JACKSON, Miss., September 9, 2024 (Newswire.com)
– CCsmart, powered by Phi Theta Kappa, has launched a statewide awareness campaign in Arkansas. This initiative aims to highlight community colleges as a smart choice for Arkansas students, helping them achieve their educational and career goals.
The campaign is partially funded by a grant from the Lumina Foundation, an independent private foundation dedicated to ensuring that learning opportunities beyond high school are available to all. According to Lumina’s research, 46% of working-aged adults in Arkansas currently hold some type of college degree or workforce credential. The goal, set by Arkansas Department of Higher Education and supported by Lumina, is to increase this to 55% by 2030.
“CCsmart lets Arkansas’s communities know what we’ve known for a long time: community colleges are more than just accessible and affordable—they offer a quality education,” said Dr. Lynn Tincher-Ladner, Phi Theta Kappa’s President and CEO. “Students and parents need to consider them not just a choice for their higher education, but a smart choice and a smart start to a career or a four-year degree.”
This six-week digital campaign connects with students, their parents, and young adults who have not yet attended college and highlights the benefits of choosing community college. The campaign is estimated to reach over 800,000 people through the social media campaign and result in over 7 million impressions across all media channels.
By emphasizing the economic value, educational quality, and career opportunities that community colleges provide, the project aims to position community colleges as a smart choice.
CCsmart has provided training for Arkansas’s college presidents, research and media specialists, and a toolkit for social media. This branded campaign collateral is ready-made for sharing or co-branding.
“Our state’s community colleges are ready to serve every student seeking knowledge, career training, or a new direction—offering a gateway to endless possibilities and a brighter future,” Executive Director of Arkansas Community Colleges (ACC) Andrea Henderson said. “Arkansas is thrilled to partner with PTK to help spread the word about the many opportunities our community colleges offer.”
About CCsmart and Phi Theta Kappa
CCsmart is a subsidiary and sub-brand of Phi Theta Kappa, an international honor society with more than 4.3 million members in nearly 1,250 chapters in 11 nations. CCsmart is an information resource designed to guide students and parents in making informed decisions regarding the college path and highlighting the resources and opportunities available through local community colleges. The mission of PTK and CCsmart is to recognize academic achievement of college students and provide opportunities for them to grow as scholars and leaders. Learn more at ccsmart.org for Arkansas.
JACKSON, Miss., September 9, 2024 (Newswire.com)
– CCsmart, powered by Phi Theta Kappa, has launched a statewide awareness campaign in Missouri. This initiative aims to highlight community colleges as a smart choice for Missouri students, helping them achieve their educational and career goals.
The campaign is partially funded by a grant from the Lumina Foundation, an independent private foundation dedicated to ensuring that learning opportunities beyond high school are available to all. According to Lumina’s research, 50% of working-aged adults in Missouri currently hold some type of college degree or workforce credential. The goal, set by Missouri Department of Higher Education and supported by Lumina, is to increase this to 60% by 2025.
“CCsmart lets Missouri’s communities know what we’ve known for a long time: community colleges are more than just accessible and affordable—they offer a quality education,” said Dr. Lynn Tincher-Ladner, Phi Theta Kappa’s President and CEO. “Students and parents need to consider them not just a choice for their higher education, but a smart choice and a smart start to a career or a four-year degree.”
This six-week digital campaign connects with students, their parents, and young adults who have not yet attended college and highlights the benefits of choosing community college. The campaign is estimated to reach over 1.5 million people through the social media campaign and result in over 8 million impressions across all media channels.
By emphasizing the economic value, educational quality, and career opportunities that community colleges provide, the project aims to position community colleges as a smart choice.
CCsmart has provided training for Missouri’s college presidents, research and media specialists, and a toolkit for social media. This branded campaign collateral is ready-made for sharing or co-branding.
“Community colleges are a key part of Missouri’s educational landscape that offers a wealth of value and opportunities for our students,” said Brian Millner, President and CEO of Missouri Community College Association. “The CCsmart campaign drives home the message that choosing a community college isn’t just a viable option, but it’s the smart choice for anyone looking to achieve their academic and career goals. We’re proud to partner with Phi Theta Kappa in this effort to elevate the awareness and benefits of our community colleges across the state.”
About CCsmart and Phi Theta Kappa
CCsmart is a subsidiary and sub-brand of Phi Theta Kappa, an international honor society with more than 4.3 million members in nearly 1,250 chapters in 11 nations. CCsmart is an information resource designed to guide students and parents in making informed decisions regarding the college path and highlighting the resources and opportunities available through local community colleges. The mission of PTK and CCsmart is to recognize academic achievement of college students and provide opportunities for them to grow as scholars and leaders. Learn more at ptk.org and ccsmart.org for Missouri.
Editor’s note: This article was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.
In a state full of rural, tucked away corners, Lincoln County is one of Montana’s most rural and tucked away.
The county of 20,000 people is located in the state’s far northwest corner, bordering Canada and Idaho’s panhandle. Its communities are dotted around the Kootenai National Forest, whose 2.2 million acres of firs, pines, spruces and towering mountains define the craggy landscape.
Libby, the county seat of 3,100 residents, is 69 miles from Eureka, the county’s second-biggest city of 1,500 residents.
Lincoln County is rural and rugged, forged by industry and ecology and steeped in a complicated history of extraction, exploitation and economic struggle. It is a place where everyone knows someone who knows your cousin — a place where the future is still being dug out of the past.
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Montana’s changing economy is palpable in Lincoln County, where formidable mills and mines once powered its small towns. The area used to be a historic powerhouse of timber and vermiculite production before shifts in the natural resource economy in the 1990s and 2000s marked the closure of nearly every local timber plant and Libby’s vermiculite mine, leaving thousands unemployed.
At the vermiculite mine, workers for decades were exposed to deadly asbestos fibers that killed hundreds, and trains carrying asbestos products blew toxic chemicals across town. As of 2021, 694 Libby residents had died of asbestos related diseases. The mine’s owner, the W.R. Grace Company, kept workers in the dark about the dangers of asbestos exposure.
It is under the shadow of the shuttered mills and mines that Lincoln County is forging ahead, crafting a future that community leaders hope will honor its history while breaking free from its dependence on extractive industries. At the center of that future is a local community college, which is helping Lincoln County residents adapt to a brave new world, building careers close to home and granting them a once elusive future in the community that raised them.
It’s a future that, according to Megan Rayome, the director of the college, is built on the premise that Lincoln County “hasn’t been left to die.”
Megan Rayome, Program Director of the Flathead Valley Community College’s Lincoln County Campus in Libby, pictured on Aug. 12, 2024. Credit: Hunter D’Antuono | Flathead Beacon
“It was almost like a guaranteed job,” Kathy Ness, executive director of the Eureka Chamber of Commerce, said of the logging industry in Lincoln County.
On an early summer day in the small town, Ness recounted her own journey to Eureka.
Ness “married in” to Eureka, settling in the town with her husband who was raised there. She’s been in Eureka for 45 years, a period during which she watched the economy ebb and flow, including her husband’s now long gone career as a logger. Her children and grandchildren have largely left home, seeking jobs in bigger markets. While they’d like to come home, “There’s not a lot in Eureka,” Ness said.
After decades of strong timber markets in Montana, a confluence of local and global factors began to slow the industry’s production in Lincoln County. Overharvesting led to a downturn in timber availability on National Forest land. Economic uncertainty in the 1990s and 2000s forced fluctuations in demand. Environmental litigation shut down operations. Four mills in Lincoln County shut down between 1993 and 2005, leaving more than 500 residents without work.
Following the closure of Libby’s vermiculite mine in 1991, the county’s unemployment rate reached 29%. A decade later, after Libby’s Stimson Lumber Mill closed in 2002, unemployment hit 15.8%.
“It was very damaging to the overall psyche,” Rayome, who grew up in Libby, said.
Rayome is the director of Flathead Valley Community College’s (FVCC) Lincoln County Campus (LCC). LCC is a satellite campus of FVCC, which for four decades has offered career training and college courses to local students. It’s a small campus, boasting seven employees who work in its sole building near downtown Libby.
As a kid, Rayome remembers when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency set up shop in Libby in the late 1990s, tearing up lawns and attics in order to remove toxic asbestos. She remembers her father, a former miner, attending classes at LCC to learn computer skills in hopes of building a new career. She sometimes attended classes with him when he couldn’t find childcare.
Rayome also remembers moving to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, during her youth so that her mother could pursue a degree in nursing. While critical for her mother’s career, the move was disruptive for Rayome, who had known nothing but Libby her entire life.
“I did not enjoy that my mom moved me from my childhood home,” she said. “It’s a small town where you have the same friends and your family is all there. It was difficult for us, in a lot of different ways, for our family.”
Rayome finished high school in Idaho, then moved to Arizona for college, where she earned her bachelor’s and law degrees from Arizona State University.
While in Arizona, Rayome read about how people from rural communities who sought advanced degrees were often forced to leave home to do so, many never returning. The phenomenon, often called rural “brain drain,” stuck with her. She knew she needed to go back to Lincoln County.
After law school, Rayome returned to Libby to practice law. When LCC needed a director in 2020, she jumped at the opportunity.
Aerial view of Libby on March 19, 2024. Credit: Hunter D’Antuono | Flathead Beacon
Lincoln County’s first college program was born in 1979, after a group of local stakeholders identified a need for a college-level course in supervisory and management skills to meet industry needs. The coalition of local residents partnered with FVCC in Kalispell to bring a supervisory management certificate to Libby the next year. It proved so successful that the Libby Chamber of Commerce formed a committee to investigate expanding higher education.
Four years later, FVCC and the county reached an agreement to open a satellite campus in Libby. LCC classes were initially held in local high schools before the college found a home in an old school building on Mineral Avenue.
By 1987, the campus enrolled 73 full-time students, ranging from teenagers to middle-aged mothers heading back to work. According to local reporting, the campus’ “bread and butter” was non-traditional college students, including those who were looking for job changes, facing career-altering injuries or rebounding from layoffs. By 1994, enrollment had risen to 150 students.
A financial dispute between LCC and FVCC’s main campus in Kalispell nearly severed the colleges’ ties in the late 1990s, but the campuses were able to make amends.
In 2002, LCC moved to its current building, which was formerly occupied by the U.S. Forest Service.
“For the first time in the history of the LCC, we will take on the image of being a viable college in Libby and Lincoln County,” interim director George Gerard told the Daily Inter Lake at the time of the move.
LCC Director Pat Pezzelle in 2004 made local headlines after appearing at a board meeting virtually — a rarity at the time — through the campus’s first interactive, video teleconferencing (ITV) equipment. The distance learning classroom further expanded access for rural students. It was acquired through a $350,000 grant championed by then-U.S. Sen. Conrad Burns.
Flathead Valley Community College’s Lincoln County Campus in Libby, pictured on June 28, 2024. Credit: Hunter D’Antuono | Flathead Beacon
According to college leaders, LCC’s success has been grounded in a collective impact framework that designs programs from the ground up, rather than the top down. It’s a model that responds directly to industry needs, carving out degree programs with local relevance and, for graduates, long-term economic benefits.
After the Stimson Timber layoffs in 2002, college leaders vowed to retrain Libby’s nearly 300 displaced workers.
“We have to figure out what kind of training we can provide to make these people employable,” LCC instructor and advisor Chad Shilling said at a staff meeting after the closure, according to newspaper archives. “I don’t know if they’re going to be here for the long-term commitment, but we’re going to be here to take care of their immediate needs the best we can.”
FVCC President Jane Karas said she has “lots of those kinds of stories” about locals who showed up at the college’s door jobless and left with a new career.
Karas described one student who, before being laid off by the Owens and Hurst Mill in Eureka in the mid-2000s, had “never done anything but run logs through this mill.” After enrolling in FVCC, he completed a degree in computer science and went to work in IT.
In 2011, the college trained its first batch of welders through a 10-week program that catered to workers who had been laid off from mining and timber jobs. The program was designed to place workers at Stinger Welding, an Arizona-based bridge building company that brought 70 jobs to Libby before its closure in 2013.
When Kalispell-based Nomad Global Communication Solutions (GCS) announced its expansion into Libby in 2022, the need for welders and machinists grew. LCC worked with the local school district to launch an evening welding class at Libby High School. In its first class, the college filled seven of eight welding booths with eager learners from all walks of life.
Through the Running Start dual enrollment program, eight Libby High School students this spring passed their 3G 3/8 Welding Qualification in a college-level course. Many said they plan to expand their skills next year in pursuit of the 6G test.
“We focus on how to be most cost-effective, support our community and meet the needs of our students and our employers,” Karas said.
The landscape of Lincoln County near Eureka on May 29, 2024. Credit: Hunter D’Antuono | Flathead Beacon
“What the college did, that is extremely important in terms of working with smaller rural communities, is to go out and establish a relationship,” Lisa Blank, executive director of workforce development for FVCC, said. “Not waiting for them to come to you, but you going out to them.”
Blank acts as the conduit between FVCC, businesses, the Montana Department of Labor and Industry, public schools and students, all of whom have a vested interest in the college’s career programs. Her job was created specifically to streamline communication between those stakeholders.
“There were lots of things going on on campus — great opportunities — but they weren’t necessarily synergistic or integrated,” Blank said. “One of the tasks that this position was given was to come up with a way to integrate the effort so that we can better leverage it for the use of students.”
Blank sought out grants to expand LCC’s capacity in welding, commercial driving and Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machining following the expansions of Nomad GCS and Alpine Precision into Lincoln County. She helped to create a fully online land surveying program, which will begin this fall. She worked with the Montana Logging Association to buy a $100,000 state-of-the-art forestry simulator to prepare students for jobs in logging.
Blank says the college is the “linchpin” that holds together stakeholders in Lincoln County, but that it is not alone. Blank works closely with the Libby School District, Libby Job Service, the Department of Labor and companies in fields from healthcare to heavy machining.
“Everyone needs to be at the table,” she said.
Tabitha Viergutz, Libby Community Officer for the LOR Foundation, and an alumna of the Libby community college, pictured in a cafe in downtown Libby on June, 28, 2024. Credit: Hunter D’Antuono | Flathead Beacon
For Rayome and LCC administrators, the college’s work goes beyond developing hard skills. It is an institution that breaks down many of the barriers to higher education faced by rural students.
“Being rural is hard,” said Tabitha Viergutz, a longtime Libby resident and the local community officer for the LOR Foundation, a community development fund that works in small towns across the West.
Sitting in a combined coffee shop and carpet store in downtown Libby, Viergutz described her own arc at the college, one that brought her to her current work in the community.
Viergutz moved to Libby 13 years ago as a nail technician. Unable to get her esthetician business off the ground, she struggled to feed her family. She decided to enroll in LCC with the goal of earning an associates degree in social work. While at the college, she took a combination of in-person and virtual classes through the ITV system, which she described as “amazing.” When LOR needed a local leader to run its Libby branch, mentors from the college tapped Viergutz.
“I wouldn’t have gone back to college had LCC not been here,” she said.
Viergutz’s story is common in Libby. A young mother, the idea of moving to Missoula or Kalispell for college was out of the question. The cost of full-time enrollment was daunting. So, too, was the idea of becoming a non-traditional student in a traditional classroom setting.
Before financial aid — which, FVCC officials note, there is plenty of — a full semester of tuition and fees for an in-district student at LCC costs $2,810. Comparatively, an in-state resident at the University of Montana in the same semester will pay $4,273. At Carroll College, a private university in Helena, a semester costs $20,066 before aid.
“When you become a resident of a small, rural area, that’s where your heart lies,” she said. “The idea of going to a large college just isn’t in the cards.”
Jayne Downey, director of the Center for Research on Rural Education at Montana State University, said that beyond being smaller and more affordable, rural colleges like LCC are able to draw on the “unique strengths and assets” of their small towns, building curriculum and preparing students for careers in a way that is rooted in specific community needs.
“These smaller graduating classes, everybody knows everybody. You are known. You are cared for. Your academic needs can be addressed individually,” she said. “The places where our schools are situated — the communities are a wealth of knowledge and resources, of history and culture, of science and technology. It surrounds them.”
A Logger Nation flag flies in downtown Libby on Oct. 5, 2023. Credit: Hunter D’Antuono | Flathead Beacon
Viergutz is an unofficial spokesperson for the new Libby. She said the town is “changing our focus to what we have versus what we lost.”
Libby’s first brewery, Cabinet Mountain Brewing Company, just celebrated its 10th anniversary. A kickboxing studio came to town last fall. In the new Kootenai Business Park, a former Stimson Lumber facility, there’s a pickleball court and a large Nomad GCS office. Dollar General is now in Libby and Eureka.
“I think that Libby is still very much ingrained in our history, and very much would love to see those industries come back,” Viergutz said of mining and timber. Yet, she added, there’s “a forward facing view on reality.”
Rayome said Nomad GCS’s arrival in town “increased the upward spiral of hope.”
“We’re seeing people not just coming in to ogle at our sadness,” Rayome said.
Blank, FVCC’s workforce development director, said the future of LCC’s success lies not just in training workers, but in developing local leaders who can spearhead programs and help recruit a next generation. Cultivating homegrown leadership is part of the community resilience model that Blank bases her work off of.
“We want to build leadership in these communities,” she said. “They know what they need most, and they will always know better because they live there.”
In the future, Rayome hopes to open a dedicated building at LCC for hands-on trades education. She wants to invest in new technology, revamping the college’s ITV infrastructure. Like Blank, she wants to continue to foster leaders who were born and raised in Libby — those who want to help the town move into the future. As more jobs arrive, so too will demand for restaurants, healthcare facilities, homes, schools and the workers who power them. It’s all part of the “upward spiral of hope” that she described. Though it will be challenging, Rayome said, Lincoln County will adapt to a new economic future.
