“What are you going to do with that?” is a question I heard often from my family as both an undergraduate and a graduate student.

Yes, I was an English major. My older siblings were going to nursing and medical school and all of my cousins were pursuing engineering, science and business degrees. So there was always an edge to that question every time it came up at family gatherings. A just-under-the-surface skepticism about the usefulness of a humanities degree as job preparation.

I know now that this question was meant kindly — and was informed by the older generation’s desire to see their children enjoy a return on investment (ROI) on a college education similar to what they themselves experienced as first- and second-generation college-goers.

College degrees changed the trajectories of their lives. They opened opportunities for economic and social mobility and moved my parents’ generation beyond the experiences of their grandparents and great-grandparents, many of whom, as first- and second-generation immigrants to this country in the nineteenth century, started their working lives as farmers or day laborers.

My aunts, uncles and parents were keenly aware that they themselves had benefited substantially from America’s grand expansion of the public higher education system post-World War II. Though their question burdened me at the time with self-doubt, among other things, they asked it out of a caring sense of concern for my future.

Decades later, I now have the privilege of serving as the dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at George Mason University, an access-oriented public research university that serves and graduates high numbers of students who are first-generation college goers, military veterans, economically under-resourced or transfer students, or from historically underrepresented groups.

Related: PROOF POINTS: The number of college graduates in the humanities drops for the eighth consecutive year

As the idea of higher education as a public good is increasingly questioned or under attack, and as public perceptions of the value of a college degree relative to its cost continue to shift, I often remind my faculty of our fundamental purpose: We are here to educate our students.

We are here to engage them in the kinds of high-impact discovery learning that public research universities can offer at scale; the kinds of experiences that can change the trajectory of their lives and the lives of their families.

“What can’t you do with a humanities degree?”

It is because of my institution’s access-oriented educational mission that I view the release of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences’ Humanities Indicators report, “Employment Outcomes for Humanities Majors: State Profiles,” as an important occasion.

Drawing on data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, the data collected and analyzed in this study should help change national narratives about both the “death” of the humanities and the low ROI on a four-year college degree.

The first national study of its kind, the report offers a state-by-state comparison of the salary ranges and unemployment rates of college graduates who majored in the humanities with those of, on the one hand, high-school and two-year college graduates and, on the other hand, college graduates in the arts, education, social sciences, business, natural sciences and engineering.

In doing so, the report tells a very different story than the one you typically see circulating in the media these days. Key takeaways:

• Earnings: Humanities graduates’ earnings are substantially higher than those of people without a college degree and are often on par with or higher than those of graduates in non-engineering fields.
• Earnings Disparities: Except in a few northwestern states, humanities majors earn at least 40 percent more than people with only a high school degree.
• Unemployment: The unemployment rate of humanities majors is around 2-4 percent in every state, similar to that of engineering and business majors and substantially lower than that of people without a college degree.
• Occupational Versatility: Humanities graduates make up big portions of the legal, museum and library workforces across all states; other significant areas of humanities graduate employment are education, management and sales.

Without question, the total cost of college attendance should continue to be a concern for all of us. And earnings and occupation are not the only measures of success in one’s career or life. But I am excited, as a dean, to have in hand the American Academy of Arts & Sciences’ new Humanities Indicators report and its “State of the Humanities 2021: Workforce and Beyond”report as resources to use to help current undergraduate and graduate students see how humanities majors in all 50 states have put their degrees to work across a broad spectrum of occupations and industries.

The workforce data in this new American Academy of Arts & Sciences report is the perfect complement to individual storytelling in helping today’s humanities majors think through “What are you going to do with that?” — and see clearly the vast world of work that opens to them through education in these disciplines.

Related: OPINION: Studying humanities can prepare the next generation of social justice leaders

“What can’t you do with a humanities degree?” is a tagline we invite the George Mason undergraduate admissions officers to keep top of mind as they begin their recruitment road trips.

Even as technological change is accelerating and reshaping jobs in ways that will require all of us to reinvent our careers, this American Academy of Arts & Sciences report gives today’s college students a data-informed way to conceptualize both the job opportunities and the career earning trajectories of humanities majors in all 50 states and across many sectors of our nation’s knowledge-based economy.

Ann Ardis is dean of George Mason University’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

This story about humanities degrees was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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The thing that surprised me most about my teacher preparation program was that we never talked about how kids learn.

Instead, we were taught how to structure a lesson and given tips on classroom management. I took “methods” classes that gave me strategies for discussions and activities.

I assumed that I would eventually learn how the brain worked because I thought that studying education meant studying how learning happens.

But in my training in the late ’90s, the closest I got to cognitive science was the concept of “practitioner inquiry.” I was told to study my own students and investigate what worked best. That sounded hollow to me; surely more-experienced hands knew better.

But discussions around teacher effectiveness — what methods are scientifically proven to support cognitive development — were painfully rare. Eventually, I concluded that I never learned, and we never talked about, how the brain processes information because scientists didn’t know much about it.

I was wrong. If you are a mid-career educator like me, perhaps this sounds familiar. Maybe you have also been surprised to find out that cognitive scientists actually know quite a bit about how we learn. Over the last several years, many of us have had the uncomfortable realization that there is a gap between how we teach and how scientific findings suggest we should teach.

Many of us first felt this uneasiness when we heard about the “science of reading” in a series of podcasts by Emily Hanford. Since it aired, reading educators have engaged in a great national conversation about the discrepancy between what science understands about how students learn to read and how we often teach it in schools.

The discovery of the science of reading has led to the larger, more practice-shattering realization that educators know very little about the science of learning itself.

Related: The ‘science of reading’ swept reforms into classrooms nationwide. What about math?

Just as scientists have made great gains in understanding how students read, they have also made tremendous gains in understanding how students learn. Although some educators are familiar with this research, most of us are not. It is time to know and do better.

A 2019 survey of teachers uncovered some of these gaps. In answering one question, only 31 percent endorsed a scientifically backed strategy over less effective ones. In other answers, the vast majority of respondents voiced faith in scientifically disproven concepts – such as “learning styles” and the “left-brain, right-brain” myth.

Over the last several years, many of us have had an uncomfortable realization that there is a gap between how we teach and how scientific findings suggest we should teach.

Much of the disinformation stems from training like my own. A 2016 study found that not one textbook in commonly used teacher-training programs adequately covered the science of learning.

Delving into that science is beyond the reach of this editorial but here is a quick check to see where you stand. If any of the following six terms — central to what cognitive scientists have discovered about learning — are unfamiliar, you probably had a teacher training program like mine: retrieval practice, elaboration, spacing, interleaving, dual coding and metacognition.

If these concepts are part of your current practice as an educator, nice work. But if you are among the majority of us who have not fully encountered or employed these ideas, I humbly suggest that you have some urgent reading to do. All these ideas are established learning science.

Related: Student teachers fail test about how kids learn, nonprofit finds

One of the first principal syntheses of these findings with clear recommendations for the classroom was a 2007 federal report, “ Organizing Instruction and Study to Improve Student Learning.” The seven recommendations in the report represent, according to the U.S. Department of Education, the “most important concrete and applicable principles to emerge from research on learning and memory.”

Sixteen years later, we have no one to blame but ourselves for these ideas not taking hold in every classroom.

Scientists are trying. The 2014 bestseller “Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning,” by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel, made an urgent case for these ideas. Psychology professor Daniel Willingham and middle school teacher Paul Bruno, working with the organization Deans for Impact, summarized these concepts in a concise 2015 report, “The Science of Learning.” Willingham’s books are also tremendous primers for educators who want to know more about cognitive science.

Yet the simple fact remains that these concepts remain tangential to most of us when they should be central.

Now that we are being bombarded by headlines about students’ pandemic learning loss, perhaps we should focus on what we educators never learned. If we are to overcome these recent setbacks, we need to do so with the most effective tools.

M-J Mercanti-Anthony is the principal of Antonia Pantoja Preparatory Academy, a public school for grades 6-12 in the Castle Hill neighborhood of New York City, and a member of the Board of Education of Greenwich, Connecticut.

