Higher education affordability Archives - The Hechinger Report

Universities and colleges search for ways to reverse the decline in the ranks of male students

Jon Marcus — Fri, 03 May 2024 11:00:00 +0000

BURLINGTON, Vt. — Hopeful young entrepreneurs in business schools routinely pitch ideas for startup companies as part of their classroom assignments. But the ones who were doing it at the University of Vermont were still in high school.

It was the inaugural Vermont Pitch Challenge, to which nearly 150 teams from 27 states and seven countries had submitted their entrepreneurial brainstorms. The final five had come to the campus to battle it out for the grand prize: a full-tuition scholarship to UVM.

Their ideas included a website to help previously incarcerated applicants get jobs, a nonprofit to provide mental health support to competitive snowboarders, a medical device to prevent the recurrence of a herniated disk, a company to rent equipment to farmers in St. Croix and an invention to sustainably recharge laptops, phones and tablets.

This competition wasn’t solely about helping the planet or improving medicine, health, employment opportunities or agriculture, however.

It was part of a long-term strategy to increase the number of men at a university where women now outnumber them by nearly two to one.

Painstaking research had suggested that entrepreneurship programs could appeal to high school boys considering going to college. The findings appeared to be right: More boys than girls had entered the pitch contest. And the university hoped that some would eventually enroll.

The approach is among a fast-growing number of efforts to increase the number of men in college, which has been declining steadily.

Jay Jacobs, vice provost for enrollment management at the University of Vermont, where women now outnumber men by nearly two to one. “This male enrollment gap is something that we’re going to have to deal with,” he says. Credit: Oliver Parini for The Hechinger Report

“We thought that this idea would attract men,” said Jay Jacobs, UVM’s vice provost for enrollment management, who declared himself pleased with the results. “We thought that this idea would attract racial and ethnically diverse students. We thought that this idea would attract what I’ll call geographically diverse students, students not just from Vermont or New England.”

The university needs all of those kinds of recruits. Vermont has the nation’s third-oldest population, by median age, making it harder to find students generally. That’s even before a dramatic decline in the number of 18-year-olds about to hit the rest of the rest of the country starting next year.

“Here, we’ve already felt the impacts of the quote, unquote ‘demographic cliff,’ ” said Jacobs. “We want to make sure that we are in front of any eligible student who is able to pursue their education at the University of Vermont, or in the state of Vermont.”

That particularly includes men. The proportion of applicants to the university who are male has declined from 44 percent in 2010 to 33 percent today, an analysis of federal data shows.

“I definitely do notice that,” said Melinda Wetzel, a junior who was having coffee with a friend in the student center. “In my big lecture halls, I’d say there are more women. And I do have one small class where there is only one guy.”

It isn’t just this university that’s searching for new ways to recruit men.

The number of men enrolled in college nationwide has dropped by more than 157,000, or almost 6 percent, in just the last five years, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. The proportion of college students who are men is now a record-low 41 percent, the U.S. Department of Education says. That’s a complete reversal of the situation 50 years ago, when men outnumbered women in college by about the same extent.

Men are also 7 percentage points more likely than women to drop out, the Clearinghouse reports.

“At conferences, when we’re in rooms together, we all know that this male enrollment gap is something that we’re going to have to deal with,” said Jacobs, whose office window overlooks the university’s grand historic main quad.

The ways universities are trying to address this vary widely.

A marketing email sent to prospective students by the University of Montana, whose undergraduate enrollment is now 58 percent women. The university found in focus groups that the men it’s trying to recruit are interested in outdoor recreation. Credit: Image provided by the University of Montana

John Truslow considered skipping college and going into the trades or the military. While he ultimately enrolled at the University of Vermont, where he is a business major, some of his male high school classmates “just weren’t feeling school and they wanted to do something else.” Credit: Oliver Parini for The Hechinger Report

The University of Montana — whose enrollment overall has fallen from nearly 16,000 to about 10,000 in the last 10 years, and 58 percent of whose undergraduates are women — found in focus groups that many of the men it was trying to recruit were interested in the outdoors. So this spring it sent targeted emails to prospective students highlighting its hunting class, forestry program and recreational opportunities.

“Have you ever eaten fresh meat that you harvested yourself?” one of the emails asks. “Apply to UM and develop a closer bond to the landscape than ever before.” Another shows a brawny, bearded man cutting wood. “Embrace the wilderness, embrace the axe,” it says. “There are few other connections with the natural world better than swinging a sharp axe with the smell of pine in your nose.”

Admitted applicants considering whether or not to enroll are also sent bingo-style checkoff cards with images of hiking, ski and cowboy boots. Other promotional materials include images of country-and-western shows on campus.

Housing deposits from men — which is how the university measures who will be enrolling in the fall, as it doesn’t require enrollment deposits — are up since the campaign began, said Kelly Nolin, director of undergraduate admissions.

“Ultimately all students want to know, ‘Am I going to fit in? Do I belong?’ ” said Nolin.

Among prospective applicants who are increasingly asking those questions, she said, are men from religious conservative families, at a time when universities are accused of being bastions of left-wing cancel culture. “We want them to know they won’t be criticized for their beliefs.”

Further west, the University of Southern California Race and Equity Center has gotten money from the ECMC Foundation to help community colleges enroll and retain more Black and Hispanic men and other men of color. (ECMC is also among the many funders of The Hechinger Report.)

“If, in fact, colleges and universities want to recruit and enroll and ultimately retain and graduate more men, they have to have a strategy,” said Shaun Harper, founder and executive director of the center. “It has to be based on input and insights from college men themselves.”

Instead of trying to figure out why so many men forgo college or give up on it after starting, he said, institutions should ask, “Wait a minute, what about the ones who are here and are successful?” Harper said. “What were the factors that enabled their enrollment and their ultimate degree attainment? There’s a lot that we can learn from them that we could scale and adapt to everyone else.”

He and others said they were skeptical of some efforts to enroll more men, such as doubling down on sports by adding more men’s teams in the hope that it will lure more male students, as some colleges are doing.

“They’re not all on sports teams. So that shouldn’t be the only lever that we pull,” said Harper. And even if highlighting hunting might be effective in Montana, “it feels so presumptuous about what really appeals to men. I’m just not sure that institutions understand the full range of young men’s interests, and so they tend to default to things like forestry and outdoor adventures. I’m not sure that would work in California or Maryland.”

Whatever does work, universities are under growing pressure to figure it out. Overall enrollment has declined by 16 percent in the 10 years through 2022, the most recent period for which the figures are available from the U.S. Department of Education. Another 11 to 15 percent decline is projected to begin next year.

And there are signs that the problem of attracting men is only likely to get worse.

The University of Montana found in focus groups that men were interested in forestry and hunting, so it targets them with emails like these. “Embrace the wilderness, embrace the axe,” it says. Credit: Image provided by the University of Montana

Of high school boys in Vermont whose parents don’t have four-year degrees, for instance, only 45 percent aspire to go to college themselves, down from 58 percent in 2018, and much lower than the 68 percent of girls who do, a survey found. Even among high school students with at least one parent who has a bachelor’s degree, 87 percent of girls say they want to go to college, compared to 78 percent of boys.

The problem begins early. Girls do better in high school than boys, and are more likely to graduate. In the 37 states that report high school graduation rates by gender, 88 percent of girls finished high school on time, compared to 82 percent of boys, a 2018 study by the Brookings Institution found. Boys are more likely to think they don’t need a degree for the jobs they want, the Pew Research Center found, or go into the trades. Even if they do enroll in colleges, work opportunities lure them away. Men who dropped out of community college are more likely than women to say it was because of other work opportunities, according to a survey by the think tank New America.

Melinda Wetzel, a junior at the University of Vermont, says she has a class with only one male student in it. “I definitely do notice” that women outnumber men on the campus, Wetzel says. Credit: Oliver Parini for The Hechinger Report

That went through John Truslow’s mind when he was deciding whether or not to go to college.

“There was a point where I wasn’t thinking about college” and considered going into the trades or the military, said Truslow, who ultimately decided to major in business at UVM.

Among his male high school classmates who didn’t go to college, said Truslow, who was playing pool in the student center, some couldn’t afford it. “But most of the ones that didn’t directly go to college, it was mostly academic. They just weren’t feeling school and they wanted to do something else.”

A third of men compared to a quarter of women said they didn’t go to or finish college because they just didn’t want to, Pew found.

Richard Reeves, who studies this problem, said it may be more a result of having so successfully encouraged women to get degrees than having discouraged men.

“I think actually what’s probably happened is the opposite — that we’ve sent a really strong and positive message to girls and women. But we haven’t had similar messages for boys and men,” said Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men.

“We’ve now got to do a little bit of self-correction here and say, look, of course we want girls and women to continue to rise in the education system, but we don’t want to leave the boys and men behind.”

Reeves said that, just as male-dominated programs in engineering and business have made extra efforts to recruit women, female-dominated fields such as healthcare and education should now reach out to men.

“That’s another thing that higher education institutions can do, is look at their courses and see where are the gender splits the greatest,” he said. “Rather than thinking the football team is the answer, maybe more men in your nursing school is the answer.”

But the football team could be one of many answers. Among the more subtle efforts to attract men at UVM, the university encourages its students, faculty and staff to wear its colors, green and gold, on Fridays — the days when most prospective applicants are touring the campus. “School spiritedness” is another attribute that research showed appeals particularly to men.

“Coincidentally, Fridays are some of our highest visit volume days, yes,” said Jacobs, smiling.

UVM campus counselors say men who do enroll are less likely to join extracurricular clubs or seek help when they need it. Some men have “this lack of connection,” said Evan Cuttitta, the university’s coordinator of men and masculinities programs. “They have less experience in managing stress and advocating for themselves” and often aren’t as good at “that practice of asking for help.”

Identical twins Pierson and Parker Jones of Lutz, Florida, were finalists in an entrepreneurship competition that was meant to attract more male applicants to the University of Vermont. “After this pitch, we’re definitely going to look into it,” Pierson Jones says. Credit: Oliver Parini for The Hechinger Report

So the university has also started a program for Black and Hispanic male students that provides them with peer and professional mentors, summer internships, networking events and priority registration.

All these steps to increase male enrollment appear to be having some effect.

Identical twins Pierson and Parker Jones of Lutz, Florida, found themselves in Vermont for the entrepreneurship competition. It put the University of Vermont on their radar, they said.

“We haven’t looked at the University of Vermont,” Pierson Parker said. “But after this pitch, we’re definitely going to look into it. Because it’s definitely more interesting now.”

This story about recruiting men to college was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Additional reporting by Liam Elder-Connors. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

The post Universities and colleges search for ways to reverse the decline in the ranks of male students appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

College Uncovered, Season 2, Episode 5

Hechinger Report and GBH Boston — Thu, 02 May 2024 13:00:00 +0000

To boost enrollment and meet workforce needs, many states are offering free community college programs. It’s a well-intentioned (and bipartisan) idea to help people get the credentials they need, and states build their supply of college-educated workers.

But does free really mean free? Do these programs effectively bring students back to college? And does saying something’s free diminish its value?

Research shows that free college has had some effect, but not as much as you might think.

It doesn’t mean that students still don’t have to pay for food, rent, books, supplies, transportation and other living costs, which at community colleges often cost more than taking classes. That can stop them from taking states up on the offer. And private colleges and universities vying for the same students quietly oppose having to compete with free.

We’ll tell you what you need to know about free college. You’ll also find a searchable database of free college programs at the end of this transcript.

“College Uncovered” is made possible by Lumina Foundation.

Listen to the whole series

TRANSCRIPT

Scroll to the end of this transcript to find out more about this topic, and for links to more information.

Kirk: Can we get a Guinness and a pint of Jack’s Abbey?

Bartender: You got it.

Kirk: Thanks.

Jon. What are we doing? I thought we were podcasting.

Kirk: We are, Jon, but we’re also grabbing a pint at a local bar — cheers! — and getting some free snacks.

Jon: I like free. Hey — wouldn’t it be great if college was free?

Jack Freer: Yeah, not everyone is born with the same economic opportunities.

Shane Garrity: Yeah, college is a time where you can make so many friends, so many connections that can carry you forward into your personal and professional life.

Lila Cardillo: I think making college, like, ridiculously expensive, just, you know, doesn’t qualify a lot of people for entering certain professions. And just so it makes the wealth divide greater.

Kirk: That’s Jack Freer, Shane Garrity, and Lila Cardillo.

I mean, politically speaking, Jon, when it comes to college, perhaps nothing is more popular than free. And, again, that’s politically speaking.

Jon: Yeah. Of course, political talk is also free, or at least cheap. And if you stand in front of a group of Americans at, say, a bar like this one and say, ‘Hey, maybe everybody doesn’t need a college degree,’ most of the bar will not their heads and probably agree with you.

Kirk: But then if you say, ‘Yo, we all have to agree that young people need more than a high school degree to get a good job’ — nowadays, everybody at the bar will also not their head in agreement.

Jon: That’s why a lot of states are ending up in the middle. They’re making community college free.

Kirk: So where do I sign up? I love free stuff — like these bar snacks. But is free college really free? You might be surprised to hear the answer.

Kirk: This is College Uncovered, a podcast pulling back the ivy to reveal how colleges really work.

And we should note here, Jon, that our little podcast is already free, as they say, wherever you get your podcasts.

Jon: Yeah, it is, but it’s also priceless, Kirk. I’m Jon Marcus at The Hechinger Report …

Kirk: … and I’m Kirk Carapezza with GBH. Colleges don’t want you to know how they operate. So GBH …

Jon: … in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, is here to show you.

Okay, so the number of people in the U.S. with some college credit, but no degree or certificate to show for it — that number keeps growing. It’s now north of 40 million, the highest that it’s ever been. And since the pandemic, hundreds of thousands more students have dropped out, most of them low income or the first in their families to go to college. That’s the idea behind free community college. It’s a chance to woo those students back.

Kirk: Right. More states are offering free community college. Two thirds of states now have some form of free, from Michigan to New Mexico, Rhode Island to Oregon. The details differ from state to state, but free college has widespread support.

Community colleges like it because they’re facing an enrollment plunge. Businesses like it to meet their need for skilled workers. And it’s just plain good for students, who see their lifetime earnings rise. Or that’s the thinking. But it’s not quite so simple.

So do these new programs help students graduate on time and with less debt? You might be surprised to learn that free college isn’t as effective at helping students finish college as you’d think.

Today on the show: ‘The Real Cost of Free.’

I went over to Bunker Hill Community College here in Boston to meet Magno Garcia. Since he graduated from high school, Garcia has enrolled in Bunker Hill three times off and on, commuting from his home in nearby Chelsea. Back then, Garcia worked long hours in retail and as an air-conditioner technician so he could avoid student loan debt. He wanted a degree in accounting so he could move up to management at the HVAC company. But the first two times he enrolled, he ran out of cash, time and energy.

Magno Garcia: I wasn’t really motivated, so it was, like, the worst idea, because I paid for everything out of pocket.

Kirk: What do you think you needed at the time?

Magno Garcia: Guidance. I never felt like I had someone that was, like, ‘Hey, I’m here to help.’

