New York state lawmakers will unveil legislation on Tuesday that would eliminate enormous property tax breaks for Columbia University and New York University, which have expanded to become among New York City’s top 10 largest private property owners.

The bills would require the private universities to start paying full annual property taxes and for that money to be redistributed to the City University of New York, the largest urban public university system in the country.   

Columbia and N.Y.U. collectively saved $327 million on property taxes this year. The amount the schools save annually has soared in recent decades as the two have bought more properties, and the value of their properties has also increased.

Repealing the tax breaks would face substantial obstacles. The exemptions — which apply to universities, museums and other nonprofits — are nearly 200 years old and part of the state constitution. Overriding them would mean lawmakers would have to adopt the changes in consecutive legislative sessions. Then, voters would have to approve them on a statewide ballot.

“When the constitution of the state was written, there was no idea that such an exemption could apply to two of the top landlords in New York City,” said Assemblyman Zohran K. Mamdani, a Queens Democrat who is introducing the bill in the Assembly. “This bill seeks to address universities that have so blatantly gone beyond primarily operating as institutions of higher education and are instead acting as landlords and developers.”

The proposed constitutional amendment follows an investigation by The Hechinger Report and The New York Times in September that revealed that the city’s wealthiest universities were bigger and richer than ever before, with vast real estate portfolios that have drained the city budget – and that as Columbia has grown to become the city’s largest private landowner, it has enrolled fewer students from New York City.

Related: ‘The Untouchables’: How Columbia and N.Y.U. benefit from property tax breaks

A Columbia spokeswoman said university officials were reviewing the legislation. But she added that Columbia was a driver of the city’s economy through its research, faculty and students, and its capital projects, including $100 million in upgrades to local infrastructure since 2009.

A spokesman for N.Y.U. said that repealing the tax exemptions would be “extraordinarily disruptive” and that the university “would be forced to rethink much of the way we operate.”

“To choose two charitable, nonprofit organizations out of the thousands in the state and compel them to be treated like for-profits certainly strikes us as misguided and unfair,” the spokesman, John Beckman, said in a statement. “We are deeply appreciative of those policies, which have been in place for two centuries, but we also take some modest pride in the many, many ways, small and large, that N.Y.U. contributes to the city’s well-being and its economy.”

All 50 states offer property tax exemptions for private, nonprofit entities, which supporters argue are crucial so that these organizations can provide social, economic and cultural benefits to their communities. But in some cities, officials have pressured private universities to make voluntary payments, known as payments in lieu of taxes, or similar annual donations. Private universities often have billion-dollar endowments and charge annual tuition in the high five figures.

The legislation would only apply to Columbia and N.Y.U. and not other large private universities that own significant land, such as Cornell University in Ithaca. Lawmakers said that other universities would be excluded because their tax breaks are far lower than those of Columbia and N.Y.U.; the annual real estate tax exemption threshold would be $100 million.

“This bill seeks to address universities that have so blatantly gone beyond primarily operating as institutions of higher education and are instead acting as landlords and developers.”

Assemblyman Zohran K. Mamdani, a Queens Democrat who is introducing the bill in the Assembly.

“I don’t fault these institutions for pursuing their tax breaks and using the tax breaks to greatly expand their empires,” said State Senator John C. Liu, a Queens Democrat who is introducing the legislation in the Senate. “But this is a point where we have to look where all revenues are coming from and where all revenues are leaking. We have to stop those leaks.”

The city is facing a series of budget cuts to K-12 schools, libraries and police, among other programs, in part, Mayor Eric Adams has said, because of rising costs to care for an influx of homeless migrants.

CUNY, which is made up of 25 campuses throughout the city and which serves 225,000 students, has also been eyed for city cuts. Most of the university’s $4.3 billion budget is provided by the state, but earlier this year, the mayor proposed a 3 percent cut to the funding the city provides.

Related: Activists question whether wealthy univdersities should be exempt from property taxes

If the constitutional amendment were approved, the property tax payments would be directed every year to CUNY. That would make a significant difference in the quality of education students receive, said James C. Davis, the president of the Professional Staff Congress, which represents 30,000 CUNY faculty and staff.

“Would an additional infusion of operating funding affect retention and graduation rates?” Mr. Davis said. “Clearly the answer is yes. Even a relatively small amount of money would make a big difference.”

He noted that 80 percent of first-year CUNY students are graduates of New York City public schools, and a majority are students of color. Half come from families with incomes under $30,000 a year.

“If you’re talking about the city making a commitment to economic equity and social mobility,” Mr. Davis added, “there really is not a wiser investment than CUNY.”

This story was produced in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit news outlet that covers education. Hechinger is an independent unit at Teachers College, Columbia University.

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SALISBURY, Md. — Three times a week, on average, a police car pulls up to a school in Wicomico County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. A student is brought out, handcuffed and placed inside for transport to a hospital emergency room for a psychiatric evaluation.

Over the past eight years, the process has been used more than 750 times on children. Some are as young as 5 years old.

The state law that allows for these removals, which are known as emergency petitions, intended their use to be limited to people with severe mental illness, those who are endangering their own lives or safety or someone else’s. The removals are supposed to be the first step in getting someone involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital.

But advocates say schools across the country are sending children to the emergency room for psychiatric evaluations in response to behaviors prompted by bullying or frustration over assignments. The ER trips, they say, often follow months, and sometimes years, of the students’ needs not being met.

In most places, information about how often this happens is hidden from the public, but in districts where data has been made available, it’s clear that Black students are more frequently subjected to these removals than their peers. Advocates for students with disabilities say that they, too, are being removed at higher rates.

“Schools focus on keeping kids out rather than on keeping kids in,” said Dan Stewart, managing attorney at the National Disability Rights Network. “I think that’s the fundamental crux of things.”

In 2017, as part of a settlement with the Department of Justice intended to address widespread racial disparities in how students were disciplined, schools in Wicomico County agreed not to misuse emergency petitions. But while the number of suspensions and expulsions declined, mandated trips to the emergency room ticked up.

Last year, children were handcuffed and sent to the emergency room from Wicomico schools at least 117 times — about once per every 100 students — according to data obtained from public records requests to the Wicomico County Sheriff’s Office.

At least 40 percent of those children were age 12 or younger. More than half were Black children, even though only a little more than a third of Wicomico public school children are Black.

In interviews, dozens of students, parents, educators, lawyers and advocates for students with disabilities in Wicomico County said that a lack of resources and trained staff, combined with a punitive culture in some of the schools, are behind the misuse of emergency petitions.

One Wicomico mom, who asked for anonymity because she feared retaliation from the school, recalled the terror she felt when she got the phone call saying that her son’s school was going to have him assessed for a forced psychiatric hospitalization. When she arrived at the school, she said, her son was already in handcuffs. He was put in the back of a police car and taken to the hospital.

“He said his wrists hurt from the handcuffs,” the boy’s mom said. “He was just really quiet, just sitting there, and he didn’t understand why he was in the hospital.”

The use of psychiatric evaluations to remove children from school isn’t just happening in Wicomico. Recent data shows that New York City schools still call police to take children in emotional distress to the emergency room despite a 2014 legal settlement in which they agreed to stop the practice.

A Kentucky school district was found to have used a forced psychiatric assessment on kids more than a thousand times in a year.

In Florida, thousands of school-aged children are subjected to the Baker Act, the state’s involuntary commitment statute.

In a settlement with the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, , the Stockton Unified School District in California agreed to protocols that require other interventions before referring students with disabilities for psychiatric evaluation.

In Maryland, Wicomico uses emergency petitions more often per capita than almost every other Maryland district where data is available. Baltimore City, for example, last year had 271 emergency petitions from schools, compared with Wicomico’s 117, according to data obtained from law enforcement agencies through public records requests. But Baltimore City’s student population is five times as large.

‘Trying to get him out of school’

Wicomico parents describe struggling to get support from the schools when their children fall behind on basics like reading and math in early grades. These gaps in learning can lead to frustration and behaviors that are challenging for teachers to manage.

The Wicomico mother whose son was handcuffed said she fought for years with administrators to obtain accommodations for her child, who is autistic, an experience echoed by other parents. Her son, who also has ADHD, was several years behind in reading by the time he got to middle school. The mother said he was sent to the hospital after an outburst rooted in frustration, not mental illness.

She recalled school officials telling her, “‘He doesn’t have special needs, he just has anger issues.’ They were trying to get him out of the school.”

