Education and education access are directly connected to economic growth. Despite the dysfunction in Congress, especially over border issues and foreign aid, there are key education bills that can provide not only solutions for the issues they address but also models for getting things done across a range of other issues.

Two pieces of legislation that could improve our economic future by advancing education and workforce development passed the Committee on Education and the Workforce a few weeks ago with broad and bipartisan support, demonstrating that consensus is not only possible and practical but achievable.

The success of these bipartisan solutions could break down walls of division and better the lives of our nation’s students while bolstering our cities’ economies.

In mid-December, the committee approved the Bipartisan Workforce Pell Act, with support from both Republican Chairwoman Virginia Foxx and ranking Democratic member Bobby Scott, who co-sponsored the legislation.

The bill would expand Pell Grants to provide needed tuition assistance for short-term education and training directly linked to career opportunities, easing the costs of attaining the education and skills that all students, and especially low-income students, desperately need.

The bill would also fund access to online learning, further cutting costs and making education more flexible and accessible.  A vast array of students across red and blue states would benefit from the bill’s commonsense approach, as would our community colleges, employers and, by extension, all Americans.

Related: ‘August surprise’: That college scholarship you earned might not count

That same House Committee voted, a bit earlier, also with bipartisan support, to reauthorize the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. This legislation includes federal funding to support education and skills-based training directly connected to career opportunities and economic success.

This too will directly impact our nation’s community colleges, which are the key engines of economic mobility.

Under the bill, existing Labor Department funding could be repurposed to provide eligible workers with individual, customized education and training accounts, leading to improved career opportunities.

The bill would also specifically address the education and training needs of our incarcerated youth by providing them with the education and skills needed to ease their transition into a stable future. And it would add accountability provisions to ensure that spending for education will lead to concrete job growth. Like the Pell legislation, the bill has broad support among education and business leaders.

Passing short-term Pell along with passing workforce and education legislation would provide a clear pathway from high schools to colleges and careers, ensuring a brighter future for millions of students across the nation.

Both pieces of legislation could potentially pass the House and the Senate and be signed into law early in the New Year. 

Smart investments in Education can be both the answer to governmental gridlock and spur economic progress.

Of course, as is usually the case with legislation that clears committee hurdles, the bills contain small flaws that demand fixes. 

For example, in the Pell bill, one item that could derail passage in the full House and Senate and set back the nation’s commitment to social mobility for students is a provision calling for a reduction in student loan eligibility for students at some of the most selective colleges. Another flaw is that the legislation could open the door to abuse by predatory for-profit colleges. These parts of the plan can easily be fixed to ensure passage.

Passing short-term Pell and workforce and education legislation would provide a clear pathway from high schools to colleges and careers, ensuring a brighter future for millions of students across the nation. 

Related: OPINION: It’s time to put the brakes on student debt and give more students a shot at higher education

We’ve seen bipartisan support deliver dynamic education and economic growth before, most recently when Democrats and Republicans in both the House and the Senate united behind Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer’s CHIPS and Science Act.

That act mobilized efforts to restore American leadership in the semiconductor industry while creating good-paying jobs and reducing the cost of automobiles, refrigerators and computers.

The CHIPS and Science Act, with bipartisan support, also included a huge investment in education research, and became a model for the progress that can be achieved when parties come together to better the lives of the people.   

Now is the time for more bipartisan progress. Passage of these two critical education bills would be a fine start, fueling job creation and bettering the skills and future incomes of our nation’s students, who need our support now more than ever. And the bills’ passage would provide a model for how to eliminate gridlock and address our core economic challenges in a positive manner.

Most polling suggests that the top-of-mind topics for most Americans are the proverbial “kitchen table issues,” led by the economy and its effect on working-class Americans.

These bills address those issues. Americans with the education and skills to be employed in growing industries will earn higher wages, and the increased tax revenues from those wages will support our nation’s schools at all levels. And these bills’ prioritization of our community colleges will help them become an even stronger engine for jump-starting and sustaining America’s growth.

In recent years, it’s begun to seem that dysfunction is the one thing that Washington can be reliably counted on to provide. But let’s not simply accept that Congress can no longer come together to support initiatives that meet our needs and provide enhanced opportunities.

For many years, education issues have divided Americans; these core education bills can unite us. They deserve prompt action.

Stanley Litow served as deputy chancellor of schools for New York City and as president of the IBM Foundation. He now serves as adjunct professor at Columbia University and as trustee of the State University of New York where he chairs the Academic Affairs Committee.

This story about breaking political gridlock 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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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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WILMINGTON, Del. – A wall of the Rodriguez family home celebrates three seminal events with these words: “A moment in time, changed forever.”

Beneath the inscription, a clock marks the time and dates when three swaddled newborns depicted in large photos entered the world: Ashley, now 19, Emily, 17, and Brianna, 11.

Another“moment in time” occurred last June, one that could change the paths of Emily and Brianna. That’s when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in its landmark case on affirmative action, barring colleges from taking race into consideration as a factor in admission decisions.

The ruling struck down more than 50 years of legal precedent, creating newfound uncertainty for the first class of college applicants to be shaped by the decision – especially for Black and Hispanic students hoping to get into highly competitive colleges that once sought them out.

