The April 18 protests at Columbia University over the war in Gaza and Columbia’s investment in weapons manufacturers and companies doing business in Israel led to more than 100 arrests, and sparked widespread unrest not seen on campuses in decades. Barnard College, which is affiliated with Columbia, suspended at least 53 students and evicted them from their dorms, cut off their meal plans and barred them from campus.

We wanted to learn how the suspensions and evictions felt to students on a personal level, and what the experience meant to them. So we interviewed several Barnard students who were suspended. Most have had their suspensions lifted on the condition that they refrain from unauthorized protest, and to allow them to speak freely we are not identifying them.

A Barnard spokesperson said the college does not comment on confidential student conduct proceedings. The administration said in a statement that it was “committed to open inquiry and expression” and that “students rejected multiple opportunities to leave the encampment without consequence.”

The interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

L.S., who is Jewish, attended the protest on April 18 but said she was careful not to get arrested. Barnard suspended and evicted her from her dorm anyway. Because she is an international student, a long-term suspension could have meant the loss of her visa. She would have had to leave the country within 15 days.

How did you find out you lost your housing?

I was not counting on being suspended. I didn’t know that that was even a possibility. I figured that out when I tried to enter my dorm [that night] – they had my face on a poster in my lobby, with the words ‘ban list’ written on it.

You could only imagine what all could happen in a moment like that in the middle of the night. It’s cold. Some people genuinely had nowhere to go. I was scrambling at 2:30 a.m. to find somewhere to sleep. Luckily, there’s a huge community that was kind of immediately mobilized to help the evicted students.

How do you understand the university’s rationale for the arrests, with concern for student safety?

I don’t think anyone buys the safety narrative. There’s nothing safe ever about evicting students. Barnard is treating us worse than an American court would.

Why is this movement important to you personally?

I think this movement invites a lot of other people to see their own struggles and their own principles in the causes of Palestinian liberation. I’m not a politician. I’m just a student who comes from a background of generations of genocide survivors, and that’s why I’m a part of this.

It’s because I see the struggle of the Palestinians and the struggle of my ancestors as very, very clearly connected. I come from the region. The places I’m from have also been destroyed by war and by empire, and by diaspora and by exile. And so, you know, exile is like a universal experience I think a lot of us can identify with.

No matter what people are saying about us, we will continue to hold our Jewish identity close to our organizing and we will be Jewish even as people continue to deny that.

Is there anything you want people to know that you think isn’t getting covered enough by the media?

It’s horrible what we’ve gone through, and eviction and homelessness of students without due process is unacceptable. But at the same time, we are all going to be okay. The students in Gaza are not going to be okay. There are no universities left in Gaza. And every single bit of media attention we eat up with repeating our same story over and over again – that needs to be that same energy for the people in Gaza. Because the reason that we started all this, the reason that people were willing to get suspended and arrested is because they know that there are no universities left in Gaza, and we do not want to be financially or politically complicit in that.

Related: OPINION: I teach Renaissance literature at Columbia, but this week’s lessons are about political protests and administrative decisions

I.L., a Jewish student from New York City, was arrested at the protest and allowed to return to her dorm that night, but was told she had to leave the next morning.

What happened when you found out you had to leave the dorm?

It was honestly one of really the worst parts about this whole experience. I have two friends who have an apartment off campus. They had an air mattress so they offered it to me and I tried to sleep there, but a lot of students who were suspended and evicted have housing accommodations through our Center for Accessibility Resources and Disability Services. And I’m one of those students.

How do you understand the university’s rationale for the arrests, with concern for the student safety?

It’s absolutely not true. I blame [Columbia President Nemat] Shafik for what’s happening on other campuses with all of these arrests. She normalized calling the cops on her own students. She said that we were a threat when we were just sitting on our campus singing songs [on April 18].

Why is this movement important to you personally?

When October 7 happened, I didn’t really know anything. I went to Hebrew school for 10 years. I was pretty critical when anyone would say anything negative about Israel, because I kind of internalized this conflation between antisemitism and criticizing Israel.

But then I started seeing how Israel responded after October 7th. I basically had another Jewish person swipe up on my [Instagram] story that started the conversation with me. I was like, let me do my research, and I spent a lot of time just reading.

Once I learned, I was like, ‘Whoa, how is any of this about being Jewish?’ I felt like Judaism was being weaponized to somehow support what the State of Israel was doing. I felt like it was absolutely my duty as a Jewish person, and also just an American, because I knew that this was my tax dollars and my family’s tax dollars, that directly funds all of the brutality.

October 7 to me was just a major turning point in the whole rest of my life because I see the struggle of the Palestinians as part of the struggle for liberation of all people, and I become more aware of the other struggles throughout the world.

And so I think that now what’s happening with this encampment is such a beautiful combination of really everything that I believe in. It’s about people coming together.

I continue to bear witness because this is the worst thing that I’ve ever seen in my life. I think how I got here is definitely informed by the fact that I was watching Judaism being kind of twisted to somehow support this. So as an American and a human, that’s why I show up now.

My goal in all of this is a phrase that I’ve really come to in the past seven months. It’s that another world is possible.

Is there anything you want people to know that you think isn’t getting covered enough by the media?

I think overwhelmingly the media doesn’t understand what we’re doing. I’ve been really upset to see the way that the media is focusing on specific individuals who say things that are antisemitic, but they never say anything about the Islamophobia that I see happening every day.

I think that if you actually spend time at the encampments, you’d see that there’s something very beautiful going on. This is about divestment, because it’s the one tangible way that as college students we have the power to change what was happening to Palestinians.

This is because the world does not have to be this way and that other worlds are possible. It’s been the greatest honor of my life to be a part of this.

This story about protests at Columbia University was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

The post Q&A: Barnard students share experiences of suspension and eviction during Columbia protests appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

TOLEDO, Ohio – The sound of his teacher smacking his desk jolted Marquan into consciousness, and his head jerked up. “Wake up,” his teacher said.

Marquan hadn’t slept much the night before, and the words came out before he was fully coherent. “Watch out before you make me mad,” he said. 

His teacher turned and asked if that was a threat. The 16-year-old said no, he was just startled, but it was too late – he was sent out of the classroom and given a two-day suspension. 

What the teacher heard as a threat was, for Marquan, an instinctive reaction, and he had failed to code-switch in that groggy moment.

“I wasn’t threatening him; it was just loud and all of a sudden,” said Marquan, now 17 and a sophomore at Jesup W. Scott High School in Toledo, Ohio. (His last name is being withheld to protect his privacy.) “That was the most unfair thing.” 

In Ohio, Black students like Marquan are suspended for incidents like this far more frequently than their white peers. In the past six years, Ohio has issued close to 885,000  suspensions and expulsions for comments and misbehaviors tagged as disobedience or disruption. Nearly half of those dismissals have been for Black students, even though they make up only 17 percent of the public school population. Black students in Ohio are, on average, kicked out of classes for these offenses at four and half times the rate of white students.

A Hechinger Report analysis across 20 states found that these types of categories are cited as justification in nearly a third of all suspension and expulsion records. In many states, including Indiana, Maryland and Rhode Island, Black students are suspended more often for these kinds of incidents, which can include dress code violations, talking back to teachers and being too noisy in class.

States use different terms to describe the offenses – disrespect, insubordination, defiance – depending on their discipline code. But what they all have in common is the subjective nature of an educator’s decision; experts say that’s what leads to racial disparities. What seems disrespectful and threatening in one classroom can be entirely acceptable in another, depending on who’s listening and who’s speaking. That’s when racial and cultural differences between educators and students can come into play. Bias also plays a role.

“Disobedience is identified, by and large, by lived experiences,” said Jennifer Myree, who was a principal and assistant principal in Cincinnati for seven years and now works for the Ohio Department of Education. “If you have a child who comes from a home where they’re allowed to speak out about injustices, for example, saying ‘That’s not fair,’ and the classroom teacher, or the administrators, don’t believe that the child should speak out on things, they can consider that disobedience.”

Researchers say that racial disparities inside schools tend to reflect what’s happening in society as a whole and that income level does not explain the discrepancies.

“Teachers are no more biased than other people, but also no less biased,” said Russell Skiba, a professor in the school psychology program at Indiana University and director of its Equity Project. “Race is the much more important predictor of whether a kid gets suspended rather than poverty.”

Related: When typical middle school antics mean suspensions, handcuffs or jail

A spokesperson from the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, Lacey Snoke, didn’t respond directly to questions about the state’s racial disparities. Snoke, the chief communications officer, said the department “supports schools and districts as they address non-academic barriers to learning.” The Indiana Department of Education said that school discipline policies were set at the local level. Rhode Island said that it helps school districts in setting discipline policies that “are conducive to a safe and nurturing environment that promotes academic success.” Maryland’s state education agency said only that it makes annual data available for school districts to analyze.

Snoke also noted that the state requires schools to use a student support system known as Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, or PBIS. “When implementing PBIS with fidelity, schools and districts see a reduction in out-of-school suspension and exclusionary discipline,” she said.

