Greater Boston – a region famous for its sheer number of colleges – is also home to an underground network that helps women get access to abortion pills.

Every week, a group including many Boston-area college and medical students meets to put together abortion pill “care packages” to send to women in states where abortion is illegal or restricted.

While the founders call them “pill-packing parties” the work is not without risk. Women in Texas, Mississippi and other states can be prosecuted for aborting a fetus.

College students have long been active in the abortion movement, but the activism looks very different today than it did in the 1960s. In this election season, College Uncovered takes you to a “pill-packing party” at an undisclosed location in Greater Boston and talks with college students mobilizing to help women get abortion medication wherever they live.

We also look at the re-energized anti-abortion movement in the wake of the Dobbs ruling two years ago and hear from a leader of the “pro-life generation.”

GBH’s Andrea Asuaje, senior producer for Under the Radar with Callie Crossley hosts this week’s episode, taking a deep dive into the sweeping ways medication abortion and the internet have changed college activism around reproductive rights.

Listen to the whole series

TRANSCRIPT

[Kirk] Hey, everyone, It’s Kirk Carapezza at GBH News.

[Jon] And I’m Jon Marcus from The Hechinger Report.

Thanks for listening to another episode of College Uncovered. We’ve been diving into the politics of college this season. And this week we’re covering abortion.

[Kirk] So for this show, we’re handing the mic over to my colleague, senior producer Andrea Asuaje. Andrea, welcome to College Uncovered.

[Andrea] Hey, Kirk. Hey, Jon. Thanks for having me. 

[Jon] Andrea, we’ll let you take it from here. 

[Ambient sound] Well, wonderful. Thank you all so much for coming. I think we’re going to go ahead and get started.

[Andrea] In an undisclosed location in Massachusetts, a group of women — from college students in their early 20s to retirees in their mid-60s — sit around a large circular table. For the last year, they’ve been getting together to sit and chat and laugh while putting together special packages for recipients they don’t know and may never meet.

[Woman’s voice] After about six months of doing packing parties, we finally figured out a system that was efficient. And so we’re quite happy with our station system now.

[Andrea] This is a pill-packing party. An abortion pill-packing party.

We’re not going to tell you where this pill packing party is taking place, due to safety concerns, but it is in Greater Boston. Over the course of two hours, they will box up more than 300 packages of mifespristone and misoprostol, the two drugs used to induce abortions. 

Then they mail the pills to people who requested them through a website staffed by clinicians. The patients may be from rural Mississippi or suburban Houston, Tennessee, Kentucky or Indiana. For as little as $5, they will send the pills to patients in any state, including where abortion is illegal, and including to college students across the country.

It’s risky work, especially since critics say these volunteers should be prosecuted for committing a crime across state lines. But that doesn’t stop most of the pill-packing volunteers, like Massachusetts college student Andy, who’s originally from Texas.

[Andy] No matter how many activities I’m involved in or what’s going on in my life, I know what we’re doing is so impactful and essential. I always felt very strongly about women’s reproductive health. And so, I mean, that’s why I keep doing it. I’m doing it for these women, for people who don’t have the income or the accessibility to abortion medication.

[Andrea] This is College Uncovered from GBH News and The Hechinger Report, a podcast pulling back the ivy to reveal how colleges really work and why it matters to you.

I’m Andrea Asuaje with GBH News. Cohosts Kirk Carapezza, my colleague at GBH, and Jon Marcus at the Hechinger Report will be back after the election with a special episode.

There’s a lot happening on college campuses that matters during this election season. We’re exploring how deeply politicized higher education has become and how students, families and administrators are responding.

Today on the show: “Abortion on the Ballot … and in the Mail.

So one of the top issues that is mobilizing college students in the upcoming election is abortion. A new generation is talking more openly about abortion, not because there’s less shame or stigma around it, but because recent court rulings, including at the highest level, the Supreme Court, have made it something students have to think about and plan for in a bigger and more personal way.

Women in their 20s account for more than half of abortions, or 57 percent, according to the CDC. Roe vs. Wade guaranteed the right to an abortion for 50 years. Then in the summer of 2022, the case Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a.k.a. the Dobbs decision, overturned Roe and threw the U.S. reproductive care system into a tailspin. Two years later, with the presidential election looming, abortion is top of mind for both college-age voters and the candidates.

Here’s Kamala Harris on the campaign trail.

[Kamala Harris] This is a healthcare crisis. This is a healthcare crisis. And Donald Trump is the architect of this crisis. He brags about overturning Roe vs. Wade. In his own words, quote, ‘I did it and I’m proud to have done it,’ he says.He is proud. Proud that women are dying. Proud that young women today have few more rights than their mothers and grandmothers.How dare he? 

[Andrea] Here, in stark contrast is Donald Trump, referring to Kamala Harris and Tim Walz during their debate.

[Donald Trump] Her vice presidential pick says abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine. He also says execution after birth, it’s an execution. No longer abortion because the baby is born is okay. And that’s not okay with me.

[Andrea] Obviously untrue, by the way. 

Massachusetts was the first of eight states to pass laws shielding abortion providers from criminal and civil liability, making it a safe haven for clinicians who provide telehealth services that help patients access abortions. Massachusetts, a state packed with colleges where women increasingly outnumber men, has become the home of a relatively underground network that’s helping people across the country get abortion care.

[Angel Foster] My name is Angel Foster. I am the cofounder of the Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project, or the MAP. And my big-girl job is that I’m a professor in the faculty of health sciences at the University of Ottawa.

[Andrea] Foster studied medication abortion for two decades in humanitarian settings in the global South. After graduating from Harvard Medical School, she lives in both Massachusetts and Canada, using what she learned as a researcher to help create the Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project, which we’ll just call the MAP from now on.

[Angel Foster] Even before the Dobbs decision in 2022, we know that access to abortion care in parts of the United States was horrible. It was hard to access abortion care in most of the South and a lot of the Midwest. And then with Dobbs, 14 states almost immediately banned abortion in almost all circumstances. We now have four states that ban abortion at early gestational ages. Obviously, the landscape keeps shifting. But suffice it to say, about a third of women of reproductive age in the United States now live in a part of the country with a very restrictive abortion law. 

[Andrea] People hear that they can get abortion pills from the MAP by word of mouth on campus or on social media, like on Reddit. There’s a few rounds of online screening for medical eligibility that’s reviewed by a clinician, but no video or phone call is needed. Patients can get approval for pills in just a few hours. 

[Angel Foster] And the abortion seeker receives information about what to do next, which is to make a payment. And then once we receive the payment, we shift the pills from our office.

[Andrea] The MAP employees and volunteers are the ones filling the orders for pills, and the MAP is a homespun operation. Angel jokingly calls it the Etsy of abortion, since the organization straddles the line between clinic and small business. And for the record, the Food and Drug Administration states that mifepristone the first pill in a medication abortion, is safer than some of the most commonly used medications in the country. The rate of death from mifepristone? Five in 1,000,000. For penicillin, it’s 20 deaths in a million. And for Viagra, it’s 49 in a million.

The MAP, which was founded in October 2023, has been helping hundreds of patients across the country, month after month, particularly low-income people in places where abortion is highly restricted or straight-up illegal. It’s a pay-what-you-can setup for patients. Some get the pills for as little as $5, even though it can cost up to $250.

[Angel Foster] And what we found in our first year was that a third of our patients paid $25 or less. In my mind’s eye, I imagine someone sitting at their kitchen table and kind of counting out pennies to say, ‘How much do I actually have?’

[Andrea] The MAP is able to provide care at these deeply discounted rates thanks to donors big and small and volunteers who gladly give their time. Then there are also the paid employees of the MAP who keep it running like me.

[Maeve] You know, I have a lot of, like, hopes and dreams for my own future. And I know that if I had a child now, that would definitely get in the way. And I think that’s the same way for a lot of women and a lot of people in general.

[Andrea] Maeve is one of three project managers at the MAP, all of whom are local college students.

[Maeve] I love children. I think they’re, you know, a blessing to the world. But, like, when you don’t want a child at that time, you shouldn’t have a child at that time.

[Andrea] Her work with the MAP is simple. 

[Maeve] So I mostly do like the shipping. So I, like, will make the shipping labels on the USPS website and then put them on the packages. Take the packages to the … [fades out]

[Andrea] Yes, it may seem repetitive and, well, kind of boring to the rest of us, but Maeve feels that her work is tremendously important to the process.

[Maeve] I know that with every package I ship out, I’m helping someone and I’m, like, relieving an incredible amount of stress from someone’s life and, like, it’s just one package to me, technically, but like, for whoever is receiving it, it’s life changing. 

[Andrea] And although she recognizes how essential the work is to MAP’s mission, there’s still a little space in her brain all the way deep down in the back where fear lies. It’s why only a few people in her life know about her involvement with the MAP. 

[Maeve] I am, to an extent, putting myself at risk by working for the MAP, even though I’ve never, like, technically done anything illegal. And, like, everything we do is legal. A lot of people are not happy about it.

[Andrea] That sense of fear of potential repercussions isn’t paranoia. Despite Massachusetts being a shield-law state. While Angel, the founder of the MAP, says its strategy is legal, it also hasn’t been tested in the court system.

Then there’s the fact that 30 years ago, Brookline, Massachusetts, was the site of horrific attacks by John Salvi, who was fueled by anti-abortion sentiment. Salvi opened fire in a Planned Parenthood and then at a second clinic that performed abortions, killing two women and wounding five people. It’s the reason we’re keeping specific details about Maeve and the MAP private, because the work is risky. And that’s especially true for people who aren’t from shield-law states. That includes people like Andy, the student you heard from earlier. 

[Andy] Going back to Texas, it reminds me how necessary this work is, because you cannot get an abortion in Texas, which is terrifying. And a third of our patients are from Texas, actually, or close to a third. So where I am from, we are literally helping so many women. Even, like, I’ve sent packages to somebody in my neighborhood, which is insane to me.

[Andrea] You heard her right. She sent packages to someone in her old neighborhood, where her parents live.

[Andy] You know, I was sitting in my chair looking at my computer in this office, and I was just taken aback by the gravity of the situation and what I was doing and the fact that it has reached literally to my hometown — like, in my neighborhood. And realizing that there are so many women out there who need our help. 

[Andrea] The gravity of the situation is a mild way of putting it, when you look at how Texas has legally dealt with people seeking or somehow getting an abortion since the fall of Roe. In Texas two years ago, a 26-year-old woman who took medication for an unwanted pregnancy was charged with murder. The charge was eventually dropped, but now the woman is suing the district attorney for $1 million in damages.

These volunteers and employees with the MAP will probably never actually meet the people they’re helping. But project manager and Massachusetts college student Avery said they still feel connected to every patient who needs their help.

[Avery] I think I came back from, like, a break of some sort from school and I came back to the office and our boss had been here and she put up — Angel — she had put up a bunch of different, like, cards. We’d been sent just cards — like, people thanking us over and over again. And I remember coming in and being like, ‘My gosh.’ 

[Andrea] Avery, who’s originally from Pennsylvania, says living in Massachusetts means living in a place where most people her age in her classes and her friend group friends of friends, friends of friends of friends, most of them support abortion rights. 

[Avery] I think a part of this is acknowledging that we do live in this blue bubble. And I think this work shows us that, like, what we believe, what the people in our geographic proximity believe, is not what the rest of the country believes.

[Andrea] Maeve and Andy and Avery spend hours working with the MAP each week, helping to keep it running while taking full course loads in college and being involved with various extracurricular activities. And they’re doing it with only a few loved ones actually knowing they’re a part of this network. It’s a lot of work.

[Avery] When the work gets stressful and the work gets hard, it’s, like, corny, but, like, I kind of just have to stop for a second and, like, think about, yeah, I’m clicking a lot of buttons and I’m running boxes to the post office. But this is going to have a real effect and it’s going to benefit so many women’s lives. And this is something that I should be grateful that I get the privilege to do every day.

[Andrea] Massachusetts has a unique role as a safe haven where people can come to get an abortion or abortion services or access doctors and get help remotely. And college students are active in the effort, if not leading it.

But the Dobbs ruling has also re-energized anti-abortion activists on campuses. 

[Kristan Hawkins] Thank you all for coming to tonight’s event. My name is Sam Delmar. I’m the president of the Harvard Law Students for Life. And it’s my honor to introduce Kristan Hawkins.

[Andrea] Kristan Hawkins is the president of Students for Life of America, which has become the largest anti-abortion youth organization in the world under her leadership. The group says it has nearly 1,500 campus student groups dedicated to the anti-abortion cause, up from a few dozen 20 years ago. And Harvard is just one of her stops on a multi-year college speaking tour.