Her son had grown increasingly discouraged and agitated over an assignment he was unable to complete, she said. The situation escalated, she said, when the teacher argued with him. The student swiped at his desk and knocked a laptop to the floor, and the school called for an emergency petition. After being taken to the hospital in handcuffs, he was examined and released.

“After that, he went from angry to terrified,” she said. “Every time he saw the police, he would start panicking.”

A spokeswoman from the Wicomico County Public Schools said that emergency petitions “are used in the most extreme, emergency situations where the life and safety of the student or others are at risk.”

“[Emergency petitions] are not used for disciplinary purposes and frequently do not result from a student’s behaviors,” Tracy Sahler, the spokeswoman, said in an email. “In fact, a majority of EPs are related to when a student exhibits suicidal ideation or plans self-harm.”

Schools did not respond to questions about why the rate of emergency petitions was so much higher in Wicomico than in other counties in Maryland. The Sheriff’s Department declined to share records that would show the reasons for the removals.

Educators stretched thin

By law, certain classroom removals must be recorded. Schools are required to publicly report suspensions, expulsions and arrests — and the data reveals racial disparities in discipline. Those statistics are what state and federal oversight agencies typically use to judge a school, and they often serve as triggers for oversight and investigations.

But with the notable exceptions of Florida and New York City, most places do not routinely collect data on removals from schools for psychiatric assessments. That means oversight agencies don’t have access to the information.

Without insight into how often schools are using psychiatric removals on children, there is no way to hold them accountable, said Daniel Losen, senior director for the education team at the National Center for Youth Law.

“The civil rights of children is at stake, because it’s more likely it’s going to be Black kids and kids with disabilities who are subjected to all kinds of biases that deny them an educational opportunity,” he said.

Families who have experienced emergency petitions say that the educators who can best communicate with their child are stretched thin, and measures that could de-escalate a situation are not always taken. The day that her son was sent to the hospital, the Wicomico mother who requested anonymity recalled, the administrator who had consistently advocated for him was out of the building.

In another instance, a middle schooler said that the required accommodations for his learning and behavioral disabilities included being allowed to take a walk with an educator he trusted. The day he was involuntarily sent to the hospital, that staff member was unavailable. When he tried to leave the building to take a walk on his own, an administrator blocked him from leaving. The student began yelling and spat at the staffer. He said that by the time police arrived, he was calm and sitting in the principal’s office. Still, he was handcuffed and taken to the hospital where he was examined and released a few hours later.

Because emergency petitions happen outside the standard discipline process, missed school days are not recorded as suspensions. For students with disabilities, that has special consequences — they are not supposed to be removed from class for more than 10 days without an evaluation on whether they are receiving the support they need.

“If you use the discipline process, and you’re a student with a disability, your rights kick in,” said Selene Almazan, legal director for the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates. With emergency petitions, the same rules do not apply.

In many places around the county, the resources needed to support students with disabilities are scarce.

“‘He doesn’t have special needs, he just has anger issues.’ They were trying to get him out of the school.”

Wicomico, Maryland, mother whose autistic son was sent to hospital in handcuffs

On Maryland’s Eastern Shore, lawyers and advocates for families said the spectrum of alternatives for students is limited by both money and geography. Those can include private, out-of-district placements and specialized classrooms for specific needs like dyslexia, for example. 

“If it’s a resource-rich school system, you can provide services and supports,” said Maureen van Stone, director of the Maryland Center for Developmental Disabilities at Kennedy Krieger Institute. “If you need a walk, if you need a sensory work break, if you need to go see the school counselor, those kinds of things can prevent some of this escalation of getting to the point that you’re … emergency petitioning.”

When children need targeted services that are unavailable in the local district, the district must allow them to be educated outside the school system — and pay for it.

“You’re stuck between a rock and a hard place because you’re like, ‘This kid needs more services,’ but you can’t get the school to agree,” said Angela Ford, clinical director at Maple Shade Youth and Family Services, which serves children with emotional and behavioral disabilities in Wicomico.

Last year, only one student was placed in a private day school, according to data from the Maryland State Department of Education.

ER trips increased after settlement

The 2017 settlement with the Justice Department required the Wicomico district to reduce the significant racial and disability-related disparities in suspensions, placements in alternative schools and other discipline measures.

The district agreed not to use emergency petitions when “less intrusive interventions … can be implemented to address the behavioral concern,” and not to use them “to discipline or punish or to address lack of compliance with directions.”

But since the settlement, many parents, teachers and community leaders said the district has seemed more concerned with keeping suspension numbers down than providing support for teachers to help prevent disruptive behavior.

“If we know how to handle and deal with behaviors, then we will have less EPs,” said Anthony Mann, who was an instructional aide at Wicomico County High School last year and is a Wicomico public school parent.

“The civil rights of children is at stake, because it’s more likely it’s going to be Black kids and kids with disabilities who are subjected to all kinds of biases that deny them an educational opportunity.”

Daniel Losen, senior director for the education team at the National Center for Youth Law

Tatiyana Jackson, who has a son with a disability at Wicomico Middle School, agrees teachers need more training. “I don’t think they have a lot of patience or tolerance for children with differences. It’s like they give up on them.”

Wicomico school officials said ongoing professional development for staff includes the appropriate use of emergency petitions.

“Each school has a well-trained team that includes a social worker and school counselor, with the support of school psychologists,” said Sahler. “All supports that may be beneficial to assist the student are utilized. However, the safety of the student is paramount, and the determining factor is ensuring that there is no unnecessary delay in obtaining aid for the student.”

But Denise Gregorius, who taught in Wicomico schools for over a decade and left in 2019, questioned the feasibility of the discipline and behavior strategies taught during professional development.

“The teachers, when they said they wanted more discipline, really what they’re saying is they want more support,” she said.

“You’re stuck between a rock and a hard place because you’re like, ‘This kid needs more services,’ but you can’t get the school to agree.”

Angela Ford, clinical director at Maple Shade Youth and Family Services

Under the terms of the settlement, Wicomico was under federal monitoring for two years. Since then, the number of suspensions and expulsions has declined markedly — for both Black and white students.

But the number of emergency petitions, which don’t appear in state statistics and are often only revealed through FOIA requests, has edged up. And other measures of exclusionary discipline remained high, including school arrests. In 2021-22, Wicomico had 210 school-based arrests — the second-highest number in the state, while they were 15th in student enrollment. More than three-quarters of the children arrested were Black, and 80 percent were students with disabilities; 37 percent of Wicomico students are Black, and 10 percent of Wicomico students have disabilities.

“Monitoring the numbers doesn’t bring you the solution,” said Losen, from the National Center for Youth Law. “If you’re going to a district where they’re resistant, and they have sort of draconian policies that they can’t justify educationally and there are large racial disparities, the problem is more than what they’re doing with discipline.”

The Department of Justice declined to comment.

Black parents point to culture problem

Some Wicomico parents and educators point to an insular culture in the school district where problems are hidden rather than resolved.

They are frustrated, for example, that there is no relationship with the county’s mobile crisis unit, which is often relied on in other counties to help de-escalate issues instead of calling the police.

Many Black parents say they believe their children are more often viewed as threats than as children who need support.

Jermichael Mitchell, a community organizer who is an alum and parent in Wicomico County Schools, said that teachers and school staff often do not know how to empathize with and respond to the trauma and unmet needs that may lead to children’s behavior. 

Last year, among children sent to the hospital on emergency petitions by Wicomico schools, at least 40 percent were age 12 or younger and more than half were Black children..

“A Black kid that’s truly going through something, that truly needs support, is always looked at as a threat,” he said. “You don’t know how those kids have been taught to cry out for help. You don’t know the trauma that they’ve been through.”

Studies have found that Black and Latino children who have a teacher of the same race have fewer suspensions and higher test scores. Such educator diversity is lacking in Wicomico County: Its schools have the largest gap in the state between the percentages of students of color and teachers of color .

Wicomico school officials said they do not discriminate against any of their students.

A Wicomico teenager described a years-long process of becoming alienated from school, with an emergency petition as the ultimate break. He said he was bullied in middle school over a series of months until one day he snapped and hit the student who had been taunting him.

The school called the police. He told the officers not to touch him, that he needed to calm down. Instead, the officers grabbed him and shoved him onto the ground, he said. He was handcuffed and transported to the emergency room. But when he returned to school, he said the only thing that was different was how he felt about the adults in the building.

“I got used to not trusting people, not talking to people at school,” he said. “Nothing else really changed.”

