Cuando Angel Amankwaah viajó desde Denver a la Universidad Central de Carolina del Norte este verano para recibir orientación para nuevos estudiantes, supo que había tomado la decisión correcta.

Se divirtió aprendiendo los cantos que corean los aficionados en los partidos de fútbol. Pero también vio que “hay estudiantes que se parecen a mí y profesores que se parecen a mí” en la universidad históricamente negra, dijo Amankwaah, de 18 años, quien es negra. “Sabía que estaba en un espacio seguro”.

De repente, esto se ha convertido en una consideración importante para los estudiantes de todos los orígenes y creencias que van a la universidad.

Durante mucho tiempo, los estudiantes han elegido universidades en función de su reputación académica y vida social. Pero con los campus en la mira de las guerras culturales, ahora muchos estudiantes también están haciendo un balance de los ataques a la diversidad, el contenido de los cursos y los discursos, así como de los oradores en ambos extremos del espectro político. Están monitoreando los crímenes de odio, la legislación anti-LGBTQ, las leyes estatales de aborto y si estudiantes como ellos (negros, de zonas rurales, veteranos militares, LGBTQ o de otros orígenes) están representados y apoyados en el campus.

“No hay duda de que lo que está sucediendo a nivel estatal está afectando directamente a estos estudiantes”, dijo Alyse Levine, fundadora y directora ejecutiva de Premium Prep, una firma consultora de admisiones a universidades privadas en Chapel Hill, Carolina del Norte. Cuando ven las universidades de algunos estados ahora, dice, “hay estudiantes que se preguntan: ‘¿Realmente me quieren ahí?’”.

Para algunos estudiantes en ambos lados de la división política, la respuesta es no. En el caótico nuevo mundo de las universidades e institutos universitarios estadounidenses, muchos dicen que no se sienten bienvenidos en ciertas escuelas, mientras que otros están dispuestos a cancelar oradores y denunciar a profesores con cuyas opiniones no están de acuerdo.

Es demasiado pronto para saber en qué medida esta tendencia afectará dónde y si los futuros estudiantes terminarán yendo a la universidad, ya que los datos de inscripción disponibles públicamente se retrasan en tiempo real. Pero hay indicios de que está teniendo un impacto significativo.

Uno de cada cuatro futuros estudiantes ya ha descartado considerar una facultad o universidad debido al clima político en su estado, según una encuesta realizada por la consultora de educación superior Art & Science Group.

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Entre los estudiantes que se describen a sí mismos como liberales, la razón más común para descartar institutos universitarios y universidades, según esa encuesta, es porque es en un estado en particular “demasiado republicano” o tiene lo que consideran regulaciones laxas sobre armas, legislación anti-LGBTQ, leyes restrictivas sobre el aborto y falta de preocupación por el racismo. Los estudiantes que se describen a sí mismos como conservadores rechazan estados que creen que son “demasiado demócratas” y que tienen leyes liberales sobre el aborto y los derechos homosexuales.

Con tanta atención centrada en estos temas, The Hechinger Report ha creado una Campus Welcome Guide (Guía de Bienvenida al Campus)—la primera herramienta de su tipo— que muestra las leyes estatales y las políticas institucionales que afectan a los estudiantes universitarios. Desde prohibiciones de iniciativas de diversidad, equidad e inclusión y “teoría crítica de la raza”, hasta si se aceptan los carnets de estudiantes como prueba de residencia a efectos de votación.

También enumera —para cada institución de cuatro años en el país— aspectos como la diversidad racial y de género entre estudiantes y profesores, el número de estudiantes veteranos matriculados, la incidencia de crímenes de odio motivados por la raza en el campus, clasificaciones de la libertad de expresión y si la universidad o instituto universitario atiende a muchos estudiantes de zonas rurales.

El sesenta por ciento de los futuros estudiantes de todos los orígenes afrima que las nuevas restricciones estatales al aborto es relevante en al menos en cierta medida en el lugar donde eligen ir a la universidad, según encontró una encuesta separada realizada por Gallup y Lumina Foundation. De ellos, ocho de cada 10 dicen que preferirían ir a un estado con mayor acceso a servicios de salud reproductiva. (Lumina se encuentra entre quienes financian a The Hechinger Report, que produjo esta historia).

“Tenemos muchas mujeres jóvenes que no consideran ciertos estados”, dijo Levine. Una de sus propias clientas desistió de ir a una universidad en St. Louis después de que Missouri prohibiera casi todos los abortos tras la decisión Dobbs de la Corte Suprema, dijo.

Las instituciones de Alabama, Florida, Luisiana y Texas son las que tienen más probabilidades de ser eliminadas de las listas de estudiantes liberales, según la encuesta de Art & Science Group. En general, es más probable que se mantengan alejados del sur y el medio oeste, mientras que los estudiantes conservadores eviten California y Nueva York.

Uno de cada ocho estudiantes de secundaria en Florida dice que no iría a una universidad pública en su propio estado debido a sus políticas educativas, según encontró una encuesta separada realizada por el sitio web de información y clasificación de universidades www.Intelligent.com.

Con 494 leyes anti-LGBTQ propuestas o adoptadas este año —según American Civil Liberties Union— los futuros estudiantes que son LGBTQ+ y que han experimentado un acoso significativo a causa de ello tienen casi el doble de probabilidades de decir que no planean ir a la universidad en absoluto que los estudiantes que experimentaron niveles más bajos de acoso, según una encuesta realizada por GLSEN, anteriormente Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.

“Estás atacando a niños que ya son vulnerables”, dijo Javier Gómez, un estudiante LGBTQ en su primer año en Miami Dade College. “Y no se trata sólo de estudiantes queer. Muchos jóvenes están hartos”.

Aún no es evidente si las nuevas leyes están afectando el lugar donde los jóvenes LGBTQ eligen ir a la universidad, dijo Casey Pick, director de leyes y políticas de The Trevor Project, que apoya a los jóvenes LGBTQ en crisis. Existe evidencia que los adultos LGBTQ si se están alejando de los estados que aprueban leyes anti-LGBTQ, dijo Pick. Y “si los empleados adultos toman esto en cuenta cuando deciden dónde quieren vivir, puedes apostar que los estudiantes universitarios están tomando las mismas decisiones”.

Mientras tanto, en una era de rechazo a las políticas de diversidad, equidad e inclusión en muchos estados —y contra la acción afirmativa en todo el país— Amankwaah es una de un número creciente de estudiantes negros que eligen lo que consideran la seguridad relativa de una HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities). La inscripción en las HBCU aumentó alrededor del 3 por ciento en 2021, el último año del que se dispone de cifras, mientras que el número de estudiantes en otras universidades y facultades disminuyó.

“El verdadero ataque aquí es el sentimiento de pertenencia”, dijo Jerry Young, quien dirige el programa Freedom to Learn en PEN America, que hace seguimiento a las leyes que restringen los esfuerzos de diversidad y la enseñanza sobre la raza en colegios y universidades. “Lo que realmente hace es izar una bandera para decirle a los estudiantes más marginados: ‘No los queremos aquí'”.

Más del 40 por ciento de los administradores de universidades y facultades dicen que el fallo de la Corte Suprema que restringe el uso de la acción afirmativa en las admisiones afectará la diversidad en sus campus, según una encuesta de Princeton Review cuando comenzaba el año escolar.

Los estudiantes universitarios de todas las razas y tendencias políticas informan que se sienten incómodos en los campus que se han convertido en campos de batalla de temas culturales y políticos. Los de izquierda están furiosos por las nuevas leyes que bloquean programas de diversidad, equidad e inclusión y la enseñanza de ciertas perspectivas sobre la raza. Mientras los de derecha lamentan que los oradores conservadores son abucheados o cancelados, los comentarios impopulares criticados en clase y lo que ven como una adopción de valores diferentes a los que aprendieron en casa.

Un padre de Michigan dijo que apoyaba la decisión de su hijo de saltarse la universidad. Según él, otros padres también están disuadiendo a sus hijos de ir a la universidad, citando “el consumo excesivo de alcohol, la cultura de las relaciones, las enseñanzas seculares, profesores de izquierdista radicales que mezclan antiamericanismo, anticapitalismo, anti libertad de expresión y un énfasis en la diversidad, equidad e inclusión” que, según él, es contrario a un enfoque en el mérito. El padre pidió que no se usara su nombre para que sus comentarios no afectaran a su hija, quien asiste a una universidad pública.

Más de uno de cada 10 estudiantes en universidades de cuatro años ahora dicen que sienten que no pertenecen a su campus, y otros dos de cada 10 no están ni de acuerdo ni muy de acuerdo con que pertenecen, según encontró otra encuesta de Lumina y Gallup. También descubrió que quienes responden de esta manera tienen más probabilidades de experimentar estrés con frecuencia y de abandonar los estudios. Uno de cada cuatro estudiantes hispanos informa que frecuente u ocasionalmente se siente inseguro o sufre falta de respeto, discriminación o acoso.

Los veteranos militares que utilizan los beneficios de la ley G.I. para retomar los estudios dicen que una de sus barreras más importantes es la sensación de que no serán bienvenidos, según una encuesta realizada por el Instituto D’Aniello para Veteranos y Familias Militares de la Universidad de Syracuse. Casi dos tercios dice que los profesores y administradores no entienden los desafíos que enfrentan, y el 70 por ciento dice lo mismo sobre sus compañeros de clase no veteranos.

Las universidades deben ser “espacios seguros y de afirmación”, dijo Pick, del Proyecto Trevor, no lugares de aislamiento y alienación.

Sin embargo, un número significativo de estudiantes dice que no se siente cómodo compartiendo sus puntos de vista en clase, según otra encuesta realizada por College Pulse para el Sheila and Robert Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth, de tendencia conservadora, en la Universidad Estatal de Dakota del Norte. De ellos, el 72 por ciento dice que teme que sus opiniones sean consideradas inaceptables por sus compañeros de clase y el 45 por ciento por sus profesores. Los estudiantes conservadores tienen menos probabilidades que sus compañeros liberales, de creer que todos los puntos de vista son bienvenidos y están menos dispuestos a compartir los suyos.

“¿Es realmente un entorno intelectualmente diverso?” se pregunta Sean Stevens, director de encuestas y análisis de la Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), que ha lanzado una clasificación de la libertad de expresión en los campus basada en las percepciones de los estudiantes sobre la comodidad al expresar ideas, la tolerancia hacia los oradores y otras medidas.

“Anecdóticamente y por experiencia personal, ciertamente hay un grupo de estudiantes

que están considerando estos factores en términos de dónde ir a la universidad”, dijo Stevens.

El 81 por ciento de los estudiantes liberales y el 53 por ciento de los conservadores dicen que apoyan las denuncias a profesores que hacen comentarios que consideran ofensivos, según la misma encuesta. Esta utilizó comentarios en su muestra como: “No hay evidencia de prejuicios contra los negros en los tiroteos policiales”, “Exigir la vacunación contra el COVID es un asalto a la libertad individual” y “El sexo biológico es un hecho científico”.

