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.

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.

If survival required a special backpack and a portable first aid kit, you’d do well to hear that with enough time to prepare. If wilderness guides knew all this and didn’t tell you, what kind of wilderness guides would they be?

But when a college student enrolls in a course that has a high rate of students earning Ds or Fs or withdrawing – or high DFW rate – the only way they might find that out is through informal warnings from an academic advisor, said Bridget Burns, chief executive officer at the University Innovation Alliance, a group of public research universities that works to increase college graduation rates. Historically, students enrolling in these classes haven’t been equipped with the academic first aid kit they might need to get through the course without becoming part of the DFW statistic. 

Those who run colleges know when a course is a “high DFW” course, Burns said, but their approach is simply to hope that students don’t fail. “And we’re smarter than that, as a sector. We care too much about students to let that kind of posture for our work continue.”

This realization sank in for Burns during the pandemic, when leaders from the University Innovation Alliance began reporting increased DFW rates. Surely Covid itself was a factor, but it was unclear what else was contributing to these students earning Ds or Fs or withdrawing. Factors such as the time of day a class is offered, whether it’s in-person or online, the student demographics and faculty demographics, or the combination of classes a student is taking could all contribute, but there hasn’t been a way of identifying why certain classes have high DFW rates. 

“I was shocked to discover there’s no way of diagnosing DFW rates,” Burns said. “That blew my mind.”

Not surprisingly, students who receive Ds, Fs or Ws graduate at lower rates than their peers, according to a 2021 analysis of data from eight colleges by the Association of Public Land Grant Universities. The report found that 69 percent of students who had never received a DFW graduated in four years, compared to 44 percent of those who had received one DFW, and 22 percent of those who had received more than one DFW.

And students from certain groups get DFWs at higher rates than others, the study found. For example, in 18 of 20 classes analyzed, first-generation students were more likely to have a DFW than their peers. Students from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups were more likely than their peers to have a DFW in 19 of 20 classes. Students receiving Pell grants were more likely to have a DFW in 17 of 20 classes. 

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

Burns said the answer should not be to track students into easier classes, but to ensure that all students have enough academic support to succeed in the tough classes and finish their degrees.

“It’s more expensive, it’s a little bit more resource intensive, I get it,” Burns said. “But it’s so much more costly for us to have students getting Ds, Fs and Ws and walking away.”

Over the past few years, Burns has been working to better understand DFW rates, reduce them, and figure out how to help students recover academically after they’ve received a D or F or withdrawn from a particularly tough class.

Burns and leaders at 11 colleges across the country have put together a sort of academic first aid kit, and are testing it on students who have got a D or F or withdrawn from certain classes. The kit includes things like academic coaching, writing assistance, supplemental instruction and tutoring. As a part of the trial, they also re-enrolled students in the courses they’d failed, at no cost. 

According to data from the University Innovation Alliance, about 77 percent of the students in the trial passed the class the second time, compared to 55 percent of students who paid to retake the course and did so without the added support. These figures reflect the outcomes of 311 students who had earned Ds, Fs or Ws in certain classes and then retook them with the support of the University Innovation Alliance last summer or fall.  

The participating colleges are the University of California, Riverside; North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University; the University of Illinois, Chicago; Georgia State University; Purdue University; the University of Utah; Virginia Commonwealth University; Oregon State University; the University of Central Florida; Arizona State University and the University of Colorado, Denver. 

Each college selected courses with high DFW rates, including classes in math, chemistry, biology, psychology and English. 

Burns said that academic support services are clearly helping the students as they retake the difficult classes. And they’re resources that are already available at most colleges. If students are not being connected with these resources before enrolling in these challenging courses for the first time, Burns said, “we are just not giving ourselves the benefit of our own knowledge.”

“Why are we letting students fail when we know that they’re going down a path that is unlikely to be successful?” Burns said. “We’re going to have to interrogate the practices that allow students to consistently struggle with the exact same classes over time. Because it’s not the student that’s the problem.”

This story about difficult college classes 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 ‘First aid kit’ for tough classes 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.

Students at one New York university have a surprise awaiting them: an $8,000-a-year “academic excellence fee.” We have to ask: Isn’t academic excellence included in tuition? In fact, tuition is only part of the cost of college. Like car dealerships, schools are nickel-and-diming consumers with huge fees — fees for student activities, fees for athletics, fees for building maintenance, fees for libraries, even fees for graduation, the bills for which arrive just as students and their families thought they were finally done paying for college.

Unexpected fees are frustratingly piled on top of a long list of expenses for college beyond tuition that many people never plan for or expect, or that can’t be covered by financial aid, sometimes forcing them to take out more and more loans, or quit college altogether. One study estimates that fees add 27 percent to student charges, on top of the typical cost of tuition. They’ve also been increasing far faster than tuition. That’s because some colleges and universities want to make tuition look like it’s staying flat, instead putting their increased charges into fees.

At public universities, many of these fees are added “temporarily” during times when state budgets are cut, but they seldom if ever go away. Graduate students bear a big brunt of them. Graduate students pay fees of $4,653 per year at Louisiana State University, $3,622 at North Carolina State and $3,160 at the University of Tennessee.

“College Uncovered” is made possible by Lumina Foundation.

Listen to the whole series

Kirk: Okay, we’re in very windy Maryville, Missouri, population 12,000. It’s home to Northwest Missouri State, which is surrounded by farmland, cows, and I can see wind turbines in the distance. The public university has about 8500 students. Most of them live here on campus, and all of them pay substantial fees. That’s because the state of Missouri limited tuition increases for a decade. So to keep up with costs, the university kept adding fees. We’re going to stop by the student center, which has a Chick-fil-A inside, to ask students about these fees.

Sitting in the back is Angela Kinzel, a graduate student. She recommends the waffle fries, by the way, and she works as a graduate assistant. So her tuition, it’s covered 100 percent.

Angela Kinzel: So I’m really only paying the fees. Which is just as bad.

Kirk: Why is it just as bad?

Angela Kinzel: I’d say it’s probably about probably a third of my tuition.

Kirk: Kinzel is studying to be a science teacher. Like the rest of the country, Missouri desperately needs more teachers, especially in science and math. That’s why she can’t believe how many fees there are getting in the way of her graduating and earning a degree that will allow her to teach.

Angela Kinzel: Well, there’s a technology fee. Since I’m a graduate student, we have textbook fees, which is like $20 a rental. And then I live on campus as well, so dorms and the food that’s associated with that. There’s also a graduate fee, I believe. So, super fun.

Kirk: Do you feel like you’re being nickel and dimed?

Angela Kinzel: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Throughout my five years here, it’s just gotten worse. And so really looking at the bill, it definitely makes you do a double take and be, like, is it actually worth it?

Jon: This is College Uncovered, a podcast pulling back the ivy to reveal how colleges really work. I’m Jon Marcus with The Hechinger Report …

Kirk: … and I’m Kirk Carapezza with GBH.

Jon: Colleges don’t want you to know how they operate. So GBH …

Kirk: In collaboration with The Hechinger Report, is here to show you.

Today on the show: “Nickel and Dimed.”

Jon: It depends on the school, of course, but colleges can charge you for basically anything, Kirk. From fees for campus services like a shuttle bus you may or may not use to student academic fees or athletic fees.

Kirk: Yeah. At northwestern Missouri State, it’s called a “designated fee.” More and more colleges are using these generic charges as substitutes for tuition. They use the revenue to pay for things like facility improvements, debt and sustainability, health and wellness.

Jon: So here’s the gist. In about 30 states, there’s some kind of control or limit on what public colleges can charge for tuition, but there’s less control over fees. So if you’ve been paying attention to our podcast, you know colleges always seem to find a way to get the money, right?

Kirk: Yes, I’d say that has been a major takeaway, Jon. Of course, going to college and earning a degree is worth it if you graduate on time and with less debt. College is good. More jobs in the future will require education beyond high school. But the higher ed landscape, it’s pretty rocky. And we found there’s a real lack of transparency surrounding pricing and, as we’ll explore in our next episode, outcomes.

Jon: Well, as a result of tuition freezes, fees have gone up faster than tuition over time.

Kirk: Because it’s usually easier to increase or add new fees than tuition.

Jon: Of course, that’s right.

Kirk: I know you’ve done quite a bit of reporting on this, Jon. What do you see as some of the most egregious examples?

Jon: I mean, my favorite is the academic excellence fee I found at one university in New York. I mean, you’d think that academic excellence is included in tuition, right? I’ve also seen academic building fees, academic credentialing fees, academic facility and life safety fees, arts and cultural enrichment fees — they go on and on. Bicycle path maintenance fees, campus environmental improvement fees, campus spirit fees — that’s a good one. ID card fees, safety fees and solar energy fees. One university charges — this is unbelievable — one university charged what it called a “free, anonymous HIV testing fee.”

Kirk: All right. There are also those fees that just annoy students but provide a revenue stream. So think about graduation fees and fees for transcripts. Colleges say it’s all to support the student experience.

Robert Kelchen: That there are colleges that will charge several hundred dollars a semester in an academic support or an excellence fee. And it’s basically tuition living under another name.

Kirk: That’s. Economist Robert Kelchen. Kelchen is at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and he teaches higher ed finance. So during his office hours, I asked Kelchen: Why are colleges doing this?

Robert Kelchen: The first is, for public colleges, they often don’t get to control how much they raise tuition, but they may have more control over fees. And this is a way to get the revenue that they’re looking for.