This story about the science of learning was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — The journey to Boston was more than 1,500 miles. The plane ticket cost about $500. The hotel: another $400. She felt a little guilty about going, knowing that not everyone could afford this trip. But it was important; she was headed there to learn. 

So, Amrita Bhagia, a second-year medical student from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, caught that flight to Boston to attend a weekend workshop hosted by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. There, she joined medical students from around the country for a summit on abortion care. She learned about medication abortion, practiced the technique of vacuum aspiration using papayas as a stand-in for a uterus, and sat in on a workshop about physician’s rights. 

“It was the most empowering thing I could have imagined, especially coming from a state where people don’t want to talk about this stuff, ever,” said Bhagia, an aspiring OB-GYN at the University of South Dakota, a state where abortion is banned. “Other than me flying to Boston to go to an ACOG workshop, I have no idea how to get that training.” 

Even before Roe v. Wade was overturned last summer, access to abortion training was uneven. Medical schools are not required to offer instruction on it, and students’ experiences vary wildly based on their institution. 

But for Bhagia and med students like her in states where abortion has been banned or severely restricted, those training opportunities have gone from not great to nonexistent.

As a result of this insufficient gynecological training, experts warn, a generation of doctors will be ill-equipped to meet their patients’ needs. And across the country, maternal-care deserts will likely expand, as graduating medical students and residents avoid abortion-restricted states.

More than 30,000 medical students are training in states with abortion bans. Another 1,400 OB-GYN residents, who are required to receive abortion training as part of their specialty, are studying in states where abortion is banned or severely restricted. 

“There’s a concern that in states with these restrictions, students are simply not getting enough training and exposure,” said Jody Steinauer, an OB-GYN, medical educator and director of the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco. “There’s really a worry that if this continues, you’re going to be training a large group of OB-GYNs who can’t provide patient-centered, evidence-based care, no matter where they practice.”

“I would love to stay in Texas and train. This is a fantastic institution and I want to serve this community. But if I can’t get the training I need, I will have to leave.”

Chelsea Romero, a third-year medical student at McGovern Medical School in Houston, Texas

A related concern: Fewer medical students will choose to become OB-GYNs at all, fearing lawsuits or criminal prosecution. Figures show that OB-GYN residency applications are down across the country, but programs in states with abortion bans saw the biggest drops. Application rates for family medicine programs experienced a similar decline.

Abortion is currently banned in 14 states. All offer a narrow exception to this blanket prohibition when the mother’s life is at risk and a few of these states allow abortions in cases of rape or incest. But doctors say guidance on maternal health exceptions remains unclear, leaving physicians vulnerable to potential prosecution when treating patients.

“Students are seeing us struggle with this stuff and they’re like, ‘Yeah, why would I stay here for this?’” said Amy Kelley, a Sioux Falls OB-GYN and clinical associate professor at the University of South Dakota, a state where doctors can face up to two years in prison for violating the state’s ban.

These developments are particularly worrisome in South Dakota and other rural states that are already struggling to recruit and retain maternal healthcare providers. More than half of the state’s counties have no OB-GYNs, and rural South Dakotans with high-risk pregnancies often have no choice but travel to Sioux Falls for specialty care.

Limited access to maternal health care is reflected in troubling maternal mortality rates in abortion-restricted states across the country, where mothers are three times as likely to die due to their pregnancy, according to recent research. Barriers to abortion training could amplify physician shortages, increasing the number of maternal-care deserts and posing even greater risk to maternal health.

“We already have a physician shortage in this country,” said Pamela Merritt, a reproductive rights activist and director of Medical Students for Choice. “And we have the maternal health outcomes that come with that shortage. We have the worst pregnancy outcomes in the developed world. The last thing I want to see is people either having an insufficient education yet providing care, or people not even thinking of OB-GYN as a specialty in certain states.”

Although medical schools’ curricula vary, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education requires OB-GYN residency programs to provide access to abortion training. Residents with moral or religious objections are allowed to opt out. It’s a key component of an OB-GYN’s training, even for doctors who have no plans of becoming abortion providers.

An OB-GYN must be able to evacuate a uterus — whether the skill is used to care for a patient who’s had an incomplete miscarriage, to remove polyps for cancer diagnosis or assist someone who wants to terminate an unwanted pregnancy — and doctors-in-training can develop this ability through clinical abortion training. 

“Such training is directly relevant to preserving the life and health of the pregnant patient in some instances,” ACGME program requirements state.

Yet in states with abortion bans, direct access to that training has vanished. In the past year, program directors in those states have scrambled to find out-of-state training opportunities so their residents can fulfill OB-GYN program accreditation requirements. But identifying and coordinating those training opportunities is no small feat.

“A lot of programs are grappling with the logistics piece of partnering with another institution to send a resident somewhere else,” said Alyssa Colwill, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Oregon Health & Science University, who directs the university’s OB-GYN Ryan Residency program. OHSU plans to host a dozen out-of-state learners for four- to six-week clinical rotations during this academic year. 

Programs like these require significant behind-the-scenes orchestration and space is limited. Visiting learners must apply for a medical license in their new state, complete required hospital training, take out new malpractice insurance, and secure housing and transportation.

More than half of South Dakota’s counties have no OB-GYNs; rural South Dakotans with high-risk pregnancies often have no choice but travel to Sioux Falls for specialty care.

In addition, programs in abortion-restricted states must often cope with the loss of a team member while residents travel for training.

“Programs really need their residents for services they provide,” said Colwill. “It’s not the easiest ask, to have a resident be gone from all clinical duties at their site for a month at a time.”

And while the overturn of Roe has had the most profound impact on residency programs, medical students who are not yet in a residency say they’re also feeling its effects. Doctors-in-training spend four years in medical school before beginning a residency in their chosen specialty.

“Bringing abortion up feels like a violation because it’s so taboo now,” said Bhagia. “I don’t know if I can even ask questions, and that’s impeding my learning.”

Chelsea Romero, a third-year medical student at McGovern Medical School in Houston, Texas, where abortion is restricted, said she has never faced repercussions for discussing abortion, but the risk of consequences is always on her mind. 

“As a student, you’re being evaluated constantly, and these evaluations can dictate if you get residency interviews or not,” said Romero, who stressed she spoke only for herself and not as a representative of her university. “If I have those conversations with a wrong person in power, I could face blowback.” 

One year after Roe was overturned, this stifled learning environment appears to be having an influence on where medical students are applying to residencies. One recent survey of medical students found that 58 percent of those responding were unlikely to apply to a residency program in a state with abortion restrictions, regardless of their specialty. 

“I would love to stay in Texas and train. This is a fantastic institution and I want to serve this community,” said Romero. “But if I can’t get the training I need, I will have to leave.”

“Where you train is where you stay. It is rare that a resident will train in California and then move to rural South Dakota; it just doesn’t happen.”

Yalda Jabbarpour, a family physician and director of the Robert Graham Center, the American Academy of Family Physicians’ policy and research center

Decisions like hers will have ripple effects for the physician workforce in the coming years, said Yalda Jabbarpour, a family physician and director of the Robert Graham Center, the American Academy of Family Physicians’ policy and research center. “Where you train is where you stay,” she said. “It is rare that a resident will train in California and then move to rural South Dakota; it just doesn’t happen.”

That’s exactly what worries Erica Schipper, an OB-GYN in Sioux Falls.

South Dakota is one of only six states in the country without an OB-GYN residency program, which means medical students who want to become OB-GYNs must leave the state to receive their training. Schipper, who also teaches medical students at the USD Sanford School of Medicine, said the state’s abortion ban will make recruitment even harder. 

“When I look at some of the brightest, up-and-coming medical students who we’ve sent away for their residency, we’re hoping they’ll come back, but I suspect they’re thinking twice,” said Schipper. 

One of those students is Morgan Schriever, a Sioux Falls native and a graduate of USD’s Sanford School of Medicine. Schriever is a second-year OB-GYN resident at Southern Illinois University who said she always planned to return to her home state. But after training in Illinois, where abortion is protected, she’s having second thoughts. 

Schriever is not only concerned that she would be unable to provide elective abortions in her home state. She’s also worried that South Dakota’s restrictive law would impede her ability to provide medically necessary abortions when treating patients experiencing pregnancy loss.

