ATLANTA — Two construction cranes hover over a giant worksite just outside the Scheller College of Business at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
What they’re building is both a show of optimism in and a way to attract more students to something universities badly need but are beginning to worry about: graduate education.
The $200 million project will house Scheller’s graduate and executive business programs in one tower, connected to Georgia Tech’s School of Industrial and Systems Engineering in another. Linking graduate business programs with other disciplines has proven to increase demand; Scheller has already added a science, technology, engineering and math designation to its master’s program in business administration, with a resulting bump in applications, the school says.
At a university focused on technology, doing this “seemed like a natural fit, and we were seeing some of our competitors doing it,” said Peter Severa, Scheller’s assistant dean for MBA student engagement, in a conference room overlooking the construction site.
It’s also a kind of enticement that’s become essential in response to signs that, after years of increase, the graduate enrollment on which universities heavily rely for revenue may be softening as prospective students question the cost of grad school and as shorter, cheaper and more flexible alternatives pop up.
“What we’re seeing now is a combination of a leveling off and a big question mark as to where this long-term trend will go,” said Brian McKenzie, director of research at the Council of Graduate Schools.
Unlike undergraduate enrollment, which has been on a steady decline, graduate enrollment has gone up over the last decade. Undergraduate numbers fell by 15 percent between 2010 and 2021, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, while graduate enrollment grew by 9 percent. That was fueled in part by a change in 2007 that let graduate students borrow up to the full cost of their educations, unlike undergraduates, who can borrow only a limited amount.
Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweeklyhigher education newsletter
This growth made graduate programs a lucrative source of revenue for universities. To cash in, private, nonprofit, bachelor’s degree-granting universities and colleges in particular vastly expanded their graduate offerings, listing more than three times as many by 2021 as they had in 2005, according to research conducted at the University of Tennessee.
It seemed a good bet. Not even the pandemic slowed the increase in graduate enrollment. It reached its highest level ever in 2021, as workers who had been laid off or furloughed opted to get graduate degrees. Then, in 2022, it fell.
A new building for Georgia Tech’s Scheller College of Business under construction beside the existing school. The complex will also house the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. Linking graduate business schools to other programs has proven to increase demand. Credit: Terrell Clark for The Hechinger Report
There was a slight rebound in the fall of 2023. But that was largely driven by an increase in master’s degree enrollment at public as opposed to private, nonprofit universities and in the number of international students, who have quietly come to constitute much of the growth at graduate schools. Among domestic students, graduate enrollment was starting to decline.
Sheer population trends helped drive graduate enrollment during the last decade, with an increase in the number of Americans who are candidates for it — ages 25 to 44, with bachelor’s degrees.
But even as there are more of those 25- to 44-year-old candidates for graduate education, the proportion of them who actually go has started to erode. It’s down from 8.4 percent to 6.5 percent over the last 10 years, the higher education research and advisory firm Eduventures found.
“If that continues, and you see a slowing in the underlying population growth, then we’re starting to talk about some challenges,” said Clint Raine, senior analyst at Eduventures.
That’s because of a looming decline in the number of 18-year-olds beginning next year, which is projected to take another big toll on undergraduate enrollment. Basic math suggests that it will eventually hit graduate programs, too.
“The next five years we may be safe,” said Lily Bi, president and CEO of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, or AACSB. “But five years down the road, I think we really need to watch.”
Peter Severa, assistant dean for MBA student engagement at Georgia Tech’s Scheller College of Business. Adding a designation in science, technology, engineering and math “seemed like a natural fit, and we were seeing some of our competitors doing it,” Severa says. Credit: Terrell Clark for The Hechinger Report
There are other challenges. All those graduate programs that universities rushed to add meant that, even when graduate enrollment was going up, the number of students per program — and, therefore, the revenue that institutions made from them — was going down.
“The issue is that graduate student growth has not kept pace,” Raine said. “So we’ve seen a flood of programs in the market, but student demand has not kept up.”
Another challenge for graduate programs: A strong labor market has many people staying in their jobs instead of furthering their educations.
“The choice became, ‘Do I go to graduate school or do I look at some of these very good opportunities?’ Many of them chose to go with the money,” said Julia Kent, vice president for best practices and strategic initiatives at the Council of Graduate Schools.
Meanwhile, there has been a proliferation of alternatives to traditional graduate degrees.
“A prospective student today has never had more options,” Raine said.
Interest in traditional master’s degrees is down since 2019, Eduventures found, while interest in lower-price, shorter-term certificates and other nondegree offerings is up.
Aubrey Charron, an undergraduate at Georgia Tech’s Scheller College of Business, says she wants to work for a while before deciding whether to go on to graduate business school, “just to make sure I’ve really found what I want to do.” Credit: Terrell Clark for The Hechinger Report
“We live in a fast-food society,” Bi said. “People want something easy, something fast.”
And flexible. Twenty-seven percent of master’s programs and 66 percent of MBAs are now offered online, giving students more choice of when and where to take them. That’s up from 12 percent and 36 percent, respectively, in 2012.
Students’ preference for part-time and online MBA programs translated into an increase in applications for those programs in the academic year that started in the fall, the Graduate Management Admission Council says. But applications overall were down by 3 percent, as enthusiasm waned for more conventional and expensive in-person versions, whose enrollments fell.
There has also been growing coverage of and skepticism about the high amount of debt students assumed for graduate programs that don’t necessarily result in earnings high enough to allow them to repay their loans. Those programs are disproportionately at private, nonprofit universities, which charge twice as much as public universities for master’s degrees in fields such as social work, according to a study by the Urban Institute.
The increase in borrowing for graduate study has sparked a warning from the U.S. Department of Education, which notes that growing numbers of borrowers are finishing their graduate educations with very high levels of debt. And while people with graduate degrees generally earn more than people without them, that premium has flattened out, “suggesting a potential decline in the net return,” the department’s chief economist observed.
At 15 percent of master’s, doctoral and professional programs, the median graduate makes less than the median undergraduate degree holder, according to a separate study by three think tanks across the political spectrum: the American Enterprise Institute, EducationCounsel and The Century Foundation.
The average graduate federal student loan holder owes $70,000, that study found, and one in five has borrowed more than $100,000.
While 90 percent of students who are studying toward or just got bachelor’s degrees say they are interested in graduate school, more than half consider the return on investment an important part of their decision, a survey by the higher education marketing firm Spark451 found. That’s the same questioning of value that has been eating away at undergraduate enrollment.
The Scheller College of Business at the Georgia Institute of Technology, which, like other business schools, is trying to reverse a decline in the number of full-time MBA students. Credit: Terrell Clark for The Hechinger Report
“We have to think about who’s on the doorstep now to graduate programs. It’s Gen Z. They’re that prime graduate-going cohort, and we know from some of our research that this generation is more price- and cost-sensitive compared to the last,” Raine said.
Mindful of this, the Council of Graduate Schools has created a task force to study the cost of graduate education and has recommended expanding eligibility for Pell Grants to graduate students and lowering the graduate student loan interest rate from the current 8.05 percent, Kent said.
American students who have enrolled in graduate schools are less than enthusiastic about the value of it. Just over half say it was “definitely worth it,” a survey by the think tank Third Way found.
That has left universities to increasingly rely on one market that continues to grow: international graduate students. A closer look at the data shows that they now account for almost all of the rise in graduate enrollment.
The number of international students in U.S. graduate programs rose 21 percent in 2022 — compared to a 4.3 percent increase among international undergraduates — and 22 percent in 2023, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
In almost every graduate field that reported an increase in enrollment, it was due to a big jump in the number of international students, even as the numbers of U.S. citizen and permanent resident students fell.
Inside Georgia Tech’s Scheller College of Business at the end of the spring semester. Like other business schools, the college is trying to reverse a steady decline in its number of full-time MBA students. Credit: Terrell Clark for The Hechinger Report
The number of graduate business students who are U.S. residents or permanent residents dropped 7 percent while the number from other countries went up 19 percent in the fall, AACSB figures show.
That growing dependence on international students could be risky, as became clear during the pandemic, when they all but disappeared. Geopolitical tensions also could have an impact; though more international students continue to come to the United States from China than from any other country, the number of Chinese students fell slightly last year, according to the Institute of International Education.
Still, McKenzie, of the Council of Graduate Schools, pointed out that the number of students from India increased 35 percent during the same period.
That’s because a STEM designation allows international students to stay in the United States and work in their fields of study, without an employer sponsor, for three years after earning a degree, compared to the usual limit of one year.
Emily Sharkey, executive director of MBA admissions and recruiting at Georgia Tech’s Scheller College of Business, which has added a science, technology, engineering and math designation to its MBA degrees. The designation is meant in large part to attract international students. Credit: Terrell Clark for The Hechinger Report
“If a large portion of our applicants are international, it’s important to be attractive to them,” said Emily Sharkey, Scheller’s executive director of MBA admissions and recruiting. That third year of a visa “is a game-changer as we look at our applications,” added Dave Deiters, associate dean of MBA programs at Scheller, who heads up its career center.
Among other universities whose business schools have added STEM designations: Arizona State, Carnegie Mellon, Duke, Indiana, Michigan, Northwestern and Rice.
Incorporating technology into business education also appeals to undergraduates who might eventually be candidates for graduate degrees.
Even as an undergraduate at Scheller, “I’ve learned coding and stuff I probably wouldn’t have learned at other business schools,” said Elizabeth Curvin, who just finished her sophomore year there. “Compared to my friends at other business schools, we get a lot more of that,” said Amelia Fox, a junior. “You’re set up very well.” And Daniel Manning, a junior, already has a concentration in strategy and innovation. “That gives you practical information about how to manage engineers,” he said.
Elizabeth Curvin just finished her sophomore year at Georgia Tech’s Scheller College of Business, which has intensified its focus on science, technology, engineering and math. “I’ve learned coding and stuff I probably wouldn’t have learned at other business schools,” she says. Credit: Terrell Clark for The Hechinger ReportAmelia Fox, an undergraduate at Georgia Tech’s Scheller College of Business, likes its focus on data analytics and other technology-related subjects. “Compared to my friends at other business schools, we get a lot more of that,” Fox says. Credit: Terrell Clark for The Hechinger Report
But none was ready to commit to investing in an MBA.
“I’d probably go out to the workforce and see if it was something that I wanted,” Curvin said. Junior Aubrey Charron said she also wants to try out her planned career in hospital administration first, “just to make sure I’ve really found what I want to do.”
Concerns about graduate enrollment go beyond what students might earn or owe, or how such changes might affect universities’ bottom lines. There are growing shortages of workers who require graduate degrees, the Council of Graduate Schools says.
“It is concerning that domestic enrollment is slightly down, because it will be critical to have more Americans participating in graduate education,” said Kent, at the Council of Graduate Schools.
Yet what’s happening at graduate schools has so far been eclipsed by a focus on falling undergraduate enrollment, Raine said.
“It’s a very much less discussed future trend that we certainly are trying to shed more light on.”
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.
Get important education news and analysis delivered straight to your inbox
If survival required a special backpack and a portable first aid kit, you’d do well to hear that with enough time to prepare. If wilderness guides knew all this and didn’t tell you, what kind of wilderness guides would they be?
But when a college student enrolls in a course that has a high rate of students earning Ds or Fs or withdrawing – or high DFW rate – the only way they might find that out is through informal warnings from an academic advisor, said Bridget Burns, chief executive officer at the University Innovation Alliance, a group of public research universities that works to increase college graduation rates. Historically, students enrolling in these classes haven’t been equipped with the academic first aid kit they might need to get through the course without becoming part of the DFW statistic.
Those who run colleges know when a course is a “high DFW” course, Burns said, but their approach is simply to hope that students don’t fail. “And we’re smarter than that, as a sector. We care too much about students to let that kind of posture for our work continue.”
This realization sank in for Burns during the pandemic, when leaders from the University Innovation Alliance began reporting increased DFW rates. Surely Covid itself was a factor, but it was unclear what else was contributing to these students earning Ds or Fs or withdrawing. Factors such as the time of day a class is offered, whether it’s in-person or online, the student demographics and faculty demographics, or the combination of classes a student is taking could all contribute, but there hasn’t been a way of identifying why certain classes have high DFW rates.
“I was shocked to discover there’s no way of diagnosing DFW rates,” Burns said. “That blew my mind.”
Not surprisingly, students who receive Ds, Fs or Ws graduate at lower rates than their peers, according to a 2021 analysis of data from eight colleges by the Association of Public Land Grant Universities. The report found that 69 percent of students who had never received a DFW graduated in four years, compared to 44 percent of those who had received one DFW, and 22 percent of those who had received more than one DFW.
And students from certain groups get DFWs at higher rates than others, the study found. For example, in 18 of 20 classes analyzed, first-generation students were more likely to have a DFW than their peers. Students from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups were more likely than their peers to have a DFW in 19 of 20 classes. Students receiving Pell grants were more likely to have a DFW in 17 of 20 classes.
Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter
Burns said the answer should not be to track students into easier classes, but to ensure that all students have enough academic support to succeed in the tough classes and finish their degrees.
“It’s more expensive, it’s a little bit more resource intensive, I get it,” Burns said. “But it’s so much more costly for us to have students getting Ds, Fs and Ws and walking away.”
Over the past few years, Burns has been working to better understand DFW rates, reduce them, and figure out how to help students recover academically after they’ve received a D or F or withdrawn from a particularly tough class.
Burns and leaders at 11 colleges across the country have put together a sort of academic first aid kit, and are testing it on students who have got a D or F or withdrawn from certain classes. The kit includes things like academic coaching, writing assistance, supplemental instruction and tutoring. As a part of the trial, they also re-enrolled students in the courses they’d failed, at no cost.
According to data from the University Innovation Alliance, about 77 percent of the students in the trial passed the class the second time, compared to 55 percent of students who paid to retake the course and did so without the added support. These figures reflect the outcomes of 311 students who had earned Ds, Fs or Ws in certain classes and then retook them with the support of the University Innovation Alliance last summer or fall.
The participating colleges are the University of California, Riverside; North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University; the University of Illinois, Chicago; Georgia State University; Purdue University; the University of Utah; Virginia Commonwealth University; Oregon State University; the University of Central Florida; Arizona State University and the University of Colorado, Denver.
Each college selected courses with high DFW rates, including classes in math, chemistry, biology, psychology and English.
Burns said that academic support services are clearly helping the students as they retake the difficult classes. And they’re resources that are already available at most colleges. If students are not being connected with these resources before enrolling in these challenging courses for the first time, Burns said, “we are just not giving ourselves the benefit of our own knowledge.”
“Why are we letting students fail when we know that they’re going down a path that is unlikely to be successful?” Burns said. “We’re going to have to interrogate the practices that allow students to consistently struggle with the exact same classes over time. Because it’s not the student that’s the problem.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn't mean it's free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Students say the most important factor in choosing a college is academic quality. But the reality is, it’s really hard to tell how much college students actually learn.
While there are a lot of tests to get into college, there are no exit exams to get out. Despite the soaring price of tuition and the fact that most Americans strive to go to college, undergrads often spend little time studying compared to other activities. Instead, they’re working, socializing or partying and, as a result, show limited gains in critical thinking — the hallmark of American higher education.
At the same time, to address mental health concerns, colleges are creating more courses in fields like “the environmental humanities,” Hamilton and Taylor Swift studies and offering more and more wellness days.
So what’s really happening inside classrooms?
“College Uncovered” is made possible by Lumina Foundation.
Kirk: Hey, Jon, do you remember that New York University professor who was fired after he was accused of being a little too tough on his students?
Jon: Right. His firing raised all kinds of questions about academic quality and safe spaces and snowflakes.
Maitland Jones lost his job teaching organic chemistry at New York University after students signed a petition saying his course was too hard. “Many of us noticed that not only were student grades going down and student attendance was going down, but their ability to read a question and to answer the right question was going down,” Jones says. Credit: Maitland Jones
Kirk: Yeah. His name is Maitland Jones, and he taught organic chemistry for nearly 60 years, 43 at Princeton and then another 15 at NYU, before he was fired. Jones says he was very popular with many of his students, and he says he loved being in the classroom.
What were your students learning?
Maitland Jones: Well, nominally, they were learning organic chemistry, how to interpret the interplay of structure and reactivity. It’s been quite properly noted that many of these students will go on to medical school.
Kirk: Jon, you know the famous saying, write: ‘Save a life.’
Jon: Right: ‘Fail a pre-med.’
Kirk: Yeah. So we asked Jones, do pre-med students really need to know organic chemistry to become doctors?
Maitland Jones: Most doctors don’t really need to know the details of organic chemistry. And that’s right. But what they do need to know how to do is to problem-solve.
Kirk: Over his decades in the classroom, Jones noticed his students’ ability to problem-solve was declining, and as a result, more of his students were struggling. Jones found himself handing out more and more Fs. Then, during the pandemic, his students started a petition. But it didn’t stop there. The students’ parents called the dean to complain that Jones was being too tough on their kids. I mean, that makes sense, right? The families are doling out $50,000, $60,000 for their kids to go to NYU. They want to make sure they get a return on their investment. Right?
Maitland Jones: Well, I don’t think it’s supposed to be that transactional. At least I would hope it isn’t. You know, I’m an old timer, and I believe that there is value in, well, humanities, and a humanistic approach to teaching science.
Kirk: Ultimately, as the parental complaints piled up, NYU let him go.
Maitland Jones: I was fired.
Kirk: Because you were trying to maintain standards?
Maitland Jones: I think I’ve got to avoid that question.
Kirk: Welcome to College Uncovered, a podcast pulling back the ivy to reveal how colleges really work. I’m Kirk Carapezza with GBH.
Jon: And I’m Jon Marcus with The Hechinger Report. Between us, we’ve been covering higher education for years.
Kirk: And in the process, we’ve learned that higher education is a huge, multibillion-dollar-a-year industry. With colleges treating tuition-paying students like customers, and schools increasingly operating like giant corporations.
Jon: So we’re here to tell you some of their most closely held secrets about quality, and what you get for your hard-earned bucks.
Kirk: Today on the show: ‘What Do You Learn and What Will You Earn?’
Okay, so students say one of the most important factors in choosing a college is academic quality or rigor.
Jon: Sure, just behind getting a job. But the reality is that it’s really hard to tell how much students actually learn in college, and whether what they learn will lead to a career. There are a lot of tests to get into college, but there are few exit exams, you know, to demonstrate that you’ve actually learned anything.
Kirk: Perhaps that’s why a declining percentage of Americans see practical value in college degrees. A report from Gallup and Strada Education Network finds that the top reason students attend college is to get a good job. Yet only a quarter of working Americans with college experience strongly agreed that their education was relevant to their work and daily life.
Despite the soaring price of tuition and the fact that most Americans strive to go to college and then get a good job, research shows undergrads often spend a little time studying compared to other activities. Instead, they’re working, socializing or partying, and research finds — get this, Jon — college students show limited gains in critical thinking, the hallmark of American higher education.
Josipa Roksa: Students are not spending adequate time on academics and academic pursuits. And that has consequences for how much they learn in higher education.
Kirk: That’s Josipa Roksa. She’s a sociology professor at the University of Virginia and coauthor of the book Academically Adrift.
Josipa Roksa: And so the data shows that, you know, many students are not making much progress on the critical-thinking skills over the first two years. And it’s not surprising, if you think about the limited number of time spent in class, limited number of time spent studying, then limited gains in critical-thinking skills makes logical sense. Because you have to actually work and develop those skills. And if you’re not investing the time to do it, you’re not going to develop them.
Kirk: If you’ve listened to our other episodes from the season, and you’ve managed to pay for college, and now you’re hoping to develop critical-thinking skills and trying to figure out what you’re going to learn in college, where do you think, Jon, would be the natural place to start?
Jon: Hmm. The course catalog?
Kik: Yes. The menu, Jon. That’s why I took a long look at how course catalogs have changed and expanded over time.
A few years ago, I went out to Amherst College in western Massachusetts, where Catherine Epstein took me down to the school’s archives.
Catherine Epstein: We have the papers of some relatively famous alums, and then we have lots of information just on the history of the college.
Kirk: Epstein is dean of the faculty at the small liberal arts college. Amherst enrolls about 1,900 students and offers more than 850 courses, many of them small seminars.
Catherine Epstein: So these guys are interested in catalogs.
Archivist: Great. Yeah. We pulled the three that you requested.
Kirk: Sitting around a big oak table, Epstein and I dust off the 1966 leather-bound course catalog and compare it to the 2016 paperback.
Kirk: My catalog only has 223 pages, and that includes the index.
Catherine Epstein: This is the 2015-16 catalog. It has 591 pages.
Kirk: More pages means a lot more choices. In the late 1960s, Amherst and other liberal arts colleges responded to faculty demands and switched from a core curriculum, where students all took the same courses, like English, math, and the history of western civilization, to an open curriculum, giving students many options with very few requirements outside their majors.
Catherine Epstein: You can do anything that you want. If you never want to take a science class, you don’t have to take a science class.
Kirk: As we flip through the 2016 catalog. Epstein gives me a sampling of some of the history department’s offerings, like ‘Birth of the Avant-Garde: Modern Poetry and Culture in France and Russia, 1870 to 1930.’
Kirk: That’s not obscure?
Catherine Epstein: That is not obscure. No.
Kirk: Epstein defends every single course in the catalog.
Catherine Epstein: It’s all good stuff, as long as it’s taught in a rigorous way where students are challenged, where students can express their thoughts.
Kirk: With a $2 billion endowment and a $60,000 sticker price, Amherst can afford to pay faculty to teach all these courses. But as the cost of college continues to soar, critics are raising questions.
Michael Poliakoff is president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which finds most of the country’s leading colleges don’t have rigorous general education requirements. Poliakoff keeps tabs on those courses that he thinks are foolish.
Michael Poliakoff: ‘Video Games and the Boundaries of Narrative.’ ‘Knowing Television.’ ‘Disney for Grown-ups.’
Kirk: Poliakoff has spent a lot of time studying the evolution of course catalogs.
Michael Poliakoff: What we’ve seen is the multiplication of course options, often without any real respect for the kind of intellectual nutrition that students need.
Kirk: He thinks too many colleges treat their students like customers. And he points to recent studies that found many college students finish their four years without learning much more than what they came in with.
Professors at Amherst reject that criticism. While some of their courses may sound soft, they say students are in fact learning hard skills.
Nicola Courtright: How to analyze a text. How to understand an argument.
Kirk: Nicola Courtright teaches art history at Amherst. She says the college’s open curriculum creates an ideal learning environment.
Nicola Courtright: Students know that they’re not just taking classes because they should, or they might get a job afterwards. They really have to take it out of fundamental interest.
Kirk: But, Jon, now sticker prices at some colleges like Amherst, Wellesley, Boston University and NYU are breaking the $90,000-a-year barrier. That includes tuition, fees, room and board and a meal plan, and maybe a fancy computer. Other schools aren’t far behind. So as college sticker prices have soared, more and more students and families have a justifiable interest in getting a return on their investment.
Jon: Ah, yes. The ROI. It makes sense. I mean, you can’t blame them. If you’re going to pay a steep price tag and take out loans and take on debt, you probably want to know what you’re actually getting for your money, and whether it will lead to a job where you can pay off those loans.
Kirk: New data show that how much you earn over a lifetime largely depends on your choice of major internships and getting a well-paying first job after graduation.
Jon: Yeah, but five and even 10 years after graduation, about half of college-educated workers remain underemployed, meaning they’re ending up in jobs where the degrees they earned aren’t needed. The research organization Burning Glass Institute recently tracked the career paths of 10 million people who entered the job market over the past decade. It found even 10 years out, the number of grads in jobs that don’t make use of their skills or credentials is 52 percent. Advocates want colleges to be more open about what students and their families get for their investment.
Jane Swift: Just like the college admissions process, it is not transparent. It needs to be more transparent.
Kirk: Jane Swift is president of Education at Work, a nonprofit that helps match students with Fortune 500 companies that have workforce shortages.
Jane Swift: Both the people who pay — students — as well as people who hire you have a hard time qualifying exactly what it is that you gain. And I think that there needs to be better efforts to articulate that.
Kirk: Swift is also the former governor of Massachusetts, a state — you might have noticed — with a few colleges and universities. And she says while some of these schools are doing better than others, she’d like to see the federal government hold them all accountable under the so-called Gainful Employment Rule.
Jon: Right, the Gainful Employment Rule that sounds very wonky.
Kirk: Yeah, this long-delayed regulation from the U.S. Education Department is finally set to go into effect in 2026. And, basically, here’s how it works: Students who enroll in an academic program that leaves graduates with debt they can’t afford will have to sign a disclosure agreement. The agreement says that they understand their education might not lead to a well-paying job. The Education Department says the goal is to provide families with more information about the costs and risks, but it only applies to for profit colleges and non-degree programs. Jane Swift points out that colleges and the higher ed lobby strongly oppose it.
