You’ve read the national headlines about the student-led protests at Columbia University and graduation ceremonies being canceled because of demonstrations at the University of Southern California.  

In both cases, and in similar protests including those at Yale, Rutgers and UCLA, the students are protesting the war in Gaza and demanding that their universities cut financial ties with Israel and call for a ceasefire. No doubt, what’s happening on these high-profile campuses is worth paying attention to.  
 

But protests are happening on campuses all across the country, and some of the most dogged reporting on demonstrations has come from the student journalists who are covering their own classmates and administrations. 

As of May 1, these protests were happening on at least 80 college campuses, according to a Chronicle of Higher Education tracker. 

At Virginia Commonwealth University, the situation suddenly went from sidewalk chalk messages to officers in riot gear when students set up a “liberated zone” encampment near the campus library, and refused to leave at night when college leaders asked them to. According to reporting by The Commonwealth Times journalists, state police, city police and campus police officers used pepper spray* to control the situation, and arrested several students.  

The situation developed rapidly. Four days earlier, in an email to The Hechinger Report, student editor Peggy Stansbery had said: “I wouldn’t say there is unrest, but students using their voices in unison to try to make a change and hold people in power accountable, including our university’s president. To note, the president has not tried to silence anyone on campus.” 

Some students returned to the encampment site the day after the arrests, but so did police. University leaders also handed out fliers with a “major events policy” that said any gathering of more than 50 people, any installation of tents or other structures or use of speaker systems could result in being “excluded from university property,” criminal penalties for trespass, or other university disciplinary action.  

At the University of Delaware, students staged a three-day “Walk Out, Die In” event, in which they marched across the campus and then lay on blankets outdoors in silence to honor the Palestinians killed in the conflict, according to reporting in the The Review. 

The university has permitted the protests so far. The Review reported that police were present during at least one demonstration, but the protest was peaceful and officers didn’t get involved.  

 In early April, The Review wrote about a display of hundreds of small Israeli flags placed on campus lawns, which another group of students removed and threw in trash cans. The university said there would be “repercussions” for those responsible and allowed the display to remain on the green for a week.  

At the University of Portland in Oregon, student journalists for The Beacon have written about very tall graffiti on campus buildings that read “Palestine” and “Free Palestine.”  

The university is removing the graffiti, but the director of campus safety and emergency management, Michael McNerney, told The Beacon, “We’re not doing [the cleanup] because of any judgments placed on the message or the meaning [of the vandalism], although the University has chosen to take a more neutral position on the conflict, but because this is something that has significant repercussions for the campus community.” 

Beyond dealing with the graffiti, the university administration has not addressed the conflict or the protests, except for a Palm Sunday email to students. In it, the vice president of student affairs, Rev. John Donato wrote “May this upcoming Holy Week be remembered by prayers for peace and action. Let’s be focused on ending war, death, and destruction in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan and Haiti, and at home in the United States.” 

Last week at the University of Minnesota, student journalists for The Minnesota Daily covered a protest related to “the political repression of Palestine activists on campus,” during which the campus police cleared out a student tent encampment. The student publication reported that six students, two former students and one faculty member were arrested.  

Student activists have since called for “an escalation of support,” and the university has closed 12 campus buildings. The Daily reported that, in an email to students, executive vice president and provost Rachel Croson said protestors are expected to adhere to student and employee conduct policies while engaging in freedom of expression. 

*CORRECTION: An earlier version misstated what police officers at Virginia Commonwealth University used to control protests on that campus. It was pepper spray. The Commonwealth Times student newspaper updated its story with this corrected information.

Reporting was contributed by Peggy Stansbery, Ella Holland, Kate Cuadrado, Konner Metz and Alex Steil.  

This story about student journalists covering protests 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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BALTIMORE – Jazz Lewis wound up at the University of Maryland not by luck or privilege but by the strings of a guitar.

Now a member of the Maryland House of Delegates, Lewis said he paid for his college degree with a mix of scholarships and money paid from stints with his church band. As one of the first men in his family to attend college, he said higher education was by no means a given; he earned it.

That’s why, Lewis said, he co-sponsored legislation designed to eliminate the use of legacy preferences at Maryland universities.

“I’m a Terp; I would love for my son to go there,” he said of the main campus at College Park. “But I just think, as a matter of public policy, state money shouldn’t be helping fulfill these types of preferences.”

The bill passed just before the end of the legislative session, was signed by Gov. Wes Moore in late April and will become law on July 1.

The idea for the legislation came last summer, after the Supreme Court ruled against the consideration of race in college admissions. Lewis, like many others across the country, wondered why colleges could still consider whether an applicant was the child of alumni or donors, but not the child’s race. While some have lauded his bill, others say it’s not enough unless it comes with other efforts to foster diversity on campus.

Lewis, a 35-year-old Democrat serving his second term in the state legislature, sees it as an easy win for Maryland, one of the most racially diverse states in the country, where the most selective college, Johns Hopkins University, and the state’s flagship, the University of Maryland, already do not consider legacy status in admissions.

Maryland becomes the third state to eliminate the practice, as the question of fairness in admissions undergoes increased scrutiny across the country. Colorado was the first state to ban legacy preference in 2021, and earlier this spring, Virginia became the second.

