is affiliated with Autistic UK CIC, where she is a voluntary non-executive director.
A Brutalist-inspired apartment in the suburbs of Rome in Tor de’ Cenci recently received a complete renovation by STUDIOTAMAT. Designed for a lawyer couple, the project consisted of renovating the 120-square-meter apartment, along with a coveted 40-square-meter terrace. The Casa Rude residence overlooks the Castelporziano Nature Reserve offering both wooded and sea views, an ideal locale after years of living in small apartments in the heart of the city. Now, their space is filled with natural light, original character, and modern conveniences.
“What guided us in the design was the desire to enhance the distinctive features of the unique terraced building, dating back to the 1980s, which houses the apartment. We wanted to restore fluidity to the spaces, encourage the opening, and the discovery of pre-existing materials and details, on which to set a new vision,” says STUDIOTAMAT co-founder Tommaso Amato.
The main living area is designed much like a open plan loft with unfinished walls and the support structure’s exposed concrete visually connecting the spaces.
Paired with the original Brutalist details are a variety of tones, textures, and materials that add up to a visually enticing space. The roughness of the terracotta tiles on the oval island and concrete pillars are juxtaposed with the smooth Patagonia marble countertops that connect the two.
A custom dining table with a Shou sugi treated wood top rests on a black base and a glossy red ceramic leg for a sleek look.
A large, multifunctional birch wood cube is built to hide the pantry, hold coats, provide storage, and house a TV.
A wall of perforated bricks separates the living room and home office allowing natural light to pass through. A custom desk extends out from the built-in shelves and is held up by a circular red wheel, complementing the dining table’s leg a few feet away. The wheel allows the desk to roll along on a track to a new position.
A pivoting door visually separates the public areas from the sleeping area, which houses a main bedroom with ensuite bathroom, and a guest room.
In the primary bedroom, sliding ribbed glass doors offer privacy to those in the bathroom while allowing light in.
The large terrace features an outdoor kitchen, seating areas, dining space, and outdoor shower, all of which benefit from sunset views.
STUDIOTAMAT \\\ Photo: Flavia Rossi
Photography by Serena Eller Vainicher.
Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) is one of the two most famous Catholic theologians and philosophers; the other is Augustine (354–430). Seven hundred years ago, on 18 July 1323, Pope John XXII presided at Aquinas’s canonization as a saint. In 1567, Pope Pius V proclaimed Aquinas to be a “Doctor of the Church,” one whose teachings occupy a special place in Catholic theology. Thomas was the first thinker after the time of the Church Fathers to be so honored. In 1879 Pope Leo XIII issued a famous encyclical, Aeterni Patris: On the Restoration of Christian Philosophy, calling on all Catholic educational institutions to give pride of place to the theology and philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Although today he is a well-established authority in both philosophy and theology, in his own time he was considered a revolutionary thinker whose views challenged the accepted intellectual establishment of the West.
As a young man in Italy, Thomas joined the recently founded Dominican Order. Along with the Franciscans, the Dominicans were part of a widespread reform movement within the Catholic Church. In many ways these new religious orders were urban-based youth movements and, to be effective in their apostolate of reform in the Church, the Dominicans sought out the ablest young men and quickly established houses of study in the great university centers, such as Bologna, Paris, and Oxford.
Thomas traveled north to Paris (1245) to study with Albert the Great at the University of Paris. Albert was already well known for his work in philosophy, theology, and the natural sciences. Like other Dominicans of his time, Thomas walked to Paris from Italy; and then, with Albert, he walked to Cologne (1248) where the Dominicans were establishing another center of studies. He came back to Paris (in 1252) to complete his studies to become a Master of Theology. After three years in Paris, he spent the next ten years in various places in Italy, only to return to Paris in the late 1260s. There, he once again occupied a chair as Master of Theology and confronted various intellectual and institutional challenges, especially concerning the proper relationship between philosophy and theology.
In his own time, Aquinas was considered a revolutionary thinker whose views challenged the accepted intellectual establishment of the West.
Aristotelian Revolution
Universities in the thirteenth century were relatively new institutions—centers of lively intellectual life. In addition to a liberal arts faculty, the universities had advanced faculties of law, medicine, and theology. Paris was especially famous for its faculty of theology. Thomas was a member of a brand-new religious order, and his professional life was often connected with this new institution in the West, the university. The growing intellectual authority, and relative institutional autonomy, of the new universities often represented a challenge to the established order, both religious and secular.