Kirk: Overwhelmed, Garcia dropped out twice to put food on the table and pay rent. He kept working retail. He was also devoting time to a personal passion: producing his own music videos on YouTube. Now, at 34 years old, Garcia is back at Bunker Hill. And, Jon, guess what drew him back to college?

Jon: Let me guess. Was it because it was free?

Kirk: Indeed it was. Massachusetts recently began offering free community college for anyone over the age of 25 without a degree.

Magno Garcia: I’m taking advantage of that.

Kirk: Massachusetts education officials say returning students like Garcia are responsible for the first public college enrollment increase in nine years. Enrollment in public four-year colleges slowed, but community college enrollment in Massachusetts rose by 8 percent last year. All 15 community college campuses, including Bunker Hill, saw a spike. But that’s not necessarily the full story.

Davis Jenkins: It’s good news in that there’s been some stabilization, but, overall, you know, enrollment’s down.

Jon: Davis Jenkins studies community colleges at Columbia University. Despite the recent uptick, Jenkins points out that community college enrollment in Massachusetts is actually down nearly 40 percent since 2014. It’s also down nationwide. The number of community college students across the country dropped nearly 30 percent over the last 10 years.

Davis Jenkins: Community college enrollment was hit hardest during Covid, and it had been dropping for a decade before that.

Jon: To get more students back in classrooms, some political leaders want to expand free community college to all state residents, regardless of age.

But free doesn’t always work out for students. Because, while, yes, removing financial barriers is a good thing, many still can’t afford to stop working and focus on their studies. So they don’t graduate. While federal data doesn’t tell us the racial makeup of the 40 million Americans with some college and no degree, researchers say they’re likely to be more diverse, the first in their families to go to college and from low-income backgrounds, compared to their peers who did graduate.

Amanda Fernandez: We certainly have a long, long way to go — in particular, for Latino students who still to this day are experiencing the ramifications of an inequitable education, and in particular during the pandemic, when these issues were exacerbated.

Kirk: Amanda Fernandez is CEO of Latinos for Education. She says free community college signals progress. But a poll commissioned by Latinos for education and the nonprofit Mass., Inc. finds disparities in attitudes about going to college among people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. And Latino parents were the least likely to say their child participated in college prep programs. Another survey by The Chronicle of Higher Education finds Latinos with a high school degree are more likely to be unsure how to enroll and how to pay for college.

So I asked Amanda Fernandez: Is there an information gap?

Amanda Fernandez: It’s a communication gap and it’s a belief gap. And that’s where I think it’s actually lower-hanging fruit. Because our families want their children to go to college, but they don’t have the information about how to even get into an early college program, how to get into a vocational education program. And so, therefore, their students don’t believe or their children don’t believe that they can access higher education and therefore they lose interest.

Kirk: That interest is so important, right? Because in many Latino communities, this is often a family decision.

Amanda Fernandez: Our Latino families are having conversations with their kids about, ‘What are you going to do after high school?’ But they’re not confident in being able to say, ‘You will go to college because we know how to access financial aid, we know how to apply for it.’

Kirk: Does taxpayer support for free college programs help students access college, and — more importantly — graduate?

Amanda Fernandez: I do believe some of that scholarship money does go to other supports that are needed for persistence in the community college space. But, again, you have to think about the longer term and the realities of, you know, when the average age of our community college students is around 27 years old and they have lives and they have to support their own families and children and extended families, you have to support the continued persistence.

Kirk: Sociologist Sara Goldrick-Rab agrees. Goldrick Rab is a senior fellow at Education Northwest, a nonprofit organization in Portland, Oregon. She’s author of “Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid and the Betrayal of the American Dream.” And she’s a longtime advocate for free community college programs.

Sara Goldrick-Rab: For 20 years, my research has suggested that this is a very viable part of the solution, and that’s what I’d call it. I’d call it part of the solution.

Kirk: She says free community college will help close some of these gaps, but it’s not a panacea.

Sara Goldrick-Rab: It’s not meant to be all things. It’s not meant to solve every problem around college affordability, but it’s very clear that it’s targeted to the people who most need college to be affordable. Those are the people who right now are not going at all.

Jon: Goldrick-Rab says making college tuition free is not enough, because going to college costs much more than just tuition. Even if politicians do promote free college as the answer.

Sara Goldrick-Rab: They’re not accounting for the full range of costs. The number one college affordability issue in this country is housing. That’s what people are grappling with. And we’re not talking about that because most people don’t live on campus, for example.

Jon: Kirk, that’s one of the issues with these free programs. It’s not always clear what’s covered. For example, some provide funding for living expenses, but most of them do not.

The total cost of attending college includes food, housing, books, supplies, health care, transportation and a bunch of other costs. In fact, non-tuition expenses are the majority of the cost in public higher education. And if you want to find the true cost of attendance from a college, good luck, because that’s based on numbers provided by the colleges. They report them to the federal government. But they’re just estimates for everything except tuition and fees. And those estimates — they’re often grossly incorrect.

So for all of these reasons, supporters of free college say funneling everyone into a system where you’re supposed to graduate within two or four years is the wrong approach. It will only make educational inequities worse.

Kirk: And they say free community college changes who’s going to college. And it helps colleges reach students who will get the biggest return on investment.

Not everyone agrees with that logic, though, Jon. I went to Nashville, Tennessee, to check out the free college program there firsthand. Former Gov. Bill Haslam told me he had made the successful push for free community college because Tennessee employers need well-trained workers.

Bill Haslam: We had looked out at the state and realized that of all the jobs are going to exist in Tennessee in 2025, 55 percent of them would require a degree or certificate beyond high school.

Kirk: It was all about churning out more qualified workers and attracting companies to locate or relocate there. At the time Haslam said this, only a third of Tennessee’s population held a degree or certificate, so Haslam said he wanted to do something that would shock the system and then get people to think:

Bill Haslam: ‘Hey, I never thought that I would go to school, but maybe I will.’ If you haven’t grown up with the thought that college is a real possibility for you, then it’s not something talked about at the dinner table. It’s not on the radar screen.

Kirk: And it worked. At first.

Community college enrollments spiked 5 percent the first year, with thousands of low-income students taking up the offer. Students like Eric Bihembo, who immigrated from Uganda as a teen, signed up.

Eric Bihembo: College wasn’t on my radar.

Kirk: Did you think it was too good to be true?

Eric Bihembo: It was too good to be true. I mean, free money where I could go and get a free education. It was overwhelming. At the same time, I just wanted to check it out.

Kirk: Going from Uganda to Nashville, was there a bit of a culture shock?

Eric Bihembo: We don’t have these big buildings where you can stand and compare yourself and see how small you are.

[‘Pomp and Circumstance,’ from the Tennessee State commencement ceremony]

Kirk: In the end, Bihembo graduated from community college in Nashville and then completed a Tennessee Highway Patrol cadet program.

Where do you see yourself in 10 or 20 years?

Eric Bihembo: My dream job is one day to work with the FBI doing cybersecurity. But I want to start as a police officer to pick up all the experience and be able to apply it in the in the bigger world.

Kirk: Researchers say Bihembo, who graduated in two years, is the exception. Because while more students enrolled in Tennessee’s community colleges, it didn’t mean a higher percentage graduated.

Jennifer Freeman: It boosts enrollments at first, but those people don’t necessarily stay in school.

Jon: Jennifer Freeman is with the nonprofit Jobs for the Future. Turns out, even though most community college students say their goal is to earn a degree, they usually don’t.

Only one in five adults who re-enrolled in Tennessee’s free college program graduated after three years.

To retain students, Freeman suggests improving support systems and tailoring offerings to students career goals. Otherwise …

Jennifer Freeman: … people go back and then they kind of go back to the same college format, structure that didn’t work for them in the first place.

Jon: Columbia’s Davis Jenkins agrees. He says, sure, free helps, but two-year schools will ultimately need to improve their product.

Davis Jenkins: Community colleges. I love them, but they generally don’t treat adults well. They’re going to have to move toward more of a 24-seven advising. They’re going to have to schedule the courses when students need them, not Tuesday through Thursday between 10 and 1, when the professors want to teach.

Jon: Sara Goldrick-Rab, on the other hand, defends these programs, because she says no-cost college broadens access and benefits society. She says the current financial aid system, which requires filling out complicated forms and figuring out formulas to calculate how much college will cost, is an obstacle for too many students.

Sara Goldrick-Rab: Things that knock out a given cost, like tuition, are more promising than things that are predicated on jumping through a bunch of hoops.

Kirk: And advocates say these programs help students like Rebecca Beaucher in Massachusetts. At 45, Beaucher returned to college last fall thanks to the state’s new free college program. Beaucher started college 20 years ago, but quickly dropped out because working full time as an IT analyst and parenting spread her too thin. Going back wasn’t easy, either.

Rebecca Beaucher: I think I was intimidated. You know, it had been so long since I had been in a class environment.

Kirk: She says the free program was the enticement she needed to re-enroll at Northern Essex Community College. She recalls when she heard the news that the program passed in the state’s budget.

Rebecca Beaucher: My heart just dropped and I immediately burst into tears and I sent a text to my husband, like, this is it. Game on. I’m finally getting my degree. I’m just, I’m going for it. I can’t believe this finally happened.

Kirk: This year, Bouchet is taking business classes online and says her goal is to earn her doctorate someday.

Rebecca Beaucher: On my headstone I want it to say, ‘Dr. Rebecca Beaucher.’ I understand that I’m 45, and I may get that when I’m 90. And I am absolutely okay with this.

Jon: So free college is a mixed bag. Some students might only be interested in taking a few classes to brush up their skills. Others might want to get a doctorate someday. But we do know the vast majority are hoping for a four-year degree.

Surveys show more than 80 percent of community college students aspire to earn a bachelor’s degree. Only a small percentage do, though — just about 13 percent, even within six years. That’s according to the U.S. Department of Education. And those rates are even lower for low-income, male, Black and Hispanic students.

Kirk: Yeah. Economists like Josh Goodman at Boston University say there are lots of reasons why low-income students might be better served if they went straight to a four-year college.

Josh Goodman: It’s a combination of things. One is we know the community colleges are less well funded per student than a four-year institution, so they have fewer resources. [Students] are with peers who are academically weaker. And that may have an influence on their success in their own coursework. And though many students plan to start at a community college and then transfer to the four-year sector, many of the students who plan to do that don’t end up succeeding, either because they misunderstand that transfer process or because the alignment between their community college coursework and the requirements of the four-year institutions is not always great.

Kirk: We have a whole episode just about that topic from our first season. It’s called ‘The Transfer Trap,’ so be sure to check it out.

Jon: Okay, so, Kirk, I guess the old saying there’s no such thing as a free lunch — that still holds.

Kirk: Yeah. So here are a few key takeaways from this episode.

One: Do your research. Make sure you’re enrolling in a free program that meets your career and personal goals.

Two: Ask about retention and graduation rates. Because if nobody graduates, then free doesn’t really mean anything.

And three: If your aim is to earn a bachelor’s degree someday, ask whether the credits you earn will even transfer and if they’ll transfer to your major. Because while most community college students say they want to earn a four-year degree, few do so within six years, and the rate is even lower for first-generation, low-income, Black and Latino students like Magno Garcia.

Back at Bunker Hill. Garcia told me the new free community college program for adults there renewed his hope to earn a degree.

Magno Garcia: Third time’s a charm. I actually feel very confident saying that I will graduate.

Kirk: Garcia has found a support network on Bunker Hill’s campus through a program designed for men of color. That’s another good takeaway, Jon: Find a support network on campus.

Garcia is now working as a social worker at a high school while wrapping up his associate degree, and he switched his major from accounting to psychology.

Magno Garcia: It made a huge difference. I was enjoying my classes. The subject matters were more interesting to me than, you know, crunching in numbers.

Kirk: This fall, he plans to transfer to a four-year university and pursue a bachelor’s degree so he can become a teacher or a school counselor.

This is College Uncovered from GBH and The Hechinger Report. I’m Kirk Carapezza …

Jon: … and I’m Jon Marcus. We’d love to hear from you. Send us an email to gbhnewsconnect@wgbh.org. And tell us what you want to know about how colleges really operate. And if you’re with a college or university. Tell us what you think the public should know about higher ed.

This episode is produced and written by Kirk Carapezza …

Kirk: … and Jon Marcus, and it was edited by Jeff Keating. Meg Woolhouse is supervising editor. Ellen London is executive producer. Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott. We had production assistants from Diane Adame.

Theme song and original music by Left Roman out of MIT, and all of our music is by college bands.

Mei He is our project manager, and head of GBH podcasts is Devin Maverick Robins.

College Uncovered is a production of GBH News and The Hechinger Report and distributed by PRX.

It’s made possible by Lumina Foundation.

Thank you so much for listening.

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Las guerras culturales en los campus comienzan a afectar el lugar donde los estudiantes eligen ir a la universidad

Jon Marcus — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 05:00:00 +0000

Traducción por:

César Segovia

Cuando Angel Amankwaah viajó desde Denver a la Universidad Central de Carolina del Norte este verano para recibir orientación para nuevos estudiantes, supo que había tomado la decisión correcta.

Se divirtió aprendiendo los cantos que corean los aficionados en los partidos de fútbol. Pero también vio que “hay estudiantes que se parecen a mí y profesores que se parecen a mí” en la universidad históricamente negra, dijo Amankwaah, de 18 años, quien es negra. “Sabía que estaba en un espacio seguro”.

De repente, esto se ha convertido en una consideración importante para los estudiantes de todos los orígenes y creencias que van a la universidad.

Durante mucho tiempo, los estudiantes han elegido universidades en función de su reputación académica y vida social. Pero con los campus en la mira de las guerras culturales, ahora muchos estudiantes también están haciendo un balance de los ataques a la diversidad, el contenido de los cursos y los discursos, así como de los oradores en ambos extremos del espectro político. Están monitoreando los crímenes de odio, la legislación anti-LGBTQ, las leyes estatales de aborto y si estudiantes como ellos (negros, de zonas rurales, veteranos militares, LGBTQ o de otros orígenes) están representados y apoyados en el campus.

“No hay duda de que lo que está sucediendo a nivel estatal está afectando directamente a estos estudiantes”, dijo Alyse Levine, fundadora y directora ejecutiva de Premium Prep, una firma consultora de admisiones a universidades privadas en Chapel Hill, Carolina del Norte. Cuando ven las universidades de algunos estados ahora, dice, “hay estudiantes que se preguntan: ‘¿Realmente me quieren ahí?’”.

Para algunos estudiantes en ambos lados de la división política, la respuesta es no. En el caótico nuevo mundo de las universidades e institutos universitarios estadounidenses, muchos dicen que no se sienten bienvenidos en ciertas escuelas, mientras que otros están dispuestos a cancelar oradores y denunciar a profesores con cuyas opiniones no están de acuerdo.

Es demasiado pronto para saber en qué medida esta tendencia afectará dónde y si los futuros estudiantes terminarán yendo a la universidad, ya que los datos de inscripción disponibles públicamente se retrasan en tiempo real. Pero hay indicios de que está teniendo un impacto significativo.

Uno de cada cuatro futuros estudiantes ya ha descartado considerar una facultad o universidad debido al clima político en su estado, según una encuesta realizada por la consultora de educación superior Art & Science Group.

