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.

The post A campaign to prod high school students into college tries a new tack: Making it simple appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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.

The post MIT, Yale and other elite colleges are finally reaching out to rural students 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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PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Friday mornings on a university campus are usually quiet times. Savvy students plan their schedules to avoid Friday classes, getting a head start on their weekends.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kelli Armstrong, president, Salve Regina College

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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MONTREAL — Raad Jassim really likes his job.

As an adjunct faculty member at a Canadian university, Jassim has four teaching assistants to help him grade assignments and answer questions. He makes the equivalent of about $7,000 per course, per term. He has a multiyear contract and can typically pick the subjects that he teaches. He has an office, access to professional training and government-provided health insurance.

All of these things, he said, help him focus on the reason that he’s there: his students.

And few of these benefits, or that kind of pay, are available to his counterparts south of the border, in the United States.

The comparatively poor working situation of American adjuncts “is a sad story,” said Jassim, who teaches corporate finance, real estate investment and managerial and engineering economics at McGill University. “It breaks my heart.”

Now there’s new scrutiny of how adjuncts’ pay and benefits affect not only them but also their students, who often go into debt to cover rising tuition.

Some 44 percent of American university and college faculty are part-time, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

U.S. adjuncts worry about their ability to engage with students and how well their students are learning, according to a new study that compares Canadian adjuncts with what it calls the “woefully under-supported and poorly compensated” American adjuncts.

“You’re almost like a starving artist.”

Antwan Daniels, an adjunct in Kansas City

“The people we’re relying on to teach our youth are dedicated and feel meaning in their jobs but are being relied upon without making a living wage,” said Candace Sue, executive director of Chegg’s Center for Digital Learning, a spin-off of the textbook and study help company that produces resources about technology and education and commissioned the study.

“It’s not fair to them — we know that. But it’s also not fair to the students who are relying on them to be focused on the classroom and to keep them going.”

The research is among the latest to document the woes of what has grown into an army of 792,000 U.S. university part-time and contingent faculty who work part time or on fixed contracts.

Related: What’s in a word? A way to help impatient college students better connect to jobs

American adjuncts earn a median of $3,700 per course, an amount that has declined significantly when adjusted for inflation, the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP, says. The figure comes from 900 universities and colleges that provide employment data for about 370,000 full-time and 90,000 part-time faculty.

More than one in four adjuncts earn below the federal poverty level for a family of four, another new report, from the American Federation of Teachers, or AFT, finds. More than three-quarters are guaranteed employment for only one term or semester at a time. That information is based on a survey distributed to adjuncts who are AFT members and, through social media, to adjuncts who are not members of the union; 1,043 responded. The AFT represents 85,000 adjuncts who have unionized.

“If you’re cobbling together jobs at different universities to make ends meet, you don’t have the time to do the work you want to with your students,” said AFT President Randi Weingarten.

Fifty-seven percent of adjunct faculty, and almost all of the adjuncts at community colleges, get no medical benefits, the AAUP says. About one in five rely on Medicare or Medicaid, according to the AFT.

“You’re almost like a starving artist,” said Antwan Daniels, an adjunct in Kansas City and father of four who teaches chemistry at three different universities — one in person and two online — while also working on a doctorate in higher education administration.

Though much of the conversation around these salaries and benefits has centered on the toll it takes on adjunct faculty members themselves, researchers have turned to documenting how it is affecting students.

Forty-eight percent of university and college faculty are adjuncts, while fewer than a quarter are now full time and tenured.

“Like with everything, if a contingent faculty [member] doesn’t have security themselves, it’s really hard to do that million and one things to help their students,” said Josh Kim, a sociologist at Dartmouth and a senior fellow at the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship at Georgetown University, who began his own career as an adjunct.

More than a third of adjuncts in the Center for Digital Learning study, which was conducted by Hanover Research, said low pay and lack of benefits or job security affected their ability to engage with students and the learning students take with them from class.

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

Adjunct faculty are more likely than faculty in general to say they don’t have enough time to prepare their courses and don’t receive enough administrative support, according to a breakdown of a September faculty survey provided to The Hechinger Report by the educational publishing and technology company Cengage.

“Unless the school has a well-rounded support system for the adjunct faculty, you’re serving the students at probably 60 percent of your capacity,” Daniels said. “You’re having a rushed conversation. You’re trying to distill it down to, ‘What do you need at this moment?’ ” Students, he said, “are not served in the way they should be.”

Fewer than half of adjuncts say they’ve received the training they need to help students in crisis, the AFT survey found.

More than one in four adjuncts earn below the federal poverty level for a family of four. Fifty-seven percent get no medical benefits.

“We have a population of people that are being depended on to educate students that don’t have all the tools in their toolkit to do it in the way that we as a society expect them to be supported to do their jobs,” Sue said.

These new studies follow earlier findings by the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success showing that increased reliance on part-time and non-tenure track faculty resulted in higher dropout rates, lower grade-point averages and graduation rates and a reduced likelihood that community college students will continue on to four-year institutions for bachelor’s degrees, among other things.

Related: Some universities’ response to budget woes: Making faculty teach more courses

“There are now two decades of research saying that having more exposure to part-time faculty who lack the most support leads to more dropouts, lower graduation rates, lower GPAs and difficulty finding a major,” said Adrianna Kezar, director of the Delphi Project and the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California, where it’s housed.

Last-minute hiring and lack of job security are among the biggest problems, Kezar said. But “it’s overwhelming and cumulative, the number of bad working conditions, so you can’t totally distill out one or two. There are so many of these things that add up.”

What’s bringing new attention to this issue, she said, is that “institutions are being held accountable more” for their success rates, “so they’re more worried about these connections.”

“There are now two decades of research saying that having more exposure to part-time faculty who lack the most support leads to more dropouts, lower graduation rates, lower GPAs and difficulty finding a major.”

Adrianna Kezar, director, Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success

Things appear brighter in Canada, the Center for Digital Learning study found in its comparison. Canadian adjuncts were almost three times less likely to be concerned about low salaries, and 87 percent of them get benefits.

“It does show that alternatives are available,” the report concluded.

While policies like that require financial investments by universities and colleges, Weingarten said it’s mostly a matter of these institutions’ priorities.

Instructional spending by universities, per student, goes down as the proportion of the faculty who are adjuncts goes up, a researcher from the Center for the Study of Academic Labor at Colorado State University found.