[Kristan Hawkins] I prepared a little with something because, you know, I’m at Harvard Law and you all tend to remind each other and others that you go to Harvard. So I was, like, I got to step up my game a little bit. I’m a bumpkin from West Virginia. I did want to go to law school until I met a bunch of lawyers. No offense. 

[Andrea] Hawkins says she likes to argue and found her calling as an anti-abortion activist. She calls herself a Christian wife, mother and leader of the post-Roe generation, and she calls her website unapologetically pro-life. Hawkins tells the crowd that she had an abortion when she was 20 and suffered emotionally from it for decades as a result.

[Kristan Hawkins] I had an abortion. Abortion didn’t solve the problem I thought it was going to solve. It kept me in abusive relationship. It hurt my body. It’s made me infertile. I’ve been suffering from abortion for decades emotionally, because of that decision I made when I was 20 years old. 

[Andrea] In her speech, Hawkins echoed the refrain of the anti-abortion movement around what she calls natural rights.

[Kristan Hawkins] Every single abortion is killing, ending the life of a unique whole living human being that never existed before and will never exist again. We in the pro-life movement see all human beings as equally valuable, deserving, at the very minimum, of those natural rights of the right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. Therefore, abortion is wrong.

[Andrea] But mostly, Hawkins encourages audience members who favor abortion rights to ask questions first. She regularly posts her exchanges with her opponents on TikTok, where she has 134,000 followers.

We reached out to Kristan Hawkins for an interview when she was in Boston, but we didn’t hear back from her scheduler.

If Hawkins came ready for a debate, that’s probably because surveys show that most women with some college education or a degree support abortion rights under most circumstances. Pew Research Center found that number is around 75 percent.

In all, about 70 people attended Hawkins’s event at Harvard. But there weren’t protests or open debate, only respectful applause and polite disagreement.

Recent polls have shown that students are increasingly ruling out colleges in states where they disagree with the state’s laws around abortion and reproductive rights.

[Harper Brannock] I have seen in the South increasing anti-abortion rhetoric, violence against women who are seeking health care. And I know people who have been shunned from their communities because they had a medically necessary abortion.

[Andrea] That’s Harper Brannock. She’s 21 and a junior from Huntsville, Alabama. She spoke to us at a recent Boston University event, a drag bingo night held to raise money for an abortion fund in Brannock’s home state of Alabama. Abortions are illegal, except in cases where the life of the mother is at stake. And that’s one of the reasons Harper decided to attend a college in Massachusetts.

[Harper Brannock] I felt that it was just really important to me to come to a place where if something happens to me, even sexual assault or something completely consensual and I just couldn’t have the child, I really feel like it’s important that I can have safe access to health care. 

[Andrea] We were curious if these sentiments were shared by students who go to colleges with religious affiliations. So we sent our team out to Boston College, a Jesuit school, to talk to women on campus about the issue. Like other Catholic universities, the college health center doesn’t distribute birth control or refer women for abortions.

Here’s what some of those students had to say.

[Student 1] I kind of stayed away from, like, the southern schools, also because I really just like New England and I like the vibes, but thinking about like, how safe I feel as a woman and like how my choice is valued was, like, very important.

[Student 2] I think it’s telling that we have a pro-life club on campus, and just seeing it at, like, the club fair or things like that, especially my first year last year, was very shocking. And I didn’t really know how to process it. And at first when they came up to and were, like, ‘Do you want to know more about the pro-life club?’ I was, like, ‘No, not really.’

[Andrea] The students all agreed to speak to us without using their names due to privacy concerns. One BC sophomore told us that, yes, BC is a more conservative school known for its academics, but she’s made up her mind on who she’s going to cast her vote for on Nov. 5. And that’s Vice President Kamala Harris. 

[Student 3] Yes, 100 percent. I mean, just as a young woman in general, I don’t think I could feel safe voting for somebody who didn’t want to ensure my rights to my own body. So, yeah.

[Andrea] So the abortion movement has been underway for almost two centuries, going all the way back to federal legislation around contraceptives in the mid-1800s and really heating up in the 1960s when the FDA approved the pill.

In many ways, the pill-packing parties and the MAP are the modern incarnation of the Jane Collective, an underground organization in Chicago in the 1960s and ’70s that helped women get abortions in the days before Roe. The Janes, the anonymous women behind the collective, were mostly college students and women in their 20s. And the collective itself was founded by then 19-year-old University of Chicago college student Heather Booth. The Janes eventually started performing abortions themselves, and by the time Roe passed in 1973, the Janes had arranged or performed more than 11,000 abortions.

The abortion movement among college students today is very different than it was even a generation ago. The parents of college students listening to this podcast will not be at all surprised to hear this. There were no pill-packing parties in the ’80s, when the previous generation was college age. Mifespristone and misoprostol weren’t approved for use in the U.S. until 2000. The advent of medication abortion changed the landscape entirely.

And the internet wasn’t accessible to most people, unlike today, when organizing and finding access to abortion care or medication is done predominantly online and on social media.

[Loretta Ross] What is happening is that they’re generally not joining the legacy feminist organizations, and they’re developing their own ways of being active according to the conditions that they’re dealing with.

[Andrea] This is Loretta J. Ross, the renowned human rights activist who’s now a professor at Smith College. Ross used to be an organizer for NOW, the National Organization for Women, and helped organize the women’s marches in Washington, D.C., during the Reagan era. Those marches drew massive crowds of supporters unlike ever before. And that was before Trump was elected in 2016.

[Loretta Ross] The Women’s March, the pink pussy march, blew all of our previous numbers away in 2017. After that, all of a sudden, the abortion funds started exploding. We felt like Cassandras in the reproductive justice movement, always pointed at the sky was falling and then it fell down. So I don’t doubt that young women care about these issues.

[Andrea] After her work with NOW, Ross went on to become a founding member of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective in Atlanta.

[Loretta Ross] I would argue in one sense that Black women were far more interested in the politics of fertility control even. Man, even [than] white women, because since we were kidnapped here and brought here as slaves and forced to breed for profit, bodily autonomy has always been front and center for Black women, long before the Seneca Falls Declaration, etc., etc.. And so we’ve had a consistent demand for bodily autonomy.

[Andrea] Ross, who was sexually assaulted twice in her youth, says some of her earliest work studied the role religion played in women’s views on abortion and reproductive rights.

[Loretta Ross] There was not only a reluctance in the Black church to talk about reproduction. There was a reluctance to talk about sex because of AIDS. And so it’s like a perfect storm of shame was created around Black women’s sex, sexuality and reproduction. And yet, as I said, the rhetoric doesn’t match the data, because however shameful they feel about it, they still get one third of the abortions in this country.

[Andrea] And Ross makes the point that many first ladies, including most recently Melania Trump in her new autobiography, expressed support for the idea that women should make their own decisions about their bodies. Ross also believes the Republican Party is more committed to using abortion as a political football than caring about actual abortion bans. And that goes for Republicans from former President Ronald Reagan all the way to Donald Trump.

[Loretta Ross] Well, it’s always been a multi-front battle. So you battle in the courts, you battle in the legislature, you battle in the streets, and then you center your ability to provide services to the most vulnerable. I mean, this is what we’ve always had to do. And I think that’s what this new generation of people is doing.

[Ambient sound]

[Andrea] At tonight’s pill-packing party, everyone takes turns at each station, whether it’s folding boxes, packing pills or inserting directions at the big circular table. Avery is double-checking boxes at the end of the line.

Medical student Rasa puts bottles of misoprostol into each box. She keeps coming back because she says this is an important part of her training as a future OB-GYN.

[Rasa] I think it’s some of the most important work that I do as a med student. This is, like, the ultimate dream of how can I help people who my hand can’t reach?

[Andrea] And then there’s Cheryl Hamlin, a physician who performed abortions in the South, including in Jackson Women’s Health — yes, of Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health — in Mississippi. She’s the first stop at the table folding boxes.

Cheryl may be retired, but that’s not stopping her from doing the work. 

[Cheryl Hamlin] I do think some younger people, especially in Massachusetts, don’t entirely understand how bad it is elsewhere. And, you know, I sort of feel like it’s my duty to whatever I can do to keep people informed. And if there is an opening to make a difference, whether it’s, you know, supporting a clinic or whatever, then I should do that.

[Andrea] The group meets weekly now to eat pizza, sip soda and wine and commiserate. The final touch added to each package at the end of the line is a handwritten note. The women take turns writing them. It’s nurse practitioner Erin’s favorite task.

[Erin] I always like to write the notes that we wish you the best, because I feel that I’m putting a little bit of myself into that box to really tell them this is hard and we’re supporting you and we’re wishing you the best.

[Andrea] The group mailed its 5,000th package this month.

This is College Uncovered, from GBH News and The Hechinger Report. I’m Andrea Asuaje.

We’d love to hear from you. Send us an email to GBHNewsConnect@WGBH.org, or leave us a voicemail at 617-300-2486, and tell us what you think.

This episode was produced and written by me, Andrea Asuaje, and Meg Woolhouse, with reporting help from Diane Adame and Harriet Gaye.

It was edited by Jeff Keating.

Supervising editor is Meg Woolhouse.

Ellen London is executive producer

Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott.

Theme song and original music by Left Roman.

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 is distributed by PRX.

It’s made possible by Lumina Foundation.

Thanks for listening. 

The post College Uncovered: Abortion on the ballot … and in the mail appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

LOCKHART, Texas — Sometime last year, Alfonso Sifuentes was on a bus tour as part of a chamber of commerce’s efforts to map out the future of the bustling Central Texas region south of Austin where he lives and works.

There was chatter about why San Marcos, a suburb along one stretch of the Interstate 35 corridor, had little interest in a proposed expansion of Austin Community College into that area. Voters previously rejected the idea because of the property tax increase it would have required. As he swayed in his seat on the moving bus, Sifuentes, a businessman in the waste management industry who has long been involved in community development, thought about his hometown of Lockhart — like San Marcos just 30-some miles from Austin — and about the opportunities the college’s growing network of campuses could bring. Somewhere along the bus route, he made a declaration for all to hear. 

“Well, if San Marcos doesn’t want it,” Sifuentes said, “Lockhart will take it.”

This November, the college is coming to voters in the Lockhart Independent School District with a proposition to begin paying into the Austin Community College taxing district. In exchange, residents would qualify for in-district tuition and trigger a long-term plan to build out college facilities in this rural stretch of Texas, which is positioning itself to tap into the economic boom flowing into the smaller communities nestled between Austin and San Antonio.

Community colleges have long played a crucial role in recovering economies. But in Lockhart, ACC’s potential expansion could serve as a case study of the role colleges can play in emerging economies as local leaders and community members eye the economic growth on the horizon.

That is, if they can convince enough of their neighbors to help pay for it.

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

At the edge of two massive metropolitan areas — Austin to the north and San Antonio to the south — Caldwell County is dotted by quaint communities offering small-town living. While the streets in other small rural communities are lined by shuttered storefronts or sit in the shadow of industry long gone, local leaders pitch this as a place “where undeniable opportunity meets authentic Texas community.”

Lockhart, the county seat, is revered as the barbecue capital of Texas with an established status as a day trip destination. About 30 miles southeast of Austin, its picturesque town square hosts a regular rotation of community events, including a summer concert series on the courthouse lawn and a series of pop-ups on the first Friday of the month featuring some mix of live music, receptions at a local art gallery, and sip and strolls and cheesecake specials at the antique store.

The county’s population of roughly 50,000 residents is dwarfed by the big cities and the nearby suburban communities that often rank among the fastest growing in the country. But what the county lacks in population it makes up for with a relatively low cost of living, space to make room for industry, housing and, potentially, Austin Community College.

The potential annexation is an example of how colleges are becoming more nimble and more responsive to both emerging economies and the needs of students, said Maria Cormier, a senior research associate for the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University. But Cormier argues such expansions must be intentionally designed with equity in mind to envision multiple pathways for students so that, for example, students from marginalized backgrounds aren’t limited only to certificate-level programming. (The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College.)

“These sorts of questions become important when colleges are proposing these kinds of expansions: To what extent are they thinking about longer-term pathways for students?” Cormier said.

ACC already partners with Lockhart ISD on an early college high school that allows students to complete transferable college credit hours while earning a high school diploma, and proponents of annexation highlight the affordable higher education opportunities it would generally provide students in the Lockhart area. But their sales pitch emphasizes what it would mean to leverage ACC for the whole community. While the share of adults with a high school degree within Lockhart ISD’s territory is roughly aligned with the state, the share who have a bachelor’s degree — just 16.8 percent — falls to about half of the state rate.