Legislators in California, New York, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Connecticut are considering similar proposals. On the federal level, Senators Tim Kaine of Virginia (a Democrat) and Todd Young of Indiana (a Republican) have introduced a bill that would prevent colleges from being accredited if they considered legacy or donor connections in admissions.

Julie J. Park, an associate professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, who studies equity in college admissions, said that giving preference to applicants who have ties to alumni or donors unfairly benefits students who likely already have advantages over their peers.

“They’re obviously not first-generation college students, they’re not suffering due to lack of opportunity,” Park said, and those with fewer advantages “are usually the students we want to help.”

Even though elite colleges have slowly diversified over the past several decades, Park said, the people who benefit from legacy preferences are still disproportionately white and affluent.

Across the country, racial disparities in access to college are pervasive. Far more white Americans than Black Americans hold college degrees, and the gap is growing. And many taxpayer-funded flagship universities, including in Maryland, have been failing to enroll Black and Latino students in the same proportions as Black and Latino graduates from their state’s high schools.

The Supreme Court’s majority determined that attempts to diversify college campuses with affirmative action policies violated the Constitution’s equal protections clause designed to prevent race-based discrimination. But the court’s dissenting justices argued that ignoring race would hurt, rather than help, students from historically disadvantaged groups and reverse progress on promoting more inclusive campuses.

In the wake of the decision, the Departments of Education and Justice jointly released a list of recommendations for colleges to use to advance opportunities for applicants from historically underrepresented groups. The list included eliminating legacy considerations from admissions, but some institutions have hesitated to adopt this recommendation.

James Murphy, the director of postsecondary policy at the advocacy group Education Reform, said he expects legacy admission preferences to disappear through a combination of legislation, like Maryland’s bill, and institutions voluntarily dropping the practice.

“Legislation has become necessary,” he added, “because colleges have not chosen to do the right thing themselves.”

At least 593 colleges across the United States reported that they considered legacy status in admissions during the 2022-2023 academic year, according to the most recently available data from the National Center for Education Statistics. That number has since shrunk due to the statewide ban on legacy preferences in Virginia, and other individual institutions dropping the practice. In Maryland, schools that do consider legacy status include Bowie State University, Capitol Technology University, Goucher College, Hood College, Loyola University of Maryland, Mount St. Mary’s University, Notre Dame of Maryland University, Salisbury University, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, the United States Naval Academy, Washington College and Women’s Institute of Torah Seminary and College.

Murphy said that passing this kind of legislation matters because “it sends a clear signal that Maryland is a state that doesn’t believe it’s fair to give students an advantage that is passed along family bloodlines.”

Also, he said, just because some college leaders drop the practice doesn’t mean their successors will follow the same course. Creating laws that prohibit the consideration of legacy status in admissions will ensure that these practices become a relic of the past.

And Park, the University of Maryland professor, said that states banning the practice can contribute to the momentum of the movement across the country.

“We can say, ‘Hey, this is something that if institutions are not brave enough on their own to step away from it, then, you know, states will act,’” she said.

Research shows that elite colleges benefit from accepting legacy students. These students often matriculate at higher rates than their peers, boosting completion rates and other success metrics, and their alumni family members are more likely to donate.

Johns Hopkins University ended legacy-conscious admissions in 2013, a move that university president Ronald J. Daniels said helped boost its proportion of low-income and first-generation students. The number of Pell grant recipients increased by about 10 percentage points from 2013 to 2022, according to data from the Johns Hopkins Admissions Office. Meanwhile, the number of legacy students dropped from more than 8 percent in 2013 to fewer than 2 percent over that same period, while the percentage of first-generation college students grew from about 8 percent to 21 percent.

In an interview, Daniels said that creating more parity during the admissions process has enriched the social fabric of the campus during a period he described as “highly polarized” across the country.

“There’s a richness of debate you’re able to have on a set of contemporary political and social issues that is possible with more diverse students,” Daniels said.

The institution did weigh the effect the move would have on alumni support, but Daniels said alumni giving has not significantly declined.

The university’s effort to broaden access also benefited, he said, from a $1.8 billion donation from former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2018 that allowed Hopkins to provide more need-based financial assistance to students. And it has changed its recruiting and outreach procedures to identify more students who might not have considered Hopkins as an option.

“We have worked very deliberately to change the applicant pool,” Daniels said. “The truth is, it’s multi-factorial … but I don’t think we would’ve been entirely as successful at changing the percentage of students from Pell-eligible populations had it not been for the coupling of the legacy admissions [ban] and the change in strategy.”

If Hopkins can end legacy-conscious admissions, Lewis said, other Maryland institutions should have no problem following suit.

“If it’s good for the most selective private institution in the state, then all the other private institutions in the state, I think, can come aboard,” Lewis said.

In written testimony about the bill, Matt Power, president of the Maryland Independent College and University Association, wrote that some private institutions in the state do consider “alumni relationships” as part of a comprehensive application process, but that students who do not meet admission standards are never accepted due to legacy or alumni relationships alone. He also wrote that alumni relationships can be powerful tools to recruit and attract prospective students. (The group did not take a position on the legislation.)