Jane Swift: I think they believe it’s a veiled attempt to regulate out for-profit education. And it’s, you know, all students need jobs no matter where you go to college. If it’s good policy, it should be good policy for everyone.
Kirk: By everyone, she means not just for-profit and non-degree programs, but all degree programs.
Jane Swift: I think there’s good players and value in degrees in both nonprofit and for-profit. I think what we really need to understand is what are the outcomes and how can you improve your ability to achieve a positive outcome? You know, I have a liberal arts degree. Two of my three daughters received a liberal arts degree and one received a math degree. But my aspirations for all three of them with that investment were the same. It was a j-o-b at the end of that investment.
Kirk: Swift says more college students need to have work-based learning opportunities, working both before they go to college and then during their college careers, so they can get a job. She says these experiences can give them skills that aren’t taught in the classroom.
Since his days as an engineering professor at Iowa State, Richard Miller has long advocated for more transparency about what students learn and earn.
Richard Miller: I’m the former president of Olin College of Engineering, where I spent 21 years, and since leaving there, I’ve begun working with others to develop a coalition aimed at changing higher education more broadly.
Most students attend college with the objective of finding their first career. Something like half of all of them, if you interview them, will tell you, ‘The reason I’m here is for my first career.’ But faculty don’t normally think that way. Faculty think about, it’s deeper than that. It’s about changing your life. And that’s kind of a disconnect here in who’s hearing what message.
Kirk: That disconnect appears to be widening. Some students just aren’t going to college straight out of high school. And those who do enroll are increasingly selecting career-focused majors. Fewer college students are majoring in liberal arts subjects like philosophy or English and political science, like you did, Jon.
Jon: Yeah, or history, like you did, Kirk. Over the past 50 years, the percentage of students graduating with a degree in the humanities has fallen by half.
Skepticism about the value of a liberal arts degree is now pretty widespread. In his Netflix special, Kid Gorgeous, comedian John Mulaney riffs about the cost of his English degree from Georgetown.
John Mulaney: Yes, you heard me. An English major. I paid $120,000. How dare you clap? How dare you clap for the worst financial decision I ever made in my life? I paid $120,000 for someone to tell me to go read Jane Austen. And then I didn’t.
Kirk: Despite this growing skepticism, college humanities programs have been found to still offer value. A 2023 report by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences concluded humanities majors’ incomes are 40 percent higher than those with a high school degree. At the same time, humanities professors defend new emerging courses or fields, like ‘Taylor Swift and her World’ or the Environmental humanities. They say both are directly relevant to students’ lives and, of course, boost enrollment in their struggling departments.
Richard Miller, an engineer by training, is deeply skeptical of this approach.
Richard Miller: As the country and I think as the world is moving towards addressing sustainability, you can see lots of investments in this area. There’s going to be a lot of careers built on this, but most of those careers are going to require more than having read something about it. It’s going to require some science background and will require understanding how to use what we’ve learned to make an impact.
We’ve got a whole video, by the way, about the rise of the environmental humanities and what it says about the state of higher education, on the GBH News YouTube channel. So check it out. Okay, for now, Miller says too many students are being led to a buffet of college courses and then wondering, hmm, what’s on the menu?
Richard Miller: So they flip through the catalog and they say, ‘Oh, here’s a course in environmental science. It’s taught by the, you know, the Geology Department. But look, they have all these courses in chemistry that are required in mathematics. And I didn’t take a lot of that in high school. Be really hard to do that. Oh, but here’s a course in environmental humanities. Okay. It doesn’t have those science course backgrounds. What’s the difference? This is accessible to me. So I’m going to study this,’ which is great. But you have to realize that when they get to the end of the road, somebody needs to help them understand what career opportunities are with these different labels on them. And I think, personally, higher education could do a much better job of informing kids what the outcome is with these different fields.
Kirk: At the end of the day, these students will become graduates who are facing a job market, right? And they don’t all have the same market value.
Jon: Another way you can learn about the market value of certain degrees and programs is from the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution. This nonprofit does a detailed study about incomes and jobs for people with different academic backgrounds. We’ll also post a link to that on our landing page.
Kirk: Okay, let’s be clear here, because in many ways, Jon, colleges and universities are operating like large corporations that resist transparency. Corporations with bosses who need to make budget decisions based on customer demand. So if there’s a sudden student interest in, let’s say, Taylor Swift studies or sports management or climate change literature, they ditch those low-enrollment courses in 18th-century literature or modern poetry and culture, and France and Russia, 1870 to 1930, after the old professor retires. Then they reallocate that faculty position to another department, like computer science or data analytics, which has growing enrollment.
Jon: Yeah, and this is happening everywhere, as colleges try to balance their budgets and make their courses more relevant and more marketable.
Kirk: Sure. But more old-school faculty think students and families are too focused on their return on investment. And higher education should take this opportunity, when it’s under so much public scrutiny, to reimagine general education. They say academic programs should broaden students’ understanding of the world and strengthen their critical-thinking skills, write clearly, speak with confidence and consider differing viewpoints.
Andrew Delbanco: We really want to be careful about losing the broader purpose of college, which in this country has always been an institution that gives young people an opportunity. And that kind of gray space between adolescence and adulthood gives them an opportunity to think about who they are, and more particularly, who they want to be.
Kirk: That’s Andrew Delbanco. He teaches American studies at Columbia, and he’s president of the Teagle Foundation, which is helping dozens of colleges reimagine their curriculum.
Andrew Delbanco: Our country, after all, claims to be different from all other countries because we tell our citizens, you have freedom. What it means to be an American is that you can decide for yourself by what means you wish to pursue happiness. That phrase that is enshrined in our Declaration of Independence. And so college has been a very important institution for hundreds of years, by which we try to make good on that promise.
Kirk: That promise to pursue happiness sounds amazing, right? But what specifically are college students learning, and how do we know it will lead to a career?
Andrew Delbanco: We know, frankly, way too little about what students are learning. We give our diplomas out on the basis of earned credits. But we have very little idea what those credits really represent, in the sense of what what’s actually happened to the student’s mind in the course of earning those credits. I mean, every teacher likes to think that they’ve got some reasonable evaluation system in place, which is called grading. But we all know that we have rampant grade inflation. So even the grading system tells us very little about whether students are learning a lot or a little or nothing much at all. So this is a big problem.
Kirk: It’s a huge problem for the higher ed industry. I think it’s safe to say everyone agrees on that. But Delbanco and other academics worry that colleges are cheating young people and the country if they focus too much on job training and gainful employment and don’t give them the chance to pause, learn and then think deeply.
Andrew Delbanco: We want to have democratic-informed citizens in our country, people who are thoughtful about history, have some idea of what the big issues of the day are about and what our democratic institutions are about, why we have checks and balances [in] government, where all the power is not concentrated in one branch or another. We want young people to reflect on their responsibilities as citizens, not just their opportunities as consumers.
Kirk: Delbanco says colleges shouldn’t tell students what to think or believe, but challenge them and ask them hard questions.
Andrew Delbanco: That’s what a college should be, and we need colleges to continue to be that for the sake of the students and for the sake of our democracy.
Kirk: And, Jon, for the record, Delbanco defends the incredible growing course catalog at Amherst and other colleges.
Andrew Delbanco: One reason has gotten so much larger than it used to be is because there’s more knowledge, right? I mean, especially in the sciences, the proliferation of specialized knowledge is mind boggling.
Kirk: To stay relevant. Delbanco says more and more schools are placing a special, renewed emphasis on the importance of general education.
Andrew Delbanco: Which is the term we use to describe that moment at the beginning of college, before the student has decided which specialty is right for him or her. The college has to put up in front of incoming students a serious general education experience so that they’re not plunged immediately into this bewildering, overwhelming, you know, endless menu of choices.
Jon: One of the schools tweaking its gen ed courses is Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where the sticker price is now approaching $100,000 a year. Remember, Kirk, the Chivas Regal effect?
Kirk: Oh, yeah. Well, if you’re charging that much for your whiskey or your degrees, you’ve got to do some quality control from time to time, right?
Well, so colleges and universities now reimagine their curriculum every 20, 25 years. It’s like, I don’t know, the cicadas or something like that.
Jon: Sarah Igo chairs the American History Department at Vanderbilt and is an intellectual historian.
Kirk: Intellectual historian? What does that mean?
Sarah Igo: What that means is I study the history of ideas rather than, say, public policy or economic development or wars or that kind of thing. I study the stuff of culture and ideas and how those change.
Kirk: When it comes to ideas, what kind of ideas are students learning in college and why don’t we know?
Sarah Igo: It’s a great question. A hard question to answer. Students are learning all kinds of things, of course, in college. And we don’t know because we probably haven’t been as attentive as we should be about evaluating and assessing what they know and how they know and how they learn, as I would argue, what is more important than either of the things: how to ask questions to get them further along the path toward either of those objectives.
Jon: As an intellectual historian, Igo says, historically, what students learn can’t be captured in a single answer or data point.
Sarah Igo: Because universities and colleges offer such an incredible wealth of options — electives, majors, minors, small credential programs. It’s the wealth of what is offered. And then the number of pathways through is really quite astonishing and would have astonished someone looking at college, or who went to college 100 years ago, or honestly even 75 years ago. The big explosion in electives and kind of choose your own adventure really happened after the mid century, mid 20th century.
Kirk: Okay, Vanderbilt has been around for 150 years. Why is the university reimagining its general education now? What’s the goal?
Sarah Igo: We are, I would say, part of a kind of movement. I won’t say back because it’s not back. It’s definitely forward. But a kind of move toward a more common understanding of what students need from their college education, and particularly what they need to understand is the value of a liberal arts education, which, you know, has gotten kind of battered in public culture in recent decades, and maybe especially in the last year or so.
Jon: Kirk, I went to a conference recently of higher education people, and they had a panel about this. And they concluded that two of the most unpopular words in the English language right now in America are ‘liberal’ and ‘arts.’ That’s why Vanderbilt a few years ago committed to taking a hard look at what students and graduates really need to succeed today. But Igo says the committee charged with reimagining gen ed quickly ran into a brick wall.
Sarah Igo: We didn’t actually have an idea of what general education was or what it should be. We actually didn’t even have a vocabulary for it. And so, our first effort was to kind of figure out, you know, for students in the 21st century, what is a meaningful liberal arts education? How do we help them, see that value? How do we help our own faculty articulate what that is? And what does it mean? We need to reform about how we’re doing things.
Jon: Igo says she and other university leaders decided students needed some common intellectual experience.
Sarah Igo: It doesn’t need to be a canon. Doesn’t need to be western civ. Doesn’t need to be a kind of older model of a foundation or a core. But students actually would really benefit from faculty designing a program, especially in the first year, that all students take in common, to get a chance to understand the richness and breadth of a liberal arts education. Right? Read something from philosophy, read something from economics, read something from neuroscience, that are circling around the same question perhaps. That’s how our new curriculum is designed. And mentor them in small groups where the idea is to think about big questions, but also to learn how to read and write in ways that will serve them well for the rest of their college career and beyond.
Kirk: Chemist Renã Robinson is one of the Vanderbilt faculty mentors.
Renã Robinson: I teach the science, technology and values core course for undergraduate freshman students. But I also teach upper-level chemistry courses and graduate-level chemistry courses and things like mass spectrometry.
Kirk: Do you teach organic chemistry?
Renã Robinson: Absolutely not.
Kirk: Okay, so what do students get out of this new program? Like, if I’m a chemist or chemistry student, what why do I need general education?
Renã Robinson: I think what general education does is it causes you to question the history behind some of the things that you’re learning. It gives you an opportunity to ask questions about how does the way that I’m being taught and the material that I’m being taught provide value to me or provide value to society? And, I think, for our students to learn how to think critically. General education is a great space to do that because when they get into courses like chemistry and upper-level chemistry courses, we want them to be critical thinkers, especially around data that they’re generating or data that we’re providing them in classes and these hard, sometimes abstract phenomena. And so if they have the skill set to already think critically, then they can do well when they get to these classes.
Kirk: Robinson says reimagining gen ed helps, but what’s really important is a good evaluation mechanism, something to understand what students are learning.
Renã Robinson: So in this core pilot course, there is an assessment of what students know and what they’re thinking about, the topic, generally before they come into the course, and then there are surveys that are given to the students throughout the course and at the end of it. And there are also surveys that are given to faculty who work piloting and teaching these different types of courses throughout, as well as some of the faculty that are helping to coordinate the courses across different sections.
Chloe Whalen was skeptical when she took a course at Vanderbilt University called “Being Human: Encountering Others.” But she found she learned a lot. “If the college doesn’t have good academics, what are you spending your money on? It’s basically just a summer camp where you go to a few classes.” Credit: Chloe Whalen
Chloe Whalen: My name is Chloe Whalen, and I am a communication of science and technology major. It’s the new kind of arts and science program at Vanderbilt.
Jon: Whalen is from a small town in Illinois. The daughter of a teacher and a firefighter, she received generous financial aid to attend Vanderbilt, and her parents are helping her pay the rest. She and her parents want a return on that investment — a j-o-b at the end. So Whalen says academic quality in choosing a college was extremely important to her.
Chloe Whalen: Like, at the end of the day, you know, you go to college for the academics. Yes, you know, you want there to be good sports teams, if you’re into that. You hope that the dining food isn’t too bad. But at the end of the day, like, if the college doesn’t have good academics, what are you spending your money on? It’s basically just a summer camp where you go to a few classes.
Kirk: In her first semester on campus, the new gen ed class she enrolled in was called ‘Being Human: Encountering Others.’
Chloe Whalen: When I signed up for it, I was, like, this sounds like I’m just going to be sitting around, like, thinking, just like an old, like, Greek philosopher. And I was kind of, like, I feel, like that’s going to get a little boring. Like, am I really paying to go to college just to sit and talk about, like, the meaning of life? You know, I don’t really know how I really felt about that. I came in thinking it was going to be my least favorite class that semester, and it ended up actually being my favorite.
Kirk: Why was it your favorite?
Chloe Whalen: The level of discussion we had in that class was really good, and I felt like every time we were all very engaged in it. We all had thoughts and opinions to share, and it really did make me think a lot about kind of why I was here. Like, not just on earth, like, at college and, like. what that says about my future and what I want for it. And also, just, like, human nature, what sets us apart? Why are we the species that, you know, wears clothes and has, like, different languages and also, you know, does things like go to college —what makes us do that?
Kirk: That’s a great question.
Kirk: That’s a great question. And it’s one that I had to spend a lot of time thinking about last semester.
Kirk: So why did you go?
Chloe Whalen: I kind of felt like it’d be a missed opportunity to not go to college, just because I’d always done well in school. You know academics always came easy to me. So I was, like, well, I got to go to college, and I guess I just decided, like, once I got past that sense of, like, obligation that I had felt and really thought about what makes me want to do this and not just the feeling that I have to.
Jon: It’s easy to say kids today don’t learn as well or as much as they used to. Sarah Igo, the intellectual historian, says she does think we’re in a moment where a whole lot of things are conspiring to make traditional learning more difficult.
Sarah Igo: Beyond Covid, beyond mental health crises, which are, of course, related, I think I would put first the war for attention on students’ brains. It’s really clear. And students are quite frank about this. You ask them, you know, about the reading for a class. They’ll say that they don’t read, they can’t read uninterrupted, that they can’t sit and read for a chunk of time. And that chunk of time, I think, is getting smaller and smaller. Too many things whistling, buzzing, etc. And there are some steps we can take to deal with that. I mean, one of the things we’re experimenting with, which I’m most excited about, is devoting some of our classes in the first-year class sessions to reading. I mean, this whole period for an hour in 15 minutes, all we’re going to do is read together.
Jon: And that brings us back to Maitland Jones, the organic chemist we heard at the top of this episode, who reportedly was fired for being too tough on his students. Jones says reducing digital distractions and increasing in-person attendance really matter.
Maitland Jones: Absolutely. Here’s an experiment: Give an exam on Friday. It’s graded that night. The students get their grades either late Friday night or Saturday morning. So they all know. The first lecture, Monday or Tuesday, you pass around a yellow pad and ask the students to just write their score. No names, nothing like that. Just the number, right? So you can get the average score of the people in class. And since you know the overall average, you can back out the average score for those who are not in class. And there’s a 20-point difference. So yes, it really matters whether you have your body in that classroom.
Kirk: Jones says it’s increasingly tempting to say, oh, you know, students are just struggling with the effects of Covid and mental health. But he says that’s not right.
Maitland Jones: The decline in student attendance and students’ ability to read and answer the right question was happening well before that. Covid was important because the sort of gentle decline and how things were going fell off a cliff. But it was happening before. And for 10 or 12 years, many of us noticed that not only were student grades going down and student attendance was going down, but their ability to read a question and to answer the right question was going down. There was an epidemic in answering the wrong question.
Kirk: So what was happening 10 years ago? Jones says the decline coincided with the widespread adoption of the iPhone.
Maitland Jones: It’s unbelievably seductive, and like social media in general, it’s so seductive that it seems to have dragged students away from certainly the classroom and, in a way, from the notion that learning requires pretty serious effort.
Kirk: Today, at 86 years old, Jones is retired and living in rural new Jersey in a renovated barn.
Maitland Jones: It’s got a great big room and a very good piano.
Kirk: With his newfound free time, he organizes jazz concerts, and he recently co-produced a six TV set of the complete works of Thelonius Monk.
Maitland Jones: Which, by the way, is absolutely great, thanks to the musicians.
Kirk: Do you miss the classroom and the lab? Would you still like to be teaching?
Maitland Jones: I would. On the other hand, how many years was it? Forty-three and 15? That’s a lot of years.
Kirk: A pretty good run.
Maitland Jones: I wouldn’t say that I didn’t have a good time doing.
Kirk: This is College Uncovered from GBH 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.
Jon: Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott. All of our music is from college bands. The theme song and original music in this episode is by Left Roman out of MIT. Mei He is our project manager, and head of GBH podcasts is Devin Maverick Robins.
Kirk: College Uncovered is a production of GBH News and The Hechinger Report and distributed by PRX. It’s made possible by Lumina Foundation.
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.
Get important education news and analysis delivered straight to your inbox
By Liz Willen
For many high school seniors and others hoping to attend college next year, the last few months have become a stress-filled struggle to complete the trouble-plagued, much-maligned FAFSA, or Free Application for Federal Student Aid.
The rollout of this updated and supposedly simplified form was so delayed, error-ridden and confusing that it has derailed or severely complicated college decisions for millions of students throughout the U.S., especially those from low-income, first-generation and undocumented families.
The bureaucratic mess is also holding up decisions by private scholarship programs and adding to public skepticism about the value of higher education — threatening progress in efforts to get more Americans to and through college.
To see the impact in person, The Hechinger Report sent reporters to schools in four cities — San Francisco, Chicago, Baltimore and Greenville, South Carolina — to hear students’ stories. Because we found them through schools, most of those we interviewed had counselors helping them; for the millions of students who don’t, it’s an even more daunting task.
Do you already have financial aid but don’t understand your offer letter?
“It was stressing me every day,” said one San Francisco senior who was accepted to 16 colleges but could not attend without substantial financial aid. Some became so frustrated they gave up, at least for now. Others said they will turn to trade schools or the military.
Students whose parents are undocumented had special worries, including concern that naming their parents would bring immigration penalties (although the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act forbids FAFSA officials from sharing family information).
To give students more time to weigh options, more than 200 colleges and universities pushed back their traditional May 1 commitment deadlines, some until June 1, according to the American Council on Education, which keeps an updated list.
Despite heroic efforts by counselors and a slew of public FAFSA-signing events, just 40.2 percent of high school seniors had completed the FAFSA as of May 10, in contrast to 49.6 of last year’s seniors at the same time, according to the National College Attainment Network. The numbers do not bode well for college enrollment, nor for the many high school graduates who will not get the benefits of higher education.
Damiana Beltran, a senior at Mission High School in San Francisco, has been working with Wilber Ramirez and other staffers from a nonprofit group that runs the school’s Future Center, where students get advice about college options and financial aid. It was touch-and-go whether her FAFSA form would be processed in time for her to attend her top-choice college. Credit: Gail Cornwall for The Hechinger Report
No one in Damiana Beltran’s family went to college, so she didn’t picture it in her future. But at the end of her junior year, “everybody” at Mission High School in San Francisco started talking about applying, so she did. San José State University admitted her, as did a few other schools. Excited, Beltran entertained visions of becoming a psychologist and showing her younger brother that “you don’t have to be from the wealthiest family” to go to college.
But the online FAFSA form wouldn’t let Beltran, who is a U.S. citizen, submit her application because her mother, who isn’t, doesn’t have a Social Security number. They tried using her individual taxpayer identification number but got an error message. Leaving the field blank didn’t work either. Beltran’s mother skipped work to get help at the school’s Future Center, but still, no dice. Eventually, they mailed in a paper version.
When May 1 passed with no offer of aid — or even an indication that her FAFSA had been received — Beltran decided to give up on attending the schools that would require her to pay for housing and a meal plan. If she went to nearby San Francisco State University, living at home would mean not asking her mother to take on debt. “I want to go to San José, but I don’t want to do that to her,” a teary Beltran said in April. “I think about it a lot during classes. During the whole school day, it’s in the back of my head.” She’s had trouble sleeping.
Her classmate Josue Hernandez also lost sleep over the FAFSA. It took him about a month and two submission attempts to access the part of the online form that would allow him to upload his undocumented parents’ IDs to verify their identity, he said. Once he did, it took about three more weeks to process. The senior, who had received local news coverage for being accepted into 16 out of 20 schools, said he thought to himself, “It was 12 years of hard work, and I finally got in, but I might not even be able to go.”
Hernandez’s other hope was scholarships. He cut back his hours at an after-school job to work on the applications and had to stay up late into the night to do the homework he’d pushed aside. Most of his free periods, including lunches, went to figuring out how to pay for college. “It was stressing me every day,” Hernandez said.
Related: Interested in innovations in the field of higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly Higher Education newsletter.
Finally, the University of California, Berkeley, told him that his FAFSA had gone through, and financial aid would pay for almost everything; the SEED Scholars Honors Program would likely take care of the rest. “It’s finally over,” he said.
But it was not over for Jocelyn, another Mission High senior, who asked to be referred to by first name only, to protect her family’s privacy. She said that her father had been working two jobs waiting tables and her mother had been saving what she could from the household budget for quite some time; they had amassed $1,000. Jocelyn had saved $200 from working at an organic bagel shop. Room and board at San José State, her top choice too, runs $20,971 a year.
But that gap wasn’t her sole source of anxiety. By sending her undocumented parents’ names to the government in the FAFSA form, she feared she’d put them at risk, even though federal regulations forbid FAFSA officials from sharing private data with others.
Jocelyn (right) and Maria (left) are seniors at Mission High School in San Francisco, and both have had to deal with uncertainty about filling out the FAFSA form because their Spanish-speaking parents don’t have immigration documentation. Both also worried that delays in getting financial aid offers could mean they would have to defer going to college. Credit: Gail Cornwall for The Hechinger Report
Jocelyn, who wants to be a neonatal intensive care nurse, didn’t share the FAFSA difficulties with her dad, who only went to middle school in Mexico, or her mom, who never got to go to school. “They’re just gonna say, ‘Stay in San Francisco, problem solved,’ ” she said. But she already takes a class at City College of San Francisco, a community college, and finds the idea of enrolling there, with so many “grown adults,” discouraging. A friend of the family who did that and then transferred to a four-year school told Jocelyn she felt lonely having missed out on the first-year bonding. Now Jocelyn thinks she’ll go to San Francisco State, live at home for a year, and then move into an apartment. But she’d still need financial aid to make that work. “It’s like, back to square one,” Jocelyn sighed — and then said she might forgo college and get a full-time job instead.
That’s not too far from Alessandro Mejia’s plan. As a senior in the challenging Game Design Academy at Balboa High School, he has the coding skills to major in computer science at one of the four-year colleges he got into. “College is my first choice,” Mejia said in late April, but he was eyeing trade school. Financing college “would just be much harder on our family,” he said, and “being an electrician or a car mechanic doesn’t seem too bad.” Of abandoning a tech career, he said, “I’m a little frustrated, but I feel like I developed a good work ethic in school so … it’s not completely a waste.”
School counselor Katherine Valle listened to Mejia with carefully concealed horror. “It’s shocking to hear,” she said. The Game Design Academy “is our hardest pathway, and we don’t have a lot of Latino males in it. To know he did that and is going to end up being a mechanic is just …” She couldn’t find words.
Source: National College Attainment Network Credit: Jacob Turcotte/The Christian Science Monitor
Valle said that for her students whose parents have white-collar jobs, the new FAFSA was everything promised: “easier process, less questions.” But it took kids in Mejia’s family income bracket many attempts to complete. He has the same potential as his wealthier peers, but those kids are “10 steps ahead,” she said. “It’s not fair.”
Mejia finally submitted his FAFSA on April 29. He said if he didn’t hear back by the new decision deadline for California State University institutions, May 15, he wouldn’t enroll.