Una profesora de la Universidad Texas A&M fue investigada cuando un estudiante la acusó de criticar al vicegobernador del estado durante una conferencia, aunque finalmente fue exonerada. Una profesora de antropología de la Universidad de Chicago que impartió un curso universitario llamado “El problema de la blancura” dijo que se vio inundada de mensajes de odio cuando un estudiante conservador publicó su foto y su dirección de correo electrónico en las redes sociales.

Más de la mitad de los estudiantes de primer año dicen que las universidades tienen derecho a prohibir a oradores radicales, según una encuesta anual realizada por un instituto de la UCLA. La encuesta de College Pulse dice que el sentimiento lo comparte el doble de proporción de estudiantes liberales que de conservadores.

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La aparición de un jurista conservador —quien habló en el Washington College de Maryland el mes pasado— fue interrumpida por estudiantes debido a sus posiciones sobre cuestiones LGBTQ y el aborto. El tema: la libertad de expresión en el campus.

En marzo, un grupo de estudiantes en el campus de Stanford interrumpió un discurso de un juez federal cuyo historial judicial, según dijeron, era anti-LGBTQ. Cuando pidió la intervención de un administrador, un decano asociado de diversidad, equidad e inclusión lo confrontó y le preguntó: “¿Vale la pena el dolor que esto causa y la división que esto causa?”. El decano asociado fue suspendido y luego renunció.

“Hoy es un hecho triste que la mayor amenaza a la libertad de expresión proviene del interior de la academia”, afirmó el American Council of Trustees and Alumni, de tendencia derechista, que está presionando a las universidades para que firmen su Iniciativa de Libertad Universitaria que alienta a enseñar a los estudiantes sobre libertad de expresión durante la orientación para estudiantes de primer año y disciplinar a las personas que interrumpan a los oradores o eventos, entre otras medidas.

“Tengo que imaginar que en las universidades que tienen un mal historial en materia de libertad de expresión o libertad académica, esto afectará su reputación”, dijo Steven Maguire, becario de libertad en el campus de la organización. “Escucho a personas decir cosas como: ‘Me preocupa a qué tipo de instituto universitario o universidad puedo enviar a mis hijos y si serán libres de ser ellos mismos y de expresarse'”.

Algunas universidades ahora están reclutando activamente estudiantes basándose en este tipo de inquietudes. Colorado College creó en septiembre un programa para facilitar el proceso a los estudiantes que desean transferirse de instituciones en estados que han prohibido las iniciativas de diversidad, equidad e inclusión. Hampshire College en Massachusetts ha ofrecido admisión a cualquier estudiante de New College en Florida, sujeto a lo que los críticos han descrito como una toma de posesión conservadora. Hasta ahora, treinta y cinco han aceptado la invitación.

Aunque muchos críticos conservadores de los institutos universitarios y universidades dicen que los profesores están adoctrinando a los estudiantes con opiniones liberales, los estudiantes entrantes de primer año tienden a tener opiniones de izquierda antes de poner un pie en el aula, según esa encuesta de UCLA.

Menos de uno de cada cinco se considera conservador. Tres cuartas partes dicen que el aborto debería ser legal y favorecer leyes de control de armas más estrictas, el 68 por ciento dice que las personas ricas deberían pagar más impuestos de los que pagan ahora y el 86 por ciento que el cambio climático debería ser una prioridad federal y que debería haber un camino claro hacia la ciudadanía para todos los inmigrantes indocumentados.

Los futuros estudiantes dicen que están observando cómo se aprueban nuevas leyes, surgen controversias en los campus y analizan activamente no sólo la calidad de la comida y las especialidades disponibles en las universidades a las que podrían asistir, sino también la política estatal.

“Una vez que decidí que iba a Carolina del Norte Central, busqué si Carolina del Norte era un estado rojo o un estado azul”, dijo Amankwaah. (Carolina del Norte tiene un demócrata como gobernador, pero los republicanos controlan ambas cámaras de la legislatura y tienen una supermayoría a prueba de veto en el Senado estatal).

Las leyes anti-LGBTQ de Florida llevaron a Javier Gómez a dejar su estado natal y mudarse a Nueva York para ir a la escuela de moda. Pero luego regresó y se transfirió a Miami Dade.

“La gente me pregunta: ‘¿Por qué diablos estás de vuelta en Florida?’”, dijo Gómez. “La razón por la que regresé fue porque tenía esa vocación innata de que tenías que quedarte y luchar por los niños queer y trans de aquí. A veces es abrumador. Puede ser muy agotador mentalmente. Pero quería quedarme y continuar la lucha y construir una comunidad contra el odio”.

The post Las guerras culturales en los campus comienzan a afectar el lugar donde los estudiantes eligen ir a la universidad appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

AURORA, Colo. — Until early this year, Alberto, 11, had never stepped into a classroom.

The closest school was many miles from his village in Venezuela, and Alberto’s father never allowed him or his mom, Yuliver, to stray far, according to mother and son. The school also charged far more than they could afford.

“I want to learn to become somebody in life,” Alberto said through an interpreter. “I’m going to be a lawyer or a doctor. I wanted to go school, but dad wouldn’t let me.”

Yuliver, who has a third-grade education, stepped in as Alberto’s teacher, sharing what she knew about numbers and letters. He loved those lessons, and wanted to know more. (The surnames of Alberto and Yuliver, like those of other migrants in this story, are omitted due to privacy or safety concerns.)

Last summer, Yuliver and her son left their home country, walking through deserts and jungles across two continents before they arrived in Denver, where Yuliver’s sister lives, six months later. Alberto enrolled in suburban Aurora Public Schools as a fourth grader, and has learned enough English that his teachers hide their smirks when he makes a particularly witty, and inappropriate, pun. In math, however, he’s grades behind and even in Spanish struggles to follow his teacher’s instruction.

Alberto is one of approximately 2,800 migrant and refugee children who’ve arrived in Aurora, located just east of Denver, this academic year. The Denver school district — the state’s largest, with a total enrollment of about 88,000 — similarly has enrolled at least 3,700 newcomer students since last summer. In May 2023, Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, started sending immigrant families by the busloads to the Colorado capital, adding it to a destination list of other Democrat-led cities including Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.

Aurora and Denver, like many school systems in Colorado, have long welcomed students new to the United States. In recent years, they have designated specific campuses to serve as resource hubs for migrant and refugee families, offering wraparound supports, integration services and dual-language programs. But the ongoing surge of immigrants — local educators hesitate to call it a crisis — have exposed clear signs of strain: Classrooms don’t have enough seats for students. Teachers are fatigued by large class sizes, discipline issues and new students showing up each day. And state and local leaders are increasingly resistant to helping shoulder the costs.

The city council in Aurora, for example, recently passed a resolution restricting migrants from receiving local public services, a move that opponents fear will place undocumented residents at risk if they experience a fire, medical emergency or violent crime. But when it comes to schools, requirements under the U.S. Constitution are clear: States are obligated to allow children living in the U.S. without legal documentation to access a basic education. That’s created a new dilemma for schools in communities like Aurora and Denver: The steady arrival of newcomers has all but reversed years of declining enrollment, staving off budget cuts and layoffs, but the costs associated with addressing the new arrivals’ basic needs are steep.

“It doesn’t matter what your opinion is. You have to serve these kids,” said Julie Sugarman, an associate director for K-12 education research at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. “There are civil rights that support these kids, but it does come with real, significant costs.”

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Although migration fell at the start of the pandemic in 2020, it rebounded quickly, with the number of migrants encountered along the U.S.-Mexico border by U.S. Border Patrol more than quadrupling in 2021.

In a typical year, Denver Public Schools enrolls about 500 students who’ve just moved to the country. The district so far this year has been receiving an average of 250 each week, according to Adrienne Endres, the district’s executive director of multilingual education.

“We have some less-than-ideal circumstances,” she said. “We have some very full classrooms. We hear most from teachers, ‘This is kind of overwhelming. There’s a lot more kids and they all need a lot more from me.’”

The majority of migrant families in Denver have chosen to place their kids in schools with existing bilingual programs, Endres added. But many students who have little, or any, formal experience with education find a better fit in one of the district’s newcomer centers. The city opened its first center back in 1999, in an unused gym at Denver South High School, as a magnet program for refugee children who speak neither Spanish nor English.

The district has since expanded the program to six campuses, where students learn literacy skills for one to two semesters before gradually moving into general classes.

On a recent morning at South High’s newcomer center, teacher Karen Vittetoe worked with 14 teenagers from nearly as many countries — including Burundi, El Salvador and Sudan — on how to tell time and describe a daily schedule in English.

“Marta goes to work at 9:50 in the morning. Is that 9:15 or 9:50? Do you hear the difference?” she asked as two teaching assistants walked in the classroom.

The adults together speak six different languages, allowing them to help during small group and one-on-one instruction during the 90-minute period. But that’s not nearly enough in Vittetoe’s larger second period, where 31 students speak 11 different languages.

“Can you imagine?” she said. “I don’t even have enough desks for them all.”

One of her students, 18-year-old Momena, spoke no English when she first enrolled at South High about eight months ago. Her family left Afghanistan, where the Taliban banned girls from attending school beyond the sixth grade. 

“I like everything about this school — except the food,” Momena said. “They have a nice curriculum and also kind teachers.”

Like her older brother, a nurse, Momena hopes to one day work in the medical field.

“This is very important for me,” she said of getting an education in the U.S. “I want to go to college, go into nursing. I try hard every day.”

Unlike Momena, most students in Vittetoe’s classes arrived after October 1 — the date on which Colorado determines its annual funding for K-12 schools based on enrollment. Only 10 other states rely on a single count day to allocate funding to districts. And in Denver, that’s required central administrators to draw from cash reserves and other department budgets to make up for the roughly $17.5 million that the district hasn’t received in per-pupil funding despite enrolling so many migrant and refugee children since last fall.

State lawmakers in February fast-tracked a plan to provide $24 million — to be split among districts across Colorado — to ease the strain on local school budgets. Gov. Jared Polis signed the legislation in early March, but the money has yet to trickle down to local districts.

“Without action in D.C., it’s up to each state if schools get any support at all,” said Jill Koyama, vice dean of educational leadership and innovation at Arizona State University’s teachers college.

Related: Convincing parents to send their children to a San Francisco public school

At Boston P-8 School in Aurora, the first few weeks made for a rough transition for Alberto.

He failed a vision screening test and received a voucher for an eye exam, but passed it. Teachers eventually determined he had such little schooling that he simply couldn’t identify letters to follow along in class. The school nurse also learned about trauma Alberto had experienced back home and on his journey to this country. School staff would have placed him with a therapist on campus, but no one on the mental health support team speaks Spanish. Many newcomers, including Alberto, have been referred to an online therapy service.

The school, however, had recently hired Danielle Pukansky, one of two English language development teachers who, in a tiny and cramped room, lead daily 45-minute classes for multilingual learners like Alberto.

“The trauma showed when he first got here,” Pukansky recalled, noting he had been aggressive toward other students. “How to re-regulate when these big emotions come up in such a little body, that is part of my background — and thank goodness.”

She said many of her students come to school worried about deportation, insecure housing and simply being misunderstood. “I try to help the kids not feel that fear,” Pukansky said.