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Entre los estudiantes que se describen a sí mismos como liberales, la razón más común para descartar institutos universitarios y universidades, según esa encuesta, es porque es en un estado en particular “demasiado republicano” o tiene lo que consideran regulaciones laxas sobre armas, legislación anti-LGBTQ, leyes restrictivas sobre el aborto y falta de preocupación por el racismo. Los estudiantes que se describen a sí mismos como conservadores rechazan estados que creen que son “demasiado demócratas” y que tienen leyes liberales sobre el aborto y los derechos homosexuales.

Con tanta atención centrada en estos temas, The Hechinger Report ha creado una Campus Welcome Guide (Guía de Bienvenida al Campus)—la primera herramienta de su tipo— que muestra las leyes estatales y las políticas institucionales que afectan a los estudiantes universitarios. Desde prohibiciones de iniciativas de diversidad, equidad e inclusión y “teoría crítica de la raza”, hasta si se aceptan los carnets de estudiantes como prueba de residencia a efectos de votación.

También enumera —para cada institución de cuatro años en el país— aspectos como la diversidad racial y de género entre estudiantes y profesores, el número de estudiantes veteranos matriculados, la incidencia de crímenes de odio motivados por la raza en el campus, clasificaciones de la libertad de expresión y si la universidad o instituto universitario atiende a muchos estudiantes de zonas rurales.

El campus de la Universidad Texas A&M en College Station, Texas. Las instituciones de Texas se encuentran entre las que tienen más probabilidades de ser eliminadas de las listas de estudiantes liberales, mientras que los estudiantes conservadores dicen que están evitando California y Nueva York. Credit: Sarah Butrymowicz/The Hechinger Report

El sesenta por ciento de los futuros estudiantes de todos los orígenes afrima que las nuevas restricciones estatales al aborto es relevante en al menos en cierta medida en el lugar donde eligen ir a la universidad, según encontró una encuesta separada realizada por Gallup y Lumina Foundation. De ellos, ocho de cada 10 dicen que preferirían ir a un estado con mayor acceso a servicios de salud reproductiva. (Lumina se encuentra entre quienes financian a The Hechinger Report, que produjo esta historia).

“Tenemos muchas mujeres jóvenes que no consideran ciertos estados”, dijo Levine. Una de sus propias clientas desistió de ir a una universidad en St. Louis después de que Missouri prohibiera casi todos los abortos tras la decisión Dobbs de la Corte Suprema, dijo.

Las instituciones de Alabama, Florida, Luisiana y Texas son las que tienen más probabilidades de ser eliminadas de las listas de estudiantes liberales, según la encuesta de Art & Science Group. En general, es más probable que se mantengan alejados del sur y el medio oeste, mientras que los estudiantes conservadores eviten California y Nueva York.

Uno de cada ocho estudiantes de secundaria en Florida dice que no iría a una universidad pública en su propio estado debido a sus políticas educativas, según encontró una encuesta separada realizada por el sitio web de información y clasificación de universidades www.Intelligent.com.

Con 494 leyes anti-LGBTQ propuestas o adoptadas este año —según American Civil Liberties Union— los futuros estudiantes que son LGBTQ+ y que han experimentado un acoso significativo a causa de ello tienen casi el doble de probabilidades de decir que no planean ir a la universidad en absoluto que los estudiantes que experimentaron niveles más bajos de acoso, según una encuesta realizada por GLSEN, anteriormente Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.

“Estás atacando a niños que ya son vulnerables”, dijo Javier Gómez, un estudiante LGBTQ en su primer año en Miami Dade College. “Y no se trata sólo de estudiantes queer. Muchos jóvenes están hartos”.

Aún no es evidente si las nuevas leyes están afectando el lugar donde los jóvenes LGBTQ eligen ir a la universidad, dijo Casey Pick, director de leyes y políticas de The Trevor Project, que apoya a los jóvenes LGBTQ en crisis. Existe evidencia que los adultos LGBTQ si se están alejando de los estados que aprueban leyes anti-LGBTQ, dijo Pick. Y “si los empleados adultos toman esto en cuenta cuando deciden dónde quieren vivir, puedes apostar que los estudiantes universitarios están tomando las mismas decisiones”.

Mientras tanto, en una era de rechazo a las políticas de diversidad, equidad e inclusión en muchos estados —y contra la acción afirmativa en todo el país— Amankwaah es una de un número creciente de estudiantes negros que eligen lo que consideran la seguridad relativa de una HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities). La inscripción en las HBCU aumentó alrededor del 3 por ciento en 2021, el último año del que se dispone de cifras, mientras que el número de estudiantes en otras universidades y facultades disminuyó.

“El verdadero ataque aquí es el sentimiento de pertenencia”, dijo Jerry Young, quien dirige el programa Freedom to Learn en PEN America, que hace seguimiento a las leyes que restringen los esfuerzos de diversidad y la enseñanza sobre la raza en colegios y universidades. “Lo que realmente hace es izar una bandera para decirle a los estudiantes más marginados: ‘No los queremos aquí'”.

Más del 40 por ciento de los administradores de universidades y facultades dicen que el fallo de la Corte Suprema que restringe el uso de la acción afirmativa en las admisiones afectará la diversidad en sus campus, según una encuesta de Princeton Review cuando comenzaba el año escolar.

Los estudiantes universitarios de todas las razas y tendencias políticas informan que se sienten incómodos en los campus que se han convertido en campos de batalla de temas culturales y políticos. Los de izquierda están furiosos por las nuevas leyes que bloquean programas de diversidad, equidad e inclusión y la enseñanza de ciertas perspectivas sobre la raza. Mientras los de derecha lamentan que los oradores conservadores son abucheados o cancelados, los comentarios impopulares criticados en clase y lo que ven como una adopción de valores diferentes a los que aprendieron en casa.

Un padre de Michigan dijo que apoyaba la decisión de su hijo de saltarse la universidad. Según él, otros padres también están disuadiendo a sus hijos de ir a la universidad, citando “el consumo excesivo de alcohol, la cultura de las relaciones, las enseñanzas seculares, profesores de izquierdista radicales que mezclan antiamericanismo, anticapitalismo, anti libertad de expresión y un énfasis en la diversidad, equidad e inclusión” que, según él, es contrario a un enfoque en el mérito. El padre pidió que no se usara su nombre para que sus comentarios no afectaran a su hija, quien asiste a una universidad pública.

Más de uno de cada 10 estudiantes en universidades de cuatro años ahora dicen que sienten que no pertenecen a su campus, y otros dos de cada 10 no están ni de acuerdo ni muy de acuerdo con que pertenecen, según encontró otra encuesta de Lumina y Gallup. También descubrió que quienes responden de esta manera tienen más probabilidades de experimentar estrés con frecuencia y de abandonar los estudios. Uno de cada cuatro estudiantes hispanos informa que frecuente u ocasionalmente se siente inseguro o sufre falta de respeto, discriminación o acoso.

Los veteranos militares que utilizan los beneficios de la ley G.I. para retomar los estudios dicen que una de sus barreras más importantes es la sensación de que no serán bienvenidos, según una encuesta realizada por el Instituto D’Aniello para Veteranos y Familias Militares de la Universidad de Syracuse. Casi dos tercios dice que los profesores y administradores no entienden los desafíos que enfrentan, y el 70 por ciento dice lo mismo sobre sus compañeros de clase no veteranos.

Las universidades deben ser “espacios seguros y de afirmación”, dijo Pick, del Proyecto Trevor, no lugares de aislamiento y alienación.

Sin embargo, un número significativo de estudiantes dice que no se siente cómodo compartiendo sus puntos de vista en clase, según otra encuesta realizada por College Pulse para el Sheila and Robert Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth, de tendencia conservadora, en la Universidad Estatal de Dakota del Norte. De ellos, el 72 por ciento dice que teme que sus opiniones sean consideradas inaceptables por sus compañeros de clase y el 45 por ciento por sus profesores. Los estudiantes conservadores tienen menos probabilidades que sus compañeros liberales, de creer que todos los puntos de vista son bienvenidos y están menos dispuestos a compartir los suyos.

“¿Es realmente un entorno intelectualmente diverso?” se pregunta Sean Stevens, director de encuestas y análisis de la Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), que ha lanzado una clasificación de la libertad de expresión en los campus basada en las percepciones de los estudiantes sobre la comodidad al expresar ideas, la tolerancia hacia los oradores y otras medidas.

“Anecdóticamente y por experiencia personal, ciertamente hay un grupo de estudiantes

que están considerando estos factores en términos de dónde ir a la universidad”, dijo Stevens.

El 81 por ciento de los estudiantes liberales y el 53 por ciento de los conservadores dicen que apoyan las denuncias a profesores que hacen comentarios que consideran ofensivos, según la misma encuesta. Esta utilizó comentarios en su muestra como: “No hay evidencia de prejuicios contra los negros en los tiroteos policiales”, “Exigir la vacunación contra el COVID es un asalto a la libertad individual” y “El sexo biológico es un hecho científico”.

Una profesora de la Universidad Texas A&M fue investigada cuando un estudiante la acusó de criticar al vicegobernador del estado durante una conferencia, aunque finalmente fue exonerada. Una profesora de antropología de la Universidad de Chicago que impartió un curso universitario llamado “El problema de la blancura” dijo que se vio inundada de mensajes de odio cuando un estudiante conservador publicó su foto y su dirección de correo electrónico en las redes sociales.

Más de la mitad de los estudiantes de primer año dicen que las universidades tienen derecho a prohibir a oradores radicales, según una encuesta anual realizada por un instituto de la UCLA. La encuesta de College Pulse dice que el sentimiento lo comparte el doble de proporción de estudiantes liberales que de conservadores.

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La aparición de un jurista conservador —quien habló en el Washington College de Maryland el mes pasado— fue interrumpida por estudiantes debido a sus posiciones sobre cuestiones LGBTQ y el aborto. El tema: la libertad de expresión en el campus.

En marzo, un grupo de estudiantes en el campus de Stanford interrumpió un discurso de un juez federal cuyo historial judicial, según dijeron, era anti-LGBTQ. Cuando pidió la intervención de un administrador, un decano asociado de diversidad, equidad e inclusión lo confrontó y le preguntó: “¿Vale la pena el dolor que esto causa y la división que esto causa?”. El decano asociado fue suspendido y luego renunció.

“Hoy es un hecho triste que la mayor amenaza a la libertad de expresión proviene del interior de la academia”, afirmó el American Council of Trustees and Alumni, de tendencia derechista, que está presionando a las universidades para que firmen su Iniciativa de Libertad Universitaria que alienta a enseñar a los estudiantes sobre libertad de expresión durante la orientación para estudiantes de primer año y disciplinar a las personas que interrumpan a los oradores o eventos, entre otras medidas.

“Tengo que imaginar que en las universidades que tienen un mal historial en materia de libertad de expresión o libertad académica, esto afectará su reputación”, dijo Steven Maguire, becario de libertad en el campus de la organización. “Escucho a personas decir cosas como: ‘Me preocupa a qué tipo de instituto universitario o universidad puedo enviar a mis hijos y si serán libres de ser ellos mismos y de expresarse'”.

Algunas universidades ahora están reclutando activamente estudiantes basándose en este tipo de inquietudes. Colorado College creó en septiembre un programa para facilitar el proceso a los estudiantes que desean transferirse de instituciones en estados que han prohibido las iniciativas de diversidad, equidad e inclusión. Hampshire College en Massachusetts ha ofrecido admisión a cualquier estudiante de New College en Florida, sujeto a lo que los críticos han descrito como una toma de posesión conservadora. Hasta ahora, treinta y cinco han aceptado la invitación.

Aunque muchos críticos conservadores de los institutos universitarios y universidades dicen que los profesores están adoctrinando a los estudiantes con opiniones liberales, los estudiantes entrantes de primer año tienden a tener opiniones de izquierda antes de poner un pie en el aula, según esa encuesta de UCLA.

Menos de uno de cada cinco se considera conservador. Tres cuartas partes dicen que el aborto debería ser legal y favorecer leyes de control de armas más estrictas, el 68 por ciento dice que las personas ricas deberían pagar más impuestos de los que pagan ahora y el 86 por ciento que el cambio climático debería ser una prioridad federal y que debería haber un camino claro hacia la ciudadanía para todos los inmigrantes indocumentados.

Los futuros estudiantes dicen que están observando cómo se aprueban nuevas leyes, surgen controversias en los campus y analizan activamente no sólo la calidad de la comida y las especialidades disponibles en las universidades a las que podrían asistir, sino también la política estatal.

“Una vez que decidí que iba a Carolina del Norte Central, busqué si Carolina del Norte era un estado rojo o un estado azul”, dijo Amankwaah. (Carolina del Norte tiene un demócrata como gobernador, pero los republicanos controlan ambas cámaras de la legislatura y tienen una supermayoría a prueba de veto en el Senado estatal).

Las leyes anti-LGBTQ de Florida llevaron a Javier Gómez a dejar su estado natal y mudarse a Nueva York para ir a la escuela de moda. Pero luego regresó y se transfirió a Miami Dade.

“La gente me pregunta: ‘¿Por qué diablos estás de vuelta en Florida?’”, dijo Gómez. “La razón por la que regresé fue porque tenía esa vocación innata de que tenías que quedarte y luchar por los niños queer y trans de aquí. A veces es abrumador. Puede ser muy agotador mentalmente. Pero quería quedarme y continuar la lucha y construir una comunidad contra el odio”.

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OPINION: Immigrant students need trained advisers to navigate the problematic college admissions process

Juan Carlos Pérez — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 05:00:00 +0000

The new Free Application for Federal Student Aid promised to be an easy process for all students, especially those from immigrant families. For the first time, students with undocumented parents were told, they would be able to complete this form online.

We should have known better. Students with undocumented parents are constantly getting error messages from the FAFSA portal and are struggling to create FAFSA IDs for their parents who don’t have Social Security numbers. When they contact the FAFSA helpline, they hear “It’s a glitch. Try at a different time. Try a different browser.”

As I have seen as a college adviser, the online process has only worked for a few of my qualifying students. Others were asked to send their parents’ documents for verification.

Many of these students are still waiting for approval and have been unable to complete their FAFSA forms. Delays in their FAFSA applications could mean delays in receiving financial aid packages and possibly mean getting less financial aid to cover the costs of college. Their FAFSA applications now echo the immigration policies in this country — forever in limbo, mired in legislative and bureaucratic delays.

It wouldn’t surprise me if those students’ documents were among the FAFSA program’s thousands of unread emails, indicative of its widespread failure.

This isn’t the only roadblock my students face while attempting to pursue a college education. And it just underscores their need for help from someone familiar with the system and the frustration it brings.

Sadly, there aren’t enough college advisers like me for the growing population of immigrant students in New York City. We need to earmark funds to hire more advisers because no matter how much we prepare students in high school to succeed academically at the next level, they also need someone trained in the intersection of immigration and education to get them there.

For nearly a decade, the New York State Youth Leadership Council (YLC) and Teach Dream, the council’s educator team, have pushed city officials for more support for immigrant students in schools.

