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.

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.

College campuses have become battlegrounds in America’s culture wars, with diversity, equity and inclusion programs at the center of the debate. In at least 20 states, Republican lawmakers are pushing to limit or even ban DEI initiatives at public universities.

College Uncovered cohost Kirk Carapezza heads to North Carolina, where rollbacks in DEI are raising concerns. At the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, some students fear these changes could make campus less welcoming for certain people. Conservative students worry about a chilling effect on free speech.

Off campus, voters are questioning whether taxpayer dollars should fund DEI programs at all. Even among supporters of diversity and inclusion, some progressive and independent academics concede that some elements of DEI could discourage discussion of controversial topics for fear of offending some students. Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gerson argues that while DEI programs were well-intentioned, they’ve gone off course.

GBH senior investigative reporter Phillip Martin joins the podcast to trace the historical roots of DEI policies and explain what scaling them back means for today’s students and their families.

Listen to the whole series

TRANSCRIPT

[Students singing a cappella]

[Kirk] This is College Uncovered. I’m Kirk Carapezza with GBH News. And that’s the Tarpeggios, a college a cappella group at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

UNC is the oldest public university in America, and it was a hotbed of civil rights protest in the 1960s. It wasn’t until 2018 that the college formally acknowledged that enslaved people helped build the campus. It also apologized for the — quote — ‘profound injustices of slavery.’

But today on campus, things are considerably different. Millions in state funding originally set aside for diversity, equity and inclusion programs, or DEI, is now being redirected to race-neutral programs, including civics education.

UNC student Samantha Green believes the university is trying to turn back the clock. Green heads the Black Student Movement at UNC.

[Samantha Green] We do a lot of work on the ground trying to support diversity, equity, inclusion. However, recently those at the legislative level that have authority over our actions have stepped in, deeming some of the policies that we’ve had in the past as being non neutral or non effective, and in some ways even harmful to the student body.

[Kirk] Across campus, others see the issue very differently. UNC student Preston Hill is a sophomore studying journalism and political science. A leader of the College Republicans, he sees the need to move toward what he calls a colorblind society, and he’s all for the repeal and replacement of DEI.

[Preston Hill] I think going back to neutrality, back to just simply looking at people based off of their personalities, their achievements, as opposed to the color of their skin or their sexual orientation — I think that that’s the way to go. And I think that that’s been the problem with DEI and why so many companies — not just universities, but companies, are rolling it back as well.

[Kirk] This is College Uncovered, a podcast pulling back the ivy to reveal how colleges really work and why it matters to you. I’m Kirk Carapezza from GBH News. …

[Jon] … and I’m Jon Marcus with The Hechinger Report. We’ll be joined later in this episode by Phillip Martin, an investigative reporter at GBH News who’s been following controversies around DEI for years.

[Kirk] Dozens of state or local bills are now targeting DEI funding. These are programs intended to expand universities’ demographic reach and make all students, regardless of their backgrounds, feel welcome and safe. That idea was born in the civil rights era and then embraced by many college campuses and some workplaces after the murder of George Floyd. But now it’s facing a big backlash.

[Jon] Beginning this year, Texas banned all DEI offices, as well as diversity training and — quote — ‘ideological oaths and statements,’ at all public institutions. Florida has eliminated all DEI programing at public colleges. And universities in both of those, states have also announced cuts to DEI office staffs.

[Kirk] At least 20 states have Republican proposals aimed at limiting DEI programs at public universities. In Wisconsin and Alabama, public university systems have decided to ban DEI preemptively after threats by lawmakers to withhold money and raises.

[Sound of voting] We are in order.

[Kirk] In May, North Carolina became the latest state to repeal its policy on diversity and inclusion.

[Peter Hans] Higher education does not exist to settle the most difficult debates in our democracy.

[Kirk] UNC System President Peter Hans speaking to the Board of Governors.

[Peter Hans] Our role is to host those debates, to inform them, to make them richer and more constructive. That’s a vital responsibility, and we can’t fulfill it if our institutions are seen as partisan actors in one direction or another.