Boston P-8 is one of six community schools in Aurora that provide intensive support services — such as medical care, food, clothing and adult education and language classes — to help stabilize families so kids can focus on academics in class. It’s similar to the community hub model that Denver Public Schools operates at six campuses. And as of 2022, the state has allowed low-performing schools to convert to the model as part of a school’s turnaround plan.

Late on a Wednesday afternoon, Yuliver sat in Boston P-8’s community room with her head in her hands. A worsening toothache had kept her awake for days, and made it hard to look for work or an immigration lawyer who might help her. After making a couple calls, a staff member booked her a tooth extraction, free of charge, at a nearby dental clinic.

“This is the only place I feel supported,” Yuliver said. “Clothes, Wi-Fi, food, shoes — they help with everything.”

Upstairs, in an afterschool science program, Alberto was learning about the education required to become a dentist.

Related: PROOF POINTS: Schools’ mission shifted during the pandemic with healthcare, shelter and adult ed

In Aurora and Denver, which both faced enrollment declines during the pandemic, the influx of migrant students this year presents an ironic silver lining: By contrast, enrollment statewide has continued to fall for two straight years — with the largest decreases in pre-kindergarten through first grade — prompting school closures, budget cuts and potential layoffs.

In the Denver area, the surge of students from other countries has more than made up the difference.

So far this year, Ellis Elementary in southeast Denver has absorbed 60 more students than initially expected. Several classes are packed with 35 students — the maximum allowed under the district’s contract with teachers. A week before even more students arrived in late February, Principal Jamie Roybal hired two novice educators. They had only a couple days to convert a teachers lounge and music room into their first classrooms.

Roybal said that on hard days many of her staff members contemplate leaving the profession. “We’re swimming in the deep end,” she said, looking into a classroom. “That’s a first-grade teacher with 35 newcomers. That’s a lot. When she goes home, she’s exhausted.”

By winter break, Hamilton Middle School in Denver had already absorbed 100 additional students over its projected enrollment. Priscilla Rahn, a Republican candidate for the Douglas County commission who teaches band and orchestra at Hamilton, said it’s been a joy to welcome so many new musicians who have never had an instrument of their own.

Still, Rahn wondered whether the community’s generosity had been exhausted.

“We’re cutting city services,” she said, referring to the mayor’s budget. “As a teacher, we can’t ask if you’re legal. It doesn’t matter. I teach all kids. But as a city, we’re pretty much at capacity. We cannot take any more families, because we don’t have the money or the space.”

At Centro de los Trabajadores, a local labor rights group, executive director Mayra Juárez-Denis has for months fielded calls from recent migrants trying to secure legal work or file complaints about employers who exploited them. Lately, her phone started ringing with rants from teachers overwhelmed with the current crisis.

The organization has tried to partner with Denver Public Schools, mostly to host a worker center or hiring fair for hourly jobs. Scott Pribble, a spokesman for the district, said it has looked for parents with legal documentation to work in cafeterias or get licensed to drive a bus.

“We want to help the district with labor integration for parents,” Juárez-Denis said. “They need not just immigrant teachers who serve Spanish speakers, but every staff position can use someone who is already part of the immigrant community.”

Related: School support staffers stuck earning poverty level wages

At some campuses, Denver principals have been able to identify and recruit migrant parents who used to teach in their home countries, but for out-of-country teachers, the checklist of requirements they must meet for eligibility to work in the state long. At Ellis Elementary, for example, a classroom aide from Venezuela finally got her teaching license approved in Colorado — three years after she first applied to teach in the U.S.

The latest federal bipartisan immigration reform proposal, which collapsed in Congress in February, would have expedited access to work authorization for asylum seekers, potentially allowing people like Yuliver to begin employment before the current six-month waiting period.

Without a job, Yuliver has struggled to afford an apartment — even one without hot water or central heating — for her and Alberto. She tried to sell household goods to shoppers on the street and would like to work in a beauty shop, doing nails and hair. Already, though, Yuliver has considered making the trek back to Venezuela if she can’t find employment.

“I wish for him to keep studying,” she said of Alberto. “He’s intelligent. He just wants to learn everything.”

Alberto, meanwhile, said he misses his friends and swimming at the beach back home. But here he’s learning to ride a bike — provided by the community school program — and has already made five new friends at Boston P-8.

During a sunny but chilly recess, Alberto drew a heart with wood chips on the ground in his school’s playground. He placed a stray feather in the middle, and said it was for those friends he’d made at his first-ever school.

*Correction: The photo credits in this story have been updated with the correct name for the photographer, Rebecca Slezak.

This story about Denver migrants 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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CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Starting at about 3 p.m. every day, buses line the driveway of this afterschool program for immigrant and refugee children in Charlotte. Kids, who range from kindergarten through eighth grade, hop off the bus and stream into the building. Inside, they get a meal and a chance to relax before starting activities aimed at improving their English. 

Enrollment in the program, ourBRIDGE for Kids, has bloomed over the last few years, from 35 students when it opened in 2014 to about 230 children in 2023, with more on waitlists. More than half the children speak Spanish, but it’s common to hear conversations in Dari, Pashto, Russian and other languages spoken in the hallways, too. 

To attend ourBRIDGE for Kids, students need to meet one simple requirement — they must attend classes during the regular school day before arriving. But in 2020, when a growing number of children stopped showing up for schooltime classes during the pandemic, ourBRIDGE decided to expand its focus.  

In addition to running its afterschool program, staffers and volunteers started working with families to address the issues that prevented kids from logging into class online or showing up to school buildings. The school district noticed the impact: While other students in Charlotte were becoming chronically absent, children in ourBRIDGE were staying connected to school.  

“We realized before trying to address why your child isn’t going to school, we needed to ask, ‘What’s worrying you right now?’ That question really opened up all the reasons why going to school was not the first priority for many families: housing insecurity, food insecurity, job loss,” said Sil Ganzó, the program’s founder and executive director, who emigrated from Argentina two decades ago. 

Before 2020, the school attendance rate for English language learners across the country was high. In many schools, these students were more likely to show up to class than other groups.  

But that changed when schools shut their doors and classes went virtual. 

The number of students who are chronically absent — generally defined as missing 18 or more days in a school year — has swelled since the pandemic, and the problem is even more alarming among English language learners.  

In California, only 10 percent of English learners were chronically absent in 2019. By 2022, the rate had more than tripled to 34 percent. Other states reported similar trends: Forty percent of English learners in Colorado were chronically absent last year, 10 percentage points higher than the rate for the overall student population.  

The problems are similar in Charlotte, a community with a fast-growing immigrant population and the largest share of English learners in North Carolina by a wide margin. Since before the pandemic, the rate of chronically absent English language learners more than doubled, from 16 percent in 2019 to 36 percent in 2022.  

Related: OPINION: Creating better post-pandemic education for English learners 

Those numbers improved slightly in 2023, but nearly 1 in 3 English learner students are still chronically absent from school, while the overall rate of absenteeism for students is down to 1 in 4. 

Overall, many students are chronically absent now for the same reasons they were before the pandemic, such as illness, disengagement from school or unreliable housing and transportation, said Joshua Childs, an assistant professor at the University of Texas, Austin, who studies chronic absenteeism. But the pandemic intensified these problems.  

“It increased existing inequities around students attending schools,” Childs said. “Our schooling system wasn’t adequately prepared for what a different model, or a disruption, in schooling would look like.” 

That lack of preparation was even more evident in instruction for English language learners. Nationwide, schools struggled to provide a remote curriculum in other languages, and translation services faltered under the weight of virtual learning. And teachers had trouble explaining the logistics of remote learning through translators, a report from the Office of Civil Rights detailed.  

One study out of Virginia found schools were also struggling to keep track of English learners during this time. And a report from a federal watchdog agency on the challenges English learners faced offered, as an example, a district that mailed a workbook home to students in English and Spanish, intending to help Spanish-speakers access the online learning curriculum. However, the effort did nothing to help students who spoke any of the other 90 languages used in the district. 

In the midst of these challenges, ourBRIDGE for Kids found that it could fill some of those gaps. 

The afterschool program, which Ganzó started in 2014, now has more than three dozen employees and over 100 volunteers. The center rents its main campus from a Methodist retirement community for $1 and operates an additional program out of an elementary school.  

Within the last couple of years, the group has hired a few employees to lead its new family services program. 

“We realized we needed to help the families address those and provide some stability so that the kids can actually go to school,” Ganzó said. When parents lost their jobs, volunteers helped connect them to resources, delivered groceries to students’ homes and acted as a call center when families needed help navigating the online learning system.   

Because of its success, the Charlotte school district hired ourBRIDGE to help track down English language learners who haven’t been showing up to school. Charlotte uses a small portion of its ESSER funds to help pay for the services, but the overwhelming majority of ourBRIDGE’s funding comes from donations and grants. The services it provides to families and students are free. 

Related: International newcomer academies offer lessons on how to quickly catch up children who are learning English 

The district contacted ourBRIDGE when staff noticed the positive effect the group had on students and their families, said Nadja Trez, director of learning and language acquisition in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools.  

“I took the initiative to reach out and say, ‘I need your help,’” said Trez, who also partners with the nonprofit Latin American Coalition for similar services.  

The district’s English learner population has grown significantly in the past year, from 27,405 students to 30,151. And for the first time in years, the make-up of student languages is changing. In prior years, the top spoken languages in Charlotte schools were Spanish and Vietnamese, Trez said. Now, schools are welcoming a large proportion of Russian speakers, refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine. Overall, students in the district speak 194 different languages.   

But it’s hard for schools to track down families in every community, and families often have needs that go beyond the scope of what a school can offer.  

“Many of our multilingual students, especially at the high school level, have circumstances outside of their control,” Trez said.  

When ourBRIDGE reached out to one family whose student hadn’t been attending class, the group learned the absences were due to a combination of setbacks: both parents were laid off from work, their youngest child recently had a medical emergency that required surgery, and the owners of the apartment they lived in were filing to evict them. The afterschool program connected the family with an organization that provides crisis emergency funding for low-income families and attended court hearings with them to help translate. The family was able to raise the money they needed and stay in their home. 

Another absent student ourBRIDGE was able to locate had a chronic illness, and the family didn’t know how to submit a medical excuse on the online portal. 

“The biggest part of what we do is say, ‘You have to speak up about things,’” said Yeferline Gomez, a family support manager who works at ourBRIDGE. “It’s your right to know these things. It’s your right to ask questions, and it’s your right to have things translated in a way that you understand.” 

Related: Seeking asylum in a time of Covid 

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools has its own teams to knock on doors and try to find students who have been missing from class for long periods of time. But it can be difficult for schools to gain trust with families who speak another language and are new to the country, said Brian Harris, a social worker with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools who speaks Spanish.  

“When I show up to the door, I represent something to the Latino population that is not always good — I’m a tall white guy. I look like immigration or police, and I sound like it,” Harris said. “Once you gain their trust, you have it. You’re in, it’s like you’re family. And you can go knock on their door and they’ll answer. But it takes a while to get there.” 