Finally, in 2021, they launched the Immigrant Liaison pilot program in a collaborative project with CUNY’s Initiative on Immigration and Education. That program led to the creation of positions for school staff members with experience working with and supporting immigrant youth, undocumented students, their families and caregivers.

The pilot began with three New York City public high schools, including the one where I work; in its second year, it added two middle schools. But funds for the program ended last June, leaving many of us doing this work informally.

Two decades ago, I was an undocumented student in high school and was unable to complete the FAFSA because of my status. I did some research to try to find out if I would be eligible for academic scholarships. I made several inquiries to tri-state college admissions counselors.

Like many of my students, I wanted to be the first in my family to earn a college degree, but my research results were discouraging.

I’ll never forget one response: An admissions counselor said I would have to contact the office for “special education accommodation” — as if immigration were a disability.

Federal and state immigration policies have since changed, and options have multiplied for immigrant students. In 2012, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, began to allow eligible immigrants like myself to obtain work permits and Social Security numbers.

In 2016, New York State changed its licensing rules, allowing DACA recipients like me to earn professional certifications in teaching, and I was able to continue my career as a math teacher in the Department of Education. And in 2019, the New York State Senate passed the José Peralta New York State DREAM Act, which gave undocumented students in New York State the ability to qualify for state aid for higher education.

Yet even with all these changes, undocumented immigrants in New York State make up less than 2 percent of the students enrolled in higher education despite the fact that undocumented immigrants comprise roughly 14 percent of the state’s overall population.

How many more could go to college if they had someone in their high school who could properly guide them through the college application process?

At schools across the country, at all grade levels, not enough counselors and staff are equipped to navigate the intricacies of the complex and often confusing immigration system.

We need state or city-funded immigrant liaisons at every school. Securing funding will be like working with FAFSA: We will need to be persistent and patient.

It’s worth it. This winter, I walked a student through the steps on how to create her mother’s FAFSA ID. The mother then tried multiple times for a month until she was successful in creating it.

After that, my student completed her FAFSA form in 10 minutes. Now, we are waiting to hear whether she gets financial aid to attend college.

My work as an immigrant liaison is never finished. I only wish more could join me.

Juan Carlos Pérez is a project researcher for the CUNY Initiative on Immigration & Education and a college adviser at an international high school in New York City.

This story about immigrant students and FAFSA was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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Can Biden’s new jobs program to fight climate change attract women and people of color?

Jessica Kutz — Sat, 27 Apr 2024 05:00:00 +0000

This story was originally published by The 19^th and reprinted with permission.

At a national park in Virginia on Monday, President Joe Biden announced that people can start applying to the American Climate Corps, a program that is expected to connect workers with more than 20,000 green jobs.

“You’ll get paid to fight climate change, learning how to install those solar panels, fight wildfires, rebuild wetlands, weatherize homes, and so much more that’s going to protect the environment and build a clean energy economy,” Biden said at the Earth Day event.

The American Climate Corps (ACC) is modeled after the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which was created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 to employ men in environmental projects on the country’s public lands — projects like trail building, planting trees and soil erosion control. Nearly 3 million people were put to work in an effort to address both Depression-era unemployment and to shore up national infrastructure.

But it wasn’t very diverse. Although Black and Native American men were allowed to enroll, the work was segregated. And women could not apply. For a brief time, a sister program created by Eleanor Roosevelt — mockingly called the “She-She-She camps” by its detractors — trained 8,500 women in skills like typing and filing.

The Biden administration is adamant that this iteration of the program will attract a more diverse conservation and climate workforce, promising that the program will “look like America” and expand pathways into the workforce for people from marginalized backgrounds.

On Monday, Biden announced the launch of a long-awaited job board where applicants can look for opportunities. Some positions were created through the American Climate Corps partner agencies like the Forest Service, which announced the Forest Corps — 80 jobs in reforestation and wildfire mitigation — or the USDA’s Working Lands Climate Corps, with 100 positions. At the same time, the Department of Interior and the Department of Energy announced a new project that will place corps members in priority energy communities — places that have historically been the site of coal mining and power plants — for work in community-led projects like environmental remediation. All of these positions have a term limit, although they vary; some listed on the website are seven-months for example, others are over a year long.

Other jobs listed on the site are compiled from existing conservation corps programs; either state-run programs like the California Conservation Corps or those run by nonprofits like Conservation Legacy. These provide opportunities for young people in local communities to do everything from prescribed burning on public lands to solar panel installations on schools.

So far, there are 273 listings on the website, ranging from working on trail crews to invasive plant management to wildland firefighting positions. There is also an “ag literacy” position to teach kids about where their food comes from, and a posting for a climate impact coordinator who will help a Minnesota nonprofit develop climate resilience projects. That’s a far cry from the administration’s goal of 20,000 jobs.

Colleges are now closing at a pace of one a week. What happens to the students?

Jon Marcus — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 11:00:00 +0000

It was when the shuttle bus stopped coming that Luka Fernandes began to worry.

Fernandes was a student at Newbury College near Boston whose enrollment had declined in the previous two decades from more than 5,300 to about 600.

“Things started closing down,” Fernandes remembered. “There was definitely a sense of things going wrong. The food went downhill. It felt like they didn’t really care anymore.”

The private, nonprofit school had been placed on probation by its accreditors because of its shaky finances. Then the shuttle bus connecting the suburban campus with the nearest station on the public transportation system started running late or not showing up at all. “That was one of the things that made us feel like they were giving up.”

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After students went home for their winter holiday, an email came: Newbury would shut down at the end of the next semester.

“It was, ‘Unfortunately we have to close after all these many years, and blah, blah, blah,’ ” said Fernandes, who was a junior. “I was very angry.”

The loans that students had taken out to pay the college weren’t forgiven, “which was infuriating. I had already put so much money into my education, and my family didn’t have that money. How am I going to apply this to my future if it doesn’t exist?”

This and other questions are on the minds of more and more students this spring as the pace of college closings dramatically speeds up.

About one university or college per week so far this year, on average, has announced that it will close or merge. That’s up from a little more than two a month last year, according to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, or SHEEO.

So many colleges are folding that some students who moved from one to another have now found that their new school will also close, often with little or no warning. Some of the students at Newbury, when it closed in 2019, had moved there from nearby Mount Ida College, for example, which shut down the year before.

Most students at colleges that close give up on their educations altogether. Fewer than half transfer to other institutions, a SHEEO study found. Of those, fewer than half stay long enough to get degrees. Many lose credits when they move from one school to another and have to spend longer in college, often taking out more loans to pay for it.

The rest join the growing number of Americans — now more than 40 million, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center — who spent time and money to go to college but never finished. And that’s happening at a time when efforts to increase the proportion of the population with degrees are already facing headwinds.

“I was asking my dad, ‘Can I not go back?’ ” said Fernandes, who eventually decided to continue at another college and now works as a patient coordinator at a hospital.

“I’m glad I did. But it honestly scares me for the future of education. I’m not sure where education’s going to go if all of these colleges keep closing. It’s just another roadblock, especially with people who are struggling with tuition in the first place.”

Colleges are almost certain to keep closing. As many as one in 10 four-year colleges and universities are in financial peril, the consulting firm EY Parthenon estimates.

“It’s simply supply and demand,” said Gary Stocker, a former chief of staff at Westminster College in Missouri and the founder of College Viability, which evaluates institutions’ financial stability. The closings follow an enrollment decline of 14 percent in the decade through 2022, the most recent period for which the figures are available from the Education Department. Another decline of up to 15 percent is projected to begin in 2025.

“The only thing that’s going to fix this is enough closings or consolidations at which supply and demand reach equilibrium,” Stocker said.

That’s likely little comfort to students who attend or have attended closing schools.

The College of Saint Rose, one of many higher education institutions that are closing at the end of this semester. Credit: Albany Times Union/Hearst Newspapers

Already this year, and within a span of a few days, Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama, Fontbonne University in St. Louis and Eastern Gateway Community College in Ohio all announced that they would close — Birmingham-Southern in May, Fontbonne next year and Eastern Gateway by June, unless it gets a financial bailout.

The private, for-profit University of Antelope Valley in California was ordered by the state in late February to shut down because of financial shortfalls. Lincoln Christian University in Illinois and Magdalen College in New Hampshire will close in May, Johnson University of Florida in June and Hodges University in Florida by August. The College of Saint Rose in New York, Cabrini University in Pennsylvania, Oak Point University in Illinois, Goddard College in Vermont and the Staten Island campus of St. John’s University will all be shuttered by the end of this semester.

Notre Dame College in Ohio will also close its doors at the end of this semester, stranding for a second time students who transferred there from Alderson Broaddus University in West Virginia, which shut down just days before classes were scheduled to begin the year before.

Seven out of 10 students at colleges that have closed got little or no warning. Of those, a smaller proportion were likely to continue their educations than students at colleges that gave more notice and ended operations in an “orderly” way, the SHEEO study found.

Tatiana Hicks was at her laptop preparing for her final exams in the nursing program she attended at for-profit Stratford University in Virginia when her group chat with fellow students started to blow up. “The only thing that was going through my mind was studying for finals, but my phone would not stop ringing,” said Hicks, who was going to school while working 12-hour shifts three days a week as a nurse assistant in a hospital to pay for it.

An email from the university president had just gone out saying Stratford had lost its accreditation and was closing, effective immediately. Students had a month to get their transcripts, it said. But within a day, the university’s phones and email were shut down, said Hicks, now 27, who lives in Gainesville, Virginia.

“I started panicking. I cried. I cried for hours that day. This just happened out of nowhere,” said Hicks, who lost all of the 94 credits she had earned and owed $30,000 in student loans, though they would later be forgiven after more than a year of red tape.

“Everyone kept asking me, ‘When are you going to go back?’ And I didn’t want to go back,” she said. “I thought, this just proved I shouldn’t have gone to college in the first place.”

Hicks did eventually enroll in a new program, beginning again from scratch on her way to a degree in respiratory therapy.

More common is the experience of Misha Zhuykov, who ended his formal education when Burlington College in Vermont shut down during his junior year there. The college had embarked on an ill-fated expansion, buying an abandoned Catholic orphanage so spooky Zhuykov helped make an award-winning movie in it for his film studies program. (The president at the time of the controversial expansion project was Jane O’Meara Sanders, wife of Sen. Bernie Sanders.)

Misha Zhuykov, who ended his formal education when Burlington College in Vermont shut down during his junior year there. “A lot of folks just kind of dropped off,” Zhuykov says. “I have a friend who’s working at a gas station.” Credit: Image provided by Misha Zhuykov

“There was always this ramshackle feeling” at Burlington, he said. Adjunct instructors were gradually replacing full-time faculty. “We kind of all suspected something might happen. I thought, ‘Just hold out for another two years and I’m out of here.’ ”

Instead, Zhuykov and the last 100 or so other undergraduates were given less than two weeks’ notice that the college would be closing. A private security company came to lock up the buildings. He said he found that not all of his credits would be accepted if he transferred.

Students who transfer lose an average of 43 percent of the credits they’ve already earned and paid for, the Government Accountability Office found in the most recent comprehensive study of this problem.

Like many of his classmates, Zhuykov never took his formal education any further. He now works as a graphic designer in New Hampshire. “A lot of folks just kind of dropped off. They were banking on that degree. I have a friend who’s working at a gas station.”

Even those who graduated from colleges that later closed run into uncomfortable questions when they look for jobs. Roy Mercon went to Burlington after serving in the Army. He managed to graduate before the college stopped operating. But when he’s applied for jobs, he gets skeptical reactions. “They say, ‘Oh, you’re from that school. I tried to look it up,’ ” he said.

“You kind of trusted the people teaching you that they know what they’re doing. This makes you feel a little cynical and sets the tone for the rest of your life,” said Mercon, who is 35 and working on the help desk of a citywide internet service provider in Burlington. He now has a 12-year-old daughter of his own. If she decides to go to college, he said, he will investigate to make sure the one she picks won’t close. “That’s an insane thing to have to think about.”

The former Burlington College campus in Vermont. The college closed in 2016. Credit: The Associated Press

Laila Ali, who was in the last group of students to graduate from Newbury College, has run into similar paperwork problems. When she started a new job in December, she said, her employer tried to verify her education, but couldn’t. “I didn’t really know what route to take. Who do I contact?” She ultimately showed them the physical degree that she was handed when she walked at graduation, which the employer accepted. But it triggered unwelcome memories.

“I remember graduation and my last semester being gloomy,” said Ali, now 27 and living in Atlanta. She said she saw a few signs that the college was in trouble, but it had also recently renovated a gym, with new equipment, and added sports teams. So the closing came as a surprise. “They could have given us a warning.”

How much difference a warning can make was evident at Presentation College in South Dakota, which — before announcing that it would close — contracted with the nonprofit College Possible to help its 384 remaining students continue their educations. After the announcement, the college stayed open for a final full semester and kept paying its athletics coaches to connect its many student-athletes with new teams.

At first, when administrators gathered everyone in the fieldhouse to announce the closing, “the students were so struck with disbelief that about half of them just got up and left,” said Catherine Marciano, College Possible’s vice president for partnerships. “Other students were crying very publicly or expressing anger toward the administration.” And when the college held a “teach-out fair” in the same gym with institutions that had agreed to accept its students and their credits, none showed up, despite a deluge of social media promotion.

“It took a little while for us to gain momentum,” Marciano said. Faculty and staff were looking for new jobs, while “students at that point were still in that state of grief where they were paralyzed.”

But given time, she said, “we saw those emotions shift to, ‘Okay, I have to figure out my next steps. I want to keep playing sports or keep pursuing my nursing degree.’ ”

In the end, 90 percent of those last students either graduated in the final semester before the college closed its doors for good or transferred to another institution, Marciano said — a far higher proportion than at closed colleges elsewhere.

Cassy Loa was one of those. A junior at Presentation when it closed, she played on its softball team and managed to transfer to Dickinson State University. But even with the help provided to her, she said, the path from the day the closing was announced was bumpy.

“All these thoughts were going through my mind. What was I going to do? Will my credits transfer? Can I still play softball? Where will my friends go? I had one more year until I graduated, and now I had to go and find a school for one more year.”

Cassy Loa, who was a junior at Presentation College when it closed. She transferred to Dickinson State University, where she was able to continue playing softball. Credit: Image provided by Cassy Loa

Living through that process, she said, “felt like being a senior in high school again.” In the end, because Presentation had a teach-out agreement with North Dakota’s Dickinson State, most of her credits transferred.

That kind of an experience is an exception to the rule, however. “Students don’t always do well when colleges close. In fact, they typically don’t do well,” said Paula Langteau, the last president of Presentation. “Some colleges literally padlock the door, and that’s their announcement.”

This is not deliberately malicious, Langteau said. Struggling schools “think they can somehow stay open. Or maybe they’re afraid of looking like they failed.”

She now works as a consultant to help other colleges through the process — a sign of how frequently it’s happening.