People think the cost of higher education is increasing “because there are more and more resources that are going into teaching and learning and it’s completely the opposite,” Weingarten said. “Where is the rising tuition going? Where’s the money going?”

Life as a Canadian adjunct isn’t perfect, said Jay Lister, who teaches education at McGill. But “I have guaranteed employment,” he said. “Even days when I’m just normal stressed, I worry about my students. I can’t fathom what I would do without the job security.”

At a coffee shop near the campus, wearing a union T-shirt, an Expos cap and a long beard tied with elastics, Lister said he also has enough to live on — though he said that might be different if he had kids.

Related: With tenure under attack, professors join forces with a powerful teachers’ union

Heather McPherson, a contingent lecturer at McGill, said her daughter — a doctoral candidate in anthropology at a university in California — has none of the relative job security she herself enjoys.

“She’s complained a lot,” McPherson said, outside the Faculty of Education Building on the slope of Mount Royal, which overlooks the city. “I don’t think her students suffer, but her stress level does.”

Adjuncts at McGill even get university email addresses for up to nine semesters after they teach a course, so students can reach out for recommendations or advice, said Jassim, who is president of the university’s Course Lecturers & Instructors Union.

Back in the United States, Kim likened the plight of adjuncts to those of autoworkers and Hollywood writers and actors, who have or are now striking for improved conditions.

“We have this system where the people who actually do the work are getting the least benefits and the least security. I think this is all related,” he said.

“What an enormous resource,” Kim said. “We have these motivated people. Just a little more security and a little more recognition and a little more pay would make such a difference.”

This story about adjunct professors 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.

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When Angel Amankwaah traveled from Denver to North Carolina Central University for incoming student orientation this summer, she decided she had made the right choice.

She had fun learning the chants that fans perform at football games. But she also saw that “there are students who look like me, and professors who look like me” at the historically Black university, said Amankwaah, 18, who is Black. “I knew that I was in a safe space.”

This has now become an important consideration for college-bound students from all backgrounds and beliefs.

Students have long picked schools based on their academic reputations and social life. But with campuses in the crosshairs of the culture wars, many students are now also taking stock of attacks on diversity, course content, and speech and speakers from both ends of the political spectrum. They’re monitoring hate crimes, anti-LGBTQ legislation, state abortion laws and whether students like them —Black, rural, military veterans, LGBTQ or from other backgrounds — are represented and supported on campus.

“There’s no question that what’s happening at the state level is directly affecting these students,” said Alyse Levine, founder and CEO of Premium Prep, a private college admissions consulting firm in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. When they look at colleges in various states now, she said, “There are students who are asking, ‘Am I really wanted here?’ ”

For some students on both sides of the political divide, the answer is no. In the chaotic new world of American colleges and universities, many say they feel unwelcome at certain schools, while others are prepared to shut down speakers and report faculty with whose opinions they disagree.

It’s too early to know how much this trend will affect where and whether prospective students end up going to college, since publicly available enrollment data lags real time. But there are early clues that it’s having a significant impact.

One in four prospective students has already ruled out a college or university for consideration because of the political climate in its state, according to a survey by the higher education consulting firm Art & Science Group.

Related: Many flagship universities don’t reflect their state’s Black or Latino high school graduates

Among students who describe themselves as liberal, the most common reason to rule out colleges and universities in a particular state, that survey found, is because it’s “too Republican” or has what they consider lax gun regulations, anti-LGBTQ legislation, restrictive abortion laws and a lack of concern about racism. Students who describe themselves as conservative are rejecting states they believe to be “too Democrat” and that have liberal abortion and gay-rights laws.

With so much attention focused on these issues, The Hechinger Report has created a first-of-its-kind College Welcome Guide showing state laws and institutional policies that affect college and university students, from bans on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and “critical race theory” to rules about whether student IDs are accepted as proof of residency for voting purposes.

The interactive guide also lists, for every four-year institution in the country, such things as racial and gender diversity among students and faculty, the number of student veterans enrolled, free-speech rankings, the incidence of on-campus race-motivated hate crimes and if the university or college serves many students from rural places.

Sixty percent of prospective students of all backgrounds say new state restrictions on abortion would at least somewhat influence where they choose to go to college, a separate poll by Gallup and the Lumina Foundation found. Of these, eight in 10 say they would prefer to go to a state with greater access to reproductive health services. (Lumina is among the funders of The Hechinger Report.)

“We have many young women who will not look at certain states,” said Levine. One of her own clients backed out of going to a university in St. Louis after Missouri banned almost all abortions in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, she said.

Institutions in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Texas are the most likely to be knocked off the lists of liberal students, according to the Art & Science Group survey, while conservative students avoid California and New York.

One in four prospective students has already ruled out a college or university for consideration because of the political climate in its state.

One in eight high school students in Florida say they won’t go to a public university in their own state because of its education policies, a separate poll, by the college ranking and information website Intelligent.com, found.

With 494 anti-LGBTQ laws proposed or adopted this year, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, prospective students who are LGBTQ and have experienced significant harassment because of it are nearly twice as likely to say they don’t plan to go to college at all than students who experienced lower levels of harassment, according to a survey by GLSEN, formerly the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.

“You are attacking kids who are already vulnerable,” said Javier Gomez, an LGBTQ student in his first year at Miami Dade College. “And it’s not just queer students. So many young people are fed up.”

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

It’s not yet evident whether the new laws are affecting where LGBTQ young people are choosing to go to college, said Casey Pick, director of law and policy at The Trevor Project, which supports LGBTQ young people in crisis. But LGBTQ adults are moving away from states passing anti-LGBTQ laws, she said. And “if adult employees are taking this into account when they decide where they want to live, you can bet that college students are making the same decisions.”

Meanwhile, in an era of pushback against diversity, equity and inclusion policies in many states, and against affirmative action nationwide, Amankwaah is one of a growing number of Black students choosing what they see as the relative security of an HBCU. Enrollment at HBCUs increased by around 3 percent in 2021, the last year for which the figure is available, while the number of students at other universities and colleges fell.

“The real attack here is on the feeling of belonging,” said Jeremy Young, who directs the Freedom to Learn program at PEN America, which tracks laws that restrict college and university diversity efforts and teaching about race. “What it really does is hoist a flag to say to the most marginalized students, ‘We don’t want you here.’ ”

More than 40 percent of university and college administrators say the Supreme Court ruling curbing the use of affirmative action in admissions will affect diversity on their campuses, a Princeton Review poll found as the school year was beginning.