This story about emergency petitions was produced by The Associated Press and The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ashworth College did not respond to requests for comment.

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

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

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

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

Edward Conroy, senior policy advisor, New America

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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As Columbia University puts the last touches on its brand-new campus in Harlem, it has reached a milestone: The university is now the largest private landowner in New York City.

In a city where land is more valuable than almost anywhere in the nation, the school now owns more than 320 properties, with a combined value of nearly $4 billion. The growth has helped it stay competitive within the Ivy League and meet its broader ambitions to become a global institution.

By many measures, those ambitions have also helped lift the city around it, attracting higher numbers of students, producing new jobs and boosting New York’s reputation as an international center of knowledge.

But as Columbia has expanded its footprint, it has also become more of a drain on the city budget because of a state law more than 200 years old that allows universities, museums and other nonprofits to pay almost no property taxes.

The law saves Columbia more than $182 million annually, according to an analysis by The New York Times. The amount has soared from $38 million just 15 years ago as the university has bought up more properties and their value has increased.

Columbia’s property tax savings, which are a fraction of its $14.3 billion endowment, far exceed the tax breaks granted to many high-profile commercial developments, including large-scale sites like Hudson Yards. They are 50 percent larger than those at Yankee Stadium and greater than the combined tax deals for Citi Field and Madison Square Garden.

Even as Columbia has swallowed up more land, it has taken fewer students from New York City. Since 2010, the number of city students enrolled in Columbia’s undergraduate ranks has declined by 37 percent.

Nearly every state has property tax exemptions for nonprofits, including universities, which are exempt from paying taxes on their academic buildings and dormitories. (Universities, including Columbia, pay tax on properties they own that are not used for educational purposes.)

But they are often contentious, and the seven other Ivy League universities pay some property taxes on those buildings or voluntarily pay millions of dollars every year to their local governments and school districts.

Not one university in New York City does, including two of the nation’s wealthiest institutions, Columbia and N.Y.U., which had property tax savings of $145 million this year.

“I call them the untouchables: I can’t think of anyone who has been willing to take on this issue,” said Harvey Robins, who worked for Mayor Edward I. Koch and Mayor David N. Dinkins and has followed the issue of tax exemptions for universities. “It’s really important that we begin a conversation finally about who pays what and who subsidizes whom.”

A Columbia University spokeswoman, Samantha Slater, pointed to $170 million in contributions the university had pledged to the community near its campuses starting in 2009, saying the investments “have been a model for similar investments by other universities.”

“The effect is the same — forging partnerships with the city and local organizations to invest in the economic development of the community,” she said in a statement. She did not respond to specific questions about the institution’s property tax savings and whether it had considered making annual payments to the city.

The debate may have been muted in New York because the city has other major revenue streams, such as Wall Street. Columbia has also spent more than $2 million over the last five years to retain some of the city’s most prominent lobbying firms, who meet with officials, including the mayor, on a number of issues, including its real estate interests.

“They have a very powerful board, they talk to the mayor. I think it should be looked at, particularly in the years coming up. If you look at the budget deficits, they’re massive.”

Gale Brewer, a councilwoman and former Manhattan borough president

But with financial challenges looming, a growing number of city and state officials are re-examining the longstanding exemptions for private universities. Property tax revenue accounts for more than 40 percent of the city’s total tax collections.

Columbia’s contribution probably would be small in the scheme of the more than $31 billion the city collects every year. But it is also significantly more than some of the expenses that city leaders haggled over during budget negotiations this year. Programs serving inmates at the troubled Rikers Island jail complex were cut, for example, and the budget for free preschool for 3-year-olds was reduced.

In the coming year, federal pandemic funds — which the city has leaned on to shore up public school budgets and other services — are drying up, even as the city says it expects to spend billions to manage an influx of migrants from the southern border. Mayor Eric Adams has asked city agencies to cut their budgets by 5 percent by November and has said the Police and Fire Departments, among others, will need to slice overtime.

Gale Brewer, a councilwoman and former Manhattan borough president, said she was among those the university has lobbied in recent years, mostly in connection with faculty housing. She said she was not sure why city officials have not asked Columbia and N.Y.U. to make annual payments.

“They have a very powerful board, they talk to the mayor,” she said. “I think it should be looked at, particularly in the years coming up. If you look at the budget deficits, they’re massive.”

‘Civic project’ or ‘land grab’?

The state’s tax breaks for nonprofits date to 1799, long before Columbia and other higher education institutions became vast enterprises with billion-dollar endowments. At the time, the country’s first universities were primarily connected to religious denominations and were deemed charitable enterprises.

Columbia opened in 1754 and moved in the early 20th century to its core Morningside Heights campus, where it confined itself for nearly a century. In 1968, it abandoned its move to construct a gym on the edge of Harlem — a project that was derided as “Gym Crow” — after enormous protests. Then, in the early 2000s, Columbia administrators, led by its president at the time, Lee C. Bollinger, said the university could no longer remain competitive without a larger campus.

To help Columbia expand, New York State condemned land in 2008 in the West Harlem neighborhood of Manhattanville and used eminent domain to seize properties for the university. The university made promises to be a good neighbor and hire local workers. 

“There was a time when Columbia really turned its back on where it was located,” Bollinger said in a 2006 interview with The Times. “I wanted to take exactly the opposite approach.”

Bollinger, who declined to comment for this article, told community leaders and neighborhood groups that the university had changed since the 1968 upheaval. 

A lawsuit briefly halted the Bollinger plan because judges agreed it was not a “civic project.” Nick Sprayregen owned self-storage warehouses in West Harlem and fought Columbia’s efforts to buy his properties. “This is a really nothing more than a land grab of the most extreme type,” Sprayregen said in 2007. He died in 2016.

A higher court allowed the project to go forward. Columbia moved several dozen residents to a 12-story condominium building and gave them $7,000 each.

As it expanded, the university said that it spent at least $600 million with local firms, many of them owned by women and people of color, for construction, maintenance and repairs at its campuses — approximately 16 percent of the total it spent during that time period.

The university has also paid out about $104 million of the $170 million it pledged to the community — to local organizations, an affordable housing fund and city agencies like the Parks Department. The university also said it had spent more than $100 million in upgrades to local infrastructure since 2009 and that it would soon pay to replace two escalators at a subway station on 125th Street.

“Columbia continues to prioritize engagement with our local community — from Morningside Heights to Harlem, Washington Heights and beyond,” Slater, the Columbia spokeswoman, said in a statement. “We focus on meaningful investments that provide local jobs and economic opportunity, along with sustainable community partnerships.”

Maritta Dunn, the former chairwoman of Community Board 9 who lives across the street from the new campus, praised it. “It gives the local community a nearby pretty park with trees, benches and tables,” she said.

But some residents said the university ultimately hired few local residents, overlooked local companies for much of the work and has not been as welcoming to neighbors as promised.

“It didn’t happen the way I thought it should have happened,” said Walter J. Edwards, the founder of the Harlem Business Alliance whose company, Full Spectrum, helped renovate a 1920s building on the new campus. “If you are displacing us, give us something.”

Altagracia Hiraldo, who runs the Dominican Community Center, said she had hoped for more, including the chance for neighborhood nonprofits like hers to work on campus.

“They forgot about us,” Hiraldo said.

Since the expansion, Columbia’s new properties in West Harlem have more than doubled the market value of the neighborhood, and they are now valued at $644 million. The centerpiece of the campus is the Jerome L. Greene Science Center, a massive glass and steel structure. Additional buildings are under construction, including a 34-story residential tower for graduate students and faculty.

Because Columbia took over properties that had been paying taxes, the city now collects half the annual property taxes that it collected on that land in 2008, The Times found.

Taking more space, but not more students

Local public schools have questioned Columbia’s commitment to its surrounding community. As recently as 2010, a quarter of Columbia’s undergraduate students came from New York City: 2,236 students. By 2022, that number had decreased to 1,416, or about 15 percent of the student body.

Several administrators at local public schools said that the university, which has been vocal in supporting diversity and affirmative action, has shown minimal interest in recruiting local students, especially children from low-income families.

Its overall student body is 7 percent Black and 15 percent Latino, and 22 percent of students receive Pell grants, which are aimed at low-income students. The racial breakdown is similar to other Ivy League universities; a higher share of Pell-eligible students attend than at some of its peers. (Columbia declined to share demographic data for its New York City students.)

