Jazmín Mejía pasó directamente de la secundaria a lo que pensó que era la opción perfecta en la Universidad Loyola de Chicago, a 30 minutos en automóvil del barrio donde creció.

Pero pronto se sintió abrumada en el campus del lado norte, que tiene casi 17,000 estudiantes.

“Las clases eran demasiado grandes”, dijo Mejía, de 18 años. “Se me dificultaba pedir ayuda”.

Un año después, dice que la universidad se ha vuelto mucho más llevadera.

Mejía dejó el campus principal de Loyola para ir a Arrupe College, un programa de dos años en el centro de la ciudad que ofrece títulos asociados. Tomar clases más pequeñas con instructores que interactúan más con los estudiantes ha sido para ella un gran cambio.

“Los maestros intentan comunicarse contigo y comprender tu situación”, dijo Mejía mientras desayunaba en la cafetería Arrupe.

Durante mucho tiempo, los títulos asociados de dos años se han ofrecido casi exclusivamente en colegios comunitarios. Pero el modelo de Loyola está cobrando fuerza en las universidades privadas sin fines de lucro de cuatro años de todo el país.

Muchas de ellas son escuelas jesuitas como Loyola y afirman que los programas de grado asociado de dos años, de menor costo, ayudan especialmente a los estudiantes que necesitan más apoyo.

“Es una cultura de acercamiento”, dice el reverendo Thomas Neitzke, decano de Arrupe. “Es un apoyo total tanto en el salón como afuera”.

En la actualidad, existe un impulso coordinado para ampliar los programas de título asociado en las universidades de cuatro años. Steve Katsouros, decano fundador de Arrupe y presidente y director ejecutivo de Come to Believe Network, organización sin fines de lucro dedicada a llevar los títulos de dos años a las universidades de cuatro años, es el principal promotor.

Según Katsouros, la red concede subvenciones para ayudar a las universidades a poner en marcha programas de título asociado. Además de Loyola, entre las universidades que han abierto o tienen previsto abrir centros de dos años se encuentran la University of St. Thomas de St. Paul (Minnesota), la University of Mount Saint Vincent de Nueva York, la Butler University de Indiana y el Boston College.

Otras universidades, como la University of the Pacific de California, están considerando programas por separado. Y Homeboy Industries, organización sin ánimo de lucro dedicada a la rehabilitación de pandillas, está estudiando la posibilidad de asociarse con la Mount Saint Mary’s University en Los Ángeles para crear un programa asociado.

Según Katsouros, el simple hecho de considerar el concepto puede ayudar a una universidad a conocer mejor las necesidades de su alumnado en general. Los programas de la red Come to Believe deben comprometerse a matricular a estudiantes de bajos ingresos y a reducir al mínimo la deuda de los alumnos.

En Arrupe, la matrícula anunciada es de algo más de $13,000 al año, aunque las becas y los programas de trabajo y estudio hacen que la mayoría de los estudiantes paguen unos $2,000.

“Intentamos identificar los factores que les impiden a los estudiantes tener éxito”, dice Katsouros, señalando que la mayoría de las universidades también ofrecen alguna combinación de comidas, computadoras portátiles y hospedaje gratuitos.

Hay pocos datos sobre los programas emergentes, pero la esperanza es que la mayoría de los graduados terminen sus estudios universitarios. Un éxito, por modesto que fuera, supondría una enorme mejora con respecto a los índices nacionales de éxito en los colegios comunitarios.

Según el Aspen Institute y el Community College Research Center (CCRC, por sus siglas en inglés) del Teachers College de la Universidad de Columbia, aunque el 80% de los estudiantes de estos centros dicen que quieren licenciarse, sólo el 16% lo consigue en un plazo de seis años. Las cifras son aún peores para los estudiantes de bajos ingresos (11%), negros (9%) e hispanos (13%). (El Hechinger Report, que elaboró este reportaje, es una unidad independiente del Teachers College).

Aunque es difícil comparar a millones de estudiantes de colegios comunitarios con el puñado relativo que asiste a estos nuevos programas de dos años, las diferencias son notables. En el Arrupe College de Loyola, por ejemplo, el 50% de los estudiantes se gradúan, y el 70% de ellos continúan con programas de licenciatura.

Según Davis Jenkins, investigador principal del CCRC, más universidades deberían ofrecer títulos asociados.

“Se trata de instituciones que podrían utilizar su prestigio y su dedicación a la enseñanza de alta calidad para incorporar realmente a estudiantes que de otro modo no asistirían a la universidad”, afirma Jenkins. “Se trata de tender un puente hacia la universidad, aprovechando su fuerza”.

La mayoría de los nuevos programas garantizan a los graduados la admisión en el campus de origen. En la Butler University, que abrirá su Founder’s College de dos años a 100 estudiantes el año que viene, los alumnos que se gradúen en el Founder’s con notas suficientemente buenas podrán terminar automáticamente sus licenciaturas en la universidad, según Brooke Barnett, rectora de Butler.

Los estudiantes no tendrán deudas después de los dos primeros años, dice Barnett, y los que vayan a Butler no pagarán más de un total de $10,000 por los cuatro años completos. El Founder’s College está financiado en su totalidad por fundaciones y donantes, dice, y cumplirá el objetivo de la universidad de ofrecer titulaciones de bajo coste a estudiantes subrepresentados.