“Being in practice in Illinois, I come across these scenarios where I picture myself in South Dakota and I’m like, ‘Oh my God. How would I have handled this?’ I’m just not sure I want to put myself in that position where essentially my license is on the line.”

“There’s really a worry that if this continues, you’re going to be training a large group of OB-GYNs who can’t provide patient-centered, evidence-based care, no matter where they practice.”

Jody Steinhauer, director of the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health

These latest recruitment challenges particularly affect states already grappling with an OB-GYN shortage and struggling to improve maternal health care.

“Abortion-restrictive states are the same states that are traditionally rural and have a really hard time attracting physicians,” said Jabbarpour, “so any decline in those states is troublesome.”

Heather Spies, an OB-GYN who trains family medicine and general surgeon residents at Sanford Health, a hospital system in Sioux Falls, said the Sanford system is ensuring its residents are trained in basic obstetrics and gynecology care, including labor and delivery and miscarriage care. Even with the state’s abortion ban in place, she said, doctors at Sanford are able to provide miscarriage care and treat most pregnancy complications. 

“I don’t think those learning experiences have changed because the procedures that we do at Sanford haven’t changed,” said Spies. 

Still, there are some healthcare needs that require specialty care, certain medical emergencies that demand the expertise of an OB-GYN. And as abortion bans undermine training and push OB-GYNs out of restricted states, public health experts say they’re worried maternal-care deserts across the country will grow even drier.

“In the dead of a South Dakota winter blizzard, if you can’t get that helicopter to where it needs to go and that mom and that baby are in danger, you’re much more likely to save those lives if you have a doctor nearby,” said Schipper.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s already ample and dramatic evidence of this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Bada-bing,” their teacher happily responded.

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

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In the last few years, the American education system has been bludgeoned by changes that have upended decades of progress toward better academic, economic and social outcomes for all.

Politicians around the country have been aiming to demolish progressive policies by targeting teaching about race and ethnicity, the LGBTQIA+ community and women’s reproductive rights. Calls for book banning and censorship have become common. These dangerous culture wars will wreak havoc on education and education policy for years to come.

As a teacher and school-based leader, I always understood the necessity of advocating for students and helping them navigate life, and I tried to help other teachers change the trajectory of many lives.

I taught my students to respect the power of civic engagement and social activism. Recent politics has made it hard to extend that work. The rollout of Florida’s House Bill 1557, popularly known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, was the start of a radical transformation that threatens to undo decades of social change. Other states, including Indiana, Alabama, Ohio and Tennessee have followed Florida’s lead with legislation that is discriminatory against the LGBTQIA+ community. It must be resisted.

Teaching is inherently activist.

Politicians are also attacking the Black population. When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis challenged the College Board’s AP African American Studies course, he inspired others to follow suit with flagrant concessions to institutional racism. Calls to be “anti-woke” and “anti-indoctrination” have become increasingly popular battle cries. Earlier, the complete misrepresentation and misunderstanding of critical race theory signaled a disregard for the Black community and contempt for the importance of students learning about all people and cultures. Since then, states such as Arkansas and Texas have also opposed the true teaching of the history of Black people in this country by dropping African American history courses and eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. The states’ actions provide a smoke screen for efforts to limit discussion of race and racism and disenfranchise the Black community.

As teachers worry about losing their jobs for violating the often-vague language of these new laws, school boards have succumbed to the demands of the few over the best interests of the majority. Who suffers the most? The students.

Related: Teachers, deputized to fight the culture wars, are often reluctant to serve

There is a critical need to prepare teachers to be intentional voices calling out the oppression that continues to plague our education system. We must do this through teaching, learning and advocacy — as well as social activism and civic engagement.

I have trained in, taught and led educator preparation programs. In past years, these programs met societal and student needs through instruction on culturally responsive teaching, trauma-informed education, conscious leadership and many other progressive approaches. Our goals were not far-fetched or new.

Teacher preparation programs have traditionally served as catalysts for shaping the future of the American education system and the ways in which we collectively work as a society to improve outcomes for all students. Teaching is inherently activist. Colleges, schools of education and alternative teacher preparation programs prepare people to engage in activism through teaching and learning. This is not what some politicians would call “indoctrination”; instead, these efforts embrace the potential for educators to be true change agents and justice warriors.

Related: OPINION: You can’t teach psychology without covering gender and sexuality, and you can’t teach history without covering racism

Today, during this 21st century version of the civil rights struggle, it is more important than ever to remember the lessons of the past and the role of educator preparation in training teachers and other education professionals to confront lies, dismantle oppressive systems and be advocates for students’ causes.

We must be deliberate in the ways in which we prepare teachers to serve the community. So many rights and freedoms are currently under attack in this country. That makes it even more important to fight for justice within the American K-12 educational system and ensure that our students learn the truth. This is dire.

Eugene Pringle Jr. is a senior professorial lecturer at the American University School of Education.

This story about teacher activism was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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We are facing an impending crisis in the nation’s principal pipeline, and the way we license principals is making it worse. This is especially true if a would-be principal is enrolled in a distance education program offered by a college or university outside their state. It is difficult for aspiring school administrators to know in advance if their home state will accept the program they are considering or the license they have earned.

We could not be experiencing this problem at a worse time. Principals, like teachers, are struggling and accelerating their plans to leave their roles in the wake of the pandemic. This is on top of the pre-pandemic trend in which 50 percent of school leaders were leaving in their third year. Schools in communities experiencing high poverty suffer the most.

With only 40 to 50 percent of assistant principals becoming principals, the nation needs more educators willing to become administrators. To help fill these gaps, we need to streamline school principal licensure across state lines.

This issue seems to be particularly acute for Black and Hispanic educators, who are underrepresented in principalship and systemically delayed in being promoted. In a survey of Black and Hispanic teachers, 52 percent suggested allowing licensure across state lines as a key tactic to diversify the profession (there is limited data on principals’ attitudes on this issue).

Expanding the school administrator pipeline is critical. Research shows that when a school has a Black leader, students do better and more Black teachers get hired and stay on the job.

Related: OPINION: Want to improve our public schools? Create an impressive principal pipeline

As a consultant and educator licensure professional, I have seen firsthand how complicated it can be for aspiring leaders trained in one state to become licensed in another. I recall an interaction with an education student who had been offered a pathway to a school leadership position. She was excited by the offer, but wanted to ensure that she would be able to become licensed in that state before committing. Despite documenting how her program of study matched the requirements listed on the state’s website, she could not get confirmation from the state’s licensing board that her program would meet the state’s requirements. This experience left her agonizing between completing her current program or starting another program approved by the state offering the leadership pathway.

Licensure across state lines is complicated not only for principal candidates but also for licensing boards and principal preparation program providers. Boards and providers know that the requirements a candidate needs to meet to become licensed in their home state can change before the student ends the program. This makes them reluctant to confirm for candidates in advance whether an out-of-state program meets their state’s standards for licensure.

We must change our approach to credentialing school leaders trained or licensed outside of the state in which they hope to work.

I recall one year in which, over a six-month period, requirements in seven states where many of our students were located changed, requiring us to reevaluate whether a path to licensure still existed for our students in those states.

The current system does not serve aspiring principals, administrator preparation programs or state licensing boards well. We must change our approach to credentialing school leaders trained or licensed outside of the state in which they reside.

One critical step that we can take is to create a more straightforward pathway for licenses earned in one state to transfer to another. Here, we can take a cue from policies developed for teachers. The recently launched Interstate Teacher Mobility Compact creates reciprocity between participating states and reduces barriers to employment. We need a similar agreement for principals. Policymakers should act now to develop a compact for principal licensure, leveraging the Interstate Teacher Mobility Compact as a guide.

Related: OPINION: How to make it easier for teachers to stay in the classroom

Additionally, licensing boards and principal preparation program providers must take action to ensure that students know when they enroll if a program meets their home state’s requirements. Minimally, providers must allocate more internal or consulting capacity to review changing licensure requirements in other states. Often, program providers only employ one staff person to oversee licensure-related work for multiple educator preparation programs. When standards change, it is incredibly difficult for staff to keep pace. States should have clear language (as in Tennessee and Rhode Island) describing the requirements that in-state and out-of-state program completers must meet to be licensed.