Jerome Furman, a counselor at East Side Community School in the East Village of Manhattan, where about two-thirds of students are low income, said he has had students accepted to every Ivy League college except Columbia in his seven years at the school.

He said his calls and emails about college fairs or students who apply go unanswered.

“The relationship has been nonexistent,” Furman said.

“If New York is such an asset to them, then it makes sense to make sure that New York students are represented in a real capacity in the student body.”

Fred Raphael, the college and career counselor at Boerum Hill School for International Studies in Brooklyn

Columbia would not say how many New York City public school students are enrolled, but said that the number had increased in the past five years and that students from 45 of the city’s public high schools entered Columbia last year.

Fred Raphael, the college and career counselor at Boerum Hill School for International Studies in Brooklyn, where a majority of students are Black or Latino, said that acceptances have become so rare that he doesn’t see Columbia as a realistic option, even for his highest-performing students.

“If New York is such an asset to them,” he said, “then it makes sense to make sure that New York students are represented in a real capacity in the student body.”

Other urban Ivy League universities declined to share enrollment from their home cities, except for Brown University, located in Providence, R.I. A Brown spokesman said on average between 20 and 30 undergraduates from Providence public schools enrolled in a given year — slightly more than from comparably sized cities outside Rhode Island.

Other major universities in the city have a larger percentage of New Yorkers. At Fordham University in the Bronx, 23 percent of undergraduates come from New York City, a percentage that has been stable for the last decade. At N.Y.U., about 17 percent of undergraduate students are New York City residents.

Like Columbia, N.Y.U. has sought to transform itself into a national and global powerhouse. It has been expanding since the 1980s and recently began to build out its own campus, for the most part on land it already owned, including a 23-story glass and steel academic building in Greenwich Village that cost $1.2 billion to construct. After community backlash, the expansion has been scaled back, but the university will pay no property taxes.

“I would bet my life that they are nowhere near the end of their growth,” said Andrew Berman, the executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group Village Preservation.

An N.Y.U. spokesman pointed to the contributions the university makes to the city, including its students who assist in public school classrooms and its relatively large Higher Educational Opportunity Program, which provides college access for low-income New Yorkers. It also noted that the majority of its graduates stay in New York for work and that its thousands of employees pay in excess of $100 million in payroll taxes.

“We recognize the budget challenges the city faces. Nevertheless, we feel the charitable status that derives from N.Y.U.’s educational mission — and the attendant tax policies — is not a one-way exchange,” said an N.Y.U. spokesman, John Beckman. “We are deeply appreciative of those policies, but we also take some humble pride in the many, many ways, small and large, that N.Y.U. contributes to the city’s well-being and its economy.”

New York’s exceptional exceptions

New York is among 49 other states with property tax exemptions for private, nonprofit entities, which supporters say allow them to provide crucial social, economic and cultural benefits to their communities. In the case of universities, they conduct often costly research and public-policy studies and employ people who pay income taxes.

But in other cities, officials have pressured universities to make voluntary payments, known as payments in lieu of taxes, or PILOTs, or similar annual donations. Even within New York State, other cities have charted a different course.

In upstate Ithaca, Cornell University started making annual payments decades ago that have now grown to $1.6 million and are expected to climb to $4 million in October.

Columbia has sought to maintain close ties to many of the people who might put pressure on it to contribute, spending more than $2.2 million since 2017 on firms that lobby city and state officials. The university said that the firms that it employs provided other services in addition to lobbying and spent most of their lobbying efforts on education, research and health care.

A spokesman for Mayor Adams, Jonah Allon, said that the city’s financial problems meant “every option is on the table to ensure we continue to fund city services we rely on.” But he did not directly respond to questions about whether the city had considered asking the universities to make voluntary payments.

Recently, calls for the universities to pay more have been growing.

After then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo proposed a $485 million cut in 2016 to CUNY, the city’s public university system, the union that represents its professors began calling for private universities to help offset the cuts.

“CUNY is the higher education institution that serves the working people of New York,” said James Davis, the president of the union, “and those same working people are effectively subsidizing these tax breaks for Columbia and N.Y.U.”

Assemblywoman Deborah J. Glick, a Democrat who represents an area that includes New York University’s Manhattan campus, has spent a decade questioning the tax exemptions. In a recent interview, the city’s comptroller, Brad Lander, praised the universities, but said they should “step up” to help CUNY.

“There’s just more urgency than ever,” he said.

During the 2021 mayoral campaign, candidates including Andrew Yang and Curtis Sliwa called for ending the property tax exemptions altogether.

But forcing the universities to pay property taxes would require lawmakers in Albany to change state law.

Zohran Mamdani, a state assemblyman who represents parts of Queens, has said he plans to try this year, with a bill that would end property tax exemptions for private higher education institutions with exemptions of more than $50 million in real estate.*

The only private universities that meet that threshold are Columbia and N.Y.U.

Liset Cruz and Emma G. Fitzsimmons contributed reporting.

*Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated how a bill that would end property tax exemptions for private higher education institutions would determine which schools are eligible. It would be for institutions with annual property-tax exemptions of more than $50 million, not more than $50 million in real estate holdings.

This story was produced in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit news outlet that covers education. Hechinger is an independent unit at Teachers College, Columbia University.

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Millions of student loan borrowers have been waiting to find out whether the Biden Administration’s plan to forgive some federal student debt will provide them with financial relief.

On Friday, the last day of this year’s session, the Supreme Court ruled the plan unconstitutional, throwing a key Biden campaign promise into doubt and denying debt forgiveness for 26 million people who had applied. The vote was 6-3, with the liberal justices dissenting.

The court considered two cases at the same time, U.S. Department of Education v. Brown, which was brought by two student loan borrowers who didn’t qualify for relief, and Biden v. Nebraska, which was brought by six Republican attorneys general who argued the plan would hurt state tax revenue and the income of a student-loan agency.

Before a court halted the program last fall, 26 million borrowers had applied for relief and 16 million had been approved. The Biden plan proposed forgiving up to $20,000 for borrowers whose income was low enough to receive a Pell grant while in college, as long as their current income was less than $125,000 (or $250,000 for married couples or heads of household), and $10,000 for borrowers within those income limits but who had not received a Pell grant.

The Hechinger Report spoke in February with three experts, each with a different view, about what was at stake in the case.

The Biden Administration cited the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act passed in 2003 (also known as the HEROES Act), which allows the government to forgive student loans for borrowers who are at risk of default because of war, military operation, or national emergency. They argued that the Covid pandemic qualified as a national emergency, which was the same justification Trump Administration officials used when they paused student loan repayments in 2020.

Many Republicans and conservative advocates fought against Biden’s $400 billion plan, contending that it was unfair to taxpayers who never went to college and to people who paid back their loans without help. Student debt forgiveness advocates argued that the financial burden had been stymieing the futures of an entire generation who went to college to ensure financial stability and, in some cases, a path out of poverty. Low-income students and Black borrowers – especially Black women – have been disproportionately affected by student loan debt.

Student loan payments have been on pause since March 2020 and are scheduled to resume October 1.

The Hechinger Report has covered many aspects of the student debt crisis – including federal loans, parent loans and “hidden” debt that doesn’t show up in government statistics.

Also, Jon Marcus reported on an often unasked question – what are colleges’ responsibilities when it comes to mounting student debt?

The Supreme Court case was never going to have an impact on the lives of people with private student loans. More than $127 billion is owed by these borrowers, who have been falling further behind recently. We wrote about a group of students who took out private loans to attend for-profit colleges and were left out of a relief plan.

The Hechinger Report has also reported extensively on the hidden forms of student debt that keep students in financial peril. We broke open the issue of transcript withholding – when  students can’t get their transcript because they owe money to a university. The practice has now been banned in several states and the federal government has proposed prohibiting it nationally. We also reported on students being sued by their states for unpaid bills and on debt collection agencies that were making millions of dollars from collecting on overdue tuition payments and fees.

We wrote about for-profit colleges that loan money directly to students, which they often cannot pay back. And we exposed the plight of parents who take out loans so their children can go to college and end up in debt for the rest of lives.

Regardless of the Supreme Court’s decision, tens of millions of people will continue to have to pay off debt they took on to get a college degree. Americans are encouraged to make this gamble – borrow now for a better life down the line— but the high cost of tuition guarantees that the question of whether it’s worth striking this bargain will be with us for years to come.

This story about the student loans 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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In the coming weeks, the Supreme Court will rule about whether colleges can consider race in admissions decisions, deciding two cases, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. the University of North Carolina. The case against affirmative action is based on the argument that some colleges are discriminating against Asian and white students and giving an unfair advantage to Black and Latino students.