“An effort like this can never be wrong if it always is for the right reasons,” said Nick Metzler, an information technology manager and consultant who serves as the president of the Greater Lockhart for ACC political action committee, which formed to pursue the college’s expansion.

Related: Five community colleges tweak their offerings to match the local job market

First established in 1973, ACC has steadily grown its footprint in Central Texas through annexation. Though not commonly used, a provision of Texas education law grants a community college the ability to expand its taxing district by adding territory within its designated service area. Working within a service district roughly the size of Connecticut, ACC first expanded its reach in 1985 when voters in the territory covered by the Leander Independent School District, a northern suburb of Austin, agreed to be annexed.

In the years since, neighboring communities in the Manor, Del Valle and Round Rock school districts followed with large majority votes in favor of annexation. ACC’s expansion into Austin’s southern suburbs didn’t begin until 2010, when annexation passed in the Hays Consolidated Independent School District.

The collective initiative to bring ACC to Lockhart has been the topic of discussion for many years, but the current effort was formally triggered by a community-led petition that required locals to gather signatures from at least 5 percent of registered voters. Fanning out at youth sporting events, school functions and other community gatherings, PAC members met with neighbors who indicated their children would be the first in their families to go to college, if they could afford it. Others were adults excited by the prospect of trade programs and certifications they could pursue and the transformative change it could bring to their families as new industries move into Caldwell County.

“Those things would catch a lot of the individuals who couldn’t make it to four-year universities or couldn’t afford to go to four-year universities,” Metzler said. “That’s always been kind of where we as a community have kind of been lacking.”

Lockhart also has an incentive for partnering with ACC: A recent assessment commissioned by the city identified the need to partner with a postsecondary institution for job training if it wanted to meet its economic goals and compete in its target business sectors, namely large-scale auto and electronic manufacturing, food processing and tourism. It also identified the lack of skilled administrative workers along with computer and math specialists as a challenge to reaching those goals.

In the end, PAC members easily surpassed the threshold of the 744 signatures they were required to submit — they turned in 1,013.

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

On the ballot now is a proposal for homeowners to trade $232.54 a year on average — a rate of $.1013 per $100 in property value — for in-district services. That includes a steep discount for in-district tuition that comes out to $85 per credit hour compared with $286 for out-of-district residents, though high school graduates from Lockhart ISD would also qualify for free tuition under a recently adopted five-year pilot program going into effect this fall.

“We are very interested in providing access to high-quality, affordable education in our region because we think it’s a game changer for families,” Chris Cervini, ACC’s vice chancellor for community and public affairs, said in an interview. “We think it promotes affordability by providing folks a lifeline to a family-sustaining wage, so we are very bullish on our value proposition.”

The vote would also allow ACC to grow its tax base as it works to keep pace with its growing enrollment. When classes kicked off this fall, ACC was serving about 70,000 students across 11 campuses in the Central Texas region — an enrollment increase of 15 percent compared with a year earlier. The potential expansion comes as community colleges are adapting to a new state financing model based on student outcomes, including financial incentives for schools if students obtain workforce credentials in certain fields.

The college proposed a three-phase service plan that would begin with expanded offerings in the area, such as evening classes, and eventually work up to a permanent facility tailored to match workforce needs, including demand for certificate programs to “reskill and upskill” for various high-demand careers. Cervini, who has been a main liaison with the Lockhart community, previously said the college was considering whether it could quickly deploy its resources into the community through mobile training rigs for HVAC and welding.

Its timeline could be sped up now that the college has identified a historic building in the heart of downtown — the old Ford Lockhart Motor Company building — as its potential home. During a recent presentation to the Lockhart City Council, ACC Chancellor Russell Lowery-Hart told city leaders he appreciated that the site would represent the community’s history juxtaposed to “what we think the future looks like.”

But ACC leaders said the issue ultimately has to play out in the community. There’s been no apparent organized opposition to the vote in Lockhart, and ACC officials say they’ve been engaged with local leaders who have been supportive in helping inform voters about the annexation process. The proposal recently picked up the endorsement of Lockhart’s mayor, Lew White, who commended ACC leaders for their outreach to the community about their offerings.

“I think that’s what a lot of people have been asking for, and I think you’re really shaping your proposal for this fall election very nicely,” White said. “And I think it’s something that our community needs to get together and get behind and support.”

Related: States and localities pump more money into community colleges than four-year campuses

Even Lockhart ISD leaders frame the college’s pitch as an initiative with potential benefits extending well beyond the increased access it would offer students in the region.

Overseeing a record 6,850 students in a district covering about 300 square miles, Superintendent Mark Estrada said education is essential to cultivating communities where residents can not only actively participate in the sort of growth Caldwell County is experiencing but benefit from it as well.

“I think the real conversation and consideration is how would this benefit the educational attainment of the entire community, which currently is one of the lowest in Central Texas,” Estrada said. “The mid-career switches, people’s opportunity to have access to education to pursue a passion or career they’ve always been interested in — that’s a major consideration for the community. It’s a narrow look if we’re only looking at high school graduates.”

Still, Caldwell County remains a conservative area in a conservative state where fighting property tax increases has become a favorite political calling card. Much of that debate has centered on funding for public schools, with the fight over school finance often falling to the question of whether older Texans, who are mostly white and less likely to have children enrolled in public schools, are willing to pay for the future of younger Texans, who are mostly Latino. Roughly 4 out of every 5 students enrolled in Lockhart ISD are Latinos.

Voters in the area have shown at least some unwillingness to foot the bill for education-related expansions. In 2019, they rejected a $92.4 million bond proposed to address the significant growth in student enrollment Lockhart ISD had seen in the prior decade. The bond package would have gone toward making more room for more students through the addition of a two-story wing to the local high school, two new school buildings and renovations throughout the district. It also would have backed improvements to the district’s workforce preparation efforts, including a new agricultural science facility and additions to the district’s career technology center to allow more students to participate in auto repair classes and hospitality training. Opponents of the measure, 1,632 voters, won with 55 percent of the vote compared with 1,340 who voted in favor.

This time around, proponents of annexation are hoping the eagerness they’ve felt in the community from those who signed onto the original petition — and those who come to see the broader benefits it could bring to the community — will translate to votes.

In recounting the interest they fielded in the early days of their efforts collecting signatures, PAC members described one canvas of a local gym in a portion of the county that’s seeing some of the biggest growth but trails in terms of income. Some of the gym-goers were enthusiastic about the possibility of pursuing technical certifications but realized they weren’t registered to vote, a requirement of the signature collection process.

They went out and got on the voter rolls. Then, they came back to put their names on the petition.

Contact the editor of this story, Nirvi Shah, at 212-678-3445 or shah@hechingerreport.org.

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

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Dual enrollment is exploding. During the 2022-23 school year, nearly 2.5 million high school students took college classes, simultaneously earning high school and college credits. That’s up from 1.5 million students in the fall of 2021 and roughly 300,000 students in the early 2000s. Figures released last week show that dual enrollment grew another 7 percent in the fall of 2024 from a year earlier, even as the number of traditional college freshmen fell. 

Exactly how much all of this is costing the nation isn’t known. But the state of Texas, which accounts for 10 percent of high schoolers who are taking these college classes, was investing $120 million annually as recently as 2017, according to one estimate. It wouldn’t be far-fetched to extrapolate that over $1 billion a year in public funds is being spent on dual enrollment across the nation. 

Alongside this meteoric rise of students and resources, researchers are trying to understand who is taking advantage of these early college classes, whether they’re expanding the pool of college-educated Americans, and if these extra credits help students earn college degrees faster and save money.

A new analysis released in October 2024 by the Community College Research Center (CCRC), at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center tracked what happened to every high school student who started taking dual enrollment classes in 2015. Of these 400,000 high schoolers, more than 80 percent enrolled in college straight after high school. That compares favorably with the general population, of whom only 70 percent of high school graduates went straight to college. Almost 30 percent of the 400,000 dual enrollees, roughly 117,000 students, earned a bachelor’s degree in four years. But a majority (58 percent) had not earned any college degree, either a four-year bachelor’s or a two-year associate, or any post-secondary credential, such as a short-term certificate, within this four-year period. (The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College.)

This is the most detailed and extensive analysis of dual enrollment that I’ve seen, covering all students in the nation, and tracking them for years after high school. But the analysis does not answer the fundamental question of whether dual enrollment  is a worthwhile public policy. 

It’s not clear that  an early taste of higher education encourages  more students to go to college who wouldn’t have otherwise. And it’s hard to tell from this report if the credits are helping students get through college any faster. 

The fact that students with dual enrollment credits are faring better than students without dual enrollment credits isn’t terribly persuasive. In order to qualify for the classes, students usually need to have done well on a test, earned high grades or be on an advanced or honors track in school. These high-achieving students would likely have graduated from college in much higher numbers without any dual enrollment courses.

“Are we subsidizing students who were always going to go to college anyway?” asked Kristen Hengtgen, a policy analyst at EdTrust, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization that lobbies for racial and economic equity in education. “Could we have spent the time and energy and effort differently on higher quality teachers or something else? I think that’s a really important question.”

Related: High schoolers account for nearly 1 out of every 5 community college students

Hengtgen was not involved in this latest analysis, but she is concerned about the severe underrepresentation of Black and Hispanic students that the report highlights. A data dashboard accompanying the new report documents that only 9 percent of the high schoolers in dual enrollment classes were Black, while Black students made up 16 percent of high school students. Only 17 percent of dual enrollment students were Hispanic at a time when Hispanic students made up almost a quarter of the high school population. White students, by contrast, took 65 percent of the dual enrollment seats but represented only half of the high school population. Asian students were the only group whose participation in dual enrollment matched their share of the student population: 5 percent of each. 

Advocates of dual enrollment have made the argument that an early taste of college can motivate students to go to college, and the fact that so few Black and Hispanic students are enrolling is perhaps is the most troubling sign that the giant public-and-private investment in education isn’t fulfilling one of its main objectives: to expand the college-educated workforce.

Hengtgen of EdTrust argues that Black, Hispanic and low-income students of all races need better high school advising to help them sign up for the classes. Sometimes, she said, students don’t know they have to take a prerequisite class in 10th grade in order to be eligible for a dual enrollment class in 11th grade, and by the time they find out, it’s too late. Cost is another barrier. Depending upon the state and county, a family may have to pay fees to take the classes. Though these fees are generally much cheaper than what college students pay per course, low-income families may still not be able to afford them. 

Tatiana Velasco, an economist at CCRC and lead author of the October 2024 dual enrollment report, makes the argument that dual enrollment may be most beneficial to Black and Hispanic students and low-income students of all races and ethnicities. In her data analysis, she noted that dual enrollment credits were only providing a modest boost to students overall, but very large boosts to some demographic groups. 

Among all high school students who enrolled in college straight after high school, 36 percent of those with dual enrollment credits earned a bachelor’s degree within four years compared with 34 percent without any dual enrollment credits. Arguably, dual enrollment credits are not making a huge difference in time to completion, on average.

However, Velasco found much larger benefits from dual enrollment when she sliced the data by race and income. Among only Black students who enrolled in college straight away, 29 percent of those who had earned dual enrollment credits completed a bachelor’s degree within four years, compared to only 18 percent of those without dual enrollment credits. That’s more than a 50 percent increase in college attainment. “The difference is massive,” said Velasco.

Among Hispanic students who went straight to college, 25 percent of those with dual enrollment credits earned a bachelor’s degree within four years. Only 19 percent of Hispanic college students without dual enrollment credits did. Dual enrollment also seemed particularly helpful for college students from low-income neighborhoods; 28 percent of them earned a bachelor’s degree within four years compared with only 20 percent without dual enrollment. 

Again, it’s still unclear if dual enrollment is driving these differences. It could be that Black students who opt to take dual enrollment classes were already more motivated and higher achieving and still would have graduated from college in much higher numbers. (Notably, Black students with dual enrollment credits were more likely to attend selective four-year institutions.) 

There is a wide variation across the nation in how dual enrollment operates in high schools. In most cases, high schoolers never step foot on a college campus. Often the class is taught in a high school classroom by a high school teacher. Sometimes community colleges supply the instructors. English composition and college algebra are popular offerings. The courses are generally designed and the credits awarded by a local community college, though 30 percent of dual enrollment credits are awarded by four-year institutions. 