“They’re doers. They believe in themselves,” she said of Libby. “It’s a community of survivors.”
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The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
At the end of July, McDowell Technical Community College in Marion, North Carolina, hosted a party for something people don’t typically throw parties for: Applying for financial aid.
The campus is often quiet after 5pm, but on this day, it was transformed into a loud and lively space for Latino families from the western part of the state. While they waited for their turn in an upstairs computer lab where bilingual education advocates could help them fill out their FAFSA, they ate from a hodgepodge buffet of donated food while a DJ played pop hits in Spanish and in English and raffled off prizes big and small.
The FAFSA Fiesta at McDowell was one of four that the College Foundation of North Carolina, a nonprofit based in Raleigh, hosted this summer to try to boost Latino college going across the state in an unusually difficult year.
Students are typically encouraged to fill out the FAFSA before they graduate from high school (and much sooner for those applying to many four-year colleges and universities), but the application is still open until next June for students who may decide to enroll later, either for the spring semester or at a two- or four-year college that offers rolling admissions. The summer FAFSA Fiestas targeted recent high school graduates who hadn’t applied for aid or made college plans, and those whose family circumstances might make the process challenging to navigate.
“Let’s be totally honest, FAFSA is not the most fun thing in the world to do,” said Bill DeBaun, senior director of data and strategic initiatives at NCAN. “You have to make these events look like something people want to spend their time on — draw them in with a carrot.”
At these events, Hernandez-Lira and other advocates helped families navigate tech issues, such as forgotten passwords, and more complex issues that are common in immigrant communities. For example, U.S.-citizen students from mixed-status families (meaning at least one parent is undocumented) are eligible for federal and state financial aid, but their FAFSAs can be more complicated to fill out. And their parents often hesitate to go through the process, fearful that disclosing personal immigration information on federal documents is a bad idea. Hernandez-Lira and others working at the events knew how to take the extra steps with the application and were prepared to talk to parents about what protections they might have.
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More than 112 families attended the North Carolina FAFSA Fiesta events, and 43 indicated on a follow-up survey that they had been able to successfully complete the FAFSA, according to Juana Hernandez-Lira, the College Foundation’s associate director of outreach of special populations. (She believes the actual figures are higher, because only about half the attendees filled out the survey afterward.)
Though the event was focused on FAFSA completion, Hernandez-Lira said the organization also has resources available to help undocumented students who aren’t eligible for federal or state aid. The event was primarily advertised to Spanish speaking North Carolinians via the Spanish-language radio station La Grande, but non-Latinos were welcome, too.
Silvia Martin del Campo, director of LatinX education at McDowell Tech, said that even though these can be challenging situations, “those would be the best cases,” because students and families came to ask for help in the first place.
“A lot of them decide just to not even come and ask if it’s possible to aim for higher education, because they think that they need to have, like, thousands of dollars in their bank account to be able to go to college,” Martin del Campo said.
Though she works at McDowell Tech, Martin del Campo said the goal was to help these families fill out the new FAFSA and navigate the complicated system so that they can go to any community four-year college.
QUICK TAKES
Success and failure in graduate school
We’ve written a lot about low completion rates for undergraduates across the country; now new research from the University of Chicago shows similar issues among graduate students. Economist Lesley Turner found that only 58 percent of graduate students finish their programs within 6 years. She and her co-author used data from grad students at public and nonprofit institutions in Texas, which they said is broadly representative of graduate students nationwide.
“It is especially important to focus on this population because graduate students hold almost half of all student loan debt,” Lesley Turner said in a press release. Her comments echoed many of the findings that my colleague Jon Marcus wrote about recently, in a story that also appeared in USA Today.
Direct admission via the College App
The Common App announced an expansion of its direct admissions program, which will allow 116 colleges and universities to reach out directly to first-generation, low- and middle-income students with admissions offers without them having to apply – up from 71 schools that participated last year. Students who have a Common App account but have not yet completed all of their applications can see and act on offers in their application. Common App, which began the direct-admissions program in 2021, reported that about 400,000 students received offers last year. This year’s list of participating colleges includes schools from 34 states.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
DURANGO, Colo. — For three dozen high schoolers, summer break in this southwest Colorado city kicked off with some rock climbing, mountain biking and fly-fishing.
Then, the work began.
As part of a weeklong institute on climate and the environment, mountain researchers taught the students how to mix clumps of grass seed, clay, compost and sand for seedballs that they threw into burned areas of the Hermosa Creek watershed to help with native plant recovery. The students upturned rocks — and splashed each other — along the banks of the Animas River, searching for signs of aquatic life after a disastrous mine spill. They later waded through a wetland and scouted for beaver dams as part of a lesson on how humans can support water restoration.
Each task was designed to prepare them for potential careers connected to the natural world — forest ecologist, aquatic biologist, conservationist. Many of the students had already taken college-level environmental science courses, on subjects such as pollution mitigation and water quality, at local high schools and Fort Lewis College.
Other students in and around Durango were taking a summer crash course in the health sciences, and this fall can earn college credit in classes like emergency medical services and nursing. Still others were participating in similar programs for early childhood education and for teacher preparation.
“I like the let-me-work-outside model,” said Autumn Schulz, a rising sophomore at Ignacio High School. Every day this past school year, she rode a public transit bus, passing miles of high desert terrain, to take an ecology class at Bayfield High School, in another district. She’d already completed internships at a mountain research nonprofit and a public utility to explore environmental and municipal jobs in her preferred field.
“It’s my favorite subject,” she said. “It’s one of my favorite things.”
None of this would have been possible before 2020. Back then, the Bayfield, Durango and Ignacio school districts operated largely independently. But as the pandemic took hold and communities debated whether to reopen schools after lockdown, a newly formed alliance of nine rural districts in southwest Colorado attempted to extinguish their attendance boundaries and pooled staff and financial resources to help more students get into college and high-paying careers.
Across the United States, rural schools often struggle to provide the kinds of academic opportunities that students in more populous areas might take for granted. Although often the hub of their communities, rural schools tend to struggle with a shrinking teaching force, budgets spread too thin and limited access to employers who can help. Rural students have fewer options for advanced courses or career and technical education, or CTE, before entering the workforce.
Gracie Vaughn and BreAnna Bennet, right, attend different high schools in different school districts. The teenagers roomed together during a summer program at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colo. Credit: Neal Morton/The Hechinger Report
But clustered near the Four Corners in Colorado, the coalition of nine rural districts has partnered with higher education and business leaders to successfully expand career and college pathways for their students. A nonprofit formed by the districts conducts job market analysis and surveys teenagers about their interests. Armed with that data, academic counselors can advise students on the array of new CTE and college-level classes in high-wage positions in the building trades, hospitality and tourism, health sciences, education and the environment.
Teachers working in classrooms separated by 100 miles or more regularly meet in-person and online to share curriculum and industry-grade equipment. More than five dozen employers in the region have created ways for students to explore careers in new fields, such as apprenticeships, job shadows and internships. And some students earn a job offer, workforce certificate or associate degree before they finish high school.
Collectively, the Southwest Colorado Education Collaborative has raised more than $7 million in private and public money to pay for these programs, and its work has inspired similar rural alliances across the state. The collaborative’s future, however, is uncertain, as federal pandemic relief funds that supported its creation soon expire. Advocates have started to campaign for a permanent funding fix and changes in state policy that would make it easier for rural schools to continue partnering with one another.
Jess Morrison, who stepped down at the end of July as the collaborative’s founding executive director, said the group — and others like it in Indiana and South Texas — demonstrates the strength of regional neighbors creating solutions of their own, together.
“It’s about our region not waiting on people to save us,” she said.
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Nationally, more than 9.5 million U.S. students — or about 1 in 5 students — attend a rural school. The National Center for Education Statistics has found that, compared with the U.S. average, students in rural schools finish high school at higher rates and even outperform their peers in cities and suburbs. But only 55 percent of rural high schoolers enroll in college, a much lower share than their urban and suburban counterparts. Rural students make less money as adults and, compared to suburban students, are more likely to grow up in poverty.
In this part of southwest Colorado, where about half of students qualify for subsidized meals at school, employers have struggled to find enough workers but also to provide a liveable wage. Hoping to steer more high schoolers into high-skill and high-wage jobs, educators and superintendents from five school districts — Archuleta, Bayfield, Durango, Ignacio and Silverton — started to meet with representatives from Fort Lewis College and Pueblo Community College. In early 2019, they began working with the nonprofits Empower Schools and Lyra Colorado to formally create a regional collaborative and visited a similar project in South Texas.
Covid briefly disrupted much of that work, but in June 2020, tapping federal relief dollars for education, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis announced a nearly $33 million fund to close equity gaps and support students affected by the pandemic. Already poised to work together, the collaborative secured the largest award — $3.6 million — from the governor’s fund to help students explore environmental science and the building trades, two areas in which the number of jobs was projected to increase.
Waylon Kiddoo, left, and fellow Dolores Secondary School student Gus Vaughn, classify insects they discovered in the Animas River for an environmental climate institute offered every summer to high schoolers in southwest Colorado. Credit: Neal Morton/The Hechinger Report
Despite that demand for workers, none of the school districts offered a single class in HVAC, electrical or plumbing, according to Morrison, nor did any of the nearby higher ed institutions. “We were a complete desert,” she said.
In 2022, the collaborative began piloting summer institutes, employers started hiring students directly from those programs and Pueblo Community College began offering electrical certification at its southwest campus. Woodworking instructors from different districts started to gather monthly, comparing lesson plans and creating wish lists for new classes and equipment. New CNC routers, laser cutters and electric planers arrived at teachers’ classrooms. Soon, teachers will pilot an HVAC course for high schoolers.
Over time, the collaborative added four additional school districts: Dolores, Dove Creek, Mancos and Montezuma Cortez. It also formally partnered with two tribal nations, Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute, while expanding its college and career tracks to include education, the health sciences and hospitality/tourism.
As of 2023, nearly 900 students across the nine districts — of about 13,000 total for the region — had participated in environmental, agriculture and outdoor recreation courses, according to the collaborative’s annual report. Approximately 325 students have completed a building trades course, with 40 so far earning industry certificates. Another 199 students finished a welding course, and 77 students also took college-level classes in that field.
Joshua Walton just finished his 11th year teaching science at Bayfield High School. He’s seen the changes firsthand: His classroom today has clinometers, game cameras and soil-testing equipment on its shelves. Walton often reserves the collaborative’s mobile learning unit, a 14-passenger van converted into a traveling science lab, so students can run experiments along the Animas River. He also prepares students to get their certification in water science.
“We’re giving students the opportunity where they can be an aquatic biologist or get a job doing water testing pretty much right after they graduate,” said Walton.
Ari Zimmerman-Bergin and James Folsom, right, use peat moss, scrubbing pads and rocks to build an experimental wetland. They studied water restoration in Silverton, Colo., as part of a field trip for students interested in environmental studies. Credit: Neal Morton/The Hechinger Report
Tiffany Aspromonte, who works as academic advisor at Mancos High School, grew up in town and has raised her two children there. Her oldest son, a rising senior at Mancos High, regularly changes his mind about his future, she said.
He already earned a mini-certification in welding, and he’s taken courses in drones and — when he wanted to become an eye doctor — medical terminology. Now, he’s in love with hands-on engineering classes, but hates the bookwork, Aspromonte said. This fall, her son will spend Friday nights at Pueblo Community College for a wildland fire class.
“He’s not the exception,” Aspromonte said. “Just in our small school, a lot of kids can go really in-depth so they can get an idea of what they do or don’t want to do.”
And, she added, the rural brain drain — of ambitious students leaving a small town for college or better jobs — seems less pressing.
“There’s no pressure to leave home, unless you really want to,” Aspromonte said.
Along the way there have been challenges. Since 2020, all but one of the founding five superintendents left their positions, reflecting the nationwide churn of school leaders during the pandemic. Deciding how to divide money among districts hasn’t always been easy, said Morrison, the collaborative’s former director.
Student enrollment in shared courses never reached a point that would justify added costs, such as transportation. This fall, the alliance will limit the classes that high schoolers can take across district lines to education and health sciences. (Students can still take the courses in the building trades, environment and hospitality/tourism in their own high schools and at the local colleges. Each track will continue to include work-based learning.)
“We needed to simplify our approach,” Morrison said. “We started grand with all five pathways across all nine districts.”
And working with local business leaders has at times been challenging too, said Patrick Fredricks, the collaborative’s deputy director. Employers often want to give students tours of their businesses but, with the collaborative’s nudging, they can create real-world lessons: A popular bar and grill in Cortez reopened on a day off so students could host a pop-up restaurant. Dove Creek schools sent 20 kids to practice with staple guns and X-ray machines in the paramedic wing of the regional hospital.
Today, the collaborative regularly hosts career fairs with local businesses, matches students with employers to shadow on half-day visits to the workplace and helps arrange longer-term internships as well. Last school year, more than 200 students shadowed business leaders at 16 different job sites, including the local hospital, ski resorts and a cattle ranch.
The Colorado Education Initiative, a Denver-based nonprofit, has studied the impact of the pandemic relief money on students and plans to release initial findings this fall. In an early review of the data, released last November, the nonprofit found that projects funded by the governor’s office, including those of the collaborative, generally improved academic and social emotional outcomes.
Hailey Perez, right, an education coordinator with the Mountain Studies Institute, leads an outdoor classroom as part of a weeklong institute on climate and the environment. Credit: Neal Morton/The Hechinger Report
The collaborative model has started to spread. Three remote districts in eastern Indiana recently created a “rural alliance zone” to get students into IT, advanced manufacturing, marketing and other career clusters. Last year, the Texas legislature overwhelmingly approved the creation of an annual $5 million pot of money to incentivize the creation of rural alliances in that state.
Back in Colorado, political allies of the collaborative have pitched the idea of dedicating state money for such partnerships or reducing the amount of bureaucracy and paperwork needed to share funds among school districts. Eric Maruyama, spokesman for Gov. Polis, said in a statement that the Colorado governor “is committed to creating educational opportunities that give students the skills needed to thrive and fill in-demand jobs” but declined to say if he would take specific action.
Taylor McCabe-Juhnke, executive director of the Rural Schools Collaborative, a national network that operates in more than 30 states, said she’s optimistic that successful partnerships in rural communities like southwest Colorado will convince philanthropic and public funders to invest.
“It’s not very sexy to fund or make time and space for relationship building,” she said. “It’s also the right thing to do to benefit broader rural community vitality.”
In Silverton, an old mining town near the headwaters of the Rio Grande, kayakers called to the students sitting on rocks along banks of the Animas River. The teenagers circled around ice trays brimming with river water and tried to classify the swimming macroinvertebrates.
“Is that one squiggly like a worm?” BreAnna Bennet, a rising senior from Durango High School, asked her group.
At the start of the summer program, Bennet said she had no desire to do any job in the outdoors. By the third day, she often tailed the instructor and supplied a stream of questions about wetland restoration efforts and wildlife in the backcountry.
“This is fun. I like this,” Bennet said, looking up from the ice tray. “Your activity is my favorite so far.”
This story about Colorado rural schools alliances was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Education vaulted to the forefront of conversations about the presidential race when Democratic nominee Kamala Harris announced Tim Walz as her running mate. Walz, the governor of Minnesota, worked for roughly two decades in public schools, as a geography teacher and football coach. He has championed investments in public education: For example, in March 2023, he signed a bill to make school meals free to all students in public schools.
Harris, a former U.S. senator and attorney general in California, has less experience in education than her running mate. But her record suggests that she would back policies to make child care more affordable, protect immigrant and LGBTQ+ students and promote broader access to higher education through free community college and loan forgiveness. Like Walz, she has defended schools and teachers against Republican charges that they are “indoctrinating” young people; she has also spoken about her own experience of being bused in Berkeley, California, as part of a program to desegregate the city’s schools.
Harris and Walz have been endorsed by both the country’s two largest teachers unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, which tend to support Democratic candidates.
We will update this guide as the candidates reveal more information about their education plans. You can also read about the Republican ticket’s education ideas.
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Early childhood
Child care
Harris has been a vocal supporter of child care legislation during her time in the Biden administration, though the proposals have had a mixed record of success.
During the pandemic, the Biden administration provided $39 billion in child care aid to help keep programs afloat.
The administration lowered the cost of child care for some military families and supported raising pay for federally funded Head Start teachers to create parity with public school teachers.
Earlier this year, Harris announced a new federal rule that would reduce lower child care costs for low-income families that receive child care assistance through a federally funded program. That same rule also requires states to pay child care providers on a more reliable basis.
Walz has also supported child care programs as governor of Minnesota. Earlier this year, he announced a new $6 million child care grant program aimed at expanding child care capacity, which followed a 2023 grant program that cemented pandemic-era support so programs could increase wages for child care workers. — Jackie Mader
Family leave and tax benefits
As soon as she became the presumptive Democratic nominee in July, Harris reaffirmed her support for paid family leave, which also was part of the platform she proposed as a candidate in the 2020 Democratic presidential contest. Harris provided the tie-breaking Senate vote that temporarily increased the child tax credit during the pandemic and has proposed making that tax credit permanent.
In 2021, the Biden administration proposed a universal preschool program as part of a multi-trillion-dollar social spending plan called Build Back Better. The plan ultimately failed to win backing from the Senate.
Harris has played a key role in leading the Biden administration’s AI initiatives, particularly since the launch of ChatGPT. Biden signed an executive order on AI in October 2023, which directed the Education Department to develop within a year resources, policies and guidance on AI and to create an “AI toolkit” for schools.