Kirk: Think of it like a balloon, Jon. Okay, so you squeeze one end, right? And the other end expands. But the overall cost, it doesn’t go down. The other big reason, Kelchen says, is that some scholarships, like the one Angela Kinzel got at Northwest Missouri State, are full tuition, but they don’t cover fees.

Robert Kelchen: And colleges and states often want to push charges into fees so students pay for it instead of scholarships.

Kirk: Kelchen defends the practice — if colleges use the revenue generated from these fees to do things like hire more faculty or offer academic advisors. He says colleges are not businesses, even if they act like them sometimes.

Robert Kelchen: They’re nonprofit, mission oriented, but they also need the money to be able to pay employees. And if the money’s not coming from the state and enrollment is down, they have to get money from somewhere. And often fees are the only way that they can get the money.

Kirk: Not having enough courses or academic advising, after all, could cause students to drop out.

Kelchen says careful consumers should be on the lookout for things like mandatory athletic fees.

Robert Kelchen: They can be very large at some institutions. If we look at some of the institutions in Virginia, North Carolina, it’s like $1,000 a year just to support athletics.

Kirk: And Jon, you’d think it’s the schools with big time athletic programs charging these big athletic fees. But it’s not.

Robert Kelchen: It’s the ones that are trying to keep up with them because they don’t have the same revenue coming in and they’re subsidizing basically everything through student fees.

Jon: So we understand that this is yet another part of the college process that consumers need to be aware of. And, Kirk, it can be overwhelming. But we don’t want people to worry. We’ll have a few tips on how to navigate all of this and potential solutions at the end of this episode. So stay tuned for that.

Kirk: Okay, for now, Kelchen says all of these mandatory fees make it really hard for families to calculate how much college will actually cost.

Robert Kelchen: They certainly don’t help. Students are going to end up paying the same no matter what. It’s just what they’re labeled under. And the big difference can be, what can they apply financial aid to?

Kirk: And what do the fees look like there at the University of Tennessee?

Robert Kelchen: We have some fees. And actually, the only increase we had to student charges this past year was in fees. Tuition was flat, but there were increased fees for facilities and to fund transportation. Because parking on this campus is an absolute nightmare.

Kirk: Okay, Jon, this is another thing that came up in my reporting at Northwest Missouri State. Students there say parking is also a nightmare, and campus police are pretty aggressive about parking tickets, which students view as just another revenue stream.

Lucas Nocker: I’m terrible about parking fees.

Kirk: Lucas Nocker from Smithville, Missouri, is a freshman.

Lucas Nocker: I racked up a bunch of parking fees first semester. I think I had something over $200, which is kind of embarrassing because the rules are pretty clear.

Kirk: Full disclosure here, Jon. I thought that the rules were pretty clear, too, and that I was parked in a safe spot. But when I left the campus center’s Chick-fil-A and headed back to my car, I noticed a little something on my windshield.

Kirk, at Northwest Missouri State: I just came back to my car, my rental car. I got a traffic and parking violation here, $30 fine, “no permit displayed.” I thought I was in the clear. So I’m going to try to expense this.

Jon: Good luck with that. You know, this is public media, right? Okay, pledge now to help Kirk Carapezza pay his parking ticket.

Kirk: It’s going to work.

There could be consequences, you know, if you’re a student and you don’t pay that ticket or the graduation fee or the sports activity fee. Some schools will withhold your transcript, even for relatively small unpaid amounts. We’ll post a link to some of our previous reporting on transcript holds on our landing page.

Okay, so to learn more about how all of these fees work and how we got here, we reached out to Jeongeun Kim.

Jeongeun Kim: I’m an associate professor of higher education at the University of Maryland. My research primarily touches on how universities and colleges are organizing their major practices and policies, including pricing behaviors in response to, you know, their environmental changes.

Kirk: Environmental changes, Kim says, include basic supply-and-demand economics. Her research focuses primarily on the mandatory fees that are required for everybody, but specifically full-time undergraduate students. And she finds that, as of last year, public four-year universities were charging about $1,600 per semester just in fees for in-state students.

Jeongeun Kim: And that’s typically adding about 20 percent, you know, to the cost of tuition. And if you kind of think about how it used to be, let’s say in 2000, that amount used to be only $680, which means, this amount has been almost 130 percent increased compared to that time.

Kirk: And that steep increase in fees? Well, Kim says it really started about 16 years ago, after the 2008 Great Recession.

Jeongeun Kim: When there is a recession, oftentimes states are trying to also cut their budgets, which makes them to go through the pressure of, okay, we need to identify which functions we are cutting and which function we need to continue supporting. And, unfortunately, I think higher education is one of the areas the state will consider cutting when there is an economic recession.

Kirk: What was really shocking to Kim in her research was that some schools were pretty open about what they were doing with these new designated recession-inspired fees. But they had all kinds of different names for them.

Jeongeun Kim: The names were something along the lines of “tuition contingency fee,” “economic recovery surcharge fee.” And basically some of the descriptions were, oh, the state cut the funding and we need to come up with somewhere to recoup the money, and you are going to pay for it, the students, which was very fascinating.

Jon: Fascinating, sure, Kirk. I mean, if you’re a researcher. Frustrating, definitely, if you’re a student — especially one from out of state.

Kirk: Yeah. And that’s because, after 2008, facing demographic shifts and shrinking student enrollment numbers, public colleges began fiercely competing for out-of-state students who they can charge much more in tuition and fees. So on campuses nationwide, to recruit more out-of-state students, colleges added more amenities. Think Chick-fil-As south of the Mason-Dixon line and Starbucks to the North. They began popping up in student centers, usually right next to the cafeteria.

Jeongeun Kim: These students tend to want to have, you know, those wholesome experience in college, which means, okay, like, you know, we want the lazy rivers or, you know, like, fancy facilities, which then, you know, drives the institutions to spend more on creating these resources and facilities. But, again, where do they find the money? That will be also coming from fees.

Kirk: Kim compares the rise in fees to cell phone bills with their roaming charges, or airline ticket pricing, with all of those add-ons and junk fees.

Jeongeun Kim: Yeah, higher ed is not much different, unfortunately. If you wanted to get your seats reserved, like, you pay extra. Like, almost the same thing. Even academic support at different academic level. So there would be fees for, like, lower-level or upper-level students, things like that. So that’s what I call nickel-and-dime fees.

Jon: There it is again, Kirk: nickel and dime.

Kirk: Many students at Northwest Missouri State told me they were, shall we say, annoyed by all of the nickel-and-diming going on. Students here have to pay $1,600 just for dining services, but many of them say they don’t really like the cafeteria food downstairs, so they eat the fast food from the Chick-fil-A upstairs. Here’s out-of-state student Kearsten Peterson from Nebraska and her friends Makenna Odagard from Iowa and Izzy Arias from Missouri. They had just eaten lunch at the fast-food joint.

Kearsten Peterson: I’m paying fees for things that I don’t even use or necessarily need, like my meal plan I’m paying how much for that I don’t use all the time? My textbook fees, I could probably go and order those textbooks for 40 bucks.

Makenna Odagard: You don’t even use the textbooks.

Kearsten Peterson: That’s true. I don’t even use the textbooks.

Izzy Arias: Yeah, and, you know, the biggest pisser for me was we’re paying 1,600 bucks a semester. Well, we don’t have to live on campus, some of us — freshmen do. But being on campus, you have to have a meal plan. And the cheapest one you can get is $1,600 for 10 meal times a week. I don’t eat downstairs. I haven’t eaten downstairs all semester.

Kirk: So you’re paying $1,600 for the meal plan, but you’re paying for Chick-fil-A upstairs.

Izzy Arias: Yes. Which comes with, like, the $500 dining dollars, but which is still, that’s all I use. What a waste.

Makenna Odagard: I mean, yeah, we pay them anyways. And they somewhat make sense, but at the same time, like, a little unnecessary. We had to pay $65 just to live in the LLC.

Kirk: LLC. That’s the living learning communities, which the university’s website says are designed to ease the transition to college life and provide support for personal and academic growth that encourages its mission of student success. Students here say they understand the institution’s stated goal, but …

Makenna Odagard: We’re already paying, like, $5,000 to live in the dorms. Why do we need to pay another $65? Like, you know, what is the point of some of those little things?

Kirk: And if you want to use your computer when school is not in session? Yep, you guessed it, Jon. There’s even a fee for that.

Joleigh Gann: Every summer you have to pay $75 just to keep it.

Kirk: That’s Joleigh Gann, a first-year student. She says that, taken together, all of these fees add up and they make the whole student experience feel much more transactional.

Joleigh Gann: I mean, I wish they would explain why they think we need the fees more because they kind of just give them to us and don’t really explain them. And then we have to pay them, because if we don’t, we don’t get to come here. I think it’s a little unfair that we don’t get to understand why we have them. Because a lot of people disagree with a lot of them. Like, there’s a $60 fee if you don’t check out correctly. Like even if you completely move out of your dorm, completely everything’s clean. There’s still a fee if you don’t correctly check out.

Kirk: Okay, so we did reach out to the university to respond to these complaints. A spokesperson declined to make anyone available to meet with me on campus, and then didn’t respond to several requests for comment.

Jon: A handful of colleges are listening to students and eliminating fees altogether.

Jason Reinohel is vice president for strategic enrollment management at the University of Dayton in Ohio.