“Queremos dar a los estudiantes la oportunidad de prosperar, brillar y mostrar el talento que pueden aportar”, afirma Barnett. “No siempre se les han dado esas oportunidades”.

Algunas universidades, como Butler, están utilizando los programas de título asociado como una oportunidad para que los estudiantes conozcan el campus principal sin abrumarlos con clases enormes. Otras, como Loyola y Boston College, mantienen separados a los estudiantes de títulos asociados para facilitar su incorporación a la vida universitaria.

El nuevo Messina College del Boston College abrirá sus puertas a 100 estudiantes este verano, a una milla del campus principal, en una propiedad adquirida de un colegio que cerró. Los responsables del Messina College esperan que el aislamiento inicial ayude a evitar el choque cultural de un campus grande y a que los estudiantes no abandonen los estudios.

“Es una gran ventaja que nuestros estudiantes empiecen en un entorno más pequeño”, afirma Erick Berrelleza, decano fundador de Messina.

Aunque el concepto de las universidades que ofrecen títulos asociados es relativamente nuevo, en la última década los colegios comunitarios de casi la mitad del país han incorporado títulos asociados en varias disciplinas, una innovación que las universidades no siempre han aceptado.

Antes de que Idaho aprobara en marzo un plan para que un colegio comunitario ofreciera títulos bachilleratos, la Boise State University argumentó en contra de la propuesta, diciendo esencialmente que competiría con los intereses de la universidad.

“De hecho, podría perjudicar la eficacia y eficiencia de la educación postsecundaria en Idaho”, escribió la universidad la Junta de Educación estatal, “canibalizando los recursos limitados disponibles para la educación postsecundaria y duplicando la oferta de titulaciones en la misma región”.

Los colegios comunitarios aún no han expresado su preocupación por el hecho que las universidades ofrezcan titulaciones asociadas, y Jenkins, del CCRC, afirma que no hay motivo para que los colegios comunitarios se preocupen por estos programas relativamente pequeños de dos años. Aun así, es importante que las universidades colaboren con los colegios comunitarios.

“Donde se ha hecho bien, ha habido negociación”, afirma. “Espero que esto estimule a los colegios comunitarios a asociarse con instituciones de cuatro años”.

Varios centros de cuatro años afirman que no habían hablado formalmente con los colegios comunitarios antes de iniciar programas asociados. Esto incluye a la Mount Saint Vincent University, que abrirá su nuevo Seton College de dos años este verano en su campus del Bronx.

Un portavoz del Bronx Community College se negó a responder a preguntas sobre el programa de Mount Saint Vincent. El otro colegio comunitario del distrito, Hostos, no respondió a las solicitudes de entrevista.

La St. Thomas University abrió su programa de título asociado en 2017. No ha habido fricciones entre la universidad y St. Paul College, el colegio comunitario más cercano. Paul College ha apoyado la iniciativa, según Austin Calhoun, portavoz del centro.

“Eso significa 200 estudiantes más al año en las Twin Cities que acceden a la enseñanza superior”, afirma. “Thomas es sin duda la excepción. Si la University of Minnesota entrara en el juego, la balanza cambiaría”.

En el Arrupe College, el estudiante de segundo año Jonathan Larbi dividía su tiempo entre la escuela y un trabajo en la oficina de admisiones del campus mientras se preparaba para continuar su educación en Loyola el próximo año.

Larbi, que espera ir a la escuela de medicina y convertirse en pediatra, creció en Chicago y Ghana y había planeado ir a Loyola luego de la secundaria, “pero no fue la decisión financiera más inteligente”.

Empezar en Arrupe ha funcionado bien, dice, ya que se siente como un estudiante de Loyola pero no tiene que pagar la matrícula de más de $50,000 de la universidad.

“Es como tener lo mejor de ambos mundos”, dice. “Sus recursos son nuestros recursos”.

Traducido por Gisela Orozco para La Voz Chicago

Esta historia sobre universidades de cuatro años que ofrecen títulos asociados fue producida por The Hechinger Report.

The post En Loyola y más alla, existe la posibilidad de obtener un título asociado de dos años appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

By Liz Willen

For many high school seniors and others hoping to attend college next year, the last few months have become a stress-filled struggle to complete the trouble-plagued, much-maligned FAFSA, or Free Application for Federal Student Aid.

The rollout of this updated and supposedly simplified form was so delayed, error-ridden and confusing that it has derailed or severely complicated college decisions for millions of students throughout the U.S., especially those from low-income, first-generation and undocumented families.

The bureaucratic mess is also holding up decisions by private scholarship programs and adding to public skepticism about the value of higher education — threatening progress in efforts to get more Americans to and through college.

To see the impact in person, The Hechinger Report sent reporters to schools in four cities — San Francisco, Chicago, Baltimore and Greenville, South Carolina — to hear students’ stories. Because we found them through schools, most of those we interviewed had counselors helping them; for the millions of students who don’t, it’s an even more daunting task.

“It was stressing me every day,” said one San Francisco senior who was accepted to 16 colleges but could not attend without substantial financial aid. Some became so frustrated they gave up, at least for now. Others said they will turn to trade schools or the military.

Students whose parents are undocumented had special worries, including concern that naming their parents would bring immigration penalties (although the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act forbids FAFSA officials from sharing family information).

