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

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

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

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

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

Rachel Burns, a senior policy analyst at SHEEO. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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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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Rural Realities: Education, Workforce, and Progress

More rural residents are graduating from high school, but people in those communities remain less likely than their suburban and urban peers to continue their education. This five-part series from the Rural News Network, made possible with support from Ascendium, explores how institutions and students are meeting their educational needs and the demands of today’s rural workforce.

ISSAQUENA COUNTY — The kings and queens of the South Delta School District tossed candy and waved at their families as the mid-October parade wound through a small town several miles north of this rural county.

“There’s no place like homecoming,” read a sign on a colorful “Wizard of Oz”-themed float.

Homecoming in Issaquena County – the least populated county in Mississippi and one of the smallest in the country — is so popular that locals call it “South Delta University.”

But there is no college here and no public school. It’s a big reason why many of these kids will have no choice when they grow up but to move away.

There are few jobs for college graduates in this county blanketed in farm fields of soybeans, cotton and corn. No factories, no hospitals. The median household income of roughly $24,000 is a little more than half the statewide average.

A single statistic underscores all these factors. Out of the county’s 1,111 residents, just an estimated 42 people aged 25 and older have a bachelor’s degree — meaning Issaquena County’s population has one of the lowest rates of educational attainment in America.

That’s not because young people from this county aren’t going to college. Many families want them to get a degree — and then leave.

There’s little appetite or means in Issaquena to change this reality, a product of generations of decisions that favored powerful, largely white land interests over education and jobs. 

“All my grandkids, they’re going to college,” said Norah Fuller, a Black farm manager, as he watched the football game that Friday night. “I’m going to make sure they’re going to college. Do we want the kids to stay? No. What they gonna stay here for?”

Unless his grandchildren want to work on a farm, it’s hard to say. Outside of local government and a prison, the primary source of jobs are the farms that have existed since before the Civil War. But these days, the white families who own much of the land in a county that’s 63% Black are hiring less, and they have little incentive to make room for industries or jobs that could bring college-educated people back.

So the cycle continues: Year after year, more and more people move away, leaving behind fewer reasons for anyone else to stay.

“Around here, that’s really the only way you’re gonna make money,” said Amber Warren, a 29-year-old mom with an associate degree who after years of applying for jobs finally landed one as a caseworker aide last year making $11 an hour.

Now she’s searching for a better-paying job outside the Delta.

Issaquena County is flat, desolate and strikingly more rural than anywhere else in Mississippi.

Its story began in 1820 when it was ceded by the Choctaw, whose words for “deer river” form “Issaquena.” Wealthy cotton farmers from the East set up plantations. By the eve of the Civil War, a vast majority of the nearly 100 farm operators in Issaquena owned enslaved people, who made up 93% of the county’s population, the highest percentage in Mississippi.

Reconstruction did little to change this imbalance of power. Agriculture continued to dominate. Mayersville, the county seat, became something of a boom town, replete with hotels and saloons as the area grew to more than 10,000 people.

Soon politicians, businessmen and planters all over the Delta were vying for a railroad to come through their town, eager for alternatives to the crumbling, unpaved roads.

Issaquena’s landowners resisted. The county was circumvented.

Thus began Issaquena’s first major population decline. By 1930, the county had shrunk to less than 6,000 residents. Nearly all the farms were operated by sharecroppers.

Around this time, Stan Delaney’s grandfather crossed the river from Arkansas to Mayersville and bought land.Delaney grew up on it. He dropped out of the private Sharkey-Issaquena Academy in his senior year to farm.

Today, his wife and son help him work the family’s roughly 1,150 acres, which are worth about $1 million. One of the county’s 189 farm producers who are white, he rents the land from his mother.

Delaney wants to see more young people in Issaquena — especially so his 28-year-old son can meet someone. He knows industry could bring that. But he’d never dream of selling the land to make way for it. If his kids didn’t feel the same way, he’d set up a trust so it could never be sold.

“My dad worked so hard, and my grandfather worked so hard and sacrificed,” he said. “That’s your tradition, that’s just your Southern tradition.”

The Head Start, opened in 1964, is Issaquena’s sole educational institution. LaSonya Coleman, the center manager, oversees 41 students, just seven from Issaquena, she said.

Many residents, Black and white, aren’t troubled by Issaquena’s lack of public schools because the population is so small. In rural school districts across the country, consolidation is a common cost-saving measure.

