Category: Academic Reportage

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Kaitlyn M. Sims, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, University of Denver; Institute for Humane Studies

As of July 2026, graduate degree programs in nursing, public health, social work, public policy and more will no longer be defined as professional degrees by the Department of Education.

The change limits how much federal financial aid students in those programs can qualify for under new borrowing limits set by the big tax and spending cuts bill passed by Congress in 2025.

The Department of Education said excluding these degrees from the professional degree classification is solely an “internal definition” and “not a value judgment about the importance of (these) programs.” The department argues these changes will push some graduate programs to reduce their tuition costs.

Every day, survivors of domestic violence rely on a care network built and maintained by a system of nurses, forensic nurse examiners, social workers, therapists and emergency shelter managers. Many of these jobs require graduate training that comes with substantial education costs. To afford these degrees, students often rely on federal financial aid.

The status change will cut the amount of lifetime federal aid students in these programs can receive by about half relative to students in professional programs. In combination with ongoing federal funding cuts, the change threatens to destabilize an already strained social service system.

We are faculty and student researchers at the University of Denver’s Systems, Housing, and Anti-violence Policy Evaluation Lab. We are alarmed at what the status change means for social service providers, especially those serving survivors of domestic and sexual violence.

Excluding programs that prepare individuals to work with survivors of domestic violence from the professional degree designation risks discouraging entry into these professions nationwide. Fewer people entering the profession will impact both the quality and availability of care for those who rely on these services. Moreover, increasing the amount of private debt students will take on to complete these degrees will have lasting consequences.

Professional degree classification and loans

Under the new rules going into effect this summer, graduate student borrowers face annual loan limits and lifetime caps on total borrowing for federal student aid.

Graduate students in professional degree programs, which include medicine, law, dentistry and other high-cost degrees, can access federal loans of up to US$50,000 per year and $200,000 in total.

Taking away the professional degree label from programs limits students to $20,500 in annual federal loans and a lifetime cap of $100,000 for graduate study. But program costs remain unchanged.

In Colorado, and elsewhere, the cost of graduate education often exceeds what students can pay without borrowing. The new cap of $20,500 per year for students in nonprofessional graduate degree programs is far less than the total cost of attendance at major Colorado universities.

At the University of Colorado Boulder, annual costs can top $38,000 including food, housing, books and transportation for in-state students with a full-time credit load. Tuition and fees alone cost about $16,000.

At Colorado State University, costs range from $36,000 for in-state students to $57,000 for out-of-state students. At the University of Denver, some programs can approach $80,000 per year after housing and other personal expenses are accounted for.

For students who cannot pursue these degrees without adequate financial aid, this policy will create barriers to entering the field. Others will be saddled with private debt that lacks the protections and favorable borrowing terms of federal loans.

Undergraduates can access income-based aid through the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, known as FAFSA. That includes Pell Grants, which are need-based financial aid for undergraduate students, and subsidized loans.

Graduate students lack comparable need-based grant programs and instead rely largely on direct, unsubsidized loans and Grad PLUS loans, which cover educational expenses not met by other financial aid, such as food, housing and books. But the Grad PLUS loan program is set to end for new borrowers on July 1, 2026, further tightening access to advanced degrees.

Impacts on long-term labor force

Removing these programs from the list of professional status degrees that qualify for higher loans delivers both a symbolic and financial blow to the essential services that support survivors of domestic violence.

Denise Smith, assistant professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz College of Nursing, told Denver7 the policy leaves nurses feeling devalued. She argues that this reinterpretation of the professional degree definition could reduce growth in the nursing profession, with long-term impacts on patients’ access to care.

The New York Academy of Medicine cautions that restricting financial aid will shut out students from lower-income backgrounds, reverse progress in workforce diversity and erode respect for vital health professions at a time when trust in evidence-based care is already stretched thin.

Victim advocacy roles such as shelter managers and housing navigators, which sometimes require a graduate degree, are already chronically underpaid. The median annual salary for social workers nationwide is about $61,000.

Analysts argue that limiting how much students can borrow to earn the credentials they need may accelerate the collapse of the workforce pipeline. Some of these professions, such as nursing, already face a critical shortage of workers.

In fields that rely on moral wages – compensating poorly paid staff with the intrinsic satisfaction of helping those in need – recognition matters. The work done by graduates with these degrees has not changed, and the skills these workers bring to domestic and sexual violence response programs are still vital.

Why this matters

In Colorado, where many shelters operate at or above capacity and most counties don’t have their own shelter program, we believe the impact of fewer trained service professionals would be especially acute.

According to a 2025 survey by NO MORE, an advocacy coalition supporting victims of domestic violence, 80% of organizations in the sexual and domestic violence sector in the U.S. have experienced service disruptions due to federal funding instability. A multistate survey in 2021 of domestic violence programs found that 90% reported high staff turnover due to inadequate funding and the lack of livable wages. State coalitions against domestic violence say employees who remain at these jobs often juggle multiple roles and face substantial burnout.