Part of the reason ourBRIDGE has been successful is a simple change the program made a few years ago — it doesn’t communicate with families through translators. Instead, it hires staff and volunteers who are immigrants themselves and speak the same languages. When a new student arrives who speaks a language the current staff do not, the program makes an effort to hire someone who can talk to them.   

“It was day and night. Because parents have a trusting relationship with people from the same country and they have shared experiences,” Ganzó said. “They come to the events and we all have a relationship with them, but they know that person that speaks their language is going to be there, and it’s not a different person every time.” 

On a Thursday in December, third and fourth grade students sat at half a dozen tarp-covered tables at ourBRIDGE’s main campus, paint up to their elbows: red, green, yellow, and a muddy combination of all three.  

Some were talking to each other excitedly in Spanish, others were using their fingers to draw in the paint. 

Flags from various countries are strung across the campus’ hall and classroom ceilings, large letters spelling out “diversity” sit in the entryway across from a painting of a woman in a hijab. Teaching English to students who are new to the country is just one goal of ourBRIDGE, another is to make them feel welcome and celebrate their heritage.  

“We want them to feel proud of their background and their cultures and their traditions and their language and their accents as they learn English and get used to living in the United States,” Ganzó said.  

This story about ourBridge for Kids 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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Mireya Barrera no quería pelear.

Durante años, se sentó en las reuniones con los docentes de educación especial de su hijo, luchando por mantener una sonrisa mientras entendía poco de lo que decían. En las ocasiones poco comunes en que se pedía ayuda a otros docentes que hablaban el idioma de Barrera, el español, las conversaciones seguían siendo vacilantes porque no eran intérpretes calificados.

Pero cuando su hijo Ian entró en la escuela secundaria, Barrera decidió invitar a un voluntario bilingüe de una organización local sin ánimo de lucro para que se sentara con ella y recordara sus derechos al equipo escolar.

“Quería a alguien de mi lado”, dijo Barrera, cuyo hijo tiene autismo, a través de un intérprete. “Durante todo este tiempo, no nos estaban facilitando las cosas. Eso provocó muchas lágrimas”. 

Independientemente del idioma que hablen los padres en casa, tienen el derecho civil de recibir información importante de los educadores de sus hijos en un idioma que entiendan. En el caso de los estudiantes con discapacidad, la ley federal es aún más clara: las escuelas “deben tomar todas las medidas necesarias”, incluidos los servicios de interpretación y traducción, para que los padres puedan participar de forma significativa en la educación de sus hijos.

Pero, a veces, las escuelas de todo el país no prestan esos servicios.

Las familias que no hablan inglés se ven obligadas a asistir a las reuniones sobre el progreso de sus hijos sin poder opinar ni preguntar a los educadores cómo pueden ayudar. Las diferencias culturales y lingüísticas pueden convencer a algunos padres de no cuestionar lo que ocurre en la escuela, un desequilibrio de poder que, según los defensores, hace que algunos niños se queden sin un apoyo fundamental. En caso de ser necesario, no es infrecuente que las escuelas encarguen a los estudiantes bilingües la interpretación para sus familias, poniéndolos en la posición de describir sus propios defectos a sus padres y tutores.

“Eso es totalmente inapropiado, en todos los sentidos posibles, y poco realista”, dice Diane Smith Howard, abogada principal de la Red Nacional de Derechos de las Personas con Discapacidad. “Si al niño no le va especialmente bien en una asignatura académica, ¿por qué confiaría en que su hijo adolescente se lo contara?”.

Los distritos escolares culpan a la falta de recursos. Dicen que no tienen dinero para contratar a más intérpretes o a agencias de servicios lingüísticos y que, aunque lo tuvieran, no hay suficientes intérpretes calificados para hacer el trabajo.

En Washington y en algunos otros estados, la cuestión ha empezado a recibir más atención. Los legisladores estatales de Olympia presentaron este año una ley bipartidista para reforzar los derechos civiles federales en el código estatal. Los sindicatos de docentes de Seattle y Chicago negociaron recientemente, y consiguieron, servicios de interpretación durante las reuniones de educación especial. Y los distritos escolares se enfrentan a una creciente amenaza de demandas de los padres, o incluso a una investigación federal, si no se toman en serio el acceso lingüístico.

Aun así, los esfuerzos por ampliar el acceso lingüístico en la educación especial se enfrentan a una ardua batalla, debido al escaso número de intérpretes capacitados, la falta de cumplimiento a nivel estatal y el escaso financiamiento del Congreso (a pesar de que en 1974 prometió cubrir casi la mitad del costo adicional que supone para las escuelas proporcionar servicios de educación especial, el gobierno federal nunca lo ha hecho). El proyecto de ley bipartidista de Washington para ofrecer más protecciones a las familias fracasó repentinamente, después de que los legisladores estatales lo despojaran de disposiciones clave y los defensores retiraran su apoyo.

El sistema de educación especial puede ser “increíblemente difícil para todos”, dijo Ramona Hattendorf, directora de defensa de The Arc of King County, que promueve los derechos de las personas con discapacidad. “Luego todo se agrava cuando se introduce el idioma en la mezcla”. En todo el país, aproximadamente 1 de cada 10 estudiantes que califican para recibir servicios de educación especial también se identifican como estudiantes de inglés, según datos federales de educación, y esa proporción está creciendo. Cerca de 791,000 estudiantes de inglés participaron en educación especial en 2020, un aumento de casi el 30 % desde 2012. En más de una docena de estados, incluido Washington, el aumento fue aún mayor.

A medida que crece su número, también aumenta la frustración de sus padres con los servicios lingüísticos.

Durante el año escolar 2021-22, la defensora del pueblo en materia educación del estado de Washington recibió casi 1,200 quejas de los padres sobre las escuelas. Su principal preocupación, en todos los grupos raciales y demográficos, fue el acceso y la inclusión en la educación especial. La defensora del pueblo principal en materia de educación, Jinju Park, calcula que entre el 50 % y el 70 % de las llamadas que recibe la agencia son sobre educación especial, y que el 80 % de ellas son de clientes que necesitan servicios de interpretación.

Mientras que la mayoría de los estados conceden a las escuelas un máximo de 60 días desde que se remite a un estudiante a los servicios de educación especial para determinar si califica, las escuelas de Washington pueden tardar hasta medio año escolar. Y si un padre necesita servicios de interpretación o traducción, la espera puede durar aún más.

“Las leyes actuales no apoyan la participación plena de los padres”, escribió Park a los legisladores estatales en apoyo a la primera versión del proyecto de ley 1305 de la Cámara de Representantes, propuesta que finalmente fracasó. “Los padres para los que el inglés puede que no sea su lengua materna”, añadió, “a menudo, se ven abrumados por la información e incapaces de participar de forma significativa en el proceso”.

Barrera, cuyo hijo asistió al distrito escolar de Auburn, al sur de Seattle, dijo que, a menudo, se sentía excluida de su aprendizaje.

En el kínder, tras el diagnóstico de autismo de Ian, su equipo de educación especial llegó a la conclusión de que necesitaba un paraeducador asignado a tiempo completo, dijo Barrera. Recurrió a Google Translate y a otros padres para que la ayudaran a redactar correos electrónicos preguntando por qué no recibió ese apoyo hasta tercer grado. Sus solicitudes de copias traducidas de documentos legales quedaron en gran parte sin respuesta, mencionó, hasta que un director le dijo que la traducción era demasiado costosa.

Cuando Ian entró en la escuela secundaria, el acoso escolar y su seguridad se convirtieron en la principal preocupación de Barrera. Una vez llegó a casa sin un mechón de pelo, cuenta. A pesar de las repetidas llamadas y correos electrónicos a sus docentes, Barrera dijo que nunca recibió una explicación.

Además, cuando pidió ir a la escuela para observar, un docente le dijo: “Ni siquiera habla inglés. ¿Qué sentido tiene?”. Vicki Alonzo, portavoz del distrito de Auburn, afirma que el auge de la población inmigrante en la región en los últimos años ha llevado al distrito a destinar más recursos a ayudar a las familias cuya lengua materna no es el inglés. Casi un tercio de sus estudiantes son multilingües, dijo, y hablan alrededor de 85 idiomas diferentes en casa.

En el año 2019-20, el distrito gastó alrededor de $175,000 en servicios de interpretación y traducción, dijo; el año escolar pasado, esa cifra fue de más de $450,000.

Alonzo señaló que el distrito no recibió financiamiento adicional para esos servicios, que incluyeron alrededor de 1,500 reuniones con intérpretes y la traducción de más de 3,000 páginas de documentos.

El problema del acceso lingüístico es “un fenómeno nacional”, dijo Smith Howard, de la Red Nacional de Derechos de las Personas con Discapacidad. “Es un problema de recursos y también una cuestión de respeto, dignidad y comprensión, que todos los padres deberían recibir”.

Los docentes también están frustrados.

El sindicato de docentes de Seattle protestó y retrasó el inicio de las clases el año pasado por unas demandas que incluían servicios de interpretación y traducción en educación especial. El contrato final, que dura hasta 2025, exige que los miembros del personal tengan acceso a diversos servicios que proporcionen traducción telefónica (un intérprete en directo) o de texto (en el caso de documentos escritos). El objetivo de esta disposición es garantizar que no se pida al personal bilingüe que traduzca si no forma parte de su trabajo.

Los docentes dicen que estas herramientas han sido útiles, pero solo en cierta medida: en ocasiones poco comunes hay intérpretes telefónicos disponibles para los idiomas menos comunes, como el amárico, y son frecuentes los problemas técnicos, como la interrupción de las llamadas.

La disponibilidad de intérpretes “no es tan constante como nos gustaría”, afirma Ibi Holiday, docente de educación especial de la escuela primaria Rising Star de Seattle.

También hay una cuestión de contexto. Es posible que los traductores no tengan experiencia en educación especial, por lo que las familias pueden salir de una reunión sin entender todas las opciones, lo cual puede ralentizar el proceso significativamente.

“Para muchas familias, la escuela de su país funciona de forma completamente diferente”, explica Mari Rico, directora del Centro de Desarrollo Infantil Jose Marti de El Centro de la Raza, un programa bilingüe de educación temprana. “Traducir no bastaba; tenía que enseñarles el sistema”.

Muchas escuelas del distrito de Seattle cuentan con personal multilingüe, pero el número y la diversidad de idiomas hablados no es constante, afirma Rico. Y existe un mayor riesgo de que el caso de un estudiante se pase por alto o se estanque debido a las barreras lingüísticas. Dijo que ha tenido que intervenir cuando las familias han pasado meses sin una reunión del programa de educación individualizada, incluso cuando su hijo estaba recibiendo servicios.

Hattendorf, de The Arc del condado de King, dijo que las soluciones tecnológicas más económicas, como las que utiliza Seattle, ofrecen cierta ayuda, pero su calidad varía mucho. Y los servicios pueden no ofrecer a los padres tiempo suficiente para procesar información complicada y hacer preguntas de seguimiento, explicó.

Al sur de Seattle, los Barrera decidieron cambiar a Ian de escuela secundaria.

Se graduó este año, pero la ley federal garantiza sus servicios de educación especial tres años más. Ian asiste ahora a un programa de transición para estudiantes con discapacidad, donde aprenderá habilidades para la vida, como conseguir un trabajo.