A small number of states, like South Carolina, go even further. They allow education students, before enrolling in an out-of-state program, to request a review of the program to clarify whether it is expected to meet South Carolina’s requirements. Initiatives like this should be expanded and, potentially, opened to preparation program providers.

This is not an argument that we should have lower standards for licensure. It is a plea that we remove barriers to candidates who have enrolled in, or received a principal license from, a quality administrator preparation program outside of the state in which they hope to work.

Having an effective school leader is one of the highest-leverage investments we can make in a K-12 school. Failure to take proactive steps to widen the principal pipeline will significantly affect the supply of school administrators in this country. Policymakers, licensing boards and principal preparation program providers must act now to ensure an ample and equitable workforce of school leaders prepared to serve this nation’s schools.

Leopold Richardson is the principal consultant at Asher Ambrose, a strategic leadership and education consultancy, and former senior regulatory affairs, accreditation and certification professional.

This story about school principal licensure was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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In a 1987 opinion piece in The New York Times, William Bennett, former President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education, explained how he thought federal policy was partly to blame for rising college tuition. Under the headline “Our Greedy Colleges,” Bennett wrote that  “increases in financial aid in recent years have enabled colleges and universities blithely to raise their tuitions, confident that Federal loan subsidies would help cushion the increase … Federal student aid policies do not cause college price inflation, but there is little doubt that they help make it possible.” In other words, Bennett argued, when colleges are aware that students have easy access to cheap loans to pay their bills, they’re more likely to hike prices.

This theory became known as the “Bennett Hypothesis.” Since then, as Uncle Sam created and expanded direct student lending programs, the Bennett Hypothesis has been hotly debated. Now, a team of economists has found evidence that subsidized loans have been a major reason why tuition has soared in one sector of higher education:  graduate school. 

The federal government limits how much it loans undergraduates.  But in 2006, the Republican-controlled Congress effectively eliminated all limits on loans for graduate school with the creation of the Graduate PLUS loan program. Students could borrow as much as their graduate programs cost, including fees, books, supplies and living expenses. The idea was to help more middle- and low-income Americans afford graduate programs, ranging from master’s degrees in education and social work to professional degrees in law, business and medicine. Doctoral students generally receive tuition waivers and stipends, but funding has always been far more limited for professional degrees and many graduate students previously relied on expensive loans from private banks. Advocates argued that the prospect of these bank loans kept many low-income Americans from pursuing a graduate degree.

Borrowing for graduate school has since soared. Graduate students constitute only 16 percent of postsecondary students, but they received almost half of the $95 billion in new federal student loans issued in 2021-22, according to the most recent data available. And when you look at the entire stock of $1.6 trillion in outstanding federal student loan debt, it’s estimated that 40 percent of it was used to pay for graduate school. The numbers are big because graduate students take out big loans. It’s not uncommon for a medical student to borrow more than $100,000. Almost two-thirds of Americans with the largest student loan balances, exceeding $50,000, borrowed to attend graduate school. 

A team of three economists from Columbia, Vanderbilt and Brigham Young universities had access to a trove of data in Texas and they calculated how the universities in that state charged more tuition when students were able to borrow more from the federal government. The posted cost of attendance (also known as list price or sticker price) increased one dollar for every dollar that students borrowed in Grad PLUS loans. But that overstates the loan-driven inflation because, at the same time, admissions offices were ramping up their practice of price discrimination, wooing some students by slashing their bills with grant and “merit aid” offers. The actual net price that many students paid was considerably lower than the posted tuition price.  Factoring that in, the inflationary effect of unlimited graduate student loans was actually more modest, a 64-cent increase in net price of attendance for every dollar borrowed. For every additional $1,000 that a graduate student borrowed from the federal government, the university effectively took $640 of it for itself.

“Overall, our results demonstrate that schools do in fact respond to increased loan access by increasing tuition,” the researchers wrote in a study, “PLUS or Minus? The Effect of Graduate School Loans on Access, Attainment and Prices.” I read a preliminary draft version of the study, dated February 2023, which was publicly posted online by one of the authors. The authors revised their calculations in April 2023 and I am using their latest figures here.

Tuition certainly would have increased even without federal loans. To disentangle how much of the tuition hikes could be attributed to the availability of easy and cheap student loans after 2006, the economists essentially divided all the universities in Texas, both public institutions such as the University of Texas and private institutions such as Rice University, into two groups. One group included universities that served a higher share of graduate students who were already borrowing as much as they could from the federal government before 2006 (roughly $18,500 a year in Stafford loans). The second group included institutions that primarily served graduate students who were borrowing less. Some graduate programs charged less than $18,500 a year and students generally didn’t need to borrow more. In theory, their students should be unaffected by the ability to take out unlimited loans because they already had room to borrow more.

Before 2006, both groups of universities had hiked tuition at the same pace. But after 2006, there was a schism. There were much larger tuition hikes at the more expensive universities where many students had been at their borrowing limit. These institutions raised their prices more and their students borrowed more to pay these bills. By contrast, there were much smaller tuition hikes at the second group of universities where fewer students had been maxing out their federal loans. 

The authors contend that the universities had “captured” some of the additional federal funds for themselves. Students who were already saddled with the most debt had to take on more debt to pay higher bills. 

The economists looked to see if there were other benefits from unlimited graduate school loans. Unfortunately, they didn’t find any. The policy didn’t increase the number of students enrolled in graduate programs in Texas universities. It didn’t improve the demographic composition of new graduate student cohorts. There were the same percentages of Black, Hispanic and Native American students after the 2006 policy change as there were before. Gender composition was the same too. 

The ability to pay college bills didn’t help more students complete their graduate degrees; graduation rates stayed the same. There was little evidence that students’ earnings in the workplace were any higher after graduate school.

One major caveat is that the researchers analyzed only graduate programs that existed before the policy change to document how they changed afterwards. We don’t know from this study if new graduate programs significantly increased access to graduate school or diversified their student ranks. This study ended with students who entered graduate school in 2009-10; it’s possible that the hoped-for benefits of unlimited lending kicked in afterwards.

The saddest part of this analysis is how the availability of loans saddled students with more debt, and there are hints that this burden was especially borne by Black students. In the study, the authors documented how universities used grant aid to woo prospective graduate students and there are indications that very little of this aid was targeted to Black students. That left many Black graduate students taking out larger loans to pay higher tuition bills than their white, Asian American and Hispanic peers. White and Asian American students effectively had the lowest tuition increases. Hispanic students fell in between. 

Well-intentioned policies can backfire. Access to cheaper loans was supposed to create more opportunities for Americans. But this study found that this didn’t happen in practice. 

The Texas study looked only at loans to graduate students. The results are very different for undergraduates. In their previous research, the authors of this study found that the increase in undergraduate loan limits had been very helpful to students. They documented significantly higher rates of college graduation and post-college earnings in the workplace. Several studies have found that federal lending has helped community college students. Access to credit can make a positive difference.   

But just because a policy works in one area of higher education, undergraduate degrees, doesn’t mean it will work for all areas. Education financing is complicated. As policy makers in Washington debate extending more financial aid for non-degree certifications – short-term programs in a professional field –  they would be well-served to read this study and think through whether or not it is likely to be another example of the Bennett Hypothesis.

This story about graduate school loans was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters. 

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The dean of Harvard Medical School was emphatic and unambiguous when he announced that it would end its participation in the U.S. News & World Report rankings.

“Rankings cannot meaningfully reflect the high aspirations for educational excellence, graduate preparedness, and compassionate and equitable patient care that we strive to foster,” Dean George Daley wrote.

Harvard thereby became one of more than a dozen medical schools and more than 40 law schools ranked by U.S. News that have said they will no longer provide information to it. They say the rankings formula discouraged them from admitting promising graduates of less-prestigious colleges who hadn’t performed as well on entrance tests as applicants from top schools, and that they were penalized in the rankings when their graduates chose careers in public service over more lucrative options.

But the exodus has also called attention to the lack of other easy-to-find reliable information available to consumers to help them make one of the most consequential and expensive investments in their lives.