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To give students more time to weigh options, more than 200 colleges and universities pushed back their traditional May 1 commitment deadlines, some until June 1, according to the American Council on Education, which keeps an updated list.

Despite heroic efforts by counselors and a slew of public FAFSA-signing events, just 40.2 percent of high school seniors had completed the FAFSA as of May 10, in contrast to 49.6 of last year’s seniors at the same time, according to the National College Attainment Network. The numbers do not bode well for college enrollment, nor for the many high school graduates who will not get the benefits of higher education. 

No one in Damiana Beltran’s family went to college, so she didn’t picture it in her future. But at the end of her junior year, “everybody” at Mission High School in San Francisco started talking about applying, so she did. San José State University admitted her, as did a few other schools. Excited, Beltran entertained visions of becoming a psychologist and showing her younger brother that “you don’t have to be from the wealthiest family” to go to college.

But the online FAFSA form wouldn’t let Beltran, who is a U.S. citizen, submit her application because her mother, who isn’t, doesn’t have a Social Security number. They tried using her individual taxpayer identification number but got an error message. Leaving the field blank didn’t work either. Beltran’s mother skipped work to get help at the school’s Future Center, but still, no dice. Eventually, they mailed in a paper version.

When May 1 passed with no offer of aid — or even an indication that her FAFSA had been received — Beltran decided to give up on attending the schools that would require her to pay for housing and a meal plan. If she went to nearby San Francisco State University, living at home would mean not asking her mother to take on debt. “I want to go to San José, but I don’t want to do that to her,” a teary Beltran said in April. “I think about it a lot during classes. During the whole school day, it’s in the back of my head.” She’s had trouble sleeping.

Her classmate Josue Hernandez also lost sleep over the FAFSA. It took him about a month and two submission attempts to access the part of the online form that would allow him to upload his undocumented parents’ IDs to verify their identity, he said. Once he did, it took about three more weeks to process. The senior, who had received local news coverage for being accepted into 16 out of 20 schools, said he thought to himself, “It was 12 years of hard work, and I finally got in, but I might not even be able to go.”

Hernandez’s other hope was scholarships. He cut back his hours at an after-school job to work on the applications and had to stay up late into the night to do the homework he’d pushed aside. Most of his free periods, including lunches, went to figuring out how to pay for college. “It was stressing me every day,” Hernandez said.

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Finally, the University of California, Berkeley, told him that his FAFSA had gone through, and financial aid would pay for almost everything; the SEED Scholars Honors Program would likely take care of the rest. “It’s finally over,” he said.

But it was not over for Jocelyn, another Mission High senior, who asked to be referred to by first name only, to protect her family’s privacy. She said that her father had been working two jobs waiting tables and her mother had been saving what she could from the household budget for quite some time; they had amassed $1,000.  Jocelyn had saved $200 from working at an organic bagel shop. Room and board at San José State, her top choice too, runs $20,971 a year.

But that gap wasn’t her sole source of anxiety. By sending her undocumented parents’ names to the government in the FAFSA form, she feared she’d put them at risk, even though federal regulations forbid FAFSA officials from sharing private data with others.

Jocelyn, who wants to be a neonatal intensive care nurse, didn’t share the FAFSA difficulties with her dad, who only went to middle school in Mexico, or her mom, who never got to go to school. “They’re just gonna say, ‘Stay in San Francisco, problem solved,’ ” she said. But she already takes a class at City College of San Francisco, a community college, and finds the idea of enrolling there, with so many “grown adults,” discouraging. A friend of the family who did that and then transferred to a four-year school told Jocelyn she felt lonely having missed out on the first-year bonding. Now Jocelyn thinks she’ll go to San Francisco State, live at home for a year, and then move into an apartment. But she’d still need financial aid to make that work. “It’s like, back to square one,” Jocelyn sighed — and then said she might forgo college and get a full-time job instead.

That’s not too far from Alessandro Mejia’s plan. As a senior in the challenging Game Design Academy at Balboa High School, he has the coding skills to major in computer science at one of the four-year colleges he got into. “College is my first choice,” Mejia said in late April, but he was eyeing trade school. Financing college “would just be much harder on our family,” he said, and “being an electrician or a car mechanic doesn’t seem too bad.” Of abandoning a tech career, he said, “I’m a little frustrated, but I feel like I developed a good work ethic in school so … it’s not completely a waste.”

School counselor Katherine Valle listened to Mejia with carefully concealed horror. “It’s shocking to hear,” she said. The Game Design Academy “is our hardest pathway, and we don’t have a lot of Latino males in it. To know he did that and is going to end up being a mechanic is just …” She couldn’t find words.

Valle said that for her students whose parents have white-collar jobs, the new FAFSA was everything promised: “easier process, less questions.” But it took kids in Mejia’s family income bracket many attempts to complete. He has the same potential as his wealthier peers, but those kids are “10 steps ahead,” she said. “It’s not fair.”

Mejia finally submitted his FAFSA on April 29. He said if he didn’t hear back by the new decision deadline for California State University institutions, May 15, he wouldn’t enroll.

With less than a week to spare, Mejia learned his FAFSA had been processed. He committed to San Francisco State. Jocelyn did, too, though she would have preferred San José State. For Beltran, though, the May 15 deadline came and went; she was “still waiting for my FAFSA to come in,” she said, and hadn’t submitted an intent to register.