Thomas lived at a critical juncture in the history of Western culture. The vast intellectual revolution in which he participated was the result of the translation into Latin of almost all the works of Aristotle. Aristotle offered, so it seemed, a comprehensive understanding of man, of the world, and even of God. In the Divine Comedy, Dante’s Virgil calls Aristotle “the master of those who know.”
Aristotle’s works came to the Latin West in the late twelfth century and first half of the thirteenth century, with a set of very compelling, and often conflicting, interpretations from Muslim and Jewish sources: thinkers such as Avicenna, Averroës, and Maimonides. How should Christian theologians react to this new way of understanding things? Aristotle’s claims about the eternity of the world, the mortality of the human soul, and how to understand happiness seemed to represent a fundamental challenge to Christian revelation. Should the teaching of Aristotle be rejected, or at least restricted? Many Christian thinkers in the thirteenth century thought so, and there were various attempts—mostly unsuccessful—throughout the century to ban Aristotle from the curriculum of the new universities. The most famous were lists of condemned propositions in 1270 and 1277, issued by the Bishop of Paris, Étienne Tempier.
Thomas, following his teacher Albert, was among the first to see, and to see profoundly, the value for Christian theology that Aristotle’s scientific and philosophical revolution offered. Thomas was first of all a theologian, committed to setting forth clearly the fundamentals of the Christian faith. But, precisely because he was a theologian, he recognized that he had to be a philosopher and have scientific knowledge as well. His most famous theological work, the Summa Theologiae, contains many philosophical arguments that have their own formal independence and validity, yet are organized in the service of Christian truth. Thomas recognized that whatever truths science and philosophy disclose cannot, in the final analysis, be a threat to truths divinely revealed by God: after all, God is the author of all truth—the truths of both reason and faith. Thomas thought that by reason alone it was possible to demonstrate not only that there is a God but that this God is the creator of all that is. He argued that faith perfects and completes what reason can tell us about the Creator and all creatures.
Precisely because he was a theologian, Aquinas recognized that he had to be a philosopher and have scientific knowledge as well.
As an astute student of Aristotle, Thomas was critical not only of those who ignored Aristotle, but also of those who, sometimes in the tradition of Averroës, read Aristotle in a way that did indeed result in contradictions of Christian belief. Thomas’s philosophical position was not mainstream in his own day; rather, his more traditional colleagues’ views were more widely accepted. Nowhere was this difference more apparent than in debates about the proper relationship between philosophy and theology on a wide variety of questions about human nature and the doctrine of creation. Those opposed to Thomas came from what can broadly be called an Augustinian tradition, which resolutely insisted that philosophy must always teach what faith affirms. Thomas did reject the kind of excessive philosophical autonomy found in Averroës, but he also rejected the tendency toward fideism found in his more traditionalist opponents.
Thomas wrote extensive commentaries on major Aristotelian treatises, such as the Physics, the De Anima (On the Soul), the Posterior Analytics, the Metaphysics, and the Nicomachean Ethics, in which he sought to present comprehensive views of these subjects. One can see Thomas employing principles drawn from Aristotle, as well as from other sources in Greek philosophy, in his wide-ranging collections of disputed questions On Truth and On the Power of God, in Summa contra Gentiles, and even in his biblical commentaries.
Creation and Causality
Throughout his writings, Thomas is keen to emphasize the importance of thinking analogically: recognizing, for example, that to speak of God as cause and of creatures as causes requires that the term “cause” be predicated of both God and creatures in a way that is both similar and different. For Thomas, an omnipotent God, complete cause of all that is, does not challenge the existence of real causes in nature, causes that, for example, the natural sciences disclose. God’s power is so great that He causes all created causes to be the causes that they are.
One of his greatest insights concerns a proper understanding of God’s act of creating and its relationship to science. The natural sciences explain changes in the world; creation, on the other hand, is a metaphysical and theological account of the very existence of things, not of changes in things. Such a distinction remains useful for discussions in our own day about the philosophical and theological implications of evolutionary biology and cosmology. The subject of these disciplines is change, indeed change on a grand scale. But as Thomas would remind us, creation is not a change, since any change requires something that changes. Rather, creation is a metaphysical relationship of dependence. Creation out of nothing does not mean that God changes “nothing” into something. Any creature separated from God’s causality would be nothing at all. Creation is not primarily some distant event; it is the ongoing causing of the existence of whatever is.