Eighteen state flagship universities – the jewels in the crowns of public university systems –now allow for the consideration of race as one of many factors in admission decisions. At least 30 also consider whether a student is the first in their family to go to college and 11 take into account whether an applicant is related to an alum of the college, also known as “legacy admissions,” according to the universities’ most recent Common Data Set, which they submit annually.  Whether they consider these factors or not, many flagships have had poor records recruiting Black and Latino high school graduates to enroll.

At most state flagship universities, Black and Latino students are still very much underrepresented.

In 14 states, the gap between the number of public high school graduates who are Black and the number of Black students who enroll in the state flagship was 10 percentage points or more in 2021.

Flagships in southern states have some of the widest such gaps for Black students.

In Mississippi, 48 percent of high school graduates were Black in 2021 but only 8 percent of first-year students at Ole Miss, the state’s flagship, were Black.

The gap at the University of Georgia has grown over the past two years to 31 percentage points. In 2021, just 2 percent of incoming first-year students were Black men.

Eight of the 10 flagships with the biggest gaps for Black students do not consider race in admissions.

The Supreme Court ruling could also have a big impact on Latino students. The University of Texas at Austin, for example, does consider race in admissions but already has the second biggest gap for Latino students in the country.

In 12 states, the gap between the number of students who graduated from state public high schools who were Latino and the number of Latino students enrolled at the state flagship was 10 percentage points or more.

The gap at 10 of those universities – concentrated in the Southwest – has widened over the past five years.

The University of California at Berkeley has the biggest gap – 34 percentage points. The state banned affirmative action in 1996.

The University of Texas at Austin has reduced its gap some in the last five years, but it’s still significant at 23 percentage points.

Of the 12 states with the biggest gap for Latino students, four consider race in admissions.

Why does it matter that so many of these colleges don’t look like their state’s graduating high school classes? Public flagships were created to educate the residents of their states and most make that explicit. The University of South Carolina’s mission statement, for example, begins, “The primary mission of the University of South Carolina Columbia is the education of the state’s citizens through teaching, research, creative activity, and community engagement.” Still, it has the third largest gap for Black students in the country.

State flagships are funded by residents’ tax dollars, and last year they enrolled a combined 1.1 million undergraduate students. Many states have other high-quality state universities, but the flagships often have the most resources, the best graduation rates and graduates’ salaries, and powerful alumni networks that help can launch students’ careers.

Why does it matter if flagship enrollment is racially equitable?

In most states, flagship graduates also earned the highest or second-highest salaries compared with graduates of other public universities.

At 48 of the 50 flagships, the graduation rate was the highest or second-highest among public universities in the state.

The flagship universities where Black and Latino students were the most underrepresented also had the highest graduation rates.

Officials at several of the state flagships that consider race in admissions said they are concerned that the Supreme Court’s ruling could make it more difficult to enroll a racially diverse student body that reflects their state’s populations. Seven of the 18 universities that consider race in admissions already have a gap of 14 percentage points or more between the percentage of Black or Latino students who graduated from the state’s public high schools in 2021 and the percentage who enrolled in the flagships that fall. Some officials said they feared that the court’s ruling would go beyond admissions. They worry that scholarships targeted at underrepresented populations, for example, or sponsored campus visits for college chapters of groups like the National Society of Black Engineers, could be prohibited.

“Our priority is to serve the residents of the state,” said Nikki Chun, vice provost for enrollment management at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. “But if we’re restricted from asking questions about race and ethnicity, it’s going to be really difficult to be able to measure whether we’re meeting our mission as an institution.”

The University of Maryland has struggled to enroll Black students in numbers that reflect the state’s demographics, and officials say that prohibiting the consideration of race in admissions will make that effort more difficult.

“We remain committed to recruiting and retaining the most diverse classes possible,” Shannon Gundy, assistant vice president at Maryland, said in an email, “but will not lose sight that this fact remains true: when pursuing the most diverse and talented class, there is no proxy for considering a student’s race.”

New York state designated a second flagship, Stony Brook University, in 2022 and it was not included in this analysis. (Its gap for Black and Latino students was 11 and 12 percentage points, respectively, in 2021.)

This story about race in college admissions 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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Last month, when more than 200,000 students who had been victims of misconduct by their colleges began getting the news that their federal student loans were cancelled, Amanda Luciano felt a sense of satisfaction — and a pang of despair.

The students getting the good news had been just like her — struggling with student debt because a for-profit college had defrauded them — with one difference, a difference that hadn’t seemed important until recently. When she needed money to start college, she was advised to borrow from a private lender instead of the federal government and, because of that, she’s stuck with $81,000 debt.

“I’m frustrated, because, what can I do? I’d be in the same position as these other people had my loans been federal, period,” said Luciano, who is now 37. “Of course, I’m so happy for these people, but it’s just crazy that no one’s being held accountable for us private [loan] people.”

A federal judge ruled last fall, in Sweet v. Cardona, that former students from more than 150 colleges (most of them for-profit institutions) who had filed what’s known as a borrower defense to repayment claim were entitled to automatic loan cancellation, such was the magnitude of those colleges’ misconduct. But when the final legal hurdle was cleared in February, erasing their debt, Luciano — and tens of thousands of private-loan borrowers like her — was left out.

The settlement came after a class-action lawsuit filed in 2018 that alleged the government had unfairly delayed granting relief to students who had been defrauded by their colleges. Although consumer protections apply to private lenders as well as the government, the legal mechanism that could trigger relief for private education-loan borrowers is different from the one used in the Sweet case, which sought relief only for students who had government loans.

Back in 2006, when Luciano was researching degrees that would lead to a good job in the fashion industry, she came across the website of the now-shuttered International Academy of Design and Technology, or IADT. The college promoted its national accreditation and promised a pathway to a lucrative career in design and merchandising, she said. Visiting the Chicago campus, Luciano met with a financial aid counselor to help her figure out how to pay for college. The counselor even got a representative from the private lender Sallie Mae on speakerphone to explain how easy it would be to pay off her loans after she graduated.

Nineteen years old and the first in her family to go to college, Luciano asked her grandfather to co-sign the loan and took the plunge. The degree proved worthless.

She borrowed $51,000; over the last 15 years she says she has paid back a total of $41,000. But because of the interest, her balance today stands at $81,000. Her current monthly payments of $500 only cover the interest, she says.

“These private loan borrowers are coming out of the exact same circumstances and the exact same context,” said Eileen Connor, director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending who represented the former students who started getting relief last month. “They have similar rights to cancellation. There’s no rationale to explain why one loan would be enforceable and another is not.”

Even though the private student loan market is much smaller than the federal one, it’s still very large — more than $127 billion is owed by private student loan borrowers, and delinquencies have been rising over the past two years.

After Luciano graduated from high school, she initially enrolled at nearby Joliet Junior College, unsure exactly what she wanted to do but interested in teaching. She kept her job at her local Big Lots, where she had worked during high school. Living at home, she scheduled her classes for the morning and often worked a 1-9 p.m. shift. She was able to earn enough to pay the Joliet tuition out of pocket.

During her third semester, she took a class on fashion merchandising and fell in love with it. She felt like she had found her calling, she said, but there weren’t many classes in fashion at Joliet. That’s when she went online to see whether it was possible to get a degree in fashion and found IADT promising exactly that — just a train ride away.

She visited the school and an admissions representative repeated what the website had promised: Getting a degree from IADT would lead to a career as a buyer, a fashion designer or a virtual merchandizer, depending on which track she chose.

“They literally listed what would be available to us. They made it seem like, get this degree and here are the jobs you can have,” Luciano said. “So of course, I was like, this sounds perfect.”

Luciano says the financial aid officer at IADT never mentioned the option of federal loans and told her that a private loan was her best option since it would also give her money for living expenses.

“My thinking was, this is kind of what you needed to do — get a college degree to get a well-paying job,” she said.

Luciano’s interest rate is now over 9 percent and is not fixed, so it has risen and fallen over the years. The current interest rate on federal student loans is 5 percent, and once a student borrows, it doesn’t change over time.

Related: As the Supreme Court hears arguments on student loan forgiveness, three experts explain what’s at stake

After Luciano graduated from IADT in 2008, she searched for jobs in the fashion industry for several years.

IADT “promised networking opportunities, high paying jobs within our industry, even internship opportunities that lead to positions within the industry,” she recalled.