Samaya Acker stayed on top of her college plans all year. She applied for early action admission at 17 colleges, submitted her FAFSA application for financial aid two days after the window opened and came up with a backup plan to join the military, just in case.

Most of those preparations went well.

Acker, an 18-year-old senior at Air Force Academy High School on Chicago’s South Side who has “Power” tattooed in script on her arm, was accepted by 16 colleges (her top choice, the University of Chicago, was the only one to turn her down) and planned to spend a few months in the Air National Guard to help pay for college. But as scholarship and deposit deadlines approached, her FAFSA application was still classified as “pending” three months after she submitted it.

“It really put me on edge,” said Acker, whose high school years were interrupted first by Covid and then by the birth of her son halfway through her sophomore year, but who still is graduating with a weighted grade-point average over 4.0.

With Acker’s college decision deadlines looming, her counselor, Ashley Spencer, pulled her from class one day in mid-April to look over her options, whatever FAFSA results she got. “We are getting close to the end with you, slowly but surely,” Spencer said.

About a week later, Acker was awarded a Gates Scholarship, which pays the full cost of college attendance for high-achieving students from underrepresented groups. Acker, who is Black, accepted her offer of admission from Chicago’s Loyola University, where tuition alone is more than $52,000 per year. She plans to become an anesthesiologist. (The Gates Foundation is among the many funders of The Hechinger Report.)

A few miles away, a group of students at Hubbard High School in southwest Chicago were not as lucky.

The FAFSA delays have created unique challenges for students with undocumented immigrant parents — including students at Hubbard. At a late-April meeting with Dulcinea Basile, the school’s college and career coach, four seniors whose parents are undocumented said they had spent months waiting for the federal government to fix a glitch that prevented parents without Social Security numbers from submitting financial information. “How many times have we logged in and it says ‘FAFSA not available’?” Basile asked rhetorically.

The glitch was finally fixed, but all four were still waiting, in early May, to find out how much financial aid they might receive.

“There’s really not much I can do,” said Javier Magana, 18, who was still trying to figure out whether he could afford any of the colleges that had accepted him. “It’s definitely been frustrating because I’ve been trying my best.”

Ixchel Ortiz, 17, plans to go to a Chicago community college, but said if she didn’t receive financial aid, even that would have to wait.

Isaac Raygoza and Octavio Rodriguez, both 18, said they had a few four-year college options but likely wouldn’t be able to pursue any of them without a FAFSA answer.

Rodriguez said he had been repeatedly frustrated by trying to complete the FAFSA. “I would go home and wait 20 to 30 minutes on hold, and we didn’t get anywhere,” he said. In late April he was notified that he had misspelled his own name on the application; in mid-May, he was still waiting to hear whether he needed to re-apply from scratch.

“I’m slightly stressed,” he said in mid-May.

Raygoza said he had submitted his application on time but had failed to notice an error message that prevented it from being processed. He resubmitted it in late April.

“I was just shocked it was never processed,” he said. “I had to do it all again.”

All four said they would likely take a year off to work if they didn’t get aid.

At the Academy for College and Career Exploration in Baltimore, juniors and seniors have weekly class, run by the nonprofit organization iMentor, to help them understand and pursue postsecondary options, including colleges and various types of financial aid. Counselor LaToia Lyle worries about the long delays with FAFSA, because most of her students are low-income and will be first-generation college students, so they don’t always have someone to help them at home, and the delays could mean decisions had to be made quickly.

She helps them compare tuition costs and reminds them that housing deposits are not refundable and book fees add up. “Even gaps as small as $500 can make a difference,” she said.

For Zion Wilson and Camryn Carter, both seniors, the delays and the need to constantly try to log into FAFSA accounts that froze were frustrating, but both students said they were relieved when glitches with the forms meant their college commitment deadlines got pushed back.

“The last thing I wanted to do was make a fast-paced decision,” said Wilson, an ebullient 17-year-old with a wide smile. “I kept bouncing between different things. I felt the FAFSA delay gave me more of a chance to decide what I actually wanted to do.”

She had applied for computer science programs at several colleges but was nervous about taking out loans. Even though Baltimore City Community College would be tuition-free for her, she worried she wouldn’t have enough money to spend if she wasn’t working. But her family wanted her to go to college, especially because her elder sister had enrolled but dropped out after the first year.

Wilson was admitted to her top three choices — BCCC, University of Maryland Eastern Shore and Coppin State University — but even with scholarships, she decided not to go. Instead, Wilson plans to go straight into the workforce through a program called Grads2Careers, where she will get training in information technology.

“It kind of sounded like I can just do the exact same thing that I would be doing if I went to college, but I can just start now versus waiting two years to start,” Wilson said. After a two-week training period, she will be paid between $15 and $17 an hour, she said.

In the end, she filled out her portion of the FAFSA, but told her parents not to do theirs. “Why make my parents do this long thing and put in their tax information, if I’m not going anywhere that requires it?”

Wilson is relieved not to have to think about college anymore. “I think I made the right choice, and having some money in my pocket will also be a good push for me to continue to advance up.”

Her classmate Carter, 18, is a serious student who is also on the baseball, wrestling and track teams. He has never wavered from his childhood decision to study biology. It began, he said, when he was about four years old, and his grandmother tuned to the National Geographic channel on TV.