It also places the Rodriguez sisters on opposite sides of history: Ashley applied to college when schools in many states could still consider race, while Emily can expect no such advantage.

Their parents, Margarita Lopez, 38, and Rafael Rodriguez, 42, are immigrants from Mexico who moved to the United States as teenagers.

Ashley is the first in her family to attend college, a freshman studying child psychology on a full scholarship to prestigious Oxford College of Emory University, where annual estimated costs approached $80,000 this year.

Emily is the middle daughter, a senior and mostly straight-A student at Conrad Schools of Science in Wilmington who wants to become a veterinarian, and who spent most of this fall anxiously awaiting word from her first-choice college, Cornell University.

The impact of the court’s decision on enrollment at hundreds of selective colleges and universities won’t start to become clear until colleges send out offers this spring and release final acceptance figures.

“We definitely feel that this year, the window is narrower for students whose GPA does not tell the full story of their brilliance and the challenges they’ve overcome.”

TeenSHARP co-founder Atnre Alleyne

But many students, counselors and families view this admission cycle as the first test of whether colleges will become less diverse going forward, while cautioning it may take years before a clear pattern emerges. The Hechinger Report contacted more than 40 selective colleges and universities asking for the racial breakdown of those who applied for early decision and were accepted this year.

About half the institutions responded and none provided the requested information. Several said that they would not have such data available even internally until after the admissions cycle wraps up next year. Some have cited advice from legal counsel in declining to release the racial and ethnic composition for the class of 2028.

For the Rodriguez family, higher education has already become a symbol of upward mobility, a life-altering path to meaningful careers and the sort of financial stability that Margarita and Rafael have never known.

College wasn’t a part of their culture, and before last year Rafael and Margarita had no idea how complicated and competitive the landscape would be for their bright, hardworking daughters. Of all U.S. racial or ethnic groups, Hispanic Americans are the least likely to hold a college degree.

“I never even dreamed about a place like Emory, or about all the schools that have really good financial aid,” Margarita said recently. She wouldn’t have looked beyond the local community college and state universities for her daughters if she hadn’t learned about TeenSHARP, a nonprofit that prepares high-performing students from underrepresented backgrounds for higher education.

She immediately signed up Ashley, and later, Emily.

TeenSHARP co-founder Atnre Alleyne, with his wife, Tatiana Poladko, and team of advisers, guided Ashley and Emily through their high school course selection and college essays, while pointing out leadership opportunities and colleges with good track records of offering scholarships.

Related: College advisors vow to kick the door open for Black and Hispanic students despite affirmative action ruling

Emory is one. The school admitted no Black students until 1963, but has aggressively recruited students from underrepresented backgrounds in recent years. Hispanic enrollment had been growing before the Supreme Court’s decision, from 7.5 percent in 2017 to 9.2 percent in 2021. Ashley’s class at Oxford is 15 percent Hispanic.

“I felt like I was right at home here,” Ashley said, shortly after arriving in August. The entire Rodriguez family dropped her off and stayed for a few days until she was settled. “It felt very homey to me,” she said. “Everybody is so welcoming.”

Still, Ashley worried about her grades as she adjusted to her new workload. She fielded constant texts and calls from her family, who were adjusting to having her away from home for the first time.

Emily missed her sister terribly – together they’d started their high school’s club for first-generation scholars, helping others navigate college choices. “She has the brain and I like to talk,” Emily joked.

This fall, Emily set her sights on some of the most selective colleges in the country, many of which had terrible track records on diversity even before the Supreme Court’s decision. She approached her search knowing that she was unlikely to get any boost based on her ethnicity.

That makes her angry.

“We have so much history behind us as people of color,” Emily said. “So why would we be put at the same level as somebody whose family has benefited off of the harm done to communities of color?”

Emily also knew she would need a hefty scholarship to attend one of her dream schools; her family can’t afford the tuition, and they’ve been loath to saddle their daughters with loans.

“I don’t think it’s a bad thing if poor whites now benefit from affirmative action.”

Richard Kahlenberg, an author and scholar at Georgetown University

Elite schools like those on Ashley and Emily’s lists are more likely to be filled with wealthy students: Families from the top 0.1 percent are more than twice as likely to get in as other applicants with the same test scores. But such schools also offer the most generous scholarship and aid packages, and Emily and Ashley believed they presented the best shot at a different life from their parents’.

“Ever since I was little, I knew that college was the ticket to break this cycle our family has been in for generations and generations, of not knowing, of not being educated,” Emily said. “And because of that, having to work with their backs instead of their brains.”

That the Rodriguez sisters could even consider top-tier colleges is a credit to their mother.

“I want them to have the opportunity I never had,” Margarita said. “I know that life after education will be easier for them. I don’t want them to be working 12, 14 hours like their dad did.”

Rafael Rodriguez has always worked: first, with livestock as a child in central Mexico and later, in Florida, on an orange farm until the age of 15, with a residential permit. His earnings went toward helping the rest of the family come to the United States and settle in West Grove, Pennsylvania.

Rafael didn’t attend high school because he had to help support his parents and sisters. He now owns a trucking company.

Margarita desperately wanted to go to college, but said her mother did not believe in taking out loans for higher education and refused to sign her financial aid forms.