A few other takeaways from the CCRC and National Student Clearinghouse report:

• States with very high rates of college completion from their dual enrollment programs, such as Delaware, Georgia, Mississippi and New Jersey, tend to serve fewer Black, Hispanic and low-income students. Florida stood out as an exception. CCRC’s Velasco noted it had both strong college completion rates while serving a somewhat higher proportion of Hispanic students.
• In Iowa, Texas and Washington, half of all dual enrollment students ended up going to the college that awarded their dual enrollment credits. 
• In Montana, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Wisconsin, dual enrollment students have become a huge source of future students for community colleges. (A separate cost study shows that some community colleges are providing dual enrollment courses to a nearby high school at a loss, but if these students subsequently matriculate, their future tuition dollars can offset those losses.)

And that perhaps is the most worrisome unintended consequence of the explosion of dual enrollment credits. Many bright high school students are racking up credits from three, four or even five college classes and they’re feeling pressure to take advantage of these credits by enrolling in the community college that partners with their high school. That might seem like a sensible decision. It’s iffy whether these dual enrollment credits can be transferred to another school, or, more importantly, count toward a student’s requirements in a major, which is what really matters and holds students back from graduating on time. 

But a lot of these students could get into their state flagship or even a highly selective private college on scholarship. And they’d be better off. Dual enrollment students who started at a community college, the report found, were much less likely than those who enrolled at a four-year institution to complete a bachelor’s degree four years after high school.

Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595 or barshay@hechingerreport.org.

This story about dual enrollment was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters. 

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WATERVILLE, Maine — For Emily Kayser, the prospect of covering her son’s college tuition on a teacher’s salary is “scary. It’s very stressful.” To pay for it, “I’m thinking, what can I sell?”

Kayser, who was touring Colby College with her high school-age son, Matt, is among the many Americans in the middle who earn too much to qualify for need-based financial aid, but not enough to simply write a check to send their kids to college.

That’s a squeeze becoming more pronounced after several years of increases in the prices of many other goods and services, a period of inflation only now beginning to ease.

“The cost of everything, from food to gas to living expenses, has become so high,” Kayser said.

Middle-income Americans have borne a disproportionate share of college price increases, too. For them, the net cost of a degree has risen from 12 percent to 22 percent since 2009, depending on their earnings level, compared to about 1 percent for lower-income families, federal data show.

Now a handful of schools — many of them private, nonprofit institutions trying to compete with lower-priced public universities — are beginning to designate financial aid specifically for middle-income families in an attempt to lure them back.

“This is a group, particularly in private colleges, where it just does not make sense to them, in many cases, to send their children to the colleges and universities that might be the best fit,” said David Greene, Colby’s president. “Many of them are feeling, frankly, a little stretched with everything that’s going on.”

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Colby has announced a program that will take effect next fall to attract prospective students in the middle. It will cap the cost of tuition, room and board at $10,000 a year for families who earn up to $100,000, and $15,000 for those with incomes of from $100,000 to $150,000.

That’s compared with the current net price at Colby of up to about $53,000 a year for people in those income brackets, after existing discounts and financial aid.

The new, guaranteed lower price for middle-income families, underwritten by a $10 million gift from an alumnus, figures prominently in Colby’s outreach to prospective parents and students, popping up among the scenic promotional photos of stately red-brick Georgian revival buildings encircled by the Maine woods.

When she heard about it, “I felt the weight come off my shoulders,” said Kayser, of Westchester County, New York, who remembered being so relieved when she finally paid off her own substantial college loans that she framed the receipt.

The anxiety among middle-income families about costs is having an effect on universities and colleges, whose proportion of students from those families has been declining. Their presence on U.S. campuses fell from 45 percent in 1996 to 37 percent in 2016, the Pew Research Center found using the most recent available federal data. Middle-income Americans make up 52 percent of the population, Pew estimates.

Those drops might not seem particularly ominous. But in a complex balancing act, colleges badly need to appeal to those middle-income families that can afford to pay at least part of the price.

“That group of students is their bread and butter,” said Jinann Bitar, director of higher education research and data analytics at The Education Trust, which advocates for equity in education. “That’s why they’re trying to keep this group in the mix. Some inflow is better than no inflow.”

Related: The students disappearing fastest from American campuses? Middle-class ones

The slowing drip in the number of middle-income students on campuses also comes as enrollment overall has been falling for a decade, meaning institutions need all the students they can get. At the same time, the proportion of students from lower-income families enrolling directly in college has been going up.

“Maybe we’ve done a better job with the lower-income students — that, yes, there is financial aid for you for college,” said Jill Desjean, senior policy analyst at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. “And maybe the middle has heard the message that financial aid is just for lower-income families.”

This perception isn’t entirely true, Desjean said. Middle-income families can qualify for some federal, state and institutional financial aid.

“A lot of it is messaging — trying to simplify the message out there that, yes, we understand tuition is high, but there are programs you’re eligible for,” she said.

The median household income as determined by the U.S. Census Bureau is $77,540. Pew defines “middle income” as ranging between two-thirds and twice that much, or from $51,176 to $155,080.

Families with annual incomes of from $75,000 to $110,000 get less than half as much financial aid as people who make under $48,000, federal figures show.

That can make college a struggle, even when both parents work, and especially in families with several children and with assets such as houses.

“Anyone who has to borrow or use financial aid to afford college is getting squeezed. That’s the gist,” Bitar said. “There are a lot of middle-income families that are really worried about access to college, and those voices have been loud.”

In his previous role as vice president for enrollment and student success at Trinity College in Connecticut, Angel Pérez saw how financial aid calculations could disadvantage middle-income families.

“If you add the layer on top of that of the skepticism about the value of higher education right now, we are seeing more middle-income families just not getting into the pipeline or enrolling,” said Pérez, who is now CEO of the National Association for College Admission Counseling.

Related: Use The Hechinger Report Tuition Tracker tool to find out what college will really cost you and your family.

Meanwhile, the disconnect between the prices colleges advertise, and what they actually expect people to pay appears to particularly frustrate many middle-income families.

At Colby, a private liberal arts college, the published total cost for this academic year is around $90,000, for instance. But half of families already get some form of financial aid.

“I have a hard time with a price tag that’s so high, and they say, ‘Don’t worry, you’re never going to pay that,’” said Ryan Paulson of Traverse City, Michigan, on a tour of Colby with his wife, Kate, and their daughter, Annie, and who was speaking about the college admission process in general. “Just tell us the price.”

Part of Colby’s strategy is to simplify what Greene called “this overly byzantine and complex system,” by showing the maximum amount a student will be charged based on his or her family’s income.

“It’s pretty simple. If you make $200,000 a year, you’re going to pay no more than $20,000 for tuition, room and board,” he said. “We try to keep it as clean and easy as we can.”

Many parents, at all income levels, don’t know about the full range of financial aid that might be available to them, a survey by the lending company Sallie Mae found. More than half think money goes only to students with exceptional grades, and nearly 40 percent believe it’s not worth bothering to apply if they make what they assume is too much money.

The Paulsons’ goal for their daughter “is for her to not fall in love with any school, knowing that, being in the middle, we might not be able to afford it,” Kate Paulson said.

The universities and colleges that have begun making financial aid available specifically for middle-income families are typically wealthy and highly selective.

With a student body of 2,300, for example, Colby has an endowment worth more than $1.1 billion and accepts just 7 percent of applicants. The campus tour includes a new $200 million, 350,000-square-foot athletic complex that’s so big and high-tech, opposing teams have taken to calling it the Death Star.

Rice University, a private research campus in Houston, is seeking to raise $150 million by the end of this academic year to continue a program it began in 2019 of giving full-tuition scholarships to undergraduates from families that earn between $75,000 and $140,000.

Related: Universities and colleges that need to fill seats start offering a helping hand to student-parents

Many institutions say they’re trying to appeal to these families because they want to balance the socioeconomic representation on their campuses.

But another major reason is to help address an ongoing decline in enrollment projected to get much steeper beginning next year.

“If the enrollment issue is a struggle for your university or college, you’d better be thinking about how you price things, in a simple and straightforward way,” Greene said.

Liberty University, in Lynchburg, Virginia, cited affordability issues it said were discouraging middle-income applicants when it announced a “Middle America Scholarship” providing up to $6,395 this year to families with annual incomes between $35,000 and $95,000.

Grinnell College in Iowa offers scholarships toward what it calls “felt” financial need among middle-income families frustrated that the calculations of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, overstate what they can actually afford.

Some prospective students “are squeezed out of eligibility for need-based financial aid even though they do not have the financial wherewithal to fund higher education without assistance,” said Brad Lindberg, Grinnell’s associate vice president of institutional initiatives and enrollment.

The problem for colleges, he said, is that families like those “assume they’re not going to be eligible for financial aid, so they just don’t apply. People exclude themselves from the process before the process even starts.”

Greene, at Colby, said that could be among the reasons that only a little more than a third of Americans now say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, according to a Gallup survey — down from 57 percent in 2015.

Related: Grad programs have been a cash cow; now universities are starting to fret over graduate enrollment

 “The value proposition of higher education relative to its cost is a huge question mark in the minds of many people,” he said. “That’s why I think there’s such extraordinary discontent about America’s colleges and universities, because middle-income families are the ones that have been squeezed out of those top places.”

Targeting middle-income families with designated scholarships appears to be working, according to some of the colleges that have already been doing it.

“We’ve seen a nice bump in applications,” said Karen Kristof, assistant vice president and dean of admission at Colorado College. “We’ve seen a better yield.”

Since 2019, the private college has limited the cost of room and board to about $16,000 a year for Colorado families with annual incomes between $60,000 and $125,000.

“This is a group that felt neglected in the need-based system” that favors lower-income applicants, Kristof said.

Now, more colleges and universities are setting out to boost the people in the middle. A donor has helped the public University of Montana double, to $15 million, the annual amount available from its Payne Family Impact Scholarship for in-state middle-income families.

“We had a clear understanding and feedback from families in Montana that we just didn’t have enough to offer in the middle-income range,” said Leslie Webb, the university’s vice president for student success and enrollment management.

Some advocates warned that colleges shouldn’t forsake their lowest-income applicants in the cause of helping middle-income ones.

“It’s crucial for colleges to still target their limited resources to students with the lowest incomes,” said Diane Cheng, vice president of research and policy at the Institute for Higher Education Policy.

The institute calculates that a typical middle-income family has to spend 35 percent of its annual household income sending a child to college for a year. “That’s a pretty substantial share,” said Cheng. But for the lowest-income Americans, she said, a year in college consumes the equivalent of nearly one and a half times their annual household income.

“Institutions typically have limited resources for providing financial aid,” Cheng said, “and we want to encourage them to balance their desire to attract students from middle-income families with supporting students from low-income backgrounds.”

Still, institutions are increasingly focused on this issue, said Art Rodriguez, vice president and dean of admissions and financial aid at Carleton College. The private institution in Northfield, Minnesota, also offers scholarships specifically to families in the middle.

“The number in the middle is decreasing,” he said, “so colleges are making efforts to try to not lose that middle.”

Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556 or jmarcus@hechingerreport.org.

This story about middle-class families paying for 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.

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When I left home at 17, I knew I wanted to go to college. I knew earning a degree would help me find a path to a more secure future. And I knew that I was interested in pursuing a career focused on social justice.

I also had no idea how I could afford college when I was already working multiple jobs just to earn enough money to make ends meet. I had never met my father, and I had a rocky relationship with my mother, so I was largely on my own. Fortunately, I was able to use financial aid to enroll at Prairie State College, a community college just outside of Chicago. It remains the best decision I have ever made.

I thrived at Prairie State, where I was surrounded by an incredible community of faculty, staff and other students who had my back at every turn. The support I received eventually allowed me to earn a scholarship and transfer to a four-year college to begin my pre-law journey.

I’m now a senior at Howard University, where it remains all too obvious that the four-year college experience is not designed for transfer students like me — a realization that leaves us feeling isolated and overlooked.

Like many transfer students, I felt stigmatized during the admissions process and alienated by other students; I didn’t get an orientation when I started, as first-year students do; and many of my previous credits didn’t transfer with me.

That even an HBCU — commonly known for community-building efforts — struggles to effectively support transfer students underscores the gravity of this issue.

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Solving such challenges will require four-year universities to reimagine how they support transfer students. Creating a sense of belonging for learners is critical. Research shows that students who feel as though they belong at their institution are more likely to remain and persist. Developing that connection can be challenging for transfer students, especially those coming from community colleges, as there are typically so few of us on a given campus.

Some 80 percent of community college students aspire to earn a bachelor’s degree, yet just one-third transfer to a four-year institution. In total, community college transfers account for just 5 percent of undergraduate students at elite colleges and universities.

The most obvious starting point for institutions looking to better support transfer students from community colleges is to admit more of us. This can be achieved by intensifying outreach efforts at local two-year colleges and more effectively promoting the message that transferring to a selective, four-year university is not only possible but encouraged. Some schools are already making an effort to admit more transfer students.