Sixty percent of prospective students of all backgrounds say new state restrictions on abortion would at least somewhat influence where they choose to go to college.

College students of all races and political persuasions report feeling uncomfortable on campuses that have become political battlegrounds. Those on the left are bristling at new laws blocking programs in diversity, equity and inclusion and the teaching of certain perspectives about race; on the right, at conservative speakers being shouted down or canceled, unpopular comments being called out in class and what they see as an embrace of values different from what they learned at home.

One Michigan father said he supported his son’s decision to skip college. Other parents, he said, are discouraging their kids from going, citing “binge-drinking, hookup culture, secular teachings, a lopsided leftist faculty mixed with anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-free speech and a diversity, equity and inclusion emphasis” that he said is at odds with a focus on merit. The father asked that his name not be used so that his comments didn’t reflect on his daughter, who attends a public university.

More than one in 10 students at four-year universities now say they feel as if they downright don’t belong on their campus, and another two in 10 neither agree nor strongly agree that they belong, another Lumina and Gallup survey found. It found that those who answer in these ways are more likely to frequently experience stress and more likely to drop out. One in four Hispanic students report frequently or occasionally feeling unsafe or experiencing disrespect, discrimination or harassment.

Related: American confidence in higher education hits a new low, yet most still see value in a college degree

Military veterans who use their G.I. Bill benefits to return to school say one of their most significant barriers is a feeling that they won’t be welcome, a survey by the D’Aniello Institute for Veterans and Military Families at Syracuse University found. Nearly two-thirds say that faculty and administrators don’t understand the challenges they face, and 70 percent say the same thing about their non-veteran classmates.

Colleges should be “safe and affirming spaces,” said Pick, of the Trevor Project — not places of isolation and alienation.

Yet a significant number of students say they don’t feel comfortable sharing their views in class, according to another survey, conducted by College Pulse for the right-leaning Sheila and Robert Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth at North Dakota State University. Of those, 72 percent say they worry their opinions would be considered unacceptable by classmates and 45 percent, by their professors. Conservative students are less likely than their liberal classmates to believe that all points of view are welcome and less willing to share theirs.

“I do hear people saying things like, ‘I’m worried about what kind of a college or university I can send my kids to and whether they’ll be free to be themselves and to express themselves.’ ”

Steve Maguire, campus freedom fellow, American Council of Trustees and Alumni

“Is that really an intellectually diverse environment?” asked Sean Stevens, director of polling and analytics at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, which has launched a campus free-speech ranking based on students’ perceptions of comfort expressing ideas, tolerance for speakers and other measures.

“Anecdotally and from personal experience, there’s certainly a pocket of students who are weighing these factors in terms of where to go to college,” Stevens said.

Eighty-one percent of liberal students and 53 percent of conservative ones say they support reporting faculty who make comments that they find offensive, the same survey found. It used sample comments such as, “There is no evidence of anti-Black bias in police shootings,” “Requiring vaccination for COVID is an assault on individual freedom” and “Biological sex is a scientific fact.”

A professor at Texas A&M University was put under investigation when a student accused her of criticizing the state’s lieutenant governor during a lecture, though she was ultimately exonerated. An anthropology lecturer at the University of Chicago who taught an undergraduate course called “The Problem of Whiteness” said she was deluged with hateful messages when a conservative student posted her photo and email address on social media.

More than half of all freshmen say that colleges have the right to ban extreme speakers, according to an annual survey by an institute at UCLA; the College Pulse poll says that sentiment is held by twice the proportion of liberal students as conservative ones.

Related: How higher education lost its shine

An appearance by a conservative legal scholar who spoke at Washington College in Maryland last month was disrupted by students because of his positions about LGBTQ issues and abortion. The subject: free speech on campus.

A group of Stanford students in March disrupted an on-campus speech by a federal judge whose judicial record they said was anti-LGBTQ. When he asked for an administrator to intervene, an associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion confronted him and asked: “Is it worth the pain that this causes and the division that this causes?” The associate dean was put on leave and later resigned.

“Today it is a sad fact that the greatest threat to free speech comes from within the academy,” pronounced the right-leaning American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which is pushing colleges to sign on to its Campus Freedom Initiative that encourages teaching students about free expression during freshman orientation and disciplining people who disrupt speakers or events, among other measures.

Seventy-two percent of students say they worry their opinions would be considered unacceptable by their classmates and 45 percent that their comments would be considered unacceptable by their professors.

“I have to imagine that universities that have a bad track record on freedom of expression or academic freedom, that it will affect their reputations,” said Steven Maguire, the organization’s campus freedom fellow. “I do hear people saying things like, ‘I’m worried about what kind of a college or university I can send my kids to and whether they’ll be free to be themselves and to express themselves.’ ”

Some colleges are now actively recruiting students on the basis of these kinds of concerns. Colorado College in September created a program to ease the process for students who want to transfer away from institutions in states that have banned diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives; Hampshire College in Massachusetts has offered admission to any student from New College in Florida, subject of what critics have described as a conservative takeover. Thirty-five have so far accepted the invitation.

Though many conservative critics of colleges and universities say faculty are indoctrinating students with liberal opinions, incoming freshmen tend to hold left-leaning views before they ever set foot in a classroom, according to that UCLA survey.

If everyone is thinking the same way or in similar ways about all topics, “is that really an intellectually diverse environment?”

Sean Stevens, director of polling and analytics, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

Fewer than one in five consider themselves conservative. Three-quarters say abortion should be legal and favor stricter gun control laws, 68 percent say wealthy people should pay more taxes than they do now and 86 percent that climate change should be a federal priority and that there should be a clear path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

Prospective students say they are watching as new laws are passed and controversies erupt on campuses, and actively looking into not just the quality of food and available majors at the colleges they might attend, but state politics.

“Once I decided I was going to North Carolina Central, I looked up whether North Carolina was a red state or a blue state,” Amankwaah said. (North Carolina has a Democrat as governor but Republicans control both chambers of the legislature and hold a veto-proof supermajority in the state Senate.)

Florida’s anti-LGBTQ laws prompted Javier Gomez to leave his native state and move to New York to go to fashion school. But then he came back, transferring to Miami Dade.

