LOS ANGELES — Citrus College was Kyshawna Johnson’s third attempt at higher education. 

She first enrolled in a community college at age 18 while living with her grandmother, who was her foster care guardian. But the house was too chaotic to focus on studies, and without support, Johnson dropped out. She gave it another go at 19, but said when foster care support money stopped, she was forced to leave her grandmother’s house and college.

Her aunt and uncle offered her a room in 2016, and for nearly eight months, Johnson experienced a stable, calm home. She enrolled again and excelled at Citrus in Glendora. But her housing arrangement didn’t last. All her apartment applications were rejected, even though she could afford the rent from jobs at T.J. Maxx and a movie theater. She bounced from one friend’s couch to another. Then she lived in her car for six months, each night trying to find a parking spot under a streetlight.

“It was just scary,” she said. Her grades fell to Ds, and she thought, “College just may not be for me.”

But before dropping out a third time, Johnson connected with Jovenes Inc., an East Los Angeles nonprofit that helps homeless youth. The organization paid for her to stay in a room in a woman’s house. Finally, she had a place “just to be, and focus.”

For many former foster care students like Johnson — young adults with few resources to navigate independence — housing instability is a major impediment to completing a college degree. Nationally, reports indicate that 20 to 40 percent of youth aging out of foster care lack stable housing. Housing-insecure students take fewer classes, earn fewer credits and are more likely to leave college before graduating, research shows.

California has made significant moves to offer housing assistance to students with foster care experience, yet a comprehensive solution that identifies these students early and offers housing well-suited to their needs remains elusive.

One model gaining popularity is called “college-focused rapid rehousing,” which received $19 million in state funding during the 2022-23 school year across California’s three higher education systems. Sometimes Jovenes master-leases apartments for students to live in while working with a case manager to find a more permanent solution. Other times, as in Johnson’s case, the organization offers a rental subsidy. The goal is to provide a place to live right away and a path to self-sufficiency. For example, at first a participant might pay little or nothing for their living space, then housing costs incrementally increase.

Another fix is dorms. But such housing is a rarity at community colleges, where most former foster care students begin their higher education. With state funding help, several of California’s community colleges have plans to build housing, but space is not specifically dedicated to students from the foster care system.

Advocates say investing in both the Jovenes model and a new type of dorm designed for community college students with foster care experience could significantly change their dim college prospects.

Related: California helps college students cut their debt by paying them to help their communities

Students with foster care backgrounds often must overcome hurdles rooted in their K-12 education. In California, these youth — who disproportionately identify as LGBTQ+ and Black — are more likely to be chronically absent, attend high-poverty schools and experience disruption because of transfers.

Those who do enter college are often less academically prepared and are more likely to require significant financial and mental health support. Like Johnson, they typically work more hours than ideal for a college student.

Among 18-year-old young adults with foster care experience, more than 80 percent said they wanted to complete a degree from a four-year college. But only 4.8 percent had attained that goal four years later, according to the California Youth Transitions to Adulthood Study.

“Housing is probably the number one challenge that foster students face,” said Debbie Raucher of John Burton Advocates for Youth, a California nonprofit that helps youth who have been in foster care or homeless.

A 2015 study found that students who had experienced homelessness were 13 times more likely to have failed college courses and 11 times more likely to have withdrawn from them or failed to register.

Johnson said Jovenes “gave me a chance, and my life turned around.” Her grades shot up to all As. She applied to Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma and received a full scholarship, including housing.

Related: ‘Revolutionary housing’: How colleges aim to support formerly incarcerated students

A major move to disrupt the foster-to-homelessness pipeline at the federal level began with legislation in 2008 that helped states extend foster care services from 18 to 21 years of age.

Since then, California lawmakers have passed a slew of budget expansions and laws to benefit students with foster care experience. In 2009, for example, the state passed legislation requiring many schools to give them priority for on-campus housing. In 2015, the state required some colleges to allow them to stay in dorms over academic breaks for free.

California has also gradually expanded their financial aid and increased funding for campus-based support programs, which include NextUp, Guardian Scholars, and more. Recently, the state increased foster student rent subsidies in higher cost-of-living areas.

But holes remain.

Young people who exited the foster system before age 18, for example, typically don’t qualify for extended services, including a government program that gives housing support through age 24.

For those who qualify for rental subsidies, the California market is so tight that appropriate units, especially close to campus, are rarely available. Plus, students with foster experience struggle to find landlords who will rent to them because they rarely have co-signers, solid credit histories or first and last month’s rent.

Some research suggests that on-campus housing provides the most stable living arrangement for them. But even increased financial aid often doesn’t go far enough to cover all housing costs, said Raucher. Dorms can also be hard socially, because these students tend to be older, and many have children.

Related: Overdue tuition and fees – as little as $41 – derail hundreds of thousands of California college students

This is where Jovenes — and others like it — come in. The organization’s College Success Initiative supports students attending 10 L.A. County colleges. At least 30 percent of Jovenes clients have known foster care experience, said Eric Hubbard, a Jovenes leader.

Jovenes case managers meet with their counterparts on college campuses to give students with foster care experience the support others often get from parents: help connecting with therapists and finding apartments to rent, vouching for them with landlords and financial support.

Academic achievement “skyrockets,” Hubbard said, “once you place someone in an environment where you don’t have to worry about where you’re going to sleep.”

When students at Cerritos College were housed by Jovenes, they became significantly more likely than the rest of the student body to receive a degree in two years and matriculate at a four-year institution, he said.

In 2019, California passed legislation meant to replicate the Jovenes model, and the number of students served has grown.

During the 2021-22 academic year, eight CSU campuses referred students and funneled about $5.2 million to Jovenes and eight other housing providers throughout the state. The program served 1,598 CSU students in 2021-22, up 40% from the year before. Those helped showed a 91% retention or graduation rate, according to a CSU report.

However, the Jovenes model is expensive — roughly $10,000 to $20,000 a year per student according to Hubbard — because it covers not only housing, but also support services and program administration. Another downside is that a significant chunk of money ultimately goes to private landlords.

Some are advocating for community-college based dorms dedicated specifically to students with foster care experience as a more sustainable solution. 

Raucher sees cause for optimism. The state recently allocated funds to build subsidized dorms on community college campuses and passed additional legislation to fast-track the effort.

Meanwhile, a bill introduced in the state Senate in February, which is eligible to move forward next year, would amend California’s financial aid programs to guarantee housing for students with foster care experience.

Johnson, who graduated from Oral Roberts with a 3.9 GPA in April 2022, said she is devoted to turning around the lives of students whose experiences she knows all too well.

She accepted a job with Jovenes as a live-in resident manager at one of the larger buildings, and she said she’s trying to be that “one caring adult” research shows is so important to the educational success of students.

This story about Jovenes 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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It wasn’t the first time Ventrese Curry’s granddaughter had gotten into trouble at school. A seventh grader at a charter school in St. Louis, Missouri, she had a long history of disrupting her classes and getting into confrontations with teachers. Several times, the school issued a suspension and sent Curry’s granddaughter home. 

In each instance, the school followed state law: The punishment was officially recorded and assigned a set length of time, Curry was formally notified and she and her granddaughter had a chance to appeal the decision.

But one day in February, after refusing to go into her classroom and allegedly cursing at her teachers, the seventh grader was sent home to learn online indefinitely. Curry said she wasn’t given any sense of when her granddaughter would be able to return to the classroom, just that the school and administrators would determine the best learning environment for her. In the meantime, the middle schooler would be left to keep up with her schoolwork on her own, on a district-issued tablet that Curry says would often lock her granddaughter out. 

“They’d rather send her home than work on the issues she was going through,” Curry said. “She missed out on a lot of work, a whole lot. It makes me feel bad. It wasn’t fair at all, the way they were treating her.” 

“There’s a pattern that the easiest solution is to remove a student rather than deal with the underlying issues.”