In one of the more radical sentences written in the thirteenth century, Thomas claimed that “not only does faith hold that there is creation, but reason also demonstrates creation.” Here he is distinguishing between a philosophical and a theological analysis of creation. Arguments in reason for the world’s being created occur in the discipline of metaphysics: from the distinction between what it means for something to be (its essence) and its existence. This distinction ultimately leads to the affirmation that all existence necessarily has a cause.
The philosophical sense of creation concerns the fundamental dependence of any creature’s being on the constant causality of the Creator. For Thomas, an eternal universe would be just as much a created universe as a universe with a temporal beginning. From the time of the Church Fathers, theologians always contrasted an eternal universe with a created one. Thomas did believe that the universe had a temporal beginning, but he thought that such knowledge was exclusively a matter of divine revelation, as disclosed in the opening of Genesis and dogmatically affirmed by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215).
The theological sense of creation incorporates the philosophical sense. Thomas viewed creation as much more than what reason alone discovers. With faith, he sees all of reality coming from God as a manifestation of God’s goodness and ordered to God as its end. This relationship is a grand panorama of out-flow and return, analogous to the dynamic life of the Persons of the Trinity.
With faith, Aquinas sees all of reality coming from God as a manifestation of God’s goodness and ordered to God as its end.
As the German philosopher and historian Joseph Pieper observed, the doctrine of creation is the key to almost all of Thomas’s thought. The revolutionary nature of Thomas’s position on creation is evident in the way it differs from that of his teacher, Albert the Great, and his colleague at the University of Paris, Bonaventure. Both thought that the fact of creation could only be known by faith and that a created world necessarily meant a world with a temporal beginning. Neither fully appreciated Thomas’s observation that creation is not a change. In fact, one of the condemnations of 1277 by the Bishop of Paris noted that it was an error to hold that creation is not a change.
It may be difficult for us to appreciate the radical nature of Thomas’s thought, especially his brilliant synthesis of faith and reason that honored the appropriate autonomy of each. Thomas does not fit easily into a philosophical or a theological category. He thought that human beings could come to knowledge of the world and of God, but he also recognized that a creature’s knowledge of the Creator must always fall short of what and who the Creator is.
For Thomas, reason—deployed in all the intellectual disciplines (including philosophy and the natural sciences)—is a necessary complement to religious faith. After all, a believer is a human being: a rational animal. Faith perfects but does not abolish what reason discloses. In deploying his understanding of the relationship between reason and faith, Thomas offered what were for his time radically novel views about nature, human nature, and God. What commends these views to us—and what was later realized by the Catholic Church—is not their novelty but their truth. Ironically, in the context of today’s intellectual currents that reject metaphysics and embrace various forms of materialism, Thomas’s thought is once again a radical, if not revolutionary, enterprise.
After Houghton University fired two employees for listing their pronouns in emails, some alumni have protested the decision as un-Christian.
Lawmakers across the country tried to enact 563 measures to restrict the teaching of “critical race theory” from 2021 to 2022, according to a new report from the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law.
Of those measures aimed at limiting instructors’ ability to teach about America’s fraught racial history, 241 were adopted, and nearly half borrowed language from Donald Trump’s 2020 executive order against the teaching of “divisive concepts” in public schools.
The report also found that 91 percent of proposed anti-CRT measures, and 94 percent of enacted measures, targeted K-12 schools. Only 20 percent of proposed measures and 12 percent of those enacted targeted institutions of higher education during the same time period; those that were enacted affected just 29 institutions of higher education, compared to 226 K-12 schools.
Still, the report’s authors wrote, “while individual measures aimed at systems of higher education are less numerous than those targeting local school districts, such measures impact hundreds of thousands of college and graduate students.”
The report, part of a larger project tracking attacks on critical race theory, was undertaken by the law school’s Critical Race Studies Department, also highlights more recent data, which suggest that the barrage of anti-CRT proposals from state and local government officials is not slowing down.
“Government officials at all levels are introducing an equal or greater number of measures in 2023 as they did in 2021 or 2022,” the authors wrote.
Lawmakers across the country tried to enact 563 measures to restrict the teaching of “critical race theory” from 2021 to 2022, according to a new report from the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law.
Of those measures aimed at limiting instructors’ ability to teach about America’s fraught racial history, 241 were adopted, and nearly half borrowed language from Donald Trump’s 2020 executive order against the teaching of “divisive concepts” in public schools.