Community college transfer students can find themselves adrift in their new institutions due to a lack of proper guidance and support. We are typically not given the insider knowledge required to navigate the complexities of a four-year university. For example, I’ve been excluded from being a part of student-led organizations that I would have needed to join as a freshman — when I was still in community college. A history of belonging to these organizations is mandatory when being considered for larger and more prominent selective organizations, including sororities and fraternities.

Related: ‘Waste of time’: Community college transfers derail students

The absence of a support system can transform what initially felt like an exciting step forward into a daunting and solitary journey. I am fortunate to have benefited from the support of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, which provides me with access to a network of fellow transfer students and alumni who have successfully navigated this path.

But many transfer students are not as lucky.

Colleges could help by connecting transfer students with one another — either through on-campus groups or external organizations — to ensure they have the support, community and resources they need to thrive.

Schools should make it clear that transfer students will be warmly welcomed and supported throughout their academic journey. By doing so, these schools can begin to foster a more inclusive environment, one that acknowledges and values the unique perspectives community college students bring.

Colleges should also work to dismantle obstacles that complicate the transfer process and serve as subtle deterrents to students. Every prohibitive application fee, convoluted form or arbitrary rule might as well be a sign that says, “Turn back now.”

For example, students lose an estimated 43 percent of their credits when they transfer, wiping out semesters of hard work, extending their time and increasing their costs to a degree. Institutions can proactively create clearer, more consistent transfer agreements with local community colleges, guaranteeing that credits will transfer.

The financial aid and application processes for transfer students, who are not typically provided financial award packages upon admission, must also take into account their unique needs and circumstances.

Here’s why this all matters: Data is clear that students who transfer from a community college are just as capable of succeeding as students who are first-time freshmen or transfer from four-year institutions.

We know we can do this. We just need opportunities and support.

Rebbie Davis is an English major, Philosophy minor who previously attended Prairie State College before transferring to Howard University. She is president of the Howard University Writers Guild and vice chair of HU’s Future Law Scholars’ board of directors.

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

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ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

In the 1970s, Congress committed to funding a higher education system controlled by Indigenous communities. These tribal colleges and universities were intended to serve students who’d been disadvantaged by the nation’s history of violence and racism toward Native Americans, including efforts to eradicate their languages and cultures.

But walking through Little Big Horn College in Montana with Emerson Bull Chief, its dean of academics, showed just how far that idea has to go before becoming a reality. Bull Chief dodged signs warning “Keep out!” as he approached sheets of plastic sealing off the campus day care center. It was late April and the center and nearby cafeteria have been closed since January, when a pipe burst, flooding the building, the oldest at the 44-year-old college. The facilities remained closed into late September.

“Sometimes plants grow along here,” Bull Chief said nonchalantly as he turned down a hallway in the student union building.

While the school appears to be in better condition than most tribal colleges, its roofs leak, sending rain through skylights in the gym and wellness center, which needs $1 million in repairs. An electronic sign marking the entrance has been sitting dark since a vehicle hit it months ago. College leaders said they have no idea when they will be able to afford repairs.

It’s a reality faced by many of the 37 schools in the system, which spans 14 states. Congress today grants the colleges a quarter-billion dollars per year less than the inflation-adjusted amount they should receive, ProPublica found.

President Joe Biden declared early in his term that tribal schools were a priority. Yet the meager funding increases he signed into law have done little to address decades of financial neglect. Further, the federal Bureau of Indian Education, tasked with requesting funding for the institutions, has never asked lawmakers to fully fund the colleges at levels called for in the law.

The outcome is crimped budgets and crumbling buildings in what the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights once called the “most poorly funded institutions of higher education in the country.” At a time when their enrollment is rising, the schools lack money to update academic programs and hire enough qualified instructors to train nurses, teachers and truck drivers and to prepare students to transfer to other universities. As they expand degree programs, their researchers are trying to conduct high-level work in old forts, warehouses and garages.

The laws that authorized the creation of the tribal colleges also guaranteed funding, which was set at $8,000 annually per student affiliated with a tribe, with adjustments for inflation. But the federal government has never funded schools at the level called for in the statute, and even experts struggle to explain the basis for current funding levels.

Since 2010, per-student funding has been as low as $5,235 and sits at just under $8,700 today, according to the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, which lobbies on behalf of the colleges in Washington. Had Congress delivered what’s required by statute, tribal colleges and universities would receive about $40,000 per student today.

The Bureau of Indian Education has not asked Congress for major funding increases for the bulk of the tribal colleges in the past three years, according to the agency’s budget documents, and congressional negotiations have done little to increase what they get.

The Bureau of Indian Education said in a written statement that when requesting funding, it follows guidelines set by the Department of the Interior and the White House. A department spokesperson directed ProPublica to the White House budget office for an explanation of the colleges’ funding; a spokesperson for the budget office declined an interview request and directed ProPublica back to the Interior Department.

Biden called the colleges “integral and essential” to their communities in a 2021 executive order that, among other things, established a tribal college initiative to determine systemic causes of education shortcomings and improve tribal schools and colleges. But while it has led to some forums and largely ceremonial events, that initiative has done next to nothing substantive, advocates say.

As funding has fallen behind the need, even the American Indian Higher Education Consortium — the schools’ primary pipeline to Congress and the Bureau of Indian Education — has asked for far less than the law says the colleges are entitled to. Its recent requests have been for around $11,000 per student.

Some people advocating for the tribal colleges have noted a frequent topic of debate: Should the schools ask for what they’re owed and risk angering lawmakers or just accept the meager amount they receive?

Separately, the colleges get very little for maintenance and capital improvements, money that isn’t part of the per-student funding.

Asked why the Bureau of Indian Education doesn’t better understand the facilities needs at tribal colleges, Sharon Pinto, the agency’s deputy director for school operations, said, “We really wouldn’t know that because the buildings located at these tribal colleges are not necessarily federal assets and they’re not in an inventory system.” In a follow-up email, the bureau said it was waiting for the colleges to let it know what their facility needs are.

Several college leaders and researchers said such responses are typical of a federal government that has routinely ignored its promises to Indigenous communities over the past two centuries.

Meredith McCoy, who is of Turtle Mountain Ojibwe descent and taught at the tribe’s college in North Dakota, noted that Native education is guaranteed by federal law and at least 150 treaties. Neglect of tribal colleges reflects a conscious decision by Congress and the federal government to dodge accountability, said McCoy, now an assistant professor at Carleton College who studies federal funding of tribal schools and colleges.

“The patterns of underfunding are so extreme that it’s hard not to see it as a systematic approach to underfunding Native people,” she said. “We’re teaching our children that it’s OK to make a promise and break it.”

An Outdated System

To evaluate the impact of the federal government’s underfunding of tribal colleges’ and universities’ academic mission, ProPublica sent a survey to the 34 fully accredited schools, of which 13 responded, and visited five campuses. Our reporting found classes being held in a former fort constructed more than a century ago; campuses forced to temporarily close because of electrical, structural and plumbing problems; broken pipes that destroyed equipment and disrupted campus life; and academic leaders who lack the resources to adequately address the issues, build new facilities and keep pace with growing enrollment.

The colleges that responded to the survey reported that they commonly have problems with foundations, roofs, electrical systems and water pipes because they couldn’t afford maintenance. One campus put the price tag for repairs at $100 million. Several noted they don’t have money to upgrade technology so students can keep pace with skills required by the job market.

The Bureau of Indian Education stated in its 2024 budget request that delays in addressing the problems only makes them more costly to fix. Continuing to ignore them could in some cases create “life-threatening situations for school students, staff, and visitors” and “interrupt educational programs for students, or force closure of the school,” the bureau told Congress.

But that same document did not request enough funding to fix the issues, college leaders say.

In 2021, Congress began providing $15 million per year for maintenance, to be shared by all tribal colleges. That has since increased to $16 million — less than $500,000 per college. The same year, the American Indian Higher Education Consortium estimated it would cost nearly half a billion dollars to catch up on deferred maintenance. Construction of new buildings would cost nearly twice that amount. The organization acknowledged the actual price tag could be far higher.

Tribal colleges are not allowed to raise taxes or use bond measures for basic academic or building costs.

The schools receive no federal funding for any non-Native students who attend. Their budgets were stretched even tighter by the COVID-19 pandemic, when non-Native enrollment rose sharply as classes moved online. It has remained above pre-pandemic levels.

The Tribally Controlled Colleges and Universities Assistance Act of 1978, which funded the schools, contributes to confusion over what they should be paid. While it specifies base funding of $8,000 per student, it also notes that colleges will only be given what they need, without explaining how that should be calculated, and only when the government can afford it.

“When we think about the funding, it was set up for something that was needed 40 years ago,” said Ahniwake Rose, the American Indian Higher Education Consortium’s president. “What a school looked like and needed 40 years ago is absolutely not what it looks like and needs now.”

Few Alternatives for Funding

Though colleges and their representatives fault the Bureau of Indian Education, they say primary accountability falls on Congress.

ProPublica contacted 21 members of the U.S. House and Senate who either sit on an appropriations or Indian Affairs committee, or who represent a district or state with a tribal college to ask if they were aware of the condition of the campuses. Only Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, a New Mexico Democrat, spoke to ProPublica. The others either didn’t respond or declined to be interviewed.

Leger Fernández, a member of the Indian and Insular Affairs subcommittee of the House Committee on Natural Resources, said she has pushed for the colleges to receive more funding but has been shut down by members of both parties, partly because of a lack of understanding about how they are funded.

“Our tribal colleges are part of our federal trust responsibility,” said Leger Fernández, whose district in northern and eastern New Mexico is home to three tribal colleges. “We made a commitment. This is an obligation the federal government has.”

Former U.S. Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, who chaired the Senate Indian Affairs Committee before retiring in 2005, said the colleges lose out to louder voices in Washington, D.C. “Federal money is always caught in a tug-of-war between needs,” Campbell said. “The needs are always higher than the amount available.”

Yet tribal colleges have fewer alternatives for bolstering their budgets.

Many of the colleges are far from industrial centers and have few wealthy alumni, college leaders say, so private donations are rare and usually small.

“We don’t have the alumni who can afford to donate,” said Marilyn Pourier, the development director at South Dakota’s Oglala Lakota College, which is perched on a hill on the Pine Ridge reservation. “We get a pretty good response, but it’s not enough.”

The schools’ tuition is among the lowest in the nation, but college leaders are hesitant to raise it because most reservation residents already can’t afford it.

Naomi Miguel, the executive director of the White House tribal college initiative, said she plans to press states to contribute more to tribal colleges and universities. At the moment, most provide little or nothing.

“If the states would support the TCUs, they’d be supporting jobs in their communities,” said Miguel. “It benefits them overall to create this sustainable workforce.”

“A Saving Grace”

Proof of the value of tribal colleges and universities, advocates say, can be found in what they accomplish despite their meager funding.

Many are the only places teaching their tribes’ languages at a time when nearly all of the 197 Indigenous languages in the United States are endangered.

They are often among the few places in their communities with access to high-speed internet. Nearly 28% of residents of tribal lands lack high-speed internet access, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

And some Native students find that the schools are a more welcoming place to pursue a degree and prepare for a career.

Shyler Martin, who grew up on the Navajo Nation near Navajo Technical University, enrolled there after leaving New Mexico State University during her second year there. Now entering her senior year, Martin said it’s been a relief to learn from instructors who understand the pressures she faces as the oldest child of a Navajo family, with whom she shares responsibility for raising her younger sister.

“They’re culturally sensitive and understanding,” Martin said of Navajo Tech’s staff. “I’m a parent, and they do what they can to help you continue school.”

Yet her time at the college has included winter days when classrooms were so cold that students had to bring blankets and classes that were canceled at the last minute because of a shortage of qualified instructors.

Tribes would be in dire straits without the colleges, said Carmelita Lamb, a professor at the University of Mary in North Dakota who has taught at and studied tribal colleges.

“The tribal college has been a saving grace,” said Lamb, a member of the Lipan Band of Apache. “Had we never had the tribal colleges, I really shudder to think where we’d be now.”

The colleges keep doing the best they can, but some are finding it increasingly difficult.

At Chief Dull Knife, college leaders planned three years ago to build a modern structure with classrooms and a ceremonial arbor, but the estimated price — $14 million at the time — was already out of reach even before it ballooned to more than $20 million because of inflation. The plans haven’t been scrapped, but Bill Briggs, the dean of academic affairs, talks about them in the past tense.