Sabrina Bernadel, legal counsel at the National Women’s Law Center

Lawyers and advocates across the country say that the practice of forcing a student out of the physical school building and into online learning has emerged as a troubling — and largely hidden — legacy of the pandemic’s shift to virtual learning. Critics charge that these punishments can deprive students and their families of due process rights. Students risk getting stuck in deficient online programs for weeks or even months without the support they need and falling behind in their academics. Sometimes, there is no system in place for tracking how many students are being punished this way or how many days of in-person classroom learning they are forced to miss. 

“We are speaking about an equal right, an equal opportunity to access education,” said Sabrina Bernadel, legal counsel at the National Women’s Law Center. “Instead of taking traditional or legal pathways,” she said, “there’s a pattern that the easiest solution is to remove a student rather than deal with the underlying issues.” 

Related:Hidden expulsions? Schools kick students out but call it a ‘transfer’

In 2020, nearly every school district in the nation was forced to come up with a way of providing education online. Later, as students returned to in-school learning, that infrastructure remained, making it easier than ever for districts to remove students from the classroom but say they were still educating them. The pandemic showed, however, that the quality of virtual instruction varies greatly and that online classes work best for only a minority of students; vast learning loss and student setbacks resulted. 

Still, districts nationwide are now placing students in online learning in response to misbehavior, in a process referred to in certain circles as “virtualization.”

Some school districts consider virtual learning an alternative to discipline — not a form of discipline itself. Other districts embrace virtualization as a disciplinary measure and have started to develop official policies around using this punishment. 

In Clayton County School District, outside Atlanta, “misdeeds” committed by a student can lead to mandatory online learning until “behavior challenges are identified and mitigated,” according to a statement provided over email by Charles White, a district spokesperson. He said that virtual assignments are intended to be temporary and not to serve as in-school suspensions “or elimination of the expected learning experience.” 

In Toppenish School District in Washington State, serving Yakima County, however, the transfer of a student to online learning for 10 to 20 school days is used as a top-tier disciplinary sanction, according to its student handbook. This action is considered a “long-term out-of-school suspension” and is to be used only after a number of other less drastic methods have failed to achieve behavior change, the handbook says. The district did not respond to requests for comment.

“I have worked on a lot of cases where the attorney gets involved, and suddenly the school lets the kids back in, no questions asked. They aren’t making any arguments as to why the child should be out of school — because they have none.”

Maggie Probert, Legal Services of Eastern Missouri

Paula Knight, superintendent of Jennings School District in Missouri, said students can be placed in online learning for anywhere from a few hours to a full semester as a punishment, calling the virtual option a “game changer” in how the district is able to deliver instruction. 

An afternoon away from the classroom in virtual learning is “almost like a restoration practice, giving them an opportunity to cool down or cool off,” Knight said. For other students, virtualization has its “pluses and minuses,” she said. “It just depends. When the kids are academically on target, for example, you don’t want them to lose that momentum, and we allow [virtual] as an option.”

Knight said that online learning has not yet been written into the district’s disciplinary code, but that there are plans to incorporate it more formally at some point. Currently, students are recommended for involuntary virtual learning by the principal, she said, and these placements are tracked aggregately along with suspensions, which makes identifying the particular impact of virtualization difficult. 

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

Rosalind Crawford moved her five young boys, all in elementary and middle school, to Jennings, just north of St. Louis, in the spring of 2022. A single mom, Crawford left her longtime home of Memphis to get her family away from gun violence near their home. She enrolled her boys in the local schools that April. 

It wasn’t long before she started hearing about two of the boys getting into trouble. Crawford said she could see that they were dealing with trauma and struggling to behave in school as a result. She also believes they were being bullied. She says she met with administrators several times to raise concerns about her kids’ relationships with their peers and their performance in school. 

After a fight broke out involving two of her children and other classmates in October 2022, Crawford and her lawyers say all five of her kids were placed on virtual learning. 

Jennings School District officials did not respond to follow-up questions about Crawford’s case, but a letter addressed to the family said that the boys were transferred to home-school learning at Crawford’s request. She denies making this request and says she sought legal help to get them back into school. 

In the meantime, Crawford said, the boys were provided with laptops and Google Classroom access. 

For the better part of the school year, they tried to learn from home. Crawford says that sometimes they only received two lessons per week and that there was no teacher instruction, which made it hard for them to learn. She watched as they fell behind in everything from academic courses to physical education. Her sixth grader soon was at risk of being unable to move up to seventh grade in fall 2023. 

“I feel like a failure. How do you tell your kids — when you see the devastation — that this isn’t their fault?” Crawford said. “Virtual learning is basically putting the kids somewhere [the school doesn’t] have to deal with them.” 

“I feel like a failure. How do you tell your kids — when you see the devastation — that this isn’t their fault.”

Rosalind Crawford, parent of children placed on virtual learning

Ventrese Curry’s granddaughter was also in danger of falling behind due to the amount of schoolwork she missed while learning virtually, her grandmother said. In all, she missed nearly a month of school. 

“They never gave her homework. I was calling every day asking if they could give me a package of her work,” she said. “They were telling me she might have to repeat the same grade.” 

The school did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Related: How the pandemic has altered school discipline — perhaps forever

The stakes of such discipline playing out in schools across the country “are fairly enormous,” said Sara Zier from TeamChild, a youth advocacy organization in Washington State that also provides legal services. Lost classroom time reduces social and emotional skills, hinders academic progress and can decrease a student’s likelihood of graduating; lower levels of education can lead to lower employment and financial prospects in adulthood. “It’s not something we can solve by representing one kid at a time,” she said. “It’s a much bigger challenge.” 

Yet because many schools don’t separate virtualization from other suspensions or, in some cases, even record it as a removal from the classroom, it’s almost impossible to know how often it’s happening and to whom. 

For example, although Clayton County uses virtual learning as a disciplinary tool, the district has no records of how many students have been put into online programs involuntarily.

Hopey Fink, a lawyer at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, said, “We suspect that there is an attempt to obscure and euphemize the suspension data that’s kind of embedded in part of this” in order to evade accountability. Without data, advocates like Fink worry that disproportionate disciplinary measures against already-marginalized groups could be hiding in plain sight. 

In the 2015-2016 school year, Black students lost 103 days of learning per 100 students, 82 more days than their white peers.

Typically, discipline overwhelmingly and disproportionately affects students of color and students with disabilities. Research from the UCLA Center for Civil Rights Remedies, using data from the 2015-16 school year, concluded that Black students lost 103 days of learning per 100 students, 82 more days than their white peers. Another study found that Latino students were more likely to receive disciplinary action than white students. U.S. Department of Education data from the 2017-18 school year shows that students with disabilities accounted for 16 percent of total enrollment but received 25 percent of in-school suspensions and 28 percent of out-of-school suspensions. Disparities for Black students with disabilities were even worse. 

“We can only extrapolate” that disparities are comparable in other newer forms of discipline, such as virtualization, said Bernadel of the National Women’s Law Center. “Without formal data, we can’t speak to that directly and address that problem, and it’s a huge issue.” 

Related: When typical middle school antics mean suspensions, handcuffs or jail

Getting back into the classroom after being placed on virtual learning can be more difficult than returning after a suspension. Lawyers in Washington State say clients have been required to make behavioral and academic improvement in a virtual setting before returning to the classroom, and when students do return, they’re typically saddled with cumbersome and alienating rules. 

Documents show a laundry list of requirements that a middle-schooler in Washington’s Toppenish School District would need to re-enroll in brick-and-mortar classes: pick-up and drop-off in the main office; random student searches; escorted transition times five minutes before class is over; and chaperoned bathroom trips with a staff member, among others.

For Crawford’s children to return to the classroom in the Jennings School District, she and two of her sons were required to participate in a conflict resolution program through the St. Louis County Juvenile Courts, according to a November 7, 2022, letter from the Jennings School District superintendent and security director. Failure to do so risked “further disciplinary action” that could result in “virtual learning for the remainder of the 2022-2023 school year.” 