Jason Reinohel: … and prior to that, I served in an assistant vice president role and working with my predecessor we uncovered some data around the effect of fees here at UD, and I was on kind of on point to help socialize the negative effects of fees on our students.

Kirk: Jason, what kind of fees did the University of Dayton have on its books?

Jason Reinohel: Fees for things like labs, course-based fees, extracurricular-related fees. And then we had, like, a graduation fee.

Kirk: And how much was that one?

Jason Reinohel: If I recall — it’s been a little while — if I recall it, it was, like, $75 to graduate.

Kirk: So what were the negative effects of all of these fees?

Jason Reinohel: You know something we did then and still do is we would do a survey of our graduating students and ask them about their experience. And the kind of the trigger moment for me in driving this change was the feedback we received in that survey. So we’re surveying students. Imagine the student is at a point where they’ve successfully completed their degree. They should be on Cloud Nine, right? They should be talking about how much they love UD and their faculty and all of this. And they did that. But then they also indicated how just frustrated and, you know, really ticked off they were about feeling nickel and dimed because these fees were surprises to them over and over.

Kirk: On average, the survey found students graduated having experienced 20 different fees.

Jason Reinohel: Nickel and dimed. It was their phrase. And so we captured that data, that qualitative data as well as some quantitative data. The average amount that our students were paying per year was $2,100 in these, you know, in a sense undisclosed fees.

Kirk: Undisclosed fees like what?

Jason Reinohel: You would have things like a School of Business student who, you know, would be taking a finance class and naturally, we’d want to get them a subscription to The Wall Street Journal. Well, you know, so you’d start class and then all of a sudden the faculty member would say, well, that’s going to cost you $50 extra for this semester, right? Like that type of thing. And it’s not it’s not like that student can really say no to that. Like they need that access, right? We took the quantitative and qualitative data and put that together and in a way to help drive change across the institution.

Kirk: So Reinhold says what the University of Dayton did was roll all of those fees into the overall cost of college.

Jason Reinohel: As a person flying on a plane, like, you just expect to be able to do certain things when you’re on the plane. And that’s how our students behave as well, right? They want to fully participate. In fact, we sell the experience that way. We want them to fully participate. But we used to nickel and dime them on the edges. And in a way that they felt, you know, frustrated about.

Kirk: Reinohel says this was part of a larger set of changes the university made to meet its commitment to improve price transparency.

Jason Reinohel: We removed these surprise fees and at the same time, we also articulated the net price for tuition that our family would pay across all four years. And so we created a financial aid offer that, you know, for most institutions is one year at a time.

Kirk: Right. And that’s the bait and switch we’ve been talking about this season. Your financial aid offer your first year probably doesn’t equal what it’s going to be your sophomore and then junior year. So you guarantee the same package throughout.

Jason Reinohel: Yes. Actually, we fixed the net tuition. And so the net tuition the family paid in year one was the same net tuition they paid in year two, three and four. Because really, ultimately, it’s not the aid package that matters. It’s actually what’s out of pocket to the family that matters. Right? So we fixed that. And actually in order to do that, we had to eliminate fees because these these are significant. The $2,100 per year, we couldn’t have that level of variance and make a complete commitment to our families about the cost of the degree.

Kirk: Sounds on the level. Right, Jon?

Jon: And it helped the university, too. Dayton’s first-year class sizes grew significantly after the change and to this day.

Kirk: But eliminating fees remains pretty rare in the land of higher ed. Economists say it’s a lot easier for private colleges like the University of Dayton to make these changes.

Jon: That’s because, again, private colleges are in control of their pricing strategies. But state legislatures set the tuition limits of public universities, and they say that’s why they have to jack up fees.

Kirk: So if you’re a student or family trying to navigate the wild world of university fees, or you’re just trying to save a buck, what can you do first? Do your research and look on colleges websites.

Jon: Yeah, some schools are better than others, but most public colleges will list their overall fees, although they won’t always give you a clear breakdown of what the fees are actually used for. So ask for it.

Kirk: And once you do that and you understand what exactly you’re paying for, there might be ways that your full-time status is calculated a little bit differently based on the types of classes you’re taking. So you might be able to reduce the total amount of fees you’re paying if you’re taking fewer credits in any particular semester. The key here, again, Jon, is to ask. And sometimes there may be some fees that you can opt out of if you’re not using, for example, the cafeteria or the gym.

Jon: So the bottom line is, pay attention. Read the fine print and know what you’re paying for. Then ask questions. Which is what we’ve said throughout this podcast. And we’ve given you places to look for the info. Kirk, sorry we can get you off the hook for that parking ticket.

Kirk: Don’t worry about it, man. I’m just going to expense it to your colleagues over at The Hechinger Report.

This is College Uncovered from GBH and The Hechinger Report. I’m Kirk Carapezza …

Jon: And I’m Jon Marcus. We’d love to hear from you. Send us an email to GBHNewsconnect@wgbh.org, and tell us what you want to know about how colleges really operate. And if you’re with a college or university, tell us what you think the public should know about higher Ed.

This episode was produced and written by Kirk Carapezza …

Kirk: … and Jon Marcus, and it was edited by Jeff Keating. Meg Woolhouse is our supervising editor. Ellen London is executive producer. Production assistant from Diane Adame.

Jon: Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott. All of our music is by college bands. Our theme song and original music is by Left Roman out of MIT. Mei He is our project manager and head of GBH podcasts is Devin Maverick Robins.

College Uncovered is a production of GBH News and The Hechinger Report and distributed by PRX.

It’s made possible by Lumina Foundation.

Thanks so much for listening.

The post College Uncovered, Season 2, Episode 7 appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Student loans aren’t the only kind of university debt. Colleges and universities themselves have borrowed billions, mostly to keep building facilities they may or may not actually need as enrollment declines. Today, nearly 10 cents of every dollar in university budgets goes to pay the interest on institutional debt.

Colleges and universities now collectively owe around a quarter of a trillion dollars, according to the Moody’s bond-rating agency. The annual cost of servicing this debt is $48 billion, or $750 per student at public and $1,289 at private institutions. Several recent college closings were caused by unmanageable debt.

Much of the money has gone to new buildings, even at a time when some instruction is moving online and when existing buildings need billions worth of repairs. Some has been spent on amenities meant to attract more students as enrollment declines. But many colleges have simply ended up with more debt, even as they have fewer customers to pay for it.

Curious about how much your college owes, or the one that you’re considering attending. We’ll show you how to find out, at the end of this transcript.

“College Uncovered” is made possible by Lumina Foundation.

Listen to the whole series

Scroll to the end of this transcript to find out more about this topic, and for links to more information.

Jon: So, Kirk, how’s the food?

Kirk: It’s not bad, Jon. I got the salad and a slice of pizza. It’s a little greasy.

Jon: Yeah, I had the greasy pizza, too. We’re in the dining room at Marsh Hall. It’s a really nice new dorm with a fitness room, video consoles, pool tables, flat-screen TVs. And it’s next to a bike path with great views of a salt marsh. That’s all here on the campus at Salem State University.

Kirk: Salem, Massachusetts. Famous for all those witches.

Jon: That’s right. But I’ve got something even scarier for you, Kirk. We talk a lot about student loan debt, but universities also borrow an enormous amount of money to build places like where we’re sitting right now. This relatively small public university has been on a building boom with more to come. It’s built three dorms, a parking garage, and a brand-new fitness center. And while it was doing all that, its enrollment was declining. That’s the kind of higher education debt you don’t hear about as much. But students end up paying for this, too. Salem State pays $16 million a year just in interest on what it borrowed to build all this stuff.

Kirk: Wow. That’s crazy. On top of how expensive colleges are already. So all that institutional debt ends up putting more of a burden on students and families who have to pay for it.

This is College Uncovered, from GBH News and The Hechinger Report, a podcast pulling back the Ivy to reveal how colleges really work. I’m Kirk Carapezza, with GBH …

Jon: … and I’m Jon Marcus at The Hechinger Report.

Kirk: Colleges don’t want you to know how they operate. So GBH …

Jon: In collaboration with The Hechinger Report, is here to show you.

Today on the show: “Red Ink.”

So universities and colleges nationwide have kind of an edifice complex. Even though the number of students continues to go down, they keep building and building. And to do that, they’re borrowing tens of billions of dollars a year. The cost of paying that money back adds to the already high price of college.

Here at Salem State, students pay more than $3,300 per year, per student, to service the university’s debt, through dorm charges and other fees. We got that number from a faculty task force that’s been critical of the process. We talked to the university, too. It doesn’t dispute the number, but it says that students asked for these new facilities and that it’s constantly restructuring the debt to save money.

Students walking around the campus say they weren’t aware that part of what they’re paying goes to pay off the university’s debt.

Greg O’Connor: No, I was not.

Kirk: Greg O’Connor is a freshman and a member of the Student Government Association.

Greg O’Connor: Students aren’t really satisfied here with the dining. So the fact that they took out that much money to build the dorm halls and like, dining, still like a student concern, that’s that’s really wild to me. I didn’t know that.

Jon: Mackenzie Trainor was surprised to hear about this, too.

Mackenzie Trainor: My mom pays for me to be here. I love my mom a lot, so I mean. … My dorm’s disgusting. That’s a lot of money going into dorms that are not …

Kirk: Why is it disgusting?