But the reason why Issaquena has no public schools has little to do with population.

“All my grandkids, they’re going to college. I’m going to make sure they’re going to college. Do we want the kids to stay? No. What they gonna stay here for?”

Norah Fuller, a farm manager

In 1952, the U.S. Supreme Court took up five cases that signaled it was going to rule on school segregation. Fearing the end of separate-but-equal, white lawmakers in Mississippi in a special session passed a plan to “equalize” the white and Black schools, believing the ruling could be stopped if the state proved it actually funded separate-but-equal facilities equally.

Instead, the plan threw into relief how unequal school funding really was: Black students received just 13% of education funding around that time, despite making up 57% of the school-age population.

In Issaquena, which had no white schools, the plan resulted in the shuttering of the school district, making it the first county in the state to not have one of its own. A 1988 newspaper article notes Issaquena’s 13 public schools closed, too.

Yet Issaquena County has continued to pay taxes to support three public schools – more than $937,000 last year alone – that provide scant economic benefit to the county itself. South Delta is in Sharkey County, the Western Line School District in Washington County and Mississippi Delta Community College, 60 miles away in Moorhead.

“Having a school district does require college-educated people earning not great salaries, but still college-educated salaries, which helps in terms of property taxes, income taxes, all of the above,” said Toren Ballard, an analyst at Mississippi First, an education policy nonprofit.

If anyone wanted to bring more jobs to Issaquena County, it’d be tough to do it without talking to George Mahalitc first.

With more than 9,200 acres, Mahalitc is one of the county’s biggest landowners and, with about 30 workers, one of its major employers.

He believes Issaquena has no jobs for college graduates, and few for anyone else, because its people don’t want to work, a point of view not uncommon among farmers and landowners.

“What needs to happen is people need to get off their lazy tails and wanna go to work,” Mahalitc said.

Still, Mahalitc admits, “Us farmers, we like it like that. We don’t want the big population.”

Farmers in Issaquena have resisted efforts to develop the land that could bring other industries, even as mechanization means they’re hiring less. And because just 26 farm producers in Issaquena are Black, most of the people protesting development in Issaquena are white.

In 1990, they foiled plans for a $75 million hazardous waste incinerator. A pair of farmers fiercely opposed it, writing op-eds and sending mailers to every registered voter in the county, The vote was 413-315 against the plant, which would have created 79 permanent jobs and increased local tax revenues by an estimated $2.5 million.

“If it wasn’t for the farmers, we wouldn’t have anything around here. But the average young person right now, you got a few of them who will work on a farm, but most are gonna leave here.”

County Supervisor Stallard Williams

The county also voted to legalize gambling (the casino went to Vicksburg). Then came along the 376-bed Issaquena County Correctional Facility, which opened in 1997 and brought $1 million to the county tax rolls. Today it is the county’s largest employer. More than 50 people work there, but many are not from Issaquena. It sits across Highway 1 from Mayersville, bordered by Mahalitc’s land.

County Supervisor Stallard Williams, who represents Mayersville, would like to spend what money the county has on projects to develop Issaquena.

He wants to attract tourism by preserving the home of former Mayersville Mayor Unita Blackwell, the first Black woman to be elected mayor in the United States.

The Mississippi River, he says, is Mayersville’s “golden opportunity for economic development,” but the town doesn’t even have a port. He’d like to raise salaries at the prison, which pays a few dollars above minimum wage. Issaquena attracts hundreds of recreational hunters and fishers — but there’s no place for them to buy gas locally.

So many of his ideas require land to generate taxes and to build on. In recent years, some of the county’s land was bought by the state to create hunting grounds named after former governor Phil Bryant. And much of the land is controlled by farmers.

“You have to face reality,” Williams said. “If it wasn’t for the farmers, we wouldn’t have anything around here. But the average young person right now, you got a few of them who will work on a farm, but most are gonna leave here.”

This reporting is part of a collaboration with the Institute for Nonprofit News‘ Rural News Network, and the Cardinal News, KOSU, Mississippi Today, Shasta Scout and The Texas Tribune. Support from Ascendium made the project possible.

The post In this tiny and shrinking Mississippi county, getting a college degree means leaving home behind appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

LAS VEGAS — Among its many other nicknames, this landlocked desert city is often jokingly referred to by Hawaiians as their state’s ninth island.