During committee hearings, Lewis and the bill’s co-sponsor, state Sen. Benjamin Brooks, a Baltimore County Democrat, also faced questions about the legislation having “unintended consequences” of harming admissions chances for students of color and low-income students at selective institutions that had accepted their parents or relatives.

Brooks, an Army veteran who attended college with help from the G.I. Bill, said that the legislation might have flaws, but with the Supreme Court having “taken the stance they did,” this bill “is one way of bringing some equity back into the process.”

Supporters of fair admissions acknowledge that ending legacy-conscious admissions alone won’t diversify college campuses.

“These legacy admission bans often are simply a way to create the illusion of change, and excusing institutions that end the practice from taking more substantive steps,” a former U.S. Education Secretary, John B. King, said in a keynote address earlier this year. “The reality is, this is performative wokeness when transformative action is what is desperately needed.”

King, now the chancellor of the State University of New York, said that the legacy preference bans must come with other efforts to increase socioeconomic diversity among the student body.

He said colleges should strive to double the number of Pell-eligible students and try harder to recruit students from rural communities. He urged colleges to value student extracurricular activities such as part-time jobs or caring for family members as much as “equestrian trophies or glam charity outings in the more vacation-friendly developing nations.”

Lewis, the state delegate, said he can’t remember meeting with University of Maryland recruiters when he looked into applying to colleges. He now has two degrees from College Park, which he attributes to hard work — but he hopes his bill can make it easier for the next generation of Black and low-income scholars to get their feet in the door.

“I don’t see this bill as a silver bullet,” Lewis said. “I see it as one piece of our broader collection of bills that me and other colleagues are bringing to make sure that we don’t move backwards in Maryland. And hopefully, we can be a leader in the country.”

Correction: This article has been updated to correct an error in federal data. McDaniel College does not consider legacy status in admissions.

This story about banning legacy admissions was produced by The Baltimore Banner, a nonprofit local news site, and 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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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.”

Related: Sick parents? Caring for siblings? Colleges experiment with asking applicants how home life affects them

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.

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When Carlos Sanchez immigrated to Grand Rapids, Michigan, from Mexico City 25 years ago, he’d already completed two years of college at Universidad Iberoamericana, and he was determined to finish his degree. Already bilingual, he felt comfortable tackling the second half of his education in English. But the language barrier was only part of the challenge. 

When he tried to enroll, he found that colleges had no idea how to handle his international transcripts and credentials. He recalls finding (and paying a considerable amount for) an outside company that could convert his transcripts into something more comparable to the U.S. education system. 

Eventually, Davenport University recognized the academic work he’d done in Mexico and he was able to finish his bachelor’s degree in international business there, without having to start from scratch. 

Sanchez is now the executive director of Casa Latina, a new bilingual college program at Davenport that will cater to students exactly like the one he was 25 years ago. He hopes it will help many highly trained or qualified people who are underemployed because they believe their English isn’t good enough to earn a college degree.

“I’ve been here 25 years and I’ve met engineers that are Uber drivers,” he said. “I’ve met accountants that have worked on a manufacturing line. Not that there’s anything wrong with those positions, but these individuals have four-plus years of college in their countries and they are underutilized.”

Beginning this fall, Casa Latina will offer 12 online undergraduate and graduate programs in an entirely bilingual and bicultural format. The curriculum will be offered entirely in Spanish one week and entirely in English the next, and all support services will be available in both languages.

Davenport’s tuition prices will apply to the Casa Latina programs, but accepted students will be awarded scholarships of $9,200 per year to help make the program more accessible financially. Those enrolled part time will receive a proportionate amount of scholarship funding, Sanchez said. Students are eligible for the scholarship award regardless of their immigration status, which Davenport does not ask about, he said. If students are eligible for federal financial aid, they can also use that funding to pay tuition.  

Once students are accepted, Sanchez said, Davenport will assess their education and work experience to see what can count toward degree progressions. The idea is to help students finish their education as efficiently and affordably as possible and get them into the workforce so they can provide better lives for their families. 

Latinos are the fastest growing demographic group in the United States, but data shows they are less likely than other racial and ethnic groups to have earned a college diploma. About 23 percent of Latino adults between the ages of 25 and 29 have a bachelor’s degree, compared to 45 percent of their white peers, according to a 2022 Pew Research Center report.

Davenport, like colleges across the country, has struggled with declining undergraduate enrollment since the pandemic. It has six campuses in Michigan along with its online program. In the 2018-2019 academic year, the university enrolled 6,763 undergraduate students, compared to 5,372 in the 2021-2022 academic year (the most recent year available from the National Center for Education Statistics). And colleges across the country are bracing for a shrinking number of graduating high schoolers after 2025 to have an effect on their enrollment. 

But Davenport’s president, Richard J. Pappas, said that the college has had good enrollment for the last three semesters, and the Casa Latina program is not just about boosting those numbers.

“It’s not a recruiting tool. Because if we don’t retain them and graduate them, this is a failure,” Pappas said. 

About 7 percent of Davenport’s undergraduate students identify as Hispanic or Latino, and 34 percent as nonwhite, according to data from the Department of Education. 

Deborah Santiago, president of the national advocacy group Excelencia in Education, said she’s excited about Casa Latina because it is advancing what it means to support not only Latino students but Latino communities more broadly. 

