This story was produced by The 19th and reprinted with permission.
In 2023, Diamond Harriel was looking to make a career switch. She had a 10-month-old daughter and had recently gone back to school for a business administration degree, hoping it could help her earn higher pay than the temporary administrative jobs she had been working.
One day, through a program that helps single moms, she saw a flier about a new city initiative in Rochester, Minnesota, that aimed to bring women of color into the construction workforce.
After learning more, Harriel enrolled into a trades readiness training program that taught the ins and outs of construction, from how to read a blueprint, to operating different tools and basic safety. The program exposed her to the possibilities within the construction world: building inspections, project management, apprenticeships in skilled trades like plumbing and electricity.
The city initiative that guided Harriel through the training and helped set up the interview is called the Equity in the Built Environment program. It started in 2023 after Rochester Mayor Kim Norton won a $1 million grant from the Bloomberg Philanthropies Global Mayors Challenge.
When the 2020 recession hit, one thing had become apparent to Norton: Women of color were bearing the brunt of it. In Rochester, they already held some of the lowest paid jobs, and as the pandemic took hold, those positions disappeared in sectors like the service industry, which disproportionately employs women of color.
“Probably they struggled the most anyway,” Norton said. “But it was held up and in the sunlight during the pandemic in a way that it was so obvious you couldn’t ignore it.”
What her office realized is that there wasn’t a shortage of employment opportunities.
Rochester, with a population around 220,000, was halfway into a $585 million, 20-year funding initiative to build new infrastructure downtown. It was also home to the prestigious Mayo Clinic, which had just announced a $5 billion economic growth project.
All of that growth meant a lot of available construction jobs, which was facing a worker shortage. Could that problem be solved by diversifying the workforce?
“Our research showed that very few women are in construction and almost no women of color. We said, ‘Well, here’s an opportunity,’” Norton said. According to the city, women of color make up 13 percent of the city’s population but less than 1 percent work in the construction industry.
Over the past year the city has piloted Equity in the Built Environment to create a solution that could work for everyone — both the construction industry facing an employee shortage and the women they sought to help. If they are successful, they could be a model for other cities as construction projects boom across the country.
The pilot project consists of tackling the workforce challenge in three ways, said project manager Julie Brock: educating women and girls about the employment possibilities; training and recruitment for women of color; and addressing long-standing issues with discrimination and harassment in the industry.
First, program participants are set up with a career counselor with a local workforce development nonprofit, and then they enter either a trades readiness track, or an entrepreneurial track that helps women start their own construction businesses. Throughout that time they have access to wraparound services like child care and transportation to remove barriers to attending classes. For those looking for a job, the program works to place them at three different companies that are partners in the work. So far eight women have completed the program.
Explaining to women that there could be a job in the field that fits their interests and skills has been a challenge, Brock said. At first, women assumed that the only jobs available would be more around tradework. Now, the pilot program has framed conversations around the built environment, more broadly, with other career opportunities in health and safety inspections, interior design and project management among others.
“The mindset shift is you are not asking people to go on a construction crew to swing hammers,” Brock said. “If somebody wants to do that, that’s great. But there is amazing wealth to be made in the built environment.”
Trainee Diamond Harriel, who heard about the program through an organization that helps single mothers, participates in a trades readiness training. Credit: Courtney Perry/Bloomberg Philanthropies
Aaron Benike, vice president of operations at Benike Construction, one of the pilot’s partner companies, said that his company is doing whatever it can to attract a more diverse workforce. It’s what drew him to participating in this pilot.
With the industry currently going through a wave of retirements of its primarily White male workforce — nationwide 1 in 5 construction workers is 55 or older — he realized they need to be more intentional about outreach.
Out of over 200 employees, they have few women, and just one woman of color who currently works for the company.
“It’s just a segment of the population that for one reason or another isn’t part of the team,” Benike said. “For one reason or another they haven’t felt welcome or we haven’t reached out, it’s probably both.”
The construction industry as a whole does have a reputation for discrimination and harassment. A report released by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission last year found that women were often denied jobs or harassed and discriminated against on job sites in the construction industry.
Benike, who had the opportunity to talk with women interested in construction when the program was being designed, said it opened his eyes to things he’d never really thought about. For the women, he said, “safety meant safety from harassment … and that was a blind spot to me,” he said. “I’ve been on job sites my whole life and never experienced anything like that, but why would I, right?”
His company is currently undergoing training to obtain an Inclusive Workforce Employer Designation, a series of trainings focused on diversity, equity and inclusion, and a requirement to participate in the pilot. He hopes that job seekers will see that as a sign that his company is a safe space to work. The city’s pilot also has trained mentors at each company to work with women when they are hired to ensure a smooth transition into a new field.
Benike wants to convince more women to consider getting into the field. “The pay is good. The training is good. It’s safe and the pension is good,” he said.
In recent weeks the city has also launched public service announcements to bring more women into the pilot; now that it’s been running for over a year, organizers feel ready to scale up.
For Sara Tekle, a participant who did the entrepreneurial track, the pilot has helped her start a business in craft labor, doing the demoing and cleaning up for construction projects.
Tekle, who is originally from Eritrea, was working in nursing at the Mayo Clinic for years. She had already been doing side jobs with construction after taking on some remodeling at her own house.
But the program helped her build her website, start the process of getting her contractor license and register her business. She is now in a training that will help her place bids for construction work. She’s also been able to network with companies from the city’s pilot who could potentially contract with her company.
The Rochester City Council has adopted requirements that a certain number of women- and minority-owned businesses be involved in construction on city projects, which could help women like Tekle.
The program made Tekle feel more comfortable working in construction and supported in making a transition to running a company full-time, which she hopes to do in May when bidding season starts for construction work.
Tekle, who also works as a women’s advocate, said she’d like to encourage other women she knows to consider working in the built trades — eventually she hopes to be an employer.
“The construction industry is not engaging or welcoming to women,” she said. “When I start my own company, the biggest vision is to hire a woman.”
This story was produced by The 19th and reprinted with permission.
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The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Listen to the audio version of this story, by Liam Elder-Connors at Vermont Public.
BRISTOL, Vt. — The mobile home park in this rural village seemed to be hibernating on a subfreezing, snowy day. But there was evidence of damage from an earlier storm that had brought high winds and freezing rain — another in an unusual number of weather events that have battered this state with flooding and other natural disasters.
“It looks like they just had to replace some skirting, probably from the storm,” said Chris Ouellette, property manager for a local affordable housing agency that owns the park, pointing at the plywood wrapped around the base of one home shared by several people she said had recently been homeless. “We have a roof that was ripped off a house over there. We’ve had a couple sheds that have been lost.”
At least one of the residents had started a GoFundMe page to pay for repairs, Ouellette said. “There’s no funding that is designated in any way for mobile home parks,” she said, before trailing off. “So when you have a situation like these storms that continue to keep coming …”
Now help is arriving from an unexpected source: The University of Vermont, or UVM, the state’s flagship higher education institution, has opened a new center to help rural communities like this one. Among other projects, it has taken on the long-neglected job of finding ways to make this kind of mobile home park more resistant to extreme weather.
Looking down Merchants Row to Main Street on a snowy day in Middlebury, Vermont. A new institute at the University of Vermont is reaching out to help towns like this one. Credit: Oliver Parini for The Hechinger Report
Supporting their neighbors isn’t always a priority for universities and colleges. Even when it is, it often happens so quietly that it isn’t widely noticed.
“It’s not on the national radar,” said Glenda Gillaspy, dean of the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which is upgrading and expanding a network of weather and environmental monitoring stations crucial to that state’s farmers and foresters.
But advocates suggest that such help is one way to counteract crashing public confidence in higher education, a problem that has been worsened by political attacks and self-destructive missteps by even the most elite universities.
Universities that engage in community outreach “are that middle piece in between what the community needs and this political thing,” Gillaspy said.
This kind of work pulls faculty, students and researchers away from grand, picturesque campuses with neat grassy quads like UVM’s and into neighborhoods like Bristol’s mobile home park, 30 miles away and a world apart, where people can be surprised to see them.
“When you’re knocking on people’s doors and saying, ‘Hi, I’m a student from the University of Vermont,’ people would look at you a little perplexed at first,” said Kelly Hamshaw, a research lecturer in the university’s Department of Community Development and Applied Economics, who is working on the disaster resilience project.
Chris Ouellette, property manager for Addison County, Vermont, and Kelly Hamshaw, a research lecturer at the University of Vermont. Hamshaw is working on a project to make mobile homes like these more resistant to severe weather. Credit: Oliver Parini for The Hechinger Report
Even before the culture wars and the recent resignations of the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania following their performances before a congressional committee and disclosures of plagiarism, Americans’ faith in higher education had dropped more than their confidence in any other institution tracked by the Gallup polling organization, including the presidency, Congress, big business and the criminal justice system.
“There’s huge mistrust between universities and communities, so there is a whole process of culture shift and rebuilding that needs to happen,” said Sarah McKinley, director of community wealth-building programs for The Democracy Collaborative, which encourages universities to leverage some of their $702 billion a year in direct spending and nearly 4 million employees to boost their neighborhoods.
Helping solve community problems is a step toward restoring public confidence, she said. “Whether there’s been a conscious articulation or awareness of that within universities, I don’t know, but there is certainly something to it.”
And not just in rural areas. Through the Greater University Circle Initiative, for example, Case Western Reserve University and several nearby hospitals — more than half of whose neighbors in East Cleveland live in poverty — have agreed to leverage their purchasing power by buying locally and hiring local residents.
Of 100 urban universities surveyed by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, three-quarters included public service as part of their missions.
For one thing, universities are increasingly fending off calls to pay more taxes on the property they own and on their endowments. Showing communities that they’re contributing in other ways can help deflect those kinds of demands.
Some have also been struggling to attract students and faculty to remote places, inner cities and other areas in economic decline by helping to transform them, “rather than put up walls and be surrounded by a sort of deteriorating urban wasteland,” said Democracy Collaborative President Joe Guinan.
Such interventions can “help stabilize and develop local communities in a way that makes them more attractive places for faculty, for students, to come,” said Guinan. “It’s very much in [universities’] interest to do a thing they should be doing anyway.”
Taylor Welch-Plante, director of a teen center called the Hub in Bristol, Vermont. University of Vermont students came here to study the services Vermont towns provide to their young people. Credit: Oliver Parini for The Hechinger Report
Colby College in Maine, for instance, is helping to revitalize its surrounding city of Waterville, which was hammered by the closing of several manufacturing plants that provided well-paying jobs. The college built a dorm on the main street to help restore foot traffic to the fading downtown, where it has also seeded $200 million worth of projects including an arts center and boutique hotel.
“The people we’re attracting have lots of choices about where they can go and where they can live,” said David Greene, Colby’s president. By helping the community stay vibrant, he said, “you have a much better chance of being able to recruit them to your college.”
Unlike private companies, universities are place-bound, said McKinley. “They aren’t going to pick up and leave. There is that economic stickiness, whether they like it or not.”
Yet “by no means is higher education doing everything it can,” said Bobbie Laur, president of Campus Compact, a coalition of 500 colleges and universities that have committed to serving their communities. It “has a more critical role than it has ever had to make an impact. We should say that it’s an expectation.”
Making that sort of an impact isn’t always smooth, however. Parachuting in to offer solutions to communities’ problems — as in, “We’re from the university, and we’re here to help” — can come across as paternalistic, especially in the current political climate, people who do this work acknowledged.
“A certain amount of humility is absolutely required in almost any of those situations, and universities haven’t been terribly good at humility in the past,” said Kirk Dombrowski, vice president for research and economic development at UVM, who oversees its new Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships and other community engagement projects.
“We have names for it, right? The ‘town-gown’ dynamic,” said Dombrowski, a cultural anthropologist. “The university sat on a hill and was full of people with big robes and funny hats.”
Kirk Dombrowski, vice president for research and economic development at the University of Vermont, who oversees its community engagement. “A certain amount of humility is absolutely required” to do this kind of work off campus, he says, “and universities haven’t been terribly good at humility in the past,” he says. Credit: Oliver Parini for The Hechinger Report
Kirk Dombrowski, vice president for research and economic development at the University of Vermont. “Showing that large institutions like this are interested in what’s happening in towns can show goodwill,” he says. Credit: Oliver Parini for The Hechinger Report
That perception “has always been kind of true,” he said as bundled-up students just outside his window scurried across the campus of historic red-brick buildings. “And it’s also been not true.” Universities like his were started largely to train teachers for the local schools, for instance, and farmers how to use new and more effective techniques.
Today, Dombrowski said, “Showing that large institutions like this are interested in what’s happening in towns can show goodwill.”
UVM has branched into a multitude of projects through the Leahy Institute, which is named for former Sen. Patrick Leahy and being funded by the same four-year federal grant that is paying for the outreach in Wisconsin and work at Auburn University in Alabama to support chicken farmers, the forest-products industry and the estimated 210,000 jobs they represent in that state.
The institute helped the Town Hall Theater in the town of Middlebury to apply for grants to build a $7.5 million addition, for example, researching such things as the economic impact of the arts in the surrounding county and the number of jobs they represent — a complex task the small nonprofit community theater couldn’t have afforded to do on its own.
The Town Hall Theater in Middlebury, Vermont. The University of Vermont helped the theater apply for grants toward a $7.5 million expansion. Credit: Oliver Parini for The Hechinger Report
“It would have been a tremendous struggle for us to understand what that impact is, or even to have the basic data to be able to craft our narrative,” said Lisa Mitchell, executive director of the theater, which has since raised much of the money that it needs and has begun construction. “This was really game-changing for us.”
Upstairs in the building, a landmark in the heart of town that dates to 1884, performers were rehearsing for an upcoming musical, “Next to Normal,” accompanied on a piano. Downstairs in a gallery was an exhibition of art by a retired local veterinarian.
Getting things like free data and statistics might not seem glamorous, but “it’s a wonderful service that we would each have to pay a lot of money for” without the university, said Fred Kenney, executive director of the Addison County Economic Development Corporation, who connected Mitchell with UVM and who also relies on the university for data. “It’s not the only example, but it’s a really useful one.”
Fred Kenney, executive director of the Addison County Economic Development Corporation. Getting things like free data and statistics from a university might not seem glamorous, but “it’s a wonderful service that we would each have to pay a lot of money for” otherwise, he says. Credit: Oliver Parini for The Hechinger ReportLisa Mitchell, executive director of the Town Hall Theater in Middlebury, Vermont. It was “game-changing” to have help with an expansion project from a university, she says. Credit: Oliver Parini for The Hechinger Report
As for what’s in it for UVM, he said in a conference room hung with photos of industrial buildings, maps and a framed invitation to the opening of a microbrewery, the theater’s leaders are “letting a lot of people know that they won some grants” and giving some of the credit to the university. “So the word is getting out.”
University employees, of course, are also almost always members of the communities around their campuses. That’s how Hamshaw got involved with another project: making recommendations about a local teen center called the Hub, in rural Bristol, where she lives.
“We intersected on a dog walk actually,” Hamshaw said of the director of the center, Taylor Welch-Plante. The result was a research project conducted largely by students on how Vermont towns are helping and failing their young people.
“It’s a really great place to kind of get that information in one quick dose,” said Hamshaw of the teen center, in a former bingo hall across a ballfield from the trailer park and filled with musical instruments, TVs, beanbag chairs and other mismatched furniture, board games, an air-hockey table, art supplies and a disco ball. There’s a skate park outside.
Another benefit: exposing local high school students to their only slightly older college counterparts, helping overcome growing reluctance among rural young people to continue their educations. “The teens can then see the college kids and be, like, ‘Wow, I want to go to college,’ ” Welch-Plante said.
Engagement initiatives coordinator Emma Spett and director Tricia Coates of the Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships at the University of Vermont with Fred Kenney, executive director of the Addison County Economic Development Corporation. More people should be hearing about universities’ work beyond their campuses, Spett says. Credit: Oliver Parini for The Hechinger Report
But more people than teenagers, theater lovers and mobile home park residents should be hearing about these community outreach initiatives, said Emma Spett, engagement initiatives coordinator at the Leahy Institute.
“I feel like we’re doing a lot of doing and not a lot of telling,” Spett said.
When a community does see and hear about these good works, it “can completely change the tone” of how the public perceives its local college or university, said Greene, at Colby.
“Colleges and universities have been losing the trust of the public, and there’s no doubt that a piece of this is that they often seem more apart from their communities than a part of their communities,” Greene said. That “can lead to a real distrust of the institutions — that the institutions are not for me, they’re for someone else.”
When he first arrived on campus, he said, “I just felt enormous distrust in the community about Colby and how we seemed to ignore the challenges the city was facing. Now we can have discussions in the city that are completely productive, without having that piece that we don’t trust each other.”
Gillaspy cited the example in Wisconsin of a collaboration with Native Americans by university scientists — one a Native American himself — to return to traditional farming practices while growing particular types of corn.
Projects like those have several advantages, she said. “There’s economic impact. There’s the exchange of ideas and knowledge. And then there’s the people part of it — that confidence and trust.”
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.
Since the Supreme Court abolished affirmative action last June, selective colleges and universities have had to dismantle their most effective tools for pursuing racially and ethnically diverse student bodies.
Some institutions have even preemptively eliminated race-based scholarships and special academic programs for historically marginalized groups, fearing litigation.
It’s no surprise that advocates of equity feel profoundly pessimistic. Yet if we broaden our focus, there are myriad more impactful ways to promote educational equity than adjusting the admissions practices of elite colleges.
Just a small subset of the 4,000 degree-granting institutions in the United States have ever practiced race-conscious admissions, and only a tiny fraction of all Black, Latino and Native American students attend those schools.
Widespread improvements in educational equity and economic mobility will happen only when minority-serving and broad-access institutions receive our respect and support.
Here are some ways we can help:
1. Invest in the schools doing the bulk of equity work. Far greater numbers of Black, Latino and Native American students are enrolled at public and private schools with moderately selective to open admission practices than at elite colleges. These more accessible institutions have higher economic mobility ratings than their Ivy peers due to the larger number of students from low-income backgrounds that they serve. Initiatives that increase affordability and make big publics feel more like small privates directly contribute to their positive outcomes.
2. Redirect philanthropic dollars from prestige-school endowments to minority-serving institutions. Chronic underfunding and inadequate endowments limit the opportunities that minority-serving institutions can provide. Historically Black colleges and universities and community colleges, in particular, have been neglected by philanthropy for decades.
