CHICO, Calif. — Most students in the California State University, Chico library were silently poring over books or computers on a recent afternoon, but one group was tucked into a corner peppering university president Stephen Perez with questions.

What’s the world’s smallest mountain range? The Sutter Buttes, about an hour south of Chico. The only incorporated city in Modoc County? Alturas. The biggest lake in Plumas County? Lake Almanor.

The students were testing Perez’s knowledge of the largely rural swath of the state served by his campus. Because that’s where they are from.

This mostly lighthearted mixer had a serious purpose: getting university leaders to see and support rural students. It’s part of a small but growing effort on some campuses to create a stronger sense of belonging for rural students, who drop out at higher rates than their suburban counterparts.

The university is trying to “change the narrative,” Perez told the 15 or so students and employes in the library, where a small space has been set aside for a permanent rural student resource center. “I’d love to talk to you more about what we can do,” he said, after fielding questions about budgets, tuition hikes and whether he was a Taylor Swift fan. (Yes: Perez said he had just been singing “Our Song” on a drive back from the airport.)

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

About a fifth of Americans live in rural areas, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. But few colleges have clubs for rural students to socialize and help each other through the challenges they face, obstacles such as feeling out of place, dealing with crowds or public transportation and even navigating busy freeways. Fewer still have physical spaces for those students to hang out together.

With support hard to come by, rural students across the country have begun to create their own support networks, mostly in the past two or three years, sometimes even without administration support. Most of these rural student clubs have emerged at Ivy League universities or other highly selective private institutions, and often have just a handful of members. But the trend is spreading.

At Chico State, a group called the North State Student Ambassadors advocates for rural classmates and works to make them feel welcome. Their new space in the library includes a map of the university’s 12-county service area, which covers 33,000 square miles. Three of those counties — Modoc, Plumas and Trinity — are 100 percent rural, census data show.

High school students in remote towns across rural Northern California have a low opinion of the university, said sophomore Brynna Garcia, one of the event’s moderators, partly because — as Perez acknowledged — Chico recruiters rarely travel to those towns to speak with prospective students. Few of her classmates in Red Bluff, about an hour north of Chico, even considered Chico State, she said.

Garcia said she chose Chico, the closest public university, mostly because snow closed the roads as she was preparing to visit her other option, the University of Nevada, Reno.

Attending college just a quick drive from home has made the experience a little easier for Garcia, but as with other students from small towns and tiny high schools, the transition to Chico’s 13,000-student campus has been daunting at times. A dormitory, for instance, might have more residents than a rural student’s high school had students.

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

“No one around you has the same experiences,” Garcia wrote in an essay for the Chico program. “They don’t know what [Future Farmers of America] is. They don’t realize your town doesn’t have a single Uber or Lyft driver. They’ve never seen the stars from their backyard or touched snow and they surely don’t have horses or cattle to tend to.”

The Chico library space might not be much, but it gives students an opportunity to take a break from the pressure of adapting to the different, said Karen Schreder, an assistant professor of education who works with rural students through the campus’s civic engagement office.

“They know everybody in their town, and they have been supported in their journey by everybody in their school and town,” Schreder said. “And then they come here, and they’re, like, ‘What do I do on Sunday? Where do I go?’ ”

Related: The latest group to get special attention from college admissions offices: men

At the University of Chicago, Savannah Doty, a 21-year-old senior from rural eastern Washington, said she felt completely shut down when she brought up rural issues in a class about the histories of infrastructure.

“It got steamrolled by both the professor and the rest of the class,” said Doty, president of that campus’s Rural Student Alliance. “I’ve had that experience hundreds of times in classes, in that my rural identity is downplayed. I think everyone would benefit from hearing about the rural experience.”

Chicago is one of several campuses with rural groups that now hold bowling excursions, ice cream socials and other events designed to help students feel more comfortable and talk about what they’re up against.

At Brown University in Rhode Island, the rural club has held sessions on how to use the bus and how to navigate Providence, said Eliana Hornbuckle, a junior from the small town of Nevada, Iowa, population just under 7,000. Few Brown administrators, if any, are from rural areas, she said, so a student-driven club makes more sense than a university program.

 “I don’t think it would be as successful if it were started by the college or university itself,” said Hornbuckle, one of the club’s leaders. “I think it would feel weird if the university were creating a space for us to meet. It would be too formal.”

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

The club became an official student organization in 2022, a couple of years after it was founded, said Abigail Bachenberg, a 2023 Brown graduate and one of the first members. Organizers had trouble finding similar clubs at other schools to use as models, she said.

“I’ve had that experience hundreds of times in classes, in that my rural identity is downplayed.”

Savannah Doty, senior, University of Chicago

Many elite colleges are starting to ramp up their recruiting of applicants from rural areas, but students at some institutions say the attention ends there. Rural students, once they arrive on campus, often feel as if their colleges forget about them, noted Ty McNamee, a University of Mississippi assistant professor of higher education who studies rural students. A rural club can help alleviate that angst, he said.

“A lot of times these students have the same cultural backgrounds and are able to support one another,” said McNamee, who grew up on a Wyoming ranch and founded a rural student group while attending Columbia University. As a student who moved to New York City from a town of 600, he said, “being in that bubble where I felt validated was really helpful to me.”

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

Students in the few official rural clubs are trying to expand those opportunities to more universities and colleges. Madison Mellinger, then a senior at Princeton University, organized a two-day virtual conference attended by 80 to 90 students last February to help students organize rural clubs. Topics included “imposter syndrome and the rural identity” and “starting and developing your rural student club.”

Nobody knows how many rural student clubs exist, Mellinger said, but the most successful ones have forged connections with their school administrations that have resulted in financial support.

Servando Melendrez, a 19-year-old Chico State sophomore from the Lassen County town of Westwood, California, said he had never met other rural students on campus before joining the university’s North State Ambassadors program.

“It’s definitely a big step for Chico to do something like this,” said Melendrez, whose hometown has about 1,500 people and whose high school class had about 15 students. “It does feel good that the university is looking out for us.”

Educators involved with rural education at Purdue University, Kansas State University and Virginia Tech have said they would like to find more ways to support rural students.

Inspired by the Chico initiative, Virginia Tech plans to create a physical space for rural students, said Amy Azano, a professor of adolescent literacy and rural education there. Even though the 38,000-student university is surrounded by rural communities, she said, it can still be overwhelming for rural students.

“We have to build that sense of belonging,” said Azano, founding director of the Virginia Tech Center for Rural Education. “Just because we’re in this bucolic setting doesn’t mean rural students feel comfortable here.”

Chico’s rural student group was a big reason 19-year-old Sophia Dutton, from the Plumas County town of Graeagle, California, transferred to Chico after a tough freshman year at a big San Diego campus. Her classmates and professors in San Diego didn’t understand how her rural upbringing influenced her life and education, Dutton recalled, and the campus did not have a rural student club.

Being closer to home and rural California has been a relief, she said.

“I have never been a city person and I know that,” Dutton said.

As the Chico event with the president wrapped up, students mingled and discussed weekend plans. A few planned to drive home to their small towns, where they said the remoteness is part of the draw.

“I’m going to go home and look at the stars tonight,” Dutton said.

This story about rural college students 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 and check out our College Welcome Guide.

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CHICAGO — Donje Gates’ family wants him to go to college in the fall, to “break that cycle” of so many young Black men choosing other paths.

But he’s keeping his options open.

“The thing is,” given its high price and questions about its value, “college might be a scam,” said Gates, an 18-year-old senior at Bogan Computer Technical High School on Chicago’s South Side. He’s considering going to a trade school instead.

Gates was among the scores of high school students who accepted an invitation to visit Malcolm X College, a community college in Chicago, as part of a program run jointly with the Chicago Public Schools. With an enrollment that is now three-quarters female, Malcolm X — like colleges and universities across the country — is struggling to find new ways to attract men like him to campus.

Women now make up about 58 percent of U.S. college undergraduates, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, and each year far more women are enrolling in higher education than men. The trend is especially acute for Black men, with about 138,000 fewer Black men enrolled in college last year than in 2017.

The situation has become so worrying that some colleges have started to treat men as a group that needs additional support, seeking ways to both attract male students and keep them enrolled from one year to the next.

At Malcolm X, college leaders took a close look at student data and realized that Black men were dropping out in far higher numbers than other segments of the student body. In response, they started a new mentoring program that pairs an instructor or other employee with two Black male students. This has helped. While 43 percent of Black male students dropped out between the fall of 2021 and the spring of 2022, President David Sanders said, 93 percent of the few dozen men in the mentoring program stuck around.

Related: How higher education lost its shine

Still, it can be a challenge persuading men to seek academic help, said Sanders, who is Black.

“There’s an expectation for a male,” he said. “He’s supposed to be strong and not show weakness. If I can’t read or write at college level, I can’t show that.”

Colleges and universities have had a difficult time attracting students of any gender recently. Undergraduate enrollment is down by 1.11 million just since 2019, according to the clearinghouse.

The obstacles are not only financial and academic, but also cultural. One of the most difficult challenges can be breaking through the conflicting messages men and boys have been getting from family and friends for years.

Berea College in Kentucky has 18 percent fewer male students now than in 2019, and the college has started focusing on attracting Appalachian men — and keeping them there.