With less than a week to spare, Mejia learned his FAFSA had been processed. He committed to San Francisco State. Jocelyn did, too, though she would have preferred San José State. For Beltran, though, the May 15 deadline came and went; she was “still waiting for my FAFSA to come in,” she said, and hadn’t submitted an intent to register.
Ashley Spencer, left, a counselor at Air Force Academy High School in Chicago, kept telling senior Samaya Acker “We’re getting there, we’re close,” as they navigated college and FAFSA applications amid the confusion caused by financial aid delays and errors. Credit: Matt Krupnick for The Hechinger Report
Samaya Acker stayed on top of her college plans all year. She applied for early action admission at 17 colleges, submitted her FAFSA application for financial aid two days after the window opened and came up with a backup plan to join the military, just in case.
Most of those preparations went well.
Acker, an 18-year-old senior at Air Force Academy High School on Chicago’s South Side who has “Power” tattooed in script on her arm, was accepted by 16 colleges (her top choice, the University of Chicago, was the only one to turn her down) and planned to spend a few months in the Air National Guard to help pay for college. But as scholarship and deposit deadlines approached, her FAFSA application was still classified as “pending” three months after she submitted it.
“It really put me on edge,” said Acker, whose high school years were interrupted first by Covid and then by the birth of her son halfway through her sophomore year, but who still is graduating with a weighted grade-point average over 4.0.
Samaya Acker, right, earned stellar academic credentials at Air Force Academy High School in Chicago, despite many obstacles, and was rewarded with a full scholarship that she will use to attend Loyola University. Credit: Matt Krupnick for The Hechinger Report
With Acker’s college decision deadlines looming, her counselor, Ashley Spencer, pulled her from class one day in mid-April to look over her options, whatever FAFSA results she got. “We are getting close to the end with you, slowly but surely,” Spencer said.
About a week later, Acker was awarded a Gates Scholarship, which pays the full cost of college attendance for high-achieving students from underrepresented groups. Acker, who is Black, accepted her offer of admission from Chicago’s Loyola University, where tuition alone is more than $52,000 per year. She plans to become an anesthesiologist. (The Gates Foundation is among the many funders of The Hechinger Report.)
A few miles away, a group of students at Hubbard High School in southwest Chicago were not as lucky.
The FAFSA delays have created unique challenges for students with undocumented immigrant parents — including students at Hubbard. At a late-April meeting with Dulcinea Basile, the school’s college and career coach, four seniors whose parents are undocumented said they had spent months waiting for the federal government to fix a glitch that prevented parents without Social Security numbers from submitting financial information. “How many times have we logged in and it says ‘FAFSA not available’?” Basile asked rhetorically.
The glitch was finally fixed, but all four were still waiting, in early May, to find out how much financial aid they might receive.
“There’s really not much I can do,” said Javier Magana, 18, who was still trying to figure out whether he could afford any of the colleges that had accepted him. “It’s definitely been frustrating because I’ve been trying my best.”
Dulcinea Basile, second from right, a college and career coach at Hubbard High School in Chicago, has been concerned for months that financial aid delays might cause some of her seniors — from left, Javier Magana, Octavio Rodriguez and Ixchel Ortiz — to forgo college. Credit: Matt Krupnick for The Hechinger Report
Ixchel Ortiz, 17, plans to go to a Chicago community college, but said if she didn’t receive financial aid, even that would have to wait.
Isaac Raygoza and Octavio Rodriguez, both 18, said they had a few four-year college options but likely wouldn’t be able to pursue any of them without a FAFSA answer.
Rodriguez said he had been repeatedly frustrated by trying to complete the FAFSA. “I would go home and wait 20 to 30 minutes on hold, and we didn’t get anywhere,” he said. In late April he was notified that he had misspelled his own name on the application; in mid-May, he was still waiting to hear whether he needed to re-apply from scratch.
“I’m slightly stressed,” he said in mid-May.
Raygoza said he had submitted his application on time but had failed to notice an error message that prevented it from being processed. He resubmitted it in late April.
“I was just shocked it was never processed,” he said. “I had to do it all again.”
All four said they would likely take a year off to work if they didn’t get aid.
LaToia Lyle works with students at the Academy for College and Career Exploration, a public high school in Baltimore. She’s a counselor from the nonprofit iMentor, which connects juniors and seniors to mentors for coaching on post-secondary planning. Many of her students are low-income and first-generation college prospects. Credit: Kavitha Cardoza for The Hechinger Report
At the Academy for College and Career Exploration in Baltimore, juniors and seniors have weekly class, run by the nonprofit organization iMentor, to help them understand and pursue postsecondary options, including colleges and various types of financial aid. Counselor LaToia Lyle worries about the long delays with FAFSA, because most of her students are low-income and will be first-generation college students, so they don’t always have someone to help them at home, and the delays could mean decisions had to be made quickly.
She helps them compare tuition costs and reminds them that housing deposits are not refundable and book fees add up. “Even gaps as small as $500 can make a difference,” she said.
For Zion Wilson and Camryn Carter, both seniors, the delays and the need to constantly try to log into FAFSA accounts that froze were frustrating, but both students said they were relieved when glitches with the forms meant their college commitment deadlines got pushed back.
“The last thing I wanted to do was make a fast-paced decision,” said Wilson, an ebullient 17-year-old with a wide smile. “I kept bouncing between different things. I felt the FAFSA delay gave me more of a chance to decide what I actually wanted to do.”
Zion Wilson said the extra time caused by FAFSA delays allowed her to decide against going to college as she’d originally planned. She got into several universities but decided to study information technology as a trainee through Grads2Careers, a Baltimore City program. Credit: Kavitha Cardoza for The Hechinger Report
She had applied for computer science programs at several colleges but was nervous about taking out loans. Even though Baltimore City Community College would be tuition-free for her, she worried she wouldn’t have enough money to spend if she wasn’t working. But her family wanted her to go to college, especially because her elder sister had enrolled but dropped out after the first year.
Wilson was admitted to her top three choices — BCCC, University of Maryland Eastern Shore and Coppin State University — but even with scholarships, she decided not to go. Instead, Wilson plans to go straight into the workforce through a program called Grads2Careers, where she will get training in information technology.
“It kind of sounded like I can just do the exact same thing that I would be doing if I went to college, but I can just start now versus waiting two years to start,” Wilson said. After a two-week training period, she will be paid between $15 and $17 an hour, she said.
In the end, she filled out her portion of the FAFSA, but told her parents not to do theirs. “Why make my parents do this long thing and put in their tax information, if I’m not going anywhere that requires it?”
Wilson is relieved not to have to think about college anymore. “I think I made the right choice, and having some money in my pocket will also be a good push for me to continue to advance up.”
Camryn Carter, a senior in Baltimore, got accepted with a full scholarship to the University of Maryland, College Park, his first choice. He called the FAFSA delays “a blessing and a curse”: a blessing because his mother had more time to fill out the form and a curse because it was difficult for him to juggle the FAFSA process with his demanding AP courses and college essays. Credit: Kavitha Cardoza for The Hechinger Report
Her classmate Carter, 18, is a serious student who is also on the baseball, wrestling and track teams. He has never wavered from his childhood decision to study biology. It began, he said, when he was about four years old, and his grandmother tuned to the National Geographic channel on TV.
“I was like, ‘stop, stop, stop,’ ” he said, recalling the video of a lion attacking a zebra. Carter was hooked. He started watching the channel every day. “I fell in love with ants, ecosystems, that just sparked my interest in biology.”
Carter applied to 14 colleges. He said filling out all the forms was challenging because the delayed release of the FAFSA meant he was doing it at the same time as he was taking a demanding course load, including AP Literature and AP Calculus. “It was really time-consuming and really work-heavy with a lot of essays, a lot of homework,” he said. “It’s pretty tough to do that at the same time while I’m doing college supplemental essays and my personal statement.”
But the FAFSA delay also meant that his mother had more time to finish the form, something she had been putting off for months. Because he is the oldest of four children, his mom hadn’t had to complete a form like this that asks for a lot of personal information, including tax data, he said.
“My mom was just brushing over it,” he said. “But I was like, ‘No, you really have to do this because this is for my future. Like, you don’t do this, I’ll have so much debt.’ So I was just telling her to please do this and please get on it.”
She did, but Carter said it likely wouldn’t have happened without the delay.
Carter got into his dream school, the University of Maryland, College Park, with a full scholarship, including tuition, meals and accommodation. His second choice, McDaniel College, also offered him a generous scholarship, but he says he still would have ended up paying $6,000 a year, which he didn’t want to do. “Definitely money was a big factor,” he said. He said he’s excited about starting a new chapter in September: “I feel like UMD is the perfect fit for me.”
Braden Freeman, a senior at J.L. Mann High School in Greenville, South Carolina, talks to his school counselor, Nicole Snow, about his plans after graduation. Credit: Ariel Gilreath/The Hechinger Report
Chylicia and Chy’Kyla Henderson worked hard to graduate early from Eastside High School in Greenville, South Carolina. The sisters filled their schedules and took virtual classes as well, so that Chylicia, now 18, could be done with school a semester early and Chy’Kyla, 17, could graduate after her junior year. Both want to attend college but need financial aid to afford it.
Their mom, Nichole Henderson, said the stress of trying to fill out both their FAFSA forms at once led her to take her daughters and two other graduating seniors she knew to a FAFSA workshop at a local college in April. Even with help from someone there, she found the forms confusing — Chylicia’s asked for Nichole’s tax information, she said, but Chy’Kyla’s did not.
“I don’t think there was a lot of help surrounding the whole FAFSA process,” Nichole said. “As a parent, it’s stressful. Especially when you have two.”
Chylicia is thinking about pursuing a degree in nursing or social work, and leaning toward starting at Greenville Technical College, a community college. But the school emailed her saying they needed more information on her financial aid application; it wasn’t clear if the issue stemmed from the FAFSA form or something else, she said.
Then, on May 8, she got an email from South Carolina Tuition Grants, a program that provides up to $4,800 in need-based scholarships, saying she was tentatively approved for the full amount. She still hasn’t resolved the paperwork issue at Greenville Technical College, though, and so isn’t sure yet whether she’ll be able to enroll there.
And if Chylicia’s application is missing information, the family worries that Chy’Kyla’s will have the same issue. Like her sister, she’s considering starting out at a community college, but Chy’Kyla also applied to a handful of schools in South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia. By May 8, she said, she hadn’t received word about financial aid from any schools or any need-based scholarship programs.
“We’re just playing the waiting game,” their mother said.
Heather Williams, a school counselor at Riverside High School in Greenville, said students told her they struggled simply to complete and correct errors in their forms.
“Some of the errors they’ve had were just missing a signature,” Williams said. “Trying to circumvent that and fix it was hard for students because you can make corrections, but it was hard to get back in and [do it]. It was a lot of, ‘If I click this, then what?’ And being aware there’s an error, but not sure how to fix it.”
The FAFSA process has always been complicated, but the truncated timeline this year made it significantly more stressful, said Nicole Snow, a school counselor at J.L. Mann High School, also in Greenville County. Normally, her students and their families start filling out their FAFSA forms in the fall, but this year, they couldn’t access the form until January.
“By January and February, we’ve almost kind of lost those seniors that have already done their [college] applications,” she said. “Like, ‘Oh, let’s pull you back three months later and open up FAFSA.’”
Braden Freeman, a graduating senior at J.L. Mann High School in Greenville, South Carolina, was still waiting to hear back from some colleges about financial aid in May of 2024. Credit: Ariel Gilreath/The Hechinger Report
The delay created some challenging decisions for students like Braden Freeman. Freeman, who is the student body president at J.L. Mann, submitted his financial aid application in January, right after it opened up. In March, he was told he got a full scholarship to attend Southern Methodist University in Texas, but by May 1, he still hadn’t heard back from his other top choices — the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Virginia — on how much need-based and merit-based aid he would get. Those colleges had pushed back their decision deadlines because of FAFSA delays.
Instead of waiting to hear back from UNC and UVA, Freeman decided to put a deposit down at Southern Methodist, whose deadline was May 1. The full scholarship was a big factor in his decision. “With the rising cost of tuition, I just can’t take on that much alone,” he said.
Both UNC and UVA eventually sent Freeman his financial aid packages a week before their deadline to enroll, which was May 15. Freeman said he still planned to attend Southern Methodist.
“I’m fortunate enough to not be incredibly dependent on need-based aid,” Freeman said. “For kids that are waiting on that and don’t know, I can imagine that would be way worse.”
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.
On April 29 – just a week before finals – Wells College announced that it would close. The last-minute decision by the 156-year-old liberal arts college in upstate New York sent students rushing to find new colleges for the fall. And it threw newly accepted students, who had already put down deposits, into a frantic scramble to see if the colleges they had turned down would take them back. Faculty members, having missed the academic hiring cycle, were left facing unemployment.
But there is mounting evidence that Wells administrators knew for months that the college would close, even as they made public assurances that all was well.
Wells quietly made student transfer arrangements with another college last fall, according to Wells’ accreditor. And Wells agreed earlier this year to convert the land-use zoning for the campus from institutional to mixed use, which would allow the buildings and land to be used, and sold, for non-educational purposes.
Wells joins a parade of colleges that have been closing this year at a rate of one per week, as enrollment dips and pandemic-era aid dries up. The process is never easy, throwing students’ lives into chaos, ending employment for faculty in a field where jobs are scarce and, in some cases, adding extreme stress to small-town economies. But abrupt closures put this process on steroids.
“What concerns me here is that there’s no accountability,” said Anna Anderson, an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center and a Wells alum. “The students were given just days to pack up and leave … if an institution that’s this respected can do something that’s so horrible, what’s to stop others from doing the same thing?”
Wells has struggled with enrollment declines and budget crunches for years, but recently administrators had assured faculty and local leaders that it was in fine shape.
In late February, two months before announcing the closure, Wells president Jonathan Gibralter wrote to the board of trustees of the Village of Aurora, where the college is located, that rumors about the college shutting its doors were unfounded.
“Let me assure you that we are accepting enrollment deposits for the fall semester — our fall to spring retention rate for our students is higher than it has been in several years,” Gibralter wrote in a statement. “We are hiring staff and we are developing an operating budget for the next fiscal year. We are full steam ahead.”
Related: Interested in innovations in the field of higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly Higher Education newsletter.
One week before the college’s board of trustees voted to close, Wells posted a message on its Facebook account encouraging new students to visit the college for an “admitted students’ day.”
Faculty members say they were never told that the college was in danger of closing, even though they asked regularly about the state of the college at monthly faculty meetings.
“When the budget was presented to us, if you looked at the numbers, it was pretty grim,” said Laura McClusky, who has been a professor at Wells for 23 years. “But if you listen to the narrative, it was, ‘We’re doing great. Retention is up, the number of applications is up.’”
The president of Wells College, Jonathan Gibralter, and the college’s board of trustees announced April 29 that the college would close at the end of the spring semester due to financial difficulties. But evidence indicates he and other administrators knew many months beforehand that this would have to happen. Credit: Wells College
Even as administrators were assuring faculty that the college was in good shape, Wells was already making arrangements as early as last November with other institutions for them to become what’s known as a “teach-out” partner. That designation signals to a student that an accreditor has approved a college as an appropriate place to continue their education when their current college closes.
“There seems to be evidence that they were preparing at that time,” said Nicole Biever, who is the chief of staff at Wells’ accreditor, Middle States Commission on Higher Education.
At the same time, the Village of Aurora’s ad hoc zoning committee was working alongside Wells administrators on a proposal that would convert most of the college’s campus from institutional to mixed-use zoning. The move would allow the use, and sale, of buildings for purposes not related to the college. The village board of trustees voted in favor of the change in March and has submitted the plan to the state for approval.
Wells officials acknowledged its previous agreements with other institutions.
“The College, over the course of many months, prepared itself should the Board make the difficult decision to close the institution,” Kristopher LaGreca, Wells vice president of marketing and communications, said in an email. “The Board and senior leadership worked out confidential agreements with other institutions to support our students in the event of a closure.”
In response to questions about the re-zoning, LaGreca said that Wells had “continuously looked to divest in non-academic properties in order to bridge gaps in annual budgets.”
He added that the decision to close was “centered on what was best for our students, our prospective students, and their families.”
“Wells College faces significant financial challenges,” Gibralter wrote in a letter announcing the closure. “We conducted a comprehensive review of the institution’s financial health and future sustainability, including an independent analysis, which has led to the necessary conclusion of closure.”
The college told faculty earlier this semester that there was a new articulation agreement with the American Musical and Dramatic Academy, which would bring in online students. But the deal collapsed and with it went the hope of an enrollment boost.
Members of the board of trustees declined, or didn’t respond to, requests for comment about why the decision was so last-minute, but the vote was not unanimous. The board has agreed to meet with faculty to explain the timeline next week, according to two faculty members with knowledge of the planned meeting.
Abrupt closures can make it much more difficult for students to earn a degree.
“You often see these domino precipitous closures, where students will go to a school that closes and then they’ll be funneled into the school that most wants their money,” said Jessica Ranucci, a supervising attorney for the New York Legal Assistance Group. “The school that most wants their money is a school that’s teetering on the brink, and then that school closes.”
Unfortunately, being an accreditor-approved teach-out college doesn’t necessarily mean an institution will stay open. Middle States had designated Wells as a teach-out school for Cazenovia College and Medaille University, both of which closed last year – forcing students who had just arrived at Wells in the fall to find a new college for the second time.
“To take on students from other places that have closed when you yourself might be closing is just horrible,” said Meghan McCune, a Wells alum and former trustee who is also a professor at Northern Michigan University. “Not to mention, faculty and staff. It’s really hard to find other positions, and it’s completely out of the academic cycle. There’s no way that most people are going to be able to find something. All the hiring is done now.”
Since 1868, Wells College has been a fixture of Aurora, N. Y., on the shore of Cayuga Lake, but it has announced it will close after the current semester. More than 300 students must scramble to find new places to enroll, and more than 100 workers are expected to lose their jobs. Credit: Wells College
Students were stunned by the announcement.
“You don’t think your school is going to close down when they’ve given you a lottery number to choose your room for next year. They’ve let you pick out your classes for next year. They’ve let you order your gowns for next year,” said Olive Blair, 20, who just finished her junior year and is the class president. “It was a shock to say the least.”
A paper proposal for a fall conference was due two days after the announcement was made and she spent the week scrambling to find another college where her credits as an art history major would transfer, not to mention ensuring that the finances would work.
Last year, 82 percent of Wells’ roughly 350 students had federal student loans and close to half received Pell grants, federal aid that goes to low-income students.
“It doesn’t make sense to me that they had to wait until the week before finals,” said Blair. “Did you just realize we don’t have enough money? You can’t be that dysfunctional. Something must have been known prior to this.”
People with an inside track were well aware of the problems.
“It was the elephant in the room. We’ve been talking about it for 15 years,” said Bonnie Bennett, who was mayor of Aurora from 2010 until 2022. “But whenever anyone raised the issue of Wells closing, they would deny it. They would say, ‘You’re anti-Wells.’”
Wells was put on probation in 2019 by Middle States, requiring that, among other things, it show evidence of “adequate fiscal and human resources” and proper financial planning. The following year, in the height of the pandemic, a letter was sent to alumni saying that the college could close if it didn’t raise money quickly. The fundraising appeal worked – alumni donated millions of dollars. The college also received $3.5 million between 2020 and 2022 from pandemic-related federal funds.
In light of the college’s financial struggles, some faculty members and students are upset about the money spent on President Gibralter’s compensation. In fiscal year 2019, just after Wells was put on probation, Gibraltar collected more than $78,000 in bonuses, bringing his total compensation to more than $386,000, according to federal tax filings. The following year, as the college was begging for donations, he took in more than $345,000 and in fiscal year 2021, the last year for which figures are available, his total compensation was more than $368,000. (The college declined to comment.)
Middle States took Wells off probation in the summer of 2021, despite enrollment having cratered to about 330 that year from about 420 the previous one.
An independent audit of the college in 2022 also showed that it had been dipping into its restricted endowment earnings. And it was discounting its tuition at an average of 70 percent in the 2021-22 academic year.
When asked why Wells was taken off probation, given its ongoing financial troubles, Biever said Middle States continued to monitor Wells over the next four years, sending teams to visit the college.
“In addition, the Commission required the institution to submit reports including financial information multiple times,” Biever said in an email. “When institutions submit reports, the Commission examines the evidence submitted by institutions and considers that information as part of the multi-level decision making process.”
After Wells announced it was closing, Middle States put it back on probation, citing the abrupt closure and its failure to make plans to ensure the well-being of its students. But the move will have no impact on current students or faculty.
Middle States has yet to approve any of two dozen teach-out colleges announced by Wells even though the college held a campus fair on May 3 with some of the institutions.
The New York State Department of Education said it wasn’t notified about the closure until the weekend before it was announced.
State Sen. Rachel May introduced a bill last week that would require colleges to provide notice of closure at least a year in advance, host public meetings about the decision and provide students with teach-out agreements at least six months in advance.
Students from closed schools usually don’t make it to graduation. Fewer than half of students at closed colleges end up transferring to other institutions, according to a 2022 study, and more than half of those who did transfer left their new college without graduating.
Faculty and staff are scrambling to find jobs, but at this point it’s almost impossible for them to find an academic position for next year. They will lose their health insurance coverage at the end of June (they have an option to pay a COBRA to extend the coverage). The college has said it doesn’t have the money to give them severance payments, although some faculty are wondering about the millions of dollars in assets in the property the college is sitting on.
“Someone would ask about the financial health of the college at every faculty meeting, but they never said there was any danger of closing,” said Andrew Hunt, who was a visiting assistant professor of theatrical design and technology at Wells. “That’s the complaint many of us have. You should have said something.”
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.
Get important education news and analysis delivered straight to your inbox
Student loans aren’t the only kind of university debt. Colleges and universities themselves have borrowed billions, mostly to keep building facilities they may or may not actually need as enrollment declines. Today, nearly 10 cents of every dollar in university budgets goes to pay the interest on institutional debt.
Colleges and universities now collectively owe around a quarter of a trillion dollars, according to the Moody’s bond-rating agency. The annual cost of servicing this debt is $48 billion, or $750 per student at public and $1,289 at private institutions. Several recent college closings were caused by unmanageable debt.
Much of the money has gone to new buildings, even at a time when some instruction is moving online and when existing buildings need billions worth of repairs. Some has been spent on amenities meant to attract more students as enrollment declines. But many colleges have simply ended up with more debt, even as they have fewer customers to pay for it.
Curious about how much your college owes, or the one that you’re considering attending. We’ll show you how to find out, at the end of this transcript.
“College Uncovered” is made possible by Lumina Foundation.
Scroll to the end of this transcript to find out more about this topic, and for links to more information.
Jon: So, Kirk, how’s the food?
Kirk: It’s not bad, Jon. I got the salad and a slice of pizza. It’s a little greasy.
Jon: Yeah, I had the greasy pizza, too. We’re in the dining room at Marsh Hall. It’s a really nice new dorm with a fitness room, video consoles, pool tables, flat-screen TVs. And it’s next to a bike path with great views of a salt marsh. That’s all here on the campus at Salem State University.
Kirk: Salem, Massachusetts. Famous for all those witches.
Jon: That’s right. But I’ve got something even scarier for you, Kirk. We talk a lot about student loan debt, but universities also borrow an enormous amount of money to build places like where we’re sitting right now. This relatively small public university has been on a building boom with more to come. It’s built three dorms, a parking garage, and a brand-new fitness center. And while it was doing all that, its enrollment was declining. That’s the kind of higher education debt you don’t hear about as much. But students end up paying for this, too. Salem State pays $16 million a year just in interest on what it borrowed to build all this stuff.
Kirk: Wow. That’s crazy. On top of how expensive colleges are already. So all that institutional debt ends up putting more of a burden on students and families who have to pay for it.
This is College Uncovered, from GBH News and The Hechinger Report, a podcast pulling back the Ivy to reveal how colleges really work. I’m Kirk Carapezza, with GBH …
Jon: … and I’m Jon Marcus at The Hechinger Report.
Kirk: Colleges don’t want you to know how they operate. So GBH …
Jon: In collaboration with The Hechinger Report, is here to show you.
Today on the show: “Red Ink.”
So universities and colleges nationwide have kind of an edifice complex. Even though the number of students continues to go down, they keep building and building. And to do that, they’re borrowing tens of billions of dollars a year. The cost of paying that money back adds to the already high price of college.
Here at Salem State, students pay more than $3,300 per year, per student, to service the university’s debt, through dorm charges and other fees. We got that number from a faculty task force that’s been critical of the process. We talked to the university, too. It doesn’t dispute the number, but it says that students asked for these new facilities and that it’s constantly restructuring the debt to save money.
Students walking around the campus say they weren’t aware that part of what they’re paying goes to pay off the university’s debt.
Greg O’Connor: No, I was not.