In all, it took nearly five months and a lawyer’s involvement for Crawford to get her kids reenrolled. The boys also needed to sign a behavior contract, but were ultimately admitted back into the classroom in March.

Indeed, family and student advocates say that the legal credibility of this practice of virtualization is fragile. If families are able to get legal support, school districts tend to quickly allow the student to reenroll, said Maggie Probert from Legal Services of Eastern Missouri. But even free legal aid can be difficult for already-vulnerable families to access. 

Probert worked with Curry to get her granddaughter back into her regular classes after more than three weeks of online learning. 

“I have worked on a lot of cases where the attorney gets involved, and suddenly the school lets the kids back in, no questions asked,” Probert said. “They aren’t making any arguments as to why the child should be out of school — because they have none.” 

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

The post The newest form of school discipline: Kicking kids out of class and into virtual learning appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

SALEM, Ore. — Jaeci Hall completed her dissertation in tears. She was writing about the importance of revitalizing and teaching Indigenous languages, specifically the Nuu-wee-ya’ language and her tribe’s dialects. “I spent months writing,” she said, “just crying while I wrote because of how it felt to not be recognized.”

Hall — who graduated in 2021 with a doctorate in linguistics from the University of Oregon — is the language coordinator for the Coquille Indian Tribe.

But Hall is not part of the federally recognized tribe of the Coquille. She’s part of the Confederated Tribes of Lower Rogue, which she described as the descendants of nine women who relocated and returned to the Rogue River after the Rogue River Wars of the 1850s in southern Oregon. Despite their rich history and Hall’s documentation of her heritage, Hall and her ancestors are not acknowledged by the United States government as a tribal nation.

Hall’s status meant that when she was earning her degrees, she didn’t qualify for financial assistance designed for Native students. She would not have been eligible for tuition waiver programs instituted in Oregon last year that reduce or eliminate costs for students who belong to federally recognized tribes.

For decades, a handful of individual states and schools have offered financial assistance to Native students. A new wave of offerings this past year – spurred in part by growing land rights movements and a larger focus on racial justice following the murder of George Floyd – shows the programs are becoming increasingly popular.

The programs are meant to help reduce the barrier of cost for Native students, who have historically faced significant challenges in attending and staying in college. Native students have the lowest college-going rate of any group in the United States, a third less than the national average, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. And since 2010, Native enrollment in higher-ed institutions also has declined by about 37 percent, the largest drop in any student demographic group. Studies suggest affordability is one of the leading causes of attrition.

But in nearly every iteration of these programs — old and new — only some Indigenous people benefit.

That’s because the U.S. government does not formally acknowledge the status of an estimated 400 tribes and countless Indigenous individuals, thus shutting them out of programs meant to reduce barriers to higher education. Tribes have to meet several criteria in their petitions for federal recognition, including proof they’ve had decades of a collective identity, generations of descendants and long-standing, autonomous political governance.

As a result, thousands of Native students aren’t getting the same opportunities as their peers in recognized tribes and are left with a disproportionate amount of debt. Affected students say the disparate treatment also leaves social and emotional wounds.

“I made it through it,” Hall said, adding with a laugh that she did most of her dissertation work remotely during Covid, often with her toddler playing around her. “And I would have made it through it better if I had had more support.”

Hall is now paying off about $190,000 in student loans, the cumulative cost of her undergraduate degree from Linfield College in Oregon, her master’s at the University of Arizona and her doctorate from the University of Oregon. A loan forgiveness program through her work will cut her obligation to roughly $50,000, but the total harms her chances of receiving a loan or improving her credit.

Hall’s children, who have Native status because of her father’s enrollment in a recognized tribe, will likely have opportunities Hall did not. If her daughter, for example, a Eugene middle schooler, maintains a 3.0 grade-point average, she will be able to attend the University of Oregon for free.

There are “so many people that are stuck in poverty and stuck in situations where they can’t get an education,” Hall said. “I started thinking … how hard their lives are, and how much of a difference could be made.”

Related: States were adding lessons about Native American history. Then came the anti-CRT movement

Individual schools and states across the country have instituted varying forms of these tuition programs over the years. The University of Maine, for example, has had a tuition waiver option since the 1930s. The program helped the school retain its Native students during the pandemic at higher rates than the national average, according to Marcus Wolf, a university spokesperson. Michigan and Montana have had waivers available for Native students for almost half a century.

Oregon joined this list, beginning with the 2022-23 school year, when then-Gov. Kate Brown announced the introduction of a statewide grant fund. The Oregon Tribal Student Grant covers up to full college costs including tuition, housing and books at public institutions for undergraduate students belonging to Oregon’s nine federally recognized tribes, as well as some support for students at eligible Oregon private institutions and those pursuing graduation education.* The money is awarded only after students apply for federal or state financial aid.

In its first year, 416 students received the grant, according to Endi Hartigan, a spokesperson for the state’s Higher Education Coordinating Commission. Oregon lawmakers allocated $19 million for the first year — based on an estimate that 700 or more students would receive a grant — and this legislative session, they codified the program in state statute and allocated $24 million for the next two years.

Several state universities – including Western Oregon, Oregon State, Portland State and Southern Oregon – also began providing an additional form of financial aid. Last year, these schools extended in-state tuition prices to members of all 570-plus federally recognized tribes in the U.S., regardless of what state they live in. The same is true for the University of California system, the University of Arizona and other institutions across the country.

Western Oregon started its Native American Tuition program last fall. It’s been a slow start to get students interested, with public records requests revealing that fewer than 10 students applied for or participated in the program in its inaugural year. However, the impact it has on those students is substantial: The university estimates the program saves participating students nearly $20,000 per student per year.

Anna Hernandez-Hunter, who until June was the director of admissions for Western Oregon, said the numbers are low because the program is new and the university enrolls few students from out of state (only about 19 percent of undergraduates). She said the university has made the application process easier for next year, published more information online and made sure admission counselors are sharing the information with prospective students.

But eligibility for that program, like the vast majority of such tuition offerings, requires enrollment in a federally recognized tribe.

Western Oregon’s Office of the President, as well as communications and admissions officials with the University of Oregon,  declined to comment specifically on why unrecognized tribes are excluded from the programs. One university official said on background that, generally speaking, program staff at any university have to follow federal and state guidelines, as well as standards for who qualifies for the resources.

Institutions typically validate a student’s enrollment by requiring a federally issued tribal ID or a letter from a recognized tribal council confirming enrollment. Native advocates said some students don’t have this kind of documentation even when they are enrolled in a recognized tribe. Documentation depends on the information families can access to prove their lineage. Enrollment requirements differ from tribe to tribe, and after generations of forced removal and assimilation, such documentation can be limited. 

Limiting which Native students get financial assistance is especially significant, given the rising cost of post-secondary degrees. According to the College Board, the average cost of tuition and fees at a public, four-year school was $10,940 for in-state students in 2022-23 or $28,240 for out-of-state students. And research by the Education Data Initiative shows Native students borrow more and pay more per month in student loan debt than their white peers.

Native students have the lowest college-going rate of any group in the United States, a third less than the national average, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Some colleges or states have agreements with specific unrecognized tribes. Oregon, for example, allows members of Washington’s Chinook Indian Nation, which is fighting to regain its federal recognition, to at least access in-state tuition because the Chinook have tribal boundaries in Oregon.

Jason Younker, who is part of the Coquille tribe, leads the University of Oregon’s Home Flight Scholars Program, one of the school’s many assistance programs available for Native students. Launched last October, Home Flight not only works to recruit more Native students to the university but also provides funding, mentors, culturally specific programs and support to help Native students adjust to life on campus.

Younker said students can prove their eligibility for the program by showing a Certificate Degree of Indian Blood card (CDIB) instead of enrollment records. Blood quantum, or the measurement of someone’s “Indian blood,” has a long, controversial history in the U.S. And certificates are only available to people related to members of recognized tribes. But Younker said this allows someone to show they are Native without enrollment records since some tribes’ enrollment requirements exclude those who still have high percentages of Native blood.