These institutions are being asked to carry the responsibility of changing lives and creating regional workforces but are not reliably given the fiscal means to do so. Redirecting even a small percentage of philanthropic dollars to these schools would be transformative. The recent $100 million gift to Spelman College, three-quarters of which will go to scholarships, embodies this mandate.
3.Address the needs of the fast-growing community of “some college, no credential”—an estimated 40.4 million former students as of 2021. Black, Latino and Native American students comprise greater proportions of this demographic than they do of total undergraduates.
This large number is unsurprising when you consider the actual cost of college attendance. In New York, a student enrolled at a public four-year university who qualifies for full federal and state aid will still face a gap of $15,000 to $20,000 to cover total educational expenses. (This gap increases if the student is among the more than one in five undergraduates who is a parent and if child care costs are considered.)
Nationwide, Black students have the greatest unmet need; many take on debt to graduate, while others drop out.
Several states have launched efforts to reenroll potential-completers, including some of the 2.9 million former students who have at least two years’ worth of credits. Other programs, like ASAP and ACE, have helped to significantly improve degree completion at associate and baccalaureate colleges.
Supporting and expanding these initiatives through advocacy and philanthropy would directly benefit the completion rates of historically marginalized students.
4. Elite graduate schools, firms and training programs need to expand the circle of schools from which they recruit. If they do not, the Supreme Court ruling risks impeding the pipeline of underrepresented groups into prestigious career tracks and leadership positions, many of which rely on a specific recruiting network and academic pedigree.
For example, internships enhance a college student’s ability to secure a job after graduation, but a recent survey found that “male students, white students, students who are not first generation, and students who are not Pell Grant recipients were more likely to participate in internships than other groups of students.” A study of CUNY, a minority-serving system, reported that only 10 percent of students participated in paid internships during college.
There are remedies to this problem. For more than a dozen years, the philanthropy I work for in New York City has supported paid internships for women with financial need. The students choose internships that best serve their career interests, and we provide a stipend and cover transportation expenses.
On the national level, organizations like Braven partner with schools to supplement campus career services with mentoring, internship and job application assistance and a career development curriculum. There are many other opportunities and innovations; what is needed is investment to pilot and scale these programs and appropriate funding to help less selective schools prepare students for them.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, feelings of distress are warranted. But the bigger question, asked recently by Jonathan Koppell, president of Montclair State University, a Hispanic-serving institution, is, “How do we create more opportunities for more people, regardless of their race or ethnicity, so that it doesn’t feel like the stakes of getting into one of these tiny, tiny institutions is so life-altering?”
The answer: shift our attention and dollars to the colleges, universities and student success organizations pursuing a vision of abundant opportunity.
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.
FAYETTEVILLE, Ohio — Ghosts populate the campus of Chatfield College.
They’re in the fading photos on the library walls of students who, over 177 years, attended the college and the boarding school from which it sprang, and of the Ursuline nuns who taught them, in their simple tunics and scapulars.
Amid seemingly endless acres of tobacco, soybean and wheat farms in a village in southwest Ohio with a population of 241, the now-closed college sits at the end of a narrow entrance road flanked by Bradford pear trees, colorless and bare in the winter gloom. Just about the only traffic on the way is an occasional stray chicken.
Chatfield has been shut down for a year now, though the buildings and grounds remain so neatly tended that they look as if they’re ready for the students to return. It’s among a fast-growing number of closed colleges in rural America, stripping communities of nearby higher education options to which young people can aspire and eventually go.
In this case, however, something unusual has happened: The assets left by the defunct college are being used to help at least some local students continue their educations past high school.
It’s a story that underscores the role played by colleges and universities in rural America, what’s lost when they close and how advocates are trying to keep the proportion of rural high school graduates who go to college from falling even further than it already has.
“It was a really great starting point for me, and it could have been a starting point for other students,” said Anna Robertson, 23, who attended Chatfield until the end.
Locals once saw greater potential for the college, which was founded in 1845 as a boarding school by an English-born Ursuline nun named Julia Chatfield. In the early 20th century, it benefited from being close to U.S. 50, a heavily trafficked major east-west route. And in 1971, it evolved into Chatfield College, which conferred two-year associate degrees.
“It was the heart of the area,” said Amber Saeidi Asl, who grew up next to the campus. She took courses offered by Chatfield through a dual-enrollment program while she was still in high school, and eventually went there.
Just having a college nearby inspired her to go, she said.
“The people of the area really wanted a college,” Sister Ellen Doyle, president from 1986 to 1997, said in a video history.
“A lot of kids that wouldn’t otherwise go to college felt comfortable coming here,” Mary Jacobs, a Chatfield graduate who later worked as its director of finance, said on the video. “If it hadn’t been for this college, a lot of them wouldn’t have attended college at all.”
Sister Patricia Homan in the Chatfield College Library with a portrait of Julia Chatfield, founder of the boarding school that preceded the college. Homan is compiling an archive of Chatfield’s history. Credit: Grace McConnell for The Hechinger Report
Sister Patricia Homan points out landmarks in an aerial photo of the Chatfield College campus in its heyday. The college has now closed. Credit: Grace McConnell for The Hechinger Report
But the interstate highway system long ago supplanted U.S. 50. Even the village where the college was located, St. Martin, was dissolved in 2011, when the population had dwindled to 129; the campus was absorbed into Fayetteville.
Like other small, rural, tuition-dependent and religiously affiliated institutions, Chatfield grew even more imperiled as Americans increasingly questioned the cost and value of postsecondary education. There are only about 80 two-year private, nonprofit colleges left, fewer than half as many as just 30 years ago.
It’s also in a part of the country that has been among the most acutely affected by a decline in the number of high school graduates and their interest in going to college. The number of students in Ohio’s public high schools slid by 7 percent from 2012 to 2022, and the percentage of them going directly to college fell to 53 percent by 2020, the most recent year for which the figure is available — nearly 10 percentage points below its peak, and well below the national average of 62 percent.
“We could see the enrollment trends,” said Robert Elmore, Chatfield’s last president. “We just didn’t see how we could sustain this and continue operating.”
Robert Elmore, the last president of now-closed Chatfield College. “We could see the enrollment trends,” says Elmore. “We just didn’t see how we could sustain this and continue operating.” Credit: Grace McConnell for The Hechinger Report
So the school announced in the fall of 2022 that it would shut down at the end of that semester, taking 70 jobs with it. It barely made the headlines. But it had joined more than a dozen other private, nonprofit universities and colleges in rural areas or that serve rural students that have closed or announced their closings just since 2020.
Those include Nebraska Christian College, Marlboro College in Vermont, Holy Family College in Wisconsin, Judson College in Alabama, Ohio Valley and Alderson Broaddus universities in West Virginia, Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts in New Hampshire, Iowa Wesleyan University, Marymount California University, Cazenovia College in New York, Finlandia University in Michigan, Presentation College in South Dakota and Lincoln College, Lincoln Christian University and MacMurray College in Illinois.
Nearly 13 million Americans now live in places, mostly in the Midwest and Great Plains, where the nearest college or university is beyond a reasonable commute away, the American Council on Education reports. The nearest colleges to the Chatfield campus — a community college and a branch of the University of Cincinnati — are about 45 minutes away.
“For a lot of college students who are living in rural areas, it’s just not feasible to drive to one of the city universities,” said Robertson.
Helping overcome those kinds of obstacles is now the purpose of the nonprofit set up with the remaining Chatfield College endowment, which Elmore put at $4 million; the organization also claims the grounds and buildings as assets, valued along with the endowment at $11 million.
Called the Chatfield Edge, it has provided volunteer mentors, career counseling, assistance with admission and financial aid applications and other help to 21 students, and scholarships of about $1,500 per semester to 19 of them, said David Hesson, director of programs, who was an associate dean at the college.
David Hesson, former associate dean at Chatfield College and now director of programs for a nonprofit helping rural students continue their educations. “They don’t think they can do it. It’s unknown.” Credit: Grace McConnell for The Hechinger Report
It’s not only about getting students to college; the Chatfield Edge will also help with trade school and certificate programs. The target is low-income high school students who would be the first in their families to go to college and students who are older than the traditional age. Robertson, who now is finishing her bachelor’s degree at Asbury University in Kentucky, is among the beneficiaries.
“We said we don’t have to necessarily provide the education. But we could support them, and we know what that looks like, and we have the scholarship money to cover the gap,” Elmore said.
Other than Hesson and Elmore, the only employees left are a facilities director and the director of development. They work in the onetime student center. “We’re the whole gang,” said Hesson as he held open the door for some rare visitors. An Ursuline sister, Patricia Homan, has an office in a separate, otherwise empty building, and spends time in the library compiling an archive of the college’s history.
The small number of students it has helped so far speaks to the challenges faced by the Chatfield Edge and other organizations promoting access to college and other education after high school for young people growing up in rural places.
“A lot of the kids I knew grew up to do what their parents did,” said Saeidi Asl, who now volunteers as a mentor. “If your parents were farmers, you became a farmer. If your parents were truckers, you became a trucker.”
That was not the case for Destiny Jones, who also was at Chatfield when it closed. “I didn’t think I was going to do well in the workforce without an education,” Jones said. “I’m a person who needs to be told how to do something.” Plus, “it was going to lead to a higher-paying job.”
Jones, who is 21, was speaking at a daycare center where she works during breaks to help make money for tuition at Mount Saint Joseph University in Cincinnati, which she now attends on her way to getting a degree in art education and becoming a teacher.
Going to Chatfield was much easier. “I didn’t feel like I had to stress about not being able to get there,” she said. Now, at Mount Saint Joseph, “I definitely get pretty homesick, especially in the middle of the semester.” As someone who is close to her family, “I didn’t want to be away.”
Destiny Jones at the daycare center where she works to help earn money for tuition. Jones attended Chatfield College until it closed and now goes to Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati. Chatfield’s very existence “made people think about college because it was close by,” Jones says. Credit: Grace McConnell for The Hechinger Report
Chatfield’s very existence, Jones said, “made people think about college because it was close by.” Still, many of her high school classmates didn’t go. They took “blue-collar jobs, working in restaurants, doing mechanical work, construction — anything they can get their hands on.”
Rural high school graduates are far less likely to go directly to college than their suburban counterparts, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center — 56 percent, compared to 62 percent, respectively. That’s down substantially in just the last three years.
A big reason for that is a lack of confidence, said Hesson. “They don’t think they can do it. It’s unknown.” And without a college close by, “you lose accessibility.”
Robertson, for instance, had never driven on a highway before Chatfield’s closing forced her to transfer to her Kentucky university, nearly two and a half hours away, which has 1,395 undergraduates.
“She said Asbury is such a big college, and I cracked up, because it’s not,” said April Houk, a Fayetteville resident who is Robertson’s volunteer mentor. “She was kind of like a deer in the headlights.” So Houk sent her a bouquet of flowers and some words of encouragement at the beginning of the school year; two weeks later, Robertson had joined some extracurricular clubs, found a friend to study with and was majoring in equine science with plans to become a veterinarian.
April Houk, who lives on a farm near the now-closed Chatfield College. Houk has become a volunteer mentor for a rural student being helped by the Chatfield Edge, a nonprofit that succeeded the college. Credit: Grace McConnell for The Hechinger Report
Still, Robertson said, she misses having a college closer to home, which was also cheaper, since she could commute. Her new life “is a pretty different experience,” she said, “because I’m living away from home for the first time. It’s a much bigger campus. There’s more of a sense of anonymity. It can be a little lonely.”
Small rural colleges are more supportive, said Homan, the Ursuline nun and archivist, who also went to Chatfield and later worked there and at a tiny branch campus in Cincinnati that has also closed. “I was the cheerleader,” she said. “I found students if they didn’t show up. If they didn’t have bus fare, we would help them with that.”
Her experience of working in the area “is that the older generation says, ‘I don’t have a college education and I did fine.’ Students aren’t looking for a college education. It is not the aspiration.”
Many, when they’re older, find they do need one, however. That was the case for Jackie Schmidt, who got her associate degree at Chatfield and went on to a successful career as an office manager and accounting manager before helping start a contract manufacturing company. When she was laid off — “I was 54 and had the rug pulled out from under me” — she found “the jobs I thought I was qualified for required a bachelor’s degree.” But “I was intimidated at this age to be going back to school.”
Jackie Schmidt, who went to Chatfield College and now is returning to school for a bachelor’s degree at 56, with help from a nonprofit, the Chatfield Edge. “I was intimidated at this age to be going back to school,” Schmidt says. Credit: Grace McConnell for The Hechinger Report
Schmidt, now 56, found her way to the Chatfield Edge and with its help enrolled in an online bachelor’s degree program in business administration.
With rural colleges closing, she said, “I worry because not only for kids just getting out of high school but adults who decide they want to go back to school — what avenues do they have?”
Chatfield College created a sense of community not only for its students, but for the surrounding township, said Houk, who lives a mile from the campus on a 1,300-acre farm. Her husband’s grandmother worked there as a cook, and Houk went to summer camps at Chatfield and was married in the chapel. “We loved this place,” she said. “It really has a lot of history.”
She looked around at the all-but-abandoned campus. “It almost makes you emotional — the integrity it brought to the community.” Even though it’s no longer operating, she said, “I still say, ‘I live one mile from Chatfield College at the stop sign.’ It’s sad to have it gone.”
Without the college, “We lose that educational opportunity and the gifts that these young people have if they were educated,” said Homan, who is now on the board of the Chatfield Edge and Schmidt’s mentor. She, too, looked around the campus. “Oh my gosh, it’s quiet. But it lives on. It does. I know that.”
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.
Our students are struggling. As a college president and a clinical psychologist, I know this well.
Recent headlines tell a distressing story about the mental health of college students. While the news articles are alarming, it is worth noting that much of the data they cite comes from self-reporting by students.
This self-reporting gives us important insights into how our students are feeling, but it is not equivalent to clinical diagnoses. By equating self-reporting with diagnoses, we risk applying the wrong interventions.
I’ve spent much of my career overseeing clinical services and other student supports, and I know the importance of clinical interventions. They are intended to be matched to specific diagnoses and can involve a variety of treatments, including individual or group and outpatient or inpatient, by licensed mental health professionals.
But I believe we must shift how we support students’ emotional needs. Clinical interventions are not the only way — and often not the most appropriate or effective way — to support young people who may be temporarily struggling with feelings that do not meet the full psychological definition of mental illness.
Rather than needing a clinical intervention, many students may benefit most from support that builds their resilience if they are feeling sad, worried, overwhelmed or anxious. Resilient students are better positioned to cope with temporary periods of heightened emotional stress.
In the past, teaching these skills was usually not seen as central to the mission of a college or university, yet learning how to cope emotionally may be among our students’ most vital and integral lessons.
It is something that will serve them throughout — and well beyond — their time on our campuses.
Data drawn from student self-reporting provides important insights into their needs. Some 44 percent of students reported that they experienced symptoms of depression during the 2021-22 academic year, a Healthy Minds survey of 96,000 U.S. college students shows; 37 percent said they experienced anxiety.
In addition, two out of five undergraduates said that they “frequently” experience emotional stress, results from a Gallup-Lumina Foundation report found, while 36 percent of students pursuing bachelor’s degrees reported that they had considered “stopping out” in the last six months. The most commonly cited reasons were “emotional stress” (69 percent) and “personal mental health reasons” (59 percent).
Researchers have hypothesized that at least some of these self-reported crises may be due to an increased awareness and normalization of mental health conditions.
This awareness is something we should regard as positive and beneficial because it reduces the stigma and isolation that have long impeded students from getting support. But we also must recognize an unintentional, negative impact of this increased awareness: overinterpretation.
Young people experiencing negative emotions and facing normal developmental challenges may be particularly vulnerable to misidentifying those experiences as actual illnesses.
This is not to suggest that the mental health crisis is not real, or that we should not support our students or validate their experiences. Students are struggling every day on my campus and on campuses across the country. Mental illness often first appears or worsens in young adulthood, and for these students, accessing appropriate clinical intervention is critical.
But for many students, what will be most appropriate and effective are supports to develop their resilience and coping strategies and the confidence to rebound from setbacks.
Being a young adult today is not easy. In addition to facing typical challenges, such as forming an identity and developing life skills, they have grown up with pressures from social media, isolation brought on by the global pandemic and the economic and political uncertainties of the twenty-first century.
Rising college costs have also raised the stakes for many students. College is a huge commitment both monetarily and emotionally, and our students know it.
They inevitably face obstacles when they move into the college environment, such as not knowing where they fit in and encountering more challenging coursework than they had previously. Believing they are an outlier, rather than the norm, may undermine their resilience.
That’s why at Lewis & Clark we incorporate resilience-building practices, using research-based belonging exercises as well as intentional peer-to-peer support.
Two of our psychology professors, Jerusha Detweiler-Bedell and Brian Detweiler-Bedell, spearheaded our participation in a multiyear Stanford-led study that aimed to foster a deeper sense of belonging among our incoming first-year students, with the goal of helping them understand that their struggles are normal — and that things will get better over time.
The exercises in the study incorporated stories of obstacles faced by other students and how they overcame them. While the original study’s sample size was small, we saw an increase in retention rates and GPAs, especially among students from underrepresented groups. The results were so compelling that all incoming Lewis & Clark undergraduates now participate in the social belonging intervention.
We also initiated a peer mentoring program specifically serving first-year students. The mentors reach out to incoming first-year students and introduce them to campus life with information about academic advising, navigating health and wellness services and various campus clubs and social options. The mentoring relationship begins during orientation and continues throughout the semester. Just as important as what the peer mentors do is how they model resilience.
Of course, approaches like these should be offered with an understanding of what other interventions some students may need. Clinical depression and anxiety disorders do require clinical support. Higher education institutions must continue to expand our capacity to provide such support for those students who need it.
But we must also prioritize programs that bolster resilience. These efforts can reassure and help students (and their families) who may be misidentifying their feelings based on popular rather than clinical understandings of depression and anxiety.
When it comes to setting students up for success in their professional and personal lives, resilience may be the most important skill we can encourage them to develop.
Robin H. Holmes-Sullivan is president of Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She has maintained a private clinical psychology and consulting practice for more than three decades.
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.
Though college enrollment seems to be stabilizing after the pandemic disruptions, predictions for the next 15 years are grim. Colleges will be hurt financially by fewer tuition-paying students, and many will have to merge with other institutions or make significant changes to the way they operate if they want to keep their doors open.