“People ask me, ‘Why the hell are you back in Florida?’ ” said Gomez. “The reason I came back was that there was this innate calling in me that you have to stick around and fight for the queer and trans kids here. It’s overwhelming at times. It can be very mentally depleting. But I wanted to stay and continue the fight and build community against hatred.”

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

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To create our College Welcome Guide we relied on more than a dozen data sources. If you haven’t seen our tool, you can find it here. Read on to learn more about where the information comes from.

Campus-level data

All of the data other than what is shown on the maps or otherwise noted comes from IPEDS, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. IPEDS data is reported directly by colleges to the U.S. Department of Education. Our dataset includes all two- and four-year colleges.

Figures for total enrollment and enrollment by race/ethnicity and gender show the 12-month unduplicated undergraduate student numbers in 2021-22, the latest year for which the information is available. When 12-month enrollment was unavailable, as was the case for enrollment by age and attendance status (part- or full-time), data from the fall 2021 semester has been used. Pell Grant enrollment data is from 2020-21.

Institutional affiliation indicates whether a private, nonprofit institution is associated with a religious group or denomination.

Graduation rates were calculated using the most recent five years of data. In the case of institutions for which those five full years were not available, the graduation rate was calculated from the available years. This figure represents the percentage of students who complete a bachelor’s degree within six years or an associate degree within three years.

The proportion of students with disabilities represents the percentage of undergraduates in the fall who formally registered with their institutions’ offices of disability services.

Under the IPEDS definition, a point of contact for veterans refers to whether a school has dedicated support services for veterans, military service members and their families. An institution is shown as having services for student veterans if it offers at least one of the following: the Yellow Ribbon Program, academic credit for military training or a recognized student veteran organization; or if it is a member of the Department of Defense Voluntary Education Partnership Memorandum of Understanding. The number of students receiving Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits and tuition assistance includes spouses and dependents. Only benefits awarded through or certified by the institution are shown.

Hate crimes are reported by institutions to the U.S. Department of Education and are defined as crimes for which there is evidence “that the victim was intentionally selected because of the perpetrator’s bias against the victim.” The data, which was downloaded from the department’s Campus Safety and Security Data Analysis Cutting Tool, includes hate crimes committed in any building owned or controlled by an institution or student organization or on any public property within or adjacent to a campus, such as streets, sidewalks and parking facilities.

Data about first-generation students came from the Department of Education’s College Scorecard, which gets it from the National Student Loan Data System. Under the federal definition, students are considered first generation if they do not have a parent who graduated with a four-year degree. First-generation status is self reported by the student.

Data about whether or not there is an LGBTQ+ student resource center on a campus comes from the Consortium of Higher Education LGBT Resource Professionals.

In addition to indicating which institutions are designated as historically Black, Hispanic-serving or affiliated with a religion, we used data from the MSI Data Project to show colleges and universities that have Black, Hispanic, Asian-American and Indigenous enrollments that exceed the proportion of the general population for those categories. We also used data from the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges to indicate which institutions are considered rural-serving, meaning they’re in rural places or serve students from those places.

State-level data

Information about whether a state allows undocumented immigrants residing in that state to pay in-state tuition comes from the Higher Ed Immigration Portal.

Veterans’ tuition status was determined on a state-by-state basis by a review of policies of public higher education institutions, as well as state higher education and veterans’ agencies.

States that restrict the teaching of critical race theory are tracked by PEN America. Legislatures that have constrained or banned the use of diversity, equity and inclusion programs were identified through legislative tracking services and news reports. Some states that have not yet limited or banned DEI have ordered that public universities disclose how much they spend on those programs. We included this measure because it is a step that has historically been a precursor for legislatures to cut public institutions’ budgets by those amounts.

Anti-LGBTQ+ laws affecting college students are monitored by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Trans Legislation Tracker. Anti-trans laws are those passed since 2022 and include legislation restricting trans athletes or medical procedures for trans people including those of college age.

Information on state laws allowing or restricting the use of student IDs to vote comes from the Voting Rights Lab.

LGBTQ+ Profile scores produced by the Movement Advancement Project are based on measures including the proportion of adults and of workers who are LGBTQ+ and a state’s policies and laws around LGBTQ+ issues.

Data from the Center for Reproductive Rights has been used to show abortion laws by state.

Download the data here.

This College Welcome Guide was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post How we made our College Welcome Guide appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Hear the radio version of this story, from Vermont Public.

COLCHESTER, Vt. — Mohamud Diini’s office is bare but for a single plant and posters of the Boston Celtics and the college in nearby Burlington from which he graduated in the spring with a degree in business administration and a minor in accounting.

It’s not just because he’s had this job for only a few months that the space is otherwise so empty. To Diini, it’s surprising that he’s here at all.

“I did not want to stay in Vermont,” said the son of Somali immigrants who was brought to New England as a child and never got used to the cold winters.

Diini planned to bolt for somewhere warmer after he graduated from Champlain College, such as Atlanta or Charlotte, North Carolina. But there was one thing in Vermont that pulled him back: a new program that is paying him $2,500 a year toward the $20,000 of student loans he owes as long as he stays and works in the state for at least two years.

Even $2,500 a year “is better than zero,” he said, which is what he got when the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness plan on which he’d counted was blocked in June by the Supreme Court.

“I was, like, hey, why not stay” in Vermont? said Diini, 23, who is working as a staff accountant for the local branch of a national insurance brokerage. “Maybe the two years can turn into five years” or even “turn into forever.”

That’s exactly what lawmakers behind the student loan repayment program hope. So do their counterparts in other states with aging populations and worker shortages, who are dangling incentives of as much as $100,000 toward paying off the student loan debt of college graduates if they agree to stay.

Related: In Japan, plummeting university enrollment forecasts what’s ahead for the U.S.

“Generally, there is a massive shortage of talent, particularly in certain skilled talent areas,” said Jamie Kohn, senior research director for the human resources practice of the Gartner consulting firm, who said competition for college graduates is fierce. “Student loan repayment may be a way for states to mitigate some of the loss of wage growth that people are feeling” so they not only stay, but can afford to start families and buy houses.

“It definitely will help their dollar stretch a lot further if they’re not weighed down by those student loans,” Kohn said.