Program leaders also allow students, even those from unrecognized tribes, to apply to Home Flight via letters from council members, in an attempt to extend this support to at least some of Oregon’s unrecognized students pursuing undergraduate degrees.

Younker said the question should no longer be: “Can I afford to go to college?” The question should be: “Where can I go to college?”

“Each and every one of us has had an ancestor that sacrificed and survived so that they could have the choices that they do today,” he said. “I always tell students: ‘It doesn’t matter where you go; it matters that you do go.’”

But he said tuition assistance isn’t enough to attract and retain Native American students. To succeed in this, colleges must also recruit on reservations, provide academic counseling, cultural support and a community of peers, and include Native leaders in major decisions at the university. “If you don’t have those kinds of things, you’re not a very attractive school — no matter how much tuition you waive,” he said.

Related: 3 Native American students try to find a home at college

For students and parents like Yvette Perrantes, the lack of support affects multiple generations.

Perrantes wanted to go to college as an adult so she could move into a higher income bracket. She’s a member and leader of the Duwamish Tribe, who lived on the land that is now South Seattle, Renton and Kent, and have been called Seattle’s first people. They’ve fought a decades-long battle for federal recognition that continues today.

Without tribal status and consequent financial aid, Perrantes owed $27,000 in student loans after finishing her associate degree in clean energy technologies at Washington’s Shoreline Community College in 2014. She deferred her loan payments until she no longer could. Threatened with having her wages garnished, she filed for bankruptcy. Her credit score took a hit. She had to keep making payments, but now had no chance of leasing a car, getting a credit card or exercising other opportunities.

Her son was looking into college at the same time Perrantes faced these financial hardships. He hoped to receive an athletic scholarship, but when he tore his ACL, the young student-athlete stopped pursuing higher education altogether. In his eyes, Perrantes said, all it would lead to was debt.

The effects of exclusion from federal recognition and benefits are compounded, Perrantes said, for those who come from families, like hers, with intergenerational trauma and parents who are “doing a lot of healing themselves.”

Not “being included in this process with the federal government and not having equal access to student loans and money for education, and more interest rates, you know, everything that comes along with federal recognition,” she said, “it’s pretty crushing to the spirit.”

Perrantes now works as a program manager for Mother Nation, a Seattle-based nonprofit that focuses on cultural services, advocacy, mentorship and homeless prevention for Native women. She worries that students who go out of state for school may be disproportionately denied aspects of their identity. If someone isn’t a recognized tribal member, she said, they aren’t allowed to participate in certain cultural practices such as burning, smudging, harvesting certain trees or having an eagle feather. Those barriers are even more pronounced when the person is from a different state. 

“[H]ow are we going to be educated enough to cite policy, to fight for recognition? We need more Natives who are educated and who are willing to do the work for the people.”

Yvette Perrantes, a member of the Duwamish tribe and a leader on its council

“Being Native and being grounded in your ways, traditionally, and being out of state, outside your family, outside of your tradition, outside of your culture, and then you’re not being able to practice your cultural ways. You know, I think it’s impactful on your emotional, spiritual and mental health,” she said. “We need those to sustain ourselves as students.”

Perrantes still encourages Indigenous students to pursue education at all costs. That way, she said, they can be the ones making laws and the ones teaching their history in the classroom. “The pen is mightier than the sword,” she said. “I know that sounds so cliche, but how are we going to be educated enough to cite policy, to fight for recognition? We need more Natives who are educated and who are willing to do the work for the people.”

As states and institutions expand tuition waiver programs, Hall, the doctoral graduate from the Confederated Tribes of Lower Rogue, would like to see different ways used to verify a claim of being Native and for resources to extend to unrecognized students. Her advice for Native students is to be as stubborn as they can, to believe in themselves and to remember that any kind or any level of education will improve their lives and that of their community.

“We all have some history. We’re survivors. Regardless,” Hall said. Education “is an answer to the prayers of our ancestors, no matter if we’re recognized or not.”

* Clarification: This sentence has been updated to clarify the types of support provided by the Oregon Tribal Student Grant.

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

The post College tuition breaks for Native students spread, but some tribes are left out appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Over the last several decades, paying for college has shifted ever more from a public responsibility to an individual one. Now, even after accounting for grant aid, college costs are high enough that the majority of students cannot earn a degree without taking on debt.

To cover the average cost of attending a four-year public college, students from families making $30,000 or less now need to spend 93 percent — nearly all — of their total family income, a recent analysis by The Institute for College Access & Success found.

This has created an untenable conundrum: A college credential is increasingly necessary for financial stability, but most students can’t afford to earn one without taking on debt. That debt is a heavy burden for many of those who complete a degree; it’s even worse for those who don’t complete a degree or who attended low-quality programs that failed to improve their employment prospects.

Families — and the nation’s economy — cannot afford for this to go on.

Related: Supreme Court decides the fate of millions of student loan borrowers

In recognition of the burden this debt has placed on nearly 44 million Americans, the Biden administration has introduced a number of relief programs, including an improved income-driven repayment (IDR) plan called the SAVE Plan.

Under this new plan, the government would provide significant financial relief to borrowers by lowering monthly payments, keeping balances from ballooning and, for many, shortening the maximum repayment term.

These changes will be a financial lifeline for millions.

The Biden plan provides a critical safety net to protect students from the worst outcomes of debt, but it doesn’t address the barriers students face before they start school. Lower payments and debt relief programs reduce harm but do not reduce tuition costs. Nor do they solve the broader structural issues that students and recent graduates face: long-term declines in state funding for public colleges; stagnant wages; skyrocketing housing costs; and long-standing racial disparities in wealth attainment due to redlining and labor market discrimination.

Families — and the nation’s economy — cannot afford for this to go on.

Even with income-driven repayment plan protections in place, many students, including many first-generation students, are understandably debt-averse and may choose not to enroll — or may work too many hours to truly focus on school — rather than borrow.

Ultimately, Congress must address the root causes of the student debt crisis by enabling all students, regardless of family income, to earn a four-year degree at a public college without needing to borrow. Loans, even with back-end safety nets, are not a substitute for grants.

When policymakers act, they must address all college costs, not just tuition. Those include housing, food, child care, books and transportation, which are often more burdensome than tuition itself — especially for students from low-income backgrounds.

Related:  How the promise of free college doesn’t always help low-income students

To build this debt-free future, Congress must pair investments in grant aid with a federal affordability guarantee that is universal, easy to communicate and attractive to states with vastly different economic priorities. How?

Federal policymakers should work closely with state leaders to build a sustainable partnership that restores funding for public higher education, drives down tuition and sends more resources to historically underfunded schools.

Recognizing that higher education is workforce development, many states have blazed ahead with their own affordability programs. Take North Carolina: Its NC Promise initiative has lowered tuition costs to $500 per semester at four public institutions.

In New Mexico, through the New Mexico Opportunity and Lottery Scholarships, qualifying students can attend the state’s public colleges tuition- and fee-free.

States must balance their budgets, though, and many struggle to maintain these kinds of programs on their own. But the federal government can harness its unique spending powers to sustain and expand such promising programs and make it possible for more states to follow suit.

Any new federal-state funding partnership should be paired with a big boost to the Pell Grant program. The program enjoys strong bipartisan support and has spurred college enrollment and completion for low-income students for more than 50 years.

Today’s Pell Grants are flexible and enable students to access the institution of their choice, even if that institution is not covered by a state or federal affordability guarantee. Yet Pell Grants now cover the lowest share of college costs in the program’s history.

In 1975-76, the maximum Pell award covered more than 75 percent of the cost of attending a four-year public college. The current maximum award amount covers just 26 percent of that cost.