Kirk] Hunt says students and faculty should be ready to engage with liberal, conservative and traditional ideas and even explore progressive ones like DEI, but that college administrators ought to stay out of it altogether, leaving faculty and students free to grapple with competing ideas and pursue truth and discover knowledge with an open mind.

I wanted to hear from the people most affected by these changes. So I visited Chapel Hill, where student groups were recruiting new members outside the student center. I talked to the Tarpeggios, that a cappella group we heard earlier, about what DEI programs offer and what might be lost without them. Here are seniors Lou Lindsley, Ella Breiner and junior Valentina Fernandez Escalona.

[Ella Breiner] I have no words. It’s so incredibly upsetting. And I think as a senior, I hate the idea that, like, I’m leaving this school and that’s going to be, like, that’s going to have a huge effect on our student population.

[Lou Lindsley] I think what’s frustrating to me is that, like, people are reorienting their focus from the ways that race affects people’s opportunities to, like, thinking about it just in terms of wealth and income. But there are so many different ways that, like, people’s race, people’s sex, all those different sort of identifying characteristics, like, how those factor into people’s future opportunities.

[Valentina Fernandez Escalona] Especially as a person of color on campus. I think that representation is super important and, like, being able to talk about diversity is something that should not be a question. I feel like it’s just something that’s so simple that everyone should be able to talk about freely.

[Kirk] On and off campus. I found DEI advocates who see these initiatives as essential to making underrepresented students and faculty feel more welcome and included by providing advising and support for them.

[Chantal Stevens] If I were, you know, a Black student from a rural town in North Carolina and I’m struggling, where do I go? And I think that’s what’s really scary.

[Kirk] Chantal Stevens is executive director of the ACLU of North Carolina.

[Chantal Stevens] If you are in an underrepresented group, you need to know where your resources are, because your experiences are different. And so to have this idea of, you know, being colorblind or issue blind, that really doesn’t work, right? Because we experience the world in very, very different ways. And so I really see this as a setback.

[Kirk] Over the long run. That can mean fewer Black and Hispanic students come to schools like UNC.

[Chantal Stevens] There’s so much at stake, right? When you think about the way we live. Let’s take, I don’t know, science and technology, just for an example. And let’s think about it in the form of AI and you’re developing voice technology. If you don’t have diverse people at that table, if you don’t have people who understand that different people bring certain inflections and certain words and your dialects might be different, think about what’s missed when that technology gets developed.

[Jon] Even before its repeal of the DEI, UNC took down its web page for its office of diversity and inclusion. The Board of Governors has since reallocated millions of dollars it used to spend on DEI to what the administration calls student success programs and civics education, at a school where most of the students come from within the state.

[Kirk] So to hear how voters and taxpayers who subsidize the university are responding to these changes, I took a 30-minute drive south of Chapel Hill to a diner in a small town called Pittsboro

[Hostess answering phone] Hello, Virlie’s Grill.

[Kirk] At the bar, people chatted quietly over ham and eggs while Fox News aired on big flat screens overhead. All the patrons I spoke to agreed their taxpayer dollars should not be funding DEI on campus. Here’s Christopher Partain, Carollyn Lloyd and Hal Gwynn.

[Christopher Partain] I disagree with most of those policies, but I do believe that we should treat everyone as equal going into it. But it doesn’t have to be an equal outcome.

[Kirk] When you say you oppose DEI policy, specifically what do you oppose about it?

[Christopher Partain] I don’t think that we necessarily need to teach ideologies that are politically driven and motivated.

[Carollyn Lloyd] You’re there to get an education, nothing more. Focus on your education. You take up politics when you leave.

[Hal Gwynn] They should be learning about science, math, education English if we’re covering the costs. We don’t want them to learn about woke and the LGBTQ thing. That’s just my opinion.

[Kirk] So when you think about American colleges, what concerns you the most?

[Jimmie Phar] That’s pretty easy: all the liberal indoctrination now. They’re almost all that way now.