She contacted the school’s career services office at least once a week, she said, but they only sent her job listings easily found on any job website.

“I never thought to question the school in why this was all happening,” she said. “I just thought I needed to try harder, keep searching.”

She looked for jobs at stores with nearby corporate headquarters, constantly checking their websites to see if they were hiring, but positions were few and far between. She had one interview at the retail giant Claire’s for a buying position, but they were looking for someone with more experience.

In three years of searching, she never landed anything more than a $13-an-hour job at the retail store Kohl’s as an apparel supervisor, which did not require a degree.

“That was all I could find on the job boards,” she said. “I kept reaching back out to the school, but there was nothing. I finally realized this degree was worth absolutely nothing.”

Related: The unasked question about the student loan bailout: What’s colleges’ responsibility?

She moved back home with her mom and eventually decided to cut her losses. In 2011, she enrolled at the College of DuPage — a nearby community college — and became certified to teach preschool. She took out federal student loans to pay for the program.

“It was just so demoralizing,” she said. “And then to find out that this school — my school — was part of this predatory scam. After hearing that, I just can’t believe I’m still paying for it.”

In 2012, when Luciano started teaching preschool, the median annual salary for IADT graduates in Chicago was just $25,000 ten years after graduating, and more than half of students with federal loans were either delinquent or in default five years after starting repayment. In 2015, eight out of ten of the college’s bachelor’s degree programs failed the government’s “gainful employment” test — a measurement that looks at whether students, on average, are earning enough to repay their loans. In 2017, the year the college closed, 75 percent of its students with federal loans were delinquent or in default.

Those borrowers — the ones with federal loans — are getting relief from the Sweet settlement, and while the wait has been long, they got a break during the pandemic. They haven’t had to make payments since March 2020, and no interest has been added since then. Luciano, whose private loans are held by Navient, was allowed an 18-month pause, but her interest kept building up during that time. The company offers forbearances for economic hardships, but Luciano used up what was available when her son, now 6 years old, was born prematurely and she couldn’t work full-time.

A Navient representative declined to comment on Luciano’s situation, citing privacy concerns, and said that individuals with private loans who are facing repayment challenges should contact their servicers to inquire about available options.

Connor, of the Project on Predatory Student Lending, says she is looking into ways to help students like Luciano.

Meanwhile, Luciano, now a mom of two, has watched her fellow students from IATD posting images on Facebook of the emails they received alerting them to full loan cancellation.

“I’m so regretful, every day,” she said. “I just keep paying, but I’ll never be rid of it.”

This story about private loan forgiveness 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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Dora Bray Magilke had been unemployed for over a month when someone from her local career center in Branson, Missouri, reached out in the summer of 2020 with an offer. Magilke qualified for a government grant to go back to school, she was told, at a place the center suggested: an online company called MedCerts.

Having previously worked as a certified nursing assistant, Magilke leapt at the chance to move up in the medical field with the full $4,000 tuition for a medical-assistant training program covered. But she said she was never told that she needed in-person clinical training — which MedCerts did not provide — to make her a viable candidate for a job as a medical assistant. After finishing the roughly seven-month-long program and passing her certification exam in late 2021, she found that no one would hire her. Would-be employers told her she lacked the experience they required.

She asked MedCerts for help finding a clinical training placement, but said she was told the company could not help. She tried going back to the local career center, too. “They couldn’t do anything,” Magilke, now 53, said. “That’s a lot of wasted money in my eyes.”

MedCerts, which offers short-term training in industries like health care and information technology, is a large workforce training provider enrolling thousands of students annually. Like hundreds of similar programs, it receives millions in tuition dollars, not from traditional student aid, but from the Departments of Labor and Defense.

Since 2018, just 54 percent of people who attended WIOA-approved programs became employed at all after completing their program.

The appeal of training for a good job in a short program paid for by the government is obvious. But for hundreds of thousands of Americans like Magilke who have tried to take advantage of this, there is virtually no way to find out whether the programs actually lead to good jobs.

That’s because these schools aren’t eligible for federal student financial aid from the Department of Education, placing them in a sort of no man’s land of accountability.Students enrolling in traditional two- and four-year colleges can easily find graduation rates and can even get some employment data. But the Department of Defense does not release information on how many students complete specific programs for some of its grants – or even how much money the providers get. The Department of Labor does track and publish results, but the state and federal data on how many students finish a program and get jobs is often contradictory or is simply unavailable.

Related: Blurring the lines between education and workforce

Between 2018 and 2021, these schools took in more than $239 million in federal workforce grants from the Department of Labor — most of which went to for-profit institutions like MedCerts. On top of that, such schools received unspecified millions of dollars in tuition money from Department of Defense grants for military service members and their spouses.

“There isn’t enough oversight,” said Shalin Jyotishi, a senior analyst at the progressive think tank New America, adding that information about how students fare “is excruciatingly difficult to obtain for for-profit institutions.”

MedCerts, owned by the publicly traded corporation Stride, Inc., is approved to provide workforce training in more than 30 states. It promises quick, affordable paths to jobs; most courses take less than nine months to complete and cost less than $5,000. Yet it’s impossible to know how many MedCerts students finish their programs or how many of those who use taxpayer money to do so ultimately get jobs in the fields they trained for.

In an interview, Rafael Castañeda, vice president of workforce development at MedCerts, said that more than 85 percent of students who sit for certification exams pass them.

Asked repeatedly for specific graduation rates and employment rates, Castañeda replied only that the “vast majority” of students work in the field they studied and that in “our best-performing programs, completion rates are 86 percent.”

MedCerts, and other such providers, must submit data to state agencies, which use that information to decide whether to approve them for funding. The data in MedCerts’ applications to the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity, obtained through a public records request, shows that, at most, a third of students who went through MedCerts programs had a job of any kind a year after leaving. Castañeda said the data was imprecise because it was based on self-reported information. But MedCerts has told state regulators in Michigan, where the company is based, that “often times” students receiving federal grants fail to finish or to become employed because of “life obstacles.”

Related: Many certificate programs don’t pay off, but colleges want to keep offering them anyway

Michigan state officials said companies use such disclaimers to justify any exception to the required performance metrics. Department officials said that MedCerts had been meeting or exceeding its goals for the number of students who pass a certification exam.

Complicating matters further, agencies don’t track what kinds of jobs the students get, meaning they have no way of knowing whether the students ended up in the field they were studying. Magilke, for instance, began working as a medication aide while taking classes and still has that job. On paper, she would count as a win for MedCerts. But her job pays less than what she could earn as a medical assistant, the job she was training for. 

In 2021, the most recent year for which information is available, the government spent roughly $547 million on training for more than 220,000 people. 

“You’re still working in that same job that you were trying to get out of,” she said. “It’s just frustrating.”

The data about student performance is also rife with inconsistencies. For example, Michigan’s public website says that fewer than three students were enrolled in MedCerts’ phlebotomy technician program for the most recent one-year time period available. But MedCerts’ applications to the state indicate that, in the same time period, 60 students exited the program, 40 of whom completed it. And an unwieldy federal database says that 1,041 Michigan residents have exited MedCerts’ phlebotomy technician program over the past three years.

Officials at the federal Department of Labor said that states bear the responsibility for making sure their data is accurate. 

Local workforce boards play a crucial role in connecting students with training programs, including those funded by the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, known as WIOA. In 2021, the most recent year for which information is available, the government spent roughly $547 million on training for more than 220,000 people. The inspector general from the Department of Labor, which is primarily responsible for administering WIOA, audited a sample of participant data in 2020 and said it was not “accurate, valid and reliable.”

The data that does exist paints a bleak picture: Since 2018, just 54 percent of people who attended WIOA-approved programs became employed at all after completing their program, according to the Department of Labor.

Related: Impatient for workers, businesses help students take college shortcuts

Officials said the agency “does not regulate training providers or their programs” because states do. States are required to set goals for the training programs WIOA funds, including graduation and job placement rates. But these criteria are often so weak or poorly enforced that schools that fail to help a majority of students get a job, according to federal data, can continue to enroll new ones year after year.

Many local workforce boards don’t have enough staffers or the technology to track what’s effective, experts say.

“Some workforce boards are persistently under-resourced, and they lack an understanding of how to best use WIOA money,” said Justin Birch, program director of workforce development at the Rural Local Initiatives Support Corporation.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, companies like MedCerts, which received about $3 million through WIOA grants from 2018 to 2021, lobby local job centers to send students to their programs.