By boosting the Pell Grant and partnering with states to restore investment in public colleges — and lowering costs — we can eliminate the need to borrow to earn a four-year degree from any public institution.

The White House’s extensive student debt relief efforts would better protect and provide relief to the tens of millions of borrowers carrying heavy student debt burdens. It’s time for lawmakers to build on the administration’s promising proposals to ensure that future students no longer need to shoulder such a burden at all.

Michele Shepard is senior director for college affordability at The Institute for College Access & Success.

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

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Ask any college president, and they will likely tell you the biggest challenge they face — more than the broken business model, the enrollment cliff and even affordability issues — is the mental health crisis.

Student mental health is in a fragile and dangerous place on our campuses. Fewer than 40 percent  of students say they are flourishing, according to the national Healthy Minds Study. Over 40 percent report some form of depression, while 37 percent live with anxiety.

Since 2007, suicidal ideation has more than doubled and now impacts 14 percent  of students. Each of these statistics is heartbreaking, especially when you know that students are often reluctant to seek help.  

Campuses are struggling to provide enough counseling services, due to financial reasons and a shortage of professionals in the field, and the outcome can be dropping out of school or, much worse, the tragedy of lost lives.

Our dramatic mental health crisis is cause for colleges and universities to reimagine how they support students.

Related: A surprising remedy for teens in mental health crises

Some colleges and universities — including my institution, Hollins University — use a public health approach. That includes establishing early alert systems, providing mental health first aid training to faculty and staff and increasing group therapy.

These efforts are designed for triage and to ensure the highest levels of care are available to those with the greatest needs. But we must also find ways to be present and support our students in daily moments, human moments.

For many students, technology is a major contributor to health and wellness concerns. Long before the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory about the perils of social media for young people, we knew about its negative effect on the mental well-being of young women.

Having led two colleges for women, I have seen this firsthand, with incessant bullying and dangerous calling out  on social media leading to a loss of confidence and feelings of inadequacy.

A generation that has experienced active shooter drills, a pandemic lockdown, rampant racism, sexism, homophobia and a democracy far from its best needed a moment to simply be cared for.

However, as a president deeply engaged with students and often a confidant and witness to their struggles, I wanted to do more than provide resources and create policies — as critical as those processes are.

I quickly realized that what was missing for many students was connection to others in their lives. The Healthy Minds Study found that over 65 percent of students report loneliness, defined as lack of companionship and feeling left out or isolated.

While I could not disrupt the biochemical or social processes that trigger many mental health issues, I recognized that I could help students create connections to others and feel less lonely.

I began to ponder ways we could curate environments where we could be intensely human together.

We tried a few things, each of which had some success. Our “Sundaes on Sunday” brought students to our equestrian center where they got to spend a few hours eating ice cream and engaging with horses.

The majority who joined me had never been close to a horse. We bonded over the calm presence of animals, shared awe and simply spending time away from screens and with one another.

Next came game nights where we sat and played board games. With lots of snacks, no phones and a spirit of friendly competition, we hung out, played and chatted. While we talked about stress, we also reduced our stress.

Hands down, our most successful endeavor was bedtime stories. I am pretty sure that most reasonable people would suggest that reading bedtime stories to college students is a bad idea.

They might call it infantilizing and coddling or say that students wouldn’t be interested or that it is not a good use of presidential time.

All of these are very good criticisms. I did it anyway.

To be clear, Hollins may be uniquely situated for a venture like this. After all, Margaret Wise Brown, the author of what is arguably the best-known children’s bedtime book, “Goodnight Moon,”is a graduate.

English and creative writing are among our signature majors. We even have a graduate program in children’s literature and illustration.

But even with that context, no one thought bedtime stories would resonate.

Undeterred, we ordered hot cocoa, set up a yule log and told students to don pajamas, bring their blankets, a friend and, if they liked, a stuffed animal.

Students came, sat around tables, and I began reading. By the third page of Brown’s “Runaway Bunny,” I heard the first sob. By the time I finished it, we were all in tears.

We read other books and cried more. We recovered as we closed, reciting “Goodnight Moon” together, but the power of the emotional release throughout the reading was unforgettable. The group doubled in size for the next bedtime stories.

Related: STUDENT VOICE: After confronting mental health struggles in college, I’m now helping others

What our students needed was someone to connect with them, to let them be young people free of the demands of the world and technology. A generation that has experienced active shooter drills, a pandemic lockdown, rampant racism, sexism, homophobia and a democracy far from its best needed a moment to simply be cared for.

They needed to spend a few moments recalling when, for many, life was simpler and connection everywhere. They needed to be emotionally nourished.

To be clear, bedtime stories are not a solution to the mental health crisis. They do, however, show that we can disrupt loneliness with the simplest of efforts, and that the deep human connections are perhaps more valuable now than ever.

Mary Dana Hinton became the 13th president of Hollins University in Virginia in 2020 and is president emerita of the College of Saint Benedict.

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

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As public confidence in the value of higher education wanes, state and national higher education leaders must do more to invest in programs that have demonstrated success at improving college completion rates and helping students find well-paying jobs.  

A good example is the Accelerated Study in Associate Programs, or ASAP, at the City University of New York (CUNY). The ASAP model was designed in 2007 to address institutional barriers to student success, particularly for CUNY’s low-income students. ASAP students receive dedicated academic and career advising, generous financial aid to cover tuition and other expenses, flexible class scheduling with expectations for full-time enrollment and support services to help them balance family, work and personal commitments.

Hallmarks of the program are its financial incentives (in addition to the financial aid, CUNY ASAP students receive an unlimited NYC MetroCard as part of their benefits); an engaging advising model; and a sophisticated data management infrastructure. The program has served nearly 88,000 CUNY students since its inception and has nearly doubled the chances that these students will graduate with an associate degree within three years.

The program has significant economic rewards. For each additional ASAP associate degree, the public return is three times the investment because graduates earn higher wages, pay more in taxes and receive fewer social services. The graduates’ returns are even greater: For every dollar a student invests up front, they realize $12 through better employment options and higher wages.

Related:  Many community college students never earn a degree. New approaches to advising aim to reverse that trend

ASAP can, and should, be expanded to benefit hundreds of thousands more students. In 2015, CUNY applied the ASAP model to bachelor’s degree-seeking students through an academic support program known as ACE (Accelerate, Complete, Engage) with positive results similar to ASAP’s. CUNY has already replicated ASAP and ACE in 14 colleges and universities across seven states, with comparable results to the original ASAP initiatives. Even during the pandemic, the ASAP model continued to have a positive impact on student outcomes.

CUNY and Ithaka S+R, a not-for-profit research and consulting firm, worked together to design a strategy to further replicate ASAP around the country. If enacted, this strategy has the potential to increase the number of community college graduates by 50,000 or more in 10 years. 

The program nearly doubles the chances that a community college student will graduate with an associate degree within three years.

A core feature of the strategy is to invite state higher education system leaders to create ASAP replication programs in their states’ community colleges. Compared to incrementally expanding ASAP, the advantages of a state-level approach include consistency, efficiency and sustainability. Students in ASAP replications will have a common college experience even if they transfer to another participating community college within the state, and state-level coordination can increase the program’s efficiency through shared services and enhanced cross-college collaboration. Given ASAP’s relatively high upfront costs, state investment to sustain it over the long term is both essential and commonsensical, as the state reaps the benefits of increased graduation rates, an increased tax base and reductions in social services.

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

The state and institutional leaders that have already replicated ASAP now constitute the ASAP|ACE National Replication Collaborative at CUNY, a group that will support change as more states and institutions choose to replicate ASAP in the future. 

CUNY ASAP’s track record proves that it’s possible to significantly boost the number of community college graduates nationwide. The ASAP approach works, andit’s cost effective. For state higher education system leaders looking to improve degree attainment, address persistent equity gaps and prove the value of higher education, the decision is easy. Statewide approaches to ASAP replication at community colleges ensure the program’s benefits will multiply and be sustained.

