For the first time, a majority of Ivy League schools will soon be led by women.

Starting July 1, 2023, will assume the role of president at Harvard University, at Columbia University and at Dartmouth College. They will join current female presidents at Brown University, Cornell University and University of Pennsylvania.

, an associate professor of higher education at Old Dominion University, explains what this means for gender equity in the college presidency – and why U.S. colleges and universities still have a long way to go.

Why does this matter?

While women make up about as well as in the U.S., only about of American colleges and universities are women.

However, the Ivy League is not new to selecting female presidents – they have been doing so for a few decades. Judith Rodin was the first, in 1994, when she became president of the University of Pennsylvania. She was followed by and , both in 2001. Rodin was succeeded by another woman, , in 2004.

Still, one reason this moment may be one to watch is that Ivy League institutions are often seen as exemplars of elite, complex institutions. So seeing what one could consider a critical mass of female leaders in the Ivy League could signal the benefit of women in leadership to other boards that are hesitant or slow to hire women as presidents.

How unusual is this across higher ed?

I think it would be more surprising to see mostly female presidents at the majority of large public research universities, or at a majority of the schools in the .

Despite what may seem like a boom in women leading institutions, the percentage of women in the presidency at colleges and universities more broadly has plateaued at for the past decade. This was after increasing from to .

A number of factors contribute to this low percentage, including – such as exclusion from networks that provide mentorship – reward and that are not equitable across genders, and .

A recent analysis of explains how this bias against women occurs, specifically when it comes to academic leadership roles. This is important because college presidents typically through such as deans, vice provosts and provosts.

What are the biggest challenges that college presidents face?

The biggest priority or challenge really depends on the individual college or university. However, all institutions must ensure they are financially healthy and identify opportunities to strengthen their financial resources. College presidents have reported that they spend the most time on , followed by fundraising.

Particularly in the current , where the average cost of college runs , college leaders must work to keep their institutions fiscally strong and also competitive and affordable. This may involve, for example, , creating new programs and cultivating new sources of funding.

What effect does having a woman in the top seat have?

For colleges that have only ever had a man in the president’s role, hiring their first woman as president can signal that the institution embraces change and evolution. This can be an especially important message to send to funders, alumni donors, philanthropists, state legislators and corporate partners, who all play a role in ensuring a particular college’s financial vitality.

Female presidents add to the diversity of the college presidency. They to conversations that shape practices and policies both within their college and across higher education. They might, for example, provide their particular perspective regarding compensation for female faculty members of color, who tend to on campuses.

Organizational scholars and business leaders affirm that made by organizations and . A more diverse group of decision-makers can generate than a homogeneous group that may be susceptible to group think.

And lastly, having women at the helm of academic institutions that it is indeed possible.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

But that academic slippage isn’t measured only in scale points and proficiency standards. In a new study timed to coincide with the NAEP release, researchers found that the erosion of math skills experienced by America’s eighth graders may lead to hundreds of billions of dollars in lost earnings over the coming decades. Other important life trends, including high school graduation, college enrollment, and criminal arrests, are also likely to be adversely affected by years of thwarted schooling. 

The research offers a perspective on the immediate damage wrought by the pandemic, but also a penetrating observation about the relationship between students’ performance on standardized tests and their chances of future success. Douglas O. Staiger, an economics professor at Dartmouth and one of the paper’s co-authors, said that part of the motivation for the work was to explore whether progress on indicators like NAEP is connected to the authentic development of intellectual ability or simply the product of “teaching to the test.” 

“We interpret this evidence as saying that NAEP means something,” Staiger said. “When there are improvements in scores, those kids coming out of school are going to have better outcomes later in life. And we can infer from this recent decline that all the cohorts in school now are going to do a bit worse than we expected.” 

Experts have attempted to quantify the long-run costs of the pandemic since its early months. A model created in 2020 by economists for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development concluded that each additional quarter of disrupted learning could result in tens of trillions of dollars in vanished economic activity. 

The latest study used 2022 scores, available only for a matter of days, to project the potential consequences of COVID-era learning loss. But its analysis was principally based on decades of data from prior NAEP releases, which the research team used to generate a picture of how eighth-grade achievement in math correlates with students’ subsequent prospects in life. 

Staiger and co-author Tom Kane, a Harvard economist and faculty director of the university’s Center for Education Policy Research, collected testing records for about 125,000 students attending nearly 4,800 schools over multiple decades. Test-takers sat for the eighth-grade math exam multiple times in the 1990s and biannually since 2003. (Before 2003, participation in NAEP was not mandatory, though at least 38 states administered the test each year.) The average scores were used as a metric for general math performance among students born in each state 13 years prior. 

Next, they combined that information with representative responses from both the U.S. Census and the American Community Survey — which provided state- and year-specific data on income, educational attainment and teen motherhood — as well as FBI estimates of both violent and property crime arrests by age, year, and state. 