Kirk: Greg O’Connor is a freshman and a member of the Student Government Association.
Greg O’Connor: Students aren’t really satisfied here with the dining. So the fact that they took out that much money to build the dorm halls and like, dining, still like a student concern, that’s that’s really wild to me. I didn’t know that.
Jon: Mackenzie Trainor was surprised to hear about this, too.
Mackenzie Trainor: My mom pays for me to be here. I love my mom a lot, so I mean. … My dorm’s disgusting. That’s a lot of money going into dorms that are not …
Kirk: Why is it disgusting?
Mackenzie Trainor: Just different issues. Like, my shower for some reason just gets dirty very easily. The rust is disgusting.
Jon: Is it one of these new dorms?
Mackenzie Trainor: Actually, yeah. Charlotte Forten Hall. I do love this school, but I mean, I’m recently having, like, financial aid issues. I think it’s interesting to find out some of the things about where funding’s going and where the money’s going.
Jon: It’s pretty quiet on the campus, except between classes, when students start crisscrossing the quad. Nearly all the students on this campus, 95 percent of them, qualify for financial aid. And those new dorms aren’t helping the half who commute.
Brendan Sheehan is a junior majoring in business and music. He runs a landscaping company with his brothers to help pay for the cost of going here.
Brendan Sheehan, who is working his way through college, says he’d just as soon rough it to keep the cost down than to pay the interest on the debt his university assumed to build new dorms. Credit: Brendan Sheehan.
Brendan Sheehan: Yeah, I just I just got off work.
Jon: What’s the music for? What are you planning to do?
Brendan Sheehan: Not a solid plan yet, but I just love music, so I’ve always stuck with that.
Kirk: Favorite band?
Brendan Sheehan: Favorite band? Oof, so many to choose from. But I got to go with the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Kirk: All right,that’s a good choice.
Brendan Sheehan: Definitely.
Jon: New dorms are nice, but Sheehan said he’d be just as happy paying less for college and roughing it a little.
Brendan Sheehan: I could honestly, personally handle, you know, 5-foot-by-10-foot, you know, like, I’d be okay with living like that. I assume other people might think otherwise, but personally, I just, you know, I know that avoiding debt as much as possible is the goal.
Jon: But not necessarily for colleges and universities. And it isn’t only here at Salem State.
Kirk: Okay, so colleges and universities are borrowing vast sums to put up new dorms and student centers and other buildings, even as their enrollments decline. The actual amount of borrowed is estimated to be more than $32 billion a year in public bond debt. Most of it has gone to build new buildings that universities hope will attract students. And we’re not talking about buildings paid for by wealthy alums or giving campaigns. Forty percent of new construction on campuses is financed with debt.
Howard Bunsis: Most of the borrowing is for buildings, and the majority of those buildings are dorms. Universities have come to believe universally that dorms, that having the newest, fanciest wave pool, cool kitchens, cool whatever, are the answer in the competitive market to attract students to come to the university.
Jon: Howard Bunsis is a professor in the business school at Eastern Michigan University who studies colleges and debt. Servicing this debt now costs about 10 cents out of every dollar in university operating budgets. It’s also a major reason why a lot of small colleges are closing. We talked in Episode 4 about the large number of colleges closing these days. Many of them have more debt than assets. Ohio Valley University had $18 million in assets, but $30 million worth of liabilities when it shut down. The College of New Rochelle had $77 million worth of assets and $87 million in liabilities. I could go on and on. Cazenovia College in New York. Iowa Wesleyan. Birmingham Southern in Alabama. You get the idea. I asked Howard Bunsis what kind of colleges are doing this.
Howard Bunsis: Whether we’re talking about a flagship public, a regional public, a very wealthy private — it goes across the spectrum of universities.
Jon: So most of this is for dorms.
They figure that the proceeds they’re going to get, the revenue they’re going to generate from these dorms is going to more than cover it. And in addition, up until a year ago, interest rates in our country were very, very low. So they figured, you know what? It’s almost like free money — 3percent, 2 percent. So there was a lot of borrowing around the country by universities, no doubt. And a lot of it was for dorms, but a lot of it was generated by the low interest rates. Now interest rates are not so low anymore.
Jon: Let’s be clear, though. Just like people who have a mortgage, a lot of colleges can handle the debt, right?
Howard Bunsis: Well, let’s start at the top: flagship public universities. They have absolutely no trouble borrowing money and paying it back. They have tuition coming in. They have grants and contracts and all the research they do. They have state appropriations. They have a lot of people donating money. They have such a wonderfully diverse revenue source. They’re not going to have any trouble.
Jon: Okay. But but what about other schools like Eastern Michigan?
Howard Bunsis: You come to a place where I teach, a regional public university. Well, the grants and contracts aren’t that great. There’s not that much money coming in from gifts. So they’re relying on tuition revenue and the state appropriation. So it’s a little more problematic.
Jon: Should prospective students be wary about going to small, tuition dependent private colleges that have a lot of debt?
Howard Bunsis: The small private university that’s borrowing a lot of money, and they have one revenue source that I think is — can I use the word problematical? Is that is that a fair word? I would be very wary of a private university that gets more than 80 percent of its revenue from tuition only and is borrowing a lot of money.
Jon: So how do you tell if the college you’re considering has too much debt?
Howard Bunsis: One of my pet peeves, and [for] transparency, I think every university that takes any federal money, including a private university that gets federal money for student loans, should put their audited statements on their website for people to see. Because remember, with debt, it’s not like you have to write a check. Like when you borrow. If you borrow $200,000 in your mortgage, you don’t have to write a $200,000 check tomorrow. You have to write a monthly check. And so that’s why looking at the total cash, the two investments, that ratio should be above one.
Jon: That sounds complicated, but but you’re saying that if there’s a problem, it’s going to stick out, right?
Howard Bunsis: So I looked at this in college in West Virginia, which went under. Basically they had cash and investments of $6 million and debt of $28 million, and they had negative cash flows. So that’s troubling.
Jon: Yeah. You’re talking about Alderson Broaddus University, which closed last year just a few days before the start of the school year. It couldn’t even pay its utility bills.
Howard Bunsis: The debt issue that we’re talking about is really about small privates that put all their eggs in one basket, borrowed too much money to build dorms. The people didn’t come. The enrollment didn’t increase. The cash flows were not generated. But the principal has to be paid. The interest has to be paid.
Kirk: Back at Salem State, it was concerned faculty who took the initiative and investigated all the debt the university took on to build its new dorms, gym and that dining hall with the greasy pizza. Joanna Gonsalves is a professor of psychology, and she says it was a risky strategy from the very start.
Joanna Gonsalves: That gamble wasn’t good, because, more and more, our campuses, our students can’t afford that. It was the gamble that having those beautiful, campus facilities make our campus appealing to somebody from New Hampshire, Rhode Island, California. That really, actually never came to pass.
Jon: And yet now everybody’s paying for it.
Joanna Gonsalves: Yeah, everybody’s paying for it.
Jon: So we’ve been talking about shiny new buildings and how colleges borrow to pay for them. But that new state-of-the-art computer science building also comes at the cost of other projects and priorities. Even as they take on more debt to put up new buildings, some colleges are neglecting their existing infrastructure. Universities now have — listen to this, Kirk — $112 billion worth of deferred maintenance and repairs.
Kirk: That’s a lot of money. And I’m still thinking about the gross dorm rooms and the antiquated bathrooms or heating systems on college campuses. The things you know you don’t see on a college brochure.
Jon: Yeah. So analysts say it’s a maintenance backlog that’s now become impossible to catch up with. It means that the condition of some buildings is getting really bad.
Alice Roberts Davis: Generally what happens is, as buildings age, we should go in and replace certain aspects — plumbing, roof, heating, electrical, mechanical. All those systems need to be maintained and replaced over time. And if we don’t have the funding to do that, that becomes an item of deferred maintenance. And as those things go on without replacement, they become more critical, at risk for failure.
Kirk: That’s the person with the very tough job of overseeing this issue on one of America’s biggest campuses.
Alice Roberts Davis: I am Alice Roberts Davis. I am vice president for university services at the University of Minnesota. We have about 1,000 buildings, and more than half of our buildings are more than 50 years old. We have a number of buildings that are more than 100 years old. And so as you think about your own home and what types of things need to be repaired in your own home, if you had a home that was 50, 60 or 70 years old, you would definitely need to replace the roof. You need to replace the windows and probably work with the foundation or plumbing. Some sort of structural work would probably be necessary in our university. Buildings are no different. All of those things need to be done on a regular cadence.
Kirk: But often they haven’t been. This can affect the average college experience. These are not the buildings that gets showcased during a college tour, or when the college is trying to make a good first impression and get you the student to enroll.
Alice Roberts Davis: They want it to look stately. They want it to look old. They want it to look like those universities back east that have those long-tenured buildings and look like great thinkers have paced those corridors. And we want them to have that original character, but that costs money for us to maintain them in a way that makes them continue to be functional.
Jon: But Davis says there’s more to this than pretty buildings.
Alice Roberts Davis: Students who have had a great K-through-12 experience with wonderful facilities come to our university, and seeing something that feels like a step backward as far as facilities go — they may be looking at a lab that is the same lab that their mom and dad used, versus something that’s really state of the art in their in their high school. When that happens, they tend to look at surrounding states, other universities, other options that they may have. And what we find is when they go to those other schools, in other states, they tend to form professional and personal relationships that cause them to stay. That’s a long-term workforce issue for our state.
Jon: The condition of the campus really has a far-reaching impact. What are some other ways that it matters? I mean, schools send a message not only to students, but to faculty with the quality of their infrastructure.
Alice Roberts Davis: It’s so important that we attract the best faculty so that we can get the best students here. And when faculty assess the facilities and see that they may or may not be able to get the grant funding that they need because of the facilities that they’re being offered, they make really difficult decisions that may or may not include our university.
Kirk: Okay. So what should you, the consumer, look for when you visit a college campus? Here are some ideas.
Alice Roberts Davis: I think the parents should look at what the child’s major is. They should be thinking about what type of facility they need. What equipment is there that will help prepare them for their workforce of the future? Or do they have the faculty there that can prepare them for the workforce that they plan to enter?
Jon: So, to recap, wander around to campus when the official tour is over and look for yourself, especially at the buildings where you’re likely to take labs or classes. Next, check out the college’s ratio of assets to liabilities. That’s a way to understand whether a college might have too much debt.
Kirk: That sounds like as much fun as doing your taxes, Jon.
Jon: Well, none of this is fun, right? But there are tools that make it easy, and you’ll find them linked from the landing page for this episode. They’ll take you to universities’ publicly required financial documents, which summarize these numbers pretty well.
Kirk: This is College Uncovered. I’m Kirk Carapezza from GBH …
Jon: … and I’m Jon Marcus from The Hechinger Report. Be sure to keep listening to future episodes to hear more about what colleges and universities don’t teach you.
This episode was produced and written by Kirk …
Kirk: … and Jon, and it was edited by Jeff Keating. Meg Woolhouse is our supervising editor and Ellen London is executive producer.
Jon: Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott.
Kirk: We had production assistance from Diane Adame.
Jon: Theme song and original music by Left Roman out of MIT. Mei He is our project manager and head of GBH podcasts is Devin Maverick Robins.
Kirk: College Uncovered is a production of GBH News and The Hechinger Report and distributed by PRX. It’s made possible by Lumina Foundation. Thanks so much for listening.
Kirk: Okay, now we’re at the sundae bar. Where are you going with?
Jon: Well, cookies and cream. What else would you go with?
Kirk: Cookie dough looks good. Or mint chocolate chip?
For more information about the topics covered in this episode:
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.
CHICAGO — Jazmin Mejia went straight from high school to what she thought was the perfect fit at Loyola University, a 30-minute drive from the Chicago neighborhood where she grew up.
But Mejia was quickly overwhelmed on the North Side campus of nearly 17,000 students.
“The classes were too big,” said Mejia, 18. “I was struggling to ask for help.”
A year later, she says college has become much more manageable.
Mejia left Loyola’s main campus in favor of the university’s Arrupe College, a two-year program in downtown Chicago that offers associate degrees. Taking smaller classes with instructors who interact more with students has been a game-changer, she said.
“The professors try to communicate with you and try to understand your situation,” Mejia said over breakfast at one of the communal tables in the Arrupe cafeteria.
Jazmin Mejia, who left Loyola University’s four-year main campus in favor of the university’s two-year program, called Arrupe College. “The classes were too big,” she says. “I was struggling to ask for help.” Credit: Camilla Forte for The Hechinger Report
Two-year associate degrees have long been offered almost exclusively at community colleges, but the model pioneered at Loyola is picking up steam at private, nonprofit four-year universities around the country. Many of these are Jesuit schools like Loyola, which say that lower-cost two-year associate degree programs particularly help students who need the most support.
“It’s a reach-in culture,” said the Rev. Thomas Neitzke, Arrupe’s dean. “It’s that total wraparound, both in the classroom and outside the classroom.”
The expansion of the Arrupe model is largely being championed by Steve Katsouros, who was the founding dean of Arrupe nine years ago and is now president and CEO of the Come To Believe Network, a nonprofit focused solely on bringing two-year degrees to four-year schools. The network raises money to provide grants to universities to start associate degree programs.
In addition to Loyola, schools that have either recently opened or plan to open two-year colleges include the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, the University of Mount Saint Vincent in New York City, Butler University in Indiana and Boston College.
A handful of other schools, such as the University of the Pacific in California, are considering programs. And Homeboy Industries, a gang rehabilitation nonprofit, is exploring partnering with Mount Saint Mary’s University in Los Angeles to create an associate degree program.
Even considering the concept can help a college learn more about the needs of its broader student body, Katsouros said. “We try to identify the factors that prevent students from being successful,” Katsouros said, noting that most of the programs also offer some combination of free meals, laptops and housing.
The concept also suggests a way to diversify and expand enrollment. Programs in the Come To Believe Network must commit to accepting lower-income students and keeping their loan debt to a minimum. At Arrupe, for instance, the advertised tuition is a little over $13,000 a year, but scholarships and work-study programs mean most students pay about $2,000, Neitzke said. The strategy, he explained, is partly to attract students who can’t afford private universities and might not want to attend cheaper public community colleges that don’t offer as much personal attention.
The hope is that most graduates of the two-year programs will go on to finish bachelor’s degrees at universities. Data is sparse so far, but even modest success toward that goal would be a huge improvement over the national numbers.
A poster advertising support for Arrupe College students to transfer to Loyola University’s four-year program hangs in the cafeteria of Arrupe’s downtown Chicago building. Credit: Camilla Forte for The Hechinger Report
While 80 percent of community college students say they plan to earn bachelor’s degrees, only 16 percent manage to do so within six years, according to the Aspen Institute and the Community College Research Center, or CCRC, at Teachers College, Columbia University. The numbers are even worse for low-income (11 percent), Black (9 percent) and Hispanic (13 percent) students. (The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College.)
Only a relative handful of students attend these new two-year programs compared to millions at traditional community colleges, but the differences are stark. At Loyola’s Arrupe College, for instance, 50 percent of students graduate, and 70 percent of those graduates continue to bachelor’s degree programs, according to figures provided by the college.
More universities should be offering associate degrees, said Davis Jenkins, a senior research scholar at the CCRC.
“These are institutions that could use their prestige and dedication to high-quality teaching to really onboard students” who would otherwise not attend college, Jenkins said. “This is building a bridge into the college, using the college’s strength.”
Most of the new programs guarantee graduates admission to the parent campus, although not all students decide to accept the opportunity.
At Butler University, which will open its two-year Founder’s College to 100 students next year, students who graduate from Founder’s with sufficient grades will automatically be eligible to finish their bachelor’s degrees at the university. Students will have no debt after the first two years, said Brooke Barnett, Butler’s provost, and those who go on to Butler will pay no more than $10,000 total for the full four years. Founder’s College is being funded entirely by foundations and donors, she said, and will fulfill the university’s longtime goal of offering low-cost degrees to underrepresented students.
“We want to give students the opportunity to flourish and shine and show the talents they can bring,” Barnett said. “They have not always been given those opportunities.”
Some universities, including Butler, are using the associate degree programs as an opportunity to introduce students to the main campus without overwhelming them with huge classes. Others, such as Loyola and Boston College, are keeping associate students separate to ease them into college life.
A student at Arrupe College gets ready for a test. Credit: Camilla Forte for The Hechinger Report
Boston College’s new Messina College will open to 100 students this summer on property it acquired from a college that closed, about a mile from the main campus. Messina College leaders hope the initial isolation will help avoid the culture shock of a large campus and keep students from dropping out.
“There’s a great advantage in having our students start off in that smaller setting,” said Erick Berrelleza, Messina’s founding dean.
While the concept of universities offering associate degrees is relatively new, some community colleges in 24 states have introduced bachelor’s degrees in a handful of disciplines in the past decade — an innovation universities haven’t always welcomed.
Before Idaho approved a plan in March for a community college to offer bachelor’s degrees, for instance, Boise State University argued against the proposal, essentially saying it would step on the university’s toes.
“Indeed, it could hurt effective and efficient postsecondary education in Idaho,” the university wrote to the state Board of Education, “cannibalizing limited resources available to postsecondary education and duplicating degree offerings in the same region.”
Community colleges have not yet voiced concerns about universities offering associate degrees, and the CCRC’s Jenkins said there’s little reason for community colleges to worry about these relatively small two-year programs. Still, he said, it will be important for universities to collaborate with community colleges.
Images of past graduates of Arrupe College line the hallways between classrooms in its downtown Chicago campus building. Credit: Camilla Forte for The Hechinger Report
“Where it’s been done well, there’s been negotiation,” he said. “I would hope this would encourage community colleges to partner with four-year institutions.”
Several four-year schools said they had not talked formally with community colleges before starting associate programs. That includes the University of Mount Saint Vincent, which will open its new two-year Seton College this summer on its campus in the Bronx.
A spokesman for Bronx Community College declined to answer questions about the Mount Saint Vincent program, while the borough’s other community college, Hostos, did not respond to interview requests.
In Minnesota, where University of St. Thomas opened its associate degree program in 2017, there has been no friction between the university and St. Paul College, the closest community college. St. Paul College leaders have been supportive of the initiative, said Austin Calhoun, a St. Paul spokesperson.
“That’s 200 more students in the Twin Cities per year getting access to higher education,” she said. Still, she added, “St. Thomas is definitely the outlier. If the University of Minnesota got in the game, that would be a different scale.”
Jonathan Larbi, a sophomore at Loyola College’s two-year arm, Arrupe College. Larbi plans to transfer to Loyola’s four-year campus and ultimately go to medical school to become a pediatrician. Credit: Camilla Forte for The Hechinger Report
Back at Arrupe College, second-year student Jonathan Larbi was splitting his time between school and a campus job in the admissions office while preparing to continue his education at Loyola next year. Larbi, who hopes to go to medical school and become a pediatrician, grew up in Chicago and Ghana and had planned to go to Loyola straight out of high school, “but it wasn’t the smartest financial decision.”
Starting at Arrupe has worked well, he said, since he feels like a Loyola student but doesn’t have to pay the university’s $50,000-plus tuition.
“It’s kind of the best of both worlds,” he said. “Their resources are our resources.”
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.
After four years battling a chain of for-profit cosmetology schools in court, and many more years struggling with debts caused by those schools, about 150 students will receive some financial relief.
As part of a settlement finalized this week in a class action lawsuit, La’ James International College, which is based in Iowa, will pay current and former students who joined the lawsuit $1,500 each. It will also discharge debts those students owed to the school and make changes in how it communicates about financial aid.
The suit was brought against La’ James International College in 2020 following a Hechinger Report investigation into cosmetology schools in Iowa. Our reporting showed how the business model of beauty schools can help for-profit schools rake in profits while pushing students deep into debt for an ultimately low-paying career.
Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox.
The lawsuit, which was brought on behalf of current and former students by the nonprofit legal and advocacy organization Student Defense, accused La’ James of delaying financial aid payments and causing them financial hardship in violation of the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act.
“Students rely on their financial aid to stay afloat while they pursue their goals – and La’ James pulled that out from under them,” Student Defense’s litigation director, Eric Rothschild, said in a statement. “When for-profit colleges engage in such practices, hard-working students pay the price.”
La’ James did not respond to request for comment.
Most colleges disburse financial aid each semester, but beauty schools work differently. Students are required to clock a certain number of hours either in class or working in the school’s salon practicing their skills on paying customers. Financial aid payments are supposed to be made after students hit certain hour benchmarks, but students said La’ James often delayed those payments for months, so that they had to take out other loans to meet daily living expenses.
Cosmetology students in Iowa must complete more hours of training than those in any other state: 2,100 hours. (Most states require 1,500 hours.) Many for-profit beauty schools in Iowa have fought fiercely to keep it this way, lobbying hard against proposed changes. The state cosmetology school association has also protected its monopoly in this educational market, suing a community college that wanted to open a cosmetology program in 2005.
Many Iowa cosmetologists told Hechinger reporters that they spent a significant portion of their clock hours sitting around waiting for customers, not learning or practicing anything.
A Hechinger analysis showed that the more time a state requires for cosmetology training, the more debt aspiring hairdressers tend to take on. Yet the median annual pay for a cosmetologist is $35,000.
According to the most recent federal data, La’ James programs cost up to $20,000, while graduates from their schools make anywhere from $23,000 to $30,000 annually.
The Student Defense lawsuit is not the first time the school has found itself in legal jeopardy. The chain was sued in 2014 by the Iowa attorney general’s office, which accused it of deceptive marketing and enrollment practices. That suit resulted in a settlement in which La’ James forgave more than $2 million in student debt, paid a $500,000 fine and agreed to not make false or misleading statements about financial aid disbursements.
In 2021, however, the attorney general’s office found that the school was misleading students about financial aid, and once again entered into a settlement where the school forgave more than $460,000 in institutional debt.
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.
BURLINGTON, Vt. — Hopeful young entrepreneurs in business schools routinely pitch ideas for startup companies as part of their classroom assignments. But the ones who were doing it at the University of Vermont were still in high school.
It was the inaugural Vermont Pitch Challenge, to which nearly 150 teams from 27 states and seven countries had submitted their entrepreneurial brainstorms. The final five had come to the campus to battle it out for the grand prize: a full-tuition scholarship to UVM.
Their ideas included a website to help previously incarcerated applicants get jobs, a nonprofit to provide mental health support to competitive snowboarders, a medical device to prevent the recurrence of a herniated disk, a company to rent equipment to farmers in St. Croix and an invention to sustainably recharge laptops, phones and tablets.
This competition wasn’t solely about helping the planet or improving medicine, health, employment opportunities or agriculture, however.
Painstaking research had suggested that entrepreneurship programs could appeal to high school boys considering going to college. The findings appeared to be right: More boys than girls had entered the pitch contest. And the university hoped that some would eventually enroll.
The approach is among a fast-growing number of efforts to increase the number of men in college, which has been declining steadily.
Jay Jacobs, vice provost for enrollment management at the University of Vermont, where women now outnumber men by nearly two to one. “This male enrollment gap is something that we’re going to have to deal with,” he says. Credit: Oliver Parini for The Hechinger Report
“We thought that this idea would attract men,” said Jay Jacobs, UVM’s vice provost for enrollment management, who declared himself pleased with the results. “We thought that this idea would attract racial and ethnically diverse students. We thought that this idea would attract what I’ll call geographically diverse students, students not just from Vermont or New England.”
The university needs all of those kinds of recruits. Vermont has the nation’s third-oldest population, by median age, making it harder to find students generally. That’s even before a dramatic decline in the number of 18-year-olds about to hit the rest of the rest of the country starting next year.
“Here, we’ve already felt the impacts of the quote, unquote ‘demographic cliff,’ ” said Jacobs. “We want to make sure that we are in front of any eligible student who is able to pursue their education at the University of Vermont, or in the state of Vermont.”
That particularly includes men. The proportion of applicants to the university who are male has declined from 44 percent in 2010 to 33 percent today, an analysis of federal data shows.
“I definitely do notice that,” said Melinda Wetzel, a junior who was having coffee with a friend in the student center. “In my big lecture halls, I’d say there are more women. And I do have one small class where there is only one guy.”
It isn’t just this university that’s searching for new ways to recruit men.
The number of men enrolled in college nationwide has dropped by more than 157,000, or almost 6 percent, in just the last five years, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. The proportion of college students who are men is now a record-low 41 percent, the U.S. Department of Education says. That’s a complete reversal of the situation 50 years ago, when men outnumbered women in college by about the same extent.
“At conferences, when we’re in rooms together, we all know that this male enrollment gap is something that we’re going to have to deal with,” said Jacobs, whose office window overlooks the university’s grand historic main quad.
The ways universities are trying to address this vary widely.