Elizabeth Davidson Pisacreta is the director of Educational Transformation at Ithaka S+R and Katherine Giardello is the senior policy advisor at the ASAP|ACE National Replication Collaborative.

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

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DALLAS — Daisy Donjuan’s family never saw the value in college. After graduating from high school, she did what was expected of her — dropped education, worked and pitched in at home as her parents did.

So when she enrolled in Dallas College after a five-year break in school, she was left to navigate a dizzying array of options and decisions solo as she sought to train for a job outside of retail management.

The college’s steps to enroll included a checklist that laid bare what Donjuan needed to do, including scheduling an appointment with a success coach.

Success coaches, a more hands-on approach to advising, are Dallas College’s latest effort to demystify the process of obtaining a degree and help its students overcome obstacles along the way. 

With her coach’s help, Donjuan created a plan to graduate through the college’s paralegal program. She avoided taking classes that didn’t advance her career and stayed on top of coursework.

“It felt good, the fact that someone is actually checking up on you and that they’re keeping up with you,” Donjuan, 24, said. “They actually care about us succeeding.”

Supporting students — particularly those who come from nontraditional paths — is key as difficult circumstances, unclear pathways to a career and uncertainty about the value of pursuing a college can derail their education, experts say.

About half of Dallas College’s students are first-generation; a little more than 20 percent are parents; and about 22 percent are adult learners who are at least 25 with a full-time job,according to self-reported responses and data from a fall 2022 survey.

Soon, ensuring that students are successful could be even more important as Texas lawmakers want to tie community college funding to outcomes. 

But without purposeful guidance on choosing the right classes or taking advantage of available resources, students can easily get lost and end up “making decisions that don’t get them to a degree,” said Josh Wyner, who leads higher education programs at The Aspen Institute. 

In efforts to mitigate the mix of challenges that students encounter, Dallas College leaders invested in a heartier, more intrusive advising nearly three years ago that pairs students with success coaches as research suggests that contact with a significant college staffer is a crucial factor in retention.

Trustees approved $10 million to strengthen the system’s student success infrastructure and nearly doubled its coaching and advising capacity. 

Related: More than a third of community college students have vanished

Donjuan’s father, a car salesman, often boasted that he was able to create a business without a high school diploma or degree. Following their lead, she began working at a retail store where she quickly ran out of room for growth after reaching a management position.

Mulling over the sacrifices her father made when he upended his life in Mexico in pursuit of a better life, Donjuan saw this as wasted potential.

“I felt lost,” she said. “I wanted to break that cycle. We can do better than this … we came for a reason.”

Such details about a student’s life and struggles usually aren’t immediately available to success coaches. 

That’s why it’s key to ask probing questions that “dig a little deeper” to find the underlying challenges interfering in students’ education, said Garry Johnson, a success coach at Dallas College’s Richland Campus. 

“It felt good, the fact that someone is actually checking up on you and that they’re keeping up with you. They actually care about us succeeding.”

Daisy Donjuan, Dallas College student

If a student is missing classes due to transportation issues, Johnson can point those who take six credits or more to a free bus pass. Experiencing food insecurity? Here’s the campus’ food pantry. Need last-minute child care? These are the four system campuses that offer flexible assistance.

Success coaches not only provide academic advising or help with financial aid applications, they also anticipate barriers.

“No student should be hungry, homeless or hopeless,” Johnson said. “Our job … is to address the whole student, not just mere academics.”

Students are assigned to one coach, allowing them to develop more meaningful relationships with someone who can help them “navigate the Dallas College maze” without having to bounce around to different people, said Jermain Pipkins, dean of success coaching at the school.

More than 64,500 students are enrolled at Dallas College, and the system employs nearly 240 success coaches who are spread out across its seven campuses. Before the revamp, it had only about 130 advisers.

The coaches are distributed among teams who focus on dual credit high schoolers, older adult learners or traditional students.

“The underlying hope is that these navigators and these coaches help students manage to navigate the inevitable bumps that will come up and be able to persist in their academic studies.”

Nikki Edgecombe, a senior research scholar at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University

If students aren’t ready to open up or feel ashamed to ask for help, that can limit how much the advisers can support them initially, said Lisa Frost, another success coach at Richland. That makes follow up meetings essential.

“Building rapport with a student takes time, and sometimes one session is not going to solve this,” she said. 

Overall, enrollment in community colleges has plummeted in recent years. In 2020, as COVID-19 spread across the country, the number of students at Texas community colleges fell by 5.7 percent, or by more than 1.5 million students, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

Nationally, the number has dropped by 37 percent since 2010 — nearly 2.6 million students.

Related: Bachelor’s degrees of community college students stymied by red tape

Getting students to enroll and stay can be a challenge as such schools aren’t typically known for intense advising.

Their student-to-advisor ratio is usually quite high and labor costs are among the biggest barriers for such institutions, said Nikki Edgecombe, a senior research scholar at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University.

“The underlying hope is that these navigators and these coaches help students manage to navigate the inevitable bumps that will come up and be able to persist in their academic studies,” Edgecombe said.

After Frost coached a student on how to ask her instructor about grades and opportunities to earn extra credit, she knew she’d developed a relationship with her. 

The student soon opened up about how she had never been able to speak her own mind with her family, but the advice allowed her to work on her confidence.

“This simple skill alone helped this student overcome a barrier of being shy to ask what she wanted without holding back,” Frost said.

At Dallas College, the student-to-success coach ratio is roughly 350 to one. Some caseloads may be higher or lower depending on the success coach’s role and the type of students they serve.

Related: Trade programs – unlike other areas of higher ed – are in hot demand

Many advocates have said that Texas’ support for community colleges isn’t enough as the schools grow, expand wraparound services and pivot offerings to meet workforce demands.

“Any model that doesn’t fully fund or potentially starve those efforts is gonna run up against challenges,” Edgecombe said. “Institutions will struggle to deliver on their mission.”

Currently, Texas’ community colleges are funded through a blend of local property taxes, student tuition and fees and state contributions. 

Lawmakers set aside a fixed amount of money toward public community colleges each biennium. The funds are then distributed to schools based on a complex formula. 

At Dallas College, that state support is nearly 20% in the current budget. The bulk of its revenue, almost 60 percent, comes from property and other taxes while tuition and fees make up about 20 percent.

“I was stagnant for a very long time,” she said. “If you want more you have to go for it, it’s not as easy as being comfortable where you are. But it’s worth it.”

Kianna Vaughn, Dallas College student

A commission tasked with examining how the state should finance such schools — made up of college officials, business leaders and lawmakers — spent a year reviewing options. 

The group released a set of recommendations in November proposing a complete overhaul that would funnel more money to community colleges based on student success.

Those measurable outcomes could include the number of credentials that provide professional skills; credentials awarded in high-demand fields; and transfers to four-year universities. 

The related legislation — which has wide bipartisan support across both chambers and is endorsed by the state’s 50 community college districts — was passed by the House last month. Lawmakers have until Memorial Day weekend to send the proposal to Gov. Greg Abbott, who has expressed support for a funding revamp.

The overhaul would require lawmakers to allot roughly $650 million in additional funding toward community colleges every two years, Harrison Keller, Texas’ commissioner of higher education, previously estimated.

Meanwhile, Dallas College leaders say they’re ahead because of how they shifted priorities over the past few years. 

Although they’re still committed to getting people in the door and increasing enrollment, there’s a heightened focus on assessing how to keep students on track, college completion and students’ achievements after graduating.

Kianna Vaughn, 28, didn’t immediately enroll in college after graduating from Cedar Hill High School in 2013 because of its sticker price. Although she received an acceptance letter for Texas Southern University, she didn’t qualify for financial aid.

Many of her friends went off to college, which overwhelmed her as education was the only path to success she’d ever heard about.

A well-paying job cushioned Vaughn’s worries for some years, but she noticed younger people were often filling positions above her own. Despite her years of experience, the absence of a degree was preventing her from procuring different opportunities.