[Kirk] That’s Jimmie Phar, who’s a graduate of UNC Chapel Hill.

[Jimmie Phar] I went twice. I went in ‘69 and ‘73. And then I was in the Air Force for five years, then I went back in the ‘70s. And my experience was you get a lot of socialism indoctrination. I call it indoctrination, they call it teaching. Being an alumni, I can I can poke fun at them, you know? I still like their sports. I just don’t like their politics.

[Jon] Back at the UNC campus, junior Matthew Trott is from Pittsboro. He feels the same way as the people at that diner in his hometown. Trott is double-majoring in political science and public policy. And he’s on board with ending DEI.

[Matthew Trott] Speaking for myself and a lot of other Republican students, we of course are very much in favor of having a diverse and inclusive student body. The problem is that, in the past, many of these policies have been used to silence differing viewpoints that are not even opposed to diversity and inclusion.

[Jon] Trott says these policies have made it difficult for the College Republicans to host certain conservative speakers like far-right commentator Candace Owens.

[Matthew Trott] We eventually did, of course, get her approved, and it was a huge event where we had a full house of about 750 and had to turn away probably an equal number.

[Kirk] So now let’s bring in Phillip Martin, a senior investigative reporter with GBH News, who’s covered DEI and its backlash for years.

Hey, Phillip.

[Phillip Martin] Hey, how’s it going?

[Kirk] All right. So, Phillip, what goes through your head when we talk about this controversial topic?

[Phillip Martin] Well, first of all, when you talk about DEI, you can’t limit it to what’s going on on campus. Campuses are reflecting what’s going on nationally. The backlash against DEI is the issue. The backlash against DEI is formed from a national perspective. It’s an ideological backlash. So it’s not neutral. Right? That’s the first thing that has to be clear. Some of the same advocates who are advocating, for example, for free speech on campus are some of the same people who are pushing back against DEI, and who are silencing various progressive speakers, like former Black Panther Angela Davis on some campuses. So, in other words, the notion of talking about DEI on campus can’t be extricated from the larger conservative goal of anti wokeness, as it’s called.

[Kirk] And it’s part of our national narrative now. We heard it with, you know, Republicans saying Kamala Harris is just a DEI higher, or the DEI candidate.

[Phillip Martin] Precisely. It’s become a metaphor for race. And the same is true by and large on campus. That’s not to say that you don’t have some legitimate concerns about DEI institutionally, but for the most part, this is an ideological frame. It’s an ideological backlash. It’s not something that is neutral, as some people have advocated or stated. And it’s certainly not colorblind. You don’t go walk into a supermarket and not see what color the fruit is. It’s a question of what you do with that fruit. It’s a question of if you buy it or don’t buy it. The same thing is true about the whole issue of colorblindness. It’s a term that basically obfuscates all of reality. And it’s a way of not of really dealing forthrightly with the issues in front of you.

[Kirk] So, Phil, what do you hear in those voices from the campus in North Carolina and the diner in Pittsboro?

[Phillip Martin] I love the diner in Pittsburgh. I mean, what’s the name of the community?

[Kirk] Pittsboro.

[Phillip Martin] You gotta love that diner.

[Kirk] What do you hear in those voices?

[Phillip Martin] I hear hungry people. No, seriously, what I hear are people who have basically — it made sense to me that Fox News was on in the background, because what I heard was Fox News. When you hear someone talk about liberal indoctrination when you’re talking about DEI, what does that mean? That DEI is somehow counterposed to progress, that it’s counterposed to expertise, to qualifications. And that is exactly what you hear in these voices of where folks say things should be colorblind. Now, that’s my point. Colorblindness is, in fact, some would argue, and from my reporting, color blindness has been blindness. The notion of seeing things in terms of of neutrality. How could it possibly be colorblind if someone like Donald Trump got into the Wharton School as an undergraduate, and most reporting by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal showed that he did not get in on the basis of his academics. George Bush, he did not get into Harvard Business School on the basis of his academics or to Yale. This the issues that are involved — legacy, money, nepotism and other factors. DEI is simply another way of expanding the campus population, its diversity, and to include larger voices. And as some of your people you’ve interviewed, Kirk, have said, this actually expands the voices and it expands the type of people who are on these campuses.

