ATLANTA — Science teacher Daniel Thompson circulated among his sixth graders at Ron Clark Academy on a recent spring morning, spot checking their work and leading them into discussions about the day’s lessons on weather and water. He had a helper: As Thompson paced around the class, peppering them with questions, he frequently turned to a voice-activated AI to summon apps and educational videos onto large-screen smartboards.

When a student asked, “Are there any animals that don’t need water?” Thompson put the question to the AI. Within seconds, an illustrated blurb about kangaroo rats appeared before the class.

Thompson’s voice-activated assistant is the brainchild of computer scientist Satya Nitta, who founded a company called Merlyn Mind after many years at IBM where he had tried, and failed, to create an AI tool that could teach students directly. The foundation of that earlier, ill-fated project was IBM Watson, the AI that famously crushed several “Jeopardy!” champions. Despite Watson’s gameshow success, however, it wasn’t much good at teaching students. After plowing five years and $100 million into the effort, the IBM team admitted defeat in 2017.

“We realized the technology wasn’t there,” said Nitta, “and it’s still not there.”

Since the November 2022 launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, an expanding cast of AI tutors and helpers have entered the learning landscape. Most of these tools are chatbots that tap large language models — or LLMs — trained on troves of data to understand student inquiries and respond conversationally with a range of flexible and targeted learning assistance. These bots can generate quizzes, summarize key points in a complex reading, offer step-by-step graphing of algebraic equations, or provide feedback on the first draft of an essay, among other tasks. Some tools are subject-specific, such as Writable and Photomath, while others offer more all-purpose tutoring, such as Socratic (created by Google) and Khanmigo, a collaboration of OpenAI and Khan Academy, a nonprofit provider of online lessons covering an array of academic subjects.

As AI tools proliferate and their capabilities keep improving, relatively few observers believe education can remain AI free. At the same time, even the staunchest techno optimists hesitate to say that teaching is best left to the bots. The debate is about the best mix — what are AI’s most effective roles in helping students learn, and what aspects of teaching should remain indelibly human no matter how powerful AI becomes?

Skepticism about AI’s place in the classroom often centers on students using the technology to cut corners or on AI’s tendency to hallucinate, i.e. make stuff up, in an eagerness to answer every query. The latter concern can be mitigated (albeit not eliminated) by programming bots to base responses on vetted curricular materials, among other steps. Less attention, however, is paid to an even thornier challenge for AI at the heart of effective teaching: engaging and motivating students.

Nitta said there’s something “deeply profound” about human communication that allows flesh-and-blood teachers to quickly spot and address things like confusion and flagging interest in real time.

He joins other experts in technology and education who believe AI’s best use is to augment and extend the reach of human teachers, a vision that takes different forms. For example, the goal of Merlyn Mind’s voice assistant is to make it easier for teachers to engage with students while also navigating apps and other digital teaching materials. Instead of      being stationed by the computer, they can move around the class and interact with students, even the ones hoping to disappear in the back.

Others in education are trying to achieve this vision by using AI to help train human tutors to have more productive student interactions, or by multiplying the number of students a human instructor can engage with by delegating specific tasks to AI that play to the technology’s strengths. Ultimately, these experts envision a partnership in which AI is not called on to be a teacher but to supercharge the power of humans already doing the job.

Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox.

Merlyn Mind’s AI assistant, Origin, was piloted by thousands of teachers nationwide this past school year, including Thompson and three other teachers at the Ron Clark Academy. The South Atlanta private school, where tuition is heavily subsidized for a majority low-income student body, is in a brick warehouse renovated to look like a low-slung Hogwarts, replete with an elaborate clocktower and a winged dragon perched above the main entrance.

As Thompson moved among his students, he wielded a slim remote control with a button-activated microphone he uses to command the AI software. At first, Thompson told the AI to start a three-minute timer that popped up on the smartboard, then he began asking rapid-fire review questions from a previous lesson, such as what causes wind. When students couldn’t remember the details, Thompson asked the AI to display an illustration of airflow caused by uneven heating of the Earth’s surface.

At one point, he clambered up on a student worktable while discussing the stratosphere, claiming (inaccurately) that it was the atmospheric layer where most weather happens, just to see if any students caught his mistake (several students reminded him that weather happens in the troposphere). Then he conjured a new timer and launched into a lesson on water by asking the AI assistant to find a short educational movie about fresh and saltwater ecosystems. As Thompson moved through the class, he occasionally paused the video and quizzed students about the new content.

Study after study has shown the importance of student engagement for academic success. A strong connection between teachers and students is especially important when learners feel challenged or discouraged, according to Nitta. While AI has many strengths, he said, “it’s not very good at motivating you to keep doing something you’re not very interested in doing.”

“The elephant in the room with all these chatbots is how long will anyone engage with them?” he said.

The answer for Watson was not long at all, Nitta recalled. In trial runs, some students just ignored Watson’s attempts to probe their understanding of a topic, and the engagement level of those who initially did respond to the bot dropped off precipitously. Despite all Watson’s knowledge and facility with natural language, students just weren’t interested in chatting with it.

Related: PROOF POINTS: AI essay grading is ‘already as good as an overburdened’ teacher, but researchers say it needs more work

At a spring 2023 TED talk shortly after launching Khanmigo, Sal Khan, founder and CEO of Khan Academy, pointed out that tutoring has provided some of the biggest jolts to student performance among studied education interventions. But, there aren’t enough human tutors available nor enough money to pay for them, especially in the wake of pandemic-induced learning loss.

Khan envisioned a world where AI tutors filled that gap. “We’re at the cusp of using AI for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen,” he declared. “And the way we’re going to do that is by giving every student on the planet an artificially intelligent but amazing personal tutor.”

One of Khanmigo’s architects, Khan Academy’s chief learning officer, Kristen DiCerbo, was the vice president of learning research and design for education publisher Pearson in 2016 when it partnered with IBM on the Watson tutor project.

“It was a different technology,” said DiCerbo, recalling the laborious task of scripting Watson’s responses to students.

Since Watson’s heyday, AI has become a lot more engaging. One of the breakthroughs of generative AI powered by LLMs is its ability to give unscripted, human-like responses to user prompts.

To spur engagement, Khanmigo doesn’t answer student questions directly, but starts with questions of its own, such as asking if the student has any ideas about how to find an answer. Then it guides them to a solution, step by step, with hints and encouragement (a positive tone is assured by its programmers). Another feature for stoking engagement allows students to ask the bot to assume the identity of historical or literary figures for chats about their life and times. Teachers, meanwhile, can tap the bot for help planning lessons and formulating assessments. 

Notwithstanding Khan’s expansive vision of “amazing” personal tutors for every student on the planet, DiCerbo assigns Khanmigo a more limited teaching role. When students are working independently on a skill or concept but get hung up or caught in a cognitive rut, she said, “we want to help students get unstuck.”

Some 100,000 students and teachers piloted Khanmigo this past academic year in schools nationwide, helping to flag any hallucinations the bot makes and providing tons of student-bot conversations for DiCerbo and her team to analyze.

“We look for things like summarizing, providing hints and encouraging,” she explained. “Does [Khanmigo] do the motivational things that human tutors do?”

The degree to which Khanmigo has closed AI’s engagement gap is not yet known. Khan Academy plans to release some summary data on student-bot interactions later this summer, according to DiCerbo. Plans for third-party researchers to assess the tutor’s impact on learning will take longer.

Nevertheless, many tutoring experts stress the importance of building a strong relationship between tutors and students to achieve significant learning boosts. “If a student is not motivated, or if they don’t see themselves as a math person, then they’re not going to have a deep conversation with an AI bot,” said Brent Milne, the vice president of product research and development at Saga Education, a nonprofit provider of in-person tutoring.

Since 2021, Saga has been a partner in the Personalized Learning Initiative (PLI), run by the University of Chicago’s Education Lab, to help scale high-dosage tutoring — generally defined as one-on-one or small group sessions for at least 30 minutes every day. The PLI team sees a big and growing role for AI in tutoring, one that augments but doesn’t replicate human efforts.

For instance, Saga has been experimenting with AI feedback to help tutors better engage and motivate students. Working with researchers from the University of Memphis and the University of Colorado, the Saga team fed transcripts of their math tutoring sessions into an AI model trained to recognize when the tutor was prompting students to explain their reasoning, refine their answers or initiate a deeper discussion. The AI analyzed how often each tutor took these steps.  

When Saga piloted this AI tool in 2023, the nonprofit provided the feedback to their tutor coaches, who worked with four to eight tutors each. Tracking some 2,300 tutoring sessions over several weeks, they found that tutors whose coaches used the AI feedback peppered their sessions with significantly more of these prompts to encourage student engagement.

While Saga is looking into having AI deliver some feedback directly to tutors, it’s doing so cautiously, because, according to Milne, “having a human coach in the loop is really valuable to us.”

Related: How AI could transform the way schools test kids

In addition to using AI to help train tutors, the Saga team wondered if they could offload certain tutor tasks to a machine without compromising the strong relationship between tutors and students. Specifically, they understood that tutoring sessions were typically a mix of teaching concepts and practicing them, according to Milne. A tutor might spend some time explaining the why and how of factoring algebraic equations, for example, and then guide a student through practice problems. But what if the tutor could delegate the latter task to AI, which excels at providing precisely targeted adaptive practice problems and hints?

The Saga team tested the idea in their algebra tutoring sessions during the 2023-24 school year. They found that students who were tutored daily in a group of two had about the same gains in math scores as students who were tutored in a group of four with assistance from ALEKS, an AI-powered learning software by McGraw Hill. In the group of four, two students worked directly with the tutor and two with the AI, switching each day. In other words, the AI assistance effectively doubled the reach of the tutor.

Experts expect that AI’s role in education is bound to grow, and its interactions will continue to seem more and more human. Earlier this year, OpenAI and the startup Hume AI separately launched “emotionally intelligent” AI that analyzes tone of voice and facial expressions to infer a user’s mood and respond with calibrated “empathy.” Nevertheless, even emotionally intelligent AI will likely fall short on the student engagement front, according to Brown University computer science professor Michael Littman, who is also the National Science Foundation’s division director for information and intelligent systems.

No matter how human-like the conversation, he said, students understand at a fundamental level that AI doesn’t really care about them, what they have to say in their writing or whether they pass or fail algebra. In turn, students will never really care about the bot and what it thinks. A June study in the journal “Learning and Instruction” found that AI can already provide decent feedback on student essays. What is not clear is whether student writers will put in care and effort — rather than offloading the task to a bot — if AI becomes the primary audience for their work. 

“There’s incredible value in the human relationship component of learning,” Littman said, “and when you just take humans out of the equation, something is lost.”

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

The post What aspects of teaching should remain human? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Deciding what to disclose in a personal essay for college applications has plagued students since, perhaps, the essay first became required. How should they present themselves? What do they think colleges need to know about them? Should they try to fit their whole life story onto a page and a half? Should they focus on the worst thing that’s ever happened to them, or their greatest success? 