“I was under the impression that there would be an actual teacher uploading videos and that there would be a way for me to get in contact with that teacher to get better explanations.”

Jon Oue, former MedCerts student

In marketing materials, the company also promises students access to subject-matter experts, personal one-on-one mentoring and job search assistance. But Isa Partee, a former student success adviser for the company who had a caseload of about 500 students for the year she worked there, remembers feeling ill-equipped to help students understand the course material. She’d sometimes try to puzzle through the content with them, having nowhere else to send them for assistance. Partee said many students didn’t have access to a computer, despite having been admitted to an online-only program.

“It really started to feel like I wasn’t a student success adviser that genuinely cares about students’ overall success,” Partee said, which is why she quit.

Related: Are colleges finally going to start training students for the workforce?

Castañeda said MedCerts had “more than tripled the size of our team and increased the training and level of proactive program support” since Partee left the company in November 2021. While subject matter experts are available to students, he said, the courses are designed for them to progress on their own.

“The need to talk to a faculty member, if you will, is somewhat redundant,” he said.

That’s not how Jon Oue understood it. As the Covid pandemic and widespread unemployment raged in the summer of 2020, Oue, an Army specialist, was looking for a job that would earn him a decent paycheck when he left the military.

“I was Googling classes I could take, and MedCerts popped up. It said it was quick and easy and interactive,” said Oue from his home in Georgia. “It said you could talk to an instructor and it doesn’t take long.” He enrolled in the PC Technician program using an Army grant administered through the Department of Defense.

Significant federal funding for workforce training programs like those MedCerts offers comes from military grants, including a military spousal benefit known as MyCAA and the grant Oue used. And these grants receive even less oversight than WIOA’s; no information is collected about how many students get jobs or continue their education elsewhere. 

Army officials said they do not track how much funding it directs to individual providers; Department of Defense officials said information on the spousal grant was not public. MedCerts has enrolled more MyCAA students than almost any other school or training program in the country, though, with nearly 16,000 having attended.

Oue’s problems with MedCerts began almost immediately. Delivery of his textbook was delayed, and he had questions about the material.

Related: PROOF POINTS — Number of students enrolled in job-focused degree programs dropping by double digits

“When I signed up, I was under the impression that there would be an actual teacher uploading videos and that there would be a way for me to get in contact with that teacher to get better explanations,” said Oue, 23. “That wasn’t the case.”

Instead, he was assigned a career counselor to answer questions. MedCerts officials said Oue’s counselor offered career support services such as resume assistance and interview coaching — not what Oue said he needed.

Between August 2020 and January 2021, Oue said he tried to reach his counselor several times with questions about the course material, but she responded only twice — and once was to tell him whether he needed to pass the state licensing exam to graduate from the course.

The answer to that was no. He worked hard to finish the course, in part to make sure he didn’t have to reimburse the military for the tuition, he said, but never learned enough to enable him to take the state licensing exam.

“I didn’t understand enough,” he said. “There was no way I could have passed the state test. It was just a big waste of my time.”

This story about workforce training programs 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 ‘Wasted money’: How career training companies scoop up federal funds with little oversight appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Many people on both sides of the debate are awaiting the oral arguments before the Supreme Court next Tuesday about whether President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan is constitutional.

Last August, Biden announced that a student loan borrower whose income was low enough to receive a Pell grant while in college would be eligible for up to $20,000 in debt cancellation, as long as their current income was less than $125,000 (or less than $250,000 in the case of married couples or heads of households). Borrowers whose income fell within those limits but who did not receive a Pell grant in college qualified for up to $10,000 of debt relief.

But legal challenges to the President’s student loan forgiveness action quickly followed, putting the plan on pause, and leaving the financial fate of millions of borrowers in the hands of the Court.

We interviewed three experts to get their take on the debate and what it means for the future of college cost and college debt.

Their answers have been edited for length and clarity.

The Hechinger Report: What is at stake in these oral arguments?

Sandy Baum (senior fellow in the Center for Education Data and Policy at the Urban Institute): On one hand there are millions of former students who were told to expect that a significant fraction of their student debt would be forgiven and they’re counting on it. And if it doesn’t happen, they’re going to all be disappointed and some of them are going to really struggle with that. That’s the most obvious.

But of course, the case is about more than that because it’s about whether the president has the authority to do that. The question of whether the chief executive can do something that expensive, spend that much money in the way that he chooses, without Congress, is a bigger question and I think we don’t want to lose track of that either.

Michael Brickman (adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute): There’s a lot at stake because this is not only going to determine the future of the Biden Administration’s broad loan forgiveness plans, but it’s also getting to this question of whether an executive agency can suddenly discover some vast new power that no one realized they had before.

Brian Kennedy II (senior policy analyst of workforce policy at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies):  I used to teach history and social studies, so it’s really hard for me to start without rooting it in context…We have to recognize that there’s a massive racial wealth gap that exists.

I think there are two levels of disparities – one on issues of affordability and the ability to access higher education and Black students taking out more debt and riskier types of debt. And the other of not being rewarded for the same degree in terms of income.

In a typical household with an associate degree holder, the median annual income was just over $68,000, for Black households it was just over $48,000 and for White households it was just under $74,000.

THR: What will the national picture of college cost and student debt look like five years from now if the court upholds the loan forgiveness plan?

SB: It’s not helping anybody pay for college in the future, so it isn’t going to make the conversation about paying for college any easier. If the student debt forgiveness holds, it may be that people will be more comfortable borrowing money because they’ll just assume they never have to pay it back. Obviously, we can debate whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. But people are going to still think college is too expensive. College is going to get more expensive over this period of time. People are going to continue to borrow money.

MB: If the loan forgiveness program is upheld, you’re going to see a green light to the Biden Administration to continue on its quest to forgive as many loans as possible, which in turn gives colleges and universities a green light to more or less charge whatever they want. There’s already sufficient evidence that for every dollar that’s used to subsidize students, a large portion of that disappears through tuition and fees and other increases.

BK: We’ll see folk better able to afford basic things like food, like rent. People are going to better be able to afford childcare, because those costs are not going down.

While wages are increasing, they’re not increasing at the same rate as basic costs. So I think the first impact is that people are going to have more money in their pockets to be able to afford the basics. People are going to be able to put money into retirement accounts and to save for things like college.”

THR: What about if the Supreme Court overturns it?

SB: The impact will be on people who currently hold debt, not on future students.

MB: If the Court strikes down loan forgiveness, attention will then turn to the Administration’s changes to the loan program [such as the income-driven repayment plan], because those also have a limited authority granted by Congress, but that authority is now being used for purposes that no one envisioned when the law was originally passed.

Let’s remember that just a few months ago very few people thought there was a realistic chance of the loan forgiveness program being struck down.

And so, if the Supreme Court strikes this down, and especially if they do so in a broader way versus a more limited decision, I think it would open the door to further challenges of this type of executive overreach.

BK: We’ll continue to see federal student debt accumulate. People attend college for lots of reasons, but it’s a pretty heavily shared value, so people will continue to take out student loans to attend college to try to get higher paying jobs or to advance their training. What I could imagine is that we’ll continue to see the racial wealth gap widen, and we’ll continue to see folk have a more difficult time paying for basics.

It’s fair to look at inequities in student debt hand in hand with the same trends we’re seeing in the racial wealth gap. What we’ve seen is that the racial wealth gap has grown exponentially, and I would assume that we can expect to see similar trends in the student debt field as well.

THR: Some people say if loan forgiveness is upheld, taxpayers would be footing the bill. Is that fair or not?

SB: People think that because it’s debt owed to the federal government, somehow we can just erase it and it has no impact. But it obviously increases the federal debt by a fairly significant amount. There’s already a lot of pressure to decrease the debt and cut government spending. This could only add to that pressure. There’s just reporting that Republicans are putting pressure on SNAP, on the food program for low-income households. That pressure might increase and maybe those people will bear the burden. But there will be either, long-run, increased taxes or lower spending on other things, because this is a lot of money.

MB: There are people who did not go to college or maybe went for a little bit of time or are working in a field that does not require a college degree, who are trying to support their family and are likely going to see taxes go up or a reduction in other government benefits, because this money has to come from somewhere. I think there are people who just want to say, ‘Oh no, it’s just on the credit card, it’s fine, don’t worry about it.’ But the money has to come from somewhere.