The report also found that 91 percent of proposed anti-CRT measures, and 94 percent of enacted measures, targeted K-12 schools. Only 20 percent of proposed measures and 12 percent of those enacted targeted institutions of higher education during the same time period; those that were enacted affected just 29 institutions of higher education, compared to 226 K-12 schools.
Still, the report’s authors wrote, “while individual measures aimed at systems of higher education are less numerous than those targeting local school districts, such measures impact hundreds of thousands of college and graduate students.”
The report, part of a larger project tracking attacks on critical race theory, was undertaken by the law school’s Critical Race Studies Department, also highlights more recent data, which suggest that the barrage of anti-CRT proposals from state and local government officials is not slowing down.
“Government officials at all levels are introducing an equal or greater number of measures in 2023 as they did in 2021 or 2022,” the authors wrote.
The US president, Joe Biden, is expected in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland next week to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. His visit will be one of historic symbolism and of personal significance, as an Irish Catholic president who has spoken proudly of his ties to the country.
A few weeks ago, the UK prime minister, Rishi Sunak, formally invited Biden to come to Northern Ireland to mark the anniversary of the peace deal, which the US helped broker. The UK has much work to do to repair relations with the US following the Trump-Johnson years, especially if they are to pursue a much desired trade deal that has been stymied partly due to US concerns about the safety of the Good Friday Agreement post-Brexit.
The four-day visit comes at a fragile time for the agreement, threatened by post-Brexit trade arrangements and political tensions in Northern Ireland. Power-sharing in the Northern Ireland assembly – a key feature of the Good Friday Agreement – has been in limbo for over a year, due to a boycott by the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). In a recent poll, a majority of Northern Irish unionists said they would vote against the agreement if a referendum were held today.
Read more: Rishi Sunak's Brexit deal: how the Stormont brake could block new EU laws from Northern Ireland
The visit has other historical symbolism and personal relevance for the US president. Biden will spend three days in the Republic of Ireland. For that part of the island, the visit will be less about Northern Ireland issues, and more around the historically resonant imagery of an Irish Catholic president returning to his roots.
There is a long history of US presidents visiting Ireland. It is thought that 23 of the 46 presidents have been of Irish heritage. Until the early 1960s, most visits were by former presidents whose families originated in Northern Ireland.
In 1963, John F. Kennedy became the first sitting – and first Irish Catholic – president to visit. His sojourn was widely viewed as a symbolic homecoming. Both Irish and American media at the time described it as a “sentimental journey”. Biden, the second Irish Catholic US president, will stir memories of Kennedy.
Biden will spend time visiting his ancestral home and meeting family in County Louth and County Mayo. He is clearly proud of his Irish roots, often referencing how his family history has shaped his political career and worldview. As he wrote in 2016: “Northeast Pennsylvania will be written on my heart. But Ireland will be written on my soul.”
Biden has knowingly taken on the Kennedy mantle as a politician. Over the years he has come to personify a liberal politics of empathy, in which his Irish ancestry and Catholicism function as moral touchstones. However, this can shroud an underlying reality, that Ireland and the US are increasingly adrift, out of sync on matters political and cultural.
At the same time, Irish America is ageing and growing more conservative, with very few new emigrants refuelling it. Biden represents a disappearing figure, the last of a once powerful tribe of liberal Irish American politicians.
Biden’s visit should not be understood as purely a sentimental journey. Indeed, looking back we can see that Kennedy’s visit was much more of a diplomatic mission than many viewed it in 1963.
Kennedy visited Ireland on his return from Berlin, after giving one of the most important speeches of the Cold War. His engagement with Ireland at that time aligned the controversially neutral state with the forces of “freedom”. And behind the scenes, a good deal of diplomatic and economic business was carried out that would benefit Ireland’s relations with the US for years to come.
As with Kennedy’s visit, economic diplomacy will be important, most obviously in the promise of US investment in Northern Ireland to reward and secure the new EU-UK deal on Brexit.
It is also a chance for Biden to repair the US’s global reputation for leadership in liberal internationalism, which has been on the back foot since the Trump administration.
Biden views the Good Friday Agreement as a significant achievement of US foreign policy, and one that enjoys bipartisan support in the US. To celebrate it today is to assert the US’s support for the rule of law in foreign policy, and promote the agreement as a model of peace for other post-conflict states. He’ll receive a warm welcome, but like Kennedy, the visit is something more than just sentimental.