In the first year after the Supreme Court banned the consideration of race in college admissions, how students chose to present themselves in their essay became of even greater consequence. In years past, students could write about their racial or ethnic identity if they wanted to, but colleges would know it either way and could use it as a factor in admissions. Now, it’s entirely up to students to disclose their identity or not.

Data from the Common App shows that in this admissions cycle about 12 percent of students from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups used at least one of 38 identity-related phrases in their essays, a decrease of roughly one percent from the previous year. About 20 percent of American Indian and Alaskan Native applicants used one of these phrases; 15 percent of Asian students; 14 percent of Black students; 11 percent of Latinx students and less than 3 percent of white students. 

To better understand how students were making this decision and introducing themselves to colleges, The Hechinger Report asked newly accepted students from across the country to share their college application essays with us. We read more than 50 essays and talked to many students about their writing process, who gave them advice, and how they think their choices ultimately influenced their admissions outcomes.

Here are thoughts from eight of those students, with excerpts from their essays and, if they permitted, a link to the full essay.

Jaleel Gomes Cardoso, Boston

A risky decision

As Jaleel Gomes Cardoso sat looking at the essay prompt for Yale University, he wasn’t sure how honest he should be.  “Reflect on your membership in a community to which you feel connected,” it read. “Why is this community meaningful to you?” He wanted to write about being part of the Black community – it was the obvious choice – but the Supreme Court’s decision to ban the consideration of a student’s race in admissions gave him pause.

“Ever since the decision about affirmative action, it kind of worried me about talking about race,” said Cardoso, who grew up in Boston. “That entire topic felt like a risky decision.” 

In the past, he had always felt that taking a risk produced some of his best writing, but he thought that an entire essay about being Black might be going too far.

“The risk was just so heavy on the topic of race when the Court’s decision was to not take race into account,” he said. “It was as if I was disregarding that decision. It felt very controversial, just to make it so out in the open.”

In the end, he did write an essay that put his racial identity front and center. He wasn’t accepted to Yale, but he has no regrets about his choice.

“If you’re not going to see what my race is in my application, then I’m definitely putting it in my writing,” said Cardoso, who graduated from Boston Collegiate Charter School and will attend Dartmouth College this fall, “because you have to know that this is the person who I am.”   

 – Meredith Kolodner

Excerpt:

I was thrust into a narrative of indifference and insignificance from the moment I entered this world. I was labeled as black, which placed me in the margins of society. It seemed that my destiny had been predetermined; to be part of a minority group constantly oppressed under the weight of a social construct called race. Blackness became my life, an identity I initially battled against. I knew others viewed it as a flaw that tainted their perception of me. As I matured, I realized that being different was not easy, but it was what I loved most about myself.

READ ENTIRE ESSAY

Klaryssa Cobian, Los Angeles 

A semi-nomadic mattress life

Klaryssa Cobian is Latina – a first-generation Mexican American – and so was nearly everyone else in the Southeast Los Angeles community where she grew up. Because that world was so homogenous, she really didn’t notice her race until she was a teenager.

Then she earned a scholarship to a prestigious private high school in Pasadena. For the first time, she was meaningfully interacting with people of other races and ethnicities, but she felt the greatest gulf between her and her peers came from her socioeconomic status, not the color of her skin. 

Although Cobian has generally tried to keep her home life private, she felt that colleges needed to understand the way her family’s severe economic disadvantages had affected her. She wrote about how she’d long been “desperate to feel at home.”

She was 16 years old before she had a mattress of her own. Her essay cataloged all the places she lay her head before that. She wrote about her first bed, a queen-sized mattress shared with her parents and younger sister. She wrote about sleeping in the backseat of her mother’s red Mustang, before they lost the car. She wrote about moving into her grandparents’ home and sharing a mattress on the floor with her sister, in the same room as two uncles. She wrote about the great independence she felt when she “moved out” into the living room and onto the couch. 

“Which mattress I sleep on has defined my life, my independence, my dependence,” Cobian wrote.

She’d initially considered writing about the ways she felt she’d had to sacrifice her Latino culture and identity to pursue her education, but said she hesitated after the Supreme Court ruled on the use of affirmative action in admissions. Ultimately, she decided that her experience of poverty was more pertinent. 

“If I’m in a room of people, it’s like, I can talk to other Latinos, and I can talk to other brown people, but that does not mean I’m going to connect with them. Because, I learned, brown people can be rich,” Cobian said.  She’s headed to the University of California, Berkeley, in the fall.

– Olivia Sanchez

Excerpt: 

With the only income, my mom automatically assumed custody of me and my younger sister, Alyssa. With no mattress and no home, the backseat of my mom’s red mustang became my new mattress. Bob Marley blasted from her red convertible as we sang out “could you be loved” every day on our ride back from elementary school. Eventually, we lost the mustang too and would take the bus home from Downtown Los Angeles, still singing “could you be loved” to each other.

READ ENTIRE ESSAY

Oluwademilade Egunjobi, Providence, Rhode Island

The perfect introduction

Oluwademilade Egunjobi worked on her college essay from June until November. Not every single day, and not on only one version, but for five months she was writing and editing and asking anyone who would listen for advice.

She considered submitting essays about the value of sex education, or the philosophical theory of solipsism (in which the only thing that is guaranteed to exist is your own mind). 

But most of the advice she got was to write about her identity. So, to introduce herself to colleges, Oluwademilade Egunjobi wrote about her name.

Egunjobi is the daughter of Nigerian immigrants who, she wrote, chose her first name because it means she’s been crowned by God. In naming her, she said, her parents prioritized pride in their heritage over ease of pronunciation for people outside their culture. 

And although Egunjobi loves that she will always be connected to her culture, this choice has put her in a lifelong loop of exasperating introductions and questions from non-Nigerians about her name. 

The loop often ends when the person asks if they can call her by her nickname, Demi. “I smile through my irritation and say I prefer it anyways, and then the situation repeats time and time again,” Egunjobi wrote. 

She was nervous when she learned about the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision, wondering what it might mean for where she would get into college. Her teachers and college advisors from a program called Matriculate told her she didn’t have to write a sob story, but that she should write about her identity, how it affects the way she moves through the world and the resilience it’s taught her. 

She heeded their advice, and it worked out. In the fall, she will enter the University of Pennsylvania to study philosophy, politics and economics. 

– Olivia Sanchez

Excerpt:

I don’t think I’ve ever had to fight so hard to love something as hard as I’ve fought to love my name. I’m grateful for it because it’ll never allow me to reject my culture and my identity, but I get frustrated by this daily performance. I’ve learned that this performance is an inescapable fate, but the best way to deal with fate is to show up with joy. I am Nigerian, but specifically from the ethnic group, Yoruba. In Yoruba culture, most names are manifestations. Oluwademilade means God has crowned me, and my middle name is Favor, so my parents have manifested that I’ll be favored above others and have good success in life. No matter where I go, people familiar with the language will recognize my name and understand its meaning. I love that I’ll always carry a piece of my culture with me.

Francisco Garcia, Fort Worth, Texas 

Accepted to college and by his community

In the opening paragraph of his college application essay, Francisco Garcia quotes his mother, speaking to him in Spanish, expressing disappointment that her son was failing to live up to her Catholic ideals. It was her reaction to Garcia revealing his bisexuality. 

Garcia, 18, said those nine Spanish words were “the most intentional thing I did to share my background” with colleges. The rest of his essay delves into how his Catholic upbringing, at least for a time, squelched his ability to be honest with friends about his sexual identity, and how his relationship with the church changed. He said he had strived, however, to avoid coming across as pessimistic or sad, aiming instead to share “what I’ve been through [and] how I’ve become a better person because of it.” 

He worked on his essay throughout July, August and September, with guidance from college officials he met during campus visits and from an adviser he was paired with by Matriculate, which works with students who are high achievers from low-income families. Be very personal, they told Garcia, but within limits. 

“I am fortunate to have support from all my friends, who encourage me to explore complexities within myself,” he wrote. “My friends give me what my mother denied me: acceptance.”

He was accepted by Dartmouth, one of the eight schools to which he applied, after graduating from Saginaw High School near Fort Worth, Texas, this spring.

– Nirvi Shah

Excerpt: 

By the time I got to high school, I had made new friends who I felt safe around. While I felt I was more authentic with them, I was still unsure whether they would judge me for who I liked. It became increasingly difficult for me to keep hiding this part of myself, so I vented to both my mom and my closest friend, Yoana … When I confessed that I was bisexual to Yoana, they were shocked, and I almost lost hope. However, after the initial shock, they texted back, “I’m really chill with this. Nothing has changed Francisco:)”. The smiley face, even if it took 2 characters, was enough to bring me to tears. 

READ ENTIRE ESSAY

Hafsa Sheikh, Pearland, Texas 

Family focus above all 

Hafsa Sheikh felt her applications would be incomplete without the important context of her home life:  She became a primary financial contributor to her household when she was just 15, because her father, once the family’s sole breadwinner, could not work due to his major depressive disorder. Her work in a pizza parlor on the weekends and as a tutor after school helped pay the bills. 

She found it challenging to open up this way, but felt she needed to tell colleges that, although working two jobs throughout high school made her feel like crying from exhaustion every night, she would do anything for her family.

“It’s definitely not easy sharing some of the things that you’ve been through with, like really a stranger,” she said, “because you don’t know who’s reading it.”

And especially after the Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action, Sheikh felt she needed to write about her cultural identity. It’s a core part of who she is, but it’s also a major part of why her father’s mental illness affected her life so profoundly. 

Sheikh, the daughter of Pakistani immigrants, said her family became isolated because of the negative stigma surrounding mental health in their South Asian culture. She said they became the point of gossip in the community and even among extended family members, and they were excluded from many social gatherings. This was happening as she was watching the typical high school experiences pass her by, she wrote. Because of the long hours she had to work, she had to forgo the opportunity to try out for the girls’ basketball team and debate club, and often couldn’t justify cutting back her hours to spend time with her friends. 

She wrote that reflecting on one of her favorite passages in the Holy Quran gave her hope:

“One of my favorite ayahs, ‘verily, with every hardship comes ease,’ serves as a timeless reminder that adversity is not the end; rather, there is always light on the other side,” Sheikh wrote.

Her perseverance paid off, with admission to Princeton University.

– Olivia Sanchez

Excerpt: 

Besides the financial responsibility on my mother and I, we had to deal with the stigma surrounding mental health in South Asian culture and the importance of upholding traditional gender roles. My family became a point of great gossip within the local Pakistani community and even extended family.  Slowly, the invitations to social gatherings diminished, and I bailed on plans with friends because I couldn’t afford to miss even a single hour of earnings.

Manal Akil, Dundalk, Maryland

Life lessons from cooking

Manal Akil explores the world’s cultures without leaving her family’s kitchen in Dundalk, Maryland. 

“I believe the smartest people in all of history were those who invented dishes. The first person who decided to throw tomato and cheese on dough, the first person who decided to roll fish with rice in seaweed,” Akil wrote. “These people experimented with what they had and changed the world.” 

For Akil, cooking is about much more than preparing a meal. It’s about knowing when you have to meticulously follow directions and when you can be creative and experimental. It’s about realizing when you make a mistake, and being mentally flexible enough to salvage your ingredients with a positive attitude. And it’s about marveling at the similarities and differences of humanity across cultures. 

