President Donald Trump wants to collect more admissions data from colleges and universities to make sure they’re complying with a 2023 Supreme Court decision that ended race-conscious affirmative action. And he wants that data now.
But data experts and higher education scholars warn that any new admissions data is likely to be inaccurate, impossible to interpret and ultimately misused by policymakers. That’s because Trump’s own policies have left the statistics agency inside the Education Department with a skeleton staff and not enough money, expertise or time to create this new dataset.
The department already collects data on enrollment from every institution of higher education that participates in the federal student loan program. The results are reported through the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). But in an Aug. 7 memorandum, Trump directed the Education Department, which he sought to close in March, to expand that task andprovide “transparency” into how some 1,700 colleges that do not admit everyone are making their admissions decisions. And he gave Education Secretary Linda McMahon just 120 days to get it done.
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Expanding data collection on applicants is not a new idea. The Biden administration had already ordered colleges to start reporting race and ethnicity data to the department this fall in order to track changes in diversity in postsecondary education. But in a separate memorandum to the head of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), McMahon asked for even more information, including high school grades and college entrance exam scores, all broken down by race and gender.
Bryan Cook, director of higher education policy at the Urban Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C., called the 120-day timeline “preposterous” because of the enormous technical challenges. For example, IPEDS has never collected high school GPAs. Some schools use a weighted 5.0 scale, giving extra points for advanced classes, and others use an unweighted 4.0 scale, which makes comparisons messy. Other issues are equally thorny. Many schools no longer require applicants to report standardized test scores and some no longer ask them about race so the data that Trump wants doesn’t exist for those colleges.
“You’ve got this effort to add these elements without a mechanism with which to vet the new variables, as well as a system for ensuring their proper implementation,” said Cook. “You would almost think that whoever implemented this didn’t know what they were doing.”
Cook has helped advise the Education Department on the IPEDS data collection for 20 years and served on technical review panels, which are normally convened first to recommend changes to the data collection. Those panels were disbanded earlier this year, and there isn’t one set up to vet Trump’s new admissions data proposal.
Cook and other data experts can’t figure out how a decimated education statistics agency could take on this task. All six NCES employees who were involved in IPEDS data collection were fired in March, and there are only three employees left out of 100 at NCES, which is run by an acting commissioner who also has several other jobs.
An Education Department official, who did not want to be named, denied that no one left inside the Education Department has IPEDS experience. The official said that staff inside the office of the chief data officer, which is separate from the statistics agency, have a “deep familiarity with IPEDS data, its collection and use.” Former Education Department employees told me that some of these employees have experience in analyzing the data, but not in collecting it.
In the past, there were as many as a dozen employees who worked closely with RTI International, a scientific research institute, which handles most of the IPEDS data collection work.
Technical review eliminated
Of particular concern is that RTI’s $10 million annual contract to conduct the data collection had been slashed approximately in half by the Department of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE, according to two former employees, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation. Those severe budget cuts eliminated the technical review panels that vet proposed changes to IPEDS, and ended training for colleges and universities to submit data properly, which helped with data quality. RTI did not respond to my request to confirm the cuts or answer questions about the challenges it will face in expanding its work on a reduced budget and staffing.
The Education Department did not deny that the IPEDS budget had been cut in half. “The RTI contract is focused on the most mission-critical IPEDS activities,” the Education Department official said. “The contract continues to include at least one task under which a technical review panel can be convened.”
Additional elements of the IPEDS data collection have also been reduced, including a contract to check data quality.
Last week, the scope of the new task became more apparent. On Aug. 13, the administration released more details about the new admissions data it wants, describing how the Education Department is attempting to add a whole new survey to IPEDS, called the Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement (ACTS), which will disaggregate all admissions data and most student outcome and financial aid data by race and gender. College will have to report on both undergraduate and graduate school admissions. The public has 60 days to comment, and the administration wants colleges to start reporting this data this fall.
Complex collection
Christine Keller, executive director of theAssociation for Institutional Research, a trade group of higher education officials who collect and analyze data, called the new survey “one of the most complex IPEDS collections ever attempted.”
Traditionally, it has taken years to make much smaller changes to IPEDS, and universities are given a year to start collecting the new data before they are required to submit it. (Roughly 6,000 colleges, universities and vocational schools are required to submit data to IPEDS as a condition for their students to take out federal student loans or receive federal Pell Grants. Failure to comply results in fines and the threat of losing access to federal student aid.)
Normally, the Education Department would reveal screenshots of data fields, showing what colleges would need to enter into the IPEDS computer system. But the department has not done that, and several of the data descriptions are ambiguous. For example, colleges will have to report test scores and GPA by quintile, broken down by race and ethnicity and gender. One interpretation is that a college would have to say how many Black male applicants, for example, scored above the 80th percentile on the SAT or the ACT. Another interpretation is that colleges would need to report the average SAT or ACT score of the top 20 percent of Black male applicants.
The Association for Institutional Research used to train college administrators on how to collect and submit data correctly and sort through confusing details — until DOGE eliminated that training. “The absence of comprehensive, federally funded training will only increase institutional burden and risk to data quality,” Keller said. Keller’s organization is now dipping into its own budget to offer a small amount of free IPEDS training to universities.
The Education Department is also requiring colleges to report five years of historical admissions data, broken down into numerous subcategories. Institutions have never been asked to keep data on applicants who didn’t enroll.
“It’s incredible they’re asking for five years of prior data,” said Jordan Matsudaira, an economist at American University who worked on education policy in the Biden and Obama administrations. “That will be square in the pandemic years when no one was reporting test scores.”
‘Misleading results’
Matsudaira explained that IPEDS had considered asking colleges for more academic data by race and ethnicity in the past and the Education Department ultimately rejected the proposal. One concern is that slicing and dicing the data into smaller and smaller buckets would mean that there would be too few students and the data would have to be suppressed to protect student privacy. For example, if there were two Native American men in the top 20 percent of SAT scores at one college, many people might be able to guess who they were. And a large amount of suppressed data would make the whole collection less useful.
Also, small numbers can lead to wacky results. For example, a small college could have only two Hispanic male applicants with very high SAT scores. If both were accepted, that’s a 100 percent admittance rate. If only 200 white women out of 400 with the same test scores were accepted, that would be only a 50 percent admittance rate. On the surface, that can look like both racial and gender discrimination. But it could have been a fluke. Perhaps both of those Hispanic men were athletes and musicians. The following year, the school might reject two different Hispanic male applicants with high test scores but without such impressive extracurriculars. The admissions rate for Hispanic males with high test scores would drop to zero. “You end up with misleading results,” said Matsudaira.
Reporting average test scores by race is another big worry. “It feels like a trap to me,” said Matsudaira. “That is mechanically going to give the administration the pretense of claiming that there’s lower standards of admission for Black students relative to white students when you know that’s not at all a correct inference.”
The statistical issue is that there are more Asian and white students at the very high end of the SAT score distribution, and all those perfect 1600s will pull the average up for these racial groups. (Just like a very tall person will skew the average height of a group.) Even if a college has a high test score threshold that it applies to all racial groups and no one below a 1400 is admitted, the average SAT score for Black students will still be lower than that of white students. (See graphic below.) The only way to avoid this is to purely admit by test score and take only the students with the highest scores. At some highly selective universities, there are enough applicants with a 1600 SAT to fill the entire class. But no institution fills its student body by test scores alone. That could mean overlooking applicants with the potential to be concert pianists, star soccer players or great writers.
The Average Score Trap
This graphic by Kirabo Jackson, an economist at Northwestern University, depicts the problem of measuring racial discrimination though average test scores. Even for a university that admits all students above a certain cut score, the average score of one racial group (red) will be higher than the average score of the other group (blue). Source: graphic posted on Bluesky Social by Josh Goodman
Admissions data is a highly charged political issue. The Biden administration originally spearheaded the collection of college admissions data by race and ethnicity. Democrats wanted to collect this data to show how the nation’s colleges and universities were becoming less diverse with the end of affirmative action. This data is slated to start this fall, following a full technical and procedural review.
Now the Trump administration is demanding what was already in the works, and adding a host of new data requirements — without following normal processes. And instead of tracking the declining diversity in higher education, Trump wants to use admissions data to threaten colleges and universities. If the new directive produces bad data that is easy to misinterpret, he may get his wish.
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There’s a lot to consider when deciding where to apply to college.
Tuition costs, financial aid offerings and student loans are high on the list, but so are questions about campus culture and free speech policies. We’ve created a whole suite of tools with brand new data that can answer your questions and help you research what life might be like at thousands of colleges and universities across the country.
Here is what these tools do and how they can help you.
Tuition Tracker shows the difference between a college’s “sticker price” and the actual cost of attending. With a bit of information about the college or colleges you’re interested in, the tool will show you what students who have a similar household income have paid for tuition in the past. Colleges and universities also can be compared based on graduation rate, which shows the likelihood of a student successfully completing their degree on time — a significant factor in affordability. Watch our video explainer on how to use Tuition Tracker.
The College Welcome Guide is a collection of interactive charts and maps that help you assess campus culture. They list the demographics of faculty and students, services for veterans or students with disabilities and more. The maps outline the state-level laws that might be most relevant to matriculating students, such as restrictions on teaching Critical Race Theory or laws permitting the use of student IDs when voting. The guide also allows you to compare the graduation rates of up to five schools at the same time. Watch our video explainer on how to use the College Welcome Guide.
The Offer Letter Decoder helps college applicants understand the financial aid offer letter they receive from a college or university. The tool scans this letter and identifies what portion of the aid offered is a grant or scholarship that doesn’t need to be paid back and what is a student loan, a debt that has to be paid back. The decoder also can highlight differences between subsidized and unsubsidized loans and identify work-study programs, which require students to take a job on campus. Watch our video explainer on how to use the Offer Letter Decoder.
The Hechinger Report created the College Closure Tracker to document the more than 800 colleges and universities which have closed since 2008. The data come from the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, which is updated periodically. And as an added bonus, read an interview with Jon Marcus, our senior higher education reporter, on how college applicants can gauge the financial health of schools where they may want to apply.
A Game of College is an interactive website that explains how students successfully move from high school to college. Play the role of a student and select from a variety of different income levels and demographics. Then, navigate your way through college as debt-free as possible. This game was created in collaboration with CalMatters.
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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.
Greater Boston – a region famous for its sheer number of colleges – is also home to an underground network that helps women get access to abortion pills.
Every week, a group including many Boston-area college and medical students meets to put together abortion pill “care packages” to send to women in states where abortion is illegal or restricted.
While the founders call them “pill-packing parties” the work is not without risk. Women in Texas, Mississippi and other states can be prosecuted for aborting a fetus.
College students have long been active in the abortion movement, but the activism looks very different today than it did in the 1960s. In this election season, College Uncovered takes you to a “pill-packing party” at an undisclosed location in Greater Boston and talks with college students mobilizing to help women get abortion medication wherever they live.
We also look at the re-energized anti-abortion movement in the wake of the Dobbs ruling two years ago and hear from a leader of the “pro-life generation.”
GBH’s Andrea Asuaje, senior producer for Under the Radar with Callie Crossley hosts this week’s episode, taking a deep dive into the sweeping ways medication abortion and the internet have changed college activism around reproductive rights.
[Kirk] Hey, everyone, It’s Kirk Carapezza at GBH News.
[Jon] And I’m Jon Marcus from The Hechinger Report.
Thanks for listening to another episode of College Uncovered. We’ve been diving into the politics of college this season. And this week we’re covering abortion.
[Kirk] So for this show, we’re handing the mic over to my colleague, senior producer Andrea Asuaje. Andrea, welcome to College Uncovered.
[Andrea] Hey, Kirk. Hey, Jon. Thanks for having me.
[Jon] Andrea, we’ll let you take it from here.
[Ambient sound] Well, wonderful. Thank you all so much for coming. I think we’re going to go ahead and get started.
[Andrea] In an undisclosed location in Massachusetts, a group of women — from college students in their early 20s to retirees in their mid-60s — sit around a large circular table. For the last year, they’ve been getting together to sit and chat and laugh while putting together special packages for recipients they don’t know and may never meet.
[Woman’s voice] After about six months of doing packing parties, we finally figured out a system that was efficient. And so we’re quite happy with our station system now.
[Andrea] This is a pill-packing party. An abortion pill-packing party.
We’re not going to tell you where this pill packing party is taking place, due to safety concerns, but it is in Greater Boston. Over the course of two hours, they will box up more than 300 packages of mifespristone and misoprostol, the two drugs used to induce abortions.
Then they mail the pills to people who requested them through a website staffed by clinicians. The patients may be from rural Mississippi or suburban Houston, Tennessee, Kentucky or Indiana. For as little as $5, they will send the pills to patients in any state, including where abortion is illegal, and including to college students across the country.
It’s risky work, especially since critics say these volunteers should be prosecuted for committing a crime across state lines. But that doesn’t stop most of the pill-packing volunteers, like Massachusetts college student Andy, who’s originally from Texas.
[Andy] No matter how many activities I’m involved in or what’s going on in my life, I know what we’re doing is so impactful and essential. I always felt very strongly about women’s reproductive health. And so, I mean, that’s why I keep doing it. I’m doing it for these women, for people who don’t have the income or the accessibility to abortion medication.
[Andrea] This is College Uncovered from GBH News and The Hechinger Report, a podcast pulling back the ivy to reveal how colleges really work and why it matters to you.
I’m Andrea Asuaje with GBH News. Cohosts Kirk Carapezza, my colleague at GBH, and Jon Marcus at the Hechinger Report will be back after the election with a special episode.
There’s a lot happening on college campuses that matters during this election season. We’re exploring how deeply politicized higher education has become and how students, families and administrators are responding.
Today on the show: “Abortion on the Ballot … and in the Mail.
So one of the top issues that is mobilizing college students in the upcoming election is abortion. A new generation is talking more openly about abortion, not because there’s less shame or stigma around it, but because recent court rulings, including at the highest level, the Supreme Court, have made it something students have to think about and plan for in a bigger and more personal way.
Women in their 20s account for more than half of abortions, or 57 percent, according to the CDC. Roe vs. Wade guaranteed the right to an abortion for 50 years. Then in the summer of 2022, the case Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a.k.a. the Dobbs decision, overturned Roe and threw the U.S. reproductive care system into a tailspin. Two years later, with the presidential election looming, abortion is top of mind for both college-age voters and the candidates.
Here’s Kamala Harris on the campaign trail.
[Kamala Harris] This is a healthcare crisis. This is a healthcare crisis. And Donald Trump is the architect of this crisis. He brags about overturning Roe vs. Wade. In his own words, quote, ‘I did it and I’m proud to have done it,’ he says.He is proud. Proud that women are dying. Proud that young women today have few more rights than their mothers and grandmothers.How dare he?
[Andrea] Here, in stark contrast is Donald Trump, referring to Kamala Harris and Tim Walz during their debate.
[Donald Trump] Her vice presidential pick says abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine. He also says execution after birth, it’s an execution. No longer abortion because the baby is born is okay. And that’s not okay with me.
[Andrea] Obviously untrue, by the way.
Massachusetts was the first of eight states to pass laws shielding abortion providers from criminal and civil liability, making it a safe haven for clinicians who provide telehealth services that help patients access abortions. Massachusetts, a state packed with colleges where women increasingly outnumber men, has become the home of a relatively underground network that’s helping people across the country get abortion care.
[Angel Foster] My name is Angel Foster. I am the cofounder of the Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project, or the MAP. And my big-girl job is that I’m a professor in the faculty of health sciences at the University of Ottawa.
[Andrea] Foster studied medication abortion for two decades in humanitarian settings in the global South. After graduating from Harvard Medical School, she lives in both Massachusetts and Canada, using what she learned as a researcher to help create the Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project, which we’ll just call the MAP from now on.
[Angel Foster] Even before the Dobbs decision in 2022, we know that access to abortion care in parts of the United States was horrible. It was hard to access abortion care in most of the South and a lot of the Midwest. And then with Dobbs, 14 states almost immediately banned abortion in almost all circumstances. We now have four states that ban abortion at early gestational ages. Obviously, the landscape keeps shifting. But suffice it to say, about a third of women of reproductive age in the United States now live in a part of the country with a very restrictive abortion law.
[Andrea] People hear that they can get abortion pills from the MAP by word of mouth on campus or on social media, like on Reddit. There’s a few rounds of online screening for medical eligibility that’s reviewed by a clinician, but no video or phone call is needed. Patients can get approval for pills in just a few hours.
[Angel Foster] And the abortion seeker receives information about what to do next, which is to make a payment. And then once we receive the payment, we shift the pills from our office.
[Andrea] The MAP employees and volunteers are the ones filling the orders for pills, and the MAP is a homespun operation. Angel jokingly calls it the Etsy of abortion, since the organization straddles the line between clinic and small business. And for the record, the Food and Drug Administration states that mifepristone the first pill in a medication abortion, is safer than some of the most commonly used medications in the country. The rate of death from mifepristone? Five in 1,000,000. For penicillin, it’s 20 deaths in a million. And for Viagra, it’s 49 in a million.
The MAP, which was founded in October 2023, has been helping hundreds of patients across the country, month after month, particularly low-income people in places where abortion is highly restricted or straight-up illegal. It’s a pay-what-you-can setup for patients. Some get the pills for as little as $5, even though it can cost up to $250.
[Angel Foster] And what we found in our first year was that a third of our patients paid $25 or less. In my mind’s eye, I imagine someone sitting at their kitchen table and kind of counting out pennies to say, ‘How much do I actually have?’
[Andrea] The MAP is able to provide care at these deeply discounted rates thanks to donors big and small and volunteers who gladly give their time. Then there are also the paid employees of the MAP who keep it running like me.
[Maeve] You know, I have a lot of, like, hopes and dreams for my own future. And I know that if I had a child now, that would definitely get in the way. And I think that’s the same way for a lot of women and a lot of people in general.
[Andrea] Maeve is one of three project managers at the MAP, all of whom are local college students.
[Maeve] I love children. I think they’re, you know, a blessing to the world. But, like, when you don’t want a child at that time, you shouldn’t have a child at that time.
[Andrea] Her work with the MAP is simple.
[Maeve] So I mostly do like the shipping. So I, like, will make the shipping labels on the USPS website and then put them on the packages. Take the packages to the … [fades out]
[Andrea] Yes, it may seem repetitive and, well, kind of boring to the rest of us, but Maeve feels that her work is tremendously important to the process.
[Maeve] I know that with every package I ship out, I’m helping someone and I’m, like, relieving an incredible amount of stress from someone’s life and, like, it’s just one package to me, technically, but like, for whoever is receiving it, it’s life changing.
[Andrea] And although she recognizes how essential the work is to MAP’s mission, there’s still a little space in her brain all the way deep down in the back where fear lies. It’s why only a few people in her life know about her involvement with the MAP.
[Maeve] I am, to an extent, putting myself at risk by working for the MAP, even though I’ve never, like, technically done anything illegal. And, like, everything we do is legal. A lot of people are not happy about it.
[Andrea] That sense of fear of potential repercussions isn’t paranoia. Despite Massachusetts being a shield-law state. While Angel, the founder of the MAP, says its strategy is legal, it also hasn’t been tested in the court system.
Then there’s the fact that 30 years ago, Brookline, Massachusetts, was the site of horrific attacks by John Salvi, who was fueled by anti-abortion sentiment. Salvi opened fire in a Planned Parenthood and then at a second clinic that performed abortions, killing two women and wounding five people. It’s the reason we’re keeping specific details about Maeve and the MAP private, because the work is risky. And that’s especially true for people who aren’t from shield-law states. That includes people like Andy, the student you heard from earlier.
[Andy] Going back to Texas, it reminds me how necessary this work is, because you cannot get an abortion in Texas, which is terrifying. And a third of our patients are from Texas, actually, or close to a third. So where I am from, we are literally helping so many women. Even, like, I’ve sent packages to somebody in my neighborhood, which is insane to me.
[Andrea] You heard her right. She sent packages to someone in her old neighborhood, where her parents live.
[Andy] You know, I was sitting in my chair looking at my computer in this office, and I was just taken aback by the gravity of the situation and what I was doing and the fact that it has reached literally to my hometown — like, in my neighborhood. And realizing that there are so many women out there who need our help.
[Andrea] The gravity of the situation is a mild way of putting it, when you look at how Texas has legally dealt with people seeking or somehow getting an abortion since the fall of Roe. In Texas two years ago, a 26-year-old woman who took medication for an unwanted pregnancy was charged with murder. The charge was eventually dropped, but now the woman is suing the district attorney for $1 million in damages.
These volunteers and employees with the MAP will probably never actually meet the people they’re helping. But project manager and Massachusetts college student Avery said they still feel connected to every patient who needs their help.
[Avery] I think I came back from, like, a break of some sort from school and I came back to the office and our boss had been here and she put up — Angel — she had put up a bunch of different, like, cards. We’d been sent just cards — like, people thanking us over and over again. And I remember coming in and being like, ‘My gosh.’
[Andrea] Avery, who’s originally from Pennsylvania, says living in Massachusetts means living in a place where most people her age in her classes and her friend group friends of friends, friends of friends of friends, most of them support abortion rights.
[Avery] I think a part of this is acknowledging that we do live in this blue bubble. And I think this work shows us that, like, what we believe, what the people in our geographic proximity believe, is not what the rest of the country believes.
[Andrea] Maeve and Andy and Avery spend hours working with the MAP each week, helping to keep it running while taking full course loads in college and being involved with various extracurricular activities. And they’re doing it with only a few loved ones actually knowing they’re a part of this network. It’s a lot of work.
[Avery] When the work gets stressful and the work gets hard, it’s, like, corny, but, like, I kind of just have to stop for a second and, like, think about, yeah, I’m clicking a lot of buttons and I’m running boxes to the post office. But this is going to have a real effect and it’s going to benefit so many women’s lives. And this is something that I should be grateful that I get the privilege to do every day.
[Andrea] Massachusetts has a unique role as a safe haven where people can come to get an abortion or abortion services or access doctors and get help remotely. And college students are active in the effort, if not leading it.
But the Dobbs ruling has also re-energized anti-abortion activists on campuses.
[Kristan Hawkins] Thank you all for coming to tonight’s event. My name is Sam Delmar. I’m the president of the Harvard Law Students for Life. And it’s my honor to introduce Kristan Hawkins.
[Andrea] Kristan Hawkins is the president of Students for Life of America, which has become the largest anti-abortion youth organization in the world under her leadership. The group says it has nearly 1,500 campus student groups dedicated to the anti-abortion cause, up from a few dozen 20 years ago. And Harvard is just one of her stops on a multi-year college speaking tour.
[Kristan Hawkins] I prepared a little with something because, you know, I’m at Harvard Law and you all tend to remind each other and others that you go to Harvard. So I was, like, I got to step up my game a little bit. I’m a bumpkin from West Virginia. I did want to go to law school until I met a bunch of lawyers. No offense.
[Andrea] Hawkins says she likes to argue and found her calling as an anti-abortion activist. She calls herself a Christian wife, mother and leader of the post-Roe generation, and she calls her website unapologetically pro-life. Hawkins tells the crowd that she had an abortion when she was 20 and suffered emotionally from it for decades as a result.
[Kristan Hawkins] I had an abortion. Abortion didn’t solve the problem I thought it was going to solve. It kept me in abusive relationship. It hurt my body. It’s made me infertile. I’ve been suffering from abortion for decades emotionally, because of that decision I made when I was 20 years old.
[Andrea] In her speech, Hawkins echoed the refrain of the anti-abortion movement around what she calls natural rights.
[Kristan Hawkins] Every single abortion is killing, ending the life of a unique whole living human being that never existed before and will never exist again. We in the pro-life movement see all human beings as equally valuable, deserving, at the very minimum, of those natural rights of the right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. Therefore, abortion is wrong.