At least 30 colleges closed their only or final campus in the first 10 months of 2023, including 14 nonprofit colleges and 16 for-profit colleges, according to an analysis of federal data by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, or SHEEO. Among nonprofits, this came on the heels of 2022, when 23 of them closed, along with 25 for-profit institutions. Before 2022, the greatest number of nonprofit colleges that closed in a single year was 13.
Over the past two decades, far more for-profit colleges closed each year than nonprofits. An average of nine nonprofit colleges closed each year, compared to an average of 47 for-profit colleges.
This time last year, experts predicted we’d see another wave of college closures, mostly institutions that were struggling before the pandemic and were kept afloat by Covid-era funding. Since then, keeping their doors open has become unrealistic for these colleges, many of which are regional private colleges.
“It’s not corruption, it’s not financial misappropriation of funds, it’s just that they can’t rebound enrollment.”
Rachel Burns, a senior policy analyst at SHEEO.
For many, the situation has been made worse by the enrollment declines during the pandemic.
“It’s not corruption, it’s not financial misappropriation of funds, it’s just that they can’t rebound enrollment,” said Rachel Burns, a senior policy analyst at SHEEO.
Hundreds of colleges are expected to see significant enrollment declines in the coming years, according to David Attis, managing director of research at the education consulting company EAB. Among the reasons, he said, are declining birthrates, smaller shares of students choosing college, and college-going students veering toward larger and more selective institutions.
By 2030, 449 colleges are expected to see a 25 percent decline in enrollment and 182 colleges are expected to see a 50 percent decline, according to an EAB analysis of federal enrollment data. By 2035, those numbers are expected to rise to 534 colleges expecting a 25 percent decline and 227 colleges expecting a 50 percent decline; by 2040, a total of 566 colleges are expected to see a 25 percent decline and 247 are expected to see a 50 percent decline, according to EAB’s analysis.
These are predictions, of course, and they certainly don’t ensure that all those colleges will close. But with these drops in enrollment expected to continue, colleges need to plan now and make significant changes in order to survive, Attis said.
“Imagine if you lose half your students – that is a threat to your continued existence.”
David Attis, managing director of research at the education consulting company EAB.
“Imagine if you lose half your students – that is a threat to your continued existence,” Attis said. “You’ll have to make some pretty dramatic changes. It’s not just a ‘We’ll cut a few academic programs,’ or ‘We’ll trim our administrative staff a little bit.’ That requires a real reorientation of your whole strategy.”
Many colleges face the decision to merge with another institution or close down entirely, Attis said. And if they wait too long to find a college to merge with, they really won’t have a choice.
“If you wait until you’re on the verge of closure, you’re not a particularly attractive partner,” Attis said. “But if you’re not on the verge of closure, then you’re not as motivated to find that partner.”
Attis said that he’s been surprised to hear from several leaders of regional colleges – both private and public – that they are in talks about mergers.
“Whether they’ve pursued them or not, they’ve either made a call or gotten a call,” Attis said. “They’re thinking about it in a way I hadn’t heard in the past.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
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Education and education access are directly connected to economic growth. Despite the dysfunction in Congress, especially over border issues and foreign aid, there are key education bills that can provide not only solutions for the issues they address but also models for getting things done across a range of other issues.
Two pieces of legislation that could improve our economic future by advancing education and workforce development passed the Committee on Education and the Workforce a few weeks ago with broad and bipartisan support, demonstrating that consensus is not only possible and practical but achievable.
The success of these bipartisan solutions could break down walls of division and better the lives of our nation’s students while bolstering our cities’ economies.
In mid-December, the committee approved the Bipartisan Workforce Pell Act, with support from both Republican Chairwoman Virginia Foxx and ranking Democratic member Bobby Scott, who co-sponsored the legislation.
The bill would expand Pell Grants to provide needed tuition assistance for short-term education and training directly linked to career opportunities, easing the costs of attaining the education and skills that all students, and especially low-income students, desperately need.
The bill would also fund access to online learning, further cutting costs and making education more flexible and accessible. A vast array of students across red and blue states would benefit from the bill’s commonsense approach, as would our community colleges, employers and, by extension, all Americans.
That same House Committee voted, a bit earlier, also with bipartisan support, to reauthorize the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. This legislation includes federal funding to support education and skills-based training directly connected to career opportunities and economic success.
This too will directly impact our nation’s community colleges, which are the key engines of economic mobility.
Under the bill, existing Labor Department funding could be repurposed to provide eligible workers with individual, customized education and training accounts, leading to improved career opportunities.
The bill would also specifically address the education and training needs of our incarcerated youth by providing them with the education and skills needed to ease their transition into a stable future. And it would add accountability provisions to ensure that spending for education will lead to concrete job growth. Like the Pell legislation, the bill has broad support among education and business leaders.
Passing short-term Pell along with passing workforce and education legislation would provide a clear pathway from high schools to colleges and careers, ensuring a brighter future for millions of students across the nation.
Both pieces of legislation could potentially pass the House and the Senate and be signed into law early in the New Year.
Smart investments in Education can be both the answer to governmental gridlock and spur economic progress.
Of course, as is usually the case with legislation that clears committee hurdles, the bills contain small flaws that demand fixes.
For example, in the Pell bill, one item that could derail passage in the full House and Senate and set back the nation’s commitment to social mobility for students is a provision calling for a reduction in student loan eligibility for students at some of the most selective colleges. Another flaw is that the legislation could open the door to abuse by predatory for-profit colleges. These parts of the plan can easily be fixed to ensure passage.
Passing short-term Pell and workforce and education legislation would provide a clear pathway from high schools to colleges and careers, ensuring a brighter future for millions of students across the nation.
We’ve seen bipartisan support deliver dynamic education and economic growth before, most recently when Democrats and Republicans in both the House and the Senate united behind Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer’s CHIPS and Science Act.
That act mobilized efforts to restore American leadership in the semiconductor industry while creating good-paying jobs and reducing the cost of automobiles, refrigerators and computers.
The CHIPS and Science Act, with bipartisan support, also included a huge investment in education research, and became a model for the progress that can be achieved when parties come together to better the lives of the people.
Now is the time for more bipartisan progress. Passage of these two critical education bills would be a fine start, fueling job creation and bettering the skills and future incomes of our nation’s students, who need our support now more than ever. And the bills’ passage would provide a model for how to eliminate gridlock and address our core economic challenges in a positive manner.
Most polling suggests that the top-of-mind topics for most Americans are the proverbial “kitchen table issues,” led by the economy and its effect on working-class Americans.
These bills address those issues. Americans with the education and skills to be employed in growing industries will earn higher wages, and the increased tax revenues from those wages will support our nation’s schools at all levels. And these bills’ prioritization of our community colleges will help them become an even stronger engine for jump-starting and sustaining America’s growth.
In recent years, it’s begun to seem that dysfunction is the one thing that Washington can be reliably counted on to provide. But let’s not simply accept that Congress can no longer come together to support initiatives that meet our needs and provide enhanced opportunities.
For many years, education issues have divided Americans; these core education bills can unite us. They deserve prompt action.
Stanley Litow served as deputy chancellor of schools for New York City and as president of the IBM Foundation. He now serves as adjunct professor at Columbia University and as trustee of the State University of New York where he chairs the Academic Affairs Committee.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn't mean it's free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Aléshah Brown wasn’t yet in high school when she started having doubts about college.
“Even in middle school, you’re feeling all this pressure and stress about going to college, but no one’s asking you, ‘What do you want to do?’ ” said Brown, of San Antonio, Texas. “That was a very stressful thing for me.”
This anxiety, along with the cost and other issues, is among the many things discouraging growing numbers of students from even applying to college.
Brown eventually found a website that promised, in plain and simple English, to help her start her journey. Much of the information was conveyed by other young people who had already graduated from high school and begun careers. And the site prominently included how much money she could make in particular jobs.
“It’s showing students, ‘Hey, let’s see what you individually like to do, what you love and how you can make a difference in the world,’ ” she said. “You’re being asked that question instead of being given this general list of options that you don’t understand.”
This clear-cut, straightforward message didn’t come from academics or administrators, policymakers or politicians. It’s the brainchild of an advertising executive, Roy Spence, the man behind such well-known slogans as “Don’t Mess With Texas” and “You are now free to move about the country.”
The proportion of high school graduates going directly to college has fallen from a high of 70 percent in 2016 to 62 percent in 2021.
Spence’s campaign underscores how glaringly little the higher education industry itself has done to confront the crisis of confidence that is eating away at its business.
“Universities tend to have a hard time having a very clear, focused message,” said Eunkyu Lee, associate dean and a professor of marketing at Syracuse University’s Whitman School of Management. “There’s a lot more focus on rankings and much less collective effort to rebuild confidence in the value of higher education.”
That’s one of the reasons Spence set up an independent nonprofit group two years ago called the Make It Movement — the organization whose website Brown found — to show students in central Texas how and why to continue their educations past high school. There are now plans to expand the campaign nationwide.
It doesn’t promote any particular university or college — not even Spence’s beloved University of Texas at Austin, whose logo adorns the bright orange fleece he’s wearing at the stand-up desk in his Austin office. In fact, it doesn’t suggest that students have to go to college at all; it just encourages them to learn something that can set them up for jobs that pay more than if they stopped at high school. They could train for a trade, for instance.
There’s an interactive tool from which users can choose what kind of workplace they prefer (indoor, outdoor, at home), their personalities (thinker, doer, creator, planner) and what they value. Various careers pop up, with the educations required to reach each one, and what they pay.
“The world doesn’t deal with complex stuff anymore. You have to get it to me fast and compelling, interactive, peer to peer and simple,” said Spence, co-founder and chair of GSD&M, a marketing and advertising company whose clients have included Walmart, DreamWorks, the PGA Tour, BMW and the U.S. Air Force.
A highway billboard encouraging central Texans to continue their educations past high school — and telling them how much they can earn if they do. The billboards are part of the Make It Movement, an independent campaign to reverse the crisis of confidence in postsecondary education. Credit: Winston O’Neal/@CCRStudios
The point, the website tells the middle and high school students at whom it’s aimed, “is to help you discover your purpose” — something that has gotten blurred as young people question the traditional paths once taken after high school, such as going straight to college.
“At some point universities and colleges must advertise not the college but have a young person look in the camera and say, ‘I went to Boston University. Here’s what happened.’ ” Spence said.
The idea has proven popular beyond expectations. Make It Movement hoped to reach 20,000 central Texas students with its website; more than 80,000 have logged on, the organization says. Billboards drawing more attention to the campaign line the sides of highways in the region.
A survey of 300 middle and high school students in Austin and central Texas found that the proportion who were very aware of how they could make at least $50,000 soon after high school rose from 23 percent before they used the website to 61 percent afterward, Make It Movement says. The proportion who were aware that there were options close to home to train for jobs doing what they wanted went from 42 percent to 93 percent.
In other industries with image problems, competitors have banded together to change public perception, often using marketing and advertising the way the Make It Movement has, Spence said.
If universities came together that way, in a sort of alliance for higher learning, “you would have the best [advertising] agencies in the country bidding on it.” Instead, he said, “what you have now is every university doing its own thing, when what we have is an industry image issue.”
There’s myriad evidence that many Americans are souring on college.
The proportion of high school graduates going directly to college has fallen from a high of 70 percent in 2016 to 62 percent in 2021, the most recent year for which the figure is available, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That’s the equivalent of hundreds of thousands fewer high school grads entering college that year as freshmen.
“What you have now is every university doing its own thing, when what we have is an industry image issue.”
Roy Spence, founder, Make It Movement
One important reason this is happening is the cost, which has doubled in the last 40 years, even after being adjusted for inflation, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
But another is an indisputable lack of faith in the payoff.
Nearly half of high school graduates age 18 to 30 who decided not to go to college or dropped out agreed that getting a college degree was not worth the cost because they couldn’t afford to go into debt to pay for it without a guarantee of a career, according to focus groups convened by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Fewer than four in 10 of the 1,675 non-college-goer focus group participants believed that getting a degree would lead to a career allowing them to be financially stable.
In fact, people with college and university degrees make back in annual income 14 percent to 36 percent more than what they spent per year on their educations, depending on their race and gender, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis estimates. While this premium has been falling, it still makes college “an excellent investment,” the Fed concluded.
Yet universities don’t like talking about jobs and salaries, said Marcus Collins, a former head of strategy at Wieden+Kennedy, New York, and a marketing executive who has done work for Apple and McDonald’s, headed a digital strategy for Beyoncé and is now a clinical professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.
“I see it as an incongruence of expectations and ambitions,” Collins said. Universities believe themselves to be places people come to learn, he said, “and in doing so you get some skills that will help you in the job market.” But consumers are increasingly focused first and foremost on careers; 62 percent say they would be willing to go into debt to pay for college if they knew there was a good job at the end, those Gates Foundation focus groups found.
“Universities tend to have a hard time having a very clear, focused message. There’s a lot more focus on rankings and much less collective effort to rebuild confidence in the value of higher education.”
Eunkyu Lee, associate dean and professor of marketing, Martin J. Whitman School of Management, Syracuse University
“It’s about product market fit, in that the product that we bring to market has to meet the ambitions of the market,” said Collins, author of the new book “For the Culture: The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do, and Who We Want to Be.” And many prospective students no longer connect the product of a college education with the outcome of a good job.
Meanwhile, universities have struggled to reverse even basic misperceptions — that students all pay the full advertised tuition listed on their websites, for example.
“The cost of higher education is real and it’s very high, but what people generally hear about is the sticker price at prestigious universities, where in fact the net price that most people pay is much lower” after accounting for discounts and financial aid, Syracuse’s Lee said.
After cost, the second most common reason people age 18 to 30 give for not going to college or for dropping out is stress. Also in the top four: not being certain of a career. That’s according to focus groups assembled by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, which was trying to figure out why high school students weren’t going on to college — a trend that’s jeopardizing that state’s goal of increasing the proportion of its population with degrees.
The decline in college-going is worrying employers struggling to fill jobs that require workers who are college educated or trained in the trades. Among the funders of the Make It Movement are the Austin chamber of commerce, the Texas Association of Builders and the Austin Regional Manufacturers Association.
“We have a massive surplus of high-skill careers out there,” Spence said, “and nobody to apply for them.”
The Make It Movement hoped to reach 20,000 central Texas students with its website; so far, more than 80,000 have logged on.
More of this kind of marketing outreach is critical, Lee said.
“There needs to be a more collective effort to deal with this public skepticism” about education after high school, he said. “Building a common voice that could reverse the negative trend of confidence in higher education is critical not only for the well-being of the institutions, but also the well-being of the nation economically.”
As for Brown, the student in San Antonio, she’s now in college studying toward a degree in digital marketing with plans to work in the entertainment industry. She liked the Make It Movement’s work so much, she has become a “student ambassador” for it.
Other young people, Brown said, are “almost succumbing — I know that’s a dramatic word — to an idea that they have to do things a specific way: ‘I have to go to college. I don’t know what I want to do, but I have to go.’ And that’s so stressful.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Editor’s note: This story led off this week’s Higher Education newsletter, which is delivered free to subscribers’ inboxes every other Thursday with trends and top stories about higher education.
Dear Reader,
Saying it’s been a wild year in higher education news seems like the understatement of the century. (I think even non-education nerds would agree!) Thank you for sticking with The Hechinger Report as we tried to make sense of it all.
The court ultimately ruled against student loan forgiveness and against the consideration of race in college admissions.
Shortly thereafter, led by Jon Marcus and Fazil Khan, our team began working on The College Welcome Guide, a tool that helps students and families go beyond the rankings and understand what their life might be like on any four-year college campus in America. Jon’s reporting made it clear that the culture wars are beginning to affect where students go to college, and we wanted to help ensure people had the many types of information they needed to make the best choice, regardless of who they are or what their political orientation is.
In 2024, we will continue to cover equity and innovation in higher education with nuance, care and a critical eye. Is there a story you think we should cover? Reply to this email to let us know.
For now, we hope you have a warm and restful break. See you in the new year.
Olivia
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The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
CROSSVILLE, Tenn. — From the time she was in elementary school, Isabella Cross has dreamed of going to an Ivy League college to become an engineer.
But in her “little no-name town,” as she describes it, selective universities and colleges rarely came to recruit.
As a 17-year-old in rural Tennessee, and the daughter of a single parent, “I always kind of felt, like, I wouldn’t say necessarily trapped, but a lot of kids feel trapped,” Cross said. “And a lot of them never get out. They never get to explore and never get to see other things.”
Now Cross thinks she might get to a top-flight college after all.
Carlos Vega, an admissions recruiter from MIT, sets up a table for a college fair at Stone Memorial High School in Crossville, Tennessee. The visit was among the first by a new consortium of top universities to reach out to rural students. Credit: Austin Anthony/The Hechinger Report
Recruiters from some of the nation’s most selective universities — MIT, the University of Chicago, Yale — have, for the first time, come to her “little no-name town,” part of an effort to pay more attention to rural America, where students are less likely than their urban and suburban counterparts to go to college and, if they do, more likely to drop out.
“It kind of just felt like they heard us and they see us and that they know that there’s a need as well for small-town kids like me to have really big dreams,” Cross said.
Rural students graduate from high school at a higher rate (90 percent) than their counterparts in cities (82 percent) and suburbs (89 percent). But only 55 percent go directly to college.
The visit to Crossville was among the first by a new consortium called STARS, or Small Town and Rural Students College Network, prompted by a $20 million grant from a University of Chicago trustee who left a small town in Missouri to create a financial services company and who wants to see more people from backgrounds like his go to and through college.
It follows a long history of neglect of rural areas by many colleges and universities. Not even public research universities recruit in rural places, a study by scholars at UCLA and the University of Arizona found, disproportionately favoring higher-income public and private high schools in major metropolitan areas.
Even when they do find their way to these small towns, recruiters are up against increasing reluctance by students and their families to go to four-year institutions, and especially to campuses far away from home.
Students in the hallway of Stone Memorial High School in Crossville, Tennessee. The graduation rate at Stone Memorial is 91 percent, higher than the national average. Credit: Austin Anthony/The Hechinger Report
Sixteen colleges and universities in all — also including Brown, the California Institute of Technology, Columbia, Northwestern and the University of Southern California — have signed on to STARS and agreed to visit rural high schools in exchange for financial help with travel costs and staffing.