“I was like, ‘stop, stop, stop,’ ” he said, recalling the video of a lion attacking a zebra. Carter was hooked. He started watching the channel every day. “I fell in love with ants, ecosystems, that just sparked my interest in biology.”

Carter applied to 14 colleges. He said filling out all the forms was challenging because the delayed release of the FAFSA meant he was doing it at the same time as he was taking a demanding course load, including AP Literature and AP Calculus. “It was really time-consuming and really work-heavy with a lot of essays, a lot of homework,” he said. “It’s pretty tough to do that at the same time while I’m doing college supplemental essays and my personal statement.”

But the FAFSA delay also meant that his mother had more time to finish the form, something she had been putting off for months. Because he is the oldest of four children, his mom hadn’t had to complete a form like this that asks for a lot of personal information, including tax data, he said.

“My mom was just brushing over it,” he said. “But I was like, ‘No, you really have to do this because this is for my future. Like, you don’t do this, I’ll have so much debt.’ So I was just telling her to please do this and please get on it.”

She did, but Carter said it likely wouldn’t have happened without the delay.

Carter got into his dream school, the University of Maryland, College Park, with a full scholarship, including tuition, meals and accommodation. His second choice, McDaniel College, also offered him a generous scholarship, but he says he still would have ended up paying $6,000 a year, which he didn’t want to do. “Definitely money was a big factor,” he said. He said he’s excited about starting a new chapter in September: “I feel like UMD is the perfect fit for me.”

Chylicia and Chy’Kyla Henderson worked hard to graduate early from Eastside High School in Greenville, South Carolina. The sisters filled their schedules and took virtual classes as well, so that Chylicia, now 18, could be done with school a semester early and Chy’Kyla, 17, could graduate after her junior year. Both want to attend college but need financial aid to afford it.

Their mom, Nichole Henderson, said the stress of trying to fill out both their FAFSA forms at once led her to take her daughters and two other graduating seniors she knew to a FAFSA workshop at a local college in April. Even with help from someone there, she found the forms confusing — Chylicia’s asked for Nichole’s tax information, she said, but Chy’Kyla’s did not.

“I don’t think there was a lot of help surrounding the whole FAFSA process,” Nichole said. “As a parent, it’s stressful. Especially when you have two.”

Chylicia is thinking about pursuing a degree in nursing or social work, and leaning toward starting at Greenville Technical College, a community college. But the school emailed her saying they needed more information on her financial aid application; it wasn’t clear if the issue stemmed from the FAFSA form or something else, she said.

Then, on May 8, she got an email from South Carolina Tuition Grants, a program that provides up to $4,800 in need-based scholarships, saying she was tentatively approved for the full amount. She still hasn’t resolved the paperwork issue at Greenville Technical College, though, and so isn’t sure yet whether she’ll be able to enroll there.

And if Chylicia’s application is missing information, the family worries that Chy’Kyla’s will have the same issue. Like her sister, she’s considering starting out at a community college, but Chy’Kyla also applied to a handful of schools in South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia. By May 8, she said, she hadn’t received word about financial aid from any schools or any need-based scholarship programs.

“We’re just playing the waiting game,” their mother said.

Heather Williams, a school counselor at Riverside High School in Greenville, said students told her they struggled simply to complete and correct errors in their forms.

“Some of the errors they’ve had were just missing a signature,” Williams said. “Trying to circumvent that and fix it was hard for students because you can make corrections, but it was hard to get back in and [do it]. It was a lot of, ‘If I click this, then what?’ And being aware there’s an error, but not sure how to fix it.”

The FAFSA process has always been complicated, but the truncated timeline this year made it significantly more stressful, said Nicole Snow, a school counselor at J.L. Mann High School, also in Greenville County. Normally, her students and their families start filling out their FAFSA forms in the fall, but this year, they couldn’t access the form until January.

“By January and February, we’ve almost kind of lost those seniors that have already done their [college] applications,” she said. “Like, ‘Oh, let’s pull you back three months later and open up FAFSA.’”

The delay created some challenging decisions for students like Braden Freeman. Freeman, who is the student body president at J.L. Mann, submitted his financial aid application in January, right after it opened up. In March, he was told he got a full scholarship to attend Southern Methodist University in Texas, but by May 1, he still hadn’t heard back from his other top choices — the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Virginia — on how much need-based and merit-based aid he would get. Those colleges had pushed back their decision deadlines because of FAFSA delays.

Instead of waiting to hear back from UNC and UVA, Freeman decided to put a deposit down at Southern Methodist, whose deadline was May 1. The full scholarship was a big factor in his decision. “With the rising cost of tuition, I just can’t take on that much alone,” he said.

Both UNC and UVA eventually sent Freeman his financial aid packages a week before their deadline to enroll, which was May 15. Freeman said he still planned to attend Southern Methodist.

“I’m fortunate enough to not be incredibly dependent on need-based aid,” Freeman said. “For kids that are waiting on that and don’t know, I can imagine that would be way worse.”

This story about FAFSA applications 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 Four cities of FAFSA chaos: Students tell how they grappled with the mess, stress appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

CHICAGO — Jazmin Mejia went straight from high school to what she thought was the perfect fit at Loyola University, a 30-minute drive from the Chicago neighborhood where she grew up.

