Our students are struggling. As a college president and a clinical psychologist, I know this well.

Recent headlines tell a distressing story about the mental health of college students. While the news articles are alarming, it is worth noting that much of the data they cite comes from self-reporting by students.

This self-reporting gives us important insights into how our students are feeling, but it is not equivalent to clinical diagnoses. By equating self-reporting with diagnoses, we risk applying the wrong interventions.

I’ve spent much of my career overseeing clinical services and other student supports, and I know the importance of clinical interventions. They are intended to be matched to specific diagnoses and can involve a variety of treatments, including individual or group and outpatient or inpatient, by licensed mental health professionals.

But I believe we must shift how we support students’ emotional needs. Clinical interventions are not the only way — and often not the most appropriate or effective way — to support young people who may be temporarily struggling with feelings that do not meet the full psychological definition of mental illness.

Rather than needing a clinical intervention, many students may benefit most from support that builds their resilience if they are feeling sad, worried, overwhelmed or anxious. Resilient students are better positioned to cope with temporary periods of heightened emotional stress.

In the past, teaching these skills was usually not seen as central to the mission of a college or university, yet learning how to cope emotionally may be among our students’ most vital and integral lessons.

It is something that will serve them throughout — and well beyond — their time on our campuses.

Related: Congress is starting to tackle student mental health

Data drawn from student self-reporting provides important insights into their needs. Some 44 percent of students reported that they experienced symptoms of depression during the 2021-22 academic year, a Healthy Minds survey of 96,000 U.S. college students shows; 37 percent said they experienced anxiety.

In addition, two out of five undergraduates said that they “frequently” experience emotional stress, results from a Gallup-Lumina Foundation report found, while 36 percent of students pursuing bachelor’s degrees reported that they had considered “stopping out” in the last six months. The most commonly cited reasons were “emotional stress” (69 percent) and “personal mental health reasons” (59 percent).

Researchers have hypothesized that at least some of these self-reported crises may be due to an increased awareness and normalization of mental health conditions.

This awareness is something we should regard as positive and beneficial because it reduces the stigma and isolation that have long impeded students from getting support. But we also must recognize an unintentional, negative impact of this increased awareness: overinterpretation.

Young people experiencing negative emotions and facing normal developmental challenges may be particularly vulnerable to misidentifying those experiences as actual illnesses.

This is not to suggest that the mental health crisis is not real, or that we should not support our students or validate their experiences. Students are struggling every day on my campus and on campuses across the country. Mental illness often first appears or worsens in young adulthood, and for these students, accessing appropriate clinical intervention is critical.

But for many students, what will be most appropriate and effective are supports to develop their resilience and coping strategies and the confidence to rebound from setbacks.

Being a young adult today is not easy. In addition to facing typical challenges, such as forming an identity and developing life skills, they have grown up with pressures from social media, isolation brought on by the global pandemic and the economic and political uncertainties of the twenty-first century.

Rising college costs have also raised the stakes for many students. College is a huge commitment both monetarily and emotionally, and our students know it.

They inevitably face obstacles when they move into the college environment, such as not knowing where they fit in and encountering more challenging coursework than they had previously. Believing they are an outlier, rather than the norm, may undermine their resilience.

That’s why at Lewis & Clark we incorporate resilience-building practices, using research-based belonging exercises as well as intentional peer-to-peer support.

Two of our psychology professors, Jerusha Detweiler-Bedell and Brian Detweiler-Bedell, spearheaded our participation in a multiyear Stanford-led study that aimed to foster a deeper sense of belonging among our incoming first-year students, with the goal of helping them understand that their struggles are normal — and that things will get better over time.

The exercises in the study incorporated stories of obstacles faced by other students and how they overcame them. While the original study’s sample size was small, we saw an increase in retention rates and GPAs, especially among students from underrepresented groups. The results were so compelling that all incoming Lewis & Clark undergraduates now participate in the social belonging intervention.

Related: OPINION: One college president uses board games, bedtime stories, horses and ice-cream sundaes to help students cope

We also initiated a peer mentoring program specifically serving first-year students. The mentors reach out to incoming first-year students and introduce them to campus life with information about academic advising, navigating health and wellness services and various campus clubs and social options. The mentoring relationship begins during orientation and continues throughout the semester. Just as important as what the peer mentors do is how they model resilience.

Of course, approaches like these should be offered with an understanding of what other interventions some students may need. Clinical depression and anxiety disorders do require clinical support. Higher education institutions must continue to expand our capacity to provide such support for those students who need it.

But we must also prioritize programs that bolster resilience. These efforts can reassure and help students (and their families) who may be misidentifying their feelings based on popular rather than clinical understandings of depression and anxiety.

When it comes to setting students up for success in their professional and personal lives, resilience may be the most important skill we can encourage them to develop.

Robin H. Holmes-Sullivan is president of Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She has maintained a private clinical psychology and consulting practice for more than three decades.

This story about college students and resilience 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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Aléshah Brown wasn’t yet in high school when she started having doubts about college.

“Even in middle school, you’re feeling all this pressure and stress about going to college, but no one’s asking you, ‘What do you want to do?’ ” said Brown, of San Antonio, Texas. “That was a very stressful thing for me.”

This anxiety, along with the cost and other issues, is among the many things discouraging growing numbers of students from even applying to college.

Brown eventually found a website that promised, in plain and simple English, to help her start her journey. Much of the information was conveyed by other young people who had already graduated from high school and begun careers. And the site prominently included how much money she could make in particular jobs.

“It’s showing students, ‘Hey, let’s see what you individually like to do, what you love and how you can make a difference in the world,’ ” she said. “You’re being asked that question instead of being given this general list of options that you don’t understand.”

This clear-cut, straightforward message didn’t come from academics or administrators, policymakers or politicians. It’s the brainchild of an advertising executive, Roy Spence, the man behind such well-known slogans as “Don’t Mess With Texas” and “You are now free to move about the country.”

The proportion of high school graduates going directly to college has fallen from a high of 70 percent in 2016 to 62 percent in 2021.

Spence’s campaign underscores how glaringly little the higher education industry itself has done to confront the crisis of confidence that is eating away at its business.

“Universities tend to have a hard time having a very clear, focused message,” said Eunkyu Lee, associate dean and a professor of marketing at Syracuse University’s Whitman School of Management. “There’s a lot more focus on rankings and much less collective effort to rebuild confidence in the value of higher education.”

That’s one of the reasons Spence set up an independent nonprofit group two years ago called the Make It Movement — the organization whose website Brown found — to show students in central Texas how and why to continue their educations past high school. There are now plans to expand the campaign nationwide.

Related: College leaders refocus attention on their students’ top priority: Jobs after graduation

It doesn’t promote any particular university or college — not even Spence’s beloved University of Texas at Austin, whose logo adorns the bright orange fleece he’s wearing at the stand-up desk in his Austin office. In fact, it doesn’t suggest that students have to go to college at all; it just encourages them to learn something that can set them up for jobs that pay more than if they stopped at high school. They could train for a trade, for instance.

There’s an interactive tool from which users can choose what kind of workplace they prefer (indoor, outdoor, at home), their personalities (thinker, doer, creator, planner) and what they value. Various careers pop up, with the educations required to reach each one, and what they pay.

“The world doesn’t deal with complex stuff anymore. You have to get it to me fast and compelling, interactive, peer to peer and simple,” said Spence, co-founder and chair of GSD&M, a marketing and advertising company whose clients have included Walmart, DreamWorks, the PGA Tour, BMW and the U.S. Air Force.

The point, the website tells the middle and high school students at whom it’s aimed, “is to help you discover your purpose” — something that has gotten blurred as young people question the traditional paths once taken after high school, such as going straight to college.

“At some point universities and colleges must advertise not the college but have a young person look in the camera and say, ‘I went to Boston University. Here’s what happened.’ ” Spence said.

The idea has proven popular beyond expectations. Make It Movement hoped to reach 20,000 central Texas students with its website; more than 80,000 have logged on, the organization says. Billboards drawing more attention to the campaign line the sides of highways in the region.