For these students to thrive in college and afterwards, Santiago said, the bilingual curriculum has to be connected to services that support students’ lives outside the classroom and resources that help them prepare for the workforce. 

“There is intentionality, there’s leadership here,” she said of the Davenport program. “They see the Latino community, they want to connect them to employment, they want to make sure that they get the academic rigor.”

Pappas said Davenport has worked with state and local Hispanic business leaders to make sure that Casa Latina is an opportunity for higher education and career development for “people who don’t feel comfortable, who may feel like they’re not capable because of the language barrier.”

Degree programs to be offered include accounting, business administration, education, human resource management, health services administration and technology project management.

Latino adults with work experience or some higher education in their home country are one of three demographic groups that Davenport expects to serve with this new program. Another is the college-aged children of those immigrants, who speak Spanish at home but are English dominant, and who have not yet harnessed their Spanish skills in academic or professional settings. 

Sanchez said they also expect to serve non-Latino students who attended immersion programs in high school, are bilingual and want to develop Spanish-language proficiency in their field of study and prepare to work as fully bilingual professionals. 

Regardless of their backgrounds, Pappas said he thinks that having a bilingual degree will help set these students apart in the workforce. 

“We still have some heavy lifting to make sure we do it well,” Pappas said. “But I think it’s going to have a big impact, not only on the people who go to our program, but the places that employ them.” 

This story about bilingual college was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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People who read college applications are a lot like detectives. Without having been there for the event (the student’s K-12 education and life), they must find clues in documents (high school transcripts and student essays) and eyewitness accounts (letters of recommendation) to solve the case (decide whether a student might be able to thrive at the college). 

But even with the extensive applications that each student submits, the detectives (college application readers) must do a lot of reading between the lines, said Tim Brunold, dean of admission at the University of Southern California. 

The clues they have on how students spend their time outside of school are typically limited to a list of sports teams they’ve captained, clubs they joined, volunteer work they’ve done and awards they’ve won. But the application readers often lack key information on other responsibilities or life circumstances students may have, such as caring for siblings or sick family members, working part-time jobs to help pay family bills, or living in a home without a stable internet connection.

And those missing clues often mean a student’s application doesn’t get a fair shake. If a student is getting good grades in spite of being responsible for siblings from after school until bedtime, that could mean the student is even more academically talented than a peer with no such burdens. 

In order to fill this gap, and signal to prospective students that these responsibilities matter, a set of 12 colleges participated in an experiment in which they asked every applicant to go through a list of extenuating home life circumstances or responsibilities and check off which ones they spend four hours or more per week doing.

“We want these kids to essentially get credit for these things that are taking a lot of skills and a lot of time, in the same way that kids who are doing traditional, school-based extracurricular activities are getting credit,” said Trisha Ross Anderson, the college admission director of the Making Caring Common project at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, which helped develop the questions with Common App. (The idea was in development before the Supreme Court ruled that race could not be considered in admissions decisions.)   

“We want to make it easier for students to report this information and talk about it. If students don’t want to have to write their essay about this, for instance, they shouldn’t have to.”

In order to make it fast and simple for prospective students, and to prevent application readers from having to play detective as they try to figure out, “Is there something else going on with this kid?,” they added this optional question to the Common App: 

Sometimes academic records and extracurricular activities are impacted by family responsibilities or other circumstances. We would like to know about these responsibilities and circumstances. Your responses will not negatively impact your application. You may repeat some information you already provided in the Common App Activities section. 

Please select which activities you spend 4 or more hours per week doing: 

• Assisting family or household members with situations such as doctors’ appointments, bank visits, or visa interviews
• Doing tasks for my family or household (cooking, cleaning, laundry, etc.)
• Experiencing homelessness or another unstable living situation
• Interpreting or translating for family or household members
• Living in an environment without reliable or usable internet
• Living independently or living on my own (not including boarding school)
• Managing family or household finances, budget, or paying bills
• Providing transportation for family or household members
• Taking care of sick, disabled and/or elderly members of my family or household
• Taking care of younger family or household members
• Taking care of my own child or children
• Working at a paid job to contribute to my family or household’s income
• Yard work/farm work
• Other (please describe)
• None of these

Across the 12 colleges, 66 percent of the students who applied to these colleges using the Common App checked at least one box, according to Karen Lopez, who manages this project at Common App. A quarter of the prospective students checked four or more boxes.

In the fall of 2022, these 12 colleges included the question in the Common App: Amherst College, Caltech, Cornell University, Harvey Mudd College, St. Olaf College, Transylvania University, University of Arizona, University of Dubuque, University of Maryland-Baltimore County, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California and Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

In the fall of 2023, these 23 colleges added the question: Allegheny College, Amherst College, Bard College at Simon’s Rock, Boston College, Caltech, College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University, College of the Holy Cross, Cornell University, Earlham College, Elon University, George Washington University, Harvey Mudd, Haverford College, Immaculata University, Lafayette College, Maryland Institute College of Art, Nazareth University, Providence College, University of Pennsylvania, University of Richmond, University of Rochester, University of Southern California and Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Ross Anderson said that the second-year data will begin being processed in the coming months. She said they also plan to look at how this question affected admissions and enrollments, but they won’t be able to examine that until late summer. Lopez said these are among the factors that will help decide if this question should become a regular part of the Common App. 