But Mejia was quickly overwhelmed on the North Side campus of nearly 17,000 students.

“The classes were too big,” said Mejia, 18. “I was struggling to ask for help.”

A year later, she says college has become much more manageable.

Mejia left Loyola’s main campus in favor of the university’s Arrupe College, a two-year program in downtown Chicago that offers associate degrees. Taking smaller classes with instructors who interact more with students has been a game-changer, she said.

“The professors try to communicate with you and try to understand your situation,” Mejia said over breakfast at one of the communal tables in the Arrupe cafeteria.

Two-year associate degrees have long been offered almost exclusively at community colleges, but the model pioneered at Loyola is picking up steam at private, nonprofit four-year universities around the country. Many of these are Jesuit schools like Loyola, which say that lower-cost two-year associate degree programs particularly help students who need the most support.

“It’s a reach-in culture,” said the Rev. Thomas Neitzke, Arrupe’s dean. “It’s that total wraparound, both in the classroom and outside the classroom.”

The expansion of the Arrupe model is largely being championed by Steve Katsouros, who was the founding dean of Arrupe nine years ago and is now president and CEO of the Come To Believe Network, a nonprofit focused solely on bringing two-year degrees to four-year schools. The network raises money to provide grants to universities to start associate degree programs.

In addition to Loyola, schools that have either recently opened or plan to open two-year colleges include the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, the University of Mount Saint Vincent in New York City, Butler University in Indiana and Boston College.

A handful of other schools, such as the University of the Pacific in California, are considering programs. And Homeboy Industries, a gang rehabilitation nonprofit, is exploring partnering with Mount Saint Mary’s University in Los Angeles to create an associate degree program.

Related: Community colleges tackle another challenge: Students recovering from past substance use

Even considering the concept can help a college learn more about the needs of its broader student body, Katsouros said. “We try to identify the factors that prevent students from being successful,” Katsouros said, noting that most of the programs also offer some combination of free meals, laptops and housing.

The concept also suggests a way to diversify and expand enrollment. Programs in the Come To Believe Network must commit to accepting lower-income students and keeping their loan debt to a minimum. At Arrupe, for instance, the advertised tuition is a little over $13,000 a year, but scholarships and work-study programs mean most students pay about $2,000, Neitzke said. The strategy, he explained, is partly to attract students who can’t afford private universities and might not want to attend cheaper public community colleges that don’t offer as much personal attention.

The hope is that most graduates of the two-year programs will go on to finish bachelor’s degrees at universities. Data is sparse so far, but even modest success toward that goal would be a huge improvement over the national numbers.

While 80 percent of community college students say they plan to earn bachelor’s degrees, only 16 percent manage to do so within six years, according to the Aspen Institute and the Community College Research Center, or CCRC, at Teachers College, Columbia University. The numbers are even worse for low-income (11 percent), Black (9 percent) and Hispanic (13 percent) students. (The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College.)

Only a relative handful of students attend these new two-year programs compared to millions at traditional community colleges, but the differences are stark. At Loyola’s Arrupe College, for instance, 50 percent of students graduate, and 70 percent of those graduates continue to bachelor’s degree programs, according to figures provided by the college.

More universities should be offering associate degrees, said Davis Jenkins, a senior research scholar at the CCRC.

“These are institutions that could use their prestige and dedication to high-quality teaching to really onboard students” who would otherwise not attend college, Jenkins said. “This is building a bridge into the college, using the college’s strength.”

Related: A campaign to prod high school students into college tries a new tack: Making it simple

Most of the new programs guarantee graduates admission to the parent campus, although not all students decide to accept the opportunity.

At Butler University, which will open its two-year Founder’s College to 100 students next year, students who graduate from Founder’s with sufficient grades will automatically be eligible to finish their bachelor’s degrees at the university. Students will have no debt after the first two years, said Brooke Barnett, Butler’s provost, and those who go on to Butler will pay no more than $10,000 total for the full four years. Founder’s College is being funded entirely by foundations and donors, she said, and will fulfill the university’s longtime goal of offering low-cost degrees to underrepresented students.

“We want to give students the opportunity to flourish and shine and show the talents they can bring,” Barnett said. “They have not always been given those opportunities.”

Some universities, including Butler, are using the associate degree programs as an opportunity to introduce students to the main campus without overwhelming them with huge classes. Others, such as Loyola and Boston College, are keeping associate students separate to ease them into college life.

Boston College’s new Messina College will open to 100 students this summer on property it acquired from a college that closed, about a mile from the main campus. Messina College leaders hope the initial isolation will help avoid the culture shock of a large campus and keep students from dropping out.

“There’s a great advantage in having our students start off in that smaller setting,” said Erick Berrelleza, Messina’s founding dean.

While the concept of universities offering associate degrees is relatively new, some community colleges in 24 states have introduced bachelor’s degrees in a handful of disciplines in the past decade — an innovation universities haven’t always welcomed.

Before Idaho approved a plan in March for a community college to offer bachelor’s degrees, for instance, Boise State University argued against the proposal, essentially saying it would step on the university’s toes.

Related: After its college closes, a rural community fights to keep a path to education open

“Indeed, it could hurt effective and efficient postsecondary education in Idaho,” the university wrote to the state Board of Education, “cannibalizing limited resources available to postsecondary education and duplicating degree offerings in the same region.”