Rick Childers, a Berea alumnus who leads the Appalachian initiative, said a lot of the male students he comes across from the region face the same outdated ideas about masculinity that he did.

“You’re encouraged to go better yourself, but my dad would always call me ‘college boy,’ ” Childers said. “It was confusing, because I thought it was what I was supposed to be doing. But then there’s this resentment.”

It’s difficult to recruit men who have been brought up to believe college isn’t for them, educators say.

Among the groups trying to change such childhood messages is an American Psychological Association task force aimed at getting teachers and others to better understand boys and their educational needs.

“[R]igid conceptions of masculinity, that include anti-school sentiments, harm their well-being, and contribute to adverse outcomes in education,” the task force notes on its website. “All boys have the capacity to reach their full potential, especially within schools; yet, many boys experience unnecessary and preventable distress and hardship.”

Related: Bachelor’s degree dreams of community college students get stymied by red tape — and it’s getting worse

Nationally, about 138,000 fewer Black men were enrolled in college last year compared to 2017.

More educators would be inclined to help boys and men if it weren’t for mistaken assumptions about that male privilege, said Ioakim Boutakidis, a task force member and professor of child and adolescent studies at California State University Fullerton. Boutakidis said he has encountered that pushback at his own campus as he has tried to get the university to pay attention to male enrollment and academics.

Even his own colleagues have expressed skepticism about the need for more focus on male students, he said.

“I go where the data tells me to go,” said Boutakidis, the father of two adolescent boys. “If I care about equity gaps, then I’ll put my efforts where the equity gaps are biggest. I’m not trying to bring an ideology to this.”

Related: Momentum builds for helping students adapt to college by nixing freshman grades

Boutakidis suggested that the easiest way to start to close those equity gaps is to focus first on men of color, who are less likely to attend college than white men.*

Some colleges across the country have done just that, with a bevy of race-specific initiatives cropping up on campuses.

California’s 116-campus community college system has boosted support of its African American Male Education Network and Development program, or A2MEND, to attract and retain Black men. The program is meant to improve the climate for Black male students by providing one-on-one mentoring and meeting spaces to create a sense of community. It has given out $700,000 in scholarships to Black men, according to Amanuel Gebru, vice president of student support at Moorpark and the president of the A2MEND board.

Black men need even more commitment, Gebru said.

“We’re making efforts, but we haven’t done enough,” he said. “There’s a lot of initiatives and conversations about creating safer spaces in the classroom for Black male students, but there isn’t policy to say we have to hire more Black faculty and staff at these colleges.”

Just 7 percent of U.S. faculty members are Black, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, and Moorpark College said just 2 percent of its faculty is Black. The U.S. population is 13.6% Black.

Moorpark has added “equity lounges,” summer trips to Africa, and seminars for professors on how to best teach men. It has asked every department to gather data on its male students and has developed counseling and mentoring programs for Black and Latino men.

New Jersey’s Montclair State University last year launched the Male Enrollment and Graduation Alliance to increase the number of male Black and Latino students. Forty percent of the students at Montclair State are male, 36 percent are Hispanic and 13 percent are Black.

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

Montclair has tried a range of methods to attract male students from cities such as Newark and Camden — everything from counseling and tutoring to providing toiletries and food. But many communities still believe men don’t belong in college, said the initiative’s director, assistant provost Daniel Jean.

“There are more accolades for getting out of jail than for graduating from college,” he said. “There’s an anti-intellectual environment that’s gotten worse. The definition of manhood is often flawed.”

“We’re making efforts, but we haven’t done enough. There’s a lot of initiatives and conversations about creating safer spaces in the classroom for Black male students, but there isn’t policy to say we have to hire more Black faculty and staff at these colleges.”

Amanuel Gebru, board president, A2MEND

Boys and men in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods tend to focus more on other things than college, said Vaughn Smith Jr., a 23-year-old Montclair State senior from Newark. Smith, who is Black, said he decided as a high school senior that he wanted more from life. Most of his male high school classmates did go to college, he said, but many of them have since dropped out.

Men don’t support each other the way women do, Smith said, which makes it harder to find male role models.

“Men are very competitive,” he said, “so we don’t succeed as much because we’re always trying to get ahead of each other.”

Similar trends are being seen in Appalachia. Another challenge, some educators there said, is that men have had a particularly difficult time recovering from the isolation of Covid lockdowns. To address this, many campus initiatives are now including social gatherings and one-on-one mentoring. At Berea, the Appalachian program has held dinners and organized road trips to baseball games and museums, with varying levels of success.

“I’ve had events where literally one person showed up and I had to throw away a bunch of food,” Childers said. Attendance has improved since he made the events more casual. “We pull out our hair trying to figure out how to get them engaged. It’s come down to they just want to relax and blow off some steam with each other.”

*Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that college-going declines have been steepest among Black men. 

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LOS ANGELES – The first in his family to attend college, Paul Medina was increasingly frustrated by his inability to get into a college-level math class.

Medina first enrolled in remedial courses at a Los Angeles-area community college in 2005 after an assessment test placed him three classes below college level. The courses did not count toward a degree or transfer credits. He passed the first two, pre-algebra and high school-level algebra, but got stuck in intermediate algebra.

Twice, Medina dropped that class in frustration, giving up on college math for a few years, unsure he would ever pass the classes needed for a degree.

But a 2017 California law that sought to nearly eliminate remedial classes allowed Medina to skip intermediate algebra; he enrolled in a higher-level statistics course that offered intense tutoring, and he had no trouble passing.

“I see the benefits of not having remedial classes,” said Medina, 35, who has made academic progress toward three different associate degrees while working, sometimes full time. They can “discourage you and leave you behind. I saw a lot of students like myself get discouraged.”

But despite the law that requires community colleges to direct students like Medina away from remedial education, more than half of California’s 116 campuses have yet to embrace the change, which took effect in 2019.

Related:  College students increasingly caught in remedial education trap

At least one in five introductory math courses is remedial at 69 California community colleges, according to the California Acceleration Project, a faculty group supporting a bill to strengthen the 2017 law to force the hold-outs to reduce those numbers. The bill passed in the California Assembly last week and now goes to the state Senate. While the original law required colleges to direct students into classes where they are “most likely to succeed,” it was vague on how colleges should do that. Some colleges have even increased remedial offerings since the law took effect, the California Acceleration Project says.

Advocates who want to largely do away with remedial education in California and in a handful of other states — including New York, Florida, Tennessee and Georgia, all of which have made changes — say many students can handle college-level work if given the opportunity, especially when they get help from tutors or supplemental classes. Students shouldn’t have to pay for classes that don’t count toward a degree and that they most likely won’t pass, these advocates say.

The community college law took effect shortly after California State University, the largest four-year system in the nation, eliminated placement exams and remedial classes in 2018, saying that they were costly and largely failed to help students achieve their educational goals.

Despite early success since the changes, just seven California community colleges had implemented the 2017 law “with fidelity” by 2021, according to the state chancellor’s office, meaning that the vast majority had yet to achieve the law’s goals of better student progress toward degrees. Colleges were allowed to implement the changes as they wished, a chancellor’s office spokesman said, but few strategies have worked.

Before the changes in California and elsewhere, half the nation’s community college students were placed in remedial classes in math or English, according to Complete College America. Fewer than a quarter of them passed those courses and went on to complete college-level math and English classes.  

In California in 2020, though, after the law went into effect, 46 percent of first-time math students in college-level classes passed those classes, up from just 24 percent in 2018, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.  

Despite those positive results, some community collegeadministrators are reluctant to eliminate remedial classes and often argue that students who feel unprepared academically should have the choice whether to start out in such courses, which don’t count toward a transfer to a four-year college or university.

Some students just aren’t ready for college math or English, they say.

“It’s about thinking more creatively about how to support students who don’t need a full repeat of high school coursework.” Adrián Trinidad, USC doctoral candidate

Even “if you don’t know basic arithmetic, you are now in a transfer-level course from day one,” said Jamey Nye, a deputy chancellor for the four-college Los Rios Community College District near Sacramento. “Faculty are very concerned with what to do with students who fail this course.”

Most colleges prevent students from taking a course more than three times. And students who run into academic trouble risk wasting time and money on a class they can’t pass, which experts say often leads them to give up on college altogether.

Resistance to eliminating remedial classes among California community college instructors is so strong that the statewide faculty association is opposing the new legislative bill and coordinating a letter-writing campaign against it. 

Thousands of students failed college-level courses after the changes took effect in 2019, said Evan Hawkins, the faculty association’s executive director. 

“To us that’s alarming,” he said. “Students are failing these courses at much higher levels than they were before.” 

But statewide data from the chancellor’s office shows that the increase in students failing the higher-level courses is simply due to the fact that so many more students are taking them. And those failures are more than offset by the thousands fewer who are failing remedial courses. Completion rates in college-level math classes were up at every community college except one — Cuyamaca College near San Diego — in 2019-20, the first school year the new law was in effect, according to data from the state chancellor’s office.

Reform advocates say schools can do more. They note that many schools fail to explain to students that they likely could handle college-level classes, especially with what’s called a corequisite model, which gives underprepared students additional support or resources, such as tutors and “boot camps,” to make up gaps in their learning. If remedial courses are offered, these advocates say, too many students will choose them instead of the corequisite courses.

That strategy — giving students the choice — prevents many students from completing college, said Katie Hern, a co-founder of the California Acceleration Project.