“We’re starting to get through to colleges and to boards that there needs to be more pre-planning, and it’s hard,” Langteau said. “It’s hard to admit when it’s time for an institution to close or to merge.’ ”

Mergers are also picking up, though they almost always end with the struggling partner fading away. Woodbury University is being merged into the University of Redlands, and St. Augustine College in Chicago into Lewis University. The Pennsylvania College of Health Sciences was absorbed by Saint Joseph’s University in January. Salus University will become part of Drexel University in June and stop running as a separate institution next year. Bluffton University in Ohio will be integrated into the University of Findlay, also next year.

This seems an easier route for students, who presumably can finish at the successor college. But it isn’t always. Students who attended Mills College received a $1.25 million settlement in a lawsuit charging that they were promised they could finish their degrees after the college was absorbed by Northeastern University. The lawsuit alleged that Northeastern phased out programs it didn’t already offer, in which 408 of the Mills students had enrolled. The universities deny having misled the students.

These shutdowns also affect taxpayers, who have to absorb the cost of the federally subsidized student loans that are forgiven in some instances. Students attending ITT Tech had $1.1 billion in debt forgiven when it shut down, for instance.

New U.S. Department of Education rules take effect in July that will require institutions to report if they are entering bankruptcy or facing expensive legal judgments, and to set aside reserves to cover the cost of student loans if they go under.

It’s also growing more important that consumers understand the financial status of colleges they consider, said Stocker, of College Viability.

“If a restaurant has health complaints, we don’t want to go there,” said Stocker. “If a car manufacturer is having trouble, why would we want to buy that car? Same thing for colleges.”

This story about college closings was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Additional reporting by Sara Hutchinson. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

The post Colleges are now closing at a pace of one a week. What happens to the students? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

To better serve first-generation students, expand the definition

Olivia Sanchez — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 05:00:00 +0000

What makes a first-generation college student? Well, that depends on who’s doing the defining.

Yes, there’s the federal definition: a student is first-generation if neither parent has a bachelor’s degree.

Sounds simple enough. But it doesn’t account for those who had a highly educated parent who wasn’t involved in their lives, or those whose parent got a college degree in another country, with an academic system unlike ours, or those who have one degree-holding parent, but are being raised in a single-parent household.

Researchers argue that many students like these are still meaningfully less advantaged compared to students who have two parents with degrees. Despite the narrow federal definition, many believe these are students who need to be identified and given added resources and support both to get through the college application process and to thrive once they get on campus.

New research from Common App shows that expanding the definition of first-generation expands enrollment data, and thus can tell a different story about who is ready for college.

According to 2022 data from Common App, about 450,000 applicants that year met the federal definition, meaning that neither parent had a bachelor’s degree, including about 300,000 students whose parents had never attended any college. But if the definition is expanded to include applicants who had one parent with a bachelor’s degree, the population increases to more than 700,000. And, according to the report, changing that definition changes other things, too, such as college readiness, socioeconomic status and the number of colleges students apply to.

Brian Heseung Kim, director of data science, research and analytics at Common App, said there isn’t one right way to define first-generation students; the question should be, “What kind of disadvantage are we trying to measure?”

After the Supreme Court ruled against the consideration of race in college admissions last summer, Kim said he was interested in looking at many different aspects of diversity in college applicants, including first-generation status. He said this analysis might help colleges that want to understand the diversity of their applicants; how certain home contexts and hardships might affect how competitive students appear in the application process; and how to support students from all different backgrounds.

“It would be great if everyone could kind of align on one definition for first-generation, it’d be so wonderful if we had that clarity,” Kim said. “But the reality is that different contexts kind of require different identification methods.”

The Common App’s analysis shows that, depending on the definition, the percentage of students identified as being part of an underrepresented minority group can range from 45 percent (for those who have one parent who earned a bachelor’s degree) to 58 percent (for students whose parents did not attend any college). And the percentage of those students from low-income families varies from 48 percent (for students who have one parent who earned a bachelor’s degree) to 66 percent (for students whose parents did not attend any college).

Sarah E. Whitley, vice president of the Center for First-generation Student Success, said most colleges define first-generation students as those whose parents do not have bachelor’s degrees or those whose parents did not earn bachelor’s degrees in the United States. She said the center doesn’t use one universal definition, and instead works with colleges to identify the definition that makes the most sense for them.

Whitley said the purpose of identifying students as first-generation is to understand whether they have people in their family who can support them with college-going knowledge, but that’s often harder to determine than asking simply “Are you the first in your family to attend college?”

Whitley discourages college from using this language because students may not categorize themselves as first-generation if they had an aunt or uncle or older sibling who attended college. She said it’s better to ask specific questions about parental education, as Common App does, but it can still be difficult to capture everyone. For example, asking about the education of biological parents might not capture students who had a highly educated birth parent but were raised by a stepparent, she said, or students who were raised in a family with two moms or two dads.

The Common App research found that there could be more than 100 definitions, considering the different combinations of parents and caregivers, whether they attended college or graduated, what degree they and many more factors. The analysis considered eight definitions:

Neither parent earned a bachelor’s degree (the federal definition)
No bachelor’s degrees among living parents (to focus on those who can provide support to the student)
No bachelor’s degrees among caregivers (considers others in the household beyond biological parents, such as a stepparent)
No domestic bachelor’s degree among caregivers (because degrees from other countries may be less relevant in helping students in the U.S. higher education system)
No bachelor’s degrees earned by caregivers before the student was born (excludes those who earned degrees more recently and may not yet have “accrued some of the more socioeconomic benefits of a college degree,” according to the report)
No associate degrees, either parent
No college attendance, either parent
One parent earned a bachelor’s degree

Yolanda Watson-Spiva, president of the advocacy group Complete College America, said it’s also important to think about the social capital that students have if both their parents went to college, such as access to college alumni and professional networks. She said there are big differences in resources between students who have one parent who earned a bachelor’s degree and students whose parents, grandparents and great-grandparents all went to college.

It makes more sense to think of first-generation status as a spectrum, she said, rather than a yes or no question. Using only the federal definition of first-generation is too narrow and constrictive, she said.

Watson-Spiva’s mother earned a bachelor’s degree and her father went to community college, but one of her grandmothers only had an eighth grade education. She doesn’t identify as a first- generation student, but said she could imagine how someone in a similar situation might, even though they don’t meet the federal definition.

“Many of those folks still struggle,” she said. “There are still big variations between that person and a person who’s had like four generations of family members that are legacies, that went to college.”

This story about first-generation students was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

The post To better serve first-generation students, expand the definition appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

College Uncovered, Season 2, Episode 3

Hechinger Report and GBH Boston — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 05:02:00 +0000

As they struggle to fill seats, universities on average dole out more than half of the revenue they collect from tuition in the form of discounts and financial aid.

If a private company discounted its products by more than half, it would be out of business. It’s an incredibly self-destructive model, but no one seems willing to be the first to stop doing it.

This financial arms war among colleges is draining so much revenue that many are losing money even as they increase their tuition. That’s because almost no one pays the advertised price; nearly all students, including those whose families can afford to pay, now get discounts and institutional financial aid. Not only is this pushing colleges into insolvency; it discourages many students and families — particularly low-income ones — from considering a college, since they see only the advertised cost and don’t realize they’d almost certainly pay a much, much lower one.

These many machinations are beginning to slow down the annual increases in the cost of college. Some institutions are even lowering their prices. In this episode of College Uncovered, The Hechinger Report and GBH will show you how to take advantage of the college pricing chaos.

Listen to the whole series

TRANSCRIPT

Scroll to the end of this transcript to find out more about these topics, with links to additional helpful information — including a tool to help you search for calculators that will tell you the likely net price you will pay at any college, based on your income.

Jon: So we’re here at Vinyl Index, which is a very hip record store. They sell new and used vinyl, in the very hip boom market section of Somerville outside of Boston.

Kirk: And you’re looking for some ’80s albums? Maybe Chicago?

Jon: And we are not looking for some ’80s albums, but we’re looking for some rare albums, and we’re going to see what kind of a discount we can get.

Kirk: You’re going to haggle.

Jon: We’re going. To haggle.

Aaron Wetjen-Barry: I am Aaron Wetjen-Barry, aka Aaron-eous. I work here at Vinyl Index, ordering new and used music.

Kirk: Aaron-eous. Can you explain the nickname?

Aaron Wetjen-Barry: So, I started in college, actually, but I’m a visual artist, and I’m kind of from the hip hop scene where we all have our, like, hip hop names.

Jon: So tell me what the most expensive album is that you have here?

Aaron Wetjen-Barry: So, we sell a lot of, say, Grateful Dead box sets here. So, you know, like, something like this. This record just has, like, eight records in there. So it’s, like, four hours of music.

Kirk: How much does that go for?

Aaron Wetjen-Barry: This one goes for $200 even.

Jon: So can we get this for 56 percent off?

Aaron Wetjen-Barry: Unfortunately, the mark up is not that good, so it wouldn’t be able to do that.

Jon: Yeah, so what would happen if you sold everything here in this shop for 56 percent off?

Aaron Wetjen-Barry: We’d probably be out of business in a week.

Jon: That makes pretty logical sense if you do the math. I mean, a business can’t give back more than half of what it makes and stay in business.

Kirk: But that’s exactly what colleges and universities are doing in a complicated and largely unknown pricing strategy that makes seemingly no logical sense at all. Or does it?

This is College Uncovered from GBH News and The Hechinger Report podcast, pulling back the ivy to reveal how colleges really work.

I’m Kirk Carapezza from GBH.

Jon: And I’m Jon Marcus with The Hechinger Report.

Kirk: We’re calling this episode “Half Off Full Price.”

Jon: We’ve been talking on this podcast about how families can negotiate their way into a discount on the cost of college, but how much money colleges are actually giving away might come as a surprise.

Colleges give back, in the form of tuition discounts and financial aid, 56 percent of the revenue they take in. And that’s the average. Some are giving overall discounts of 60 or even 70 percent.

The colleges don’t call them discounts. They call them scholarships. And that’s how families see them when they get offered their financial aid. But those are just fancy ways to reduce the price, the same way retailers do when they’re trying to attract more customers.

Kirk: This discounting practice started back in the ’90s, the last time colleges faced a really big enrollment decline. Today, both public and private colleges do it.

Will Doyle: Many people thought a lot of private colleges were going to go out of business at that time.

Kirk: Will Doyle is a professor of higher education at Vanderbilt University.

Will Doyle: What the private colleges did, though, was they figured out that the worst thing in the world is an empty seat. If they could figure out what somebody was willing to pay for a seat and charge them that, then they might as well fill every seat and get what they could for it.

Kirk: So Doyle says that’s exactly what they did.

Will Doyle: They looked at what people in different categories were willing to pay and figured out what they could charge them. And by doing that, they ended up being able to fill those empty seats. And they survived what was supposed to be an incredibly difficult time, actually pretty well.

Kirk: Notice that he isn’t saying that the money goes to the people who couldn’t pay the full freight, just that they might be on the fence about picking a school. So colleges have steadily shifted some of their financial aid to people who might not actually need it, just to get them to enroll.

Will Doyle: Colleges actually will charge a little less for the highest-income students, the ones who are closest to the ability to do full pay, because just a small discount, a small honorific discount where you’ve told the student they’ve gotten the scholarship, can tip the decision for that student to attend. Many of the highest-income students with not necessarily great test scores actually do receive some amount of financial aid.

Jon: Right, just like the way the person sitting next to you on an airplane might have paid a completely different price for the flight. From the college’s point of view, it sort of makes sense. You need to have at least some people who can pay at least some of the tuition.

Brett Schraeder: But if you don’t give them anything, they may never show up. And so then you don’t have any revenue from that student to help with your mission, to help serve other students, to pay your faculty.

Jon: That’s Brett Schraeder, managing director for financial aid at the consulting firm EAB, which advises colleges about this kind of thing.

But as the years have gone by, this approach has sort of trapped many colleges and universities in a cutthroat competition for students to whom they have to give more and more discounts and financial aid. And continuing to advertise a very high list or sticker price that almost no one pays is discouraging some students from even applying to colleges that might be a really good fit for them.

Kirk: Okay, so what does all of this mean to you if you’re a student or a parent? Well, you could be missing out. One survey found that a majority of families don’t know that colleges discount their price. Another, by the student loan company Sallie Mae, finds that nearly 80 percent of people eliminate a college from consideration because they see the list price, and they think it’s too high.

Brian Rosenberg saw this firsthand from the inside.

Brian Rosenberg: I am president emeritus of Macalester College and author of a recent book, Whatever It Is, I’m against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education.

Jon: Rosenberg says the whole pricing mechanism is complicated and baffling to a consumer.

Brian Rosenberg: And so students, particularly first-generation students, students who aren’t particularly sophisticated, will simply look at the fact that a college’s posted price for tuition, room and board of $70,000 and say, ‘Well, I’m not even going to think about that.’

Jon: That’s right — even though almost no one actually pays that price. I ran the federal data, which, as you know, Kirk, is something I like to do in my free time. And there are 428 colleges and universities at which not a single incoming freshman pays the full price.

Kirk: So that leads to another little secret you might not have noticed. Yes, it’s true that the price of tuition and fees has been going up at three times the rate of inflation, but those price increases have suddenly leveled off.

In 2022, average tuition actually went down, when adjusted for inflation.

Let’s be clear. Paying for college is still scary and expensive. But the point of all this is that it doesn’t cost as much as people sometimes think. And the price? It’s pretty much stopped going up.

Jon: I mean, as you said, college is still really expensive. Tuition, room, board, books and other costs comes to nearly $60,000 a year at private nonprofit colleges and nearly 30 grand at public ones. But colleges are giving back more and more of their money to fill seats. Which means they’re running into money crunches of their own.

So how do students and their parents take advantage of this practice? We asked one of the top experts who helps low income and first-generation students do it.

Scott Del Rossi: My name is Scott Del Rossi and I am the vice president of college and career at College Possible. College Possible is a national nonprofit, that provides college access and college success coaching to about 25,000 students across the country.

Jon: So how can a family find out how much of a discount they might get from a particular college? I mean, short of actually applying.

Scott Del Rossi: If you navigate to their financial aid page. Oftentimes they’ll have a tuition calculator that you can enter in your family’s income, yearly income. And that will let you know how much college will typically cost for a family at that income.

Jon: That’s true. The colleges are actually required by law to provide these net price calculators. They’re supposed to tell you what you’ll actually pay after discounts and financial aid based on your family income. And for the most part, they’ll give you the right general idea.

But a study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that some of the links didn’t work, or the prices were out of date, or they didn’t say what year they were from. So don’t assume they’re right on the money — so to speak.

Scott: Absolutely. Ironically, I was looking for one for the other day, and it was very much buried on the website. You kind of had to know it existed in order just to find the calculator.

Kirk: So now you know, and just knowing about these discounts can be a big help in getting the best deal, especially with many colleges so desperate for enrollment. Here’s Scott Del Rossi again.

Scott Del Rossi: We always recommend to students and families that they apply to more than one college.

Jon: You mean, so they can pit one against the other?

Scott Del Rossi: You can always present that as, you know, ‘Hey, these are the things that I really hope that you consider, and reevaluate the financial aid award. And these are the types of awards I’m getting from other colleges and universities.’

Kirk: This growing discount rate is a major reason why a lot of them are closing or likely to close, which we’re also going to be talking about this season.