Akil’s parents are from Morocco, but she chose not to mention her cultural identity in her essay. Because she didn’t choose where she came from, she feels it doesn’t reveal much about who she is. In supplemental essays, Akil said she did write about her experience growing up with immigrant parents. In those essays, she wrote about how she understands her parents’ native language, but can’t speak it, and how she had to become independent as a young child. 

But the life lessons Akil has gained through cooking are so important to her that she chose to focus on them in her primary essay instead of sharing a personal narrative. When comparing essay ideas and drafts with her classmates, she realized that most of them were writing much more directly about their identities and experiences. 

She felt her nontraditional approach to personal essay writing was risky, but it worked. She was admitted to eight colleges, and in the fall she’ll enter Georgetown University. 

“​​I have never, nor will ever, regret any time spent making food; all my work in the kitchen has paid off,” Akil wrote. “I enter with ambition and leave with insight on myself and the world. Each plate served, each bite taken, and each ‘Mmmh’ has contributed to my growth.”

– Olivia Sanchez

Excerpt: 

In the comfort of my own home, I have been to many countries from all around the world. Throughout this world travel, I have picked up on different quirks unique to each region, while simultaneously connecting the dots between the world. South Asia with its warm taste profile, East Asia with its wholesome flavors, and North Africa with its savory delights. Thousands of miles apart and all so distinct in regard to culture, yet sharing similar foods, just under different names: Paratha, Diao Lu Bing, and Msemen — all flaky pancakes. I love discovering such culinary parallels that make me say, “This reminds me of that!” or “That reminds me of this!” These nuances serve as a powerful reminder that regardless of our varied backgrounds, we as humans are one because at the end of the day, food is the heart of every civilization. 

READ ENTIRE ESSAY

David Arturo Munoz-Matta, McAllen, Texas

If I’m honest, will an elite college want me?

It was Nov. 30 and David Arturo Munoz-Matta had eight college essays due the next day. He had spent the prior weeks slammed with homework while also grieving the loss of his uncle who had just died. He knew the essays were going to require all the mental energy he could muster – not to mention whatever hours were left in the day. But he got home from school to discover he had no electricity. 

“I was like, ‘What am I gonna do?’” said Munoz-Matta, who graduated from Lamar Academy in McAllen, Texas. “I was panicking for a while, and my mom was like, ‘You know what? I’m just gonna drop you off at Starbucks and then just call me when you finish with all your essays.’ And so I was there at Starbucks from 4 until 12 in the morning.” 

The personal statement he agonized over most was the one he submitted to Georgetown University. 

“I don’t want to be mean or anything, but I feel like a lot of these institutions are very elitist, and that my story might not resonate with the admissions officers,” Munoz-Matta said. “It was a very big risk, especially when I said I was born in Mexico, when I said I grew up in an abusive environment. I believed at the time that would not be good for universities, that they might feel like, ‘I don’t want this kid, he won’t be a good fit with the student body.’”

He didn’t have an adult to help him with his essay, but another student encouraged him to be honest. It worked. He got into his dream school, Georgetown University, with a full ride. Many of his peers were not as fortunate. 

“I know because of the affirmative action decision, a lot of my friends did not even apply to these universities, like the Ivies, because they felt like they were not going to get in,” he said. “That was a very big sentiment in my school.”    

– Meredith Kolodner

Excerpt:

While many others in my grade level had lawyers and doctors for parents and came from exemplary middle schools at the top of their classes, I was the opposite. I came into Lamar without middle school recognition, recalling my 8th-grade science teacher’s claim that I would never make it. At Lamar, freshman year was a significant challenge as I constantly struggled, feeling like I had reached my wit’s end. By the middle of Freshman year, I was the only kid left from my middle school, since everyone else had dropped out. Rather than following suit, I kept going. I felt like I had something to prove to myself because I knew I could make it.

READ ENTIRE ESSAY

Kendall Martin, Austin, Texas

Between straight hair and a hard place

Kendall Martin wanted to be clear with college admissions officers about one thing: She is a young Black woman, and her race is central to who she is. Martin, 18, was ranked 15th in her graduating class from KIPP Austin Collegiate. She was a key figure on her high school basketball team. She wanted colleges to know she had overcome adversity. But most importantly, Martin said, she wanted to be sure, when her application was reviewed, “Y’all know who you are accepting.”

It wouldn’t be as simple as checking a box, though, which led Martin, of Kyle, Texas, to the topic she chose for her college admissions essay, the year after the Supreme Court said race could not be a factor in college admissions. Instead, she looked at the hair framing her face, hair still scarred from being straightened time and again. 

Martin wrote about the struggles she faced growing up with hair that she says required extensive time to tame so she could simply run her fingers through it. Now headed to Rice University in Houston – her first choice from a half-dozen options – she included a photo of her braids as part of her application. Her essay described her journey from hating her hair to embracing it, from heat damage to learning to braid, from frustration to love, a feeling she now hopes to inspire in her sister.  

“That’s what I wanted to get across: my growing up, my experiences, everything that made me who I am.” 

– Nirvi Shah

Excerpt

I’m still recovering from the heat damage I caused by straightening my hair every day, because I was so determined to prove that I had length. When I was younger, a lot of my self worth was based on how long my hair was, so when kids made fun of my “short hair”, I despised my curls more and more. I begged my mom to let me get a relaxer, but she continued to deny my wish. This would make me so angry, because who was she to tell me what I could and couldn’t do with my hair? But looking back, I’m so glad she never let me. I see now that a relaxer wasn’t the key to making me prettier, and my love for my curls has reached an all-time high. 

READ ENTIRE ESSAY

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

The post How did students pitch themselves to colleges after last year’s affirmative action ruling? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

ALBANY, Ore. – It’s 7:15 on a cold gray Monday morning in May at Linn-Benton Community College in northwestern Oregon. Math professor Michael Lopez, in a hoodie and jeans, a tape measure on his belt, paces in front of the 14 students in his “math for welders” class. “I’m your OSHA inspector,” he says. “Three sixteenths of an inch difference, you’re in violation. You’re going to get a fine.”

He’s just given them a project they might have to do on the job: figure out the rung spacing on an external steel ladder that attaches to a wall. Thousands of dollars are at stake in such builds, and they’re complicated: Some clients want the fewest possible rungs to save money, others a specific distance between steps. To pass inspection, rungs must be evenly spaced to within one sixteenth of an inch, the top rung exactly flush with the top of the wall.

The exercise could be an algebra problem, but Lopez gives them a six-step algorithm that doesn’t use algebraic letters and symbols. Instead, they get real-world industry variables: tolerances, basic rung spacing, wall height.

Lopez breaks the class into five teams. Each team is assigned different wall heights and client specs, and they get to work calculating where to place the rungs. Lopez will inspect each team’s work and pass or fail the job.

Math is a giant hurdle for most community college students pursuing welding and other career and technical degrees. About a dozen years ago, Linn-Benton’s administration looked at their data and found that many students in career and technical education, or CTE, were getting most of the way toward a degree but were stopped by a math course, said the college’s president, Lisa Avery. That’s not unusual: Up to 60 percent of students entering community college are unprepared for college-level work, and the subject they most often need help with is math.

The college asked the math department to design courses tailored to those students, starting with its welding, culinary arts and criminal justice programs. The first of those, math for welders, rolled out in 2013.

More than a decade later, welding department instructors say that math for welders has had a huge impact on student performance. Since 2017, 93 percent of students taking it have passed, and 83 percent have achieved all the course’s learning goals, including the ability to use arithmetic, geometry, algebra and trigonometry to solve welding problems, school data show. Two years ago, Linn-Benton asked Lopez to design a similar course for its automotive technology program; they began to offer that course last fall.

Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter

Math for welders changed student Zane Azmane’s view of what he could do. “I absolutely hated math in high school. It didn’t apply to anything I needed at the moment,” said Azmane, 20, who failed several semesters of math early in high school but last year got a B in the Linn-Benton course. “We actually learned equations I’m going to use, like setting ladder rungs,” he said.

Linn-Benton’s aim is to change how students pursuing technical degrees learn math by making it directly applicable to their technical specialties.

Some researchers think these small-scale efforts to teach math in context could transform how it’s taught more broadly.

Among strategies to help college students who struggle with math, giving them contextual curriculums seems to have “the strongest theoretical base and perhaps the strongest empirical support,” according to a 2011 paper by Columbia University Teachers College professor emerita Dolores Perin. (The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College.)

Perin’s paper echoed the results of a 2006 study of math in CTE involving 131 CTE high school teachers and almost 3,000 students. Students in the study who were taught math through an applied approach performed significantly better on two of three standardized tests than those taught math in a more traditional way. (The applied math students also performed better on the third test, though the results didn’t reach the statistical significance threshold.)

So far, there haven’t been systematic studies of math in CTE at the college level, said James Stone, director of the National Research Center for Career and Technical Education at the Southern Regional Education Board, who ran the 2006 study.

Stone explained how math in context works. Students start with a practical problem and learn a math principle for solving it. Next, they use the principle to solve a similar practical problem, to see that it applies generally. Finally, they apply the principle on paper, in say, a standardized test.

“I like to say math is just like a wrench: It’s another tool in the toolbox to solve a workplace problem,” said Stone. “People learn almost anything better in context because then it has meaning.”

Linn-Benton dean Steve Schilling offers an example. Carpenters use a well-known 3-4-5 rule to get a square corner — lay out two boards at a square angle and mark one board at 3 feet and the other at 4 feet. Now a straight line joining the two marks should measure exactly 5 feet—if it doesn’t, the boards are out of square.

The rule is based on the Pythagorean theorem, a method for calculating the lengths of a right triangle’s sides: a² + b² = c². When explaining to students why the theorem describes the rule, the instructor uses math terms — “adjacent side,” “opposite side,” “hypotenuse” — that they’ll need to use on a math test, said Schilling. When using practical skills like the 3-4-5 rule on a project, “at first, they don’t even realize they’re doing math,” he said.

Related: Federal relief money boosted community colleges, but now it’s going away

Oregon appears to be one of the few places where this approach is spreading, if slowly.

Three hours south of Linn-Benton, Doug Gardner, an instructor in the Rogue Community College math department, had long struggled with a persistent question from students: “Why do we need to know this?” The answer couldn’t just be that they needed it for their next, higher-level math class, said Gardner, now the department’s chair. “It became my life’s work to have an answer to that question.”

Meanwhile, Algebra I was a huge barrier for many Rogue students. About a third of those taking the course or a lower-level math course failed or withdrew. That meant they had to retake the class and likely stay another term to graduate; since many were older students with families and obligations, hundreds dropped out, school administrators said.

For those who stayed, lack of math knowledge hurt their job skills. Pipe fitters, for example, are among the higher-paid welders, said welding department chair Todd Giesbrecht, but they need a solid understanding of the math involved. “Whether they’re making elbows, whether they’re making dump truck bodies, they’re installing steam pipe, all of those things involve math,” he said.