Like many of America’s school districts, Toledo’s public schools have struggled with keeping discipline racially equitable for years. In 2020, following a federal civil rights investigation, the district agreed to a settlement with the federal Department of Justice “to address and prevent discriminatory discipline of students based on race or disability.” Last spring, the government extended its monitoring for an additional year after finding that the district was not in full compliance with the settlement terms. 

Part of the problem in Toledo, the fifth-largest school district in Ohio with more than 21,000 students, is that teachers and administrators haven’t figured out what’s at the root of the disparity, according to a federal monitoring report sent to the district last May and obtained by The Hechinger Report as part of its investigation into the widespread use of suspension for things like defiance and disruption around the country.

“Speculative answers about the reasons for why disciplinary referrals would be greater for Black students when compared to white students ranged from blaming the students’ underperformance in math and English language arts to blaming ‘parents who don’t take pride’ or are otherwise uninvolved in their children’s lives,” according to the report. “Educators at one school opined that they are not using strategies that engage kids of color; those at another school said they needed to develop activities for students to feel more of a sense of belonging.”        

Last year, there were more than 12,000 suspensions in Toledo public schools for defiance or disruption and more than 7,700 were given to Black students, up from 7,000 the year before. Black students received 65 percent of defiance and disruption suspensions last year, even though they make up about 46 percent of the student population in Toledo.

Related: Preventing suspensions: Tackle discipline problems with empathy first    

The reason for the high numbers is multi-faceted, and the solutions need to be as well, said Amerah Archer, acting executive director for the Department of Equity Diversity and Inclusion in the Toledo Public Schools.

“We understand there’s sometimes a cultural mismatch between teachers and students and their backgrounds,” Archer said. “So we offer culturally responsive training, to help our teachers understand how to build relationships and students across cultures.”

The district has also brought in outside mental health providers and — in all 57 of its schools — it has set up social-emotional wellness teams to examine discipline data and look for trends, including racial disparities within schools and classrooms. Educators receive training on how to respond to students who have endured trauma and may be acting out as a result, with responses that can lead to alternatives to suspensions.

Sheena Barnes, president of the school board until January this year, points to a culture that views some children as more dangerous than others. She’s also concerned about educators who have trouble appropriately interpreting a child’s behavior.

Barnes, who is Black, got a call last year to come to her child’s school immediately. Her son, who is on the autism spectrum and was in third grade at the time, had been trying to mix paints to make a specific color. The teacher accidentally took one of the colors away, frustrating the boy, who threw his paintbrush and splattered some paint. After Barnes arrived and helped de-escalate the situation, she said the teacher asked her if they could talk. 

“’He just scares me,” she said the teacher confessed to her. 

“So I asked her, ‘What did he do? Did he bite you, kick you, did he throw something at you, cuss at you? I’m going through all the list of things that could make you scared of a 9-year old, my baby.’ And she says, ‘It’s the way he looks at me.’

“And I just crumble,” Barnes recalled. “If you’re scared of him in third grade, what the hell are you gonna do to him in ninth grade?”

Moments like these – when adults see children as threatening – can influence decisions made in a heated classroom situation. The Department of Justice report on Toledo schools last spring concluded that “subjective infractions that are prone to bias, such as ‘Disruptive Behavior’ and ‘Failure to Follow Directions’” play a role in racial discrepancies when it comes to discipline.

Related: Hidden expulsions? Schools kick students out but call it a ‘transfer’

Toledo school officials noted that the report said that the district had “made significant progress” in some areas and that the Covid-19 pandemic had “hampered and delayed the District’s ability to execute certain provisions in a timely manner.”

Barnes, who remains on the school board, said she welcomed the continued monitoring by the government, because, she said, “we still have work to do.”

“There’s not a bad child – there’s a child reacting to a bad situation,” she said, sitting in a cafe in downtown Toledo, and noting the many serious issues faced by young people, such as gun violence and food insecurity.

“Maybe I can’t read. So, I’m gonna disrupt the class, because I don’t want to get embarrassed,” said Barnes. “Or if you ask me where my homework is, I’m gonna make some silly jokes and get kicked out, because I don’t want people to know that I didn’t have a home to sleep in last night, or I couldn’t do my homework, because we didn’t have power.”

Sometimes disruptive behavior starts with a small incident – like a student calling out in class. If a teacher has trouble redirecting the child, it can escalate, and the classroom can become chaotic. Teachers sometimes conclude that removing the child who is being loud is in the best interest of the whole class.

Experience and training can provide teachers with tools to address student conduct without suspensions.

One study in California published last year found that it was often the least-experienced teachers who relied on removing disruptive students from the classroom, and that even three years of teaching experience led to a substantial drop in the number of students referred for discipline.

The same study found that, among teachers who removed students from class and sent them to the principal’s office for disciplinary action, the top 5 percent did this so often that they accounted for most of the racial gaps in these referrals – effectively doubling those gaps.

Those gaps are largely driven by incidents that require a more subjective call, such as for “defiance,” rather than more objective categories like drug use or skipping class, according to Jing Liu, an assistant professor of education at the University of Maryland and one of the study’s authors. 

Related: Civil rights at stake: Black, Hispanic students blocked from class for missing class

Other researchers argue that stressful environments can bolster racial inequities.

“When people are stressed out, when they are under pressure, when they don’t have the time to think through a response, they are more likely to rely on racial biases,” said Juan Del Toro, a professor in the psychology department at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, who has studied the impact of discipline policies on Black students. 

Del Toro argues that more support for teachers could bring down the number of suspensions for low-level offenses, which in turn could help more students perform well academically. His research showed that when students committed minor misbehavior infractions, those who were suspended experienced significant negative academic consequences, compared with students who were just written up for the same kind of offense. 

In Toledo, Jamarion, a 10th grader at E. L. Bowsher High School, was serving an in-school suspension last December for getting in an argument with another student when he was assigned an additional three days for talking in the suspension room.

“We were just talking about the way we were feeling, bored and all that. You’re just sitting there all day staring at the wall or doing your homework,” said Jamarion, who is 15. (His last name is being withheld to protect his privacy.) “You should at least get a warning or something.”

“It’s not fair,” he said. “I was mad, upset.” And he said he was concerned about missing more math classes and falling behind.

Related: How career and technical education shuts out Black and Latino students from high-paying professions     

Educators and administrators emphasize that simply banning suspensions for low-level offenses would not change school culture or help educators find alternatives. “It could fix the data,” said Myree, the former Cincinnati principal, “but it might not fix what’s going on in the building.”

Some districts in Ohio, such as Cleveland Municipal, reduced the number of disobedience suspensions of Black children over the past year, but the number in Ohio overall climbed to more than 78,400 in 2022-23, up 16 percent from the previous year.

Izetta Thomas spent 18 years as an educator in Columbus public schools in Ohio and is now the education justice organizer for the Columbus Education Association, the union that represents Columbus educators. 

She believes individual teachers have a responsibility for their actions, but that teacher-prep programs and the school system itself could do more to curb the overuse of suspensions. 

“It’s hard for educators because a lot of us might feel like this [discipline decisions] is not what I signed up to do, this is not what I learned in my college classroom,” said Thomas. “But why isn’t it a part of teacher training in colleges? Why isn’t understanding of our own biases and lenses and those that are different from ours, why aren’t we taught early on what that is?”

“Everybody needs Band-Aids, she added, “but Band-Aids only last so long.”

Editors’ note: The Hechinger Report’s Fazil Khan had nearly completed the data analysis and reporting for this project when he died in a fire in his apartment building. Read about the internship fund created to honor his legacy as a data reporter. USA TODAY Senior Data Editor Doug Caruso completed data visualizations for this project based on Khan’s work.

This story about racial disparities in school discipline was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

The post ‘It was the most unfair thing’: Disobedience, discipline and racial disparity appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

A Rhode Island student smashed a ketchup packet with his fist, splattering an administrator. Another ripped up his school work. The district called it “destruction of school property.” A Washington student turned cartwheels while a PE teacher attempted to give instructions. 

A pair of Colorado students slid down a dirt path despite a warning. An Ohio 12th grader refused to work while assigned to the in-school suspension room. Then there was the Maryland sixth grader who swore when his computer shut off and responded “my bad” when his teacher addressed his language. 

Their transgressions all ended the same way: The students were suspended.

Discipline records state the justification for their removals: These students were disorderly. Insubordinate. Disruptive. Disobedient. Defiant. Disrespectful. 

At most U.S. public schools, students can be suspended, even expelled, for these ambiguous and highly subjective reasons. This type of punishment is pervasive nationwide, leading to hundreds of thousands of missed days of school every year, and is often doled out for misbehavior that doesn’t seriously hurt anyone or threaten school safety, a Hechinger Report investigation found. 

Districts cited one of these vague violations as a reason for suspending or expelling students more than 2.8 million times from 2017-18 to 2021-22 across the 20 states that collect this data. That amounted to nearly a third of all punishments recorded by those states. Black students and students with disabilities were more likely than their peers to be disciplined for these reasons. 