Don’t just take it from us. We asked Brian Rosenberg, the former president of Macalester, who had to deal with this problem, whether a 56 percent average discount rate at private colleges is too much.

Brian Rosenberg: It’s unsustainable.

Jon: So why don’t colleges stop?

Brian Rosenberg: They have no choice. I mean, the obvious question that a lot of people ask is, ‘Well, if your discount rate is 50 percent, why don’t you just cut your sticker price in half?’ And some colleges are doing that.

Jon: You’re talking about a tuition reset.

Brian Rosenberg: A tuition reset.

Jon: A tuition reset is the higher education’s sort of typically wonky way of describing lowering the price. And as Brian Rosenberg says, some colleges are trying that now, charging everyone the average that people were paying anyway without playing the game of showing one price and charging another one.

Kirk: Especially in places where they’re running out of students, like in the Northeast and the Midwest. That’s where an enrollment cliff is on its way, as the number of 18-year-olds declines.

Susan Stuebner: My name is Sue Stuebner, and I’m the president of Colby Sawyer College, which is in New London, New Hampshire.

Jon: Last year, Colby Sawyer lowered its advertised price by more than 60 percent, down from about $46,000 to $17,000 a year, not including room and board. Not a single student was paying the full price anyway.

Susan Stuebner: As institutions’ tuition prices go up, you’re losing the chance to have a conversation with more and more families. And so the pool you’re actually drawing from gets smaller and smaller. And we looked around the marketplace and our listed or sticker-price tuition was among the highest in New Hampshire as well as even in in New England. So when I mentioned that statistic earlier about not being in conversation with so many families, you know, that combined with the enrollment cliff had us very nervous.

Kirk: Stuebner says that Colby Sawyer has gotten a bump in applications, and a lot more of the students it accepted have already put down their deposits. And other colleges are watching whether this model works.

Susan Stuebner: We’re getting a lot of interest. You know, a lot of folks have reached out and just asked about the process. So I think, if nothing else, a lot of schools are considering it.

Kirk: But American consumer behavior is a little strange. For one thing, if something costs more, we seem to think it must be better. Like cars. Or whiskey. Will Doyle says it’s called the Chivas Regal Effect.

Will Doyle: It’s called the Chivas Regal Effect because Chivas Regal is this kind of mediocre whiskey. And they came up with a brilliant strategy, which was actually to increase their price. And by increasing the price, they moved it from the bottom shelf to the middle shelf. And people look at whiskeys and they think, ‘Oh, the middle shelf must be an okay whiskey.’ And they bought that one.

Lots of colleges find the same thing that when they reduce the sticker price. When they reduce the stated price, the perceived quality of the institution goes down. So if an institution maintains a very high stated price, they’re kind of saying, ‘Oh, we’re a high-quality place. Then they can quietly discount for the set of students that they’re seeking to enroll.

Kirk: So you’re there in Tennessee, a major producer of whiskey, and the sticker price at Vanderbilt is now approaching $100,000 a year. Is that the Chivas Regal Effect?

Will Doyle: I’m going to decline to comment on my own institution.

Kirk: Okay. Fair enough. So the other thing that colleges have done is disguise the discounts as scholarships that parents love to see. It gives the parents bragging rights. And at a lot of colleges, almost everybody gets them. But we love to get awards. And so when colleges lower the price, Susan Stuebner says parents want to know where their kids’ scholarships went.

Susan Stuebner: The group that had the most difficult time understanding what we were trying to do were our current students. We provided them with a comparison of what they were currently receiving from the college that year and what they would receive the next year. When you looked at the actual amount they paid to attend Colby Sawyer, it was the same. But for some families and for some students, you know, their initial reaction was, you’re taking this scholarship away from me.

Jon: Brett Schrader’s consulting firm does a survey of high school seniors every year to find out what would attract them to a college.

Brett Schraeder: We ask them, ‘Hey, if you had three different awards, if you had a $40,000 prize and a $20,000 scholarship, if you had a $30,000 prize and a $10,000 scholarship, or you had just a $20,000 prize — so basically same net cost for each one — which one would you pick?’ Always. They pick the ones with the scholarships.

Jon: The bottom line is that colleges and universities have created a system that makes it ridiculously hard for people to figure out what they’ll actually pay, even though it might be less than they expect.

Susan Stuebner: In today’s era, higher education is being scrutinized for how much it costs, and at the same time, what it actually costs to families is much less for most of us than what we list. So it’s very confusing.

Jon: It’s pretty quiet here on a Thursday morning on a campus. I thought it was Friday that students didn’t go to class.

Kirk: We went to the campus of Lasell University, which, like Colby Sawyer, also cut its price this year by about a third, from nearly $60,000 to just under $40,000. Lasell is one of those schools we mentioned earlier where not a single student had been paying the advertised sticker price. That raises the question, do students who are already attending save any money when a college cuts its list price?

Jon: We caught up with a business management major on her way to or her off campus job.

Rose Andrey Pluviose: My name is Rose Andrey Pluviose. I’m a senior here at LaSalle, and I’m from Boston, Massachusetts.

Jon: Did you come out ahead when they lowered the price? Did you end up paying less to go here?

Rose Andrey Pluviose: I would say about $1,500 less.

Jon: Other students came out even.

Parker Tallman: I’m Parker Tallman. I am 21 years old. I’m from New Jersey. So for me, it didn’t really make an impact. Tuition went down, which means your scholarships go down, too. So even though we’re paying less out of pocket, the scholarships go down as well. I don’t know what the dollar figure is, what I’m paying right now anymore. And I just heard that it’s possibly going up again.

Jon: Lots of students told us the same thing — that the pricing system at colleges doesn’t make much sense when tuition gets lowered by $20,000, but their own price stays the same or falls by maybe $1,500.

Parker Tallman: It shouldn’t be that difficult. If you’re going to have a set price, have a set price.

Jon: But in your case, basically you came out even.

Parker Tallman: I came out even. Yeah, basically I came out even, luckily.

Jon: Scott Del Rossi also warns that tuition resets are a little bit of a gimmick when you do the math, and that people shouldn’t get too excited about them.

Scott Del Rossi: If the sticker price is still being lowered, but the financial aid package is getting lowered, we certainly do want to get students’ and families’ hopes up.

Kirk: So the moral of this crazy story is to not assume that the price you see is what you’ll pay for college. You will likely pay a lot less.

Jon: We’ll let Brian Rosenberg have the last word here. The former president of Macalester says colleges are clinging to this impenetrable pricing strategy in a desperate bid for survival.

Brian Rosenberg: These colleges need students. And unless they keep marking down the price more and more, students simply are not going to come. There are many, many colleges where not a single student pays the full price. It is like a business that is struggling to stay alive.

Jon: And yet we keep doing it.

Brian Rosenberg: And yet we keep doing it.

Kirk: This is College Uncovered. I’m Kirk Carapezza from GBH.

Jon: And I’m Jon Marcus from The Hechinger Report. Be sure to keep listening to future episodes to hear more about what colleges and universities don’t teach you.

Kirk: We would love to hear from you. Send us an email to gbhnewsconnect@wgbh.org and tell us what you want to know about how colleges really operate. And if you’re with a college or university. Tell us what you think the public should know about higher ed.

Jon: This episode was produced and written by Kirk Carapezza …

Kirk: … and Jon Marcus, and it’s edited by Jeff Keating. Meg Woolhouse is our supervising editor and Ellen London is the executive producer.

Gary Mott and David Goodman are our mix engineers. We had production assistance from Diane Adame.

All of our music is by college bands. Theme song and original music by Left Roman out of MIT.

Mei He is our project manager and head of GBH podcasts is Devin Maverick Robins.

College Uncovered is a production of GBH News and The Hechinger Report and distributed by PRX. It’s made possible by Lumina Foundation.

For more information about the topics covered in this episode:

Learn more about College Possible.
Search for a college’s net price calculator.

The post College Uncovered, Season 2, Episode 3 appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

College Uncovered, Season 2, Episode 4

Hechinger Report and GBH Boston — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 05:01:00 +0000

Okay, so you’re going to college. But will the college you pick still have its lights on by the time you get to graduation?

It’s a question more and more families are asking as universities and colleges face financial and enrollment challenges, close or merge. We’ll tell you what schools are doing to stay alive, what happens to students when they shut down and how to check on the financial health of colleges.

Listen to the whole series

TRANSCRIPT

Scroll to the end of this transcript to find out more about this topic, and for links to more information.

Jon: This is College Uncovered. I’m Jon Marcus with The Hechinger Report …

Kirk: And I’m Kirk Carapezza with GBH. We’re getting out of our Boston studio to start today’s episode and heading to the nearby town of Brookline, Massachusetts.

Jon: Nice neighborhood up here, huh, Kirk?

Kirk: Beautiful view up here, Jon. Is this where you live?

Jon: No, I do not. This is Fisher Hill. It’s a really swanky neighborhood. It was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the guy that laid out Central Park. The inventor of the smallpox inoculation lived up here. So did search Serge Koussevitzky, the conductor of the Boston Symphony. These mansions around here are some of the best 19^th-century architecture you can find. I saw one listed this morning, Kirk, for just a little over $8 million.

Kirk: Is there a pool?

Jon: Yeah. Well, one thing apparently this neighborhood didn’t need was college.

Kirk: That’s right. There used to be a college here. It was called Newbury College, and it closed five years ago. It had $11 million worth of debt and a dwindling number of students. It lost $7 million just in its last year. When it closed, the campus was sold for $34 million. So, Jon, the real estate that we’re standing on right now, it was worth more than the actual college.

Jon: That’s right. And some of it is now being transformed into this giant luxury elderly housing complex. You can hear it going up across the street.

Kirk: That’s right. And they converted this part over here, over your shoulder, it looks like, into a dog park.

Jon: Yeah, a dog park where rich people walk their very expensive dogs.

Kirk: Dogs that have Instagram accounts, we found out.

Your dog is on Instagram?

Dog walker: Yup. His name is Bennie in Boston with an “-ie.”

Kirk: Bennie in Boston is a Cockapoo, by the way.

Okay, so a lot of colleges are closing — more of them in Massachusetts than in any other state. But it’s happening all over the country, too. These days, among the things you need to know before you pick a college is whether it will even stay in business long enough for you to graduate. So how do you know whether your school might close? We’ll tell you how to find out.

A lot of colleges are closing around here, and in other parts of the country, hit hard by an enrollment decline. Massachusetts has seen nine nonprofit colleges close or merge since 2016, giving it the rather dubious honor of being first in the nation for nonprofit college closings.

Just a few miles away from Fisher Hill in Newton, Massachusetts, Mount Ida College closed suddenly in 2018. It was the spring, and the abrupt decision, delivered to the campus community in an email, would leave hundreds of students in debt and in limbo for years.

Like Newbury College, Mount Ida was out of cash and out of luck. But at least Newbury gave students a year’s notice about its closure. Mount Ida’s dirty little secret was that to get more students in seats, it had been discounting its tuition heavily. Very few students were paying the sticker price or even close to it. But like a lot of small private colleges here in New England and across the country, Mount Ida’s board seemed to assume the college was just one more marketing campaign away from turning it all around.

Jon: And it wasn’t?

Kirk: No, Jon, it was not.

Newscaster: ‘It’s WGBH’s morning edition. I’m Joe Mathieu. Under a deal announced last week, Mount Ida will shut down. UMass will acquire its campus.’

Kirk: In public hearings, one by one, I heard Mount Ida students and their parents blame administrators for the school’s sudden closure.

Lisa McLean: Someone needs to be held accountable and do what’s right for these students.

Kirk: Lisa McLean said Mount Ida’s president had told parents like her that the college failed because it offered tuition discounts it couldn’t afford. The college was basically cutting the cost to students by more than half.

Lisa McLean: If this is the case, why are they being offered? Why are you preying on our children? Luring them to come to Mount Ida with this nonexistent money?

Jon: Mount Ida is definitely part of a bigger trend, one that’s being felt around the country. At the time, junior Jared Maimon was working part time as a campus tour guide — not at Mount Ida, but 50 miles southwest at another small private college, Nichols College, in Dudley, Massachusetts. Maimon says he didn’t start thinking about the financial challenges of small colleges like Nichols until Mount Ida closed abruptly.

Jared Maimon: And that’s when it kind of popped into my head and I was, like, ‘Oh, man, like, is this something that could happen to us?’

Jon: And he started hearing prospective students and their parents talking about the same things on the campus tours he gave. They started asking him not just about food, dorms and classes, but about whether his college would be around long enough for them to graduate.

Kirk: And, Jon, that’s also when, for the first time, I began getting that question at our higher ed desk. Stressed-out parents started calling me, wanting to know if the colleges they were considering for their kids would still be open in four years.

So how do you know? There’s no surefire way to know whether college is at risk of shutting down. But there are a few things you can look for.

Over the past 20 years, more than 1,900 colleges have closed. About 80 percent of them were for-profits. But the other 20 percent were private nonprofits like Newbury and Mount Ida. That’s according to an analysis by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, which tracks these things.

Jon: And last year, 2023, was a record year, with about 80 colleges closing, many of them small liberal arts colleges with enrollments around 1,000 students or less.

Kirk: Eighty! Okay, that’s a lot of colleges — I mean, at least six a month. And experts are predicting many, many more will follow as college enrollment problems are getting worse.

Jon: That’s right, because the number of high school graduates is shrinking and the percentage of those who do graduate high school going directly to college keeps falling. Meanwhile, compared to 40 years ago, college costs have more than doubled. So it makes sense that only one in three American adults now says a degree is worth the cost.

All of these headwinds are about to push a lot of colleges straight off a demographic cliff.

So many colleges have closed recently that there’s even an app to tell you whether your college is on the way up.

Kirk: What? Come on. Are you kidding me?

Jon: Nope. A former administrator at Westminster College in Missouri is now a researcher and founder of something called College Viability. It’s an app that collects publicly available data so that you can compare and contrast colleges across the country.

Kirk: Come on. Will you text me that?

Jon: Sure. Hold on. It’s a little clunky and it’s not exactly scientific. It simply shares the characteristics of colleges that might be financially shaky. But the fact that it even exists, Kirk, proves there’s demand for this kind of information.

Kirk: Definitely. Well, rather than relying on this app. I sat down with Michael Horn. Horn thinks and writes about college closures all the time. He’s the co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute, a research outfit that has long predicted lots of colleges would close because the enrollment and tuition numbers simply don’t add up. Sitting in his living room, looking back on 2023, Horn told me that he and his research team were right. A ton of schools did close.

So I asked him: What’s going on?

Michael Horn: Well, I think there’s a few things going on. One, the pandemic forestalled, actually, a lot of colleges from closing, because they were going to close, but then all these federal dollars comes in and basically saves them. And then we’ve got a bunch of colleges that need to close. Structurally, they’re not sound. And 2023, the federal money is gone. They start to collapse.

Kirk: How many schools are we talking about?

Michael Horn: Yeah, it was over one a month last year, in 2023. And the pace is increasing. Right? And this isn’t even counting the for-profit schools that closed. Higher ed has never seen anything like this.

Kirk: Michael, do you predict we’ll see more schools shut down in 2024?