While Harris hasn’t specifically addressed education technology, in the Biden administration, the Education Department earlier this year released the National Education Technology Plan to serve as a blueprint for schools on how to implement technology in education, how to address inequities in the use and design of ed tech and how to offer ways to bridge the country’s digital divide.
In 2023, the current administration announced several new initiatives to tackle cybersecurity threats in K-12 schools, including a three-year pilot program through the Federal Communications Commission thatwill provide up to $200 million to help school districts that are eligible for FCC’s E-Rate program cover the cost of cybersecurity services and equipment. — Javeria Salman
Immigrant students
Harris has vowed to protect those in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which delays deportation for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. The Biden administration has also used its bully pulpit to remind states and school districts that all children regardless of immigration status have a constitutional right to a free public education. As a senator in 2018, Harris sponsored legislation designed to reunite migrant families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border by the Trump administration, although family separation has continued on a much smaller scale in the Biden administration. In Minnesota, Walz signed legislation that starting next year will provide free public college tuition to undocumented students from low-income families. — Neal Morton
LGBTQ+ students and Title IX
Harris and Walz have both expressed support for LGBTQ+ students and teachers. As a senator, Harris supported the Equality Act in 2019, which would have expanded protections in the Civil Rights Act on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in education, among other areas. In a speech to the American Federation of Teachers, Harris decried the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” laws passed by Florida and other states in recent years. Walz has a long history of supporting LGBTQ+ students in Minnesota, where he was the faculty adviser of Mankato West High School’s first Gay-Straight Alliance club in the 1990s. In 2021, Walz signed an executive order restricting insurance coverage for so-called conversion therapy for minors and directing a state agency to investigate potential “discriminatory practice related to conversion therapy.” Walz signed an executive order in 2023 protecting gender-affirming health care. Earlier this year, he signed a law barring libraries from banning books based on ideology; book bans nationwide have largely targeted LGTBQ+-themed books.
The Biden administration announced significant rule changes to Title IX in 2024 that undid some of the changes the Trump administration made, including removing a mandate for colleges to have live hearings and cross-examinations when investigating sexual assaults on campus. The current administration also expanded protections for students based on sexual orientation and gender identity, which had been temporarily blocked in more than two dozen states and in schools attended by children of members of Moms for Liberty, Young America’s Foundation and Female Athletes United. — Ariel Gilreath
Native students
As vice president, Harris worked in an administration that promised to improve education for Native Americans, including a 10-year plan to revitalize Native languages. The president’s infrastructure bill, passed in 2021, created a $3 billion program to broaden access to high-speed internet on tribal lands — a major barrier for students trying to learn at home during the pandemic. During his time as governor, Walz signed legislation last year to make college tuition-free for Native American students in Minnesota and required K-12 teachers to complete training on Native American history. Walz also required every state agency, including the department of education, to appoint tribal-state liaisons and formally consult with tribal governments.
Walz spent part of his early career teaching in small rural schools, including on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. — N.M.
School choice
Harris, who was endorsed by the nation’s largest public school teachers unions, has voiced support for public schools, but has said little about school vouchers or school choice. Walz does not support private-school vouchers, opposing statewide private-school voucher legislation introduced in 2021 by Republicans in Minnesota. — A.G.
School meals
One of Walz’s signature legislative achievements was supporting a bill that provides free school breakfasts and lunches to public and charter school students in Minnesota, regardless of household income. Walz, who signed the law in 2023, made Minnesota one of only eight states to have a universal school meal policy. The new law is expected to cost about $480 million over the next two years.
The Biden administration also expanded access to free school lunch by making it easier for schools to provide food without collecting eligibility information on every child’s family. — Christina A. Samuels
School prayer
The Biden administration has sought to protect students from feeling pressured into praying in schools. Following the 2022 Supreme Court decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton, the federal Education Department published updated guidance saying that while the Constitution permits school employees to pray during the workday, they may not “compel, coerce, persuade, or encourage students to join in the employee’s prayer or other religious activity.” — Caroline Preston
Special education
As a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, Harris released a “children’s agenda” in 2019 that, among other provisions, called for a large boost in special education spending.
When Congress first passed the federal law that is now called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, it authorized spending to cover up to 40 percent of the “excess costs” of educating students with disabilities compared to their peers. But Congress has never come close to meeting that goal, and today the federal government distributes only about 15 percent of the total cost of educating students with disabilities. The shortfall is “immoral,” Harris told members of the National Education Association at a 2019 candidates forum.
The Biden administration also has proposed large increases in special education spending, but proposals for full funding of special education have not made it through Congress. — C.A.S.
Student mental health, school safety
As California attorney general, Harris created a Bureau of Children’s Justice to address childhood trauma, among other issues. She has spoken out about the mental health toll of trauma, including from poverty, and the need for more resources and “culturally competent” mental health providers. But a 2011 law she pushed for as attorney general allowing parents of chronically absent students to be criminally charged later drew criticism for its toll on families, particularly those who are Black or Hispanic. Harris has said she regrets the law’s “unintended consequences.”
As vice president, Harris leads the new White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which was created after lobbying by survivors of school shootings to support gun safety regulations. She has touted the administration’s efforts to prevent school shootings, including a grant program that has awarded roughly $500 million to schools for “evidence-based solutions,” including anonymous reporting systems for threats and training for school employees on preventing school violence.
In Minnesota, Walz’s 2022 budget called for $210 million in spending to help schools support students experiencing mental health challenges. “As a former classroom teacher, I know that students carry everything that happens outside the classroom into the classroom every day, and this is why it is imperative that our students get the resources they deserve,” he said. — C.P.
Teachers unions, pandemic recovery
The Biden administration has close ties to the nations’ largest teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, the latter of which is the largest labor union of any kind in the country. First lady Jill Biden, who teaches community college courses, is a member of the NEA. Walz, a former teacher, is also an NEA member.
The administration was criticized for discussing with the AFT what kinds of safety measures should accompany the reopening of public schools after the pandemic.
Since 2021, the Biden administration has poured billions into helping public schools recover from the pandemic in various ways: to pay for more staff and tutors and upgrade facilities to improve air conditioning and ventilation, among other things. However, academic performance has yet to rebound, and the recovery has been uneven, with wealthier white students more likely to have made up ground lost during remote classes and Black and Latino students less likely to have done so.
The two unions, which had supported reelecting Biden, quickly threw their support to Harris and Walz. “Educators are fired up and united to get out and elect the Harris-Walz ticket,” NEA President Becky Pringle said after Harris named Walz as her running mate. “We know we can count on a continued and real partnership to expand access to free school meals for students, invest in student mental health, ensure no educator has to carry the weight of crushing student debt and do everything possible to keep our communities and schools safe.” — Nirvi Shah
Teaching about U.S. history and race
Both Harris and Walz have pushed back against Republican-led attacks on K-12 history instruction and efforts to minimize classroom conversations around slavery and race. Shortly after taking office in January 2021, the Biden administration dissolved President Donald Trump’s 1776 commission. In July 2023, Harris criticized a new history standard in Florida that said the experience of being enslaved had given people skills “for their personal benefit.”
As governor, Walz released an education plan calling for more “inclusive” instruction that is “reflective of students of color and Indigenous students.” It also called for anti-bias training for school staff, the establishment of an Equity, Diversity and Inclusion center at the Minnesota Department of Education, and the expansion of efforts to recruit Indigenous teachers and teachers of color. Walz also has advocated for educating students about the Holocaust and other genocides; state bans on teaching about “divisive concepts” in some Republican-led states have chilled such instruction. — C.P.
Title I
Harris’ 2019 “children’s agenda,” from when she was angling to be the Democratic nominee for president, proposed “significantly increasing” Title I, the federal program aimed at educating children from low-income families. The Biden administration also has proposed major increases to Title I spending, but Congress has not enacted those proposals. — C.A.S.
Higher Education
Accreditation
As California attorney general, Harrisurged the federal government in 2016 to revoke federal recognition for the accrediting agency of the for-profit chain Corinthian Colleges, which she hadsuccessfully sued for misleading students and using predatory recruiting practices. The accreditor’s recognition ultimately was removed in 2022.
As vice president, Harris has said little about the accreditation system, which is independently run and federally regulated and acts as a gatekeeper to billions of dollars in federal student aid. But the Biden administration has sought to require accreditors to createminimum standards on student outcomes such as graduation rates and licensure-exam pass rates. —Sarah Butrymowicz
Affirmative action
Harris has long supported affirmative action in college admissions. As California attorney general, she criticized the impact of the state’s 1996 ban at its public colleges. She also filed friend-of-the-court briefs in support of the University of Texas’ race-conscious admissions policy when the Supreme Court heard challenges to it in 2012 and 2015.
Last June, Harris criticized the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action the same day it was handed down, calling the decision a “denial of opportunity.” Walz, referring to the decision, wrote on X, “In Minnesota, we know that diversity in our schools and businesses reflects a strong and diverse state.” — Meredith Kolodner
DEI
Harris has not shied away from supporting DEI initiatives, even as they became a focus of attack for Republicans. “Extremist so-called leaders are trying to erase America’s history and dare suggest that studying and prioritizing diversity, equity, and inclusion is a bad thing. They’re wrong,” she wrote on X.
As governor, Walz has taken steps to increase access to higher education across racial groups, including offering tuition-free enrollment at state colleges for residents who are members of a tribal nation. This spring, Walz signed a budget that increased funding for scholarships for students from underrepresented racial groups to teach in Minnesota schools. — M.K.
For-profit colleges
Harris has long been a critic of for-profit colleges. In 2013, as California state attorney general, she sued Corinthian Colleges, Inc., eventually obtaining a more than $1.1 billion settlement against the defunct company. “For years, Corinthian profited off the backs of poor people — now they have to pay,” she said in a press release. As senator, she signed a letter in the summer of 2020 calling for the exclusion of for-profit colleges from Covid-era emergency funding. — M.K.
Free college
The Biden administration repeatedly has proposed making community college free for students regardless of family income. The administration also proposed making college free for students whose families make less than $125,000 per year if the students attend a historically Black college, tribal college or another minority-serving institution.
In 2023, Walz signed a bill that made two- and four-year public colleges in Minnesota free for students whose families make less than $80,000 per year. The North Star Promise Program works by paying the remaining tuition after scholarships and grants have been applied, so that students don’t have to take out loans to pay for school. — Olivia Sanchez
Free/hate speech
Following nationwide campus protests against the war in Gaza, Biden said, “There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for antisemitism or threats of violence against Jewish students. There is no place for hate speech or violence of any kind, where it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans.” His Education Department is investigating dozens of complaints about antisemitism and Islamophobia on K-12 and college campuses, a number that has spiraled since the start of the war. — O.S.
Pell grants
The Pell grant individual maximum award has increased by $900 to $7,395 since the beginning of the Biden administration, part of its goal to double the maximum award by 2029. Education experts say that when the Pell grant program began in the 1970s, it covered roughly 75 percent of the average tuition bill but today covers only about one-third. They say doubling the Pell grant would make it easier for low-income students to earn a degree. The administration tried several times to make Pell grants available to undocumented students who are part of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, but has been unsuccessful. — O.S.
Student loan forgiveness
In 2019, while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, Harrisproposed forgiving loans for Pell grant recipients who operated businesses in disadvantaged communities for a minimum of three years. As vice president, she was reportedly instrumental in pushing Biden to announce a sweeping debt cancelation policy.
The policy, which would have eliminated up to $20,000 in debt for borrowers under a certain income level, ultimately was blocked by the Supreme Court. Since then, the Biden administration has used other existing programs, including Public Service Loan Forgiveness, to cancel more than $168 billion in federal student debt.
Harris has regularly championed these moves. In April, for instance, she participated in a round-table discussion on debt relief, touting what the administration had done. “That’s more money in their pocket to pay for things like child care, more money in their pocket to get through the month in terms of rent or a mortgage,” she said of those who had loans forgiven.
But challenges remain. In August, a federal appeals court issued a stay on a Biden plan, known as the SAVE plan, which aimed to allow enrolled borrowers to cut their monthly payments and have their debts forgiven more quickly than they currently can. — S.B.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Sarah Butrymowicz, Ariel Gilreath, Meredith Kolodner, Jackie Mader, Neal Morton, Caroline Preston, Javeria Salman, Christina A. Samuels, Olivia Sanchez and Nirvi Shah
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If survival required a special backpack and a portable first aid kit, you’d do well to hear that with enough time to prepare. If wilderness guides knew all this and didn’t tell you, what kind of wilderness guides would they be?
But when a college student enrolls in a course that has a high rate of students earning Ds or Fs or withdrawing – or high DFW rate – the only way they might find that out is through informal warnings from an academic advisor, said Bridget Burns, chief executive officer at the University Innovation Alliance, a group of public research universities that works to increase college graduation rates. Historically, students enrolling in these classes haven’t been equipped with the academic first aid kit they might need to get through the course without becoming part of the DFW statistic.
Those who run colleges know when a course is a “high DFW” course, Burns said, but their approach is simply to hope that students don’t fail. “And we’re smarter than that, as a sector. We care too much about students to let that kind of posture for our work continue.”
This realization sank in for Burns during the pandemic, when leaders from the University Innovation Alliance began reporting increased DFW rates. Surely Covid itself was a factor, but it was unclear what else was contributing to these students earning Ds or Fs or withdrawing. Factors such as the time of day a class is offered, whether it’s in-person or online, the student demographics and faculty demographics, or the combination of classes a student is taking could all contribute, but there hasn’t been a way of identifying why certain classes have high DFW rates.
“I was shocked to discover there’s no way of diagnosing DFW rates,” Burns said. “That blew my mind.”
Not surprisingly, students who receive Ds, Fs or Ws graduate at lower rates than their peers, according to a 2021 analysis of data from eight colleges by the Association of Public Land Grant Universities. The report found that 69 percent of students who had never received a DFW graduated in four years, compared to 44 percent of those who had received one DFW, and 22 percent of those who had received more than one DFW.
And students from certain groups get DFWs at higher rates than others, the study found. For example, in 18 of 20 classes analyzed, first-generation students were more likely to have a DFW than their peers. Students from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups were more likely than their peers to have a DFW in 19 of 20 classes. Students receiving Pell grants were more likely to have a DFW in 17 of 20 classes.
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Burns said the answer should not be to track students into easier classes, but to ensure that all students have enough academic support to succeed in the tough classes and finish their degrees.
“It’s more expensive, it’s a little bit more resource intensive, I get it,” Burns said. “But it’s so much more costly for us to have students getting Ds, Fs and Ws and walking away.”
Over the past few years, Burns has been working to better understand DFW rates, reduce them, and figure out how to help students recover academically after they’ve received a D or F or withdrawn from a particularly tough class.
Burns and leaders at 11 colleges across the country have put together a sort of academic first aid kit, and are testing it on students who have got a D or F or withdrawn from certain classes. The kit includes things like academic coaching, writing assistance, supplemental instruction and tutoring. As a part of the trial, they also re-enrolled students in the courses they’d failed, at no cost.
According to data from the University Innovation Alliance, about 77 percent of the students in the trial passed the class the second time, compared to 55 percent of students who paid to retake the course and did so without the added support. These figures reflect the outcomes of 311 students who had earned Ds, Fs or Ws in certain classes and then retook them with the support of the University Innovation Alliance last summer or fall.
The participating colleges are the University of California, Riverside; North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University; the University of Illinois, Chicago; Georgia State University; Purdue University; the University of Utah; Virginia Commonwealth University; Oregon State University; the University of Central Florida; Arizona State University and the University of Colorado, Denver.
Each college selected courses with high DFW rates, including classes in math, chemistry, biology, psychology and English.
Burns said that academic support services are clearly helping the students as they retake the difficult classes. And they’re resources that are already available at most colleges. If students are not being connected with these resources before enrolling in these challenging courses for the first time, Burns said, “we are just not giving ourselves the benefit of our own knowledge.”
“Why are we letting students fail when we know that they’re going down a path that is unlikely to be successful?” Burns said. “We’re going to have to interrogate the practices that allow students to consistently struggle with the exact same classes over time. Because it’s not the student that’s the problem.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn't mean it's free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
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By Liz Willen
For many high school seniors and others hoping to attend college next year, the last few months have become a stress-filled struggle to complete the trouble-plagued, much-maligned FAFSA, or Free Application for Federal Student Aid.
The rollout of this updated and supposedly simplified form was so delayed, error-ridden and confusing that it has derailed or severely complicated college decisions for millions of students throughout the U.S., especially those from low-income, first-generation and undocumented families.
The bureaucratic mess is also holding up decisions by private scholarship programs and adding to public skepticism about the value of higher education — threatening progress in efforts to get more Americans to and through college.
To see the impact in person, The Hechinger Report sent reporters to schools in four cities — San Francisco, Chicago, Baltimore and Greenville, South Carolina — to hear students’ stories. Because we found them through schools, most of those we interviewed had counselors helping them; for the millions of students who don’t, it’s an even more daunting task.
Do you already have financial aid but don’t understand your offer letter?
“It was stressing me every day,” said one San Francisco senior who was accepted to 16 colleges but could not attend without substantial financial aid. Some became so frustrated they gave up, at least for now. Others said they will turn to trade schools or the military.
Students whose parents are undocumented had special worries, including concern that naming their parents would bring immigration penalties (although the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act forbids FAFSA officials from sharing family information).
To give students more time to weigh options, more than 200 colleges and universities pushed back their traditional May 1 commitment deadlines, some until June 1, according to the American Council on Education, which keeps an updated list.