A survey of 300 middle and high school students in Austin and central Texas found that the proportion who were very aware of how they could make at least $50,000 soon after high school rose from 23 percent before they used the website to 61 percent afterward, Make It Movement says. The proportion who were aware that there were options close to home to train for jobs doing what they wanted went from 42 percent to 93 percent.

In other industries with image problems, competitors have banded together to change public perception, often using marketing and advertising the way the Make It Movement has, Spence said.

Related: Culture wars on campus start to affect students’ choices for college

If universities came together that way, in a sort of alliance for higher learning, “you would have the best [advertising] agencies in the country bidding on it.” Instead, he said, “what you have now is every university doing its own thing, when what we have is an industry image issue.”

There’s myriad evidence that many Americans are souring on college.

The proportion of high school graduates going directly to college has fallen from a high of 70 percent in 2016 to 62 percent in 2021, the most recent year for which the figure is available, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That’s the equivalent of hundreds of thousands fewer high school grads entering college that year as freshmen.

“What you have now is every university doing its own thing, when what we have is an industry image issue.”

Roy Spence, founder, Make It Movement

One important reason this is happening is the cost, which has doubled in the last 40 years, even after being adjusted for inflation, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

But another is an indisputable lack of faith in the payoff.

Nearly half of high school graduates age 18 to 30 who decided not to go to college or dropped out agreed that getting a college degree was not worth the cost because they couldn’t afford to go into debt to pay for it without a guarantee of a career, according to focus groups convened by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Fewer than four in 10 of the 1,675 non-college-goer focus group participants believed that getting a degree would lead to a career allowing them to be financially stable.

In fact, people with college and university degrees make back in annual income 14 percent to 36 percent more than what they spent per year on their educations, depending on their race and gender, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis estimates. While this premium has been falling, it still makes college “an excellent investment,” the Fed concluded.

Related: Aging states to college graduates: We’ll pay you to stay

Yet universities don’t like talking about jobs and salaries, said Marcus Collins, a former head of strategy at Wieden+Kennedy, New York, and a marketing executive who has done work for Apple and McDonald’s, headed a digital strategy for Beyoncé and is now a clinical professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.

“I see it as an incongruence of expectations and ambitions,” Collins said. Universities believe themselves to be places people come to learn, he said, “and in doing so you get some skills that will help you in the job market.” But consumers are increasingly focused first and foremost on careers; 62 percent say they would be willing to go into debt to pay for college if they knew there was a good job at the end, those Gates Foundation focus groups found.

“Universities tend to have a hard time having a very clear, focused message. There’s a lot more focus on rankings and much less collective effort to rebuild confidence in the value of higher education.”

Eunkyu Lee, associate dean and professor of marketing, Martin J. Whitman School of Management, Syracuse University

“It’s about product market fit, in that the product that we bring to market has to meet the ambitions of the market,” said Collins, author of the new book “For the Culture: The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do, and Who We Want to Be.” And many prospective students no longer connect the product of a college education with the outcome of a good job.

Meanwhile, universities have struggled to reverse even basic misperceptions — that students all pay the full advertised tuition listed on their websites, for example.

“The cost of higher education is real and it’s very high, but what people generally hear about is the sticker price at prestigious universities, where in fact the net price that most people pay is much lower” after accounting for discounts and financial aid, Syracuse’s Lee said.

After cost, the second most common reason people age 18 to 30 give for not going to college or for dropping out is stress. Also in the top four: not being certain of a career. That’s according to focus groups assembled by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, which was trying to figure out why high school students weren’t going on to college — a trend that’s jeopardizing that state’s goal of increasing the proportion of its population with degrees.

Related: Spending summer in class means these college students will be done in three years

The decline in college-going is worrying employers struggling to fill jobs that require workers who are college educated or trained in the trades. Among the funders of the Make It Movement are the Austin chamber of commerce, the Texas Association of Builders and the Austin Regional Manufacturers Association.

“We have a massive surplus of high-skill careers out there,” Spence said, “and nobody to apply for them.”

The Make It Movement hoped to reach 20,000 central Texas students with its website; so far, more than 80,000 have logged on.

More of this kind of marketing outreach is critical, Lee said.

“There needs to be a more collective effort to deal with this public skepticism” about education after high school, he said. “Building a common voice that could reverse the negative trend of confidence in higher education is critical not only for the well-being of the institutions, but also the well-being of the nation economically.”

As for Brown, the student in San Antonio, she’s now in college studying toward a degree in digital marketing with plans to work in the entertainment industry. She liked the Make It Movement’s work so much, she has become a “student ambassador” for it.

Other young people, Brown said, are “almost succumbing — I know that’s a dramatic word — to an idea that they have to do things a specific way: ‘I have to go to college. I don’t know what I want to do, but I have to go.’ And that’s so stressful.”

This story about college-going 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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WILMINGTON, Del. — Striding into a packed community center filled with high school seniors, Atnre Alleyne has a few words of advice for the crowd, members of the first class of college applicants to be shaped by June’s Supreme Court ruling striking down race-conscious admissions.

“You have to get good grades, you have to find a way to do the academics, but also become leaders,” said Alleyne, the energetic co-founder and CEO of TeenSHARP, a nonprofit that prepares students from underrepresented backgrounds for higher education. “In your schools, do something! Fight for social justice.”

Many of the TeenSHARP participants gathered here, who are predominantly Black or Hispanic, worry that their chances of getting into top-tier schools have diminished with the court’s decision. They wonder what to say in their admissions essays and how comfortable they’ll feel on campuses that could become increasingly less diverse.

On this autumn night, Alleyne and his team are fielding questions from the dozens of students they advise, on everything from early decision deadlines to which schools are most likely to give generous financial aid and scholarships. The changed admissions landscape has only increased the team’s determination to develop a new generation of leaders, students who will fight to have their voices represented on campuses and later on in the workplace.

“I want them to kick the door open to these places, so they will go back and open more doors,” Alleyne said.

That goal is shared by successful alumni of the program Alleyne and his wife, Tatiana Poladko, started in a church basement 14 years ago. Several are on hand tonight recounting their own educational journeys, culminating in full scholarships to schools such as the University of Chicago and Wesleyan University, where annual estimated costs approach $90,000.

Before the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, highly selective colleges served as a beacon of hope and economic mobility for students like those TeenSHARP advise. Many are first in their families to attend college and lack legacy connections or access to the private counselors who’ve long given a boost to wealthier students.

Related: Colleges decry Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, but most have terrible records on diversity

But even before the high court ruling, Black and Latino students were poorly represented at these institutions, while the college degree gap between Black and white Americans was getting worse. For some students, the court decision sends a message that they do not belong, and if they get in, they worry they’ll stand out even more.

“I felt really upset about it,” Jamel Powell, a high school junior from Belle Mead, New Jersey, who participates in TeenSHARP, said about the affirmative action ruling. “This system has helped many underrepresented minorities get into these Ivy League schools and excel.”

While the full impact of the ruling on student demographics remains unknown, representatives of 33 colleges wrote in an amicus brief filed in the case that the share of Black students on their campuses would drop from roughly 7.1 percent to 2.1 percent if affirmative action were banned.

The uncertainty of what the decision means is taking a toll on students and school counselors nationally, said Mandy Savitz-Romer, a senior lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. As colleges sort through how they can meet commitments to diversity while complying with the law, students wonder if mentioning race in their essays will help or hurt them.

In his majority decision, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that race could be invoked only within the context of the applicant’s life story, making essays the one opportunity for students to discuss their race and ethnicity. But since then, Edward Blum, the conservative activist who helped bring the case before the court, has threatened more lawsuits, promising to challenge any essay topic that is “nothing more than a back-channel subterfuge for divulging a student’s race.”

The Department of Education has published guidelines saying that while schools cannot put a thumb on the scale for students based on their race, they “remain free” to consider characteristics tied to individual students’ life experiences, including race. The National Association of College Admission Counseling issued similar guidance, while the Common App introduced new essay prompts that include one about students’ “identity” and “background.”

Because of the uncertainty,school counselors need specific training on crafting essays and how or whether to talk about race, Savitz-Romer said during a Harvard webinar last month on college admissions after affirmative action. “We need counselors and teachers to make students understand that college is still for them,” she said.