“Sabemos que, con ayuda, puede hacer lo que quiera”, dijo Barrera.

Ya, añadió, “todo es diferente. Los docentes intentan encontrar la mejor manera de comunicarse conmigo”.

Este artículo sobre los servicios de interpretación fue elaborado por The Hechinger Report, una organización de noticias independiente y sin ánimo de lucro centrada en la desigualdad y la innovación en la educación, en colaboración con The Seattle Times.

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I cried the day I gained acceptance to Wesleyan University in 2018. My tears signified relief, joy and excitement. I viewed my acceptance into this elite private institution as a dooropening, a new opportunity for young Black students like me.

As a Sierra Leonean American, I had felt constrained by my public education in the United States. I had to fight against low expectations and conditions that devalued my potential, including “accidentally” being placed into English as a Second Language in elementary school, even though English is my first language. I then had to fight for a spot in upper-level classes when I got into high school.

I was fortunate to become a part of TeenSHARP, a college access program for marginalized students that exposed me to schools like Wesleyan and taught me how to advocate for myself while paving the way for others.

Little did I know that my acceptance to Wesleyan was opening a portal to an academic and corporate world in which I would see even fewer people who looked like me. While many college students experience their first semester as an exhilarating time filled with joining student groups, I spent a lot of my time grappling with what it meant to be the only Black woman in predominantly white classes. With the end of affirmative action, more students will experience what I felt: being the only or one of a few Black students.

I remember exploring Wesleyan for the first time. The halls were filled with pictures of alumni, mostly white men, that sent me on a trip down the institution’s memory lane where, as a Black woman, I didn’t exist.

No matter how much I told myself that I belonged, the insidious history of Wesleyan, from its pictures to its architecture to its racial makeup, was a haunting reminder that while I may have gained entry into this world, Black people generally do not.

I would have loved to go to a historically Black college or university, but the lack of funding for HBCUs means they can’t be as generous with financial aid,leaving me, and many other Black students, with the options of taking on unsustainable debt or trying to get in somewhere else.

My acceptance to Wesleyan came at a time when race could still be considered in college admissions, before the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action, effectively ending an avenue of hope for Black and Latino groups.

Related: Will the Rodriguez family’s college dreams survive the end of affirmative action?

However, the gap between the numbers of Black and white college graduates was growing even before the court ruled on affirmative action.

Affirmative action was a meager attempt at leveling the playing field. The Supreme Court’s decision to get rid of it will only continue the caste system in which people with marginalized identities are barred from reaching self-determination because we simply can’t get into spaces that will allow us to thrive.

Ending affirmative action is not only an attack on the benefits of diversity in education, but a direct way to end the mobility of students like me by closing the door to opportunities that were already hard to access.

Historically, race has been a social determinant. Race determined which jobs you could get and which schools you could attend. To ignore race in college admissions will not erase the race problem that plagues our nation. It will only exasperate it.

As long as America refuses to look in the mirror and face the social barriers that necessitated the creation of affirmative action in the first place, brilliant students of color will be overlooked in the admissions process.

Related: OPINION: Legacy admissions are unnecessary, raise moral concerns and exclude deserving students

As I build my career, I often find myself in situations similar to those I experienced as an undergraduate: One of just a handful ofBlack people, or even the only one, in professional settings.

The Supreme Court’s decision has now set a precedent such that initiatives like the Fearless Fund, a nonprofit that provides funding for Black women entrepreneurs, are under attack. And many companies have halted diversity, equity and inclusion programs due to fear of being sued.

Now is the time not to be complacent but to educate ourselves, stay informed and mobilize. The court’s decision is a reminder that the rights and opportunities we have fought for are not a given, and only stay firm when we are.

Alphina Kamara is a development associate at The World Justice Project and a previous Fulbright fellow.

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

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As our country continues to struggle with historic teacher shortages, we ought to consider an untapped pool of aspiring teachers: Young immigrants who want to become educators.

They can connect with other newcomers by sharing their stories and serving as role models, like the ones I had when I arrived in Queens from Ecuador at the age of 14.

The bustling pace of rush-hour commuters, the tangled mix of languages and the loud rhythm of a sleepless city disoriented me for months.

Thanks to Mr. Bello, my supportive math teacher at Newcomers High School in Queens, I was able to quiet the cacophony with the anonymity of numbers.

Mr. Bello taught me much more than trigonometry and geometry. He taught me about probability, and helped me see that I could succeed as an undocumented student despite the uncertainty of my status.

Mr. Bello, himself an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, helped me build confidence in my potential, which allowed me to face a higher education and workforce system that systemically shuts doors to undocumented immigrants.

Another teacher, Mr. Palau, an immigrant from Paraguay, patiently guided me through my college application process. He made sure I understood that I was eligible for the in-state tuition rate despite my undocumented status.

Eventually, I qualified for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. That allowed me to get a work permit and pursue a career in the immigration research field.

Today, I am the project director at the Initiative on Immigration and Education at the City University of New York (also known as CUNY-IIE), which produces research and resources that center the strengths of immigrant communities.

In this role, I see firsthand the importance and urgent need in our schools for more teachers like Mr. Bello and Mr. Palau.

Related: Teacher shortages are real, but not for the reason you heard

Congress’s inability to pass any kind of immigration reform that would help undocumented immigrants become teachers makes easing the path of immigrants into educator roles a tough ask, especially as the 11-year-old DACA program is in peril of being eliminated for good by judicial decree.

Currently, immigrant educators may be granted work permits only if they qualify for DACA or Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which has been extended to people from 16 countries. State and local lawmakers and policymakers can and should be creative in expanding options.

The situation is urgent. According to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, the state needs to hire 180,000 new teachers over the next decade to keep up with the demands of the workforce. Enrollment in New York State’s teacher education programs has declined by 53 percent since 2009.

Congress’s inability to pass any kind of immigration reform that would help undocumented immigrants become teachers makes easing the path of immigrants into educator roles a tough ask.

Most disconcerting for our newest students: There is a significant shortage of bilingual teachers. In 2022-23, approximately 134,000 students who were enrolled in New York City’s public schools identified as English Language Learners, yet the United Federation of Teachers reported that the school system had fewer than 3,000 certified bilingual educators.

This shortage intersects with a political and social upheaval in the city. Since April 2022, New York has received more than 116,000 asylum seekers, including approximately 20,000 children who have now entered the public school system.

The majority of these students are from Latin America and the Caribbean and speak languages other than English.

Bilingual education is considered the best approach for immigrant students, according to Tatyana Kleyn, professor of Bilingual Education & TESOL at The City College of New York. Kleyn favors bilingual education because it allows students to continue learning in their home language while they also learn English.

For all New York teachers, an initial certification is valid for just five years. From there, they are expected to get a professional teaching certificate. For a while, DACA beneficiaries were not eligible for professional certification.

In 2016, the New York State Education Department began to allow undocumented students who are DACA beneficiaries to get professional teaching certificates.

Last year, the state expanded that guidance, allowing undocumented students without a social security number (and who are not DACA holders) to do fieldwork in certain schools and obtain initial certification.

These are two steps in the right direction.

Related: OPINION: In an era of teacher shortages, we must embrace and develop new ways to unleash educator talent

However, undocumented educators who are not DACA holders can’t make use of their education degree and initial certification because they do not have access to work permits.

In addition, some undocumented immigrants just missed the cutoff for DACA or have not been allowed to apply due to the litigation battles about the program.

Our working group, UndocuEdu, produced a report in 2021 titled “The State of Undocumented Educators in New York” that outlines the challenges undocumented educators face navigating teacher education programs.

One suggestion in the report is to eliminate testing fees for NYS certification exams for those in financial need.

Another recommendation is for policymakers to create municipal or state exceptions so that our city’s schools can hire educators who have training and certification but lack a work permit.

State legislators and advocates in New York are already discussing the creation of municipal work permits for recently arrived asylum-seekers.

We urge the city and state to embrace these types of solutions and find others to address the current educational need. It’s time to give more opportunities to a group of trained educators who are already in our communities.

Now more than ever, we need to expand our teaching pool for students who urgently need help. Undocumented teachers can become the Mr. Bellos and Mr. Palaus that every immigrant student deserves.

Daniela Alulema is project director of the CUNY-Initiative on Immigration and Education in New York City.

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

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When Angel Amankwaah traveled from Denver to North Carolina Central University for incoming student orientation this summer, she decided she had made the right choice.

She had fun learning the chants that fans perform at football games. But she also saw that “there are students who look like me, and professors who look like me” at the historically Black university, said Amankwaah, 18, who is Black. “I knew that I was in a safe space.”

This has now become an important consideration for college-bound students from all backgrounds and beliefs.

Students have long picked schools based on their academic reputations and social life. But with campuses in the crosshairs of the culture wars, many students are now also taking stock of attacks on diversity, course content, and speech and speakers from both ends of the political spectrum. They’re monitoring hate crimes, anti-LGBTQ legislation, state abortion laws and whether students like them —Black, rural, military veterans, LGBTQ or from other backgrounds — are represented and supported on campus.

“There’s no question that what’s happening at the state level is directly affecting these students,” said Alyse Levine, founder and CEO of Premium Prep, a private college admissions consulting firm in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. When they look at colleges in various states now, she said, “There are students who are asking, ‘Am I really wanted here?’ ”

For some students on both sides of the political divide, the answer is no. In the chaotic new world of American colleges and universities, many say they feel unwelcome at certain schools, while others are prepared to shut down speakers and report faculty with whose opinions they disagree.

It’s too early to know how much this trend will affect where and whether prospective students end up going to college, since publicly available enrollment data lags real time. But there are early clues that it’s having a significant impact.

One in four prospective students has already ruled out a college or university for consideration because of the political climate in its state, according to a survey by the higher education consulting firm Art & Science Group.

Related: Many flagship universities don’t reflect their state’s Black or Latino high school graduates

Among students who describe themselves as liberal, the most common reason to rule out colleges and universities in a particular state, that survey found, is because it’s “too Republican” or has what they consider lax gun regulations, anti-LGBTQ legislation, restrictive abortion laws and a lack of concern about racism. Students who describe themselves as conservative are rejecting states they believe to be “too Democrat” and that have liberal abortion and gay-rights laws.

With so much attention focused on these issues, The Hechinger Report has created a first-of-its-kind College Welcome Guide showing state laws and institutional policies that affect college and university students, from bans on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and “critical race theory” to rules about whether student IDs are accepted as proof of residency for voting purposes.

The interactive guide also lists, for every four-year institution in the country, such things as racial and gender diversity among students and faculty, the number of student veterans enrolled, free-speech rankings, the incidence of on-campus race-motivated hate crimes and if the university or college serves many students from rural places.

Sixty percent of prospective students of all backgrounds say new state restrictions on abortion would at least somewhat influence where they choose to go to college, a separate poll by Gallup and the Lumina Foundation found. Of these, eight in 10 say they would prefer to go to a state with greater access to reproductive health services. (Lumina is among the funders of The Hechinger Report.)

“We have many young women who will not look at certain states,” said Levine. One of her own clients backed out of going to a university in St. Louis after Missouri banned almost all abortions in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, she said.