[Kirk] Right. And so it sounds like what we’re hearing is some conflation of DEI and, you know, quote-unquote socialism or indoctrination.

[Kirk] That becomes the problem with these terms. It obfuscates reality when people say that DEI is anti-democratic or they call it socialism or they call it indoctrination. These are terms we’ve heard since the civil rights movement. I mean, when during the civil rights movement of when people were pushing back against civil rights, do you know what they advocated? Why don’t we just be colorblind, even as the need for civil rights was very clear and directly in front of their faces. It’s a go-to phrase or a go-to term for doing nothing or essentially embracing the status quo, which is, again, the priority of whiteness.

So, Kirk, this question to you. I mean, what does your reporting on the ground say about the effectiveness of DEI.

[Kirk] Well, you know, we’ve got to put this in context, right? All this backlash comes after the Supreme Court banned race-conscious admissions, or affirmative action, as it’s better known. And DEI advocates tell me that these campus programs are not just effective, but increasingly necessary to achieve true equity.

Dr. Tina Opie teaches organizational behavior at Babson College, and she says despite the backlash, colleges should recommit to DEI.

[Tina Opie] The concern that I have with people who are trying to repeal or ban DEI is, okay, so you don’t like that tool, but what tool or solution are you offering to redress the fact that there are so many inequities and higher education?

[Kirk] And Phillip, as a Black woman, Opie points out that, at places like Babson and UNC, Black, Hispanic and Asian professors are significantly underrepresented.

[Phillip Martin] Well, you know, she has a point. I mean, a recent USC study found Black and Hispanic professors only made up 5 percent of tenured faculty at four-year universities.

[Tina Opie] And it’s not because of a pipeline issue. There is something happening within institutions of higher education where people who are from historically marginalized groups are not ascending at the same levels as their white, male, straight counterparts. Why is that? What it feels to me that they’re doing, Kirk, is they’re banning DEI and offering no solution, which suggests to me that they’re content with the status quo.

[Kirk] And Opie says the same people who oppose DEI aren’t protesting the baked-in advantages eealthier students have, like tutoring or who may have a legacy edge in admissions.

[Phullip Martin] Well, that’s interesting, too. But so too, Kirk, is the fact that DEI is actually more popular than people think. There was this poll that was conducted by YouGov in 2023. It found that nearly 60 percent of Americans support having a DEI office on a college campus.

[Kirk] Sure. But even those who support the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion object to what they see as the bureaucracy of those offices. These critics say in many ways it’s all gone too far and it needs to be scaled back or at least do a better job of including conservative ideas.

Jeannie Suk Gersen teaches constitutional law at Harvard.

[Jeannie Suk Gersen] I think the problem begins when you take a set of principles that are really good, right? Anti-discrimination is really good. Diversity — that’s really good. Obviously, you should be including people. All those things are really good principles and they’re very beneficial to the educational setting. I think that there’s a tendency sometimes on university campuses to think you take principles that you’re committed to and that you want to promote, and you turn them into rules that become the basis of punishment. Either punishment through social shaming or sanction or through making it harder to do the job that you’re supposed to do because you’re having to deal with the threat that something, you know, maybe you’ll have, of course, taken away from you or that you could actually be investigated for discipline and for wrongdoing. That’s been the chill.

[Kirk] Have you seen that happen at Harvard?

[Jeannie Suk Gersen] So I can’t talk about specific cases, because I might have been involved as a lawyer. But I can say it is something that professors, whether at Harvard or elsewhere, have come to feel is a is an ordinary part of life now.

[Kirk] And even among some supporters of a diverse campus, Suk Gersen says there’s a growing sense that these relatively new, well-intentioned programs could go awry if they’re institutionalized.