Instead, she married Rafael a few days after graduating from high school and had Ashley a year later. Emily was born 17 months later. Margarita was thinking of enrolling in community college until Brianna came along six years later. She now helps Rafael with his trucking business while working as a translator.

Both sisters are keenly aware of the gulf between their lives and their mom’s. In her college essay, Ashley described being “a daughter of two immigrant parents who undertook a dangerous journey from their native Guanajuato, Mexico, to America.”

Emily wrote about how Margarita had violated “every norm of our Mexican community, allowing me to sacrifice my time with family on weekends and in the summer” to attend Saturday leadership trainings with TeenSHARP, as well as college-level courses in epidemiology and health sciences at Brown, Cornell and the University of Delaware.

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

The pressure Emily feels is both formidable and familiar to the immigrant experience, magnified by the divisive court decision.

Hamza Parker, a senior at Smyrna High School in Delaware, feels it as well. He was at first unsure of whether or not to write about race in his essay, a debate many students have been having.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority decision that race could be invoked only within the context of the applicant’s life story, leaving it up to students to decide if they would use their essays to discuss their race.

Meanwhile, conservative activist Edward Blum, who helped bring the case before the court, has threatened more lawsuits and said he would challenge essays “used to ascertain or provide a benefit based on the applicant’s race.”

“I never even dreamed about a place like Emory, or about all the schools that have really good financial aid.”

Margarita Rodriguez, mother

Hamza wavered at first, then rewrote his essay to describe his family’s move to the United States from Saudi Arabia in sixth grade and the racism he subsequently experienced. He applied early decision to Union College in upstate New York; earlier this month, he learned via email that he did not get in.

Neither Hamza nor his father, Timothy Parker, an engineer, know why, or what role affirmative action played in Union’s decision: Rejections never come with explanations.

Parker hopes his son will now consider an HBCU like the one he attended, Hampton University, in Virginia. He worries that if Hamza ends up at a school where he is clearly in the minority, he could be made to feel as though he doesn’t belong.

Related: Beyond the Rankings: College Welcome Guide

“I’m letting it be his choice,” Parker said, noting that Hamza might also feel more comfortable at an HBCU given the nation’s divisive political climate. With the end of affirmative action, he added, “It feels like we are going backwards not forward.”

HBCUs are becoming more competitive after the court’s decision. Chelsea Holley, director of admissions at Spelman College in Atlanta, said Black high schoolers may be choosing HBCUs because they fear further assaults on diversity and inclusion and believe they’ll feel more comfortable on predominantly Black campuses.

Parker is now finishing his applications to Denison University, the University of Maryland, the University of Delaware, and Carleton College. He’s not sure if Hampton will be on his list.

Alleyne, Hamza’s adviser, said that while they will never know if the court’s decision had any impact on Hamza’s rejection from Union, he’s concerned about what it portends for other TeenSHARP seniors.

“We have so much history behind us as people of color. So why would we be put at the same level as somebody whose family has benefited off of the harm done to communities of color?”

Emily Rodriguez, high school senior

“There are so many factors at play with every application,” Alleyne said. “We definitely feel that this year, the window is narrower for students whose GPA does not tell the full story of their brilliance and the challenges they’ve overcome.”

Alleyne is also concerned that scholarships once available for students like Parker are disappearing. Some of the race-based scholarships his students applied for in past years are no longer listed on college websites, he said.

At the same time, there are plenty who believe that the court’s decision was a much-needed correction, including Richard Kahlenberg, an author and scholar at Georgetown University who testified in the case. He argues that the ban will lead to a fairer landscape for low-income students for all races.

Kahlenberg is in favor of using affirmative action based on class instead of race. “I don’t think it’s a bad thing if poor whites now benefit from affirmative action,” Kahlenberg said.

Related: A poster child for protesting affirmative action now says he never meant for it to be abolished

For the Rodriguez family, Cornell’s early decision announcement was long anticipated, to be marked on the magnetic calendar attached to their refrigerator as soon as they knew it. Ashley would be home from Emory for winter break and would hear the news alongside her sister.

For weeks, the family had prepared themselves for bad news: Cornell had announced it was limiting the number of students it would accept early decision, in what the university said was “an effort to increase equity in the admissions process.”

Still, Emily had spent a summer studying at Cornell and gotten to know some faculty and advisers there. She had fallen in love with the animal science program, and the lively upstate New York college town of Ithaca, set amid stunning gorges and waterfalls.

“Let’s go, let’s go!” Rafael said as they huddled together in front of Emily’s laptop. Emily wore a white t-shirt with “Cornell” emblazoned in bold red letters on the front, for good luck. She wavered, then clicked.

“Congratulations, you have been admitted to the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences: College major: Animal Science at Cornell University for the fall of 2024. Welcome to the Cornell community!” said the email on her screen, adorned with red confetti.Annual estimated costs for next year would be $92,682 – but Cornell pledged to meet all of it.

Emily screamed, and the room erupted in cheers. Every member of the family began sobbing. Cinnamon, the family’s three-year-old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, barked wildly.

Emily jumped up and down. “Ivy League!” she shouted. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. I did it.”