Institutions in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Texas are the most likely to be knocked off the lists of liberal students, according to the Art & Science Group survey, while conservative students avoid California and New York.

One in four prospective students has already ruled out a college or university for consideration because of the political climate in its state.

One in eight high school students in Florida say they won’t go to a public university in their own state because of its education policies, a separate poll, by the college ranking and information website Intelligent.com, found.

With 494 anti-LGBTQ laws proposed or adopted this year, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, prospective students who are LGBTQ and have experienced significant harassment because of it are nearly twice as likely to say they don’t plan to go to college at all than students who experienced lower levels of harassment, according to a survey by GLSEN, formerly the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.

“You are attacking kids who are already vulnerable,” said Javier Gomez, an LGBTQ student in his first year at Miami Dade College. “And it’s not just queer students. So many young people are fed up.”

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

It’s not yet evident whether the new laws are affecting where LGBTQ young people are choosing to go to college, said Casey Pick, director of law and policy at The Trevor Project, which supports LGBTQ young people in crisis. But LGBTQ adults are moving away from states passing anti-LGBTQ laws, she said. And “if adult employees are taking this into account when they decide where they want to live, you can bet that college students are making the same decisions.”

Meanwhile, in an era of pushback against diversity, equity and inclusion policies in many states, and against affirmative action nationwide, Amankwaah is one of a growing number of Black students choosing what they see as the relative security of an HBCU. Enrollment at HBCUs increased by around 3 percent in 2021, the last year for which the figure is available, while the number of students at other universities and colleges fell.

“The real attack here is on the feeling of belonging,” said Jeremy Young, who directs the Freedom to Learn program at PEN America, which tracks laws that restrict college and university diversity efforts and teaching about race. “What it really does is hoist a flag to say to the most marginalized students, ‘We don’t want you here.’ ”

More than 40 percent of university and college administrators say the Supreme Court ruling curbing the use of affirmative action in admissions will affect diversity on their campuses, a Princeton Review poll found as the school year was beginning.

Sixty percent of prospective students of all backgrounds say new state restrictions on abortion would at least somewhat influence where they choose to go to college.

College students of all races and political persuasions report feeling uncomfortable on campuses that have become political battlegrounds. Those on the left are bristling at new laws blocking programs in diversity, equity and inclusion and the teaching of certain perspectives about race; on the right, at conservative speakers being shouted down or canceled, unpopular comments being called out in class and what they see as an embrace of values different from what they learned at home.

One Michigan father said he supported his son’s decision to skip college. Other parents, he said, are discouraging their kids from going, citing “binge-drinking, hookup culture, secular teachings, a lopsided leftist faculty mixed with anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-free speech and a diversity, equity and inclusion emphasis” that he said is at odds with a focus on merit. The father asked that his name not be used so that his comments didn’t reflect on his daughter, who attends a public university.

More than one in 10 students at four-year universities now say they feel as if they downright don’t belong on their campus, and another two in 10 neither agree nor strongly agree that they belong, another Lumina and Gallup survey found. It found that those who answer in these ways are more likely to frequently experience stress and more likely to drop out. One in four Hispanic students report frequently or occasionally feeling unsafe or experiencing disrespect, discrimination or harassment.

Related: American confidence in higher education hits a new low, yet most still see value in a college degree

Military veterans who use their G.I. Bill benefits to return to school say one of their most significant barriers is a feeling that they won’t be welcome, a survey by the D’Aniello Institute for Veterans and Military Families at Syracuse University found. Nearly two-thirds say that faculty and administrators don’t understand the challenges they face, and 70 percent say the same thing about their non-veteran classmates.

Colleges should be “safe and affirming spaces,” said Pick, of the Trevor Project — not places of isolation and alienation.

Yet a significant number of students say they don’t feel comfortable sharing their views in class, according to another survey, conducted by College Pulse for the right-leaning Sheila and Robert Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth at North Dakota State University. Of those, 72 percent say they worry their opinions would be considered unacceptable by classmates and 45 percent, by their professors. Conservative students are less likely than their liberal classmates to believe that all points of view are welcome and less willing to share theirs.

“I do hear people saying things like, ‘I’m worried about what kind of a college or university I can send my kids to and whether they’ll be free to be themselves and to express themselves.’ ”

Steve Maguire, campus freedom fellow, American Council of Trustees and Alumni

“Is that really an intellectually diverse environment?” asked Sean Stevens, director of polling and analytics at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, which has launched a campus free-speech ranking based on students’ perceptions of comfort expressing ideas, tolerance for speakers and other measures.

“Anecdotally and from personal experience, there’s certainly a pocket of students who are weighing these factors in terms of where to go to college,” Stevens said.

Eighty-one percent of liberal students and 53 percent of conservative ones say they support reporting faculty who make comments that they find offensive, the same survey found. It used sample comments such as, “There is no evidence of anti-Black bias in police shootings,” “Requiring vaccination for COVID is an assault on individual freedom” and “Biological sex is a scientific fact.”

A professor at Texas A&M University was put under investigation when a student accused her of criticizing the state’s lieutenant governor during a lecture, though she was ultimately exonerated. An anthropology lecturer at the University of Chicago who taught an undergraduate course called “The Problem of Whiteness” said she was deluged with hateful messages when a conservative student posted her photo and email address on social media.

More than half of all freshmen say that colleges have the right to ban extreme speakers, according to an annual survey by an institute at UCLA; the College Pulse poll says that sentiment is held by twice the proportion of liberal students as conservative ones.

Related: How higher education lost its shine

An appearance by a conservative legal scholar who spoke at Washington College in Maryland last month was disrupted by students because of his positions about LGBTQ issues and abortion. The subject: free speech on campus.

A group of Stanford students in March disrupted an on-campus speech by a federal judge whose judicial record they said was anti-LGBTQ. When he asked for an administrator to intervene, an associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion confronted him and asked: “Is it worth the pain that this causes and the division that this causes?” The associate dean was put on leave and later resigned.

“Today it is a sad fact that the greatest threat to free speech comes from within the academy,” pronounced the right-leaning American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which is pushing colleges to sign on to its Campus Freedom Initiative that encourages teaching students about free expression during freshman orientation and disciplining people who disrupt speakers or events, among other measures.

Seventy-two percent of students say they worry their opinions would be considered unacceptable by their classmates and 45 percent that their comments would be considered unacceptable by their professors.

“I have to imagine that universities that have a bad track record on freedom of expression or academic freedom, that it will affect their reputations,” said Steven Maguire, the organization’s campus freedom fellow. “I do hear people saying things like, ‘I’m worried about what kind of a college or university I can send my kids to and whether they’ll be free to be themselves and to express themselves.’ ”

Some colleges are now actively recruiting students on the basis of these kinds of concerns. Colorado College in September created a program to ease the process for students who want to transfer away from institutions in states that have banned diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives; Hampshire College in Massachusetts has offered admission to any student from New College in Florida, subject of what critics have described as a conservative takeover. Thirty-five have so far accepted the invitation.

Though many conservative critics of colleges and universities say faculty are indoctrinating students with liberal opinions, incoming freshmen tend to hold left-leaning views before they ever set foot in a classroom, according to that UCLA survey.

If everyone is thinking the same way or in similar ways about all topics, “is that really an intellectually diverse environment?”

Sean Stevens, director of polling and analytics, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

Fewer than one in five consider themselves conservative. Three-quarters say abortion should be legal and favor stricter gun control laws, 68 percent say wealthy people should pay more taxes than they do now and 86 percent that climate change should be a federal priority and that there should be a clear path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

Prospective students say they are watching as new laws are passed and controversies erupt on campuses, and actively looking into not just the quality of food and available majors at the colleges they might attend, but state politics.

“Once I decided I was going to North Carolina Central, I looked up whether North Carolina was a red state or a blue state,” Amankwaah said. (North Carolina has a Democrat as governor but Republicans control both chambers of the legislature and hold a veto-proof supermajority in the state Senate.)

Florida’s anti-LGBTQ laws prompted Javier Gomez to leave his native state and move to New York to go to fashion school. But then he came back, transferring to Miami Dade.

“People ask me, ‘Why the hell are you back in Florida?’ ” said Gomez. “The reason I came back was that there was this innate calling in me that you have to stick around and fight for the queer and trans kids here. It’s overwhelming at times. It can be very mentally depleting. But I wanted to stay and continue the fight and build community against hatred.”

This story about choosing 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.

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Alexa Maqueo Toledo was a junior in high school in Tennessee when she enrolled in Spanish 4, the first course she’d take that offered students the chance to earn both high school and college credit at the same time. 

She remembers hearing that the college credit was free, and it seemed like a great opportunity to knock some college credits out of the way early. Though that was the case for most of her classmates, Maqueo Toledo quickly learned it was not the case for her. She was born in Mexico and immigrated to the United States at age two with her mother. They came on a visa and stayed in the U.S. even after it expired. In Tennessee, undocumented students are not eligible for in-state tuition or state financial aid, which she would need for dual-credit classes.

“My teacher kind of pulled me aside and was like, ‘Hey, you need to go to your guidance counselor, there’s a little bit of complications with signing you up for this class,’” said Maqueo Toledo, who is now a college access fellow at the Education Trust in Tennessee. 

Everything she’d heard about the dual-credit class was technically true, it just didn’t apply to her.  A state grant made the college credits free for most students, but U.S. citizenship was required. Without the grant, if she wanted to earn the college credits for the course she was already taking, she’d have to pay the community college’s out-of-state tuition rate. 

An estimated 20 percent of community college students are actually high schoolers getting both high school and college credit for the courses they are taking. Students who take dual enrollment classes in high school are more likely to finish college.

Today, that rate is $726 per credit, compared to $176 per credit for students who qualify for in-state tuition (though, thanks to the state grant, in-state high school students pay nothing for dual enrollment credits). Maqueo Toledo had been working at fast food restaurants ever since being approved for a work permit, but she was also paying half the bills at home. She couldn’t afford to pay for the college credits that her peers were getting for free because, she said, “I have more important things to pay for.”

Last month, Hechinger’s Jill Barshay reported that an estimated 20 percent of community college students are actually high schoolers who are getting both high school and college credit for the courses they are taking. Research has shown that the students who take dual enrollment classes in high school are more likely to enroll in college and graduate than their peers of similar backgrounds. For the students who can get the credit easily and for little money, it seems like a great set-up. 

But it excludes thousands of undocumented students. They can face a variety of barriers, like the cost-prohibitive dual-enrollment credits in Tennessee, depending on the state they live in. 

Related: STUDENT VOICE: DACA recipients like this DREAMer ask for full participation in American life

According to research by the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, a nonprofit group of university and college leaders that supports immigrant, refugee and international students, state policies vary drastically. Among them:

• Three states bar undocumented students from attending some or all public institutions of higher education. 
• Six states block undocumented students from accessing in-state tuition.

Five states provide in-state tuition only to recipients of DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.  

• Four states provide undocumented students with in-state tuition at some, but not all, colleges.
• 24 states (and the District of Columbia) allow undocumented students to access in-state tuition, and 18 of those states also allow undocumented students to access state financial aid.
• Eight states have no known policies related to undocumented students and higher education funding. 