Where can prospective applicants to not only law and medical schools but also undergraduate colleges and other graduate programs find the clear and independent facts they need to choose among them?

On that question, higher education’s elite are more muted. Almost none of the institutions that withdrew from the rankings would respond to it.

“We would urge you to pose your question to independent experts elsewhere,” a Harvard Medical School spokesman wrote.

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

The issue is compounded by the problem that the information higher education institutions provide about themselves — their costs, postgraduate placement rates, whether credits will transfer and other important measures — has historically been, and in many cases still is, not accurate.

Some graduate and professional programs say they are trying to address this problem. Many business schools have started streamlining the data they provide and have added a sort of seal of approval attesting that it’s true. And law school deans will meet March 1 to talk about how to deliver more and better information about their institutions.

“We all know that the data is out there. We want to make sure we get it to our students in the most useful ways,” said Heather Gerken, dean of Yale Law School, who is heading up the conference in conjunction with her counterpart at Harvard.

Related: Colleges provide misleading information about their costs

There is already independently corroborated information about law and medical schools available from accrediting organizations, sometimes for a fee; in several cases it exists in part precisely because of previous scandals in which professional schools falsified their data. The federal government also offers consumer information about undergraduate universities and colleges, though it can be misleading if it’s not read closely.

Some of the most comprehensive centralized data that’s already available is about law schools, collected and provided by the American Bar Association, or ABA, which accredits 199 of the nation’s schools of law.

It includes information on application fees, acceptance rates, the GRE scores and diversity of accepted students, faculty race and gender, tuition and fees, estimated living expenses, scholarships and dropout and transfer rates, plus the proportion of graduates who pass the bar, how many have found work and whether or not it’s in jobs that require a law degree.

“If you’re a law school, you’re likely not going to lie to your accrediting agency. So there’s a great degree of confidence that the data the ABA has is accurate,” said Mike Spivey, founder of the Spivey Consulting Group, which works with both prospective applicants and law school admissions offices.

Employment data given to the ABA must be certified personally by the dean and senior career services officer of every law school, and the ABA can order an audit if it spots red flags.

That’s in part a result of scandals in the 2010s, when some law schools, including those at the University of Illinois and Villanova University, were found to have inflated grades and entrance-exam scores. As the job market for lawyers slumped, other law schools were sued by at least 15 of their own graduates for exaggerating placement rates. One alumna of the Thomas Jefferson School of Law, for instance, alleged that the 80 percent of graduates the school reported had found jobs included one who was a convenience store clerk. But courts have generally ruled that students enroll in higher education at their own risk.

The Association of American Medical Colleges, or AAMC, which accredits medical schools, also offers information about them in a resource it calls Medical School Admissions Requirements, or MSARs. Harvard’s dean, in his statement withdrawing from the rankings, referred people there.

The most detailed information in MSARs requires a $28 subscription and is collected from the scores and surveys of people who take the Medical College Admissions Test, which the AAMC administers. Users who pay the fee can compare up to 10 medical schools at a time, said Tami Levin, AAMC’s director of premedical and applicant resources.

“That’s how we’re different: We don’t have the schools provide the data to us; we provide it to them,” Levin said.

Only around half of people with graduate degrees think they were worth the cost, according to a Gallup poll. Fewer than one out of four law and business students think their graduate educations prepared them for the workforce.

But some observers point out that accreditors have flaws, too; several undergraduate accreditors have continued to accredit failing institutions with what the U.S. Department of Education’s office of the inspector general has found is inadequate oversight.

“I’d be skeptical of any approach that relies on accreditors to be the brokers of that information. I think they’re conflicted,” said Beth Akers, a senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute.

“I’m probably supposed to be arguing for smaller government,” Akers said, “but there is a role for bigger government in this space. It’s a travesty that we don’t have independent sources of information about this product.”

Related: Shopping for a major? Detailed salary info shows which majors pay off

For undergraduate colleges and universities, the U.S. Department of Education has a website called College Scorecard that reports students’ average annual costs, after discounts and financial aid, along with typical student loan debt, median earnings 10 years after enrollment and other information that can be compared among schools.

Median earnings come from the IRS, as reported by employers and taxpayers; the rest of the data is supplied by institutions directly and not independently checked, and can be misleading. For example, a user would have to click on the fine print to learn that the graduation rate for four-year colleges shows the proportion of students who finish in eight years, not in four.

“The fact that we are reporting eight-year graduation data when colleges are advertising the programs as taking four years is outrageous,” said Brendan Williams, a financial aid expert at uAspire, which helps low-income students go to college. “To think consumers understand this is asking a lot.”

Nor do colleges’ track records make advocates for students confident about the information they report themselves, whether to the government or directly to prospective students.

“Applicants often say, ‘Well, the admissions officer told me this or that,’ ” said Spivey. He said consumers need to do the same independent vetting they would if they were buying a car. “I don’t necessarily believe everything the car salesman tells me.”

A General Accounting Office investigation in November found that 91 percent of colleges and universities misrepresented their expected cost of attendance, something Virginia Foxx, Republican leader of the U.S. House Committee on Education and Labor, called “inexcusable and outright shameful.” Families “make one of the most critical financial decisions of their lives when they accept their financial aid offer,” said Foxx, who requested the investigation. “Schools should not hide the true cost of college from them.”

Many institutions also send out offers of financial aid that thwart families from comparing institutions.

“They don’t view students as consumers, and that’s one of the underlying issues,” said Williams. “When you talk to a college, they’ll say, ‘Don’t view it as a commodity.’ But students need to know how much this product is going to cost them before they make a decision. They deserve that.”

Information on the job placement of graduates — the second-most important reason students pick a university or college, after academic reputation, according to a survey of freshmen nationwide by an institute at UCLA — almost universally comes from email questionnaires of alumni, something universities sometimes fail to disclose or mention only in the small print.

Related: Placement rates, other data colleges provide consumers are often alternative facts

On average, they hear from only slightly more than half of former students, a proportion euphemistically called the “knowledge rate.” So when a university says that 98 percent of its graduates are working or pursuing further education, it means 98 percent of the half from whom the alumni office heard back — a very different number.

With consumer information lacking, hard to find and sometimes wrong, there is a considerable amount of buyers’ remorse in higher education. Only a quarter of recent grads in another survey, by the educational publishing and technology company Cengage, said that, if they could do it again, they’d take the same educational path. More than four in 10 bachelor’s degree-holders under 45 did not agree that the benefits of their educations exceeded the costs, according to a survey by the Federal Reserve.

Only around half of people with graduate degrees think they were worth the cost, according to a Gallup poll. Fewer than one out of four law and business students and fewer than one in three other master’s recipients think their graduate educations prepared them for the workforce.

“When you talk to a college, they’ll say, ‘Don’t view it as a commodity.’ But students need to know how much this product is going to cost them before they make a decision. They deserve that.”

Brendan Williams, financial aid expert at uAspire

That’s on the heels of a significant investment. The average amount of student loan debt owed by graduates of medical schools is $241,560; of law schools, $142,870 and of graduate business schools, $65,090, federal figures show.

Yet there continues to be less information about higher education than for other services and products people buy.

“In other marketplaces, people know to be skeptical,” said Akers. Higher education, on the other hand, “has been something that we talk about as if it’s some sort of magical transformational experience. The thought that we’d need to measure and assess the quality of education in this coldhearted financial way is inconsistent with the way we’ve thought of it historically. But that’s changing.”

As law schools meet to consider creating more transparency, the Graduate Management Admission Council is tightening its guidelines for how graduate business programs report information about themselves. Starting this month, those that comply with the new reporting standards will be able to show a badge that they are in compliance, though this isn’t mandatory and the information won’t be audited or vetted, the GMAC said.

U.S. News has said it will continue ranking schools, whether they provide information to it or not. Still, for all of the attention given to the rankings, only 15 percent of freshmen in that UCLA survey said they relied on them to pick a college.

The rankings dust-up has at least provoked a conversation about how to help students pick a college or professional or graduate school, said William Hoye, associate dean for admissions and student affairs at the Duke University School of Law.