[Jeannie Suk Gersen] With a whole bunch of personnel and officials dedicated to it and an office and, you know, funding for it, and then certain, you know, training modules and orientation procedures and things like that, then it becomes a whole new world.

[Kirk] Are you concerned that DEI is defined by or too narrowly focused on race?

[Jeannie Suk Gersen] To the extent that you’re really going to have a campus that’s truly inclusive, it must also include the viewpoints that one’s not very, you know, comfortable with or in agreement with.

[Kirk] She cites conservative viewpoints like the belief that abortion should be illegal or that Roe vs. Wade was wrong. Still, Suk Gerson, who describes herself as politically independent, cautions that conservative critics should not be so quick to just condemned DEI and hope that it will just go away or disappear.

[Jeannie Suk Gersen] Because it is actually DEI that could end up making people understand the value of inclusivity toward conservative viewpoints on liberal campuses.

[Kirk] Phillip, in my reporting, I heard this idea again and again. Jeannie Suk Gerson and other critics talk a lot about the DEI bureaucracy.

So if I’m a student or parent, what, if anything, do I need to know about that bureaucracy?

[Phillip Martin] Well, first of all, there is a bureaucracy. It’s becoming less and less, however, as part of this backlash against DEI. There has been a commitment since the civil rights movement, at least verbally, to the notions of equality, diversity and inclusion. It wasn’t always called DEI.

[Kirk] These aren’t new ideas, right?

[Phillip Martin] These aren’t new ideas at all. But there have been attempts to try to institutionalize them. Those attempts only became serious, most people believe, after the death, after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Suddenly there was this reawakening, if you will, and an acknowledgment that the country was beset by institutional racism, systemic racism, not just a problem of attitudes, but institutional racism. And to counter that, it was suggested, okay, we need to create some form of some mechanism to bring in greater voices, to bring in more students of color onto campuses, those who might be poorer and those who might be more females, or more transgender students, so on and so forth. There was a legitimate effort to basically remedy this.

[Kirk] And by setting up offices, did that just create a bigger target?

[Phillip Martin] Yes. When you put up a sign, you’re asking for criticism. It expanded the bureaucracy. And any bureaucracy is going to be beset by problems and contradictions. And what happened here was that a lot of folks believed, okay, suddenly, you know, you’re being asked to take what some folks construe as a loyalty test before you are hired.

[Kirk] Right. You’re talking about diversity statements.

[Phillip Martin] That’s right. Right. Now, that in itself is not problematic when you consider that we do statements on all types of things. We agree not to curse out the person in the cubicle next to us. We agree not to sexually harass someone. So on and so forth. So this was yet another set of agreements. But you also had people who felt that it went too far and you had other people, sometimes liberals, sometimes progressives, who felt that these diversity statements expanded a bureaucracy that shouldn’t exist and that you’re not going to solve or push back against racism by having someone sign a statement, because it’s simply an action as opposed to a commitment or belief.

[Kirk] But do you think that whether we’re talking about diversity statements or we’re talking about DEI offices and the mechanism that you describe — do you worry or do you think that this is all creating a chilling effect on campus where people just aren’t even talking?

[Phillip Martin] Well, I think the chilling effect actually comes from the pushback against DEI. I mean, DEI has never said let’s ban books. Many critics of the idea call DEI socialist. But that doesn’t make sense if you’ve read any written rudimentary studies of socialism, that doesn’t make sense. If you call it liberal indoctrination, that, too, is a is a conservative catchphrase that doesn’t make sense. So I think that DEI has done a lot of good in terms of expanding or truly creating a diverse campus and asking folks to live up to equitable ideas, if you will. But I think it also serves as a convenient target for folks who already see liberal education as problematic or as a threat, who already see the academy as problematic. You see what’s happening in Florida with dissenters on college campuses trying to re-create the ideal on college campus as a conservative frame.

[Kirk] And what does your reporting over the years say about this idea of a quote-unquote, post-racial or colorblind society? And how far along or not along are we?