Michael Horn: I think the number’s going to go up and up and up. The real cliff is going to start coming in about two years. So we’ve got a little bit of time. Maybe there was pent-up colleges that needed to close, and so maybe it’ll be about the same. I think at least 20, 25 schools will close, and that doesn’t count the mergers. It’s not going to be less.

Kirk: You’re talking about 2026, when we’ll see the number of 18-year-olds drop precipitously because no one was having babies in 2008, during the Great Recession.

Michael Horn: Exactly. Everyone stopped having babies in 2008. And generally, in the past, after recessions, people started having babies again. That didn’t happen this time, and so we don’t see a rebound. And that’s why a lot of people don’t like the word cliff. They like slide, or something like that — something more gradual. But that’s why people call it a cliff, because it doesn’t rebound.

Kirk: If I’m a prospective student — because, you know, we’re very consumer focused on our podcast — how do I know whether the school that I choose will still be open, will still have its lights on in four years? You’re shaking your head.

Michael Horn: It’s the greatest question, because there’s just not great information for students and families. Everyone asks me this question: ‘How do I know?’ And it’s really hard to tell them. I think what I would do is, frankly, look at a few sources of information. Number one, has enrollment been dropping over the last 10 years? I wouldn’t look in just the last year or two. I would look over a decade. Number two, is enrollment below a thousand students? If so, and the school doesn’t have a really strong name brand, I’d be really worried. And number three, can I look at some historical lists? You know, there’s databases out there about schools that are struggling. Take a look at them and see, was this a school that was already on life support before the pandemic? And if so, I’d be really nervous if it’s hitting on those other two as well.

Kirk: But even those things, there’s no guarantee, right? You think about schools like Hampshire College, right, where Ken Burns has swept in and raised a ton of money to keep that school afloat. It hits all of those targets that you just mentioned, but it’s still open.

Michael Horn: Yeah, absolutely. Look, there are colleges that have basically hit the cliff and then rebounded, right? There’s Hampshire, there’s Sweet Briar College — alumni saved it. Those are schools with strong brands. And so I might say, give them a chance. Frankly, the schools that are closing aren’t generally ones we’ve heard of.

Kirk: You mentioned you get this question all the time. I remember when Mount Ida College shut down here in Newton, people started calling me because they heard me on the radio reporting this, and they said, ‘I’m thinking about sending my kid to this school. Is it still going to be open?’ Do you get the same calls?

Michael Horn: Yeah, because you’re the expert, right? You’re the one, right? Well, I mean, that may be scary to both of us, but, like, you’re the one reporting on this, you’re seeing the numbers, you’re seeing the trend, you’re seeing, frankly, the struggles that students are then having as a college closes on them. Right? They’re trying to transfer credits. They’re trying to find a school that will accept them. They’re trying to find a comparable school that has a major that will work for them. The Department of Education will say, ‘Oh, schools have lots of, you know, brothers and sisters out there you can easily transfer to.’ But if you’re a student in the soup, so to speak, you’re not seeing that big picture. And so it’s scary.

Kirk: And, Jon, there is one other potential red flag. Michael Horn did not mention at first.

Jon: Yeah? What’s that?

Kirk: Well, in the wake of Mount Ida, education officials in Massachusetts created a so-called financial stress test for colleges like the one the federal government launched for banks after the 2008 recession. This was the first of its kind in the country, and it was really controversial. But the idea was to alert students and their parents if a college was in financial trouble.

At the time, the higher education lobby pushed back on the plan. They said no one stress test fits all.

Barbara Brittingham was then head of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. That’s the regional accrediting body. She told me colleges worried if the public really knew about their financial challenges, their demise would become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Barbara Brittingham: When an institution is financially fragile, we ought to be watching it. The accreditor should be watching it. Arguably, the state ought to be watching it. But we ought to do it in a way that doesn’t overly burden the institution, which is already working very hard to make things work.

Jon: Well, that makes sense. I can understand that once word is out that a college is in trouble, no one’s going to want to go to that school.

So if the public can’t see this financial stress test, how on earth is it useful? And how do I know if the school I’m choosing will close?

Rachel Burns: You don’t.

Jon: That’s Rachel Burns with the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association.

Rachel Burns: So I work on all of our projects related to financial aid, data and research and finance.

Jon: While financial stress tests don’t appear to have any teeth, she says they can still effectively protect consumers behind the scenes, almost like the pipes in a building. You don’t see them, but it’s good to know they’re there, right? And she thinks more states should install them.

Rachel Burns: Absolutely. State agencies should be requiring institutions to have plans in place in the event that a closure happens.

Jon: College closings disproportionately affect low-income and Black and Hispanic students. So Burns says these plans should include pathways for all students to continue their educations.

Rachel Burns: So whether they transfer to another institution that has agreed to take those students, if they have a really strong sort of crosswalk of how their credits might apply to other local institutions, and that there’s some sort of — this is less likely — but some sort of financial recompense for students. So if they’re getting tuition returned for that semester or if they’re getting any sort of assistance, you know, because that’s such an important indicator for whether a student is going to continue after a closure, is if they had some sort of support from the institution, whether it’s financial or, like, transfer agreements.

Jon: Burns says one reason more states haven’t followed Massachusetts’ lead is the strong private college lobby.

Rachel Burns: I mean, that’s part of it. I think some institutions are never going to be beholden to those rules because, you know, you wouldn’t ask an Ivy League institution or a really large land grant. And that’s not really who we’re focused on anyway.

Jon: Instead, they’re focused on small private colleges where the enrollment cliff has already arrived. Forty percent of colleges in this country enroll fewer than 1,000 students.

Another problem, Burns says, is that most state agencies don’t have the capacity to monitor the financial health of colleges.

Rachel Burns: We’re not going to catch any of the bad actors out there with authorization, because they’re already authorized. State agencies who are responsible for this authorization process just have to pick their battles. And even if those policies are on the books, they’re not always being enforced. So it’s on both sides of the equation. You know, the institutions aren’t doing it, but then the agencies aren’t enforcing it.

Kirk: Okay. So this gets wonky and bureaucratic pretty fast, but it’s so important. So let’s slow it down a bit. Bring it back to earth and explain why it matters to you. Jon, what happens to students and their credits when their college is closed?

Jon: Well, there is some research on this, and it shows there are two different scenarios. One is where a student is attending an institution that has a teach-out plan, or something similar between the closing institution and another college. It’s almost like automatic enrollment. In those cases, students tend to do pretty well. All or most of their credits transfer, and they just keep going as if almost nothing happened, although they might have to move or become an online student. Two thirds of those students re-enroll and they go on to complete a credential.

But Rachel Burns, who’s studied college closings, says then there are the students she’s most worried about. And this is the majority of students at colleges like Mount Ida, that give students too little warning that they’re going to close.

Rachel Burns: These are what we call the abrupt closures. They happen pretty quickly. There’s not a lot of notice, a lot of warning. And the institution itself doesn’t have any plan in place. And those students may be able to get their credits to transfer. They will always be able to access their transcript, but there’s no guarantee that another institution will take those credits, particularly if it’s a closure that happens for some sort of accreditation issue.

Jon: So if a school is losing accreditation, for example, those credits essentially have no value anymore.

Rachel Burns: The majority of students, when they’re in that situation, a little over half just don’t re-enroll. And if they do re-enroll, only about a third of them end up completing. So it’s a pretty significant barrier to getting to getting any further. And so then they tend to end up worse off. So they’ve spent all this time and this money for credits that don’t mean anything and never earn a credential.

Kirk: Wow, let’s repeat that. Half of those students whose colleges shut down abruptly never even re-enroll.

Jon: Yeah, 52 percent of those students never do. So they end up with debt and no degree.

Kirk: But that means the other half do transfer and continue on. Take Sam Marshall. She and her sister, Siobhan, were both enrolled at Mount Ida College when it announced it would shut down.

Sam Marshall: Yeah, I was in an accounting class, and I remember my professor looking like somebody had told her to look at her email. And she goes, ‘Why?’ And they’re like, ‘You need to see this.’ And she opens it and she goes, ‘Okay, so you all need to open your emails. And I’m going to allow you to leave for the day, and we’re just going to call class done. Because you guys don’t have a school and I no longer have a job.’

Siobhan Marshall: They were still giving tours that day, after I saw the email.

Kirk: Weeks later, the Marshall sisters attended a college fair on campus, and Sam decided to transfer to nearby Newbury College.

Sam Marshall: When Newbury came to Mount Ida to recruit students, I had sent an email to the admissions office asking if the college was in any danger of closing down, if they’re in any financial trouble. And they said, ‘Oh, no, we don’t have any plans of closing anytime soon.’ So I said, ‘Okay, I’ll go there.’

Kirk: But then a year later, Newbury shut down. Sam says she was depressed.

Sam Marshall: Oh, I was done. I just wanted to drop out. But I had to keep going.

Kirk: Sam transferred once again to Suffolk University in Boston. All of her credits didn’t transfer, though, so she says she had to enroll for a fifth year. Her experience at Mount Ida and then Newbury undermined her motivation and her faith in higher education.

Sam Marshall: I didn’t join any clubs. I wasn’t getting involved. I just wanted to graduate.

Kirk: And she worried about Suffolk University’s fate.

Sam Marshall: I don’t know, I always thought in the back of my mind that it was going to shut down, too.

Kirk: After four years, Sam thought she should have been done with college. But administrators told her she didn’t have enough credits.

Sam Marshall: So I did have to take another year. And even then, they said I would have to do another semester. But I said, ‘That makes no sense. I’ve done this much schooling.’ So the guy who I was talking to, very nice, looked into my past classes and said, ‘Oh, I found credits. You’re good to go.’

Kirk: She graduated, finally, with a degree in interior design. Meanwhile, her sister, Siobhan, was determined to finish her education so she could work in the funeral industry.

Siobhan Marshall: So I moved seven hours and out of state to a school that was supposed to provide me with the same education. And I stayed there for — what was it, like, two and a half years? — until Covid. And then the pandemic happened, and then I came back and immediately started working in a funeral home. And I worked all through the pandemic, and I was trying to complete my education during that time.

Kirk: That’s when Siobhan says she found out she’d been sold what she describes as …

Siobhan Marshall: … I was sold a lie going to New York because my education wasn’t comparable. There’s different laws in the two states. There’s so many things that I was told were interchangeable that were not. And it made working in this state while having to learn in that state pretty impossible.

Kirk: Now in their mid 20s, the two Marshall sisters are living at home with their parents, facing nearly $100,000 in student loan debt — each — and working jobs that don’t necessarily require their degrees.

Kirk: Are you surprised that Americans have so little faith in higher education?

Sam Marshall: No, not at all. Personally, I think I would be better off joining a trade or something else. I don’t know. It’s tough.

Kirk: In 2019, three former Mount Ida students filed a class-action lawsuit against the school’s leaders, claiming they were deliberately misled about the college’s ailing finances. But a federal judge dismissed it, saying Mount Ida had made all of its required public disclosures showing that the school had been operating at a deficit for three years — if they had bothered to check it. Philanthropist Bob Hildreth funded the lawsuit.

So why did you get involved?

Bob Hildreth: Because this was at the very beginning of colleges closing. I thought that students were being screwed by a process that didn’t give them enough time to pursue their education.

Kirk: Hildreth called the judge’s ruling appalling, not just for former Mount Ida students, but for college students and their families across the country.

Bob Hildreth: Universities, which were increasingly corporations, were treating their kids like Wall Street treats their employees. When they get into financial trouble, they just throw them out onto the street.

Jon: Harsh words. Well, Kirk, five years after Mount Ida shut down, higher ed researcher Rachel Burns predicts we’ll see more colleges head for the exits. It’ll be another long year of college closings.

Rachel Burns: We kind of anticipated as soon as federal funding dried up, there would be a bunch of closures right away. But we’re seeing that it’s actually sort of trickling across several years because every institution was kind of in a different place at the start of the pandemic. So it makes sense that they’re recovering or not recovering at different rates. So I don’t know that I would say 2024 will be historic, but I think the next three years combined, once we hit that demographic cliff — I think that will be significant. Probably the most closures we’ve had since about the 2010s, when there were all of the shutdowns of the private for-profits that had shady practices.

Kirk: So where is the accountability? The problem, Michael Horn says, is that the boards of trustees who are supposed to be overseeing these colleges are not really on top of this issue.

Michael Horn: They’re not asking the right questions of their presidents and provosts to say, are the trends in the right direction? This is a really terrible market in the sense that the buyers, the students, they have very little information. The college leadership has all the cards. And if, again, the school goes under, that hurts. That makes you uncertain about, ‘Gee, my neighbor just had this happen to them. Is this a good place for me to spend my next four years? Maybe I ought to just get a job.’

Kirk: Should more states adopt similar financial stress test?

Michael Horn: I think all states ought to adopt something like what Massachusetts has done, because the accreditors are not on top of this as much as they should be. They’re one line of defense. The federal government is a second line of defense. But it’s too big a country for them to be able to monitor this. And states are a third line of defense. And this is a really great place they can step in.

Jon: And more states might need to step in because higher ed’s enrollment problems are not going away. So as more colleges stop operating, experts say states will need to help protect consumers against the fresh wave of closings.

Kirk: This is College Uncovered from GBH and The Hechinger Report. I’m Kirk Carapezza.

Jon: And I’m Jon Marcus.

Kirk: Our show is created by Jon …

Jon: … and Kirk, and it’s edited by Jeff Keating. Meg Woolhouse is our supervising editor and Ellen London is the executive editor.

Kirk: Gary Mott and David Goodman are our mix engineers.

Jon: All of our music is by college bands. Our theme music is by Left Roman out of MIT. We also used music by students in the Pacific Jazz Ambassador program at University of the Pacific. In today’s episode, it was “The Crossing” by Marwan Ghonima.

Kirk: Additional sound by W.M. Quincy from freesound.org.

Mei He is our project manager and head of GBH podcasts is Devin Maverick Robins.

Jon: We’d love to hear from you. Send us an email to gbhnewsconnect@wgbh.org and tell us what you want to know about how colleges really operate. And if you’re with a college or university, tell us what you think the public should know about higher education.

College Uncovered is a production of GBH News and The Hechinger Report and distributed by PRX. It’s made possible by Lumina Foundation.

Kirk: Thank you so much for listening.

For more information about the topics covered in this episode:

The U.S. Department of Education’s financial responsibility composite scores, which generally track whether an institution is at risk.
An independent guide from the advocacy organization Third Way about how to use the federal government’s financial responsibility scores.
Check a private, nonprofit institution’s publicly available financial documents.

The post College Uncovered, Season 2, Episode 4 appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Universities and colleges that need to fill seats start offering a helping hand to student-parents

Jon Marcus — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 05:00:00 +0000

JERSEY CITY, N.J. — When Keischa Taylor sees fellow student-parents around her campus, she pulls them aside and gives them a hug.

“I tell them, ‘Don’t stop. You’ve got this. You didn’t come this far to stop. You’re not going to give up on yourself.’ ”

Taylor is exceedingly well qualified to offer this advice. She began her college education in her early 20s, balancing it with raising two sons and working retail jobs. And she just finished her bachelor’s degree last semester — at 53.