Brianna, a sixth grader who will work with TeenSHARP once she’s in high school, hugged both of her sisters.

It will be her turn next.

Additional reporting was contributed by Sarah Butrymowicz.

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

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The recent rise of ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence tools has inspired growing anxiety on college campuses while fueling a national conversation about faculty attempts to thwart students from using the tools to cheat.

But that prevalent narrative around AI and cheating is overshadowing the technology’s true potential: Artificial intelligence holds great promise for dramatically enhancing the reach and impact of postsecondary institutions and improving outcomes for all students.

Last month, President Biden issued a sweeping executive order aimed at better mitigating the risks and harnessing the power of artificial intelligence, while also arguing for the need to “shape AI’s potential to transform education by creating resources to support educators deploying AI-enabled educational tools.”

Biden’s call to action could not have been more timely.

The question now is not whether generative AI can positively transform educational access and attainment, but whether higher education is ready to truly democratize and personalize learning with these tools.

Related: Future of Learning: Teaching with AI, part 1

AI’s transformational potential is perhaps greatest at community colleges, minority-serving institutions and open-access universities. These schools’ diversity necessitates a broader set of supports. Dedicated faculty and staff not only serve a very broad range of students — including first-generation and low-income learners, returning adults, those for whom English is a second language and those balancing academic pursuits with family and work responsibilities — but they do so with fewer resources than instructors at elite and flagship institutions. Generative AI tools can augment critically needed services such as advisers, tutors and coaches.

Exploring the possibilities of AI is not cheap, however. While some low-cost or free tools can make a difference, the largest impacts will be achieved through more advanced — and costly — tools that are developed with specific learner populations in mind and blend academic material with students’ sociocultural and language contexts rather than providing generic solutions.

Challenges around cost and availability could further disenfranchise the very learners who could gain the most from AI tools by denying them access to the experts, resources and development opportunities they need to benefit from them. Institutions may struggle to bring the true power of AI to bear on addressing their students’ needs.

Similarly, too often, the datasets and algorithms behind AI tools reflect historical inaccuracies and intrinsic biases that only further disenfranchise learners. This will continue to be the case until we collectively confront the inequitable ways that AI systems are designed and resources are distributed.

That’s why we need to think about AI differently, shifting our focus from debates about academic integrity and concerns about cheating to how we can leverage artificial intelligence in equitable ways that will boost college completion for all students.

Related: How college educators are using AI in the classroom

Let’s focus on how AI advances could provide all learners with the kinds of high-touch support already offered to students who attend wealthier institutions. AI tools could have a transformative effect on access, progression and completion for learners who were previously constrained by limitations of time, space and resources.

Imagine if generative AI tutors could provide 24/7 individualized support, along with AI-powered virtual reality tools that would widen access to experiential learning opportunities. What about having adaptive learning tools enabling students to learn at a pace that best suits their level of preparation? And personalized learning materials that reflect their backgrounds and lived experiences?

A technology that has incredible potential to help expand access to the many benefits of higher education should not become a mechanism through which inequity is exacerbated.

Such steps could augment engagement and outreach efforts to lower the barriers that prevent students from underserved communities from earning degrees.

This is not a speculative vision of a not-too-distant future, but an emerging reality on some campuses. Arizona State University, for example, has assembled a team of engineers and data scientists to develop AI tools to enhance learning and improve student outcomes.

For now, such experimentation is limited to colleges and universities with the resources for scaling the benefits of the technology and developing the guardrails necessary for mitigating risks to learners.

Related: OPINION: The world is changing fast. Students need data science instruction ASAP

According to a new report from the Brookings Institution, many of the nation’s most selective and affluent colleges and universities are clustered in the same coastal metro areas long home to Big Tech — and now to AI innovation and job growth.

That’s unfortunate. Access to new technology — and the ability to play a role in shaping its design — should not be limited by geography or institutional type. A technology that has incredible potential to help expand access to the many benefits of higher education should not become a mechanism through which inequity is exacerbated.

That’s why the newly convened Complete College America Council on Equitable AI plans to bring together organizations representing over 1,000 access-focused two-year and four-year colleges and universities in January. We hope to influence and initiate policies and practices to encourage equitable engagement of AI technologies.

We hope that college leaders, policymakers and technologists will join us to make sure that AI helps to realize, rather than hinder, higher education’s promise as an engine of equity, prosperity and hope.

Yolanda Watson Spiva is president of Complete College America.

Vistasp M. Karbhari is a professor of engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he also served as president from 2013 to 2020, and is a fellow and board member of Complete College America.

This story about AI in higher education 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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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.

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For every two freshmen enrolled in a college in the University of California system, administrators say they would like to enroll one transfer student from a California community college. 

Whether they succeed depends on the campus and the year and the community college enrollment – but that’s the goal all nine undergraduate campuses strive toward, said Gary Clark, the associate vice chancellor for enrollment management at the University of California, Los Angeles.

To reach that goal and also diversify the transfer population, university leaders announced a new program at UCLA designed specifically for students at community colleges that have historically sent few transfers to the University of California. UCLA will give these students’ applications special consideration, and if they don’t get in, they’ll be guaranteed admission to another campus in the UC system, which should boost the overall number of students transferring into the University of California.