Community colleges have not yet voiced concerns about universities offering associate degrees, and the CCRC’s Jenkins said there’s little reason for community colleges to worry about these relatively small two-year programs. Still, he said, it will be important for universities to collaborate with community colleges.

“Where it’s been done well, there’s been negotiation,” he said. “I would hope this would encourage community colleges to partner with four-year institutions.”

Several four-year schools said they had not talked formally with community colleges before starting associate programs. That includes the University of Mount Saint Vincent, which will open its new two-year Seton College this summer on its campus in the Bronx.

A spokesman for Bronx Community College declined to answer questions about the Mount Saint Vincent program, while the borough’s other community college, Hostos, did not respond to interview requests.

In Minnesota, where University of St. Thomas opened its associate degree program in 2017, there has been no friction between the university and St. Paul College, the closest community college. St. Paul College leaders have been supportive of the initiative, said Austin Calhoun, a St. Paul spokesperson.

“That’s 200 more students in the Twin Cities per year getting access to higher education,” she said. Still, she added, “St. Thomas is definitely the outlier. If the University of Minnesota got in the game, that would be a different scale.”

Back at Arrupe College, second-year student Jonathan Larbi was splitting his time between school and a campus job in the admissions office while preparing to continue his education at Loyola next year. Larbi, who hopes to go to medical school and become a pediatrician, grew up in Chicago and Ghana and had planned to go to Loyola straight out of high school, “but it wasn’t the smartest financial decision.”

Starting at Arrupe has worked well, he said, since he feels like a Loyola student but doesn’t have to pay the university’s $50,000-plus tuition.

“It’s kind of the best of both worlds,” he said. “Their resources are our resources.”

This story about four-year universities offering two-year associate degrees was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

The post To support underserved students, four-year universities offer two-year associate degrees appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

TOHONO O’ODHAM NATION, Ariz. — By the numbers, Tohono O’odham Community College is booming.

Enrollment in the fall semester was just under 1,200, according to the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, nearly triple what it was in fall 2019.

But the desert campus on an isolated patch of the sprawling Tohono O’odham Native American Reservation was nearly empty on a weekday afternoon. Instructors sat alone in front of computers in classrooms and offices teaching their courses online, which is where nearly all the students are learning these days.

Among the few students physically present was Tim James, a 36-year-old from the Gila River reservation, about two hours from the campus. He’s a resident adviser in one of the school’s few dorms, but even he has taken almost all his courses online this school year. And that’s been tough for him to deal with.

“There’s not that personal touch,” said James, who doesn’t have a computer and takes classes on his phone. “I like that human interaction.”

The empty campus at Tohono O’odham reflects an ongoing dilemma facing not only tribal colleges, but colleges in general, where students are increasingly taking courses at a distance instead of studying together in person.

More than half of all undergraduates now take at least some of their courses online, according to the U.S. Department of Education, up from 43 percent in 2015.

This means that students are spending less time than ever on campus, socializing in residence halls, studying together in the library or working in groups. While some online courses are scheduled so that all students meet at the same time, others are designed to give them flexibility to learn at a convenient time.

The upside is the ability to attract students who work full time or care for children, but online courses also run the risk of increasing isolation at a time when technology and working from home are already creating a lot more of it than was previously the case.

Related: After its college closes, a rural community fights to keep a path to education open

“It is a delicate balance,” said Sharla Berry, associate director of the Center for Evaluation and Educational Effectiveness at California State University, Long Beach. “It involves understanding the unique needs of your population. Instructors really have to be intentional about creating connection points in these online courses.”

This challenge is already being felt acutely at the country’s roughly three dozen tribal colleges. They’re struggling with the conflict between trying to serve as many students as possible in some of the poorest parts of the United States and promoting in-person classes on campuses that often serve as cultural hubs for reservations and work to perpetuate Native American culture.

“A lot of our cultural practices require us to be together,” said Zoe Higheagle Strong, vice provost for Native American relations and programs at Washington State University and a member of the Nez Perce tribe in Idaho, who also teaches educational psychology. And while online courses have helped attract students who otherwise might not have attended college, Higheagle Strong said, a physical gathering place plays an important role for many Indigenous groups.

“It’s very difficult for us to practice our culture over technology.”

Congress defined tribal colleges and universities in the 1960s; these schools enrolled about 15,500 Indigenous students in the fall, according to the college consortium, and more than 2,000 non-Indigenous students. Most, but not all, are associated with specific Native American tribes.

While nearly all the nation’s colleges and universities have debated how online courses will fit into their futures, the stakes are higher for tribal institutions.

Most get money from the federal government for every student they enroll who is a member of a recognized tribe. The tribal college system rewards higher enrollment, which is why many tribal colleges are especially benefiting financially from the upsurge in online students. If they pull back on offering courses online, they risk losing students — many of whom live 50 miles or more from the closest campus — and the funding that comes with them.

Tribal colleges typically charge low tuition and some, including Tohono O’odham, cut tuition altogether during the pandemic.

At Tohono O’odham, college leaders say they’re now torn by how to proceed. On the one hand, they know students won’t drive hours to attend classes. But they also would prefer that more of them come to campus, not only to be together in person, but because the academic results of online students have been comparatively poor.

“The push is to bring students back,” said Laura Sujo-Montes, the academic dean. “Whether they will want to come back, that is the question.”