It’s a tall order: On average, public school counselors serve more than 400 students each, which offers little time for one-on-one advising.

Related: Why aren’t more school counselors trained in helping students apply to college?

That reality is why nonprofit advising groups like TeenSHARP toil alongside students, guiding them through an increasingly confounding admissions system. TeenSHARP’s team of three advisers works intensively with roughly 140 students at a time, including 50 seniors who often apply to as many as 20 colleges to maximize their chances.

That’s a fraction of those who need help, another reason why the group’s leaders rely on their network of more than 500 “Sharpies,” as alums are known.

Emily Rodriguez, a TeenSHARP senior who attends Conrad Schools of Science in Wilmington, decided to address race head on in her college essays: She wrote about her determination that she would not “play the role of the poor submissive Mexican woman.”

“Admissions officers assure us that their commitment to diversity hasn’t changed. But we will have to see. We’ve explained to families and students that this year is a learning year.”

Tatiana Poladko, co-founder, TeenSHARP

Hamza Parker, a senior at Delaware’s Smyrna High School who moved to the U.S. from Saudi Arabia as a sixth grader, said he was against writing about his identity at first. “I feel like it puts you in a position where you have to have a sob story for your essay instead of talking about something good, like, that happened in your life,” he told Alleyne and Poladko during a counseling session over Zoom.

But in the session Alleyne and Poladko encouraged him to draw from his own story, one they know something about from working with his older sister Hasana, now a junior at Pomona College. The family had a difficult move from Saudi Arabia to New York City and later Delaware, where Hamza joined the Delaware Black Student Coalition.

Hamza decided to revise his essay from one focused on linguistics to describe experiencing racism and then embracing his Muslim heritage.

“I am my normal social self and my Muslim faith and garb are widely known and respected at my school,” he wrote. “My school even now has a dedicated space for prayer during Ramadan.”

Related: The newest benefit at top companies: Private college admissions counseling

Alleyne and Poladko typically work with students who are beginning their first year of high school, so the pair can guide the entire college application process, much as some pricey private counselors do — although TeenSHARP’s services are free; as a nonprofit it relies on an array of donors for support.

Neither Poladko nor Alleyne attended elite schools. They met as graduate students at Rutgers University and became committed to starting TeenSHARP after helping Alleyne’s niece apply to colleges from a large New York City public high school.

Astonished by how complicated and inaccessible college admissions could be, the two decided to make it their life’s work, writing grants and getting donations from local banks and foundations so they could serve more students.

“I felt really upset about it. This system has helped many underrepresented minorities get into these Ivy League schools and excel.”

Jamel Powell, a high school junior from Belle Mead, New Jersey, who participates in TeenSHARP, about the affirmative action ruling.

Their work is now largely remote: During the pandemic, the couple relocated from Wilmington to Poladko’s native Ukraine to be closer to her family, leading to a dramatic escape to Poland with their three young children when war broke out. Poladko is taking a sabbatical from TeenSHARP this year, although she still helps some students via Zoom. Alleyne flies from Warsaw to Wilmington to meet with students in person, often at the community center downtown that once housed their offices.

They also rely on relationships they’ve built over the years with college presidents and admissions officers at schools like Boston College, Pomona College and Wesleyan, along with both Carleton and Macalester Colleges in Minnesota, many of whom have welcomed TeenSHARP applicants.

“We need more ‘Sharpies’ on our campus,” said Suzanne Rivera, president of Macalester College, in Minnesota, and a member of TeenSHARP’s advisory board. “Their questions are always so smart and so insightful.”

Sharpies also tend to become campus leaders, in part because TeenSHARP requires that its students develop leadership skills. That’s something William Garcia, who graduated from the University of Chicago last spring, told seniors in Wilmington.

“If Black high school seniors no longer feel like they are welcomed on predominantly white campuses, they are less likely to apply and even less likely to enroll even if they are offered admission.”

Chelsea Holley, director of admissions at Spelman College in Atlanta

At first, he felt isolated in Chicago, reticent to talk about his experiences as a Hispanic man. “I was in your shoes five years ago,” Garcia said. He later realized his background could be an asset, and drew on it to turn an ingredient for one of Mexico’s most popular liquors into a business venture for his own agave beverage company.

“Embrace your story; tell your story,” Garcia said. “I would tell my story and people would be really interested and would start to help me.”

Alphina Kamara, a 2022 graduate of Wesleyan University, urged seniors to aim high and look beyond state schools and local community colleges that have lower graduation rates and fewer resources — campuses she might have ended up at it not for TeenSHARP.

“I would have never have known that schools like Wesleyan existed, and that I, as a first-generation Black woman, had a place in them,” said Kamara, the child of immigrant parents from Sierra Leone.

Related: Beyond the Rankings: College Welcome Guide

Still, there will always be some TeenSHARP students who don’t want to be on campuses that had terrible track records for diversity, even before the court’s decision.

Tariah Hyland, who in high school co-founded the Delaware Black Student Coalition, knew she’d be more comfortable at one of the country’s more than 100 historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs. She told the Delaware audience that she’s thriving in her junior year at Howard University, where she is studying political science.

Powell, the New Jersey junior, is eyeing both Howard and Atlanta’s Morehouse College and said he’ll likely only apply to HBCUs.

“When I was in public school, I was the only Black boy in my classes,” said Powell, who now attends Acelus Academy, an online school. “I was always the minority, and so by going to an HBCU, I would likely see more people who look like me.” 

That’s no surprise to Chelsea Holley, director of admissions at Spelman College in Atlanta, who said she’s expecting “more interest from Black and Brown students, now that the Supreme Court has made what I believe to be a regressive political decision.”

HBCUs like Spelman — whose graduates include Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman and author Alice Walker — are already seeing more applications and are becoming even more competitive.

“If Black high school seniors no longer feel like they are welcomed on predominantly white campuses, they are less likely to apply and even less likely to enroll, even if they are offered admission,” Holley said, adding that students may be worried about further assaults on diversity and inclusion on college campuses and believe they will be more comfortable at an HBCU.

Still, not everyone predicts the court ruling will precipitate a permanent drop in Black and Hispanic students at predominantly white, selective colleges. Richard Kahlenberg, an author and scholar at Georgetown University predicts the drop will be temporary, and that the affirmative action ban will eventually lead to a fairer landscape for low-income students of all races.

Kahlenberg, who served as an expert witness for Students for Fair Admissions, said he wants to see an end to legacy preferences as well as athletic recruiting, so that colleges can give “a meaningful boost” to “disadvantaged students of all races” and “you can get racial diversity without racial preferences.” Challenges to legacy admissions are mounting: The Education Department has opened an investigation into Harvard’s use of the practice, and a recent bipartisan bill calls for colleges to end it.

As mid-December approaches, Alleyne and Poladko are anxiously waiting to see how the handful of TeenSHARP students who applied for early decision will fare.

“Admissions officers assure us that their commitment to diversity hasn’t changed,” Poladko said. “But we will have to see. We’ve explained to families and students that this year is a learning year.”

Until that time, both Poladko and Alleyne will continue pushing students to help those who come after them.

“Our goal is to figure out the game of admissions and give our students an advantage,” Alleyne said. “And our job is to teach them how to play the game.”

This story about TeenSHARP is the first in a series of articles, produced by The Hechinger Report in partnership with Soledad O’Brien Productions, about the impact of the Supreme Court ruling on race-based affirmative action. Stay tuned for an upcoming documentary and part II. Hechinger is a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post College advisers vow to ‘kick the door open’ for Black and Hispanic students despite affirmative action ruling  appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

To Florina Caprita, the mother of three young children, the paralegal studies program at Ashworth College seemed like the perfect route to a much-needed career. The classes were entirely online, and an admissions officer told her she could make small monthly payments toward the $4,465 tuition while she was taking classes, instead of having to pay it all at once.

But in 2018, a family emergency forced her out of school, just six credits shy of her degree. To make matters worse, she fell behind on her monthly payments, which had steadily increased from $25 to more than $200.