“I really hope there’s going to be a groundswell to think of new ways to capture information and data and new ways to help people make these very, very important decisions,” Hoye said.

This story about how to pick a college 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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Cuando Andrea Soto tenía 10 años, su familia emigró a Texas desde México. Su abuela, que vivía en Houston, tenía la enfermedad de Alzheimer y sus padres querían estar más cerca para ayudar con sus cuidados.

Al crecer, Soto a menudo sirvió como intérprete entre los miembros de su familia y sus médicos.

“Hice lo mejor que pude”, dijo, “pero hubo momentos que fueron complicados, y se me pasó por alto, e hicimos lo mejor que pudimos como familia”.

Hoy, Soto es estudiante de medicina de tercer año en la Facultad de Medicina de la Universidad de Texas Valle del Río Grande. Ella eligió estudiar allí — al sur de Texas, a lo largo de la frontera con México— debido a la oportunidad de trabajar con una población inmigrante de habla hispana.

“Quiero ser ese doctor moreno que una niña morena que está interpretando para sus padres hubiera debido tener”, dijo.

Su objetivo es establecer una práctica que sirva a familias inmigrantes como la suya, con una especialidad en medicina familiar u obstetricia y ginecología. Pero mientras Soto se prepara para solicitar su residencia después de la escuela de medicina, le está dando prioridad a los programas fuera de su estado natal.

Eso se debe a que, a pesar de su deseo de quedarse cerca de casa, le preocupa no tener acceso a la capacitación médica que necesita si se queda en Texas.

“Si me quedo, no obtendré la capacitación en atención del aborto que necesito, y no estoy dispuesta a sacrificar eso”, dijo Soto.

En los estados donde el aborto ahora es ilegal, los estudiantes de medicina como Soto están reconsiderando sus opciones, abandonando sus planes originales a favor de seguir una formación en los estados donde el aborto es legal.

45 por ciento de todos los programas de residencia de obstetricia y ginecología se encontraban en estados “seguros o probables de prohibir el aborto” con la revocación de Roe

Así es para Jessica Flores, una estudiante de medicina de segundo año en la Universidad de Texas Valle del Río Grande.

“Es una posición difícil”, dijo Flores, quien proviene de la pequeña ciudad de Portland en el sur de Texas y ha soñado durante mucho tiempo con servir a su comunidad como médica. Ahora que Texas ha convertido el aborto en un delito punible con cadena perpetua, ella está reconsiderando sus planes.

“¿Sigo mi educación en un estado en el que quiero estar idealmente, pero que potencialmente me perjudicará y no me preparará como un médico para mis pacientes? ¿O me voy?” dijo Flores.

En un mundo posterior a Roe, miles de futuros médicos ahora enfrentan obstáculos para acceder a capacitación clínica en atención del aborto. Los expertos dicen que estas nuevas barreras podrían, en última instancia, limitar el acceso no solo al aborto, sino a toda la atención obstétrica y ginecológica.

Durante años, los investigadores han advertido sobre una creciente escasez de obstetricia y ginecología, especialmente en las comunidades rurales de todo el país. Tras la decisión Dobbs de la Corte Suprema, aumenta la preocupación de que las prohibiciones del aborto intensifiquen esa escasez al hacer que el camino para convertirse en un obstetra y ginecólogo sea más difícil y menos atractivo.

Para convertirse en médico, los estudiantes asisten a cuatro años de la escuela de medicina y luego completan una residencia en la especialidad elegida. Los programas de residencia en obstetricia y ginecología deben ofrecer acceso a la capacitación en aborto inducido, aunque los estudiantes con objeciones morales o religiosas pueden optar por no participar.

El Consejo de Acreditación para la Educación Médica de Graduados ha hecho cumplir este requisito desde 1996, y los programas que no pueden cumplir con este estándar ponen en peligro su estado de acreditación.

Pero después de la decisión de Dobbs, a medida que los legisladores estatales de todo el país se movilizan para promulgar leyes que prohíban o restrinjan severamente el aborto, el acceso directo a la capacitación en aborto clínico ha desaparecido, o es probable que desaparezca, en las instituciones de origen de miles de médicos residentes.

Casi la mitad de los futuros proveedores de atención médica para mujeres del país podrían verse afectados. Un informe de abril de 2022 en la revista Obstetrics & Gynecology dijo que el 45 por ciento de todos los programas de residencia de obstetricia y ginecología se encontraban en estados “seguros o probables de prohibir el aborto” con la revocación de Roe. Esos programas dieron cuenta de 2.638 residentes de un total de 6.007.

En este nuevo panorama legal, los programas de residencia deben equilibrar la obediencia a las leyes estatales con el cumplimiento de los estándares de acreditación de su campo. En respuesta a la decisión de Dobbs, el ACGME redactó revisiones a sus lineamientos que proporcionarían una solución alternativa que permitiría a los programas en estados donde el aborto está restringido enviar a sus residentes fuera del estado para recibir capacitación o, si eso no es factible, brindar capacitación sobre el aborto a través de instrucción y simulación.

Mientras tanto, los directores de programas en los estados donde se restringe el aborto ahora confían en sus redes personales, comunicándose con colegas en estados que permiten el aborto para encontrar oportunidades de capacitación para sus residentes, pero la logística ha demostrado ser un desafío.

“No existe un sistema centralizado para ayudar a que esto suceda”, dijo la Dra. Kate Dielentheis, obstetra y ginecóloga y directora asociada del programa de residencia en obstetricia y ginecología en el Colegio Médico de Wisconsin. “Depende de institución por institución tratar de improvisar experiencias para sus residentes”.

Esta capacitación ad hoc está agregando presión a un sistema ya tenso.

Kristin Simonson es directora de programas y operaciones en el Programa de Capacitación de Residencia Ryan, con sede en la Universidad de California, San Francisco, que trabaja con programas de residencia de obstetricia y ginecología en todo el país para ayudar a desarrollar su capacitación en aborto y planificación familiar. Ella dijo que la organización está trabajando con programas en estados donde el aborto es legal para aumentar la capacidad de entrenamiento, pero esos médicos ya enfrentan una afluencia de nuevos pacientes.

“En este momento, están sucediendo dos cosas en los estados donde el aborto está protegido”, dijo. “Están tratando de administrar el aumento de los servicios para los pacientes, y están tratando de administrar la entrada de nuevos estudiantes”.

A medida que se prueba la capacidad de los proveedores de servicios de aborto, a muchos expertos les preocupa que los residentes actuales de obstetricia y ginecología que necesitan capacitación en aborto se pierdan.

“La residencia es finita”, dijo Dielentheis. “La residencia de obstetricia y ginecología es de cuatro años, y la idea de ‘Oh, vamos a necesitar seis meses o un año para resolver esto’ es mucho tiempo para un residente”.

Más allá de los desafíos de capacidad, a los educadores médicos les preocupa que las nuevas barreras a la capacitación en aborto desalienten a los futuros médicos de estudiar en estados que restringen el aborto.

“¿Sigo mi educación en un estado en el que quiero estar idealmente, pero que potencialmente me perjudicará y no me preparará como un médico para mis pacientes? ¿O me voy?”

Jessica Flores, una estudiante en la Universidad de Texas Valle del Río Grande

En la Facultad de Medicina y Salud Pública de la Universidad de Wisconsin en Madison, la Dra. Laura Jacques, profesora asistente, asesora a los estudiantes de medicina que planean solicitar una residencia en obstetricia y ginecología.

“Puedo decirles que el 100% de ellos están considerando la disponibilidad de capacitación sobre aborto cuando están creando la [lista de] programas a los que quieren postularse”, dijo.

La investigación apoya esa opinión. Una encuesta reciente, aún por publicar, de residentes de obstetricia y ginecología en Wisconsin y Minnesota encontró que el 95 por ciento de ellos deseaba obtener más información sobre la necesidad de una atención del aborto integral y segura, y el 84 por ciento planeaba brindar atención del aborto en su futuras carreras.

Según Jacques, la prohibición del aborto restablecida recientemente en Wisconsin, que hace que proporcionar un aborto sea un delito grave, tendrá un efecto negativo en la capacidad del programa para atraer candidatos.