[Andrea] But mostly, Hawkins encourages audience members who favor abortion rights to ask questions first. She regularly posts her exchanges with her opponents on TikTok, where she has 134,000 followers.
We reached out to Kristan Hawkins for an interview when she was in Boston, but we didn’t hear back from her scheduler.
If Hawkins came ready for a debate, that’s probably because surveys show that most women with some college education or a degree support abortion rights under most circumstances. Pew Research Center found that number is around 75 percent.
In all, about 70 people attended Hawkins’s event at Harvard. But there weren’t protests or open debate, only respectful applause and polite disagreement.
Recent polls have shown that students are increasingly ruling out colleges in states where they disagree with the state’s laws around abortion and reproductive rights.
[Harper Brannock] I have seen in the South increasing anti-abortion rhetoric, violence against women who are seeking health care. And I know people who have been shunned from their communities because they had a medically necessary abortion.
[Andrea] That’s Harper Brannock. She’s 21 and a junior from Huntsville, Alabama. She spoke to us at a recent Boston University event, a drag bingo night held to raise money for an abortion fund in Brannock’s home state of Alabama. Abortions are illegal, except in cases where the life of the mother is at stake. And that’s one of the reasons Harper decided to attend a college in Massachusetts.
[Harper Brannock] I felt that it was just really important to me to come to a place where if something happens to me, even sexual assault or something completely consensual and I just couldn’t have the child, I really feel like it’s important that I can have safe access to health care.
[Andrea] We were curious if these sentiments were shared by students who go to colleges with religious affiliations. So we sent our team out to Boston College, a Jesuit school, to talk to women on campus about the issue. Like other Catholic universities, the college health center doesn’t distribute birth control or refer women for abortions.
Here’s what some of those students had to say.
[Student 1] I kind of stayed away from, like, the southern schools, also because I really just like New England and I like the vibes, but thinking about like, how safe I feel as a woman and like how my choice is valued was, like, very important.
[Student 2] I think it’s telling that we have a pro-life club on campus, and just seeing it at, like, the club fair or things like that, especially my first year last year, was very shocking. And I didn’t really know how to process it. And at first when they came up to and were, like, ‘Do you want to know more about the pro-life club?’ I was, like, ‘No, not really.’
[Andrea] The students all agreed to speak to us without using their names due to privacy concerns. One BC sophomore told us that, yes, BC is a more conservative school known for its academics, but she’s made up her mind on who she’s going to cast her vote for on Nov. 5. And that’s Vice President Kamala Harris.
[Student 3] Yes, 100 percent. I mean, just as a young woman in general, I don’t think I could feel safe voting for somebody who didn’t want to ensure my rights to my own body. So, yeah.
[Andrea] So the abortion movement has been underway for almost two centuries, going all the way back to federal legislation around contraceptives in the mid-1800s and really heating up in the 1960s when the FDA approved the pill.
In many ways, the pill-packing parties and the MAP are the modern incarnation of the Jane Collective, an underground organization in Chicago in the 1960s and ’70s that helped women get abortions in the days before Roe. The Janes, the anonymous women behind the collective, were mostly college students and women in their 20s. And the collective itself was founded by then 19-year-old University of Chicago college student Heather Booth. The Janes eventually started performing abortions themselves, and by the time Roe passed in 1973, the Janes had arranged or performed more than 11,000 abortions.
The abortion movement among college students today is very different than it was even a generation ago. The parents of college students listening to this podcast will not be at all surprised to hear this. There were no pill-packing parties in the ’80s, when the previous generation was college age. Mifespristone and misoprostol weren’t approved for use in the U.S. until 2000. The advent of medication abortion changed the landscape entirely.
And the internet wasn’t accessible to most people, unlike today, when organizing and finding access to abortion care or medication is done predominantly online and on social media.
[Loretta Ross] What is happening is that they’re generally not joining the legacy feminist organizations, and they’re developing their own ways of being active according to the conditions that they’re dealing with.
[Andrea] This is Loretta J. Ross, the renowned human rights activist who’s now a professor at Smith College. Ross used to be an organizer for NOW, the National Organization for Women, and helped organize the women’s marches in Washington, D.C., during the Reagan era. Those marches drew massive crowds of supporters unlike ever before. And that was before Trump was elected in 2016.
[Loretta Ross] The Women’s March, the pink pussy march, blew all of our previous numbers away in 2017. After that, all of a sudden, the abortion funds started exploding. We felt like Cassandras in the reproductive justice movement, always pointed at the sky was falling and then it fell down. So I don’t doubt that young women care about these issues.
[Andrea] After her work with NOW, Ross went on to become a founding member of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective in Atlanta.
[Loretta Ross] I would argue in one sense that Black women were far more interested in the politics of fertility control even. Man, even [than] white women, because since we were kidnapped here and brought here as slaves and forced to breed for profit, bodily autonomy has always been front and center for Black women, long before the Seneca Falls Declaration, etc., etc.. And so we’ve had a consistent demand for bodily autonomy.
[Andrea] Ross, who was sexually assaulted twice in her youth, says some of her earliest work studied the role religion played in women’s views on abortion and reproductive rights.
[Loretta Ross] There was not only a reluctance in the Black church to talk about reproduction. There was a reluctance to talk about sex because of AIDS. And so it’s like a perfect storm of shame was created around Black women’s sex, sexuality and reproduction. And yet, as I said, the rhetoric doesn’t match the data, because however shameful they feel about it, they still get one third of the abortions in this country.
[Andrea] And Ross makes the point that many first ladies, including most recently Melania Trump in her new autobiography, expressed support for the idea that women should make their own decisions about their bodies. Ross also believes the Republican Party is more committed to using abortion as a political football than caring about actual abortion bans. And that goes for Republicans from former President Ronald Reagan all the way to Donald Trump.
[Loretta Ross] Well, it’s always been a multi-front battle. So you battle in the courts, you battle in the legislature, you battle in the streets, and then you center your ability to provide services to the most vulnerable. I mean, this is what we’ve always had to do. And I think that’s what this new generation of people is doing.
[Ambient sound]
[Andrea] At tonight’s pill-packing party, everyone takes turns at each station, whether it’s folding boxes, packing pills or inserting directions at the big circular table. Avery is double-checking boxes at the end of the line.
Medical student Rasa puts bottles of misoprostol into each box. She keeps coming back because she says this is an important part of her training as a future OB-GYN.
[Rasa] I think it’s some of the most important work that I do as a med student. This is, like, the ultimate dream of how can I help people who my hand can’t reach?
[Andrea] And then there’s Cheryl Hamlin, a physician who performed abortions in the South, including in Jackson Women’s Health — yes, of Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health — in Mississippi. She’s the first stop at the table folding boxes.
Cheryl may be retired, but that’s not stopping her from doing the work.
[Cheryl Hamlin] I do think some younger people, especially in Massachusetts, don’t entirely understand how bad it is elsewhere. And, you know, I sort of feel like it’s my duty to whatever I can do to keep people informed. And if there is an opening to make a difference, whether it’s, you know, supporting a clinic or whatever, then I should do that.
[Andrea] The group meets weekly now to eat pizza, sip soda and wine and commiserate. The final touch added to each package at the end of the line is a handwritten note. The women take turns writing them. It’s nurse practitioner Erin’s favorite task.
[Erin] I always like to write the notes that we wish you the best, because I feel that I’m putting a little bit of myself into that box to really tell them this is hard and we’re supporting you and we’re wishing you the best.
[Andrea] The group mailed its 5,000th package this month.
This is College Uncovered, from GBH News and The Hechinger Report. I’m Andrea Asuaje.
More information about the topics covered in this episode:
An Art & Science Group survey of how reproductive rights laws affect students’ college selections
We’d love to hear from you. Send us an email to GBHNewsConnect@WGBH.org, or leave us a voicemail at 617-300-2486, and tell us what you think.
This episode was produced and written by me, Andrea Asuaje, and Meg Woolhouse, with reporting help from Diane Adame and Harriet Gaye.
It was edited by Jeff Keating.
Supervising editor is Meg Woolhouse.
Ellen London is executive producer
Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott.
Theme song and original music by Left Roman.
Mei He is our project manager, and head of GBH podcasts is Devin Maverick Robins
College Uncovered is a production of GBH News and The Hechinger Report and is distributed by PRX.
It’s made possible by Lumina Foundation.
Thanks for listening.
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.
Share of new college students in the fall of 2015 who were still in high school and taking a dual enrollment class. Map reprinted from The Postsecondary Outcomes of High School Dual Enrollment Students A National and State-by-State Analysis (October 2024) Community College Research Center.
Dual enrollment is exploding. During the 2022-23 school year, nearly 2.5 million high school students took college classes, simultaneously earning high school and college credits. That’s up from 1.5 million students in the fall of 2021 and roughly 300,000 students in the early 2000s. Figures released last week show that dual enrollment grew another 7 percent in the fall of 2024 from a year earlier, even as the number of traditional college freshmen fell.
Exactly how much all of this is costing the nation isn’t known. But the state of Texas, which accounts for 10 percent of high schoolers who are taking these college classes, was investing $120 million annually as recently as 2017, according to one estimate. It wouldn’t be far fetched to extrapolate that over $1 billion a year in public funds is being spent on dual enrollment across the nation.
Alongside this meteoric rise of students and resources, researchers are trying to understand who is taking advantage of these early college classes, whether they’re expanding the pool of college educated Americans, and if these extra credits help students earn college degrees faster and save money.
A new analysis released in October 2024 by the Community College Research Center (CCRC), at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center tracked what happened to every high school student who started taking dual enrollment classes in 2015. Of these 400,000 high schoolers, more than 80 percent enrolled in college straight after high school. That compares favorably with the general population, of whom only 70 percent of high school graduates went straight to college. Almost 30 percent of the 400,000 dual enrollees, roughly 117,000 students, earned a bachelor’s degree in four years. But a majority (58 percent) had not earned any college degree, either a four-year bachelor’s or a two-year associate, or any post-secondary credential, such as a short-term certificate, within this four-year period. (The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College.)
This is the most detailed and extensive analysis of dual enrollment that I’ve seen, covering all students in the nation, and tracking them for years after high school. But the analysis does not answer the fundamental question of whether dual enrollment is a worthwhile public policy.
It’s not clear that an early taste of higher education encourages more students to go to college who wouldn’t have otherwise. And it’s hard to tell from this report if the credits are helping students get through college any faster.
The fact that students with dual enrollment credits are faring better than students without dual enrollment credits isn’t terribly persuasive. In order to qualify for the classes, students usually need to have done well on a test, earned high grades or be on an advanced or honors track in school. These high-achieving students would likely have graduated college in much higher numbers without any dual enrollment courses.
“Are we subsidizing students who were always going to go to college anyway?” asked Kristen Hengtgen, a policy analyst at EdTrust, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization that lobbies for racial and economic equity in education. “Could we have spent the time and energy and effort differently on higher quality teachers or something else? I think that’s a really important question.”
Hengtgen was not involved in this latest analysis, but she is concerned about the severe underrepresentation of Black and Hispanic students that the report highlights. A data dashboard accompanying the new report documents that only 9 percent of the high schoolers in dual enrollment classes were Black, while Black students made up 16 percent of high school students. Only 17 percent of dual enrollment students were Hispanic at a time when Hispanic students made up almost a quarter of the high school population. White students, by contrast, took 65 percent of the dual enrollment seats but represented only half of the high school population. Asian students were the only group whose participation in dual enrollment matched their share of the student population: 5 percent of each.
Advocates of dual enrollment have made the argument that an early taste of college can motivate students to go to college, and the fact that so few Black and Hispanic students are enrolling is perhaps is the most troubling sign that the giant public-and-private investment in education isn’t fulfilling one of its main objectives: to expand the college-educated workforce.
Hengtgen of EdTrust argues that Black, Hispanic and low-income students of all races need better high school advising to help them sign up for the classes. Sometimes, she said, students don’t know they have to take a prerequisite class in 10th grade in order to be eligible for a dual enrollment class in 11th grade, and by the time they find out, it’s too late. Cost is another barrier. Depending upon the state and county, a family may have to pay fees to take the classes. Though these fees are generally much cheaper than what college students pay per course, low-income families may still not be able to afford them.
Tatiana Velasco, an economist at CCRC and lead author of the October 2024 dual enrollment report, makes the argument that dual enrollment may be most beneficial to Black and Hispanic students and low-income students of all races and ethnicities. In her data analysis, she noted that dual enrollment credits were only providing a modest boost to students overall, but very large boosts to some demographic groups.
Among all high school students who enrolled in college straight after high school, 36 percent of those with dual enrollment credits earned a bachelor’s degree within four years compared with 34 percent without any dual enrollment credits. Arguably, dual enrollment credits are not making a huge difference in time to completion, on average.
However, Velasco found much larger benefits from dual enrollment when she sliced the data by race and income. Among only Black students who enrolled in college straight away, 29 percent of those who had earned dual enrollment credits completed a bachelor’s degree within four years, compared to only 18 percent of those without dual enrollment credits. That’s more than a 50 percent increase in college attainment. “The difference is massive,” said Velasco.
Among Hispanic students who went straight to college, 25 percent of those with dual enrollment credits earned a bachelor’s degree within four years. Only 19 percent of Hispanic college students without dual enrollment credits did. Dual enrollment also seemed particularly helpful for college students from low-income neighborhoods; 28 percent of them earned a bachelor’s degree within four years compared with only 20 percent without dual enrollment.
Again, it’s still unclear if dual enrollment is driving these differences. It could be that Black students who opt to take dual enrollment classes were already more motivated and higher achieving and still would have graduated college in much higher numbers. (Notably, Black students with dual enrollment credits were more likely to attend selective four-year institutions.)
There is a wide variation across the nation in how dual enrollment operates in high schools. In most cases, high schoolers never step foot on a college campus. Often the class is taught in a high school classroom by a high school teacher. Sometimes community colleges supply the instructors. English composition and college algebra are popular offerings. The courses are generally designed and the credits awarded by a local community college, though 30 percent of dual enrollment credits are awarded by four-year institutions.
A few other takeaways from the CCRC and National Student Clearinghouse report:
States with very high rates of college completion from their dual enrollment programs, such as Delaware, Georgia, Mississippi and New Jersey, tend to serve fewer Black, Hispanic and low-income students. Florida stood out as an exception. CCRC’s Velasco noted it had both strong college completion rates while serving a somewhat higher proportion of Hispanic students.
In Iowa, Texas and Washington, half of all dual enrollment students ended up going to the college that awarded their dual enrollment credits.
In Montana, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Wisconsin, dual enrollment students have become a huge source of future students for community colleges. (A separate cost study shows that some community colleges are providing dual enrollment courses to a nearby high school at a loss, but if these students subsequently matriculate, their future tuition dollars can offset those losses.)
And that perhaps is the most worrisome unintended consequence of the explosion of dual enrollment credits. Many bright high school students are racking up credits from three, four or even five college classes and they’re feeling pressure to take advantage of these credits by enrolling in the community college that partners with their high school. That might seem like a sensible decision. It’s iffy whether these dual enrollment credits can be transferred to another school, or, more importantly, count toward a student’s requirements in a major, which is what really matters and holds students back from graduating on time.
But a lot of these students could get into their state flagship or even a highly selective private college on scholarship. And they’d be better off. Dual enrollment students who started at a community college, the report found, were much less likely than those who enrolled at a four-year institution to complete a bachelor’s degree four years after high school.
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.
WATERVILLE, Maine — For Emily Kayser, the prospect of covering her son’s college tuition on a teacher’s salary is “scary. It’s very stressful.” To pay for it, “I’m thinking, what can I sell?”
Kayser, who was touring Colby College with her high school-age son, Matt, is among the many Americans in the middle who earn too much to qualify for need-based financial aid, but not enough to simply write a check to send their kids to college.
That’s a squeeze becoming more pronounced after several years of increases in the prices of many other goods and services, a period of inflation only now beginning to ease.
“The cost of everything, from food to gas to living expenses, has become so high,” Kayser said.
Middle-income Americans have borne a disproportionate share of college price increases, too. For them, the net cost of a degree has risen from 12 percent to 22 percent since 2009, depending on their earnings level, compared to about 1 percent for lower-income families, federal data show.
Now a handful of schools — many of them private, nonprofit institutions trying to compete with lower-priced public universities — are beginning to designate financial aid specifically for middle-income families in an attempt to lure them back.
“This is a group, particularly in private colleges, where it just does not make sense to them, in many cases, to send their children to the colleges and universities that might be the best fit,” said David Greene, Colby’s president. “Many of them are feeling, frankly, a little stretched with everything that’s going on.”
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Colby has announced a program that will take effect next fall to attract prospective students in the middle. It will cap the cost of tuition, room and board at $10,000 a year for families who earn up to $100,000, and $15,000 for those with incomes of from $100,000 to $150,000.
That’s compared with the current net price at Colby of up to about $53,000 a year for people in those income brackets, after existing discounts and financial aid.
The new, guaranteed lower price for middle-income families, underwritten by a $10 million gift from an alumnus, figures prominently in Colby’s outreach to prospective parents and students, popping up among the scenic promotional photos of stately red-brick Georgian revival buildings encircled by the Maine woods.
Matt Kayser and his mother, Emily, tour Colby College, whose new athletic center — so big it’s been dubbed the “Death Star” — is in the background. A teacher, Emily Kayser says she “felt a weight come off my shoulders” when she learned that Colby is expanding its financial aid for middle-income families. Credit: Sofia Aldinio for The Hechinger Report
When she heard about it, “I felt the weight come off my shoulders,” said Kayser, of Westchester County, New York, who remembered being so relieved when she finally paid off her own substantial college loans that she framed the receipt.
The anxiety among middle-income families about costs is having an effect on universities and colleges, whose proportion of students from those families has been declining. Their presence on U.S. campuses fell from 45 percent in 1996 to 37 percent in 2016, the Pew Research Center found using the most recent available federal data. Middle-income Americans make up 52 percent of the population, Pew estimates.
Those drops might not seem particularly ominous. But in a complex balancing act, colleges badly need to appeal to those middle-income families that can afford to pay at least part of the price.
“That group of students is their bread and butter,” said Jinann Bitar, director of higher education research and data analytics at The Education Trust, which advocates for equity in education. “That’s why they’re trying to keep this group in the mix. Some inflow is better than no inflow.”
The slowing drip in the number of middle-income students on campuses also comes as enrollment overall has been falling for a decade, meaning institutions need all the students they can get. At the same time, the proportion of students from lower-income families enrolling directly in college has been going up.
“Maybe we’ve done a better job with the lower-income students — that, yes, there is financial aid for you for college,” said Jill Desjean, senior policy analyst at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. “And maybe the middle has heard the message that financial aid is just for lower-income families.”
This perception isn’t entirely true, Desjean said. Middle-income families can qualify for some federal, state and institutional financial aid.
“A lot of it is messaging — trying to simplify the message out there that, yes, we understand tuition is high, but there are programs you’re eligible for,” she said.
The median household income as determined by the U.S. Census Bureau is $77,540. Pew defines “middle income” as ranging between two-thirds and twice that much, or from $51,176 to $155,080.
Families with annual incomes of from $75,000 to $110,000 get less than half as much financial aid as people who make under $48,000, federal figures show.
Ryan and Kate Paulson and daughter Annie after touring Colby College. Their goal “is for her to not fall in love with any school, knowing that, being in the middle, we might not be able to afford it,” Credit: Sofia Aldinio for The Hechinger Report
That can make college a struggle, even when both parents work, and especially in families with several children and with assets such as houses.
“Anyone who has to borrow or use financial aid to afford college is getting squeezed. That’s the gist,” Bitar said. “There are a lot of middle-income families that are really worried about access to college, and those voices have been loud.”
In his previous role as vice president for enrollment and student success at Trinity College in Connecticut, Angel Pérez saw how financial aid calculations could disadvantage middle-income families.
“If you add the layer on top of that of the skepticism about the value of higher education right now, we are seeing more middle-income families just not getting into the pipeline or enrolling,” said Pérez, who is now CEO of the National Association for College Admission Counseling.
Meanwhile, the disconnect between the prices colleges advertise, and what they actually expect people to pay appears to particularly frustrate many middle-income families.
At Colby, a private liberal arts college, the published total cost for this academic year is around $90,000, for instance. But half of families already get some form of financial aid.
“I have a hard time with a price tag that’s so high, and they say, ‘Don’t worry, you’re never going to pay that,’” said Ryan Paulson of Traverse City, Michigan, on a tour of Colby with his wife, Kate, and their daughter, Annie, and who was speaking about the college admission process in general. “Just tell us the price.”
Part of Colby’s strategy is to simplify what Greene called “this overly byzantine and complex system,” by showing the maximum amount a student will be charged based on his or her family’s income.
Prospective students and their parents look on as an admissions officer at Colby College shows what they’d pay, based on their income, when the school expands financial aid for middle-income families next fall. Credit: Sofia Aldinio for The Hechinger Report
“It’s pretty simple. If you make $200,000 a year, you’re going to pay no more than $20,000 for tuition, room and board,” he said. “We try to keep it as clean and easy as we can.”
Many parents, at all income levels, don’t know about the full range of financial aid that might be available to them, a survey by the lending company Sallie Mae found. More than half think money goes only to students with exceptional grades, and nearly 40 percent believe it’s not worth bothering to apply if they make what they assume is too much money.
The Paulsons’ goal for their daughter “is for her to not fall in love with any school, knowing that, being in the middle, we might not be able to afford it,” Kate Paulson said.
The universities and colleges that have begun making financial aid available specifically for middle-income families are typically wealthy and highly selective.
With a student body of 2,300, for example, Colby hasan endowment worth more than $1.1 billion and accepts just 7 percent of applicants. The campus tour includes a new $200 million, 350,000-square-foot athletic complex that’s so big and high-tech, opposing teams have taken to calling it the Death Star.
Rice University, a private research campus in Houston, is seeking to raise $150 million by the end of this academic year to continue a program it began in 2019 of giving full-tuition scholarships to undergraduates from families that earn between $75,000 and $140,000.
Many institutions say they’re trying to appeal to these families because they want to balance the socioeconomic representation on their campuses.
But another major reason is to help address an ongoing decline in enrollment projected to get much steeper beginning next year.
“If the enrollment issue is a struggle for your university or college, you’d better be thinking about how you price things, in a simple and straightforward way,” Greene said.
David Greene, the president of Colby College, in his office overlooking the main quad. He says colleges worried about enrollment need to be “thinking about how you price things in a simple and straightforward way.” Credit: Sofia Aldinio for The Hechinger Report
Liberty University, in Lynchburg, Virginia, cited affordability issues it said were discouraging middle-income applicants when it announced a “Middle America Scholarship” providing up to $6,395 this year to families with annual incomes between $35,000 and $95,000.
Grinnell College in Iowa offers scholarships toward what it calls “felt” financial need among middle-income families frustrated that the calculations of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, overstate what they can actually afford.
Some prospective students “are squeezed out of eligibility for need-based financial aid even though they do not have the financial wherewithal to fund higher education without assistance,” said Brad Lindberg, Grinnell’s associate vice president of institutional initiatives and enrollment.
The problem for colleges, he said, is that families like those “assume they’re not going to be eligible for financial aid, so they just don’t apply. People exclude themselves from the process before the process even starts.”
Greene, at Colby, said that could be among the reasons that only a little more than a third of Americans now say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, according to a Gallup survey — down from 57 percent in 2015.
“The value proposition of higher education relative to its cost is a huge question mark in the minds of many people,” he said. “That’s why I think there’s such extraordinary discontent about America’s colleges and universities, because middle-income families are the ones that have been squeezed out of those top places.”
Targeting middle-income families with designated scholarships appears to be working, according to some of the colleges that have already been doing it.
“We’ve seen a nice bump in applications,” said Karen Kristof, assistant vice president and dean of admission at Colorado College. “We’ve seen a better yield.”