An assessment focusing solely on NAEP trends shows that eighth graders experienced substantial growth in math from 1990 to 2019, but that growth was highly variable across state lines. Students in North Carolina, where scores increased the most over that time, saw improvements roughly nine times the magnitude of those in comparative stragglers. And dishearteningly, the 2022 results show that achievement has shrunk in every state, including five (Oregon, North Dakota, Maine, Iowa, and Montana) in which eighth-grade math scores are now lower than they were 32 years ago.  

Still, Staiger argued, even with the persistence of achievement gaps across race and socioeconomic status, the scale of progress in the last three decades has been “astounding.” While the pandemic has, at least for the moment, lowered the baseline for average math proficiency, some of the benefits of past growth are still with us, he added. 

“We’re still way ahead of where we were in the 1990s, even though some states have slipped back,” said Staiger. “This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be thinking about helping these cohorts, because we’ve now reset the norm. But we really should be celebrating the incredible things that schools and teachers have done over the last 30 years.”

But the apparent influence of those gains on later-life outcomes was even more striking. After controlling for the possible effects of race, gender and educational attainment of parents (all of which could exert a powerful sway on young lives independently of their classroom learning) Staiger and Kane found that growth in eighth-grade math was positively correlated with high school graduation, college enrollment, and life earnings from age 28. Girls born in states with relatively higher scoring jumps were also less likely to become teen mothers, while boys were less likely to be arrested for violent crimes or institutionalized.

Across the country, the average NAEP math achievement for eighth graders rose by 18 points between 1990 and 2007 (the year when today’s 28-year-olds were enrolled in eighth grade); that rise was associated with an annual boost to earnings of 4.2 percent. In best-in-the-nation North Carolina, the increase in earned income was even higher at 7 percent. 

But that happy news must be revised in light of the pandemic-era learning loss illustrated by last week’s NAEP release. The average decline of eight points would conversely imply a loss of 1.6 percent of earnings. Using existing estimates of Americans’ lifetime income, the authors present a rough calculation of what that would mean across 48 million public school students: $900 billion.

That stark projection assumes that the learning effects observed over three school years — massive learning loss beginning in spring of 2020, then likely reaching its nadir in 2021 before rebounding more recently — are rendered permanent. Several pieces of contemporary evidence indicates that this will not be the case, as the recent release of state test scores show reading and math performance climbing gradually upward.

But some researchers argue that a complete turnaround will only come through historic changes to K-12 schooling in the years ahead. Harvard’s Kane has publicly struck a pessimistic tone, noting in a conversation with ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ that the learning recovery strategies implemented in most states won’t come close to reversing the full impact of learning loss for all K-12 students.

Staiger issued a similar call to urgency, arguing that the $190 billion cost of the federal government’s pandemic aid to schools would be well spent if it could trigger a revival of math performance and earning potential. Hints of progress from the return to in-person learning could still end in the diminished learning trajectories of tens of millions of students, he added.

“They’re not saying that test scores are back to where they were. We’re half a year behind, and we’re staying half a year behind. So you ask, are we going to catch up by 2024? If we do nothing and just go back to business as usual, I don’t think there’s a lot of evidence that we will.”

The second grader, who lives with her mother, father and two older siblings in Tacoma, Washington, was excited to return to class, though she was worried about having a new teacher. 

“Back home,” in Ukraine, her mother, Anastasiia explained, “elementary students have the same teacher from first through fourth grade.”

But Virsaviia’s fears melted after just a few hours.

“I like my new teacher,” said the little girl, sitting in the family car as her father drove her and her sister to Elmhurst Elementary on the second day of school last week. “I liked my class and my new friends.” 

Virsaviia’s brother, Illia, 11, felt the same: The sixth grader, who moved up to middle school this year, was thrilled to have Ukrainian- and Russian-speaking students in his English language classes. And middle sister Yeva, 9, was elated to have the same 5th-grade teacher this year as her big brother did for the few months the siblings were in school last year. Not only did Illia speak highly of her, Yeva got to meet her during a spring parent-teacher conference. 

“She was excited to see her (again),” her mother said. 

But underneath the joy that accompanies the start of the new school year is a painful uncertainty about the future. Virsaviia’s parents worry daily about their immigration status, their ability to work and about the family they left behind. 

They and others with strong ties to Ukraine wonder when and how the invasion, now in its seventh month, will end. 

ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ has been keeping pace with expats since last winter and with Virsaviia’s family since meeting them at a refugee camp in Tijuana, Mexico in April: They were among more than who fled the country since the invasion began Feb. 24. 

Another 7 million Ukrainians are internally displaced and are living in areas prone to conflict, unable to leave because of security risks, battered infrastructure and a lack of money and information about how and where to head for safety, according to the United Nations.  