It attracts about a quarter of a million visitors each year who fly from Honolulu. More than 40,000 have stayed permanently. There are hula-dancing and lei-making lessons and outposts of Hawaii’s iconic Honolulu Cookie Company and ABC convenience stores. The Hawaiian fast-food chain Zippy’s opened its first mainland location here in October.

Soon there will be another Hawaiian export in Las Vegas: the first branch campus of Hawai‘i Pacific University.

The university, whose undergraduate enrollment has been falling, is among several that are opening new campuses in cities with growing populations and high student demand.

They’re not the first to do this; Pittsburgh-based Carnegie Mellon University, for example, spun off a campus in Silicon Valley in 2002.

But with customers getting harder to find, more colleges and universities are going to where the students are: in fast-growing cities that don’t already have a big supply of higher education institutions, such as Phoenix, Austin and Las Vegas.

“The islands are only so big. By nature, our potential student base is going to be constrained,” said Jennifer Walsh, senior vice president and provost at Hawai‘i Pacific, whose full-time undergraduate enrollment fell by 25 percent in the five years through 2020-21 — the last period for which official figures are available.

Las Vegas, by comparison, “is for all practical purposes an education desert. Not just an actual desert, but an education desert,” Walsh said.

Fifty-seven international campuses run by universities worldwide have closed, including 30 American satellite campuses since 2009.

Market research shows that there will be high demand for the graduates of the doctoral programs in physical and occupational therapy that Hawai‘i Pacific is opening here on one floor of a building in an industrial park it will share with the administrative offices of a casino operator. A master’s program for physician assistants is also planned.

Many schools in other places where the number of prospective students is declining “are going through the same population analysis,” Walsh said. “It’s just part of what you need to do to stay relevant and viable in this very fast-evolving climate.”

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

Those include Creighton University in Omaha and Fairfield University in Connecticut, which have opened campuses in fast-growing Phoenix and Austin, respectively, to train much-needed healthcare workers.

Unlike Hawai‘i Pacific, neither Creighton nor Fairfield has been experiencing enrollment declines on their home campuses, federal figures show. But both are in regions where a drop in the number of traditional-age undergraduates is looming, according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, which tracks this.

Healthy enrollments “could change for a lot of us with that demographic cliff” ahead, said the Rev. Daniel Hendrickson, president of Creighton. “We’ve realized it can’t just be business as usual.”

The university’s $100 million, 195,000-square-foot campus in Phoenix, which opened in 2021, includes a four-year medical school and accelerated nursing, pharmacy and occupational and physical therapy programs. This year it also started training physician assistants. Enrollment in the fall was 719 toward a goal of about 1,000 by 2025, a university spokesman said.

Phoenix is the nation’s second fastest-growing city, according to the U.S. Census. But its number of healthcare workers has lagged. Arizona has a shortage of primary care physicians and needs more nurses.

“The lack of healthcare professionals was very notable, and there was a notable lack of healthcare education,” Hendrickson said.

Universities are paying more attention to markets like that, said Rob Schnieders, vice president for online strategy and innovation at Fairfield. “A lot of planning goes into this, and more sophisticated research,” Schnieders said of the expansion of the university’s Egan School of Nursing to a satellite campus in Austin that opened in May.

Related: Canada treats its adjunct professors better than the U.S. does – and it pays off for students

Central Texas needs 3,600 more nurses than it has, for example, a gap expected to grow to more than 7,000 by 2032, the Texas Department of State Health Services projects.

“There’s really exciting potential to reach new folks” in places like that, Schnieders said.

That’s one of several reasons universities are opening branch campuses, said Peter Stokes, managing director at the consulting firm Huron, which helps them do that.

But when it comes to the criteria used to make a final decision about where to launch a branch campus, “enrollment and net tuition growth are going to be among the primary measures” schools consider, Stokes said — especially given “the supply and demand mismatch that we’re going to be experiencing for the next decade or decade and a half,” as the number of students in some parts of the country declines.

These days, he said, “almost every strategic conversation we have with a college or university involves some discussion of the role of place in that institution’s identity and in the context of that institution’s future.”

Northeastern University in Boston has been particularly aggressive in opening campuses with programs not otherwise widely available, in cities, including Oakland, California, Portland, Maine, Charlotte, Miami, Seattle, Toronto and Vancouver.