Since 2019, the private college has limited the cost of room and board to about $16,000 a year for Colorado families with annual incomes between $60,000 and $125,000.
“This is a group that felt neglected in the need-based system” that favors lower-income applicants, Kristof said.
Now, more colleges and universities are setting out to boost the people in the middle. A donor has helped the public University of Montana double, to $15 million, the annual amount available from its Payne Family Impact Scholarship for in-state middle-income families.
“We had a clear understanding and feedback from families in Montana that we just didn’t have enough to offer in the middle-income range,” said Leslie Webb, the university’s vice president for student success and enrollment management.
Some advocates warned that colleges shouldn’t forsake their lowest-income applicants in the cause of helping middle-income ones.
“It’s crucial for colleges to still target their limited resources to students with the lowest incomes,” said Diane Cheng, vice president of research and policy at the Institute for Higher Education Policy.
The institute calculates that a typical middle-income family has to spend 35 percent of its annual household income sending a child to college for a year. “That’s a pretty substantial share,” said Cheng. But for the lowest-income Americans, she said, a year in college consumes the equivalent of nearly one and a half times their annual household income.
“Institutions typically have limited resources for providing financial aid,” Cheng said, “and we want to encourage them to balance their desire to attract students from middle-income families with supporting students from low-income backgrounds.”
Still, institutions are increasingly focused on this issue, said Art Rodriguez, vice president and dean of admissions and financial aid at Carleton College. The private institution in Northfield, Minnesota, also offers scholarships specifically to families in the middle.
“The number in the middle is decreasing,” he said, “so colleges are making efforts to try to not lose that middle.”
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.
When I left home at 17, I knew I wanted to go to college. I knew earning a degree would help me find a path to a more secure future. And I knew that I was interested in pursuing a career focused on social justice.
I also had no idea how I could afford college when I was already working multiple jobs just to earn enough money to make ends meet. I had never met my father, and I had a rocky relationship with my mother, so I was largely on my own. Fortunately, I was able to use financial aid to enroll at Prairie State College, a community college just outside of Chicago. It remains the best decision I have ever made.
I thrived at Prairie State, where I was surrounded by an incredible community of faculty, staff and other students who had my back at every turn. The support I received eventually allowed me to earn a scholarship and transfer to a four-year college to begin my pre-law journey.
I’m now a senior at Howard University, where it remains all too obvious that the four-year college experience is not designed for transfer students like me — a realization that leaves us feeling isolated and overlooked.
Like many transfer students, I felt stigmatized during the admissions process and alienated by other students; I didn’t get an orientation when I started, as first-year students do; and many of my previous credits didn’t transfer with me.
That even an HBCU — commonly known for community-building efforts — struggles to effectively support transfer students underscores the gravity of this issue.
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Solving such challenges will require four-year universities to reimagine how they support transfer students. Creating a sense of belonging for learners is critical. Research shows that students who feel as though they belong at their institution are more likely to remain and persist. Developing that connection can be challenging for transfer students, especially those coming from community colleges, as there are typically so few of us on a given campus.
Some 80 percent of community college students aspire to earn a bachelor’s degree, yet just one-third transfer to a four-year institution. In total, community college transfers account for just 5 percent of undergraduate students at elite colleges and universities.
The most obvious starting point for institutions looking to better support transfer students from community colleges is to admit more of us. This can be achieved by intensifying outreach efforts at local two-year colleges and more effectively promoting the message that transferring to a selective, four-year university is not only possible but encouraged. Some schools are already making an effort to admit more transfer students.
Community college transfer students can find themselves adrift in their new institutions due to a lack of proper guidance and support. We are typically not given the insider knowledge required to navigate the complexities of a four-year university. For example, I’ve been excluded from being a part of student-led organizations that I would have needed to join as a freshman — when I was still in community college. A history of belonging to these organizations is mandatory when being considered for larger and more prominent selective organizations, including sororities and fraternities.
The absence of a support system can transform what initially felt like an exciting step forward into a daunting and solitary journey. I am fortunate to have benefited from the support of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, which provides me with access to a network of fellow transfer students and alumni who have successfully navigated this path.
But many transfer students are not as lucky.
Colleges could help by connecting transfer students with one another — either through on-campus groups or external organizations — to ensure they have the support, community and resources they need to thrive.
Schools should make it clear that transfer students will be warmly welcomed and supported throughout their academic journey. By doing so, these schools can begin to foster a more inclusive environment, one that acknowledges and values the unique perspectives community college students bring.
Colleges should also work to dismantle obstacles that complicate the transfer process and serve as subtle deterrents to students. Every prohibitive application fee, convoluted form or arbitrary rule might as well be a sign that says, “Turn back now.”
For example, students lose an estimated 43 percent of their credits when they transfer, wiping out semesters of hard work, extending their time and increasing their costs to a degree. Institutions can proactively create clearer, more consistent transfer agreements with local community colleges, guaranteeing that credits will transfer.
The financial aid and application processes for transfer students, who are not typically provided financial award packages upon admission, must also take into account their unique needs and circumstances.
Here’s why this all matters: Data is clear that students who transfer from a community college are just as capable of succeeding as students who are first-time freshmen or transfer from four-year institutions.
We know we can do this. We just need opportunities and support.
Rebbie Davis is an English major, Philosophy minor who previously attended Prairie State College before transferring to Howard University. She is president of the Howard University Writers Guild and vice chair of HU’s Future Law Scholars’ board of directors.
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.
College enrollment has been declining for more than a decade, and that means that many institutions are struggling to pay their bills. A growing number of them are making the difficult decision to close.
In the first nine months of 2024, 28 degree-granting institutions closed, compared with 15 in all of 2023, according to an analysis of federal data provided to The Hechinger Report by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association or SHEEO.
The numbers are staggering. Nearly 300 colleges and universities offering an associate degree or higher closed between 2008 and 2023. For-profit operators ran more than 60 percent of those colleges and universities.
From 2008 to 2011, an average of seven colleges and universities shut down each year in the wake of the financial crisis. That four-year average had doubled to 14 by 2014 before reaching 32 by 2018.
In recent years, the annual number of closures began to plateau, with an average of 16 colleges and universities closing between 2020 and 2023.
Hundreds more post-secondary institutions offering non-degree programs – from cosmetology to midwifery to manufacturing schools – have shuttered over the past 15 years. When we added in these post-secondary institutions, we tallied 843 closures between 2008 to 2023.
“It’s not corruption; it’s not financial misappropriation of funds; it’s just that they can’t rebound enrollment,” said Rachel Burns, a senior policy analyst at SHEEO, who provided the closure data to The Hechinger Report.
See which schools have closed
Covid-related enrollment dips have mostly stabilized, but colleges are still dealing with a declining birth rate, with fewer 18-year-olds graduating from high school. At the same time, many parents don’t think their financial investment in their child’s college tuition will pay off.
The result is fewer students enrolling and far fewer tuition dollars coming in.
And when colleges close, it hurts the students who are enrolled. At the minimum, colleges that are shutting down should notify students at least three months in advance, retain their records and refund tuition, experts say. Ideally, it should form an agreement with a nearby school and make it easy for students to continue their education.
A SHEEO study of students from closed colleges found that only about half transferred to other institutions, and the chances of those students earning a degree varied depending on several factors including how long it took them to re-enroll.
This story about college closures was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.
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.
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
In the 1970s, Congress committed to funding a higher education system controlled by Indigenous communities. These tribal colleges and universities were intended to serve students who’d been disadvantaged by the nation’s history of violence and racism toward Native Americans, including efforts to eradicate their languages and cultures.
But walking through Little Big Horn College in Montana with Emerson Bull Chief, its dean of academics, showed just how far that idea has to go before becoming a reality. Bull Chief dodged signs warning “Keep out!” as he approached sheets of plastic sealing off the campus day care center. It was late April and the center and nearby cafeteria have been closed since January, when a pipe burst, flooding the building, the oldest at the 44-year-old college. The facilities remained closed into late September.
“Sometimes plants grow along here,” Bull Chief said nonchalantly as he turned down a hallway in the student union building.
While the school appears to be in better condition than most tribal colleges, its roofs leak, sending rain through skylights in the gym and wellness center, which needs $1 million in repairs. An electronic sign marking the entrance has been sitting dark since a vehicle hit it months ago. College leaders said they have no idea when they will be able to afford repairs.
It’s a reality faced by many of the 37 schools in the system, which spans 14 states. Congress today grants the colleges a quarter-billion dollars per year less than the inflation-adjusted amount they should receive, ProPublica found.
President Joe Biden declared early in his term that tribal schools were a priority. Yet the meager funding increases he signed into law have done little to address decades of financial neglect. Further, the federal Bureau of Indian Education, tasked with requesting funding for the institutions, has never asked lawmakers to fully fund the colleges at levels called for in the law.
The outcome is crimped budgets and crumbling buildings in what the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights once called the “most poorly funded institutions of higher education in the country.” At a time when their enrollment is rising, the schools lack money to update academic programs and hire enough qualified instructors to train nurses, teachers and truck drivers and to prepare students to transfer to other universities. As they expand degree programs, their researchers are trying to conduct high-level work in old forts, warehouses and garages.
The laws that authorized the creation of the tribal colleges also guaranteed funding, which was set at $8,000 annually per student affiliated with a tribe, with adjustments for inflation. But the federal government has never funded schools at the level called for in the statute, and even experts struggle to explain the basis for current funding levels.
Since 2010, per-student funding has been as low as $5,235 and sits at just under $8,700 today, according to the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, which lobbies on behalf of the colleges in Washington. Had Congress delivered what’s required by statute, tribal colleges and universities would receive about $40,000 per student today.
The Bureau of Indian Education has not asked Congress for major funding increases for the bulk of the tribal colleges in the past three years, according to the agency’s budget documents, and congressional negotiations have done little to increase what they get.
The Bureau of Indian Education said in a written statement that when requesting funding, it follows guidelines set by the Department of the Interior and the White House. A department spokesperson directed ProPublica to the White House budget office for an explanation of the colleges’ funding; a spokesperson for the budget office declined an interview request and directed ProPublica back to the Interior Department.
Biden called the colleges “integral and essential” to their communities in a 2021 executive order that, among other things, established a tribal college initiative to determine systemic causes of education shortcomings and improve tribal schools and colleges. But while it has led to some forums and largely ceremonial events, that initiative has done next to nothing substantive, advocates say.
As funding has fallen behind the need, even the American Indian Higher Education Consortium — the schools’ primary pipeline to Congress and the Bureau of Indian Education — has asked for far less than the law says the colleges are entitled to. Its recent requests have been for around $11,000 per student.
Some people advocating for the tribal colleges have noted a frequent topic of debate: Should the schools ask for what they’re owed and risk angering lawmakers or just accept the meager amount they receive?
Maintenance foreman Wayne O’Daniel is concerned about peeling paint and crumbling concrete. Credit: Matt Krupnick for ProPublica
Separately, the colleges get very little for maintenance and capital improvements, money that isn’t part of the per-student funding.
Asked why the Bureau of Indian Education doesn’t better understand the facilities needs at tribal colleges, Sharon Pinto, the agency’s deputy director for school operations, said, “We really wouldn’t know that because the buildings located at these tribal colleges are not necessarily federal assets and they’re not in an inventory system.” In a follow-up email, the bureau said it was waiting for the colleges to let it know what their facility needs are.
Several college leaders and researchers said such responses are typical of a federal government that has routinely ignored its promises to Indigenous communities over the past two centuries.
Meredith McCoy, who is of Turtle Mountain Ojibwe descent and taught at the tribe’s college in North Dakota, noted that Native education is guaranteed by federal law and at least 150 treaties. Neglect of tribal colleges reflects a conscious decision by Congress and the federal government to dodge accountability, said McCoy, now an assistant professor at Carleton College who studies federal funding of tribal schools and colleges.
“The patterns of underfunding are so extreme that it’s hard not to see it as a systematic approach to underfunding Native people,” she said. “We’re teaching our children that it’s OK to make a promise and break it.”
An Outdated System
To evaluate the impact of the federal government’s underfunding of tribal colleges’ and universities’ academic mission, ProPublica sent a survey to the 34 fully accredited schools, of which 13 responded, and visited five campuses. Our reporting found classes being held in a former fort constructed more than a century ago; campuses forced to temporarily close because of electrical, structural and plumbing problems; broken pipes that destroyed equipment and disrupted campus life; and academic leaders who lack the resources to adequately address the issues, build new facilities and keep pace with growing enrollment.
The colleges that responded to the survey reported that they commonly have problems with foundations, roofs, electrical systems and water pipes because they couldn’t afford maintenance. One campus put the price tag for repairs at $100 million. Several noted they don’t have money to upgrade technology so students can keep pace with skills required by the job market.
The Bureau of Indian Education stated in its 2024 budget request that delays in addressing the problems only makes them more costly to fix. Continuing to ignore them could in some cases create “life-threatening situations for school students, staff, and visitors” and “interrupt educational programs for students, or force closure of the school,” the bureau told Congress.
But that same document did not request enough funding to fix the issues, college leaders say.
In 2021, Congress began providing $15 million per year for maintenance, to be shared by all tribal colleges. That has since increased to $16 million — less than $500,000 per college. The same year, the American Indian Higher Education Consortium estimated it would cost nearly half a billion dollars to catch up on deferred maintenance. Construction of new buildings would cost nearly twice that amount. The organization acknowledged the actual price tag could be far higher.
Emerson Bull Chief, dean of academics, looks at leaky skylights. Credit: Matt Krupnick for ProPublica
Tribal colleges are not allowed to raise taxes or use bond measures for basic academic or building costs.
The schools receive no federal funding for any non-Native students who attend. Their budgets were stretched even tighter by the COVID-19 pandemic, when non-Native enrollment rose sharply as classes moved online. It has remained above pre-pandemic levels.
The Tribally Controlled Colleges and Universities Assistance Act of 1978, which funded the schools, contributes to confusion over what they should be paid. While it specifies base funding of $8,000 per student, it also notes that colleges will only be given what they need, without explaining how that should be calculated, and only when the government can afford it.
“When we think about the funding, it was set up for something that was needed 40 years ago,” said Ahniwake Rose, the American Indian Higher Education Consortium’s president. “What a school looked like and needed 40 years ago is absolutely not what it looks like and needs now.”
Few Alternatives for Funding
Though colleges and their representatives fault the Bureau of Indian Education, they say primary accountability falls on Congress.
ProPublica contacted 21 members of the U.S. House and Senate who either sit on an appropriations or Indian Affairs committee, or who represent a district or state with a tribal college to ask if they were aware of the condition of the campuses. Only Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, a New Mexico Democrat, spoke to ProPublica. The others either didn’t respond or declined to be interviewed.
Leger Fernández, a member of the Indian and Insular Affairs subcommittee of the House Committee on Natural Resources, said she has pushed for the colleges to receive more funding but has been shut down by members of both parties, partly because of a lack of understanding about how they are funded.
“Our tribal colleges are part of our federal trust responsibility,” said Leger Fernández, whose district in northern and eastern New Mexico is home to three tribal colleges. “We made a commitment. This is an obligation the federal government has.”
Former U.S. Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, who chaired the Senate Indian Affairs Committee before retiring in 2005, said the colleges lose out to louder voices in Washington, D.C. “Federal money is always caught in a tug-of-war between needs,” Campbell said. “The needs are always higher than the amount available.”
Yet tribal colleges have fewer alternatives for bolstering their budgets.
Dean of Academic Affairs Bill Briggs inspects rotting wood. Credit: Matt Krupnick for ProPublica
Many of the colleges are far from industrial centers and have few wealthy alumni, college leaders say, so private donations are rare and usually small.
“We don’t have the alumni who can afford to donate,” said Marilyn Pourier, the development director at South Dakota’s Oglala Lakota College, which is perched on a hill on the Pine Ridge reservation. “We get a pretty good response, but it’s not enough.”
The schools’ tuition is among the lowest in the nation, but college leaders are hesitant to raise it because most reservation residents already can’t afford it.
Naomi Miguel, the executive director of the White House tribal college initiative, said she plans to press states to contribute more to tribal colleges and universities. At the moment, most provide little or nothing.
“If the states would support the TCUs, they’d be supporting jobs in their communities,” said Miguel. “It benefits them overall to create this sustainable workforce.”
“A Saving Grace”
Proof of the value of tribal colleges and universities, advocates say, can be found in what they accomplish despite their meager funding.
They are often among the few places in their communities with access to high-speed internet. Nearly 28% of residents of tribal lands lack high-speed internet access, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
And some Native students find that the schools are a more welcoming place to pursue a degree and prepare for a career.
Shyler Martin, who grew up on the Navajo Nation near Navajo Technical University, enrolled there after leaving New Mexico State University during her second year there. Now entering her senior year, Martin said it’s been a relief to learn from instructors who understand the pressures she faces as the oldest child of a Navajo family, with whom she shares responsibility for raising her younger sister.
“They’re culturally sensitive and understanding,” Martin said of Navajo Tech’s staff. “I’m a parent, and they do what they can to help you continue school.”
Chief Dull Knife College hasn’t been able to fund a planned $20 million academic building and ceremonial arbor. Credit: Matt Krupnick for ProPublica
Yet her time at the college has included winter days when classrooms were so cold that students had to bring blankets and classes that were canceled at the last minute because of a shortage of qualified instructors.
Tribes would be in dire straits without the colleges, said Carmelita Lamb, a professor at the University of Mary in North Dakota who has taught at and studied tribal colleges.
“The tribal college has been a saving grace,” said Lamb, a member of the Lipan Band of Apache. “Had we never had the tribal colleges, I really shudder to think where we’d be now.”
The colleges keep doing the best they can, but some are finding it increasingly difficult.
At Chief Dull Knife, college leaders planned three years ago to build a modern structure with classrooms and a ceremonial arbor, but the estimated price — $14 million at the time — was already out of reach even before it ballooned to more than $20 million because of inflation. The plans haven’t been scrapped, but Bill Briggs, the dean of academic affairs, talks about them in the past tense.
“If we’re going to change the course of this country, everyone needs to have an opportunity,” Briggs said. “All we’re asking for is an opportunity to educate our students.”
This story was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.
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.
Data is now everywhere in our lives, informing our decisions about which new show to watch, what path to take or whether to grab an umbrella. But it’s practically absent from the way our kids learn.
Our approach to teaching data science and data literacy has hardly evolved since I started my teaching career in 1995. Yet now more than ever, K-12 students need basic modern data science skills.
Nearly 1 in 4 job postings in the United States require data science skills. These aren’t just tech jobs — they span industries from manufacturing to agriculture to transportation. The ability to capture, sort and analyze data is as important for small business owners as it is for computer scientists.
Now is the time to reprioritize curricular emphases to reflect the importance of data science and data literacy. With data talent in high demand globally, other countries are investing billions in data education.
But American K-12 education still underemphasizes data science and data literacy skills — including the ability to understand qualitative and quantitative data, assess claims based on data and make data-driven predictions.
How do we know? Look at the data.
Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox.
Data science education is typically reserved for higher education, but only slightly more than a third of Americans have a college degree. The opportunity to learn basic data skills should not be reserved for a select group of students.
Every student needs a chance to practice these vital skills from kindergarten through high school. That’s why I am excited for the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics to be a part of Data Science 4 Everyone’s national Chart the Course initiative, exploring the integration of data literacy and science across our most important school subjects. It will build upon NCTM’s work to reimagine, revitalize and increase math’s relevance for high schoolers.
As president of NCTM, I’ve had the honor of helping to lead the mathematics education community through a time of profound technological change, which has included developing a position statement on AI.
Additionally, in partnership with the National Science Teaching Association, the Computer Science Teachers Association, the National Council for the Social Studies and the American Statistical Association, we made an unprecedented joint call to build data science as an interdisciplinary subject across K-12 education.
Early in my teaching career, we focused on teaching students how to use a dataset to create a bar graph or scatter plot. Now, students need to know how to formulate the question that will generate the data, how to collect the data and how to interpret the data.
Students are eager to make sense of the world around them, but many don’t see how classroom instruction is related to the problems they will face as adults.
Data — in the form of numbers, graphics and videos — can provide the hook that pulls students into lessons with real-world examples and applications.
While a math teacher might look at a graph and observe that a certain variable decreased, a social studies teacher might say, “Of course there was a decrease, look at what was happening at that moment in history.”
If we want students to think with and use data analysis skills in their everyday lives during and after high school, we need to create relevant data-learning experiences that engage students in using statistics to make sense of the world around them. This will also result in better test scores because students will understand the material and be able to apply what they know.
We are now joining with Data Science 4 Everyone in an even broader effort to create the first-ever national K-12 data learning progression that stretches across school subjects. It will shape how generations of students study data.
Educator voices are vital to this process. We need input from the people who are closest to students and who will be rolling out data science lessons in their classrooms, so we’re asking them to weigh in. We need to engage our educators in order to effect change.
Data Science 4 Everyone’s Chart the Course voting platform is open through October 31, and we are encouraging teachers to vote for the learning outcomes they believe are the most important for K-12 students to learn by the time they graduate from high school.
The selection of the learning outcome options in Chart the Course was informed by 11 focus groups made up of students, educators, higher education leaders, policymakers, researchers, curriculum designers and industry professionals.
The collaborative approach was designed to create a framework that meets the needs of students and reflects the cross-disciplinary potential of data science. We hope to equip students with the skills they need to understand data and think critically and carefully as they interact with AI tools and draw their own conclusions about the world around them.
Engaging with data is a way to make education relevant for all our students and bring our many subjects together in unique ways. It’s time to chart a course that connects classroom learning to the lives of students. That should be our goal for all teachers.
Kevin Dykema is president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), an international mathematics education organization with more than 30,000 members. He has taught eighth grade mathematics for over 25 years in southwest Michigan.
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.
Presidents of colleges and universities serve for less than six years on average. For women and people of color, that tenure is even shorter – a full year shorter. So what’s going on?
College presidents are under fire for what they say about issues such as systemic racism, abortion access and war in the Middle East, and what they do — or don’t do — about campus protests.
Why would anyone want to be a college president? And does it even matter to a student or a parent who the college president is?
What questions should students and their families be asking of colleges’ top brass?
We talk to former Colorado College President Song Richardson, who left her dream job because she wanted to speak freely about hot-button issues, and the current and former presidents of Macalester College, Suzanne Rivera and Brian Rosenberg, to learn more about the challenges and pitfalls of life at the top of the academic ladder.
As a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, Song Richardson says she noticed her graduate students were struggling to discuss their disagreements in class, a skill she thought somebody should have taught them already.
[Song Richardson] And I wanted to start instilling those values of having courageous conversations earlier in their educational lifecycle. And that meant going to a college.
[Kirk] So when Colorado College, a liberal arts school committed to combating racial and religious discrimination, strongly recruited her for its top job, she took it an honor.
[Song Richardson] I felt like it was a great fit in terms of our values and the mission of the school.
[Kirk] Richardson is a Harvard-educated civil rights attorney. She comes from a military family and grew up on army bases across the country. She’s the daughter of a Black father and Korean mother.
[Emcee] Ladies and gentlemen, it is my honor to present to you Song Richardson, the 14th president of Colorado College.
[Kirk] In 2021 she became the first woman of color to lead the private college, a point she touched on in her inaugural address.
[Song Richardson] Colorado College is a place that is willing to take bold action. A place that’s willing to take courageous action to ignite our students’ potential in order to create a more just world. This is what we do. This is what drives us. And I am here because this is what drives me, too.
[Jon] But that optimism and ambition — it didn’t last long, Kirk. Richardson says outside events left her feeling limited by the restrictions of the job. Events like the Supreme Court rulings on race-conscious admission and reproductive rights, and female Ivy League presidents called to testify before Congress. She wanted the freedom to speak out.