So, in 2010, Gardner applied for and got a National Science Foundation grant to create two new applied algebra courses. Instead of abstract formulas, students would learn practical ones: how to calculate the volume of a wheelbarrow of gravel and the number of wheelbarrows needed to cover an area, or how much a beam of a certain size and type will bend under a certain load.

Since then, the pass rate in the applied algebra class has averaged 73 percent while that of the traditional course has continued to hover around 59 percent, according to Gardner. Even modest gains like that are hard to achieve, said Navarro Chandler, a dean at the college. “Any move over 2 percent, we call that a win,” he said.

One day in May, math professor Kathleen Foster was teaching applied algebra in a sun-drenched classroom on Rogue’s wooded campus and launched into a lesson about the Pythagorean theorem and why it’s an essential tool for building home interiors and steel structures.

She presented the formula, then jumped to illustrated exercises: What’s the right length for diagonal braces in a lookout tower to ensure that the structure will hold? What length does the diagonal top plate for a stair wall need to be to ensure that the wall’s corners are perfectly square?

James Butler-Kyniston, 30, who is pursuing a degree as a machinist, said that the exercises covered in Foster’s class are directly applicable to his future career. One exercise had them calculate how large a metal sheet you would need to manufacture a certain number of parts at one time, a skill he’s used in the lab. “Algebraic formulas apply to a lot of things, but since you don’t have any examples to tie them to, you end up thinking they’re useless,” he said.

Related: Proof Points: Shop class sometimes boosts college going, Massachusetts study finds

Unlike at Linn-Benton, students at Rogue in any degree field can take this course, so some of the applied examples don’t work for everyone. Butler-Kyniston said he thinks applied math works better if it’s tailored to a specific set of majors.

Still, Foster’s class could rescue the college plans of at least one student. Kayla LeMaster, 41, is on her second try at a two-year degree. She had to drop out in 2012 after getting injured in a house fire. She’s going for a degree that will let her transfer to the University of Oregon to major in psychology; she hopes to eventually work as a school counselor or in some other job supporting kids.

But her graduation from Rogue hangs by a thread because she needs a math credit. She struggled in the traditional algebra class and had to withdraw, and the same happened in a statistics course. Applied algebra is her last chance. “When you add the alphabet to math, it doesn’t make sense,” she said. By contrast, in the examples in Foster’s class, “you get into that work mode, a job site somewhere, and you can see the problem in your head.” She got an A on her first test. “I’m getting it,” she said.

Gardner worries about the consequences of the traditional abstract approach to teaching math. When he was in college, “nobody ever showed me one formula that calculated anything really interesting,” he said. “I just think we’re doing a terrible job. Applied math is so fun.”

Oregon’s leaders appear to see merit in teaching math in context. In 2021, state legislators passed a law requiring all four-year colleges to accept an applied math community-college course called Math in Society as satisfying the math requirement for a four-year degree. In that course, instead of studying theoretical algebra, students learn how to use probability and statistics to interpret the results in scientific papers and how political rules like apportionment and gerrymandering affect elections, said Kathy Smith, a math professor at Central Oregon Community College.

“If I had my way, this is how algebra would be taught to every student, the applied version,” said Gardner. “And then if a student says, ‘This is great, but I want to go further,’ then you sign up for the theoretical version.”

At the level of individual schools, lack of money and time constrain the spread of applied math. Stone’s team works with high schools around the country to design contextual math courses for career and technical students. They tried to work with a few community colleges, but their CTE faculty, many of whom are part-timers on contract, didn’t have time to partner with their math departments to come up with a new curriculum, a yearlong process, Stone said.

Linn-Benton was able to invest the time and money because its math department was big enough to take on the task, said Avery. And both Linn-Benton and Rogue may be outliers because they have math faculty with technical backgrounds: Lopez worked as a carpenter and sheriff’s deputy and served three tours as a machine gunner in Iraq, and Gardner was a construction contractor who still designs houses. “I have up to 16 house plans in the works during construction season,” he said.

Back in Lopez’s class, on a sunny Wednesday, students are done calculating where their ladder rungs should go and now must mark them on the wall. One team struggles. “I don’t understand any of this,” says Keith Perkins, 40, who’s going for a welding degree and wants to get into the local pipe fitters union.

“I know, but you’re not doing the steps in the right order,” says Lopez. “Walk me through it. Tell me what you did, starting with step 1.”

As teams finish up, Lopez inspects their work. “That’s one thirty-second shy. But I wouldn’t worry too much about it,” he tells one group. “OSHA’s not going to knock you down for that.”

Three teams pass, two fail — but this is the place to make mistakes, not out on the job, Lopez tells them.

“This stuff is hard,” said Perkins. “I hated math in school. Still hate it. But we use it every day.”

This story about math in CTE 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. Listen to our higher education podcast.

The post Math ends the education careers of thousands of community college students. A few schools are trying something new appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

DECATUR, Ark. — When Ashlyn Siebert started looking last year for teaching jobs near Decatur — her rural hometown — she knew she wouldn’t make as much as a first-year teacher would 16 miles away in Bentonville, home to Walmart’s headquarters.

The story was the same in dozens of other small towns across Arkansas. If teachers wanted to earn more, they had to move to a bigger school district. In Decatur, teachers with a bachelor’s degree made a starting salary of $36,000. Even if they taught in schools for 25 years, they would still earn less than teachers right out of college in Bentonville, who were making $48,755 a year.

But Siebert’s timing was good. In the span of 15 days in early 2023, the state legislature passed a massive education bill, which went into effect that fall. When Siebert ultimately signed a contract to teach in Decatur for the 2023-24 school year, the starting salary had jumped to $50,000. It’s been a huge help at a time when the cost of living has swelled, Siebert said.

“I think it’s a good way to draw people into the profession, especially if it’s something they already knew they wanted to do but were held back by the salary,” she said.

But the new law has had a mixed reception.

School leaders said the pay jump has made it much easier to attract teachers to small rural school districts like Decatur, where salaries had not kept up with inflation. However,  the law — called the LEARNS Act —  also got rid of mandated annual raises. And it’s caused tension among veteran teachers, many of whom had to work for two decades to come close to making $50,000 annually. Because of the new law, in more than half of the state’s school districts, every teacher made the same salary this year, regardless of years of experience.

It is the largest state investment in teacher salaries in Arkansas history, a big deal in a state that ranked 48th in the country for starting pay up until this year. The law in Arkansas is one of nearly two dozen similar measures in states around the country that have been proposed or passed in the last few years. Most, like the Arkansas law, aim to address staffing shortages. Just north of Arkansas, Missouri passed its own version of the LEARNS Act this year. The state boosted teacher pay to $40,000 among other, more controversial provisions, including an expansion of its voucher program.

Decatur sits in the northwest corner of Arkansas, surrounded by farmland and in the heart of poultry country. Outside of the school system, most people in Decatur work either in the chicken processing plant a few minutes out of town or they raise chickens to sell to the plant, Siebert said. About 80 percent of the nearly 600 students in the school district qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a federal measure of poverty.

Decatur is near some of the state’s biggest school districts: Springdale, Fayetteville and Bentonville. A year ago, schools in those cities could afford to pay a first-year teacher between $48,000 and $50,282, depending on the district.

Because of that pay gap, between 30 and 40 percent of teachers in Decatur were leaving each year, Decatur School District Superintendent Steven Watkins said.

“We would hire new teachers out of college and keep them three years, until they weren’t novice anymore, and then the bigger schools would hire them,” Watkins said. “There was a huge discrepancy in the money.”

Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox. 

This year, teacher turnover in the district dropped to about 10 percent. Watkins credits the salary increase and the district’s decision to move to a four-day school week next year. “I can say out of the ones we’ve lost this year, none of them have been because of the money,” Watkins said.

Since the passage of the LEARNS Act, the district’s applicant pool has been larger and of higher quality, Watkins said. A high school teaching position in Decatur that would have received one or two applicants in the past had more than a dozen this year. The same was true in similar districts. Guy-Perkins, a small school district in central Arkansas with just over 300 students, typically saw three to four applicants depending on the position. This year, the district received 15 applications for a single teaching position at the elementary school.

It’s still too soon to say how much the law will impact future teacher recruitment and retention, according to researchers at the University of Arkansas. A study of teachers entering and exiting schools just before the 2023-24 school year showed modest improvements, at best, but that could be because the law passed in March, when many teachers had likely already made up their mind about the next school year. Because of legal challenges to the LEARNS Act that have since been dismissed, there was also a degree of uncertainty about whether it would actually be implemented, the researchers said. An important litmus test will be the law’s impact on teachers with several years of experience, which research has shown is correlated with classroom effectiveness.

“We cannot say conclusively,” said Gema Zamarro, a professor at the university who co-authored the study. “We have to wait and see.”

But there have already been some unexpected consequences to the new law. While the pay boost may have helped the front-end of the teacher pipeline in small rural schools, the effect on veteran teachers at the top end of salary schedules was less pronounced. The law guaranteed that educators who made close to or more than $50,000 could receive a $2,000 one-time salary increase. That meant in 55 percent of the state’s school districts this year, there was no reward for years of experience or, in many of those districts, advanced degrees. Educators with two decades in the classroom are earning the same salary as their peers who just graduated college. Before the law, teachers made less money but were guaranteed a raise of a few hundred dollars a year for at least 15 years, and teachers with advanced degrees had a higher pay scale.

Related: When schools experimented with pay hikes for teachers in hard-to-staff areas, the results were surprising

“It’s a little frustrating when the guy next door to you has a year and he’s making the same amount as you are,” said Decatur teacher Rebecca McElhannon, who has a master’s degree and 17 years of experience. “Any recognition that we need more pay is amazing, but it could have been more fair.”

A single mother with a teenager, McElhannon occasionally drives for DoorDash and picks up shifts doing concessions at the Fayetteville ballparks to make a little extra money. But she did see some benefits from the law. After the raise, her salary went from a little more than $48,000 to just over $50,000 this year — a pay boost that would have taken her four years to get on the previous salary model.

In Mayflower, a small school district of just under 1,000 students between Little Rock and Conway, kindergarten teacher Kristin Allbritton and third grade teacher Karen Wilson know their years of experience have made them better teachers. The legislation sent them a different message.

“I know I’m valued here,” said Allbritton, who has taught in Mayflower for 15 years. “But feeling, as a professional, valued from this legislation? Yeah, no.”

According to the district’s current salary schedule, both Allbritton and Wilson will continue to make $50,000 until they retire.

“No one has ever become a teacher to gain financially,” said Wilson, who has taught in Mayflower for 19 years, “but at the same time, financial gain is why you work, period. Right? It’s why you work. We can’t put teachers in a box and say, ‘Well, you don’t do it for the money.’ You still have to earn money; you still have to live. It’s hard to watch when teachers are trying to balance all of those feelings and make decisions for what’s best for them.”

From a strategy perspective, it makes sense for a state to focus on improving pay for early career teachers, said Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research.

“The attrition rate for first-year teachers in some districts can be 20 or 30 percent, and the attrition rate for somebody who has been teaching for 10 or 15 years is going to be very low — more like 3 or 4 percent,” Goldhaber said. “So, if you’re trying to change salaries to affect teacher attrition, you’re working off a much larger number at the beginning of a career.”