“If we’re going to change the course of this country, everyone needs to have an opportunity,” Briggs said. “All we’re asking for is an opportunity to educate our students.”

This story was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.

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College enrollment has been declining for more than a decade, and that means that many institutions are struggling to pay their bills. A growing number of them are making the difficult decision to close.

In the first nine months of 2024, 28 degree-granting institutions closed, compared with 15 in all of 2023, according to an analysis of federal data provided to The Hechinger Report by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association or SHEEO.

Earlier this year, our colleague Jon Marcus reported that colleges were closing at a rate of nearly one per week. The Hechinger Report has created a tool to track these changes in the higher education landscape. Readers can search through the archive of colleges that have closed since 2008, and we will update it periodically with the latest shutdowns. 

The numbers are staggering. Nearly 300 colleges and universities offering an associate degree or higher closed between 2008 and 2023. For-profit operators ran more than 60 percent of those colleges and universities.

From 2008 to 2011, an average of seven colleges and universities shut down each year in the wake of the financial crisis. That four-year average had doubled to 14 by 2014 before reaching 32 by 2018.

In recent years, the annual number of closures began to plateau, with an average of 16 colleges and universities closing between 2020 and 2023.

Hundreds more post-secondary institutions offering non-degree programs – from cosmetology to midwifery to manufacturing schools – have shuttered over the past 15 years. When we added in these post-secondary institutions, we tallied 843 closures between 2008 to 2023.

“It’s not corruption; it’s not financial misappropriation of funds; it’s just that they can’t rebound enrollment,” said Rachel Burns, a senior policy analyst at SHEEO, who provided the closure data to The Hechinger Report.

Covid-related enrollment dips have mostly stabilized, but colleges are still dealing with a declining birth rate, with fewer 18-year-olds graduating from high school. At the same time, many parents don’t think their financial investment in their child’s college tuition will pay off.

The result is fewer students enrolling and far fewer tuition dollars coming in.

And when colleges close, it hurts the students who are enrolled. At the minimum, colleges that are shutting down should notify students at least three months in advance, retain their records and refund tuition, experts say. Ideally, it should form an agreement with a nearby school and make it easy for students to continue their education.

A SHEEO study of students from closed colleges found that only about half transferred to other institutions, and the chances of those students earning a degree varied depending on several factors including how long it took them to re-enroll.

Contact staff writer Marina Villenueve at 212-678-3430 or villenueve@hechingerreport.org. Contact staff writer Olivia Sanchez at 212-678-8402 or osanchez@hechingerreport.org.

This story about college closures was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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MONTCLAIR, N.J. — As a high-school senior in New Jersey, Ernesto Reyes Velasco couldn’t envision himself taking the leap to become an independent college student. Neither of his parents, who are immigrants from Mexico, had gone to college. He didn’t have close friends as examples. Money was tight.

But this past summer Reyes Velasco spent five weeks on Montclair State University’s campus as part of a program designed to support incoming first-year low-income students. He took college classes for credit, received tutoring and advising and learned about other services available on campus and where to find them.

“I gained the confidence I needed,” said Reyes Velasco, who is now a first-year student. “And I really feel like I have an edge now, where I know what to expect in fall semester, I know how to act.”

Students like Reyes Velasco often receive federal Pell Grants, which were designed to help them attend college and earn degrees. But nationally just under half of these students graduate from four-year institutions within six years, compared with more than two-thirds of students who receive neither Pell Grants nor direct subsidized loans, according to federal education data.

With so many Pell Grant students falling short of the program’s goal — and schools complicit in that failure — what can colleges do to turn it around? It’s a stubborn and complicated question.

A handful of large, broadly accessible public universities have begun to answer it and are graduating large shares of low-income students at higher-than-average rates. For example, Montclair State; the University of California, Riverside; the University of California, Merced; and Rutgers University-Newark admit more than three-quarters of all applicants, and roughly half or more of their full-time, first-time students receive Pell Grants, according to institutional and federal data. According to 2020 data, at least 65 percent of low-income students at these colleges completed their degrees within six years.

Some flagship public universities, elite private colleges and historically Black colleges and universities also graduate low-income students at high rates, but those are more selective schools, have lower shares of low-income students overall or a combination of both.

The less-selective schools that graduate high shares of low-income students help them succeed not only by reducing financial barriers, but also by providing an array of academic support through learning communities, peer support and undergraduate research experiences. In addition, they deliberately find ways to increase students’ sense of belonging on campus.

“I don’t know if there’s one thing — I think it’s a blend,” said Louie Rodriguez, vice provost and dean for undergraduate education at UC Riverside, where in the 2021-22 school year 46 percent of freshmen received Pell Grants and 75 percent of Pell recipients graduated within six years. “There’s an emphasis on getting students connected to opportunity.”

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

The Pell Grant, now capped at $7,395 for the academic year, often does not cover full tuition. Most awards go to students who have family incomes below $30,000. State programs and institutional financial aid can help them make up the difference.

But “one of the big obstacles for low-income families is understanding what the costs are going to be” and being able to plan accordingly, said John Gunkel, senior vice chancellor for academic affairs and strategic partnerships at Rutgers University-Newark, where 64 percent of Pell Grant recipients graduate within six years.

About 10 years ago, Gunkel and his colleagues restructured financial aid packages to help students and their families anticipate their costs over four years and added technology funds and emergency aid programs for unexpected situations, like a job loss or housing emergency.

“They don’t have a very big financial safety net,” Gunkel said of low-income families, which can lead to a student being suddenly pulled out of higher education.

In New Jersey, the Educational Opportunity Fund, established in the aftermath of the 1967 Newark riots, helps cover college costs like books, fees and room and board for low-income students. The program is making it possible for Reyes Velasco to attend Montclair State and live in a dorm.

In addition to the summer bootcamp that Reyes Velasco attended, the EOF program includes mandatory tutoring during the first semester and monthly meetings with an adviser throughout students’ undergraduate years.

“Those touch points are at the core of what helps to move the needle for first-generation, limited-income scholars,” said Montclair State’s associate provost for educational opportunity and success programs, Daniel Jean. Nearly half of Montclair State undergraduates receive Pell Grants, and 63 percent graduate within six years, according to the most recent federal data.

Jean, the son of Haitian immigrants, grew up in poverty in Newark and himself got help from the EOF program as a college student. “It transformed my life,” he said, helping him turn around abysmal grades and ultimately earn a doctorate.

Related: What happens when a college recruits Black students others consider too risky?

UC Riverside and Rutgers University-Newark similarly offer incoming students who test into a developmental math or writing course the option of coming to campus and taking the course before freshman year so they can start on a strong foundation. Riverside offers financial aid for this, and Rutgers covers the cost internally.

During their first year, UC Riverside students who are enrolled in “gateway courses” like biology, chemistry, math or physics can join study groups led by peers who have already done well in those subjects. And students who fail one of those courses can receive a stipend to take it again with additional support.

Rodriguez, the Riverside vice provost, said this type of supplemental instruction can make a big difference. “We want the students to stay in their major of choice,” he said, whether in the sciences, social sciences or otherwise.

“Learning communities,” in which cohorts of students, usually in their first year, take core classes together, participate in workshops, get exposed to career development and sometimes live together, are another way of supporting the transition to college.

At UC Merced, where almost 60 percent of freshmen receive Pell Grants, such communities help students build a family of peers, said Brian O’Bruba, interim vice chancellor for student affairs, and “that helps students feel more connected to campus.”

Matthew Lansing, a first-generation college student who qualified for full financial aid, received little guidance from family members when he registered at Merced. He casually checked a box indicating his interest in participating in a learning community and joined one focused on clean energy his freshman year.

The group of about 30 students lived on the same floor, for the most part, and landed in some of the same core introductory classes, including physics and calculus, Lansing said. They also participated in weekly dinners where they discussed current topics in renewable energy.

During these dinners, Lansing, an electrical engineering student, forged a relationship with Professor Sarah Kurtz, the chair of his department. He said conversations with professors at these dinners were more relaxed than in the classroom or office hours.

“It’s a little more casual, and they’re going to be there for an hour, so you can actually talk to them,” Lansing said. Office hours can feel rushed, he said, and “you have a lot of pressure to be very intellectual.”

Related: Often overwhelmed on big campuses, rural college students push for support

Kurtz advised Lansing on which classes to take and wrote him a recommendation for a summer field-based environmental science program. Lansing said he only got the idea to apply after hearing a friend in the learning community talk about his summer job plans.

“I don’t think I would have had as much direction and I wouldn’t have taken as many opportunities” if it hadn’t been for the learning community, Lansing said.

Trizthan Jimenez Delgado, a UC Merced junior whose parents didn’t attend college, connected to campus a different way.

During her sophomore year, Jimenez Delgado went out on a limb and asked her ecology professor about open research positions. That professor became a mentor, and Jimenez Delgado joined her lab, which led to additional research experiences. Last spring she worked with graduate student Christopher Bivins to extract and sequence DNA from fungi.

“We identified a new mushroom species, which was insane,” she said. “I’m going to be a co-author when he publishes.”

At UC Merced, where more than 68 percent of low-income students graduate within six years, 42 percent of undergraduate students participate in research with faculty — well above the national average and also the highest share of any UC, O’Bruba said, citing UC and national survey data.

Undergraduate research and learning communities are both well-known as “high-impact practices” that support student learning and success, said Ashley Finley, vice president for research at the American Association of Colleges and Universities. Other such practices include first-year seminars, writing-intensive courses, service learning, internships and study abroad.

These practices are linked to higher student GPAs and higher retention and graduation rates, research has shown. The effects are particularly pronounced when students participate in more than one — and they are especially positive for Black and Latino students, first-generation students and low-income students.

When done well, Finley said, high-impact practices tend to include high levels of interaction, feedback and reflection; have real-world connections; and offer students an opportunity to demonstrate their competence publicly.

Jimenez Delgado, an undocumented student who was born in Mexico but grew up in the Los Angeles area, said that “coming to college, I felt like it was going to be a lot of culture clashing — and it wasn’t.”

One reason for that was the Monarch Center on Merced’s campus, which provides services for undocumented students and a place for them to hang out. The center is one of a suite of programs under the Calvin E. Bright Success Center designed to foster a sense of belonging among students, especially those who are underrepresented or face additional obstacles, including homeless students, foster youth and formerly incarcerated students.

Through the Monarch Center, Jimenez Delgado participated in a career seminar where she learned about research and professional opportunities, found out about resources for undocumented students and met people like herself.

Related: College Uncovered podcast, Un-welcome to college

“Knowing that there are similar students around me makes me feel more confident,” she said.

Rutgers-Newark, which also has a large immigrant population and where two-thirds of all undergraduates are low-income students, has likewise been intentional about making students feel at home, Gunkel, the senior vice chancellor, said. The university operates a food pantry, has dedicated prayer spaces for its many Muslim students, among others, and blocks time off during the week when undergraduate classes cannot be scheduled so that student organizations can run programming.

“A lot of it has been about creating an environment in which students want to stay,” Gunkel said.

At Montclair State’s opening day this year, more than 100 student clubs, including The Brotherhood/La Hermandad for Black and Latino men, a pre-med group and a roller hockey club, set up tables along a campus corridor before an afternoon barbecue and carnival. The clubs displayed cultural flags and handmade posters, blasted music and enticed potential recruits with Skittles, Kit Kats and Oreos.

Darielly Suriel, a senior majoring in history, was representing the Dominican Student Organization (“Dominican centered, not Dominican exclusive”), which she and other students founded last year.

“I really didn’t feel like I had a place here until I joined,” said Suriel, who is from Jersey City and plans to become a teacher.

Her club hosts weekly meetings where students talk about Dominican slang and Caribbean food, as well as fundraisers and an annual gala with music, food and dancing.

At the club fair, Suriel said, “We get a lot of transfer students and freshman students. We let them know, you do have a home here — your home away from home.”

Lawrie Mifflin edited this story. Contact her at mifflin@hechingerreport.org.

This story about Pell Grant graduation rates 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.

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Presidents of colleges and universities serve for less than six years on average. For women and people of color, that tenure is even shorter – a full year shorter. So what’s going on?

College presidents are under fire for what they say about issues such as systemic racism, abortion access and war in the Middle East, and what they do — or don’t do — about campus protests.

Why would anyone want to be a college president? And does it even matter to a student or a parent who the college president is?

What questions should students and their families be asking of colleges’ top brass?

We talk to former Colorado College President Song Richardson, who left her dream job because she wanted to speak freely about hot-button issues, and the current and former presidents of Macalester College, Suzanne Rivera and Brian Rosenberg, to learn more about the challenges and pitfalls of life at the top of the academic ladder.