“They’ve never come and taken an interest in us. But the big thing right now is rural, and they’re finally seeing it, I guess,” said Karen Hicks, lead counselor at Crossville’s Stone Memorial High School, who has been an educator in the city for 36 years. “I love it in the sense that it gives our kids opportunities. I hate that they didn’t see it before.”
Rural communities can be hard to reach and often have only small numbers of prospective high school seniors, said Marjorie Betley, senior associate director of admissions at the University of Chicago, who helped organize STARS and serves as its executive director.
“Driving hours and hours on the road to meet with five students, that’s really hard,” said Betley.
But when that trustee, Byron Trott, asked in 2018 how many students at her university came from rural places, as he had, “we couldn’t even answer the question,” Betley said. After further inquiry, she said, “the numbers were not good.” Rural students comprised about 3 percent of enrollment at the time, which she said has since increased to 9 percent. Rural Americans comprise nearly 20 percent of the population, the Census Bureau reports.
Crossville, Tennessee. Rural students nationwide graduate from high school at a higher rate than their counterparts in cities and suburbs but are the least likely to go directly to college. Credit: Austin Anthony/The Hechinger Report
That’s a smaller proportion than suburban students. It’s also getting worse, down from 61 percent in 2016, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center says. In Tennessee, the share of all high school graduates who went directly to college last year, though up slightly, was still 10 percentage points lower than five years before.
So rarely do top colleges recruit in rural towns, said Bryan Sexton, a father who came with his son to the college fair in Crossville, that, “you know, when I saw some of the names, I was, like, what are these schools doing here?”
A city of 12,470 named for the spot where an old stagecoach road crossed a onetime cattle drivers’ route between Nashville and Knoxville, Crossville is in the middle of the rocky, heavily forested Cumberland Plateau in the Appalachian Mountains. And it’s a case study in how rural families aspire to, fret about and often decide to forgo college.
Outside the auditorium of the city’s Stone Memorial High School, Nae Evans Sims stopped and thought for a moment about the smallest community she’d ever visited as an admissions recruiter for Case Western Reserve University. “Oh, my gosh,” she said. “Probably this one.”
Alongside representatives from Yale, MIT, the University of Chicago and other institutions, Sims was arranging brochures on a table in anticipation of the kind of college recruiting fair that draws throngs of anxious students and their parents almost every night of the fall in more densely populated towns and cities.
Vice Principal April Moore sets up a projector for the presentations of the Tristar College Tour on Wednesday, Oct. 4, 2023, at Stone Memorial High School in Crossville, Tenn. (Austin Anthony for the Hechinger Report) Credit: Austin Anthony/The Hechinger Report
In Crossville, 81 students showed up for the recruiting night, to which students from adjoining towns across the county were also invited.
“My friends in the cities, their kids start talking about college when they’re freshmen,” said Rob Harrison, a city councilmember who stopped by. But in Crossville, he said, “a lot of kids don’t even think about the opportunities out there. It’s just not part of the culture.”
Then again, no one from those elite universities had ever come to Crossville, school officials said, even though the graduation rate from Stone Memorial is 91 percent, school statistics show.
Of the students here who choose to continue their education, many simply stick around and go to the community college just across the street, where tuition is free. More than one in 10 enroll in a local trade school, the Tennessee College of Applied Technology, and 4 percent enlist in the military.
That makes Crossville fairly typical of rural places, where residents are less likely to get bachelor’s degrees. Only about 20 percent of people over 25 in rural America (and 15 percent in Crossville) have bachelor’s degrees or higher, compared to 40 percent nationally, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture — a gap the Federal Reserve reports has been widening steadily over the last 50 years.
Main Street in Crossville, Tennessee. The city of 12,470 on the Cumberland Plateau was named for the spot where an old stagecoach road crossed a onetime cattle drivers’ route. Credit: Austin Anthony/The Hechinger Report
That not only contributes to the worsening divide between urban and rural America; it limits economic opportunity in rural places.
“Whenever a student graduates from high school on a path to create career success, communities benefit from strong workforces and from economic development,” said Noa Meyer, president of rootED Alliance, another STARS partner, which puts college and career advisors in rural high schools. “It’s essential for rural communities to have a skilled and invested workforce. Local businesses need skilled workers.”
But the path to that goal is narrowing. At least a dozen private, nonprofit colleges in rural areas or that serve rural students have closed or announced their closings in the last three years. Public universities in rural parts of Kansas, Arkansas and West Virginia are cutting dozens of majors. Others are merging, including in Pennsylvania and Vermont. Spending on higher education fell in 16 of the 20 most rural states between 2008 and 2018, when adjusted for inflation, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Laura Kidwell, a counselor at Stone Memorial High School. Even high-achieving students “don’t necessarily want to leave” for college, she says. Credit: Austin Anthony/The Hechinger Report
About 13 million people now live in higher education “deserts,” mostly in the Midwest and Great Plains, where the nearest university is beyond a reasonable commute away, the American Council on Education estimates.
“There is a significant untapped talent pool in our rural communities, yet rural students often lack access to the resources needed to help set them up for their education, careers and economic stability,” said Trott, founder, chairman and co-CEO of BDT & MSD Partners.
Also as in Crossville, rural students who do go to college generally prefer to stay close to home, research shows.
“Even the ones that have the higher scores, that can survive at some of the more prestigious colleges, they like it here, and they don’t necessarily want to leave,” said Laura Kidwell, another Stone Memorial school counselor. “They want to be within driving distance from home and their family and friends and relatives.”
Aaron Conley, a senior at Stone Memorial High School in Crossville, Tennessee, is deciding between learning heating, ventilation and air conditioning or going to college. If he does go, he says, he’d stick close to home so “I can come back and see my family whenever I want.” Credit: Austin Anthony/The Hechinger Report
Aaron Conley is a senior at the high school. He’s deciding between learning heating, ventilation and air conditioning to start his own HVAC business or going to college to study physical therapy or nursing — though both of those fields require “a lot of college. It’s something that I just don’t know if I want to do for a long period of time like that.”
If he does go to college, Conley said, he’d opt for Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville, 30 minutes away, so “I can come back and see my family whenever I want.”
Karen Hicks, lead counselor at Stone Memorial High School. Top colleges have “never come and taken an interest in us,” she says. “But the big thing right now is rural, and they’re finally seeing it, I guess.” Credit: Austin Anthony/The Hechinger Report
Many parents here don’t want their kids to move away, either. Some are concerned that university campuses and faculty in far-flung places are too liberal and not religious enough, Hicks, the school counselor, said. In the surrounding Cumberland County, nearly four out of five voters in the 2020 presidential election cast their ballots for Donald Trump and 71 percent of Tennessee residents consider religion very important to their lives, according to the Pew Research Center, compared to the national average of 53 percent.
“Some of the things that you hear in the news and stuff that happens at different colleges is scary for a conservative family,” Hicks said. Parents think, “ ‘I have control of you now, and I know your environment, and to send you out to that big world is scary.’ ”
Amy Beth Strong would prefer that her daughter, Ellie Beth, stick around for at least a little while, and maybe start at the local community college after she graduates from Stone Memorial next spring.
“I’m not trying to hold on to them, and I want them to do what they want to do, but I would rather they have a little bit more life experience under their belt,” Strong said, instead of “throwing them out in the middle of the world and saying, ‘Okay, there you go, you’re 18, you’re done. So have at it.’ ”
Amy Beth Strong and her daughter Ellie Beth, who she would like to stay close to home after high school — at least for a while. “I want them to do what they want to do, but I would rather they have a little bit more life experience under their belt,” Amy Beth Strong says. Credit: Austin Anthony/The Hechinger Report
Some rural parents also worry that their children, if they go far away for college, won’t come back, Hicks said.
Even Harrison conceded that they may be right. “We raise a lot of good kids, and they go off and there’s not a lot to come back to” in a city ringed by soybean, corn and cotton farms and whose main industries include the manufacturing of tile, porcelain, automotive parts and truck trailers.
Some Crossville parents are encouraging their reluctant children to go on to further education, however.
Tina Carr started college, stopping now and then to earn the money she needed to pay for it. But she never graduated.
Only 20 percent of people over 25 in rural places nationwide has a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 40 percent nationally.
“I’ve always regretted not being able to finish,” Carr said, still in her scrubs after commuting home from her job in Knoxville as the front-desk coordinator at a surgeon’s office. “I just see where people get stuck in, it’s a bad word to say, but ‘dead-end’ jobs without a college degree.” And while she likes what she does, she said, “I’ve seen a lot of jobs posted throughout the years that I think I could do, but I can’t because I don’t have that degree.”
That’s why Carr is pushing her daughter, Kira, to continue her education after high school. “I don’t want her down the line to eventually regret that she didn’t go to college” too, she said.
Another major reason fewer rural high school students go to college is the cost. Median earnings in rural areas are nearly one-sixth lower than incomes elsewhere, according to the USDA. In Crossville, the median household income is $40,708, compared to the national median of $74,580. More than 20 percent of the population lives in poverty; 40 percent of the 1,000 students at the high school are considered economically disadvantaged.
Despite their higher graduation rates, rural students also often feel that they don’t belong at top colleges. That, along with homesickness and the cost, is among the reasons those who do go are more likely to drop out than their urban and suburban classmates.
“We do have rural students come in who have that imposter syndrome, with classmates who took 20 [Advanced Placement courses] and their high school didn’t have any,” said Betley, at the University of Chicago.
At the Stone Memorial recruiting fair, the longest lines were to talk to representatives from the nearby University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Middle Tennessee State University and Tennessee Tech. The shortest was for MIT.
“That’s typically not the MIT experience,” said Carlos Vega, the recruiter from that university. “I go somewhere and I have auditoriums full of students.” In Tennessee, however, two other high schools had told him not to bother coming for scheduled visits, he said, because they didn’t have any students who were interested — a first in his career.
Max Bartley, a University of Chicago recruiter who is himself from rural Maine, speaks to students and parents at a college fair at Stone Memorial High School in Crossville, Tennessee. Sixteen top colleges and universities have agreed to visit rural high schools. Credit: Austin Anthony/The Hechinger Report
Ellie Beth Strong — she goes by E.B., a nickname given to her by her soccer coach — wonders how comfortable she’d feel at a big or far-off university. Also a senior at Stone Memorial, she has applied to two Christian colleges and the University of Tennessee.
After growing up in a small town, “I don’t want to go to a giant university where I’m just another person that you pass by when you’re going to class,” she said. “I don’t want to have 300 people in my class and have the professor just lecture the whole time. I want to actually get to sit down and talk to the people and get to know everybody.”
Rural students often face cultural differences at universities that mostly enroll people from other backgrounds, said Corinne Smith, an associate director of admissions at Yale who reads the applications of many students from rural places.
“So many students when they get to these campuses, especially when they’re more urban campuses, they have shared challenges,” Smith said.
Smith is also the advisor to the Rural Student Alliance at Yale, formed five years ago to help rural students feel more of a sense of belonging. When the group was started, she suggested social activities such as apple-picking. But the students instead wanted help getting used to the unaccustomed urban traffic noise outside their dorms or off-campus apartments. “Then they said, ‘Can someone take us on a tour of New Haven so I can see where things are — my town has one stoplight.’ ”
Rural perspectives like these are essential to the diversity of campuses, said Smith, who is working on a dissertation about rural college-going.
“They’ve never come and taken an interest in us. But the big thing right now is rural, and they’re finally seeing it, I guess. I love it in the sense that it gives our kids opportunities. I hate that they didn’t see it before.”
Karen Hicks, lead counselor, Stone Memorial High School
“If you say you want to have a university with a wonderful political science department and then 100 percent of the students in that political science seminar are from urban and suburban towns with the same religious and political affiliation, then are you really having the discussions that we say our institutions are meant to be having?” she asked.
Isabella Cross, the aspiring engineer, has no doubt about what she could contribute to a campus: a small-town sense of community.
“We see you in Walmart? We’re going to stop and talk to you for 45 minutes. We’re going to ask how the kids are. We’re going to ask how your mom is doing. We’re going to ask about all of the things that, you know, sometimes you just don’t get in, like, New York City or whatever larger-scale city that you want to put in there,” she said. “I just think that that’s something that you can bring to a school where it’s definitely a cutthroat competition to get into.”
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.
LAS VEGAS — Among its many other nicknames, this landlocked desert city is often jokingly referred to by Hawaiians as their state’s ninth island.
It attracts about a quarter of a million visitors each year who fly from Honolulu. More than 40,000 have stayed permanently. There are hula-dancing and lei-making lessons and outposts of Hawaii’s iconic Honolulu Cookie Company and ABC convenience stores. The Hawaiian fast-food chain Zippy’s opened its first mainland location here in October.
Soon there will be another Hawaiian export in Las Vegas: the first branch campus of Hawai‘i Pacific University.
The university, whose undergraduate enrollment has been falling, is among several that are opening new campuses in cities with growing populations and high student demand.
They’re not the first to do this; Pittsburgh-based Carnegie Mellon University, for example, spun off a campus in Silicon Valley in 2002.
But with customers getting harder to find, more colleges and universities are going to where the students are: in fast-growing cities that don’t already have a big supply of higher education institutions, such as Phoenix, Austin and Las Vegas.
“The islands are only so big. By nature, our potential student base is going to be constrained,” said Jennifer Walsh, senior vice president and provost at Hawai‘i Pacific, whose full-time undergraduate enrollment fell by 25 percent in the five years through 2020-21 — the last period for which official figures are available.
Las Vegas, by comparison, “is for all practical purposes an education desert. Not just an actual desert, but an education desert,” Walsh said.
Fifty-seven international campuses run by universities worldwide have closed, including 30 American satellite campuses since 2009.
Market research shows that there will be high demand for the graduates of the doctoral programs in physical and occupational therapy that Hawai‘i Pacific is opening here on one floor of a building in an industrial park it will share with the administrative offices of a casino operator. A master’s program for physician assistants is also planned.
Many schools in other places where the number of prospective students is declining “are going through the same population analysis,” Walsh said. “It’s just part of what you need to do to stay relevant and viable in this very fast-evolving climate.”
Those include Creighton University in Omaha and Fairfield University in Connecticut, which have opened campuses in fast-growing Phoenix and Austin, respectively, to train much-needed healthcare workers.
Unlike Hawai‘i Pacific, neither Creighton nor Fairfield has been experiencing enrollment declines on their home campuses, federal figures show. But both are in regions where a drop in the number of traditional-age undergraduates is looming, according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, which tracks this.
The satellite campus in Austin of Fairfield University’s Egan School of Nursing. The university has started offering healthcare degrees in the fast-growing city. Credit: Sarah Butrymowicz/The Hechinger Report
Healthy enrollments “could change for a lot of us with that demographic cliff” ahead, said the Rev. Daniel Hendrickson, president of Creighton. “We’ve realized it can’t just be business as usual.”
The university’s $100 million, 195,000-square-foot campus in Phoenix, which opened in 2021, includes a four-year medical school and accelerated nursing, pharmacy and occupational and physical therapy programs. This year it also started training physician assistants. Enrollment in the fall was 719 toward a goal of about 1,000 by 2025, a university spokesman said.
“The lack of healthcare professionals was very notable, and there was a notable lack of healthcare education,” Hendrickson said.
Universities are paying more attention to markets like that, said Rob Schnieders, vice president for online strategy and innovation at Fairfield. “A lot of planning goes into this, and more sophisticated research,” Schnieders said of the expansion of the university’s Egan School of Nursing to a satellite campus in Austin that opened in May.
Central Texas needs 3,600 more nurses than it has, for example, a gap expected to grow to more than 7,000 by 2032, the Texas Department of State Health Services projects.
“There’s really exciting potential to reach new folks” in places like that, Schnieders said.
That’s one of several reasons universities are opening branch campuses, said Peter Stokes, managing director at the consulting firm Huron, which helps them do that.
Inside the Austin campus of Connecticut-based Fairfield University’s Egan School of Nursing. The new building opened in May. Credit: Sarah Butrymowicz/The Hechinger Report
But when it comes to the criteria used to make a final decision about where to launch a branch campus, “enrollment and net tuition growth are going to be among the primary measures” schools consider, Stokes said — especially given “the supply and demand mismatch that we’re going to be experiencing for the next decade or decade and a half,” as the number of students in some parts of the country declines.
These days, he said, “almost every strategic conversation we have with a college or university involves some discussion of the role of place in that institution’s identity and in the context of that institution’s future.”
Northeastern University in Boston has been particularly aggressive in opening campuses with programs not otherwise widely available, in cities, including Oakland, California, Portland, Maine, Charlotte, Miami, Seattle, Toronto and Vancouver.
“Our strategy has always been to listen to the market and to go to where the learners are,” said Mary Ludden, senior vice president for global network and strategic initiatives at Northeastern, which also absorbed struggling Mills College near Silicon Valley in a deal finalized last year.
In this case, there’s another motivation, said Northeastern’s president, Joseph Aoun: Many of these campuses are focusing on older-than-traditional-age students seeking to further their educations and advance in their careers.
Northeastern University in Boston. The university has launched branch campuses in cities including Oakland, California, Portland, Maine, Charlotte, Miami, Seattle, Toronto and Vancouver. Credit: Rodrique Ngowi/ Associated Press
“The demand and the need is going to be at the lifelong-learning level,” even as the supply of 18- to 22-year-olds declines, Aoun said.
“On one side you have a shrinking pool and on the other side you have an expanding pool and people need to serve the lifelong learners,” he said.
Ludden said other universities and colleges are calling Northeastern for advice about how to open campuses in new markets.
“I think you’re going to see more of this, because a single-campus model may not be the most viable of institutions into the future,” she said.
Several other factors are driving universities to open branch campuses.
One is labor shortages, particularly in rural areas, spurring appeals from local leaders that the schools come and train workers there. The Indiana University School of Social Work this month, for instance, announced the creation of a satellite program in Lafayette, 100 miles to its north, to produce badly needed social workers trained in mental health and addiction issues.
And as remote work has emptied office buildings, there’s commercial real estate available at lower-than-usual prices in in desirable markets.
“We’ve realized it can’t just be business as usual.”
The Rev. Daniel Hendrickson, president, Creighton University
There are other examples. Historically Black Paul Quinn College in Dallas is exploring opening a campus in California, which doesn’t have any undergraduate historically Black colleges or universities.
As UCLA’s expansion in downtown Los Angeles shows, branch campuses don’t need to be particularly far away from their main campuses. Sacramento State University is planning to open one on the east side of its own city, where a giant development promises to significantly increase the population.