[Phillip Martin] Well, first of all, we’re not anywhere close to post-racial. Post-racial is a term that’s been introduced into society, but it does not reflect the objective reality of, we can’t be post-racial if, in fact, you know, like, we were, for example, demonizing Haitians in Springfield, Ohio. And you have more than half the country that have gone along with that demonization, or at least half the country, I should say, has gone along with that demonization. That’s not post-racial.

[Kirk] On this podcast, we’re very consumer focused. And so, what’s your advice to students and families who are trying to navigate this really tricky moment on campus right now?

[Phillip Martin] Find the most diverse campus you can, because that is going to reflect real-world experience once you graduate four years later. The type of world we live in is not a monochromatic world. We live in a world of different colors, different ethnicities, of men, women, nonbinary. This is the reality. And so, look for a diverse campus. Look for a diverse campus also in terms of thought. And that’s out there. Even when many conservatives say that a university does not adhere to the foundations of freedom of speech, my experience has always been that you have these debates, you have these discussions, and one frame may be more dominant than another on the campus — again, that might be the nature of the university — but that doesn’t mean those voices will be drowned out. And I say, look, for the greatest diversity you can find and inclusion of all types of folks, and where people feel they belong.

[Kirk] But there’s a difference between belonging and feeling comfortable all the time.

[Phillip Martin] Well, that’s right.

[Kirk] So the campus is where you feel most comfortable might not actually be the best fit.

[Phillip Martin] Well, that’s true. And so you have to also feel that you belong there. And it has to be acknowledged. The university has to acknowledge that you, my friend, belong here with us, and so on and so forth. Not that we’re tolerating you, but that you actually belong here and you feel comfortable being here and you can contribute.

[Kirk] And you can contribute.

[Phillip Martin] That is the type of space I would look for as a student.

[Kirk] And what about when it comes to the bureaucracy? And, specifically, what’s your advice to students trying to navigate the DEI space?

[Phillip Martin] Well, I think, first of all, I would think that colleges have to be very careful. Again, if a DEI statement is construed as a loyalty statement, that’s probably no good for anyone. That’s been my experience in reporting that. It simply creates a backlash. So I think what you have to do is figure out how to get people to commit in other ways — commit in the way they teach, commit in the way students feel they belong to that institution, to that campus, to each other.

[Kirk] So it’s not just window dressing, but it’s actually part of the plumbing.

[Phillip Martin] It’s built into the campus. It’s the wiring and it’s the tiles.

[Kirk] Phillip Martin, a senior investigative reporter with GBH News. Phillip, thank you so much.

[Phillip Martin] Thank you.

[Kirk] These decisions to roll back DEI have the greatest impact on students living and studying on the margins. Samantha Green is one of those students. She’s transgender and leads UNC’s Black Student Movement. And I met her in UNC’s Upendo Lounge. Upendo is the Swahili word for love.

[Samantha Green] And it’s kind of a testament to what DEI on our campus has done. So I really wanted to show it to you all because it really shows the progression of from the establishment of this space that’s meant to be a location where Black students who at the time especially were not allowed to be really in a lot of locations and really thrive in those locations. We made a space of our own and we got it chartered.

[Kirk] Nearly 60 years later. Green says the repeal of DEI and the loss of funds will hurt students this space was designed to support, on a campus that was actually built by slaves in the 1700s. Today, about 70 percent of UNC students are white and about 8 percent are Black.

[Samantha Green] We are setting up infrastructure for our students that are coming back onto campus, and a lot of our infrastructure is based around state funding. It’s based around community organizing. And these DEI repeals have basically taken away the footing that we normally stand on.

[Kirk] Green is studying public health and says the effects of repealing DEI will be felt far beyond the walls of the Upendo Lounge.

What message does this sent to students if the office shuts down or is stripped of funding and staff? What message does that send to a student like you?

[Samantha Green] It tells me that I have to fight harder. But to many students, it tells them that they’re not supported, that they’re not welcome, and that they’re either going to need to find another place to be or get out of here as quickly as possible or whatever they can do. And I fear that means that more students are not going to come to our university and the university could be negatively impacted by this.