“Our strategy has always been to listen to the market and to go to where the learners are,” said Mary Ludden, senior vice president for global network and strategic initiatives at Northeastern, which also absorbed struggling Mills College near Silicon Valley in a deal finalized last year.

In this case, there’s another motivation, said Northeastern’s president, Joseph Aoun: Many of these campuses are focusing on older-than-traditional-age students seeking to further their educations and advance in their careers.

“The demand and the need is going to be at the lifelong-learning level,” even as the supply of 18- to 22-year-olds declines, Aoun said.

“On one side you have a shrinking pool and on the other side you have an expanding pool and people need to serve the lifelong learners,” he said.

Ludden said other universities and colleges are calling Northeastern for advice about how to open campuses in new markets.

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

“I think you’re going to see more of this, because a single-campus model may not be the most viable of institutions into the future,” she said.

Several other factors are driving universities to open branch campuses.

One is labor shortages, particularly in rural areas, spurring appeals from local leaders that the schools come and train workers there. The Indiana University School of Social Work this month, for instance, announced the creation of a satellite program in Lafayette, 100 miles to its north, to produce badly needed social workers trained in mental health and addiction issues.

And as remote work has emptied office buildings, there’s commercial real estate available at lower-than-usual prices in in desirable markets.

“We’ve realized it can’t just be business as usual.”

The Rev. Daniel Hendrickson, president, Creighton University

The University of Southern California this year opened a $49 million, 60,000-square-foot campus in Washington, D.C., to teach undergraduate and graduate programs. Also in Washington, Johns Hopkins converted the former Newseum into a 10-story, $650 million capital campus. UCLA bought the 11-story Trust Building in Los Angeles to expand its presence downtown, part of a bid to increase enrollment.

There are other examples. Historically Black Paul Quinn College in Dallas is exploring opening a campus in California, which doesn’t have any undergraduate historically Black colleges or universities.

As UCLA’s expansion in downtown Los Angeles shows, branch campuses don’t need to be particularly far away from their main campuses. Sacramento State University is planning to open one on the east side of its own city, where a giant development promises to significantly increase the population.

Other primary reasons that institutions open satellite campuses include the availability of outside funding and more exposure for universities not widely known outside of their traditional areas of operation, according to a study conducted for the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission when it was trying to lure a research campus to Montgomery County, Maryland.

Creighton, for instance, has seen an increase in the number of students from Phoenix who are enrolling at its main campus in Omaha, according to the university.

Related: Often overwhelmed on big campuses, rural college students push for support

“There’s a recognition of the Creighton brand,” Hendrickson said.

But spinning off campuses can also be risky. Many U.S. universities that opened a spate of campuses abroad from 2000 to 2012 based partly on the promise of generous startup money from host countries in the Middle East and elsewhere have seen those schools struggle.

Eighty-four U.S. universities now operate campuses abroad, about a quarter of all international campuses globally, according to the Cross-Border Education Research Team, or C-BERT.

“Our strategy has always been to listen to the market and to go to where the learners are.”

Mary Ludden, senior vice president for global network and strategic initiatives, Northeastern University

Of those, 16 are in China, where geopolitics has chilled relations, and 10 are in the Middle East, where enthusiasm has ebbed. Fifty-seven international campuses run by universities worldwide have closed, including 30 American-run satellite campuses since 2004 for reasons including enrollment falling below expectations and sponsors pulling out. Yale has announced that it will end its collaboration in Singapore with the National University of Singapore in 2025.

The opening and operation of international satellite campuses “has flattened out from the burst of activity we saw 15 years ago,” said Kevin Kinser, department head of education policies studies at Pennsylvania State University and C-BERT’s co-founder. “The momentum for creating overseas campuses is not really what it was.”

Opening a new domestic campus may lack the complications of politics, currency exchanges and cultural divides, said Kinser. “But you still have some of the same challenges, which is that it’s a lot easier to manage a program within the same geographic space than across the country.”

For now, however, the trend continues. Hawai‘i Pacific is next considering opening a campus in the Pacific Northwest, Shaw said. With undergraduate enrollments expected to be stagnant, a spokesman said, the university’s growth strategy is focused on expanding its graduate programs at its main and other campuses.

This story on affirmative action history 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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CROSSVILLE, Tenn. — From the time she was in elementary school, Isabella Cross has dreamed of going to an Ivy League college to become an engineer.