Other primary reasons that institutions open satellite campuses include the availability of outside funding and more exposure for universities not widely known outside of their traditional areas of operation, according to a study conducted for the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission when it was trying to lure a research campus to Montgomery County, Maryland.
Creighton, for instance, has seen an increase in the number of students from Phoenix who are enrolling at its main campus in Omaha, according to the university.
“There’s a recognition of the Creighton brand,” Hendrickson said.
But spinning off campuses can also be risky. Many U.S. universities that opened a spate of campuses abroad from 2000 to 2012 based partly on the promise of generous startup money from host countries in the Middle East and elsewhere have seen those schools struggle.
Eighty-four U.S. universities now operate campuses abroad, about a quarter of all international campuses globally, according to the Cross-Border Education Research Team, or C-BERT.
“Our strategy has always been to listen to the market and to go to where the learners are.”
Mary Ludden, senior vice president for global network and strategic initiatives, Northeastern University
Of those, 16 are in China, where geopolitics has chilled relations, and 10 are in the Middle East, where enthusiasm has ebbed. Fifty-seven international campuses run by universities worldwide have closed, including 30 American-run satellite campuses since 2004 for reasons including enrollment falling below expectations and sponsors pulling out. Yale has announced that it will end its collaboration in Singapore with the National University of Singapore in 2025.
The opening and operation of international satellite campuses “has flattened out from the burst of activity we saw 15 years ago,” said Kevin Kinser, department head of education policies studies at Pennsylvania State University and C-BERT’s co-founder. “The momentum for creating overseas campuses is not really what it was.”
Opening a new domestic campus may lack the complications of politics, currency exchanges and cultural divides, said Kinser. “But you still have some of the same challenges, which is that it’s a lot easier to manage a program within the same geographic space than across the country.”
For now, however, the trend continues. Hawai‘i Pacific is next considering opening a campus in the Pacific Northwest, Shaw said. With undergraduate enrollments expected to be stagnant, a spokesman said, the university’s growth strategy is focused on expanding its graduate programs at its main and other campuses.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
WILMINGTON, Del. – A wall of the Rodriguez family home celebrates three seminal events with these words: “A moment in time, changed forever.”
Beneath the inscription, a clock marks the time and dates when three swaddled newborns depicted in large photos entered the world: Ashley, now 19, Emily, 17, and Brianna, 11.
Another“moment in time” occurred last June, one that could change the paths of Emily and Brianna. That’s when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in its landmark case on affirmative action, barring colleges from taking race into consideration as a factor in admission decisions.
The ruling struck down more than 50 years of legal precedent, creating newfound uncertainty for the first class of college applicants to be shaped by the decision – especially for Black and Hispanic students hoping to get into highly competitive colleges that once sought them out.
The Rodriguez family at their home in Wilmington, Delaware, left to right: Mom Margarita, middle daughter Emily, youngest Brianna, father Rafael, with their college adviser, Atnre Alleyne. Credit: Liz Willen/The Hechinger Report
It also places the Rodriguez sisters on opposite sides of history: Ashley applied to college when schools in many states could still consider race, while Emily can expect no such advantage.
Their parents, Margarita Lopez, 38, and Rafael Rodriguez, 42, are immigrants from Mexico who moved to the United States as teenagers.
Ashley is the first in her family to attend college, a freshman studying child psychology on a full scholarship to prestigious Oxford College of Emory University, where annual estimated costs approached $80,000 this year.
Affirmative Action ends
While affirmative action made strides in increasing diversity on college campuses, it fell far short of meeting its intended goals. And now that it’s been struck down, CBS Reports teamed up with independent journalist Soledad O’Brien and The Hechinger Report to examine the fog of uncertainty for students and administrators who say the decision threatens to unravel decades of progress.
Emily is the middle daughter, a senior and mostly straight-A student at Conrad Schools of Science in Wilmington who wants to become a veterinarian, and who spent most of this fall anxiously awaiting word from her first-choice college, Cornell University.
The impact of the court’s decision on enrollment at hundreds of selective colleges and universities won’t start to become clear until colleges send out offers this spring and release final acceptance figures.
“We definitely feel that this year, the window is narrower for students whose GPA does not tell the full story of their brilliance and the challenges they’ve overcome.”
TeenSHARP co-founder Atnre Alleyne
But many students, counselors and families view this admission cycle as the first test of whether colleges will become less diverse going forward, while cautioning it may take years before a clear pattern emerges. The Hechinger Report contacted more than 40 selective colleges and universities asking for the racial breakdown of those who applied for early decision and were accepted this year.
About half the institutions responded and none provided the requested information. Several said that they would not have such data available even internally until after the admissions cycle wraps up next year. Some have cited advice from legal counsel in declining to release the racial and ethnic composition for the class of 2028.
For the Rodriguez family, higher education has already become a symbol of upward mobility, a life-altering path to meaningful careers and the sort of financial stability that Margarita and Rafael have never known.
College wasn’t a part of their culture, and before last year Rafael and Margarita had no idea how complicated and competitive the landscape would be for their bright, hardworking daughters. Of all U.S. racial or ethnic groups, Hispanic Americans are the least likely to hold a college degree.
“I never even dreamed about a place like Emory, or about all the schools that have really good financial aid,” Margarita said recently. She wouldn’t have looked beyond the local community college and state universities for her daughters if she hadn’t learned about TeenSHARP, a nonprofit that prepares high-performing students from underrepresented backgrounds for higher education.
She immediately signed up Ashley, and later, Emily.
TeenSHARP co-founder Atnre Alleyne, with his wife, Tatiana Poladko, and team of advisers, guided Ashley and Emily through their high school course selection and college essays, while pointing out leadership opportunities and colleges with good track records of offering scholarships.
Emory is one. The school admitted no Black students until 1963, but has aggressively recruited students from underrepresented backgrounds in recent years. Hispanic enrollment had been growing before the Supreme Court’s decision, from 7.5 percent in 2017 to 9.2 percent in 2021. Ashley’s class at Oxford is 15 percent Hispanic.
“I felt like I was right at home here,” Ashley said, shortly after arriving in August. The entire Rodriguez family dropped her off and stayed for a few days until she was settled. “It felt very homey to me,” she said. “Everybody is so welcoming.”
The entire Rodriguez family dropped Ashley Rodriguez off for her freshman year at Emory University’s Oxford College this fall. Credit: Image provided by Emily Rodriguez
Still, Ashley worried about her grades as she adjusted to her new workload. She fielded constant texts and calls from her family, who were adjusting to having her away from home for the first time.
Emily missed her sister terribly – together they’d started their high school’s club for first-generation scholars, helping others navigate college choices. “She has the brain and I like to talk,” Emily joked.
This fall, Emily set her sights on some of the most selective colleges in the country, many of which had terrible track records on diversity even before the Supreme Court’s decision. She approached her search knowing that she was unlikely to get any boost based on her ethnicity.
That makes her angry.
“We have so much history behind us as people of color,” Emily said. “So why would we be put at the same level as somebody whose family has benefited off of the harm done to communities of color?”
Emily also knew she would need a hefty scholarship to attend one of her dream schools; her family can’t afford the tuition, and they’ve been loath to saddle their daughters with loans.
“I don’t think it’s a bad thing if poor whites now benefit from affirmative action.”
Richard Kahlenberg, an author and scholar at Georgetown University
Elite schools like those on Ashley and Emily’s lists are more likely to be filled with wealthy students: Families from the top 0.1 percent are more than twice as likely to get in as other applicants with the same test scores. But such schools also offer the most generous scholarship and aid packages, and Emily and Ashley believed they presented the best shot at a different life from their parents’.
“Ever since I was little, I knew that college was the ticket to break this cycle our family has been in for generations and generations, of not knowing, of not being educated,” Emily said. “And because of that, having to work with their backs instead of their brains.”
That the Rodriguez sisters could even consider top-tier colleges is a credit to their mother.
“I want them to have the opportunity I never had,” Margarita said. “I know that life after education will be easier for them. I don’t want them to be working 12, 14 hours like their dad did.”
Rafael Rodriguez has always worked: first, with livestock as a child in central Mexico and later, in Florida, on an orange farm until the age of 15, with a residential permit. His earnings went toward helping the rest of the family come to the United States and settle in West Grove, Pennsylvania.
Rafael didn’t attend high school because he had to help support his parents and sisters. He now owns a trucking company.
Margarita desperately wanted to go to college, but said her mother did not believe in taking out loans for higher education and refused to sign her financial aid forms.
Instead, she married Rafael a few days after graduating from high school and had Ashley a year later. Emily was born 17 months later. Margarita was thinking of enrolling in community college until Brianna came along six years later. She now helps Rafael with his trucking business while working as a translator.
Ashley Rodriguez fields calls, Facetime requests and texts from her family while settling in as a freshman at Oxford College of Emory University in Georgia. Credit: Image provided by Emily Rodriguez
Both sisters are keenly aware of the gulf between their lives and their mom’s. In her college essay, Ashley described being “a daughter of two immigrant parents who undertook a dangerous journey from their native Guanajuato, Mexico, to America.”
Emily wrote about how Margarita had violated “every norm of our Mexican community, allowing me to sacrifice my time with family on weekends and in the summer” to attend Saturday leadership trainings with TeenSHARP, as well as college-level courses in epidemiology and health sciences at Brown, Cornell and the University of Delaware.
The pressure Emily feels is both formidable and familiar to the immigrant experience, magnified by the divisive court decision.
Hamza Parker, a senior at Smyrna High School in Delaware, feels it as well. He was at first unsure of whether or not to write about race in his essay, a debate many students have been having.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority decision that race could be invoked only within the context of the applicant’s life story, leaving it up to students to decide if they would use their essays to discuss their race.
Meanwhile, conservative activist Edward Blum, who helped bring the case before the court, has threatened more lawsuits and said he would challenge essays “used to ascertain or provide a benefit based on the applicant’s race.”
“I never even dreamed about a place like Emory, or about all the schools that have really good financial aid.”
Margarita Rodriguez, mother
Hamza wavered at first, then rewrote his essay to describe his family’s move to the United States from Saudi Arabia in sixth grade and the racism he subsequently experienced. He applied early decision to Union College in upstate New York; earlier this month, he learned via email that he did not get in.
Neither Hamza nor his father, Timothy Parker, an engineer, know why, or what role affirmative action played in Union’s decision: Rejections never come with explanations.
Parker hopes his son will now consider an HBCU like the one he attended, Hampton University, in Virginia. He worries that if Hamza ends up at a school where he is clearly in the minority, he could be made to feel as though he doesn’t belong.
“I’m letting it be his choice,” Parker said, noting that Hamza might also feel more comfortable at an HBCU given the nation’s divisive political climate. With the end of affirmative action, he added, “It feels like we are going backwards not forward.”
HBCUs are becoming more competitive after the court’s decision. Chelsea Holley, director of admissions at Spelman College in Atlanta, said Black high schoolers may be choosing HBCUs because they fear further assaults on diversity and inclusion and believe they’ll feel more comfortable on predominantly Black campuses.
Parker is now finishing his applications to Denison University, the University of Maryland, the University of Delaware, and Carleton College. He’s not sure if Hampton will be on his list.
Alleyne, Hamza’s adviser, said that while they will never know if the court’s decision had any impact on Hamza’s rejection from Union, he’s concerned about what it portends for other TeenSHARP seniors.
“We have so much history behind us as people of color. So why would we be put at the same level as somebody whose family has benefited off of the harm done to communities of color?”
Emily Rodriguez, high school senior
“There are so many factors at play with every application,” Alleyne said. “We definitely feel that this year, the window is narrower for students whose GPA does not tell the full story of their brilliance and the challenges they’ve overcome.”
Alleyne is also concerned that scholarships once available for students like Parker are disappearing. Some of the race-based scholarships his students applied for in past years are no longer listed on college websites, he said.
At the same time, there are plenty who believe that the court’s decision was a much-needed correction, including Richard Kahlenberg, an author and scholar at Georgetown University who testified in the case. He argues that the ban will lead to a fairer landscape for low-income students for all races.
Kahlenberg is in favor of using affirmative action based on class instead of race. “I don’t think it’s a bad thing if poor whites now benefit from affirmative action,” Kahlenberg said.
For the Rodriguez family, Cornell’s early decision announcement was long anticipated, to be marked on the magnetic calendar attached to their refrigerator as soon as they knew it. Ashley would be home from Emory for winter break and would hear the news alongside her sister.
For weeks, the family had prepared themselves for bad news: Cornell had announced it was limiting the number of students it would accept early decision, in what the university said was “an effort to increase equity in the admissions process.”
Still, Emily had spent a summer studying at Cornell and gotten to know some faculty and advisers there. She had fallen in love with the animal science program, and the lively upstate New York college town of Ithaca, set amid stunning gorges and waterfalls.
Rafael Rodriguez, affectionately known as “Papa Bear,” keeps a close eye on the jam-packed family calendar. Credit: Liz Willen/The Hechinger Report
“Let’s go, let’s go!” Rafael said as they huddled together in front of Emily’s laptop. Emily wore a white t-shirt with “Cornell” emblazoned in bold red letters on the front, for good luck. She wavered, then clicked.
“Congratulations, you have been admitted to the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences: College major: Animal Science at Cornell University for the fall of 2024. Welcome to the Cornell community!” said the email on her screen, adorned with red confetti.Annual estimated costs for next year would be $92,682 – but Cornell pledged to meet all of it.
Emily screamed, and the room erupted in cheers. Every member of the family began sobbing. Cinnamon, the family’s three-year-old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, barked wildly.
Emily jumped up and down. “Ivy League!” she shouted. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. I did it.”
Brianna, a sixth grader who will work with TeenSHARP once she’s in high school, hugged both of her sisters.
It will be her turn next.
Additional reporting was contributed by Sarah Butrymowicz.
This story about the end of affirmative action is the second in a series of articles accompanying a documentary produced by The Hechinger Reportin partnership with Soledad O’Brien Productions, about the impact of the Supreme Court ruling on race-based affirmative action.Hechinger is a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
New York state lawmakers will unveil legislation on Tuesday that would eliminate enormous property tax breaks for Columbia University and New York University, which have expanded to become among New York City’s top 10 largest private property owners.
The bills would require the private universities to start paying full annual property taxes and for that money to be redistributed to the City University of New York, the largest urban public university system in the country.
Columbia and N.Y.U. collectively saved $327 million on property taxes this year. The amount the schools save annually has soared in recent decades as the two have bought more properties, and the value of their properties has also increased.
Repealing the tax breaks would face substantial obstacles. The exemptions — which apply to universities, museums and other nonprofits — are nearly 200 years old and part of the state constitution. Overriding them would mean lawmakers would have to adopt the changes in consecutive legislative sessions. Then, voters would have to approve them on a statewide ballot.
“When the constitution of the state was written, there was no idea that such an exemption could apply to two of the top landlords in New York City,” said Assemblyman Zohran K. Mamdani, a Queens Democrat who is introducing the bill in the Assembly. “This bill seeks to address universities that have so blatantly gone beyond primarily operating as institutions of higher education and are instead acting as landlords and developers.”
The proposed constitutional amendment follows an investigation by The Hechinger Report and The New York Times in September that revealed that the city’s wealthiest universities were bigger and richer than ever before, with vast real estate portfolios that have drained the city budget – and that as Columbia has grown to become the city’s largest private landowner, it has enrolled fewer students from New York City.
A Columbia spokeswoman said university officials were reviewing the legislation. But she added that Columbia was a driver of the city’s economy through its research, faculty and students, and its capital projects, including $100 million in upgrades to local infrastructure since 2009.
A spokesman for N.Y.U. said that repealing the tax exemptions would be “extraordinarily disruptive” and that the university “would be forced to rethink much of the way we operate.”
“To choose two charitable, nonprofit organizations out of the thousands in the state and compel them to be treated like for-profits certainly strikes us as misguided and unfair,” the spokesman, John Beckman, said in a statement. “We are deeply appreciative of those policies, which have been in place for two centuries, but we also take some modest pride in the many, many ways, small and large, that N.Y.U. contributes to the city’s well-being and its economy.”
All 50 states offer property tax exemptions for private, nonprofit entities, which supporters argue are crucial so that these organizations can provide social, economic and cultural benefits to their communities. But in some cities, officials have pressured private universities to make voluntary payments, known as payments in lieu of taxes, or similar annual donations. Private universities often have billion-dollar endowments and charge annual tuition in the high five figures.
The legislation would only apply to Columbia and N.Y.U. and not other large private universities that own significant land, such as Cornell University in Ithaca. Lawmakers said that other universities would be excluded because their tax breaks are far lower than those of Columbia and N.Y.U.; the annual real estate tax exemption threshold would be $100 million.
“This bill seeks to address universities that have so blatantly gone beyond primarily operating as institutions of higher education and are instead acting as landlords and developers.”
Assemblyman Zohran K. Mamdani, a Queens Democrat who is introducing the bill in the Assembly.
“I don’t fault these institutions for pursuing their tax breaks and using the tax breaks to greatly expand their empires,” said State Senator John C. Liu, a Queens Democrat who is introducing the legislation in the Senate. “But this is a point where we have to look where all revenues are coming from and where all revenues are leaking. We have to stop those leaks.”
CUNY, which is made up of 25 campuses throughout the city and which serves 225,000 students, has also been eyed for city cuts. Most of the university’s $4.3 billion budget is provided by the state, but earlier this year, the mayor proposed a 3 percent cut to the funding the city provides.
If the constitutional amendment were approved, the property tax payments would be directed every year to CUNY. That would make a significant difference in the quality of education students receive, said James C. Davis, the president of the Professional Staff Congress, which represents 30,000 CUNY faculty and staff.
“Would an additional infusion of operating funding affect retention and graduation rates?” Mr. Davis said. “Clearly the answer is yes. Even a relatively small amount of money would make a big difference.”
He noted that 80 percent of first-year CUNY students are graduates of New York City public schools, and a majority are students of color. Half come from families with incomes under $30,000 a year.
“If you’re talking about the city making a commitment to economic equity and social mobility,” Mr. Davis added, “there really is not a wiser investment than CUNY.”
This story was produced in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit news outlet that covers education. Hechinger is an independent unit at Teachers College, Columbia University.
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The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
WILMINGTON, Del. — Striding into a packed community center filled with high school seniors, Atnre Alleyne has a few words of advice for the crowd, members of the first class of college applicants to be shaped by June’s Supreme Court ruling striking down race-conscious admissions.