Brunold, from USC, said that the people who read college applications are trying to get a “360-degree view of this young person who’s often baring their soul to you,” without knowing them personally. Giving students the opportunity to share information about their lives in this way helps colleges make a more thorough assessment. 

“For us, at a place that unfortunately doesn’t have the capacity to admit anywhere near the number of students who want to come here, we take great care in this process,” Brunold said. 

Whitney Soule, vice provost and dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania, said that asking this question and capturing a wider view of students’ lives can help level the playing field for applicants of different backgrounds. 

“What we are trying to do is understand how a student is moving throughout their lives, what their commitment of time is and their responsibility is, and their awareness of themselves relative to other people,” Soule said. “Because that’s going to be incredibly important in our environment when they arrive on our campus, and they’re living and learning within the community of our school.”

This story about student home life was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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Erika Turner and her husband have 11 children between them. Four of them are already in college, two are graduating from high school this spring, and her husband has gone back to school in pursuit of a bachelor’s degree. 

“I have seven people depending on the results of their FAFSAs coming back,” said Turner, who lives in Cohutta, Georgia, near the Tennessee border. “That’s a lot of tuition to pay for – you know, financial aid never fully covers everything. You’ve got other expenses, like books, food and room and board and just things that come up during the year. So, as we think about budgeting for this next school year… I don’t like the unknown.”

The Education Department says that last year about 17.5 million people (both high schoolers and older students) completed the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA; so far this year, only about 4 million have successfully done so.

Turner and her family filled out the new version of the FAFSA in one marathon session in January. Because of the government’s delays in launching and in processing the forms, Turner’s family is among the many still waiting for their applications to be processed. Turner works as the head of human resources for a flooring manufacturer and her husband works as an environmental health and safety manager for a field turf company. 

She hopes the returning college students in her family will eventually receive similar aid packages as they have in years past and will be able to persist uninterrupted. For the two children filling out the FAFSA for the first time, she is less certain. One son plans to attend a private liberal arts college in Georgia, Turner said, and the other is likely headed to technical school. 

“Obviously, that’s not as much of a financial burden on us as a family, but it’s still money I don’t necessarily have set aside to pay for that,” Turner said. “We’re depending on Pell Grants and things like that to help close that gap.”

Turner’s family will also rely heavily on outside scholarships. That’s how she first got to know Stephanie Young, the director of scholarships at the Community Foundation of Greater Chattanooga. 

Young focuses on helping students and families figure out how to pay for college. That’s a tough job in normal years, but it’s required a near-herculean lift this year because of the delays and the domino effect they are having on the rest of the process.

Colleges use the FAFSA to determine which grants and scholarships students are eligible for, but they won’t get that information until at least March, so award letters likely won’t go out until sometime in April. Colleges typically require students to confirm their enrollment by May 1, but because they will be so delayed in sending financial aid award information, scores of colleges are extending that deadline. Some are even devising their own forms to ask students directly for financial need data, hoping to give them at least some estimate of what aid to expect.

Related: Decoding the cost: Figuring out the price of college holds many students back

Students often rely partly on outside scholarships, but these scholarships, too, are often awarded based on student need, which is typically determined using the FAFSA.

Young manages many such scholarships and has had to quickly pivot from her normal timelines and procedures to meet the needs of scrambling students and families. Because of the delay in FAFSA forms becoming available, the application figures on some scholarships that require FAFSA information are down significantly.

One such scholarship that typically has about 100 applications by mid-February, this year had 12, Young said. She could see that about 200 applications for it were in the midst of being drafted, but she thinks students haven’t been able to submit them yet because their FAFSAs haven’t been processed yet. This scholarship typically opens its application process in November and closes it at the end of January. This year, it didn’t open until January, and it will remain open until at least March 2, Young said. 

The delays could result in students walking across the stage at high school graduation (which in the South can be as early as the second week in May) not knowing whether they will be able to afford to attend the colleges they were admitted to. 

“My concern is either students will make a snap decision, go to a school and then not be able to fully enroll because they don’t have enough finances to meet the need, or they may wait too late to decide and lose a spot,” Young said. “Will they be at the ones that are the right fit, that are the most affordable to them?”

Young is especially concerned about first-generation students and students from low-income families. Those parents, she said, “may not have the wherewithal to walk through this process with them. So a lot of it falls back on the schools trying to do that or myself in any way that I can jump in and help.”

Yolanda Watson Spiva, president of the advocacy group Complete College America, said she’s worried that the “domino effect” started by the delayed FAFSA is going to eventually affect college completion rates.

“The FAFSA has already been a very intimidating form and the process,” she said. “Even with FAFSA simplification efforts, we’re now seeing that the simplification is not all that simple.”

Because of the delays and glitches, fewer students have been filling out the FAFSA, Watson Spiva said. If fewer students apply for aid, fewer students have the opportunity to compare offers and select the best college for them, and, she suspects, fewer students will go to college.