Mackenzie Trainor: Just different issues. Like, my shower for some reason just gets dirty very easily. The rust is disgusting.

Jon: Is it one of these new dorms?

Mackenzie Trainor: Actually, yeah. Charlotte Forten Hall. I do love this school, but I mean, I’m recently having, like, financial aid issues. I think it’s interesting to find out some of the things about where funding’s going and where the money’s going.

Jon: It’s pretty quiet on the campus, except between classes, when students start crisscrossing the quad. Nearly all the students on this campus, 95 percent of them, qualify for financial aid. And those new dorms aren’t helping the half who commute.

Brendan Sheehan is a junior majoring in business and music. He runs a landscaping company with his brothers to help pay for the cost of going here.

Brendan Sheehan: Yeah, I just I just got off work.

Jon: What’s the music for? What are you planning to do?

Brendan Sheehan: Not a solid plan yet, but I just love music, so I’ve always stuck with that.

Kirk: Favorite band?

Brendan Sheehan: Favorite band? Oof, so many to choose from. But I got to go with the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Kirk: All right,that’s a good choice.

Brendan Sheehan: Definitely.

Jon: New dorms are nice, but Sheehan said he’d be just as happy paying less for college and roughing it a little.

Brendan Sheehan: I could honestly, personally handle, you know, 5-foot-by-10-foot, you know, like, I’d be okay with living like that. I assume other people might think otherwise, but personally, I just, you know, I know that avoiding debt as much as possible is the goal.

Jon: But not necessarily for colleges and universities. And it isn’t only here at Salem State.

Kirk: Okay, so colleges and universities are borrowing vast sums to put up new dorms and student centers and other buildings, even as their enrollments decline. The actual amount of borrowed is estimated to be more than $32 billion a year in public bond debt. Most of it has gone to build new buildings that universities hope will attract students. And we’re not talking about buildings paid for by wealthy alums or giving campaigns. Forty percent of new construction on campuses is financed with debt.

Howard Bunsis: Most of the borrowing is for buildings, and the majority of those buildings are dorms. Universities have come to believe universally that dorms, that having the newest, fanciest wave pool, cool kitchens, cool whatever, are the answer in the competitive market to attract students to come to the university.

Jon: Howard Bunsis is a professor in the business school at Eastern Michigan University who studies colleges and debt. Servicing this debt now costs about 10 cents out of every dollar in university operating budgets. It’s also a major reason why a lot of small colleges are closing. We talked in Episode 4 about the large number of colleges closing these days. Many of them have more debt than assets. Ohio Valley University had $18 million in assets, but $30 million worth of liabilities when it shut down. The College of New Rochelle had $77 million worth of assets and $87 million in liabilities. I could go on and on. Cazenovia College in New York. Iowa Wesleyan. Birmingham Southern in Alabama. You get the idea. I asked Howard Bunsis what kind of colleges are doing this.

Howard Bunsis: Whether we’re talking about a flagship public, a regional public, a very wealthy private — it goes across the spectrum of universities.

Jon: So most of this is for dorms.

They figure that the proceeds they’re going to get, the revenue they’re going to generate from these dorms is going to more than cover it. And in addition, up until a year ago, interest rates in our country were very, very low. So they figured, you know what? It’s almost like free money — 3percent, 2 percent. So there was a lot of borrowing around the country by universities, no doubt. And a lot of it was for dorms, but a lot of it was generated by the low interest rates. Now interest rates are not so low anymore.

Jon: Let’s be clear, though. Just like people who have a mortgage, a lot of colleges can handle the debt, right?

Howard Bunsis: Well, let’s start at the top: flagship public universities. They have absolutely no trouble borrowing money and paying it back. They have tuition coming in. They have grants and contracts and all the research they do. They have state appropriations. They have a lot of people donating money. They have such a wonderfully diverse revenue source. They’re not going to have any trouble.

Jon: Okay. But but what about other schools like Eastern Michigan?

Howard Bunsis: You come to a place where I teach, a regional public university. Well, the grants and contracts aren’t that great. There’s not that much money coming in from gifts. So they’re relying on tuition revenue and the state appropriation. So it’s a little more problematic.

Jon: Should prospective students be wary about going to small, tuition dependent private colleges that have a lot of debt?

Howard Bunsis: The small private university that’s borrowing a lot of money, and they have one revenue source that I think is — can I use the word problematical? Is that is that a fair word? I would be very wary of a private university that gets more than 80 percent of its revenue from tuition only and is borrowing a lot of money.

Jon: So how do you tell if the college you’re considering has too much debt?

Howard Bunsis: One of my pet peeves, and [for] transparency, I think every university that takes any federal money, including a private university that gets federal money for student loans, should put their audited statements on their website for people to see. Because remember, with debt, it’s not like you have to write a check. Like when you borrow. If you borrow $200,000 in your mortgage, you don’t have to write a $200,000 check tomorrow. You have to write a monthly check. And so that’s why looking at the total cash, the two investments, that ratio should be above one.

Jon: That sounds complicated, but but you’re saying that if there’s a problem, it’s going to stick out, right?

Howard Bunsis: So I looked at this in college in West Virginia, which went under. Basically they had cash and investments of $6 million and debt of $28 million, and they had negative cash flows. So that’s troubling.

Jon: Yeah. You’re talking about Alderson Broaddus University, which closed last year just a few days before the start of the school year. It couldn’t even pay its utility bills.

Howard Bunsis: The debt issue that we’re talking about is really about small privates that put all their eggs in one basket, borrowed too much money to build dorms. The people didn’t come. The enrollment didn’t increase. The cash flows were not generated. But the principal has to be paid. The interest has to be paid.

Kirk: Back at Salem State, it was concerned faculty who took the initiative and investigated all the debt the university took on to build its new dorms, gym and that dining hall with the greasy pizza. Joanna Gonsalves is a professor of psychology, and she says it was a risky strategy from the very start.

Joanna Gonsalves: That gamble wasn’t good, because, more and more, our campuses, our students can’t afford that. It was the gamble that having those beautiful, campus facilities make our campus appealing to somebody from New Hampshire, Rhode Island, California. That really, actually never came to pass.

Jon: And yet now everybody’s paying for it.

Joanna Gonsalves: Yeah, everybody’s paying for it.

Jon: So we’ve been talking about shiny new buildings and how colleges borrow to pay for them. But that new state-of-the-art computer science building also comes at the cost of other projects and priorities. Even as they take on more debt to put up new buildings, some colleges are neglecting their existing infrastructure. Universities now have — listen to this, Kirk — $112 billion worth of deferred maintenance and repairs.

Kirk: That’s a lot of money. And I’m still thinking about the gross dorm rooms and the antiquated bathrooms or heating systems on college campuses. The things you know you don’t see on a college brochure.

Jon: Yeah. So analysts say it’s a maintenance backlog that’s now become impossible to catch up with. It means that the condition of some buildings is getting really bad.

Alice Roberts Davis: Generally what happens is, as buildings age, we should go in and replace certain aspects — plumbing, roof, heating, electrical, mechanical. All those systems need to be maintained and replaced over time. And if we don’t have the funding to do that, that becomes an item of deferred maintenance. And as those things go on without replacement, they become more critical, at risk for failure.

Kirk: That’s the person with the very tough job of overseeing this issue on one of America’s biggest campuses.

Alice Roberts Davis: I am Alice Roberts Davis. I am vice president for university services at the University of Minnesota. We have about 1,000 buildings, and more than half of our buildings are more than 50 years old. We have a number of buildings that are more than 100 years old. And so as you think about your own home and what types of things need to be repaired in your own home, if you had a home that was 50, 60 or 70 years old, you would definitely need to replace the roof. You need to replace the windows and probably work with the foundation or plumbing. Some sort of structural work would probably be necessary in our university. Buildings are no different. All of those things need to be done on a regular cadence.

Kirk: But often they haven’t been. This can affect the average college experience. These are not the buildings that gets showcased during a college tour, or when the college is trying to make a good first impression and get you the student to enroll.

Alice Roberts Davis: They want it to look stately. They want it to look old. They want it to look like those universities back east that have those long-tenured buildings and look like great thinkers have paced those corridors. And we want them to have that original character, but that costs money for us to maintain them in a way that makes them continue to be functional.

Jon: But Davis says there’s more to this than pretty buildings.

Alice Roberts Davis: Students who have had a great K-through-12 experience with wonderful facilities come to our university, and seeing something that feels like a step backward as far as facilities go — they may be looking at a lab that is the same lab that their mom and dad used, versus something that’s really state of the art in their in their high school. When that happens, they tend to look at surrounding states, other universities, other options that they may have. And what we find is when they go to those other schools, in other states, they tend to form professional and personal relationships that cause them to stay. That’s a long-term workforce issue for our state.

Jon: The condition of the campus really has a far-reaching impact. What are some other ways that it matters? I mean, schools send a message not only to students, but to faculty with the quality of their infrastructure.

Alice Roberts Davis: It’s so important that we attract the best faculty so that we can get the best students here. And when faculty assess the facilities and see that they may or may not be able to get the grant funding that they need because of the facilities that they’re being offered, they make really difficult decisions that may or may not include our university.

Kirk: Okay. So what should you, the consumer, look for when you visit a college campus? Here are some ideas.

Alice Roberts Davis: I think the parents should look at what the child’s major is. They should be thinking about what type of facility they need. What equipment is there that will help prepare them for their workforce of the future? Or do they have the faculty there that can prepare them for the workforce that they plan to enter?