“You have to get good grades, you have to find a way to do the academics, but also become leaders,” said Alleyne, the energetic co-founder and CEO of TeenSHARP, a nonprofit that prepares students from underrepresented backgrounds for higher education. “In your schools, do something! Fight for social justice.”
Many of the TeenSHARP participants gathered here, who are predominantly Black or Hispanic, worry that their chances of getting into top-tier schools have diminished with the court’s decision. They wonder what to say in their admissions essays and how comfortable they’ll feel on campuses that could become increasingly less diverse.
Tariah Hyland joins fellow TeenSHARP alums Alphina Kamara and William Garcia to meet with and advise TeenSHARP co-founder Atnre Alleyne in Wilmington Delaware. Credit: Liz Willen/The Hechinger Report
On this autumn night, Alleyne and his team are fielding questions from the dozens of students they advise, on everything from early decision deadlines to which schools are most likely to give generous financial aid and scholarships. The changed admissions landscape has only increased the team’s determination to develop a new generation of leaders, students who will fight to have their voices represented on campuses and later on in the workplace.
“I want them to kick the door open to these places, so they will go back and open more doors,” Alleyne said.
That goal is shared by successful alumni of the program Alleyne and his wife, Tatiana Poladko, started in a church basement 14 years ago. Several are on hand tonight recounting their own educational journeys, culminating in full scholarships to schools such as the University of Chicago and Wesleyan University, where annual estimated costs approach $90,000.
Before the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, highly selective colleges served as a beacon of hope and economic mobility for students like those TeenSHARP advise. Many are first in their families to attend college and lack legacy connections or access to the private counselors who’ve long given a boost to wealthier students.
But even before the high court ruling, Black and Latino students were poorly represented at these institutions, while the college degree gap between Black and white Americans was getting worse. For some students, the court decision sends a message that they do not belong, and if they get in, they worry they’ll stand out even more.
“I felt really upset about it,” Jamel Powell, a high school junior from Belle Mead, New Jersey, who participates in TeenSHARP, said about the affirmative action ruling. “This system has helped many underrepresented minorities get into these Ivy League schools and excel.”
While the full impact of the ruling on student demographics remains unknown, representatives of 33 colleges wrote in an amicus brief filed in the case that the share of Black students on their campuses would drop from roughly 7.1 percent to 2.1 percent if affirmative action were banned.
The uncertainty of what the decision means is taking a toll on students and school counselors nationally, said Mandy Savitz-Romer, a senior lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. As colleges sort through how they can meet commitments to diversity while complying with the law, students wonder if mentioning race in their essays will help or hurt them.
TeenSHARP alums Taria Hyland and Alphina Kamara reconnect in Wilmington, Delaware, to share advice on navigating college admissions and financial aid. Credit: Liz Willen/The Hechinger Report
In his majority decision, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that race could be invoked only within the context of the applicant’s life story, making essays the one opportunity for students to discuss their race and ethnicity. But since then, Edward Blum, the conservative activist who helped bring the case before the court, has threatened more lawsuits, promising to challenge any essay topic that is “nothing more than a back-channel subterfuge for divulging a student’s race.”
The Department of Education has published guidelines saying that while schools cannot put a thumb on the scale for students based on their race, they “remain free” to consider characteristics tied to individual students’ life experiences, including race. The National Association of College Admission Counseling issued similar guidance, while the Common App introduced new essay prompts that include one about students’ “identity” and “background.”
Because of the uncertainty,school counselors need specific training on crafting essays and how or whether to talk about race, Savitz-Romer said during a Harvard webinar last month on college admissions after affirmative action. “We need counselors and teachers to make students understand that college is still for them,” she said.
It’s a tall order: On average, public school counselors serve more than 400 students each, which offers little time for one-on-one advising.
That reality is why nonprofit advising groups like TeenSHARP toil alongside students, guiding them through an increasingly confounding admissions system. TeenSHARP’s team of three advisers works intensively with roughly 140 students at a time, including 50 seniors who often apply to as many as 20 colleges to maximize their chances.
That’s a fraction of those who need help, another reason why the group’s leaders rely on their network of more than 500 “Sharpies,” as alums are known.
Emily Rodriguez, a TeenSHARP senior who attends Conrad Schools of Science in Wilmington, decided to address race head on in her college essays: She wrote about her determination that she would not “play the role of the poor submissive Mexican woman.”
“Admissions officers assure us that their commitment to diversity hasn’t changed. But we will have to see. We’ve explained to families and students that this year is a learning year.”
Tatiana Poladko, co-founder, TeenSHARP
Hamza Parker, a senior at Delaware’s Smyrna High School who moved to the U.S. from Saudi Arabia as a sixth grader, said he was against writing about his identity at first. “I feel like it puts you in a position where you have to have a sob story for your essay instead of talking about something good, like, that happened in your life,” he told Alleyne and Poladko during a counseling session over Zoom.
But in the session Alleyne and Poladko encouraged him to draw from his own story, one they know something about from working with his older sister Hasana, now a junior at Pomona College. The family had a difficult move from Saudi Arabia to New York City and later Delaware, where Hamza joined the Delaware Black Student Coalition.
Hamza decided to revise his essay from one focused on linguistics to describe experiencing racism and then embracing his Muslim heritage.
“I am my normal social self and my Muslim faith and garb are widely known and respected at my school,” he wrote. “My school even now has a dedicated space for prayer during Ramadan.”
Alleyne and Poladko typically work with students who are beginning their first year of high school, so the pair can guide the entire college application process, much as some pricey private counselors do — although TeenSHARP’s services are free; as a nonprofit it relies on an array of donors for support.
Neither Poladko nor Alleyn attended elite schools. They met as graduate students at Rutgers University and became committed to starting TeenSHARP after helping Alleyne’s niece apply to colleges from a large New York City public high school.
Astonished by how complicated and inaccessible college admissions could be, the two decided to make it their life’s work, writing grants and getting donations from local banks and foundations so they could serve more students.
“I felt really upset about it. This system has helped many underrepresented minorities get into these Ivy League schools and excel.”
Jamel Powell, a high school junior from Belle Mead, New Jersey, who participates in TeenSHARP, about the affirmative action ruling.
Their work is now largely remote: During the pandemic, the couple relocated from Wilmington to Poladko’s native Ukraine to be closer to her family, leading to a dramatic escape to Poland with their three young children when war broke out. Poladko is taking a sabbatical from TeenSHARP this year, although she still helps some students via Zoom. Alleyne flies from Warsaw to Wilmington to meet with students in person, often at the community center downtown that once housed their offices.
They also rely on relationships they’ve built over the years with college presidents and admissions officers at schools like Boston College, Pomona College and Wesleyan, along with both Carleton and Macalester Colleges in Minnesota, many of whom have welcomed TeenSHARP applicants.
“We need more ‘Sharpies’ on our campus,” said Suzanne Rivera, president of Macalester College, in Minnesota, and a member of TeenSHARP’s advisory board. “Their questions are always so smart and so insightful.”
Sharpies also tend to become campus leaders, in part because TeenSHARP requires that its students develop leadership skills. That’s something William Garcia, who graduated from the University of Chicago last spring, told seniors in Wilmington.
“If Black high school seniors no longer feel like they are welcomed on predominantly white campuses, they are less likely to apply and even less likely to enroll even if they are offered admission.”
Chelsea Holley, director of admissions at Spelman College in Atlanta
At first, he felt isolated in Chicago, reticent to talk about his experiences as a Hispanic man. “I was in your shoes five years ago,” Garcia said. He later realized his background could be an asset, and drew on it to turn an ingredient for one of Mexico’s most popular liquors into a business venture for his own agave beverage company.
“Embrace your story; tell your story,” Garcia said. “I would tell my story and people would be really interested and would start to help me.”
Alphina Kamara, a 2022 graduate of Wesleyan University, urged seniors to aim high and look beyond state schools and local community colleges that have lower graduation rates and fewer resources — campuses she might have ended up at it not for TeenSHARP.
“I would have never have known that schools like Wesleyan existed, and that I, as a first-generation Black woman, had a place in them,” said Kamara, the child of immigrant parents from Sierra Leone.
Still, there will always be some TeenSHARP students who don’t want to be on campuses that had terrible track records for diversity, even before the court’s decision.
Tariah Hyland, who in high school co-founded the Delaware Black Student Coalition, knew she’d be more comfortable at one of the country’s more than 100 historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs. She told the Delaware audience that she’s thriving in her junior year at Howard University, where she is studying political science.
Powell, the New Jersey junior, is eyeing both Howard and Atlanta’s Morehouse College and said he’ll likely only apply to HBCUs.
“When I was in public school, I was the only Black boy in my classes,” said Powell, who now attends Acelus Academy, an online school. “I was always the minority, and so by going to an HBCU, I would likely see more people who look like me.”
That’s no surprise to Chelsea Holley, director of admissions at Spelman College in Atlanta, who said she’s expecting “more interest from Black and Brown students, now that the Supreme Court has made what I believe to be a regressive political decision.”
HBCUs like Spelman — whose graduates include Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman and author Alice Walker — are already seeing more applications and are becoming even more competitive.
“If Black high school seniors no longer feel like they are welcomed on predominantly white campuses, they are less likely to apply and even less likely to enroll, even if they are offered admission,” Holley said, adding that students may be worried about further assaults on diversity and inclusion on college campuses and believe they will be more comfortable at an HBCU.
Still, not everyone predicts the court ruling will precipitate a permanent drop in Black and Hispanic students at predominantly white, selective colleges. Richard Kahlenberg, an author and scholar at Georgetown University predicts the drop will be temporary, and that the affirmative action ban will eventually lead to a fairer landscape for low-income students of all races.
Kahlenberg, who served as an expert witness for Students for Fair Admissions, said he wants to see an end to legacy preferences as well as athletic recruiting, so that colleges can give “a meaningful boost” to “disadvantaged students of all races” and “you can get racial diversity without racial preferences.” Challenges to legacy admissions are mounting: The Education Department has opened an investigation into Harvard’s use of the practice, and a recent bipartisan bill calls for colleges to end it.
As mid-December approaches, Alleyne and Poladko are anxiously waiting to see how the handful of TeenSHARP students who applied for early decision will fare.
“Admissions officers assure us that their commitment to diversity hasn’t changed,” Poladko said. “But we will have to see. We’ve explained to families and students that this year is a learning year.”
Until that time, both Poladko and Alleyne will continue pushing students to help those who come after them.
“Our goal is to figure out the game of admissions and give our students an advantage,” Alleyne said. “And our job is to teach them how to play the game.”
This story about TeenSHARP is the first in a series of articles, produced by The Hechinger Reportin partnership with Soledad O’Brien Productions, about the impact of the Supreme Court ruling on race-based affirmative action. Stay tuned for an upcoming documentary and part II.Hechinger is a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
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.
To Florina Caprita, the mother of three young children, the paralegal studies program at Ashworth College seemed like the perfect route to a much-needed career. The classes were entirely online, and an admissions officer told her she could make small monthly payments toward the $4,465 tuition while she was taking classes, instead of having to pay it all at once.
But in 2018, a family emergency forced her out of school, just six credits shy of her degree. To make matters worse, she fell behind on her monthly payments, which had steadily increased from $25 to more than $200.
She struggled financially for several years as her health declined, but last spring, she got an opportunity to earn a degree at a different college. The problem? Ashworth, an unaccredited, for-profit school in Georgia, refused to release her transcript until she paid – in full – the more than $2,200 that she owed them.
This practice, known as transcript withholding, has become a growing worry for state and federal regulators. Critics say that it makes it harder for students to earn a degree or get a job, which would allow them to earn enough to pay back their debts. But the system of oversight is patchwork; no single federal agency bans it, state rules vary and there are significant challenges with monitoring the practice. That means students like Caprita can fall through the cracks.
In October, the Department of Education released new rules that would bar colleges from withholding a transcript for any semester for which a student used federal student aid money and paid their balance in full. The move was lauded by advocates as a huge step forward in eradicating the practice – but would not apply to any of the thousands of schools that don’t accept federal student aid to begin with, including Ashworth College.
Experts have long criticized authorities for not providing better oversight of these schools.
“Some of these schools exist that way because they would never qualify, and that’s usually because they provide very low value to students, unfortunately,” said Edward Conroy, a senior policy advisor at the progressive think tank New America. “Not in all cases, but a lot of these programs are not lifting people out of poverty, they’re not providing a route to middle class jobs or middle-class income, and so I think sometimes they’re of questionable value.”
Unlike the Department of Education, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau does have jurisdiction over colleges that don’t qualify to receive federal money. And in the past year, the agency has begun investigating colleges for refusing to release transcripts because of a loan balance owed directly to the school.
“If they help me, I can help to pay them. If they withhold [the transcript] from me, then I how can I ever pay them?”
Florina Caprita, who has an outstanding loan from an online for-profit university
In 2022, the agency found that transcript withholding was an abusive practice under the Consumer Protection Act, “designed to gain leverage over borrowers and coerce them into making payments.”
The CFPB has adopted a broad definition of what a student loan is. They include in that category things like payment plans, arguing that those are essentially forms of credit. Money owed for things like unpaid room and board balances or overdue fines, however, is not covered.
By their definition, Caprita should have been eligible to access her transcript. But she says she called and emailed the college repeatedly to no avail. She even asked to re-enroll in a new payment plan but college officials said their hands were tied and she would have to take up the matter with a collection agency.
“If they help me, I can help to pay them,” said Caprita, who is 44 years old and is hoping to join a Christian ministry. “If they withhold it from me, then I how can I ever pay them?”
Ashworth College did not respond to requests for comment.
A CFPB official acknowledged that it’s impossible to examine the policies of all of the thousands of colleges and universities across the country. The bureau has tried to make enough public statements for institutions to take note and change their policies without additional intervention, the official said. The agency has investigated some colleges for transcript withholding and made them change their practices but has not released any institution names publicly.
The education department’s rule on transcript withholding will go into effect in July 2024, joining other federal and state regulations meant to protect students from transcript withholding.
An education department spokesperson said that the agency plans to adjust its oversight procedures to ensure that schools that receive federal funding are following new regulations and that all student complaints alleging transcript withholding are investigated. Schools may eventually lose eligibility to receive federal student aid if they don’t comply with the new rule.
“It wouldn’t completely surprise me if one of the institutional reactions was, ‘We’re just going to stop doing this, period.’ ”
Edward Conroy, senior policy advisor, New America
Despite the fact that the regulation only applies to students who have used federal money to pay for their education, advocates hope that colleges will respond in a broader way.
“It wouldn’t completely surprise me if one of the institutional reactions was, ‘We’re just going to stop doing this period,’ ” Conroy said. “The number of students who are paying completely out of pocket isn’t that big; you don’t want to have separate administrative systems.”
Indeed, that’s what some policymakers have seen happen at the state level. Some states have only banned the practice at public institutions or for debts of up to a certain amount. In other cases, schools are only required to release transcripts for certain uses.
For instance, in 2022, Colorado passed a law prohibiting withholding transcripts from students requesting them for several reasons including needing to provide it to an employer, another college or the military. Carl Einhaus, a senior director at the Colorado Department of Education says that most institutions found it too burdensome to differentiate between which transcript requests were required by law to be honored and which weren’t and have opted to grant all requests.
“They’re not going to bother trying to figure out how to operationalize this very difficult thing to operationalize,” he said.
Starting next summer, the Colorado law also requires institutions to submit data about how many students requested transcripts and how many were withheld. Einhaus said that some schools initially resisted the new law, arguing that it would take away one of their main tools to recover money owed from students. “It will be interesting to see if this really is having an impact on the amount of debt they’re able to collect back,” he said.
But Brittany Pearce, a program manager at the higher ed consulting firm Ithaka S+R, is skeptical that withholding transcripts was ever an effective way to recoup debt. “From a really practical business sense, nobody is winning,” she said.
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.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Friday mornings on a university campus are usually quiet times. Savvy students plan their schedules to avoid Friday classes, getting a head start on their weekends.
But at Brown University’s Center for Career Exploration, there’s a steady stream of visitors, checking out jobs and internships, meeting with advisers and occasionally stopping on the way out to scoop up a few colorful pieces of hard candy from the bowl on the reception counter.
In the center, steps from the university’s main quad and across the street from the college bookstore, everything is brand new, from the furniture to the stenciling on the window to some of the staff.
Brown University’s Center for Career Exploration. The office is in the heart of the campus, near the main quad and across the street from the college bookstore. Credit: Kate Flock/The Hechinger Report
After a two-year planning process, Brown has revamped and renamed its career center and is more than doubling its number of advisers, from 13 to 28.
It’s an example of the new attention being devoted to career services by universities — even top universities, whose students likely won’t have trouble finding jobs — as consumer demand gets louder for a tangible return on investment for a degree.
At a time of intensifying competition for students, “career success” is the top reason people give for getting a degree, a new survey of alumni by the workforce analytics firm Lightcast found.
That’s driving institutions to beef up career services staffs and budgets, promote career directors to the highest levels of leadership and start offering career advising to students from the time they put down their first-year deposits.
“If you’re in a market where prospective families are asking for assurances about this, and you can’t give them an answer, that’s really dangerous. They’re going to opt out.”
Kelli Armstrong, president, Salve Regina College
At least one university has upgraded “career preparation” onto its list of four core strategic priorities.
That this wasn’t the case before might come as a surprise to students and their parents. But when the College of William & Mary promised in its new five-year plan to help students “thrive from their first job to their last,” the move was greeted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, or NACE, as “a profound shift regarding the importance of career education at research universities.”
Career services “has been sort of a stepchild on campuses. But I think that’s starting to change because of what students want,” said Ben Wildavsky, a visiting scholar at the University of Virginia School of Education and Human Development and author of the new book “The Career Arts: Making the Most of College, Credentials, and Connections.”
For most students, the change can’t happen soon enough. Fewer than one in five of the graduates in that Lightcast survey strongly agreed with the statements that their universities and colleges had invested in their careers and helped them understand career opportunities, create career plans and network with employers or alumni.
For years, at some universities, talking about careers was seen as “antithetical to an education,” said Rashid Zia, dean of the college and a professor of engineering and physics at Brown.
Brown University’s Center for Career Exploration. The university is more than doubling its numbers of career advisers, from 13 to 28. Credit: Kate Flock/The Hechinger Report
They’re also transforming the ways they provide career advice.