Related: Louisiana makes filling out FAFSA a ‘fun’ contest to engage students

She said that she’s been hearing from prospective college students that it just doesn’t seem worth the trouble, that waiting a year might be a better decision. But delaying college or taking a gap year makes people less likely to attend college, she said.

Advocates for higher education are perpetually trying to “convince folks that there is a value proposition to go into college,” she said, “This actually doesn’t help us to make our case, unfortunately.”

And there’s a risk for students who are already enrolled, too. Many students leave college because they can’t afford it, and if they can’t get timely information about their financial aid, she thinks it could prevent them from re-enrolling.

“Regardless of whether you’re a prospective student or a current student, college is not easily affordable,” Watson Spiva said. And for many families, “getting the financial aid award letter saying that you’ll have resources is really make or break.”

The pressure to figure it all out is weighing on Chattanooga native Maurquez Thompson, a first-year student at Stanford University.

Thompson, a first-generation college student, said he pays his tuition using a combination of grants and scholarships. He said he’s overwhelmed trying to keep up with all the requests for extra documentation from scholarship providers that are trying to sidestep the need for FAFSA data to determine awards for students. He knows Stanford meets full financial aid for its students, but the extra processes still add stress.

“If the first year of college was just like it is right now for the FAFSA, I think I’d be crying. It’s too much,” Thompson said. “I think the FAFSA right now is the hardest thing people are dealing with.” 

This story about FAFSA changes was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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Dear Reader, 

If my newsletter landed in your inbox, you care about college students. If you’re a person in the world, you know that mental health challenges are real. If you had any doubts, the response to Elmo’s “How is everyone doing?” should have cleared those right up.

So, I think I can safely conclude that we agree – college student mental health matters. Now what?

We’ve been writing about student mental health since the early days of The Hechinger Report, and more recently we’ve done our best to document the challenges students and educators faced throughout the pandemic.

We wrote about the anxiety and despair students felt in early Covid isolation. We wrote about college students facing increased symptoms of burnout. Although people of all backgrounds deal with mental health issues, we wrote about how students from marginalized racial and ethnic groups, religious communities, and the LGBTQ+ community faced particular challenges and often lacked access to culturally responsive counseling. We wrote about the pricey mental health recovery programs students often turn to when they take mental health leaves of absence from college. We wrote about how overscheduling kids can lead to depression and anxiety. We wrote about folks trying to answer the question: Is mental health care a job for schools?  

Our colleagues across education journalism are pushing the conversation forward, too. The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote last week about tech companies attempting to fill the void of student need that can’t be met by college counseling centers. EdSource wrote about the way some colleges are taking advantage of their outdoor space to support student mental health. Inside Higher Ed has reported on college counseling centers facing increased demand for trauma counseling.  

A recent story in The New York Times offered a haunting portrait of how faculty and staff at Worcester Polytechnic Institute are responding to the campus mental health crisis.

Clearly, stories of complex personal and community suffering are still out there, well beyond the worst of the pandemic years, and we think these stories are worth telling.

Data shows that current college students are struggling — roughly 40 percent of them experience some level of depression, and 36 percent screened positive for anxiety disorders, according to the 2022-2023 Healthy Minds Study, a study on college student mental health from the University of Michigan. Nearly half of the college students surveyed reported they had been diagnosed with a mental health disorder at some point in their lifetime. 

And mental health concerns could act as an obstacle for students currently considering college. A new survey from the education consulting firm EAB found that 28 percent of high school students said that mental health concerns are a key reason they might postpone enrolling or opt out of college altogether. These concerns are more pronounced for students in certain underrepresented groups: More than half of transgender and nonbinary students reported feeling this way, one third of Black students, and 30 percent of Native American students.

Among the 6,330 high school students surveyed, 48 percent said that “stress and anxiety overshadow their college search and planning.”

The mental health needs of college students are clearly immense. They may also be changing. How is the world of higher education adapting to meet these needs?

Help us decide what to write about next. Under the broad umbrella of college students’ mental health, what are you curious about? What worries you? What gives you hope? Email me and share your thoughts. 

I can’t wait to hear from you. Thank you,

Olivia

If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline 988 and the Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741 — are free, 24-hour services that can provide support, information and resources.

This story about college student mental health crisis was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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When ChatGPT burst into the world at the end of 2022, the prevailing feelings in higher education circles were fear of students cheating and concern about how the technology might diminish learning. 

Then – still amid a dizzying flurry of question marks – came hope that maybe educators could find a way to use the technology in their favor and enhance students’ learning. 

Now comes the first partnership between a higher education institution and OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, and a new flurry of question marks.  

Arizona State University will begin to offer an unlimited version of ChatGPT Enterprise to its community on an ASU-only server, to ensure that nothing users type into the program will leave the ASU community. ChatGPT Enterprise differs from the free version of the product in what it can process (it has greater data analysis capabilities and doesn’t limit the number of requests), how quickly it can process requests and how secure the information is (with this type of account, OpenAI won’t use the data for its training models).

At least at first, the ChatGPT Enterprise accounts will be available only to faculty, staff and researchers who submit proposals for how it could be used to further student success, generate new research and streamline organizational processes. Students will not have access to it unless they are working with faculty, staff or researchers who get accounts.