Many discipline reform advocates say that suspensions should be reserved for only the most serious, dangerous behaviors. Those, the analysis found, were much less common. Violations of rules involving alcohol, tobacco or drugs were cited as reasons for ejecting students from classes about 759,000 times, and incidents involving a weapon were cited 131,000 times. Even infractions involving physical violence — such as fighting, assault and battery — were less common, with about 2.3 million instances. (Learn more about the data and how we did our analysis.)

Because categories like defiance and disorderly conduct are often defined broadly at the state level, teachers and administrators have wide latitude in interpreting them, according to interviews with dozens of researchers, educators, lawyers and discipline reform advocates. That opens the door to suspensions for low-level infractions.  

“Those are citations you can drive a truck through,” said Jennifer Wood, executive director for the Rhode Island Center for Justice. 

The Hechinger Report also obtained more than 7,000 discipline records from a dozen school districts across eight states through public records requests. They show a wide range of behavior that led to suspensions for things like disruptive conduct and insubordination. Much of the conduct posed little threat to safety. For instance, students were regularly suspended for being tardy, using a phone during class or swearing. 

Decades of research have found that students who are suspended from school tend to perform worse academically and drop out at higher rates. Researchers have linked suspensions to lower college enrollment rates and increased involvement with the criminal justice system.

These findings have spurred some policymakers to try to curtail suspensions by limiting their use to severe misbehavior that could harm others. Last year, California banned all suspensions for willful defiance. Other places, including Philadelphia and New York City, have similarly eliminated suspensions for low-level misconduct. 

Elsewhere, though, as student behavior has worsened following the pandemic, legislators are calling for stricter discipline policies, concerned for educators who struggle to maintain order and students whose lessons are disrupted. These legislative proposals come despite warnings from experts and even classroom teachers who say more suspensions — particularly for minor, subjective offenses — are not the answer. 

Roberto J. Rodríguez, assistant U.S. education secretary, said he was concerned by The Hechinger Report’s findings. “We need more tools in the toolkit for our educators and for our principals to be able to respond to some of the social and emotional needs,” he said. “Suspension and expulsion shouldn’t be the only tool that we pull out when we see behavioral issues.”

In Rhode Island, insubordination was the most common reason for a student to be suspended in the years analyzed. Disorderly conduct was third. 

In the Cranston Public Schools, these two categories accounted for half of the Rhode Island district’s suspensions in 2021-22. Disorderly conduct alone made up about 38 percent. 

Behavior that led to a such a suspension there in recent years included:

• Getting a haircut in the bathroom;
• Putting a finger through the middle of another student’s hamburger at lunch;
• Writing swear words in an email exchange with another student;
• Throwing cut up pieces of paper in the air;
• Stabbing a juice bottle with a pencil and getting juice all over a table and peers; and
• Leapfrogging over a peer and “almost” knocking down others.

Cranston school officials did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Rhode Island Department of Education spokesperson Victor Morente said in an email that the agency could not comment on specific causes for suspension, but that the department “continues to underscore that all options need to be exhausted before schools move to suspension.” 

The department defines disorderly conduct as “Any act which substantially disrupts the orderly conduct of a school function, [or] behavior which substantially disrupts the orderly learning environment or poses a threat to the health, safety, and/or welfare of students, staff, or others.”

Related: In New York state, students can be suspended for up to an entire school year

Many states use similarly unspecific language in their discipline codes, if they provide any guidance at all, a review of state policies found. 

For education departments that do provide definitions to districts, subjectivity is frequently built in. In Louisiana’s state guidance, for instance, “treats authority with disrespect” includes “any act which demonstrates a disregard or interference with authority.”

Ted Beasley, spokesperson for the Louisiana Department of Education, said in an email that discipline codes are not defined in state statutes and that “school discipline is a local school system issue.” 

Officials in several other states said the same.

The result, as demonstrated by a review of discipline records from eight states, is a broad interpretation of the categories: Students were suspended for shoving, yelling at peers, throwing objects, and violating dress codes. Some students were suspended for a single infraction; others broke several rules. 

In fewer than 15 percent of cases, students got in trouble for using profanity, according to a Hechinger analysis of the records. The rate was similar for when they yelled at or talked back to administrators. In at least 20 percent of cases, students refused a direct order and in 6 percent, they were punished for misusing technology, including being on the cell phones during class or using school computers inappropriately. 

“What is defiance to one is not defiance to all, and that becomes confusing, not just for the students, but also the adults,” said Harry Lawson, human and civil rights director for the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union. “Those terms that are littered throughout a lot of codes of conduct, depending on the relationship between people, can mean very different things.”

But giving teachers discretion in how to assign discipline isn’t necessarily a problem, said Adam Tyner, national research director at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. “The whole point of trusting, in this case, teachers, or anyone, to do their job is to be able to let them have responsibility and make some judgment calls,” he said.

Tyner added that it’s important to think about all students when considering school discipline policies. “If a student is disrupting the class, it may not help them all that much to take them and put them in a different environment, but it sure might help the other students who are trying to learn,” he said. 

Johanna Lacoe spent years trying to measure exactly that — the effect of discipline reforms on all students In Philadelphia, including those who hadn’t been previously suspended. The district banned out-of-school suspensions for many nonviolent offenses in 2012. 

Critics of the policy shift warned that it would harm students who do behave in class; they’d learn less or even come to school less often. Lacoe’s research found that schools faithfully following the new rules saw no decrease in academic achievement or attendance for non-suspended students. 

But, the policy wasn’t implemented consistently, the researchers found. The schools that complied already issued the fewest suspensions; it was easier for them to make the policy shift, Lacoe said. In schools that kept suspending students, despite the ban, test scores and student attendance fell slightly.

Overall, though, students who had been previously suspended showed improvements. Lacoe called eliminating out-of-school suspensions for minor infractions a “no brainer.”

“We know suspensions aren’t good for kids,” said Lacoe, the research director of the California Policy Lab’s site at the University of California, Berkeley.* The group partners with government agencies to research the impact of policies. “Kicking kids out of school and providing them no services and no support and then returning them to the environment where nothing has changed is not a good solution.” 

Related: Hidden expulsions? Schools kick students out but call it a ‘transfer’

This fall, two high schoolers in Providence, Rhode Island, walked out of a classroom. They later learned they were being suspended for their action, because it was disrespectful to a teacher.

On her first day back after the suspension, one of the students, Sara, said she went to her teacher to talk through the incident. It was something she wished she’d had the chance to do without missing a couple days of school.

“Suspending someone, not talking to someone, that’s not helping,” said Sara, whose last name is being withheld to protect her privacy. “You’re not helping them to succeed. You’re making it worse.”

In 2021-22, disorderly conduct and insubordination made up a third of all Providence Public School suspensions. 

District spokesperson Jay Wegimont said in an email that the district uses many alternatives to suspension and out-of-school suspensions are only given to respond to “persistent conduct which substantially impedes the ability of other students to learn.”

Some parents and students interviewed asked not to have their full names published, fearing retaliation from their school districts. But nearly all parents and students who have dealt with suspension for violations such as disrespect and disorderly conduct also said that the punishment often did nothing but leave the student frustrated with the school and damage the student’s relationships with teachers. 

At a Cincinnati high school in 2019, Yousuf Munir led a peaceful protest about the impact of climate change, with about 50 fellow students. Munir, then a junior, planned to leave school and join a larger protest at City Hall. The principal said Munir couldn’t go and threatened to assign detention.

Munir left anyway.

That detention morphed into suspension for disobeying the principal, said Munir, who remembers thinking: “The only thing you’re doing is literally keeping me out of class.”

The district told The Hechinger Report that Munir was suspended for leaving campus without written permission, a decision in line with the district’s code of conduct. 

The whole incident left Munir feeling “so angry I didn’t know what to do with it.” They went on to start the Young Activists Coalition, which advocated for fair discipline and restorative practices at Cincinnati Public Schools.

Now in college, Munir is a mentor to high school kids. “I can’t imagine ever treating a kid that way,” they said. 

Parents and students around the country described underlying reasons for behavior problems that a suspension would do little to address: Struggles with anxiety. Frustration with not understanding classwork. Distraction by events in their personal lives. 

Discipline records are also dotted with examples that indicate a deeper cause for the misbehavior.

In one case, a student in Rhode Island was suspended for talking back to her teachers; the discipline record notes that her mother had recently died and the student might need counseling. A student in Minnesota “lost his cool” after having “his buttons pushed by a couple peers.” He cursed and argued back. A Maryland student who went to the main office to report being harassed cursed at administrators when asked to formally document it. 

To be sure, discipline records disclose only part of a school’s response, and many places may simultaneously be working to address root causes. Even as they retain — and exercise — the right to suspend, many districts across the country have adopted alternative strategies aimed at building relationships and repairing harm caused by misconduct. 

“There needs to be some kind of consequence for acting out, but 9 out of 10 times, it doesn’t need to be suspension,” said Judy Brown, a social worker in Minneapolis Public Schools.

Related: Preventing suspensions: Tackle discipline problems with empathy first

Some educators who have embraced alternatives say in the long run they’re more effective. Suspension temporarily removes kids; it rarely changes behavior when they return. 