She struggled financially for several years as her health declined, but last spring, she got an opportunity to earn a degree at a different college. The problem? Ashworth, a for-profit school in Georgia, refused to release her transcript until she paid – in full – the more than $2,200 that she owed them.

This practice, known as transcript withholding, has become a growing worry for state and federal regulators. Critics say that it makes it harder for students to earn a degree or get a job, which would allow them to earn enough to pay back their debts. But the system of oversight is patchwork; no single federal agency bans it, state rules vary and there are significant challenges with monitoring the practice. That means students like Caprita can fall through the cracks.

In October, the Department of Education released new rules that would bar colleges from withholding a transcript for any semester for which a student used federal student aid money and paid their balance in full. The move was lauded by advocates as a huge step forward in eradicating the practice – but would not apply to any of the thousands of schools that don’t accept federal student aid to begin with, including Ashworth College.

Experts have long criticized authorities for not providing better oversight of these schools.

“Some of these schools exist that way because they would never qualify, and that’s usually because they provide very low value to students, unfortunately,” said Edward Conroy, a senior policy advisor at the progressive think tank New America. “Not in all cases, but a lot of these programs are not lifting people out of poverty, they’re not providing a route to middle class jobs or middle-class income, and so I think sometimes they’re of questionable value.”

Unlike the Department of Education, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau does have jurisdiction over colleges that don’t qualify to receive federal money. And in the past year, the agency has begun investigating colleges for refusing to release transcripts because of a loan balance owed directly to the school.

“If they help me, I can help to pay them. If they withhold [the transcript] from me, then I how can I ever pay them?”

Florina Caprita, who has an outstanding loan from an online for-profit university

In 2022, the agency found that transcript withholding was an abusive practice under the Consumer Protection Act, “designed to gain leverage over borrowers and coerce them into making payments.”

The CFPB has adopted a broad definition of what a student loan is. They include in that category things like payment plans, arguing that those are essentially forms of credit. Money owed for things like unpaid room and board balances or overdue fines, however, is not covered. 

By their definition, Caprita should have been eligible to access her transcript. But she says she called and emailed the college repeatedly to no avail. She even asked to re-enroll in a new payment plan but college officials said their hands were tied and she would have to take up the matter with a collection agency.

“If they help me, I can help to pay them,” said Caprita, who is 44 years old and is hoping to join a Christian ministry. “If they withhold it from me, then I how can I ever pay them?”

Ashworth College did not respond to requests for comment.

A CFPB official acknowledged that it’s impossible to examine the policies of all of the thousands of colleges and universities across the country. The bureau has tried to make enough public statements for institutions to take note and change their policies without additional intervention, the official said. The agency has investigated some colleges for transcript withholding and made them change their practices but has not released any institution names publicly.

The education department’s rule on transcript withholding will go into effect in July 2024, joining other federal and state regulations meant to protect students from transcript withholding.

An education department spokesperson said that the agency plans to adjust its oversight procedures to ensure that schools that receive federal funding are following new regulations and that all student complaints alleging transcript withholding are investigated. Schools may eventually lose eligibility to receive federal student aid if they don’t comply with the new rule.

“It wouldn’t completely surprise me if one of the institutional reactions was, ‘We’re just going to stop doing this, period.’ ” 

Edward Conroy, senior policy advisor, New America

Despite the fact that the regulation only applies to students who have used federal money to pay for their education, advocates hope that colleges will respond in a broader way.

“It wouldn’t completely surprise me if one of the institutional reactions was, ‘We’re just going to stop doing this period,’ ” Conroy said. “The number of students who are paying completely out of pocket isn’t that big; you don’t want to have separate administrative systems.” 

Indeed, that’s what some policymakers have seen happen at the state level. Some states have only banned the practice at public institutions or for debts of up to a certain amount. In other cases, schools are only required to release transcripts for certain uses.

For instance, in 2022, Colorado passed a law prohibiting withholding transcripts from students requesting them for several reasons including needing to provide it to an employer, another college or the military. Carl Einhaus, a senior director at the Colorado Department of Education says that most institutions found it too burdensome to differentiate between which transcript requests were required by law to be honored and which weren’t and have opted to grant all requests.

“They’re not going to bother trying to figure out how to operationalize this very difficult thing to operationalize,” he said.

Starting next summer, the Colorado law also requires institutions to submit data about how many students requested transcripts and how many were withheld. Einhaus said that some schools initially resisted the new law, arguing that it would take away one of their main tools to recover money owed from students. “It will be interesting to see if this really is having an impact on the amount of debt they’re able to collect back,” he said.

But Brittany Pearce, a program manager at the higher ed consulting firm Ithaka S+R, is skeptical that withholding transcripts was ever an effective way to recoup debt. “From a really practical business sense, nobody is winning,” she said.

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

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

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PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Friday mornings on a university campus are usually quiet times. Savvy students plan their schedules to avoid Friday classes, getting a head start on their weekends.

But at Brown University’s Center for Career Exploration, there’s a steady stream of visitors, checking out jobs and internships, meeting with advisers and occasionally stopping on the way out to scoop up a few colorful pieces of hard candy from the bowl on the reception counter.

In the center, steps from the university’s main quad and across the street from the college bookstore, everything is brand new, from the furniture to the stenciling on the window to some of the staff.

After a two-year planning process, Brown has revamped and renamed its career center and is more than doubling its number of advisers, from 13 to 28.

It’s an example of the new attention being devoted to career services by universities — even top universities, whose students likely won’t have trouble finding jobs — as consumer demand gets louder for a tangible return on investment for a degree.

At a time of intensifying competition for students, “career success” is the top reason people give for getting a degree, a new survey of alumni by the workforce analytics firm Lightcast found.

That’s driving institutions to beef up career services staffs and budgets, promote career directors to the highest levels of leadership and start offering career advising to students from the time they put down their first-year deposits.

“If you’re in a market where prospective families are asking for assurances about this, and you can’t give them an answer, that’s really dangerous. They’re going to opt out.”

Kelli Armstrong, president, Salve Regina College

At least one university has upgraded “career preparation” onto its list of four core strategic priorities.

That this wasn’t the case before might come as a surprise to students and their parents. But when William & Mary promised in its new five-year plan to help students “thrive from their first job to their last,” the move was greeted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, or NACE, as “a profound shift regarding the importance of career education at research universities.”

Related: Aging states to college graduates: We’ll pay you to stay

Career services “has been sort of a stepchild on campuses. But I think that’s starting to change because of what students want,” said Ben Wildavsky, a visiting scholar at the University of Virginia School of Education and Human Development and author of the new book “The Career Arts: Making the Most of College, Credentials, and Connections.”

For most students, the change can’t happen soon enough. Fewer than one in five of the graduates in that Lightcast survey strongly agreed with the statements that their universities and colleges had invested in their careers and helped them understand career opportunities, create career plans and network with employers or alumni.

For years, at some universities, talking about careers was seen as “antithetical to an education,” said Rashid Zia, dean of the college and a professor of engineering and physics at Brown.

Now institutions are increasing spending on career services, NACE reports.

They’re also transforming the ways they provide career advice.

Rather than keeping advisers in one place, for instance, many universities are now dispersing them across campuses to counsel students with interest in particular careers and majors.

Related: What’s a college degree worth? States start to demand colleges share the data

At Ohio Wesleyan University, “career catalysts” have been assigned to “career communities” of students interested variously in fields including economics and business; education and communication; entrepreneurship; humanities and the arts; health; and science, technology, engineering and math.

That means “having career coaches in the different academic departments, where students are every day,” rather than in the single previous centralized but “out-of-the-way” location on the third floor of the campus center, said Megan Ellis, executive director of what has been renamed Career Connection and whose staff she said has more than doubled, from four counselors to nine. If a student has a question about getting a job, Ellis said, “faculty can literally walk them down to the career specialist.”

Washington University in St. Louis, too, has created career communities — one each in business; arts, design and media; healthcare and sciences; government policy and social impact; technology, data and engineering; and “career exploration,” for students who haven’t yet settled on a field. It offers separate mentoring programs, employer events and alumni networking for each group.