“No hay duda de que los residentes no van a venir a estados que no les brinden la capacitación que valoran y creen que necesitan”, dijo Jacques.

Dielentheis está de acuerdo. “Mucha gente quiere vivir en San Francisco, San Diego o la ciudad de Nueva York”, dijo, “pero puede ser difícil atraer a un médico a un estado como Wisconsin”.

A largo plazo, Simonson del programa Ryan predice cambios en la coincidencia de residencia nacional.

“Estamos interesados ​​en ver cómo esto podría cambiar donde los residentes solicitan y tratan de igualar”, dijo. “Suponemos que los programas en los estados donde el acceso al aborto es seguro serán más competitivos”.

Los educadores médicos dicen que los residentes que no pueden capacitarse en la atención del aborto están perdiendo la oportunidad de desarrollar una amplia gama de habilidades obstétricas y ginecológicas.

“La capacitación en aborto es más que solo realizar un aborto”, dijo la Dra. Eve Espey, presidenta del Departamento de OB-GYN de la Universidad de Nuevo México y presidenta del Consejo de Cátedras Universitarias de OB-GYN.

La técnica quirúrgica de dilatación y evacuación, por ejemplo, se utiliza como método de aborto en el segundo trimestre, pero también para tratar abortos espontáneos incompletos mediante la eliminación del tejido restante del embarazo. Perder la capacitación en aborto, dijo Espey, significa perder oportunidades de preparar a los médicos para responder a los abortos espontáneos y otras complicaciones del embarazo.

“Hay consecuencias no deseadas de gran alcance”, dijo.

El escrutinio legal adicional en torno a la atención del aborto espontáneo también dificulta el aprendizaje, dice el Dr. Tony Ogburn, presidente del departamento de obstetricia y ginecología de la Universidad de Texas Valle del Río Grande.

“Me preocupa que sea un desafío tanto desde el punto de vista de la educación como del punto de vista de la práctica”, dijo Ogburn. “Ya no está pensando en cuál es el estándar de atención y qué es lo mejor para mi paciente. En el fondo está: ‘No puedo hacer esto’ o ‘¿Esto es algo que podría hacer, pero podría ser ilegal?’. Eso es lamentable, porque en última instancia, quienes sufren son los pacientes”.

Incluso antes de la decisión de Dobbs, los obstetras y ginecólogos estaban distribuidos de manera desigual en los Estados Unidos, ubicados de manera desproporcionada en y cerca de áreas urbanas. Según el Colegio Estadounidense de Obstetras y Ginecólogos, la mitad de todos los condados de EE.UU. carecen de un solo obstetra y ginecólogo, y se espera que esa escasez aumente.

La nueva legislación que limita el aborto podría sesgar aún más la distribución.

“Los proveedores realmente lo van a pensar dos veces”, dijo Espey. “Van a tener verdaderas dudas sobre mudarse a estados que anteponen la política a la relación paciente-proveedor”.

Los defensores de la salud de la mujer han advertido que la cantidad de obstetras y ginecólogos capacitados no ha logrado mantener el ritmo de una creciente población de mujeres adultas. El año pasado, 2161 estudiantes de medicina solicitaron 1503 plazas de residencia en obstetricia y ginecología en todo el país, según datos del National Resident Matching Program.

Según la Asociación de Colegios Médicos Estadounidenses, la mayoría de los médicos optan por permanecer en el estado donde completaron su formación. Pero los estados que restringen el aborto después de Dobbs podrían tener más dificultades para retener a sus médicos, advierten los defensores de la salud de la mujer.

“Es una gran pregunta que está por verse”, dijo Simonson.

Y no son solo los residentes cuyo entrenamiento se ve afectado. Los que aún están en la escuela de medicina también sufrirán la decisión de Dobbs, dicen los educadores médicos.

A diferencia de los programas de residencia en obstetricia y ginecología, que deben brindar acceso a capacitación sobre el aborto para mantener su acreditación, las facultades de medicina no están obligadas a incluir instrucción sobre la atención del aborto. Como resultado, la exposición de los estudiantes de medicina al aborto varía según el diseño del plan de estudios de su programa.

Una encuesta de 2021 de estudiantes de medicina en el Medio Oeste encontró que, si bien el 55 por ciento de los encuestados se había encontrado con el aborto en el “contenido ético”, solo el 41 por ciento había recibido instrucción sobre la atención del aborto. Se espera que las prohibiciones estatales sobre el aborto hagan que la instrucción sea aún más rara.

“No importa en qué te metas, estarás atendiendo a pacientes que han tenido o tendrán o buscarán un aborto, y si no obtienes ese nivel básico de capacitación en la escuela de medicina, eso solo va a aumentar aún más estas disparidades y problemas de acceso”, dijo Jacques.

Para muchos estudiantes de medicina que alguna vez se interesaron en obstetricia y ginecología, estos obstáculos de capacitación, junto con el riesgo de enjuiciamiento, son abrumadores.

“Ninguno de nosotros planea volver a ser OB-GYN, cero. Me rompe el corazón”.

Alexandra Chetty, estudiante, Escuela de Medicina de LSU Health New Orleans

Alexandra Chetty, estudiante de medicina de segundo año en la Escuela de Medicina de LSU Health New Orleans, ha estado fascinada por la obstetricia y la ginecología desde su primer semestre en la escuela de medicina. Pero este verano, cuando entró en vigor la ley desencadenante de Luisiana que prohíbe casi todos los abortos, Chetty dijo que decidió no seguir esa especialidad.

“Es un campo frustrante para entrar si no estás en el estado correcto, lo cual es realmente agotador”, dijo Chetty. “Número uno, no quieres lidiar con estas demandas locas o simplemente el temor de que algo suceda. Y luego, número dos, no puedes cuidar a tus pacientes”.

Chetty, quien es presidenta del grupo de interés en obstetricia y ginecología de su escuela y del capítulo del campus de Medical Students for Choice, dijo que los líderes estudiantiles en estos grupos han cambiado sus planes de manera similar.

“Ninguno de nosotros planea volver a ser OB-GYN, cero. Me rompe el corazón”, dijo Chetty. “No queremos ponernos un objetivo a nosotros mismos”.

De vuelta en el Valle del Río Grande, Andrea Soto está considerando programas de residencia en Nuevo México y Colorado. Le preocupa que el nuevo panorama legal en Texas aleje a los futuros médicos del estado.

“Muchos estudiantes se irán de Texas. ¿Volverán?” dijo Soto. “Probablemente no.”

Este artículo acerca de la capacitación en obstetricia y ginecología fue producido por The Hechinger Report, una organización de noticias independiente sin fines de lucro enfocada en la desigualdad y la innovación en la educación. Lea sus otros artículos en español.

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When Andrea Soto was 10 years old, her family immigrated to Texas from Mexico. Her grandmother, who lived in Houston, had Alzheimer’s disease, and her parents wanted to be closer to help with her care.  

Growing up, Soto often served as an interpreter between her family members and their doctors.

“I did the best I could,” she said, “but there were moments that were complicated, and it went over my head, and we just tried the best we could as a family.”  

Today, Soto is a third-year medical student at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine. She chose to study at UTRGV — located in South Texas, along the border with Mexico — because of the opportunity to work with a Spanish-speaking immigrant population. 

“I want to be that brown doctor that a brown little girl who is interpreting for their parents should have had,” she said.

Her goal is to establish a practice that will serve immigrant families like her own, with a specialty in either family medicine or obstetrics and gynecology.  But as Soto prepares to apply for her residency after medical school, she’s giving priority to programs outside her home state. 

That’s because, despite her desire to stay close to home, she’s concerned she won’t have access to the medical training she needs if she stays in Texas.

“I won’t get the abortion care training I need if I stay, and I’m not willing to sacrifice that,” said Soto.

In states where abortion is now illegal, medical students like Soto are reconsidering their choices, abandoning their original plans in favor of pursuing training in states where abortion is legal.  

“It’s a difficult position to be put in,” said Jessica Flores, a second-year medical student at UTRGV, who comes from the small city of Portland in South Texas and has long dreamed of serving her community as a physician. Now that Texas has made abortion a felony punishable by up to life in prison, she is rethinking her plans.