Liam Kennedy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Colorado could soon pass a law that would effectively allow public colleges and universities to admit more out-of-state students—if they also recruit more high-achieving state residents.
Colorado law currently allows no more than 45 percent of each public institution’s incoming freshmen to come from out of state. House Bill 96—passed by both the House and Senate and now awaiting the governor’s signature—won’t literally increase that cap, but it would raise the limit on the number of in-state students who, by virtue of their status as “Colorado Scholars,” can be counted twice in institutions’ residency calculations, thereby making room for more out-of-state students.
The Colorado Scholars Program applies to state residents who qualify for a specific merit scholarship of $2,500—and who, crucially, count as two in-state students in the calculations that determine whether institutions are in compliance with the nonresident limit. Right now, only 8 percent of Colorado Scholars admitted in any incoming class can double count toward the in-state resident number; the new bill would nearly double that, to 15 percent, creating more space for out-of-state students than admitting in-state students who didn’t qualify for the program would.
Angie Paccione, executive director of the Colorado Department of Higher Education (DHE), said the bill is about more than increasing tuition revenue for schools with high out-of-state demand; it’s also intended to keep Colorado’s best and brightest high school students from leaving. In 2020, nearly a quarter of the state’s high school graduates who went on to pursue a degree did so out of state—5 percent more than in 2009, according to data from the Colorado DHE.
Raising the cap on scholars program recipients, Paccione hopes, will incentivize institutions to aggressively recruit more high-achieving Colorado residents in order to raise the threshold for out-of-state students.
“It’s a war for enrollment right now, and we want to put an end to the brain drain we’re seeing,” Paccione said. “We’ve seen in-state enrollment decline, and we’re trying to shore it up … This is one way to do that.”
Tom Harnisch, vice president for government relations at the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO), said Colorado’s efforts to make more room for nonresidents at public institutions follows a general trend, especially in states facing demographic declines that also have high demand from out-of-state applicants, like Wisconsin and North Carolina.
“There are very few states with caps on out-of-state students, and in those states there has been a movement to try and loosen them,” he said. “It’s really an issue in states with popular, well-known public flagships” like the University of Colorado at Boulder—which is pushing up against its state-imposed limits. The university’s newest incoming freshman class was made up of 42 percent out-of-state students, just three percentage points below the cap.
The bill would apply to all Colorado public institutions, but experts say it would only be meaningful for two: Boulder, the state’s public flagship, and the Colorado School of Mines.
Boulder, an R-1 institution located in prime skiing country, has “always been a destination for students from other states,” Harnisch said. Mines, a small but elite engineering university, boasts some of the top energy programs in the country; enrollment there has increased by almost 40 percent since 2010, according to Colorado DHE data.
In total, only 18 percent of undergraduate students attending four-year public universities in Colorado are nonresidents; at Boulder and Mines, they make up over 35 percent of the student population, according to DHE data.
And that number is growing, particularly at Boulder. The new bill would give the institution some breathing room.
“We’ve been calling it the CU bill, because it’s really about Boulder,” Paccione said. “We don’t want CU to become primarily nonresident; it used to be primarily Colorado students, and that’s been changing. But they’re also the only ones with a significant waiting list of out-of-state students, and that’s money sitting on the table right now that could really benefit the institution.”
Colorado State University, in Fort Collins, also boasts a sizable proportion of out-of-state students—about 27 percent in 2021—but for now the bill wouldn’t have much impact there. That’s because Boulder and Mines are two of only three schools that enrolled any Colorado Scholars at all since 2019; the other is Metropolitan State University of Denver, which saw its last class of Scholars graduate in 2021.
Ken McConnellogue, vice president of communications for the University of Colorado (CU) system—of which Boulder is the flagship—told Inside Higher Ed that “the number of nonresident students is not projected to grow but remain in line with the prior year incoming class.”
Cecelia Orphan, an associate professor of higher education at the University of Denver, said even if that were true, the bill would set Boulder up for future expansion of its nonresident student body—and potentially bring it one step closer to securing an end to the state-imposed cap on out-of-state students. She sees House Bill 96 as an incremental victory in a pitched battle between the CU system and state lawmakers reluctant to look like they’re rolling out the welcome mat for out-of-state students at the expense of Colorado taxpayers.
“The Legislature has really held this line that you can only have a certain number of out-of-state students … but Boulder has a strong lobbying presence in the state and has been pushing for that to be removed,” Orphan said. “I’m guessing they got creative and are trying to work a different angle. It’s certainly a more politically palatable approach than just raising the cap.”