After enrolling last year, Vaughn met with a Dallas College success coach who helped her lay out a flexible roadmap that allowed her to juggle school and a full-time job.

“I was stagnant for a very long time,” she said. “If you want more you have to go for it, it’s not as easy as being comfortable where you are. But it’s worth it.”

Now, Vaughn is set to transfer to Jarvis Christian University, a historically Black institution with a Dallas location, starting next year to pursue a bachelor’s degree. 

This story about community college advising was produced by The Dallas Morning News, as part of the series Saving the College Dream, a collaboration between Hechinger and Education Labs and journalists at The Associated Press, AL.com, The Christian Science Monitor, The Seattle Times and The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina. Sign up for Hechinger’s higher education newsletter.

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Over and over, we read news stories and research studies demonstrating that Black learners face huge barriers in attending and completing college and gaining a strong economic foothold.

These barriers include the cost of higher education, the disproportionate debt Black students and families take on and the discrimination and lack of belonging many Black students experience at college.

In stories detailing inequities, from post-graduation income gaps to programming that places Black students in less upwardly mobile career tracks, the news consistently demonstrates that our higher education system is not equitably serving Black learners.

Little wonder that a recent report reveals that Black public community college enrollment dropped by 26 percent, or almost 300,000 students, between 2011 and 2019 and by another 100,000 students during the pandemic, bringing Black community college enrollment levels back to where they were more than two decades ago.

If we as a society believe that higher education is still a key lever in creating more equitable outcomes for all learners, we must renew our commitment to addressing the lack of educational opportunity and economic mobility that Black students, families and communities face.

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

This requires us to abandon the failed thinking and practices that divide us and weaken our economy. Some estimates, including one from Citi, find that the racial economic divide has cost our country $16 trillion over the last two decades. 

By moving in a new direction, we can reap the benefits of what author Heather McGhee calls the “solidarity dividend,” which is achieved when people come together across race to help communities thrive. 

Dozens of organizations, including Achieving the Dream, have joined the Level UP National Panel to raise awareness of solutions and introduce policies that will reverse the trending inequity.

We are calling for action in four areas:

• Making higher education truly accessible and affordable for Black learners and their families.
• Creating mechanisms for shared accountability among all stakeholders for the success of Black learners in and beyond their postsecondary experiences.
• Providing academic and social supports for Black learners inside and outside the classroom and creating college environments that foster a sense of belonging and respect.
• Using engaging teaching practices that draw upon Black students’ lived experiences, perspectives, strengths and needs to ensure that students “own” what they learn.

To actively pursue these actions, community colleges, which serve over a third (36 percent) of all Black undergraduate students, must rethink our notions of college access. It is no longer a given that, simply because we are “in” a community and provide the most affordable postsecondary option, Black learners will see our institutions — or even going to college — as attractive and possible for them.

We need to locate staff, recruitment and faculty in schools and communities in zip codes that we have too often overlooked, and we need to make dual-enrollment more equitable. For instance, we know that students who attend community college while completing high school are more likely to graduate from both. Yet as research has shown, Black learners participate in these programs at significantly lower rates than white students due to “exclusionary mindsets, policies, and practices.” 

We must also expand College Promise programs, which make college tuition free under certain conditions, to help eliminate financial barriers. These efforts, aligned to local talent needs and linked to high-value credentials, should focus on students from poverty-impacted families and include federal Pell Grants to reduce students’ financial worries and limit their need to work low-wage jobs while in school.

If we as a society believe that higher education is still a key lever in creating more equitable outcomes for all learners, we must renew our commitment to addressing the lack of educational opportunity and economic mobility that Black students, families and communities face.

Promise programs do help: A 2020 study analyzed 33 programs that provided tuition benefits to students attending local two-year colleges. Colleges with Promise programs saw first-time enrollment of Black men and Black women increase 47 and 51 percent respectively. 

We also need to tailor our student supports for Black students.

Data shows that many Black students lack the resources to get into college and succeed, in terms of adequate academic preparation, access to technology and other essential tools. Black students are also more likely to have caregiver responsibilities and work full-time. And the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies reports that “an alarming 70 percent of Black students experienced food or housing insecurity or homelessness during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

All of which means that our institutions need to know who the Black learners that we serve are and ensure that they have access to customized support services, both academic and nonacademic. We must provide them with an equitable opportunity to succeed on their educational journey and in all aspects of their lives.

Increasing Black learner success will also require that we help faculty more fully understand the importance of culturally relevant, responsive and affirming teaching. Fostering students’ sense of belonging inside and outside of the classroom directly impacts how they experience the institution.

It is up to us as higher education leaders, policymakers and community leaders to chart a new path to meet the needs of Black college students.

“It’s our responsibility,” Keith Curry, president of Compton College and chair of the Level UP National Panel said recently. We must not “put the blame back on learners because the systems have been broken.”

Karen A. Stout is president and CEO of Achieving the Dream. 

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

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EVERETT, Wa. – Terrica Purvis squinted through goggles as her hands carefully guided a pipette full of indigo-tinted fluid into clear glass test tubes.

It was the last chemistry lab of the winter quarter at Everett Community College, and Purvis was working through the steps of what chemistry faculty member Valerie Mosser jokingly refers to as the “post-apocalypse survival” lab — an experiment using boiled red cabbage water to test the acidity of common household chemicals.

Purvis is in her first year of study for an associate degree in nursing at Everett Community College. The 27-year-old is also one of more than 6,000 Washington community and technical college students enrolled in the state’s Integrated Basic Education and Skills Training (I-BEST) program. 

Students who need extra help in subjects such as algebra struggle to learn if the content is taught in an abstract, isolated manner, educators say. That’s why I-BEST programs feature two teachers in the classroom: one provides job training and the other teaches basic skills in reading, math or English language.

For Purvis, who hasn’t been in school for nearly a decade, this class meant getting extra math help right when she needed it: during a chemistry class.

Statewide data shows students in the program graduate at a higher rate than those enrolled in traditional adult basic education.

Among students who started college from 2015 to 2018, an average of 52 percent enrolled in I-BEST classes earned a degree or certificate within four years compared to 38 percent of students who did so while enrolled in traditional adult basic education coursework, according to the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges. 

The program is so successful that 12 states have implemented or are in the process of implementing an I-BEST model at one or more education institutions.

Related: More than a third of community college students have vanished

In the lab, instructor Mosser bounced between pairs of students, fielding questions about pH measurements and telling them they’ll never know when the skills they’re learning will come in handy.

Each time she gave a lecture or held a lab, she was joined by co-instructor Candace Ronhaar, who works as a tutor and extra math support instructor for students.

In one session, Ronhaar lifted a marker to the whiteboard and drew a little heart. She wrote the word “mole” beside it and explained it is a unit of measurement equivalent to the amount of atoms contained in 12 grams of carbon-12. 

She guided students through practice problems, calculating the molar mass of chemical compounds.

All six students in Chemistry 121 were also taking an entry-level statistics class, and Ronhaar was co-instructor for both courses. Mosser said Ronhaar’s presence was the most valuable part of the I-BEST model.

“I’m an assessment instructor,” Mosser said. “She’s just a helping instructor. In the minds of students, the difference is incalculable. They have a different relationship with her. They’re more willing to go to her, because she doesn’t grade them.”

Purvis, who calls herself a strong student, said chemistry was the first class she ever took that “humbled” her. She doesn’t think she would have passed without I-BEST. Students fresh out of high school had an easier time remembering chemistry and math, Purvis said, but she hadn’t studied those subjects for 10 years.

“We have used Sputnik-era mathematics, abstractly taught, to sort by race and class. Math has revolutionized every industry.”

Davis Jenkins, senior research associate with the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University

“They couldn’t have picked a better second instructor,” Purvis said of Ronhaar. “I loved it. We went to her office hours all the time. She even joked around with us.”