[Song Richardson] These things were core to my identity as a faculty member. And as those debates started to grow across the country. I felt compelled to speak because these are the things that motivated my entire career as a scholar.
[Jon] So three years after she started her dream job, Richardson quit.
[Kirk] 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 News. …
[Jon] And I’m Jon Marcus at the Hechinger Report.
Colleges don’t want you to know what’s really going on. So GBH, …
[Kirk] … in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, is here to break it all down.
In this election season, we’re exploring how deeply politicized higher education has become and what students and their parents can do to navigate these choppy waters.
Today on the show: The Politics of the College Presidency.
You might be surprised to learn the average college president serves only four six years, Jon.
[Jon] Actually, I’m surprised that it isn’t even shorter, given how hard it is.
[Kirk] And for women and leaders of color like Song Richardson, it’s even less — a full year less.
Even though women now outnumber men among students in college, men outnumber women as college presidents by two to one, and nearly three quarters of presidents are white.
So what’s going on?
[Suzanne Rivera] I think the traditions of racism and sexism in our country make it really difficult to lead in a visible role when you don’t present in a traditional way.
[Kirk] Suzanne Rivera is the first woman of color to lead Macalester College in Minnesota. She saw herself as sort of an outsider candidate for becoming president of a college.
[Suzanne Rivera] And breaking barriers requires having the tenacity and resilience to withstand unfair criticisms or criticisms that are personal and not really about the work we do. But I can understand why people in these roles who have to field criticism that sometimes comes in the form of vulgar language, threatening language, fear about their personal safety might decide that this isn’t the right job for them.
[Kirk] And Rivera says that has consequences for turnover rates and campus culture. Before taking the helm at Macalester, Rivera participated in a presidents-in-residence program at Harvard — a kind of boot camp for new college presidents.
[Suzanne Rivera] A few of us developed really close friendships that I rely on. These are my most trusted advisers outside of the institution.
[Kirk] What percentage of your class of presidents are now gone?
[Suzanne Rivera] Gosh, I haven’t done the math, but I think at least a third are no longer sitting presidents from our version of the boot camp. And from what I hear when I go to professional meetings, something like a third of presidencies are open or have an interim serving right now. So there’s been a lot of volatility.
[Kirk] Rivera says one of the major reasons for that volatility is that the job itself has gotten more demanding.
[Suzanne Rivera] It’s more in the public eye than it used to be. I think social media has really ramped up the extent to which serving as a college or university president makes you more like an elected official than perhaps the job previously was.
[Jon] And who wants to feel like an elected official these days?
[Kirk] Yeah. College presidents are dealing with the same political polarization as everybody else who’s in the public eye.
[Suzanne Rivera] So when people disagree with the decisions a college or university president makes, the discourse has become really impolite at times. And I think lots of sitting presidents have made the assessment that as much as they love higher education and love leading their institutions, the amount of abuse might be more than they’re prepared to take.
[Jon] Let’s just look at the Ivy League, for example, Kirk. Last year, six out of eight Ivy League presidents were women. Then Gaza related protests shook their campuses, putting all of them in the hot seat.
[Chair of committee] Good morning. The Committee on Education and Workforce will come to order.
[Jon] Suddenly they were called before a congressional committee looking at claims of anti-semitism on campus. This kind of aggressive questioning of then-Harvard President Claudine Gay by Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik went viral. Here’s the moment that would forever shake American higher education.
[Elise Stefanik] Dr. Gay, at Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no?
[Claudine Gay] It can be, depending on the context.
[Elise Stefanik] What’s the context?
[Claudine Gay] Targeted at an individual. Targeted at an individual.
[Elise Stefanik] It’s targeted at Jewish students, Jewish individuals. It does not depend on the context. The answer is yes. And this is why you should resign.
[Kirk] Gay did resign, a month after that testimony. Now, it’s complicated — she was also facing plagiarism allegations, which she said were politically motivated. An internal investigation found she did, in fact, use some material without credit. Her time in office lasted just six months and two days. Harvard’s first Black woman president was also its shortest serving. Liz Magill at Penn and Minouche Shafik at Columbia also resigned under intense pressure.
[Jon] And, you know, while the Ivy League takes up a lot of the oxygen and media spotlight, there’s pressure on college presidents everywhere. Presidents of all kinds of institutions are under fire for what they say about broader political issues such as systemic racism, abortion access, the war 5,000 miles away in Gaza and especially how they handle campus protests.
[Kirk] Yet critics say it’s the presidents who are making the job more political by being so outspoken about controversial topics, rather than focusing on the central missions of their schools.
[Jon] Add the pandemic and enrollment challenges and near-constant battles with state lawmakers over funding and today, the college presidency is as political as it is academic.
[Kirk] Jon, in reporting this episode, I asked one former community college president why she left the job early, and once she stopped laughing, she provided this list of why the job was so impossible.
One, funding and enrollment declining every year.
Two, faculty increasingly unhappy and worried about their jobs and resisting needed changes.
And three, the growing public questions about the value of college degrees.
It’s all a lot, but the politics of being a college president aren’t necessarily new. The job’s just gotten more intense.
[Brian Rosenberg] There have always been political dimensions to it.
[Jon] Brian Rosenberg is a visiting fellow at Harvard and author of the book ‘Whatever it Is, I’m Against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education.’ What has changed, he says, is that in recent years the college presidency has become not just more political but nearly impossible at certain schools.
[Brian Rosenberg] So no one really is paying a lot of attention to the politics of the presidents of community colleges or regional public colleges or small rural liberal arts colleges. And the reality is, that’s where most students go. We’re really talking for the most part about wealthy selective institutions.
[Jon] Rosenberg isn’t saying that all of that criticism is fair or justified, but he does say leaders at those highly selective schools do need to take some responsibility.
[Brian Rosenberg] I think these institutions have over the last couple of decades leaned pretty heavily, maybe too heavily, into social issues, and that’s provoked a backlash.
[Jon] Rosenberg says colleges and universities have made themselves easy targets for conservatives like J.D. Vance.
[J.D. Vance] The professors are the enemy.
[Jon] That was Vance speaking when he was running for Senate in Ohio. Here’s Brian Rosenberg again.
[Brian Rosenberg] And so you began to see the pushback against DEI, critical race theory, things like that. And then you began to see all the action in legislatures, mostly in the South and Midwest.
[Sound of protest]
[Jon] And Rosenberg says Oct. 7 and the subsequent protests over the fighting in the Middle East further divided these selective college campuses.
[Brian Rosenberg] What was so distinctive about that event and what followed was that it was the first event that I could recall that really divided the progressive culture on campuses. There tended to be a consensus around most of them. Now there was a split, and that provoked a lot of political pushback, both on campus and off campus.
[Sound of protest]
[Kirk] Even in peacetime, college presidents have to balance the demands of students and their parents, faculty and staff, boards and alumni.
Ted Mitchell is head of the American Council on Education and a former college president himself. He says each of those stakeholders expects to have a voice and sometimes even a vote in what happens on campus.
[Ted Mitchell] Presidents are on edge all the time. It’s in the best of times like tap-dancing on a surfboard in the middle of a storm. And I think the storms are just getting more rugged.
[Kirk] Here’s Suzanne Rivera again, the president of Macalester College. She takes that tap-dancing analogy one step further.
[Suzanne Rivera] Some days it feels like that. Other days it feels like a pesky mosquito that you need to swat in order to do the important work.
[Jon] So given all these challenges, why on earth would anyone want to be a college president today? Lynn Pasquerella is the former president of Mount Holyoke College and the current president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities. She says those who take the role are often called to it ….
[Lynn Pasquerella] … because they are committed to thriving institutions. They haven’t aspired to become college presidents, but they’re good at what they do. And so they’re asked to take on increasing leadership roles.
[Jon] When she began her career in academia in the 1980s, Pasquerella says there was still the idea that a president could be an intellectual leader who made a difference in society.
[Lynn Pasquerella] And I think that’s almost completely disappeared in the way that we’ve moved away from the notion of higher education as a public good to viewing it as a private commodity — tuition in exchange for jobs. There’s now a sense that presidents are there to raise money, and that’s the job.
[Jon] Now, let’s pause here for a moment, Kirk, and point out that college presidents are very well paid for doing that job. The average pay for private college presidents is just under $1 million a year.
[Kirk] That’s on average?
[Jon] Yes, on average. And that’s more than double what it was 10 years ago, even accounting for inflation. Eighty of them make more than $1 million a year. So do 19 public university presidents. Most of them also get houses provided or housing subsidies, cars, club memberships and other perks.
[Kirk] Never underestimate the power of the perks, Jon.
[Jon] Yeah, or the promise of job security, Kirk. Even after they resign, college presidents typically get to keep their jobs on the faculty.
[Kirk] Nice work if you can get it.
[Jon] I know. Imagine if a private-sector CEO got fired or stepped down, but still had a job with the company.
[Kirk] So what does all this palace intrigue mean for you? I mean, does it really matter who your college president is? We wanted to find out whether students even know. So I went over to Commonwealth Avenue here in Boston to pose that question to some students at Boston University. Now, for context, we should say it was days before Melissa Gilliam, the first Black and first female president at New England’s largest private university, was to be inaugurated.
[Andrew Steele] My name’s Andrew Steele. I am getting my master’s in music and voice performance.
[Kirk] Do you know who the president is, of BU?
[Andrew Steele] I think she just got anointed or something. I saw videos about it. I don’t know.
[Kirk] Does it matter who the president is?
[Andrew Steele] Hmm. That’s a great question. I don’t really know what they do, but it seems like it matters. I just, I don’t know.
[Kirk] Here’s seniors Kaitlyn Amado and Jahiem Jones.
So who’s the president of the college?
[Jahiem Jones] Dr. Melissa Gilliam.
[Kirk] Nice. You’re the first one to get it.
[Kaitlyn Amado] I was, like, I was going to say, I know her face. I’m so bad with names, though.
[Kirk] You knew her by name. Does it matter who the president is?
[Jahiem Jones] I think so. Yeah.
[Kirk] Why?
[Jahiem Jones] I think there’s a there’s a culture and a dynamic, and I think it requires someone who is really multifaceted and diverse.
[Kirk] And you said yes emphatically.
[Kaitlyn Amado] Yeah, because I feel like representation matters a lot. Especially because I feel like applying to BU, I was looking at the president and I was, like, it matters to me when they’re introducing their university and their values, and you could tell how she presents herself.
[Kirk] Tim McCorry, Fynn Buesnel and George Audi are all studying computer science at BU, and they aren’t so sure the university’s leadership matters to their day-to-day life on campus.
[Tim McCorry] I don’t think we have really too much interaction with the president now.
[George Audi] I still feel like it’s important to have a good president, though. I don’t know what constitutes a good president for us, but it’s important.
[Kirk] What do you think makes a good president?
[Tim McCorry] I mean, there’s just so few points of interaction. Like, we get an email every couple of weeks and maybe you see a clip on Instagram.
[Kirk] We also asked higher ed experts the same question. And surprisingly, we got a similar answer. If I’m a student and — don’t take this personally — does it matter who my president is?
[Brian Rosenberg] I don’t take it personally at all.
[Kirk] Brian Rosenberg is the former president of Macalester College, and he admits it really depends on the kind of institution.
[Brian Rosenberg] At the institution where I’m teaching right now, Harvard University, the simple answer is no. I was an undergraduate at Cornell. I probably could not name the president when I was a student. It makes a little bit more difference at smaller institutions, at institutions that are financially challenged, because the president does have the ability to create a particular culture on campus.
[Jon] Besides keeping the lights on, Suzanne Rivera, the current president of Macalester, agrees that at smaller colleges, the president plays a more visible role.
[Suzanne Rivera] I think at small, independent liberal arts college where I know the students by their first name and I know what their extracurriculars are and I can compliment them on their performance in the soccer game on Friday night when I see them on campus Monday morning, then it really does matter who your college president is.
[Kirk] Former Colorado College President Song Richardson says leadership always matters no matter the size of the school.
[Song Richardson] Everything from do you see yourself in the president of the institution? I think that’s an important part for students. How the president is able to engage with leaders across the campus to create an environment where people feel valued.
[Kirk] For example, Richardson made headlines by pulling Colorado College out of the U.S. News rankings, a move she says was driven by the school’s core mission.
[Song Richardson] Continuing to participate in U.S. News and World Report was inconsistent with the values of equity and intellectual engagement and academic rigor.
[Kirk] Richardson’s decision sparked intense backlash, especially from alumni who questioned her character and her credentials.
[Song Richardson] So it was, ‘You have a woke president. You have a president who I don’t believe went to Harvard.’
[Kirk] Richardson says she had faced sexism and racism before, so she understood that everything she did or said would be filtered through that lens.
[Song Richardson] People began to paint me as someone who cared only about equity issues and not about the other issues that were important in higher ed at the time.
[Kirk] Then when the Dobbs decision leaked, signaling restrictions on abortion rights, Richardson felt compelled to speak out.
[Song Richardson] At that point, as president, I was hoping that we could live in a world where I could speak in my voice as an individual, both as president and share my opinions, and that others would also feel free to disagree with me.
[Kirk] She quickly realized, though, that her speaking out made conservative students feel alienated.
[Song Richardson] Because their leader is expressing an opinion that they don’t agree with. And that made me start to wonder, what is the role of the president and when and how should I speak about controversial issues when I feel like my role is to be the voice box for the institution and that represents everyone?
[Kirk] After you received that feedback, you continued to speak out, though. Did that pull you back at all?
[Song Richardson] So I have to share, Kirk, that one of the things that my leadership team will always say to me is that Song has gone off script. Because I am someone who loves to speak my mind. That’s just who I am. And so what it caused me to do was to pause a little bit before speaking.
[Kirk] When did you realize you just couldn’t stay in the position anymore?
[Song Richardson] It was an evolution. It was in my third year of the presidency that I started to realize that the compromise I had to make of speaking freely and robustly about how I felt about the issues that were happening across the country was constrained because of my role as president. It felt like my mouth was taped shut.
[Kirk] Eventually, she says, the constraints of the role — not sexism or racism — led her to step down and return to teaching and lecturing at UC Irvine.
[Song Richardson, in class] It is such a pleasure to be here today to speak with all of you on the day before Constitution Day. I want to focus on the epidemic — I would call it an epidemic — of racial violence that’s taking place across the country. And the continued and relentless killings of young Black men and women at the hands of the police are disturbing but unfortunately, unsurprising.
[Song Richardson] I had to live my values, Kirk, and that’s really what this is about. This was a decision about leaving one type of leadership position because I couldn’t be my full, authentic self. That’s really what it is.
[Jon] So what does all of this leadership turnover mean for students, for you? Well, Brian Rosenberg says frequent changes in leadership hurt stability and delay progress on strategic planning or long-term plans.
[Brian Rosenberg] And if you’re continually changing your leadership, essentially that process tends to start all over again. And so you end up in this endless cycle of restarting, planning and strategic efforts that really never gets beyond the planning stage.
[Kirk] So in this tumultuous environment, with so much volatility, what should prospective students and parents ask about college leadership?
[Song Richardson] How do they think about the learning environment?
[Kirk] Here’s Song Richardson again.
[Song Richardson] Is this a president and leaders who will support difficult and uncomfortable conversations in the classroom. Or is this a leader and a leadership team that will cave to pressure from groups to shut down conversation?
[Kirk] Brian Rosenberg, former president of Macalester.
[Brian Rosenberg] You know, when you choose a college as a student or as a parent, you don’t really care a lot about the fact that they have a giant medical center. And unless you’re an intercollegiate athlete, you don’t care a lot about what the Division 1 football facilities look like. You want to know whether your child or you are going to get an education, get an opportunity to have a job. And so the question I would ask is where on your list of priorities does undergraduate education actually rank? Is it 10th? Is it fifth? Is it first? That, to me, is the most important question.
[Kirk] Suzanne Rivera, the current president of Macalester, says the most important thing is how college presidents keep the focus on the success of student.
[Suzanne Rivera] One of the most fun things I get to do during orientation week is give a pep talk to the parents as they’re getting ready to depart our campus and drop their children off.
[Suzanne Rivera, at orientation] We may be living through hard times now, but we’re not doing so alone. We’re doing it in communities. So we owe it to each other to be our best selves, especially when it’s hard. Because if this community is to be the inclusive place to live and grow that we all want, then it also needs to be a place where people are free to speak, free to learn and make mistakes, and free to be themselves.
[Suzanne Rivera] And I thank them for trusting us with the responsibility to educate their children. But I also say to them that this is a really exciting time in their child’s life and that it’s a privilege for me to get to walk alongside their student as they figure out what kind of adult they’re going to be.
[Kirk] This is College Uncovered from GBH News and The Hechinger Report. I’m Kirk Carapezza.
[Jon] And I’m Jon Marcus. We’d love to hear from you. Send us an email to GBHNewsConnect@WGBH.org, or leave us a voicemail at (617) 300-2486. And tell us what you want to know about how colleges really operate.
This episode was produced and written by Kirk Carapezza …
[Kirk] … and Jon Marcus, and it was edited by Jeff Keating.
Meg Woolhouse is supervising editor.
Ellen London is executive producer.
Production Assistance from Diane Adame.
Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott.
Theme song and original music by Left Roman.
Project manager and head of GBH podcasts is Devin Maverick Robbins.
College Uncovered is a production of GBH News and The Hechinger Report and distributed by PRX.
It’s made possible by Lumina Foundation.
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.
College campuses have become battlegrounds in America’s culture wars, with diversity, equity and inclusion programs at the center of the debate. In at least 20 states, Republican lawmakers are pushing to limit or even ban DEI initiatives at public universities.
College Uncovered cohost Kirk Carapezza heads to North Carolina, where rollbacks in DEI are raising concerns. At the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, some students fear these changes could make campus less welcoming for certain people. Conservative students worry about a chilling effect on free speech.
Off campus, voters are questioning whether taxpayer dollars should fund DEI programs at all. Even among supporters of diversity and inclusion, some progressive and independent academics concede that some elements of DEI could discourage discussion of controversial topics for fear of offending some students. Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gerson argues that while DEI programs were well-intentioned, they’ve gone off course.
GBH senior investigative reporter Phillip Martin joins the podcast to trace the historical roots of DEI policies and explain what scaling them back means for today’s students and their families.
[Kirk] This is College Uncovered. I’m Kirk Carapezza with GBH News. And that’s the Tarpeggios, a college a cappella group at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
UNC is the oldest public university in America, and it was a hotbed of civil rights protest in the 1960s. It wasn’t until 2018 that the college formally acknowledged that enslaved people helped build the campus. It also apologized for the — quote — ‘profound injustices of slavery.’
But today on campus, things are considerably different. Millions in state funding originally set aside for diversity, equity and inclusion programs, or DEI, is now being redirected to race-neutral programs, including civics education.
UNC student Samantha Green believes the university is trying to turn back the clock. Green heads the Black Student Movement at UNC.
[Samantha Green] We do a lot of work on the ground trying to support diversity, equity, inclusion. However, recently those at the legislative level that have authority over our actions have stepped in, deeming some of the policies that we’ve had in the past as being non neutral or non effective, and in some ways even harmful to the student body.
[Kirk] Across campus, others see the issue very differently. UNC student Preston Hill is a sophomore studying journalism and political science. A leader of the College Republicans, he sees the need to move toward what he calls a colorblind society, and he’s all for the repeal and replacement of DEI.
[Preston Hill] I think going back to neutrality, back to just simply looking at people based off of their personalities, their achievements, as opposed to the color of their skin or their sexual orientation — I think that that’s the way to go. And I think that that’s been the problem with DEI and why so many companies — not just universities, but companies, are rolling it back as well.
[Kirk] This is College Uncovered, a podcast pulling back the ivy to reveal how colleges really work and why it matters to you. I’m Kirk Carapezza from GBH News. …
[Jon] … and I’m Jon Marcus with The Hechinger Report. We’ll be joined later in this episode by Phillip Martin, an investigative reporter at GBH News who’s been following controversies around DEI for years.
[Kirk] Dozens of state or local bills are now targeting DEI funding. These are programs intended to expand universities’ demographic reach and make all students, regardless of their backgrounds, feel welcome and safe. That idea was born in the civil rights era and then embraced by many college campuses and some workplaces after the murder of George Floyd. But now it’s facing a big backlash.
[Jon] Beginning this year, Texas banned all DEI offices, as well as diversity training and — quote — ‘ideological oaths and statements,’ at all public institutions. Florida has eliminated all DEI programing at public colleges. And universities in both of those, states have also announced cuts to DEI office staffs.
[Kirk] At least 20 states have Republican proposals aimed at limiting DEI programs at public universities. In Wisconsin and Alabama, public university systems have decided to ban DEI preemptively after threats by lawmakers to withhold money and raises.
[Sound of voting] We are in order.
[Kirk] In May, North Carolina became the latest state to repeal its policy on diversity and inclusion.
[Peter Hans] Higher education does not exist to settle the most difficult debates in our democracy.
[Kirk] UNC System President Peter Hans speaking to the Board of Governors.
[Peter Hans] Our role is to host those debates, to inform them, to make them richer and more constructive. That’s a vital responsibility, and we can’t fulfill it if our institutions are seen as partisan actors in one direction or another.
Kirk] Hunt says students and faculty should be ready to engage with liberal, conservative and traditional ideas and even explore progressive ones like DEI, but that college administrators ought to stay out of it altogether, leaving faculty and students free to grapple with competing ideas and pursue truth and discover knowledge with an open mind.
I wanted to hear from the people most affected by these changes. So I visited Chapel Hill, where student groups were recruiting new members outside the student center. I talked to the Tarpeggios, that a cappella group we heard earlier, about what DEI programs offer and what might be lost without them. Here are seniors Lou Lindsley, Ella Breiner and junior Valentina Fernandez Escalona.
[Ella Breiner] I have no words. It’s so incredibly upsetting. And I think as a senior, I hate the idea that, like, I’m leaving this school and that’s going to be, like, that’s going to have a huge effect on our student population.
[Lou Lindsley] I think what’s frustrating to me is that, like, people are reorienting their focus from the ways that race affects people’s opportunities to, like, thinking about it just in terms of wealth and income. But there are so many different ways that, like, people’s race, people’s sex, all those different sort of identifying characteristics, like, how those factor into people’s future opportunities.
[Valentina Fernandez Escalona] Especially as a person of color on campus. I think that representation is super important and, like, being able to talk about diversity is something that should not be a question. I feel like it’s just something that’s so simple that everyone should be able to talk about freely.
[Kirk] On and off campus. I found DEI advocates who see these initiatives as essential to making underrepresented students and faculty feel more welcome and included by providing advising and support for them.
[Chantal Stevens] If I were, you know, a Black student from a rural town in North Carolina and I’m struggling, where do I go? And I think that’s what’s really scary.
[Kirk] Chantal Stevens is executive director of the ACLU of North Carolina.
[Chantal Stevens] If you are in an underrepresented group, you need to know where your resources are, because your experiences are different. And so to have this idea of, you know, being colorblind or issue blind, that really doesn’t work, right? Because we experience the world in very, very different ways. And so I really see this as a setback.
[Kirk] Over the long run. That can mean fewer Black and Hispanic students come to schools like UNC.
[Chantal Stevens] There’s so much at stake, right? When you think about the way we live. Let’s take, I don’t know, science and technology, just for an example. And let’s think about it in the form of AI and you’re developing voice technology. If you don’t have diverse people at that table, if you don’t have people who understand that different people bring certain inflections and certain words and your dialects might be different, think about what’s missed when that technology gets developed.
[Jon] Even before its repeal of the DEI, UNC took down its web page for its office of diversity and inclusion. The Board of Governors has since reallocated millions of dollars it used to spend on DEI to what the administration calls student success programs and civics education, at a school where most of the students come from within the state.