More than had been killed by early August and more than 7,400 others have been injured, the UN reported. 

The Zaporizhzhia power plant, located inside a city that has become , is currently being monitored by while Ukraine’s armed forces, bolstered by volunteers, held by the Russian military. 

Marta Hulievska, a rising sophomore at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, has been worried about the power plant ever since war began: It’s located in her hometown. 

The history major is anxious about her parents’ recent decision to reunite there after months spent apart. Married for 21 years, they were eager to live together again.  

“Sirens go off every hour,” she told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ earlier this summer. “My dad ignores them: If you would go to the bomb shelter every time the alarms go off, you would not be able to function.”

Hulievska, who spent her summer in New York City working as an intern at a human-rights focused organization founded by Eleanor Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie, worries whether her father, a 57-year-old attorney, will be called up to war. 

“So far, he has not gotten any documentation about it,” his daughter said, speaking of the draft. “But it happens kind of randomly. It’s always in the back of our minds.”

And her parents’ financial situation is dire. The Ukrainian by the end of the year. Hulievska has been sending them money for several months. 

She isn’t sure when she will see them again, though she does plan to participate in a three-week study abroad program in Berlin in December. Hulievska hopes her mother and sisters, who are free to travel outside Ukraine, will join her. If they make the trip, it will be their first visit since she left for college. 

Wartime restrictions mean her father will not attend. Men in his age group are prohibited from leaving the country. And no one knows when — or how — the invasion will conclude. 

Her parents remain divided on the topic.  

“My mom feels it will end soon, which helps her to not panic,” Hulievska said. “But my dad is pessimistic. Whenever I talk to him about coming back to Ukraine, he thinks I might not be able (to).”

Yana Lysenko, a graduate student at New York University, wasn’t willing to wait any longer. Her boyfriend lives in Odesa, which is partly why she headed back to the country in late August. She was so worried about alerting her parents to her plan that she told them only after she bought her plane ticket. It took two days to enter the beleaguered country. 

“It was an exhausting trip,” she said in an Aug. 26 email from Ukraine. “I flew to Warsaw and then Moldova Saturday-Sunday, rested in Moldova overnight and then crossed the border via bus to Odesa on Monday night. Things are much calmer here currently than I expected. I’ve heard a few sirens over the past few days, but no attacks from what I know on the city itself.” 

Lysenko, working toward a Ph.D. in comparative literature and Slavic studies, longs to volunteer. 

“I’ve done a bit of inquiring and there are a lot of different opportunities, although I’m really leaning toward those that help prepare meals for people in need within the city, as well as those that help the elderly,” she wrote. “People are really struggling. Prices are very high for food and basic necessities right now, so I’d like to help the most vulnerable groups in that way.”

But vulnerability isn’t confined to those who remain in-country. Anastasiia Puzhalina and her family, who’ve been living in Tacoma for the past four months, have relied on the goodness of strangers as they navigate life in the United States. 

They currently live rent-free with an elderly man whom they met through their church. A recent widower who lost his wife to COVID, he enjoys their company. 

“He is an amazing man,” Puzhalina said. “His grandkids are almost the same age as our children, so this is such a great blessing for our family.”

He pledged to help them until they can live on their own but it’s a difficult position: Puzhalina’s husband worked for years at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and she sold clothing online. They’ve always supported themselves. 

They’ve applied for Temporary Protected Status and employment authorization but neither has come through yet. Right now, they’re surviving on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANIF. 

The uncertainty makes it difficult to plan for the future: Puzhalina has no idea where they might be in a year.

“It depends on what status we will have,” she told The74. “I am praying for the end of war, but I can’t see the end yet. If the war does end, I think our Temporary Protected Status won’t be extended and we will have to leave. I don’t think we have any path to legalization. I think we will use this time as much as possible to help our family in Ukraine.”

Puzhalina’s parents still live in Chernihiv. Her father is not allowed to flee and her mother wouldn’t go without him.

Their daughter’s concern extends well beyond their physical safety. 

“It’s not just about the danger of being hit by a missile, but about inflation, the lack of work, the price for groceries, of fuel, for everything,” she said. “It is a really bad situation in Ukraine.”

Despite these fears, the family’s stay in America has been marked by many bright spots — particularly for the children, who spent the summer swimming in a backyard pool, visiting a local rock-climbing center and camping. 

Illia, who months earlier in Tijuana expressed worry about making new friends in America, has since forged a strong bond with a boy at school. The relationship has greatly improved his ability to speak English. 

And the children aren’t the only students in the family. Their mother has spent the past few months learning to drive. 

She’s already passed her written exam and will soon sign up for the road test. 

“It’s very challenging,” she said, “I never had to do it in Ukraine: We lived in a 100% walkable place. The big test, I’ll take it when I will feel more confident. I had never been behind the wheel before.”