Despite heroic efforts by counselors and a slew of public FAFSA-signing events, just 40.2 percent of high school seniors had completed the FAFSA as of May 10, in contrast to 49.6 of last year’s seniors at the same time, according to the National College Attainment Network. The numbers do not bode well for college enrollment, nor for the many high school graduates who will not get the benefits of higher education.
Damiana Beltran, a senior at Mission High School in San Francisco, has been working with Wilber Ramirez and other staffers from a nonprofit group that runs the school’s Future Center, where students get advice about college options and financial aid. It was touch-and-go whether her FAFSA form would be processed in time for her to attend her top-choice college. Credit: Gail Cornwall for The Hechinger Report
No one in Damiana Beltran’s family went to college, so she didn’t picture it in her future. But at the end of her junior year, “everybody” at Mission High School in San Francisco started talking about applying, so she did. San José State University admitted her, as did a few other schools. Excited, Beltran entertained visions of becoming a psychologist and showing her younger brother that “you don’t have to be from the wealthiest family” to go to college.
But the online FAFSA form wouldn’t let Beltran, who is a U.S. citizen, submit her application because her mother, who isn’t, doesn’t have a Social Security number. They tried using her individual taxpayer identification number but got an error message. Leaving the field blank didn’t work either. Beltran’s mother skipped work to get help at the school’s Future Center, but still, no dice. Eventually, they mailed in a paper version.
When May 1 passed with no offer of aid — or even an indication that her FAFSA had been received — Beltran decided to give up on attending the schools that would require her to pay for housing and a meal plan. If she went to nearby San Francisco State University, living at home would mean not asking her mother to take on debt. “I want to go to San José, but I don’t want to do that to her,” a teary Beltran said in April. “I think about it a lot during classes. During the whole school day, it’s in the back of my head.” She’s had trouble sleeping.
Her classmate Josue Hernandez also lost sleep over the FAFSA. It took him about a month and two submission attempts to access the part of the online form that would allow him to upload his undocumented parents’ IDs to verify their identity, he said. Once he did, it took about three more weeks to process. The senior, who had received local news coverage for being accepted into 16 out of 20 schools, said he thought to himself, “It was 12 years of hard work, and I finally got in, but I might not even be able to go.”
Hernandez’s other hope was scholarships. He cut back his hours at an after-school job to work on the applications and had to stay up late into the night to do the homework he’d pushed aside. Most of his free periods, including lunches, went to figuring out how to pay for college. “It was stressing me every day,” Hernandez said.
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Finally, the University of California, Berkeley, told him that his FAFSA had gone through, and financial aid would pay for almost everything; the SEED Scholars Honors Program would likely take care of the rest. “It’s finally over,” he said.
But it was not over for Jocelyn, another Mission High senior, who asked to be referred to by first name only, to protect her family’s privacy. She said that her father had been working two jobs waiting tables and her mother had been saving what she could from the household budget for quite some time; they had amassed $1,000. Jocelyn had saved $200 from working at an organic bagel shop. Room and board at San José State, her top choice too, runs $20,971 a year.
But that gap wasn’t her sole source of anxiety. By sending her undocumented parents’ names to the government in the FAFSA form, she feared she’d put them at risk, even though federal regulations forbid FAFSA officials from sharing private data with others.
Jocelyn (right) and Maria (left) are seniors at Mission High School in San Francisco, and both have had to deal with uncertainty about filling out the FAFSA form because their Spanish-speaking parents don’t have immigration documentation. Both also worried that delays in getting financial aid offers could mean they would have to defer going to college. Credit: Gail Cornwall for The Hechinger Report
Jocelyn, who wants to be a neonatal intensive care nurse, didn’t share the FAFSA difficulties with her dad, who only went to middle school in Mexico, or her mom, who never got to go to school. “They’re just gonna say, ‘Stay in San Francisco, problem solved,’ ” she said. But she already takes a class at City College of San Francisco, a community college, and finds the idea of enrolling there, with so many “grown adults,” discouraging. A friend of the family who did that and then transferred to a four-year school told Jocelyn she felt lonely having missed out on the first-year bonding. Now Jocelyn thinks she’ll go to San Francisco State, live at home for a year, and then move into an apartment. But she’d still need financial aid to make that work. “It’s like, back to square one,” Jocelyn sighed — and then said she might forgo college and get a full-time job instead.
That’s not too far from Alessandro Mejia’s plan. As a senior in the challenging Game Design Academy at Balboa High School, he has the coding skills to major in computer science at one of the four-year colleges he got into. “College is my first choice,” Mejia said in late April, but he was eyeing trade school. Financing college “would just be much harder on our family,” he said, and “being an electrician or a car mechanic doesn’t seem too bad.” Of abandoning a tech career, he said, “I’m a little frustrated, but I feel like I developed a good work ethic in school so … it’s not completely a waste.”
School counselor Katherine Valle listened to Mejia with carefully concealed horror. “It’s shocking to hear,” she said. The Game Design Academy “is our hardest pathway, and we don’t have a lot of Latino males in it. To know he did that and is going to end up being a mechanic is just …” She couldn’t find words.
Source: National College Attainment Network Credit: Jacob Turcotte/The Christian Science Monitor
Valle said that for her students whose parents have white-collar jobs, the new FAFSA was everything promised: “easier process, less questions.” But it took kids in Mejia’s family income bracket many attempts to complete. He has the same potential as his wealthier peers, but those kids are “10 steps ahead,” she said. “It’s not fair.”
Mejia finally submitted his FAFSA on April 29. He said if he didn’t hear back by the new decision deadline for California State University institutions, May 15, he wouldn’t enroll.
With less than a week to spare, Mejia learned his FAFSA had been processed. He committed to San Francisco State. Jocelyn did, too, though she would have preferred San José State. For Beltran, though, the May 15 deadline came and went; she was “still waiting for my FAFSA to come in,” she said, and hadn’t submitted an intent to register.
Ashley Spencer, left, a counselor at Air Force Academy High School in Chicago, kept telling senior Samaya Acker “We’re getting there, we’re close,” as they navigated college and FAFSA applications amid the confusion caused by financial aid delays and errors. Credit: Matt Krupnick for The Hechinger Report
Samaya Acker stayed on top of her college plans all year. She applied for early action admission at 17 colleges, submitted her FAFSA application for financial aid two days after the window opened and came up with a backup plan to join the military, just in case.
Most of those preparations went well.
Acker, an 18-year-old senior at Air Force Academy High School on Chicago’s South Side who has “Power” tattooed in script on her arm, was accepted by 16 colleges (her top choice, the University of Chicago, was the only one to turn her down) and planned to spend a few months in the Air National Guard to help pay for college. But as scholarship and deposit deadlines approached, her FAFSA application was still classified as “pending” three months after she submitted it.
“It really put me on edge,” said Acker, whose high school years were interrupted first by Covid and then by the birth of her son halfway through her sophomore year, but who still is graduating with a weighted grade-point average over 4.0.
Samaya Acker, right, earned stellar academic credentials at Air Force Academy High School in Chicago, despite many obstacles, and was rewarded with a full scholarship that she will use to attend Loyola University. Credit: Matt Krupnick for The Hechinger Report
With Acker’s college decision deadlines looming, her counselor, Ashley Spencer, pulled her from class one day in mid-April to look over her options, whatever FAFSA results she got. “We are getting close to the end with you, slowly but surely,” Spencer said.
About a week later, Acker was awarded a Gates Scholarship, which pays the full cost of college attendance for high-achieving students from underrepresented groups. Acker, who is Black, accepted her offer of admission from Chicago’s Loyola University, where tuition alone is more than $52,000 per year. She plans to become an anesthesiologist. (The Gates Foundation is among the many funders of The Hechinger Report.)
A few miles away, a group of students at Hubbard High School in southwest Chicago were not as lucky.
The FAFSA delays have created unique challenges for students with undocumented immigrant parents — including students at Hubbard. At a late-April meeting with Dulcinea Basile, the school’s college and career coach, four seniors whose parents are undocumented said they had spent months waiting for the federal government to fix a glitch that prevented parents without Social Security numbers from submitting financial information. “How many times have we logged in and it says ‘FAFSA not available’?” Basile asked rhetorically.
The glitch was finally fixed, but all four were still waiting, in early May, to find out how much financial aid they might receive.
“There’s really not much I can do,” said Javier Magana, 18, who was still trying to figure out whether he could afford any of the colleges that had accepted him. “It’s definitely been frustrating because I’ve been trying my best.”
Dulcinea Basile, second from right, a college and career coach at Hubbard High School in Chicago, has been concerned for months that financial aid delays might cause some of her seniors — from left, Javier Magana, Octavio Rodriguez and Ixchel Ortiz — to forgo college. Credit: Matt Krupnick for The Hechinger Report
Ixchel Ortiz, 17, plans to go to a Chicago community college, but said if she didn’t receive financial aid, even that would have to wait.
Isaac Raygoza and Octavio Rodriguez, both 18, said they had a few four-year college options but likely wouldn’t be able to pursue any of them without a FAFSA answer.
Rodriguez said he had been repeatedly frustrated by trying to complete the FAFSA. “I would go home and wait 20 to 30 minutes on hold, and we didn’t get anywhere,” he said. In late April he was notified that he had misspelled his own name on the application; in mid-May, he was still waiting to hear whether he needed to re-apply from scratch.
“I’m slightly stressed,” he said in mid-May.
Raygoza said he had submitted his application on time but had failed to notice an error message that prevented it from being processed. He resubmitted it in late April.
“I was just shocked it was never processed,” he said. “I had to do it all again.”
All four said they would likely take a year off to work if they didn’t get aid.
LaToia Lyle works with students at the Academy for College and Career Exploration, a public high school in Baltimore. She’s a counselor from the nonprofit iMentor, which connects juniors and seniors to mentors for coaching on post-secondary planning. Many of her students are low-income and first-generation college prospects. Credit: Kavitha Cardoza for The Hechinger Report
At the Academy for College and Career Exploration in Baltimore, juniors and seniors have weekly class, run by the nonprofit organization iMentor, to help them understand and pursue postsecondary options, including colleges and various types of financial aid. Counselor LaToia Lyle worries about the long delays with FAFSA, because most of her students are low-income and will be first-generation college students, so they don’t always have someone to help them at home, and the delays could mean decisions had to be made quickly.
She helps them compare tuition costs and reminds them that housing deposits are not refundable and book fees add up. “Even gaps as small as $500 can make a difference,” she said.
For Zion Wilson and Camryn Carter, both seniors, the delays and the need to constantly try to log into FAFSA accounts that froze were frustrating, but both students said they were relieved when glitches with the forms meant their college commitment deadlines got pushed back.
“The last thing I wanted to do was make a fast-paced decision,” said Wilson, an ebullient 17-year-old with a wide smile. “I kept bouncing between different things. I felt the FAFSA delay gave me more of a chance to decide what I actually wanted to do.”
Zion Wilson said the extra time caused by FAFSA delays allowed her to decide against going to college as she’d originally planned. She got into several universities but decided to study information technology as a trainee through Grads2Careers, a Baltimore City program. Credit: Kavitha Cardoza for The Hechinger Report
She had applied for computer science programs at several colleges but was nervous about taking out loans. Even though Baltimore City Community College would be tuition-free for her, she worried she wouldn’t have enough money to spend if she wasn’t working. But her family wanted her to go to college, especially because her elder sister had enrolled but dropped out after the first year.
Wilson was admitted to her top three choices — BCCC, University of Maryland Eastern Shore and Coppin State University — but even with scholarships, she decided not to go. Instead, Wilson plans to go straight into the workforce through a program called Grads2Careers, where she will get training in information technology.
“It kind of sounded like I can just do the exact same thing that I would be doing if I went to college, but I can just start now versus waiting two years to start,” Wilson said. After a two-week training period, she will be paid between $15 and $17 an hour, she said.
In the end, she filled out her portion of the FAFSA, but told her parents not to do theirs. “Why make my parents do this long thing and put in their tax information, if I’m not going anywhere that requires it?”
Wilson is relieved not to have to think about college anymore. “I think I made the right choice, and having some money in my pocket will also be a good push for me to continue to advance up.”
Camryn Carter, a senior in Baltimore, got accepted with a full scholarship to the University of Maryland, College Park, his first choice. He called the FAFSA delays “a blessing and a curse”: a blessing because his mother had more time to fill out the form and a curse because it was difficult for him to juggle the FAFSA process with his demanding AP courses and college essays. Credit: Kavitha Cardoza for The Hechinger Report
Her classmate Carter, 18, is a serious student who is also on the baseball, wrestling and track teams. He has never wavered from his childhood decision to study biology. It began, he said, when he was about four years old, and his grandmother tuned to the National Geographic channel on TV.
“I was like, ‘stop, stop, stop,’ ” he said, recalling the video of a lion attacking a zebra. Carter was hooked. He started watching the channel every day. “I fell in love with ants, ecosystems, that just sparked my interest in biology.”
Carter applied to 14 colleges. He said filling out all the forms was challenging because the delayed release of the FAFSA meant he was doing it at the same time as he was taking a demanding course load, including AP Literature and AP Calculus. “It was really time-consuming and really work-heavy with a lot of essays, a lot of homework,” he said. “It’s pretty tough to do that at the same time while I’m doing college supplemental essays and my personal statement.”
But the FAFSA delay also meant that his mother had more time to finish the form, something she had been putting off for months. Because he is the oldest of four children, his mom hadn’t had to complete a form like this that asks for a lot of personal information, including tax data, he said.
“My mom was just brushing over it,” he said. “But I was like, ‘No, you really have to do this because this is for my future. Like, you don’t do this, I’ll have so much debt.’ So I was just telling her to please do this and please get on it.”
She did, but Carter said it likely wouldn’t have happened without the delay.
Carter got into his dream school, the University of Maryland, College Park, with a full scholarship, including tuition, meals and accommodation. His second choice, McDaniel College, also offered him a generous scholarship, but he says he still would have ended up paying $6,000 a year, which he didn’t want to do. “Definitely money was a big factor,” he said. He said he’s excited about starting a new chapter in September: “I feel like UMD is the perfect fit for me.”
Braden Freeman, a senior at J.L. Mann High School in Greenville, South Carolina, talks to his school counselor, Nicole Snow, about his plans after graduation. Credit: Ariel Gilreath/The Hechinger Report
Chylicia and Chy’Kyla Henderson worked hard to graduate early from Eastside High School in Greenville, South Carolina. The sisters filled their schedules and took virtual classes as well, so that Chylicia, now 18, could be done with school a semester early and Chy’Kyla, 17, could graduate after her junior year. Both want to attend college but need financial aid to afford it.
Their mom, Nichole Henderson, said the stress of trying to fill out both their FAFSA forms at once led her to take her daughters and two other graduating seniors she knew to a FAFSA workshop at a local college in April. Even with help from someone there, she found the forms confusing — Chylicia’s asked for Nichole’s tax information, she said, but Chy’Kyla’s did not.
“I don’t think there was a lot of help surrounding the whole FAFSA process,” Nichole said. “As a parent, it’s stressful. Especially when you have two.”
Chylicia is thinking about pursuing a degree in nursing or social work, and leaning toward starting at Greenville Technical College, a community college. But the school emailed her saying they needed more information on her financial aid application; it wasn’t clear if the issue stemmed from the FAFSA form or something else, she said.
Then, on May 8, she got an email from South Carolina Tuition Grants, a program that provides up to $4,800 in need-based scholarships, saying she was tentatively approved for the full amount. She still hasn’t resolved the paperwork issue at Greenville Technical College, though, and so isn’t sure yet whether she’ll be able to enroll there.
And if Chylicia’s application is missing information, the family worries that Chy’Kyla’s will have the same issue. Like her sister, she’s considering starting out at a community college, but Chy’Kyla also applied to a handful of schools in South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia. By May 8, she said, she hadn’t received word about financial aid from any schools or any need-based scholarship programs.
“We’re just playing the waiting game,” their mother said.
Heather Williams, a school counselor at Riverside High School in Greenville, said students told her they struggled simply to complete and correct errors in their forms.
“Some of the errors they’ve had were just missing a signature,” Williams said. “Trying to circumvent that and fix it was hard for students because you can make corrections, but it was hard to get back in and [do it]. It was a lot of, ‘If I click this, then what?’ And being aware there’s an error, but not sure how to fix it.”
The FAFSA process has always been complicated, but the truncated timeline this year made it significantly more stressful, said Nicole Snow, a school counselor at J.L. Mann High School, also in Greenville County. Normally, her students and their families start filling out their FAFSA forms in the fall, but this year, they couldn’t access the form until January.
“By January and February, we’ve almost kind of lost those seniors that have already done their [college] applications,” she said. “Like, ‘Oh, let’s pull you back three months later and open up FAFSA.’”
Braden Freeman, a graduating senior at J.L. Mann High School in Greenville, South Carolina, was still waiting to hear back from some colleges about financial aid in May of 2024. Credit: Ariel Gilreath/The Hechinger Report
The delay created some challenging decisions for students like Braden Freeman. Freeman, who is the student body president at J.L. Mann, submitted his financial aid application in January, right after it opened up. In March, he was told he got a full scholarship to attend Southern Methodist University in Texas, but by May 1, he still hadn’t heard back from his other top choices — the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Virginia — on how much need-based and merit-based aid he would get. Those colleges had pushed back their decision deadlines because of FAFSA delays.
Instead of waiting to hear back from UNC and UVA, Freeman decided to put a deposit down at Southern Methodist, whose deadline was May 1. The full scholarship was a big factor in his decision. “With the rising cost of tuition, I just can’t take on that much alone,” he said.