“They legitimately believe that students should still have the ‘choice’ to enroll in a college-level course, but they put their thumb on the scale by offering so many remedial classes,” said Hern, who teaches English at Skyline College south of San Francisco. “They’re continuing to steer students toward these classes while saying, ‘No, no, it’s their choice.’ ”

Related: States are testing unproven ways to eliminate remedial ed — on their students

A California law firm, Public Advocates, last year urged the Los Rios Community College District to stop directing students into remedial courses, arguing that the practice disproportionately hurts Black and Latino students. At least one student, lawyers wrote, said the college never told him that he had a right to take more advanced courses.

Los Rios administrators ultimately agreed, and now say they are removing all remedial courses for the upcoming fall term.

“Math faculty are saying that’s crazy, that we need to offer remedial courses,” said Nye, the deputy chancellor. “But it wasn’t working, and it was a dead end for many students. We need to address the equity issues.”

Instructors do struggle, however, to find a balance between dead-end remedial classes and higher-level ones that might be too difficult, causing students to drop out.

“They legitimately believe that students should still have the ‘choice’ to enroll in a college-level course, but they put their thumb on the scale by offering so many remedial classes.” Katie Hern, a co-founder of the California Acceleration Project

Adrián Trinidad, who studied how race and power have affected the implementation of remedial reforms for his doctoral dissertation at the University of Southern California, says traditional placement tests have pushed too many students into remedial courses, especially students of color. Community college instructors need to do a better job of making college more welcoming and effective for those students, Trinidad said, by understanding individual needs and giving students the right support.

“It’s about thinking more creatively about how to support students who don’t need a full repeat of high school coursework,” he said.

Some instructors, such as John Schlueter at Saint Paul College in Minnesota, who teaches remedial writing, say colleges should offer both, and make remedial courses available to students who need them.

“I think that corequisite class where you have a student who’s maybe on the bubble is a great option,” he said. “But it’s not as good of an option for a student who’s not ready for college or not a native English speaker.”

At least some students like having the remedial option.

Algebra hadn’t been part of Lorrie Parks’ life since she left high school more than four decades ago. Now 56 and trying to finish an elusive college degree, Parks was embarrassed to find she wasn’t ready for basic math at Ventura College in California.

“I’m supposed to go into linear equations next fall. How’s that going to work?” said Parks, who is disabled and trying to get back into the workforce. She’s turned to private math classes to get up to speed. “It’s like I’ve just learned to read.”

Related:  Alabama community college overhaul improves the odds for unprepared students

Nationally, more colleges are switching to the corequisite model.

During a large-scale trial run of corequisite classes in Tennessee, more students passed an introductory math class in one year than in the previous five years combined, said Tristan Denley, who led the effort for the Tennessee higher education system.

In New York, the City University of New York system found significantly higher degree completion rates and post-graduation wages among students who took corequisite courses than those who took remedial classes. CUNY plans to eliminate most remedial courses by the fall term, said Alexandra Logue, a CUNY professor and former provost for the 25-campus system who is helping lead those reforms. Too many students are incorrectly placed in remedial classes, she said, and the low completion rates there doom them.

“The weight of the evidence is clearly in favor of corequisite,” Logue said. “With traditional remediation, you’re eliminating potential students before they get there.”

Tennessee, Georgia and Florida have all seen success since eliminating most remedial courses, said Denley, who also led the initiative in Georgia and now is doing the same in Louisiana. The changes in Tennessee and Georgia eliminated racial disparities in completion rates, he said. Instructors have been mostly receptive to the reforms because of the promising results, and states will gradually have an easier time convincing faculty members as the changes gain momentum.

“Faculty are very sympathetic to these ideas when they’re presented with this data,” he said. “It’s perfectly reasonable for people to be skeptical. I think change is hard.”

This story about remedial education in 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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College took a back seat the moment Izzy B. called the suicide hotline.

Izzy, 18, had spent her senior year of high school online. Then she’d gone straight to online summer school at a local community college near Denver. When in-person classes there started this past fall, she was glad to be back in the classroom and finally experiencing some real college life.

But after Omicron forced classes back online late in the semester, Izzy, who was living  with her parents, felt overwhelmed by loneliness; she struggled to focus on her schoolwork and enjoy life. 

“We’re at this age where we’re supposed to be hanging out with our friends and socializing,” she said. “It definitely affected my mental health.”

Izzy, whose full name has been withheld to protect her privacy, said she had always earned straight A’s, so the B she received in one class this fall was a sign something was wrong. As she seriously considered suicide, Izzy sought help and moved into her grandparents’ home in Wyoming to be closer to her extended family. And she stopped attending school.

Thousands of other students around the country are leaving college — some because of mental health issues, others for financial or family reasons – and educators worry that many have left for good.

“There is a very significant mental health crisis. Students just are not OK. Students feeling lost, students feeling depressed, students feeling anxious — it’s weighing really heavily on them.”

Sara Goldrick-Rab, professor of sociology and medicine, Temple University

Of the 2.6 million students who started college in fall 2019, 26.1 percent, or roughly 679,000, didn’t come back the next year, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. That was an increase of 2 percentage points over the previous year, and the highest share of students not returning for their sophomore year since 2012. The dropout spike was even more startling for community college students like Izzy, an increase of about 3.5 percentage points.

Researchers usually look at how many college freshmen become sophomores because if a student is going to drop out, that’s when it’s most likely to happen.

While national figures on dropping out of college have not yet been compiled for the current school year, the omicron surge and the continued uncertainty around the virus are elevating concerns that the numbers of students abandoning college could continue to grow.

The rising dropout rate on college campuses has consequences for individual students, their families and the economy. People who leave college before finishing are more likely to face unemployment and earn less than those who complete bachelor’s degrees, and they are about  three times as likely to default on their student loans. With fewer college-educated workers to fill skilled jobs, the economy could also suffer in terms of lost business productivity and lower GDP.

“People are worried the shadow this casts will be quite a bit longer than the pandemic itself,” said David Hawkins, chief education and policy officer for the National Association for College Admission Counseling. “This pandemic has really made an impact on a lot of students’ ability to free up time to attend school.”

Related: Many young adults choose work over college, report shows

The wave of students dropping out of college has hit schools of all sizes and characteristics around the country, but in different ways and for different reasons.

Nassau Community College on New York’s Long Island has seen a sharp drop in returning students for the spring semester. College leaders believe some students are tired of online classes, said David Follick, dean of admissions and an assistant vice president.

Even though spring classes are evenly split between online and in-person, demand for the latter is outpacing that for online classes by at least a 2-1 ratio, Follick said. The school is trying to get students to stick around regardless of how they attend classes, he said.

“We’re looking for the silver bullet,” he said.

At private Ohio Wesleyan University, with an enrollment of just over 1,300, a few dozen students decided not to return this fall because the school required vaccinations, said Stefanie Niles, vice president for enrollment and communications.

“I think a lot fewer people are going to graduate from college.”

Maggie Callow, student, Pomona College

And while most students have returned to Michigan State University this year, officials are alarmed by a loss of lower-income students and those who were the first in their families to attend college, said Mark Largent, the associate provost for undergraduate education and dean of undergraduate studies. Even though freshman retention is up overall, to 91.7 percent, the share of returning students eligible for Pell Grants (federal aid for low-income students) has dropped more than a percentage point, to 86.3 percent, and the share of first-generation college students has fallen by 1.4 percentage points, also to 86.3 percent.

Those students often have financial burdens forcing them to drop out.

“For one student it might be a car repair, for another student it might be child care,” said Marjorie Hass, a former college president and now president of the Council of Independent Colleges, a 765-member coalition of nonprofit colleges and universities. Congress could help, she said, by dramatically increasing the amount available in a Pell Grant.

Related: Many young adults choose work over college, report shows

Largent said Michigan State has provided additional financial help to the highest-need students, and has also been digging through data to figure out which students might benefit most from some human contact. The school recently emailed about 1,000 students who had yet to register for the spring semester; about 25 percent responded.

Largent worries about the other 75 percent.

“The students I engage with and the students who come back, we can learn what they need,” he said. “But what we really need to study are the students who don’t come back. The students who stop out sort of fall out of communication with us.”

Colleges and universities have good reason to be worried about uncommunicative students, said Sara Goldrick-Rab, a professor of sociology and medicine at Temple University who studies college students’ basic needs.

Out of the country’s 2.6 million students who started college in fall 2019, 26.1 percent, or roughly 679,000, didn’t come back the next year, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. That was an increase of 2 percentage points over the previous year’s level, and the highest share of students not returning for their sophomore year since 2012.

“There is a very significant mental health crisis,” she said. “Students just are not OK. Students feeling lost, students feeling depressed, students feeling anxious — it’s weighing really heavily on them.”

Staff members at Cal Poly Pomona have been so overwhelmed by students’ needs in recent years that they created a chatbot to help answer questions.* If a student mentions certain key words, including suicide, the message is passed on to a counselor, who reaches out personally.

“Students have told us they are leaving because they lost both their parents,” said Cecilia Santiago-González, the assistant vice president for strategic initiatives for student success. “There’s definitely a lot of mental health concerns that have been brought up.”

Several college officials mentioned students are taking fewer credits than before, or registering for a full load of classes and then withdrawing from some of them. Both are possible precursors to failing to graduate.