On the other end of the partnership, OpenAI will be involved in designing, supporting and ensuring the effective use of its tools at ASU, according to a university spokesperson.

Leo S. Lo, the dean of the college of university library and learning sciences at the University of New Mexico and an advocate for AI literacy in higher education, called the partnership a forward-thinking move.

“There are obviously a lot of issues to figure out as they implement this, but the only way to figure out these issues is really by hands-on implementing these things,” Lo said. “A lot of us outside ASU will be looking at this with interest. We want to learn from them and I’m sure they will share their lessons learned so we can think about how to do it at our own institutions.”

He said ASU can start tackling big questions, such as: What are the ethical and societal implications of using this technology? What are the biases of the trained models and the information they put out? What are the limitations and can they be accounted for as the technology evolves?

Though much of the buzz around generative AI in the academic setting has concerned teaching and learning, Lo sees significant implications for other aspects of higher education. Researchers, for example, will be able to use these tools to synthesize large data sets.

Lo said that ASU leaders and others should be wary of a new sort of digital divide that may arise at a time when not all universities have access to these tools.

Though he’s excited about ASU’s partnership with OpenAI and the similar partnerships he expects will form, he likened the current moment to the dawn of the internet: “Caution is always warranted at this point.”

Some ASU instructors already use various forms of artificial intelligence.

For students and others using the free version of ChatGPT, the university’s artificial intelligence page advises that they avoid sharing personal information or intellectual property (their own or that of others) with the program.

Kyle Jensen, the director of writing programs at ASU and a professor of English who has had his students working with free versions of ChatGPT and similar technologies, said that generative AI has already brought together faculty from across the university. 

“I routinely talk with colleagues outside of my discipline about issues that I think we all really care about, about problems that we want to solve, about concepts that still seem fuzzy to us,” Jensen said. “The power is in the collaboration. The power is in the opportunities that we don’t necessarily see before the technology gets put in our hands.”

Jensen said he tested some of these technologies with a recent section of his writing methods course, a course primarily filled with upperclassmen.

He encourages students to use ChatGPT to get ideas if they are struggling to start an assignment; he said typing a prompt into the technology can be helpful to students who feel stuck. After they’re already in the writing process, he encourages them to share their writing with ChatGPT or similar programs and get feedback about how to improve it. If the technology spits out five different options for how to improve a given sentence, for example, usually the student will either take some aspects of the suggestions and craft their own revision or will dislike the suggestions and become more confident about what they originally wrote. 

Jensen said that using these technologies throughout the process is helping his students become better writers.

ASU has a reputation for its innovative partnerships. Last year, for example, the university began partnering with the ed tech company DreamScape Learn to offer virtual reality biology classes, where students don VR headsets rather than white coats and goggles, and learn about life sciences by solving problems and dissecting dinosaur-like creatures in the Alien Zoo. 

It’s unclear how much this new partnership will cost the university. Kyle Bowen, deputy chief information officer of ASU Enterprise Technology, which is responsible for advancing the digital ecosystem at the university, said that the cost will depend on how large the initiative ends up being, and how long it lasts. Right now, he said, both factors are unknown. 

“I wouldn’t be able to put a dollar figure on it for you at this point, largely because the use, the response by our community, helps determine what that investment looks like,” Bowen said. “It’s open-ended, it’s designed to be flexible, so that as we identify places where we can have big impact and we want to scale it bigger and do that in responsible ways, then that affords us the opportunity to do that.”

As for the future, Anne Jones, ASU’s vice provost for undergraduate education, said these types of partnerships make sense for both tech companies and colleges because colleges are microcosms of society at large.

The ASU community is enormous. The university serves nearly 115,000 undergraduate students and 32,000 graduate and professional students, and employs 5,300 faculty members, according to its website.

“We represent an incredibly diverse population of students and faculty and researchers and projects, to test out ideas and look at what is going to have value in that future marketplace,” Jones said. “But it’s also essential for our students that we be at the table to be training them, because that’s going to influence how all of those technologies are being used in workplaces as well.”

This story about an Open AI partnership was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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Though college enrollment seems to be stabilizing after the pandemic disruptions, predictions for the next 15 years are grim. Colleges will be hurt financially by fewer tuition-paying students, and many will have to merge with other institutions or make significant changes to the way they operate if they want to keep their doors open.

At least 30 colleges closed their only or final campus in the first 10 months of 2023, including 14 nonprofit colleges and 16 for-profit colleges, according to an analysis of federal data by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, or SHEEO. Among nonprofits, this came on the heels of 2022, when 23 of them closed, along with 25 for-profit institutions. Before 2022, the greatest number of nonprofit colleges that closed in a single year was 13. 

Over the past two decades, far more for-profit colleges closed each year than nonprofits. An average of nine nonprofit colleges closed each year, compared to an average of 47 for-profit colleges. 

This time last year, experts predicted we’d see another wave of college closures, mostly institutions that were struggling before the pandemic and were kept afloat by Covid-era funding. Since then, keeping their doors open has become unrealistic for these colleges, many of which are regional private colleges. 

“It’s not corruption, it’s not financial misappropriation of funds, it’s just that they can’t rebound enrollment.”

Rachel Burns, a senior policy analyst at SHEEO. 