BK: That line of reasoning is a typical line of reasoning, but it is often only applied when talking about specific groups of folks. In the last administration, we saw a wide range of tax relief bills and legislation aimed towards higher earners and that same line of argument wasn’t made for those policies.

Last February, the Joint Center did a survey and 76 percent of Black Americans said the President should cancel all student debt, and that was regardless of whether those individuals had student loan debt themselves.

They understand the inequities that exist within the system. Also, people understand the larger economic benefits of canceling $1.7 billion of student debt.  There are larger benefits to the overall economy when people aren’t burdened with this kind of debt.

There’s a larger macroeconomic argument to be made for this kind of relief. And the second argument, which in my opinion is just as strong, is that it’s recognizing that there are inequities present within the current student loan system. It’s recognizing that there are inequities within the student loan system. It’s not as simple as, ‘People made a choice and people should be made to uphold that choice.’ People made an investment in their education and they’re not seeing the benefits that a lot of them were promised, and those are systemic issues that require systemic solutions.

This story about student loan forgiveness action was produced by The Hechinger Report, an independent, nonprofit news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our Higher Ed Newsletter!

The post As the Supreme Court hears arguments on student loan forgiveness, three experts explain what’s at stake appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

The phone call from her son’s school was alarming. The assistant principal told her to come to the school immediately.

But when Lisa Manwell arrived at Pioneer Middle School in Plymouth, Michigan, her son wasn’t sick or injured. He was sitting calmly in the principal’s office.  

John, who has ADHD and finds it soothing to fidget during class, had been removed from the classroom after he refused to stop using a pair of safety scissors to cut his cuticles.

When she asked why he couldn’t stay for the rest of the day, Manwell said the school told her they would call child protective services if she didn’t take him home.

The call was just one of a dozen that Manwell received last fall telling her John couldn’t stay in school because of behaviors she says stemmed from his disability. Many schools have promised to cut down on suspensions, since kids can’t learn as well when they aren’t in class. But none of these pickups were ever recorded as suspensions, despite the missed class time.  

The practice is known as informal removal, defined by the U.S. Department of Education as an action taken by school staff in response to a child’s behavior that excludes the child for part or all of the school day – or even indefinitely.

Related: Senators call for stronger rules to reduce off-the-books suspensions

Excessive use of informal removals amounts to a form of off-the-books discipline — a de facto denial of education that evades accountability, advocates and legal experts say. It has special implications for kids with disabilities: Informally removing these students circumvents federal law that protects them from being disciplined or barred from class for behaviors related to their disability.

If you’ve had experiences with informal removals of children school, we’d like to hear about them: Tell us about your experiences with informal removals.

Since the pandemic began, parents of kids with disabilities say the practice is on the rise, denying their kids their legal right to an education.

“This is a repeat issue that we see in enforcement across the country, over years,” said Catherine E. Lhamon, assistant secretary for the department’s Office for Civil Rights. “And that means that the practice has taken hold in a way that is dangerous for students and needs to be addressed.”

“We do not want our school communities to be sending a message that there’s some category of kids who can’t be there.” 

 Catherine E. Lhamon, assistant secretary, Office for Civil Rights, U.S. Department of Education

In July, the department issued guidance on discriminatory practices in discipline for students with disabilities. Lhamon said the guidance included informal removals because of how often they appeared in the office’s investigations of complaints against school districts. Informal removals can happen through frequent parent pickups, shortened school days or hours spent in “time-out” rooms.

The Associated Press and The Hechinger Report interviewed 20 families in 10 states who described being called repeatedly and at all hours of the school day to pick up their children. In some cases, parents were called less than an hour into the school day. Others said they had to leave work to get their child so frequently they lost their jobs. Many felt they had no choice but to change schools, or even districts.

Related: Why disability testing has become so expensive

Because the removals aren’t recorded, there’s no way to quantify how often they happen. But the National Disability Rights Network says it has seen an increase during the pandemic.

Teacher shortages mean there are fewer staffers available to do evaluations and provide services for students with disabilities, creating “more of an incentive or more of a push for getting kids with behavioral needs out,” said Dan Stewart, the organization’s managing attorney for education and employment.

Students of color with a disability appear to be disproportionately affected based on anecdotal reports to the network from disability rights advocates around the country.

“It’s pervasive,” said Ginny Fogg, an attorney at Disability Rights North Carolina, “And the reason for that is that most parents don’t know their rights, and the consequence for the school system is not enough to make them not do it.

“The remedy isn’t, ‘You just can’t go to school,’” she added. “The law was enacted 50 years ago to prevent this very outcome — that students with disabilities aren’t allowed to go to school and participate in an education.”

Manwell said the calls from her son’s school felt relentless.

“They would be calling my personal phone, my work phone. They were calling my husband, who works nights,” said Manwell, a resource planner at Ford Motor Company. “It was impossible. I couldn’t function. I never knew when they were going to call or what was going to happen.”

An official from the Plymouth-Canton Community Schools district in Michigan where John goes to school said he couldn’t comment on specific student issues, citing federal student privacy law.

Related: PROOF POINTS: Rethinking claims of racial bias in special education

Federal law protects students with disabilities from being repeatedly disciplined or removed from school for behaviors related to their disability. If they are suspended for more than 10 days, families are entitled to a meeting with the school to determine whether the behaviors are a result of the child’s disability. If so, then the school must offer adjustments instead of suspension. For example, if a child’s disability makes it difficult for them to focus in a loud classroom with dozens of other children, the parent has the right to request a quieter classroom or one with fewer children.

The Education Department’s July guidance made clear that children who are informally removed have the same rights, such as reviews of whether the student’s behavior was a result of their disability, as those who have been officially suspended.  

Tricia Ellinger says she would have requested a hearing to make sure her 10-year-old daughter Cassie was getting appropriate services and support, had she known that her frequent removals from the classroom amounted to suspensions.

One day last spring, she received three phone calls in rapid succession, telling her to immediately pick up Cassie from Kenneth J. Carberry Elementary School in Emmett, Idaho. When she arrived, her daughter was sitting quietly in the school’s resource room eating a snack. She says a school staff member told her that Cassie was refusing to do her work and needed to go home.

“When I got her in the car, I asked her, ‘Cass, what happened? Did you tear up your notebook, did you throw your pencil?’” Ellinger recalled. “She said, ‘No, it was just hard. Math is hard.’”

The call was one of about 20 Ellinger says she got last year from the school, which is designed specifically to educate students with disabilities. She says her daughter was also taken out of class repeatedly and kept in a room by herself. None of the removals were recorded as suspensions.

“The remedy isn’t, ‘You just can’t go to school.’ The law was enacted 50 years ago to prevent this very outcome — that students with disabilities aren’t allowed to go to school and participate in an education.” 

Ginny Fogg, attorney at Disability Rights North Carolina

Emmett School District Superintendent Craig Woods said he couldn’t comment, citing federal student privacy law.  

Families often do not know what grounds they have to lodge a complaint, Lhamon said. Sometimes they aren’t aware their child should not have been suspended in the first place.  

“That is so concerning when schools are excluding students for reasons that are unlawful,” she said. “We want our kids to be in class, learning with other students, fully participant and respected as learners. We do not want our school communities to be sending a message that there’s some category of kids who can’t be there.”  

Related: Some kids have returned to in-person learning only to be kicked right back out

Manwell said most of the calls she got last year from her son’s school were a result of bullying.  On the fourth day of school John got shoved in the locker room, and she got a call to pick him up. Another time, he went to the bathroom and another student threatened to beat him up.  

Because of his disability, John was supposed to be granted access to a quiet room so he could recover from difficult incidents. But often, she said, either there wasn’t a room or when he didn’t want to return to class, she’d get a call to come pick him up.

“It was just the stress of never knowing what I was sending my kid into each day. I was worrying the whole time he was gone,” said Manwell. “I could see the damage.”

“He was withdrawing. He started talking about hurting himself,” she said, her voice breaking.  

In January, she made the decision to switch John to homebound instruction, sending him to a tutoring center every day for a couple of hours and rearranging her work schedule.  It made her life more predictable, she said, and John began to act like his old self.  

She said she’d like to send him back to school but doesn’t trust what will happen.

“You want to protect your kids, right?” she said. “I just can’t send him to a school where he won’t be safe.”

This story was produced by The Associated Press and The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.  If you’ve had experiences with informal removals of children school, we’d like to hear about them: 

Tell us about your experiences with informal removals.

The post When your disability gets you sent home from school appeared first on The Hechinger Report.