So much of a worry has student loan debt become that nearly seven in 10 current college seniors said it will affect their life and career choices after graduation, a survey by the career services company Handshake found.

Now, states that need young and educated workers are stepping into the breach.

“From the states’ perspective, if they want people in the state to stay and have kids, reducing debt is going to help people make that decision,” said Arielle Kuperberg, an associate professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and co-author of a study about how student loan debt affects behavior, commissioned by the Council on Contemporary Families at the University of Texas at Austin.

At least 42 states have enacted student loan repayment or forgiveness programs since 2018, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Almost all of them are for professionals in specific areas of shortages — mostly teaching and healthcare — or who agree to work in underserved areas.

At least 42 states have enacted student loan repayment or forgiveness programs since 2018, mostly for professionals in specific areas of shortages or who agree to work in under-served areas.

Doctors, dentists and pharmacists who work for at least three years in underserved parts of Utah, for example, can get up to $75,000 of their student loans paid off. South Carolina will pay off up to $5,000 per year of student loans for teachers. Illinois will help repay the student loan debt of school social workers.

So short of veterinarians are some areas that veterinarians who agree to stay and work in Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, Ohio or Utah can also get help from those states with student loan repayment — in Colorado, of up to $90,000.

In Arkansas, pathologists who work in the state crime laboratory can get up to $100,000 of their student loans forgiven. North Dakota helps repay the student loans of graduates from eligible universities and colleges there trained in any of a long list of high-demand occupations, including teaching, engineering, architecture, finance, healthcare, information technology, social work and firefighting.

And New York’s Get on Your Feet program offers student loan relief for up to two years for residents who graduated from New York high schools and colleges, have specific types of federal student loans and earn below a certain income.

Now two states, Vermont and Maine, have started offering student loan repayment support to new college graduates with degrees in any field who agree to stay and work, with few strings attached.

Related: Pandemic speeds up influx of remote workers to small cities

Maine has the nation’s oldest population by median age; Vermont, the third oldest. Vermont has also seen five private colleges close since 2016, each a conduit that once brought young people there who put down roots and stayed. In September, after declines in enrollment, three of its public universities were merged.

That leaves a smaller population of graduates, a decline that’s beginning to happen nationwide and that can result in labor shortages, slower economic growth and declines in state tax revenues. Unemployment in Vermont is just 1.8 percent, third lowest in the country after New Hampshire and Maryland. Maine has projected a need for 75,000 more workers in the 10 years ending 2029.

“This is not a panacea. It’s not like people are going to flood to Maine because they’re going to get $2,500 a year. But it is a chance to come and see the long-term benefit of staying.”

Maine State Sen. Matthew Pouliot, R-Kennebec

This mismatch between labor supply and demand only got worse with the early retirements of many older workers during and since the Covid-19 pandemic. Businesses in Maine now say the availability of professional and skilled technical workers has become a top concern.

The influx of younger workers to the labor force has been far outpaced by the growth in the number of Americans 65 and older nationwide, which is up by 34 percent since 2010, according to the Census Bureau. Since around 2013, the number of births in half of all states has fallen below the number of deaths.

All of these trends are heating up the competition for young skilled workers.

“If you look at America writ large, our economy is growing in ways our talent pipeline isn’t keeping up with,” said Nate Wildes, executive director of the employer- and community-funded nonprofit Live + Work in Maine and the owner of a microbrewery in Brunswick. “That mismatch on the national level is also motivating for states.”

Maine’s Student Loan Repayment Tax Credit was expanded and broadened last year in a bipartisan effort. It provides a state income tax credit of up to $2,500 a year to people with associate, bachelor’s or graduate degrees and student loan debt who live and work in Maine, with a lifetime cap of $25,000.

“We’re facing a demographic winter,” said state Sen. Matthew Pouliot, who sponsored the measure.

“This is not a panacea. It’s not like people are going to flood to Maine because they’re going to get $2,500 a year. But it is a chance to come and see the long-term benefit of staying,” said Pouliot, who owns a real estate company in Augusta. “If you’re a recent graduate in your mid- 20s and you’re renting an apartment, $2,500 a year can be a big deal.”

This year, 13,982 Mainers claimed a total of $31.4 million in tax credits toward their student loan repayments, according to the state’s Department of Economic and Community Development.

Student loan repayment programs that require graduates to stay and work are also more politically palatable than blanket debt forgiveness, said Pouliot, a Republican. “It’s one thing to just wipe out student loan debt. But this doesn’t do that. We give back if you show up. Learn a skill, and then we’re going to pay you back.”

The idea is certain to spread, said Wildes.

Related: With new ‘talent visas,’ other countries lure workers trained at U.S. universities

“A lot of other states are figuring this out,” he said. “We get a lot of phone calls from governors’ offices and legislators asking for feedback and insight about how the policy is working.”

In Vermont, the Green Mountain Job & Retention Program, launched in the spring with bipartisan political support, will repay up to $5,000 a year of the student loans of new graduates of colleges and universities here who agree to stay and work in any kind of job for at least two years.

So far, 212 people have applied for the program, for which the state has budgeted $4 million, and 95 have been approved, toward a goal of 400, according to Vermont Student Assistance Corporation figures provided by the University of Vermont, or UVM. 

To people elsewhere, a number that small “sounds a little adorable,” said Patrick Walsh, an associate professor of economics at Vermont’s Saint Michael’s College. He pulled out his laptop on a wooden table in a classroom and opened it to a population chart. But “when I looked at the numbers, I was actually surprised at how effective it actually might be.”

That’s because, since 2010, the number of people in Vermont aged 25 to 39 has increased by an average of 1,100 per year, according to the Vermont Legislative Joint Fiscal Office. And “in the context of that net migration of this younger population,” Walsh said, 400 more people per year “is actually kind of meaningful.”

The federal government’s Public Service Loan Forgiveness program erases all debt for graduates in certain public service jobs but requires 10 years in a job, compared to the Vermont program’s two, said Michele Karode, who helps administer the Vermont plan in her role as an outreach professional at UVM. “You have to really be in it for those 10 years. This being two years seems much more attainable.”

Many out-of-staters still enroll at Vermont’s remaining higher education institutions, including Middlebury and Bennington colleges and the flagship UVM, causing a spike in the population of 18- to 22-year-olds. More than 70 percent of the students at the public university, whose picturesque quad outside Karode’s window is crowded with them, come from out of state. But most immediately leave right after graduating.