Related: Debt without degree — The human cost of college debt that becomes ‘purgatory’

About 81 percent of students who attend college full time graduate within six years, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, while just 21 percent of part-time students graduate within six years. Students who mix full-time and part-time attendance complete degrees at a 44 percent rate.

Often, all it takes to keep a student from dropping out of college is some personal attention.

Leaders at California State University, San Bernardino, alarmed by the pandemic’s effect on student retention, recently hired re-enrollment coaches to help students who had fallen off the grid. About a quarter of those students registered for classes within three days of being contacted by the coaches, said Lesley Davidson-Boyd, the interim associate vice president and dean of undergraduate studies.

“It’s a lot of hand-holding,” she said. “Students have said things like, ‘Wow, it’s like somebody actually cared.’ ”

Izzy B. said she did not receive that kind of support from her Colorado college. She said she called her advisers repeatedly but never reached anyone. In California, Victoria Castro-Chavez had a different experience — and it made all the difference.

Castro-Chavez had about nine classes left to go at California State University, Stanislaus, in fall 2020 when she felt pushed past her limits. Covid was devastating her family, she was working full time moving trucks at a logistics company, and she was driving more than an hour to sit in a classroom fearing for her life. When her college classes went virtual midsemester, she struggled to learn from a computer screen.

“I was having a really difficult time passing classes and was really burned out,” said Castro-Chavez, 23, a communications studies major who hopes to become a public school teacher. “And I’ve lost four family members to Covid now. It hit me pretty hard.”

As that fall semester wrapped up, Castro-Chavez, who had recently tested positive for Covid herself after losing her aunt and cousins, told her adviser she wasn’t sure she’d be back. The adviser encouraged her to take a short break and then return to school slowly, maybe just taking a couple of classes to start.

The pep talk worked. Castro-Chavez took the spring semester off and focused on her trucking company job. But this past August she re-enrolled, first with a course load of two classes, and then, this semester, three.

It can be challenging getting any student back on track after time off. Just 2 percent of 2020 high school graduates who did not immediately enroll in college showed up in fall 2021, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. The center also found that 30,600 fewer transfer students who took time off from college returned this past fall, a drop of 5.8 percent from the year before.

Related: ‘It’s just too much’: Why students are abandoning community colleges in droves

Maggie Callow, 19, bucked those national trends but said it was tough to get into the college mindset after taking a pandemic-induced gap year last year. Having struggled with online classes her final two months of high school in 2020, she just couldn’t fathom spending her first year of college online. So she spent the year at home in Bozeman, Montana, working in a pizza shop, hiking and taking a French class at Montana State University.

Now halfway through her freshman year at Pomona College in Southern California, Callow was deeply disappointed when the college announced the first two weeks of the spring semester would be online. A lot of her classmates are having trouble, she said.

“I think a lot fewer people are going to graduate from college,” she said.

Izzy B., the 18-year-old from Colorado, said she wants to return to college eventually, to become a therapist. But for now, she’s working on her mental well-being.

“We just don’t take mental health seriously,” said Izzy. “It wasn’t until I was thinking, ‘Oh, I’m going to kill myself,’ ” she said, that she realized she needed to take action to care for herself. “That was a very concrete point.”

*Correction: This sentence has been updated to reflect that CalPoly’s chatbot to help answer student questions was created before the pandemic, in 2019.

If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), and the Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741 — are free, 24-hour services that can provide support, information and resources.

This story about dropping out of college 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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With the Covid-19 pandemic threatening the two restaurants he owned in Oklahoma City, Vetiana Phiasiripanyo decided to sell and switch to a vastly different career: wind energy.

It would prove a lucrative decision.

Before he was finished taking classes at a local trade school, Phiasiripanyo had employers lining up. He landed four offers and a six-figure job after just two months. He now makes more than $100,000 as a project lead for a company that installs wind turbines.

It’s an example of the huge demand for talent in industries that include wind power and other alternative energies — and the potential labor shortage facing President Joe Biden’s ambitious plan to upgrade the country’s infrastructure, after a years-long failure to train the kinds of workers needed to do it.

The plan, which needs congressional approval, would build, rebuild or strengthen highways, bridges, water facilities, power plants and the electrical grid.

But many of the industries needed to complete this work are already struggling to find skilled labor — despite relatively high salaries and comparatively good benefits — in a nation that has put more emphasis on bachelor’s degrees than vocational education.

That will make it difficult to catch up to the boom in demand that would be created by a national infrastructure push, said Joseph Kane, a researcher and fellow with the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program.

“We have to market these jobs and make sure high school kids who are smart consider it.”

Levi Fuller, wastewater operations superintendent, Dublin San Ramon Services District

Infrastructure workers “require months, if not years, of on-the-job experience to demonstrate competency,” Kane said. “It’s not just a matter of, ‘Let’s hire someone in infrastructure.’ ”

Much of the infrastructure economy is also facing a “silver tsunami” of retirements in the next decade; experts worry there won’t be nearly enough younger workers to fill those jobs. Brookings estimates about 10 percent of the infrastructure workforce — about 1.5 million people — will permanently leave their jobs every year over the next decade.

About a quarter of the workforce in industries such as power generation and water and sewer operations is 55 to 64 years old, according to the economic modeling firm Emsi. In nearly every sector included in Biden’s plan, almost a quarter of the workers are 45 to 54 years old.

Related: High-paying jobs go begging while high school grads line up for bachelor’s degrees

Take the water industry, which is facing a severe problem finding younger workers — or any workers at all. A 2018 Brookings study found water workers tend to be a few years older than the average American worker.

Rebecca Shelton, an assistant director at the Gwinnett County, Georgia, water resources department, said one out of every 10 of her employees could retire now if they wanted.

“While I’m excited about the infrastructure bill, I think that’s going to cause an even more severe need,” said Shelton, a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers’ infrastructure committee. “Some places are going to have trouble getting projects done on time. Getting them done in a timely manner, getting the quality of work that we need, certainly could be affected.”

When it comes to the water Americans drink or the bridges they cross, quality is particularly important. But some infrastructure fields, especially construction, never recovered from the last recession, and the pandemic has made shortages much worse.

More than 60 percent of the construction workers who lost their jobs from 2007 to 2009 never returned to the industry, said Michael Ibrahim, an assistant professor of civil engineering at California State University, Los Angeles.

Then, when Covid hit, more than a million construction workers were laid off in March and April of 2020 alone, he said. Once again, many may be lost from the construction workforce permanently, unless policymakers find new ways to entice them to come back, he said.

“The labor shortage has been a problem for more than a decade,” said Ibrahim, who is also director of the construction and engineering management program at Cal State Los Angeles. “Covid-19 is just shedding some light on the problem.”

Related: More people with bachelor’s degrees go back to school to learn skilled trades

Staffing shortfalls between industries differ; industries growing the fastest are likely to have the most difficulties. Brookings predicts a 60 percent increase in wind turbine technician hiring and a 50 percent rise in solar panel installer jobs over the next decade, compared to a 3.7 percent average increase across all jobs nationally.

Some regions are likely to see more severe worker shortages should the infrastructure bill be passed. Take Omaha, which has experienced a surge in technology companies that can’t find enough plumbers, electricians and mechanics. The region’s colleges acknowledge they can’t keep up with the demand.

“Our programs are full,” said Nathan Barry, dean of career and technical education at Metropolitan Community College in Omaha. “We could double our enrollment and we still wouldn’t meet the needs of the community.”

More than 60 percent of the construction workers who lost their jobs from 2007 to 2009 never returned to the industry. More than a million more were laid off when Covid hit and also may not come back.

Community colleges are the backbone of the nation’s workforce. More than 40 percent of undergraduate college students attend community colleges, according to the Community College Research Center, many in vocational fields responsible for keeping the country’s infrastructure running.

But those colleges are chronically underfunded and often unable to match private-sector salaries or train students using modern technology. These challenges have been compounded by huge enrollment declines during the pandemic.

The number of students in community colleges is down by 11 percent this spring, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

Related: Progress in getting underrepresented people into college and skilled jobs may be stalling because of the pandemic

While the enrollment decline is concerning, the “biggest challenge is finding qualified instructors and getting equipment,” Barry said. “We need to make sure we’re not putting in front of them equipment that’s 10 or 15 years old. And a lot of times if we’re wanting somebody [to teach] with 20-plus years of experience, we can’t afford them.”

Biden’s plan includes $12 billion to modernize community colleges, particularly in rural areas. In the meantime, some colleges, businesses and metropolitan areas have looked for ways to ease worker shortages.

Oklahoma City’s state-funded Francis Tuttle Technology Center has made big investments in electric vehicle technology, a major part of Biden’s plan, working with local companies to develop training programs in battery development and other areas, college leaders said.

“Our workforce is rapidly evolving,” said Cody Mosley, Francis Tuttle’s director of workforce and economic development. “There are new technologies and it takes schools like Francis Tuttle to adapt and evolve.”

Companies, colleges and local governments haven’t always communicated well about workforce needs. In rural areas, colleges have been known to cut agricultural programs that drive the local economy, and urban colleges sometimes fail to train students to keep transit systems running.

In the San Francisco area, water agencies have tried to find ways to bridge those gaps, banding together to work with community colleges in an industry short of plant operators and engineers.