[Kirk] So to hear how voters and taxpayers who subsidize the university are responding to these changes, I took a 30-minute drive south of Chapel Hill to a diner in a small town called Pittsboro
[Hostess answering phone] Hello, Virlie’s Grill.
[Kirk] At the bar, people chatted quietly over ham and eggs while Fox News aired on big flat screens overhead. All the patrons I spoke to agreed their taxpayer dollars should not be funding DEI on campus. Here’s Christopher Partain, Carollyn Lloyd and Hal Gwynn.
[Christopher Partain] I disagree with most of those policies, but I do believe that we should treat everyone as equal going into it. But it doesn’t have to be an equal outcome.
[Kirk] When you say you oppose DEI policy, specifically what do you oppose about it?
[Christopher Partain] I don’t think that we necessarily need to teach ideologies that are politically driven and motivated.
[Carollyn Lloyd] You’re there to get an education, nothing more. Focus on your education. You take up politics when you leave.
[Hal Gwynn] They should be learning about science, math, education English if we’re covering the costs. We don’t want them to learn about woke and the LGBTQ thing. That’s just my opinion.
[Kirk] So when you think about American colleges, what concerns you the most?
[Jimmie Phar] That’s pretty easy: all the liberal indoctrination now. They’re almost all that way now.
[Kirk] That’s Jimmie Phar, who’s a graduate of UNC Chapel Hill.
[Jimmie Phar] I went twice. I went in ‘69 and ‘73. And then I was in the Air Force for five years, then I went back in the ‘70s. And my experience was you get a lot of socialism indoctrination. I call it indoctrination, they call it teaching. Being an alumni, I can I can poke fun at them, you know? I still like their sports. I just don’t like their politics.
[Jon] Back at the UNC campus, junior Matthew Trott is from Pittsboro. He feels the same way as the people at that diner in his hometown. Trott is double-majoring in political science and public policy. And he’s on board with ending DEI.
[Matthew Trott] Speaking for myself and a lot of other Republican students, we of course are very much in favor of having a diverse and inclusive student body. The problem is that, in the past, many of these policies have been used to silence differing viewpoints that are not even opposed to diversity and inclusion.
[Jon] Trott says these policies have made it difficult for the College Republicans to host certain conservative speakers like far-right commentator Candace Owens.
[Matthew Trott] We eventually did, of course, get her approved, and it was a huge event where we had a full house of about 750 and had to turn away probably an equal number.
[Kirk] So now let’s bring in Phillip Martin, a senior investigative reporter with GBH News, who’s covered DEI and its backlash for years.
Hey, Phillip.
[Phillip Martin] Hey, how’s it going?
[Kirk] All right. So, Phillip, what goes through your head when we talk about this controversial topic?
[Phillip Martin] Well, first of all, when you talk about DEI, you can’t limit it to what’s going on on campus. Campuses are reflecting what’s going on nationally. The backlash against DEI is the issue. The backlash against DEI is formed from a national perspective. It’s an ideological backlash. So it’s not neutral. Right? That’s the first thing that has to be clear. Some of the same advocates who are advocating, for example, for free speech on campus are some of the same people who are pushing back against DEI, and who are silencing various progressive speakers, like former Black Panther Angela Davis on some campuses. So, in other words, the notion of talking about DEI on campus can’t be extricated from the larger conservative goal of anti wokeness, as it’s called.
[Kirk] And it’s part of our national narrative now. We heard it with, you know, Republicans saying Kamala Harris is just a DEI higher, or the DEI candidate.
[Phillip Martin] Precisely. It’s become a metaphor for race. And the same is true by and large on campus. That’s not to say that you don’t have some legitimate concerns about DEI institutionally, but for the most part, this is an ideological frame. It’s an ideological backlash. It’s not something that is neutral, as some people have advocated or stated. And it’s certainly not colorblind. You don’t go walk into a supermarket and not see what color the fruit is. It’s a question of what you do with that fruit. It’s a question of if you buy it or don’t buy it. The same thing is true about the whole issue of colorblindness. It’s a term that basically obfuscates all of reality. And it’s a way of not of really dealing forthrightly with the issues in front of you.
[Kirk] So, Phil, what do you hear in those voices from the campus in North Carolina and the diner in Pittsboro?
[Phillip Martin] I love the diner in Pittsburgh. I mean, what’s the name of the community?
[Kirk] Pittsboro.
[Phillip Martin] You gotta love that diner.
[Kirk] What do you hear in those voices?
[Phillip Martin] I hear hungry people. No, seriously, what I hear are people who have basically — it made sense to me that Fox News was on in the background, because what I heard was Fox News. When you hear someone talk about liberal indoctrination when you’re talking about DEI, what does that mean? That DEI is somehow counterposed to progress, that it’s counterposed to expertise, to qualifications. And that is exactly what you hear in these voices of where folks say things should be colorblind. Now, that’s my point. Colorblindness is, in fact, some would argue, and from my reporting, color blindness has been blindness. The notion of seeing things in terms of of neutrality. How could it possibly be colorblind if someone like Donald Trump got into the Wharton School as an undergraduate, and most reporting by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal showed that he did not get in on the basis of his academics. George Bush, he did not get into Harvard Business School on the basis of his academics or to Yale. This the issues that are involved — legacy, money, nepotism and other factors. DEI is simply another way of expanding the campus population, its diversity, and to include larger voices. And as some of your people you’ve interviewed, Kirk, have said, this actually expands the voices and it expands the type of people who are on these campuses.
[Kirk] Right. And so it sounds like what we’re hearing is some conflation of DEI and, you know, quote-unquote socialism or indoctrination.
[Kirk] That becomes the problem with these terms. It obfuscates reality when people say that DEI is anti-democratic or they call it socialism or they call it indoctrination. These are terms we’ve heard since the civil rights movement. I mean, when during the civil rights movement of when people were pushing back against civil rights, do you know what they advocated? Why don’t we just be colorblind, even as the need for civil rights was very clear and directly in front of their faces. It’s a go-to phrase or a go-to term for doing nothing or essentially embracing the status quo, which is, again, the priority of whiteness.
So, Kirk, this question to you. I mean, what does your reporting on the ground say about the effectiveness of DEI.
[Kirk] Well, you know, we’ve got to put this in context, right? All this backlash comes after the Supreme Court banned race-conscious admissions, or affirmative action, as it’s better known. And DEI advocates tell me that these campus programs are not just effective, but increasingly necessary to achieve true equity.
Dr. Tina Opie teaches organizational behavior at Babson College, and she says despite the backlash, colleges should recommit to DEI.
[Tina Opie] The concern that I have with people who are trying to repeal or ban DEI is, okay, so you don’t like that tool, but what tool or solution are you offering to redress the fact that there are so many inequities and higher education?
[Kirk] And Phillip, as a Black woman, Opie points out that, at places like Babson and UNC, Black, Hispanic and Asian professors are significantly underrepresented.
[Phillip Martin] Well, you know, she has a point. I mean, a recent USC study found Black and Hispanic professors only made up 5 percent of tenured faculty at four-year universities.
[Tina Opie] And it’s not because of a pipeline issue. There is something happening within institutions of higher education where people who are from historically marginalized groups are not ascending at the same levels as their white, male, straight counterparts. Why is that? What it feels to me that they’re doing, Kirk, is they’re banning DEI and offering no solution, which suggests to me that they’re content with the status quo.
[Kirk] And Opie says the same people who oppose DEI aren’t protesting the baked-in advantages eealthier students have, like tutoring or who may have a legacy edge in admissions.
[Phullip Martin] Well, that’s interesting, too. But so too, Kirk, is the fact that DEI is actually more popular than people think. There was this poll that was conducted by YouGov in 2023. It found that nearly 60 percent of Americans support having a DEI office on a college campus.
[Kirk] Sure. But even those who support the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion object to what they see as the bureaucracy of those offices. These critics say in many ways it’s all gone too far and it needs to be scaled back or at least do a better job of including conservative ideas.
Jeannie Suk Gersen teaches constitutional law at Harvard.
[Jeannie Suk Gersen] I think the problem begins when you take a set of principles that are really good, right? Anti-discrimination is really good. Diversity — that’s really good. Obviously, you should be including people. All those things are really good principles and they’re very beneficial to the educational setting. I think that there’s a tendency sometimes on university campuses to think you take principles that you’re committed to and that you want to promote, and you turn them into rules that become the basis of punishment. Either punishment through social shaming or sanction or through making it harder to do the job that you’re supposed to do because you’re having to deal with the threat that something, you know, maybe you’ll have, of course, taken away from you or that you could actually be investigated for discipline and for wrongdoing. That’s been the chill.
[Kirk] Have you seen that happen at Harvard?
[Jeannie Suk Gersen] So I can’t talk about specific cases, because I might have been involved as a lawyer. But I can say it is something that professors, whether at Harvard or elsewhere, have come to feel is a is an ordinary part of life now.
[Kirk] And even among some supporters of a diverse campus, Suk Gersen says there’s a growing sense that these relatively new, well-intentioned programs could go awry if they’re institutionalized.
[Jeannie Suk Gersen] With a whole bunch of personnel and officials dedicated to it and an office and, you know, funding for it, and then certain, you know, training modules and orientation procedures and things like that, then it becomes a whole new world.
[Kirk] Are you concerned that DEI is defined by or too narrowly focused on race?
[Jeannie Suk Gersen] To the extent that you’re really going to have a campus that’s truly inclusive, it must also include the viewpoints that one’s not very, you know, comfortable with or in agreement with.
[Kirk] She cites conservative viewpoints like the belief that abortion should be illegal or that Roe vs. Wade was wrong. Still, Suk Gerson, who describes herself as politically independent, cautions that conservative critics should not be so quick to just condemned DEI and hope that it will just go away or disappear.
[Jeannie Suk Gersen] Because it is actually DEI that could end up making people understand the value of inclusivity toward conservative viewpoints on liberal campuses.
[Kirk] Phillip, in my reporting, I heard this idea again and again. Jeannie Suk Gerson and other critics talk a lot about the DEI bureaucracy.
So if I’m a student or parent, what, if anything, do I need to know about that bureaucracy?
[Phillip Martin] Well, first of all, there is a bureaucracy. It’s becoming less and less, however, as part of this backlash against DEI. There has been a commitment since the civil rights movement, at least verbally, to the notions of equality, diversity and inclusion. It wasn’t always called DEI.
[Kirk] These aren’t new ideas, right?
[Phillip Martin] These aren’t new ideas at all. But there have been attempts to try to institutionalize them. Those attempts only became serious, most people believe, after the death, after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Suddenly there was this reawakening, if you will, and an acknowledgment that the country was beset by institutional racism, systemic racism, not just a problem of attitudes, but institutional racism. And to counter that, it was suggested, okay, we need to create some form of some mechanism to bring in greater voices, to bring in more students of color onto campuses, those who might be poorer and those who might be more females, or more transgender students, so on and so forth. There was a legitimate effort to basically remedy this.
[Kirk] And by setting up offices, did that just create a bigger target?
[Phillip Martin] Yes. When you put up a sign, you’re asking for criticism. It expanded the bureaucracy. And any bureaucracy is going to be beset by problems and contradictions. And what happened here was that a lot of folks believed, okay, suddenly, you know, you’re being asked to take what some folks construe as a loyalty test before you are hired.
[Kirk] Right. You’re talking about diversity statements.
[Phillip Martin] That’s right. Right. Now, that in itself is not problematic when you consider that we do statements on all types of things. We agree not to curse out the person in the cubicle next to us. We agree not to sexually harass someone. So on and so forth. So this was yet another set of agreements. But you also had people who felt that it went too far and you had other people, sometimes liberals, sometimes progressives, who felt that these diversity statements expanded a bureaucracy that shouldn’t exist and that you’re not going to solve or push back against racism by having someone sign a statement, because it’s simply an action as opposed to a commitment or belief.
[Kirk] But do you think that whether we’re talking about diversity statements or we’re talking about DEI offices and the mechanism that you describe — do you worry or do you think that this is all creating a chilling effect on campus where people just aren’t even talking?
[Phillip Martin] Well, I think the chilling effect actually comes from the pushback against DEI. I mean, DEI has never said let’s ban books. Many critics of the idea call DEI socialist. But that doesn’t make sense if you’ve read any written rudimentary studies of socialism, that doesn’t make sense. If you call it liberal indoctrination, that, too, is a is a conservative catchphrase that doesn’t make sense. So I think that DEI has done a lot of good in terms of expanding or truly creating a diverse campus and asking folks to live up to equitable ideas, if you will. But I think it also serves as a convenient target for folks who already see liberal education as problematic or as a threat, who already see the academy as problematic. You see what’s happening in Florida with dissenters on college campuses trying to re-create the ideal on college campus as a conservative frame.
[Kirk] And what does your reporting over the years say about this idea of a quote-unquote, post-racial or colorblind society? And how far along or not along are we?
[Phillip Martin] Well, first of all, we’re not anywhere close to post-racial. Post-racial is a term that’s been introduced into society, but it does not reflect the objective reality of, we can’t be post-racial if, in fact, you know, like, we were, for example, demonizing Haitians in Springfield, Ohio. And you have more than half the country that have gone along with that demonization, or at least half the country, I should say, has gone along with that demonization. That’s not post-racial.
[Kirk] On this podcast, we’re very consumer focused. And so, what’s your advice to students and families who are trying to navigate this really tricky moment on campus right now?
[Phillip Martin] Find the most diverse campus you can, because that is going to reflect real-world experience once you graduate four years later. The type of world we live in is not a monochromatic world. We live in a world of different colors, different ethnicities, of men, women, nonbinary. This is the reality. And so, look for a diverse campus. Look for a diverse campus also in terms of thought. And that’s out there. Even when many conservatives say that a university does not adhere to the foundations of freedom of speech, my experience has always been that you have these debates, you have these discussions, and one frame may be more dominant than another on the campus — again, that might be the nature of the university — but that doesn’t mean those voices will be drowned out. And I say, look, for the greatest diversity you can find and inclusion of all types of folks, and where people feel they belong.
[Kirk] But there’s a difference between belonging and feeling comfortable all the time.
[Phillip Martin] Well, that’s right.
[Kirk] So the campus is where you feel most comfortable might not actually be the best fit.
[Phillip Martin] Well, that’s true. And so you have to also feel that you belong there. And it has to be acknowledged. The university has to acknowledge that you, my friend, belong here with us, and so on and so forth. Not that we’re tolerating you, but that you actually belong here and you feel comfortable being here and you can contribute.
[Kirk] And you can contribute.
[Phillip Martin] That is the type of space I would look for as a student.
[Kirk] And what about when it comes to the bureaucracy? And, specifically, what’s your advice to students trying to navigate the DEI space?
[Phillip Martin] Well, I think, first of all, I would think that colleges have to be very careful. Again, if a DEI statement is construed as a loyalty statement, that’s probably no good for anyone. That’s been my experience in reporting that. It simply creates a backlash. So I think what you have to do is figure out how to get people to commit in other ways — commit in the way they teach, commit in the way students feel they belong to that institution, to that campus, to each other.
[Kirk] So it’s not just window dressing, but it’s actually part of the plumbing.
[Phillip Martin] It’s built into the campus. It’s the wiring and it’s the tiles.
[Kirk] Phillip Martin, a senior investigative reporter with GBH News. Phillip, thank you so much.
[Phillip Martin] Thank you.
[Kirk] These decisions to roll back DEI have the greatest impact on students living and studying on the margins. Samantha Green is one of those students. She’s transgender and leads UNC’s Black Student Movement. And I met her in UNC’s Upendo Lounge. Upendo is the Swahili word for love.
[Samantha Green] And it’s kind of a testament to what DEI on our campus has done. So I really wanted to show it to you all because it really shows the progression of from the establishment of this space that’s meant to be a location where Black students who at the time especially were not allowed to be really in a lot of locations and really thrive in those locations. We made a space of our own and we got it chartered.
[Kirk] Nearly 60 years later. Green says the repeal of DEI and the loss of funds will hurt students this space was designed to support, on a campus that was actually built by slaves in the 1700s. Today, about 70 percent of UNC students are white and about 8 percent are Black.
[Samantha Green] We are setting up infrastructure for our students that are coming back onto campus, and a lot of our infrastructure is based around state funding. It’s based around community organizing. And these DEI repeals have basically taken away the footing that we normally stand on.
[Kirk] Green is studying public health and says the effects of repealing DEI will be felt far beyond the walls of the Upendo Lounge.
What message does this sent to students if the office shuts down or is stripped of funding and staff? What message does that send to a student like you?
[Samantha Green] It tells me that I have to fight harder. But to many students, it tells them that they’re not supported, that they’re not welcome, and that they’re either going to need to find another place to be or get out of here as quickly as possible or whatever they can do. And I fear that means that more students are not going to come to our university and the university could be negatively impacted by this.
More information about the topics covered in this episode:
Gallup survey of college graduates’ feelings about diversity
[Kirk] This is College Uncovered from GBH News and The Hechinger Report. I’m Kirk Carapezza.
[Jon] And I’m Jon Marcus. We’d love to hear from you. Send us an email to GBHNewsConnect@wgbh.org or leave us a voicemail at (617) 300-2486. And tell us what you want to know about how colleges really operate.
This episode was produced and written by Kirk Carapezza ….
[Kirk] And Jon Marcus, and it was edited by Jeff Keating. Meg Woolhouse is supervising editor. Ellen London is executive producer. Production assistance from Diane Adame.
Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott. Theme song and original music by Left Roman. Mei He is our project manager and head of GBH podcasts is Devin Maverick Robins.
Keep listening after the election to hear how the results will affect your college plans.
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.
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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.
BROOKLINE, Mass. — It was a humid, gray morning in July, and most of their peers were spending the summer sleeping late and hanging out with friends. But the 20 rising 10th graders in Lisa Rodriguez’s class at Brookline High School were finishing a lesson on exponents and radicals.
As Rodriguez worked with two students on a difficult problem, Noelia Ames was called over by a soft-spoken student sitting nearby. Ames, a rising senior who took Algebra II Honors with Rodriguez as a sophomore, was serving as a peer leader for the summer class.
“Are you stuck on a problem?” Ames asked, leaning over to take a closer look.
Noelia Ames, a senior at Brookline High, helps a younger student with a math problem during a summer class where she served as a peer teacher. Credit: Javeria Salman/The Hechinger Report
The students in Rodriguez’s class were participating in a summer program created by the Calculus Project, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit. Founded at Brookline High near Boston in 2009, the group now works with roughly 1,000 students from 14 nearby districts beginning in the summer after seventh grade to help them complete advanced math classes like calculus before they finish high school.
It focuses on helping students who are historically underrepresented in high-level math classes — namely those who are Black, Hispanic and low-income — succeed in that coursework, which serves as a gateway to selective colleges and well-paying careers. While some states and districts are nixing advanced-math requirements, sometimes in the name of equity, the Calculus Project has a different theory: Students who have traditionally been excluded from high-level math can succeed in those courses if they’re given a chance to preview advanced math content over the summer and take classes with a cohort of their peers.
In recent years the Calculus Project’s work has taken on fresh urgency, as the pandemic hit Black, Hispanic and low-income students particularly hard. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court ruling banning affirmative action left even some college officials concerned that inequities in high school math would make it harder for them to fill their classes with students from diverse backgrounds. The Calculus Project’s national profile has grown — its staff advises the College Board on AP math exams and classes and have advised groups in a few other states — even as the organization has attracted some scrutiny from parents, due to its emphasis on students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
“One out of 10 Black students in the eighth grade math scores were scoring basic or above,” saidKristen Hengtgen, a senior policy analyst at the nonprofit advocacy group EdTrust, referring to last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation’s Report Card. “When you see that, you need to throw certain student groups the life jacket,” she added. “We cannot combat a math crisis if we’re not helping the students who need it the most.”
Related: Widen your perspective. Our free biweekly newsletter consults critical voices on innovation in education.
The racial and socioeconomic gaps in math are stark: Only 28 percent of Black students and 31 percent Hispanic students nationwide took advanced math in high school compared with 46 percent of white students, according to a 2023 report from EdTrust. Just 22 percent of low-income students took advanced math. Experts say that’s because these students are less likely to attend high schools that offer higher-level math or to be recommended by their teachers for honors or AP classes, regardless of mastery.
They are also less likely to report feeling confident in math class or to enroll in calculus even when they are on a path to take the class early in high school, according to a report from EdTrust and nonprofit Just Equations. When it comes to Black and Hispanic students, Hengtgen blames what she calls “the belonging barrier.” “Their friends weren’t in the class,” she said. “They rarely had a teacher of color.”
Senior James Lopes, wearing a green sweatshirt, listens to William Frey teach a lesson on polynomials, rational trigonometrics, exponential and logarithmic functions at the Calculus Project’s summer leadership academy program at Boston University. Credit: Javeria Salman/The Hechinger Report
As a math teacher at Brookline High in the early 2000s, Calculus Project founder Adrian Mims got firsthand experience in what the research was beginning to establish. Black and Hispanic students were largely absent from the high school’s honors and advanced math courses, he said, and the few Black and Hispanic students who did enroll often dropped out early in the year.
As a PhD candidate at Boston College, Mims was writing his dissertation on how to improve African American achievement in geometry honors classes. His findings — suggesting that Black students dropped out of the course because they lacked knowledge of certain foundational math content, spent less time studying and preparing for tests, and lacked confidence in their math ability — became the catalyst for the first iteration of The Calculus Project.
Mims’ idea was to introduce Black students over the summer to math concepts they’d learn in eighth grade algebra in the fall. Students would be able to take the time to really understand those concepts and to build their confidence and skills, learning both from district teachers and peer teachers who could provide individual support.
In the summer of 2009, Mims piloted his idea with a group of rising eighth graders. In addition to learning concepts they’d see in algebra that fall, they were exposed to the stories of famous Black and Latino figures who excelled in STEM, such as Black NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson and Mexican-American astronaut Jose M. Hernandez. When the school year arrived, they participated in after-school tutoring at Brookline High.
The next fall, 2010, the district opened the program to all interested students, regardless of race. Summer participants were placed into cohorts so they could advance through math classes in high school with peers they knew.
Teachers and administrators at Brookline say the project had an immediate — and lasting — impact. “It’s so much more than learning math,” said Alexia Thomas, a guidance counselor and associate dean of students at Brookline High.
In 2012, Brookline High saw more Black students score as advanced on the state Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System Math test than ever before; 88 percent of those students had participated in the Calculus Project. The highest-scoring student in the district was Black – and a program alum. Two years later, when the first cohort of students who participated in both the summer and year-long programs graduated from high school, 75 percent had successfully completed calculus.
A class of rising eighth graders in the Calculus Project’s summer leadership academy at Emmanuel College finishes a review before their final exam on content previewing Algebra I. Credit: Javeria Salman/The Hechinger Report
Today, eight districts participate in the year-round program and another six send their students to the group’s summer programs, two three-week sessions that take place at Boston University, Emmanuel College and University of Massachusetts-Lowell. As of May 2024, 31 percent of students in the program identified as Black, 39 percent as Hispanic/Latino, 11 percent as Asian and 7 percent as white, according to program data. Mims has helped develop similar models in Florida and Texas.
In 2023, research consultancy group Mathematica, in partnership with the Gates Foundation, published findings from a two-year study on the effectiveness of the Calculus Project and two other math-oriented summer programs. (Disclosure: The Gates Foundation is one of the many funders of The Hechinger Report.) According to the report, students in the Calculus Project outperformed students who hadn’t participated by nearly half a grade point in their fall math classes, on average.
The project runs counter to a recent push to engage high schoolers in math by making the content more relevant to the real world and substituting classes like data science for algebra II and calculus. Justin Desai, the Calculus Project’s director of school and district support and a former Boston Public Schools math teacher and curriculum designer, said he sees risks in that approach. Students need subjects like calculus, he said, because “it’s the foundation of modern technology.” To replace advanced math classes in favor of less rigorous math courses keeps students from accessing and excelling even in some non-STEM fields like law, he said.