“Either they’ll come here for college, and then turn around and leave, or kids who grow up here in Vermont will go somewhere else for college and never come back,” Walsh said.

Mimi Duong stayed in Vermont for college but still planned to leave. “My entire college experience, I’m, like, you know, I want to go where the money takes me. I’m out of here,” said Duong, 22, who grew up in rural St. Johnsbury and graduated from UVM in the spring with a degree in public communication. “I do imagine that any Vermonter growing up or in my age range really is thinking about leaving” for the shiny skyline of a city somewhere else.

But she, too, was persuaded by the student loan repayment offer to stick around, in a new job as outreach and member coordinator of the Vermont Professionals of Color Network, based in a co-working space just a few blocks from the campus.

Duong has close to $30,000 in student loan debt. “It’s overwhelming to have that much money to pay back,” she said. “The loan program was a relief.”

Two years didn’t seem too much to ask from recent grad Mandy Dwinell, either — especially in exchange for help repaying the $20,000 student loan debt she racked up in a college career interrupted by family obligations.

Related: What’s in a word? A way to help impatient college students better connect to jobs

“I’m, like, okay, I can definitely commit to that,” said Dwinell, who graduated in the spring with a bachelor’s degree, at 40, and now works for the Vermont Association of Snow Travelers, an association of snowmobilers housed in a cabin at the edge of a hill with the Green Mountains in the background, and where her dog — a boxer mix — accompanies her to work.

“When I was in high school, I’m, like, as soon as I graduate, I’m out of here, I’m not looking back,” said Dwinell.

The number of Americans at or beyond retirement age has grown by 34 percent since 2010, threatening state tax revenues and heating up the competition for young skilled workers.

Now she’s pretty sure she’ll stay.

“I absolutely love it here,” Dwinell said. “I mean, look, at this view. You can’t get much better than this.”

Patrick Walsh, the Saint Michael’s College economist, agreed that other states will have to get into this game.

“A lot of states are going to feel that pressure,” Walsh said. “If you’re one of the few states who’s not doing a program like this, then you’re going to be left behind even faster.”

This story about student loan repayment was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Additional reporting by Liam Elder-Connors. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.

The post Aging states to college graduates: We’ll pay you to stay appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

BOSTON — Like a lot of high school students, Kevin Tran loves superheroes, though perhaps for different reasons than his classmates.

“They’re all insanely smart. In their regular jobs they’re engineers, they’re scientists,” said Tran, who is 17. “And you can’t do any of those things without math.”

Tran also loves math. He was speaking during a break in a city program for promising local high school students to study calculus for five hours a day throughout the summer at Northeastern University. And his observation was surprisingly apt.

At a time when Americans joke about how bad they are at math, and already abysmal scores on standardized math tests are falling even further, employers and others say the nation needs people who are good at math in the same way motion picture mortals need superheroes.

They say America’s poor math performance isn’t funny anymore. It’s a threat to the nation’s global economic competitiveness and national security.

“The advances in technology that are going to drive where the world goes in the next 50 years are going to come from other countries, because they have the intellectual capital and we don’t,” said Jim Stigler, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies the process of teaching and learning subjects including math.

There’s already ample and dramatic evidence of this.

Several largely overlooked reports, including from the Department of Defense, raise alarms about how Americans’ disdain for math is a threat to national security.

One, issued in July by the think tank The Aspen Institute, warns that international adversaries are challenging America’s longtime technological dominance. “We are no longer keeping pace with other countries, particularly China,” it says, calling this a “dangerous” failure and urging decisionmakers to make education a national security priority.

“There are major national and international challenges that will require better math skills,” said Josh Wyner, vice president of The Aspen Institute and founder and executive director of its College Excellence Program.

“This is not an educational question alone,” said Wyner. “It’s about knowledge development, environmental protection, better cures for diseases. Resolving the fundamental challenges facing our time require math.”

Related: How can schools dig out from a generation’s worth of lost math progress?

The Defense Department, in a separate study, calls for an initiative akin to the 1958 Eisenhower National Defense Act to support education in science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM. It reports that there are now eight times as many college graduates in these disciplines in China and four times as many engineers in Russia than in the United States. China has also surpassed the United States in the number of doctoral degrees in engineering, according to the National Science Foundation.

Meanwhile, the number of jobs in math occupations — which “use arithmetic and apply advanced techniques to make calculations, analyze data, and solve problems” — will have increased by 29 percent in the 10 years ending in 2031, or by more than 30,000 per year, Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show. That’s much faster than most other kinds of jobs.

“Mathematics is becoming more and more a part of almost every career,” said Michael Allen, who chairs the math department at Tennessee Technological University.

Tennessee Tech runs a summer camp teaching cybersecurity, which requires math, to high school students. “That lightbulb goes off and they say, ‘That’s why I need to know that,’ ” Allen said.

There are deep shortages of workers in information technology fields, according to the labor market analytics firm Lightcast, which says that there were more than 4 million job postings over the last year in the United States for software developers, database administrators and computer user support specialists.

With billions being spent to beef up U.S. production of semiconductors, Deloitte reports a projected shortage in that industry, too, of from 70,000 to 90,000 workers over the next few years.

All of these careers require math. Yet math scores among American students — which had been stagnant for more than a decade, according to the National Science Foundation — are now getting worse.

Math performance among elementary and middle-school students has fallen by 6 to 15 percent below pre-pandemic growth rates, depending on the students’ age, since before the pandemic, according to the Northwest Evaluation Association, which administers standardized tests nationwide. Math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress fell by 9 points last year, the largest drop ever recorded, to their lowest levels in more than three decades.

Related: College students are still struggling with basic math. Professors blame the pandemic

In the most recent Program for International Student Assessment tests in math, or PISA, U.S. students scored lower than their counterparts in 36 other education systems worldwide. Students in China scored the highest.

Even before the pandemic, only one in five college-bound American high school students were prepared for college-level courses in STEM, according to the National Science and Technology Council. Among the students who decide to study STEM in college, more than a third end up changing their majors, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

“And these are the students who have done well in maths,” said Jo Boaler, who studies the teaching of math as a professor at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education. “That’s a huge loss for the U.S.”