To try and offer some level of raises above $50,000, some small schools have added tiny increases to their budgets. Guy-Perkins approved a $150 annual raise for its teachers every year for up to 16 years. In Mayflower, a teacher with a bachelor’s degree and 15 graduate credit hours could increase their salary by $500 in their 22nd year of teaching.

Because the LEARNS Act funding is only guaranteed for the next two years and only pays for the current teacher workforce, leaders in smaller school districts are cautious about adding annual raises to their own budgets. According to a University of Arkansas survey, most school leaders said they were somewhat or very likely to increase pay by a flat percent in the next few years. But uncertainty over state funding was the top reason superintendents gave for why their district might not change salaries.

Related: Arkansas schools hire untrained teachers as people lose interest in the profession

The LEARNS Act does include a merit-based bonus for “effective” teachers at the end of the school year, but the rules have yet to be finalized on what “effective” looks like or exactly how much teachers will get. And district leaders have concerns about that, too, fearing that providing meaningful evaluations for every teacher each year will be too time-consuming, according to the Arkansas Times.

Some districts, like Mayflower, include small steps after several years for teachers with advanced degrees, but others don’t. The law is likely to impact graduate teaching programs throughout the state, said April Reisma, president of the Arkansas Education Association. “If you’re not going to get rewarded for going to get advanced degrees, why would you bother?” Reisma said.

Will Benight, a special education teacher in Guy-Perkins, put it this way in emails he sent to legislators: When is the state going to refund him for his master’s degree?

“I mean, seeing as how it’s pointless now, I think it would be fair to know,” said Benight, who said he would return the $6,000 raise he got this year if it meant getting rid of the LEARNS Act.

Along with de-incentivizing advanced degrees, teachers and administrators have raised concerns about other provisions in the wide-ranging law, which spans 144 pages and touches on almost every corner of education policy, including a private school voucher program, a third grade reading retention requirement and a ban on critical race theory and “indoctrination.” The legislation also made it easier for districts to fire teachers, among other changes.

The costs of some of the new policies are not covered by the state, heightening school leaders’ concerns about the long-term sustainability of funding these changes. Teachers whose salaries are paid with federal money didn’t factor into the state’s calculations. Schools with higher levels of students in poverty typically have more federally funded positions such as school social workers and early intervention specialists. Guy-Perkins had to cover the cost of the pay bump to $50,000 for positions such as dyslexia specialist and school counselor.

“I’m just trying to get my bearings straight. There is so much change all at once,” said Joe Fisher, superintendent of Guy-Perkins.

And while the salary raises gave rural schools an edge that has enabled them to better compete for teachers, larger districts have already responded with their own updated salaries. In Springdale next year, a first-year teacher will make $53,600. In Bentonville, the starting salary is $54,424. The pay gap between districts will likely grow wider over time.

Andy Chisum, the Mayflower superintendent, isn’t optimistic. “In 10 years,” he said, “you’re probably going to have that $10,000 gap again.”

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

The post One state radically boosted new teacher pay – and upset a lot of teachers appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

LEXINGTON, Neb. — Naidid Aguilera was feeling stuck.

Stuck at her job at a Tyson meatpacking plant. Stuck in a central Nebraska town after emigrating from Mexico roughly 15 years earlier with her husband. Instead of working in her dream role as an elementary school teacher, she spent her days hauling cow organs for inspection. 

Then she learned about one group’s effort to expand access to high-quality child care here, specifically for families who speak little English, through free training and help navigating state licensing laws. The classes would be entirely in Spanish, eliminating one of the single-biggest hurdles for expanding care in this town of 11,000, where 2 out of 3 residents are Hispanic. For years, it had just one Spanish-speaking child care provider.

As Aguilera dialed the phone to sign up for classes, she recalled feeling overcome with emotion because she had believed her goal of working with children was left back in Mexico.

“The only question they really asked me was why I would want to pursue a child care license,” Aguilera said through a Spanish interpreter. “My response was, ‘I want to do more than where I’m at right now at Tyson and move further in life. I’m looking for another opportunity.’”

Through the local advocacy of several organizations, the community will have nine Spanish-speaking providers by this summer — including Aguilera. Although Lexington still has a waiting list of 550 children in need of care, the town’s child care gap has been cut by nearly 100 children with the addition of new providers, according to local data. 

A nonprofit group called Communities for Kids, partnering with other organizations, began training providers after community surveys revealed the town’s need for Spanish-language child care. The group, founded in 2017, helps develop quality early care and education programs in Nebraska communities that don’t have enough of them.

“If you can’t communicate, or your culture is different, trusting a white English-speaking woman with your child — that’s a lot of trust,” said Shonna Werth, Communities for Kids’ assistant vice president of early childhood programs.

At the time, with only one bilingual provider, most Hispanic families were shuffling their children among neighbors or family members for care. It was the only way for Spanish-speaking parents to communicate with a provider directly.

Some parents employed by the local meatpacking plants worked split shifts to ensure their children were with someone they could communicate with.

“You wonder, ‘Where are those kids? What experiences are they having?’” Werth said. 

Related: Our biweekly Early Childhood newsletter highlights innovative solutions to the obstacles facing the youngest students. Subscribe for free. 

There’s a lack of Spanish-speaking or bilingual early childhood education providers across the nation, said Tania Villarroel, early childhood senior policy analyst for UnidosUS, a Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization. One of the barriers to growing the child care workforce is the process of getting certified.

“It’s a resource to speak Spanish, but if you don’t have good English skills, it can also be really hard to get those degrees,” Villarroel said. “It benefits Latino children to have a Latino provider because they have the same lived experience, same heritage — it’s easier for them to connect to families, to get more family engagement.”

Recent research from the National Research Center on Hispanic Children & Families found that Latino families across the United States consider multiple factors when trying to find child care, like schedule flexibility and whether the provider offers culturally responsive care for their children.

“Some [places] serve only Hispanic children, and they have Hispanic providers. But then other sites have no Hispanic children, and probably no Hispanic representation. So we see this sort of segregation going on,” said Julia Mendez, a researcher for the center. “There’s the families who are seeking the care and the families can’t find what they need, because it’s not available.”

Mendez said it’s common for home-based care to be of lower quality for Hispanic families, becauseif their providers don’t speak English, they have fewer opportunities for professional development or credentialing.

Boosting the quality of Lexington’s child care — not just its accessibility — was crucial, Werth said. She joined two local child care advocates, sisters Stephanie and Maricela Novoa, to implement the free training. Maricela Novoa is an early learning bilingual specialist providing assistance to early childhood educators through the Nebraska Department of Education. Stephanie Novoa, a realtor, also works with Communities for Kids and volunteers as a special advocate with the courts.

The training in Lexington began in 2021 with a program called the “Professional Learning Series,” which included 55 hours of classes on the licensing process or required skills for high-quality early childhood education. The series was taught exclusively in English – and did not attract Spanish-speakers.

Another series followed in 2022, and this time, there was a professional interpreter and headsets available for translation. The class was held every Tuesday night from August through November at the local YMCA, with free child care and food available.

“We were kind of building that foundation of [making] sure there are things that if they want to get licensed, this will be useful for them if and when they ever get there,” Werth said. “Like, let’s not just do training for the sake of training, but training that has a dual purpose. They’re building their education and their skills so that they can have better interactions with the kids they are caring for or as parents, because not all of them are on that trajectory of being a child care provider.”

Related: Our child care system gives many moms a draconian choice: Quality child care or a career

Werth said when the classes first opened, the goal was to reach five or six participants. Twenty showed up.

“Midway through the classes, participants would bring a neighbor or a friend. And so we had to close the class because it was a small room,” said Maricela Novoa. “It was just that word of mouth, that trust piece — this is safe, this is good. This is something that you’ll value.”

Next was a 10-week business class in 2023, followed by courses on parenting and safety that were provided in English with a Spanish interpreter.

Aguilera said she remembers many long days last spring working at the meatpacking plant, then attending classes in the evening.

“The classes were one after another, but at the same time that was nice because it was just all over at once,” Aguilera said. “I was tired, but it was very worth it.”

Werth said it was slow-going to license the nine women, especially when they ran into language barriers.

“Stephanie and I met with six or eight participants one night. They all brought their licensing packets, and we sat down with them to help them just try to work through that. And [it] took hours to do, which should not be the case,” Werth said.

It took several hours more to help participants navigate an online class. Most of them had little experience working with technology other than their phones. Werth recalled the library closing around them one evening as they helped participants use computers for the first time.

Maricela Novoa said the lack of Spanish materials or Spanish-speaking representatives is a constant hurdle for future providers. Even now, a Lexington resident could call a state agency for help but not get anyone on the phone who can speak Spanish.

“It does get tiring, because you’re the only person in the room saying, ‘Hey, is this available in Spanish?’ when there’s a new resource available,” Maricela Novoa said. 

Mendez, of the National Research Center on Hispanic Children & Families, said her organization calls these obstacles “administrative burden.”

“It’s true across the board that any barrier, like a language barrier, can keep people out,” Mendez said. “With administrative burden, you have to learn what the resources are, but first, you have to know about them. And then you have to navigate the systems to try to figure out how to get the credential or the support that you’re looking for.”

Related: In-home child care could be solution for rural working parents

Just a few years ago, Miriam Guedes was the only Spanish-speaking child care provider in Lexington. She started a daycare on her own after being a paraprofessional at the public school district’s preschool for 19 years.

She obtained her license by herself — an uphill battle, she said, with all the paperwork in English — but soon wanted to do more, although she didn’t know how. 

Guedes, whose business is attached to her house, said people started knocking on her door asking if she had room for more kids, but she could take only eight at a time. 

“People were coming in, asking for more and more and more,” she said.

She learned about the free training being offered through Communities for Kids and signed up. The training gave her business experience and the skills to expand her certification, allowing her to care for 12 children at once at her center, “Blooming Daycare.” Now she’s a mentor to Aguilera and the other women who are getting licenses.

Aguilera opened her own child care business, “El Niño Del Tambor Daycare” early this spring. The name means “little drummer boy.” It’s in her basement, recently renovated to include cribs, small chairs and a table, organizers filled with colorful books and crafts, an alphabet rug and more. Her new license is taped to a marker board at the entrance.

She enrolled her first child mid-March and now has four children in her care, in addition to two of her own children. Aguilera said she could easily see herself hiring an assistant and taking on more children in the near future.

It’s something that changed her life for the better, she said.

“When I first started taking in kids, I kind of broke down a little bit because it came full circle,” Aguilera said. “I didn’t have the opportunity to stay home with my kids. And now I get to do this. I’m so happy.”

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

The post A small rural town needed more Spanish-language child care. Here’s what it took appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

BOSTON — Madeline Szoo grew up listening to her grandmother talk of being laughed at when she spoke of going to college and becoming an accountant.

“‘No one will trust a woman with their money,’” relatives and friends would scoff.

When Szoo excelled at math in high school, she got her share of ridicule, too — though it was slightly more subtle. “I was told a lot, ‘You’re smart for a girl,’ ” she said. “I knew other girls in my classes who weren’t able to move past that.”