Both UNC and UVA eventually sent Freeman his financial aid packages a week before their deadline to enroll, which was May 15. Freeman said he still planned to attend Southern Methodist.
“I’m fortunate enough to not be incredibly dependent on need-based aid,” Freeman said. “For kids that are waiting on that and don’t know, I can imagine that would be way worse.”
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SHE WAS ARRAIGNED THIS MORNING AND IS DUE BACK IN COURT ON DECEMBER 9TH. ONE NORTHWEST ARKANSAS COMMUNITY COLLEGE GRADUATE WILL BE CONTINUING HER HIGHER EDUCATION NEXT YEAR – – BEFORE SHE’S EVEN ABLE TO VOTE. 40-29’S VALERIE ZHANG IS LIVE AT THE WALMART AMP TONIGHT WHERE SHE CAUGHT UP WITH MANY EXCITED GRADUATES. VALERIE? YES, MANY AND…. THE YOUNGEST OF THE CLASS. WALKING ACROSS THE STAGE AT 14 YEARS OLD… SHE’LL BE CONTINUING HER STUDIES INTO NEUROSCIENCE. áYou started NWACC when you were… 11á <> “I moved here. In August of 2020 and shortly after 2020 and shortly after I began taking classes here and work before I started high school.” RAYANA HOLIKOVA SAYS SHE STARTED OUT WITH CLASSES LIKE COLLEGE ALGEBRA AND COMP. <> “I have a younger brother. He’s a genetic disorder, and he was born when I was seven years old, so I wasn’t quite old enough to just grasp the realities of the condition he had. But as I got older and as my education progressed, I kind of realized, like, how much gravity his condition had. And that just kind of like inspired me to pursue a path that was consistent with what I was interested in as a child.” “honestly graduating with an associate’s in with in as a child.” “honestly I just woke up one morning and I was in the car on my way to take the placer test. I didn’t really understand what was happening at the moment other than like online classes. And then I guess like last year, I began to realize that this is like an associate’s degree and be graduating with an associate’s in with my high school degree” HOLIKOVA IS ALSO A STUDENT AT BENTONVILLE HIGH. <> “the individualized self- paced nature of this college is so incredibly important and it taught me a lot about how to regulate like my own study habits.” SHE’LL BE GOING TO GEORGIA TECH THIS FALL TO GET HER BACHELORS DEGREE IN NEUROSCIENCE. <> “when I graduate college, I think it would be nice to know that there are a there’s a whole community of people that are just like watching you grow and that want you to succeed.” THIS WAS THE SECOND YEAR FOR THE NURSING PINNING, BUT THE FIRST TIME THE COMMENCEMENT WAS AT THE AM
14-year-old graduates from community college
14-year-old becomes youngest NWACC graduate this spring
Updated: 5:59 AM EDT May 19, 2024
The 14-year-old graduate from Northwest Arkansas Community College started taking classes at 11. Rayana Holikova moved to Northwest Arkansas in August 2020. Shortly after, she started taking classes at the community college. “I have a younger brother. He has a genetic disorder. He was born when I was 7 years old, so I wasn’t quite old enough to just grasp the realities of the condition he had, but as I got older and as my education progressed, I kind of realized how much gravity his condition had. And that just kind of like inspired me to pursue a path that was consistent with what I was interested in as a child,” Holikova said. Holikova will also be graduating from Bentonville High School. She’ll continue her studies into neuroscience at Georgia Tech University in the fall. “When I graduate college, I think it would be nice to know that there’s a whole community of people that are just like watching you grow and that want you to succeed,” Holikova said.It was the first time the nurse pinning was at the Walmart Amp and the second time for the commencement ceremony.
ROGERS, Ark. —
The 14-year-old graduate from Northwest Arkansas Community College started taking classes at 11.
Rayana Holikova moved to Northwest Arkansas in August 2020. Shortly after, she started taking classes at the community college.
“I have a younger brother. He has a genetic disorder. He was born when I was 7 years old, so I wasn’t quite old enough to just grasp the realities of the condition he had, but as I got older and as my education progressed, I kind of realized how much gravity his condition had. And that just kind of like inspired me to pursue a path that was consistent with what I was interested in as a child,” Holikova said.
Holikova will also be graduating from Bentonville High School. She’ll continue her studies into neuroscience at Georgia Tech University in the fall.
“When I graduate college, I think it would be nice to know that there’s a whole community of people that are just like watching you grow and that want you to succeed,” Holikova said.
It was the first time the nurse pinning was at the Walmart Amp and the second time for the commencement ceremony.
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Student loans aren’t the only kind of university debt. Colleges and universities themselves have borrowed billions, mostly to keep building facilities they may or may not actually need as enrollment declines. Today, nearly 10 cents of every dollar in university budgets goes to pay the interest on institutional debt.
Colleges and universities now collectively owe around a quarter of a trillion dollars, according to the Moody’s bond-rating agency. The annual cost of servicing this debt is $48 billion, or $750 per student at public and $1,289 at private institutions. Several recent college closings were caused by unmanageable debt.
Much of the money has gone to new buildings, even at a time when some instruction is moving online and when existing buildings need billions worth of repairs. Some has been spent on amenities meant to attract more students as enrollment declines. But many colleges have simply ended up with more debt, even as they have fewer customers to pay for it.
Curious about how much your college owes, or the one that you’re considering attending. We’ll show you how to find out, at the end of this transcript.
“College Uncovered” is made possible by Lumina Foundation.
Scroll to the end of this transcript to find out more about this topic, and for links to more information.
Jon: So, Kirk, how’s the food?
Kirk: It’s not bad, Jon. I got the salad and a slice of pizza. It’s a little greasy.
Jon: Yeah, I had the greasy pizza, too. We’re in the dining room at Marsh Hall. It’s a really nice new dorm with a fitness room, video consoles, pool tables, flat-screen TVs. And it’s next to a bike path with great views of a salt marsh. That’s all here on the campus at Salem State University.
Kirk: Salem, Massachusetts. Famous for all those witches.
Jon: That’s right. But I’ve got something even scarier for you, Kirk. We talk a lot about student loan debt, but universities also borrow an enormous amount of money to build places like where we’re sitting right now. This relatively small public university has been on a building boom with more to come. It’s built three dorms, a parking garage, and a brand-new fitness center. And while it was doing all that, its enrollment was declining. That’s the kind of higher education debt you don’t hear about as much. But students end up paying for this, too. Salem State pays $16 million a year just in interest on what it borrowed to build all this stuff.
Kirk: Wow. That’s crazy. On top of how expensive colleges are already. So all that institutional debt ends up putting more of a burden on students and families who have to pay for it.
This is College Uncovered, from GBH News and The Hechinger Report, a podcast pulling back the Ivy to reveal how colleges really work. I’m Kirk Carapezza, with GBH …
Jon: … and I’m Jon Marcus at The Hechinger Report.
Kirk: Colleges don’t want you to know how they operate. So GBH …
Jon: In collaboration with The Hechinger Report, is here to show you.
Today on the show: “Red Ink.”
So universities and colleges nationwide have kind of an edifice complex. Even though the number of students continues to go down, they keep building and building. And to do that, they’re borrowing tens of billions of dollars a year. The cost of paying that money back adds to the already high price of college.
Here at Salem State, students pay more than $3,300 per year, per student, to service the university’s debt, through dorm charges and other fees. We got that number from a faculty task force that’s been critical of the process. We talked to the university, too. It doesn’t dispute the number, but it says that students asked for these new facilities and that it’s constantly restructuring the debt to save money.
Students walking around the campus say they weren’t aware that part of what they’re paying goes to pay off the university’s debt.
Greg O’Connor: No, I was not.
Kirk: Greg O’Connor is a freshman and a member of the Student Government Association.
Greg O’Connor: Students aren’t really satisfied here with the dining. So the fact that they took out that much money to build the dorm halls and like, dining, still like a student concern, that’s that’s really wild to me. I didn’t know that.
Jon: Mackenzie Trainor was surprised to hear about this, too.
Mackenzie Trainor: My mom pays for me to be here. I love my mom a lot, so I mean. … My dorm’s disgusting. That’s a lot of money going into dorms that are not …
Kirk: Why is it disgusting?
Mackenzie Trainor: Just different issues. Like, my shower for some reason just gets dirty very easily. The rust is disgusting.
Jon: Is it one of these new dorms?
Mackenzie Trainor: Actually, yeah. Charlotte Forten Hall. I do love this school, but I mean, I’m recently having, like, financial aid issues. I think it’s interesting to find out some of the things about where funding’s going and where the money’s going.
Jon: It’s pretty quiet on the campus, except between classes, when students start crisscrossing the quad. Nearly all the students on this campus, 95 percent of them, qualify for financial aid. And those new dorms aren’t helping the half who commute.
Brendan Sheehan is a junior majoring in business and music. He runs a landscaping company with his brothers to help pay for the cost of going here.
Brendan Sheehan, who is working his way through college, says he’d just as soon rough it to keep the cost down than to pay the interest on the debt his university assumed to build new dorms. Credit: Brendan Sheehan.
Brendan Sheehan: Yeah, I just I just got off work.
Jon: What’s the music for? What are you planning to do?
Brendan Sheehan: Not a solid plan yet, but I just love music, so I’ve always stuck with that.
Kirk: Favorite band?
Brendan Sheehan: Favorite band? Oof, so many to choose from. But I got to go with the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Kirk: All right,that’s a good choice.
Brendan Sheehan: Definitely.
Jon: New dorms are nice, but Sheehan said he’d be just as happy paying less for college and roughing it a little.
Brendan Sheehan: I could honestly, personally handle, you know, 5-foot-by-10-foot, you know, like, I’d be okay with living like that. I assume other people might think otherwise, but personally, I just, you know, I know that avoiding debt as much as possible is the goal.
Jon: But not necessarily for colleges and universities. And it isn’t only here at Salem State.
Kirk: Okay, so colleges and universities are borrowing vast sums to put up new dorms and student centers and other buildings, even as their enrollments decline. The actual amount of borrowed is estimated to be more than $32 billion a year in public bond debt. Most of it has gone to build new buildings that universities hope will attract students. And we’re not talking about buildings paid for by wealthy alums or giving campaigns. Forty percent of new construction on campuses is financed with debt.
Howard Bunsis: Most of the borrowing is for buildings, and the majority of those buildings are dorms. Universities have come to believe universally that dorms, that having the newest, fanciest wave pool, cool kitchens, cool whatever, are the answer in the competitive market to attract students to come to the university.
Jon: Howard Bunsis is a professor in the business school at Eastern Michigan University who studies colleges and debt. Servicing this debt now costs about 10 cents out of every dollar in university operating budgets. It’s also a major reason why a lot of small colleges are closing. We talked in Episode 4 about the large number of colleges closing these days. Many of them have more debt than assets. Ohio Valley University had $18 million in assets, but $30 million worth of liabilities when it shut down. The College of New Rochelle had $77 million worth of assets and $87 million in liabilities. I could go on and on. Cazenovia College in New York. Iowa Wesleyan. Birmingham Southern in Alabama. You get the idea. I asked Howard Bunsis what kind of colleges are doing this.
Howard Bunsis: Whether we’re talking about a flagship public, a regional public, a very wealthy private — it goes across the spectrum of universities.
Jon: So most of this is for dorms.
They figure that the proceeds they’re going to get, the revenue they’re going to generate from these dorms is going to more than cover it. And in addition, up until a year ago, interest rates in our country were very, very low. So they figured, you know what? It’s almost like free money — 3percent, 2 percent. So there was a lot of borrowing around the country by universities, no doubt. And a lot of it was for dorms, but a lot of it was generated by the low interest rates. Now interest rates are not so low anymore.
Jon: Let’s be clear, though. Just like people who have a mortgage, a lot of colleges can handle the debt, right?
Howard Bunsis: Well, let’s start at the top: flagship public universities. They have absolutely no trouble borrowing money and paying it back. They have tuition coming in. They have grants and contracts and all the research they do. They have state appropriations. They have a lot of people donating money. They have such a wonderfully diverse revenue source. They’re not going to have any trouble.
Jon: Okay. But but what about other schools like Eastern Michigan?
Howard Bunsis: You come to a place where I teach, a regional public university. Well, the grants and contracts aren’t that great. There’s not that much money coming in from gifts. So they’re relying on tuition revenue and the state appropriation. So it’s a little more problematic.
Jon: Should prospective students be wary about going to small, tuition dependent private colleges that have a lot of debt?
Howard Bunsis: The small private university that’s borrowing a lot of money, and they have one revenue source that I think is — can I use the word problematical? Is that is that a fair word? I would be very wary of a private university that gets more than 80 percent of its revenue from tuition only and is borrowing a lot of money.
Jon: So how do you tell if the college you’re considering has too much debt?
Howard Bunsis: One of my pet peeves, and [for] transparency, I think every university that takes any federal money, including a private university that gets federal money for student loans, should put their audited statements on their website for people to see. Because remember, with debt, it’s not like you have to write a check. Like when you borrow. If you borrow $200,000 in your mortgage, you don’t have to write a $200,000 check tomorrow. You have to write a monthly check. And so that’s why looking at the total cash, the two investments, that ratio should be above one.
Jon: That sounds complicated, but but you’re saying that if there’s a problem, it’s going to stick out, right?
Howard Bunsis: So I looked at this in college in West Virginia, which went under. Basically they had cash and investments of $6 million and debt of $28 million, and they had negative cash flows. So that’s troubling.
Jon: Yeah. You’re talking about Alderson Broaddus University, which closed last year just a few days before the start of the school year. It couldn’t even pay its utility bills.
Howard Bunsis: The debt issue that we’re talking about is really about small privates that put all their eggs in one basket, borrowed too much money to build dorms. The people didn’t come. The enrollment didn’t increase. The cash flows were not generated. But the principal has to be paid. The interest has to be paid.
Kirk: Back at Salem State, it was concerned faculty who took the initiative and investigated all the debt the university took on to build its new dorms, gym and that dining hall with the greasy pizza. Joanna Gonsalves is a professor of psychology, and she says it was a risky strategy from the very start.
Joanna Gonsalves: That gamble wasn’t good, because, more and more, our campuses, our students can’t afford that. It was the gamble that having those beautiful, campus facilities make our campus appealing to somebody from New Hampshire, Rhode Island, California. That really, actually never came to pass.
Jon: And yet now everybody’s paying for it.
Joanna Gonsalves: Yeah, everybody’s paying for it.
Jon: So we’ve been talking about shiny new buildings and how colleges borrow to pay for them. But that new state-of-the-art computer science building also comes at the cost of other projects and priorities. Even as they take on more debt to put up new buildings, some colleges are neglecting their existing infrastructure. Universities now have — listen to this, Kirk — $112 billion worth of deferred maintenance and repairs.
Kirk: That’s a lot of money. And I’m still thinking about the gross dorm rooms and the antiquated bathrooms or heating systems on college campuses. The things you know you don’t see on a college brochure.
Jon: Yeah. So analysts say it’s a maintenance backlog that’s now become impossible to catch up with. It means that the condition of some buildings is getting really bad.
Alice Roberts Davis: Generally what happens is, as buildings age, we should go in and replace certain aspects — plumbing, roof, heating, electrical, mechanical. All those systems need to be maintained and replaced over time. And if we don’t have the funding to do that, that becomes an item of deferred maintenance. And as those things go on without replacement, they become more critical, at risk for failure.
Kirk: That’s the person with the very tough job of overseeing this issue on one of America’s biggest campuses.
Alice Roberts Davis: I am Alice Roberts Davis. I am vice president for university services at the University of Minnesota. We have about 1,000 buildings, and more than half of our buildings are more than 50 years old. We have a number of buildings that are more than 100 years old. And so as you think about your own home and what types of things need to be repaired in your own home, if you had a home that was 50, 60 or 70 years old, you would definitely need to replace the roof. You need to replace the windows and probably work with the foundation or plumbing. Some sort of structural work would probably be necessary in our university. Buildings are no different. All of those things need to be done on a regular cadence.
Kirk: But often they haven’t been. This can affect the average college experience. These are not the buildings that gets showcased during a college tour, or when the college is trying to make a good first impression and get you the student to enroll.
Alice Roberts Davis: They want it to look stately. They want it to look old. They want it to look like those universities back east that have those long-tenured buildings and look like great thinkers have paced those corridors. And we want them to have that original character, but that costs money for us to maintain them in a way that makes them continue to be functional.
Jon: But Davis says there’s more to this than pretty buildings.
Alice Roberts Davis: Students who have had a great K-through-12 experience with wonderful facilities come to our university, and seeing something that feels like a step backward as far as facilities go — they may be looking at a lab that is the same lab that their mom and dad used, versus something that’s really state of the art in their in their high school. When that happens, they tend to look at surrounding states, other universities, other options that they may have. And what we find is when they go to those other schools, in other states, they tend to form professional and personal relationships that cause them to stay. That’s a long-term workforce issue for our state.
Jon: The condition of the campus really has a far-reaching impact. What are some other ways that it matters? I mean, schools send a message not only to students, but to faculty with the quality of their infrastructure.
Alice Roberts Davis: It’s so important that we attract the best faculty so that we can get the best students here. And when faculty assess the facilities and see that they may or may not be able to get the grant funding that they need because of the facilities that they’re being offered, they make really difficult decisions that may or may not include our university.
Kirk: Okay. So what should you, the consumer, look for when you visit a college campus? Here are some ideas.