But in her “little no-name town,” as she describes it, selective universities and colleges rarely came to recruit.

As a 17-year-old in rural Tennessee, and the daughter of a single parent, “I always kind of felt, like, I wouldn’t say necessarily trapped, but a lot of kids feel trapped,” Cross said. “And a lot of them never get out. They never get to explore and never get to see other things.”

Now Cross thinks she might get to a top-flight college after all.

Recruiters from some of the nation’s most selective universities — MIT, the University of Chicago, Yale — have, for the first time, come to her “little no-name town,” part of an effort to pay more attention to rural America, where students are less likely than their urban and suburban counterparts to go to college and, if they do, more likely to drop out.

“It kind of just felt like they heard us and they see us and that they know that there’s a need as well for small-town kids like me to have really big dreams,” Cross said.

Rural students graduate from high school at a higher rate (90 percent) than their counterparts in cities (82 percent) and suburbs (89 percent). But only 55 percent go directly to college.

The visit to Crossville was among the first by a new consortium called STARS, or Small Town and Rural Students College Network, prompted by a $20 million grant from a University of Chicago trustee who left a small town in Missouri to create a financial services company and who wants to see more people from backgrounds like his go to and through college.

It follows a long history of neglect of rural areas by many colleges and universities. Not even public research universities recruit in rural places, a study by scholars at UCLA and the University of Arizona found, disproportionately favoring higher-income public and private high schools in major metropolitan areas.

Even when they do find their way to these small towns, recruiters are up against increasing reluctance by students and their families to go to four-year institutions, and especially to campuses far away from home.

Sixteen colleges and universities in all — also including Brown, the California Institute of Technology, Columbia, Northwestern and the University of Southern California — have signed on to STARS and agreed to visit rural high schools in exchange for financial help with travel costs and staffing.

“They’ve never come and taken an interest in us. But the big thing right now is rural, and they’re finally seeing it, I guess,” said Karen Hicks, lead counselor at Crossville’s Stone Memorial High School, who has been an educator in the city for 36 years. “I love it in the sense that it gives our kids opportunities. I hate that they didn’t see it before.”

Related: Rural universities, already few and far between, are being stripped of majors

Rural communities can be hard to reach and often have only small numbers of prospective high school seniors, said Marjorie Betley, senior associate director of admissions at the University of Chicago, who helped organize STARS and serves as its executive director.

“Driving hours and hours on the road to meet with five students, that’s really hard,” said Betley.

But when that trustee, Byron Trott, asked in 2018 how many students at her university came from rural places, as he had, “we couldn’t even answer the question,” Betley said. After further inquiry, she said, “the numbers were not good.” Rural students comprised about 3 percent of enrollment at the time, which she said has since increased to 9 percent. Rural Americans comprise nearly 20 percent of the population, the Census Bureau reports.

Rural students graduate from high school at a higher rate (90 percent) than their counterparts in cities (82 percent) and suburbs (89 percent), according to the U.S. Department of Education. But only 55 percent go directly to college.

That’s a smaller proportion than suburban students. It’s also getting worse, down from 61 percent in 2016, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center says. In Tennessee, the share of all high school graduates who went directly to college last year, though up slightly, was still 10 percentage points lower than five years before.

So rarely do top colleges recruit in rural towns, said Bryan Sexton, a father who came with his son to the college fair in Crossville, that, “you know, when I saw some of the names, I was, like, what are these schools doing here?”

A city of 12,470 named for the spot where an old stagecoach road crossed a onetime cattle drivers’ route between Nashville and Knoxville, Crossville is in the middle of the rocky, heavily forested Cumberland Plateau in the Appalachian Mountains. And it’s a case study in how rural families aspire to, fret about and often decide to forgo college.

Outside the auditorium of the city’s Stone Memorial High School, Nae Evans Sims stopped and thought for a moment about the smallest community she’d ever visited as an admissions recruiter for Case Western Reserve University. “Oh, my gosh,” she said. “Probably this one.”

Alongside representatives from Yale, MIT, the University of Chicago and other institutions, Sims was arranging brochures on a table in anticipation of the kind of college recruiting fair that draws throngs of anxious students and their parents almost every night of the fall in more densely populated towns and cities.

In Crossville, 81 students showed up for the recruiting night, to which students from adjoining towns across the county were also invited.