Shrinking the pipeline of trained professionals who work with victims of domestic violence will disproportionately harm low-income, rural and marginalized survivors, not just in Colorado but nationwide. Fewer professionals means fewer safe options and longer waits for critical services.

Trauma-informed counseling in shelters and community programs is critical for survivors’ recovery and long-term well-being. However, long waits to access shelter or see a mental health professional, along with workforce shortages, already limit access. Fewer forensic nurses to conduct sexual assault exams further threatens survivor safety, especially amid nationwide nursing shortages.

In rural and underserved areas, advanced practice nurses – those with advanced clinical practice and education experience – are often the only consistent providers of care for the local population. Reducing support for nurse training puts entire communities at risk and weakens vital services, including documentation of abuse that can be essential for domestic violence legal proceedings.

These combined challenges highlight the fragility of the system that supports survivors. Without continued investment in training and recognition for these professionals, the network that provides safety and support will be weakened even further.

Kaitlyn M. Sims receives funding from the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families, the Denver Basic Income Project, the Arnold Ventures Foundation, and the Institute for Humane Studies.

Kaelyn Lara and Leslie Carvalho do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. New federal student loan limits affect social work graduate students, with impacts for survivors of domestic violence in Colorado and elsewhere – https://theconversation.com/new-federal-student-loan-limits-affect-social-work-graduate-students-with-impacts-for-survivors-of-domestic-violence-in-colorado-and-elsewhere-276254

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Emily Hodgson Anderson, Professor of English and Dean of Undergraduate Education, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

In February 2023, a little more than a year after the launch of ChatGPT, Vanderbilt University sent an email to its student body in the wake of a fatal campus shooting at Michigan State.

“The recent Michigan shootings are a tragic reminder of the importance of taking care of each other,” the email read in part. In tiny type at the bottom of the message, a disclaimer appeared: “paraphrased from OpenAI’s ChatGPT.”

Students immediately objected.

“There is a sick and twisted irony to making a computer write your message about community and togetherness because you can’t be bothered to reflect on it yourself,” one senior wrote.

A Vanderbilt apology email quickly followed. The university launched a professionalism and ethics investigation. One associate dean couched the misstep as a result of learning pains tied to the adoption of new technology.

Chatbots have spawned a host of ethical questions about writing assistance for teachers, students and authors.

But similar debates about ghostwriting have been taking place for over a century, revealing a persistent discomfort with the idea that the words we read might not belong to the person whose name is attached to them.

Outsourcing authorship

Ghostwriting, a paid arrangement in which one person writes under another’s name, has existed for over a century.

The term seems to have first appeared in the English language in a 1908 newspaper article, which I encountered while researching my forthcoming book, “Ghostwriting: A Secret History, from God to A.I.” The story appeared in the Daily Star, in Lincoln, Nebraska, and describes an anonymous writer who earned US$5,000 to help a high-society woman write a book.

Today, ghostwriting usually involves collaborations between professional writers and celebrities or professionals who otherwise wouldn’t have the time, skill or connections to write a book.

On publication of the manuscript, the ghostwriter is typically named, albeit obliquely – perhaps identified as a friend or consultant in the acknowledgments section. In some instances, the ghostwriter’s name appears alongside the credited author’s on the cover. Either way, the client assumes ownership of the ghostwriter’s work.

An ethical gray area

And yet when I type “the practice of one person writing in another person’s name” into Google, the search engine doesn’t spit out “ghostwriting.”

My first hit is “pseudonym” or “alias.” “Plagiarism,” “libel” and “slander” aren’t far behind. A 1953 article titled “Ghost Writing and History” that appeared in The American Scholar also points out that in the mid-20th century, “forgery” – falsely imitating another’s work with the intent to deceive – and “ghostwriting” could be used interchangeably by scholars.

In other words, even when consensual and compensated, ghostwriting has some relatives that are ethically suspect. And maybe that’s why many clients obscure the fact that they’ve used a ghostwriter, and why responses to ghostwritten works often reflect uneasiness with the practice.

“You should be ashamed,” read one social media post, written in response to Millie Bobby Brown’s 2023 debut novel, which she co-wrote with a ghostwriter. “[The ghostwriter’s] name should be on the cover. She was the one who actually wrote the book.”

The discomfort goes both ways: “I feel so guilty and ashamed whenever I use a ghostwriter now because I feel people will think I’m lying,” an anonymous poster on Reddit admitted.

Both the criticism and self-flagellation imply that the act of claiming another person’s words can render these words deceitful, even if the words have been paid for and the content is true.