One result of this exodus is that, in the fast-growing field of artificial intelligence, two-thirds of U.S. university graduate students and more than half the U.S. workforce in AI and AI-related fields are foreign born, according to the Georgetown University Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

Only around one in five graduate students in math-intensive subjects including computer science and electrical engineering at U.S. universities are American, the National Foundation for American Policy reports, and the rest come from abroad. Most will leave when they finish their programs; many are being aggressively recruited by other countries, such as Canada and the United Kingdom.

The economic ramifications of this in the United States are twofold: first, on individuals’ job prospects and earnings potential; and second, on the country’s productivity and competitiveness.

Every one of the 25 highest-paying college majors are in STEM fields, the financial advising website Bankrate found.

Ten years after graduating, math majors out-earn graduates in other fields by about 17 percent, according to an analysis by the Burning Glass Institute using the education and job histories of more than 50 million workers. That premium would be even higher if it wasn’t for the fact that 16 percent of math majors become teachers.

Knowing math “is a huge part of how successful people are in their lives and what jobs are open to them, what promotions they can get,” Boaler said.

A Stanford economist has estimated that, if U.S. pandemic math declines are not reversed, students now in kindergarten through grade 12 will earn from 2 to 9 percent less over their careers, depending on what state they live in, than their predecessors educated just before the start of the pandemic. The states themselves will suffer a decline in gross domestic product of from 0.6 to 2.9 percent per year, or a collective $28 trillion over the remainder of this century.

Countries whose students scored higher on math tests have experienced greater economic growth than countries whose students tested lower, one study found. It calculated that had the U.S. imrpoved its math scores on the PISA test as promised by President George H. W. Bush and the nation’s governors in 1989, it would have resulted in a 4.5 percent bump in the U.S. gross domestic product by 2015. That increase did not occur.

Related: Inside the perplexing study that’s inspired colleges to drop remedial math

“Math matters to economic growth for our country,” Wyner said.

This is among the reasons that it isn’t only schools that have been pushing for more students to learn math. It’s economic development agencies such as the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, which is trying to get more students into STEM so they can fill jobs in fields such as semiconductor production and electric vehicle design, in which the state projects a need for up to 300,000 workers by 2030.

“Math just underpins everything,” said Megan Schrauben, executive director of the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity’s MiSTEM initiative to improve STEM education. “It’s extremely important for the future prosperity of our students and communities, but also our entire state.”

The top reason young people ages 13 to 18 say they wouldn’t consider a career in technology is that it requires math and science skills, a survey by the information technology industry association and certification provider CompTIA finds. Forty-six percent fear they aren’t good enough in math and science to work in tech, a higher proportion than their counterparts in Australia, Belgium, India, the Middle East and the U.K.

In Massachusetts, which is particularly dependent on technology industries, employers are anticipating a shortage over the next five years of 11,000 workers in the life sciences alone.

“It’s not a small problem,” said Edward Lambert Jr., executive director of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education. “We’re just not starting students, particularly students of color and from lower-resourced families, on career paths related to math and computer science and those things in which we need to stay competitive, or starting them early enough.”

The Bridge to Calculus program at Northeastern where Kevin Tran spent his summer is a response to that. The 113 participating students were paid $15 an hour, most of it from the city and its public schools, the program’s coordinator, Bindu Veetel, said; the university provided the classroom space and some of the teachers.

The students’ days began at 7:30 a.m., when teacher Jeremy Howland roused his sleepy-looking charges by having them run exercises in their heads, such as calculating 20 percent of various figures he’d written on the whiteboard.

He wasn’t doing it to show them how to leave a tip. He wanted them to explain their thought processes.

“I can see the wheels turning in your head,” Howland told the sea of faces in front of him one early moning as knees bobbed and pens drummed on pages of paper notebooks crowded with equations.

The students’ daily two-hour daily calculus class got only tougher after that. Slowly the numbers yielded their secrets, like a mystery being solved. One of the students even corrected the teacher.

“Bada-bing,” Howland said whenever they were right. “Okay, now you’re talking math.”

Students used some of the rest of their time learning how to apply that knowledge, trying their hands at coding, data analysis, robotics and elementary electrical engineering under the watchful supervision of mentors including previous graduates of the program.

Related: PROOF POINTS: How a debate over the science of math could reignite the math wars

“We show them how this leads to a career,” said Veetel, who said the program’s alumni have gone on to software, electrical and civil engineering, math research, teaching, medical and other careers.

“They have so many options with math. Slowly that spark comes on, that this is something they can do.”

It’s not just a good deed that Northeastern is doing. Some of the graduates of Bridge to Calculus end up enrolling there and proceeding to its highly ranked computer science and engineering programs, which — like those at other U.S. universities — struggle to attract homegrown talent.

More than half of the graduate students in all disciplines at Northeastern, including those that require math, are foreign born, university statistics show. In his field of engineering management, “80 percent of us are Indian,” Suuraj Narayanan Raghunathan, a graduate student serving as a Bridge to Calculus mentor, said with a laugh.

The American high school students said they get why their classmates don’t like math.

“It’s a struggle. It’s constant thinking,” said one, Steven Ramos, 16, who said he plans to become a computer or electrical engineer instead of following his brother and other relatives into construction work.

But with time, the answers come into focus, said Wintana Tewolde, also 16, who wants to be a doctor. “It’s not easy to understand, but once you do, you see it.”

Peter St. Louis-Severe, 17, said math, to him, is fun. “It’s the only subject I can truly understand, because most of the time it has only one answer,” said St. Louis-Severe, who hopes to be a mechanical or chemical engineer and whose gamer name is Mathematics Boss. “Who wouldn’t like math?”

Not everyone is convinced that a lack of math skills is holding America back.

“We push so many kids away from computer science when we tell them you have to be good at math to do computer science, which isn’t true at all,” said Todd Thibodeaux, president and CEO of CompTIA.

What employers really want, Thibodeaux said, “is trainability, the aptitude of people being able to learn the systems and solve problems.” Other countries, he said, “are dying for the way our kids learn creativity.”

Back in their classroom at Northeastern, students spent a brief break exchanging math jokes, then returned to class, where even Howland’s hardest questions generally failed to stump them.

They confidently answered as he grilled them on polynomial functions. And after an occasional stumble, they got all the exercises right.

“Bada-bing,” their teacher happily responded.

This story about Americans’ poor math skills 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.