“My friends in the cities, their kids start talking about college when they’re freshmen,” said Rob Harrison, a city councilmember who stopped by. But in Crossville, he said, “a lot of kids don’t even think about the opportunities out there. It’s just not part of the culture.”

Then again, no one from those elite universities had ever come to Crossville, school officials said, even though the graduation rate from Stone Memorial is 91 percent, school statistics show.

Related: The shuttering of a rural university reveals a surprising source of its financing

Of the students here who choose to continue their education, many simply stick around and go to the community college just across the street, where tuition is free. More than one in 10 enroll in a local trade school, the Tennessee College of Applied Technology, and 4 percent enlist in the military.

That makes Crossville fairly typical of rural places, where residents are less likely to get bachelor’s degrees. Only about 20 percent of people over 25 in rural America (and 15 percent in Crossville) have bachelor’s degrees or higher, compared to 40 percent nationally, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture — a gap the Federal Reserve reports has been widening steadily over the last 50 years.

That not only contributes to the worsening divide between urban and rural America; it limits economic opportunity in rural places.

“Whenever a student graduates from high school on a path to create career success, communities benefit from strong workforces and from economic development,” said Noa Meyer, president of rootED Alliance, another STARS partner, which puts college and career advisors in rural high schools. “It’s essential for rural communities to have a skilled and invested workforce. Local businesses need skilled workers.”

Related: A big reason rural students never go to college: Colleges don’t recruit them

But the path to that goal is narrowing. At least a dozen private, nonprofit colleges in rural areas or that serve rural students have closed or announced their closings in the last three years. Public universities in rural parts of Kansas, Arkansas and West Virginia are cutting dozens of majors. Others are merging, including in Pennsylvania and Vermont. Spending on higher education fell in 16 of the 20 most rural states between 2008 and 2018, when adjusted for inflation, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

About 13 million people now live in higher education “deserts,” mostly in the Midwest and Great Plains, where the nearest university is beyond a reasonable commute away, the American Council on Education estimates.

“There is a significant untapped talent pool in our rural communities, yet rural students often lack access to the resources needed to help set them up for their education, careers and economic stability,” said Trott, founder, chairman and co-CEO of BDT & MSD Partners.

Also as in Crossville, rural students who do go to college generally prefer to stay close to home, research shows.

“Even the ones that have the higher scores, that can survive at some of the more prestigious colleges, they like it here, and they don’t necessarily want to leave,” said Laura Kidwell, another Stone Memorial school counselor. “They want to be within driving distance from home and their family and friends and relatives.”

Aaron Conley is a senior at the high school. He’s deciding between learning heating, ventilation and air conditioning to start his own HVAC business or going to college to study physical therapy or nursing — though both of those fields require “a lot of college. It’s something that I just don’t know if I want to do for a long period of time like that.”

If he does go to college, Conley said, he’d opt for Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville, 30 minutes away, so “I can come back and see my family whenever I want.”

Many parents here don’t want their kids to move away, either. Some are concerned that university campuses and faculty in far-flung places are too liberal and not religious enough, Hicks, the school counselor, said. In the surrounding Cumberland County, nearly four out of five voters in the 2020 presidential election cast their ballots for Donald Trump and 71 percent of Tennessee residents consider religion very important to their lives, according to the Pew Research Center, compared to the national average of 53 percent.

“Some of the things that you hear in the news and stuff that happens at different colleges is scary for a conservative family,” Hicks said. Parents think, “ ‘I have control of you now, and I know your environment, and to send you out to that big world is scary.’ ”

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

Amy Beth Strong would prefer that her daughter, Ellie Beth, stick around for at least a little while, and maybe start at the local community college after she graduates from Stone Memorial next spring.

“I’m not trying to hold on to them, and I want them to do what they want to do, but I would rather they have a little bit more life experience under their belt,” Strong said, instead of “throwing them out in the middle of the world and saying, ‘Okay, there you go, you’re 18, you’re done. So have at it.’ ”

Some rural parents also worry that their children, if they go far away for college, won’t come back, Hicks said.

Even Harrison conceded that they may be right. “We raise a lot of good kids, and they go off and there’s not a lot to come back to” in a city ringed by soybean, corn and cotton farms and whose main industries include the manufacturing of tile, porcelain, automotive parts and truck trailers.

Some Crossville parents are encouraging their reluctant children to go on to further education, however.

Tina Carr started college, stopping now and then to earn the money she needed to pay for it. But she never graduated.