“It’s really about having the compassion and the time and patience to be able to have these conversations with students to see what the antecedent of the behavior is,” Brown said. “It’s often not personal; they’re overwhelmed.” 

In some cases, students act out because they don’t want to be at school at all and know the quickest escape is misbehavior. 

On Valentine’s day 2022, a Maryland seventh grader showed up to school late. She then refused to go to class or leave the hallway and, according to her Dorchester County discipline record, was disrespectful towards an educator. “These are the behaviors [the student] typically displays when she does not want to go to class,” her record reads. 

By 8:30 she was suspended and sent home for three days.

Dorchester County school officials declined to comment. In 2021-22, 38 percent of suspensions and expulsions in the district were assigned for disrespect and disruption.

Last year, administrators in Minnesota’s Monticello School District spent the summer overhauling their discipline procedures and consequences, out of concern that students of color were being disproportionately disciplined. They developed clearer definitions for violation categories and instituted non-exclusionary tools to deal with isolated minor misbehaviors.

Previously, the district suspended students for telling an “inappropriate joke” in class or cursing, records show. Those types of behavior will now be dealt with in schools, Superintendent Eric Olsen said, but repeated refusals and noncompliance could still lead to a suspension.

“Would I ever want to see a school where we can’t suspend? I would not,” he said. “Life is always about balance.”

Olsen wants his students — all students — to feel valued and be successful. But they’re not his only consideration. “You also have to think of your employees,” he said. “There’s also that fine line of making sure your staff feels safe.” 

Related: Some kids have returned to in-person learning only to be kicked right back out

Monticello, like most school districts across the country, has seen an increase in student misconduct since schools reopened after pandemic closures. A 2023 survey found that more than 40 percent of educators felt less safe in their schools compared with 2019 and, in some instances, teachers have been injured in violent incidents, including shootings. 

And even before 2020, educators nationwide were warning that they lacked the appropriate mental health and social service supports to adequately deal with behavior challenges. Some nonviolent problems, like refusal to put phones away or stay in one’s seat, can make it difficult for teachers to effectively do their jobs. 

And the discipline records reviewed by The Hechinger Report do capture a sampling of more severe misbehavior. In some cases, students were labeled defiant or disorderly for fighting, throwing chairs or even hitting a teacher. 

Shatara Clark taught for 10 years in Alabama before feeling too disrespected and overextended to keep going. She recalled regular disobedience from students. 

“Sometimes I look back like, ‘How did I make it?’” Clark said. “My blood pressure got high and everything.” 

She became so familiar with the protocol for discipline referrals that she can still remember every step two years after leaving the classroom. In her schools, students were suspended for major incidents like fighting or threatening a teacher but also for repeated nonviolent behavior like interrupting or speaking out in class. 

Clark said discipline records often don’t show the full context. “Say for instance, a boy got suspended for talking out of turn. Well, you’re not going to know that he’s done that five times, and I’ve called his parents,” she said. “Then you see someone that’s been suspended for fighting, and it looks like the same punishment for a lesser thing.”

In many states, reform advocates and student activists pushing to ban harsh discipline policies have found a receptive audience in lawmakers. Many teachers are also sympathetic to their arguments; the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers support discipline reform and alternatives to suspension. 

In some instances, though, teachers have resisted efforts to curtail suspensions, saying they need to have the option to remove kids from school.

Many experts say the largest hurdle to getting teachers to embrace discipline reforms is that new policies are often rolled out without training or adequate staffing and support. 

Without those things, “the policy change is somewhat of a paper tiger,” said Richard Welsh, an associate professor of education and public policy at Vanderbilt University. “If we don’t think about the accompanying support, it’s almost as if some of these are unfunded mandates.”  

In Monticello, Olsen has focused on professional development for teachers to promote alternatives to suspension. The district has created space for students to talk about their actions and how they can rebuild relationships. 

It’s still a work in progress. Teacher training, Olsen says, is key. 

“You can’t just do a policy change and expect everyone to magically do it.”

Reporting contributed by Hadley Hitson of the Montgomery Advertiser and Madeline Mitchell of the Cincinnati Enquirer, members of the USA TODAY Network; and Amanda Chen, Tazbia Fatima, Sara Hutchinson, Tara García Mathewson, and Nirvi Shah, The Hechinger Report. 

Editors’ note: The Hechinger Report’s Fazil Khan had nearly completed the data analysis and reporting for this project when he died in a fire in his apartment building. Read about the internship fund created to honor his legacy as a data reporter. USA TODAY Senior Data Editor Doug Caruso completed data visualizations for this project based on Khan’s work.

*CLARIFICATION: This article has been updated to clarify Johanna Lacoe’s title. She is the research director of the California Policy Lab’s site at the University of California, Berkeley.

This story about classroom discipline was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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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.

Related: ‘The Untouchables’: How Columbia and N.Y.U. benefit from property tax breaks

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.”

The city is facing a series of budget cuts to K-12 schools, libraries and police, among other programs, in part, Mayor Eric Adams has said, because of rising costs to care for an influx of homeless migrants.

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.

Related: Activists question whether wealthy univdersities should be exempt from property taxes

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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SALISBURY, Md. — Three times a week, on average, a police car pulls up to a school in Wicomico County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. A student is brought out, handcuffed and placed inside for transport to a hospital emergency room for a psychiatric evaluation.

Over the past eight years, the process has been used more than 750 times on children. Some are as young as 5 years old.

The state law that allows for these removals, which are known as emergency petitions, intended their use to be limited to people with severe mental illness, those who are endangering their own lives or safety or someone else’s. The removals are supposed to be the first step in getting someone involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital.

But advocates say schools across the country are sending children to the emergency room for psychiatric evaluations in response to behaviors prompted by bullying or frustration over assignments. The ER trips, they say, often follow months, and sometimes years, of the students’ needs not being met.

In most places, information about how often this happens is hidden from the public, but in districts where data has been made available, it’s clear that Black students are more frequently subjected to these removals than their peers. Advocates for students with disabilities say that they, too, are being removed at higher rates.

“Schools focus on keeping kids out rather than on keeping kids in,” said Dan Stewart, managing attorney at the National Disability Rights Network. “I think that’s the fundamental crux of things.”

In 2017, as part of a settlement with the Department of Justice intended to address widespread racial disparities in how students were disciplined, schools in Wicomico County agreed not to misuse emergency petitions. But while the number of suspensions and expulsions declined, mandated trips to the emergency room ticked up.

Last year, children were handcuffed and sent to the emergency room from Wicomico schools at least 117 times — about once per every 100 students — according to data obtained from public records requests to the Wicomico County Sheriff’s Office.

At least 40 percent of those children were age 12 or younger. More than half were Black children, even though only a little more than a third of Wicomico public school children are Black.

In interviews, dozens of students, parents, educators, lawyers and advocates for students with disabilities in Wicomico County said that a lack of resources and trained staff, combined with a punitive culture in some of the schools, are behind the misuse of emergency petitions.

One Wicomico mom, who asked for anonymity because she feared retaliation from the school, recalled the terror she felt when she got the phone call saying that her son’s school was going to have him assessed for a forced psychiatric hospitalization. When she arrived at the school, she said, her son was already in handcuffs. He was put in the back of a police car and taken to the hospital.

“He said his wrists hurt from the handcuffs,” the boy’s mom said. “He was just really quiet, just sitting there, and he didn’t understand why he was in the hospital.”

The use of psychiatric evaluations to remove children from school isn’t just happening in Wicomico. Recent data shows that New York City schools still call police to take children in emotional distress to the emergency room despite a 2014 legal settlement in which they agreed to stop the practice.

A Kentucky school district was found to have used a forced psychiatric assessment on kids more than a thousand times in a year.

In Florida, thousands of school-aged children are subjected to the Baker Act, the state’s involuntary commitment statute.

In a settlement with the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, , the Stockton Unified School District in California agreed to protocols that require other interventions before referring students with disabilities for psychiatric evaluation.

In Maryland, Wicomico uses emergency petitions more often per capita than almost every other Maryland district where data is available. Baltimore City, for example, last year had 271 emergency petitions from schools, compared with Wicomico’s 117, according to data obtained from law enforcement agencies through public records requests. But Baltimore City’s student population is five times as large.

‘Trying to get him out of school’

Wicomico parents describe struggling to get support from the schools when their children fall behind on basics like reading and math in early grades. These gaps in learning can lead to frustration and behaviors that are challenging for teachers to manage.

The Wicomico mother whose son was handcuffed said she fought for years with administrators to obtain accommodations for her child, who is autistic, an experience echoed by other parents. Her son, who also has ADHD, was several years behind in reading by the time he got to middle school. The mother said he was sent to the hospital after an outburst rooted in frustration, not mental illness.

She recalled school officials telling her, “‘He doesn’t have special needs, he just has anger issues.’ They were trying to get him out of the school.”