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

Keep listening after the election to hear how the results will affect your college plans.

College Uncovered is a production of GBH News and The Hechinger Report and distributed by PRX. It’s made possible by Lumina Foundation.

Thanks so much for listening.

The post College Uncovered: DEI Backlash appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Rural young people who aspire to a higher education have long had fewer choices than their urban and suburban counterparts, contributing to far lower rates of college-going. Now many of the universities that serve them are eliminating large numbers of programs and majors.

That means the already limited number of options available to rural students are being squeezed even further, forcing them to travel even greater distances to college than they already do or give up on it altogether.

Rural students are much less likely to go to college than urban or suburban ones. Twenty-one percent of rural Americans have bachelor’s degrees, compared to 35 percent who live in urban places, a gap of 14 percentage points that has widened from 5 percentage points in 1970, according to the Federal Reserve.

This divide is further widening the gap that’s playing out in politics between rural America and urban and suburban places.

But there are some new attempts being made to help rural students who want to go to college.

Scroll to the end of this transcript to find out more about these topics.

Listen to the whole series

TRANSCRIPT

(Saxophone music)

Jon: We start in the rural Mississippi Delta with the sound of a saxophone performance at the senior recital at Delta State University.

The music department was highly regarded in a part of the country famous for the blues. But since this performance, the university has ended its music program. It also cut English chemistry, math, history, finance, accounting, art and other majors — 21 of them in all, or a third of everything it used to teach.

People in rural America already have far less access to higher education than people in cities and suburbs. Now the comparatively few universities that do exist in rural places are cutting huge numbers of programs and majors.

Kirk: Rural America is also home to many of the private colleges that are already starting to close at an accelerating rate.

This hollowing out of higher education in the heartland has largely gone unnoticed in cities and suburbs.

Jon: But the decline in college opportunity for rural high school graduates is only widening social, economic and political divides between rural America and the rest of the country.

Kirk: So how can we close these gaps? And if you’re a rural student who wants to go to college or a parent, how can you still make that happen?

Jon: 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 Jon Marcus from the Hechinger Report.

Kirk: And I’m Kirk Carapezza with GBH News. Colleges don’t want you to know how they operate, so GBH …

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

Kirk: 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 increasingly turbulent waters.

Today on the podcast: “The Rural Higher Education Blues.”

Maria Fields-Chism: We think a lot about this in terms of, like, financial hardships, but that’s really the least of it.

Jon: Maria Fields-Chism grew up in rural Arkansas.

Maria Fields-Chism: I grew up in a teeny, tiny town.

Jon: But she always wanted to go to college.

Maria Fields-Chism: It was not necessarily important in my family, but it was always important to me, just something that I strove for.

Jon: But the nearest and most affordable option to her ‘teeny, tiny town’ was a public university almost two hours away. So Fields-Chism started at a local community college.

Maria Fields-Chism: There were a lot of barriers even for me to get across town to go to a community college. I was also a young mom, and I would start and I would stop.

Jon: She eventually transferred to that faraway public university, Henderson State. It took her seven years in all to get her bachelor’s degree in English. Then she got her master’s, which is also in English.

Just after she finished the university cut the English program along with math, chemistry, biology, history. That’s two dozen majors students can’t take anymore.

Maria Fields-Chism: On the coasts or in a bigger city, we wouldn’t have these barriers. It becomes a sort of us-versus-them kind of idea. When college seems inaccessible, it sort of adds to that feeling of disenchantment that we that we deal with in small communities, like, I don’t have a voice.

Jon: Today, Fields-Chism teaches seventh and eighth grade in Hot Springs, Arkansas. And she sees even more obstacles confronting her students than she faced.

Maria Fields-Chism: The thing that I think just really stuck with me is that there wouldn’t be another me — another person who grew up in a rural area, made it work, managed to go to Henderson to study English and then gets to graduate and teach English. Because you can’t study English at Henderson anymore.