College graduates who felt that their colleges or universities invested in career services were twice as likely to agree that their degrees were worth the cost.

Career advisers at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota also have been newly assigned to the university’s separate colleges. It’s a way to make career services “unavoidable” to students, said Mark Sorenson-Wagner, director of career development and corporate engagement there.

“You have to design this in a way where students can’t avoid it,” echoed Kelli Armstrong, president of Salve Regina University in Rhode Island, which overhauled and renamed its career services operation this fall and moved it into a new space at the heart of the campus. “It can’t be an add-on you want them to run into. You have to bake it in.”

Career offices are also trying to help students understand something colleges and universities have previously struggled to convey: exactly what job skills — or “competencies,” in education jargon — are being taught, in what classes.

“Being able to take what students are learning in the classroom and translating that into competencies is also part of this movement,” said Mary Gatta, director of research and public policy at NACE. “You’re helping students articulate what they’re doing in the classroom and the skills they’re developing in ways employers understand.”

Though students may not think about it this way, for example, humanities courses teach such things as critical thinking and public speaking, said Renée Cramer, provost at Dickinson College, which is also helping undergraduates decipher what job skills they’re learning.

That’s because employers “aren’t coming to campus and saying, ‘I need X major,’ ” said Norma Guerra Gaier, who took over this fall as head of the newly expanded career center at WashU. “They’re saying, ‘I need talent that can work in these areas and has these competencies.’ ”

Related: One college finds a way to get students to degrees more quickly, simply and cheaply

Interpreting what real-world skills students learn in which classes means involving faculty. And their reaction has been mixed, career directors said. Not all are on board with the idea that career education is their job.

“There are some faculty who say that learning is for the sake of learning — that they’re not here to talk about careers,” said Elizabeth Soady, associate director of professional development for arts and sciences at the University of Richmond, which has also expanded its career services. But others “are keyed into that bigger national conversation about return on investment.”

As one way to help address this, St. Thomas has created a fellowship that will pay faculty who help create content related to careers, Sorenson-Wagner said.

“We’re starting with the people who we know support the work we’re doing and who will advocate for the stuff we’re doing, as opposed to naysayers,” he said.

Such naysayers are becoming fewer and farther between, said Armstrong. Salve Regina faculty “are realists,” she said. “They’re watching what’s happening in higher education and they’re rolling up their sleeves and saying, ‘How can we help?’”

In addition to consumer demand, career services are expanding in response to growing anxiety over, and the increasing complexity of, the job-search process, the people who do this work say.

“What we hear from families coming in is, ‘How can you guarantee that my child gets a good job? Because they’re going to have to start repaying these [student] loans immediately,’ ” said Armstrong.

“If you’re in a market where prospective families are asking for assurances about this, and you can’t give them an answer, that’s really dangerous,” she said. “They’re going to opt out.”

Even at Brown, “there’s a lot of stress for every student approaching graduation. And there are students for whom that financial aspect is acute,” said Matthew Donato, executive director of the university’s Center for Career Exploration. “It’s important to acknowledge that and help those students meet their goals.”

Undergraduates are barraged with questions from parents about how many internship offers they’ve gotten, and constantly see social media messages posted by classmates with job offers, said Elisabeth Bernold, a Brown senior.

“That stress, it comes from us as well,” she said. “I think it’s worse for our generation — that you always need to add one more thing to your resumé.”

Ariana Palomo arrived at the university intending to go directly to law school. Now she’s exploring other careers, for which she uses the resources of the new career center. “It’s inevitable to wonder what your future’s going to look like,” said Palomo, a junior.

Fellow junior Mahmoud Hallak plans to get a Ph.D. in physics and hopes to someday work at NASA. But even though he and other doctorate-seeking students like him don’t have to think about careers for a while, Hallak said in the career center, “it’s still a worry.”

Orders to improve career advising — at Brown and elsewhere — have been coming “from the top down,” said Donato.

That’s because of yet another reason for this renewed attention: Satisfied alumni make reliable donors. People who feel that their educations led to their careers are nearly twice as likely to financially support their alma maters, another report, by Hanover Research, found. Strong career services programs that help graduates get meaningful jobs “produce happy, high-performing alumni who are more poised to give,” the report concludes.

Of the more than 9,000 graduates in that Lightcast survey, those who strongly felt that their colleges or universities invested in career services were twice as likely to agree that their degrees were worth the cost. And those who felt their institutions prepared them for careers were nearly six times more likely to think that.

“Success leads them to give back later,” said Sorenson-Wagner, at St. Thomas. “Administrators respond to that.”

Related: Spending summer in class means these college students will be done in three years

In some states and systems, public funding has also begun to be tied to students’ career success. The budget of the Texas State Technical College system, for example, is based in part on how much graduates earn above the minimum wage.

As if to underscore this new priority, a growing number of colleges and universities are moving their career services operations directly under presidents’ offices or high up elsewhere on the organizational chart, a NACE report found.

Career services “has been sort of a stepchild on campuses. But I think that’s starting to change because of what students want.”

Ben Wildavsky, author, “The Career Arts: Making the Most of College, Credentials, and Connections”

That’s a strong signal that helping graduates find jobs has become a top priority, said the newly hired Gaier, at WashU, whose title is associate vice chancellor.

“If we can see more of that leveling up of directors to have a seat at the table, where they can help inform decisions around career readiness and curriculum, that matters for our students,” said Kathleen Powell, a former president of the board of NACE and the chief career officer at William & Mary, where she has been promoted to the rank of associate vice president.

At Grinnell College, the president has directed that the head of career services report directly to him, a spokeswoman said. The college has nearly quadrupled the staff of what it now calls its Office of Careers, Life and Service, from six to 22; the college begins career advising during first-year orientation.

The size of William and Mary’s career services staff has nearly doubled, from 12 to 23, Powell said, and it starts reaching out to first-year students even earlier — as soon as they put down their deposits.

“There is a demand, and rightfully so, for understanding the return on the investment,” said Ellis, at Ohio Wesleyan. “That’s at the heart of this. Going to college is really a big investment. And having a clearly and intentionally designed career office helps make sure there’s a return on that investment.”

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

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After an elder passed away recently in their community, the students at Dzantik’i Heeni Middle School in Dzántik’i Héeni, the Tlingit name for Juneau, Alaska, got to work creating a special gift.

Using skills they’d learned in their computer science lessons, the students designed a traditional button blanket on a laser cutting machine. “They found a meaningful way to apply all of that skill and knowledge that they have learned and in such a way that it was authentic,” said Luke Fortier, the school librarian and math teacher.

Fortier’s school participates in a program operated by the American Indian Science and Engineering Society to expand access to computer science and science, technology engineering and math, or STEM, among Native American, Alaska Native and Pacific Islander students. The program trains educators at K-12 schools whose students include Native children on different ways they can introduce young people to programming, robotics and coding.

But computer science lessons like the ones at Dzantik’i Heeni Middle School are relatively rare. Despite calls from major employers and education leaders to expand K-12 computer science instruction in response to the workforce’s increasing reliance on digital technology, access to the subject remains low — particularly for Native American students. 

Only 67 percent of Native American students attend a school that offers a computer science course, the lowest percentage of any demographic group, according to a new study from the nonprofit Code.org. A recent report from the Kapor Foundation and the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, or AISES, takes a deep look at why Native students’ access to computer and technology courses in K-12 is so low, and examines the consequences.

Director of “seeding innovation” at the Kapor Foundation and report coauthor Frieda McAlear, who is Native Alaskan of the Inupiaq tribe, said the study “forefronts the context of the violence of centuries of colonization and its continuing impacts on Native people and tribal communities as the driver of disparities in Native representation in tech and computing.” 

Schools serving higher proportions of Native students are more likely to be small institutions that lack space, funding and teachers trained in computer science, according to the report. In addition, many Native students attend schools that may lack the hardware, software and high-speed internet needed for these classes.

Even when the instruction is available, courses often lack cultural relevance that would allow Native students to authentically engage with the material, the report says.

Given the history of settler colonialism and the use of Native boarding schools that sought to erase Native identity, making sure that students’ tribal knowledge and traditions are celebrated and integrated into the curriculum will allow students to succeed, the report’s authors say.