But Szoo had no doubt she’d go to college, with plans to get a Ph.D. and become a mentor to other women as they break through glass ceilings in fields such as chemical engineering and biochemistry, which she now studies as a fourth-year student at Northeastern University.

Szoo is part of a long-running rise in the number of women getting higher educations, even as the number of men has been declining — a trend beginning to hit even male-dominated fields such as engineering and business. The number of college-educated women in the workforce has now overtaken the number of college-educated men, according to the Pew Research Center.

But while this would seem to have significant potential implications for society and the economy — since college graduates make more money over their lifetimes than people who haven’t finished college — other obstacles have stubbornly prevented women from closing leadership and earnings gaps.

Women still earn 82 cents, on average, for every dollar earned by men, Pew reports — a figure nearly unchanged since 2002. And, after steadily increasing for more than a decade, the proportion of top managers of companies who are women declined last year, to less than 12 percent, the credit ratings and research company S&P Global says.

“I think we’re getting there, but it’s slow,” said Szoo, in a conference room of a gleaming new engineering and robotics building on Northeastern’s campus.

That slow progress comes despite the fact that women now significantly outnumber men in college. The proportion of college students who are women is closing in on a record 60 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Women who go to college are also 7 percentage points more likely than men to graduate, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reports.

Related: An unnoticed result of the decline of men in college: It’s harder for women to get in

While engineering is one college discipline in which men continue to outnumber women, Northeastern has since 2022 even been admitting slightly more female than male first-year engineering students.

Still, said Elizabeth Mynatt, dean of Northeastern’s Khoury College of Computer Sciences, “In no way have we declared victory.”

For one thing, many of the rest of the degrees that women earn are disproportionately in lower-paying fields such as social work (89 percent women) and teaching (83 percent women); women still comprise fewer than a quarter of engineering majors nationwide, and fewer than half of business majors — fields that can lead to higher-paying jobs.

“Even as we see some shifts and changes, disproportionate numbers of men are pursuing pathways through higher education that tend to lead to higher earnings,” said Ruth Watkins, president of postsecondary education at the Strada Education Foundation.

As in Szoo’s case, the disparity begins in high school, where classes in subjects such as math, engineering and computer science “are still pretty gendered,” said Mynatt. “And if you don’t know you want to be a computer scientist as a sophomore in high school, you’re going to have a hard time getting into that program.”

As early as middle school, more than twice as many boys as girls say they plan to work in science or engineering-related jobs, one study by researchers at Harvard found.

Another Northeastern engineering major, Carly Tamer, said she wasn’t outright discouraged pursuing that subject in high school, “but there wasn’t strong encouragement.”

Other factors, beginning in college, perpetuate the disparities. Even with enrollment now female-dominated, women make up only a little more than a third of full professors and a third of college presidents, according to the American Association of University Women and American Council on Education, respectively.

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

Women who start in engineering in college are more likely than men to change their majors. Nearly half of the women who originally planned to major in science or engineering switch to something else, compared to fewer than a third of men.

“It was awful,” Mynatt said of her own experience as an engineering student in the 1980s, before she changed her major to computer science. “It was very male dominated. It had such a weed-out culture. I didn’t like the culture. It was about intellectual superiority and competing with the person next to you.”

That weed-out approach can be particularly tough on high achievers used to positive reinforcement, Tamer noted. “It can scare people away.” She said having more women around her, as she does in Northeastern’s engineering program, has proven more supportive.

Even there, Szoo said, she thinks projects submitted by men are sometimes taken more seriously than those turned in by women.

Once they move from college to the workforce, women still overwhelmingly bear family caregiving responsibilities that can interrupt their careers, said Joseph Fuller, professor of management practice at Harvard. Sixty-one percent of caregiving falls to women, according to the National Alliance for Caregiving and AARP, formerly the American Association of Retired Persons.

“The career path associated with decision-making jobs and highly paid jobs, their design logic and even their language is still firmly rooted in a 1960s paradigm,” he said. “If you go to a big global company, the path to the C-suite anticipates one or two international assignments, four or five relocations, very demanding work hours. There’s nothing that prevents a man or a woman from making those commitments, but if you’re the principal caregiver, those burdens still disproportionately fall on women.”

Related: The pandemic is speeding up the mass disappearance of men from college

Caregiving responsibilities also come at points in workers’ careers when they are developing networks and relationships, Fuller said.

A study by the consulting firm McKinsey & Company and the women’s advocacy organization Lean In finds that even as they are more likely than men to finish college, women in corporate roles are less likely to be promoted from entry-level jobs to management positions. Eighty-seven women advanced in their companies, it found, for every 100 men.

Researchers call this obstacle more of a “broken rung” than a glass ceiling.

It’s not that women don’t want to be promoted; nine in 10 say they aspire to move up, and three in four want to become senior managers, the McKinsey & Company study found.

Yet 75 percent of senior management jobs are held by men, S&P Global reports.

“The fundamental bias and the systemic issues in corporate America that are fueling women’s underrepresentation — they haven’t changed,” said Caroline Fairchild, Lean In’s vice president of education.

Among the many reasons for this, Fairchild said, is that men are more likely to find professional mentors and role models.

There has been progress of another kind, however, Mynatt said: Those many college-educated women entering the workforce, especially in male-dominated industries, are changing perspectives.

She told the story of a female computer scientist who used algorithms to identify the kinds of wrist injuries that show up on X-rays after accidents versus the kind that might be the result of domestic violence.

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

“The technology was there. The issue was who was motivated to ask the question. What matters is that the women bring the problem to the team,” said Mynatt. “When you bring in diverse voices, it shifts things culturally across the board.”

Another change: The more women there are in senior leadership positions, the less gender-stereotyped language their companies use, researchers at Duke, Stanford and Columbia universities and the University of Chicago found.

At Northeastern, women engineering and computer science students have won awards for projects such as an app on which people can anonymously report harassment, catcalling and sexual assault.

As for Szoo, she hopes to use her chemical engineering degree to help treat cancer.

After her plans for an accounting degree were thwarted, Szoo’s grandmother became a middle school teacher, then started her own business — for which she did her own accounting.

“We’re definitely the type of people who if you say we can’t do it,” Szoo said, “we will prove you wrong.”

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

The post Even as women outpace men in graduating from college, their earnings remain stuck appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

ATLANTA — Two construction cranes hover over a giant worksite just outside the Scheller College of Business at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

What they’re building is both a show of optimism in and a way to attract more students to something universities badly need but are beginning to worry about: graduate education.

The $200 million project will house Scheller’s graduate and executive business programs in one tower, connected to Georgia Tech’s School of Industrial and Systems Engineering in another. Linking graduate business programs with other disciplines has proven to increase demand; Scheller has already added a science, technology, engineering and math designation to its master’s program in business administration, with a resulting bump in applications, the school says.

At a university focused on technology, doing this “seemed like a natural fit, and we were seeing some of our competitors doing it,” said Peter Severa, Scheller’s assistant dean for MBA student engagement, in a conference room overlooking the construction site.

It’s also a kind of enticement that’s become essential in response to signs that, after years of increase, the graduate enrollment on which universities heavily rely for revenue may be softening as prospective students question the cost of grad school and as shorter, cheaper and more flexible alternatives pop up.

“What we’re seeing now is a combination of a leveling off and a big question mark as to where this long-term trend will go,” said Brian McKenzie, director of research at the Council of Graduate Schools.

Unlike undergraduate enrollment, which has been on a steady decline, graduate enrollment has gone up over the last decade. Undergraduate numbers fell by 15 percent between 2010 and 2021, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, while graduate enrollment grew by 9 percent. That was fueled in part by a change in 2007 that let graduate students borrow up to the full cost of their educations, unlike undergraduates, who can borrow only a limited amount.

Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter

This growth made graduate programs a lucrative source of revenue for universities. To cash in, private, nonprofit, bachelor’s degree-granting universities and colleges in particular vastly expanded their graduate offerings, listing more than three times as many by 2021 as they had in 2005, according to research conducted at the University of Tennessee.

It seemed a good bet. Not even the pandemic slowed the increase in graduate enrollment. It reached its highest level ever in 2021, as workers who had been laid off or furloughed opted to get graduate degrees. Then, in 2022, it fell.

There was a slight rebound in the fall of 2023. But that was largely driven by an increase in master’s degree enrollment at public as opposed to private, nonprofit universities and in the number of international students, who have quietly come to constitute much of the growth at graduate schools. Among domestic students, graduate enrollment was starting to decline.

Sheer population trends helped drive graduate enrollment during the last decade, with an increase in the number of Americans who are candidates for it — ages 25 to 44, with bachelor’s degrees.

But even as there are more of those 25- to 44-year-old candidates for graduate education, the proportion of them who actually go has started to erode. It’s down from 8.4 percent to 6.5 percent over the last 10 years, the higher education research and advisory firm Eduventures found.

“If that continues, and you see a slowing in the underlying population growth, then we’re starting to talk about some challenges,” said Clint Raine, senior analyst at Eduventures.

That’s because of a looming decline in the number of 18-year-olds beginning next year, which is projected to take another big toll on undergraduate enrollment. Basic math suggests that it will eventually hit graduate programs, too.

“The next five years we may be safe,” said Lily Bi, president and CEO of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, or AACSB. “But five years down the road, I think we really need to watch.”

There are other challenges. All those graduate programs that universities rushed to add meant that, even when graduate enrollment was going up, the number of students per program — and, therefore, the revenue that institutions made from them — was going down.

“The issue is that graduate student growth has not kept pace,” Raine said. “So we’ve seen a flood of programs in the market, but student demand has not kept up.”

Another challenge for graduate programs: A strong labor market has many people staying in their jobs instead of furthering their educations.

“The choice became, ‘Do I go to graduate school or do I look at some of these very good opportunities?’ Many of them chose to go with the money,” said Julia Kent, vice president for best practices and strategic initiatives at the Council of Graduate Schools.

Meanwhile, there has been a proliferation of alternatives to traditional graduate degrees.

“A prospective student today has never had more options,” Raine said.

Interest in traditional master’s degrees is down since 2019, Eduventures found, while interest in lower-price, shorter-term certificates and other nondegree offerings is up.

“We live in a fast-food society,” Bi said. “People want something easy, something fast.”

And flexible. Twenty-seven percent of master’s programs and 66 percent of MBAs are now offered online, giving students more choice of when and where to take them. That’s up from 12 percent and 36 percent, respectively, in 2012.

Students’ preference for part-time and online MBA programs translated into an increase in applications for those programs in the academic year that started in the fall, the Graduate Management Admission Council says. But applications overall were down by 3 percent, as enthusiasm waned for more conventional and expensive in-person versions, whose enrollments fell.

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

There has also been growing coverage of and skepticism about the high amount of debt students assumed for graduate programs that don’t necessarily result in earnings high enough to allow them to repay their loans. Those programs are disproportionately at private, nonprofit universities, which charge twice as much as public universities for master’s degrees in fields such as social work, according to a study by the Urban Institute.

The increase in borrowing for graduate study has sparked a warning from the U.S. Department of Education, which notes that growing numbers of borrowers are finishing their graduate educations with very high levels of debt. And while people with graduate degrees generally earn more than people without them, that premium has flattened out, “suggesting a potential decline in the net return,” the department’s chief economist observed.