University administrators have not yet selected the community colleges that will participate in the pilot program, but will choose from a list of schools identified as “high need” because they have larger proportions of students from low-income families.  

The new program, which won’t begin until the fall of 2026, was developed by university leaders, the state legislature and the governor, as part of what they say is a general commitment to students coming from California community colleges.

“If it opens up a pathway to the University of California and to graduate from this incredibly distinguished university, it will mean a great deal to all California families, because it will enable young people to come to a university that will propel them in terms of social mobility,” said Katherine S. Newman, the University of California System’s provost. “We have a common commitment to making UC education as affordable as possible, and the community college transfer program is definitely a part of that.”

The pilot program will begin with at least eight majors and will expand to 12 within the first two years, including at least four in the science, technology, engineering and math fields, according to UC system administrators. Students enrolled in the program will be advised about which courses they need to take to be able to transfer into those majors in the UC system, which Newman said will help ensure they’re fully ready to enter the university campuses as juniors and be successful.

Related: How the college transfer process derails students’ plans

Across the nine colleges that make up the University of California system, 27 percent of undergraduates had transferred from a community college, according to an August 2023 report from the University of California’s Office of Institutional Research and Academic Planning.

These transfer students typically began their education at a California community college, and walked onto a UC campus, credit-wise, about halfway to earning their bachelor’s degrees. 

Academically, these students are ready to be significant contributors in the classroom, Clark said. Often, the challenges they face outside the classroom pose greater threats to their education. 

“A large state university, like us, needs to be committed to maintaining access. And in spite of the fact that we’ve gotten quite competitive from an admissions standpoint, we still want to ensure that students have more than one path to UCLA.”

Gary Clark, associate vice chancellor for enrollment management, University of California, Los Angeles

“These are students who may be two years out of high school. These are students who may be 22-plus years out of high school,” Clark said. “They might be parents. They might be veterans. They might be former foster youth.” 

The transfer students are more likely to be from low-income families, or the first in their family to attend college, Clark said. 

To ensure the students thrive in the classroom, the universities need to provide support with whatever their challenges may be. Each UC campus has a transfer student center, though the names vary and, in some cases, they also target returning students and veterans. UCLA’s Transfer Student Center offers students a chance to connect with each other and receive transfer-specific advising on a drop-in basis, Clark said.

UCLA students also have access to the Bruin Resource Center, which has programs that cater to students of several different identities and life experiences, Clark said. The targeted support services include programs for students who are struggling to meet their basic needs, students who are in recovery from substance abuse disorders and undocumented students, among other groups.

Related: STUDENT VOICE: Poor and first-generation transfer students often don’t feel welcome on college campuses

Clark does not expect that students coming from this new transfer program will have vastly different needs than the transfer students the university is already serving. And he doesn’t expect to have to scale up the existing resources, because the total number of transfer students at UCLA is likely to stay the same. The main difference for the transfer student population at UCLA will be which community colleges these students are transferring from. 

Community college students who transfer to UCLA often go on to graduate, data shows. About 75 percent of transfer students earn a bachelor’s degree within 2 years, 90 percent within three years, and 93 percent within four years, according to data from the university’s website.

Still, they won’t all get in – UCLA accepted just 24 percent of transfer applicants in the fall of 2022 – but those who don’t will be guaranteed admission to another University of California campus, which administrators hope will increase the number of transfer students.

“If it opens up a pathway to the University of California and to graduate from this incredibly distinguished university, it will mean a great deal to all California families, because it will enable young people to come to a university that will propel them in terms of social mobility.”

Katherine S. Newman, provost, University of California System

Students turned down by UCLA might, for example, be admitted to the University of California, Riverside, about 80 miles to the east.  UCLA accepts roughly 11 percent of first-year students, while UC Riverside accepts about 65 percent of first-year students and offers a Transfer Admission Guarantee to California community college students who meet certain requirements.

Recent data from the university shows that 58 percent of UC Riverside transfer students graduated in two years, 81 percent graduated within three years and nearly 85 percent graduated within four years.

Veronica Zendejas, director of undergraduate admissions at Riverside, said that the starting at a community college before transferring to a UC campus is the right choice for many students.

When she goes to recruit high schoolers, she reminds them that even if they start at a local community college, they can plan to transfer after earning an associate degree because of the university’s guaranteed admission for community college students who meet requirements.

“A lot of times now, what we’re seeing is a lot of students are purposely going to community college and taking those first two years to really think about what they want to do before transferring to a four-year institution,” Zendejas said.

Clark, from UCLA, said that other students may have life circumstances pop up that prevent them from pursuing a four-year university immediately after high school, and still others may apply but not be academically ready yet. Still, he said, there should be opportunities for those students to get into the University of California later on, when the time is right for them.

“A large state university, like us, I think needs to be committed to maintaining access. And in spite of the fact that we’ve gotten quite competitive from an admissions standpoint, we still want to ensure that students have more than one path to UCLA,” Clark said. “I think it’s kind of the right thing to do for a state university.”

This story about California community colleges 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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SANTA CRUZ, Calif. — At 19, Elizabeth Clews knew attending community college while balancing a full-time job and caring for a newborn would be hard. But she wanted to give it a shot.