It’s a rare success story. Student-parents disproportionately give up before they reach the finish line. Fewer than four in 10 graduate with a degree within six years, compared to more than six in 10 other students.

Many have long had to rely on themselves and each other, as Taylor did, to make it through.

Now, however, student-parents are beginning to get new attention. A rule that took effect in California in July, for example, gives priority course registration at public universities and colleges to student-parents, who often need more scheduling flexibility than their classmates. New York State in September expanded the capacity of child care centers at community colleges by 200 spots; its campus child care facilities previously handled a total of 4,500 children, though most of those slots — as at many institutions with child care on campus, nationwide — went to faculty and staff.

Taylor put her sons in a Salvation Army daycare center when they were younger. “It’s a matter of paying for college, paying for the babysitter or sneaking them into class,” Taylor recalled, at Hudson County Community College, or HCCC, where she went before moving on to Rutgers University. Even though the community college is among the few that have improved their services for student-parents, she remembered asking herself, “How am I going to do this?”

Keischa Taylor, who began her college education in her 20s, balanced it with raising two sons and working retail jobs. Taylor finished her bachelor’s degree last semester at age 53. Credit: Yunuen Bonaparte for The Hechinger Report

Parents with children comprise a huge potential market for colleges and universities looking for ways to make up for the plummeting number of 18- to 24-year-olds and states’ growing need for workers to fill jobs requiring a college education. Many of these parents already have some college credits. More than a third of the 40.4 million adults who have gone to college but never finished have children under age 18, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, or IWPR.

“If you want to serve adult learners, which colleges see as their solution to enrollment decline, you have to serve student-parents,” said Su Jin Jez, CEO of California Competes, a nonpartisan research organization that focuses on education and workforce policies.

Another reason student-parents are more visible now: The Covid-19 pandemic reminded Americans how hard it is to be a parent generally, never mind one who is juggling school on top of work and children.

“A lot of the current energy has come from the focus on child care crises,” said Theresa Anderson, a principal research associate at the nonprofit research organization the Urban Institute. “Student-parents are at the intersection of that.”

There’s also new attention to the benefits for children of having parents who go to college.

Hudson County Community College in Jersey City, New Jersey. The college has added programs to support the parents among its 20,000 students. Credit: Yunuen Bonaparte for The Hechinger Report

“The greatest impact on a child’s likelihood to be successful is the education of their parents,” said Teresa Eckrich Sommer, a research professor at Northwestern University’s Institute for Policy Research.

Lori Barr dropped out of college when she got pregnant at 19, but went back as a mother and ultimately got a master’s degree. With her son, Minnesota Vikings linebacker Anthony Barr, she later co-founded a scholarship organization for single student-parents in California and Minnesota called Raise The Barr.

“Whatever we’re doing to support the parent directly impacts the child,” Barr said. “A parent can’t be well if the child’s not well, and vice versa.”

The effect works two ways, Sommer said. In a study she co-authored of an unusual program that gives college scholarships to both high school students and their parents in Toledo, Ohio, the Institute for Policy Research found that students and parents alike performed at or above average, despite what Sommer noted were financial challenges and limited academic preparation.

“Call it mutual motivation. The children helped the parents with technical issues. The parents helped the children with time management,” she said. “We think of kids as a barrier to student success. We have to turn that on its head. Kids are a primary motivator to student success.”

Tayla Easterla was enrolled at a community college near Sacramento, California, when her daughter was born prematurely four years ago; she took her midterms and finals in the neonatal intensive care unit. “I just found that motherly drive somewhere deep inside,” said Easterla, 27, who now is majoring in business administration at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.

Krystle Pale, who is about to get her bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz. When she looks at her children, “I want better for them. I just want them to have a better life,” she says. Credit: Image provided by Krystle Pale

Krystle Pale is about to get her bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz. When she looks at her children who live with her, who are 5, 7, 12 and 13, “I want better for them. I just want them to have a better life,” said Pale, choking up.

Sydney Riester, of Rochester, Minnesota, who is about to earn her dental assistant associate degree, also said her children — ages 3, 6 and 7 — were foremost in her planning. “These kids need me, and I need to get this done for them,” Riester said.

There’s a surprising lack of information about whether students in college have dependent children. Most institutions never ask. That is also slowly changing. California, Michigan, Oregon and Illinois have passed legislation since 2020 requiring that public colleges and universities track whether their students are also parents. A similar federal measure is pending in Congress.

“Ask community college presidents what percentage of their students are parents, and they’ll say, ‘That’s a really good question. I’ll get back to you,’ ” said Marjorie Sims, managing director of Ascend at the Aspen Institute, one of a growing number of research, policy and advocacy organizations focusing on student-parents.

Nearly one in four undergraduate and nearly one in three graduate students, or more than 5.4 million people, are parents, the Urban Institute estimates. More than half have children under age 6, according to the IWPR.

The student center at Hudson Community College. The college has set aside “family-friendly” spaces in libraries and lounges and holds events for parents with kids, including movie nights and barbecues. Credit: Yunuen Bonaparte for The Hechinger Report

Seventy percent of student-parents are women. Fifty-one percent are Black, Hispanic or Native American. Student mothers are more likely to be single, while student fathers are more likely to be married.

Among student-parents who go to college but drop out, cost and conflicts with work are the most-stated reasons, various research shows; 70 percent have trouble affording food and housing, according to the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice at Temple University.

Student financial aid is based on an estimated cost of attendance that includes tuition, fees, books, supplies, transportation and living expenses, but not expenses related to raising a child. The out-of-pocket cost of attending a public university or college for a low-income parent can be two to five times higher than for a low-income student without children, according to the advocacy group The Education Trust.

A student-parent would have to work 52 hours a week, on average, to cover both child care and tuition at a public university or college, EdTrust says. A separate analysis by California Competes found that students in that state who have children pay $7,592 per child a year more for their educations and related expenses than their classmates who don’t have kids.

But “when they apply for financial aid, they get financial aid packages as if they don’t have children. It’s ludicrous,” said Jez, at California Competes.

Hudson Community College’s clothes closet for students. The college keeps a supply of clothing for students to wear to internships and job interviews and in other professional situations. Credit: Yunuen Bonaparte for The Hechinger Report

Forty-five percent of student-parents who dropped out cited their need to provide child care as a significant cause, a survey released in February found. Yet the number of colleges and universities with on-campus child care has been dropping steadily, from 1,115 in 2012 to 824 today, federal data shows. That’s a decline of 291 institutions, or 26 percent.

Fewer than four in 10 public and fewer than one in 10 private, nonprofit colleges and universities have on-campus child care for students, an analysis by the think tank New America found. Ninety-five percent of those campus child care centers that existed in 2016 — the most recent year for which data is available — had waiting lists, and the number of children on the average waiting list was 82, according to the IWPR. Other students couldn’t afford the cost.

“Colleges and universities that enroll student-parents should be committed to serving their needs,” said Christopher Nellum, executive director at EdTrust-West and himself the son of a student-mother who ultimately dropped out and enlisted in the military, finding it was easier to be a parent there than at a community college. “It’s almost willful neglect to be accepting their tuition dollars and financial aid dollars and not helping them succeed.”

Even where child care is available and spots are open, it’s often too expensive for students to manage. More than two-thirds of student-parents in Washington State said they couldn’t afford child care, a state survey last year found. About half of student-parents nationwide rely entirely on relatives for child care.

Hannah Allen, who goes to Hudson County Community College. Allen gets up at 5 a.m. to get her three kids ready for the day — first the 4-year-old, then the 6-year-old, then the 8-year-old. “I go down the line,” she says. Credit: Yunuen Bonaparte for The Hechinger Report

Hannah Allen, who goes to HCCC, gets up at 5 a.m. to get her three kids ready for the day — first the 4-year-old, then the 6-year-old, then the 8-year-old. “I go down the line,” she said. Her schedule is so tight, she has a calendar on her refrigerator and another on the wall.

She can’t drop off her children at school or daycare earlier than 8:30 or pick them up later than 5. “When my kids are in school is when I do as much as I can.” She calls her school days “first shift,” while her time at home at night is “second shift.”

“First you put your kids, then you put your jobs, then you put your school and last you put yourself,” said Allen. “You have to push yourself,” she said, starting to cry softly. “Sometimes you think, ‘I can’t do it.’ ”

Hannah Allen, who goes to Hudson County Community College, picking up her son, Christian Baker, at the end of a day. “When my kids are in school is when I do as much as I can,” she says. Credit: Yunuen Bonaparte for The Hechinger Report

There is a little-noticed federal grant program to help low-income student-parents pay for child care: Child Care Access Means Parents in School, or CCAMPIS. Last year CCAMPIS was allocated about $84 million; the Government Accountability Office found that student-parents who got CCAMPIS’s subsidies were more likely to stay in school than students generally. But there were more students on the waiting list for it than received aid. A Democratic proposal in the Senate to significantly increase funding for the program has gone nowhere.

The Association of Community College Trustees, or ACCT, is pressing member colleges to make cheap or free space available for Head Start centers on their campuses in the next five years. Fewer than 100 of the nation’s 1,303 two-year colleges — where more than 40 percent of student-parents go — have them now, the ACCT says.

These things are a start, but much more is needed, said Chastity Lord, president and CEO of the Jeremiah Program, which provides students who are single mothers with coaching, child care and housing. “When your child is sick, what are you going to do with them? It becomes insurmountable. Imagine if we had emergency funding for backup child care.”

Jen Charles, who earned a certificate last year through the continuing education arm of Hudson County Community College. Charles had hoped to earn a degree while raising two children, but that “became kind of an extinguished dream.” Credit: Yunuen Bonaparte for The Hechinger Report

Jen Charles struggled with child care as she tried to earn a degree and become a social worker from the time she was 19, when she had a son who was born with disabilities. He was followed by a daughter. Charles was also working, as an administrative assistant and, later, a paralegal.

“When things were going smoothly, I would enroll for one class and say, ‘I’m going to get through this,’ ” she said. But it proved too much. And even though Charles, now 49, got an information technology certification last year through the continuing education arm of HCCC, earning a full-fledged degree “became kind of an extinguished dream.”

As important as an education was to her, she said, “your priority becomes being able to sustain your family — their well-being, their needs being met, a roof, food. All of these other things take precedence. And where in there do you fit your papers that are due, or studying for your quiz? Is that at 10 o’clock at night, when you’re exhausted?”

Just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, HCCC has steadily added programs to support the parents among its 20,000 students. It has set aside “family-friendly” spaces in libraries and lounges and holds events for parents with kids, including movie nights, barbecues, trick-or-treating and a holiday tree-lighting ceremony. There’s a food pantry with meals prepared by the students in the college’s culinary program.

Student-parents get to register first for courses. College staff help with applications to public benefit programs. Lactation rooms are planned. And there are longer-range conversations about putting a child care center in a new 11-story campus building scheduled to open in 2026.

Christopher Reber, president of Hudson County Community College. For students who are already low-income and the first in their families to go to college, he says, having children “adds insurmountable challenges to that list of insurmountable challenges.” Credit: Yunuen Bonaparte for The Hechinger Report

The college’s 20,000 students are largely poor and the first in their families to go to college, said Christopher Reber, HCCC’s president, and many are not native English speakers. Ninety-four percent qualify for financial aid. Having children, Reber said, “adds insurmountable challenges to that list of insurmountable challenges.”

There’s an even more immediate motivation for the two-year college to support its student-parents. It graduates only 17 percent of students, even within three years, which is among the lowest proportions in the state.

“If a student doesn’t know where their next meal is coming from, it doesn’t matter how much academic support you offer — the student is not going to succeed,” said Reber, in his office overlooking downtown Jersey City.

With a grant it got in January from the Aspen Institute’s Ascend, HCCC is expanding its work with the housing authority in Jersey City to help student-parents there enroll in and complete job-focused certificate programs in fields such as bookkeeping and data analytics, hiring a coordinator to work with them and appointing an advisory committee made up of student-parents.

Lori Margolin, associate vice president for continuing education and workforce development at Hudson County Community College. “ ‘Do they care that I have children, and I’m not going to be able to take classes at these times?’ ” she says student-parents she meets ask themselves. Credit: Yunuen Bonaparte for The Hechinger Report

It can be hard to win the trust of student-parents, said Lori Margolin, HCCC’s associate vice president for continuing education and workforce development. “Either they’ve tried before and it didn’t work out, so they’re reluctant to go back, or it’s too much of an unknown. ‘Do they care that I have children and I’m not going to be able to take classes at these times?’ ”

Like other schools, HCCC had what Reber called “Neanderthal” rules for student-parents. They weren’t allowed to bring their kids to campus, for example.

“I remember one student, a single mother, relying on parents and friends to watch her baby. The only time she could study was late at night [in the library], but the library said no.”

That rule was dropped, with more changes planned. A new program will reward student-parents with financial stipends for doing things such as registering early and researching child care options, said Lisa Dougherty, senior vice president for student affairs and enrollment at HCCC.

Lisa Dougherty, senior vice president for student affairs and enrollment at Hudson County Community College. A new program will reward student-parents with financial stipends for doing things such as registering early, Dougherty says. Credit: Yunuen Bonaparte for The Hechinger Report

A few other colleges and universities have programs designed for student-parents. Misericordia University in Dallas, Pennsylvania provides free housing for up to four years for up to 18 single mothers, who also get academic support and tutoring, priority for on-campus jobs and access to a children’s library and sports facilities.

At Wilson College in Pennsylvania, up to 12 single parents annually are awarded grants for on-campus housing and for child care, and their children can eat in the campus dining hall for free.

St. Catherine University in Minnesota subsidizes child care for eligible student-parents and has child-friendly study rooms.

And Howard Community College in Maryland, whose president was once a student-parent, provides mentorship, peer support, career counseling, financial assistance and a family study room in the library.

“That may not seem like a big deal, but those are the messages that say, ‘You belong here, too,’ ” Lord said.

The food pantry on the campus at Hudson County Community College. Ninety-four percent of the undergraduate students at the college qualify for financial aid. Credit: Yunuen Bonaparte for The Hechinger Report

These efforts have so far helped a small number of students. Forty single mothers have graduated from the Misericordia program since it was launched more than 20 years ago, for instance.

Some of the obstacles for student-parents are hard to measure, said Jessica Pelton, who finished community college after having a daughter at age 20 and ultimately graduated from the University of Michigan, where her husband also was enrolled.

“You’re typically isolated and alone,” said Pelton. “I just kind of stuck to myself.”

She would often miss out on nighttime study groups with classmates who lived on campus. “Their priorities are not to go home, make dinner and put their kid to bed. We don’t have the option to go party. We’re not here on our parents’ money. We’re paying our own way.”

Some faculty offered to let her bring her daughter to class, she said. “It really meant a lot to me, because it made me feel like a part of campus.”

Finding fellow student-parents helps, too, said Omonie Richardson, 22, who is going to college online to become a midwife while raising her 1-year-old son and working as a chiropractic assistant 35 hours a week in Fargo, North Dakota.

“I felt very isolated before I found a group of other single moms,” she said. “If we had the understanding and support in place, a lot more parents would be ready to pursue their educations and not feel like it’s unattainable.”

This story about student-parents 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.

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