Ghostwriting agencies rush to defuse these worries. Ghostwriting has been around forever, the Association of Ghostwriters reassures its clients. Ghostwriting is consensual and collaborative – not lazy, deceptive or a form of “selling out,” an author who’d recently used ghostwriting services explained.

And yet, in the last chapter of her ghostwritten book, Whoopi Goldberg acknowledges some misgivings about using a ghostwriter.

“I meant to try (to write the book myself),” Goldberg writes. “And when it turned out I couldn’t quite pull it off … I looked for help.”

Goldberg frames the assistance of ghostwriting as something she deserved after overcoming obstacles as a Black woman. But Goldberg also has financial resources available that others looking for writing assistance usually don’t. High-end ghostwriters collect in the mid-six figures for their services; Prince Harry’s ghostwriter, J.R. Moehringer, supposedly scored a $1 million advance.

Cue chatbots. Generative AI promises to be the ghostwriter for the masses, so much so that ghostwriter Josh Lisec explained to me how, in the future, ghostwriting will need to be marketed as a boutique service for elites if it is to survive.

Naming names

Whether you’re paying for a ghostwriter or using a free chatbot, “assistance” or “collaboration” on intellectual and artistic work is not automatically unethical.

Editors have long made a career out of helping authors shape their writing. Visual artists have long employed studio assistants. Television shows only get written collaboratively in writers’ rooms.

And yet, accepting assistance on intellectual or artistic work can raise legitimate questions, particularly with regards to how that assistance is acknowledged and how much assistance can be accepted while still calling a project “ours.”

In the late 19th century, for example, one sculptor went to court to rebut a claim that his assistant – whom the press referred to as a “ghost” – had completed sculptures for which the sculptor took credit. The judge announced that an artist could accept, with integrity, a certain amount of mechanical assistance. But he added that there was a threshold when artistic assistance became “dishonest.” The judge made the accused sculptor craft a bust in real time to prove his skill.

Similarly, most educators find it more ethical when their students turn to ChatGPT for editing assistance but much less so when they use it to generate a document from scratch.

Many universities now allow AI as a tool but require users to verify its accuracy and disclose its use – rules that echo long-standing ghostwriting contracts.

Yet even verified, A.I.-generated text, if claimed solely as an individual’s work, can pose policy violations at my institution, the University of Southern California: “You should never attempt to present … content created by others, including generative AI, as your own.”

The same policies that govern appropriate A.I. use also come up in ghostwriting contracts. The ghostwriter signs a “warranty of originality” that promises the author that the ghostwriter has – via platforms such as iThenticate – fact-checked and plagiarism-checked their work.

When inaccuracies do crop up, ghostwriters often take the fall.

Former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem blamed her ghostwriter for indicating in her memoir that she had met North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Physician David Agus, who teaches at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, held his ghostwriter responsible for the many instances of plagiarism that were identified in his popular science books.

Ghostwriters willingly provide assistance and accept responsibility for the originality of what they write. Scholars have permission to use generative AI, provided they properly cite its use.

And yet when Vanderbilt administrators advertised that their email had been written with the assistance of ChatGPT, students and faculty pushed back.

University policies and book contracts may offer veils of legitimacy and shields from legal liability. But in the end, readers still seem to want the words they’re reading to come from the mind of the person whose name is on the byline.

Emily Hodgson Anderson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. If using ChatGPT is cheating, what about ghostwriting? The old debate behind a new panic – https://theconversation.com/if-using-chatgpt-is-cheating-what-about-ghostwriting-the-old-debate-behind-a-new-panic-278754

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Iain Boyd, Director of the Center for National Security Initiatives and Professor of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder

Iran fired two ballistic missiles on March 20, 2026, at the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, which hosts a strategically important joint U.S.-U.K. military base, according to U.S., U.K. and Israeli officials. One missile broke apart during flight, and the other appears to have been destroyed by U.S. missile defenses.

Iran has denied responsibility for the launches.

Diego Garcia is about 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) from Iran, which is about twice as far as the top range Iran has declared that its ballistic missiles have. Parts of Western Europe, Asia and Africa lie within a 2,500-mile (4,000-km) radius of Iran, raising concerns about the vulnerability of these areas.

However, there’s no evidence that Iran has developed a new type of missile or that it can otherwise hit targets at the longer range. Iran most likely modified an existing type of missile, but increasing a missile’s range poses significant challenges.

Ballistic missile basics

A ballistic missile is launched on a rocket and, after separating from it, subsequently flies mostly under the influence of gravity to its destination. The name refers to the characteristic arc of projectiles whose trajectories are largely shaped by gravity. The range of these missiles is determined by the size of the rocket.

Short-range ballistic missiles can fly about 300 to 600 miles (500 to 1,000 km) and can be launched from mobile trucks. They are used for destroying key defensive infrastructure such as radars.