A marketing email sent to prospective students by the University of Montana, whose undergraduate enrollment is now 58 percent women. The university found in focus groups that the men it’s trying to recruit are interested in outdoor recreation. Credit: Image provided by the University of MontanaJohn Truslow considered skipping college and going into the trades or the military. While he ultimately enrolled at the University of Vermont, where he is a business major, some of his male high school classmates “just weren’t feeling school and they wanted to do something else.” Credit: Oliver Parini for The Hechinger Report
The University of Montana — whose enrollment overall has fallen from nearly 16,000 to about 10,000 in the last 10 years, and 58 percent of whose undergraduates are women — found in focus groups that many of the men it was trying to recruit were interested in the outdoors. So this spring it sent targeted emails to prospective students highlighting its hunting class, forestry program and recreational opportunities.
“Have you ever eaten fresh meat that you harvested yourself?” one of the emails asks. “Apply to UM and develop a closer bond to the landscape than ever before.” Another shows a brawny, bearded man cutting wood. “Embrace the wilderness, embrace the axe,” it says. “There are few other connections with the natural world better than swinging a sharp axe with the smell of pine in your nose.”
Admitted applicants considering whether or not to enroll are also sent bingo-style checkoff cards with images of hiking, ski and cowboy boots. Other promotional materials include images of country-and-western shows on campus.
Housing deposits from men — which is how the university measures who will be enrolling in the fall, as it doesn’t require enrollment deposits — are up since the campaign began, said Kelly Nolin, director of undergraduate admissions.
“Ultimately all students want to know, ‘Am I going to fit in? Do I belong?’ ” said Nolin.
Among prospective applicants who are increasingly asking those questions, she said, are men from religious conservative families, at a time when universities are accused of being bastions of left-wing cancel culture. “We want them to know they won’t be criticized for their beliefs.”
“If, in fact, colleges and universities want to recruit and enroll and ultimately retain and graduate more men, they have to have a strategy,” said Shaun Harper, founder and executive director of the center. “It has to be based on input and insights from college men themselves.”
Instead of trying to figure out why so many men forgo college or give up on it after starting, he said, institutions should ask, “Wait a minute, what about the ones who are here and are successful?” Harper said. “What were the factors that enabled their enrollment and their ultimate degree attainment? There’s a lot that we can learn from them that we could scale and adapt to everyone else.”
He and others said they were skeptical of some efforts to enroll more men, such as doubling down on sports by adding more men’s teams in the hope that it will lure more male students, as some colleges are doing.
“They’re not all on sports teams. So that shouldn’t be the only lever that we pull,” said Harper. And even if highlighting hunting might be effective in Montana, “it feels so presumptuous about what really appeals to men. I’m just not sure that institutions understand the full range of young men’s interests, and so they tend to default to things like forestry and outdoor adventures. I’m not sure that would work in California or Maryland.”
Whatever does work, universities are under growing pressure to figure it out. Overall enrollment has declined by 16 percent in the 10 years through 2022, the most recent period for which the figures are available from the U.S. Department of Education. Another 11 to 15 percent decline is projected to begin next year.
And there are signs that the problem of attracting men is only likely to get worse.
The University of Montana found in focus groups that men were interested in forestry and hunting, so it targets them with emails like these. “Embrace the wilderness, embrace the axe,” it says. Credit: Image provided by the University of Montana
Of high school boys in Vermont whose parents don’t have four-year degrees, for instance, only 45 percent aspire to go to college themselves, down from 58 percent in 2018, and much lower than the 68 percent of girls who do, a survey found. Even among high school students with at least one parent who has a bachelor’s degree, 87 percent of girls say they want to go to college, compared to 78 percent of boys.
The problem begins early. Girls do better in high school than boys, and are more likely to graduate. In the 37 states that report high school graduation rates by gender, 88 percent of girls finished high school on time, compared to 82 percent of boys, a 2018 study by the Brookings Institution found. Boys are more likely to think they don’t need a degree for the jobs they want, the Pew Research Center found, or go into the trades. Even if they do enroll in colleges, work opportunities lure them away. Men who dropped out of community college are more likely than women to say it was because of other work opportunities, according to a survey by the think tank New America.
Melinda Wetzel, a junior at the University of Vermont, says she has a class with only one male student in it. “I definitely do notice” that women outnumber men on the campus, Wetzel says. Credit: Oliver Parini for The Hechinger Report
That went through John Truslow’s mind when he was deciding whether or not to go to college.
“There was a point where I wasn’t thinking about college” and considered going into the trades or the military, said Truslow, who ultimately decided to major in business at UVM.
Among his male high school classmates who didn’t go to college, said Truslow, who was playing pool in the student center, some couldn’t afford it. “But most of the ones that didn’t directly go to college, it was mostly academic. They just weren’t feeling school and they wanted to do something else.”
A third of men compared to a quarter of women said they didn’t go to or finish college because they just didn’t want to, Pew found.
Richard Reeves, who studies this problem, said it may be more a result of having so successfully encouraged women to get degrees than having discouraged men.
“I think actually what’s probably happened is the opposite — that we’ve sent a really strong and positive message to girls and women. But we haven’t had similar messages for boys and men,” said Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men.
“We’ve now got to do a little bit of self-correction here and say, look, of course we want girls and women to continue to rise in the education system, but we don’t want to leave the boys and men behind.”
Reeves said that, just as male-dominated programs in engineering and business have made extra efforts to recruit women, female-dominated fields such as healthcare and education should now reach out to men.
“That’s another thing that higher education institutions can do, is look at their courses and see where are the gender splits the greatest,” he said. “Rather than thinking the football team is the answer, maybe more men in your nursing school is the answer.”
But the football team could be one of many answers. Among the more subtle efforts to attract men at UVM, the university encourages its students, faculty and staff to wear its colors, green and gold, on Fridays — the days when most prospective applicants are touring the campus. “School spiritedness” is another attribute that research showed appeals particularly to men.
“Coincidentally, Fridays are some of our highest visit volume days, yes,” said Jacobs, smiling.
UVM campus counselors say men who do enroll are less likely to join extracurricular clubs or seek help when they need it. Some men have “this lack of connection,” said Evan Cuttitta, the university’s coordinator of men and masculinities programs. “They have less experience in managing stress and advocating for themselves” and often aren’t as good at “that practice of asking for help.”
Identical twins Pierson and Parker Jones of Lutz, Florida, were finalists in an entrepreneurship competition that was meant to attract more male applicants to the University of Vermont. “After this pitch, we’re definitely going to look into it,” Pierson Jones says. Credit: Oliver Parini for The Hechinger Report
So the university has also started a program for Black and Hispanic male students that provides them with peer and professional mentors, summer internships, networking events and priority registration.
All these steps to increase male enrollment appear to be having some effect.
Identical twins Pierson and Parker Jones of Lutz, Florida, found themselves in Vermont for the entrepreneurship competition. It put the University of Vermont on their radar, they said.
“We haven’t looked at the University of Vermont,” Pierson Parker said. “But after this pitch, we’re definitely going to look into it. Because it’s definitely more interesting now.”
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.
“You’ll get paid to fight climate change, learning how to install those solar panels, fight wildfires, rebuild wetlands, weatherize homes, and so much more that’s going to protect the environment and build a clean energy economy,” Biden said at the Earth Day event.
The American Climate Corps (ACC) is modeled after the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which was created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 to employ men in environmental projects on the country’s public lands — projects like trail building, planting trees and soil erosion control. Nearly 3 million people were put to work in an effort to address both Depression-era unemployment and to shore up national infrastructure.
But it wasn’t very diverse. Although Black and Native American men were allowed to enroll, the work was segregated. And women could not apply. For a brief time, a sister program created by Eleanor Roosevelt — mockingly called the “She-She-She camps” by its detractors — trained 8,500 women in skills like typing and filing.
The Biden administration is adamant that this iteration of the program will attract a more diverse conservation and climate workforce, promising that the program will “look like America” and expand pathways into the workforce for people from marginalized backgrounds.
On Monday, Biden announced the launch of a long-awaited job board where applicants can look for opportunities. Some positions were created through the American Climate Corps partner agencies like the Forest Service, which announced the Forest Corps — 80 jobs in reforestation and wildfire mitigation — or the USDA’s Working Lands Climate Corps, with 100 positions. At the same time, the Department of Interior and the Department of Energy announced a new project that will place corps members in priority energy communities — places that have historically been the site of coal mining and power plants — for work in community-led projects like environmental remediation. All of these positions have a term limit, although they vary; some listed on the website are seven-months for example, others are over a year long.
Other jobs listed on the site are compiled from existing conservation corps programs; either state-run programs like the California Conservation Corps or those run by nonprofits like Conservation Legacy. These provide opportunities for young people in local communities to do everything from prescribed burning on public lands to solar panel installations on schools.
So far, there are 273 listings on the website, ranging from working on trail crews to invasive plant management to wildland firefighting positions. There is also an “ag literacy” position to teach kids about where their food comes from, and a posting for a climate impact coordinator who will help a Minnesota nonprofit develop climate resilience projects. That’s a far cry from the administration’s goal of 20,000 jobs.
But supporters of the program say opportunities to expand ACC are endless — from home weatherization positions to planting tree canopies in urban areas. The question is whether these mostly taxpayer-funded jobs will attract and retain a diverse workforce and benefits women and LGBTQ+ workers, as well as people of color.
“We know that it is going to take everybody to solve the climate process and we need to field the whole team. That’s exactly the way we’ve thought about building this program,” said Maggie Thomas, special assistant for climate to Biden.
Because the program is working with The Corps Network, a national association of about 140 conservation groups, there is already some data on how modern-day organizations operate, said Mary Ellen Sprenkel, president and CEO of the network. “They collectively engage almost 25,000 young people a year and are very diverse — young people from urban areas to rural areas. There is a diversity of race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status and education level.”
According to the organization’s data from 2023, the most recent year available, 44 percent of their members were women and 3 percent were gender non-conforming or gender expansive.
Fifty-nine percent identified as White, while 14 percent were Black, 23 percent were Latino, 4 percent were American Indian, 3 percent were Asian and 2 percent were Pacific Islander.
Sprenkel sees those numbers as progress. “What has evolved out of the original CCC has naturally become much more diverse in terms of member opportunities. And so building on that for the ACC, I think it will naturally happen,” said Sprenkel.
In addition, any of the jobs created through federal agencies in collaboration with the ACC must adhere to the administration’s Justice 40 initiative, which means 40 percent of the benefits must go to marginalized communities, in this case either through job creation, or through the projects being funded through monies like the Inflation Reduction Act.
One aspect of parity will be how well these jobs pay. Many of the positions listed on the ACC site are funded through AmeriCorps, which pays modest living stipends that have been criticized as “poverty wages.” AmeriCorps “was designed for middle class White people who could get support from their parents to have this opportunity,” Sprenkel said. But the Biden administration wants to ensure that all young people can serve, she continued, not just those who can afford to take lower-paying positions.
Sprenkel said the administration is aiming for positions to pay a living wage — with some wiggle room that allows for lower wages as long as housing and other benefits are provided. “[They’ve] said we would like for programs to strive to pay their members $15 an hour, but if that is the result of a package where you’re providing housing and transportation, that’s OK.”
One way the administration has aimed to increase pay transparency is to list an hourly wage equivalent for the jobs posted on the ACC website, said Thomas. This number could factor in stipends for transportation, living expenses and educational awards. Many jobs currently listed go above the $15 minimum — though some require more than entry-level experience.
There are also efforts in the works to increase the low stipends of current AmeriCorps members. “The president has called on Congress to raise the minimum living allowance for all of our crew members to at least $15 an hour as a starting point,” said Yasmeen Shaheen-McConnell, senior advisor for AmeriCorps. In the interim, she said, many corps positions have been able to offer packages equivalent to $15 an hour through public and private partnerships with states and outside organizations.
Madeleine Sirois, a research analyst with the left-leaning think tank Urban Institute, has been researching workforce development pathways in the clean energy transition. She said offering paid opportunities to enter a new career is a good starting point. “So many people want to upskill, they want to get new credentials, and maybe change career paths. But then they can’t leave their current job that maybe only pays 10 bucks an hour,” she said.
But other benefits are important, too, if the program is going to be equitable in its rollout, said Sirois. “It’s been mentioned on the portal that there are health care, child care, transportation and housing available, but it does say only some opportunities will offer that,” she said. “So it leaves me with the question of: Who has access to that and who doesn’t?”
Among the initial 273 listings posted on the ACC site, The 19th found only four that listed child care as a benefit, though Shaheen-McConnell said that eventually more of the positions will offer it.
Sirois said another important aspect of the ACC will be whether it will lead to actual jobs in clean energy and climate work after corps service ends. She was heartened by Monday’s announcement that the ACC had partnered with the North America’s Building Trades Alliance TradeFutures program, which will provide every ACC member access to a free pre-apprenticeship trades readiness program. Trades jobs make up the foundation of the clean energy transition, but have historically gone to men. Just 4 percent of women are trades workers in the United States.
“These are all really important, especially for getting women and people of color into these jobs, and apprenticeships that will lead into quality careers that are unionized in many cases. So I think that’s fantastic,” said Sirois. However, while the administration has also touted that ACC positions will offer workforce certifications and skill-based training, Sirois said those are only offered for some corps members. Getting clarity on how many of these jobs will lead to improved employment opportunities will be key.
It’s going to take time to see how the program plays out, she said, and learn if it will be successful in placing women and people of color in trades jobs, despite historic discrimination.
“When we talk about moving people into jobs, it’s making sure we’re very specific about what kinds of jobs in terms of the quality,” she said. “It’s about opportunities for advancement, having meaningful work, a workplace free from discrimination and harassment, and feeling that you have a voice on the job.” Sirois hopes the administration will collect data on corps members that tracks completion rates and job placements after service, and that the data can be disaggregated by gender and race.
Thomas said American Climate Corps jobs should be considered the earliest stage of the workforce development pipeline — leading to better paying jobs down the line. “This is an opportunity for young people to take action right now in communities across the country, on climate projects that we know have a tangible impact today.”
This story was originally published by The 19th and reprinted with permission.
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.
Get important education news and analysis delivered straight to your inbox
What makes a first-generation college student? Well, that depends on who’s doing the defining.
Yes, there’s the federal definition: a student is first-generation if neither parent has a bachelor’s degree.
Sounds simple enough. But it doesn’t account for those who had a highly educated parent who wasn’t involved in their lives, or those whose parent got a college degree in another country, with an academic system unlike ours, or those who have one degree-holding parent, but are being raised in a single-parent household.
Researchers argue that many students like these are still meaningfully less advantaged compared to students who have two parents with degrees. Despite the narrow federal definition, many believe these are students who need to be identified and given added resources and support both to get through the college application process and to thrive once they get on campus.
New research from Common App shows that expanding the definition of first-generation expands enrollment data, and thus can tell a different story about who is ready for college.
According to 2022 data from Common App, about 450,000 applicants that year met the federal definition, meaning that neither parent had a bachelor’s degree, including about 300,000 students whose parents had never attended any college. But if the definition is expanded to include applicants who had one parent with a bachelor’s degree, the population increases to more than 700,000. And, according to the report, changing that definition changes other things, too, such as college readiness, socioeconomic status and the number of colleges students apply to.
Brian Heseung Kim, director of data science, research and analytics at Common App, said there isn’t one right way to define first-generation students; the question should be, “What kind of disadvantage are we trying to measure?”
After the Supreme Court ruled against the consideration of race in college admissions last summer, Kim said he was interested in looking at many different aspects of diversity in college applicants, including first-generation status. He said this analysis might help colleges that want to understand the diversity of their applicants; how certain home contexts and hardships might affect how competitive students appear in the application process; and how to support students from all different backgrounds.
“It would be great if everyone could kind of align on one definition for first-generation, it’d be so wonderful if we had that clarity,” Kim said. “But the reality is that different contexts kind of require different identification methods.”
The Common App’s analysis shows that, depending on the definition, the percentage of students identified as being part of an underrepresented minority group can range from 45 percent (for those who have one parent who earned a bachelor’s degree) to 58 percent (for students whose parents did not attend any college). And the percentage of those students from low-income families varies from 48 percent (for students who have one parent who earned a bachelor’s degree) to 66 percent (for students whose parents did not attend any college).
Sarah E. Whitley, vice president of the Center for First-generation Student Success, said most colleges define first-generation students as those whose parents do not have bachelor’s degrees or those whose parents did not earn bachelor’s degrees in the United States. She said the center doesn’t use one universal definition, and instead works with colleges to identify the definition that makes the most sense for them.
Whitley said the purpose of identifying students as first-generation is to understand whether they have people in their family who can support them with college-going knowledge, but that’s often harder to determine than asking simply “Are you the first in your family to attend college?”
Whitley discourages college from using this language because students may not categorize themselves as first-generation if they had an aunt or uncle or older sibling who attended college. She said it’s better to ask specific questions about parental education, as Common App does, but it can still be difficult to capture everyone. For example, asking about the education of biological parents might not capture students who had a highly educated birth parent but were raised by a stepparent, she said, or students who were raised in a family with two moms or two dads.
The Common App research found that there could be more than 100 definitions, considering the different combinations of parents and caregivers, whether they attended college or graduated, what degree they and many more factors. The analysis considered eight definitions:
Neither parent earned a bachelor’s degree (the federal definition)
No bachelor’s degrees among living parents (to focus on those who can provide support to the student)
No bachelor’s degrees among caregivers (considers others in the household beyond biological parents, such as a stepparent)
No domestic bachelor’s degree among caregivers (because degrees from other countries may be less relevant in helping students in the U.S. higher education system)
No bachelor’s degrees earned by caregivers before the student was born (excludes those who earned degrees more recently and may not yet have “accrued some of the more socioeconomic benefits of a college degree,” according to the report)
No associate degrees, either parent
No college attendance, either parent
One parent earned a bachelor’s degree
Yolanda Watson-Spiva, president of the advocacy group Complete College America, said it’s also important to think about the social capital that students have if both their parents went to college, such as access to college alumni and professional networks. She said there are big differences in resources between students who have one parent who earned a bachelor’s degree and students whose parents, grandparents and great-grandparents all went to college.
It makes more sense to think of first-generation status as a spectrum, she said, rather than a yes or no question. Using only the federal definition of first-generation is too narrow and constrictive, she said.
Watson-Spiva’s mother earned a bachelor’s degree and her father went to community college, but one of her grandmothers only had an eighth grade education. She doesn’t identify as a first- generation student, but said she could imagine how someone in a similar situation might, even though they don’t meet the federal definition.
“Many of those folks still struggle,” she said. “There are still big variations between that person and a person who’s had like four generations of family members that are legacies, that went to college.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn't mean it's free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
TOHONO O’ODHAM NATION, Ariz. — By the numbers, Tohono O’odham Community College is booming.
Enrollment in the fall semester was just under 1,200, according to the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, nearly triple what it was in fall 2019.
But the desert campus on an isolated patch of the sprawling Tohono O’odham Native American Reservation was nearly empty on a weekday afternoon. Instructors sat alone in front of computers in classrooms and offices teaching their courses online, which is where nearly all the students are learning these days.
Among the few students physically present was Tim James, a 36-year-old from the Gila River reservation, about two hours from the campus. He’s a resident adviser in one of the school’s few dorms, but even he has taken almost all his courses online this school year. And that’s been tough for him to deal with.
“There’s not that personal touch,” said James, who doesn’t have a computer and takes classes on his phone. “I like that human interaction.”
Students Tim James, left, and Sky Johnson share a lunch table at Tohono O’odham Community College. Both are taking courses online but would prefer to be on campus. “There’s not that personal touch,” says James. Credit: Matt Krupnick for The Hechinger Report
The empty campus at Tohono O’odham reflects an ongoing dilemma facing not only tribal colleges, but colleges in general, where students are increasingly taking courses at a distance instead of studying together in person.
This means that students are spending less time than ever on campus, socializing in residence halls, studying together in the library or working in groups. While some online courses are scheduled so that all students meet at the same time, others are designed to give them flexibility to learn at a convenient time.
The upside is the ability to attract students who work full time or care for children, but online courses also run the risk of increasing isolation at a time when technology and working from home are already creating a lot more of it than was previously the case.
“It is a delicate balance,” said Sharla Berry, associate director of the Center for Evaluation and Educational Effectiveness at California State University, Long Beach. “It involves understanding the unique needs of your population. Instructors really have to be intentional about creating connection points in these online courses.”
This challenge is already being felt acutely at the country’s roughly three dozen tribal colleges. They’re struggling with the conflict between trying to serve as many students as possible in some of the poorest parts of the United States and promoting in-person classes on campuses that often serve as cultural hubs for reservations and work to perpetuate Native American culture.
“A lot of our cultural practices require us to be together,” said Zoe Higheagle Strong, vice provost for Native American relations and programs at Washington State University and a member of the Nez Perce tribe in Idaho, who also teaches educational psychology. And while online courses have helped attract students who otherwise might not have attended college, Higheagle Strong said, a physical gathering place plays an important role for many Indigenous groups.
“It’s very difficult for us to practice our culture over technology.”
Student housing at Tohono O’odham Community College. Like many tribal colleges, the school is seeking to increase its proportion of on-campus students after a surge in online enrollment during the pandemic. Credit: Matt Krupnick for The Hechinger Report
Congress defined tribal colleges and universities in the 1960s; these schools enrolled about 15,500 Indigenous students in the fall, according to the college consortium, and more than 2,000 non-Indigenous students. Most, but not all, are associated with specific Native American tribes.
While nearly all the nation’s colleges and universities have debated how online courses will fit into their futures, the stakes are higher for tribal institutions.
Most get money from the federal government for every student they enroll who is a member of a recognized tribe. The tribal college system rewards higher enrollment, which is why many tribal colleges are especially benefiting financially from the upsurge in online students. If they pull back on offering courses online, they risk losing students — many of whom live 50 miles or more from the closest campus — and the funding that comes with them.
Tribal colleges typically charge low tuition and some, including Tohono O’odham, cut tuition altogether during the pandemic.
Laura Sujo-Montes, academic dean of Tohono O’odham Community College. After the pandemic pivot to online courses, Sujo-Montes says, “The push is to bring students back.” Credit: Matt Krupnick for The Hechinger Report
At Tohono O’odham, college leaders say they’re now torn by how to proceed. On the one hand, they know students won’t drive hours to attend classes. But they also would prefer that more of them come to campus, not only to be together in person, but because the academic results of online students have been comparatively poor.
“The push is to bring students back,” said Laura Sujo-Montes, the academic dean. “Whether they will want to come back, that is the question.”
Perhaps conscious of its remote location — the college has no physical address, although the campus’s white water tank emblazoned with the college name at mile marker 125.5 north is visible for miles — Tohono O’odham leaders have been working to make the campus more attractive both for students and tribal members.
The school has built a 75-person-capacity outdoor amphitheater for tribal events off a path that skirts a patch of cholla cactus, and it plans to add a gym for athletic and cultural gatherings. Another new building under construction will house programs in the O’odham language. All students and employees are required to take tribal language and history courses, and each building is marked with only its native name. The main campus is called S-cuk Du’ag Maṣcamakuḍ.
“We’re doing things to improve this campus, to make people want to stay,” said President Paul Robertson in a conference room in the Ma:cidag Gewkdag Ki: building.
Many students, however — as has also been the case at nontribal colleges — appear to prefer taking courses online.
Massage therapist Traci Hughes works on Alohani Felix, wellness coordinator at Tohono O’odham Community College, in the school’s wellness center. Like many tribal colleges whose enrollment soared with free online courses during the pandemic, the school is now trying to bring students back to the campus. Credit: Matt Krupnick for The Hechinger Report
At Nebraska Indian Community College, with three campuses on or near the Omaha and Santee reservations, the pandemic more than doubled native enrollment, according to the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, while the number of nonnative students increased nearly twelve-fold. But the college’s board of directors has worried about the lack of in-person classes, said President Michael Oltrogge.
Adding more of those has been a tough sell, Oltrogge said.
“We tried coming back hot and heavy with in-person classes” in the fall of 2021, he said. “By the second week of classes, there was nobody on campus.”
Like Tohono O’odham, the college hopes to attract more people to the campus by building new facilities. But Oltrogge said funding shortfalls have made it difficult to add larger meeting facilities for college and cultural events.
A stretch of desert highway between Sells, Arizona, and Tohono O’odham Community College. The school wants to attract more students to study on-campus, but its remoteness may be working against it. Kitt Peak National Observatory is in the distance. Credit: Matt Krupnick for The Hechinger Report
“I need a place to have my graduations,” he said. “I need a place that’s reliable.”
At North Dakota’s Cankdeska Cikana Community College, on the Spirit Lake Reservation, President Cynthia Lindquist, a Spirit Lake Dakota tribal elder, has tried to reconcile her school’s enrollment boom with a campus that is much quieter since the pandemic.
While students are likely to remain largely online from now on, Lindquist hopes the college will find new life and energy as the tribe’s cultural hub. A new building opening in the fall will include a museum and a library with tribal genealogical materials, she said.