“For Native young people and Native professionals to be excluded systematically from the computing and tech ecosystem, it really means that they don’t have access both to the wealth generation possibilities of tech careers, but also access to creating technology tools and applications that can support the continual thriving and growth of cultural and language revitalization in our tribal communities,” McAlear said.

“For Native young people and Native professionals to be excluded systematically from the computing and tech ecosystem, it really means that they don’t have access both to the wealth generation possibilities of tech careers, but also access to creating technology tools and applications that can support the continual thriving and growth of cultural and language revitalization in our tribal communities.”

Frieda McAlear, director of “seeding innovation” at the Kapor Foundation and report coauthor

The situation isn’t much better at the post-secondary level, according to report co-author and director of research and career support for AISES, Tiffany Smith, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and a descendant of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. Since 2020, Native student enrollment in computer science courses has declined at most two-year and four-year institutions, she said, even as more students overall have received degrees in the subject. Part of the reason is that Native students don’t necessarily see a place for themselves and their culture in tech classes and spaces at predominantly white institutions, Smith said.

But the relatively few Native students who do graduate with these degrees are making significant contributions to their communities, according to Smith. She noted that graduates are using their computer science knowledge and emerging technologies to help revitalize Native languages and alleviate other issues tribal nation communities face, including climate change, biases in data collection and poverty. 

Because tribal nations are at the forefront of job growth and development in their communities, they “should be considered critical partners in the future of the technology sector,” the report’s authors write.

The report calls for more investment in training Native educators to teach computer science and related fields, and integrating Indigenous culture, traditions and languages into those classes.

A 4-year-old program run jointly by the Kapor Foundation and AISES, for example, partners with school districts and Native-serving schools to develop tribe-specific culturally relevant computer science curriculum. That instruction doesn’t only happen in computer science class, said McAlear. The program’s staff work with schools to develop project-based, culturally relevant computer science lessons that are woven into other classes including science, language and history.

In Fortier’s district, students in science classes were recently tasked with using robots to code the life cycle of a salmon. Through that activity they gained knowledge of their local tribal economies while being introduced to new tech, he said.

Before the pandemic, Fortier’s school had eliminated some computer science and technology courses due to budget cuts. But with federal Covid relief funding, along with grants from Sealaska Heritage Institute, a nonprofit arm of a regional Native corporation, and programmatic support from AISES, the school was able to restore some of that instruction.*

Fortier said he believes these courses are essential for his students — not necessarily because they’ll have to learn all the latest cutting-edge technology for their future careers, but so they can use contemporary methods to share Native practices, knowledge and skills with the wider community.

“We can learn a lot from the elders in the traditional knowledge,” he said. “But our kids need to apply it in a new, modern, meaningful way. They need to be able to communicate to and within the world.”

*Correction: This sentence has been updated with the correct version of Sealaska Heritage Institute’s name.

This story about computer science access 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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The Republican Party has spent the past few years struggling through a deep divide, largely caused by fallout from a contested election. The Democratic Party seems to be disjointed, too, though the cause is less clear.

No, I’m not talking about Congress or the national committees in Washington trying to control the future direction our country is headed. I’m talking about college students. 

For many decades, campuses have had clubs for College Democrats and College Republicans, but over the past few years these clubs and the organizations that oversee them have fallen into disarray. The 2021 election for the new leader of the College Republican National Committee was contested, and the group has frayed as a result. Tension and accusations of racism have plagued the top leaders of the College Democrats of America in recent years. And students on both sides said that it was difficult to stay organized and afloat during the pandemic, causing some chapters and state-level organizations to become dormant or die off completely. 

For politically oriented students, such campus organizations can be crucial parts of their college experience, said Amy Binder, a professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University’s SNF Agora Institute, which is dedicated to furthering civic engagement and informed dialogue. 

“Students who are active in politics in college are likely to remain active in politics. And many of them want careers in politics or politics-adjacent sectors,” Binder said. “So, what’s happening on college campuses is really important for how young leaders are being socialized and shaped.”

At The Hechinger Report, we’ve been reporting on how the culture wars and the growing political divide are beginning to affect where students go to college, which led us to publish The College Welcome Guide.  It collects data on factors like enrollment figures, graduation rates, free speech climate, incidence of hate crimes, services for veterans, LGBTQ+ resource centers from more than 4,000 campuses, as well as showing state laws that affect college students.

It seemed obvious that we should include campus political organizations in our table. I volunteered to get the lists of all College Republican and College Democrat chapters in the country.

I assumed it would be an easy task – simply Google the national organizations, find lists of campus chapters, copy them into an Excel spreadsheet and send it to my editor. At most, I thought I’d need to send an email to a press contact.

To my surprise, neither the College Democrats of America nor the College Republican National Committee had a list of chapters on their website. The Democrats have a list of links to state-level organizations, and the Republicans had a “find a chapter” feature, but no way to pull a list of all chapters. All the emails I sent to the Democrats bounced back, and the Republicans didn’t reply. We tried other search methods, too, but in the end, Hechinger editors decided that the information we had would be a nightmare to fact-check and so we couldn’t responsibly include this category in The College Welcome Guide.

Related: Culture wars on campus start to affect students’ choices for college 

I agreed – but I was determined to find out why we couldn’t accomplish this task.

The split in the College Republican National Committee seems to be the primary reason that the College Republican chapters were so tough to track down. 

Courtney Hope Britt, the chair of the organization, said that there had been some cracks in the organization ideologically before she ran for chair in 2021, but the strife increased after her win was contested. Some state-level organizations and chapters decided to disaffiliate with the College Republican National Committee at this point.

Britt, who graduated from law school at the University of Richmond in her home state of Virginia before she ran for chair, said she had worked hard to win her seat, driving around the country to meet with students for her campaign during the pandemic. She said that not everyone supported her, but that she won the election fairly, despite complaints otherwise. 

“We put a lot of our hope and faith in students because they should be young and idealistic, but in a lot of ways, they’re just refracting what they see in larger politics. It’s not fair to students, because the adults who are role models to them aren’t doing much better.”

Amy Binder, professor of sociology, Johns Hopkins University

“Some of them moved on and said, ‘Okay, this is the reality,’ and some of them took their cues from what they’re seeing nationally in politics, that if you don’t like the result of something you just deny them,” Britt said. “I disagree with that fundamentally.” 

Britt won re-election this summer and will continue to serve as the organization’s chair until 2025. Leading the organization and fundraising to keep it afloat is her full-time job.  At the start of the fall 2023 semester, she said, there were 240 clubs.

She said that running the organization over the past two years has been challenging, though not exclusively because of the election-related drama. 

“I think that everyone in party leadership, at least internally, knows right now that it is difficult to lead the party in its current state,” Britt said. “The Republican Party has a lot of very tense divisions. I mean, just look at the House Republicans over the last month. I think that I need not say much more than that.”

With all the turmoil, law student Will Donahue saw an opportunity to create a new national organization.

Donahue is from California, whose chapter had clashed with the College Republican National Committee before the 2021 election controversy.  He created the College Republicans of America in the spring of 2023 to give some of the chapters that had left the opportunity to recharter with another organization, with a new focus. 

He wants the new organization to emphasize professional and personal development, to prepare students to be successful in both their political careers and their lives. They plan to partner with organizations that teach financial literacy and investing strategies, he said, and to emphasize community service.

“I think it kind of repairs the national image I think people have about Republicans that may or may not necessarily be true,” Donahue said. “But if the youth generation is leading the ground movement to try to make the planet a better place and become global citizens, I think that’s the direction that we need to move in.”

On the left, the trouble among college Democrats has been more difficult to identify. There is no contact information on the College Democrats of America page, which is embedded in the Democratic National Committee website. I found a few email addresses elsewhere online, but all bounced back with error messages.

Related: Getting rid of the ‘gotcha’: College students try to tame political dialogue 

Finally, on Nov. 2, I got in touch with Justin Parker, the newly elected national vice president of the College Democrats of America. 