Jon: So, to recap, wander around to campus when the official tour is over and look for yourself, especially at the buildings where you’re likely to take labs or classes. Next, check out the college’s ratio of assets to liabilities. That’s a way to understand whether a college might have too much debt.

Kirk: That sounds like as much fun as doing your taxes, Jon.

Jon: Well, none of this is fun, right? But there are tools that make it easy, and you’ll find them linked from the landing page for this episode. They’ll take you to universities’ publicly required financial documents, which summarize these numbers pretty well.

Kirk: This is College Uncovered. I’m Kirk Carapezza from GBH …

Jon: … and I’m Jon Marcus from The Hechinger Report. Be sure to keep listening to future episodes to hear more about what colleges and universities don’t teach you.

This episode was produced and written by Kirk …

Kirk: … and Jon, and it was edited by Jeff Keating. Meg Woolhouse is our supervising editor and Ellen London is executive producer.

Jon: Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott.

Kirk: We had production assistance from Diane Adame.

Jon: Theme song and original music by Left Roman out of MIT. Mei He is our project manager and head of GBH podcasts is Devin Maverick Robins.

Kirk: College Uncovered is a production of GBH News and The Hechinger Report and distributed by PRX. It’s made possible by Lumina Foundation. Thanks so much for listening.

Kirk: Okay, now we’re at the sundae bar. Where are you going with?

Jon: Well, cookies and cream. What else would you go with?

Kirk: Cookie dough looks good. Or mint chocolate chip?

The post College Uncovered, Season 2, Episode 6 appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our country is facing a severe shortage of nurses, with many U.S. hospitals struggling to meet demands for patient care. By next year, we are expected to face a shortage of up to 450,000 nurses. Allied health professionals such as phlebotomists, pharmacy technicians and medical assistants are also in extremely high demand. 

Unless new policies are created to help attract and train new talent, we will never have enough healthcare professionals to fill the gaps in the workforce, and patient care will ultimately suffer. I believe it is critical for policymakers to create new pipelines for healthcare jobs — starting in high school. 

Many factors contribute to the growing healthcare workforce shortage, from policy and training barriers to high turnover and burnout. One of the most pressing challenges we have today is in building high school students’ awareness of and interest in the healthcare field, specifically in the many available nursing and allied health positions.  

Related: When nurses are needed most, nursing programs aren’t keeping up with demand

As a nurse educator and the mother of a high schooler, I know many young people who have high aspirations but aren’t familiar with the dozens of different paths to a rewarding career in healthcare.  

Surveys show that 58 percent of high school students are interested in jobs that require specific skills, like nursing. But many graduates feel unsure about what to study in college or what career path to pick. And some 30 percent are not following a planned career or educational path at all. 

This gap presents an opportunity for us to build students’ knowledge of and awareness about healthcare while they’re still in high school. That could mean sponsoring health education classes or hosting nurses to speak at job fairs. 

It could mean encouraging students to participate in educational programs to ensure they are academically prepared for the rigor of nursing school prior to their enrollment, or providing healthcare career-focused field trips so they can get a real sense of the many different roles that nurses play.  

Job-shadowing opportunities and simulation labs at local hospitals, healthcare facilities and colleges could also provide students with visual, in-person experiences that expose them to the array of opportunities in the field. 

There is often limited understanding of what it means to build a career in nursing or allied health, fields that include a rich tapestry of different roles and healthcare settings. For example, careers in nursing can range from being a certified nursing assistant in a nursing home to a registered nurse in an emergency room to a Ph.D. nursing educator in a classroom.  

For allied health, a career could mean being a medical coder in a doctor’s office, an EKG technician in a hospital or performing a variety of other roles.  

In short, there are many fulfilling ways to earn a living while bettering our communities — and not all of those paths require going to medical school or completing a four-year program.  

Quicker points of entry to the field, such as through training programs and associate degrees, are just as important for students beginning their healthcare professional journeys. 

Related: How one college is tackling the rural nursing shortage

By partnering with local hospitals, health systems, medical groups and even higher education facilities that offer degrees in healthcare, high school faculty and students can help develop a greater understanding of and interest in nursing as a profession.  

In some states, efforts are already underway. Maryland, Missouri and Florida — among other states — have invested in the future of the nursing workforce by providing grants that support nursing programs through recruitment and retention and enhance existing educational programs. In North Carolina, my local school systems have partnered with a grant-funded program to help high schoolers get credentialed and then intern at hospitals in their senior year.   

With the right support and investments, policymakers and schools can increase awareness of the critical role nursing plays in delivering quality, patient-focused care to our communities across our country.  

By starting early, we can help turn the tide on the nursing and allied health professional shortage and build a robust high school-to-healthcare-worker pipeline to ensure that all patients have access to high-quality care. 

Jade Tate, MSN, RN, CNE, is a NCLEX services manager at ATI Nursing Education. She is based in North Carolina. 

This story about healthcare career education 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 OPINION: Patient care will suffer if we don’t attract more young people to healthcare fields  appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

WILMINGTON, Del. — Entrando a un centro comunitario repleto de estudiantes de último año de secundaria, Atnre Alleyne tiene algunos consejos para la audiencia, miembros de la primera clase de solicitantes universitarios que serán influenciados por el fallo de la Corte Suprema del pasado junio que derribo las admisiones con conciencia racial.

“Hay que obtener buenas calificaciones, hay que encontrar una manera de hacer lo académico, pero también convertirse en líderes”, dijo Alleyne, el enérgico cofundador y director ejecutivo de TeenSHARP, una organización sin fines de lucro que prepara a estudiantes de entornos subrepresentados para la educación superior. “¡En sus escuelas, hagan algo! Luchen por la justicia social”.

A varios de los participantes de TeenSHARP reunidos ahí, que son predominantemente negros o hispanos, les preocupa que sus posibilidades de ingresar a escuelas de primer nivel hayan disminuido con la decisión del tribunal. Se preguntan qué decir en sus ensayos de admisión y qué tan cómodos se sentirán en campus que podrían volverse cada vez menos diversos.

En esta noche de otoño, Alleyne y su equipo responden preguntas de las docenas de estudiantes a quienes asesoran, sobre todo, desde plazos de aplicación temprana hasta qué escuelas tienen más probabilidades de otorgar becas y ayuda generosa financiera. El cambio en el panorama de admisiones solo ha aumentado la determinación del equipo de desarrollar una nueva generación de líderes, estudiantes que lucharán por que sus voces estén representadas en los campus y más adelante en el lugar de trabajo.

“Quiero que abran las puertas de estos lugares de una patada, para que regresen y abran más puertas”, dijo Alleyne.

Este objetivo lo comparten los ex alumnos del programa que Alleyne y su esposa, Tatiana Poladko, iniciaron en el sótano de una iglesia hace 14 años. Varios están presentes esta noche contando sus propias travesías educativas, que culminaron con becas completas para escuelas como la Universidad de Chicago y la Universidad Wesleyan, donde los costos anuales estimados se acercan a los $90,000.

Antes de la decisión de la Corte Suprema en el caso Students for Fair Admissions contrz Harvard, las universidades altamente selectivas servían como un faro de esperanza y movilidad económica para estudiantes como los que aconseja TeenSHARP. Muchos son los primeros en sus familias en asistir a la universidad y carecen de conexiones heredadas o de acceso a consejeros privados que durante mucho tiempo han dado un impulso a los estudiantes más ricos.

But even before the high court ruling, Black and Latino students were poorly represented at these institutions, while the college degree gap between Black and white Americans was getting worse. For some students, the court decision sends a message that they do not belong, and if they get in, they worry they’ll stand out even more.

Incluso antes del fallo del tribunal superior, los estudiantes afroamericanos y latinos estaban escasamente representados en estas instituciones, mientas que la brecha de títulos universitarios entre estadounidenses negros y blancos sigue empeoriando. Para algunos estudiantes, la decisión judicial envía el mensaje de que no pertenecen, y que, si ingresan, les preocupa resaltar aún más.

“Me sentí realmente molesto por eso”, dijo Jamel Powell, un estudiante de secundaria de Belle Mead, Nueva Jersey, que participa en TeenSHARP, sobre el fallo de acción afirmativa. “Este sistema ha ayudado a muchas minorías subrepresentadas a ingresar a estas escuelas de la Ivy League y sobresalir”.

Si bien el impacto total de la decisión sobre la demografía de los estudiantes no es claro, los representantes de 33 universidades escribieron en un informe amicus presentado en el caso que la proporción de estudiantes afroamericanos en sus campus caería de aproximadamente 7.1 por ciento a 2.1 por ciento, si se prohíben acciones afirmativas.

La incertidumbre sobre lo que significa la decisión está pasando factura a los estudiantes y consejeros escolares a nivel nacional, dijo Mandy Savitz-Romer, profesora titular de la Graduate School of Education de Harvard. Mientras las universidades analizan cómo pueden cumplir sus compromisos con la diversidad y al mismo tiempo cumplir con la ley, los estudiantes se preguntan si mencionar su raza en los ensayos de aplicación los ayudará o los perjudicará.

En la decisión mayoritaria, el presidente del Tribunal Supremo, John Roberts, escribió que la raza sólo podía invocarse dentro del contexto de la historia de vida del solicitante, haciendo de los ensayos la única oportunidad para que los estudiantes discutieran su raza y origen étnico. Pero desde entonces, Edward Blum, el activista conservador que ayudó a llevar el caso ante el tribunal, ha amenazado con más demandas, prometiendo cuestionar cualquier tema de ensayo que no sea “más que un subterfugio clandestino para divulgar la raza de un estudiante”.