“The college’s history is tied to the tribe’s history,” Lindquist said. “My tribe will finally have a place. Right now, we don’t have any place to go.”
A few hundred miles west, in Montana, Blackfeet Community College is also trying to balance the increased reliance on online courses with its role as a tribal gathering place. It opened a new elder center last fall that routinely attracts more than 100 community members to its elder luncheons, said Jim Rains, the college’s vice president for academics.
Meanwhile, San Carlos Apache College in Arizona has faced the unique challenge of coming of age during the pandemic era. It opened in 2017 with a few dozen students in a handful of unused buildings next to the tribal offices, but enrollment swelled to nearly 400 with the move to online courses, said Lisa Eutsey, the provost.
A faculty office at Tohono O’odham Community College. Administrators and faculty are looking for ways to lure students away from online and back to campus. Credit: Matt Krupnick for The Hechinger Report
While college leaders have a site in mind for a new campus and hope to deepen the school’s cultural importance to the community, Eutsey said they’re also “still trying to figure out exactly what we’re going to be.” The initial thinking was that San Carlos Apache would provide mostly in-person instruction, she said, but the strategy has changed.
“Covid has really allowed us to expand our operations to people who weren’t part of our initial plans,” Eutsey said of the online students who live far from campus. Now that the college has changed, she added, “it’s almost like there’s no turning back.”
Leaders at several tribal colleges said they have been pressured by their accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission, to bring more students back to campus because few of the schools’ online programs have been approved. Some said that the commission’s demand is unrealistic and unfair to rural colleges and students who likely will simply stop attending college without online options.
The Higher Learning Commission declined to answer questions about its discussions with the colleges.
Other leaders said a return to in-person learning makes sense, partly because of the cultural importance of being around others from their community.
“I think everybody here wants to get back to that type of service delivery,” said Monte Randall, president of the College of the Muscogee Nation in Oklahoma. “I’m so tired of Zoom meetings. We want to get back in person and see each other.”
Some tribal colleges worry that they are about to lose droves of students whether they’re online or not. During the pandemic, they offered some combination of free tuition, phones, computers, internet and housing, but say they can’t afford to continue that strategy and intend to begin charging tuition again later this year; they expect a big enrollment drop when they do so.
Those fears may be well-founded. On the campus of Tohono O’odham — which has committed to continuing to let students attend without charge — every student asked said he or she had only started attending because tuition was free.
“We want to get back in person and see each other.”
Monte Randall, president, College of the Muscogee Nation
For some, however, the cultural aspects are among the biggest draws for a return to in-person classes.
Sky Johnson grew up in the tiny O’odham village of Comobabi, in the foothills a few miles from Tohono O’odham. When the college announced in 2020 that tuition would be free, she jumped at the opportunity to start working toward her goal of studying art or animation in Japan.
Johnson said she wants to create manga or anime about her culture, as well as to become an herbalist and help her village. A self-described introvert, Johnson said she’s nevertheless in favor of in-person courses because she learns better in a classroom.
“I like to be out,” she said, “but I don’t like to talk to people.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
This story was originally published by Gristand is reprinted with permission.
Alina Sierra needs $6,405. In 2022, the 19-year-old Tohono O’odham student was accepted to the University of Arizona, her dream school, and excited to become the first in her family to go to college.
Her godfather used to take her to the university’s campus when she was a child, and their excursions could include a stop at the turtle pond or lunch at the student union. Her grandfather also encouraged her, saying: “You’re going to be here one day.”
“Ever since then,” said Sierra. “I wanted to go.”
Then the financial reality set in. Unable to afford housing either on or off campus, she couch-surfed her first semester. Barely able to pay for meals, she turned to the campus food pantry for hygiene products. “One week I would get soap; another week, get shampoo,” she said. Without reliable access to the internet, and with health issues and a long bus commute, her grades began to slip. She was soon on academic probation.
“I always knew it would be expensive,” said Sierra. “I just didn’t know it would be this expensive.”
Alina Sierra poses for a photo while wearing a locket containing the ashes of her godfather. “He would tell me, like, ‘Further your education, education is power,’” she said. “Before he passed away, I promised him that I was going to go to college and graduate from U of A.” Credit: Bean Yazzie / Grist
She was also confused. The university, known colloquially as UArizona, expressed a lot of support for Indigenous students. It wasn’t just that the Tohono O’odham flag hung in the bookstore or that the university had a land acknowledgment reminding the community that the Tucson campus was on O’odham and Yaqui homelands. The same year she was accepted, UArizona launched a program to cover tuition and mandatory fees for undergraduates from all 22 Indigenous nations in the state. President Robert C. Robbins described the new Arizona Native Scholars Grant as a step toward fulfilling the school’s land-grant mission.
Sierra was eligible for the grant, but it didn’t cover everything. After all the application forms and paperwork, she was still left with a balance of thousands of dollars. She had no choice but to take out a loan, which she kept a secret from her family, especially her mom. “That’s the number one thing she told me: ‘Don’t get a loan,’ but I kind of had to.”
Established in 1885, almost 30 years before Arizona was a state, UArizona was one of 52 land-grant universities supported by the Morrill Act. Signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln, the act used land taken from Indigenous nations to fund a network of colleges across the fledgling United States.
By the early 20th century, grants issued under the Morrill Act had produced the modern equivalent of a half a billion dollars for land-grant institutions from the redistribution of nearly 11 million acres of Indigenous lands. While most land-grant universities ignore this colonial legacy, UArizona’s Native scholars program appeared to be an effort to exorcise it.
But the Morrill Act is only one piece of legislation that connects land expropriated from Indigenous communities to these universities.
In combination with other land-grant laws, UArizona still retains rights to nearly 687,000 acres of land — an area more than twice the size of Los Angeles. The university also has rights to another 703,000 subsurface acres, a term pertaining to oil, gas, minerals, and other resources underground. Known as trust lands, these expropriated Indigenous territories are held and managed by the state for the school’s continued benefit.
New Mexico State University, which still receives revenue from stolen Indigenous land parcels, has an American Indian Student Center. Credit: Eliseu Cavalcante / Grist
State trust lands just might be one of the best-kept public secrets in America: They exist in 21 Western and Midwestern states, totaling more than 500 million surface and subsurface acres. Those two categories, surface and subsurface, have to be kept separate because they don’t always overlap. What few have bothered to ask is just how many of those acres are funding higher education.
The parcels themselves are scattered and rural, typically uninhabited and seldom marked. Most appear undeveloped and blend in seamlessly with surrounding landscapes. That is, when they don’t have something like logging underway or a frack pad in sight.
In 2022, the year Sierra enrolled, UArizona’s state trust lands provided the institution $7.7 million — enough to have paid the full cost of attendance for more than half of every Native undergraduate at the Tucson campus that same year. But providing free attendance to anyone is an unlikely scenario, as the school works to rein in a budget shortfall of nearly $240 million.
UArizona’s reliance on state trust land for revenue not only contradicts its commitment to recognize past injustices regarding stolen Indigenous lands, but also threatens its climate commitments. The school has pledged to reach net-zero emissions by 2040.
The parcels are managed by the Arizona State Land Department, a separate government agency that has leased portions of them to agriculture, grazing, and commercial activities. But extractive industries make up a major portion of the trust land portfolio. Of the 705,000 subsurface acres that benefit UArizona, almost 645,000 are earmarked for oil and gas production. The lands were taken from at least 10 Indigenous nations, almost all of which were seized by executive order or congressional action in the wake of warfare.
Over the past year, Grist has examined publicly available data to locate trust lands associated with land-grant universities seeded by the Morrill Act. We found 14 universities that matched this criteria. In the process, we identified their original sources and analyzed their ongoing uses. In all, we located and mapped more than 8.2 million surface and subsurface acres taken from 123 Indigenous nations. This land currently produces income for those institutions.
“Universities continue to benefit from colonization,” said Sharon Stein, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of British Columbia and a climate researcher. “It’s not just a historical fact; the actual income of the institution is subsidized by this ongoing dispossession.”
New Mexico State University, as seen in an aerial view, is a land-grant school founded in 1888. Credit: Eliseu Cavalcante / Grist
The amount of acreage under management for land-grant universities varies widely, from as little as 15,000 acres aboveground in North Dakota to more than 2.1 million belowground in Texas. Combined, Indigenous nations were paid approximately $4.3 million in today’s dollars for these lands, but in many cases, nothing was paid at all. In 2022 alone, these trust lands generated more than $2.2 billion for their schools. Between 2018 and 2022, the lands produced almost $6.7 billion. However, those figures are likely an undercount as multiple state agencies did not return requests to confirm amounts.
This work builds upon previous investigations that examined how land grabs capitalized and transformed the U.S. university system. The new data reveals how state trust lands continue to transfer wealth from Indigenous nations to land-grant universities more than a century after the original Morrill Act.
It also provides insight into the relationship between colonialism, higher education, and climate change in the Western United States.
Nearly 25 percent of land-grant university trust lands are designated for either fossil fuel production or the mining of minerals, like coal and iron-rich taconite. Grazing is permitted on about a third of the land, or approximately 2.8 million surface acres. Those parcels are often coupled with subsurface rights, which means oil and gas extraction can occur underneath cattle operations, themselves often a major source of methane emissions. Timber, agriculture, and infrastructure leases — for roads or pipelines, for instance — make up much of the remaining acreage.
By contrast, renewable energy production is permitted on roughly one-quarter of 1 percent of the land in our dataset. Conservation covers an even more meager 0.15 percent.
However, those land use statistics are likely undercounts due to the different ways states record activities. Many state agencies we contacted for this story had incomplete public information on how land was used.
“People generally are not eager to confront their own complicity in colonialism and climate change,” said Stein. “But we also have to recognize, for instance, myself as a white settler, that we are part of that system, that we are benefiting from that system, that we are actively reproducing that system every day.”
Students like Alina Sierra struggle to pay for education at a university built on her peoples’ lands and supported with their natural resources. But both current and future generations will have to live with the way trust lands are used to subsidize land-grant universities.
In December 2023, Sierra decided the cost to attend UArizona was too high and dropped out.
UArizona did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
Acreage now held in trust by states for land-grant universities is part of America’s sweeping history of real estate creation, a history rooted in Indigenous dispossession.
Trust lands in most states were clipped from the more than 1.8 billion acres that were once part of the United States’ public domain — territory claimed, colonized, and redistributed in a process that began in the 18th century and continues today.
The making of the public domain is the stuff of textbook lessons on U.S. expansion. After consolidating states’ western land claims in the aftermath of the American Revolution, federal officials obtained a series of massive territorial acquisitions from rival imperial powers. No doubt you’ve heard of a few of these deals: They ranged from the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 to the Alaska Purchase of 1867.
Backed by the doctrine of discovery, a legal principle with religious roots that justified the seizure of lands around the world by Europeans, U.S. claims to Indigenous territories were initially little more than projections of jurisdiction. They asserted an exclusive right to steal from Indigenous nations, divide the territory into new states, and carve it up into private property. Although Pope Francis repudiated the Catholic Church’s association with the doctrine in 2023, it remains a bedrock principle of U.S. law.
Starting in the 1780s, federal authorities began aggressively taking Native land before surveying and selling parcels to new owners. Treaties were the preferred instrument, accompanied by a range of executive orders and congressional acts. Behind their tidy legal language and token payments lay actual or threatened violence, or the use of debts or dire conditions, such as starvation, to coerce signatures from Indigenous peoples and compel relocation.
By the 1930s, tribal landholdings in the form of reservations covered less than 2 percent of the United States. Most were located in places with few natural resources and more sensitive to climate change than theiroriginal homelands. When reservations proved more valuable than expected, due to the discovery of oil, for instance, outcomes could be even worse, as viewers of Killers of the Flower Moon learned last year.
The public domain once covered three-fourths of what is today the United States. Federal authorities still retain about 30 percent of this reservoir of plundered land, most conspicuously as national parks, but also as military bases, national forests, grazing land, and more. The rest, nearly 1.3 billion acres, has been redistributed to new owners through myriad laws.
When it came to redistribution, grants of various stripes were more common than land sales. Individuals and corporate grantees — think homesteaders or railroads — were prominent recipients, but in terms of sheer acreage given, they trailed a third group: state governments.
Federal-to-state grants were immense. Cram them all together and they would comfortably cover all of Western Europe. Despite their size and ongoing financial significance, they have never attracted much attention outside of state offices and agencies responsible for managing them.
The Morrill Act, one of the best known examples of federal-to-state grants, followed a well-established path for funding state institutions. This involved handing Indigenous land to state legislatures so agencies could then manage those lands on behalf of specifically chosen beneficiaries.
Many other laws subsidized higher education by issuing grants to state or territorial governments in a similar way. The biggest of those bounties came through so-called “enabling acts” that authorized U.S. territories to graduate to statehood.
Every new state carved out of the public domain in the contiguous United States received land grants for public institutions through their enabling acts. These grants functioned like dowries for joining the Union and funded a variety of public works and state services ranging from penitentiaries to fish hatcheries. Their main function, however, was subsidizing education.
Primary and secondary schools, or K-12 schools, were the greatest beneficiaries by far, followed by institutions of higher education. What remains of them today are referred to as trust lands. “A perpetual, multigenerational land trust for the support of the Beneficiaries and future generations” is how the Arizona State Land Department describes them.
Higher education grants were earmarked for universities, teachers colleges, mining schools, scientific schools, and agricultural colleges, the latter being the means through which states that joined the Union after 1862 got their Morrill Act shares. States could separate or consolidate their benefits as they saw fit, which resulted in many grants becoming attached to Morrill Act colleges.
Originally, the land was intended to be sold to raise capital for trust funds. By the late 19th century, however, stricter requirements on sales and a more conscientious pursuit of long-term gains reduced sales in favor of short-term leasing.
The change in management strategy paid off. Many state land trusts have been operating for more than a century. In that time, they have generated rents from agriculture, grazing, and recreation. As soon as they were able, managers moved into natural resource extraction, permitting oil wells, logging, mining, and fracking.
Land use decisions are typically made by state land agencies or lawmakers. Of the six land-grant institutions that responded to requests for comment on this investigation, those that referenced their trust lands deferred to state agencies, making clear that they had no control over permitted activities.
State agencies likewise receive and distribute the income. As money comes in, it is either delivered directly to beneficiaries or, more commonly, diverted to permanent state trust funds, which invest the proceeds and make scheduled payouts to support select public services and institutions.
These trusts have a fiduciary obligation to generate profit for institutions, not minimize environmental damage. Although some of the permitted activities are renewable and low-impact, others are quietly stripping the land. All of them fill public coffers with proceeds derived from ill-gotten resources.
For a $10 fee last December, anyone in New Mexico could chop down aChristmas tree in a pine stand on a patch of state trust land just off Highway 120 near Black Lake, southeast of Taos. The rules: Pay your fee, bring your permit, choose a tree, and leave nothing behind but a stump less than 6 inches high.
“The holidays are a time we should be enjoying our loved ones, not worrying about the cost of providing a memorable experience for our kids,” said Commissioner of Public Lands Stephanie Garcia Richard, adding that “the nominal fee it costs for a permit will directly benefit New Mexico public schools, so it supports a good cause too.” The offer has been popular enough to keep the program running for several years.
The New Mexico State Land Office, sometimes described by state legislators as “the most powerful office you’ve never heard of,” has been a successful operation for a very long time. Since it started reporting revenue in 1900, it’s generated well over $42 billion in 2023 dollars.
All that money isn’t from Christmas trees.
For generations, oil and gas royalties have fueled the state’s trust land revenue, with a portion of the funds designated for New Mexico State University, or NMSU, a land-grant school founded in 1888 when New Mexico was still a territory.
The oil comes from drilling in the northwestern fringe of the Permian Basin, one of the oldest targets of large-scale oil production in the United States. Corporate descendants of Standard Oil, the infamous monopoly controlled by John D. Rockefeller, were operating in the Permian as early as the 1920s. Despite being a consistent source of oil, prospects for exploitation dimmed by the late 20th century, before surging again in the 21st. Today, it’s more profitable than ever.
In recent decades, more sophisticated exploration techniques have revealed more “recoverable” fossil fuel in the Permian than previously believed. A 2018report by the United States Geological Survey pegged the volume at 46.3 billion barrels of oil and 281 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, which made the Permian the largest oil and gas deposit in the nation.Analysts, shocked at the sheer volume, and the money to be made, have taken tocrowning the Permian the “King of Shale Oil.” Critics concerned with the climate impact of the expanding operations call it a“carbon bomb.”
As oil and gas extraction spiked, so did New Mexico’s trust land receipts. In the last 20 years, oil and gas has generated between 91 and 97 percent of annual trust land revenue. It broke annual all-time highs in half of those years, topping $1 billion for the first time in 2019 and reaching $2.75 billion last year. Adjusted for inflation, more than 20 percent of New Mexico’s trust land income since 1900 has arrived in just the last five years.
“Every dollar earned by the Land Office,” Commissioner Richardsaid when revenues broke the billion-dollar barrier, “is a dollar taxpayers do not have to pay to support public institutions.”
Trust land as a cost-free source of subsidies for citizens is a common framing. In 2023, Richard declared that her office had saved every New Mexico taxpayer $1,500 that year. Thepress release did not mention oil or gas, or Apache bands in the state.
Virtually all of the trust land in New Mexico, including 186,000 surface acres and 253,000 subsurface acres now benefiting NMSU, was seized from various Apache bands during the so-called Apache Wars. Often reduced to the iconic photograph of Geronimo on one knee, rifle in hand, hostilities began in 1849, and they remain the longest-running military conflict in U.S. history, continuing until 1924.
In 2019, newly elected New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham began aligning state policy with “scientific consensus around climate change.” According to the state’s climate action website, New Mexico is working to tackle climate change by transitioning to clean electricity, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, supporting an economic transition from coal to clean energy, and shoring up natural resource resilience.
“New Mexico is serious about climate change — and we have to be. We are already seeing drier weather and rising temperatures,” the governor wrote on the state’s website. “This administration is committed not only to preventing global warming, but also preparing for its effects today and into the future.”
No mention was made of increasingly profitable oil and gas extraction on trust lands or their production in the Permian. In 2023, just one 240-acre parcel of land benefiting NMSU was leased for five years for $6 million.
NMSU did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
More than half of the acreage uncovered in our investigation appears in oil-rich West Texas, the equivalent of more than 3 million football fields. It benefits Texas A&M.
Take the long drive west along I-10 between San Antonio and El Paso, in the southwest region of the Permian Basin, and you’ll pass straight through several of those densely packed parcels without ever knowing it — they’re hidden in plain sight on the arid landscape. These tracts, and others not far from the highway, were Mescalero Apache territory. Kiowas and Comanches relinquished more parcels farther north.
In the years after the Civil War, a “peace commission” pressured Comanche and Kiowa leaders for an agreement that would secure land for tribes in northern Texas and Oklahoma. Within two years, federal agents dramatically reduced the size of the resulting reservation with another treaty, triggering a decade of conflict.
The consequences were disastrous. Kiowas and Comanches lost their land to Texas and their populations collapsed. Between the 1850s and 1890s, Kiowas lost more than 60 percent of their people to disease and war, while Comanches lost nearly 90 percent.
If this general pattern of colonization and genocide was a common one, the trajectory that resulted in Texas A&M’s enormous state land trust was not.
Texas was never part of the U.S. public domain. Its brief stint as an independent nation enabled it to enter the Union as a state, skipping territorial status completely. As a result, like the original 13 states, it claimed rights to sell or otherwise distribute all the not-yet-privatized land within its borders.
Following the broader national model, but ratcheting up the scale, Texas would allocate over 2 million acres to subsidize higher education.
Texas A&M was established to take advantage of a Morrill Act allocation of 180,000 acres, and opened its doors in 1876. The same year, Texas allocated a million acres of trust lands, followed by another million in 1883, nearly all of it on land relinquished in treaties from the mid-1860s.
Today, the Permanent University Fund derived from that land is worth nearly $34 billion. That’s thanks to oil, of course, which has been flowing from the university’s trust lands since 1923. In 2022 alone, Texas trust lands produced $2.2 billion in revenue.
The Kiowa and Comanche were ultimately paid about 2 cents per acre for their land. The Mescalero Apache received nothing.
Texas A&M did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
For more than a century, logging has been the main driver of Washington State University’s trust land income, on land taken from 21 Indigenous nations, especially the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation. About 86,000 acres, more than half of the surface trust lands allocated to Washington State University, or WSU, are located inside Yakama land cessions, which started in 1855. Between 2018 and 2022, trust lands produced nearly $78.5 million in revenue almost entirely from timber.
But it isn’t a straight line to the university’s bank account.
“The university does not receive the proceeds from timber sales directly,” said Phil Weiler, a spokesperson for WSU. “Lands held in trust for the university are managed by the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, not WSU.”
In 2022, WSU’s trust lands produced about $19.5 million in revenue, which was deposited into a fund managed by the State Investment Board. In other words, the state takes on the management responsibility of turning timber into investments, while WSU reaps the rewards by drawing income from the resulting trust funds.
“The Washington legislature decides how much of the investment earnings will be paid out to Washington State University each biennium,” said Weiler. “By law, those payouts can only be used to fund capital projects and debt service.”
This arrangement yielded nearly $97 million dollars for WSU from its two main trust funds between 2018 and 2022, and has generally been on the rise since the Great Recession. In recent decades, the money has gone to construction and maintenance of the institution’s infrastructure, like its Biomedical and Health Sciences building, and the PACCAR Clean Technology Building — a research center focused on innovating wood products and sustainable design.
That revenue may look small in comparison to WSU’s $1.2 billion dollar endowment, but it has added up over time. From statehood in 1889 to 2022, timber sales on trust lands provided Washington State University with roughly $1 billion in revenue when Grist adjusted for inflation. But those figures are likely higher: Between 1971 and 1983, the State of Washington did not produce detailed records on trust land revenue as a cost-cutting measure.
Meanwhile, WSU students have demanded that the university divest from fossil fuel companies held in the endowment. But even if the board of regents agreed, any changes would likely not apply to the school’s state-controlled trust fund, which currently contains shares in ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, and at least two dozen other corporations in the oil and gas sector.
“Washington State University (WSU) is aware that our campuses are located on the homelands of Native peoples and that the institution receives financial benefit from trust lands,” said Weiler.
In states with trust lands, a reasonably comfortable buffer exists between beneficiaries, legislators, land managers, and investment boards, but that hasn’t always been the case. In Minnesota’s early days, state leaders founded the University of Minnesota while also making policy that would benefit the school, binding the state’s history of genocide with the institution.
Those actions still impact Indigenous peoples in the state today while providing steady revenue streams to the University.
Henry Sibley began to amass his fortune around 1834 after only a few years in the fur trade in the territory of what would become Minnesota, rising to the role of regional manager of the American Fur Company at just 23. But even then, the industry was on the decline — wild game had been over-hunted and competition was fierce. Sibley responded by diversifying his activities. He moved into timber, making exclusive agreements with the Ojibwe to log along the Snake and Upper St. Croix rivers.
His years in “wild Indian country” were paying off: Sibley knew the land, waterways, and resources of the Great Lakes region, and he knew the people, even marrying Tahshinaohindaway, also known as Red Blanket Woman, in 1840 — a Mdewakanton Dakota woman from Black Dog Village in what is now southern Minneapolis.
Sibley was a major figure in a number of treaty negotiations, aiding the U.S. in its western expansion, opening what is now Minnesota to settlement by removing tribes. In 1848, he became the first congressional delegate for the Wisconsin Territory, which covered much of present-day Minnesota, and eventually, Minnesota’s first governor.
But he was also a founding regent of the University of Minnesota — using his personal, political, and industry knowledge of the region to choose federal, state, and private lands for the university. Sibley and other regents used the institution as a shel corporation to speculate and move money between companies they held shares in.
In 1851, Sibley helped introduce land-grant legislation for the purpose of a territorial university, and just three days after Congress passed the bill, Minnesota’s territorial leaders established the University of Minnesota. With an eye on statehood, leaders knew more land would be granted for higher education, but first the land had to be made available.
That same year, with the help of then-territorial governor and fellow university regent Alexander Ramsey, the Dakota signed the Treaty of Traverse De Sioux, a land cession that created almost half of the state of Minnesota, and, taken with other cessions, would later net the University nearly 187,000 acres of land — an area roughly the size of Tucson.
Among the many clauses in the treaty was payment: $1.4 million would be given to the Dakota, but only after expenses. Ramsey deducted $35,000 for a handling fee, about $1.4 million in today’s dollars. After agencies and politicians had taken their cuts, the Dakota were promised only $350,000, but ultimately, only a few thousand arrived after federal agents delayed and withheld payments or substituted them for supplies that were never delivered.
The betrayal led to the Dakota War of 1862. “The Sioux Indians of Minnesota must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the state,” said Governor Ramsey. Sibley joined in the slaughter, leading an army of volunteers dedicated to the genocide of the Dakota people. At the end of the conflict, Ramsey ordered the mass execution of more than 300 Dakota men in December of 1862 — a number later reduced by then-president Abraham Lincoln to 39, and still the largest mass execution in U.S. history.