Rather than keeping advisers in one place, for instance, many universities are now dispersing them across campuses to counsel students with interest in particular careers and majors.
At Ohio Wesleyan University, “career catalysts” have been assigned to “career communities” of students interested variously in fields including economics and business; education and communication; entrepreneurship; humanities and the arts; health; and science, technology, engineering and math.
That means “having career coaches in the different academic departments, where students are every day,” rather than in the single previous centralized but “out-of-the-way” location on the third floor of the campus center, said Megan Ellis, executive director of what has been renamed Career Connection and whose staff she said has more than doubled, from four counselors to nine. If a student has a question about getting a job, Ellis said, “faculty can literally walk them down to the career specialist.”
Washington University in St. Louis, too, has created career communities — one each in business; arts, design and media; healthcare and sciences; government policy and social impact; technology, data and engineering; and “career exploration,” for students who haven’t yet settled on a field. It offers separate mentoring programs, employer events and alumni networking for each group.
College graduates who felt that their colleges or universities invested in career services were twice as likely to agree that their degrees were worth the cost.
Career advisers at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota also have been newly assigned to the university’s separate colleges. It’s a way to make career services “unavoidable” to students, said Mark Sorenson-Wagner, director of career development and corporate engagement there.
“You have to design this in a way where students can’t avoid it,” echoed Kelli Armstrong, president of Salve Regina University in Rhode Island, which overhauled and renamed its career services operation this fall and moved it into a new space at the heart of the campus. “It can’t be an add-on you want them to run into. You have to bake it in.”
Career offices are also trying to help students understand something colleges and universities have previously struggled to convey: exactly what job skills — or “competencies,” in education jargon — are being taught, in what classes.
The main quad at Brown University. Even top universities such as Brown, whose students likely won’t have trouble finding jobs, are beefing up career services in response to consumer demand for a return on investment for college. Credit: Kate Flock/The Hechinger Report
“Being able to take what students are learning in the classroom and translating that into competencies is also part of this movement,” said Mary Gatta, director of research and public policy at NACE. “You’re helping students articulate what they’re doing in the classroom and the skills they’re developing in ways employers understand.”
Though students may not think about it this way, for example, humanities courses teach such things as critical thinking and public speaking, said Renée Cramer, provost at Dickinson College, which is also helping undergraduates decipher what job skills they’re learning.
That’s because employers “aren’t coming to campus and saying, ‘I need X major,’ ” said Norma Guerra Gaier, who took over this fall as head of the newly expanded career center at WashU. “They’re saying, ‘I need talent that can work in these areas and has these competencies.’ ”
Interpreting what real-world skills students learn in which classes means involving faculty. And their reaction has been mixed, career directors said. Not all are on board with the idea that career education is their job.
“There are some faculty who say that learning is for the sake of learning — that they’re not here to talk about careers,” said Elizabeth Soady, associate director of professional development for arts and sciences at the University of Richmond, which has also expanded its career services. But others “are keyed into that bigger national conversation about return on investment.”
As one way to help address this, St. Thomas has created a fellowship that will pay faculty who help create content related to careers, Sorenson-Wagner said.
“We’re starting with the people who we know support the work we’re doing and who will advocate for the stuff we’re doing, as opposed to naysayers,” he said.
Brown University’s Center for Career Exploration. The office has been revamped and renamed after a two-year planning process. Credit: Kate Flock/The Hechinger Report
Such naysayers are becoming fewer and farther between, said Armstrong. Salve Regina faculty “are realists,” she said. “They’re watching what’s happening in higher education and they’re rolling up their sleeves and saying, ‘How can we help?’”
In addition to consumer demand, career services are expanding in response to growing anxiety over, and the increasing complexity of, the job-search process, the people who do this work say.
“What we hear from families coming in is, ‘How can you guarantee that my child gets a good job? Because they’re going to have to start repaying these [student] loans immediately,’ ” said Armstrong.
“If you’re in a market where prospective families are asking for assurances about this, and you can’t give them an answer, that’s really dangerous,” she said. “They’re going to opt out.”
Brown University’s dean of the college Rashid Zia with Matthew Donato, executive director of the Brown University career center. For years, at some universities, talking about careers was seen as “antithetical to an education,” Zia says. Credit: Kate Flock/The Hechinger Report
Even at Brown, “there’s a lot of stress for every student approaching graduation. And there are students for whom that financial aspect is acute,” said Matthew Donato, executive director of the university’s Center for Career Exploration. “It’s important to acknowledge that and help those students meet their goals.”
Undergraduates are barraged with questions from parents about how many internship offers they’ve gotten, and constantly see social media messages posted by classmates with job offers, said Elisabeth Bernold, a Brown senior.
“That stress, it comes from us as well,” she said. “I think it’s worse for our generation — that you always need to add one more thing to your resumé.”
Brown University junior Ariana Palomo and senior Elisabeth Bernold, at the university’s career center. Palomo had intended to go right to law school after college but now is exploring other careers. Credit: Kate Flock/The Hechinger Report
Ariana Palomo arrived at the university intending to go directly to law school. Now she’s exploring other careers, for which she uses the resources of the new career center. “It’s inevitable to wonder what your future’s going to look like,” said Palomo, a junior.
Fellow junior Mahmoud Hallak plans to get a Ph.D. in physics and hopes to someday work at NASA. But even though he and other doctorate-seeking students like him don’t have to think about careers for a while, Hallak said in the career center, “it’s still a worry.”
Orders to improve career advising — at Brown and elsewhere — have been coming “from the top down,” said Donato.
Brown University junior Mahmoud Hallak. Hallak’s career is still years off, since he plans to get a Ph.D. in physics. But getting a job “is still a worry,” he says. Credit: Kate Flock/The Hechinger Report
That’s because of yet another reason for this renewed attention: Satisfied alumni make reliable donors. People who feel that their educations led to their careers are nearly twice as likely to financially support their alma maters, another report, by Hanover Research, found. Strong career services programs that help graduates get meaningful jobs “produce happy, high-performing alumni who are more poised to give,” the report concludes.
Of the more than 9,000 graduates in that Lightcast survey, those who strongly felt that their colleges or universities invested in career services were twice as likely to agree that their degrees were worth the cost. And those who felt their institutions prepared them for careers were nearly six times more likely to think that.
“Success leads them to give back later,” said Sorenson-Wagner, at St. Thomas. “Administrators respond to that.”
In some states and systems, public funding has also begun to be tied to students’ career success. The budget of the Texas State Technical College system, for example, is based in part on how much graduates earn above the minimum wage.
As if to underscore this new priority, a growing number of colleges and universities are moving their career services operations directly under presidents’ offices or high up elsewhere on the organizational chart, a NACE report found.
Career services “has been sort of a stepchild on campuses. But I think that’s starting to change because of what students want.”
Ben Wildavsky, author, “The Career Arts: Making the Most of College, Credentials, and Connections”
That’s a strong signal that helping graduates find jobs has become a top priority, said the newly hired Gaier, at WashU, whose title is associate vice chancellor.
“If we can see more of that leveling up of directors to have a seat at the table, where they can help inform decisions around career readiness and curriculum, that matters for our students,” said Kathleen Powell, a former president of the board of NACE and the chief career officer at William & Mary, where she has been promoted to the rank of associate vice president.
At Grinnell College, the president has directed that the head of career services report directly to him, a spokeswoman said. The college has nearly quadrupled the staff of what it now calls its Office of Careers, Life and Service, from six to 22; the college begins career advising during first-year orientation.
The size of William and Mary’s career services staff has nearly doubled, from 12 to 23, Powell said, and it starts reaching out to first-year students even earlier — as soon as they put down their deposits.
“There is a demand, and rightfully so, for understanding the return on the investment,” said Ellis, at Ohio Wesleyan. “That’s at the heart of this. Going to college is really a big investment. And having a clearly and intentionally designed career office helps make sure there’s a return on that investment.”
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.
CHICO, Calif. — Most students in the California State University, Chico library were silently poring over books or computers on a recent afternoon, but one group was tucked into a corner peppering university president Stephen Perez with questions.
What’s the world’s smallest mountain range? The Sutter Buttes, about an hour south of Chico. The only incorporated city in Modoc County? Alturas. The biggest lake in Plumas County? Lake Almanor.
The students were testing Perez’s knowledge of the largely rural swath of the state served by his campus. Because that’s where they are from.
From left, California State University, Chico students Sophia Dutton, Bethany Regnani, Veronica Ulloa and Servando Melendrez discuss California’s rural northern counties with university president Stephen Perez. The university is adding resources to improve success rates for rural students. Credit: Matt Krupnick/The Hechinger Report
California State University, Chico students Servando Melendrez, left, and Brynna Garcia, right, discuss California’s rural northern counties with the university’s president, Stephen Perez. Perez says the university will offer support specifically for rural students. Credit: Matt Krupnick/The Hechinger Report
This mostly lighthearted mixer had a serious purpose: getting university leaders to see and support rural students. It’s part of a small but growing effort on some campuses to create a stronger sense of belonging for rural students, who drop out at higher rates than their suburban counterparts.
The university is trying to “change the narrative,” Perez told the 15 or so students and employes in the library, where a small space has been set aside for a permanent rural student resource center. “I’d love to talk to you more about what we can do,” he said, after fielding questions about budgets, tuition hikes and whether he was a Taylor Swift fan. (Yes: Perez said he had just been singing “Our Song” on a drive back from the airport.)
About a fifth of Americans live in rural areas, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. But few colleges have clubs for rural students to socialize and help each other through the challenges they face, obstacles such as feeling out of place, dealing with crowds or public transportation and even navigating busy freeways. Fewer still have physical spaces for those students to hang out together.
With support hard to come by, rural students across the country have begun to create their own support networks, mostly in the past two or three years, sometimes even without administration support. Most of these rural student clubs have emerged at Ivy League universities or other highly selective private institutions, and often have just a handful of members. But the trend is spreading.
At Chico State, a group called the North State Student Ambassadors advocates for rural classmates and works to make them feel welcome. Their new space in the library includes a map of the university’s 12-county service area, which covers 33,000 square miles. Three of those counties — Modoc, Plumas and Trinity — are 100 percent rural, census data show.
Brynna Garcia, a 19-year-old California State University, Chico sophomore from Red Bluff, California. “No one around you has the same experiences,” she says of being a rural student at the university. Credit: Matt Krupnick/The Hechinger Report
High school students in remote towns across rural Northern California have a low opinion of the university, said sophomore Brynna Garcia, one of the event’s moderators, partly because — as Perez acknowledged — Chico recruiters rarely travel to those towns to speak with prospective students. Few of her classmates in Red Bluff, about an hour north of Chico, even considered Chico State, she said.
Garcia said she chose Chico, the closest public university, mostly because snow closed the roads as she was preparing to visit her other option, the University of Nevada, Reno.
Attending college just a quick drive from home has made the experience a little easier for Garcia, but as with other students from small towns and tiny high schools, the transition to Chico’s 13,000-student campus has been daunting at times. A dormitory, for instance, might have more residents than a rural student’s high school had students.
“No one around you has the same experiences,” Garcia wrote in an essay for the Chico program. “They don’t know what [Future Farmers of America] is. They don’t realize your town doesn’t have a single Uber or Lyft driver. They’ve never seen the stars from their backyard or touched snow and they surely don’t have horses or cattle to tend to.”
The Chico library space might not be much, but it gives students an opportunity to take a break from the pressure of adapting to the different, said Karen Schreder, an assistant professor of education who works with rural students through the campus’s civic engagement office.
“They know everybody in their town, and they have been supported in their journey by everybody in their school and town,” Schreder said. “And then they come here, and they’re, like, ‘What do I do on Sunday? Where do I go?’ ”
At the University of Chicago, Savannah Doty, a 21-year-old senior from rural eastern Washington, said she felt completely shut down when she brought up rural issues in a class about the histories of infrastructure.
“It got steamrolled by both the professor and the rest of the class,” said Doty, president of that campus’s Rural Student Alliance. “I’ve had that experience hundreds of times in classes, in that my rural identity is downplayed. I think everyone would benefit from hearing about the rural experience.”
Chicago is one of several campuses with rural groups that now hold bowling excursions, ice cream socials and other events designed to help students feel more comfortable and talk about what they’re up against.
Prospective students and their families tour the California State University, Chico campus. The university is one of a handful adding resources specifically for rural students. Credit: Matt Krupnick/The Hechinger Report
The California State University, Chico campus. The university’s coverage area includes a mostly rural swath of northern California. Credit: Matt Krupnick/The Hechinger Report
A student walks on the California State University, Chico campus. The university’s president says it’s trying to “change the narrative” for rural students, who drop out of college at higher rates than their urban and suburban counterparts. Credit: Matt Krupnick/The Hechinger Report
At Brown University in Rhode Island, the rural club has held sessions on how to use the bus and how to navigate Providence, said Eliana Hornbuckle, a junior from the small town of Nevada, Iowa, population just under 7,000. Few Brown administrators, if any, are from rural areas, she said, so a student-driven club makes more sense than a university program.
“I don’t think it would be as successful if it were started by the college or university itself,” said Hornbuckle, one of the club’s leaders. “I think it would feel weird if the university were creating a space for us to meet. It would be too formal.”
The club became an official student organization in 2022, a couple of years after it was founded, said Abigail Bachenberg, a 2023 Brown graduate and one of the first members. Organizers had trouble finding similar clubs at other schools to use as models, she said.
“I’ve had that experience hundreds of times in classes, in that my rural identity is downplayed.”
Savannah Doty, senior, University of Chicago
Many elite colleges are starting to ramp up their recruiting of applicants from rural areas, but students at some institutions say the attention ends there. Rural students, once they arrive on campus, often feel as if their colleges forget about them, noted Ty McNamee, a University of Mississippi assistant professor of higher education who studies rural students. A rural club can help alleviate that angst, he said.
“A lot of times these students have the same cultural backgrounds and are able to support one another,” said McNamee, who grew up on a Wyoming ranch and founded a rural student group while attending Columbia University. As a student who moved to New York City from a town of 600, he said, “being in that bubble where I felt validated was really helpful to me.”
Students in the few official rural clubs are trying to expand those opportunities to more universities and colleges. Madison Mellinger, then a senior at Princeton University, organized a two-day virtual conference attended by 80 to 90 students last February to help students organize rural clubs. Topics included “imposter syndrome and the rural identity” and “starting and developing your rural student club.”
Nobody knows how many rural student clubs exist, Mellinger said, but the most successful ones have forged connections with their school administrations that have resulted in financial support.
Servando Melendrez, a 19-year-old California State University, Chico sophomore from the rural town of Westwood, California. “It does feel good that the university is looking out for us,” Melendrez says of new efforts to support rural students. Credit: Matt Krupnick/The Hechinger Report
Servando Melendrez, a 19-year-old Chico State sophomore from the Lassen County town of Westwood, California, said he had never met other rural students on campus before joining the university’s North State Ambassadors program.
“It’s definitely a big step for Chico to do something like this,” said Melendrez, whose hometown has about 1,500 people and whose high school class had about 15 students. “It does feel good that the university is looking out for us.”
Educators involved with rural education at Purdue University, Kansas State University and Virginia Tech have said they would like to find more ways to support rural students.
Inspired by the Chico initiative, Virginia Tech plans to create a physical space for rural students, said Amy Azano, a professor of adolescent literacy and rural education there. Even though the 38,000-student university is surrounded by rural communities, she said, it can still be overwhelming for rural students.
“We have to build that sense of belonging,” said Azano, founding director of the Virginia Tech Center for Rural Education. “Just because we’re in this bucolic setting doesn’t mean rural students feel comfortable here.”
Sophia Dutton, a 19-year-old California State University, Chico junior from the rural Plumas County town of Graeagle, California. Dutton transferred to Chico after a tough freshman year at a university in San Diego, where she says professors and classmates didn’t understand how her rural upbringing influenced her life and education. Credit: Matt Krupnick/The Hechinger Report
Chico’s rural student group was a big reason 19-year-old Sophia Dutton, from the Plumas County town of Graeagle, California, transferred to Chico after a tough freshman year at a big San Diego campus. Her classmates and professors in San Diego didn’t understand how her rural upbringing influenced her life and education, Dutton recalled, and the campus did not have a rural student club.
Being closer to home and rural California has been a relief, she said.
“I have never been a city person and I know that,” Dutton said.
As the Chico event with the president wrapped up, students mingled and discussed weekend plans. A few planned to drive home to their small towns, where they said the remoteness is part of the draw.
“I’m going to go home and look at the stars tonight,” Dutton said.
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.
In just the past eight years, American confidence in higher education has dropped from 57 percent to 36 percent, with more saying they have “very little” confidence than a “great deal.”
There are many reasons for this souring on colleges and universities, from high tuition sticker prices and large amounts of student loan debt to political polarization and doubts about graduates’ work readiness.
But one of the biggest contributors to declining public confidence in American colleges may be the disproportionate amount of attention paid to elite, top-ranked universities.
Americans are rankled by certain aspects of how elite institutions have behaved and what they represent. But, please America, don’t blame your local college or university because of them.
The “Varsity Blues” admissions scandal in 2019 perhaps epitomizes what bothers Americans about elite higher education. The scandal revealed a widespread scheme in which wealthy parents gained admission to elite colleges for their otherwise unqualifying children through “side door” bribery of college employees.
The lengths the wealthy were willing to go for their children felt particularly egregious given the already enormous imbalance of rich students gaining admission to top-ranked colleges.
For example, a baby born to a family in the top 0.1 percent of income in the U.S. has about a 40 percent chance of going to an Ivy League or other elite college.
At the same time, a baby born to a family in the bottom quintile of income has a less than one-half of one percent chance of admission. In other words, someone born in the top 0.1 percent is roughly 100 times more likely to land in an elite college than someone born in the bottom quintile.
Among “Ivy Plus” colleges (Ivy League plus University of Chicago, MIT, Stanford and Duke), more students come from the top one percent of income distribution than the bottom 50 percent.
The fact that wealthy students dominate enrollments at elite colleges is an insult to one of America’s most deeply held values: meritocracy.
Institutions believed to be the best educational organizations in the world, with highly selective admissions and academic standards, are failing to enroll the best and brightest students from poor and middle-class families.
Now, on the heels of the Supreme Court striking down affirmative action earlier this year (which prevents colleges from using the consideration of race in admissions) there is a lawsuit against Harvard aimed to prohibit legacy admissions — a policy that gives preference to children of often wealthy alumni.