After a few months, the single mom, who had just exited the foster care system, realized she wasn’t doing well enough to pass her classes at Ventura College. “All I could really focus on was taking care of my baby and making sure that I kept a roof over our heads,” she said.

Clews thought her performance would improve if she quit work. But when she logged into the school’s online portal to register for a second semester, a message popped up that she described as saying, “You can enroll for classes, but you’re not gonna get financial aid.” Clews was in danger of failing to meet a standard called SAP, or “satisfactory academic progress,” which is attached to nearly all federal financial aid for higher education — including grants, loans and work study — and most state aid too.

“I didn’t really know it was a thing,” Clews said, “I didn’t understand any of the financial aid terminology.” But one thing she knew with utter clarity: She couldn’t pay tuition and fees out of pocket. So, she dropped out.

The number of students across the U.S. affected by satisfactory academic progress requirements each year likely runs in the hundreds of thousands, yet until recently the issue garnered almost no attention from news media, academics and policy makers. “It’s not a noisy problem” because it doesn’t impact people with social capital and power, said Christina Tangalakis, associate dean of financial aid at Glendale Community College in Southern California.

Now, a loose coalition of nonprofits, legislators and financial aid administrators are trying to reform what they describe as overly punitive, vague standards that keep many students capable of earning a degree from obtaining one. The state of Indiana was an early actor, creating a grant in 2016 for returning students who had “SAP-ed out” of federal funding. Last month, California enacted legislation to make all colleges align their requirements for “satisfactory academic progress” with the federal minimum standard.

At the federal level, 39 nonprofit organizations sent a letter in August asking the U.S. Department of Education to clarify the rules around the SAP minimum requirements. And in Congress, Sen. Cory Booker, a Democrat, is expected to re-introduce SAP-related legislation that would give students a second chance at aid.

Related: ‘Revolutionary housing’: How colleges aim to support formerly incarcerated students

The logic behind satisfactory academic progress rules is that giving aid to students who are unlikely to graduate is a bad investment, wasting students’ time and taxpayers’ dollars.

The policy was created in 1976, and at first, each college or university was left to set its own standards. Then, in a 1981 report to the Senate, the General Accounting Office said tougher ones were needed. Citing little evidence, the agency asserted that $1.28 million had been accessed inappropriately.

“It was Reaganomics and welfare reform and this idea of deserving and undeserving poor,” said Debbie Raucher, the director of education for John Burton Advocates for Youth, or JBAY, a California nonprofit. The stance was “if a student isn’t pulling their weight, they don’t deserve our help,” she said.

Under current federal rules, students must maintain a 2.0 GPA or higher, complete at least 67 percent of credits attempted and stay on track to finish a degree in no more than 150 percent of the time it usually takes (for example, six years for a four-year degree). During the Obama administration, SAP regulations were further tightened in an attempt to prevent low-performing for-profit institutions from lining their pockets with taxpayer dollars.

“SAP is my number one enemy, my arch nemesis.”

Elizabeth Clews, University of California, Santa Cruz student who was kicked off financial aid because of SAP requirements when attending community college

Once a student becomes ineligible for financial aid after failing to make SAP, that status stays with them forever.

Some students appeal, but that process can be complicated and riddled with inconsistencies. Campuses aren’t required to offer appeals. Those that do must limit  grounds to “the death of a relative, an injury or illness of the student, or other special circumstances,” according to federal regulations. What circumstances qualify as “special” varies tremendously. For example, some schools explicitly allow students to appeal if they are struggling to balance school and work demands, while others explicitly disallow appeals on the same grounds, according to a 2023 analysis by JBAY.

At 20, Clews didn’t know anything about an appeal, but two years later, she felt “this itch to try again,” and attempted to re-enroll at Ventura. When she got a similar notification, a more mature Clews “decided to do some investigating.” She had experienced homelessness and food insecurity, but didn’t see those circumstances on the appeals list. Her takeaway was: “Oh, well you didn’t die, you didn’t get your leg cut off, so there’s no reason that you shouldn’t have been successful.”

So Clews worked as a waitress and in retail for the next five years.

“It was Reaganomics and welfare reform and this idea of deserving and undeserving poor.”

Debbie Raucher, the director of education for John Burton Advocates for Youth

This turn of events was, in part, the luck of the draw. Some schools are more stringent than the federal rules require: For example, JBAY identified 10 colleges in California that mandate a course completion rate between 70 and 80 percent, not 67. Some institutions require a 2.0 GPA every term, while others consider SAP satisfied if a student’s cumulative GPA is above the threshold. In deciding whether students are progressing fast enough, some colleges include remedial coursework and classes taken in pursuit of an old major, while others don’t. Raucher, of JBAY, said Ventura’s currently posted policy isn’t significantly stricter than average, but wouldn’t have offered Clews “the full leniency allowed by federal regs.” (A Ventura representative said in an email that the school follows federal and state guidelines.)

Fearful of government audits, financial aid administrators tend to take a conservative view of the regulations, Raucher said.

Both JBAY’s analysis and a 2016 study place the number of students who don’t meet SAP requirements at more than 20 percent of Pell grant aid recipients, with that share higher for community college students.