Her son had grown increasingly discouraged and agitated over an assignment he was unable to complete, she said. The situation escalated, she said, when the teacher argued with him. The student swiped at his desk and knocked a laptop to the floor, and the school called for an emergency petition. After being taken to the hospital in handcuffs, he was examined and released.

“After that, he went from angry to terrified,” she said. “Every time he saw the police, he would start panicking.”

A spokeswoman from the Wicomico County Public Schools said that emergency petitions “are used in the most extreme, emergency situations where the life and safety of the student or others are at risk.”

“[Emergency petitions] are not used for disciplinary purposes and frequently do not result from a student’s behaviors,” Tracy Sahler, the spokeswoman, said in an email. “In fact, a majority of EPs are related to when a student exhibits suicidal ideation or plans self-harm.”

Schools did not respond to questions about why the rate of emergency petitions was so much higher in Wicomico than in other counties in Maryland. The Sheriff’s Department declined to share records that would show the reasons for the removals.

Educators stretched thin

By law, certain classroom removals must be recorded. Schools are required to publicly report suspensions, expulsions and arrests — and the data reveals racial disparities in discipline. Those statistics are what state and federal oversight agencies typically use to judge a school, and they often serve as triggers for oversight and investigations.

But with the notable exceptions of Florida and New York City, most places do not routinely collect data on removals from schools for psychiatric assessments. That means oversight agencies don’t have access to the information.

Without insight into how often schools are using psychiatric removals on children, there is no way to hold them accountable, said Daniel Losen, senior director for the education team at the National Center for Youth Law.

“The civil rights of children is at stake, because it’s more likely it’s going to be Black kids and kids with disabilities who are subjected to all kinds of biases that deny them an educational opportunity,” he said.

Families who have experienced emergency petitions say that the educators who can best communicate with their child are stretched thin, and measures that could de-escalate a situation are not always taken. The day that her son was sent to the hospital, the Wicomico mother who requested anonymity recalled, the administrator who had consistently advocated for him was out of the building.

In another instance, a middle schooler said that the required accommodations for his learning and behavioral disabilities included being allowed to take a walk with an educator he trusted. The day he was involuntarily sent to the hospital, that staff member was unavailable. When he tried to leave the building to take a walk on his own, an administrator blocked him from leaving. The student began yelling and spat at the staffer. He said that by the time police arrived, he was calm and sitting in the principal’s office. Still, he was handcuffed and taken to the hospital where he was examined and released a few hours later.

Because emergency petitions happen outside the standard discipline process, missed school days are not recorded as suspensions. For students with disabilities, that has special consequences — they are not supposed to be removed from class for more than 10 days without an evaluation on whether they are receiving the support they need.

“If you use the discipline process, and you’re a student with a disability, your rights kick in,” said Selene Almazan, legal director for the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates. With emergency petitions, the same rules do not apply.

In many places around the county, the resources needed to support students with disabilities are scarce.

“‘He doesn’t have special needs, he just has anger issues.’ They were trying to get him out of the school.”

Wicomico, Maryland, mother whose autistic son was sent to hospital in handcuffs

On Maryland’s Eastern Shore, lawyers and advocates for families said the spectrum of alternatives for students is limited by both money and geography. Those can include private, out-of-district placements and specialized classrooms for specific needs like dyslexia, for example. 

“If it’s a resource-rich school system, you can provide services and supports,” said Maureen van Stone, director of the Maryland Center for Developmental Disabilities at Kennedy Krieger Institute. “If you need a walk, if you need a sensory work break, if you need to go see the school counselor, those kinds of things can prevent some of this escalation of getting to the point that you’re … emergency petitioning.”

When children need targeted services that are unavailable in the local district, the district must allow them to be educated outside the school system — and pay for it.

“You’re stuck between a rock and a hard place because you’re like, ‘This kid needs more services,’ but you can’t get the school to agree,” said Angela Ford, clinical director at Maple Shade Youth and Family Services, which serves children with emotional and behavioral disabilities in Wicomico.

Last year, only one student was placed in a private day school, according to data from the Maryland State Department of Education.

ER trips increased after settlement

The 2017 settlement with the Justice Department required the Wicomico district to reduce the significant racial and disability-related disparities in suspensions, placements in alternative schools and other discipline measures.

The district agreed not to use emergency petitions when “less intrusive interventions … can be implemented to address the behavioral concern,” and not to use them “to discipline or punish or to address lack of compliance with directions.”

But since the settlement, many parents, teachers and community leaders said the district has seemed more concerned with keeping suspension numbers down than providing support for teachers to help prevent disruptive behavior.

“If we know how to handle and deal with behaviors, then we will have less EPs,” said Anthony Mann, who was an instructional aide at Wicomico County High School last year and is a Wicomico public school parent.

“The civil rights of children is at stake, because it’s more likely it’s going to be Black kids and kids with disabilities who are subjected to all kinds of biases that deny them an educational opportunity.”

Daniel Losen, senior director for the education team at the National Center for Youth Law

Tatiyana Jackson, who has a son with a disability at Wicomico Middle School, agrees teachers need more training. “I don’t think they have a lot of patience or tolerance for children with differences. It’s like they give up on them.”

Wicomico school officials said ongoing professional development for staff includes the appropriate use of emergency petitions.

“Each school has a well-trained team that includes a social worker and school counselor, with the support of school psychologists,” said Sahler. “All supports that may be beneficial to assist the student are utilized. However, the safety of the student is paramount, and the determining factor is ensuring that there is no unnecessary delay in obtaining aid for the student.”

But Denise Gregorius, who taught in Wicomico schools for over a decade and left in 2019, questioned the feasibility of the discipline and behavior strategies taught during professional development.

“The teachers, when they said they wanted more discipline, really what they’re saying is they want more support,” she said.

“You’re stuck between a rock and a hard place because you’re like, ‘This kid needs more services,’ but you can’t get the school to agree.”

Angela Ford, clinical director at Maple Shade Youth and Family Services

Under the terms of the settlement, Wicomico was under federal monitoring for two years. Since then, the number of suspensions and expulsions has declined markedly — for both Black and white students.

But the number of emergency petitions, which don’t appear in state statistics and are often only revealed through FOIA requests, has edged up. And other measures of exclusionary discipline remained high, including school arrests. In 2021-22, Wicomico had 210 school-based arrests — the second-highest number in the state, while they were 15th in student enrollment. More than three-quarters of the children arrested were Black, and 80 percent were students with disabilities; 37 percent of Wicomico students are Black, and 10 percent of Wicomico students have disabilities.

“Monitoring the numbers doesn’t bring you the solution,” said Losen, from the National Center for Youth Law. “If you’re going to a district where they’re resistant, and they have sort of draconian policies that they can’t justify educationally and there are large racial disparities, the problem is more than what they’re doing with discipline.”

The Department of Justice declined to comment.

Black parents point to culture problem

Some Wicomico parents and educators point to an insular culture in the school district where problems are hidden rather than resolved.

They are frustrated, for example, that there is no relationship with the county’s mobile crisis unit, which is often relied on in other counties to help de-escalate issues instead of calling the police.

Many Black parents say they believe their children are more often viewed as threats than as children who need support.

Jermichael Mitchell, a community organizer who is an alum and parent in Wicomico County Schools, said that teachers and school staff often do not know how to empathize with and respond to the trauma and unmet needs that may lead to children’s behavior. 

Last year, among children sent to the hospital on emergency petitions by Wicomico schools, at least 40 percent were age 12 or younger and more than half were Black children..

“A Black kid that’s truly going through something, that truly needs support, is always looked at as a threat,” he said. “You don’t know how those kids have been taught to cry out for help. You don’t know the trauma that they’ve been through.”

Studies have found that Black and Latino children who have a teacher of the same race have fewer suspensions and higher test scores. Such educator diversity is lacking in Wicomico County: Its schools have the largest gap in the state between the percentages of students of color and teachers of color .

Wicomico school officials said they do not discriminate against any of their students.

A Wicomico teenager described a years-long process of becoming alienated from school, with an emergency petition as the ultimate break. He said he was bullied in middle school over a series of months until one day he snapped and hit the student who had been taunting him.

The school called the police. He told the officers not to touch him, that he needed to calm down. Instead, the officers grabbed him and shoved him onto the ground, he said. He was handcuffed and transported to the emergency room. But when he returned to school, he said the only thing that was different was how he felt about the adults in the building.

“I got used to not trusting people, not talking to people at school,” he said. “Nothing else really changed.”

This story about emergency petitions was produced by The Associated Press and The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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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, a 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.

Correction: This story has been updated to remove the description of Ashworth as unaccredited. It is accredited by the Distance Education Accrediting Commission. 

This story about transcript withholding was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Check out our College Welcome Guide.

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As Columbia University puts the last touches on its brand-new campus in Harlem, it has reached a milestone: The university is now the largest private landowner in New York City.

In a city where land is more valuable than almost anywhere in the nation, the school now owns more than 320 properties, with a combined value of nearly $4 billion. The growth has helped it stay competitive within the Ivy League and meet its broader ambitions to become a global institution.

By many measures, those ambitions have also helped lift the city around it, attracting higher numbers of students, producing new jobs and boosting New York’s reputation as an international center of knowledge.