At 15 percent of master’s, doctoral and professional programs, the median graduate makes less than the median undergraduate degree holder, according to a separate study by three think tanks across the political spectrum: the American Enterprise Institute, EducationCounsel and The Century Foundation.

The average graduate federal student loan holder owes $70,000, that study found, and one in five has borrowed more than $100,000.

While 90 percent of students who are studying toward or just got bachelor’s degrees say they are interested in graduate school, more than half consider the return on investment an important part of their decision, a survey by the higher education marketing firm Spark451 found. That’s the same questioning of value that has been eating away at undergraduate enrollment.

“We have to think about who’s on the doorstep now to graduate programs. It’s Gen Z. They’re that prime graduate-going cohort, and we know from some of our research that this generation is more price- and cost-sensitive compared to the last,” Raine said.

Mindful of this, the Council of Graduate Schools has created a task force to study the cost of graduate education and has recommended expanding eligibility for Pell Grants to graduate students and lowering the graduate student loan interest rate from the current 8.05 percent, Kent said.

Graduate students represent only a little more than a fifth of all students but account for nearly half of federal student borrowing, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

American students who have enrolled in graduate schools are less than enthusiastic about the value of it. Just over half say it was “definitely worth it,” a survey by the think tank Third Way found.

Related: Colleges are now closing at a pace of one a week. What happens to the students?

That has left universities to increasingly rely on one market that continues to grow: international graduate students. A closer look at the data shows that they now account for almost all of the rise in graduate enrollment.

The number of international students in U.S. graduate programs rose 21 percent in 2022 — compared to a 4.3 percent increase among international undergraduates — and 22 percent in 2023, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

In almost every graduate field that reported an increase in enrollment, it was due to a big jump in the number of international students, even as the numbers of U.S. citizen and permanent resident students fell.

The number of graduate business students who are U.S. residents or permanent residents dropped 7 percent while the number from other countries went up 19 percent in the fall, AACSB figures show.

That growing dependence on international students could be risky, as became clear during the pandemic, when they all but disappeared. Geopolitical tensions also could have an impact; though more international students continue to come to the United States from China than from any other country, the number of Chinese students fell slightly last year, according to the Institute of International Education.

Still, McKenzie, of the Council of Graduate Schools, pointed out that the number of students from India increased 35 percent during the same period.

Universities are aggressively recruiting international students. Georgia Tech’s STEM designation for its MBA program was devised in part as a way to help reverse a steady decline in the number of full-time MBA students.

Related: Universities and colleges search for ways to reverse the decline in the ranks of male students

That’s because a STEM designation allows international students to stay in the United States and work in their fields of study, without an employer sponsor, for three years after earning a degree, compared to the usual limit of one year.

“If a large portion of our applicants are international, it’s important to be attractive to them,” said Emily Sharkey, Scheller’s executive director of MBA admissions and recruiting. That third year of a visa “is a game-changer as we look at our applications,” added Dave Deiters, associate dean of MBA programs at Scheller, who heads up its career center.

Among other universities whose business schools have added STEM designations: Arizona State, Carnegie Mellon, Duke, Indiana, Michigan, Northwestern and Rice.

Incorporating technology into business education also appeals to undergraduates who might eventually be candidates for graduate degrees.

Even as an undergraduate at Scheller, “I’ve learned coding and stuff I probably wouldn’t have learned at other business schools,” said Elizabeth Curvin, who just finished her sophomore year there. “Compared to my friends at other business schools, we get a lot more of that,” said Amelia Fox, a junior. “You’re set up very well.” And Daniel Manning, a junior, already has a concentration in strategy and innovation. “That gives you practical information about how to manage engineers,” he said.

But none was ready to commit to investing in an MBA.

“I’d probably go out to the workforce and see if it was something that I wanted,” Curvin said. Junior Aubrey Charron said she also wants to try out her planned career in hospital administration first, “just to make sure I’ve really found what I want to do.”

Concerns about graduate enrollment go beyond what students might earn or owe, or how such changes might affect universities’ bottom lines. There are growing shortages of workers who require graduate degrees, the Council of Graduate Schools says.

“It is concerning that domestic enrollment is slightly down, because it will be critical to have more Americans participating in graduate education,” said Kent, at the Council of Graduate Schools.

Yet what’s happening at graduate schools has so far been eclipsed by a focus on falling undergraduate enrollment, Raine said.

“It’s a very much less discussed future trend that we certainly are trying to shed more light on.”

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

The post Grad programs have been a cash cow; now universities are starting to fret over graduate enrollment appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Niki Elliott skipped the fifth grade. She was so smart that she could have skipped another, she said, but her mother didn’t want her in class with older boys.*

And so she was always bored in school. She had a “near photographic” memory and didn’t need to study, she said, so she never learned how to. She remembers finishing her assignments in five minutes and spending the next 30 waiting for her classmates to catch up.

When she got to college, where classes were much more difficult, she said, “I really had a big crash and burn.”

Elliott is what’s now called twice exceptional, a term used to refer to children who are gifted in some areas, but also experience a learning or developmental challenge. In Elliott’s case, that challenge was attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder which made it difficult for her to manage her time and focus her attention.

She remembers being in college and thinking, “People told me I was so smart, but why am I struggling so hard?”

She became a special education teacher, and said she never stops thinking about how to create a world in which a young Black student like herself could be taught to work with (instead of against) her learning differences, to reach her full potential. Now, a clinical professor in the School of Leadership and Education Sciences at the University of San Diego, she’s helping to open, in August, the school’s Center for Embodied Equity and Neurodiversity.

At its simplest, neurodiversity is the idea that everybody’s brains work differently, and that these differences are normal. Neurodivergent, which is not a medical diagnosis, is an umbrella term that refers to people who have autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, dyslexia, or other atypical ways of thinking, learning and interacting with others.  

“Embodied equity,” the other term in the new center’s name, refers to an anti-discrimination approach that considers all aspects of people’s identities — including race, gender, ability, socioeconomic status — when addressing social problems.

“Who gets to develop the genius?” Elliot said. “Who gets the constraint? Who gets pushed more toward the social conformity? And how do we create a space for all learners to thrive according to their unique design?”

Elliott said the center’s work will fall into four main categories: training K-12 teachers and education support staffers, training community college educators, working on policy issues that affect neurodivergent students and offering programs to set up neurodivergent students for success in college and the workplace.

The training is being funded through contracts with schools, colleges and other organizations; additional costs will be covered by grants from philanthropic foundations, Elliott said.

“We really have to work to change the mindset of faculty to understand the ways in which these adaptations to their delivery and development of content could make all the difference for so many more highly bright and capable students to thrive in higher ed,” Elliott said.

Related: Students on the autism spectrum are often as smart as their peers — so why do so few go to college?

If teachers and education support staff are equipped with strategies to help students whose brains work differently, Elliott hopes that more of these students will have the option to go to college. With access to programs designed to help them transition beyond high school, more neurodivergent students will have the skills they need to succeed when they get there, Elliot said.

As the public understanding of brain differences expands, college leaders are trying new strategies to help make campuses more hospitable to neurodivergent students.

At the University of California, Berkeley, Lisa García Bedolla, vice provost for graduate studies, convened a task force to identify the needs of neurodivergent graduate students.  The task force is focused on medical care and access to screenings or assessments; disability accommodations for students and for employees, because grad students often work for the university in some capacity; and potential changes to the curriculum.

García Bedolla said that the needs of neurodivergent students force academics to confront a bias in which needless inflexibility is equated with academic rigor.

San Diego State University offers a class focused on cognitive and social differences. It’s designed for neurodivergent students or those who want to work in fields such as social work, special education or psychology. According to the course description, topics include executive functioning and time management; social cognition, context awareness and how to take on the perspective of another person; communication and relationship skills, and self-advocacy.

Inna Fishman, the founding director of SDSU’s Center for Autism and Developmental Disorders, said that although there’s been a “huge paradigm shift,” meaningful change for neurodivergent college students will take time.

“It’s one thing to ask schools to make accommodations for a learner. It’s a whole other empowering thing to help the learner take the bull by the horn and understand themselves.”  

Niki Elliott, professor, School of Leadership and Education Sciences at the University of San Diego

“I don’t mean to imply that it could be done ‘like that,’” Fishman said, snapping her fingers. “I’m sure for everybody, including the big systems, like universities, it’s not a simple transition to this new way of thinking about neurodiversity.”

This work is also complicated by the fact that it’s virtually impossible to know exactly how many students stand to benefit. In part that’s because definitions of neurodivergence vary.

Many experts believe the number of students with brain differences that fit under the neurodivergent umbrella is growing, whether because of an increase in people with such conditions or because of reduced stigma, greater awareness and better identification of such conditions.

For example, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that the rate of autism spectrum disorder diagnoses has been steadily increasing since 2002. In 2020, an estimated 1 in 36 eight-year-olds had an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis. Some experts argue that the rise is the result of overdiagnosis.

Conditions such as autism can go undiagnosed for various reasons, including whether the student’s parents have been educated about such conditions or have the money and time to take their child to the appropriate doctors to be assessed.

The number of colleges where at least 5 percent of students report having a disability has risen from 510 in 2008 to 1,276 in 2022, according to data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. But this measure is imperfect: It includes students who have physical disabilities. Also, roughly two-thirds of college students with disabilities who choose not to disclose their disability to their college.

“A lot of students when they leave K-12, they want to wash their label off of them and start fresh,” Elliott said. “They want to believe that they can do well in college without it, or that they would be mistreated or stigmatized if they let people know.”

Experts say that students whose brains work differently often face challenges during their K-12 education; when they get to college, the challenges don’t stop, they just change.

Laudan B. Jahromi, a professor of psychology and education at Teachers College at Columbia University, said these students often struggle with what she called “cognitive flexibility,” which can affect time management, planning, prioritizing and other such organizational skills, and make college classes more difficult to manage. (The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College.) 

Fishman, at SDSU, said students with brain differences might need help taking notes, more time to take exams or to have instructions repeated to them multiple times. They might miss certain nonverbal communication or cues from their professors or peers.

Colleges offer accommodations that can help with some of these challenges, but often students can only unlock this help with a qualifying diagnosis, which can be difficult to get, depending on a student’s health insurance and access to the appropriate assessments.

Related: How a disgraced method of diagnosing learning disabilities persists in our nation’s schools

Many neurodivergent students use medications, which must be taken on a certain schedule, to help manage their conditions, Elliott said. Problems arise when students’ classes are only offered at a time that doesn’t work with their medication schedule. If students need such a course to progress in their major, then they’re stuck trying to pass it in conditions that don’t make sense for them. Elliott said this can lead attrition or underperformance. 

And physically being in the classroom can cause stress for students who are sensitive to factors such as flickering fluorescent lights, certain types of sounds or who have difficulty being around large groups.

Some neurodivergent people struggle with understanding social dynamics and cues, or with social anxiety. Requiring social interaction (by way of graded group projects) puts them at a disadvantage. Socialization can pose significant challenges for these students outside the classroom, too, as they navigate community living, friendships and dating.