Although a handful of Bay Area colleges train students for water and wastewater jobs, some of which pay six-figure salaries, agencies weren’t hiring graduates because they didn’t have enough on-the-job experience, said Michael Kushner, who manages the Baywork coalition of regional water agencies. One utility lost several employees at once and had to turn to a staffing agency when it couldn’t find replacements on its own, Kushner said, underscoring the need for younger employees.

“Some places are going to have trouble getting projects done on time. Getting them done in a timely manner, getting the quality of work that we need, certainly could be affected.”

Rebecca Shelton, assistant director, Gwinnett County, Georgia, water resources department

“Even at the entry level, you might not have enough experience to get hired,” he said. “People would come out of these community college programs and they would have to intern, often for free, to get this experience.”

Baywork has created apprenticeship programs to get students that experience while they’re in school; utility managers believe this approach will solve some staffing problems. And some water agencies have agreed to hold community college classes at their plants to cut down on students’ commute times and provide practical experience.

At the Dublin San Ramon Services District, which provides water and sewer services to a largely residential area southeast of Oakland, leaders have used plant tours and job fairs to boost interest in water jobs. It’s a tough sell for an industry that hasn’t done a good job marketing itself, said Levi Fuller, the district’s wastewater operations superintendent.

Related: Beer making for credit: Liberal arts colleges add career tech

“Despite the fact that people have water in their house and flush the toilet every day, not very many people think about water or wastewater as a career,” Fuller said. “We have to market these jobs and make sure high school kids who are smart consider it.”

In addition to age, infrastructure fields have gender and racial diversity problems.

More than 82 percent of workers in power plant operations are white, according to the Brookings Institution, and 82 percent of infrastructure workers are men.

Fuller is one of the few Black infrastructure workers — and one of even fewer at the management level. Tajudeen Bakare, a bridge engineer in Columbus, Ohio, is among a relative handful of Black civil engineers.

Bakare, a principal at the design and engineering firm CT Consultants, has worked with the National Society of Black Engineers to bring more young people of color into the industry. Just 1 percent of his company’s 400 employees are Black, he said, but he’s seen more interest from Black college graduates recently.

“I’ve been in this business 36 years and the first 25 years I was miserable,” Bakare said. “It used to be when I went to an engineering conference I didn’t see people who looked like me. The past five years that has changed.”

A more diverse workforce would help fill jobs, but it will take broader steps to complete the slew of infrastructure projects proposed by the administration. Experts say Congress should pay attention to a few relatively easy fixes, including allowing students to use Pell grants to pay for short-term college vocational programs and investing in child care to help older students get the training they need to change jobs.

Then there are the basic digital skills many potential workers lack, said Katie Spiker, director of government affairs for the National Skills Coalition. About 48 million Americans don’t have these skills, she said, meaning they’ll be unable to operate software or machinery at a job site.

“If you don’t have the ability to log on to a computer, then it just takes that much more training,” Spiker said. “The United States has not invested in the kind of support that allows workers to access those skills.”

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LONG BEACH, Calif. — At a time when the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed a growing shortage of nurses, it should have been good news that there were more than 1,200 applicants to enter the associate degree program in nursing at Long Beach City College.

But the community college took only 32 of them.

North of here, California State University, East Bay isn’t enrolling any nursing students at all until at least next fall.

Higher education was struggling to keep up with the skyrocketing demand for nurses even before the Covid crisis. Now it’s falling further behind.

Health protocols are limiting in-person instruction. Nursing teachers are quitting in large numbers, while others are nearing retirement. Hospitals are stretched too thin to provide required hands-on clinical training. And budgets are so constrained that student nurses are forced to buy their own personal protection equipment, or PPE.

“What worries people, if Covid continues on and takes its toll, is will people still enroll in nursing programs?” asked Peter Buerhaus, a nurse, economist and professor at Montana State University who studies the nursing workforce.

All of this is only amplifying the existing demand for nurses.

Estimates of the problem vary dramatically, from a projected shortage of 510,394 registered nurses nationwide by 2030, based on a formula used by scholars at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine and elsewhere, to a predicted shortfall in some states by then but a surplus in others, according to federal forecasts.

Experts agree, however, that shortages will be worst in the West and South. California alone needs to turn out more than 65,000 new nurses, medical and dental assistants, health IT specialists and community health workers a year, according to Futuro Health, a nonprofit created jointly by the health care company Kaiser Permanente and a principal union representing health care workers in the state.*

And those estimates were all made before the pandemic, which is only likely to make things worse, Buerhaus and others said.

Related: The ‘Fauci effect’: Inspired by front-line health care workers, record numbers apply to medical schools

Nursing programs were already failing to enroll enough students to meet this need, pre-Covid, according to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing.

U.S. universities and colleges last year rejected 80,407 qualified applicants for bachelor’s and graduate degrees in nursing, blaming a lack of faculty, classroom space and clinical opportunities in hospitals. That doesn’t include the number turned away by community colleges, which educate a large number of beginning nurses.

One of the biggest bottlenecks is that overburdened hospitals are closing their doors to clinical training for nursing students who would ordinarily shadow nurses and doctors and learn by treating patients.

U.S. universities and colleges last year turned away 80,407 qualified applicants for bachelor’s and graduate degrees in nursing.

“When Covid hit, clinical sites all just shut like a trapdoor, bam,” said Lindsay McCrea, the chair of the East Bay program.

“It’s very shortsighted of them,” said Sigrid Sexton, McCrea’s counterpart at Long Beach City College. “We’re very supportive of the hospitals’ needs to protect patients, but we’d like to see them be more supportive of students.”

Nursing student Eliana Lopez only barely managed to cobble together enough clinical hours to graduate this month from East Bay.

Related: More people with bachelor’s degrees go back to school to learn skilled trades

Hospitals left and right were shutting out students from clinical rotations, said Lopez, 34. She and her professors called health care facilities across the San Francisco Bay area trying to find opportunities. Over and over again they were told that the besieged hospitals — the same ones that will eventually need more nurses — couldn’t afford to spend valuable time and equipment on students.

“It was really upsetting,” said Lopez, 34, who has felt unwelcome at hospitals that she says could use students’ help. “We can be a team member as well, but they looked at us as wasting PPE.”

Without students to help out, overworked experienced nurses may not stick around for long.

The average age of an RN is 50, the Health Resources and Services Administration says, with more than a million projected to retire by 2030, deepening the shortfall. And that estimate is from before the pandemic prompted some nurses to quit because of Covid-19 health risks.

“You’re hearing nurses say, ‘I don’t know how much more of this I can take,’ ” said Joanne Spetz, a University of California, San Francisco professor who directs that school’s Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies.

That means new nurses will be even more urgently needed, said Gail Powers, 55, who is pursuing an associate degree in nursing at Long Beach.

“It’s very important for us to get through this because there are a lot of older people stepping out of the profession,” she said.

Powers’ classmate, Sergey Bystrov, 40, has been working in the emergency room at a Long Beach hospital and will graduate from Long Beach City College this month. He said hospitals should let students step in not only so they can get important training, but to help keep full-time nurses from becoming overwhelmed.

“When the nurse has a student next to her, it takes some of the pressure off. It’s an extra set of hands,” he said.

Nursing instructors are also leaving in droves. Nearly one-third of California nursing schools surveyed have lost faculty members since March, said Sharon Goldfarb, dean of health sciences at California’s College of Marin and a regional president of the California Organization of Associate Degree Nursing. The average age of the remaining instructors is 63, she said.

Related: Progress in getting underrepresented people into college and skilled jobs may be stalling because of the pandemic

At community colleges, instructors’ salaries are notoriously low, especially compared to practicing nurses’ pay, so open faculty positions sometimes remain unfilled for a year or more.

The nursing program at Rio Hondo College, a community college in Whittier, California, has been unable to fill two open faculty slots for the past year, said Catherine Page, dean of health science and nursing. Candidates have turned down the jobs because of the salaries, she said. Pay for Rio Hondo instructors starts at $60,000 a year, while the average California registered nurse makes $113,000.

Rio Hondo had an increase in the number of nursing school applicants this year but had to limit new admissions because of the faculty vacancies and a lack of clinical opportunities.

The challenges are keeping colleges from helping solve the nursing shortage, Page said. “We’re not going to produce those new nurses.”

“What worries people, if Covid continues on and takes its toll, is will people still enroll in nursing programs?”

Peter Buerhaus, nurse, economist and professor, Montana State University

Experts worry that the next year or two could devastate nursing — and nursing quality. Scores of nursing programs are replacing on-site clinical work with computer simulations, mannequins or patient care by video, which some educators concede may not sufficiently prepare new graduates for work. Several said they aren’t convinced that students will pass their licensing exams.

“It would be naive to say, ‘Oh, no, this won’t affect them at all,’ ” said Renae Schumann, dean of the Houston Baptist University nursing school in Texas. “Yes, we all worry about it.”

Even if new nurses do arrive completely prepared, lower staffing levels in hospitals may mean higher numbers of medication errors and deaths, according to the American Nurses Association.

Older, experienced nurses are the ones who keep things running smoothly, Buerhaus, the Montana State professor, said. “Some of these nurses are exactly who you need right now, and they’re leaving. I hope many of them hang in there.”

Hospitals could have major problems soon: Acute-care hospitals employ more than 60 percent of nurses, Buerhaus said.