“This is not a fringe issue that 1 percent of students are facing,” Raucher said.

Related: Overdue tuition and fees — as little as $41 — derail hundreds of thousands of California college students

Glendale Community College’s Tangalakis, who has served at four different colleges in her 22-year career, said the policy can undermine colleges’ equity efforts. Institutions must demand rigor, she said, and that’s why they have an “academic progress” requirement for all students that is distinct from SAP.

But since SAP standards are sometimes stricter than the schools’ individual policies, Tangalakis said, low-income students “have to meet a higher standard simply because they have financial need.” The appeals process also often results in staff laying “a lot of unnecessary judgment” on students, she said, and may retraumatize students, who can be asked to prove hardships such as domestic violence.

“Ultimately, it’s just a very powerful message that says you don’t belong here,” Tangalakis said.

Two analyses place the number of students who don’t meet SAP requirements at more than 20 percent of aid recipients, with that share higher for community college students

After taking on a senior role at Glendale, she made changes. Tangalakis instructed her team to assess SAP using the most liberal interpretation of the federal regulations and to handle appeals generously, allowing consideration of anything a student thinks relevant and accepting a statement completed online or via phone (rather than demanding documentation from third parties as some schools do).

The result has been striking: According to Tangalakis, the share of students who lost aid for failing to make SAP fell from 9.3 percent in 2017 to 6.4 percent in 2021. And she found that students who failed SAP in 2021 went on to complete degrees and certificates at a significantly higher rate than those who’d failed in 2017. These gains were even larger for students from traditionally disadvantaged backgrounds. 

Other research confirms SAP’s disparate impact along racial lines: In 2021, for example, JBAY found that Black students, Native American students and foster youth who received a Pell Grant ran afoul of SAP provisions at more than twice the rate of white, Filipino and Asian students.

In theory, if students who “SAP-out” find another way to pay for college, they can requalify for aid if they improve academically. But for most students, that creates a Catch-22, Raucher said: They can’t re-enroll without financial aid, and they can’t get financial aid without re-enrolling. State aid that bypasses SAP status can springboard adults returning to college out of that Catch-22. But most don’t offer it.

“Ultimately, it’s just a very powerful message that says you don’t belong here.”

Christina Tangalakis, associate dean of financial aid at Glendale Community College in Southern California

In practice, this means that students who fall short of SAP standards are significantly more likely to drop out. In the 2016 study of one unnamed community college system, for example, the majority of those who failed SAP, approximately 60 percent, dropped out. For many students, “there is no plan B,” Tangalakis said, and SAP is “just a de facto end to their academic journey a lot of times.”

Even just receiving a SAP warning can produce that result: An analysis of data from Minnesota community colleges, for example, showed that only half of students who received a notice that they were in danger of failing to make SAP in the fall of 2013 tried to return that spring.

That, it turns out, is what happened to Clews. The message she initially received from Ventura was a warning, not notice that she was already ineligible. A financial aid deposit for what would have been her second semester showed up in her bank account, but by then she’d left the area to try to find reliable shelter and employment. Of course, when she didn’t show up for those classes, she officially failed SAP. (The money was taken out of her tax refund.)

Related: Is California saving higher education?

Years later, the pandemic hit and Clews found herself in an unusual position – with free time. Yes, she was home-schooling two kids, but with restaurants and stores closed, she couldn’t work. She said she filed an appeal letter but couldn’t receive aid while it was pending. Normally, that would have meant no school, but like millions of Americans that year, Clews received pandemic stimulus checks from the federal government.

After reenrolling with that money, her GPA shot up. Clews said, “I was doing really well, and I realized, ‘Oh, it wasn’t that I wasn’t smart enough, I just didn’t have the resources and the support that I needed to be successful.’ ”

That jibes with a small 2021 interview study that did not detect a difference in motivation between Pell-eligible students who were meeting SAP and those who weren’t. The study suggests that students who fail SAP requirements often do so because their life circumstances are different, not because they’re less “cut out” to succeed academically. Other research shows that students who SAP-out stop pursuing a degree more often than their peers with similarly low GPAs who aren’t subject to SAP.

“What SAP policies end up doing is targeting students who are coming in with the biggest existing barriers, and then doubling down,” said Raucher, whose organization helped develop the California SAP reform bill.

That legislation, which passed unanimously, requires that colleges use the least stringent definition of SAP allowed by the federal regulations for state financial aid, in effect dictating how all aid is administered. It also encourages colleges to better communicate the policy to students and mandates changes to the appeal system, including creating a review process for denied appeals, and prohibits institutions from disenrolling a student for nonpayment of tuition while an appeal is pending.

The federal legislation Booker, the Democratic senator, is expected to introduce would be similar to a bill he proposed in 2020, allowing a renewal of SAP eligibility when a student “stops out” for two years or more. The 2020 bill didn’t advance in Congress, but Booker may have a co-sponsor this time around, as talks with several Republican senators are in progress.

“The satisfactory academic progress standard is not without its flaws,” said Virginia Foxx, a Republican congresswoman from North Carolina who serves as chairwoman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. “Senator Booker’s bill isn’t perfect, but I am always willing to find common ground to improve policies and outcomes for students.”