The organization has what Parker calls a “colorful past.” He hasn’t been involved for long, but he said that lack of transparency among past leadership led to drama, resignations and the disaffiliation of state-level organizations from the national group over the last few years.

Right now, he said,  27 states are affiliated with his group, and he hopes to coax some of the groups that left to rejoin. 

Parker said he and other leaders have plans to revamp the organization to increase communication between chapters and state organizations across the country, so that they can learn from each other’s experiences and all become better.

Among those plans, Parker said, is continuing to work on a freshly revamped independent website that still has no contact information and no chapter list. The rebuilding work is crucial, he said, in order to reach as many young voters as possible before the 2024 election.

Jen Anderson, a sophomore at Montana State University in Bozeman, helped resurrect her campus chapter of the College Democrats and later the statewide Montana College Democrats after she was unhappy with some of the policies enacted by the state legislature. She said the state-level student organization had been dormant since at least 2020. 

“I think that everyone in party leadership, at least internally, knows right now that it is difficult to lead the party in its current state.”

Courtney Hope Britt Chair, College Republican National Committee

She and other leaders recently decided to disaffiliate from the College Democrats of America because they wanted to focus their energy on the issues Montana residents face. She said the group plans to avoid anything related to the presidential election, geopolitical conflict and the culture wars.

In Michigan, sophomore Jacob Welch has had a similar experience. He helped restart the College Democrats chapter at Grand Valley State University during his freshman year, then worked to re-ignite the state-level organization and was elected president. 

In early October, Welch said, the Michigan Federation of College Democrats decided to leave the College Democrats of America, because the Michigan members believe college political groups should focus more on taking action around societal issues they’d like to see changed. Like Anderson in Montana, he said he wanted the group to focus on issues that are priorities for Michigan residents.

On both sides, students said that participating in their campus political club gave them a chance to spend time with like-minded students and make friends. Those stakes seemed to be a bit higher for conservative students, who are more likely to be in the political minority on college campuses.

Related: Hampered by pandemic restrictions, campus organizers are working overtime to make student voting easier

Britt, the chair of the College Republican National Committee, said that, for conservative students, finding a sense of belonging of campus can sometimes feel difficult when few other students share their views and even faculty seem not to respect their opinions.

Britt recalls sitting in an election law class during the Trump presidency and hearing her professor say that the Republican Party was dead. She was confident enough in her views by then to be comfortable speaking up, but she said it was only one example of feeling ostracized for her political orientation.

“I think it’s useful both for those students to have a sense of belongingness, to have a home, but also for the rest of the campus community because they’re bringing ideas and conversations up that otherwise may not be presented without them being there,” Britt said.

Experts agree on the social value of these clubs, and some say that the political value can be great, too.

Binder, the sociology professor, said that she thinks students interested in politics are looking beyond the two mainstream groups.

For example, she said, some students on the left see the College Democrats as being “hopelessly in the center” and ultra-career oriented, sometimes calling them “resume builders.” She thinks leftist students are more likely to gravitate towards gender alliances, multicultural centers or groups that advocate for a specific cause. They might seek out groups like Young Democratic Socialists of America, which is focused on community organizing. On the right, Binder said, some conservative students are being drawn to groups such as Turning Point USA, a group that advocates for conservative politics on campuses, and aims to promote freedom, according to its website.

She thinks there is a tendency to scold students for not “holding up these hallowed institutions” of the political parties.

“We put a lot of our hope and faith in students because they should be young and idealistic, but in a lot of ways, they’re just refracting what they see in larger politics,” Binder said. “I kind of feel like that’s not fair to students, because the adults who are role models to them aren’t doing much better.”

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

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For many rural students, higher education means waking up before the sun four days a week, then driving an hour through cornfields or pine forests to reach the only college for 100 miles.

It’s a far cry from the awkward parental drop-off, search for elusive twin XL sheets and Olivia Rodrigo wall poster most people associate with the back-to-college season.

For the more than 33 million people living in education deserts, college-going can be a drastically different experience. In addition to long commutes, homesickness and culture shock, many students arrive underprepared in key subjects like math and science.

Their new college calendar may not be conducive to seasonal demand for jobs harvesting, hunting or fighting wildfires. They often grapple with local or even familial skepticism about the value of higher education, especially in areas where the main industries have not historically required a college degree and where students who leave town for college prove unlikely to return.

For all of these reasons, despite high school graduation rates similar to those in suburbs and cities, rural college-going rates are much lower. For rural students, the calculation about going to and staying in college is very different. Montana is seeking to make that calculation a little more positive through a new program, Montana 10.

Consider Baker, Montana, population 1,800. For high schoolers there dreaming of a college education, the nearest option, Dawson Community College, is about 70 miles away.

The nearest four-year institution, Dickinson State University, is 100 miles away, across the border in North Dakota. Students seeking a traditional four-year college experience in their home state must travel more than 225 miles to Montana State University in Billings.

That’s why these students need a little extra help both adjusting to and staying in school, and why they need someone like Julie Pettitt-Booth, executive director of new student services at MSU Billings, who understands what they’re going through as they adjust to college and the big city for the first time.

Related: Rural students are the least likely to go to college

Coming from tight-knit communities, many rural students struggle with isolation and homesickness, as well as financial constraints. Such challenges are especially prevalent for students coming from low-income homes, for students who are the first in their families to attend college and for those who have especially long commutes to school.

Each challenge makes it easier to contemplate dropping out. That’s where Pettitt-Booth and college support staff across the state come in: providing one-on-one care to help students stay focused and clear those hurdles.

If a comprehensive student support program can work in Montana the way that it has worked in other places, the state could see more degrees and less debt, spurring economic stability for rural towns and the state as a whole.

The Montana University System’s new program called Montana 10 offers academic, social and financial supports designed to help low-income, rural and Native American students get acclimated to college, stay enrolled and reach graduation on time.

To do this, Montana 10 simultaneously offers a combination of student support services — advising, career planning, academic help in first-year math and English classes — and financial supports like textbook assistance and scholarships.

In exchange, students must enroll full-time, complete their federal financial aid paperwork and meet with program staff regularly to stay on track.

The goal is simple: graduate students.

At the heart of the program are advisers who understand what students need both logistically and emotionally and who recognize what it means (good and bad) for a student, a family and a community when students leave for college.

They also help students navigate unique financial aid situations, such as how to qualify when their family’s assets are all farm equipment or when their parents live off the grid.

These advisers know how to help students who want to leave their small towns behind as well as those who commute daily from the homesteads where they plan to spend their whole lives.

Related: STUDENT VOICE: Why rural students like me are ‘meant to be here’ in college

Building students’ sense of belonging, along with financial and academic supports, can help students stay in college semester after semester. Montana 10 follows a tradition of comprehensive approaches to student success that have been proven effective in rigorous research studies in improving students’ likelihood of staying in college and earning a credential.

There’s also a big payoff: According to Montana state officials, of Montana jobs paying more than $50,000 a year created between 2011 and 2021, 63 percent went to degree holders.

In eastern Montana, the most rural part of the state and home to towns like Baker, more than 60 percent of high-demand occupations have workforce shortages, especially in vital fields like education and healthcare.

If a comprehensive student support program can work in Montana the way that it has worked in other places, the state could see more degrees and less debt, spurring economic stability for rural towns and the state as a whole.

That means illuminating a winding path through the Rockies toward a postsecondary degree. A path that will lead to more teachers, nurses, engineers and tradesmen.

Rural colleges matter. When they’re the only option for a hundred miles, getting students in the door, and even more importantly, keeping them enrolled and helping them graduate, can have far-reaching benefits.

Alyssa Ratledge is a research associate at MDRC, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization that is conducting an evaluation of Montana 10.

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More than 40 million Americans — roughly one out of every seven adults — have earned college credit but have no degree to show for their time and money.

Florida native Alix Petkov is one of them. He enrolled in college right after high school with the idea of becoming a psychiatrist. Unaware that this career choice required medical school — and unable to afford college, much less a graduate education — Petkov changed majors twice and found himself making only halting progress toward a bachelor’s degree.