That grisly punctuation mark at the end of the war meant a windfall for the University of Minnesota, with new lands being opened through the state’s enabling act and another federal grant that had just been passed: the Morrill Act. Within weeks of the mass execution, the university was reaping benefits thanks to the political, and military, power of Sibley and the board of regents.
Between 2018 and 2022, those lands produced more than $17 million in revenue, primarily through leases for the mining of iron and taconite, a low-grade iron ore used by the steel industry. But like other states that rely on investment funds and trusts to generate additional income, those royalties are only the first step in the institution’s financial investments.
Today, Sibley, Ramsey, and other regents are still honored. Their names adorn parks, counties, and streets, their homes memorialized for future generations. While there have been efforts to remove their names from schools and parks, Minnesota, its institutions, and many of its citizens continue to benefit from their actions.
Less than half of the universities featured in this story responded to requests for comment, and the National Association of State Trust Lands, the nonprofit consortium that represents trust land agencies and administrators, declined to comment. Those that did, however, highlighted the steps they were making to engage with Indigenous students and communities.
Still, investments in Indigenous communities are slow coming. Of the universities that responded to our requests, those that directly referenced how trust lands were used maintained they had no control over how they profited from the land.
And they’re correct, to some degree: States managing assets for land-grants have fiduciary, and legal, obligations to act in the institution’s best interests.
But that could give land-grant universities a right to ask why maximizing returns doesn’t factor in the value of righting past wrongs or the costs of climate change.
“We can know very well that these things are happening and that we’re part of the problem, but our desire for continuity and certainty and security override that knowledge,” said Sharon Stein of the University of British Columbia.
That knowledge, Stein added, is easily eclipsed by investments in colonialism that obscure university complicity and dismiss that change is possible.
Though it’s a complicated and arduous process changing laws and working with state agencies, universities regularly do it. In 2022, the 14 land-grant universities profiled in this story spent a combined $4.6 million on lobbying on issues ranging from agriculture to defense. All lobbied to influence the federal budget and appropriations.
But even if those high-level actions are taken, it’s not clear how it will make a difference to people like Alina Sierra in Tucson, who faces a rocky financial future after her departure from the University of Arizona.
In 2022, a national study on college affordability found that nearly 40 percent of Native students accrued more than $10,000 in college debt, with some accumulating more than $100,000 in loans. Sierra is still in debt to UArizona for more than $6,000.
“I think that being on O’odham land, they should give back, because it’s stolen land,” said Sierra. “They should put more into helping us.”
In January, Sierra enrolled as a full-time student at Tohono O’odham Community College in Sells, Arizona — a tribal university on her homelands. The full cost of attendance, from tuition to fees to books, is free.
The college receives no benefits from state trust lands.
This project was supported by the Pulitzer Center, the Data-Driven Reporting Project, and the Bay & Paul Foundation.
This story was reported and written by Tristan Ahtone, Robert Lee, Amanda Tachine, An Garagiola, and Audrianna Goodwin. Data reporting was done by Maria Parazo Rose and Clayton Aldern, with additional data analysis and visualization by Marcelle Bonterre and Parker Ziegler. Margaret Pearce provided guidance and oversight.
Original photography for this project was done by Eliseu Cavalcante and Bean Yazzie. Parker Ziegler handled design and development. Teresa Chin supervised art direction. Marty Two Bulls Jr. and Mia Torres provided illustration. Megan Merrigan, Justin Ray, and Mignon Khargie handled promotion. Rachel Glickhouse coordinated partnerships.
This project was edited by Katherine Lanpher and Katherine Bagley. Jaime Buerger handled copy editing. Angely Mercado did fact-checking, and Annie Fu fact-checked the project’s data.
Special thanks to Teresa Miguel-Stearns, Jon Parmenter, Susan Shain, and Tushar Khurana for their additional research contributions. We would also like to thank the many state officials who helped to ensure we acquired the most recent and accurate information for this story. This story was made possible in part by the Pulitzer Center, the Data-Driven Reporting Project, and the Bay & Paul Foundation.
The Misplaced Trust team acknowledges the Tohono O’odham, Pascua Yaqui, dxʷdəwʔabš, Suquamish, Muckleshoot, puyaləpabš, Tulalip, Muwekma Ohlone, Lisjan, Tongva, Kizh, Dakota, Bodwéwadmi, Quinnipiac, Monongahela, Shawnee, Lenape, Erie, Osage, Akimel O’odham, Piipaash, Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, Diné, Kanienʼkehá:ka, Muh-he-con-ne-ok, Pαnawάhpskewi, and Mvskoke peoples, on whose homelands this story was created.
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.
HAZARD, Ky. — Haley Autumn Dawn Ann Crank thinks she might like to become a teacher. There’s a shortage of teachers in this corner of Kentucky, and Crank, who has eight siblings, gets kids.
“I just fit in with them,” Crank said during a shift one February day at the Big Blue Smokehouse, where she works as a waitress.
For now, the recent high school graduate is taking some education courses at the local community college. But to pursue a teaching degree at a public, comprehensive university, she’ll need to commute four hours roundtrip or leave the town she grew up in and loves.
Haley Autumn Dawn Ann Crank thinks she’d like to be a teacher, but she’s hesitant to leave home for college. Credit: Kelly Field for The Hechinger Report
Neither of those options is feasible — or even conceivable — for many residents of Hazard, a close-knit community of just over 5,000 tucked into the hills of Southeast Kentucky. Like many rural Americans, the people here are place-bound, their educational choices constrained by geography as much as by cost. With family and jobs tying them to the region, and no local four-year option, many settle for a two-year degree, or skip college altogether.
Until fairly recently, that decision made economic sense. Mining jobs were plentiful, and the money was good. But the collapse of the coal industry here and across Appalachia has made it harder to survive on a high school education. Today, just under half the residents over the age of 16 in Perry County, where Hazard sits, are employed; the national average is 63 percent. More than a quarter of the county’s residents are in poverty; the median household income is $45,000, compared to $75,000 nationally.
Now, spurred by concerns that low levels of college attainment are holding back the southeastern swath of the state, the Kentucky legislature is exploring ways to bring baccalaureate degrees to the region. The leading option calls for turning Hazard’s community and technical college into a standalone institution offering a handful of degrees in high-demand fields, like teaching and nursing.
The move to expand education here comes as many states are cutting majors at rural colleges and merging rural institutions, blaming funding shortfalls and steadily dwindling enrollments.
If successful, the new college could bring economic growth to one of the poorest and least educated parts of the country and serve as a model for the thousands of other “educational deserts” scattered across America. Proponents say it has the potential to transform the region and the lives of its battered but resilient residents.
But the proposal carries significant costs and risks. Building a residence hall alone would cost an estimated $18 million; running the new college would add millions more to the tab. Enrollment might fall short of projections, and the hoped-for jobs might not materialize. And if they didn’t, the newly-educated residents would likely take their degrees elsewhere, deepening the region’s “brain drain.”
“The hope is that if you build the institution, employers will come,” said Aaron Thompson, president of the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education, which has studied the idea on behalf of the legislature. “But it is somewhat of an experiment.”
Still, Thompson said, it’s an experiment worth exploring.
“To say you need to move to be prosperous is not a solution, and that’s pretty much been the solution since many of the coal mines disappeared,” he said.
At the airport in Lexington, Kentucky, there’s a sign greeting passengers that reads, “You’ve landed in one smart city.” Lexington, the sign proclaims, is ranked #11 among larger cities in the share of the population with a bachelor’s degree or higher.
But drive a couple hours to the southeast, and the picture changes. Only 13 percent of the residents of Perry County over the age of 25 hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, well below the national average of 34 percent.
Downtown Hazard, with one of several colorful murals added in recent years Credit: Austin Anthony for The Hechinger Report
Michelle Ritchie-Curtis, the co-principal of Perry County Central High School, said the problem isn’t convincing kids to go to college, it’s keeping them there. Though nearly two-thirds of the county’s high school graduates continue on to college, just over a third of those who enroll in public four-years graduate within six years, compared to close to 60 percent statewide, according to the Council on Postsecondary Education.
In Hazard, as in many rural places, kids grow up hearing the message that they need to leave to succeed. But many return after a year or two, citing homesickness or the high cost of college, Ritchie-Curtis said. Sometimes, they feel ashamed about abandoning their aspirations. They take off a semester, and it becomes years, she said.
Those who make it to graduation and leave tend to stay gone, discouraged by the region’s limited job opportunities. This exodus, and the lack of a four-year college nearby, have hampered Hazard’s ability to attract employers who might fill the void left by the decline of coal, said Zach Lawrence, executive director of the Hazard-Perry County Economic Development Alliance.
Ritchie-Curtis said that having a local option would solve the homesickness problem and could save students money in room and board. It could also help stem the region’s brain drain and alleviate a teaching shortage that has forced the school to hire a growing number of career changers, she added.
Hazard Community and Technical College president Jennifer Lindon is excited about the possibility of the college offering four-year degrees. Credit: Austin Anthony for The Hechinger Report
To Jennifer Lindon, the president of Hazard Community and Technical College, “it all boils down to equity.”
“If we can provide a [four-year] education, and make it affordable, perhaps we can break the cycle of poverty in Southeast Kentucky,” she said.
Converting Hazard’s two-year college into a four-year institution wasn’t among the options initially considered by the Kentucky General Assembly. When lawmakers asked the state’s Council on Postsecondary Education to study the feasibility of bringing four-year degrees to Southeast Kentucky, it offered three approaches: building a new public university; creating a satellite campus of an existing comprehensive university; or acquiring a private college to convert into a public one.
But the council concluded in its report that each of those alternatives was “in some way problematic.” A new university would be prohibitively expensive and might fail; a new branch campus could suffer the same enrollment challenges as existing satellites; and acquiring a private college would be legally complicated.
The council considered the possibility of allowing the community college to offer baccalaureate degrees — something a growing number of states permit — but worried that doing so would lead to “mission creep” and “intense competition” for the state’s dwindling number of high school graduates.
Students in the commercial truck driving program identify parts of a tractor trailer truck. Credit: Kelly Field for The Hechinger Report
Instead, the council recommended that the legislature study the idea of making Hazard’s community college a standalone institution offering both technical degrees and a few bachelor’s programs “in line with workforce demand.” Starting small, the council suggested, would allow policymakers and college leaders to gauge student demand before building out baccalaureate offerings.
That approach makes sense to Sen. Robert Stivers, the president of the Kentucky Senate, and the sponsor of the bill that commissioned the council’s study.
“I don’t think you can just jump off the cliff into the lake,” he said. “You need to be a little more measured.”
But Andrew Koricich, executive director of the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges at Appalachian State University, said the region’s residents deserve a comprehensive college. He likened the limited offerings envisioned by the council to former President George W. Bush’s “soft bigotry of low expectations.”
“There’s this idea that rural people should be happy they have anything,” he said.
Koricich pointed to the recent merger of Martin Methodist University, a private religious college, with the University of Tennessee system as proof that the legal hurdles to acquiring a private college aren’t insurmountable.
But Thompson, the CPE president, said that the private colleges in southeast Kentucky are located too far from most residents and the schools weren’t interested in being acquired, anyway. He argued that while a comprehensive university might be “ideal,” it wasn’t realistic.
“In an ideal world, I’d be young again with a great back,” he said. “But in reality, I work with what I’ve got. And that’s what we’re doing here.”
When Stivers was growing up in southeastern Kentucky in the 60’s and 70’s, coal was king. A high school graduate could get a job paying $15 an hour — good money at the time — without ever setting foot in a college classroom, he said.
With mining jobs so abundant, “there wasn’t a value placed on education,” Stivers recalled.
Coal production peaked in eastern Kentucky in 1990, and has been on the decline ever since. Today, there are just over 400 individuals employed in coal jobs in Perry County.
The shrinking of the sector has had ripple effects across Appalachia, hurting industries that support mining and local businesses that cater to its workers. Many residents have migrated to urban centers, seeking work, and once-thriving downtowns have been hollowed out.
Colton Teague, 11, receives a guitar lesson from Luke Davis, the director of operations of the Appalachian Arts Alliance, an anchor of the revitalized downtown. Credit: Austin Anthony for The Hechinger Report
By the middle of the last decade, most of the buildings in downtown Hazard were either empty or occupied by attorneys and banks. The only place to gather was a hole-in-the-wall bar called the Broken Spoke Lounge, recalled Luke Glaser, a city commissioner and assistant principal at Hazard High School. When the Grand Hotel burned down, in 2015, a sense of resignation settled in, Glaser said.
The region has also been hard hit by opioids, which were aggressively marketed to rural doctors treating miners for injuries and black lung disease. In 2017, Perry County had the highest opioid abuse hospitalization rate in the nation.
Then, in 2021, and again in 2022, the region suffered severe flooding, which washed away homes and took the lives of almost 50 residents of Southeast Kentucky.
Yet Hazard is also in the midst of what Glaser calls an “Appalachian Renaissance,” a revival being led by 20- and 30-somethings who have come home or moved to the area in recent years. Though Appalachian Kentucky lost 2.2 percent of its population between 2010 and 2019, Hazard grew by 13 percent.
A decade ago, a group of long-time residents and young people began meeting with a mission to revitalize Hazard’s main street. The group, which called itself InVision Hazard, hired a downtown coordinator and brought free Wi-Fi and improved signage to the downtown area.
Over the past four-and-a-half years, close to 70 new businesses have opened within a three-mile radius of downtown, and only eight have closed, according to Betsy Clemons, executive director of the Hazard Perry County Chamber of Commerce. There’s an independent bookstore, an arts alliance that will put on seven full-length productions this year, and a toy store — all run by residents who grew up in Hazard and returned as adults.
A sign at Hazard Community and Technical College welcomes students. Credit: Austin Anthony for The Hechinger Report
The Grand Hotel, which stood as a burned-out shell for years, has finally been torn down, making way for an outdoor entertainment park with space for food trucks and a portable stage, and plans for live entertainment on Friday nights.
As the downtown has transformed, collective feelings of apathy and resignation have given way to a new sense of possibility, Glaser said. Brightly colored murals reading “We Can Do This,” and “Together” adorn the sides of two downtown buildings.
To Mandi Sheffel, the owner of Read Spotted Newt bookstore, the creation of a four-year college feels like a logical next step for a place that was recently dubbed “a hip destination for young people” (a description that both delights and amuses people here).
“In every college town I’ve been to, there’s a vibe, a pride in the community,” she said.
On the vocational campus of Hazard Community and Technical College in February, Jordan Joseph and Austin Cox, recent high school grads, stood alongside a tractor trailer truck, pointing out its parts. In as little as four weeks, they could become commercially licensed truck drivers, a career that pays close to $2,000 a week.
Both men followed dads and grandads into the profession and said they couldn’t imagine sitting in a classroom for four years after high school. Like the sign on the side of the truck they were working on said, they want to “Get in, Get Out, and Get to Work.”
Inside one of the campus’ labs, a pair of aspiring electricians said they doubted many local residents would be able to afford a four-year degree.
“I don’t think you’d get a lot of people,” said Walker Isaacs, one of the students.
Their skepticism underscores a key risk in creating a four-year college in a place that’s never had one: There’s no guarantee students will enroll. Larger forces — including a looming decline in the number of high school graduates, an improved labor market, and public doubts about the value of higher education — could dampen demand for four-year degrees, forcing the college to either cut costs or seek state funding to cover its losses.
Recognizing this risk -and the possibility that employers won’t show up, either – the Council declined to give an “unqualified endorsement” of the idea of turning the community college into a four-year institution, saying further study was needed. In February, Sen. Stivers introduced a bill that calls on the council to survey potential students and employers about the idea and to provide more detailed estimates of its potential costs and revenues.
Converting the college could also cause enrollment to fall at the state’s existing public and private four-years. Eastern Kentucky University, the hardest hit, could lose as many as 250 students in the seventh year after conversion, the council estimated in its report. While the council did not examine the possible effect on private colleges in the region, the president of Union College, Marcia Hawkins, said in a statement that, “Depending on the majors added, such a move could certainly impact enrollment at our southern and eastern Kentucky institutions.”
But on the main campus of Hazard Community and Technical College, there’s growing excitement about the prospect of the two-year college becoming a four-year.
Ashley Smith, who is studying to become a registered nurse, said the proposed conversion would make it easier for her to earn the bachelor’s degree she’s always wanted. With three kids at home, she can’t manage an hours-long commute to and from class.
Another nursing student, Lakyn Bolen, said she’d be more likely to continue her education if she could do so from home. She left Hazard once to finish a four-year degree, and is reluctant to do so again.
“It’s not fun going away,” Bolen said. “We definitely need more nursing opportunities here.”
Dylon Baker, assistant vice president of workforce initiatives for Appalachian Regional Healthcare, agrees. His nonprofit, which operates 14 hospitals in Kentucky and West Virginia, has struggled with staffing shortages and spent millions on contract workers. The shortages have forced the system to shutter some beds, reducing access to care in a region with high rates of diabetes, cancer and heart disease.
“We are taking care of the sickest of the sickest,” Baker said. “We have to give them access to quality healthcare.”
Hazard’s community college already offers some higher-level degrees, such as nursing, through partnerships with four-year public and private colleges in Kentucky. But most of the programs are online-only, and many students prefer in-person learning, said Deronda Mobelini, chief student affairs officer. Others lack access to broadband internet or can’t afford it.
If the conversion goes through, the college will continue to offer online baccalaureates and a wide range of certificates and associate degrees, said Lindon, the HCTC president. She envisions a system of “differential tuition” where students seeking four-year degrees would pay less during the first two years of their programs.
Though the college would still cater to commuters, a residence hall would attract students from a wider area and alleviate a housing shortage made more acute by the recent floods, Lindon said.
Ultimately, the future of the institution will rest with the Kentucky legislature, which must decide if it wants to spend some of its continuing budget surplus on bringing four-year degrees to an underserved corner of the state.
But Lindon is already imagining the possibilities, and the Appalachian culture course that she’d make mandatory for students seeking bachelor’s degrees.
“For too long, we’ve been taught to hide or even be ashamed of where we’re from,” she said. “We want to teach young people to be proud of our Appalachian heritage.”
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 Kim Churches took on the job as head of The Washington Center, a nonprofit organization that provides college students with internships, she was on a mission. It was the fall of 2021. The U.S. was just emerging from months of lockdowns and all-remote work and learning, which had exposed and exacerbated huge inequities in educational opportunities.
“I wanted to ensure greater inclusion,” Churches said — which, in her case, meant expanding access to internships, particularly for students from historically underrepresented groups.
Internships have long been a coveted component of the college experience, but now the pressure to secure them — and to secure them earlier — is growing, as students and their parents look for ways to stand out on job applications, universities work to demonstrate a high return on investment and employers increasingly rely on internships as part of their strategies to recruit and vet candidates. But traditional internships are not universally accessible.
“At any college now, the first thing the parents ask is, ‘How are the internships?’ ” Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, said. “It’s a prized commodity.”
Groups like Churches’ have built their reputations by placing students in high-quality summer or semester-long internships. But these often pay little or no money and require interns to pay for their own travel and housing — thereby excluding many students. Recognizing that, The Washington Center and other organizations have in recent years created new programs to serve a broader pool of learners.
“Not everybody is a traditional 18- to 22-year-old student,” Churches said. “Not everybody can take an internship out of their geographic area for a full summer or semester.”
Kim Churches, president of The Washington Center, welcomes participants to an experiential learning program in Washington, D.C., that offers skills training and job networking opportunities in cybersecurity and other in-demand industries. Credit: Image provided by The Washington Center
Nationwide, slightly more than 60 percent of students graduating in 2023 completed an internship during college, according to survey data collected by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. At elite universities, that figure was much higher — almost 90 percent at the University of Pennsylvania, for example, according to the school’s career services office.
But at the City College of New York, where two-thirds of students receive Pell Grants, only 35 to 40 percent of students typically complete an internship before graduation, school administrators said.
“I would think that number would be higher for those who wanted to do one but couldn’t,” Katie Nailler, director of the college’s Career and Professional Development Institute, said.
The college tries to make sure students get paid or at least subsidized when they do an internship. It sponsors paid internships itself with faculty members and college centers. And it partners with external organizations such as LifeSci NYC, a public-private initiative to support the STEM industry in New York, to place students in paid summer or academic-year internships.
But in addition to programs that pay students, “We also need programs that are flexible,” said Francesca Anselmi, executive director of the Office for Experiential Learning at City College, pointing out that many students have year-round jobs and need to keep them in the summer.
On the other side of the equation, employers are increasingly turning to internships as part of their recruiting pipeline.
Erica Kryst, executive director of Cornell Career Services, said that in more than 10 years working in this field, she has seen employers — especially big companies in finance, consulting and tech — increasingly focus on college juniors they hire as interns rather than on seniors applying for full-time jobs.
“Internships are almost viewed as a long-term interview process,” she said.
Eight out of 10 employers surveyed by the National Association of Colleges and Employers said that internships provided the best return on investment as a recruiting strategy, compared to career fairs, on-campus visits, panels or other activities. Between two similar job candidates, an internship in the industry is “the number-one tie-breaker,” said Joshua Kahn, associate director of research and public policy at NACE.
“There’s a race to get talent early,” said Barbara Hewitt, executive director of career services at the University of Pennsylvania. That, in turn, has resulted in a “focus on getting practical experience in many ways earlier in students’ academic careers,” Hewitt said.
Today, students have more options for earning that type of experience. The Washington Center, for example, last year began offering fully funded, short-term career-readiness programs. One was a cybersecurity program, consisting of a paid virtual “micro-internship” and online training in professional skills. The program also included an all-expenses paid gathering in Washington, D.C., where participants visited Amazon and Verizon offices, attended technical workshops and listened to speakers from the F.B.I. and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Ninety percent of the program’s participants were from historically underrepresented groups, and 60 percent were first-generation college students, according to The Washington Center. The participants’ ages ranged from 18 to 43.
Online internships can be more accessible than in-person programs. Faris Nabeel, a University of Arkansas graduate, participated in one for eight weeks. He credits the internship for helping him get into a master’s degree program in cybersecurity and land his current job as a security operations center analyst. Credit: Image provided by Faris Nabeel
“This met my needs,” Faris Nabeel, 26, said. Nabeel, who was the first in his family to go to college, was working overnight shifts as a behavioral health associate while also studying full-time at the University of Arkansas. The program was his first opportunity to participate in a professional internship. It was remote, roughly 10 hours a week for eight weeks, and consisted of researching and helping plan an event in the U.S. Virgin Islands to increase awareness about cybersecurity. He earned a $500 stipend.
Nabeel credited the internship for helping him build new skills, get into a master’s degree program in cybersecurity and land his current job as a security operations center analyst.
But, he said, “If it was in person, I probably would have enjoyed it more,” noting that the time difference with his East Coast employer, remote communication and online distractions made the job harder. And if he had been employed as a full-time, salaried intern, he said, he could have focused exclusively on that experience and learned more.
While groups like The Washington Center have been around for decades, several new internship organizations have sprung up in recent years, offering programs that broaden access.
U.K.-based Virtual Internships was established in 2018 with the goal of removing barriers to internship participation, especially abroad, co-founder Ed Holroyd Pearce said. The program offers fully remote internships that last one to four months, require a commitment of 10, 20 or 30 hours per week, and have start dates throughout the year. It also includes access to an online curriculum in professional skills development.
The company, whose biggest market is now the U.S., according to Holroyd Pearce, partners with universities, colleges and governments, which typically fund the program or grant academic credit — often to students who face barriers to getting work experience.
Virtual Internships partners with a Canadian organization funded by the government, for example, on a program that trains and re-skills workers who are changing or transitioning careers. And the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, also working with the company, identifies first-year students with the least work experience and helps place them in internships to give them a boost as they apply for summer positions during their sophomore and junior years.
Virtual Internships’ survey data shows that supervisors’ perceptions of the interns’ abilities on core career-readiness skills like communication, critical thinking and teamwork increased substantially during the internships. About a quarter of interns receive offers to extend or get hired full time, Holroyd Pearce said.
Micro-internships like Nabeel’s are another relatively new option. Chicago-based Parker Dewey, which launched in 2016, facilitates short-term contract projects, such as blogging, social media or data cleanup, that typically are done remotely, require 10 to 40 hours of work total and pay $20 to $25 per hour.
Students provide answers to one or more short-answer questions when they apply — and employers, whom Parker Dewey doesn’t allow to filter applicants by GPA or major, weigh those answers more heavily than the students’ resumes or pedigrees, chief executive Jeffrey Moss said.
“Essentially what we’ve done is lowered the stakes for both students and employers,” Moss said. “The employer can ‘take a chance’ on someone who came from a different background, not a finance major with a 3.7 GPA.”