In the meantime, organizations including JBAY and the national nonprofit Higher Learning Advocates have asked Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to encourage schools to make the appeals process more user-friendly, among other changes. Tanya Ang, managing director of Higher Learning Advocates, said reforming SAP has bipartisan support because eliminating “unnecessary hoops” for degree completion helps more people gain skills they can use in the workforce.  

In theory, stringent SAP requirements tell students where they stand and force them to improve. But the 2016 study didn’t find that SAP policies had much of an incentivizing effect, on average.

The message Clews received was the opposite: Don’t try. Because if at first you don’t succeed, there’s no chance to try, try again.

In 2022, she completed her classwork at Ventura and transferred to the University of California, Santa Cruz. Clews plans to become a teacher. “I’m thankful to be where I’m at,” she said, “but I definitely feel like it shouldn’t have been so hard to get back to school.”

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

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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.

This story about rural students and college 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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Choosing a college has always been an excruciating, time-consuming process for prospective students and their families. But it seems to be getting even more difficult.

These days, after prospective students have figured out how to pay, how close to home they want to be, which schools offer majors they’re interested in studying, and whether the sports teams are ones they’d be proud to cheer for, there are about a zillion other things to consider. Among them: Will there be other students like them in race, gender and sexuality or political orientation? Are there laws in the state that might affect their life and education? Will there be guest speakers or outspoken professors who are shouted down on campus or banned from speaking altogether? Are they going to feel comfortable and safe walking to the nearest grocery store for instant ramen and Red Bull during finals week?

Amid the flurry of questions, one thing is clear: The culture wars are starting to affect where students choose to go for college.

Until now, when planning for college, students and families have been left to do a zillion Google searches on their own, especially if they want to learn what factors influence the social climate of any given campus. Until now, there hasn’t been an easy, one-stop-shop way to assess where a student might feel welcome.

This week, The Hechinger Report launched the College Welcome Guide, an interactive tool that allows you to search by state or any college in the nation for factors such as the racial diversity of students and faculty, freedom of speech, whether the college has an LGBTQ+ resource center, local regulations on abortion access and whether the state has enacted any legislation that might affect the way certain topics are taught.

The College Welcome Guide can also tell you the percentage of students who get Pell Grants (federal aid for students from low-income families); graduation rates by race; whether a state offers in-state tuition to undocumented students; state-level policies on tuition benefits for student veterans, and other campus data.  

The idea behind putting these various elements together in one place was to make the increasingly long and daunting process of choosing a college a bit easier and less intimidating. We don’t purport to know what college is best for anyone, but we hope that with so much information in one place, people will be able to compare options and make the best choices. 

I was one of the Hechinger journalists who worked on this guide, and I’d like to tell you a little bit about the herculean lift by our higher education team that brought it to life.  

My colleagues Jon Marcus and Fazil Khan got the idea in June, while many of us were at the Education Writers Association’s national conference in Atlanta, Georgia.

When they came back with the proposal, many of us thought it was admirable but might be impossible. If it could be done, why hadn’t someone already done it?

We started by compiling a list of all the questions we’d like the then-hypothetical tool to be able to answer, and split up the data-scavenging duties among our staff. Most of what we set out to collect, we collected. (Not everything, though! More on that in an upcoming newsletter.) And, like everything we publish, it’s all been rigorously fact-checked.

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

Much of the data on student outcomes and diversity comes from the federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). For cultural climate and local policy data, we relied on the work of researchers and nonprofits. For example, the Mapping Advancement Project calculates an “equality score” for each state how welcoming or hostile it is to queer and transgender people. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression rates the state of free speech on college campuses with scores from “abysmal” to “exceptional,” based on student surveys. And we got information on state abortion laws from the Center for Reproductive Rights. (You can read more about our methodology here.) 

As the idea started to feel more like a reality, we began to argue over what to call it. We spent what felt like hours on Zoom debating whether it was a tool or an index or a tracker or a guide. It definitely would not be a ranking. We wanted to accurately describe it without being prescriptive or biased. While tedious, the back-and-forth helped us drill down even more specifically toward defining the tool’s purpose. 

We don’t purport to know what college is best for anyone, but we hope that with so much information in one place, people will be able to compare options and make the best choices. 

We had to go back to what was driving this project from the beginning. We wanted to help prospective college students answer the question: Will I feel welcome on that campus? 

The name “The College Welcome Guide” seems so obvious now, but even the word “welcome” was contested. As journalists, we do our best to remain neutral, and we worried that the word “welcome” might turn off prospective students and families who didn’t necessarily want a college that would be welcoming to everyone. 

Ultimately, we decided that every student, regardless of identity or political affiliation, wants to feel welcome on campus. What might make them feel welcome is different, but this tool measures a wide array of issues that might be important to students, regardless of what side of an issue they’re on.

For background, Jon Marcus’s story tells  more about what factors are influencing college applicants today, We hope his story, in combination with our College Welcome Guide, will be helpful to anyone who is thinking about enrolling – or re-enrolling – in college.

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

The post Reporter’s notebook: Why we created the College Welcome Guide appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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.

This story about debt but no degree was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

The post OPINION: Here’s why a costly college education should not be the only path to career success appeared first on The Hechinger Report.