El Departamento de Educación ha publicado directrices que dicen que, si bien las escuelas no pueden poner el dedo en la escala de los estudiantes en función de su raza, “siguen siendo libres” de considerar las características vinculadas a las experiencias de vida de los estudiantes individuales, incluida la raza. La National Association of College Admission Counseling emitió una guía similar, mientras que la Common App introdujo nuevos temas de ensayo que incluyen uno sobre la “identidad” y los “antecedentes” de los estudiantes.

Debido a la incertidumbre, los consejeros escolares necesitan capacitación específica en la elaboración de ensayos y en cómo hablar o no sobre la raza, dijo Savitz-Romer durante un webinar en Harvard, el mes pasado, sobre admisiones universitarias después de la acción afirmativa. “Necesitamos consejeros y maestros para que los estudiantes comprendan que la universidad todavía es para ellos”, dijo.

Es una tarea difícil: en promedio, los consejeros de las escuelas públicas atienden a más de 400 estudiantes cada uno, lo que ofrece poco tiempo para asesoramiento personalizado.

Esa realidad es la razón por la que grupos de asesoramiento sin fines de lucro como TeenSHARP trabajan junto a los estudiantes, guiándolos a través de un sistema de admisión cada vez más confuso. El equipo de tres asesores de TeenSHARP trabaja intensamente con aproximadamente 140 estudiantes a la vez, incluidos 50 estudiantes de último año que a menudo se postulan hasta a 20 universidades para maximizar sus posibilidades.

Esa es una fracción de los que necesitan ayuda, otra razón por la que los líderes del grupo dependen de su red de más de 500 “Sharpies”, como se conoce a los alumnos.

Emily Rodríguez, estudiante de último año de TeenSHARP que asiste a la Escuela de Ciencias Conrad en Wilmington, decidió abordar la raza de frente en sus ensayos universitarios: escribió sobre su determinación de no “hacer el papel de la pobre y sumisa mexicana”.

Hamza Parker, estudiante de último año de la escuela secundaria Smyrna de Delaware, quien se mudó a Estados Unidos desde Arabia Saudita cuando cursaba sexto grado, dijo que al principio estaba en contra de escribir sobre su identidad. “Siento que te pone en una posición en la que tienes que tener una historia triste para tu ensayo en lugar de hablar de algo bueno que sucedió en tu vida”, les dijo a Alleyne y Poladko durante una sesión de asesoramiento por Zoom.

Pero en la sesión, Alleyne y Poladko la alentaron a inspirarse en su propia historia, una de la que conocen algo gracias a su trabajo con su hermana mayor, Hasana, ahora estudiante de tercer año en Pomona College. La familia tuvo una mudanza difícil desde Arabia Saudita a la ciudad de Nueva York y más tarde a Delaware, donde Hamza se unió a la Black Student Coalition de Delaware.

Hamza decidió revisar su ensayo centrado en la lingüística para describir cómo experimentó el racismo y luego abrazó su herencia musulmana.

“Soy mi yo social normal y mi fe y vestimenta musulmana son ampliamente conocidas y respetadas en mi escuela”, escribió. “Incluso mi escuela tiene ahora un espacio dedicado a la oración durante el Ramadán”.

Alleyne y Poladko normalmente trabajan con estudiantes que están comenzando su primer año de escuela secundaria, por lo que la pareja puede guiar todo el proceso de solicitud de ingreso a la universidad, como lo hacen algunos costosos asesores privados. Los servicios de TeenSHARP son gratuitos y como organización sin fines de lucro, depende del apoyo de una variedad de donantes.

Ni Poladko ni Alleyne asistieron a escuelas de élite. Se conocieron como estudiantes de posgrado en la Universidad de Rutgers y se comprometieron a iniciar TeenSHARP después de ayudar a la sobrina de Alleyne, estudiante de una gran escuela secundaria pública de la ciudad de Nueva York, a postularse para universidades.

Asombrados por lo complicadas e inaccesibles que podían ser las admisiones universitarias, los dos decidieron convertirlo en el trabajo de su vida, redactando subvenciones y obteniendo donaciones de bancos y fundaciones locales para poder atender a más estudiantes.

Su trabajo ahora es en gran medida remoto: durante la pandemia, la pareja se mudó de Wilmington a la Ucrania natal de Poladko para estar más cerca de su familia, lo que los llevó a una dramática fuga a Polonia con sus tres hijos pequeños cuando estalló la guerra. Poladko se está tomando un año sabático en TeenSHARP este año, aunque todavía ayuda a algunos estudiantes a través de Zoom. Alleyne vuela de Varsovia a Wilmington para reunirse con los estudiantes en persona, a menudo en el centro comunitario del lugar que alguna vez albergó sus oficinas.

También dependen de las relaciones que han construido a lo largo de los años con presidentes de universidades y funcionarios de admisiones en escuelas como Boston College, Pomona College y Wesleyan, Carleton y Macalester Colleges en Minnesota y muchas otras universidades las cuales han dado la bienvenida a los solicitantes de TeenSHARP.

“Necesitamos más ‘Sharpies’ en nuestro campus”, dijo Suzanne Rivera, presidenta de Macalester College, en Minnesota, y miembro del consejo asesor de TeenSHARP. “Sus preguntas son siempre muy inteligentes y reveladoras”.

Los Sharpies también tienden a convertirse en líderes del campus, en parte porque TeenSHARP requiere que sus estudiantes desarrollen habilidades de liderazgo. Eso es algo que William García, quien se graduó de la Universidad de Chicago la primavera pasada, les dijo a los estudiantes de último año en Wilmington.

Al principio, se sintió aislado en Chicago, reticente a hablar de sus experiencias como hispano. “Yo estaba en tu lugar hace cinco años”, dijo García. Más tarde se dio cuenta de que su experiencia podía ser una ventaja y la aprovechó para convertir un ingrediente de uno de los licores más populares de México en una iniciativa comercial para su propia empresa de bebidas de agave.

“Abraza tu historia; cuenta tu historia”, dijo García. “Contaba mi historia y la gente se interesaba mucho y empezaba a ayudarme”.

Alphina Kamara, graduada de Wesleyan University en 2022, instó a los estudiantes de último año a apuntar alto y mirar más allá de las escuelas estatales y los colegios comunitarios locales que tienen tasas de graduación más bajas y menos recursos, lugares donde podría haber terminado si no fueran para TeenSHARP.

“Nunca hubiera sabido que existían escuelas como Wesleyan y que yo, como mujer negra de primera generación, tenía un lugar en ellas”, dijo Kamara, hija de padres inmigrantes de Sierra Leona.

Aun así, siempre habrá algunos estudiantes de TeenSHARP que no van a querer estar en campus con un historial terrible en materia de diversidad, incluso antes de la decisión del tribunal.

Tariah Hyland, quien en la escuela secundaria cofundó la Black Student Coalition de Delaware, sabía que se sentiría más cómoda en uno de los más de 100 colegios y universidades históricamente negros (o HBCU, por sus siglas en inglés) del país. Le dijo a la audiencia de Delaware que está prosperando en su tercer año en la Universidad Howard, donde estudia ciencias políticas.

Powell, estudiante de tercer año de Nueva Jersey, está mirando tanto a Howard como al Morehouse College de Atlanta y dijo que probablemente sólo postulará a las HBCU.

“Cuando estaba en la escuela pública, era el único niño negro en mis clases”, dijo Powell, que ahora asiste a Acelus Academy, una escuela en línea. “Siempre fui una minoría, por lo que, al ir a una HBCU, probablemente vería más personas que se parecen a mí”.

Esto no sorprende a Chelsea Holley, directora de admisiones del Spelman College en Atlanta, quien dijo que espera “más interés por parte de los estudiantes negros y minoritarios, ahora que la Corte Suprema ha tomado lo que creo que es una decisión política regresiva”.

HBCU como Spelman, entre cuyos graduados se encuentran la fundadora del Children’s Defense Fund, Marian Wright Edelman, y la autora Alice Walker, ya están viendo más solicitudes y se están volviendo aún más competitivas.

“Si los estudiantes afroamericanos de último año de secundaria ya no se sienten bienvenidos en campus predominantemente blancos, es menos probable que presenten su solicitud e incluso menos probable que se inscriban, aun cuando se les ofrece la admisión”, dijo Holley y agregó que los estudiantes pueden estar preocupados por más ataques a la diversidad y la inclusión en los campus universitarios y creen que se sentirán más cómodos en una HBCU.

Aun así, no todos predicen que el fallo judicial precipitará una caída permanente de estudiantes afroamericanos e hispanos en universidades selectivas predominantemente blancas. Richard Kahlenberg, autor y académico de la Universidad de Georgetown, predice que la caída será temporal y que la prohibición de la acción afirmativa eventualmente conducirá a un panorama más justo para los estudiantes de bajos ingresos de todas las razas.