Only 20 percent of people over 25 in rural places nationwide has a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 40 percent nationally.

“I’ve always regretted not being able to finish,” Carr said, still in her scrubs after commuting home from her job in Knoxville as the front-desk coordinator at a surgeon’s office. “I just see where people get stuck in, it’s a bad word to say, but ‘dead-end’ jobs without a college degree.” And while she likes what she does, she said, “I’ve seen a lot of jobs posted throughout the years that I think I could do, but I can’t because I don’t have that degree.”

That’s why Carr is pushing her daughter, Kira, to continue her education after high school. “I don’t want her down the line to eventually regret that she didn’t go to college” too, she said.

Another major reason fewer rural high school students go to college is the cost. Median earnings in rural areas are nearly one-sixth lower than incomes elsewhere, according to the USDA. In Crossville, the median household income is $40,708, compared to the national median of $74,580. More than 20 percent of the population lives in poverty; 40 percent of the 1,000 students at the high school are considered economically disadvantaged.

Despite their higher graduation rates, rural students also often feel that they don’t belong at top colleges. That, along with homesickness and the cost, is among the reasons those who do go are more likely to drop out than their urban and suburban classmates.

Related: Number of rural students planning on going to college plummets

“We do have rural students come in who have that imposter syndrome, with classmates who took 20 [Advanced Placement courses] and their high school didn’t have any,” said Betley, at the University of Chicago.

At the Stone Memorial recruiting fair, the longest lines were to talk to representatives from the nearby University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Middle Tennessee State University and Tennessee Tech. The shortest was for MIT.

“That’s typically not the MIT experience,” said Carlos Vega, the recruiter from that university. “I go somewhere and I have auditoriums full of students.” In Tennessee, however, two other high schools had told him not to bother coming for scheduled visits, he said, because they didn’t have any students who were interested — a first in his career.

Ellie Beth Strong — she goes by E.B., a nickname given to her by her soccer coach — wonders how comfortable she’d feel at a big or far-off university. Also a senior at Stone Memorial, she has applied to two Christian colleges and the University of Tennessee.

After growing up in a small town, “I don’t want to go to a giant university where I’m just another person that you pass by when you’re going to class,” she said. “I don’t want to have 300 people in my class and have the professor just lecture the whole time. I want to actually get to sit down and talk to the people and get to know everybody.”

Rural students often face cultural differences at universities that mostly enroll people from other backgrounds, said Corinne Smith, an associate director of admissions at Yale who reads the applications of many students from rural places.

“So many students when they get to these campuses, especially when they’re more urban campuses, they have shared challenges,” Smith said.

Related: How to raise rural enrollment in higher education? Go local

Smith is also the advisor to the Rural Student Alliance at Yale, formed five years ago to help rural students feel more of a sense of belonging. When the group was started, she suggested social activities such as apple-picking. But the students instead wanted help getting used to the unaccustomed urban traffic noise outside their dorms or off-campus apartments. “Then they said, ‘Can someone take us on a tour of New Haven so I can see where things are — my town has one stoplight.’ ”

Rural perspectives like these are essential to the diversity of campuses, said Smith, who is working on a dissertation about rural college-going.

“They’ve never come and taken an interest in us. But the big thing right now is rural, and they’re finally seeing it, I guess. I love it in the sense that it gives our kids opportunities. I hate that they didn’t see it before.”

Karen Hicks, lead counselor, Stone Memorial High School

“If you say you want to have a university with a wonderful political science department and then 100 percent of the students in that political science seminar are from urban and suburban towns with the same religious and political affiliation, then are you really having the discussions that we say our institutions are meant to be having?” she asked.

Isabella Cross, the aspiring engineer, has no doubt about what she could contribute to a campus: a small-town sense of community.

“We see you in Walmart? We’re going to stop and talk to you for 45 minutes. We’re going to ask how the kids are. We’re going to ask how your mom is doing. We’re going to ask about all of the things that, you know, sometimes you just don’t get in, like, New York City or whatever larger-scale city that you want to put in there,” she said. “I just think that that’s something that you can bring to a school where it’s definitely a cutthroat competition to get into.”

This story about rural college-going was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Additional reporting by Lauren Migaki. Sign up for our higher education newsletter and try out our College Welcome Guide.

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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.

The post Will the Rodriguez family’s college dreams survive the end of affirmative action? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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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