“Do I pursue my education in a state where I want to be ideally, but it’s going to potentially undercut me and not make me as prepared as a physician for my patients? Or do I leave?” said Flores.

In a post-Roe world, thousands of future doctors now face roadblocks to accessing clinical training in abortion care.  Experts say these new barriers could ultimately limit access not just to abortion, but to all obstetric and gynecological care.   

For years, researchers have warned of a growing OB-GYN shortage, especially in rural communities across the country. Following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, concern is rising that abortion bans will intensify those shortages by making the path to becoming an OB-GYN more difficult and less appealing. 

Related: If more students become pregnant post-Roe, are we prepared to support them?

To become a doctor, students attend four years of medical school, then complete a residency in their chosen specialty. OB-GYN residency programs are required to offer access to training in induced abortion, although students with moral or religious objections are permitted to opt out.

This requirement has been enforced by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education since 1996, and programs unable to meet this standard jeopardize their accreditation status.

But in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision, as state legislators across the country move to enact laws banning or severely restricting abortion, direct access to clinical abortion training has disappeared — or is likely to do so — at the home institutions of thousands of medical residents. 

Nearly half the country’s future women’s health care providers could be affected. An April 2022 report in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology said 45 percent of all OB-GYN residency programs were in states “certain or likely to ban abortion” with the overturn of Roe. Those programs accounted for 2,638 residents out of 6,007 total.

In this new legal landscape, residency programs must balance obeying state laws with staying in compliance with their field’s accreditation standards. In response to the Dobbs decision, the ACGME has drafted revisions to its guidelines that would provide a workaround allowing programs in abortion-restricted states to send their residents out of state for training or, if that is not feasible, provide abortion training through instruction and simulation.

Meanwhile, program directors in abortion-restricted states are now relying on their personal networks — reaching out to colleagues in states that allow abortion to find training opportunities for their residents — but the logistics have proven challenging. 

“There’s no centralized system to help make this happen,” said Dr. Kate Dielentheis, an OB-GYN and the associate director of the OB-GYN residency program at the Medical College of Wisconsin. “It’s left up to institution by institution to try to cobble together experiences for their residents.”  

This ad hoc training is adding pressure to an already strained system.

Kristin Simonson is the director of programs and operations at the Ryan Residency Training Program, based at the University of California, San Francisco, which works with OB-GYN residency programs nationwide to help build out their training in abortion and family planning. She said the organization is working with programs in states where abortion is legal to bulk up training capacity, but those doctors are already facing an influx of new patients.  

“At this moment, there are two things happening in states where abortion is protected,” she said. “They’re trying to manage increasing patient services, and they’re trying to manage new learners coming in.” 

As the capacity of abortion providers is tested, many experts worry that current OB-GYN residents in need of abortion training will miss out.  

“Residency is finite,” Dielentheis said. “OB-GYN residency is four years, and the idea that ‘Oh, we’re going to need six months or a year to figure this out,’ that’s a long time for a resident.”

Related: How are college campuses preparing for a post-Roe world?

Beyond the capacity challenges, medical educators worry that new barriers to abortion training will discourage future doctors from studying in states that restrict abortion.

At the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison, Dr. Laura Jacques, an assistant professor, advises medical students who plan to apply to an OB-GYN residency.  

“I can tell you that 100% of them are considering the availability of abortion training when they’re creating the [list of] programs that they want to apply to,” she said.

Research supports that view. A recent, yet-to-be-published survey of OB-GYN residents in Wisconsin and Minnesota found that 95% of them wanted to learn more about the need for safe, comprehensive abortion care, and 84% planned to provide abortion care in their future careers.  

According to Jacques, Wisconsin’s recently reinstated abortion ban — which makes providing an abortion a felony offense — will have a chilling effect on the program’s ability to attract candidates.

“There’s no question that residents are going to not come to states that won’t give them the training that they value and think they need,” said Jacques.

Dielentheis agrees. “A lot of people want to live in San Francisco or San Diego or New York City,” she said, “but it can be difficult to attract a physician to a state like Wisconsin.” 

Long term, Simonson of the Ryan program predicts shifts in national residency matching.

“We’re interested to see how this might change where residents are applying and trying to match,” she said. “Our guess is that programs in states where abortion access is safe will become more competitive.”

Medical educators say residents unable to train in abortion care are losing out on the opportunity to build a broad range of obstetric and gynecological skills. 

“There’s more to abortion training than just performing an abortion,” said Dr. Eve Espey, chair of the Department of OB-GYN at the University of New Mexico and president of the Council of University Chairs of OB-GYN.

The surgical technique of dilation and evacuation, for example, is used as a method of abortion in the second trimester but also to treat incomplete miscarriages by removing remaining pregnancy tissue. Missing out on abortion training, Espey said, means missing out on opportunities to prepare doctors to respond to miscarriages and other pregnancy complications.  

“There are far-reaching, unintended consequences,” she said.

The added legal scrutiny around miscarriage care also hampers learning, says Dr. Tony Ogburn, chair of the OB-GYN department at UTRGV.

“I have concerns that it’s going to be challenging both from an education standpoint and a practice standpoint,” said Ogburn. “You now are no longer thinking about what the standard of care is and what’s best for my patient. In the background is: ‘I can’t do this,’ or ‘Is this something I could do, but it might be illegal?’ That is unfortunate, because ultimately who suffers are the patients.” 

Even before the Dobbs decision, OB-GYNs were distributed unevenly in the United States, disproportionately located in and near urban areas. According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, half of all counties in the US are without a single OB-GYN, and that shortage is expected to grow.

New abortion-limiting legislation could further skew the distribution.

“Providers are really going to think twice,” said Espey. “They are going to have real second thoughts about moving into states that put politics over the patient-provider relationship.”

Women’s health advocates have warned that the number of trained OB-GYNs has failed to keep pace with a growing adult female population.  Last year, 2,161 medical students applied for 1,503 OB-GYN residency spots nationwide, according to data from the National Resident Matching Program.

According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, most doctors choose to remain in the state where they completed their training. But post-Dobbs, abortion-restricted states might have a harder time retaining their doctors, women’s health advocates warn.

“It’s a big to-be-seen question,” said Simonson.

And it’s not just residents whose training is affected. Those still in medical school will also suffer from the Dobbs decision, medical educators say.  

Unlike OB-GYN residency programs, which must provide access to abortion training to maintain their accreditation, medical schools are not required to include instruction on abortion care. As a result, medical students’ exposure to abortion varies based on the curriculum design of their program.

A 2021 survey of medical students in the Midwest found that while 55 percent of those surveyed had encountered abortion in “ethics content,” only 41 percent had received instruction on abortion care. State abortion bans are expected to make instruction rarer. 

“No matter what you go into, you’re going to be taking care of patients who have had or will be having or will be seeking an abortion, and if you don’t get that base level of training in medical school, it’s only going to further increase these disparities and access issues,” said Jacques. 

Related: Post-Roe landscape could further stress America’s crumbling child care system

For many medical students once interested in obstetrics and gynecology, these training obstacles, along with the risk of prosecution, are daunting. 

Alexandra Chetty, a second-year medical student at LSU Health New Orleans School of Medicine, has been fascinated by obstetrics and gynecology since her first semester of medical school. But this summer, as Louisiana’s trigger law banning nearly all abortions took effect, Chetty said she decided not to pursue that specialty. 

“It’s a frustrating field to enter into if you’re not in the right state, which is really draining,” said Chetty. “Number one, you don’t want deal with these insane lawsuits or just the dread of something happening. And then number two, you can’t take care of your patients.”

Chetty, who is the president of her school’s OB-GYN interest group and of the campus chapter of Medical Students for Choice, said student leaders in these groups have similarly changed their plans. 

“None of us are planning to go into OB-GYN anymore — like zero. It breaks my heart,” said Chetty. “We don’t want to put a target on ourselves.”

Back in the Rio Grande Valley, Andrea Soto is considering residency programs in New Mexico and Colorado. She worries the new legal landscape in Texas will push future doctors away from the state.

“A lot of students will leave Texas. Will they come back?” said Soto. “Probably not.”

This story about OB-GYN training 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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