Listen to the whole series

TRANSCRIPT

[Jon] This is College Uncovered. I’m Jon Marcus.

[Kirk] And I’m Kirk Carapezza.

As a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, Song Richardson says she noticed her graduate students were struggling to discuss their disagreements in class, a skill she thought somebody should have taught them already.

[Song Richardson] And I wanted to start instilling those values of having courageous conversations earlier in their educational lifecycle. And that meant going to a college.

[Kirk] So when Colorado College, a liberal arts school committed to combating racial and religious discrimination, strongly recruited her for its top job, she took it an honor.

[Song Richardson] I felt like it was a great fit in terms of our values and the mission of the school.

[Kirk] Richardson is a Harvard-educated civil rights attorney. She comes from a military family and grew up on army bases across the country. She’s the daughter of a Black father and Korean mother.

[Emcee] Ladies and gentlemen, it is my honor to present to you Song Richardson, the 14th president of Colorado College.

[Kirk] In 2021 she became the first woman of color to lead the private college, a point she touched on in her inaugural address.

[Song Richardson] Colorado College is a place that is willing to take bold action. A place that’s willing to take courageous action to ignite our students’ potential in order to create a more just world. This is what we do. This is what drives us. And I am here because this is what drives me, too.

[Jon] But that optimism and ambition — it didn’t last long, Kirk. Richardson says outside events left her feeling limited by the restrictions of the job. Events like the Supreme Court rulings on race-conscious admission and reproductive rights, and female Ivy League presidents called to testify before Congress. She wanted the freedom to speak out.

[Song Richardson] These things were core to my identity as a faculty member. And as those debates started to grow across the country. I felt compelled to speak because these are the things that motivated my entire career as a scholar.

[Jon] So three years after she started her dream job, Richardson quit.

[Kirk] 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 News. …

[Jon] And I’m Jon Marcus at the Hechinger Report.

Colleges don’t want you to know what’s really going on. So GBH, …

[Kirk] … in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, is here to break it all down.

In this election season, we’re exploring how deeply politicized higher education has become and what students and their parents can do to navigate these choppy waters.

Today on the show: The Politics of the College Presidency.

You might be surprised to learn the average college president serves only four six years, Jon.

[Jon] Actually, I’m surprised that it isn’t even shorter, given how hard it is.

[Kirk] And for women and leaders of color like Song Richardson, it’s even less — a full year less.

Even though women now outnumber men among students in college, men outnumber women as college presidents by two to one, and nearly three quarters of presidents are white.

So what’s going on?

[Suzanne Rivera] I think the traditions of racism and sexism in our country make it really difficult to lead in a visible role when you don’t present in a traditional way.

[Kirk] Suzanne Rivera is the first woman of color to lead Macalester College in Minnesota. She saw herself as sort of an outsider candidate for becoming president of a college.

[Suzanne Rivera] And breaking barriers requires having the tenacity and resilience to withstand unfair criticisms or criticisms that are personal and not really about the work we do. But I can understand why people in these roles who have to field criticism that sometimes comes in the form of vulgar language, threatening language, fear about their personal safety might decide that this isn’t the right job for them.

[Kirk] And Rivera says that has consequences for turnover rates and campus culture. Before taking the helm at Macalester, Rivera participated in a presidents-in-residence program at Harvard — a kind of boot camp for new college presidents.

[Suzanne Rivera] A few of us developed really close friendships that I rely on. These are my most trusted advisers outside of the institution.

[Kirk] What percentage of your class of presidents are now gone?

[Suzanne Rivera] Gosh, I haven’t done the math, but I think at least a third are no longer sitting presidents from our version of the boot camp. And from what I hear when I go to professional meetings, something like a third of presidencies are open or have an interim serving right now. So there’s been a lot of volatility.

[Kirk] Rivera says one of the major reasons for that volatility is that the job itself has gotten more demanding.

[Suzanne Rivera] It’s more in the public eye than it used to be. I think social media has really ramped up the extent to which serving as a college or university president makes you more like an elected official than perhaps the job previously was.

[Jon] And who wants to feel like an elected official these days?

[Kirk] Yeah. College presidents are dealing with the same political polarization as everybody else who’s in the public eye.

[Suzanne Rivera] So when people disagree with the decisions a college or university president makes, the discourse has become really impolite at times. And I think lots of sitting presidents have made the assessment that as much as they love higher education and love leading their institutions, the amount of abuse might be more than they’re prepared to take.

[Jon] Let’s just look at the Ivy League, for example, Kirk. Last year, six out of eight Ivy League presidents were women. Then Gaza related protests shook their campuses, putting all of them in the hot seat.

[Chair of committee] Good morning. The Committee on Education and Workforce will come to order.

[Jon] Suddenly they were called before a congressional committee looking at claims of anti-semitism on campus. This kind of aggressive questioning of then-Harvard President Claudine Gay by Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik went viral. Here’s the moment that would forever shake American higher education.

[Elise Stefanik] Dr. Gay, at Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no?

[Claudine Gay] It can be, depending on the context.

[Elise Stefanik] What’s the context?

[Claudine Gay] Targeted at an individual. Targeted at an individual.

[Elise Stefanik] It’s targeted at Jewish students, Jewish individuals. It does not depend on the context. The answer is yes. And this is why you should resign.

[Kirk] Gay did resign, a month after that testimony. Now, it’s complicated — she was also facing plagiarism allegations, which she said were politically motivated. An internal investigation found she did, in fact, use some material without credit. Her time in office lasted just six months and two days. Harvard’s first Black woman president was also its shortest serving. Liz Magill at Penn and Minouche Shafik at Columbia also resigned under intense pressure.

[Jon] And, you know, while the Ivy League takes up a lot of the oxygen and media spotlight, there’s pressure on college presidents everywhere. Presidents of all kinds of institutions are under fire for what they say about broader political issues such as systemic racism, abortion access, the war 5,000 miles away in Gaza and especially how they handle campus protests.

[Kirk] Yet critics say it’s the presidents who are making the job more political by being so outspoken about controversial topics, rather than focusing on the central missions of their schools.

[Jon] Add the pandemic and enrollment challenges and near-constant battles with state lawmakers over funding and today, the college presidency is as political as it is academic.

[Kirk] Jon, in reporting this episode, I asked one former community college president why she left the job early, and once she stopped laughing, she provided this list of why the job was so impossible.

One, funding and enrollment declining every year.

Two, faculty increasingly unhappy and worried about their jobs and resisting needed changes.

And three, the growing public questions about the value of college degrees.

It’s all a lot, but the politics of being a college president aren’t necessarily new. The job’s just gotten more intense.

[Brian Rosenberg] There have always been political dimensions to it.

[Jon] Brian Rosenberg is a visiting fellow at Harvard and author of the book ‘Whatever it Is, I’m Against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education.’ What has changed, he says, is that in recent years the college presidency has become not just more political but nearly impossible at certain schools.

[Brian Rosenberg] So no one really is paying a lot of attention to the politics of the presidents of community colleges or regional public colleges or small rural liberal arts colleges. And the reality is, that’s where most students go. We’re really talking for the most part about wealthy selective institutions.

[Jon] Rosenberg isn’t saying that all of that criticism is fair or justified, but he does say leaders at those highly selective schools do need to take some responsibility.

[Brian Rosenberg] I think these institutions have over the last couple of decades leaned pretty heavily, maybe too heavily, into social issues, and that’s provoked a backlash.

[Jon] Rosenberg says colleges and universities have made themselves easy targets for conservatives like J.D. Vance.

[J.D. Vance] The professors are the enemy.

[Jon] That was Vance speaking when he was running for Senate in Ohio. Here’s Brian Rosenberg again.

[Brian Rosenberg] And so you began to see the pushback against DEI, critical race theory, things like that. And then you began to see all the action in legislatures, mostly in the South and Midwest.

[Sound of protest]

[Jon] And Rosenberg says Oct. 7 and the subsequent protests over the fighting in the Middle East further divided these selective college campuses.

[Brian Rosenberg] What was so distinctive about that event and what followed was that it was the first event that I could recall that really divided the progressive culture on campuses. There tended to be a consensus around most of them. Now there was a split, and that provoked a lot of political pushback, both on campus and off campus.

[Sound of protest]

[Kirk] Even in peacetime, college presidents have to balance the demands of students and their parents, faculty and staff, boards and alumni.

Ted Mitchell is head of the American Council on Education and a former college president himself. He says each of those stakeholders expects to have a voice and sometimes even a vote in what happens on campus.

[Ted Mitchell] Presidents are on edge all the time. It’s in the best of times like tap-dancing on a surfboard in the middle of a storm. And I think the storms are just getting more rugged.

[Kirk] Here’s Suzanne Rivera again, the president of Macalester College. She takes that tap-dancing analogy one step further.

[Suzanne Rivera] Some days it feels like that. Other days it feels like a pesky mosquito that you need to swat in order to do the important work.

[Jon] So given all these challenges, why on earth would anyone want to be a college president today? Lynn Pasquerella is the former president of Mount Holyoke College and the current president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities. She says those who take the role are often called to it ….

[Lynn Pasquerella] … because they are committed to thriving institutions. They haven’t aspired to become college presidents, but they’re good at what they do. And so they’re asked to take on increasing leadership roles.

[Jon] When she began her career in academia in the 1980s, Pasquerella says there was still the idea that a president could be an intellectual leader who made a difference in society.

[Lynn Pasquerella] And I think that’s almost completely disappeared in the way that we’ve moved away from the notion of higher education as a public good to viewing it as a private commodity — tuition in exchange for jobs. There’s now a sense that presidents are there to raise money, and that’s the job.

[Jon] Now, let’s pause here for a moment, Kirk, and point out that college presidents are very well paid for doing that job. The average pay for private college presidents is just under $1 million a year.

[Kirk] That’s on average?

[Jon] Yes, on average. And that’s more than double what it was 10 years ago, even accounting for inflation. Eighty of them make more than $1 million a year. So do 19 public university presidents. Most of them also get houses provided or housing subsidies, cars, club memberships and other perks.

[Kirk] Never underestimate the power of the perks, Jon.

[Jon] Yeah, or the promise of job security, Kirk. Even after they resign, college presidents typically get to keep their jobs on the faculty.

[Kirk] Nice work if you can get it.

[Jon] I know. Imagine if a private-sector CEO got fired or stepped down, but still had a job with the company.

[Kirk] So what does all this palace intrigue mean for you? I mean, does it really matter who your college president is? We wanted to find out whether students even know. So I went over to Commonwealth Avenue here in Boston to pose that question to some students at Boston University. Now, for context, we should say it was days before Melissa Gilliam, the first Black and first female president at New England’s largest private university, was to be inaugurated.

[Andrew Steele] My name’s Andrew Steele. I am getting my master’s in music and voice performance.

[Kirk] Do you know who the president is, of BU?

[Andrew Steele] I think she just got anointed or something. I saw videos about it. I don’t know.

[Kirk] Does it matter who the president is?

[Andrew Steele] Hmm. That’s a great question. I don’t really know what they do, but it seems like it matters. I just, I don’t know.

[Kirk] Here’s seniors Kaitlyn Amado and Jahiem Jones.

So who’s the president of the college?

[Jahiem Jones] Dr. Melissa Gilliam.

[Kirk] Nice. You’re the first one to get it.

[Kaitlyn Amado] I was, like, I was going to say, I know her face. I’m so bad with names, though.

[Kirk] You knew her by name. Does it matter who the president is?

[Jahiem Jones] I think so. Yeah.

[Kirk] Why?

[Jahiem Jones] I think there’s a there’s a culture and a dynamic, and I think it requires someone who is really multifaceted and diverse.

[Kirk] And you said yes emphatically.

[Kaitlyn Amado] Yeah, because I feel like representation matters a lot. Especially because I feel like applying to BU, I was looking at the president and I was, like, it matters to me when they’re introducing their university and their values, and you could tell how she presents herself.

[Kirk] Tim McCorry, Fynn Buesnel and George Audi are all studying computer science at BU, and they aren’t so sure the university’s leadership matters to their day-to-day life on campus.

[Tim McCorry] I don’t think we have really too much interaction with the president now.

[George Audi] I still feel like it’s important to have a good president, though. I don’t know what constitutes a good president for us, but it’s important.

[Kirk] What do you think makes a good president?

[Tim McCorry] I mean, there’s just so few points of interaction. Like, we get an email every couple of weeks and maybe you see a clip on Instagram.

[Kirk] We also asked higher ed experts the same question. And surprisingly, we got a similar answer. If I’m a student and — don’t take this personally — does it matter who my president is?