Kahlenberg, quien sirvió como testigo experto para Students for Fair Admissions, dijo que quiere ver el fin de las preferencias heredadas, así como del reclutamiento atlético, para que las universidades puedan dar “un impulso significativo” a los “estudiantes desfavorecidos de todas las razas”, agregando que es posible “obtener diversidad racial sin preferencias raciales”. Los desafíos a las admisiones heredadas están aumentando: el Departamento de Educación ha abierto una investigación sobre el uso de esta práctica por parte de Harvard y un reciente proyecto de ley bipartidista exige que las universidades pongan fin a esta práctica.

A medida que se acerca la mitad de diciembre, Alleyne y Poladko esperan ansiosamente ver cómo le irá al puñado de estudiantes de TeenSHARP que solicitaron una decisión anticipada.

“Los funcionarios de admisiones nos aseguran que su compromiso con la diversidad no ha cambiado”, dijo Poladko. “Pero tendremos que ver. Hemos explicado a las familias y a los estudiantes que este año es un año de aprendizaje”.

Hasta entonces, tanto Poladko como Alleyne seguirán presionando a los estudiantes para que ayuden a quienes vengan después de ellos.

“Nuestro objetivo es descubrir el juego de las admisiones y darles una ventaja a nuestros estudiantes”, dijo Alleyne. “Y nuestro trabajo es enseñarles cómo jugar”.

Esta historia sobre TeenSHARP es la primera en una serie de artículos producidos por by The Hechinger Report conjunto con Soledad O’Brien Productions, sobre el impacto de la decisión de la Corte Suprema que prohíbe la acción afirmativa.

The post Asesores universitarios prometen “abrir la puerta” a estudiantes afroamericanos e hispanos a pesar del fallo de acción afirmativa appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

To boost enrollment and meet workforce needs, many states are offering free community college programs. It’s a well-intentioned (and bipartisan) idea to help people get the credentials they need, and states build their supply of college-educated workers.

But does free really mean free? Do these programs effectively bring students back to college? And does saying something’s free diminish its value?

Research shows that free college has had some effect, but not as much as you might think.

It doesn’t mean that students still don’t have to pay for food, rent, books, supplies, transportation and other living costs, which at community colleges often cost more than taking classes. That can stop them from taking states up on the offer. And private colleges and universities vying for the same students quietly oppose having to compete with free.

We’ll tell you what you need to know about free college. You’ll also find a searchable database of free college programs at the end of this transcript.

“College Uncovered” is made possible by Lumina Foundation.

Listen to the whole series

Scroll to the end of this transcript to find out more about this topic, and for links to more information.

Kirk: Can we get a Guinness and a pint of Jack’s Abbey?

Bartender: You got it.

Kirk: Thanks.

Jon. What are we doing? I thought we were podcasting.

Kirk: We are, Jon, but we’re also grabbing a pint at a local bar — cheers! — and getting some free snacks.

Jon: I like free. Hey — wouldn’t it be great if college was free?

Jack Freer: Yeah, not everyone is born with the same economic opportunities.

Shane Garrity: Yeah, college is a time where you can make so many friends, so many connections that can carry you forward into your personal and professional life.

Lila Cardillo: I think making college, like, ridiculously expensive, just, you know, doesn’t qualify a lot of people for entering certain professions. And just so it makes the wealth divide greater.

Kirk: That’s Jack Freer, Shane Garrity, and Lila Cardillo.

I mean, politically speaking, Jon, when it comes to college, perhaps nothing is more popular than free. And, again, that’s politically speaking.

Jon: Yeah. Of course, political talk is also free, or at least cheap. And if you stand in front of a group of Americans at, say, a bar like this one and say, ‘Hey, maybe everybody doesn’t need a college degree,’ most of the bar will not their heads and probably agree with you.

Kirk: But then if you say, ‘Yo, we all have to agree that young people need more than a high school degree to get a good job’ — nowadays, everybody at the bar will also not their head in agreement.

Jon: That’s why a lot of states are ending up in the middle. They’re making community college free.

Kirk: So where do I sign up? I love free stuff — like these bar snacks. But is free college really free? You might be surprised to hear the answer.

Kirk: This is College Uncovered, a podcast pulling back the ivy to reveal how colleges really work.

And we should note here, Jon, that our little podcast is already free, as they say, wherever you get your podcasts.

Jon: Yeah, it is, but it’s also priceless, Kirk. I’m Jon Marcus at The Hechinger Report …

Kirk: … and I’m Kirk Carapezza with GBH. Colleges don’t want you to know how they operate. So GBH …

Jon: … in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, is here to show you.

Okay, so the number of people in the U.S. with some college credit, but no degree or certificate to show for it — that number keeps growing. It’s now north of 40 million, the highest that it’s ever been. And since the pandemic, hundreds of thousands more students have dropped out, most of them low income or the first in their families to go to college. That’s the idea behind free community college. It’s a chance to woo those students back.

Kirk: Right. More states are offering free community college. Two thirds of states now have some form of free, from Michigan to New Mexico, Rhode Island to Oregon. The details differ from state to state, but free college has widespread support.

Community colleges like it because they’re facing an enrollment plunge. Businesses like it to meet their need for skilled workers. And it’s just plain good for students, who see their lifetime earnings rise. Or that’s the thinking. But it’s not quite so simple.

So do these new programs help students graduate on time and with less debt? You might be surprised to learn that free college isn’t as effective at helping students finish college as you’d think.

Today on the show: ‘The Real Cost of Free.’

I went over to Bunker Hill Community College here in Boston to meet Magno Garcia. Since he graduated from high school, Garcia has enrolled in Bunker Hill three times off and on, commuting from his home in nearby Chelsea. Back then, Garcia worked long hours in retail and as an air-conditioner technician so he could avoid student loan debt. He wanted a degree in accounting so he could move up to management at the HVAC company. But the first two times he enrolled, he ran out of cash, time and energy.

Magno Garcia: I wasn’t really motivated, so it was, like, the worst idea, because I paid for everything out of pocket.

Kirk: What do you think you needed at the time?

Magno Garcia: Guidance. I never felt like I had someone that was, like, ‘Hey, I’m here to help.’

Kirk: Overwhelmed, Garcia dropped out twice to put food on the table and pay rent. He kept working retail. He was also devoting time to a personal passion: producing his own music videos on YouTube. Now, at 34 years old, Garcia is back at Bunker Hill. And, Jon, guess what drew him back to college?

Jon: Let me guess. Was it because it was free?

Kirk: Indeed it was. Massachusetts recently began offering free community college for anyone over the age of 25 without a degree.

Magno Garcia: I’m taking advantage of that.

Kirk: Massachusetts education officials say returning students like Garcia are responsible for the first public college enrollment increase in nine years. Enrollment in public four-year colleges slowed, but community college enrollment in Massachusetts rose by 8 percent last year. All 15 community college campuses, including Bunker Hill, saw a spike. But that’s not necessarily the full story.

Davis Jenkins: It’s good news in that there’s been some stabilization, but, overall, you know, enrollment’s down.

Jon: Davis Jenkins studies community colleges at Columbia University. Despite the recent uptick, Jenkins points out that community college enrollment in Massachusetts is actually down nearly 40 percent since 2014. It’s also down nationwide. The number of community college students across the country dropped nearly 30 percent over the last 10 years.

Davis Jenkins: Community college enrollment was hit hardest during Covid, and it had been dropping for a decade before that.

Jon: To get more students back in classrooms, some political leaders want to expand free community college to all state residents, regardless of age.

But free doesn’t always work out for students. Because, while, yes, removing financial barriers is a good thing, many still can’t afford to stop working and focus on their studies. So they don’t graduate. While federal data doesn’t tell us the racial makeup of the 40 million Americans with some college and no degree, researchers say they’re likely to be more diverse, the first in their families to go to college and from low-income backgrounds, compared to their peers who did graduate.

Amanda Fernandez: We certainly have a long, long way to go — in particular, for Latino students who still to this day are experiencing the ramifications of an inequitable education, and in particular during the pandemic, when these issues were exacerbated.

Kirk: Amanda Fernandez is CEO of Latinos for Education. She says free community college signals progress. But a poll commissioned by Latinos for education and the nonprofit Mass., Inc. finds disparities in attitudes about going to college among people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. And Latino parents were the least likely to say their child participated in college prep programs. Another survey by The Chronicle of Higher Education finds Latinos with a high school degree are more likely to be unsure how to enroll and how to pay for college.

So I asked Amanda Fernandez: Is there an information gap?

Amanda Fernandez: It’s a communication gap and it’s a belief gap. And that’s where I think it’s actually lower-hanging fruit. Because our families want their children to go to college, but they don’t have the information about how to even get into an early college program, how to get into a vocational education program. And so, therefore, their students don’t believe or their children don’t believe that they can access higher education and therefore they lose interest.

Kirk: That interest is so important, right? Because in many Latino communities, this is often a family decision.

Amanda Fernandez: Our Latino families are having conversations with their kids about, ‘What are you going to do after high school?’ But they’re not confident in being able to say, ‘You will go to college because we know how to access financial aid, we know how to apply for it.’

Kirk: Does taxpayer support for free college programs help students access college, and — more importantly — graduate?

Amanda Fernandez: I do believe some of that scholarship money does go to other supports that are needed for persistence in the community college space. But, again, you have to think about the longer term and the realities of, you know, when the average age of our community college students is around 27 years old and they have lives and they have to support their own families and children and extended families, you have to support the continued persistence.

Kirk: Sociologist Sara Goldrick-Rab agrees. Goldrick Rab is a senior fellow at Education Northwest, a nonprofit organization in Portland, Oregon. She’s author of “Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid and the Betrayal of the American Dream.” And she’s a longtime advocate for free community college programs.