Related: A worrying trend this fall: decline in FAFSA applications

Yet some hospitals have said they will only accept nursing students who bring their own protective gear and pay for their own Covid tests, neither of which many nursing students can afford.

“When you start putting extra costs on the students and the programs, that becomes a barrier,” said John Cordova, a nurse who directs California’s Health Workforce Initiative, a statewide program that seeks to smooth the transition from community colleges to the labor market.

Lopez, the Cal State East Bay student, worked her way through school as a nurse’s aide. She is preparing to take her licensing exam and find a job, even if it’s out of state.

In the end, she said, her hard-fought clinical rotations this year have turned out to be the most rewarding part of her education.

“What a time to learn, during the pandemic,” she said. “What a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

* Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that California needed more than 65,000 new nurses a year.

This story about the nursing shortage was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Additional reporting by Jon Marcus. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.

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The 20 hours a week Perla Ortiz worked in the St. Edward’s University admissions office last year was the glue that kept her academic life together. Paid through the federal work-study program, the $1,500 she earned per semester covered the cost of books, groceries and other necessities.

Now admissions has gone virtual because of Covid-19 and Ortiz has lost her campus job at the Austin, Texas, private university. Unable to afford rent in Austin, she’s moved back with her family in El Paso.

“I’m barely able to pay for expenses,” said Ortiz, 21, whose work-study role was to mail acceptance letters and scholarship notices to applicants.

Work-study jobs may seem like a perk, but in a normal year, the program provides nearly $1.2 billion in help for college for more than 612,000 students across the country. They are paid at least minimum wage for part-time jobs ranging from receptionists in college offices to attendants in campus gyms or aides in local schools. The federal government typically covers about 50 percent of the wages, and the institutions pay the rest.

Many of those jobs were on campuses that have gone completely or mostly online during the pandemic, and colleges and universities have not been able to adapt all of them to this new reality.

Work-study annually provides nearly $1.2 billion for more than 612,000 students.

In a national survey conducted by an institute at the University of California, Berkeley, 53 percent of low-income and working-class students said they had lost wages from on-campus jobs.

That, compounded by confusing changes to work-study rules, has thrown some students’ finances out of balance.

“The loss of this important form of financial aid can be devastating,” the U.S. Department of Education said in an advisory about Covid-related interruptions in work-study jobs.

Related: While focus is on fall, students’ choices about college will have a far longer impact

St. Edward’s told Ortiz that she must work on campus to get paid through the work-study program, she said, even though the office where she was assigned is shut down.

“I understand the circumstances are hectic,” Ortiz said, “but when my living situation is affected by it there’s a sense of urgency on my part.”

Even in normal times, students whose financial aid offers say they will be eligible for work-study jobs don’t automatically get them; they have to apply and be accepted. Nor is work-study guaranteed from one year to the next.

St. Edward’s is trying to help students affected by the shutdown find other jobs, said Jennifer Beck, the university’s financial aid director.

“I understand the circumstances are hectic, but when my living situation is affected by it there’s a sense of urgency on my part.”

Perla Ortiz, who lost her work-study job because of the pandemic

“If a student doesn’t get a work-study job, there are still plenty of other opportunities for employment on campus,” Beck said. She said there are also off-campus work-study positions available with nonprofit partners.

Ortiz said she hasn’t been able to find one from which she could earn as much as the job she lost, which she said paid “well above minimum wage.”

And though she’s a senior, a problem for other students is that, unlike income from work-study jobs, any pay they earn from non-work-study jobs counts against them when colleges are determining how much financial aid to give them in the following year.

Colleges and universities are allowed — but not required — to use federal funds to pay students who lost work-study jobs due to the pandemic, said a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Education who asked not to be named. Schools can also choose to shift some of those funds to emergency grants for students in need, which St. Edward’s and other institutions said they have done.

The work-study program was already widely criticized for disproportionately helping higher-income rather than lower-income students. That’s because of a nearly-60-year-old formula under which the money is distributed to institutions based on how much they received the year before. More prestigious universities and colleges that have been involved the longest — and generally serve more affluent students — get more than less prestigious ones.

Private four-year universities enroll only 14 percent of undergraduates, but receive 38 percent of work-study money, while community colleges, which take almost half of all students and serve large numbers of low-income Americans, get 20 percent, according to the Center for Analysis of Postsecondary Education and Employment.

That means that, even before the pandemic, a student at a private university from a family in the top quarter of income was more likely to get work-study money than a student at a community college from the bottom quarter.

St. Edward’s paid about $580,000 to 305 federal work-study students last year, Beck said, while New York University paid more than $8 million to 3,400 students in 2018-19, the last year for which federal figures are available.

Related: Amid pandemic, graduate student workers are winning long-sought contracts

Several schools that get among the largest federal work-study payouts, including NYU, the City University of New York system and the University of Southern California, either declined to answer questions about what is happening to their students this year, or did not respond to interview requests.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has proposed significantly reducing the program.

As some work-study opportunities disappear, among the students left in the lurch is Leslie Hinojo, a 21-year-old single mother who in June finished her first year at Green River College, a community college south of Seattle.

Hinojo worked 20 hours a week last year as a receptionist in the campus career and advising center, but said she was told in June that her position would no longer be available because of the pandemic.

“They really didn’t say much to me. They said if the job was posted again I was welcome to apply again.”

Leslie Hinojo, who lost her work-study job because of the pandemic

“They really didn’t say much to me,” said Hinojo, who is trying to figure out her future while temporarily living with relatives in Mexico. “They said if the job was posted again I was welcome to apply again.”

Some institutions are finding remote jobs for work-study students. At the University of California, Santa Barbara, for instance, these include data entry, coding, graphic design, customer service and running social media.

Missing out on work-study jobs can damage more than a student’s bank account, said Judith Scott-Clayton, an associate professor of economics and education at Teachers College at Columbia University who tracks federal work-study spending. (The Hechinger Report, which produced this story, is housed at Teachers College.) The program provides valuable work experience, she said.

Related: As students fill summer courses, many ask: Why aren’t all colleges open in the summers?

“It can be a very meaningful part of a student’s college experience,” she said. “It’s not so much the money. It’s the type of jobs.”

Among students affected nationwide are tutors with America Reads/America Counts, which pairs work-study college students with children at nearby schools who need reading or math help. Arizona State University, which has more than 2,000 work-study students each year, including many with America Reads/America Counts, is trying to figure out what to do with the tutors as schools remain virtual, said Melissa Pizzo, Arizona State’s associate vice president for enrollment services.

Several universities, including the University of Michigan, said they are providing more work-study jobs this year.

Related: Urgency of getting people back to work gives new momentum to “microcredentials”

Officials in the Houston Community College system have been scrambling to find replacement positions for students who lost their work-study jobs, said Bianca Matlock, the system’s financial aid director. The colleges are trying to partner with the city of Houston to fill those gaps, she said.

The system also hopes to be part of a federal experiment to pair work-study students with private companies, which is prohibited under current rules. The Houston schools hope to team up with businesses at the local port and at medical facilities, Matlock said, which could help students jump-start careers at a time of high unemployment.

The change would also help pandemic-proof the work-study program by opening more opportunities if a job disappears, she said.

“Not all students are going to school to get a degree,” Matlock said. “Some are hoping to start work in a year, and we need to cater to those students as well.”

This story about work-study 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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You won’t know it from their mostly empty campuses, but colleges and universities will be bustling this summer.

With millions of Americans unemployed or reluctant to travel or socialize because of the Covid-19 pandemic, and even though most courses will be online, summer registrations at colleges nationwide appear to be booming.

At Ozarks Technical Community College in Missouri, for example, 3,907 students have signed up for online courses, a number 67 percent higher than it was last summer, said Hal Higdon, chancellor of the six-campus system.

It’s more than just another pandemic-related blip, said Higdon; it’s a wake-up call to the rest of higher education that schools should stop shutting down in the summer, a tradition that dates to a time when students had to go home to help on the farm, and that he said persists because of inertia.

Limits on what most institutions offer in the summer result from “laziness and lack of leadership,” Higdon said. “We’re still tied to an agrarian calendar that goes back to the 1700s.”

Limits on what other colleges offer students in the summer result from “laziness and lack of leadership. … We’re still tied to an agrarian calendar that goes back to the 1700s.”

Hal Higdon, chancellor, Ozarks Technical Community College

Many of the students who are taking summer courses at Ozarks and other community colleges are already enrolled at four-year universities that offer few or no credit-bearing classes in the summer, and to which they are expected to return, officials said.

Related: While focus is on fall, students’ choices about college will have a far longer impact

The pandemic appears to be accelerating a trend that was already under way. Compared to students who entered four-year colleges and universities in 2008 and switched to two-year institutions at some point in their college careers, those who entered in 2011 were significantly more likely to make that switch only in the summer. Of the students entering in 2011, nearly 150,000 had taken summer courses at community colleges during the subsequent six years, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

The practice, known as “summer swirl,” improves graduation rates, the center found. That’s because taking courses in the summers lets students rack up credits, save money and speed up degree attainment.

Those benefits may be propelling this summer’s surge at two- and four-year colleges.

Nearly 77,000 students — a 17 percent increase over last summer — enrolled in online summer classes at the City University of New York through June 1. William Carey University in Mississippi has blown past its previous summer enrollment record, with the largest gains in its education and nursing programs, the school said.