“She didn’t have a name for what my brother was experiencing. But she knew that it was not in alignment with who he had the potential to be.”

Kimberly White-Smith, dean, School of Leadership and Education Sciences, University of San Diego

Neurodivergent college students are often left to figure out how to survive in a system designed by and for people without brain differences. The students must also be their own advocates, often without fully understanding their own needs.

“The accommodations high schoolers are getting, they don’t know that they’re getting them; they’re just used to always having them,” said Melissa Boduch, a learning specialist at Beacon College in Florida. “If a student doesn’t necessarily know what they need, they don’t know what to ask for, either.”

That problem is less common at Beacon College because its entire system is designed for neurodivergent students; accommodations are embedded in its structure. Big projects are broken into smaller parts with individual deadlines and extra time is built into the syllabi by giving students advance notice about assignments, Boduch said. Students are required to make regular visits to the Center for Student Success to meet with their learning specialist who helps them stay on top of their workload, understand the challenges they face and learn how to advocate for themselves with their professors.

Though people with brain differences have always existed, the challenges they face have not been thoroughly understood, nor have there been systems in place that could help them move through the world more easily and successfully, said Kimberly White-Smith, dean of the School of Leadership and Education Sciences at the University of San Diego, where the new Center for Embodied Equity and Neurodiversity will be housed.  

Related: Almost all students with disabilities are capable of graduating on time. Here’s why they’re not.

White-Smith grew up in the foster care system with a brother who was nonspeaking. Because he didn’t talk, social workers thought he must not have the ability to learn and labeled him “uneducable,” she said.  

Her foster mother believed he did have the ability to learn and wanted him to be able to reach his full potential. She fought to have the “uneducable” label removed and transferred both kids to Catholic school. White-Smith’s brother eventually began speaking. He did well enough in his classes to graduate from high school.

“She didn’t have a name for what my brother was experiencing. But she knew that it was not in alignment with who he had the potential to be,” White-Smith said. “We’re much more aware now than we were 40 years ago.”

“A lot of students when they leave K-12, they want to wash their label off of them and start fresh [in college].”

Niki Elliott, professor, School of Leadership and Education Sciences at the University of San Diego

As the public understanding of neurodiversity grows, White-Smith said it’s incumbent on educators and college leaders to make changes to support these students.

“There are a lot of challenges that come with being neurodivergent, but there’s also a lot of potential,” White-Smith said.

Elliott said that the new center will offer a program that will support Black students with and without brain differences starting in sixth grade. The idea is to help students understand their learning styles, what they need to be successful in school and how to advocate for themselves as they move toward college. If the students finish high school and qualify for admission to the University of San Diego, they will have a full-ride scholarship to attend.

Next year, Elliott said the center will begin offering a summer bridge program specifically for neurodivergent students, with a similar curriculum.

“It’s one thing to ask schools to make accommodations for a learner. It’s a whole other empowering thing to help the learner take the bull by the horn and understand themselves,” Elliott said. “It’s teaching each person where their gifts are, how they contribute to a whole and how to use that to navigate a successful higher ed experience.”

*Correction: This story has been updated with the correct spelling of Niki Elliott’s name.

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

The post Autism, dyslexia, ADHD: How colleges are helping ‘neurodivergent’ students succeed appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Jacqueline Strickland has spent nearly her entire life caring for children in Washington, D.C., starting at age 7, when she began babysitting her siblings after school, and then more formally at 14, when she began working at a daycare center.

Despite the low pay, Strickland, 59, has stuck with her career, even as colleagues left child care for better-paying jobs at the post office or driving school buses.

“People look at child care providers as, you know, babysitters,” Strickland said. “But early childhood is the foundation. It’s the most important part of a child’s life because of the brain development that takes place.”

Three years ago, the financial landscape changed. Her salary jumped from $57,000 to $75,000 a year, thanks to a massive experiment underway in the nation’s capital, which seeks to solve one of the major drivers of the child care crisis: Most educators don’t make a livable wage.

The city-funded $80 million Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund has been transformational for district child care providers like Strickland; they’ve been able to pay down credit cards, move into new apartments, buy or pay off cars, schedule overdue dental procedures, help care for family members and even buy first homes.

But earlier this year, the roughly 4,000 early educators who have benefited from the pay equity program were dealt a blow by Mayor Muriel Bowser’s 2025 budget proposal. Bowser is suggesting eliminating funding for the program — along with cuts to other agencies — because of a requirement from the District of Columbia’s chief financial officer that the city replenish its depleted reserve fund, she said. That would mean a pay cut for the people who have already received a salary bump.

The budget is scheduled to be approved by the D.C. Council in June. The mayor’s office did not return a request for comment about her proposal.

Strickland, who had started the process of buying a home, has now put it on hold. She said that, before the equity fund, she had been waiting for the city to do right by child care providers like her.

“Just to be able to know that you can meet your monthly bills on time and not juggle money. To know that you can buy groceries and buy medication. To be able to afford healthcare and go to the doctor. To be able to put a little aside for retirement. I feel like I’m healthier because I don’t have to stress as much,” said Strickland, who works at an Educare center in the city’s Deanwood neighborhood.

If the mayor’s budget proposal comes to fruition, Strickland will go back to waiting.

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic toppled the country’s long-eroding child care system, policymakers in Washington had a vision for tackling the sector’s most intractable challenges, including access, recruitment, retention and pay.

That vision resulted in the pay equity fund, passed by  the D.C. Council in 2021. It provides supplemental payments to teachers in licensed child development centers and homes, with the goal of bumping up their pay to match the minimum salaries of D.C. public school teachers with the same credentials. The program has been funded through a tax on residents earning more than $250,000 a year.

Related: Our biweekly Early Childhood newsletter highlights innovative solutions to the obstacles facing the youngest students. Subscribe for free.

“It’s one piece of a larger law and larger suite of investments meant to support the whole child,” said Anne Gunderson, a senior policy analyst at the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute. “Specifically, it’s a compensation program meant to disrupt pervasive and centuries-long undervaluing of caregiving, where, due to structural racism and sexism, that’s really disproportionately harming Black and brown women.”

The pay equity program requires teachers to earn more advanced certificates and degrees if they want their salaries to increase. The costs of their tuition and books are covered almost entirely by a child care scholarship from the district in tandem with the pay equity program.

Although the mandate to earn more credentials can be taxing and eats into the time early educators can spend caring for their own families, more than a dozen teachers interviewed for this story said it’s well worth the effort.

Artia Brown, who has been working at the Educare center in Washington’s Parkside neighborhood for 10 years, graduated with her associate degree this year from Trinity Washington University and is already enrolled in classes in the bachelor’s degree program. She plans to get her master’s degree and doctorate as well.

“I have a long journey ahead of me, but the pay equity really motivated me to go back to school and to make sure I get as much credentialing as I can,” Brown said. “It will pay a livable wage, and people are starting to understand how important early education is.”

The 41-year-old, who lives in Montgomery County, Maryland, with her college student son, saw her salary increase from $27,000 before the pay equity program to roughly $37,000 with the supplemental funding. It’s allowed her to pay off her car, start saving and support her two nieces.

The pay equity program also provides funding for child care facilities to offer free or low-cost health insurance to educators and other staff.

“Really what we’re seeing for the first time is an appropriate level of compensation and benefits for a workforce that has really been ignored for far too many years,” Gunderson said.

Early data suggests that the pay equity program has helped the city hire, recruit and retain child care employees.

The research firm Mathematica found that, by the end of 2022, the program’s initial payments had increased child care employment levels in Washington by about 100 additional educators, or 3 percent.  Moreover, nearly 2 in 3 educators said that, because of the program, they intend to work in the sector longer than they’d previously planned.

And the program’s impact has continued to grow. Comparing child care employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics between 2019 and 2023, Mathematica associated the program with an increase of 219 educators, or nearly 7 percent.

Child care center directors said that they believed the program’s payments were not only influencing their “best” educators’ decisions to stay at their centers, but helping them recruit qualified educators.

Early anecdotal data from the Urban institute shows that quality has increased alongside educator pay. When researchers asked early educators about the statement “Because of the Pay Equity Fund payments, I can better focus on the needs and development of children I work with,” 71 percent somewhat or strongly agreed.

Related: States stuck trying to fix early ed pay as feds drop the ball

Washington’s efforts to tackle pay equity in the child care sector are unique. While several states began experimenting with increasing the pay of child care employees following the pandemic, they’ve mostly focused on one-time bonuses, with funding from federal pandemic aid, rather than long-term solutions. Maine’s $30 million program, which provides an average monthly stipend of $400 to educators, is one of the largest responses from other states or cities, but doesn’t come close to matching the reach of Washington’s pay equity fund.

“It is really systems reform in a way that I don’t think other states have approached,” said Erica Greenberg, senior fellow at the Urban Institute’s Center on Education Data and Policy.

Because of the unique nature of the program, Greenberg says that there’s been deep interest from the federal government, states, cities, counties, philanthropists and advocates — all of whom are trying to keep the child care sector afloat.

“They all want to understand how to do something like this,” she says. “D.C. has really been a beacon in that way.”

Yet, as with the rollout of any major new policy, the equity fund has had its share of implementation hiccups.

Chief among them — at least from the educators’ perspective — is that it has sometimes been a hassle to get the money they are due. In 2024, for example, the program switched from making direct payments to teachers to disbursing the money to child care providers, who were then in charge of getting the money to their employees. And the requirements to opt into the program can pose major financial hurdles for smaller centers and home-based providers.

Beyond the particular operating challenges, however, is the program’s solvency.

As educators earn more advanced credentials, the District of Columbia must pay them more — as much as $114,000 for the highest degree earners. As child care centers recruit more teachers, the costs will continue to rise. The mayor considers the natural growth of the program unsustainable, advocates say they’ve been told.

“What I would say is cutting the program or eliminating the program is what’s unsustainable,” said Adam Barragan-Smith, advocacy manager at Educare DC. “The early childhood system in this country is a market failure. Families can’t pay any more. Programs cannot pay teachers any less. The fund has been a really important and game-changing investment so that we don’t have to pass any costs on to families, and we are able to pay teachers what they deserve.”

Amber Hodges, 36, is a lead teacher at Bright Beginnings, a center in the southeast quadrant of the city. When her salary went from roughly $43,000 to $52,000 annually, she used the money to buy a car, move into a nicer apartment building closer to work and take her five nieces and nephews back-to-school shopping.

The supplemental funding makes her feel like, finally, after so many years in the industry, the work of early childhood educators is getting the respect it deserves.

“We have the most important age group, and a lot of people just look at us and say, ‘Oh, you’re daycare teachers or babysitters,’” she said. “There is nothing worse for me when you say that to me. What? I am not a babysitter. Not a babysitter. At all.”

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

The post D.C. experimented with giving child care workers big raises. The project may not last appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

By Liz Willen

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you already have financial aid but don’t understand your offer letter?

Try our Offer Letter Decoder, which will decipher your promised financial aid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related: Interested in innovations in the field of higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly Higher Education newsletter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Most of those preparations went well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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