This is a prime example of an unsavory practice among elite colleges that is becoming more visible in the public arena — and is certainly disagreeable to the vast majority of Americans. (Fully 75 percent are in favor of ending legacy admissions.)
Instead of being thought of as the superheroes of higher education, elite colleges are — sadly — now seen by the public as villains.
Despite its enormous wealth, the Ivy League is less than half as likely as schools nationally to enroll low income, Pell Grant recipients. And with the Ivy League schools’ estimated annual costs approaching $90,000 per student per year, they seem downright unapproachable to most Americans.
There is much to be proud of with respect to our nation’s elite colleges. Elite colleges are most certainly educating some of the best and brightest our country has to offer. And they conduct research and support discoveries that improve the health and well-being of Americans, the efficacy of our military and the overall global competitiveness of America.
However, negative stories about them are dominating the news. Instead of being thought of as the superheroes of higher education, elite colleges are — sadly — now seen by the public as villains.
They would be wise to heed the superhero advice that “with great power comes great responsibility.”
Responsibility, in the form of upholding the democratic ideal of meritocracy and providing equity for students from lower income families, is how elite colleges can help all higher education regain the public trust.
In the meantime, Americans should ask themselves how they feel about the colleges and universities in their own regions. America has the most diverse higher education system in the world, and we ought to pay more attention to the important ways in which it serves many types of students and their myriad education and career goals.
Public universities, community colleges, Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCUs), Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), federal work colleges and affordable private colleges are just some of the many wonderful options that exist across our higher education landscape: Let’s focus on them.
Such a reframe and refocus will help us all see the incredible asset that American higher education is for our citizens, our country and the world.
Brandon Busteed is the chief partnership officer and global head of Learn-Work Innovation at Kaplan and an internationally known speaker and author on education and workforce development.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
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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.
For every two freshmen enrolled in a college in the University of California system, administrators say they would like to enroll one transfer student from a California community college.
Whether they succeed depends on the campus and the year and the community college enrollment – but that’s the goal all nine undergraduate campuses strive toward, said Gary Clark, the associate vice chancellor for enrollment management at the University of California, Los Angeles.
To reach that goal and also diversify the transfer population, university leaders announced a new program at UCLA designed specifically for students at community colleges that have historically sent few transfers to the University of California. UCLA will give these students’ applications special consideration, and if they don’t get in, they’ll be guaranteed admission to another campus in the UC system, which should boost the overall number of students transferring into the University of California.
Students walk on the UCLA campus. Credit: Iris Schneider
University administrators have not yet selected the community colleges that will participate in the pilot program, but will choose from a list of schools identified as “high need” because they have larger proportions of students from low-income families.
The new program, which won’t begin until the fall of 2026, was developed by university leaders, the state legislature and the governor, as part of what they say is a general commitment to students coming from California community colleges.
“If it opens up a pathway to the University of California and to graduate from this incredibly distinguished university, it will mean a great deal to all California families, because it will enable young people to come to a university that will propel them in terms of social mobility,” said Katherine S. Newman, the University of California System’s provost. “We have a common commitment to making UC education as affordable as possible, and the community college transfer program is definitely a part of that.”
The pilot program will begin with at least eight majors and will expand to 12 within the first two years, including at least four in the science, technology, engineering and math fields, according to UC system administrators. Students enrolled in the program will be advised about which courses they need to take to be able to transfer into those majors in the UC system, which Newman said will help ensure they’re fully ready to enter the university campuses as juniors and be successful.
Across the nine colleges that make up the University of California system, 27 percent of undergraduates had transferred from a community college, according to an August 2023 report from the University of California’s Office of Institutional Research and Academic Planning.
These transfer students typically began their education at a California community college, and walked onto a UC campus, credit-wise, about halfway to earning their bachelor’s degrees.
Academically, these students are ready to be significant contributors in the classroom, Clark said. Often, the challenges they face outside the classroom pose greater threats to their education.
“A large state university, like us, needs to be committed to maintaining access. And in spite of the fact that we’ve gotten quite competitive from an admissions standpoint, we still want to ensure that students have more than one path to UCLA.”
Gary Clark, associate vice chancellor for enrollment management, University of California, Los Angeles
“These are students who may be two years out of high school. These are students who may be 22-plus years out of high school,” Clark said. “They might be parents. They might be veterans. They might be former foster youth.”
The transfer students are more likely to be from low-income families, or the first in their family to attend college, Clark said.
To ensure the students thrive in the classroom, the universities need to provide support with whatever their challenges may be. Each UC campus has a transfer student center, though the names vary and, in some cases, they also target returning students and veterans. UCLA’s Transfer Student Center offers students a chance to connect with each other and receive transfer-specific advising on a drop-in basis, Clark said.
UCLA students also have access to the Bruin Resource Center, which has programs that cater to students of several different identities and life experiences, Clark said. The targeted support services include programs for students who are struggling to meet their basic needs, students who are in recovery from substance abuse disorders and undocumented students, among other groups.
Clark does not expect that students coming from this new transfer program will have vastly different needs than the transfer students the university is already serving. And he doesn’t expect to have to scale up the existing resources, because the total number of transfer students at UCLA is likely to stay the same. The main difference for the transfer student population at UCLA will be which community colleges these students are transferring from.
Community college students who transfer to UCLA often go on to graduate, data shows. About 75 percent of transfer students earn a bachelor’s degree within 2 years, 90 percent within three years, and 93 percent within four years, according to data from the university’s website.
Still, they won’t all get in – UCLA accepted just 24 percent of transfer applicants in the fall of 2022 – but those who don’t will be guaranteed admission to another University of California campus, which administrators hope will increase the number of transfer students.
“If it opens up a pathway to the University of California and to graduate from this incredibly distinguished university, it will mean a great deal to all California families, because it will enable young people to come to a university that will propel them in terms of social mobility.”
Katherine S. Newman, provost, University of California System
Students turned down by UCLA might, for example, be admitted to the University of California, Riverside, about 80 miles to the east. UCLA accepts roughly 11 percent of first-year students, while UC Riverside accepts about 65 percent of first-year students and offers a Transfer Admission Guarantee to California community college students who meet certain requirements.
Recent data from the university shows that 58 percent of UC Riverside transfer students graduated in two years, 81 percent graduated within three years and nearly 85 percent graduated within four years.
Veronica Zendejas, director of undergraduate admissions at Riverside, said that the starting at a community college before transferring to a UC campus is the right choice for many students.
When she goes to recruit high schoolers, she reminds them that even if they start at a local community college, they can plan to transfer after earning an associate degree because of the university’s guaranteed admission for community college students who meet requirements.
“A lot of times now, what we’re seeing is a lot of students are purposely going to community college and taking those first two years to really think about what they want to do before transferring to a four-year institution,” Zendejas said.
Clark, from UCLA, said that other students may have life circumstances pop up that prevent them from pursuing a four-year university immediately after high school, and still others may apply but not be academically ready yet. Still, he said, there should be opportunities for those students to get into the University of California later on, when the time is right for them.
“A large state university, like us, I think needs to be committed to maintaining access. And in spite of the fact that we’ve gotten quite competitive from an admissions standpoint, we still want to ensure that students have more than one path to UCLA,” Clark said. “I think it’s kind of the right thing to do for a state university.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn't mean it's free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
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SANTA CRUZ, Calif. — At 19, Elizabeth Clews knew attending community college while balancing a full-time job and caring for a newborn would be hard. But she wanted to give it a shot.
After a few months, the single mom, who had just exited the foster care system, realized she wasn’t doing well enough to pass her classes at Ventura College. “All I could really focus on was taking care of my baby and making sure that I kept a roof over our heads,” she said.
Clews thought her performance would improve if she quit work. But when she logged into the school’s online portal to register for a second semester, a message popped up that she described as saying, “You can enroll for classes, but you’re not gonna get financial aid.” Clews was in danger of failing to meet a standard called SAP, or “satisfactory academic progress,” which is attached to nearly all federal financial aid for higher education — including grants, loans and work study — and most state aid too.
“I didn’t really know it was a thing,” Clews said, “I didn’t understand any of the financial aid terminology.” But one thing she knew with utter clarity: She couldn’t pay tuition and fees out of pocket. So, she dropped out.
Advocates are seeking changes to the rules around “satisfactory academic progress” that they say will benefit students like Elizabeth Clews. She dropped out of Ventura College after receiving a warning that she wasn’t meeting the standard. Credit: Talia Herman for The Hechinger Report
The number of students across the U.S. affected by satisfactory academic progress requirements each year likely runs in the hundreds of thousands, yet until recently the issue garnered almost no attention from news media, academics and policy makers. “It’s not a noisy problem” because it doesn’t impact people with social capital and power, said Christina Tangalakis, associate dean of financial aid at Glendale Community College in Southern California.
Now, a loose coalition of nonprofits, legislators and financial aid administrators are trying to reform what they describe as overly punitive, vague standards that keep many students capable of earning a degree from obtaining one. The state of Indiana was an early actor, creating a grant in 2016 for returning students who had “SAP-ed out” of federal funding. Last month, California enacted legislation to make all colleges align their requirements for “satisfactory academic progress” with the federal minimum standard.
At the federal level, 39 nonprofit organizations sent a letter in August asking the U.S. Department of Education to clarify the rules around the SAP minimum requirements. And in Congress, Sen. Cory Booker, a Democrat, is expected to re-introduce SAP-related legislation that would give students a second chance at aid.
The logic behind satisfactory academic progress rules is that giving aid to students who are unlikely to graduate is a bad investment, wasting students’ time and taxpayers’ dollars.
The policy was created in 1976, and at first, each college or university was left to set its own standards. Then, in a 1981 report to the Senate, the General Accounting Office said tougher ones were needed. Citing little evidence, the agency asserted that $1.28 million had been accessed inappropriately.
“It was Reaganomics and welfare reform and this idea of deserving and undeserving poor,” said Debbie Raucher, the director of education for John Burton Advocates for Youth, or JBAY, a California nonprofit. The stance was “if a student isn’t pulling their weight, they don’t deserve our help,” she said.
Under current federal rules, students must maintain a 2.0 GPA or higher, complete at least 67 percent of credits attempted and stay on track to finish a degree in no more than 150 percent of the time it usually takes (for example, six years for a four-year degree). During the Obama administration, SAP regulations were further tightened in an attempt to prevent low-performing for-profit institutions from lining their pockets with taxpayer dollars.
“SAP is my number one enemy, my arch nemesis.”
Elizabeth Clews, University of California, Santa Cruz student who was kicked off financial aid because of SAP requirements when attending community college
Once a student becomes ineligible for financial aid after failing to make SAP, that status stays with them forever.
Some students appeal, but that process can be complicated and riddled with inconsistencies. Campuses aren’t required to offer appeals. Those that do grounds to “the death of a relative, an injury or illness of the student, or other special circumstances,” according to federal regulations. What circumstances qualify as “special” varies tremendously. For example, some schools explicitly allow students to appeal if they are struggling to balance school and work demands, while others explicitly disallow appeals on the same grounds, according to a 2023 analysis by JBAY.
At 20, Clews didn’t know anything about an appeal, but two years later, she felt “this itch to try again,” and attempted to re-enroll at Ventura. When she got a similar notification, a more mature Clews “decided to do some investigating.” She had experienced homelessness and food insecurity, but didn’t see those circumstances on the appeals list. Her takeaway was: “Oh, well you didn’t die, you didn’t get your leg cut off, so there’s no reason that you shouldn’t have been successful.”
So Clews worked as a waitress and in retail for the next five years.
“It was Reaganomics and welfare reform and this idea of deserving and undeserving poor.”
Debbie Raucher, the director of education for John Burton Advocates for Youth
This turn of events was, in part, the luck of the draw. Some schools are more stringent than the federal rules require: For example, JBAY identified 10 colleges in California that mandate a course completion rate between 70 and 80 percent, not 67. Some institutions require a 2.0 GPA every term, while others consider SAP satisfied if a student’s cumulative GPA is above the threshold. In deciding whether students are progressing fast enough, some colleges include remedial coursework and classes taken in pursuit of an old major, while others don’t. Raucher, of JBAY, said Ventura’s currently posted policy isn’t significantly stricter than average, but wouldn’t have offered Clews “the full leniency allowed by federal regs.” (A Ventura representative said in an email that the school follows federal and state guidelines.)
Fearful of government audits, financial aid administrators tend to take a conservative view of the regulations, Raucher said.
Both JBAY’s analysis and a 2016 study place the number of students who don’t meet SAP requirements at more than 20 percent of Pell grant aid recipients, with that share higher for community college students.
“This is not a fringe issue that 1 percent of students are facing,” Raucher said.
Glendale Community College’s Tangalakis, who has served at four different colleges in her 22-year career, said the policy can undermine colleges’ equity efforts. Institutions must demand rigor, she said, and that’s why they have an “academic progress” requirement for all students that is distinct from SAP.
But since SAP standards are sometimes stricter than the schools’ individual policies, Tangalakis said, low-income students “have to meet a higher standard simply because they have financial need.” The appeals process also often results in staff laying “a lot of unnecessary judgment” on students, she said, and may retraumatize students, who can be asked to prove hardships such as domestic violence.
“Ultimately, it’s just a very powerful message that says you don’t belong here,” Tangalakis said.
Two analyses place the number of students who don’t meet SAP requirements at more than 20 percent of aid recipients, with that share higher for community college students
After taking on a senior role at Glendale, she made changes. Tangalakis instructed her team to assess SAP using the most liberal interpretation of the federal regulations and to handle appeals generously, allowing consideration of anything a student thinks relevant and accepting a statement completed online or via phone (rather than demanding documentation from third parties as some schools do).
The result has been striking: According to Tangalakis, the share of students who lost aid for failing to make SAP fell from 9.3 percent in 2017 to 6.4 percent in 2021. And she found that students who failed SAP in 2021 went on to complete degrees and certificates at a significantly higher rate than those who’d failed in 2017. These gains were even larger for students from traditionally disadvantaged backgrounds.
Other research confirms SAP’s disparate impact along racial lines: In 2021, for example, JBAY found that Black students, Native American students and foster youth who received a Pell Grant ran afoul of SAP provisions at more than twice the rate of white, Filipino and Asian students.
In theory, if students who “SAP-out” find another way to pay for college, they can requalify for aid if they improve academically. But for most students, that creates a Catch-22, Raucher said: They can’t re-enroll without financial aid, and they can’t get financial aid without re-enrolling. State aid that bypasses SAP status can springboard adults returning to college out of that Catch-22. But most don’t offer it.
“Ultimately, it’s just a very powerful message that says you don’t belong here.”
Christina Tangalakis, associate dean of financial aid at Glendale Community College in Southern California
In practice, this means that students who fall short of SAP standards are significantly more likely to drop out. In the 2016 study of one unnamed community college system, for example, the majority of those who failed SAP, approximately 60 percent, dropped out. For many students, “there is no plan B,” Tangalakis said, and SAP is “just a de facto end to their academic journey a lot of times.”
Even just receiving a SAP warning can produce that result: An analysis of data from Minnesota community colleges, for example, showed that only half of students who received a notice that they were in danger of failing to make SAP in the fall of 2013 tried to return that spring.
That, it turns out, is what happened to Clews. The message she initially received from Ventura was a warning, not notice that she was already ineligible. A financial aid deposit for what would have been her second semester showed up in her bank account, but by then she’d left the area to try to find reliable shelter and employment. Of course, when she didn’t show up for those classes, she officially failed SAP. (The money was taken out of her tax refund.)
Years later, the pandemic hit and Clews found herself in an unusual position – with free time. Yes, she was home-schooling two kids, but with restaurants and stores closed, she couldn’t work. She said she filed an appeal letter but couldn’t receive aid while it was pending. Normally, that would have meant no school, but like millions of Americans that year, Clews received pandemic stimulus checks from the federal government.
After reenrolling with that money, her GPA shot up. Clews said, “I was doing really well, and I realized, ‘Oh, it wasn’t that I wasn’t smart enough, I just didn’t have the resources and the support that I needed to be successful.’ ”
That jibes with a small 2021 interview study that did not detect a difference in motivation between Pell-eligible students who were meeting SAP and those who weren’t. The study suggests that students who fail SAP requirements often do so because their life circumstances are different, not because they’re less “cut out” to succeed academically. Other research shows that students who SAP-out stop pursuing a degree more often than their peers with similarly low GPAs who aren’t subject to SAP.
“What SAP policies end up doing is targeting students who are coming in with the biggest existing barriers, and then doubling down,” said Raucher, whose organization helped develop the California SAP reform bill.
That legislation, which passed unanimously, requires that colleges use the least stringent definition of SAP allowed by the federal regulations for state financial aid, in effect dictating how all aid is administered. It also encourages colleges to better communicate the policy to students and mandates changes to the appeal system, including creating a review process for denied appeals, and prohibits institutions from disenrolling a student for nonpayment of tuition while an appeal is pending.
After graduating from Ventura College, Elizabeth Clews transferred to the University of California, Santa Cruz. She plans to become a teacher. Credit: Talia Herman for The Hechinger Report
The federal legislation Booker, the Democratic senator, is expected to introduce would be similar to a bill he proposed in 2020, allowing a renewal of SAP eligibility when a student “stops out” for two years or more. The 2020 bill didn’t advance in Congress, but Booker may have a co-sponsor this time around, as talks with several Republican senators are in progress.
“The satisfactory academic progress standard is not without its flaws,” said Virginia Foxx, a Republican congresswoman from North Carolina who serves as chairwoman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. “Senator Booker’s bill isn’t perfect, but I am always willing to find common ground to improve policies and outcomes for students.”
In the meantime, organizations including JBAY and the national nonprofit Higher Learning Advocates have asked Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to encourage schools to make the appeals process more user-friendly, among other changes. Tanya Ang, managing director of Higher Learning Advocates, said reforming SAP has bipartisan support because eliminating “unnecessary hoops” for degree completion helps more people gain skills they can use in the workforce.
In theory, stringent SAP requirements tell students where they stand and force them to improve. But the 2016 study didn’t find that SAP policies had much of an incentivizing effect, on average.
The message Clews received was the opposite: Don’t try. Because if at first you don’t succeed, there’s no chance to try, try again.
In 2022, she completed her classwork at Ventura and transferred to the University of California, Santa Cruz. Clews plans to become a teacher. “I’m thankful to be where I’m at,” she said, “but I definitely feel like it shouldn’t have been so hard to get back to school.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn't mean it's free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