Related: Desperate for students, colleges resort to previously banned recruiting tactics

At Central Louisiana Technical Community College, summer enrollment is up nearly 14 percent, even though the school has had to suspend new enrollment in its popular prison and welding programs, college officials said. The University of La Verne in Southern California doubled summer enrollment among traditional undergraduates this year, the school said.

The pandemic has been “a time of learning lessons” for colleges, said Yolanda Watson Spiva, president of Complete College America, which works to improve college graduation rates.

Among those lessons is that summer school gets people their degrees in less time, at a lower cost.

Related: Another pandemic-related threat to universities: falling numbers of graduate students

“Hopefully institutions will see that summer enrollment is a lever for student success,” said Spiva. “Each term the institution is open should be considered essential to student success.”

Changes in college student demographics have also led to increased demand for summer classes. Today, fewer students are the traditional 18- to 24-year-olds who cherish summer vacations or internships; they’re older adults with families and jobs who don’t understand why the educations they need come to a halt in late April and don’t resume until the end of August.

Of the students who entered four-year colleges and universities in 2011, nearly 150,000 took courses in the summers at community colleges through 2017.

But universities say there are several barriers in the way of offering classes in the summer. They often pay less to teach them, for example, making full-time professors reluctant to take them on.

This hasn’t stopped several colleges from hastily adding credit-bearing courses this summer for their newly admitted students, who administrators worry might not show up for the fall term.

For Eden Schweitzer, a 17-year-old student at Ozarks who graduated high school early and started college this year, taking classes this summer was a no-brainer. With her focus squarely on getting into the college’s competitive dental hygienist program, Schweitzer is taking both anatomy and math.

“I wake up early and start my course,” she said. “I won’t do anything else until I get my course done.”

The University of La Verne has discounted summer tuition for continuing students and is offering a free course about Covid-19 for incoming freshmen. The school expects about 100 students to take the class, said Mary Aguayo, vice president of strategic enrollment management.

Related: With higher ed in limbo, students are switching to community colleges

Queens College in New York City has been almost overwhelmed by the summer demand, said Daniel Weinstein, interim dean of the School of Mathematics and Natural Sciences. Part of the City University system, Queens has hit 10-year highs in the number of students in its summer online computer science, nutrition and biology courses, Weinstein said.

“The pandemic has raised a lot of questions about long-held traditions about how to deliver higher education. The academic calendar is one of them.”

Peter Eckel, senior fellow, University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education

“I have opinions, but we don’t really know why this is happening,” he said. “Probably a lot of students who were nervous about coming to campus jumped on this.”

Like many public colleges, Queens and the rest of the CUNY system expect to be hit hard by budget cuts stemming from the pandemic-devastated economy. The crisis has led most schools to rethink how they do business, both during the summer and otherwise, said Peter Eckel, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education.

Colleges and universities should be using the opportunity to think about why they haven’t offered more summer classes, he said.

“The pandemic has raised a lot of questions about long-held traditions about how to deliver higher education,” Eckel said. “The academic calendar is one of them.”

This story about summer courses 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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As record numbers of Americans lose their jobs because of the coronavirus pandemic, Kathleen Perlmutter has been desperately trying to turn out enough graduates to fill a critical shortage of workers.

Perlmutter trains phlebotomists, the people who draw blood in hospitals and clinics, for which demand is surging and will increase by double-digit percentages over the next few years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — with or without a recession.

“We are almost at crisis mode,” said Perlmutter, who directs the phlebotomy program at Pennsylvania’s Montgomery County Community College. “When somebody retires, we can’t replace them.”

Whatever happens to the economy, shortages will remain not just in phlebotomy, but in many other professions, and some may even get worse as a result of the pandemic; social distancing and changes in behavior following the massive shutdowns will likely increase the already strong demand for digital and social media marketers, for instance.

And while the pandemic’s financial toll could postpone the expected retirements of huge numbers of aging veterinarians and plumbers, those specialists will eventually step aside, with little letup in demand for the services they offer.

Colleges and universities are already being called upon to anticipate areas of growth and supply and to help Americans learn the skills they’ll need to weather the impending recession.

Eighty-three percent of employers said last year they were having trouble finding suitable job candidates. More than a third noted a lack of skills among candidates, and more than half that the skills gap was wider than ever.

But nimbly producing graduates with skills that are needed in the workplace is something employers have complained America doesn’t do very well.

Eighty-three percent of employers said last year they were having trouble finding suitable job candidates, according to a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management. More than a third noted a lack of skills among candidates, and more than half that the skills gap was wider than ever, despite years of conversations about how to narrow it.

It’s a finding that has come up consistently in earlier surveys of people who do hiring. Only 11 percent of business leaders in a Gallup poll said college graduates were effectively prepared for the workforce. Only 42 percent of employers considered graduating seniors to be proficient in “professionalism” and “work ethic,” the National Association of Colleges and Employers found.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans said the higher education system is doing only a fair or poor job of preparing graduates for the workforce, according to a survey conducted by FTI Consulting for Northeastern University; nearly 90 percent said that the U.S. higher education system needed to change for the nation to maintain a globally competitive workforce. And that was in 2013.

Related: Colleges take new approach to anticipating — and meeting — workforce needs

The United States invests less in critical workforce aid than nearly every other industrialized country, the Campaign to Invest in America’s Workforce noted in a recent letter to congressional leaders. The group has asked Congress to invest in training for workers displaced by the pandemic.

A solution will require more than money, however. Colleges and universities, which are trying to figure out their own futures, will need to be encouraged to shift their focus to job training in some cases, and displaced workers will need to be persuaded to rethink their careers.

That’s left the planning for changes to education and retraining programs as fragmented and chaotic as the response to the pandemic itself.

Some educators’ early attempts to reach laid-off workers have been stymied, said Kris Williams, chancellor of Kentucky’s community college and technical college system, which has been trying to do that.

“Many of them right now are more focused on unemployment benefits and child care,” she said. “Retraining may not be the first thing on their minds.”

Related: Little-noticed victims of the higher education shutdowns: college towns

There are also bureaucratic and practical barriers to solutions such as certificate programs, in which students can quickly learn critical skills in fields ranging from health care to factory work, but for which they usually can’t use federal financial aid.

Congress spends three times more on the Pell Grant program to help undergraduates get degrees than it does on the nation’s principal workforce development program, the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, noted Jason Tyszko, vice president of the Center for Education and Workforce at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation.

“The problem is there isn’t much by way of infrastructure to bridge supply and demand. We don’t have a workforce system in this country. We never have.”

Jason Tyszko, vice president, U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation Center for Education and Workforce

Meaningful coordination among employers, educators and policymakers has been scant. The federal government updates its employment projections only once a year.

“The problem is there isn’t much by way of infrastructure to bridge supply and demand,” said Tyszko. “We don’t have a workforce system in this country. We never have.”

In the past, in the absence of a national system, many higher education institutions set up employer advisory boards that had “very little influence,” Tyszko said.

“It was tough to get a seat in the room to talk to higher ed, because there was this sense of, the business community doesn’t belong here. It’s a threat. You’d think I was the devil in the room. It was like the barbarians at the gates,” he said.

“Now it’s, like, no, folks are clamoring to get us in the room. We’re seen as an opportunity, not a threat.”

Related: Desperate for students, colleges resort to previously banned recruiting tactics

That’s because universities and colleges that have spent decades focusing on bachelor’s degrees have a new incentive to work with employers: They desperately need the revenue that comes from offering shorter-term programs to boost the employability of people who have been laid off, said Matt Sigelman, CEO of the labor analytics company Burning Glass Technologies.

With a devastating recession looming, compounded by state funding cuts and declining endowment returns, these institutions are expecting big drops in their numbers of tuition-paying conventional undergraduates.

“There are a lot of colleges that need to reposition right now,” Sigelman said. “You need to be able to bring in a new group of learners.”

About half of postsecondary students are already enrolled in the certificate or associate degree programs, mostly at community colleges, that supply many industries with workers.

“There are a lot of colleges that need to reposition right now. You need to be able to bring in a new group of learners.”

Matt Sigelman, CEO, Burning Glass Technologies

Certificates, professional certifications and other nondegree programs may now offer the easiest ways for other universities and colleges to quickly fill seats, too, Sigelman said — while also helping people get new jobs.

“Do you use this moment to say, ‘We’d better hunker down and burn the floorboards to save the buildings,’ or do you say, ‘There’s a silver lining to this very dark cloud’?” Sigelman asked.

There are proposals for big federal investments in community colleges to help the nation recover, and for reforms to allow students in short-term programs in high-demand fields to use federal financial aid. A bill in Congress would provide another $15 billion for the public workforce system, including for education and training. Some companies are trying to help connect businesses with schools and other organizations to train laid-off workers for new jobs.

One of those companies was created by the education incubator Entangled Group, whose head of strategy, Michael Horn, said community colleges in particular are well-suited to help their local workers and businesses.

“If they can position themselves as part of the severance package, that’s something community colleges should be doing,” Horn said. “They should be consciously putting forth programs that match up with the local community.”

Retraining displaced workers in more vibrant disciplines could help communities recover faster.

Related: What has happened when campuses shut down for other disasters? A coronavirus case study

Among the fields Sigelman expects to weather the recession best are cybersecurity, data analysis, project management and professions requiring regulatory knowledge. And more than half of the nation’s skilled tradespeople are over age 45, meaning lots of looming retirements in fields such as plumbing that require at least some postsecondary education.