After high school, Purvis spent six years as a cook in the Navy, and took classes at a couple other colleges. Last year, she was medically discharged and returned to school at Everett Community College full-time. 

After attaining her associate degree in nursing, she plans to transfer to University of Washington Bothell to earn a Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree, and hopes to work in labor and delivery at a hospital.

Related: Trade programs – unlike other areas of higher education – are in hot demand

Helping more students graduate from nursing school by giving them just-in-time math help has a larger societal benefit. From 2020 to 2021, the number of working RNs in the United States decreased by more than 100,000 — the highest drop in four decades.

An estimated 200,000 jobs for registered nurses are expected to open each year in the U.S. between now and 2031, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in 2021. That means the job prospects for students like Purvis are promising.

Not only has I-BEST increased graduation rates, its students turn in solid academic performances. Over the past three years, 90 percent of students passed their I-BEST courses with a grade of C-minus or better.

The program is so successful that 12 states have implemented or are in the process of implementing an I-BEST model at one or more education institutions.

The program is growing, and serves a diverse group of students. I-BEST enrollment in the state has increased by more than 20 percent the past five years. Forty-six percent of students enrolled in I-BEST are students of color, 55 percent are women and 39 percent have dependents.

I-BEST opens the door to federal financial aid by making it available to students who didn’t graduate from high school. Under financial aid rules, students must either have a high school diploma or prove their “ability to benefit” from aid by being enrolled in a qualifying program, such as I-BEST, where they learn basic skills as part of their career pathway. 

Along with nursing, other high-demand I-BEST job pathways include aeronautics, manufacturing and information technologies.

Related: Many community college students near earn a degree. New approaches to advising aim to reverse that trend

At Bellevue College, I-BEST students enrolled in Business 101 meet with instructor Eric Nacke for an adult basic education class on a separate day. Nacke teaches English in the context of the business world.

Student Forouzan Barfibafeghi moved from Iran to the U.S. in 2020. She holds a bachelor’s degree in business from Islamic Azad University in Tehran, where she graduated in 1999. Coming back to school in the U.S., Barfibafeghi said her biggest challenge has been learning English. 

She said Nacke’s classes have not only helped her grow her English skills, they have given her a sense of community.

“Besides teaching just the basic skills to get college-level English,” Barfibafeghi said, “This is also a space where we can meet. We have created a strong bond between us. That is one of the highlights for me.”

Barfibafeghi said that although the courses have been held exclusively online via Zoom, she has befriended many other students in the class. When she graduates with her associate degree in business, she hopes to find work in the insurance industry.

In the 2021-2022 academic year, 85 percent of students enrolled in I-BEST classes at Bellevue College were women and 58 percent were first-generation college students. 

Related: The new labor market: No bachelor’s required?

I-BEST was launched as a state pilot program almost 20 years ago, when data began to show that students needed vocational training to improve their job prospects.

The program was to change the remediation model in most community colleges, where students who don’t do well on placement tests must take pre-college classes in their weak subject — essentially a repeat of high school.

Research shows that results of standardized placement tests often correlate with race and socioeconomic status.  

The way high school math is taught has not changed much since the 1970s, despite changes in the job market and the way the subject is applied therein, said Davis Jenkins, senior research associate with the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University.

“The only purpose of this is to sort by race and class,” Jenkins said. “And the only reason is people like me – I’m middle class – have known how to work the system. This is bigger than I-BEST. … We have used Sputnik-era mathematics, abstractly taught, to sort by race and class. Math has revolutionized every industry.”

In Washington, because I-BEST uses a mix of state, federal and other grant funds, the state doesn’t know how much the program costs. But “they are more expensive than other adult basic education programs because the model calls for two instructors in the classroom, said state community college spokeswoman Laura McDowell. 

The program might be more broadly replicated if it weren’t so costly, she said.

As Purvis prepared for her next quarter of classes, the student said she hoped her future instructors would be as helpful as Ronhaar.

“She’s my favorite instructor so far since I’ve been going to Everett,” Purvis said. “We needed her. She had to be there.”

This story was produced by The Seattle Times as part of Saving the College Dream, a collaboration between that publication, AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report and The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina, with support from the Solutions Journalism Network.

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Among the multiple groups of struggling students in America, the undocumented live in the shadows, awaiting recognition and assistance.

They are not easy to spot, and often face far more challenges than many other groups, left to navigate a difficult path to higher education without adequate assistance. Nationwide, just 2 percent of undocumented students are enrolled in postsecondary education.

When we were undergraduate students, we struggled with the immense difficulties of being undocumented. We owe many of our accomplishments to our colleges’ dream resource centers, places we heavily relied upon for academic, emotional and financial support. That’s why we are firm believers in the power of dream resource centers and believe that — with nearly half a million undocumented students in college — such centers should be on every campus.

In California, multiple universities and community colleges have dream resource centers to provide support to help undocumented students navigate and find financial aid, career advancement, legal and mental health services.

The centers help set students up for success by encouraging them to feel they are part of a school community and of society as a whole.

More than 427,000 undocumented students are enrolled in higher education nationwide

Students can meet with counselors and educational advisers via Zoom or in person by appointment or drop-in sessions. And dream centers partner with legal support teams that typically include a paralegal assistant and an accredited immigration attorney and offer free legal screenings and help with DACA applications and renewals, citizenship applications and family petitions.

This is essential aid for many undocumented students as they transition into higher education.

It was for us: We educated ourselves about laws, policies and support systems through the help of these centers.

Without these designated resource centers, information on policies that save undocumented students a lot of time, worry and money — such as the policy that allows students who attended a California high school for three years to have access to in-state tuition — would be largely unknown.

Related: California helps college students cut their debt by paying them to help their communities

More than 427,000 undocumented students are enrolled in higher education, and more than 94,000 are enrolled in California’s colleges and universities. Nationally, of those enrolled, about 19 percent  are in private colleges, such as the University of Southern California, and 90 percent are in undergraduate programs. Fewer undocumented students seek graduate degrees because there are less resources available to them.

Nearly 27,000 undocumented students in California graduate high school each year. They would likely feel more inclined to pursue higher education if they knew that every college had a community they could rely on for support.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law in 2019 requiring all public colleges and universities to designate a dream resource liaison for each of their campuses; the bill also allows a California college campus to accept on behalf of the state any gift, bequest or donation that supports the development of a dream resource center.

Many Californian public colleges and universities now have on-campus dream resource centers, including UCLA, UC Irvine, UC Berkeley, and UC Davis. But some colleges are lucky to have a dream resource liaison, if that.

New York City has Immigrant Student Success centers or offices on many of its CUNY campuses. Providing these physical entities allows for the allocation of more resources and the accommodation of the needs of more undocumented students.

Unfortunately, too many colleges and universities have yet to create such support centers, even though many students are pushing for them. On our campus, the University of Southern California, undocumented students have repeatedly requested such a space, but have been unsuccessful so far.

When we were undergraduate students, we struggled with the immense difficulties of being undocumented. We owe many of our accomplishments to our colleges’ dream resource centers.

In today’s political climate, undocumented students need that support more than ever. Undocumented students struggle every single day on college campuses nationwide.

Establishing resource centers for undocumented students at public and private universities and colleges nationwide would strongly encourage undocumented students to pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees — especially if they feel supported along the way.

And having more dream centers would benefit the entire undocumented community. The support would improve and promote mental health; the physical spaces would serve as sanctuaries at a time of ever-changing immigration laws.

Undocumented students’ burdens would be lightened, and students would have more time and energy to devote to their studies.

Higher education institutions need to foster a welcoming and supportive environment that improves the university experience and creates opportunities later in life for all “Dreamers.”

Vianey Valdez is a first-generation DACA student pursuing her Master of Social Work degree at the University of Southern California. Maria Fernanda Molina is a DACA recipient and a first-year master’s student at the USC Suzanne-Dworak Peck School of Social Work.

This story about dream resource centers 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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