But as Columbia has expanded its footprint, it has also become more of a drain on the city budget because of a state law more than 200 years old that allows universities, museums and other nonprofits to pay almost no property taxes.

The law saves Columbia more than $182 million annually, according to an analysis by The New York Times. The amount has soared from $38 million just 15 years ago as the university has bought up more properties and their value has increased.

Columbia’s property tax savings, which are a fraction of its $14.3 billion endowment, far exceed the tax breaks granted to many high-profile commercial developments, including large-scale sites like Hudson Yards. They are 50 percent larger than those at Yankee Stadium and greater than the combined tax deals for Citi Field and Madison Square Garden.

Even as Columbia has swallowed up more land, it has taken fewer students from New York City. Since 2010, the number of city students enrolled in Columbia’s undergraduate ranks has declined by 37 percent.

Nearly every state has property tax exemptions for nonprofits, including universities, which are exempt from paying taxes on their academic buildings and dormitories. (Universities, including Columbia, pay tax on properties they own that are not used for educational purposes.)

But they are often contentious, and the seven other Ivy League universities pay some property taxes on those buildings or voluntarily pay millions of dollars every year to their local governments and school districts.

Not one university in New York City does, including two of the nation’s wealthiest institutions, Columbia and N.Y.U., which had property tax savings of $145 million this year.

“I call them the untouchables: I can’t think of anyone who has been willing to take on this issue,” said Harvey Robins, who worked for Mayor Edward I. Koch and Mayor David N. Dinkins and has followed the issue of tax exemptions for universities. “It’s really important that we begin a conversation finally about who pays what and who subsidizes whom.”

A Columbia University spokeswoman, Samantha Slater, pointed to $170 million in contributions the university had pledged to the community near its campuses starting in 2009, saying the investments “have been a model for similar investments by other universities.”

“The effect is the same — forging partnerships with the city and local organizations to invest in the economic development of the community,” she said in a statement. She did not respond to specific questions about the institution’s property tax savings and whether it had considered making annual payments to the city.

The debate may have been muted in New York because the city has other major revenue streams, such as Wall Street. Columbia has also spent more than $2 million over the last five years to retain some of the city’s most prominent lobbying firms, who meet with officials, including the mayor, on a number of issues, including its real estate interests.

“They have a very powerful board, they talk to the mayor. I think it should be looked at, particularly in the years coming up. If you look at the budget deficits, they’re massive.”

Gale Brewer, a councilwoman and former Manhattan borough president

But with financial challenges looming, a growing number of city and state officials are re-examining the longstanding exemptions for private universities. Property tax revenue accounts for more than 40 percent of the city’s total tax collections.

Columbia’s contribution probably would be small in the scheme of the more than $31 billion the city collects every year. But it is also significantly more than some of the expenses that city leaders haggled over during budget negotiations this year. Programs serving inmates at the troubled Rikers Island jail complex were cut, for example, and the budget for free preschool for 3-year-olds was reduced.

In the coming year, federal pandemic funds — which the city has leaned on to shore up public school budgets and other services — are drying up, even as the city says it expects to spend billions to manage an influx of migrants from the southern border. Mayor Eric Adams has asked city agencies to cut their budgets by 5 percent by November and has said the Police and Fire Departments, among others, will need to slice overtime.

Gale Brewer, a councilwoman and former Manhattan borough president, said she was among those the university has lobbied in recent years, mostly in connection with faculty housing. She said she was not sure why city officials have not asked Columbia and N.Y.U. to make annual payments.

“They have a very powerful board, they talk to the mayor,” she said. “I think it should be looked at, particularly in the years coming up. If you look at the budget deficits, they’re massive.”

‘Civic project’ or ‘land grab’?

The state’s tax breaks for nonprofits date to 1799, long before Columbia and other higher education institutions became vast enterprises with billion-dollar endowments. At the time, the country’s first universities were primarily connected to religious denominations and were deemed charitable enterprises.

Columbia opened in 1754 and moved in the early 20th century to its core Morningside Heights campus, where it confined itself for nearly a century. In 1968, it abandoned its move to construct a gym on the edge of Harlem — a project that was derided as “Gym Crow” — after enormous protests. Then, in the early 2000s, Columbia administrators, led by its president at the time, Lee C. Bollinger, said the university could no longer remain competitive without a larger campus.

To help Columbia expand, New York State condemned land in 2008 in the West Harlem neighborhood of Manhattanville and used eminent domain to seize properties for the university. The university made promises to be a good neighbor and hire local workers. 

“There was a time when Columbia really turned its back on where it was located,” Bollinger said in a 2006 interview with The Times. “I wanted to take exactly the opposite approach.”

Bollinger, who declined to comment for this article, told community leaders and neighborhood groups that the university had changed since the 1968 upheaval. 

A lawsuit briefly halted the Bollinger plan because judges agreed it was not a “civic project.” Nick Sprayregen owned self-storage warehouses in West Harlem and fought Columbia’s efforts to buy his properties. “This is a really nothing more than a land grab of the most extreme type,” Sprayregen said in 2007. He died in 2016.

A higher court allowed the project to go forward. Columbia moved several dozen residents to a 12-story condominium building and gave them $7,000 each.

As it expanded, the university said that it spent at least $600 million with local firms, many of them owned by women and people of color, for construction, maintenance and repairs at its campuses — approximately 16 percent of the total it spent during that time period.

The university has also paid out about $104 million of the $170 million it pledged to the community — to local organizations, an affordable housing fund and city agencies like the Parks Department. The university also said it had spent more than $100 million in upgrades to local infrastructure since 2009 and that it would soon pay to replace two escalators at a subway station on 125th Street.

“Columbia continues to prioritize engagement with our local community — from Morningside Heights to Harlem, Washington Heights and beyond,” Slater, the Columbia spokeswoman, said in a statement. “We focus on meaningful investments that provide local jobs and economic opportunity, along with sustainable community partnerships.”

Maritta Dunn, the former chairwoman of Community Board 9 who lives across the street from the new campus, praised it. “It gives the local community a nearby pretty park with trees, benches and tables,” she said.

But some residents said the university ultimately hired few local residents, overlooked local companies for much of the work and has not been as welcoming to neighbors as promised.

“It didn’t happen the way I thought it should have happened,” said Walter J. Edwards, the founder of the Harlem Business Alliance whose company, Full Spectrum, helped renovate a 1920s building on the new campus. “If you are displacing us, give us something.”

Altagracia Hiraldo, who runs the Dominican Community Center, said she had hoped for more, including the chance for neighborhood nonprofits like hers to work on campus.

“They forgot about us,” Hiraldo said.

Since the expansion, Columbia’s new properties in West Harlem have more than doubled the market value of the neighborhood, and they are now valued at $644 million. The centerpiece of the campus is the Jerome L. Greene Science Center, a massive glass and steel structure. Additional buildings are under construction, including a 34-story residential tower for graduate students and faculty.

Because Columbia took over properties that had been paying taxes, the city now collects half the annual property taxes that it collected on that land in 2008, The Times found.

Taking more space, but not more students

Local public schools have questioned Columbia’s commitment to its surrounding community. As recently as 2010, a quarter of Columbia’s undergraduate students came from New York City: 2,236 students. By 2022, that number had decreased to 1,416, or about 15 percent of the student body.

Several administrators at local public schools said that the university, which has been vocal in supporting diversity and affirmative action, has shown minimal interest in recruiting local students, especially children from low-income families.

Its overall student body is 7 percent Black and 15 percent Latino, and 22 percent of students receive Pell grants, which are aimed at low-income students. The racial breakdown is similar to other Ivy League universities; a higher share of Pell-eligible students attend than at some of its peers. (Columbia declined to share demographic data for its New York City students.)

Jerome Furman, a counselor at East Side Community School in the East Village of Manhattan, where about two-thirds of students are low income, said he has had students accepted to every Ivy League college except Columbia in his seven years at the school.

He said his calls and emails about college fairs or students who apply go unanswered.

“The relationship has been nonexistent,” Furman said.

“If New York is such an asset to them, then it makes sense to make sure that New York students are represented in a real capacity in the student body.”

Fred Raphael, the college and career counselor at Boerum Hill School for International Studies in Brooklyn

Columbia would not say how many New York City public school students are enrolled, but said that the number had increased in the past five years and that students from 45 of the city’s public high schools entered Columbia last year.

Fred Raphael, the college and career counselor at Boerum Hill School for International Studies in Brooklyn, where a majority of students are Black or Latino, said that acceptances have become so rare that he doesn’t see Columbia as a realistic option, even for his highest-performing students.

“If New York is such an asset to them,” he said, “then it makes sense to make sure that New York students are represented in a real capacity in the student body.”

Other urban Ivy League universities declined to share enrollment from their home cities, except for Brown University, located in Providence, R.I. A Brown spokesman said on average between 20 and 30 undergraduates from Providence public schools enrolled in a given year — slightly more than from comparably sized cities outside Rhode Island.