Sara Goldrick-Rab: For 20 years, my research has suggested that this is a very viable part of the solution, and that’s what I’d call it. I’d call it part of the solution.

Kirk: She says free community college will help close some of these gaps, but it’s not a panacea.

Sara Goldrick-Rab: It’s not meant to be all things. It’s not meant to solve every problem around college affordability, but it’s very clear that it’s targeted to the people who most need college to be affordable. Those are the people who right now are not going at all.

Jon: Goldrick-Rab says making college tuition free is not enough, because going to college costs much more than just tuition. Even if politicians do promote free college as the answer.

Sara Goldrick-Rab: They’re not accounting for the full range of costs. The number one college affordability issue in this country is housing. That’s what people are grappling with. And we’re not talking about that because most people don’t live on campus, for example.

Jon: Kirk, that’s one of the issues with these free programs. It’s not always clear what’s covered. For example, some provide funding for living expenses, but most of them do not.

The total cost of attending college includes food, housing, books, supplies, health care, transportation and a bunch of other costs. In fact, non-tuition expenses are the majority of the cost in public higher education. And if you want to find the true cost of attendance from a college, good luck, because that’s based on numbers provided by the colleges. They report them to the federal government. But they’re just estimates for everything except tuition and fees. And those estimates — they’re often grossly incorrect.

So for all of these reasons, supporters of free college say funneling everyone into a system where you’re supposed to graduate within two or four years is the wrong approach. It will only make educational inequities worse.

Kirk: And they say free community college changes who’s going to college. And it helps colleges reach students who will get the biggest return on investment.

Not everyone agrees with that logic, though, Jon. I went to Nashville, Tennessee, to check out the free college program there firsthand. Former Gov. Bill Haslam told me he had made the successful push for free community college because Tennessee employers need well-trained workers.

Bill Haslam: We had looked out at the state and realized that of all the jobs are going to exist in Tennessee in 2025, 55 percent of them would require a degree or certificate beyond high school.

Kirk: It was all about churning out more qualified workers and attracting companies to locate or relocate there. At the time Haslam said this, only a third of Tennessee’s population held a degree or certificate, so Haslam said he wanted to do something that would shock the system and then get people to think:

Bill Haslam: ‘Hey, I never thought that I would go to school, but maybe I will.’ If you haven’t grown up with the thought that college is a real possibility for you, then it’s not something talked about at the dinner table. It’s not on the radar screen.

Kirk: And it worked. At first.

Community college enrollments spiked 5 percent the first year, with thousands of low-income students taking up the offer. Students like Eric Bihembo, who immigrated from Uganda as a teen, signed up.

Eric Bihembo: College wasn’t on my radar.

Kirk: Did you think it was too good to be true?

Eric Bihembo: It was too good to be true. I mean, free money where I could go and get a free education. It was overwhelming. At the same time, I just wanted to check it out.

Kirk: Going from Uganda to Nashville, was there a bit of a culture shock?

Eric Bihembo: We don’t have these big buildings where you can stand and compare yourself and see how small you are.

[‘Pomp and Circumstance,’ from the Tennessee State commencement ceremony]

Kirk: In the end, Bihembo graduated from community college in Nashville and then completed a Tennessee Highway Patrol cadet program.

Where do you see yourself in 10 or 20 years?

Eric Bihembo: My dream job is one day to work with the FBI doing cybersecurity. But I want to start as a police officer to pick up all the experience and be able to apply it in the in the bigger world.

Kirk: Researchers say Bihembo, who graduated in two years, is the exception. Because while more students enrolled in Tennessee’s community colleges, it didn’t mean a higher percentage graduated.

Jennifer Freeman: It boosts enrollments at first, but those people don’t necessarily stay in school.

Jon: Jennifer Freeman is with the nonprofit Jobs for the Future. Turns out, even though most community college students say their goal is to earn a degree, they usually don’t.

Only one in five adults who re-enrolled in Tennessee’s free college program graduated after three years.

To retain students, Freeman suggests improving support systems and tailoring offerings to students career goals. Otherwise …

Jennifer Freeman: … people go back and then they kind of go back to the same college format, structure that didn’t work for them in the first place.

Jon: Columbia’s Davis Jenkins agrees. He says, sure, free helps, but two-year schools will ultimately need to improve their product.

Davis Jenkins: Community colleges. I love them, but they generally don’t treat adults well. They’re going to have to move toward more of a 24-seven advising. They’re going to have to schedule the courses when students need them, not Tuesday through Thursday between 10 and 1, when the professors want to teach.

Jon: Sara Goldrick-Rab, on the other hand, defends these programs, because she says no-cost college broadens access and benefits society. She says the current financial aid system, which requires filling out complicated forms and figuring out formulas to calculate how much college will cost, is an obstacle for too many students.

Sara Goldrick-Rab: Things that knock out a given cost, like tuition, are more promising than things that are predicated on jumping through a bunch of hoops.

Kirk: And advocates say these programs help students like Rebecca Beaucher in Massachusetts. At 45, Beaucher returned to college last fall thanks to the state’s new free college program. Beaucher started college 20 years ago, but quickly dropped out because working full time as an IT analyst and parenting spread her too thin. Going back wasn’t easy, either.

Rebecca Beaucher: I think I was intimidated. You know, it had been so long since I had been in a class environment.

Kirk: She says the free program was the enticement she needed to re-enroll at Northern Essex Community College. She recalls when she heard the news that the program passed in the state’s budget.

Rebecca Beaucher: My heart just dropped and I immediately burst into tears and I sent a text to my husband, like, this is it. Game on. I’m finally getting my degree. I’m just, I’m going for it. I can’t believe this finally happened.

Kirk: This year, Bouchet is taking business classes online and says her goal is to earn her doctorate someday.

Rebecca Beaucher: On my headstone I want it to say, ‘Dr. Rebecca Beaucher.’ I understand that I’m 45, and I may get that when I’m 90. And I am absolutely okay with this.

Jon: So free college is a mixed bag. Some students might only be interested in taking a few classes to brush up their skills. Others might want to get a doctorate someday. But we do know the vast majority are hoping for a four-year degree.

Surveys show more than 80 percent of community college students aspire to earn a bachelor’s degree. Only a small percentage do, though — just about 13 percent, even within six years. That’s according to the U.S. Department of Education. And those rates are even lower for low-income, male, Black and Hispanic students.

Kirk: Yeah. Economists like Josh Goodman at Boston University say there are lots of reasons why low-income students might be better served if they went straight to a four-year college.

Josh Goodman: It’s a combination of things. One is we know the community colleges are less well funded per student than a four-year institution, so they have fewer resources. [Students] are with peers who are academically weaker. And that may have an influence on their success in their own coursework. And though many students plan to start at a community college and then transfer to the four-year sector, many of the students who plan to do that don’t end up succeeding, either because they misunderstand that transfer process or because the alignment between their community college coursework and the requirements of the four-year institutions is not always great.

Kirk: We have a whole episode just about that topic from our first season. It’s called ‘The Transfer Trap,’ so be sure to check it out.

Jon: Okay, so, Kirk, I guess the old saying there’s no such thing as a free lunch — that still holds.

Kirk: Yeah. So here are a few key takeaways from this episode.

One: Do your research. Make sure you’re enrolling in a free program that meets your career and personal goals.

Two: Ask about retention and graduation rates. Because if nobody graduates, then free doesn’t really mean anything.

And three: If your aim is to earn a bachelor’s degree someday, ask whether the credits you earn will even transfer and if they’ll transfer to your major. Because while most community college students say they want to earn a four-year degree, few do so within six years, and the rate is even lower for first-generation, low-income, Black and Latino students like Magno Garcia.

Back at Bunker Hill. Garcia told me the new free community college program for adults there renewed his hope to earn a degree.

Magno Garcia: Third time’s a charm. I actually feel very confident saying that I will graduate.

Kirk: Garcia has found a support network on Bunker Hill’s campus through a program designed for men of color. That’s another good takeaway, Jon: Find a support network on campus.

Garcia is now working as a social worker at a high school while wrapping up his associate degree, and he switched his major from accounting to psychology.

Magno Garcia: It made a huge difference. I was enjoying my classes. The subject matters were more interesting to me than, you know, crunching in numbers.

Kirk: This fall, he plans to transfer to a four-year university and pursue a bachelor’s degree so he can become a teacher or a school counselor.

This is College Uncovered from GBH and The Hechinger Report. I’m Kirk Carapezza …

Jon: … and I’m Jon Marcus. We’d love to hear from you. Send us an email to gbhnewsconnect@wgbh.org. And tell us what you want to know about how colleges really operate. And if you’re with a college or university. Tell us what you think the public should know about higher ed.

This episode is produced and written by Kirk Carapezza …

Kirk: … and Jon Marcus, and it was edited by Jeff Keating. Meg Woolhouse is supervising editor. Ellen London is executive producer. Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott. We had production assistants from Diane Adame.

Theme song and original music by Left Roman out of MIT, and all of our music is by college bands.

Mei He is our project manager, and head of GBH podcasts is Devin Maverick Robins.

College Uncovered is a production of GBH News and The Hechinger Report and distributed by PRX.

It’s made possible by Lumina Foundation.

Thank you so much for listening.

The post College Uncovered, Season 2, Episode 5 appeared first on The Hechinger Report.