For many, the situation has been made worse by the enrollment declines during the pandemic. 

“It’s not corruption, it’s not financial misappropriation of funds, it’s just that they can’t rebound enrollment,” said Rachel Burns, a senior policy analyst at SHEEO. 

Data from the National Student Clearinghouse shows that undergraduate enrollment has stabilized and even slightly increased for the first time since the pandemic, but a continuing decline in birth rates means that fewer high school seniors will be graduating after 2025, so these colleges will face even greater enrollment challenges in the years to come.

Hundreds of colleges are expected to see significant enrollment declines in the coming years, according to David Attis, managing director of research at the education consulting company EAB. Among the reasons, he said, are declining birthrates, smaller shares of students choosing college, and college-going students veering toward larger and more selective institutions.

By 2030, 449 colleges are expected to see a 25 percent decline in enrollment and 182 colleges are expected to see a 50 percent decline, according to an EAB analysis of federal enrollment data. By 2035, those numbers are expected to rise to 534 colleges expecting a 25 percent decline and 227 colleges expecting a 50 percent decline; by 2040, a total of 566 colleges are expected to see a 25 percent decline and 247 are expected to see a 50 percent decline, according to  EAB’s analysis. 

These are predictions, of course, and they certainly don’t ensure that all those colleges will close. But with these drops in enrollment expected to continue, colleges need to plan now and make significant changes in order to survive, Attis said.

“Imagine if you lose half your students – that is a threat to your continued existence.”

David Attis, managing director of research at the education consulting company EAB.

“Imagine if you lose half your students – that is a threat to your continued existence,” Attis said. “You’ll have to make some pretty dramatic changes. It’s not just a ‘We’ll cut a few academic programs,’ or ‘We’ll trim our administrative staff a little bit.’ That requires a real reorientation of your whole strategy.”

Many colleges face the decision to merge with another institution or close down entirely, Attis said. And if they wait too long to find a college to merge with, they really won’t have a choice. 

“If you wait until you’re on the verge of closure, you’re not a particularly attractive partner,” Attis said. “But if you’re not on the verge of closure, then you’re not as motivated to find that partner.”

Attis said that he’s been surprised to hear from several leaders of regional colleges – both private and public – that they are in talks about mergers. 

“Whether they’ve pursued them or not, they’ve either made a call or gotten a call,” Attis said. “They’re thinking about it in a way I hadn’t heard in the past.” 

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

The post Experts predicted dozens of colleges would close in 2023 – and they were right appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Dear Reader, 

Saying it’s been a wild year in higher education news seems like the understatement of the century. (I think even non-education nerds would agree!) Thank you for sticking with The Hechinger Report as we tried to make sense of it all. 

The first half of the year felt like we were all collectively holding our breath, waiting for the United States Supreme Court to rule on two massive cases, one on student loan forgiveness and another on affirmative action in college admissions. As we waited, I wrote about the poster child of the anti-affirmative action movement, Jon Marcus broke down federal data that shows the gap between Black and white Americans with college degrees is widening, and Meredith Kolodner reported, as she has before, about the fact that many flagship universities don’t reflect their state’s Black or Latino high school graduates. 

The court ultimately ruled against student loan forgiveness and against the consideration of race in college admissions. 

Shortly thereafter, led by Jon Marcus and Fazil Khan, our team began working on The College Welcome Guide, a tool that helps students and families go beyond the rankings and understand what their life might be like on any four-year college campus in America. Jon’s reporting made it  clear that the culture wars are beginning to affect where students go to college, and we wanted to help ensure people had the many types of information they needed to make the best choice, regardless of who they are or what their political orientation is. 

All the while, we continued covering the country’s community colleges. Jill Barshay wrote about how much it costs to produce a community college graduate, and why some community colleges are choosing to drop remedial math. Jon covered the continuing enrollment struggles at these institutions. I reported on a new initiative to target job training for students at rural community colleges, as well as a guide to help community colleges make this kind of training more effective. 

We also examined some of the many routes people choose to take instead of going to college. I reported on what happens when universities get into unregulated partnerships with for-profit tech boot camps, and Meredith and Sarah Butrymowicz reported on risky, short-term career training programs that exist in a “no man’s land of accountability.” Tara García Mathewson exposed the tricky system that formerly incarcerated people have to navigate if they want to get job training and professional licenses once they’re out of prison. 

And though we love to dig deep into subjects and understand exactly how these big issues affect the lives of regular people, we also zoomed out this year. Meredith, working alongside Matthew Haag from The New York Times, discovered that Columbia University and New York University benefit massively from property tax breaks allowed for nonprofits (they saved $327 million last year alone). After their story was published, New York state legislators proposed a bill that would require these two institutions to pay those taxes and  funnel that money to the City University of New York system, the largest urban public university system in the country.

In 2024, we will continue to cover equity and innovation in higher education with nuance, care and a critical eye. Is there a story you think we should cover? Reply to this email to let us know.

For now, we hope you have a warm and restful break. See you in the new year. 

Olivia

P.S. As a nonprofit news outlet, The Hechinger Report relies on readers like you to support our journalism. If you want to ensure our coverage in 2024 is as extensive and deeply reported as possible, please consider donating.

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