Other major universities in the city have a larger percentage of New Yorkers. At Fordham University in the Bronx, 23 percent of undergraduates come from New York City, a percentage that has been stable for the last decade. At N.Y.U., about 17 percent of undergraduate students are New York City residents.

Like Columbia, N.Y.U. has sought to transform itself into a national and global powerhouse. It has been expanding since the 1980s and recently began to build out its own campus, for the most part on land it already owned, including a 23-story glass and steel academic building in Greenwich Village that cost $1.2 billion to construct. After community backlash, the expansion has been scaled back, but the university will pay no property taxes.

“I would bet my life that they are nowhere near the end of their growth,” said Andrew Berman, the executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group Village Preservation.

An N.Y.U. spokesman pointed to the contributions the university makes to the city, including its students who assist in public school classrooms and its relatively large Higher Educational Opportunity Program, which provides college access for low-income New Yorkers. It also noted that the majority of its graduates stay in New York for work and that its thousands of employees pay in excess of $100 million in payroll taxes.

“We recognize the budget challenges the city faces. Nevertheless, we feel the charitable status that derives from N.Y.U.’s educational mission — and the attendant tax policies — is not a one-way exchange,” said an N.Y.U. spokesman, John Beckman. “We are deeply appreciative of those policies, but we also take some humble pride in the many, many ways, small and large, that N.Y.U. contributes to the city’s well-being and its economy.”

New York’s exceptional exceptions

New York is among 49 other states with property tax exemptions for private, nonprofit entities, which supporters say allow them to provide crucial social, economic and cultural benefits to their communities. In the case of universities, they conduct often costly research and public-policy studies and employ people who pay income taxes.

But in other cities, officials have pressured universities to make voluntary payments, known as payments in lieu of taxes, or PILOTs, or similar annual donations. Even within New York State, other cities have charted a different course.

In upstate Ithaca, Cornell University started making annual payments decades ago that have now grown to $1.6 million and are expected to climb to $4 million in October.

Columbia has sought to maintain close ties to many of the people who might put pressure on it to contribute, spending more than $2.2 million since 2017 on firms that lobby city and state officials. The university said that the firms that it employs provided other services in addition to lobbying and spent most of their lobbying efforts on education, research and health care.

A spokesman for Mayor Adams, Jonah Allon, said that the city’s financial problems meant “every option is on the table to ensure we continue to fund city services we rely on.” But he did not directly respond to questions about whether the city had considered asking the universities to make voluntary payments.

Recently, calls for the universities to pay more have been growing.

After then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo proposed a $485 million cut in 2016 to CUNY, the city’s public university system, the union that represents its professors began calling for private universities to help offset the cuts.

“CUNY is the higher education institution that serves the working people of New York,” said James Davis, the president of the union, “and those same working people are effectively subsidizing these tax breaks for Columbia and N.Y.U.”

Assemblywoman Deborah J. Glick, a Democrat who represents an area that includes New York University’s Manhattan campus, has spent a decade questioning the tax exemptions. In a recent interview, the city’s comptroller, Brad Lander, praised the universities, but said they should “step up” to help CUNY.

“There’s just more urgency than ever,” he said.

During the 2021 mayoral campaign, candidates including Andrew Yang and Curtis Sliwa called for ending the property tax exemptions altogether.

But forcing the universities to pay property taxes would require lawmakers in Albany to change state law.

Zohran Mamdani, a state assemblyman who represents parts of Queens, has said he plans to try this year, with a bill that would end property tax exemptions for private higher education institutions with exemptions of more than $50 million in real estate.*

The only private universities that meet that threshold are Columbia and N.Y.U.

Liset Cruz and Emma G. Fitzsimmons contributed reporting.

*Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated how a bill that would end property tax exemptions for private higher education institutions would determine which schools are eligible. It would be for institutions with annual property-tax exemptions of more than $50 million, not more than $50 million in real estate holdings.

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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Millions of student loan borrowers have been waiting to find out whether the Biden Administration’s plan to forgive some federal student debt will provide them with financial relief.

On Friday, the last day of this year’s session, the Supreme Court ruled the plan unconstitutional, throwing a key Biden campaign promise into doubt and denying debt forgiveness for 26 million people who had applied. The vote was 6-3, with the liberal justices dissenting.

The court considered two cases at the same time, U.S. Department of Education v. Brown, which was brought by two student loan borrowers who didn’t qualify for relief, and Biden v. Nebraska, which was brought by six Republican attorneys general who argued the plan would hurt state tax revenue and the income of a student-loan agency.

Before a court halted the program last fall, 26 million borrowers had applied for relief and 16 million had been approved. The Biden plan proposed forgiving up to $20,000 for borrowers whose income was low enough to receive a Pell grant while in college, as long as their current income was less than $125,000 (or $250,000 for married couples or heads of household), and $10,000 for borrowers within those income limits but who had not received a Pell grant.

The Hechinger Report spoke in February with three experts, each with a different view, about what was at stake in the case.

The Biden Administration cited the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act passed in 2003 (also known as the HEROES Act), which allows the government to forgive student loans for borrowers who are at risk of default because of war, military operation, or national emergency. They argued that the Covid pandemic qualified as a national emergency, which was the same justification Trump Administration officials used when they paused student loan repayments in 2020.

Many Republicans and conservative advocates fought against Biden’s $400 billion plan, contending that it was unfair to taxpayers who never went to college and to people who paid back their loans without help. Student debt forgiveness advocates argued that the financial burden had been stymieing the futures of an entire generation who went to college to ensure financial stability and, in some cases, a path out of poverty. Low-income students and Black borrowers – especially Black women – have been disproportionately affected by student loan debt.

Student loan payments have been on pause since March 2020 and are scheduled to resume October 1.

The Hechinger Report has covered many aspects of the student debt crisis – including federal loans, parent loans and “hidden” debt that doesn’t show up in government statistics.

Also, Jon Marcus reported on an often unasked question – what are colleges’ responsibilities when it comes to mounting student debt?

The Supreme Court case was never going to have an impact on the lives of people with private student loans. More than $127 billion is owed by these borrowers, who have been falling further behind recently. We wrote about a group of students who took out private loans to attend for-profit colleges and were left out of a relief plan.

The Hechinger Report has also reported extensively on the hidden forms of student debt that keep students in financial peril. We broke open the issue of transcript withholding – when  students can’t get their transcript because they owe money to a university. The practice has now been banned in several states and the federal government has proposed prohibiting it nationally. We also reported on students being sued by their states for unpaid bills and on debt collection agencies that were making millions of dollars from collecting on overdue tuition payments and fees.

We wrote about for-profit colleges that loan money directly to students, which they often cannot pay back. And we exposed the plight of parents who take out loans so their children can go to college and end up in debt for the rest of lives.

Regardless of the Supreme Court’s decision, tens of millions of people will continue to have to pay off debt they took on to get a college degree. Americans are encouraged to make this gamble – borrow now for a better life down the line— but the high cost of tuition guarantees that the question of whether it’s worth striking this bargain will be with us for years to come.

This story about the student loans was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.

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In the coming weeks, the Supreme Court will rule about whether colleges can consider race in admissions decisions, deciding two cases, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. the University of North Carolina. The case against affirmative action is based on the argument that some colleges are discriminating against Asian and white students and giving an unfair advantage to Black and Latino students.

Eighteen state flagship universities – the jewels in the crowns of public university systems –now allow for the consideration of race as one of many factors in admission decisions. At least 30 also consider whether a student is the first in their family to go to college and 11 take into account whether an applicant is related to an alum of the college, also known as “legacy admissions,” according to the universities’ most recent Common Data Set, which they submit annually.  Whether they consider these factors or not, many flagships have had poor records recruiting Black and Latino high school graduates to enroll.

At most state flagship universities, Black and Latino students are still very much underrepresented.

In 14 states, the gap between the number of public high school graduates who are Black and the number of Black students who enroll in the state flagship was 10 percentage points or more in 2021.

Flagships in southern states have some of the widest such gaps for Black students.

In Mississippi, 48 percent of high school graduates were Black in 2021 but only 8 percent of first-year students at Ole Miss, the state’s flagship, were Black.

The gap at the University of Georgia has grown over the past two years to 31 percentage points. In 2021, just 2 percent of incoming first-year students were Black men.

Eight of the 10 flagships with the biggest gaps for Black students do not consider race in admissions.

The Supreme Court ruling could also have a big impact on Latino students. The University of Texas at Austin, for example, does consider race in admissions but already has the second biggest gap for Latino students in the country.

In 12 states, the gap between the number of students who graduated from state public high schools who were Latino and the number of Latino students enrolled at the state flagship was 10 percentage points or more.

The gap at 10 of those universities – concentrated in the Southwest – has widened over the past five years.

The University of California at Berkeley has the biggest gap – 34 percentage points. The state banned affirmative action in 1996.

The University of Texas at Austin has reduced its gap some in the last five years, but it’s still significant at 23 percentage points.

Of the 12 states with the biggest gap for Latino students, four consider race in admissions.