Paccione acknowledged that the solution is confusing, further complicating a calculus that effectively obfuscates the true ratio of in-state to out-of-state students. If the bill is signed, Paccione admitted that it could even lead to a situation at institutions like Boulder where out-of-state students outnumber residents in real numbers but still technically fall below the 45 percent threshold.
Double counting Colorado Scholars isn’t the only wrench in the works of the state’s residency numbers. There is also a provision currently in effect that excludes all international students from being counted as part of the out-of-state population—an exemption that could significantly skew data at institutions with international appeal like Boulder and Mines. Another addendum—a provision allowing institutions to count Peace Corps volunteers as in-state students even if they’re nonresidents—was introduced in the new bill.
Harnisch said Colorado is fairly unique in its student residency calculations; he couldn’t think of another state that double counted students for any reason when collecting data.
Michael Vente, director of research for the Colorado DHE, said these special calculations make collecting and tweaking the state’s residency data “one of the most complex” parts of his job.
“We’re doing our best to just follow and interpret the statutes as they’ve been written,” he said. “It can get very complicated based on the carve outs, exceptions and double counting.”
Orphan said the slow but sure push for more out-of-state students is part of a years-long balancing act, wherein Colorado’s higher ed institutions try to offset a lack of public funding by seeking revenue from external sources even as they try to provide more public services to residents.
Out of all 50 states, Colorado provides the second-lowest amount of financial support to public higher education, according to the latest SHEEO data.
“Colorado is a state of Faustian bargains in policy and funding for higher ed,” Orphan said. “What that bargain could mean is, eventually, Colorado residents might have to compete with out-of-state students for spots at our best colleges.”
Paccione said the new bill wouldn’t push out residents.
“This doesn’t mean less room for in-state students,” she said. “Out-of-state students pay a sizable amount of tuition. What that does is that extra tuition helps to fund the in-state students.”
But some are concerned that by trading out-of-state slots for merit scholarship recipients—instead of for students who qualify for Pell Grants or significant financial aid—the state is prioritizing not necessarily the best Colorado students, but the most privileged.
“Merit-based scholarships do typically go to wealthier students, so a lot of these merit-based programs are seen as perpetuating privilege,” Harnisch said. “A lot of people think a better use of taxpayer money would be to focus on need-based aid to bring in students who wouldn’t otherwise go to college.”
Orphan is one of those people. She said that Colorado’s focus shouldn’t be on allowing institutions like Boulder to usher in more out-of-state students, but on making public college more accessible to the state’s marginalized and underserved, who she says have been systemically left behind.
“If we were doing a great job of recruiting Colorado students, making sure they’re prepared through their K-12 education, making college affordable and really had tapped the in-state market dry, then I’d say yes, it’s time to turn to out-of-state applicants,” Orphan said. “But that is not the case.”
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Combination of epidemiology, preclinical models and ultradeep DNA profiling of clinical cohorts unpicks the inflammatory mechanism by which air pollution promotes lung cancerNature, Published online: 05 April 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06043-2
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A computational approach is used to design modular proteins that bind to synthetic peptides and disordered regions of human proteins with high affinity and specificity.
To reimagine a dated, 1970s ranch in Pleasanton, California, Destination Eichler partnered with Eyerly Architecture to bring this split-level house into today’s times. While the young family appreciated the 70s character of the home, they desired a fresh spin with added functionality seen in today’s builds. The updated abode now features modern details, mid-century furnishings, and a plethora of beautiful tile from Fireclay Tile.
A glass wall opens out from a multipurpose room offering views of Mount Diablo. The room’s other focal point is a double-sided fireplace that was updated with vertical wood slats and tile in a large, circular pattern.
The kitchen is renovated with light wood cabinets and a mosaic wall made with hexagonal tiles that complement the blue range.
The main living room features an angled wood ceiling and the other side of the double-sided fireplace. Clad in matte black tile, the fireplace has a minimalist aesthetic that is perfectly juxtaposed with the white walls and beams.
In the basement, which the original architect named “Rumpus Room,” a new kitchenette and bar is there to entertain guests.
Photos by John Shum.
Released April 4, 2023
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Yeshiva University has said it is a religious institution, not an educational institution. But that raises questions about whether it can receive public funds designated for schools.
Released March 31, 2023
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Released March 29, 2023
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