“Undocumented students are shut out of these opportunities, and it’s really alarming,” said Gini Pupo-Walker, executive director of The Education Trust in Tennessee. “The fact is, these are students whose families are paying taxes. And these are public institutions that they should benefit from attending.”

Exorbitant out-of-state tuition is one of several barriers undocumented students can encounter when they’re trying to access dual credit courses. Some states require students to have attended a local high school for a certain number of years, making undocumented students who have come to the U. S. recently ineligible. In California, for example, students can only access in-state tuition if they have completed at least three years of school in California (it can be either high school, a combination of middle and high school, community college or adult school).

“There are many jobs in healthcare, in business, teaching, where we’re seeing massive shortages, and we need highly educated, highly skilled people to fill those jobs. And we’re creating these artificial barriers that are preventing those students from accessing those jobs and helping fill those roles.”

Sonny Metoki, higher education analyst, The Education Trust in Tennessee

Maqueo Toledo is one of about 19,000 undocumented immigrants in Tennessee between the ages of 16 and 24, according to an analysis of 2015 to 2019 U.S. Census data by the Migration Policy Institute. The Institute estimates that there are more than 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, including about 352,000 between 13 and 17 years old and 1.4 million between the ages of 18 and 24. About 16 percent of undocumented people above the age of 25 in Tennessee have earned a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 18 percent of undocumented people nationally and 37 percent of the general population. 

Sonny Metoki, higher education analyst from the Education Trust in Tennessee, said that dual enrollment courses create a pathway toward college. Without access to it, he said, “it really does discourage a lot of students from pursuing education after high school.”

And if they do end up in college, often by combining a patchwork quilt of private scholarships, they are starting out even further behind many of their U.S. citizen peers.

Related: Undocumented students turn to each other for support post graduation

Undocumented students can even struggle to access dual-credit courses in states that don’t have an explicit residency requirement for in-state tuition, said Miriam Feldblum, executive director and co-founder of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration. There may be a requirement to have attended a school in the state for a certain number of years, as in California. About 2.7 million undocumented people, or 25 percent of all those in the U.S., live in California.

Others may be able to take dual-credit classes, only to find out that the post-high school portion of a trade program they were studying has a work-authorization requirement, or that they are ineligible for licensure in that field because of their immigration status. 

Only five states allow undocumented students to obtain a license to any profession as long as they meet all the other requirements, according to the Higher Education Immigration Portal run by the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration. But most states limit the professions that undocumented people can get licenses for; limit licensure to people with work authorization permits; block undocumented people from most professions that require licensure, or have no state policy on the professional licensure of undocumented people. 

“Undocumented students are shut out of these opportunities, and it’s really alarming. These are students whose families are paying taxes. And these are public institutions that they should benefit from attending.” 

Gini Pupo-Walker, executive director, The Education Trust in Tennessee

Undocumented students with access to hands-on career and technical education programs in high school need to know if they will be legally allowed to practice the profession they are training for. Feldblum said that these programs are typically designed so that students can move seamlessly from the high school portion of the training to a post-secondary portion, but the post-secondary portion can have work-authorization requirements that exclude undocumented students. So, they may be unable to get to the point of applying for a license because they can’t complete the training. 

“There are many jobs and sectors in healthcare, in business, teaching, where we’re seeing massive shortages, and we just need highly educated, highly skilled people to fill those jobs,” Metoki said. “And we’re creating these artificial barriers that are preventing those students from accessing those jobs and helping fill those roles. I think we’re hurting ourselves to a certain extent.”

The workforce policy and financial-aid access issues are among many challenges that undocumented students face, said Felecia Russell, director of the Higher Ed Immigration Portal at the Presidents’ Alliance for Higher Education and Immigration and founder of the online storytelling platform Embracing Undocumented. But she said these students face challenges within their institutions, too. Her doctoral research focused on the experiences of Black undocumented college students, who make up about 14 percent of all undocumented students, compared to 27 percent who are Asian American or Pacific Islander and about 48 percent who are Hispanic.

Related: STUDENT VOICE: We need dream resource centers on college campuses

Making sure undocumented students have the support they need to get to and through college is what Maqueo Toledo wants to spend her career doing.

She was lucky to have a guidance counselor she trusted to disclose her immigration status to, who could help her navigate the tricky system. In her first year after graduation, she took that role for other undocumented students, as a college and career access coach at a high school in Knox County.

“I see peers of mine and friends who started school with me and didn’t have the chance to finish or didn’t finish in my class because they had to take time off to save money, or life happens, because they don’t have the support of our citizen peers,” Maqueo Toledo said. “I want to be working at a university helping first-generation immigrant students, whether they’re undocumented themselves or they come from undocumented families, finish higher education.”

Maqueo Toledo took two classes in high school that she could have earned college credit for, classes that many of her peers did get credit for and didn’t have to retake in college. 

Advocates say that this problem could be greatly reduced if undocumented students were allowed to pay the in-state tuition price for the dual credit classes. Even if they weren’t eligible for the Tennessee state grant that makes these credits free for U.S. citizens, they would be paying the much more accessible price of $176 per credit, instead of $726 per credit. It would shrink what Metoki called a “tremendous block” for students to get the college credits. 

This story about dual enrollment courses was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.

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Less than a month after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Harvard’s admissions dean announced the university’s commitment to enrolling a higher number of Black students than in the past.

Soon, other Ivy League universities, such as Yale, Princeton and Columbia, increased efforts to enroll Black students, too, and the era of affirmative action was born. Institutions were finally beginning to address the historical exclusion of degree-aspiring students based on race or ethnicity.

Obtaining a college degree has tremendous transformative power. It has a far-reaching ripple effect, with power to uplift individuals, families and entire communities; it remains the most reliably consistent path to economic and social mobility.

Now that the Supreme Court has decided that colleges and universities can no longer take race into consideration as a specific basis in the admission process, we are witnessing the destruction of a 55-year effort to grant Black and brown students access to that upward mobility road.

Related: Supreme Court makes its historic ruling in affirmative action cases

With the gutting of affirmative action, stepping up allyship for Black and brown students as they strive to get into and through college is more urgent than ever.

It starts with dismantling the myths about affirmative action.

The first prevalent myth is that affirmative action required colleges to admit a certain number of students of color. In fact, affirmative action was not based on quotas; for most colleges, using race and ethnicity data was critical to the process of shaping their incoming class to foster a rich landscape of ideas and reflect America’s diversity of background and experience. Disallowing this practice will make it much more difficult, if not impossible, to do so.

Another myth is that the use of race and ethnicity as a consideration in admissions flooded colleges with an increasing number of Black students who took the place of applicants who were more “highly qualified.”

This false perception is contradicted by the data. Despite the widespread practice of using race and ethnicity in admissions, Black student enrollment was down 22 percent in the decade from 2010 to 2020, and recent data shows that it has fallen another 7 percent since that time.

After nearly 25 years in education, I have found that it is far more likely that a “highly qualified” student (even a student of color) will be displaced by a less qualified student benefiting from legacy admissions, financial interests or institutional priorities (academic, athletic or other extracurricular programs) than by an “affirmative action” admission.

The third, and most insidious, misconception impacting public opinion on affirmative action is the myth of meritocracy. Opponents of affirmative action assert that college admissions should be a meritocracy — basically, that those students with the highest GPAs and test scores and the most impressive slates of extracurricular accomplishments should win admission by merit.

Behind this idea is the belief that meritocracy is noble, fair and traditionally the American way. But in a country where opportunities can be purchased and/or inherited, “meritocracy” is at best an unattainable aspiration and at worst a tool to justify disproportionate privilege and power.

Sadly, there has never been a meritocracy in college admissions or in our great country as a whole.

Take the question of SAT/ACT scores: Students who excel do not generally do so based on their sheer effort and talent alone. Black and brown students are more likely to attend underperforming schools that leave students underprepared for college entrance exams. These students also typically have significantly less access to academic guidance, early college programs, pricey tutors, summer-long study programs or college admissions consultants — opportunities commonly purchased for or by their more affluent peers.

Even admissions based on extracurricular activities are innately biased. First-generation and low-income students are often compelled to work to contribute to the family income and/or take care of younger siblings or extended family members in the household, focusing on basic family needs.

This reality makes it harder for these students, disproportionately Black and brown in number, to participate in school-based sports and clubs and community volunteering opportunities. Furthermore, the schools they attend are less likely to offer costly sports camps or exposure to esoteric sports such as rowing, equestrianism and fencing that might give them a leg up in admission.

In a country where opportunities can be purchased and/or inherited, “meritocracy” is at best an unattainable aspiration and at worst a tool to justify disproportionate privilege and power.

Now that colleges are banned from considering race, what other criteria of admission will gain more weight? It won’t be academics, which is already sufficiently considered for admitted students.

Will it be economic interests, such as legacy, donor status and the ability of the student’s family to pay the “full freight” cost of college? Will it be college essays for which wealthy students often get help constructing compelling narratives from high-priced admissions consultants?

Whatever the criteria, it’s likely that they will only further reduce the number of historically excluded students admitted.

Then there is the question of college advising. Many Black and brown students are also the first in their families to go to college, and their parents have limited experience in the highly complicated processes of test prep, applications and financial aid. Yet, on average, in public schools, the student-counselor ratio is only one counselor per 400 students — and it’s even lower in some high-need districts (disproportionately attended by Black and Latino students).

In such districts, counselors are also more likely to be focused on addressing the social and emotional needs of students (like confronting the student mental health crisis and other priorities), leaving little time for in-depth college counseling.

With public school counselors so overloaded, students must either be lucky enough to find a nonprofit focused on helping drive college access and success or go it alone.

A truly merit-based process could be rationally defended in a nation where opportunities and resources are as randomly distributed as talent and drive. But that is not, and has never been, the American experience.

Related: COLUMN: Colleges decry Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, but most have terrible track records on diversity

Ours is a nation where money, power and legacy buy opportunities and privilege. The fundamental way to change that status quo is to increase access to a quality education — exactly what has been undermined by the Supreme Court ruling.

Outlawing affirmative action in college admissions is wrong from a moral and values perspective, and it is economically disastrous. It will undoubtedly raise the barriers to degree attainment for students who are already facing the most challenging of life’s hurdles.

Students are our future leaders, and it’s up to us to ensure that every student has the means to step boldly and confidently into that reality.

Instead of going backward to a time of greater inequity, we need to continue moving forward to reduce — and ultimately eliminate — the college graduation gap.

I challenge all colleges and universities to take significant steps — like ending legacy admissions practices and focusing more scholarship and aid dollars on Black and brown students — to begin to address the negative impacts of this Supreme Court decision.

Steven Colón is chief executive officer at Bottom Line, a nonprofit organization that partners with degree-aspiring students from historically excluded communities to help them get into and through college and successfully launch careers.

This story about the Supreme Court affirmative action decision was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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LONDON — When Cansu (pronounced “Johnsu”) Deniz Bayrak was deciding where to emigrate from her native Turkey, she first considered San Francisco.