The project finds ways to show students how math skills apply in the professional world. Every semester students take field trips to Harvard Medical School, Google and to university research centers and engineering companies, where they are introduced to careers and see how the math they are learning is used in society.
A group of rising eighth graders from Newton Public Schools learn how to use different engineering applications at MathWorks headquarters in Natick, Mass. Credit: Javeria Salman/The Hechinger Report
In late July, a group of rising eighth graders from Newton Public Schools’ summer program took a field trip to the sprawling campus of global software company MathWorks. In one room, an engineer showed students how a car simulation model is built and used, while a second engineer helped students test a robotic arm. Another group of students learned how to use a programming software to turn an image into music.
As the Calculus Project has grown, there has at times been friction. In July, simmering tension between teachers and students at Concord-Carlisle High School came to a head when some project participants learned they’d been placed in financial literacy or statistics courses instead of calculus.
Some students being placed into lower-level classes has been a pattern since the program started at Concord-Carlisle in 2020, Mims said. He threatened to pull the program from the high school, and the students were reassigned to calculus (and one to statistics).
Mims said “this is a clear example” of how teacher recommendations can lock students out of advanced math classes. School administrators and teachers often point to students and parents as the reason for a lack of diversity in high-level math. “When we destroy that myth and we show that students can achieve at that level,” said Mims, “they can no longer point the finger at the students and the parents anymore, because we’ve created a precedent that these students can thrive.”
Laurie Hunter, the Concord-Carlisle superintendent, wrote in an email that her district is committed to partnering with the Calculus Project and that it “works closely with individual students and families to ensure their success and path align with the outcomes of the project.” She did not respond to specific questions.
A student in William Frey’s summer class at Boston University works on graphs during a lesson on functions. Credit: Javeria Salman/The Hechinger Report
Milton Public Schools, another district that works with the Calculus Project, was the subject of a 2023 federal civil rights complaint from national conservative group Parents Defending Education. The group accused the district of discrimination by partnering with the Calculus Project, which it said segregates students by intentionally grouping students of certain backgrounds together as part of cohorts.
Mims rejects the group’s claims, noting that the Calculus Project is open to students of all backgrounds including white and Asian students. He says he has not heard from the federal government or the group about the complaint since early 2023. Parents Defending Education did not respond to several interview requests. A spokesperson for the federal Department of Education said the Office for Civil Rights does not confirm complaints but pointed to its list of open investigations. At the time of publication, there were no open investigations against Milton Public Schools.
Art Coleman, a founding partner at legal group EducationCounsel LLC, said that he doesn’t expect such challenges to be successful. School districts have a legal obligation to address inequities in student performance, he said, and “there is nothing in federal law that precludes that targeted support, as long as in broad terms, all students, regardless of their racial or ethnic status, have the ability to tap into those resources and that support.”
This summer, the Calculus Project expanded its programming, including by adding a college advising class for rising seniors. It’s part of the group’s mission to help its students succeed not just in high school but in college and beyond, Mims said.
The group plans to help its graduates secure internships while they’re in college and network once they’re out, he said, and will soon begin tracking students to see how they do in college and the workforce. “It’s really about giving them every advantage that rich kids have,” Mims said.
Ames, the Brookline High senior and peer teacher, said she has found the program “totally life-changing,” in part because of the relationships she’s built with other students and teachers.
Miranda Vasquez-Mejia, a rising ninth grader from Newton, learns how to handle a robotic arm at MathWorks headquarters in Natick, Mass. Credit: Javeria Salman/The Hechinger Report
“You can be in the hardest class or the easiest class and every teacher will be there to support you,” said Ames, who is taking AP Calculus this fall and is considering studying finance after high school. “Whatever questions you have, they’ll answer.”
Quentin Robinson, a college junior who joined the Calculus Project as a rising seventh grader, said it taught him that he enjoyed math and also how to advocate for himself.
“My freshman year, they tried to put me in a lower-level math class because they didn’t think I was capable,” Robinson said. But his summer experience empowered him, and he persuaded the school to place him in Geometry Honors instead. He graduated from high school having completed both calculus and a college-level statistics course.
Now, Robinson is an accounting and data analytics major at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts. The Calculus Project, he said, helped him realize the voices of naysayers can be used as “a fuel” to achieve what you want.
Contact staff writer Javeria Salman at 212.678.3455 or salman@hechingerreport.org.
This story about advanced math was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our 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.
Rural young people who aspire to a higher education have long had fewer choices than their urban and suburban counterparts, contributing to far lower rates of college-going. Now many of the universities that serve them are eliminating large numbers of programs and majors.
That means the already limited number of options available to rural students are being squeezed even further, forcing them to travel even greater distances to college than they already do or give up on it altogether.
Rural students are much less likely to go to college than urban or suburban ones. Twenty-one percent of rural Americans have bachelor’s degrees, compared to 35 percent who live in urban places, a gap of 14 percentage points that has widened from 5 percentage points in 1970, according to the Federal Reserve.
This divide is further widening the gap that’s playing out in politics between rural America and urban and suburban places.
But there are some new attempts being made to help rural students who want to go to college.
Scroll to the end of this transcript to find out more about these topics.
Jon: We start in the rural Mississippi Delta with the sound of a saxophone performance at the senior recital at Delta State University.
The music department was highly regarded in a part of the country famous for the blues. But since this performance, the university has ended its music program. It also cut English chemistry, math, history, finance, accounting, art and other majors — 21 of them in all, or a third of everything it used to teach.
People in rural America already have far less access to higher education than people in cities and suburbs. Now the comparatively few universities that do exist in rural places are cutting huge numbers of programs and majors.
Kirk: Rural America is also home to many of the private colleges that are already starting to close at an accelerating rate.
This hollowing out of higher education in the heartland has largely gone unnoticed in cities and suburbs.
Jon: But the decline in college opportunity for rural high school graduates is only widening social, economic and political divides between rural America and the rest of the country.
Kirk: So how can we close these gaps? And if you’re a rural student who wants to go to college or a parent, how can you still make that happen?
Jon: 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 Jon Marcus from the Hechinger Report.
Kirk: And I’m Kirk Carapezza with GBH News. Colleges don’t want you to know how they operate, so GBH …
Jon: … in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, is here to show you
Kirk: In this election season, we’re exploring how deeply politicized higher education has become, and what students and their parents can do to navigate these increasingly turbulent waters.
Today on the podcast: “The Rural Higher Education Blues.”
Maria Fields-Chism: We think a lot about this in terms of, like, financial hardships, but that’s really the least of it.
Jon: Maria Fields-Chism grew up in rural Arkansas.
Maria Fields-Chism: I grew up in a teeny, tiny town.
Jon: But she always wanted to go to college.
Maria Fields-Chism: It was not necessarily important in my family, but it was always important to me, just something that I strove for.
Jon: But the nearest and most affordable option to her ‘teeny, tiny town’ was a public university almost two hours away. So Fields-Chism started at a local community college.
Maria Fields-Chism: There were a lot of barriers even for me to get across town to go to a community college. I was also a young mom, and I would start and I would stop.
Jon: She eventually transferred to that faraway public university, Henderson State. It took her seven years in all to get her bachelor’s degree in English. Then she got her master’s, which is also in English.
Just after she finished the university cut the English program along with math, chemistry, biology, history. That’s two dozen majors students can’t take anymore.
Maria Fields-Chism: On the coasts or in a bigger city, we wouldn’t have these barriers. It becomes a sort of us-versus-them kind of idea. When college seems inaccessible, it sort of adds to that feeling of disenchantment that we that we deal with in small communities, like, I don’t have a voice.
Jon: Today, Fields-Chism teaches seventh and eighth grade in Hot Springs, Arkansas. And she sees even more obstacles confronting her students than she faced.
Maria Fields-Chism: The thing that I think just really stuck with me is that there wouldn’t be another me — another person who grew up in a rural area, made it work, managed to go to Henderson to study English and then gets to graduate and teach English. Because you can’t study English at Henderson anymore.
Jon: So, Kirk, here’s a statistic many people might not know: Rural students graduate from high school at a higher rate than their counterparts in cities and suburbs. But they go to college at a lower rate than suburban students.
Kirk: And that situation has been getting worse, Jon. Just since 2016, the proportion of rural students who enroll in college has dropped even more. They’re also more likely to drop out than their urban and suburban classmates. Researchers say that’s because they feel out of step with campus culture.
Jon: Like Maria Fields-Chism, Dreama Gentry grew up in rural America and was the first in her family to go to college. She went to Berea College in Kentucky, where students work in exchange for their educations. Today, Gentry is the CEO of Partners for Rural Impact.
Dreama Gentry: So I founded the organization because education really was what was the ladder out of poverty. We’re a national intermediary that is focused on ensuring that all rural students have a path to upward mobility.
Jon: That turns out to be a big job.
Dreama Gentry: The first obstacle students face in thinking about higher education is tying it to their aspirations and their dreams and what fulfills them. I’m also coming from Appalachia, which is a region of persistent poverty. So I think when you combine poverty and rural, we’re not instilling in young folks that they can dream and aspire to be anything — that they have possibility and that they can have those dreams.
Kirk: Now, Jon, we should pause and point out here that rural America includes all kinds of people with all levels of incomes. But Gentry is right that cost is even more of a barrier for rural students. In general, median earnings in rural areas are about 20 percent lower than in the rest of the country.
Jon: Right, Kirk. And all these things that make it hard for rural kids to go to college don’t just take a toll on their dreams and aspirations. They have an economic impact. Only about one in five young adults in rural America have bachelor’s degrees or higher. That’s half the national average. And the gap has been widening steadily for 50 years.
Before we move on, let me point out something that we’ve said before on this podcast: Not everybody has to go to college. But somebody does. And that’s become especially urgent in rural places trying to diversify their economies away from mining and agriculture, which can employ only so many people.
Kirk: Okay, so Maria Fields-Chism’s middle schoolers in Hot Springs, Arkansas — they already have a lot of strikes against them. But one of the biggest is that they just don’t have anywhere near as many higher education options as urban and suburban kids do.
Jon: Right. A few big state universities are in rural places, such as Ole Miss, Penn State and Purdue. But the vast majority of rural America is served by regional universities with far fewer resources and much less prestige.
Andrew Koricich: You know, whenever we sort of have these urban- and suburban-centric conversations, we sort of just assume that folks have colleges available to them.
Jon: That’s Andrew Koricich. He heads up the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges and is a professor at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.
Andrew Koricich: That dynamic is so different in rural places. You have fewer types of institutions to choose from. You might have only a community college. You might have a Methodist college that is the only one around you. You might have a four-year public university around. And you might have none of those things around.
Jon: Nearly 13 million Americans now live in higher education deserts, mostly in the rural Midwest and Great Plains, according to the American Council on Education. That means the nearest four-year university is well beyond commuting distance.
Here’s Koricich again.
Andrew Koricich: You know, in a lot of rural places, the idea of choice is sort of a fiction. If you only have one option, you don’t really have choice. It is not just, if this institution doesn’t do it, another one can pick up the slack. If this institution doesn’t do it, it just does not happen. It is not offered. It’s not an option.
Kirk: And that brings us to what’s happening now.
(Sound of protest against program cuts at West Virginia University)
Kirk: At West Virginia University, a plan steered through by President Gordon Gee eliminated nearly 30 programs, including most foreign languages and graduate programs in math and public administration.
Jon: Those changes got national attention just because of the sheer number of them. But many other universities and rural places have made equally big cuts.
Kirk: And that includes the places we’ve already mentioned: Delta State and Henderson State, but also Arkansas State, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Youngstown State in Ohio.
Jon: Right. And Emporia State in Kansas, Missouri Western State University, the University of Alaska system. And these aren’t just a few programs here and there that were dropped, Kirk, but dozens. Economics. Sociology. Geography. Biology. Criminal justice. English. History. Philosophy. Political science. …
Kirk: Okay, we get it. We get it. And I know you’ve done a lot of reporting on this issue.
Jon: Yeah. And it’s not just programs and majors being cut. Entire colleges in rural America are disappearing. Sixteen of them have closed just since 2020.
Back at Henderson State in Arkansas, Megan Hickerson taught English for six years until the program was eliminated. There had been warning signs, so she wasn’t entirely surprised.
Megan Hickerson: And I knew the humanities, because the humanities are always under attack these days, right?
Jon: But she was surprised to see some other majors go, such as chemistry, biology and math, and alarmed that history and other subjects got cut.
Megan Hickerson: Not everybody has to study them, but the people who do study them are more likely to have the kind of thinking and critical skills that are really, really important to good citizenship in a free society, a democracy. These cuts are coming at a time when people, including young people, are being bombarded with nonsense. How do they get the skills to pass through that?
Jon: Hickerson still remembers the call from the university’s president telling her she was going to be laid off.
Megan Hickerson: And he just told me that my job was going to be terminated. And I asked him why, you know? And he said because, you know, the numbers don’t support the maintaining the program.
Kirk: A lot of this is being driven by big drops in enrollment made worse by the Covid pandemic. The number of students at Megan Dickerson’s former employer, Henderson State, fell by 28 percent during the pandemic. West Virginia’s enrollment is down by 10 percent since 2015.
Andrew Koricich at Appalachian State says part of the problem is that rural universities don’t have rich supporters to fall back on.
Andrew Koricich: There are a lot of rural institutions that have sort of been struggling for a while, and you drop the Covid pandemic in the middle of that, which, you know, I think we’ve seen documented so many ways that the rural impacts were just qualitatively different than they were in urban areas. On the rural side as well, whether it’s publics or private, nonprofits, you know, they’re not usually the places a lot of wealthy donors think of when they’re getting ready to write a $10 million check.
Kirk: And even though rural voters in swing states get a lot of love every four years from the presidential candidates, they often don’t have much clout with state lawmakers who set the budgets. That’s because there simply aren’t very many of them.
Andrew Koricich: I think some of that is you have so many state reps and senators for each of the major urban areas. But whenever you are a rural-serving public institution, you have one rep and you have one senator and they cover a large geographic area representing a lot of different interests. It is demeaning. It is creating a second class of people to say, ‘You pay your taxes just like everybody else does. You vote like everybody else does. But you just can’t have the same choices as everybody else because there aren’t enough of you here.’
Jon: That double standard is what makes this more than the usual higher education story. It’s contributing to anger and alienation. Rural voters are convinced that their communities get less government spending than they deserve. They don’t believe their kids will do as well as they did. They worry that rural ways of living are being lost and looked down upon. And they blame a lot of this on experts and elites in cities.
Kirk: And that’s not just anecdotal, Jon. That’s according to a survey of 10,000 rural voters. One of the people who conducted that survey was Nicholas Jacobs. He’s coauthor of the book “The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America.” Jacobs grew up in rural Virginia, and now he teaches in another rural state.
Nicholas Jacobs: I’m an assistant professor of government at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.
Jon: So, hey, Kirk — pop quiz. Do you know what the most rural state is, based on the percentage of people who live in rural places?
Kirk: Wyoming?
Jon: Nope.
Kirk: Montana?
Jon: Nope. It’s Maine. I know people might be surprised by that.
Kirk: You spent a lot of your life in Maine, right, Jon?
Jon: I have had the privilege of living in that beautiful state. And, by the way, you know, you lived and worked in the second most rural state — Vermont.
Kirk: Yup. All right. Shout out to Vermont Public.
Jon: So both of us have seen this up close. Smart kids graduate from good schools, but don’t go to college.
We all might have a different idea of what rural means. And that gets back to our earlier caution about being careful to not generalize about who or what is rural. Nick Jacobs makes the same disclaimer.
Nicholas Jacobs: Rural Maine is a lot different than rural Virginia, which is a whole lot different from the rural Southwest. I have a great friend and coauthor on some other work who is a third- or fourth-generation rural Montanan and laughs at my five-acre homestead, because he’s on a 5,000-acre ranch. Rural America, you’re right, is not one thing. It is beautiful. It is complex. And I think that’s why it’s so hard for us to reconcile to the fact that when it comes to politics, we actually can talk about this thing called rural America.
Jon: So Jacobs focuses on what rural people have in common, whatever state they live in.
Nicholas Jacobs: The reason we call the book “The Rural Voter” is because we believe that there are a set of core motivating behaviors or attitudes that do distinguish rural Americans from non-rural Americans.
Kirk: Now, not everyone in rural America is up in arms over cuts by universities to English and foreign language programs. Many schools are focusing on majors that lead directly to local jobs. And that’s okay with some people. At Delta State University, for example, one of the most popular majors is agricultural piloting. That’s a fancy name for a program that teaches students to fly crop dusting airplane.
Jon: Molly Minta is a reporter with Mississippi Today and the nonprofit news outlet Open Campus. She covers the Mississippi Delta and remembers a visit to the local county fair. It’s a Mississippi tradition where politicians come to make speeches.
(Sound of politician speaking) Well, good morning. Glad to be back at the Neshoba County Fair.
Jon: Away from the campaign speeches, Minta met a family that had come to show its prize goats.
Molly Minta: And I was talking to them about how they felt about higher education for their kids. And I had asked the mom of this group — they had three kids with them — if they felt there was any room for, like, character development in college. And she basically just said, ‘Not for my kids.’ She meant that college was career training. Basically college was, you go to get a job.
Jon: Other people Minta met looked at it from a completely different point of view.
Molly Minta: For Black Mississippians from rural areas, college is definitely about opportunity, about helping, you know, get jobs that only degrees can unlock. I want to make that point to kind of complicate a little bit the way we talk about how rural students are viewing college.
Kirk: Still, what’s been happening at rural universities means that the people who do want opportunity have to go farther away to get it.
Molly Minta: What I kind of found was that young people who want opportunities of certain kinds really want to leave. I think that there is a weariness being in a place that doesn’t feel like much is coming that way.
Kirk: And that inevitably affects politics. So let’s circle back to government professor Nick Jacobs.
Nicholas Jacobs: A politics of resentment or a rural politics of grievance is animated by this belief — a very widespread belief — that government resources are not distributed fairly, or that there’s certain biases against rural communities that keep rural communities from getting what they deserve. There are some people in some places that are getting a lot, and you’re not, and your community is not. And that, I think, is a part of the politics of resentment.
Jon: So if you’re a student in a rural high school or a parent in a rural community or just a citizen who cares about closing these divides, what do you do? One thing is to know that there are still opportunities for you, even if it means going a little farther away for college.
Nicholas Jacobs: To me, it’s less about the information that’s actually exchanged and more about the signal and the message you are sending — that when we, as a as an institution of higher education, as an elite college, when we talk about diversity, when we talk about being a welcoming environment and training the next generation of leaders, we mean you.
Kirk: And that’s the idea behind a new project called the STARS Network. It stands for Small Town and Rural Students. STARS was started when recruiters from a few elite universities finally started to visit rural high schools. A wealthy graduate of the University of Chicago gave them $20 million to do it. And he was originally from a small town himself.
Marjorie Betley: We had a trustee, an alum, come to us, and he had just been back to visit his hometown high school in rural Missouri. And he came to us in the admissions office at UChicago. And he said he had a question. And he was, like, ‘How many rural kids do you have on campus? Kids like me?’
Jon: That’s Marjorie Betley. She’s deputy director of admission at the University of Chicago and now the director of STARS.
Marjorie Betley: We couldn’t answer the question. So we worked on, how do we define this? How do we identify students? How do we support students? And we came back with a pretty embarrassing number. It was, like, 3 percent of the entire campus was coming from a rural or small-town high school. And he was, like, ‘You guys should be embarrassed.’ And we were, like, ‘We are. Thank you.’
Kirk: Just 3 percent.
Jon: Yeah. And about 20 percent of Americans live in rural places. But recruiters from selective universities hadn’t historically gone to those communities. A study found that college recruiters favor higher-income, public and private high schools in cities and suburbs. So Chicago and MIT, Columbia, Brown and Yale started to recruit from rural high schools. This year, they’re being joined by Dartmouth, Stanford, Berkeley and others.
Marjorie Betley: We started the conversation with a lot of these schools the same way we got started, which was, ‘How many rural students do you have on campus?’ And every single one was coming back with, honestly, pretty low numbers. So I think that is one of the reasons a lot of schools were, like, ‘We didn’t we didn’t even realize that.’ This was a population we had severely overlooked for a long time.
Kirk: In the STARS Network’s first year, Betley says, participating schools admitted 11,000 rural students, and just under half of them enrolled. If you live in a rural area and want to know more, you’ll find a link to the organization on our landing page.
Jon: But the goal isn’t just to steer rural kids to elite schools.
Marjorie Betley: The idea is kind of planting these seeds really early for students.
Jon: And that could help convince some rural kids to go to college anywhere.
Here’s Andrew Koricich.
Andrew Koricich: Not everybody needs a bachelor’s degree, but pretty much everybody needs something after high school. And I want that something after high school to let the folks who want to stay in their communities stay in their communities. And I don’t want it to be that to get the skills and training you need, it automatically means you have to leave this place you love and that needs you. We need those folks to stay in rural communities.
More information about the topics covered in this episode:
Kirk: This is College Uncovered from GBH News and The Hechinger Report. I’m Kirk Carapezza.
Jon: And I’m Jon Marcus. We’d love to hear from you. Send us an email to GBHNewsConnect@WGBH.org, or leave us a voicemail at (617) 300-2486. And tell us what you want to know about how colleges really operate. We just might answer your question on the show.
This episode was produced and written by Kirk Carapezza …
Kirk: … and Jon Marcus, and it was edited by Jeff Keating.
Meg Woolhouse is supervising editor.
Ellen London is executive producer.
Production assistance from Diane Adame.
Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott.
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.
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.
Related articles
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.
More than 40 million Americans have student loan debt. But should the government forgive all or even or part of it?
That debate has become a surprising source of political division.
Opponents say student loan forgiveness is effectively a transfer of wealth from the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder to the top. Supporters say forgiveness gives some breathing room to graduates who are being crushed by the costs of repayment, in some cases without ever even having graduated.
Meanwhile, the cost of college is forcing people to put off getting married, starting families, buying houses and doing the other things that fuel the American economy.
We debate the pros and cons, hear from student loan holders and provide advice on how to avoid going into debt in the first place.
Scroll to the end of this transcript to find out more about these topics.
It’s Morning Edition from NPR News. I’m Leila Fadel. More than 40 million federal student loan borrowers had an eventful year. It began with a promise of forgiveness. Then they were unforgiven. And now some may be forgiven again. …
Jon: Yeah, it’s been way more than an eventful year for people who have student loans. The roller-coaster ride of student loan debt has been going on for decades.
Kirk: There have been promises of loan forgiveness, lawsuits, more promises of loan relief, more lawsuits.
Jon: Right. The idea of forgiving even part of those loans — it’s a political minefield. And there’s the crux of the matter. People who didn’t go to college or already paid back their loans, they don’t get why they should have to pay for other people who did borrow money and haven’t paid it back yet. That’s a kind of class divide that’s easy for politicians to exploit.
Virginia Foxx: There’s no such thing as forgiveness.
Jon: This is Virginia Foxx. She’s the Republican chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce and an outspoken opponent of forgiving student loan debt.
Virginia Foxx: This entire scheme is nothing more than a transfer of wealth from those who willingly took on debt to those who did not or had the grit to pay off their loans. It’s about sticking hardworking taxpayers with the tab and those who owe it walking away from it scot free.
Kirk: 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 News …
Jon: … and I’m Jon Marcus of the Hechinger Report.
Kirk: Colleges don’t want you to know how they operate, so GBH News …
Jon: … in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, is here to show you.
In this election season, we’ve been exploring how deeply politicized higher education has become. And one of those perhaps surprising flashpoints is student loans. So today, we’ll talk about how student loans work, and why there’s so much disagreement about them. More importantly, before we’re done, we’ll share some ways that you can avoid going into debt to pay for college in the first place.