[Brian Rosenberg] I don’t take it personally at all.

[Kirk] Brian Rosenberg is the former president of Macalester College, and he admits it really depends on the kind of institution.

[Brian Rosenberg] At the institution where I’m teaching right now, Harvard University, the simple answer is no. I was an undergraduate at Cornell. I probably could not name the president when I was a student. It makes a little bit more difference at smaller institutions, at institutions that are financially challenged, because the president does have the ability to create a particular culture on campus.

[Jon] Besides keeping the lights on, Suzanne Rivera, the current president of Macalester, agrees that at smaller colleges, the president plays a more visible role.

[Suzanne Rivera] I think at small, independent liberal arts college where I know the students by their first name and I know what their extracurriculars are and I can compliment them on their performance in the soccer game on Friday night when I see them on campus Monday morning, then it really does matter who your college president is.

[Kirk] Former Colorado College President Song Richardson says leadership always matters no matter the size of the school.

[Song Richardson] Everything from do you see yourself in the president of the institution? I think that’s an important part for students. How the president is able to engage with leaders across the campus to create an environment where people feel valued.

[Kirk] For example, Richardson made headlines by pulling Colorado College out of the U.S. News rankings, a move she says was driven by the school’s core mission.

[Song Richardson] Continuing to participate in U.S. News and World Report was inconsistent with the values of equity and intellectual engagement and academic rigor.

[Kirk] Richardson’s decision sparked intense backlash, especially from alumni who questioned her character and her credentials.

[Song Richardson] So it was, ‘You have a woke president. You have a president who I don’t believe went to Harvard.’

[Kirk] Richardson says she had faced sexism and racism before, so she understood that everything she did or said would be filtered through that lens.

[Song Richardson] People began to paint me as someone who cared only about equity issues and not about the other issues that were important in higher ed at the time.

[Kirk] Then when the Dobbs decision leaked, signaling restrictions on abortion rights, Richardson felt compelled to speak out.

[Song Richardson] At that point, as president, I was hoping that we could live in a world where I could speak in my voice as an individual, both as president and share my opinions, and that others would also feel free to disagree with me.

[Kirk] She quickly realized, though, that her speaking out made conservative students feel alienated.

[Song Richardson] Because their leader is expressing an opinion that they don’t agree with. And that made me start to wonder, what is the role of the president and when and how should I speak about controversial issues when I feel like my role is to be the voice box for the institution and that represents everyone?

[Kirk] After you received that feedback, you continued to speak out, though. Did that pull you back at all?

[Song Richardson] So I have to share, Kirk, that one of the things that my leadership team will always say to me is that Song has gone off script. Because I am someone who loves to speak my mind. That’s just who I am. And so what it caused me to do was to pause a little bit before speaking.

[Kirk] When did you realize you just couldn’t stay in the position anymore?

[Song Richardson] It was an evolution. It was in my third year of the presidency that I started to realize that the compromise I had to make of speaking freely and robustly about how I felt about the issues that were happening across the country was constrained because of my role as president. It felt like my mouth was taped shut.

[Kirk] Eventually, she says, the constraints of the role — not sexism or racism — led her to step down and return to teaching and lecturing at UC Irvine.

[Song Richardson, in class] It is such a pleasure to be here today to speak with all of you on the day before Constitution Day. I want to focus on the epidemic — I would call it an epidemic — of racial violence that’s taking place across the country. And the continued and relentless killings of young Black men and women at the hands of the police are disturbing but unfortunately, unsurprising.

[Song Richardson] I had to live my values, Kirk, and that’s really what this is about. This was a decision about leaving one type of leadership position because I couldn’t be my full, authentic self. That’s really what it is.

[Jon] So what does all of this leadership turnover mean for students, for you? Well, Brian Rosenberg says frequent changes in leadership hurt stability and delay progress on strategic planning or long-term plans.

[Brian Rosenberg] And if you’re continually changing your leadership, essentially that process tends to start all over again. And so you end up in this endless cycle of restarting, planning and strategic efforts that really never gets beyond the planning stage.

[Kirk] So in this tumultuous environment, with so much volatility, what should prospective students and parents ask about college leadership?

[Song Richardson] How do they think about the learning environment?

[Kirk] Here’s Song Richardson again.

[Song Richardson] Is this a president and leaders who will support difficult and uncomfortable conversations in the classroom. Or is this a leader and a leadership team that will cave to pressure from groups to shut down conversation?

[Kirk] Brian Rosenberg, former president of Macalester.

[Brian Rosenberg] You know, when you choose a college as a student or as a parent, you don’t really care a lot about the fact that they have a giant medical center. And unless you’re an intercollegiate athlete, you don’t care a lot about what the Division 1 football facilities look like. You want to know whether your child or you are going to get an education, get an opportunity to have a job. And so the question I would ask is where on your list of priorities does undergraduate education actually rank? Is it 10th? Is it fifth? Is it first? That, to me, is the most important question.

[Kirk] Suzanne Rivera, the current president of Macalester, says the most important thing is how college presidents keep the focus on the success of student.

[Suzanne Rivera] One of the most fun things I get to do during orientation week is give a pep talk to the parents as they’re getting ready to depart our campus and drop their children off.

[Suzanne Rivera, at orientation] We may be living through hard times now, but we’re not doing so alone. We’re doing it in communities. So we owe it to each other to be our best selves, especially when it’s hard. Because if this community is to be the inclusive place to live and grow that we all want, then it also needs to be a place where people are free to speak, free to learn and make mistakes, and free to be themselves.

[Suzanne Rivera] And I thank them for trusting us with the responsibility to educate their children. But I also say to them that this is a really exciting time in their child’s life and that it’s a privilege for me to get to walk alongside their student as they figure out what kind of adult they’re going to be.

[Kirk] This is College Uncovered from GBH News 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, or leave us a voicemail at (617) 300-2486. And tell us what you want to know about how colleges really operate.

This episode was 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.

Production Assistance from Diane Adame.

Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott.

Theme song and original music by Left Roman.

Project manager and head of GBH podcasts is Devin Maverick Robbins.

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

It’s made possible by Lumina Foundation.

The post College Uncovered: The Politics of the College Presidency appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

The free community college movement effectively began in 2014 when Republican Gov. Bill Haslam of Tennessee signed the Tennessee Promise Scholarship Act, which offered the state’s high school graduates free tuition to attend any two-year public community college or technical college in Tennessee.

Communities around the country had been experimenting with free college programs since 2005, usually with private funding, but Tennessee was the first to make it a statewide policy, and it inspired 36 states to follow suit. This year, Massachusetts was the most recent to make community college free. (Here is a search tool for all the free college programs, including more than 400 local ones.) 

But as free-tuition programs have multiplied, so have questions and doubts. Are low-income students benefiting? Is free tuition leading to more college graduates? 

Unfortunately we have to wait years to allow students time to get through college, but answers to these important questions are starting to emerge from Tennessee. College Promise, a nonprofit that advocates for making college free, along with tnAchieves, the nonprofit that helps administer the Tennessee program, released a 10-year anniversary report on Oct. 14. The report offers encouraging signs that the Tennessee Promise scholarship program, which now costs about $29 million a year in tuition subsidies and other services, has helped more students go to college and earn two-year associate degrees. In addition, Tennessee shared some of the lessons learned. 

First the numbers. The report highlights that more than 90 percent of all Tennessee high school seniors apply for the free college program. All students regardless of family income are eligible, and roughly 15,000 students a year ultimately use the program to enroll in college right after high school.  About half come from low-income families who qualify for the Federal Pell Grant. 

Thirty-seven percent of students who initially enrolled in college with the Promise scholarship program earned a two-year associate degree within three years, compared with only 11 percent of students who applied for the scholarship but never met its requirements, such as financial aid paperwork and service hours.* Tennessee projects that since its inception, the scholarship program will have produced a total of 50,000 college graduates by 2025, administrators told me in an interview.

Before the free tuition program went statewide, only 16 percent of Tennessee students who started community college in 2011 had earned an associate degree three years later. Graduation rates then rose to 22 percent for students who started community college in 2014. At this time, 27 Tennessee counties had launched their own free tuition programs, but the statewide policy had not yet gone into effect. 

By 2020, when free tuition statewide had been in effect for five years, 28 percent of Tennessee’s community college students had earned a degree in three years. Not all of these students participated in the free tuition program, but many did. 

It’s unclear if the free tuition program is the driving force behind the rising graduation rates. It could be that motivated students sign up for it and abide by the rules of the scholarship program and might have still graduated in higher numbers without it. It could also be that unrelated nationwide reforms, from increases in federal financial aid to academic advising, have helped more students make it to the finish line.

I talked with Celeste Carruthers, an economist at University of Tennessee Knoxville, who has been studying the free tuition program in her state. She is currently crunching the numbers to figure out whether the program is causing graduation rates to climb, but the signs she sees right now are giving her “cause for optimism.” Using U.S. Census data, she compared Tennessee’s college attainment rates with the rest of the United States. In the years immediately following the statewide scholarship program, beginning with the high school class of 2015, there is a striking jump in the share of young adults with associate degrees a few years later, while associate degree attainment elsewhere in the nation improved only mildly. Tennessee quickly went from being a laggard in young adult college attainment to a leader – at least until the pandemic hit. (See graph.)

While evaluation of the Tennessee program continues, researchers and program officers point to three lessons learned so far: 

• The scholarship program hasn’t helped many low-income students financially. The Federal Pell Grant of $7,395 far exceeds annual tuition and fees at Tennessee’s community colleges, which hover around $4,500 for a full-time student. Community college was already free for low-income students, who represent roughly half of the students in Tennessee’s free college program. Like other free college programs around the country, Tennessee’s is structured as a “last dollar” program, which means that it only pays out after other forms of financial aid are exhausted. 

That means that tuition subsidies have primarily gone to students from higher income families that don’t qualify for the Pell Grant. In Tennessee, the funding source is the state lottery. Roughly $22 million of lottery proceeds were used to pay for community college tuition in the most recent year.

• Free tuition alone isn’t enough help. In 2018, Tennessee added coaching for low-income students to give them extra support. (Low-income students hadn’t been receiving any tuition subsidies because other financial aid sources already covered their tuition.) Then, in 2022, Tennessee added emergency grants for books and other living expenses for needy students – up to $1,000 per student per semester.* The extra assistance for low-income students is financed through state budget allocations and private fundraising. For students who are the first generation in their families to attend college, current graduation rates have jumped to 34 percent with this extra support compared with 11 percent without it, the 10-year report said. 

“Pairing the financial support with the non-financial support – that mentoring support, the coaching support – is really the sweet spot,” said Graham Thomas, chief community and government relations officer at tnAchieves. “It’s the game changer, and that is often overlooked for the money part.” 

Coaching is best conducted in person on campus. During COVID, Tennessee launched an online mentoring platform, but students didn’t engage with it. “We learned our lesson that in-person is the most valuable way to go when building relationships,” said Ben Sterling, chief content officer at tnAchieves.

• The worst case scenario didn’t happen. When free community college was first announced, critics fretted that the zero price tag would lure students away from four-year colleges, which aren’t free. That’s bad because the transfer process from community college back to a four-year school can be rocky with students losing credits and the time invested. Studies have shown that most students are more likely to complete a four-year degree if they start at a four-year institution. But the number of bachelor’s degrees did not fall. It seems possible that the free tuition policy lured students who wouldn’t have gone to college at all in the past, without cannibalizing four-year colleges. However, bachelor’s degree acquisition in Tennessee, though rising, remains far below the rest of the nation. (See graph.)

As an aside, students are also able to use their Tennessee Promise scholarship funds at a limited number of public four-year colleges that offer associate degrees. About 10 percent of the program’s students take advantage of this option.

Despite all the positive signs for educational attainment in Tennessee, recent years have not been kind. “Everything that’s happened to enrollment since COVID  kind of erased all of the gains from Tennessee Promise,” said the University of Tennessee’s Carruthers. The combination of pandemic disruptions, a strong job market and changing public sentiment about higher education hammered enrollment at community colleges nationwide. Students have started returning again in Tennessee, but community college enrollment is still below what it was in 2019.  

* Correction and clarifications: Because of incorrect information supplied to The Hechinger Report, an earlier version of this story mischaracterized the two groups of students that succeeded in earning a college degree within three years. This story was also modified to clarify that only coaching was introduced in 2018. A separate mentoring service already existed. In addition, the $1,000 emergency grants, which began in 2022, are not one-time grants but can be issued multiple times.

Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595 or barshay@hechingerreport.org.

This story about free community college was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters. 

The post What one state learned after a decade of free community college appeared first on The Hechinger Report.