On the other hand, some shortages predicted before the pandemic are now less likely to materialize, including for airline pilots and event promoters.

The United States invests less in critical workforce aid than nearly every other industrialized country, according to the Campaign to Invest in America’s Workforce.

Of course, for many of the most practical vocational programs, in-person instruction is essential, which means those college departments won’t be able to train new workers until campuses reopen. In the meantime, students can’t graduate or take certification exams.

“You can’t learn how to do this online, I don’t care what anybody says,” said Perlmutter, the phlebotomy director at Montgomery County Community College. “You need to know what it would feel like to put a needle into a person.”

As a result, she said, “All of our students are in a holding pattern. That means they can’t get jobs. It’s terrible.”

The organization that accredits phlebotomy and several other health care programs, the National Accrediting Agency for Clinical Laboratory Sciences, has told college departments it will not allow them to scale back requirements, Perlmutter said.

“Which is the right decision,” she said. “Do you really want somebody drawing your blood who has only done it four or five times on a fellow student?”

In Kentucky, community colleges are searching for new ways to ensure job training doesn’t fall too far behind during the shutdown. The college system plans to assess its future after July 1, said Williams, the state chancellor.

“It’s frustrating when we can’t help people to the extent that we want to.”

This story about job 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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It hasn’t been long — just five years — since so many engineering students were flocking to California State University, Fullerton, that the university’s College of Engineering and Computer Science was bursting at the seams.

There were more than 1,300 graduate students from around the world enrolled then, according to university figures.

Today, the college has 759.

The lion’s share of the decline? A drop in the number of international engineering students deciding to come to southern California, said Susamma Barua, the college’s dean.

And that was before coronavirus threw higher education into chaos.

Until recently, graduate students had generally remained a bright spot in higher education, continuing to show up at colleges and universities and helping institutions balance their books even as undergraduate enrollment dramatically declined.

But even before the pandemic, there were signs that the once-reliable flow of graduate students and the money they bring with them was beginning to slow. And now, when that money may be needed most, school leaders and researchers fear that these numbers could plummet.

That can only worsen the predicted financial crunch for colleges and universities, as fewer undergraduates are expected on campus this fall, and schools face budget cuts and endowment losses.

“The [graduate enrollment] number is alarming and we do want to turn that around.”

Susamma Barua, dean, College of Engineering and Computer Science, California State University, Fullerton

The biggest question is whether students from abroad will risk coming to the United States. While that’s a problem at all levels of higher education, it has much more of an impact on graduate programs, where international students make up 13 percent of the enrollment, compared to less than 3 percent of undergrads.

“If you took the international students out, some of those programs would halve in size, or worse, and the revenue also is obviously critical,” said Richard Garrett, chief research officer at the consulting firm Eduventures.

The pandemic has restricted travel and closed consulates that process student visas. Garrett also expects international skepticism about the American response to the crisis to keep potential students away — especially from China, the biggest source of graduate students, with which there are also growing geopolitical tensions. 

International students may be concerned about traveling to the U.S. only to end up having to take classes online — already, this week, the California State University System announced that it will teach online and not in person in the fall — or that their home countries may not evacuate them in the event of a new outbreak.

“It’s one thing to persuade an American student to study locally or maybe cross a state line, but for an international student the U.S. does not look good in terms of its management of the pandemic,” Garrett said.

Meanwhile, four Republican senators have urged the Trump administration to suspend the right of international students who graduate from U.S. universities to stay in the United States and work for up to three years — a big incentive for them to come to the country in the first place.

Some 223,000 international graduates had their time in the United States extended last year under the program.

“There is certainly no reason to allow foreign students to stay for three additional years just to take jobs that would otherwise go to unemployed Americans as our economy recovers,” the senators wrote.

So great is the concern about international enrollment that 63 higher education organizations have urged the administration to prioritize student visa applications whenever consulates reopen, and to speed up the process.

Even before the pandemic, new international student enrollment was already falling, according to the Institute for International Education, dropping more than 10 percent since the 2015-2016 academic year — a period that began with the contentious presidential election, restrictions on immigration and intensifying competition for students from Australia, Canada and other countries.

That’s been part of a larger trend alarming graduate programs.

Related: Universities increasingly turn to graduate programs to balance their books

Loyola University in Chicago had 3,331 master’s students in 2015, but just under 2,800 this year. Also in Chicago, the Illinois Institute of Technology had about 4,800 graduate students in 2015, compared to 3,371 this year. The University of Massachusetts Boston reached a peak of 4,081 graduate students in 2015, but now has 3,394.

Top officials at Loyola and UMass Boston declined to discuss the problem. IIT did not respond to interview requests.

The most elite American research universities haven’t seen the same worrying trends — Stanford University’s master’s enrollment, for example, has remained relatively steady since 2010. Elite schools actually saw an increase last year in the number of those all-important international graduate students, according to the Council of Graduate Schools.

But second-tier universities and colleges suffered a third consecutive year of declines in international graduate enrollment.

The number of master’s students has fallen since 2015, from 3,331 to just under 2,800 this year at Loyola University in Chicago; 4,800 to 3,371 at the Illinois Institute of Technology; and 4,081 to 3,394 at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.

These universities, especially the ones that focus more on master’s degrees than doctorates and whose campuses are in the middle of the country, are trying to figure out how to stop the bleeding.

In Ohio, for example, Cleveland State, Kent State and Miami universities have all lost master’s enrollment since 2015, according to student data from those schools.

Related: Already stretched grad students rebel against rising and often surreptitious fees

A long period of rising prices for graduate education — especially in the form of escalating fees — is likely contributing to the enrollment declines. The net cost of graduate school has been increasing faster than the net cost of undergraduate programs, according to the Urban Institute. One result of this is that each graduate student now owes four times more, on average, than the average undergraduate, the College Board reports.

Yet the number of graduate students grew 39 percent from 2000 to 2017, the last year for which the figure is available, to more than three million, much faster than the increase in the number of undergraduates during that time, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

Related: Already stretched universities now face tens of billions in endowment losses

The number of master’s degrees alone conferred by universities rose 70 percent from 2000 to 2017, and more than tripled since 1970. In 2016, two master’s degrees were awarded for every five bachelor’s degrees, the Urban Institute calculated.

Any threat to that market poses a big problem.

For Cal State Fullerton, the challenges are clear, said Barua, the engineering and computer science dean. Engineering programs were thriving, with students from India and China, she said, but those students have become fed up with U.S. immigration restrictions and have been increasingly turning to universities in Canada and Australia. Travel restrictions tightened even further to combat the coronavirus pandemic — and economic reversals and paranoia stemming from it — may only make this worse.

The university has previously not really had to promote itself to international students, relying instead on word of mouth, Barua said, but it is now considering more outreach to India and China.

“Sometimes a one-on-one conversation makes all the difference,” she said.

Related: Canceled research, sports, recitals — college students are coping with more than closed campuses

Some institutions, particularly those in the Midwest, say geography is working against them.

In Michigan, for example, the share of residents who are under 18 has fallen steadily since the 1990s. At Eastern Michigan University, that has translated into a big decline in the number of graduate students, from a peak of nearly 5,100 in 2009 to 2,967 a decade later, according to university data.

Before the coronavirus pandemic, the university had planned to increase its recruiting in China and India, said Kevin Kucera, Eastern Michigan’s vice president for enrollment management.

“You don’t want to wave the white flag,” he said. “You want to stay in the game.”

Geography doesn’t explain everything. While several Midwestern universities have seen similar declines, graduate enrollment has risen at others, including Marquette in Wisconsin and Ball State in Indiana, according to university data.

It’s the economy that is most likely to dictate how graduate schools weather this new storm, administrators and others said.

Related: Online higher education isn’t winning over students forced off campus by the coronavirus

In bad economic times, people have historically decided to go back to school, for instance. The same shift to online education that undergraduates dislike could appeal to older students more interested in graduate programs, who have families and jobs and need the flexibility, said Eduventures’ Garrett.

Companies will continue to need highly educated workers, and it will be up to universities to provide them, said Bernard Mair, a senior vice president at the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities.

Institutions should concentrate for their graduate-student enrollment less on recent college graduates and more on older students, he said.

“Universities need to focus on lifelong learning,” Mair said. “They need to reskill and upskill.”

Another bright spot: While there’s been a demographic bust in the number of 18- to 24-year-olds, said Garrett, “we’re in the middle of a demographic boom in 25- to 34-year-olds that are the core graduate student.”

On the downside, there is a lot more competition than there was in the last recession, such as coding bootcamps and lower-priced subscription options to pricey graduate degrees that have started to be offered by Coursera, LinkedIn Learning and others.

Concerned about facing the same declines now being suffered by some of its peers, Marquette University in Milwaukee has set up an “incubator” to quickly get new graduate programs up and running, said Doug Woods, the vice provost. The initiative has helped start nursing, clinical health, data analytics and supply chain management programs, he said.

Marquette has also created accelerated graduate programs that allow its students and those from other Wisconsin schools to complete a graduate degree in less time than usual.

“We just have kind of a spirit of innovation right now,” Woods said.

Additional reporting by Jon Marcus

This story about graduate enrollment 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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