Today on the podcast: “The Borrowers’ Lament.”
Arti Sharma is one of the 44 million Americans with student loan debt.
Arti Sharma: My family didn’t have the funds to send me to college and I also didn’t have enough scholarship money.
Jon: She remembers when she started to borrow for college. Sharma says that after borrowing and trying to pay off the loans, with interest, she’s lost track of the total she owes. But it’s in the tens of thousands of dollars.
Arti Sharma: I’m a first-generation child of immigrants, working-class immigrants. I just wanted to get my education and sign at the dotted line. And I wasn’t concerned about loans, because I thought I was going to get a job that would help me pay off the loans to begin with. And so those are kind of the things that, you know, I wish I would have had somebody who could have talked to me about this.
Jon: Sharma borrowed even more to go to law school. Now she works for a public service nonprofit in Texas. She loves her job, but she doesn’t make the kind of money she needs to repay what she owes.
Arti Sharma: I want to pay off my loans. I don’t want to sit here and, like, you know, somebody just lets me get by scot free, right? It would have been great if I would have had enough income to pay off my loans. But it’s just, you feel kind of like a hamster on a wheel, chasing after something that never really happens, you know, going nowhere. With this interest compounding.
Kirk: At least Sharma got a degree. Forty percent of the people who borrow for college never even graduate. That means they have to repay their loans without the bump in earnings they’d expected. More than seven million people in their 50s are still paying off their student loans.
Jon: Right. The average debt for people when they get their bachelor’s degree is about $26,000. But by the time they’ve finished paying it off, decades later, that comes to more than $43,000, with interest. And all of that debt means people are putting off getting married, having kids, buying houses, starting businesses and all the other things that keep the economy running.
Arti Sharma: My parents don’t have any loans, you know, and they came from nothing. And they came to this country and they were able to have a house and a family on, you know, working-class income. And I have all these degrees, yet I don’t have even a net worth comparable to them.
Jon: Wow. Listen to what she’s saying there. That’s one of the reasons so many Americans are questioning the value of college.
Kirk: Okay, so all of this seems a pretty compelling argument for forgiving loans like Arti Sharma’s, right?
Jon: But there’s a surprising political divide. A poll by NPR found that only a narrow majority of Americans think that student loan holders should have their loans forgiven. Not surprisingly, people who don’t have student loan debt are much less likely to think it should be forgiven.
Kirk: Jon, when I was reporting in North Carolina for our episode about the backlash to DEI, I heard this sentiment again and again. Here’s Carollyn Lloyd. She’s a waitress at a diner in Pittsboro, North Carolina.
Carollyn Lloyd: I don’t think my tax dollars should pay for an education that’s not going to earn them enough to pay for their student loan when they get out.
Kirk: So in this election year, we’re going to have our own sort of mini debate about all of this. We’ll be taking a measure of the pros and cons of forgiving student loan debt.
Jon: As we heard, people like Congresswoman Virginia Foxx say it isn’t fair for taxpayers to have to repay the money other people took out in college loans.
Andrew Gillen: I would love for somebody to come and pay my mortgage, right? But that doesn’t mean there’s a good public policy reason to do that. I was the one who took on the debt. I’m the one responsible for repaying it.
Jon: That’s Andrew Gillen, a research fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute. Today in our mini debate, he’ll be arguing against the sort of blanket student loan forgiveness. President Joe Biden repeatedly proposed.
Andrew Gillen: There are, you know, for people who can’t pay their mortgages, there are consequences for that. Your house can get repossessed. You can get evicted. There’s actually less danger of that in the student loan area because nobody’s going to take your college degree away.
Kirk: On the other side of the issue is Persis Yu. She’s with the Student Borrower Protection Center, which advocates for student loan holders. And she says student loans have failed in helping students afford college.
Persis Yu: In some ways, we have broken the promise of the federal student loan system. And so I do think it is fair for the federal government at this point to then cancel those loans.
Kirk: Okay, we’re going to hear more from our debaters in a moment, Jon. But this is a good place to just pause and talk about how we even ended up with this system in the first place — using loans to pay for college.
The idea goes back to the 1960s. That’s when the federal government provided subsidies to banks for low-interest loans to students. But the amounts were very low, and so were the interest rates.
Jon: Then, in the 1990s, the government started giving out loans directly. This coincided with big increases in the cost of college.
Sameer Gadkaree: So, Jon, this is a story that spans decades.
Jon: That’s Sameer Gadkaree. He’s president of The Institute for College Access and Success. It’s a nonprofit that works to make college more affordable.
Sameer Gadkaree: The first piece of the puzzle is the growing use of student loans as far more and more and more people started going to college in order to improve their lives.
Jon: Back then, government grants for college still covered two thirds of the cost. So the loans were small. But as tuition kept rising, Pell Grants didn’t keep up, and the loans got bigger.
Sameer Gadkaree: The second piece of the puzzle I’ll offer you is something that played out over decades in state houses across the country, which is that whenever there was a recession, they would look at their budget and say, where can we meet our balanced budget requirement while also meeting these great needs that we have? And they would look at higher education and say, these public colleges and universities are really important, but they can raise some tuition.
Jon: Some colleges also have encouraged students to take out loans. Researchers at Cornell say for-profit colleges lead their students to borrow. There’s also evidence that the more money the government makes available to students, the more colleges of all kinds jack up their tuition. But in spite of calls from both Republicans and Democrats that colleges share some of the risk for students who default on their loans, that idea has gone nowhere.
Kirk: So students borrowed more and more. And now we’re closing in on $2 trillion of outstanding student loan debt.
Jon: Yeah, that’s more than Americans owe on their car loans or credit cards.
Okay, so let’s get back to our debate. Should some of those loans be forgiven? Persis Yu says yes.
Persis Yu: Right now, what we have is we have a system that is incredibly broken. The student loan system is in crisis. We have over 40 million student loan borrowers who are being crushed by $1.7 trillion of student loan debt. And this debt for many people is just not going away. It is a huge barrier, especially for young folks, to homeownership, to starting new businesses, to saving for retirement. It is also impacting older Americans as well. In fact, older Americans are the fastest-growing population of student debtors, and this is dramatically impeding their ability to save to retire and to, you know, live out their golden years.
Kirk: The golden years. Jon, most of my friends joke that we’ll never retire and enjoy our golden years.
Jon: Kirk, working with me, these are your golden years.
Kirk: I’m doomed.
But Andrew Gillen, like Virginia Foxx, says forgiving student loan debt is a regressive policy idea.
Andrew Gillen: College graduates tend to earn more than non-college graduates. And so if you’re giving college graduates a bunch of money, which is essentially what student loan forgiveness is, that’s going to be a regressive policy, that you’re benefiting the rich at the expense of the poor.
Persis Yu: Forty million people with student debt are also taxpayers, right? So it is not other people paying for their debt. Student loan borrowers are taxpayers, too. It is not an us-versus-them type of dynamic. It is a helping a subset of student of taxpayers relieve them of some of their burdens. Student loan borrowers don’t exist in a vacuum, right? Student loan borrowers exist in families and in communities. And it is good for communities when people in their community are doing financially well.
Jon: Persis Yu says it isn’t necessary to forgive all student loan debt.
Persis Yu: And, of course, you know, I do have the view that, you know, the more you cancel, the more good you will do for more people. But I do think it’s worth thinking about the different levels, right? Like, even at President Biden’s proposal to cancel, you know, up to $10,000 for everybody and, you know, $20,000 for folks who got Pell Grants, there was an income cap on that. But, you know, even that proposal would have canceled half of all student loan balances and would have disproportionately benefited borrowers who are in default and struggling on those student loans. So even debt cancellation at that level would have been hugely beneficial for millions and millions of people.
Kirk: But Andrew Gillen says that not all those millions need the help.
Andrew Gillen: There are people who struggle out there, but this is a very small minority of students. And the way a lot of student loan forgiveness advocates have approached the problem is to focus on these the small subset and act like that’s everybody and then try to forgive all of that. And so I think one of my fundamental problems is it’s just badly targeted.
Jon: Okay, back to you, Persis Yu: Are we overstating the problem?
Persis Yu: We’re not overstating the problem. The assertion that people are doing just fine with their debt is just not supported by the data. I mean, first of all, just look at the raw data. We have 40 million people holding this debt, $1.7 trillion of debt. Before the pandemic, we saw one in four student loan borrowers was behind on their loans. One in five had defaulted on their loans. And, you know, the statistics go on and on. A borrower defaulted every 26 seconds. More than one million people defaulted every single year on their student loans. So we see a lot more distress in the student loan market than we see necessarily in other markets. And the consequences are also just much more devastating as well.
Kirk: But Andrew Gillen says that there are also consequences to forgiving student loan debt.
Andrew Gillen: If I know as a borrower that I’m not going to have to repay it, I’m going to borrow as much as I can, right? And you can see this in any sector. Like, if we did mortgage forgiveness, everybody would just start buying bigger houses, right? Because they read about, yeah, the government’s going to going to pay my mortgage. So you would borrow as much as you possibly could, if you know that you don’t have to repay it. But it gets worse than that because then you have to consider, okay, what’s the school going to respond to in a situation where students completely don’t care about the price at all because somebody else is paying? The schools are going to start raising their tuition.
Jon: And Kirk, like we said before, there’s actually evidence of this — that the more money the government makes available to students, the faster colleges increase their prices.
On this point, Andrew Gillen and Persis Yu seem to agree: Colleges should be held more to account for this hugely expensive problem.
Andrew Gillen: I think you could fix the student loan problem, the overborrowing problem to the extent it exists, in a day, if you said, okay, if the student hasn’t repaid the loan, the school has to. And you’d weed out a lot of programs that shouldn’t be in existence. You’d clear the field. You’d free up those resources to grow programs that are serving their students well, that are serving the economy.
Persis Yu: There is no question. I mean, the cost of college has just grown so astronomically. And I think the question is, should students and borrowers be the ones to bear that responsibility? Right? So we absolutely need to ensure that colleges are not ripping off students. We need to ensure that colleges are charging fair prices. But we also need to make sure that we’re taking care of the borrowers and the folks who have been saddled by this out-of-control cost of college for the last several decades.
Jon: Both of our experts say there are already safety nets for student borrowers, though many people slip through. One is income-driven repayment, which ties your loan repayments to the amount you’re earning.
Andrew Gillen: So rather than a mortgage where you pay, you know, $1,000 a month for 30 years, if your income’s, you know, $30,000, you’re going to pay $200. If your income goes down to zero, you pay nothing.
Kirk: And the government is trying to make it easier to use income-dependent repayment that at least keeps monthly bills a little smaller. And it’s one of the tips you can use to avoid crushing student loan payments.
Jon: Or if you work for the government or a nonprofit like Arti, Sharma does, you can get your loans forgiven after 10 years. That’s under the public service loan forgiveness program.
Kirk: And while this won’t apply to everyone, or even most students, if you went to a college that was proven to have misled its students, you definitely need to talk to the Department of Education. Because there’s a special loan forgiveness program for people just like you.
Jon: Look, all of these programs can be complicated and frustrating. We’ll link on our landing page to some guides that can help. But the best way to avoid student loan debt is to not borrow in the first place. And while that might sound obvious, so many families don’t take these basic steps. Here’s Sameer Gadkaree again, from The Institute for College Access and Success.
Sameer Gadkaree: It’s really crucial to think carefully at the moment of enrollment about what college program are you signing up for? What’s the college that you are signing up for? Unfortunately, one of the other facets of this higher education ecosystem is that oftentimes the programs that are least liable to leave you in a good place are the ones that do a lot of advertising and spend more money on advertising than instruction.
Kirk: So start in high school. Take Advanced Placement or dual enrollment courses to knock off some credits and then avoid having to pay for them in college.
Jon: Also, fill out the dreaded FAFSA. That’s the federal form that dictates how much financial aid you’ll get. And, yeah, the recent overhaul of the form has been a fiasco. But the payoff is getting the highest possible amount of aid, without needing to borrow.
Kirk: Next, find a college or university with the lowest price, that offers the best deal. That’s because research shows that your major matters more than the name of the college you go to. And you can save a lot of money this way and then avoid more debt.
Jon: Once you get in, remember that you can negotiate for more financial aid. It’s a buyer’s market out there right now. We covered that in Season 1. Go back to the college and ask for more help if you need to.
Kirk: It’s very important that you check and see how much money graduates from those majors make at those schools. This information is available on the government’s College Scorecard website. But a surprising number of prospective students never even check it out. Will you make enough to pay back your loans? In many cases, it isn’t even close. Here’s Sameer Gadkaree again.
Sameer Gadkaree: There’s lots of data available in the form of the College Scorecard and other publicly available data sets. And it’s important to look into those and figure out what have graduates from this program been getting? How does that compare to the amount of debt I’m taking on?
Jon: A few schools promise that you won’t have to take out any loans at all. These tend to be the colleges with big endowments that are also among the toughest to get into. Like Stanford, Princeton, Amherst and Williams. So for these, you’re going to need to study extra hard and a few are going to require you to work toward part of your tuition.
Kirk: Remember Arti Sharma, who we heard from earlier in the episode? Well, she’s carrying tens of thousands of dollars while working at a nonprofit. She has applied for public service loan forgiveness, but she’s still waiting to hear if she’ll get it. Her loans have become a years-long frustration.
Arti Sharma: I really saw it as just a means to an end and not this thing that would haunt me for all these years. So that’s kind of like I’m in a holding pattern right now.
Jon: And what does she think of the student loan system? It pretty much sums up what most Americans seem to say about it.
Arti Sharma: I think it’s a hot mess. I think it’s punitive. You end up feeling bamboozled at the end, which is kind of a yucky feeling. Like, you know, when somebody tells you you’re getting this great deal, but you trust the government, you know, when you’re young. Or at least I did.
More information about the topics covered in this episode
Kirk: This is College Uncovered, from GBH News and The Hechinger Report. I’m Kirk Carapezza. …
Jon: … and I’m Jon Marcus. We’d love to hear from you. Send us an email to GBHNewsConnect@WGBH.org. Or leave us a voicemail at (617) 300-2486. And tell us what you want to know about how colleges really operate. We just might answer your question on the show.
This episode was produced and written by Kirk Carapezza …
Kirk: … and Jon Marcus, and it was edited by Jeff Keating.
Meg Woolhouse is supervising editor.
Ellen London is executive producer.
Production assistance from Diane Adame.
Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott.
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.
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.
Related articles
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.
More than a year after the Supreme Court restricted race-conscious admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, a clearer picture is starting to emerge of how some incoming classes have changed. MIT announced a sharp drop in its number of Black, Hispanic, Native American and Pacific Islander students, and other elite schools are also experiencing drops.
In my view, there is much to be learned from a major blunder committed by MIT following the Supreme Court ruling: MIT admissions officials acknowledge that they purposefully did not collect race or ethnicity data for applicants this year, even though nothing in the court’s ruling prohibits this.
Collecting applicant demographic data on race is still incredibly important. Such data provides insight into what sorts of outreach strategies are needed, as well as information critical to understanding how students from historically underrepresented groups are reacting to the Supreme Court ruling. Are students just not applying to certain institutions? Are they applying but not getting in? Or are they getting in but choosing not to attend?
Without knowing the makeup of the applicant pool, MIT is at a significant disadvantage as it works to answer these questions. Institutions that value diversity must not bend over backward to appease Edward Blum, the mastermind behind efforts to restrict the use of race in college admissions.
Related: Interested in innovations in the field of higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly Higher Education newsletter.
Importantly, in the ruling, Supreme Court Justice John Roberts noted that campuses can still consider experiences related to race and how they shape students as individuals.
Some colleges hoped that having students discuss race-related experiences in their essays would be enough to help prevent major regressions in diversity. However, the drop in the number of students from historically underrepresented groups at MIT and other selective schools is a reminder that there is no substitute for direct consideration of race/ethnicity in admissions in many contexts.
“Direct consideration” does not mean determinative: It just means being able to consider race as one of many factors influencing a student’s background and potential contributions.
In addition, MIT’s situation speaks to the debate over standardized tests. It claims that its drop in diversity is not because it went back to required testing in 2022. In fact, MIT admitted its most diverse class ever in 2023 under required testing.
However, requiring standardized testing without race-conscious admissions is a totally different situation from the days when institutions could require tests but still consider race.
Other schools that are returning to required testing, like Dartmouth, Harvard and Brown, have yet to conduct an admissions cycle without test-optional policies. Only time will tell if they will experience outcomes similar to MIT after they bring back required testing.
Some argue that requiring the SAT can help identify talented low-income students who might not submit scores under test-optional policies. Regardless of whether this claim is true, it doesn’t mean that requiring the SAT will facilitate enrollment for Black, Latinx and Indigenous students in the absence of race-conscious admissions. While overlap exists between race and class, the two categories aren’t interchangeable. Tools that work for expanding economic diversity don’t necessarily do the same thing for racial diversity, as research indicates. Expanding economic opportunity is important, but we cannot forget racial diversity.
Regarding testing, we can learn from states where race-conscious admissions had already been banned for years before the Supreme Court ruling. Schools in these states have been pleased with the outcomes of test-free and test-optional admissions.
For example, under test-free admissions, the University of California system admitted its most diverse class ever. Under test-optional admissions, the University of Michigan saw slight increases in Black student enrollment. Whether going test-optional was the cause is hard to know, but Michigan was satisfied enough to formally adopt test-optional policies.
Just changing testing policy won’t fix everything. Test-optional on its own was not enough to prevent a stark drop in the numbers of Black and Hispanic students at Amherst College following the Supreme Court ruling, but the situation may have been worse under a test-required policy. Research suggests that test-optional or test-free admissions can be one tool in a broader set of reforms.
It might seem as if colleges are out of legal options to defend race-conscious admissions, but they aren’t. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service noted another possibility: “[R]emedying educational institutions’ past discrimination is a compelling government interest distinct from the interest in fostering student-body diversity that the Court appeared to reject in Studentsfor Fair Admissions.”
An institution, they noted, “could still take action (including, perhaps, race-conscious action) to remedy its own past racial discrimination.”
MIT’s dean of admissions, Stuart Schmill, noted that “MIT does not shrink from hard problems in science or in society, and we will do what we can, within the bounds of the law.”
If that statement is really true, MIT should commit to exhausting all legal options to defend diversity, including the paths that have yet to be taken. Other schools in similar situations should do the same.
Julie J. Park is professor of education at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is currently working on a book on admissions post-SFFA, and served as a consulting expert in SFFA v. Harvard on the side of Harvard. She co-directs the College Admissions Futures Co-Laborative.
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.
Following intense, sometimes violent protests on campuses, colleges and universities are taking steps to encourage better and more civil dialogue and debate among students who disagree.
Some schools are offering new guidance and coursework around how students should speak to one another in an effort to bridge deep differences. At the same time, they’re tightening restrictions on campus protests related to the war in Gaza, and cracking down on protest tactics with heightened enforcement.
We explore the new approaches and talk with experts about the efforts to help students speak across their differences.
Scroll to the end of this transcript to find out more about these topics.
Kirk: After a year of intense and sometimes violent protest on college campuses … this fall’s orientation sounds different.
Orientation video: Colleges and universities tend to bring together people of different backgrounds, faiths and opinions. …
Kirk: Listen to this freshman orientation video some schools are using now, Jon.
Orientation video: Though it may not seem like it at first, making an effort to talk and listen to those who you disagree with can have a lasting impact on your campus culture.
Kirk: The video is produced by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which describes itself as a nonpartisan group that defends student and faculty free speech. It’s called “Talking Across Differences.”
Orientation video: We limit ourselves when we only engage with similar worldviews. In this setting, we become less curious, more hostile to perceived differences and less reflective.
Jon: This is where we are, Kirk. The political and social climate on some campuses has gotten so bad that colleges have to teach their students how to have a conversation.
Kirk: From the University of California to the University of Wisconsin, Rutgers to Harvard, colleges are amplifying or tightening their free speech and protest policies. The stated goal is to manage campus demonstrations, especially in light of the recent unrest over the Israel-Hamas conflict.
So some administrators and nonprofits say they’re stepping in to help improve civil discourse.
We’re going to dive into what’s really going on and then explain what it means for you.
Music:
Kirk: This is College Uncovered from GBH News and The Hechinger Report, a podcast pulling back the ivy to reveal how colleges really work, and why it matters.
I’m Kirk Carapezza from GBH News. …
Jon: … and I’m Jon Marcus with The Hechinger Report.
Today on the show: “The politics of protests.”
The divide on college campuses surrounding the war in Gaza runs deep. It’s changing the college experience for many students, starting with new guidance on student protests and how those rules are communicated and enforced.
Kirk: Yeah. Both the University of California and Cal State systems are cracking down on encampments and unauthorized structures on their campuses. Cal State’s new public assembly policy prohibits things like barriers, tents and even masks that conceal protesters’ identities. The University of California has issued similar directives urging campus leaders to reinforce existing bans on encampments and mass demonstrators.
Jon: These changes come after a rocky spring semester, when protests tied to the Israel-Hamas conflict swept across campuses.
Sound of campus protest:
Jon: And, Kirk, there could be financial consequences. California lawmakers say they’ll hold back $25 million in state funding for the University of California until it sets up a policy for free speech and protest.
Kirk: Rutgers and Columbia have unveiled their own new policies limiting access to campus to those with school IDs.
Jon: And over at Penn, administrators are limiting microphones, speakers and megaphones and banning chalk pictures or slogans on the walls and sidewalks.
Kirk: These schools say they’re aiming to balance the right to protest with the rights of other students looking to get an education or use a public space. But the new rules raise even more questions.
How will these policies be enforced, especially the bans on masks and encampments? And what does all this mean for student activism, which has long been a part of campus life? If you’re a student or a parent, it can be confusing. So we called up an expert to learn more and to provide some historical perspective.
Robert Cohen: My name is Robert Cohen. I’m a historian. I teach history and social studies at New York University.
Kirk: Cohen says student activism has always been controversial and unpopular with the public.
Robert Cohen: And that means that universities are under pressure to suppress student activism. You’d be surprised with the number of movements that have happened and also the fact that the public disapproved of them — when it was the sit-in movement against racial discrimination in lunch counters. The Freedom Rides, the free-speech movement, the antiwar movement of the ‘60s were all underwater. Politically, they were unpopular.
News commentator: They said they were there to protest the war, poverty, racism and other social ills. Some of them were also determined to provoke a confrontation.
Robert Cohen: And so there was pressure for various reasons to suppress them, as was true last semester.
Kirk: Yeah. In the spring, more than 3,100 students were arrested between mid April and mid June, and that’s higher than most of the 1960s. So it’s tempting, I think, to compare these nationwide campus protests to the anti-Vietnam War movement. But today’s protests have not been nearly as widespread or as violent.
Robert Cohen: That’s one of the reasons why I was so upset about all the arrest, because there’s so little provocation for it. In fact, that’s why the majority of the charges were dropped, because they didn’t really, you know, it wasn’t brazen lawlessness and certainly almost no violence. The largest student protests in American history were in May of 1970, following the Cambodian invasion and the tragic shootings of student protesters at Kent State and Jackson State. The number of students involved in protests there was almost half the student population in the United States — in the millions
Jon: Last semester, the total was in the thousands, not the millions. A new survey finds that two thirds of students say the protests didn’t have any effect at all on their educations. Yet many colleges spent the summer preparing and bracing for more protests. And they’re trying to keep what happened in the spring from escalating.
Kirk: One idea picking up steam is to promote civic dialog in and out of the classroom. Emerson College in Boston, where more than 100 activists were arrested, has launched Emerson together. The new initiative, administrators say, is aimed at creating unity on campus.
Jon: Hamilton College in New York started a program called “Civil Discourse in Local Politics “as part of its freshman orientation, connecting students with local politicians.