Alice Roberts Davis: I think the parents should look at what the child’s major is. They should be thinking about what type of facility they need. What equipment is there that will help prepare them for their workforce of the future? Or do they have the faculty there that can prepare them for the workforce that they plan to enter?
Jon: So, to recap, wander around to campus when the official tour is over and look for yourself, especially at the buildings where you’re likely to take labs or classes. Next, check out the college’s ratio of assets to liabilities. That’s a way to understand whether a college might have too much debt.
Kirk: That sounds like as much fun as doing your taxes, Jon.
Jon: Well, none of this is fun, right? But there are tools that make it easy, and you’ll find them linked from the landing page for this episode. They’ll take you to universities’ publicly required financial documents, which summarize these numbers pretty well.
Kirk: This is College Uncovered. I’m Kirk Carapezza from GBH …
Jon: … and I’m Jon Marcus from The Hechinger Report. Be sure to keep listening to future episodes to hear more about what colleges and universities don’t teach you.
This episode was produced and written by Kirk …
Kirk: … and Jon, and it was edited by Jeff Keating. Meg Woolhouse is our supervising editor and Ellen London is executive producer.
Jon: Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott.
Kirk: We had production assistance from Diane Adame.
Jon: Theme song and original music by Left Roman out of MIT. Mei He is our project manager and head of GBH podcasts is Devin Maverick Robins.
Kirk: College Uncovered is a production of GBH News and The Hechinger Report and distributed by PRX. It’s made possible by Lumina Foundation. Thanks so much for listening.
Kirk: Okay, now we’re at the sundae bar. Where are you going with?
Jon: Well, cookies and cream. What else would you go with?
Kirk: Cookie dough looks good. Or mint chocolate chip?
For more information about the topics covered in this episode:
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The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn't mean it's free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
CHICAGO — Jazmin Mejia went straight from high school to what she thought was the perfect fit at Loyola University, a 30-minute drive from the Chicago neighborhood where she grew up.
But Mejia was quickly overwhelmed on the North Side campus of nearly 17,000 students.
“The classes were too big,” said Mejia, 18. “I was struggling to ask for help.”
A year later, she says college has become much more manageable.
Mejia left Loyola’s main campus in favor of the university’s Arrupe College, a two-year program in downtown Chicago that offers associate degrees. Taking smaller classes with instructors who interact more with students has been a game-changer, she said.
“The professors try to communicate with you and try to understand your situation,” Mejia said over breakfast at one of the communal tables in the Arrupe cafeteria.
Jazmin Mejia, who left Loyola University’s four-year main campus in favor of the university’s two-year program, called Arrupe College. “The classes were too big,” she says. “I was struggling to ask for help.” Credit: Camilla Forte for The Hechinger Report
Two-year associate degrees have long been offered almost exclusively at community colleges, but the model pioneered at Loyola is picking up steam at private, nonprofit four-year universities around the country. Many of these are Jesuit schools like Loyola, which say that lower-cost two-year associate degree programs particularly help students who need the most support.
“It’s a reach-in culture,” said the Rev. Thomas Neitzke, Arrupe’s dean. “It’s that total wraparound, both in the classroom and outside the classroom.”
The expansion of the Arrupe model is largely being championed by Steve Katsouros, who was the founding dean of Arrupe nine years ago and is now president and CEO of the Come To Believe Network, a nonprofit focused solely on bringing two-year degrees to four-year schools. The network raises money to provide grants to universities to start associate degree programs.
In addition to Loyola, schools that have either recently opened or plan to open two-year colleges include the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, the University of Mount Saint Vincent in New York City, Butler University in Indiana and Boston College.
A handful of other schools, such as the University of the Pacific in California, are considering programs. And Homeboy Industries, a gang rehabilitation nonprofit, is exploring partnering with Mount Saint Mary’s University in Los Angeles to create an associate degree program.
Even considering the concept can help a college learn more about the needs of its broader student body, Katsouros said. “We try to identify the factors that prevent students from being successful,” Katsouros said, noting that most of the programs also offer some combination of free meals, laptops and housing.
The concept also suggests a way to diversify and expand enrollment. Programs in the Come To Believe Network must commit to accepting lower-income students and keeping their loan debt to a minimum. At Arrupe, for instance, the advertised tuition is a little over $13,000 a year, but scholarships and work-study programs mean most students pay about $2,000, Neitzke said. The strategy, he explained, is partly to attract students who can’t afford private universities and might not want to attend cheaper public community colleges that don’t offer as much personal attention.
The hope is that most graduates of the two-year programs will go on to finish bachelor’s degrees at universities. Data is sparse so far, but even modest success toward that goal would be a huge improvement over the national numbers.
A poster advertising support for Arrupe College students to transfer to Loyola University’s four-year program hangs in the cafeteria of Arrupe’s downtown Chicago building. Credit: Camilla Forte for The Hechinger Report
While 80 percent of community college students say they plan to earn bachelor’s degrees, only 16 percent manage to do so within six years, according to the Aspen Institute and the Community College Research Center, or CCRC, at Teachers College, Columbia University. The numbers are even worse for low-income (11 percent), Black (9 percent) and Hispanic (13 percent) students. (The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College.)
Only a relative handful of students attend these new two-year programs compared to millions at traditional community colleges, but the differences are stark. At Loyola’s Arrupe College, for instance, 50 percent of students graduate, and 70 percent of those graduates continue to bachelor’s degree programs, according to figures provided by the college.
More universities should be offering associate degrees, said Davis Jenkins, a senior research scholar at the CCRC.
“These are institutions that could use their prestige and dedication to high-quality teaching to really onboard students” who would otherwise not attend college, Jenkins said. “This is building a bridge into the college, using the college’s strength.”
Most of the new programs guarantee graduates admission to the parent campus, although not all students decide to accept the opportunity.
At Butler University, which will open its two-year Founder’s College to 100 students next year, students who graduate from Founder’s with sufficient grades will automatically be eligible to finish their bachelor’s degrees at the university. Students will have no debt after the first two years, said Brooke Barnett, Butler’s provost, and those who go on to Butler will pay no more than $10,000 total for the full four years. Founder’s College is being funded entirely by foundations and donors, she said, and will fulfill the university’s longtime goal of offering low-cost degrees to underrepresented students.
“We want to give students the opportunity to flourish and shine and show the talents they can bring,” Barnett said. “They have not always been given those opportunities.”
Some universities, including Butler, are using the associate degree programs as an opportunity to introduce students to the main campus without overwhelming them with huge classes. Others, such as Loyola and Boston College, are keeping associate students separate to ease them into college life.
A student at Arrupe College gets ready for a test. Credit: Camilla Forte for The Hechinger Report
Boston College’s new Messina College will open to 100 students this summer on property it acquired from a college that closed, about a mile from the main campus. Messina College leaders hope the initial isolation will help avoid the culture shock of a large campus and keep students from dropping out.
“There’s a great advantage in having our students start off in that smaller setting,” said Erick Berrelleza, Messina’s founding dean.
While the concept of universities offering associate degrees is relatively new, some community colleges in 24 states have introduced bachelor’s degrees in a handful of disciplines in the past decade — an innovation universities haven’t always welcomed.
Before Idaho approved a plan in March for a community college to offer bachelor’s degrees, for instance, Boise State University argued against the proposal, essentially saying it would step on the university’s toes.
“Indeed, it could hurt effective and efficient postsecondary education in Idaho,” the university wrote to the state Board of Education, “cannibalizing limited resources available to postsecondary education and duplicating degree offerings in the same region.”
Community colleges have not yet voiced concerns about universities offering associate degrees, and the CCRC’s Jenkins said there’s little reason for community colleges to worry about these relatively small two-year programs. Still, he said, it will be important for universities to collaborate with community colleges.
Images of past graduates of Arrupe College line the hallways between classrooms in its downtown Chicago campus building. Credit: Camilla Forte for The Hechinger Report
“Where it’s been done well, there’s been negotiation,” he said. “I would hope this would encourage community colleges to partner with four-year institutions.”
Several four-year schools said they had not talked formally with community colleges before starting associate programs. That includes the University of Mount Saint Vincent, which will open its new two-year Seton College this summer on its campus in the Bronx.
A spokesman for Bronx Community College declined to answer questions about the Mount Saint Vincent program, while the borough’s other community college, Hostos, did not respond to interview requests.
In Minnesota, where University of St. Thomas opened its associate degree program in 2017, there has been no friction between the university and St. Paul College, the closest community college. St. Paul College leaders have been supportive of the initiative, said Austin Calhoun, a St. Paul spokesperson.
“That’s 200 more students in the Twin Cities per year getting access to higher education,” she said. Still, she added, “St. Thomas is definitely the outlier. If the University of Minnesota got in the game, that would be a different scale.”
Jonathan Larbi, a sophomore at Loyola College’s two-year arm, Arrupe College. Larbi plans to transfer to Loyola’s four-year campus and ultimately go to medical school to become a pediatrician. Credit: Camilla Forte for The Hechinger Report
Back at Arrupe College, second-year student Jonathan Larbi was splitting his time between school and a campus job in the admissions office while preparing to continue his education at Loyola next year. Larbi, who hopes to go to medical school and become a pediatrician, grew up in Chicago and Ghana and had planned to go to Loyola straight out of high school, “but it wasn’t the smartest financial decision.”
Starting at Arrupe has worked well, he said, since he feels like a Loyola student but doesn’t have to pay the university’s $50,000-plus tuition.
“It’s kind of the best of both worlds,” he said. “Their resources are our resources.”
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I grew up in extreme poverty. The ability to access a free, high-quality education in North Texas changed my life. I benefited greatly from the ways community colleges meet students where they are and wrap their arms around them. Classes were small, and I had a clear sense of belonging, despite being the first in my family to go to college.
I still remember having deep discussions with my English professor about author Larry McMurtry. I am a first-generation Latina from the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, where everyone looked and sounded like me. But this professor and I both loved McMurtry. It was the first time I connected with someone based on shared academic interests despite entirely different lived experiences.
I did not have the remediation needs or learning gaps that many of today’s pandemic students are experiencing, but I did need support and direction. The tiny community college I attended put me on a path toward a successful and purpose-driven life, and I’m grateful.
I believe that every community college, and every higher education institution, can do the same for their students — and in doing so, help close pandemic learning gaps. It starts with effective strategies and investment of resources.
However, it won’t be easy. Although enrollment at community colleges is on the rise after steep drops during the pandemic, these schools are facing more challenges than ever before. That’s largely due to the pandemic upending education as we knew it — including at San Jacinto College, where I serve on the board of trustees. Students are showing up with serious needs across academic and nonacademic areas, and community colleges, which are often under-resourced, aren’t always equipped to address them.
The pandemic led to sweepingachievement declines in core content areas, and recovery efforts have beenuneven and unfinished. Millions of students left high school with large knowledge and skill gaps that may negatively impact their futures, including their earning potential, according to forecasts by leading economists.
Students who learned virtually or in hybrid settings largely missed out on the critical thinking that develops through classroom conversations. Their teachers were focused on keeping them engaged in an online environment and on providing fundamental instruction. They missed hearing their peers and teachers reason, explain and express. This has made the transition to higher education that much more challenging.
To address such students’ needs, community colleges typically enroll them in noncredit, remedial or developmental classes so that they can gain and demonstrate proficiency in areas they didn’t master in K-12.
At the same time, community colleges are struggling to meet thegrowing mental health needs of today’s students. Past funding models created resource challenges in this area; during the pandemic, employee turnover rates created much higher than normal advisor-to-student ratios. Thankfully, many community colleges were able to bolster mental health support through pandemic relief funding, but we must invest in this critical area in more sustainable ways, such as by focusing on a holistic set of policies and practices that others might learn from.
Higher education also hasn’t mastered how to have important conversations with students about what’s going on in their lives. We have to know them better to effectively support them. Regular surveys and focus groups are essential, and we need to act on the information they provide.
Schools should do a basic needs assessment for each student —at least once a year. Schools that do not run a food pantry, a coat closet or a partnership with local shelters should start doing so. When students don’t have basic needs met, they are unable to focus on academics as much as other students can.
We also need better academic data on incoming students. Higher education and K-12 systems typically don’t collaborate, but we should have two-way conversations to ensure that we understand who is going to need developmental support in college and in which areas.
And finally, we should adjust our teaching practices to better support students. As a former developmental education faculty member, I always did a first-day writing assessment that allowed me to learn more about my students personally and about their writing strengths and weaknesses. To help students develop their writing, I also broke essay assignments into smaller pieces so students could get quicker feedback — and I could make quicker assessments of their needs.
That approach should be extended to other courses post pandemic. Providing college students with developmental coursework means creating and delivering compact and efficient lessons to help them fill their K-12 learning gaps. It also means dealing with insecurities about reading and writing deficiencies.
We also need to recognize that many college students are also working part-time jobs and being caregivers. Taking an empathetic stance is vital.
We must get students on their desired higher education pathway as quickly as possible, and avoid holding them in high-school level, remediation courses for extended periods.
In higher education today, a lot is happening to make school leaders feel both energized and daunted. But it’s vital that we focus on the most critical tasks before us. Community colleges must get to know and understand their students so they can meet their needs.
Michelle Cantú-Wilson is a member of the San Jacinto College Board of Trustees, where she previously served in faculty and administrative roles. She also serves on the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation’s Report Card.
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What makes a first-generation college student? Well, that depends on who’s doing the defining.
Yes, there’s the federal definition: a student is first-generation if neither parent has a bachelor’s degree.
Sounds simple enough. But it doesn’t account for those who had a highly educated parent who wasn’t involved in their lives, or those whose parent got a college degree in another country, with an academic system unlike ours, or those who have one degree-holding parent, but are being raised in a single-parent household.
Researchers argue that many students like these are still meaningfully less advantaged compared to students who have two parents with degrees. Despite the narrow federal definition, many believe these are students who need to be identified and given added resources and support both to get through the college application process and to thrive once they get on campus.
New research from Common App shows that expanding the definition of first-generation expands enrollment data, and thus can tell a different story about who is ready for college.
According to 2022 data from Common App, about 450,000 applicants that year met the federal definition, meaning that neither parent had a bachelor’s degree, including about 300,000 students whose parents had never attended any college. But if the definition is expanded to include applicants who had one parent with a bachelor’s degree, the population increases to more than 700,000. And, according to the report, changing that definition changes other things, too, such as college readiness, socioeconomic status and the number of colleges students apply to.
Brian Heseung Kim, director of data science, research and analytics at Common App, said there isn’t one right way to define first-generation students; the question should be, “What kind of disadvantage are we trying to measure?”
After the Supreme Court ruled against the consideration of race in college admissions last summer, Kim said he was interested in looking at many different aspects of diversity in college applicants, including first-generation status. He said this analysis might help colleges that want to understand the diversity of their applicants; how certain home contexts and hardships might affect how competitive students appear in the application process; and how to support students from all different backgrounds.
“It would be great if everyone could kind of align on one definition for first-generation, it’d be so wonderful if we had that clarity,” Kim said. “But the reality is that different contexts kind of require different identification methods.”
The Common App’s analysis shows that, depending on the definition, the percentage of students identified as being part of an underrepresented minority group can range from 45 percent (for those who have one parent who earned a bachelor’s degree) to 58 percent (for students whose parents did not attend any college). And the percentage of those students from low-income families varies from 48 percent (for students who have one parent who earned a bachelor’s degree) to 66 percent (for students whose parents did not attend any college).
Sarah E. Whitley, vice president of the Center for First-generation Student Success, said most colleges define first-generation students as those whose parents do not have bachelor’s degrees or those whose parents did not earn bachelor’s degrees in the United States. She said the center doesn’t use one universal definition, and instead works with colleges to identify the definition that makes the most sense for them.
Whitley said the purpose of identifying students as first-generation is to understand whether they have people in their family who can support them with college-going knowledge, but that’s often harder to determine than asking simply “Are you the first in your family to attend college?”
Whitley discourages college from using this language because students may not categorize themselves as first-generation if they had an aunt or uncle or older sibling who attended college. She said it’s better to ask specific questions about parental education, as Common App does, but it can still be difficult to capture everyone. For example, asking about the education of biological parents might not capture students who had a highly educated birth parent but were raised by a stepparent, she said, or students who were raised in a family with two moms or two dads.
The Common App research found that there could be more than 100 definitions, considering the different combinations of parents and caregivers, whether they attended college or graduated, what degree they and many more factors. The analysis considered eight definitions:
Neither parent earned a bachelor’s degree (the federal definition)
No bachelor’s degrees among living parents (to focus on those who can provide support to the student)
No bachelor’s degrees among caregivers (considers others in the household beyond biological parents, such as a stepparent)
No domestic bachelor’s degree among caregivers (because degrees from other countries may be less relevant in helping students in the U.S. higher education system)
No bachelor’s degrees earned by caregivers before the student was born (excludes those who earned degrees more recently and may not yet have “accrued some of the more socioeconomic benefits of a college degree,” according to the report)
No associate degrees, either parent
No college attendance, either parent
One parent earned a bachelor’s degree
Yolanda Watson-Spiva, president of the advocacy group Complete College America, said it’s also important to think about the social capital that students have if both their parents went to college, such as access to college alumni and professional networks. She said there are big differences in resources between students who have one parent who earned a bachelor’s degree and students whose parents, grandparents and great-grandparents all went to college.
It makes more sense to think of first-generation status as a spectrum, she said, rather than a yes or no question. Using only the federal definition of first-generation is too narrow and constrictive, she said.
Watson-Spiva’s mother earned a bachelor’s degree and her father went to community college, but one of her grandmothers only had an eighth grade education. She doesn’t identify as a first- generation student, but said she could imagine how someone in a similar situation might, even though they don’t meet the federal definition.