Why does it matter that so many of these colleges don’t look like their state’s graduating high school classes? Public flagships were created to educate the residents of their states and most make that explicit. The University of South Carolina’s mission statement, for example, begins, “The primary mission of the University of South Carolina Columbia is the education of the state’s citizens through teaching, research, creative activity, and community engagement.” Still, it has the third largest gap for Black students in the country.

State flagships are funded by residents’ tax dollars, and last year they enrolled a combined 1.1 million undergraduate students. Many states have other high-quality state universities, but the flagships often have the most resources, the best graduation rates and graduates’ salaries, and powerful alumni networks that help can launch students’ careers.

Why does it matter if flagship enrollment is racially equitable?

In most states, flagship graduates also earned the highest or second-highest salaries compared with graduates of other public universities.

At 48 of the 50 flagships, the graduation rate was the highest or second-highest among public universities in the state.

The flagship universities where Black and Latino students were the most underrepresented also had the highest graduation rates.

Officials at several of the state flagships that consider race in admissions said they are concerned that the Supreme Court’s ruling could make it more difficult to enroll a racially diverse student body that reflects their state’s populations. Seven of the 18 universities that consider race in admissions already have a gap of 14 percentage points or more between the percentage of Black or Latino students who graduated from the state’s public high schools in 2021 and the percentage who enrolled in the flagships that fall. Some officials said they feared that the court’s ruling would go beyond admissions. They worry that scholarships targeted at underrepresented populations, for example, or sponsored campus visits for college chapters of groups like the National Society of Black Engineers, could be prohibited.

“Our priority is to serve the residents of the state,” said Nikki Chun, vice provost for enrollment management at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. “But if we’re restricted from asking questions about race and ethnicity, it’s going to be really difficult to be able to measure whether we’re meeting our mission as an institution.”

The University of Maryland has struggled to enroll Black students in numbers that reflect the state’s demographics, and officials say that prohibiting the consideration of race in admissions will make that effort more difficult.

“We remain committed to recruiting and retaining the most diverse classes possible,” Shannon Gundy, assistant vice president at Maryland, said in an email, “but will not lose sight that this fact remains true: when pursuing the most diverse and talented class, there is no proxy for considering a student’s race.”

New York state designated a second flagship, Stony Brook University, in 2022 and it was not included in this analysis. (Its gap for Black and Latino students was 11 and 12 percentage points, respectively, in 2021.)

This story about race in college admissions was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.

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Last month, when more than 200,000 students who had been victims of misconduct by their colleges began getting the news that their federal student loans were cancelled, Amanda Luciano felt a sense of satisfaction — and a pang of despair.

The students getting the good news had been just like her — struggling with student debt because a for-profit college had defrauded them — with one difference, a difference that hadn’t seemed important until recently. When she needed money to start college, she was advised to borrow from a private lender instead of the federal government and, because of that, she’s stuck with $81,000 debt.

“I’m frustrated, because, what can I do? I’d be in the same position as these other people had my loans been federal, period,” said Luciano, who is now 37. “Of course, I’m so happy for these people, but it’s just crazy that no one’s being held accountable for us private [loan] people.”

A federal judge ruled last fall, in Sweet v. Cardona, that former students from more than 150 colleges (most of them for-profit institutions) who had filed what’s known as a borrower defense to repayment claim were entitled to automatic loan cancellation, such was the magnitude of those colleges’ misconduct. But when the final legal hurdle was cleared in February, erasing their debt, Luciano — and tens of thousands of private-loan borrowers like her — was left out.

The settlement came after a class-action lawsuit filed in 2018 that alleged the government had unfairly delayed granting relief to students who had been defrauded by their colleges. Although consumer protections apply to private lenders as well as the government, the legal mechanism that could trigger relief for private education-loan borrowers is different from the one used in the Sweet case, which sought relief only for students who had government loans.

Back in 2006, when Luciano was researching degrees that would lead to a good job in the fashion industry, she came across the website of the now-shuttered International Academy of Design and Technology, or IADT. The college promoted its national accreditation and promised a pathway to a lucrative career in design and merchandising, she said. Visiting the Chicago campus, Luciano met with a financial aid counselor to help her figure out how to pay for college. The counselor even got a representative from the private lender Sallie Mae on speakerphone to explain how easy it would be to pay off her loans after she graduated.

Nineteen years old and the first in her family to go to college, Luciano asked her grandfather to co-sign the loan and took the plunge. The degree proved worthless.

She borrowed $51,000; over the last 15 years she says she has paid back a total of $41,000. But because of the interest, her balance today stands at $81,000. Her current monthly payments of $500 only cover the interest, she says.

“These private loan borrowers are coming out of the exact same circumstances and the exact same context,” said Eileen Connor, director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending who represented the former students who started getting relief last month. “They have similar rights to cancellation. There’s no rationale to explain why one loan would be enforceable and another is not.”

Even though the private student loan market is much smaller than the federal one, it’s still very large — more than $127 billion is owed by private student loan borrowers, and delinquencies have been rising over the past two years.

After Luciano graduated from high school, she initially enrolled at nearby Joliet Junior College, unsure exactly what she wanted to do but interested in teaching. She kept her job at her local Big Lots, where she had worked during high school. Living at home, she scheduled her classes for the morning and often worked a 1-9 p.m. shift. She was able to earn enough to pay the Joliet tuition out of pocket.

During her third semester, she took a class on fashion merchandising and fell in love with it. She felt like she had found her calling, she said, but there weren’t many classes in fashion at Joliet. That’s when she went online to see whether it was possible to get a degree in fashion and found IADT promising exactly that — just a train ride away.

She visited the school and an admissions representative repeated what the website had promised: Getting a degree from IADT would lead to a career as a buyer, a fashion designer or a virtual merchandizer, depending on which track she chose.

“They literally listed what would be available to us. They made it seem like, get this degree and here are the jobs you can have,” Luciano said. “So of course, I was like, this sounds perfect.”

Luciano says the financial aid officer at IADT never mentioned the option of federal loans and told her that a private loan was her best option since it would also give her money for living expenses.

“My thinking was, this is kind of what you needed to do — get a college degree to get a well-paying job,” she said.

Luciano’s interest rate is now over 9 percent and is not fixed, so it has risen and fallen over the years. The current interest rate on federal student loans is 5 percent, and once a student borrows, it doesn’t change over time.

Related: As the Supreme Court hears arguments on student loan forgiveness, three experts explain what’s at stake

After Luciano graduated from IADT in 2008, she searched for jobs in the fashion industry for several years.

IADT “promised networking opportunities, high paying jobs within our industry, even internship opportunities that lead to positions within the industry,” she recalled.

She contacted the school’s career services office at least once a week, she said, but they only sent her job listings easily found on any job website.

“I never thought to question the school in why this was all happening,” she said. “I just thought I needed to try harder, keep searching.”

She looked for jobs at stores with nearby corporate headquarters, constantly checking their websites to see if they were hiring, but positions were few and far between. She had one interview at the retail giant Claire’s for a buying position, but they were looking for someone with more experience.

In three years of searching, she never landed anything more than a $13-an-hour job at the retail store Kohl’s as an apparel supervisor, which did not require a degree.

“That was all I could find on the job boards,” she said. “I kept reaching back out to the school, but there was nothing. I finally realized this degree was worth absolutely nothing.”

Related: The unasked question about the student loan bailout: What’s colleges’ responsibility?

She moved back home with her mom and eventually decided to cut her losses. In 2011, she enrolled at the College of DuPage — a nearby community college — and became certified to teach preschool. She took out federal student loans to pay for the program.

“It was just so demoralizing,” she said. “And then to find out that this school — my school — was part of this predatory scam. After hearing that, I just can’t believe I’m still paying for it.”

In 2012, when Luciano started teaching preschool, the median annual salary for IADT graduates in Chicago was just $25,000 ten years after graduating, and more than half of students with federal loans were either delinquent or in default five years after starting repayment. In 2015, eight out of ten of the college’s bachelor’s degree programs failed the government’s “gainful employment” test — a measurement that looks at whether students, on average, are earning enough to repay their loans. In 2017, the year the college closed, 75 percent of its students with federal loans were delinquent or in default.

Those borrowers — the ones with federal loans — are getting relief from the Sweet settlement, and while the wait has been long, they got a break during the pandemic. They haven’t had to make payments since March 2020, and no interest has been added since then. Luciano, whose private loans are held by Navient, was allowed an 18-month pause, but her interest kept building up during that time. The company offers forbearances for economic hardships, but Luciano used up what was available when her son, now 6 years old, was born prematurely and she couldn’t work full-time.

A Navient representative declined to comment on Luciano’s situation, citing privacy concerns, and said that individuals with private loans who are facing repayment challenges should contact their servicers to inquire about available options.

Connor, of the Project on Predatory Student Lending, says she is looking into ways to help students like Luciano.

Meanwhile, Luciano, now a mom of two, has watched her fellow students from IATD posting images on Facebook of the emails they received alerting them to full loan cancellation.

“I’m so regretful, every day,” she said. “I just keep paying, but I’ll never be rid of it.”

This story about private loan forgiveness was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.

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