An on-campus job in information technology rekindled his interest in computers, but the gig paid just $10 per hour, and his computer science classes covered the same things he had already picked up at work.

So Petkov quit college roughly 30 credits short of a degree, with $16,000 in student loans and a credit card balance of $4,000 from paying living expenses.

He burnished his tech portfolio with freelance computer work, applied for IT jobs, worked in restaurants and stewed over his frustrating experience, later saying that “College only destroyed me.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. Like millions of other learners, Petkov was forced into an outdated and bureaucratic model of higher education that’s not designed for how people navigate learning and work today.

Far too many learners are pausing their education long before they earn a credential because they run out of money, time or patience. Or they wind up in a program that lacks the support and structure to meet their individualized needs and goals.

Related: The college degree gap between Black and white Americans was always bad. It’s getting worse

Learners need better access to lower-cost, shorter-term programs that help them achieve their career goals.

Federal and state governments and postsecondary institutions can and should adopt policies and practices that will help students build career pathways and make alternatives to a college degree more accessible, affordable and practical.

To achieve this, federal and state policymakers must ease some of the guardrails meant to protect learners from making “bad” decisions — after all, some of these guardrails have stifled postsecondary innovation and limited competition between college and noncollege options, ultimately restricting learners’ choices. Students must also receive better information about college and noncollege pathways and outcomes both before they begin a program and while they are enrolled.

College isn’t always the best option for every learner.

Petkov said he received little — and often incorrect — information in high school and college about higher education and potential alternatives. No one advised him, for example, that he could save thousands of dollars by completing university-required general education classes at a local community college.

Looking back, Petkov admits he would have pursued a different path altogether if he had a better up-front understanding of the costs and courses required to complete a degree.

His story, which he shared with me this summer over a video call after I requested an introduction, illustrates why students need more transparent financial counseling and more options for using financial aid beyond the limited college options currently afforded by student aid programs.

Giving high school students information about program costs and financial aid well before they apply to college will aid their decision-making. Students should be able to use Pell Grants for noncollege alternative programs that have proven track records of moving students into jobs that pay family-sustaining wages.

Petkov said it didn’t become apparent until later that his financial aid and campus job wouldn’t cover all of his college expenses. Because he was awarded Pell Grants, he borrowed less than other students.

But Pell Grants can be used in just one setting: college. Had Petkov been allowed to use the federal subsidy to pursue a college alternative — like an accelerated tech or healthcare upskilling program from a noncollege provider — he would have done that instead.

Related: OPINION: Often overlooked vocational-tech schools provide great solutions to student debt, labor shortages

Because of time and expense, college isn’t always the best option for every learner. Mounting evidence on program-level outcomes shows that far too many of the options that the government deems “safe” simply because they are accredited have failed learners and left them no better off than if they had not pursued college at all.

Petkov didn’t find his true path until more than a year after he quit college. While searching online for IT jobs, he stumbled on information about Merit America, a nonprofit offering low-cost programs that prepare people for tech careers. (Merit America is a grantee of the Charles Koch Foundation, part of the Stand Together philanthropic community, where the author is a senior fellow.)

Merit America built on Petkov’s existing IT knowledge to give him new tech skills that allowed him to push past self-doubt and launch a successful career. After completing the program, Petkov landed a tech coordinator’s job at a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., that started him at $45,000 — more than twice what he was making in food service.

Two jobs later, he’s currently the IT director of an executive coaching firm and makes a little more than $100,000 per year. A University of Virginia analysis shows that Merit America completers see an average annual wage increase of $24,000 three or more months after finishing the program.

Merit America is among the growing number of providers preparing students for placement into high-demand tech and healthcare careers. Yet students from low-income backgrounds who rely on financial aid and loans often get little guidance about such college alternatives and may instead be advised to pursue a college degree.

It’s time to open more doors to short-term, noncollege options, so that students like Petkov can access more personalized options to help them thrive.

Steven Taylor is a senior fellow on postsecondary education at Stand Together Trust. He leads the postsecondary education and workforce policy portfolio and partnership strategy.

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In one of my recent courses, a first-year student made comments about how many spaces on campus were dehumanizing, with people walking around “like robots.”

She spoke about how her first quarter in college brought significant mental health challenges related to sleep deprivation, isolation and course withdrawals. She seriously considered dropping out.

This same student also shared that our classroom was the first place she felt she could call her own on campus — a space where she could focus on learning rather than grades, explore issues relevant to her world and have authentic human conversations about life. She credited the course with rekindling her passion for learning, fostering her confidence and helping her develop meaningful connections.

Her story offers a salient example of how campuses can not only create toxic breeding grounds for mental health struggles but also foster spaces where students thrive.

Research and a plethora of anecdotal evidence tell us that campuses do far too much of the former and not enough of the latter. If this is so, how can colleges turn the tide to become more a part of the solution than we are a part of the problem?

College students continuously deal with a wide range of stressors, from racial discrimination to immense financial insecurity. It can take a toll on their well-being, yet campuses often fail to help students navigate these challenges.

In fact, many colleges actively exacerbate them in their pursuit of fame, wealth and prestige. These unhealthy obsessions often compromise valuable benefits such as deep connections, community, spirituality and health.

Related: Inside a college counseling center struggling with the student mental health crisis

It is not surprising that students are experiencing a wide range of mental health challenges, such as paralyzing stress, anxiety and depression. In 2021-22, the national Healthy Minds Survey found that college students’ anxiety and depression were at historic levels, with 37 percent reporting some anxiety and 44 percent experiencing some depression in the two weeks prior to the survey. Moreover, approximately 83 percent reported that emotional or mental difficulties had impaired their academic performance at some time during the month prior to taking the survey.

Although some observers might try to dismiss these statistics as just a result of the pandemic, national data suggest that mental health issues were on the rise before the virus arrived. It is vital that institutions pay more attention and take more responsibility for their part in causing these trends.

Campuses can not only create toxic breeding grounds for mental health struggles but also foster spaces where students thrive.

Lindsay Pérez Huber, a professor at California State University, Long Beach, and I co-authored a report that highlights how campuses fuel mental health challenges and how they can help address them. (Disclaimer: the report was commissioned by the California Futures Foundation, among the many funders of The Hechinger Report.)

We note that cultivating caring, affirming and connected communities on college campuses is critical when it comes to mental health.

Networks of professors, staff and fellow students who care can become lifelines when college stressors become all consuming. And if colleges affirm student cultures, values and identities, they can boost students’ self-esteem and sense of empowerment, help them feel less isolated and promote a greater sense of belonging. Prioritizing caring connected and affirming communities helps more students thrive.

For example, research shows a boost in students’ well-being after they simply reflect on their intrinsic values within the context of their learning environments.

A curriculum that allows students to simultaneously deepen their connections to their community’s cultural values and their learning environment can help them feel like they belong to both. Research also shows that culturally relevant learning experiences improve academic success.

Ethnic Studies programs provide a strong model for creating such learning environments. Unfortunately, they typically are undervalued and under political attack. In such contexts, they should not be asked to bear the brunt of responsibility for cultivating these culturally relevant learning spaces on their campuses.

Instead, campuses should provide mental health services that are culturally responsive, via professionals who understand diverse student backgrounds and experiences. Offering counseling services, support groups and outreach programs designed for diverse communities can help students feel understood and supported.

However, students have to know about these services and be able to easily access them.

This requires campuses to provide clear and accessible support, rather than leaving it up to students to find their own way through their institutions’ ever-increasingly complex bureaucracies.

Related: STUDENT VOICE: After confronting mental health struggles in college, I’m now helping others

Many of us who care about the holistic well-being of our students are watching mental health problems proliferate on our campuses and have been disappointed by the neglect of this growing crisis.

We need to stop pretending we have had no role in creating this mental health pandemic.

Any institution that preoccupies itself with chasing money and prestige while expecting students to sacrifice their health for a degree cannot call itself successful.

For colleges to effectively address the current mental health crisis and effectively fulfill their social responsibility, we must accept that we are part of the problem. We should actively work to address it.

Samuel D. Museus is professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He is a nationally recognized expert on issues of equity and student thriving, and he co-authored the report “Degrees of Distress.”

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