“Many of those folks still struggle,” she said. “There are still big variations between that person and a person who’s had like four generations of family members that are legacies, that went to college.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn't mean it's free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Editor’s note: This story led off this week’s Higher Education newsletter, which is delivered free to subscribers’ inboxes every other Thursday with trends and top stories about higher education.
Erika Turner and her husband have 11 children between them. Four of them are already in college, two are graduating from high school this spring, and her husband has gone back to school in pursuit of a bachelor’s degree.
“I have seven people depending on the results of their FAFSAs coming back,” said Turner, who lives in Cohutta, Georgia, near the Tennessee border. “That’s a lot of tuition to pay for – you know, financial aid never fully covers everything. You’ve got other expenses, like books, food and room and board and just things that come up during the year. So, as we think about budgeting for this next school year… I don’t like the unknown.”
The Education Department says that last year about 17.5 million people (both high schoolers and older students) completed the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA; so far this year, only about four million have successfully done so.
Turner and her family filled out the new version of the FAFSA in one marathon session in January. Because of the government’s delays in launching and in processing the forms, Turner’s family is among the many still waiting for their applications to be processed. Turner works as the head of human resources for a flooring manufacturer and her husband works as an environmental health and safety manager for a field turf company.
She hopes the returning college students in her family will eventually receive similar aid packages as they have in years past and will be able to persist uninterrupted. For the two children filling out the FAFSA for the first time, she is less certain. One son plans to attend a private liberal arts college in Georgia, Turner said, and the other is likely headed to technical school.
“Obviously, that’s not as much of a financial burden on us as a family, but it’s still money I don’t necessarily have set aside to pay for that,” Turner said. “We’re depending on Pell Grants and things like that to help close that gap.”
Turner’s family will also rely heavily on outside scholarships. That’s how she first got to know Stephanie Young, the director of scholarships at the Community Foundation of Greater Chattanooga.
Young focuses on helping students and families figure out how to pay for college. That’s a tough job in normal years, but it’s required a near-herculean lift this year because of the delays and the domino effect they are having on the rest of the process.
Colleges use the FAFSA to determine which grants and scholarships students are eligible for, but they won’t get that information until at least March, so award letters likely won’t go out until sometime in April. Colleges typically require students to confirm their enrollment by May 1, but because they will be so delayed in sending financial aid award information, scores of colleges are extending that deadline. Some are even devising their own forms to ask students directly for financial need data, hoping to give them at least some estimate of what aid to expect.
Students often rely partly on outside scholarships, but these scholarships, too, are often awarded based on student need, which is typically determined using the FAFSA.
Young manages many such scholarships and has had to quickly pivot from her normal timelines and procedures to meet the needs of scrambling students and families. Because of the delay in FAFSA forms becoming available, the application figures on some scholarships that require FAFSA information are down significantly.
One such scholarship that typically has about 100 applications by mid-February, this year had 12, Young said. She could see that about 200 applications for it were in the midst of being drafted, but she thinks students haven’t been able to submit them yet because their FAFSAs haven’t been processed yet. This scholarship typically opens its application process in November and closes it at the end of January. This year, it didn’t open until January, and it will remain open until at least March 2, Young said.
The delays could result in students walking across the stage at high school graduation (which in the South can be as early as the second week in May) not knowing whether they will be able to afford to attend the colleges they were admitted to.
“My concern is either students will make a snap decision, go to a school and then not be able to fully enroll because they don’t have enough finances to meet the need, or they may wait too late to decide and lose a spot,” Young said. “Will they be at the ones that are the right fit, that are the most affordable to them?”
Young is especially concerned about first-generation students and students from low-income families. Those parents, she said, “may not have the wherewithal to walk through this process with them. So a lot of it falls back on the schools trying to do that or myself in any way that I can jump in and help.”
Yolanda Watson Spiva, president of the advocacy group Complete College America, said she’s worried that the “domino effect” started by the delayed FAFSA is going to eventually affect college completion rates.
“The FAFSA has already been a very intimidating form and the process,” she said. “Even with FAFSA simplification efforts, we’re now seeing that the simplification is not all that simple.”
Because of the delays and glitches, fewer students have been filling out the FAFSA, Watson Spiva said. If fewer students apply for aid, fewer students have the opportunity to compare offers and select the best college for them, and, she suspects, fewer students will go to college.
She said that she’s been hearing from prospective college students that it just doesn’t seem worth the trouble, that waiting a year might be a better decision. But delaying college or taking a gap year makes people less likely to attend college, she said.
Advocates for higher education are perpetually trying to “convince folks that there is a value proposition to go into college,” she said, “This actually doesn’t help us to make our case, unfortunately.”
And there’s a risk for students who are already enrolled, too. Many students leave college because they can’t afford it, and if they can’t get timely information about their financial aid, she thinks it could prevent them from re-enrolling.
“Regardless of whether you’re a prospective student or a current student, college is not easily affordable,” Watson Spiva said. And for many families, “getting the financial aid award letter saying that you’ll have resources is really make or break.”
The pressure to figure it all out is weighing on Chattanooga native Maurquez Thompson, a first-year student at Stanford University.
Thompson, a first-generation college student, said he pays his tuition using a combination of grants and scholarships. He said he’s overwhelmed trying to keep up with all the requests for extra documentation from scholarship providers that are trying to sidestep the need for FAFSA data to determine awards for students. He knows Stanford meets full financial aid for its students, but the extra processes still add stress.
“If the first year of college was just like it is right now for the FAFSA, I think I’d be crying. It’s too much,” Thompson said. “I think the FAFSA right now is the hardest thing people are dealing with.”
This story about FAFSA changes was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.
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The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
This story was produced by The 19th and reprinted with permission.
In 2023, Diamond Harriel was looking to make a career switch. She had a 10-month-old daughter and had recently gone back to school for a business administration degree, hoping it could help her earn higher pay than the temporary administrative jobs she had been working.
One day, through a program that helps single moms, she saw a flier about a new city initiative in Rochester, Minnesota, that aimed to bring women of color into the construction workforce.
After learning more, Harriel enrolled into a trades readiness training program that taught the ins and outs of construction, from how to read a blueprint, to operating different tools and basic safety. The program exposed her to the possibilities within the construction world: building inspections, project management, apprenticeships in skilled trades like plumbing and electricity.
The city initiative that guided Harriel through the training and helped set up the interview is called the Equity in the Built Environment program. It started in 2023 after Rochester Mayor Kim Norton won a $1 million grant from the Bloomberg Philanthropies Global Mayors Challenge.
When the 2020 recession hit, one thing had become apparent to Norton: Women of color were bearing the brunt of it. In Rochester, they already held some of the lowest paid jobs, and as the pandemic took hold, those positions disappeared in sectors like the service industry, which disproportionately employs women of color.
“Probably they struggled the most anyway,” Norton said. “But it was held up and in the sunlight during the pandemic in a way that it was so obvious you couldn’t ignore it.”
What her office realized is that there wasn’t a shortage of employment opportunities.
Rochester, with a population around 220,000, was halfway into a $585 million, 20-year funding initiative to build new infrastructure downtown. It was also home to the prestigious Mayo Clinic, which had just announced a $5 billion economic growth project.
All of that growth meant a lot of available construction jobs, which was facing a worker shortage. Could that problem be solved by diversifying the workforce?
“Our research showed that very few women are in construction and almost no women of color. We said, ‘Well, here’s an opportunity,’” Norton said. According to the city, women of color make up 13 percent of the city’s population but less than 1 percent work in the construction industry.
Over the past year the city has piloted Equity in the Built Environment to create a solution that could work for everyone — both the construction industry facing an employee shortage and the women they sought to help. If they are successful, they could be a model for other cities as construction projects boom across the country.
The pilot project consists of tackling the workforce challenge in three ways, said project manager Julie Brock: educating women and girls about the employment possibilities; training and recruitment for women of color; and addressing long-standing issues with discrimination and harassment in the industry.
First, program participants are set up with a career counselor with a local workforce development nonprofit, and then they enter either a trades readiness track, or an entrepreneurial track that helps women start their own construction businesses. Throughout that time they have access to wraparound services like child care and transportation to remove barriers to attending classes. For those looking for a job, the program works to place them at three different companies that are partners in the work. So far eight women have completed the program.
Explaining to women that there could be a job in the field that fits their interests and skills has been a challenge, Brock said. At first, women assumed that the only jobs available would be more around tradework. Now, the pilot program has framed conversations around the built environment, more broadly, with other career opportunities in health and safety inspections, interior design and project management among others.
“The mindset shift is you are not asking people to go on a construction crew to swing hammers,” Brock said. “If somebody wants to do that, that’s great. But there is amazing wealth to be made in the built environment.”
Trainee Diamond Harriel, who heard about the program through an organization that helps single mothers, participates in a trades readiness training. Credit: Courtney Perry/Bloomberg Philanthropies
Aaron Benike, vice president of operations at Benike Construction, one of the pilot’s partner companies, said that his company is doing whatever it can to attract a more diverse workforce. It’s what drew him to participating in this pilot.
With the industry currently going through a wave of retirements of its primarily White male workforce — nationwide 1 in 5 construction workers is 55 or older — he realized they need to be more intentional about outreach.
Out of over 200 employees, they have few women, and just one woman of color who currently works for the company.
“It’s just a segment of the population that for one reason or another isn’t part of the team,” Benike said. “For one reason or another they haven’t felt welcome or we haven’t reached out, it’s probably both.”
The construction industry as a whole does have a reputation for discrimination and harassment. A report released by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission last year found that women were often denied jobs or harassed and discriminated against on job sites in the construction industry.
Benike, who had the opportunity to talk with women interested in construction when the program was being designed, said it opened his eyes to things he’d never really thought about. For the women, he said, “safety meant safety from harassment … and that was a blind spot to me,” he said. “I’ve been on job sites my whole life and never experienced anything like that, but why would I, right?”
His company is currently undergoing training to obtain an Inclusive Workforce Employer Designation, a series of trainings focused on diversity, equity and inclusion, and a requirement to participate in the pilot. He hopes that job seekers will see that as a sign that his company is a safe space to work. The city’s pilot also has trained mentors at each company to work with women when they are hired to ensure a smooth transition into a new field.
Benike wants to convince more women to consider getting into the field. “The pay is good. The training is good. It’s safe and the pension is good,” he said.
In recent weeks the city has also launched public service announcements to bring more women into the pilot; now that it’s been running for over a year, organizers feel ready to scale up.
For Sara Tekle, a participant who did the entrepreneurial track, the pilot has helped her start a business in craft labor, doing the demoing and cleaning up for construction projects.
Tekle, who is originally from Eritrea, was working in nursing at the Mayo Clinic for years. She had already been doing side jobs with construction after taking on some remodeling at her own house.
But the program helped her build her website, start the process of getting her contractor license and register her business. She is now in a training that will help her place bids for construction work. She’s also been able to network with companies from the city’s pilot who could potentially contract with her company.
The Rochester City Council has adopted requirements that a certain number of women- and minority-owned businesses be involved in construction on city projects, which could help women like Tekle.
The program made Tekle feel more comfortable working in construction and supported in making a transition to running a company full-time, which she hopes to do in May when bidding season starts for construction work.
Tekle, who also works as a women’s advocate, said she’d like to encourage other women she knows to consider working in the built trades — eventually she hopes to be an employer.
“The construction industry is not engaging or welcoming to women,” she said. “When I start my own company, the biggest vision is to hire a woman.”
This story was produced by The 19th and reprinted with permission.
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The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Editor’s note: This story led off this week’s Higher Education newsletter, which is delivered free to subscribers’ inboxes every other Thursday with trends and top stories about higher education.
Dear Reader,
If my newsletter landed in your inbox, you care about college students. If you’re a person in the world, you know that mental health challenges are real. If you had any doubts, the response to Elmo’s “How is everyone doing?” should have cleared those right up.
So, I think I can safely conclude that we agree – college student mental health matters. Now what?
We’ve been writing about student mental health since the early days of The Hechinger Report, and more recently we’ve done our best to document the challenges students and educators faced throughout the pandemic.
Our colleagues across education journalism are pushing the conversation forward, too. The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote last week about tech companies attempting to fill the void of student need that can’t be met by college counseling centers. EdSource wrote about the way some colleges are taking advantage of their outdoor space to support student mental health. Inside Higher Ed has reported on college counseling centers facing increased demand for trauma counseling.
Clearly, stories of complex personal and community suffering are still out there, well beyond the worst of the pandemic years, and we think these stories are worth telling.
Data shows that current college students are struggling — roughly 40 percent of them experience some level of depression, and 36 percent screened positive for anxiety disorders, according to the 2022-2023 Healthy Minds Study, a study on college student mental health from the University of Michigan. Nearly half of the college students surveyed reported they had been diagnosed with a mental health disorder at some point in their lifetime.
And mental health concerns could act as an obstacle for students currently considering college. A new survey from the education consulting firm EAB found that 28 percent of high school students said that mental health concerns are a key reason they might postpone enrolling or opt out of college altogether. These concerns are more pronounced for students in certain underrepresented groups: More than half of transgender and nonbinary students reported feeling this way, one third of Black students, and 30 percent of Native American students.
Among the 6,330 high school students surveyed, 48 percent said that “stress and anxiety overshadow their college search and planning.”
The mental health needs of college students are clearly immense. They may also be changing. How is the world of higher education adapting to meet these needs?
Help us decide what to write about next. Under the broad umbrella of college students’ mental health, what are you curious about? What worries you? What gives you hope? Email me and share your thoughts.
I can’t wait to hear from you. Thank you,
Olivia
If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline 988 and the Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741 — are free, 24-hour services that can provide support, information and resources.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
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Education and education access are directly connected to economic growth. Despite the dysfunction in Congress, especially over border issues and foreign aid, there are key education bills that can provide not only solutions for the issues they address but also models for getting things done across a range of other issues.
Two pieces of legislation that could improve our economic future by advancing education and workforce development passed the Committee on Education and the Workforce a few weeks ago with broad and bipartisan support, demonstrating that consensus is not only possible and practical but achievable.
The success of these bipartisan solutions could break down walls of division and better the lives of our nation’s students while bolstering our cities’ economies.
In mid-December, the committee approved the Bipartisan Workforce Pell Act, with support from both Republican Chairwoman Virginia Foxx and ranking Democratic member Bobby Scott, who co-sponsored the legislation.
The bill would expand Pell Grants to provide needed tuition assistance for short-term education and training directly linked to career opportunities, easing the costs of attaining the education and skills that all students, and especially low-income students, desperately need.
The bill would also fund access to online learning, further cutting costs and making education more flexible and accessible. A vast array of students across red and blue states would benefit from the bill’s commonsense approach, as would our community colleges, employers and, by extension, all Americans.
That same House Committee voted, a bit earlier, also with bipartisan support, to reauthorize the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. This legislation includes federal funding to support education and skills-based training directly connected to career opportunities and economic success.
This too will directly impact our nation’s community colleges, which are the key engines of economic mobility.
Under the bill, existing Labor Department funding could be repurposed to provide eligible workers with individual, customized education and training accounts, leading to improved career opportunities.
The bill would also specifically address the education and training needs of our incarcerated youth by providing them with the education and skills needed to ease their transition into a stable future. And it would add accountability provisions to ensure that spending for education will lead to concrete job growth. Like the Pell legislation, the bill has broad support among education and business leaders.
Passing short-term Pell along with passing workforce and education legislation would provide a clear pathway from high schools to colleges and careers, ensuring a brighter future for millions of students across the nation.
Both pieces of legislation could potentially pass the House and the Senate and be signed into law early in the New Year.
Smart investments in Education can be both the answer to governmental gridlock and spur economic progress.
Of course, as is usually the case with legislation that clears committee hurdles, the bills contain small flaws that demand fixes.
For example, in the Pell bill, one item that could derail passage in the full House and Senate and set back the nation’s commitment to social mobility for students is a provision calling for a reduction in student loan eligibility for students at some of the most selective colleges. Another flaw is that the legislation could open the door to abuse by predatory for-profit colleges. These parts of the plan can easily be fixed to ensure passage.
Passing short-term Pell and workforce and education legislation would provide a clear pathway from high schools to colleges and careers, ensuring a brighter future for millions of students across the nation.
We’ve seen bipartisan support deliver dynamic education and economic growth before, most recently when Democrats and Republicans in both the House and the Senate united behind Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer’s CHIPS and Science Act.
That act mobilized efforts to restore American leadership in the semiconductor industry while creating good-paying jobs and reducing the cost of automobiles, refrigerators and computers.
The CHIPS and Science Act, with bipartisan support, also included a huge investment in education research, and became a model for the progress that can be achieved when parties come together to better the lives of the people.
Now is the time for more bipartisan progress. Passage of these two critical education bills would be a fine start, fueling job creation and bettering the skills and future incomes of our nation’s students, who need our support now more than ever. And the bills’ passage would provide a model for how to eliminate gridlock and address our core economic challenges in a positive manner.
Most polling suggests that the top-of-mind topics for most Americans are the proverbial “kitchen table issues,” led by the economy and its effect on working-class Americans.
These bills address those issues. Americans with the education and skills to be employed in growing industries will earn higher wages, and the increased tax revenues from those wages will support our nation’s schools at all levels. And these bills’ prioritization of our community colleges will help them become an even stronger engine for jump-starting and sustaining America’s growth.
In recent years, it’s begun to seem that dysfunction is the one thing that Washington can be reliably counted on to provide. But let’s not simply accept that Congress can no longer come together to support initiatives that meet our needs and provide enhanced opportunities.