Perhaps conscious of its remote location — the college has no physical address, although the campus’s white water tank emblazoned with the college name at mile marker 125.5 north is visible for miles — Tohono O’odham leaders have been working to make the campus more attractive both for students and tribal members.

Related: A campaign to prod high school students into college tries a new tack: Making it simple

The school has built a 75-person-capacity outdoor amphitheater for tribal events off a path that skirts a patch of cholla cactus, and it plans to add a gym for athletic and cultural gatherings. Another new building under construction will house programs in the O’odham language. All students and employees are required to take tribal language and history courses, and each building is marked with only its native name. The main campus is called S-cuk Du’ag Maṣcamakuḍ.

“We’re doing things to improve this campus, to make people want to stay,” said President Paul Robertson in a conference room in the Ma:cidag Gewkdag Ki: building.

Many students, however — as has also been the case at nontribal colleges — appear to prefer taking courses online.

At Nebraska Indian Community College, with three campuses on or near the Omaha and Santee reservations, the pandemic more than doubled native enrollment, according to the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, while the number of nonnative students increased nearly twelve-fold. But the college’s board of directors has worried about the lack of in-person classes, said President Michael Oltrogge.

Adding more of those has been a tough sell, Oltrogge said.

“We tried coming back hot and heavy with in-person classes” in the fall of 2021, he said. “By the second week of classes, there was nobody on campus.”

Like Tohono O’odham, the college hopes to attract more people to the campus by building new facilities. But Oltrogge said funding shortfalls have made it difficult to add larger meeting facilities for college and cultural events.

“I need a place to have my graduations,” he said. “I need a place that’s reliable.”

At North Dakota’s Cankdeska Cikana Community College, on the Spirit Lake Reservation, President Cynthia Lindquist, a Spirit Lake Dakota tribal elder, has tried to reconcile her school’s enrollment boom with a campus that is much quieter since the pandemic.

While students are likely to remain largely online from now on, Lindquist hopes the college will find new life and energy as the tribe’s cultural hub. A new building opening in the fall will include a museum and a library with tribal genealogical materials, she said.

Related: MIT, Yale and other elite colleges are finally reaching out to rural students

“The college’s history is tied to the tribe’s history,” Lindquist said. “My tribe will finally have a place. Right now, we don’t have any place to go.”

A few hundred miles west, in Montana, Blackfeet Community College is also trying to balance the increased reliance on online courses with its role as a tribal gathering place. It opened a new elder center last fall that routinely attracts more than 100 community members to its elder luncheons, said Jim Rains, the college’s vice president for academics.

Meanwhile, San Carlos Apache College in Arizona has faced the unique challenge of coming of age during the pandemic era. It opened in 2017 with a few dozen students in a handful of unused buildings next to the tribal offices, but enrollment swelled to nearly 400 with the move to online courses, said Lisa Eutsey, the provost.

While college leaders have a site in mind for a new campus and hope to deepen the school’s cultural importance to the community, Eutsey said they’re also “still trying to figure out exactly what we’re going to be.” The initial thinking was that San Carlos Apache would provide mostly in-person instruction, she said, but the strategy has changed.

“Covid has really allowed us to expand our operations to people who weren’t part of our initial plans,” Eutsey said of the online students who live far from campus. Now that the college has changed, she added, “it’s almost like there’s no turning back.”

Leaders at several tribal colleges said they have been pressured by their accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission, to bring more students back to campus because few of the schools’ online programs have been approved. Some said that the commission’s demand is unrealistic and unfair to rural colleges and students who likely will simply stop attending college without online options.

The Higher Learning Commission declined to answer questions about its discussions with the colleges.

Other leaders said a return to in-person learning makes sense, partly because of the cultural importance of being around others from their community.

“I think everybody here wants to get back to that type of service delivery,” said Monte Randall, president of the College of the Muscogee Nation in Oklahoma. “I’m so tired of Zoom meetings. We want to get back in person and see each other.”

Related: When a Hawaii college sets up shop in Las Vegas: Universities chase students wherever they are

Some tribal colleges worry that they are about to lose droves of students whether they’re online or not. During the pandemic, they offered some combination of free tuition, phones, computers, internet and housing, but say they can’t afford to continue that strategy and intend to begin charging tuition again later this year; they expect a big enrollment drop when they do so.

Those fears may be well-founded. On the campus of Tohono O’odham — which has committed to continuing to let students attend without charge — every student asked said he or she had only started attending because tuition was free.

“We want to get back in person and see each other.”

Monte Randall, president, College of the Muscogee Nation

For some, however, the cultural aspects are among the biggest draws for a return to in-person classes.

Sky Johnson grew up in the tiny O’odham village of Comobabi, in the foothills a few miles from Tohono O’odham. When the college announced in 2020 that tuition would be free, she jumped at the opportunity to start working toward her goal of studying art or animation in Japan.

Johnson said she wants to create manga or anime about her culture, as well as to become an herbalist and help her village. A self-described introvert, Johnson said she’s nevertheless in favor of in-person courses because she learns better in a classroom.

“I like to be out,” she said, “but I don’t like to talk to people.”

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

The post A vexing drawback to tribal online college: cultural and social isolation appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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.

The post Often overwhelmed on big campuses, rural college students push for support appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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