Medium-range ballistic missiles have ranges of about 600 to 1,800 miles (1,000 to 3,000 km). They are used to attack more strategic targets such as command and control centers where military leaders coordinate operations. Intermediate-range ballistic missiles operate over about 1,800 to 3,400 miles (3,000 to 5,500 km), putting much larger geographical regions at risk.

Intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, have a range of about 3,100 to 6,200 miles (5,000 to 10,000 km), making it possible to strike targets over an enormous area. These very long-range weapons require multiple rocket stages. They fly very high, exiting the atmosphere and entering into space, before arcing back toward Earth.

At the height of the Cold War, both the Soviet Union and the United States had thousands of ICBMs armed with nuclear warheads aimed at each other. Each weapon could obliterate an entire city, and nuclear-armed ICBMs have been the basis of mutually assured destruction in which both sides were deterred from ever using the missiles.

Iran’s inventory

Iran has an extensive ballistic missile program. The country has been developing a number of short-range ballistic missiles for many years. The suite of weapons includes the Fateh, Shahab-2 and Zolfaghar systems.

The ranges of these missiles – up to 500 miles (800 km) – are insufficient for Iran to use them against Israel directly because the closest distance between the two countries is about 550 miles (900 km). However, Iranian-backed militias have deployed these weapons in neighboring countries, such as Lebanon and Syria, and have launched them from there in attacks against Israel.

Iran has also developed intermediate-range ballistic missiles such as the Shahab-3, Sejjil and Khorramshahr weapons. These missiles have ranges of up to 1,250 miles (2,000 km), which means they can reach Israel directly from Iran.

Harder to go farther

Scaling up from short range to medium range to intermediate requires larger and larger rockets, which presents a number of increasingly difficult technical challenges. Larger rockets create more dynamic vibrations that the missile structure and all its components must survive. This requires an advanced manufacturing and testing infrastructure.

The size of the rocket also determines how much payload the missile can deliver. This challenge is very well-illustrated by the enormous Saturn V rocket that took astronauts to the Moon. Of the total launch mass, less than 2% was delivered to the lunar surface, with propellant taking up almost all the remaining mass.

ICBMs also have a small payload mass, and this in part explains why militaries more often load them with nuclear warheads than conventional chemical explosives. Pound for pound, nuclear warheads produce much larger effects. It is usually not worth the very high cost of sending an ICBM many thousands of miles just to blow up a single building.

Finally, maintaining control of the missile and hitting a target with sufficient accuracy becomes increasingly more difficult as range is extended. Missile navigation systems based on gyroscopes have slight errors that increase with time, and GPS-guided missiles can be jammed.

Limits on Iran’s reach

Having successfully launched satellites into space using two-stage rockets, however, perhaps it is not too surprising that Iran has been able to build on those successes to achieve longer ranges for its missiles. The simplest modification to extend a missile’s range is to reduce its payload.

Iran has reportedly demonstrated this with the Khorramshahr, using a smaller warhead that gives it a range of 1,800 miles (3,000 km). Some observers suggest that the missiles Iran fired at Diego Garcia most likely were further-modified Khorramshahrs.

In the Iranian attack on Diego Garcia, however, one of the missiles failed in flight and the other appeared to have been destroyed by U.S. defenses. The missile failure may indicate that Iran is attempting to operate these systems at distances they are not reliably capable of.

The apparent ability of the U.S. to defend against the second missile suggests that the Iranian intermediate range ballistic missiles do not pose a significant military threat. This conclusion is further supported by the earlier high-volume attack by Iran in December 2025 when it launched hundreds of missiles and drones in a concerted raid against Israel. Almost all were shot down by a combination of Israeli and U.S. defenses.

Surprising but not so threatening

Ultimately, while Iran’s long-range attack on Diego Garcia caught the world off guard, it was likely intended more for its psychological and political effects than for posing a real military threat.

It is worth noting that an additional challenge with fielding intermediate-range ballistic missiles is the cost, which scales with the size of the rocket required. A two-stage rocket that can fly 2,500 miles (4,000 km) is probably one of the most expensive weapons that Iran possesses: It is therefore unlikely to have many of them. When launched in small salvos, these missiles are highly susceptible to the sophisticated air defense systems of the U.S. and its allies.

Still, the attack has certainly gotten the attention of the world and may increase pressure for diplomatic approaches to end the conflict with Iran quickly.

Iain Boyd receives funding from the U.S. Department of Defense and Lockheed Martin Corporation.

– ref. How far can Iran’s ballistic missiles reach? A defense expert explains how the missiles work, and what Iran can and can’t hit – https://theconversation.com/how-far-can-irans-ballistic-missiles-reach-a-defense-expert-explains-how-the-missiles-work-and-what-iran-can-and-cant-hit-279072