The post Why it matters that Americans are comparatively bad at math appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

NEWTON, Mass. — Shannon Vasconcelos fired up her laptop in a sterile conference room in a suburban office park, and right on schedule a mother and her daughter popped onto her screen.

The two were in the Adirondacks on vacation, but not even that allowed them an escape from a process that had already begun to consume them: getting the daughter into college.

Vasconcelos’s job is to coach them through this. Calm and reassuring, she fielded a barrage of questions from the daughter, a high school junior who said she wants to attend an Ivy League school and that her family has $100,000 in a college savings account.

“If you’re at the academic level where getting into an Ivy League college is a possibility, that also means that you would likely be eligible for lots of great merit scholarship money” at slightly less-selective schools, Vasconcelos responded. “So that’s something to weigh.”

It’s advice she’s well equipped to give, as a former assistant director of financial aid at Tufts University and now senior director for college finance at Bright Horizons College Coach, which provides private counseling for college admissions. And it’s free to this family, a job perk offered by the mother’s employer.

A growing number of top companies are providing access to admissions counselors such as Vasconcelos as a benefit to their employees. These include JP Morgan Chase, American Express, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, EY, Paramount Pictures, Mastercard, Goodwin Law, Johnson & Johnson, VMWare and some venture capital and private equity firms.

These employers say that offering private coaching for college admissions as a perk — which typically costs around $140 an hour, according to the Independent Educational Consultants Association — is a way to recruit and keep workers in a tight labor market with record-low job satisfaction and to prevent the stress of the admissions process from cutting into productivity.

Critics contend it’s just another advantage for wealthier parents over lower-income ones.

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“They’re giving resources for free to individuals not only who could afford it, but who actually don’t need it,” said Anthony Abraham Jack, associate professor of higher education leadership at Boston University and author of “The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students.”

“It calls into question not just fairness, but equity, because the people in the companies and organizations that put you in the top 1 percent get more perks, more benefits, more freebies than those who actually need it and would benefit from it,” Jack said.

Seldom has the college admissions process been so complicated, after such high-profile developments as the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, resurgent criticism of legacy admissions and shifting requirements for standardized entrance tests.

Are colleges still test optional? What can applicants do to get a leg up? What characteristics are important to write about in an essay? Will there be any seats left after early admission ends?

To guide them through this minefield, most families rely on high school college counselors. But counselors in public high schools are responsible for an average of 430 students each, according to the American School Counselor Association. That’s well above the maximum 1:250 ratio the association recommends.

Free college coaching is the latest in a growing list of benefits to which companies have been resorting to bolster worker satisfaction, which last year fell to its lowest level in two decades, according to a survey by MetLife. Less than a third of U.S. workers report feeling engaged on the job, a separate Gallup survey found.

This has triggered a significant increase in family support benefits, the Society of Human Resource Management, or SHRM, reports. More companies are adding maternity and paternity leave on top of existing tuition assistance and in some cases help with student loan repayments.

Older workers with high school-age kids want their fair share, said Craig Copeland, director of wealth benefits research at the Employee Benefit Research Institute, or EBRI. So employers “started saying, ‘Maybe we can help you make better decisions about what college you choose,’ ” he said.

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Employers gain from this, too, in ways that go beyond improved recruitment. Eighty-eight percent of employees are using work time to help their children plan for college or careers, according to a survey by Empowerly, another private college consulting company; 25 percent said they spend from six to as much as 15 hours a week at work doing this.

“People are spending time during the work week being stressed, helping their kids with their college applications,” said Changxiao Xie, co-founder and chief technology officer of Empowerly, which is also gearing up to branch into the employee benefits sphere.

The process “can be extremely overwhelming and stressful as you’re trying to balance not only your work life but other things outside of your work,” said Brandt Bennett, a financial benefits executive at Bank of America, which offers unlimited private college consulting to its employees — a service he has used himself. “It can just really kind of consume you, and you can get overwhelmed, and it can overwhelm your son or daughter.”

Most people, however, still don’t have access to private college consultants at work and can’t afford to pay for them. Neither SHRM nor EBRI tracks how many companies offer the perk, which has mostly emerged within the last few years.

Related: Work rules for benefits programs deter low-income Americans from going to college

The National Association for College Admission Counseling estimates that high school college counselors spend just 22 percent of their time on college advising; given the counselor-to-student ratio and the length of the school year, a public high school student can therefore expect an average of 44 minutes per year of admissions advising from his or her college counselor.

“In an ideal world, we wish our company didn’t have to exist — that everybody who wanted to go to college had the information they need, and that it wasn’t so complicated,” said Vasconcelos, whose company is a division of the employer-sponsored child care operator Bright Horizons. “But that world does not exist right now in this country. So we are here to fill that gap.”

“The people in the companies and organizations that put you in the top 1 percent get more perks, more benefits, more freebies than those who actually need it and would benefit from it.”

Anthony Abraham Jack, associate professor of higher education leadership, Boston University

For client companies that offer Bright Horizons’ college consulting benefit, employees at all ranks are typically eligible, from the C-suite to custodians and security guards, she said.

“The highest-level executives, perhaps with a lot of knowledge about this process, we may be more on their radar to take advantage of this benefit,” Vasconcelos said. “But we also talk to populations of employees who have no experience with college, who may not have gone to college themselves.”

Related: Where poor students pay more than rich ones

Jack is skeptical that employees like those even know to ask for college admissions coaching.

“Are you communicating to them the same things that you are communicating to your executives in the way that they actually understand what’s available?” he asked. “Do all your employees truly know what is available to them?”

Allen Koh, CEO of Cardinal Education, which provides college consulting as a job perk to executives of hedge funds and private equity and venture capital firms, said services like his aren’t aggravating inequality.

88% of employees use work time to help their children plan for college or careers; 25% said they spent from six to as much as 15 hours a week at work doing this.

“The percentage of people who are getting these kinds of services and getting a significant edge, when you distribute it across the size of the population, it’s actually such an insignificant number of people that to say that I am in the top million reasons for why there is inequality in this country I think is absurd,” he said.

Besides, Koh said, “Rich kids are also kids, and they have a lot of the same family issues, same emotional issues, that everybody does.”

The real culprit is “universities and their incredibly opaque admissions policies,” he said. “Every country in the world has a more transparent admissions system than the United States.”

This story about college coaching as an employee benefit 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.

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