That, in turn, Moss said, creates an opportunity for the student, who might land a summer internship or full-time role as a result, and it drives behavior change at the employer company, which now has access to and can recruit from a more diverse student pool.
More than 80 percent of students selected for Parker Dewey’s micro-internships come from populations that are underrepresented in the workforce, including first-generation, Pell-eligible, adult-learner, veteran and racial or ethnic minority students, Moss said.
Still, Moss added, micro-internships are “a feeder and a complement” to summer internships — not a replacement.
In 2022, City College in New York announced a new partnership with Braven, a national nonprofit organization founded in 2013 with the goal of promoting economic mobility by getting students from underrepresented groups into a “strong first job” or graduate school after college.
Braven runs a three-credit career development course inside its partner schools, which in addition to City College include Lehman College in the Bronx; Rutgers University-Newark; Spelman College, in Atlanta; and San Jose State University, among others.
In the semester-long course, volunteers from employer partners coach and mentor a small cohort of students on career skills, including leadership, problem-solving and communication. Students must apply for internships, ideally completing two in person and for pay before they graduate.
“We are very clear about what a high-quality internship looks like, and you need to get paid,” founder and chief executive Aimée Eubanks Davis said.
After the course, students continue to receive mentoring, invitations to network, listings for jobs and internships and guidance to help them apply. Over two and a half years, Braven follows its students to see if they are on track for their postgraduate goals — and intervenes if they’re not.
The model appears to be working. In 2023, 60 percent of Braven “fellows” landed in quality jobs or graduate schools within six months of graduation, compared to 43 percent of their peers nationally, according to the organization.
Kahn, of the National Association of Colleges and Employers, said that third-party internship providers and programs provide a crucial bridge between students and employers, offering experience and networking that otherwise might not be available to historically underrepresented students.
But ultimately, he said, the best and most sustainable solution is for employers to offer more paid internships — as many large companies already do.
“Interns provide valuable insights, creativity and skills on real projects that organizations can monetize,” he wrote in an email.
Without such pay, many students will continue to have limited options for participating in internships.
Alexandra Sandoval Flores, a junior at the University of Texas at Austin, says that experiencing a summer internship at a legal firm in Spain “changed my life,” opening her eyes to new career possibilities. Credit: Image provided by Alexandra Sandoval Flores
Alexandra Sandoval Flores, a junior at the University of Texas at Austin, saved money from three jobs and took out loans to pay for her internship at a legal firm in Spain last summer. The experience “changed my life,” she said, opening her eyes to new career possibilities as well as a new culture.
But she could only afford to go for four weeks and wished she had been able to stay longer.
“Coming from someone who is an immigrant, a minority, Hispanic, Latina, it’s very heartbreaking to know that a lot of us deserve these opportunities and we can’t get them,” Sandoval Flores said. “We know we have the qualities for them, and the only thing holding us back is the financial side.”
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.
As of today, we are over 30 percent behind last year in FAFSA filings. If we do not mobilize as a college access community, we are at risk of losing thousands of students from the pipeline to higher education.
The culprit? The difficult revised FAFSA process. Many public school counselors have told me that their students are frustrated and waiting until next year to apply.
News coverage of the disastrous new FAFSA rollout and the Education Department’s unprecedented delays in sending FAFSA data to institutions has detailed everything that went wrong. What hasn’t been covered is the potential impact this could have on the nation, what we can do to mitigate some of the unintended consequences or what we all must do right now to help.
There is no time to waste. We need a national movement to get students in the pipeline to higher education. Every single person reading this article should share this link that details state-by-state workshops, events and tools to help students complete their FAFSA.
Share this resource with places of worship and local community centers, at school board meetings and beyond. If you engage with a high school senior on the bus, on the metro or elsewhere in your local community, ask them, “Have you filled out your FAFSA yet?”
We know students who complete the FAFSA are more likely to continue their education. We need them to complete their FAFSA and matriculate now, before they’re out of reach.
During the height of COVID, we lost over a million students from the pipeline to higher education. This is on top of our already declining high school-age population. Losing more students will mean we’ll have a significant shortfall in the number of young adults with degrees.
This has serious implications for the future workforce, economic mobility for individuals, economic stability for communities and America’s ability to compete on a global stage.
This also has serious implications for institutions of higher education. Many colleges depend on the revenue students bring with them. When the college enrollment population declines, college revenues decline.
FAFSA Fiasco
This op-ed is part of a package of opinion pieces The Hechinger Report is running that focus on solutions to the new FAFSA’s troubled rollout.
A small, rural college president told me recently that the FAFSA debacle has the potential to put their school out of business. If the school loses even just a few students, they won’t make payroll.
We simply can’t afford to lose more students. School counselors can’t do this work alone. We need your help.
We need a coalition of FAFSA champions committed to helping us close the gap in application filings. Better yet, if you are a college access professional, host your own FAFSA workshop and invite students and families from your local community.
And we need to move quickly. The new FAFSA process is creating delays in financial aid offers even for students who have already completed the form, and most schools’ decision deadlines are looming. Many colleges, however, want to help relieve the anxiety students and families are feeling and are willing to extend deadlines. Our National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) directory lists institutions that have moved their enrollment decision deadlines.
Students need as much support and flexibility as possible right now, and shifted deadlines give them some breathing room to weigh their options — this is the largest financial decision of their young lives. While we have several hundred schools on our list, students and families need more schools to extend their deadlines.
Giving students the time and space to make the best decision for themselves is not only the right move ethically, but also a consumer protection issue.
We wouldn’t commit to buying a home without knowing the full price, so we shouldn’t require or expect students to commit to a college without knowing what they will have to pay.
I also know that our school counseling and advising community has been significantly impacted by the FAFSA rollout. Our counselors are exhausted, confused and frustrated.
They feel powerless and want to do everything they can to help their students. Many of them realize that they are going to have to work through the summer to help their students complete the process, but due to the politics of contract negotiations, many of them won’t be able to work into the summer to support their students.
I recently sent a letter to the Secretary of Education calling on him to remind federal grantees of allowable uses of federal funds that support college-going. Our school counselors and advisers cannot be expected to work for free, and we need them now more than ever.
Let’s shine a light on this issue by sharing our support for school counselor contract extensions with our school principals, superintendents, district leaders and boards.
Without the expertise of our counseling community, students could make bad decisions.
Finally, extending grace to each other is one of the most important actions we can take.
I have found that in crisis, our college access community tends to turn on each other. The anger is understandable, but we need to channel that energy toward creative, action-oriented solutions.
If we don’t work together, our students lose. Let’s give grace to colleges whose financial aid awards are late this year, to counselors who may make mistakes as they navigate an unprecedented process and to students who may be delayed in getting their information where it needs to go.
The future of our nation is at risk, so let’s work collaboratively with strategy, intention and grace as we steer our young people toward their best future.
Angel B. Pérez is the CEO of the National Association for College Admission Counseling and represents over 27,000 admission and counseling professionals worldwide committed to postsecondary access and success.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
The federal government’s financial aid application, known as the FAFSA, has been plagued with problems since its new version launched December 30, three months late. This is a major problem for the more than 70 percent of undergraduates who rely on some type of financial aid to pay for their education, because they’ll have less time than ever to make a decision about one of the biggest expenses of their lives.
What can parents do? The best first step is one that’s often the hardest for parents: Start a conversation about what you can afford. Research has shown that middle-class families rarely discuss the trade-offs and uncertainties related to paying for college, even though an honest conversation may prevent future financial headaches and relational heartache. The biggest reason? Parents may not want to burden their children with financial worries.
As a researcher at uAspire, a nonprofit that tries to help students learn about and access financial aid, I find that concerning. But I know how hard these discussions can be.
My own family didn’t talk about how we’d pay for college more than 25 years ago. I remember when the promissory notes arrived at my house, on green postcards, written in a tiny font size. I didn’t ask a single person what they meant, and no one in my family explained them to me — I just signed and mailed them back. Loans appeared to offer a bridge from my high school reality to an independent, adult life far from home. What I didn’t realize is how many of my future choices would be limited for the next 21 years, until those loans were finally paid off. Making room in my postcollege budget for loan payments affected where I could afford to live, how many hours I had to work, how often I could eat out, whether I could afford to travel to a friend’s wedding and whether I could donate to charities, among other choices.
Of course, the amount of financial damage I could do to myself back then was more limited than it would be now. Tuition charges alone have more than tripled at my alma mater, Northwestern University, since I was a student, rising from less than $20,000 a year in 1998 to nearly $65,000 this past fall.
FAFSA Fiasco
This op-ed is part of a package of opinion pieces The Hechinger Report is running that focus on solutions to the new FAFSA’s troubled rollout.
To muster the bravery for a financial talk, it may help parents to know that this process is complicated for every family. The FAFSA — the first step in a lengthy process to unlock grants, loans, work-study and other forms of financial aid — has been imperfect since its inception in 1992. This new version promises to be simpler and award Pell Grants to over 600,000 more students from low-income families — major policy wins. Yet families largely have not found FAFSA to be simpler. It’s improving, but the growing pains are being felt by students and parents everywhere.
That’s why it is so imperative for families to talk now, while there is still time to listen, share and make a plan, before placing a deposit somewhere.
Once you do start talking, the conversation with your child should cover a few things: What can our family afford to pay up front to start college? What sources — savings, or a part-time job, for example — can your child rely on for day-to-day expenses during college? And what can they comfortably pay back later based on their expected employment earnings?
There are other things you can do, too. First, complete the FAFSA as soon as possible. Second, review the financial aid offers once they arrive — even though they will likely arrive later than usual this year — and make sure you understand the different types of aid being offered.
My organization offers a free tool — a college cost calculator — to compare notoriously confusing aid offers. Since fewer than half of the students who begin a bachelor’s degree will graduate within four years, choose an institution with the most sustainable financing plan, one you could manage for up to six years. Browse government websites like Federal Student Aid and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or industry sites like NerdWallet, to learn about the pros and cons of different types of education loans before accepting any. The Institute of Student Loan Advisors can offer advice if you have questions about loan repayment, including forgiveness and consolidation. Appeal your aid offer if your financial situation has changed dramatically since what was captured by your 2022 tax return; resources on the SwiftStudent website can help you get started.
Of course, these are all individual actions to mitigate the effects of our broken system. Until there’s true change in how we pay for college, students and their families must be vigilant and proactive — starting now.
Jonathan Lewis is the senior director of research at uAspire, a nonprofit group that works to ensure students have the necessary financial information and resources to complete college.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
The cursing came loud and fast from a nearby room, followed by a slamming sound. This was a few years back, and I immediately suspected the culprit: the dreaded FAFSA, or Free Application for Federal Student Aid, with all its glitches and complexities.
My husband was losing his cool while attempting to fill it out for the second time in two years. Across America right now, so are millions of parents, students and counselors, frustrated by a failed promise to finally streamline this unwieldy gatekeeper to college dreams.
It’s a terrible time for anyone who counted on that U.S. Department of Education promise, and many are calling for an urgent push for help, including through legislation and a marshalling of resources from institutions like libraries and groups such as AmeriCorps.
“I don’t think we’ve seen a full court press about FASFA completion yet,” said Bill DeBaun, a senior director at the National College Attainment Network. “This is an emergency. We need all-hands on deck: governors, state departments, agencies, influencers at the White House. We are kind of at the point where we need to stop nibbling and take a big bite.”
Anyone who has dealt with the FAFSA knows how needlessly complicated and unreliable it can be: In the midst of back-to-back college application season for my two kids, the site kept kicking us out, then losing the previous information we’d painstakingly provided.
Don’t worry, parents were told over and over, it will get easier, it’s being fixed. A bipartisan law passed in 2020 initiated a complete overhaul of the FAFSA. But after a problematic soft launch on Dec. 30, glitches and delays are inflicting pain on undocumented students, first-generation college goers and others who can’t decide how and if attending college will be possible without offers and aid packages.
The so-called shorter, simpler form so far has been anything but, although DeBaun said many families have submitted it swiftly without problems. Still, as of March 8, there have been roughly 33 percent fewer submissions by high school seniors than last year, NCAN data show.
The finger-pointing and blaming right now is understandable, but not helpful: It threatens years of efforts to get more Americans to and through college at a time when higher education faces both enrollment declines and a crisis of public confidence, in part due to spiraling prices.
This year’s FAFSA rollout is frustrating sudents, parents and counselors and prompting calls for immediate help. Credit: Mariam Zuhaib/ Associated Press
Fewer than 1 in 3 adults now say a degree is worth the cost, a survey by the Strada Education Network found, and many fear FASFA snafus could lead to more disillusionment about college.
“FAFSA is such a massive hurdle, and if they [students and parents] can’t get this first step done, they may say it’s too complicated, maybe college isn’t for me,” said Scott Del Rossi, vice president of college and career success at College Possible, which helps low-income students and those from underrepresented backgrounds go to and through college.
Del Rossi wonders why the form wasn’t user-tested before being rolled out, and is among those calling for urgent solutions, beyond band-aid fixes that are literally keeping Department of Education staffers up all night.
“As much staff as government has, it’s not enough for students right now,” said Yolanda Watson Spiva, president of the national advocacy group Complete College America. She wants colleges to do more to directly help applicants still struggling to fill out the forms.
“They should be sharing webinars and workshops and talking about what’s happening and how [students] can begin in spite of the problems,” Watson Spiva said. “If we don’t have those conversations, parents will say this [college] isn’t worth it, and they will look for other opportunities and options.”
Even before the FAFSA fiasco, that’s been happening. In 2021, the proportion of high school graduates going directly to college fell to 62 percent from a high of 70 percent in 2016, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. At the same time, costs have more than doubled in the last 40 years, even when adjusted for inflation.
The task ahead is daunting: The Department of Education only started sending batches of student records this week to colleges that will determine aid offers, and about 200 have already extended the traditional May 1st deadline for students to accept offers.
No wonder parents and students are “stressing out and overwhelmed,” said Deborah Yanez, parent programs manager at TeenSHARP, a nonprofit that prepares students from underrepresented backgrounds for higher education.
“This is a special time for them; they have dreamed about sending their kids off to college, but now they are being held in this place of limbo, not knowing what the numbers are,” Yanez told me.
More colleges should extend deadlines for student decisions, Del Rossi said. Counselors that College Possible works with usually say it take at least three interactions, or sessions, with parents to conquer the FAFSA, but many are now reporting the recent form requires more than six – and many are still unsuccessful, Del Rossi said.
“We have to continue to encourage them not to give up and not to lose hope,” Del Rossi said. “We tell them it is not their fault, these are just glitches, but it’s a little heartbreaking.”
But turning to college counselors for help is not always a viable option for public school students, where public school counselors handle an average caseload of 430 students, well above the 1:250 ratio the American School Counselor Association suggests.
And this admissions year has the added complication of being the first since the Supreme Court’s landmark decision barring colleges from considering race as a factor in admissions, along with being a time of rapidly changing rules around whether standardized test scores is required for admission.
That’s why the message about the importance of a college education must continue, and students must be told not to give up. Still, if they can’t fill out the form and the government can’t turn the forms over to schools in time, it’s game over.
This story about the FASFA was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our weekly newsletters.
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.
People who read college applications are a lot like detectives. Without having been there for the event (the student’s K-12 education and life), they must find clues in documents (high school transcripts and student essays) and eyewitness accounts (letters of recommendation) to solve the case (decide whether a student might be able to thrive at the college).
But even with the extensive applications that each student submits, the detectives (college application readers) have to do a lot of reading between the lines, said Tim Brunold, dean of admission at the University of Southern California.
The clues they have on how students spend their time outside of school are typically limited to a list of sports teams they’ve captained, clubs they joined, volunteer work they’ve done and awards they’ve won. But the application readers often lack key information on other responsibilities or life circumstances students may have, such as caring for siblings or sick family members, working part-time jobs to help pay family bills, or living in a home without a stable internet connection.
And those missing clues often mean a student’s application doesn’t get a fair shake. If a student is getting good grades in spite of being responsible for siblings from after school until bedtime, that could mean the student is even more academically talented than a peer with no such burdens.
In order to fill this gap, and signal to prospective students that these responsibilities matter, a set of 12 colleges participated in an experiment in which they asked every applicant to go through a list of extenuating home life circumstances or responsibilities and check off which ones they spend four hours or more per week doing.
“We want these kids to essentially get credit for these things that are taking a lot of skills and a lot of time, in the same way that kids who are doing traditional, school-based extracurricular activities are getting credit,” said Trisha Ross Anderson, the college admission director of the Making Caring Common project at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, which helped develop the questions with Common App. (The idea was in development before the Supreme Court ruled that race could not be considered in admissions decisions.)
“We want to make it easier for students to report this information and talk about it. If students don’t want to have to write their essay about this, for instance, they shouldn’t have to.”
In order to make it fast and simple for prospective students, and to prevent application readers from having to play detective as they try to figure out, “Is there something else going on with this kid?,” they added this optional question to the Common App:
Sometimes academic records and extracurricular activities are impacted by family responsibilities or other circumstances. We would like to know about these responsibilities and circumstances. Your responses will not negatively impact your application. You may repeat some information you already provided in the Common App Activities section.
Please select which activities you spend 4 or more hours per week doing:
Assisting family or household members with situations such as doctors’ appointments, bank visits, or visa interviews
Doing tasks for my family or household (cooking, cleaning, laundry, etc.)
Experiencing homelessness or another unstable living situation
Interpreting or translating for family or household members
Living in an environment without reliable or usable internet
Living independently or living on my own (not including boarding school)
Managing family or household finances, budget, or paying bills
Providing transportation for family or household members
Taking care of sick, disabled and/or elderly members of my family or household
Taking care of younger family or household members
Taking care of my own child or children
Working at a paid job to contribute to my family or household’s income
Yard work/farm work
Other (please describe)
None of these
Across the 12 colleges, 66 percent of the students who applied to these colleges using the Common App checked at least one box, according to Karen Lopez, who manages this project at Common App. A quarter of the prospective students checked four or more boxes.
In the fall of 2022, these 12 colleges included the question in the Common App: Amherst College, Caltech, Cornell University, Harvey Mudd College, St. Olaf College, Transylvania University, University of Arizona, University of Dubuque, University of Maryland-Baltimore County, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California and Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
In the fall of 2023, these 23 colleges added the question: Allegheny College, Amherst College, Bard College at Simon’s Rock, Boston College, Caltech, College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University, College of the Holy Cross, Cornell University, Earlham College, Elon University, George Washington University, Harvey Mudd, Haverford College, Immaculata University, Lafayette College, Maryland Institute College of Art, Nazareth University, Providence College, University of Pennsylvania, University of Richmond, University of Rochester, University of Southern California and Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Ross Anderson said that the second-year data will begin being processed in the coming months. She said they also plan to look at how this question affected admissions and enrollments, but they won’t be able to examine that until late summer. Lopez said these are among the factors that will help decide if this question should become a regular part of the Common App.
Brunold, from USC, said that the people who read college applications are trying to get a “360-degree view of this young person who’s often baring their soul to you,” without knowing them personally. Giving students the opportunity to share information about their lives in this way helps colleges make a more thorough assessment.
“For us, at a place that unfortunately doesn’t have the capacity to admit anywhere near the number of students who want to come here, we take great care in this process,” Brunold said.
Whitney Soule, vice provost and dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania, said that asking this question and capturing a wider view of students’ lives can help level the playing field for applicants of different backgrounds.
“What we are trying to do is understand how a student is moving throughout their lives, what their commitment of time is and their responsibility is, and their awareness of themselves relative to other people,” Soule said. “Because that’s going to be incredibly important in our environment when they arrive on our campus, and they’re living and learning within the community of our school.”
This story about student home life was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.
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.
Editor’s note: This story led off this week’s Higher Education newsletter, which is delivered free to subscribers’ inboxes every other Thursday with trends and top stories about higher education.
Erika Turner and her husband have 11 children between them. Four of them are already in college, two are graduating from high school this spring, and her husband has gone back to school in pursuit of a bachelor’s degree.
“I have seven people depending on the results of their FAFSAs coming back,” said Turner, who lives in Cohutta, Georgia, near the Tennessee border. “That’s a lot of tuition to pay for – you know, financial aid never fully covers everything. You’ve got other expenses, like books, food and room and board and just things that come up during the year. So, as we think about budgeting for this next school year… I don’t like the unknown.”
The Education Department says that last year about 17.5 million people (both high schoolers and older students) completed the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA; so far this year, only about four million have successfully done so.
Turner and her family filled out the new version of the FAFSA in one marathon session in January. Because of the government’s delays in launching and in processing the forms, Turner’s family is among the many still waiting for their applications to be processed. Turner works as the head of human resources for a flooring manufacturer and her husband works as an environmental health and safety manager for a field turf company.
She hopes the returning college students in her family will eventually receive similar aid packages as they have in years past and will be able to persist uninterrupted. For the two children filling out the FAFSA for the first time, she is less certain. One son plans to attend a private liberal arts college in Georgia, Turner said, and the other is likely headed to technical school.
“Obviously, that’s not as much of a financial burden on us as a family, but it’s still money I don’t necessarily have set aside to pay for that,” Turner said. “We’re depending on Pell Grants and things like that to help close that gap.”
Turner’s family will also rely heavily on outside scholarships. That’s how she first got to know Stephanie Young, the director of scholarships at the Community Foundation of Greater Chattanooga.
Young focuses on helping students and families figure out how to pay for college. That’s a tough job in normal years, but it’s required a near-herculean lift this year because of the delays and the domino effect they are having on the rest of the process.
Colleges use the FAFSA to determine which grants and scholarships students are eligible for, but they won’t get that information until at least March, so award letters likely won’t go out until sometime in April. Colleges typically require students to confirm their enrollment by May 1, but because they will be so delayed in sending financial aid award information, scores of colleges are extending that deadline. Some are even devising their own forms to ask students directly for financial need data, hoping to give them at least some estimate of what aid to expect.
Students often rely partly on outside scholarships, but these scholarships, too, are often awarded based on student need, which is typically determined using the FAFSA.
Young manages many such scholarships and has had to quickly pivot from her normal timelines and procedures to meet the needs of scrambling students and families. Because of the delay in FAFSA forms becoming available, the application figures on some scholarships that require FAFSA information are down significantly.
One such scholarship that typically has about 100 applications by mid-February, this year had 12, Young said. She could see that about 200 applications for it were in the midst of being drafted, but she thinks students haven’t been able to submit them yet because their FAFSAs haven’t been processed yet. This scholarship typically opens its application process in November and closes it at the end of January. This year, it didn’t open until January, and it will remain open until at least March 2, Young said.
The delays could result in students walking across the stage at high school graduation (which in the South can be as early as the second week in May) not knowing whether they will be able to afford to attend the colleges they were admitted to.
“My concern is either students will make a snap decision, go to a school and then not be able to fully enroll because they don’t have enough finances to meet the need, or they may wait too late to decide and lose a spot,” Young said. “Will they be at the ones that are the right fit, that are the most affordable to them?”
Young is especially concerned about first-generation students and students from low-income families. Those parents, she said, “may not have the wherewithal to walk through this process with them. So a lot of it falls back on the schools trying to do that or myself in any way that I can jump in and help.”
Yolanda Watson Spiva, president of the advocacy group Complete College America, said she’s worried that the “domino effect” started by the delayed FAFSA is going to eventually affect college completion rates.
“The FAFSA has already been a very intimidating form and the process,” she said. “Even with FAFSA simplification efforts, we’re now seeing that the simplification is not all that simple.”
Because of the delays and glitches, fewer students have been filling out the FAFSA, Watson Spiva said. If fewer students apply for aid, fewer students have the opportunity to compare offers and select the best college for them, and, she suspects, fewer students will go to college.
She said that she’s been hearing from prospective college students that it just doesn’t seem worth the trouble, that waiting a year might be a better decision. But delaying college or taking a gap year makes people less likely to attend college, she said.
Advocates for higher education are perpetually trying to “convince folks that there is a value proposition to go into college,” she said, “This actually doesn’t help us to make our case, unfortunately.”
And there’s a risk for students who are already enrolled, too. Many students leave college because they can’t afford it, and if they can’t get timely information about their financial aid, she thinks it could prevent them from re-enrolling.
“Regardless of whether you’re a prospective student or a current student, college is not easily affordable,” Watson Spiva said. And for many families, “getting the financial aid award letter saying that you’ll have resources is really make or break.”
The pressure to figure it all out is weighing on Chattanooga native Maurquez Thompson, a first-year student at Stanford University.
Thompson, a first-generation college student, said he pays his tuition using a combination of grants and scholarships. He said he’s overwhelmed trying to keep up with all the requests for extra documentation from scholarship providers that are trying to sidestep the need for FAFSA data to determine awards for students. He knows Stanford meets full financial aid for its students, but the extra processes still add stress.
“If the first year of college was just like it is right now for the FAFSA, I think I’d be crying. It’s too much,” Thompson said. “I think the FAFSA right now is the hardest thing people are dealing with.”
This story about FAFSA changes was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.
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.