Kirk: In New Hampshire. Dartmouth has started “The Dialog Project” to prepare incoming students for tough conversations. And Ohio Wesleyan University is one of the first colleges to provide civil discourse training for all students, faculty and staff.
Is this really what it’s come to? Civil discourse training?
Raj Vannakota: You can’t make assumptions about where students and faculty and administrators are.
Kirk: That’s Raj Vannakota. He leads a program called College Presidents for Civic Preparedness to help those students, faculty and administrators.
Raj Vannakota: Some of them are well on their way, right? They understand this. They do this. They’ve had tons of experience. Others haven’t. And so you have to start with the basic building blocks.
Kirk: Especially for a generation of students that lived through the isolation of Covid-19 and has never seen a national government that wasn’t deeply divided.
Vannakota says these initiatives share a simple goal to promote healthy debate.
Raj Vannakota: We need to take an affirmative posture to ensure that there is free inquiry and debate on our campuses. And I want to make clear here, we’re using the term free inquiry rather than free expression. And the reason that we’re doing that is that free expression is, you know, saying whatever the heck you want. The First Amendment has rules around that. But students really need to experience university life not as this disorienting free for all, but a forum for structured dialog and debate and learning. And that is what needs to be at the center of this. So there’s still work to be done to get there.
Kirk: Jonathan Rauch, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, agrees that students need to learn how to be uncomfortable with some of what they hear. Rauch is author of the book ‘The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.’ And he says what’s needed on campus today is a genuine culture of free speech.
Jonathan Rauch: Students should understand from Day One, it should be written on the catalog, that this is a place where you will encounter ideas that will strike you as potentially offensive, potentially harmful. We call that education.
Kirk: Then, Rauch says, students should be encouraged to take up any disagreements with each other or their professors, and not complain to administrators.
Jonathan Rauch: And indeed, they should be taking positions that they themselves don’t disagree with. That’s very good training for life. And it’s also very good training for toleration.
Kirk: But, Jon, professors on campus tell me incorporating debate into the curriculum is much easier said than done because it’s increasingly tough to bring students together for a civil conversation. And as a result, some students are reporting that they feel less safe.
Take Talia Khan, for example. She told me she always felt safe studying engineering as an undergrad at MIT and performing in the university’s jazz band.
Music:
Kirk: Here she is singing the song “Lonely Moments.”
Khan is the daughter of an American Jewish mother and Afghan Muslim father. She told me that after Oct. 7, she feared for her safety.
Talia Khan: We had students immediately saying, you know, all of this violence is Israel’s fault.
Kirk: She disagreed and says she lost friendships and that her mental health suffered. As the campus climate grew more and more polarized.
Talia Khan: I personally had best friends who I had spent a lot of time studying with, and they told me that the people who were killed in the Nova massacre deserved to be killed because they were partying on stolen land. It took me so long to process that anybody could say that. There’s no excuse for, you know, killing, raping, kidnapping innocent people.
Jon: Since the war in Gaza broke out, students like Kahn have found their campuses deeply divided. Many pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli activists have just stopped talking to each other. Some have even transferred. With both anti-semitism and Islamophobia on the rise. Researchers at the University of Chicago found that more than half of Jewish and Muslim students feel unsafe on campus because of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Robert Pape: Campus fears are more intense and more widespread than we’ve previously known.
Kirk: Robert Pape studies political violence and is the author of the Chicago report.
Robert Pape: Oct. 7 caught us all by surprise, but especially caught college campuses and universities by surprise.
Kirk: Did your survey find that these students have reason to be afraid?
Robert Pape: Yes. They’re hearing protest chants they interpret as a call to genocide. And that’s scaring not just the target group that they hear, but it’s scaring everybody. They’re observing acts of violence and intimidation on campus.
Kirk: Part of the problem, Pape says, is that students sharply disagree even about the meanings of the words they use during protests.
Robert Pape: You have one group of students who are chanting ‘from the river to the sea’ that don’t think it is implying genocide of the Jews. But you’ve got four million college students hearing that phrase thinking that means genocide of the Jews.
Kirk: For many Muslim students like Harvard junior Jana Amin, the harm they experience is very real. That’s because a pro-Israeli group started publicly identifying Harvard students involved in pro-Palestinian causes. The group put a picture of Amin’s face on a truck that drove around just outside of campus and labeled her among Harvard’s leading anti-semites.
Jana Amin: I was devastated and really scared for my own personal safety on campus. Right? Like walking around, might someone recognize me from the truck and then choose to kind of take it a step further and turn to violence?
Kirk: Before Oct. 7, Amin says she felt comfortable on campus. But the doxing truck changed that.
Jana Amin: Just seeing the truck allowed to stay there with my face, that name on it forever altered how I was going to think about my time at Harvard.
Jon: Jewish students who support Israel are also losing trust in their colleges and civil discourse.
Becca Packer: A lot of people are not willing to have a conversation. It’s, you know, their way or the highway.
Jon: As a senior at Berklee College of Music, Becca Packer was a member of the college’s newly organized Hillel, a Jewish campus group. Sitting in the back of a campus café, she says after Oct. 7, she found what she considered anti-semitic posts all over social media.
Becca Packer: One of my first things that I knew I had to do following Oct. 7 was get on Instagram and try and be that opposing voice — that, you know, opposing perspective that people aren’t going to see. Because I knew exactly what was going to happen.
Kirk: The heated environment Packer describes on and offline has real, concrete consequences for the already battered reputation of American colleges.
Jon: Yeah, the protests on campuses in the spring have only deepened the erosion of public trust in colleges and universities. A survey by the research firm SimpsonScarborough finds trust in higher education has taken a big hit, especially among Republican parents.
Kirk: Nearly half of them said the protests made them trust colleges even less.
Jon: Now, Democrats and independents were less opinionated about the demonstrations. But still, 22 percent of Democratic parents and 30 percent of independents said their trust in higher education has declined. This is coming on the heels of public trust in colleges already hitting all-time lows. Confidence in colleges has dropped from around 60 percent to just 40 percent last year.
Kirk: Among the top reasons: concerns about political agendas and professors and administrators pushing what critics call woke culture. No matter your political views, this is a crisis for American higher education, and its leaders are definitely paying attention.
Lynn Pasquerella: We’re at a crucible moment in American higher education, and we must listen to the critics who are concerned. If we don’t, then we will be complicit in our own demise.
Kirk: That’s Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities.
If college leaders just kind of scoff at this, the institutions don’t just fail, right? I mean, there’s more at stake than just the colleges themselves.
Lynn Pasquerella: Democracy fails. Students who receive an American education, a liberal education, are much more likely to resist authoritarian tendencies because they are confident in their viewpoints, even when those viewpoints are challenged. They don’t feel threatened by that. We must return to basics, articulate the value of education not only for individuals but for our society.
Jon: That’s why campus leaders are trying to take action, rolling out these new policies and programs and orientation videos. They’re gearing up for more protests, not just about Gaza, but also with tensions rising around the upcoming presidential election.
Kirk: All of this is happening at a time when culture wars are escalating and the country is polarized and partizan.
Jon: This year, colleges are trying to get ahead of this. To start, Pasquerella says, they’re updating their campus speech and protest policies, focusing on when, where and how protests can happen and making sure those rules are consistently enforced.
Lynn Pasquerella: Campus leaders, I think, have learned that they must be transparent and communicate policies widely and frequently. They have to create and sustain a culture in which there’s respect for diversity points.
Music:
Kirk: So now we’re going to explore how and how quickly the politics of campus protests and even classroom discussions have changed — and what that means for you.
I recently sat down with John Tomasi. He’s the president of Heterodox Academy, a nonpartisan advocacy group of academics working to counteract what it sees as a lack of viewpoint diversity on college campuses, especially when it comes to political diversity.
Heterodox doesn’t fully disclose its funding sources, but Tomasi says its members come from across the political spectrum, and his board has directed him not to seek funding from groups that are active in politics.
Tomasi is a former professor at Brown University, where he taught political philosophy and where he met Jonathan Haidt, the founder of Heterodox, or, as they call it, HSA.
How do you explain Heterodox Academy? What is it?
John Tomasi: It started off in the very nerdy kind of techie kind of way. Lots of scientists tended to all have the same political orientation. And famously, in front of a large auditorium of 400 social scientists, John Haidt said, ‘How many of you are Republicans?’ No one raised their hands. ‘How many of you are libertarians?’ One or two kind of hesitantly did. ‘How many of you are Democrats?’ They all raised their hands. Maybe that’s a problem. Maybe we are in a bubble, group thinking. Maybe we’re not achieving that ideal of thinking for ourselves. And so that’s a reason why the social science might not be as robust as it might be. So it began as this techie little group of academics thinking about problems and research, but then it caught a wave of public interest.
I’ll give you one example that really crystallized it for me. There was a speaker invited to Brown. His name is Ray Kelly, former police commissioner of New York City. And Ray Kelly was giving his talk and some students didn’t want him to come. They were worried about stop-and-frisk, which was a policy that he was very well known for, a policy that had very strong racial overtones. And so the students said, please don’t invite Ray Kelly to come to campus. But they invited him anyway. He came to campus and the student shouted him down. That kind of thing had happened before. But what was different now — this was now 2015 — was that the students who shouted him down took responsibility for shouting him down. They gave interviews to the student paper the next day. They said we’d shout him down again. They weren’t afraid of what they had done. They weren’t worried about punishments for what they had done. They had a kind of almost a brazenness, sort of moral commitment, to believing that shouting someone down might be the right thing to do. And so there’s always been these currents on campus that controversial speakers should be protested. You should argue against them. You should do various things to make it difficult for them — banging pots and pans on the way on the way to the lecture hall. But the idea that shouting someone down might be the right thing to do — that was kind of a new creature on the the campus. And that same creature, that same set of ideas started enacting themselves all across the country in different ways.
Kirk: Around the same time, Tomasi recalls, Yale administrators sent an email to students essentially saying, ‘Please be mindful about cultural appropriation when you plan your Halloween costumes and parties.’ Another administrator sent a follow up message saying, ‘Sure, be careful, but it’s Halloween. Don’t be too worried about the details. Don’t walk on eggshells.’
John Tomasi: And students responded really strongly against that claim that they should be able to be transgressive sometimes and not take it too seriously.
Sound of campus protest:
John Tomasi: Something had changed in the temperature on campuses. Something had changed in the way students were thinking of things.
Kirk: Tomasi says political and social divisions have deepened to the point that they’re threatening academic freedom and changing the college experience, with many students afraid to speak up, adopting a new philosophy of silence is safer. A national survey from Heterodox shows that student self-censorship has been rising steadily. It’s up to around 70 percent now. That means 7 in 10 students report that they actively self-censor.
John Tomasi: The students consistently say that the reason they self-censor is not because they’re afraid of their professors grading them down or doing bad things with which they disagree. They self-censor because they’re afraid of social media and they’re afraid of what their fellow students are going to make them famous for an idea that they floated in class and therefore their social lives and personal lives will be ruined forever, perhaps.
Kirk: I heard one speaker say, you know, we’ve got this generation now who went through puberty on social media. They went through the pandemic on Zoom, and now they’re landing on these college campuses and they haven’t ever made eye contact with someone with whom they might disagree. Would you agree with that?
John Tomasi: I think there’s something to that. But I also think it’s really important to recognize that the problems we’re seeing in this generation of students isn’t solely a problem with this generation of students. In fact, the problems we’re seeing, the patterns of behavior that we’re watching on campus now in really vivid form, are very fixed patterns of human behavior. So people get their social cues, they get their ideas, they act the way they act because of the way the people around them are acting, and to a much greater degree than we like to admit.
Jon: We should point out here that organizations like Heterodox Academy and FIRE, which produced that orientation video we heard, are controversial. Critics say these groups don’t speak for them, that they tend to support and defend conservative, provocative speakers on campus.
But Tomasi says his group is growing. More than 50 colleges have established Heterodox communities led by faculty members, including at Harvard and MIT, Berkeley community colleges and large state universities.
Music:
Jon: Heterodox Academy and fire are coming at this from the outside. At the University of Wisconsin, faculty have launched their own new program called The Discussion Project. It’s a training model that’s now catching on at other colleges across the country.
Katherine Cramer: Students are afraid of each other.
Jon: Katherine Cramer teaches political science at Wisconsin.
Katherine Cramer, in class: So welcome, everybody. It’s so great to see so many faces I recognize from years past.
Jon: And since the pandemic, she’s been participating in the program.
Katherine Cramer: They’re afraid to talk about politics, but it’s bigger than that, right? They’re afraid of saying something that will be posted online and go viral and make them feel bad about themselves. They’re afraid of being publicly shamed.
Kirk: Like John Tomasi, Cramer says, the idea that silence is safer is now widespread. Even in her classroom, with the door closed.
How quickly has the college experience changed in this way?
Katherine Cramer: Fast, I think. I mean, the cohort of people that we’re seeing of traditional college age come through colleges now have this scar from the pandemic of not having the experience of like developing the social skills through in-person interaction in that age that they were in, I guess it would have been middle school now, right, for some of the college students. And that, layered on top of this very toxic political environment, I think, has just contributed to this sense that silence is safer. Like, the best approach is to not interact and not say anything.
Jon: As an educator expected to lead freewheeling discussion. Cramer says it’s increasingly hard to get students to talk and have civil conversation if they disagree. Instead, she says, they’re staring at their phones.
Katherine Cramer: Yes, and even to the point where I’ve said, ‘you know, I just want to point out to you all that when you’re done talking about that, like, using the discussion protocol and talking about the course content, you can talk about anything. Anything. I’m not going to like get mad at you for not talking about the course content. You can talk about anything.’ And still, they’re silent.
Jon: As a political scientist, Cramer notes that her students are part of a broader political environment in which Americans are being encouraged by their leaders to be suspicious of each other.
Katherine Cramer: There’s an us and there’s a them, and you don’t want to engage with the other side, because not only are they the other side, they’re evil. And if they get control, if they get a hold of you, the world is coming to an end. Like, that’s the environment we all are in, including these college students.
Jon: So what does The Discussion Project suggest that people do to change this? First, it says that everyone should get a turn leading the discussion.
Katherine Cramer: It makes it like very egalitarian in who’s who gets control and who gets to speak. But also helps us understand how to ask questions about the course content that allows people to bring in who they are as human beings.
Jon: With a presidential election looming. Kramer says figuring out how to hold civil, constructive conversations in a classroom matters far beyond the campus.
Katherine Cramer: You know, it’s a big deal, because what goes on in college is an indicator of what’s going on in other parts of American life. But also because generally we’re talking about young people, and they are the future of this country. And many of these people, for better or for worse, are going to go on and be leaders in our political system. And so, if the skills that they’re developing in college right now are silence is safer, do not engage with people of different opinions or you’re going to be harmed — that doesn’t bode well for the future of our political system.
Kirk: This is College Uncovered, from GBH News and The Hechinger Report. I’m Kirk Carapezza …
Jon: … and I’m Jon Marcus. We’d love to hear from you. Send us an email to GBHNewsConnect@WGBH.org. Or leave us a voicemail at (617) 300-2486. And tell us what you want to know about how colleges really operate. We just might answer your question on the show.
This episode was produced and written by Kirk Carapezza …
Kirk: … and Jon Marcus, and it was edited by Jeff Keating.
Meg Woolhouse is supervising editor.
Ellen London is executive producer.
Production assistance from Diane Adame.
Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott.
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.
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.
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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 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.
Related: Interested in innovations in the field of higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly Higher Education newsletter.
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.
CHICAGO — At this week’s Democratic National Convention, I spoke to left-leaning students about their biggest concerns with higher education: high tuition costs and access. The conversations were a departure from what young conservatives told me was their top issue at last month’s Republican National Convention: free speech.
That said, amid nationwide crackdowns on campus protest, some of the young Democrats I spoke with shared sentiments similar to their Republican counterparts. They said they were worried about preserving academic freedom and a space for mutual understanding and respect on campuses nationwide.
I asked both groups of students whether they believe education institutions nationwide are fulfilling their purpose in society, and about the role of diversity in college curriculum. While conservative students told me DEI initiatives blocked equal opportunity in the classroom and the workforce, liberal ones emphasized opportunity gaps in marginalized communities.
What follows are some of my questions and their replies. Interviews have been edited for clarity.
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At Union Park on Monday, thousands gathered to march with Students for Justice in Palestine. Credit: Joanna Hou/ The Hechinger Report
How did you first get into politics?
“My family owns a small farm in Iowa, that’s where my grandparents are from. My family have been Democrats since the New Deal and since Roosevelt brought electricity and plumbing to my great grandparents’ home … As part of that, it’s our job to make sure those same policies and politics of caring for other people is brought to the 21st century.” — Michael Clausen, a rising senior at Loyola University Chicago
“I have voted for the Democratic Party in general. I voted for Joe Biden in 2020, and I voted for Democrats in the midterms. But I vote for them because I dislike the Republicans more, is really how I feel about it. Especially being in Ohio, the policies the Republicans are pushing. My access to HRTs [hormone replacement therapies] has been under threat multiple times last year, so I mostly vote for the Democrats to kick out the Republicans.” — Sean Bridge, a rising senior at the University of Cincinnati
When deciding which college to attend, what were your criteria? Did your political beliefs play a role?
“The main reason I chose Florida is because of Bright Futures, a program where if you make over a certain SAT score and have a certain GPA, you get a completely free, full ride to any [in-state] public university. Unfortunately, I couldn’t afford the private schools I got into out of state. I wanted to get out of Florida, but the tuition out of state is astronomical and the financial aid is nonexistent.” — Morgan Vanderlaan, a sophomore at the University of Florida in Gainesville
“The reason I didn’t end up applying to Notre Dame or Vanderbilt was because I saw the majority of their students were conservative. I grew up in a high school that was mostly conservative, and I’d have enough of that. I didn’t want to go into a place where I wouldn’t find people like myself.” — Alyssa Manthi, a rising junior at the University of Chicago
What is the purpose of an American higher education? Are institutions achieving that purpose right now?
“Our purpose as people in higher education is to teach people what we learn and pass that down to the general public … because not everyone can afford to go to higher education … But the education field is not really geared for you to say ‘Hey, I learned a lot, now it’s time to teach my community.’ That’s not really what they’re pushing for. They’re pushing for ‘Hey, you learned all this information, now it’s time to get a job. Now it’s time to get some money.’” — Arnold Brown, a third-year student at DePaul University’s College of Law in Chicago
“The pursuit of knowledge is always the purpose of higher education, but there’s also trying to diversify the elite of a society and make leaders that are more responsive to everybody. We have to look beyond institutions in the Ivies or in the top elites because that’s only really about 6 percent or less of the student population. There are people from state schools, from schools in the South and places you’re not really looking that have people with skills. If you’re trying to diversify the elite and trying to make the leading spaces of America look like America, you can’t go to the same 20 schools.” — Sandra Ukah, a sophomore at the University of Florida in Gainesville
“College is so important to learn how to be civically engaged, and I think a lot of colleges need to have a greater focus on this. What you don’t want happening is for people in the elite to go to these colleges and use those resources just to contribute to their own personal wealth and gain.” — Meghana Halbe, a rising junior at the University of Chicago
Tennessee State Rep. Justin J. Pearson, who gained national prominence after leading gun-violence protests in his state, was met with applause at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics’ Youth VoteFest on Wednesday afternoon. Credit: Joanna Hou/ The Hechinger Report
Where is your college failing?
“For many students, college has become unaffordable. More and more students are working two, three jobs in order to put themselves through college and taking on tons of debt. I know so many people at my own university who had to drop out because of the financial burden that university was putting on them, and I go to a public school in Ohio.” — Sean Bridge
“The cost is such a huge factor, but it goes beyond cost. It’s more of an issue of access … [College admissions] are so competitive, you can’t just have good grades, you can’t just have good test scores. You need a fantastic essay and a fantastic list of extracurriculars. It makes it so hard for people who grow up in disadvantaged communities where they don’t have access to the same sorts of extracurriculars, after-school programs, the same sorts of pre-college support that are found in richer communities.” — Michael Clausen
“In Georgia, our biggest issue is that we don’t get enough funding to our public HBCUs. They have been historically underfunded. I’ve been to these campuses and they need every bit of that funding. You can’t teach kids in a run down classroom … If students can’t get better education facilities, how can we expect them to get a higher education?” — Blake Robinson, Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, Class of 2024
“At my school I feel like we often only care about outward appearances. Fordham overaccepts students, but there are so many students that are pushed out of housing, or forced to live in quads or we don’t have space for. We just re-did a cafeteria … while my campus at the Lincoln Center has problems with air conditioning, we’ve had mold and the answer is ‘We’re so sorry, we can’t fix that for you.’” — Sigalit Shure, a rising junior at Fordham University
“The protest for the ceasefire in Gaza. UChicago believes in the freedom of speech so they definitely gave some room to protest, but they shut it down because of institutional neutrality, which I definitely want to question in some ways. UChicago continues to face issues with what they mean by freedom of speech and how that can look on college campuses.” — Meghana Halbe
What is the value of being exposed to a diverse set of curriculum?
“[After college] people are going to encounter so many different communities, different perspectives and different experiences, and they need to be prepared for that. The people trying to ban diversity, ban women’s and gender studies, they’re trying to say that those things don’t matter and our movements don’t matter but they do. They are a representation of our history. We’re not going to let them be taken away.” — Victoria Hinckley, a University of South Florida Tampa student who said she doesn’t identify with either party and was expelled this spring for her involvement in the encampment protests
“A lot of the times the classes I’m taking are being taught through rose-colored glasses because they’re just not teaching anything beyond the sphere of America … and they’re only teaching the good things in America and not the bad things. And if history is not taught in its complete state, then it will be repeated. If we do not fix the issue right now, it’s going to get out of control and a degree from Florida or the South will not be on par with institutions that value DEI and DEI practices.” — Morgan Vanderlaan
“In a peak higher education environment, you want the free exchange of ideas, that’s what a college is supposed to be about. With diversity in a college, you have that. I have been in spaces where the higher education atmosphere is not diverse, and in ones where it is so diverse it’s insane to me. In those diverse areas, I feel more educated.” — Blake Robinson
Can you have productive conversations with people who have different beliefs on your campus? Have your experiences in college challenged your own beliefs?
“The greatest challenges to my beliefs have been as a result of the club I started, it’s a bipartisan club where we meet with conservatives on campus who are a minority. … Ultimately it’s all about trying to understand what other people think, why they think what they think. Most people are rational. If you try to understand them and leverage their views you can always have a bit more productive conversation.” — Angel Mosqueda, a rising senior at Elmhurst University in Chicago
“There are a couple of outspoken conservatives on campus, I haven’t had the best conversations with them. I think a lot of the time there’s a breakdown in what we believe to be fact because we use very different sources and sometimes they misconstrue data.” — Emilie Tueting, a rising junior at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois
“I’ve actually been able to have a lot of productive conversations … I was able to interact with [conservatives] on a person to person level, that did a good job of taking me out of the very reactionary and polarized identity I’d come to have. With social media, it’s very easy to get siloed into one group.” — Alyssa Manthi
“[I was challenged] on the issue of the genocide happening in Gaza. At first I was very wary to label it as anything. Just from my background, growing up in Jewish youth group, there’s an agenda that’s being pushed on you. … When I finally started talking to people outside of my bubble, who had different perspectives, I realized so much of what I grew up with is propaganda. It opened up my eyes to this new world.” — Sigalit Shure
“Personally, I have been challenged, but I’m very firm in what I believe. As a minority, as a Black man, I know what I want for the future of the country and I know the policies I personally would like to push. I’ve had conversations with Republicans pretty much opposite of me. With what they’re saying, it’s really important to listen and understand where other people are coming from, but my personal standpoint is not really going to change because of my background, who I represent and who I want to represent.” — Arnold Brown
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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