For many years, education issues have divided Americans; these core education bills can unite us. They deserve prompt action.
Stanley Litow served as deputy chancellor of schools for New York City and as president of the IBM Foundation. He now serves as adjunct professor at Columbia University and as trustee of the State University of New York where he chairs the Academic Affairs Committee.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn't mean it's free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Editor’s note: This story led off this week’s Higher Education newsletter, which is delivered free to subscribers’ inboxes every other Thursday with trends and top stories about higher education.
Dear Reader,
Saying it’s been a wild year in higher education news seems like the understatement of the century. (I think even non-education nerds would agree!) Thank you for sticking with The Hechinger Report as we tried to make sense of it all.
The court ultimately ruled against student loan forgiveness and against the consideration of race in college admissions.
Shortly thereafter, led by Jon Marcus and Fazil Khan, our team began working on The College Welcome Guide, a tool that helps students and families go beyond the rankings and understand what their life might be like on any four-year college campus in America. Jon’s reporting made it clear that the culture wars are beginning to affect where students go to college, and we wanted to help ensure people had the many types of information they needed to make the best choice, regardless of who they are or what their political orientation is.
In 2024, we will continue to cover equity and innovation in higher education with nuance, care and a critical eye. Is there a story you think we should cover? Reply to this email to let us know.
For now, we hope you have a warm and restful break. See you in the new year.
Olivia
P.S. As a nonprofit news outlet, The Hechinger Report relies on readers like you to support our journalism. If you want to ensure our coverage in 2024 is as extensive and deeply reported as possible, please consider donating.
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The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
WILMINGTON, Del. – A wall of the Rodriguez family home celebrates three seminal events with these words: “A moment in time, changed forever.”
Beneath the inscription, a clock marks the time and dates when three swaddled newborns depicted in large photos entered the world: Ashley, now 19, Emily, 17, and Brianna, 11.
Another“moment in time” occurred last June, one that could change the paths of Emily and Brianna. That’s when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in its landmark case on affirmative action, barring colleges from taking race into consideration as a factor in admission decisions.
The ruling struck down more than 50 years of legal precedent, creating newfound uncertainty for the first class of college applicants to be shaped by the decision – especially for Black and Hispanic students hoping to get into highly competitive colleges that once sought them out.
The Rodriguez family at their home in Wilmington, Delaware, left to right: Mom Margarita, middle daughter Emily, youngest Brianna, father Rafael, with their college adviser, Atnre Alleyne. Credit: Liz Willen/The Hechinger Report
It also places the Rodriguez sisters on opposite sides of history: Ashley applied to college when schools in many states could still consider race, while Emily can expect no such advantage.
Their parents, Margarita Lopez, 38, and Rafael Rodriguez, 42, are immigrants from Mexico who moved to the United States as teenagers.
Ashley is the first in her family to attend college, a freshman studying child psychology on a full scholarship to prestigious Oxford College of Emory University, where annual estimated costs approached $80,000 this year.
Affirmative Action ends
While affirmative action made strides in increasing diversity on college campuses, it fell far short of meeting its intended goals. And now that it’s been struck down, CBS Reports teamed up with independent journalist Soledad O’Brien and The Hechinger Report to examine the fog of uncertainty for students and administrators who say the decision threatens to unravel decades of progress.
Emily is the middle daughter, a senior and mostly straight-A student at Conrad Schools of Science in Wilmington who wants to become a veterinarian, and who spent most of this fall anxiously awaiting word from her first-choice college, Cornell University.
The impact of the court’s decision on enrollment at hundreds of selective colleges and universities won’t start to become clear until colleges send out offers this spring and release final acceptance figures.
“We definitely feel that this year, the window is narrower for students whose GPA does not tell the full story of their brilliance and the challenges they’ve overcome.”
TeenSHARP co-founder Atnre Alleyne
But many students, counselors and families view this admission cycle as the first test of whether colleges will become less diverse going forward, while cautioning it may take years before a clear pattern emerges. The Hechinger Report contacted more than 40 selective colleges and universities asking for the racial breakdown of those who applied for early decision and were accepted this year.
About half the institutions responded and none provided the requested information. Several said that they would not have such data available even internally until after the admissions cycle wraps up next year. Some have cited advice from legal counsel in declining to release the racial and ethnic composition for the class of 2028.
For the Rodriguez family, higher education has already become a symbol of upward mobility, a life-altering path to meaningful careers and the sort of financial stability that Margarita and Rafael have never known.
College wasn’t a part of their culture, and before last year Rafael and Margarita had no idea how complicated and competitive the landscape would be for their bright, hardworking daughters. Of all U.S. racial or ethnic groups, Hispanic Americans are the least likely to hold a college degree.
“I never even dreamed about a place like Emory, or about all the schools that have really good financial aid,” Margarita said recently. She wouldn’t have looked beyond the local community college and state universities for her daughters if she hadn’t learned about TeenSHARP, a nonprofit that prepares high-performing students from underrepresented backgrounds for higher education.
She immediately signed up Ashley, and later, Emily.
TeenSHARP co-founder Atnre Alleyne, with his wife, Tatiana Poladko, and team of advisers, guided Ashley and Emily through their high school course selection and college essays, while pointing out leadership opportunities and colleges with good track records of offering scholarships.
Emory is one. The school admitted no Black students until 1963, but has aggressively recruited students from underrepresented backgrounds in recent years. Hispanic enrollment had been growing before the Supreme Court’s decision, from 7.5 percent in 2017 to 9.2 percent in 2021. Ashley’s class at Oxford is 15 percent Hispanic.
“I felt like I was right at home here,” Ashley said, shortly after arriving in August. The entire Rodriguez family dropped her off and stayed for a few days until she was settled. “It felt very homey to me,” she said. “Everybody is so welcoming.”
The entire Rodriguez family dropped Ashley Rodriguez off for her freshman year at Emory University’s Oxford College this fall. Credit: Image provided by Emily Rodriguez
Still, Ashley worried about her grades as she adjusted to her new workload. She fielded constant texts and calls from her family, who were adjusting to having her away from home for the first time.
Emily missed her sister terribly – together they’d started their high school’s club for first-generation scholars, helping others navigate college choices. “She has the brain and I like to talk,” Emily joked.
This fall, Emily set her sights on some of the most selective colleges in the country, many of which had terrible track records on diversity even before the Supreme Court’s decision. She approached her search knowing that she was unlikely to get any boost based on her ethnicity.
That makes her angry.
“We have so much history behind us as people of color,” Emily said. “So why would we be put at the same level as somebody whose family has benefited off of the harm done to communities of color?”
Emily also knew she would need a hefty scholarship to attend one of her dream schools; her family can’t afford the tuition, and they’ve been loath to saddle their daughters with loans.
“I don’t think it’s a bad thing if poor whites now benefit from affirmative action.”
Richard Kahlenberg, an author and scholar at Georgetown University
Elite schools like those on Ashley and Emily’s lists are more likely to be filled with wealthy students: Families from the top 0.1 percent are more than twice as likely to get in as other applicants with the same test scores. But such schools also offer the most generous scholarship and aid packages, and Emily and Ashley believed they presented the best shot at a different life from their parents’.
“Ever since I was little, I knew that college was the ticket to break this cycle our family has been in for generations and generations, of not knowing, of not being educated,” Emily said. “And because of that, having to work with their backs instead of their brains.”
That the Rodriguez sisters could even consider top-tier colleges is a credit to their mother.
“I want them to have the opportunity I never had,” Margarita said. “I know that life after education will be easier for them. I don’t want them to be working 12, 14 hours like their dad did.”
Rafael Rodriguez has always worked: first, with livestock as a child in central Mexico and later, in Florida, on an orange farm until the age of 15, with a residential permit. His earnings went toward helping the rest of the family come to the United States and settle in West Grove, Pennsylvania.
Rafael didn’t attend high school because he had to help support his parents and sisters. He now owns a trucking company.
Margarita desperately wanted to go to college, but said her mother did not believe in taking out loans for higher education and refused to sign her financial aid forms.
Instead, she married Rafael a few days after graduating from high school and had Ashley a year later. Emily was born 17 months later. Margarita was thinking of enrolling in community college until Brianna came along six years later. She now helps Rafael with his trucking business while working as a translator.
Ashley Rodriguez fields calls, Facetime requests and texts from her family while settling in as a freshman at Oxford College of Emory University in Georgia. Credit: Image provided by Emily Rodriguez
Both sisters are keenly aware of the gulf between their lives and their mom’s. In her college essay, Ashley described being “a daughter of two immigrant parents who undertook a dangerous journey from their native Guanajuato, Mexico, to America.”
Emily wrote about how Margarita had violated “every norm of our Mexican community, allowing me to sacrifice my time with family on weekends and in the summer” to attend Saturday leadership trainings with TeenSHARP, as well as college-level courses in epidemiology and health sciences at Brown, Cornell and the University of Delaware.
The pressure Emily feels is both formidable and familiar to the immigrant experience, magnified by the divisive court decision.
Hamza Parker, a senior at Smyrna High School in Delaware, feels it as well. He was at first unsure of whether or not to write about race in his essay, a debate many students have been having.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority decision that race could be invoked only within the context of the applicant’s life story, leaving it up to students to decide if they would use their essays to discuss their race.
Meanwhile, conservative activist Edward Blum, who helped bring the case before the court, has threatened more lawsuits and said he would challenge essays “used to ascertain or provide a benefit based on the applicant’s race.”
“I never even dreamed about a place like Emory, or about all the schools that have really good financial aid.”
Margarita Rodriguez, mother
Hamza wavered at first, then rewrote his essay to describe his family’s move to the United States from Saudi Arabia in sixth grade and the racism he subsequently experienced. He applied early decision to Union College in upstate New York; earlier this month, he learned via email that he did not get in.
Neither Hamza nor his father, Timothy Parker, an engineer, know why, or what role affirmative action played in Union’s decision: Rejections never come with explanations.
Parker hopes his son will now consider an HBCU like the one he attended, Hampton University, in Virginia. He worries that if Hamza ends up at a school where he is clearly in the minority, he could be made to feel as though he doesn’t belong.
“I’m letting it be his choice,” Parker said, noting that Hamza might also feel more comfortable at an HBCU given the nation’s divisive political climate. With the end of affirmative action, he added, “It feels like we are going backwards not forward.”
HBCUs are becoming more competitive after the court’s decision. Chelsea Holley, director of admissions at Spelman College in Atlanta, said Black high schoolers may be choosing HBCUs because they fear further assaults on diversity and inclusion and believe they’ll feel more comfortable on predominantly Black campuses.
Parker is now finishing his applications to Denison University, the University of Maryland, the University of Delaware, and Carleton College. He’s not sure if Hampton will be on his list.
Alleyne, Hamza’s adviser, said that while they will never know if the court’s decision had any impact on Hamza’s rejection from Union, he’s concerned about what it portends for other TeenSHARP seniors.
“We have so much history behind us as people of color. So why would we be put at the same level as somebody whose family has benefited off of the harm done to communities of color?”
Emily Rodriguez, high school senior
“There are so many factors at play with every application,” Alleyne said. “We definitely feel that this year, the window is narrower for students whose GPA does not tell the full story of their brilliance and the challenges they’ve overcome.”
Alleyne is also concerned that scholarships once available for students like Parker are disappearing. Some of the race-based scholarships his students applied for in past years are no longer listed on college websites, he said.
At the same time, there are plenty who believe that the court’s decision was a much-needed correction, including Richard Kahlenberg, an author and scholar at Georgetown University who testified in the case. He argues that the ban will lead to a fairer landscape for low-income students for all races.
Kahlenberg is in favor of using affirmative action based on class instead of race. “I don’t think it’s a bad thing if poor whites now benefit from affirmative action,” Kahlenberg said.
For the Rodriguez family, Cornell’s early decision announcement was long anticipated, to be marked on the magnetic calendar attached to their refrigerator as soon as they knew it. Ashley would be home from Emory for winter break and would hear the news alongside her sister.
For weeks, the family had prepared themselves for bad news: Cornell had announced it was limiting the number of students it would accept early decision, in what the university said was “an effort to increase equity in the admissions process.”
Still, Emily had spent a summer studying at Cornell and gotten to know some faculty and advisers there. She had fallen in love with the animal science program, and the lively upstate New York college town of Ithaca, set amid stunning gorges and waterfalls.
Rafael Rodriguez, affectionately known as “Papa Bear,” keeps a close eye on the jam-packed family calendar. Credit: Liz Willen/The Hechinger Report
“Let’s go, let’s go!” Rafael said as they huddled together in front of Emily’s laptop. Emily wore a white t-shirt with “Cornell” emblazoned in bold red letters on the front, for good luck. She wavered, then clicked.
“Congratulations, you have been admitted to the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences: College major: Animal Science at Cornell University for the fall of 2024. Welcome to the Cornell community!” said the email on her screen, adorned with red confetti.Annual estimated costs for next year would be $92,682 – but Cornell pledged to meet all of it.
Emily screamed, and the room erupted in cheers. Every member of the family began sobbing. Cinnamon, the family’s three-year-old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, barked wildly.
Emily jumped up and down. “Ivy League!” she shouted. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. I did it.”
Brianna, a sixth grader who will work with TeenSHARP once she’s in high school, hugged both of her sisters.
It will be her turn next.
Additional reporting was contributed by Sarah Butrymowicz.
This story about the end of affirmative action is the second in a series of articles accompanying a documentary produced by The Hechinger Reportin partnership with Soledad O’Brien Productions, about the impact of the Supreme Court ruling on race-based affirmative action.Hechinger is a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
The recent rise of ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence tools has inspired growing anxiety on college campuses while fueling a national conversation about faculty attempts to thwart students from using the tools to cheat.
But that prevalent narrative around AI and cheating is overshadowing the technology’s true potential: Artificial intelligence holds great promise for dramatically enhancing the reach and impact of postsecondary institutions and improving outcomes for all students.
Last month, President Biden issued a sweeping executive order aimed at better mitigating the risks and harnessing the power of artificial intelligence, while also arguing for the need to “shape AI’s potential to transform education by creating resources to support educators deploying AI-enabled educational tools.”
Biden’s call to action could not have been more timely.
The question now is not whether generative AI can positively transform educational access and attainment, but whether higher education is ready to truly democratize and personalize learning with these tools.
AI’s transformational potential is perhaps greatest at community colleges, minority-serving institutions and open-access universities. These schools’ diversity necessitates a broader set of supports. Dedicated faculty and staff not only serve a very broad range of students — including first-generation and low-income learners, returning adults, those for whom English is a second language and those balancing academic pursuits with family and work responsibilities — but they do so with fewer resources than instructors at elite and flagship institutions. Generative AI tools can augment critically needed services such as advisers, tutors and coaches.
Exploring the possibilities of AI is not cheap, however. While some low-cost or free tools can make a difference, the largest impacts will be achieved through more advanced — and costly — tools that are developed with specific learner populations in mind and blend academic material with students’ sociocultural and language contexts rather than providing generic solutions.
Challenges around cost and availability could further disenfranchise the very learners who could gain the most from AI tools by denying them access to the experts, resources and development opportunities they need to benefit from them. Institutions may struggle to bring the true power of AI to bear on addressing their students’ needs.
Similarly, too often, the datasets and algorithms behind AI tools reflect historical inaccuracies and intrinsic biases that only further disenfranchise learners. This will continue to be the case until we collectively confront the inequitable ways that AI systems are designed and resources are distributed.
That’s why we need to think about AI differently, shifting our focus from debates about academic integrity and concerns about cheating to how we can leverage artificial intelligence in equitable ways that will boost college completion for all students.
Let’s focus on how AI advances could provide all learners with the kinds of high-touch support already offered to students who attend wealthier institutions. AI tools could have a transformative effect on access, progression and completion for learners who were previously constrained by limitations of time, space and resources.
Imagine if generative AI tutors could provide 24/7 individualized support, along with AI-powered virtual reality tools that would widen access to experiential learning opportunities. What about having adaptive learning tools enabling students to learn at a pace that best suits their level of preparation? And personalized learning materials that reflect their backgrounds and lived experiences?
A technology that has incredible potential to help expand access to the many benefits of higher education should not become a mechanism through which inequity is exacerbated.
Such steps could augment engagement and outreach efforts to lower the barriers that prevent students from underserved communities from earning degrees.
This is not a speculative vision of a not-too-distant future, but an emerging reality on some campuses. Arizona State University, for example, has assembled a team of engineers and data scientists to develop AI tools to enhance learning and improve student outcomes.
For now, such experimentation is limited to colleges and universities with the resources for scaling the benefits of the technology and developing the guardrails necessary for mitigating risks to learners.
According to a new report from the Brookings Institution, many of the nation’s most selective and affluent colleges and universities are clustered in the same coastal metro areas long home to Big Tech — and now to AI innovation and job growth.
That’s unfortunate. Access to new technology — and the ability to play a role in shaping its design — should not be limited by geography or institutional type. A technology that has incredible potential to help expand access to the many benefits of higher education should not become a mechanism through which inequity is exacerbated.
That’s why the newly convened Complete College America Council on Equitable AI plans to bring together organizations representing over 1,000 access-focused two-year and four-year colleges and universities in January. We hope to influence and initiate policies and practices to encourage equitable engagement of AI technologies.
We hope that college leaders, policymakers and technologists will join us to make sure that AI helps to realize, rather than hinder, higher education’s promise as an engine of equity, prosperity and hope.
Yolanda Watson Spiva is president of Complete College America.
Vistasp M. Karbhari is a professor of engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he also served as president from 2013 to 2020, and is a fellow and board member of Complete College America.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