Only in her 20s, she had already co-created an e-commerce website that rose to the top of its category in her home country, gotten snatched up by a tech company, then been poached by another tech firm. But she saw more opportunity in the United States, where there is a projected demand for more than 160,000 new software developers and related specialists per year, and where tech companies said in a survey that recruiting them is their biggest business challenge.

Bayrak quickly learned, however, that to come to the United States, she’d need an employer sponsor. Even then, she’d have to enter a lottery for an H-1B visa, with only one-in-four odds of being approved. If she was laid off, she’d have 60 days to find a new job, or she’d likely have to leave.

Bayrak was recounting her story over a pint in a pub in London, where she now lives thanks in part to a United Kingdom program that actively recruits immigrants with skills in short supply and streamlines the naturalization process for them — no employer sponsor, lottery or long and unpredictable waiting period required.

“There’s a certain element of hubris that, ‘Of course people are going to come to the U.S.,’ ” said Bayrak, now 37. But coming to the U.K. turned out to be “much easier to navigate.”

While foreign-born applicants who want to work in the United States face red tape and long delays, new “talent visas” in the U.K., Australia, Canada and elsewhere are luring away people who have some of the world’s most in-demand skills.

Now these countries are homing in on another target: international students being educated at U.S. universities to work in tech and other high-demand fields.

“We are a beneficiary of the failures of the U.S. system,” said Nicolas Rollason, partner and head of business immigration for the London-based law firm Kingsley Napley.

“How do you get to the U.S. and build your startup? You can’t, unless you win the Nobel Prize.”

Sergei Nozdrenkov, a Russian software engineer who moved to the U.K.

Most international students in the U.S. say they want to remain, and U.S. employers need workers like them to fill jobs in areas of shortage. But only 11 percent of foreign-born U.S. university bachelor’s degree recipients and 23 percent who get master’s degrees manage to stay and work in the United States, according to researchers at the University of California, Davis, and elsewhere.

International graduates of U.S. universities can apply for an optional practical training, or OPT, visa that allows them to stay in the country for 12 to 36 months, depending on what they studied, after which they have to get an employer sponsor and enter the lottery for an H-1B visa. With delays in processing and other problems, including those long odds for an H-1B, however, the number getting OPT visas was down by 17 percent last year from its peak in 2019-20, to 184,759.

That has ominous implications for the supply of talent in the United States, where around 80 percent of people studying computer science and electrical engineering at the graduate level are international students, the National Foundation for American Policy reports.

Related: How other countries are recruiting skilled immigrants who won’t come here

Other countries are eagerly taking advantage of the difficulties of the U.S. system faced by foreign-born university graduates with valuable skills.

The U.K. last year added a “high potential individual” visa, offering a two-year stay to new graduates of 40 universities outside the country ranked as the best in the world — 21 of them in the United States.

Rollason said that, at this time of year, his firm is regularly contacted by international students who have just graduated from American universities but are still waiting for an OPT visa or can’t get a visa through the H-1B lottery, and have decided to move to the U.K.

“Why wouldn’t you want people who graduate from Harvard or Stanford or MIT?” he asked mirthfully.

The number of international graduates of U.S. universities on optional practical training visas, which let them stay in the country for up to 36 months, fell by 17 percent last year from its peak in 2019-20.

Nearly 40,000 foreign-born graduates of U.S. universities were recruited to Canada from 2017 to 2021, according to an analysis by the Niskanen Center, a Washington think tank that advocates for immigration reform.

Australian recruiters are also fanning out across the United States, attending job fairs and visiting university campuses, Patrick Hallinan, regional director for the Americas in the Australian Department of Home Affairs told a webinar convened on this topic by the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute.

The United States still enjoys substantial advantages in attracting international talent. It boasts by far the most venture capital investment in technology businesses, for example — four times more than second-place China. The number of eligible applicants this year for H-1B visas for foreign workers in specialty occupations remained strong; it was up nearly 60 percent over last year, although because of a cap set more than three decades ago, the already distant one-in-four odds of approval plummeted as a result to about one in seven.

“The United States has managed to remain competitive in spite of its immigration system,” said Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford.  “People tolerate the chaotic immigration system because there’s so much else that’s attractive.”

Over the longer term, however, “the question is: As these other countries start to take the race for talent more seriously, will that dynamic shift?” said Kate Hooper, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.

A bill introduced in the House last month would eliminate per-country limits on employment-related visas and make it easier for international students with science, technology, engineering and math degrees to stay in the United States. Previous similar measures have gone nowhere.

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While other countries have promised to make life easier for immigrants with skills, it still isn’t easy. Back in that pub, Bayrak’s glass sits empty by the time she’s finished listing the many twists and turns in her journey to the British passport she finally received in February.

But the British path is still faster and simpler than the American one, said Rollason in his office overlooking London’s ascendant high-tech neighborhood of Shoreditch.

“I imagine if an Indian engineer has two job offers, one in the U.S. and one in the U.K., I can guess which they would choose,” he said.

Whether or not the new visas attract large numbers of highly skilled immigrants, they “do serve a function in terms of staking a claim in this contest for talent,” said the Migration Policy Institute’s Hooper. “There’s a sort of marketing element that signals you’re open to talent.”

She added, about the U.S.: “What signal are we sending?”

“There’s a certain element of hubris that, ‘Of course people are going to come to the U.S.’ ”

Cansu Deniz Bayrak, who moved to the U.K. from Turkey

Under the U.K.’s more general global talent visa, launched in early 2020, immigrants who work in digital technology and other industries — no matter where they got their educations — don’t need a job offer to come into the country, and can be eligible for permanent citizenship within three to five years, depending on their field.

“We’re in a global race for talent,” said Gerard Grech, founding chief executive of Tech Nation, the nonprofit organization that the British government appointed to administer its new global talent visa program. And to compete, Grech said, some countries are making it “as frictionless as possible for the best, brightest and most talented people” to immigrate.

Canada is increasing its immigration target from 465,000 to 500,000 per year by 2025, and the share of spots for people with workforce skills from 57 to 60 percent.

It already has an “express entry” program for particularly highly skilled migrants, more than 440,000 of whom applied through that program in 2021, the most recent year for which the figure is available — up from 332,331 in 2019. Most common among them were computer programmers, software engineers and designers and information systems analysts and consultants.

With an aging domestic population and high numbers of vacancies in many fields — problems also being faced by the United States — “immigration has to be part of our response as a country,” Canada’s deputy minister for Immigration Christiane Fox told that Migration Policy Institute webinar.

A company launched by an American expat is leasing billboards along Highway 101 in Silicon Valley to advertise Canada’s comparatively simpler immigration system as a means of recruiting tech workers to come there. “Canada’s secret weapon,” it calls that system, promising a process that approves 80 percent of applications within two weeks compared to as long as 18 and a half months for an employment authorization in the United States.

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In Australia, the government last year also announced an increase in the number of immigrants it would accept, to 195,000 — nearly three-quarters of them with workforce skills, Hallinan, the Home Affairs official, said.

Admitting immigrants with designated skills appears less politically controversial than immigration more broadly. Even in the U.K., where hostility to immigration helped fuel Brexit, surveys show that people largely support admitting immigrants with skills in areas in which there are labor shortages.

In those cases, “there’s not as much concern about competition in the labor market,” said Sumption. And among politicians, she said, “there was this desire to have a counterweight and say we’re not necessarily cracking down on everyone. We’re recruiting the brightest and the best. It sounds meritocratic. It sounds fair.”

In fact, giving preference to immigrants with skills isn’t necessarily either fair or meritocratic, according to its critics. Rights groups say people should be allowed to immigrate regardless of the educations they were able to afford. “There’s a lot of pushback around the words ‘skilled’ or ‘unskilled,’ ” Sumption said. “People feel it’s a judgment on a person’s worth.”

As in the United States, immigration policies in other countries are subject to political winds. There’s now worry among advocates in the U.K. that the record numbers of immigrants coming there will again prompt politicians to close the gates, including to those with needed skills. The net number of immigrants who arrived in the U.K. last year was a record more than 600,000, despite the Conservative government’s promise to reduce the annual flow to below 100,000.

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While research is only now getting started to track the people admitted to the U.K. through the global talent visa, “it seems to be the case that lots of these [immigrants] are working for decent corporations or setting up their own companies,” said Jonathan Kingham, an attorney based in London who specializes in business and personal immigration law at the legal-research provider LexisNexis.

That’s because, “if you allow people to naturally shine, they create great things,” said Sergei Nozdrenkov, a Russian software engineer who also moved to the U.K., where he is working with an Italian-born fellow immigrant to create technology that could help scientists and commercial interests measure marine biodiversity and predict algae outbreaks.

The U.S. “has more VC,” Nozdrenkov, who is 30 and resembles a young Elon Musk, said at a coffee shop outside London’s Liverpool Street rail station, using the acronym for venture capital. “But the immigration process is very hard. How do you get to the U.S. and build your startup? You can’t, unless you win the Nobel Prize.”

Notwithstanding recent layoffs at Meta, Amazon and other US. tech giants, deep shortages of workers continue in those fields, according to the labor market analytics firm Lightcast; there have been more than four million job postings in the last year in the United States for software developers, database administrators and computer user support specialists, it says, and the number of computer and IT jobs is projected to grow another 15 percent by 2031, with too few native-born workers to fill them.

As billions are being spent to beef up U.S. production of semiconductors, there’s a projected shortage in that industry alone of 70,000 to 90,000 workers, Deloitte reports. In the equally hot field of artificial intelligence, more than half of the workforce in the United States consists of immigrants, according to the Georgetown University Center for Security and Emerging Technology. Two-thirds of U.S. university graduate students in AI-related fields are foreign born.

“These visas [in other countries, for skilled workers] often aren’t catering to a huge number of people, but they do serve a function in terms of staking a claim in this contest for talent.”

Kate Hooper, policy analyst, Migration Policy Institute

“We are educating the best and brightest, and then we end up losing them to other countries,” said Cecilia Esterline, an immigration research analyst at the Niskanen Center.

“We don’t have the necessary talent within the U.S.” to do these jobs, Esterline said. “But we don’t have the visas required to onshore the people who can.” Now “other countries are jumping at the opportunity to take our graduates.”

One result is that international students appear to be reconsidering whether they want to come to the United States at all. That’s a threat not just to the broader economy, but to universities and their communities, which take in $45 billion a year from them, the U.S. Department of Commerce reports.

The number of international students in the United States has been flat or down since 2016, and international enrollment in the especially important subjects of science and engineering began to fall in 2018 after years of steady growth, according to the most recent figures from the National Science Foundation.

A survey by Interstride, which helps universities recruit international students, found significant concern among them about their ability to stay in the country once they graduate; fewer than half said the value of a U.S. higher education continued to justify the cost.

“Our ranking as the top destination for international students is in jeopardy,” said Esterline. Already, she said, “We’re not necessarily keeping up and we’re going to lose our edge when these other countries are coming up with new schemes that are very welcoming to immigrants.”

Nozdrenkov said he might have moved to the United States if the process had been easier. But like other immigrants with skills who have been welcomed to the U.K., he said England “feels like home now.” And he is planning to stay.

He paused, reconsidering for a moment.

“I might skip winters, though,” he said. “It’s too dark.”

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

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