Jon: So, Kirk, here’s a statistic many people might not know: Rural students graduate from high school at a higher rate than their counterparts in cities and suburbs. But they go to college at a lower rate than suburban students.

Kirk: And that situation has been getting worse, Jon. Just since 2016, the proportion of rural students who enroll in college has dropped even more. They’re also more likely to drop out than their urban and suburban classmates. Researchers say that’s because they feel out of step with campus culture.

Jon: Like Maria Fields-Chism, Dreama Gentry grew up in rural America and was the first in her family to go to college. She went to Berea College in Kentucky, where students work in exchange for their educations. Today, Gentry is the CEO of Partners for Rural Impact.

Dreama Gentry: So I founded the organization because education really was what was the ladder out of poverty. We’re a national intermediary that is focused on ensuring that all rural students have a path to upward mobility.

Jon: That turns out to be a big job.

Dreama Gentry: The first obstacle students face in thinking about higher education is tying it to their aspirations and their dreams and what fulfills them. I’m also coming from Appalachia, which is a region of persistent poverty. So I think when you combine poverty and rural, we’re not instilling in young folks that they can dream and aspire to be anything — that they have possibility and that they can have those dreams.

Kirk: Now, Jon, we should pause and point out here that rural America includes all kinds of people with all levels of incomes. But Gentry is right that cost is even more of a barrier for rural students. In general, median earnings in rural areas are about 20 percent lower than in the rest of the country.

Jon: Right, Kirk. And all these things that make it hard for rural kids to go to college don’t just take a toll on their dreams and aspirations. They have an economic impact. Only about one in five young adults in rural America have bachelor’s degrees or higher. That’s half the national average. And the gap has been widening steadily for 50 years.

Before we move on, let me point out something that we’ve said before on this podcast: Not everybody has to go to college. But somebody does. And that’s become especially urgent in rural places trying to diversify their economies away from mining and agriculture, which can employ only so many people.

Kirk: Okay, so Maria Fields-Chism’s middle schoolers in Hot Springs, Arkansas — they already have a lot of strikes against them. But one of the biggest is that they just don’t have anywhere near as many higher education options as urban and suburban kids do.

Jon: Right. A few big state universities are in rural places, such as Ole Miss, Penn State and Purdue. But the vast majority of rural America is served by regional universities with far fewer resources and much less prestige.

Andrew Koricich: You know, whenever we sort of have these urban- and suburban-centric conversations, we sort of just assume that folks have colleges available to them.

Jon: That’s Andrew Koricich. He heads up the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges and is a professor at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.

Andrew Koricich: That dynamic is so different in rural places. You have fewer types of institutions to choose from. You might have only a community college. You might have a Methodist college that is the only one around you. You might have a four-year public university around. And you might have none of those things around.

Jon: Nearly 13 million Americans now live in higher education deserts, mostly in the rural Midwest and Great Plains, according to the American Council on Education. That means the nearest four-year university is well beyond commuting distance.

Here’s Koricich again.

Andrew Koricich: You know, in a lot of rural places, the idea of choice is sort of a fiction. If you only have one option, you don’t really have choice. It is not just, if this institution doesn’t do it, another one can pick up the slack. If this institution doesn’t do it, it just does not happen. It is not offered. It’s not an option.

Kirk: And that brings us to what’s happening now.

(Sound of protest against program cuts at West Virginia University)

Kirk: At West Virginia University, a plan steered through by President Gordon Gee eliminated nearly 30 programs, including most foreign languages and graduate programs in math and public administration.

Jon: Those changes got national attention just because of the sheer number of them. But many other universities and rural places have made equally big cuts.

Kirk: And that includes the places we’ve already mentioned: Delta State and Henderson State, but also Arkansas State, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Youngstown State in Ohio.

Jon: Right. And Emporia State in Kansas, Missouri Western State University, the University of Alaska system. And these aren’t just a few programs here and there that were dropped, Kirk, but dozens. Economics. Sociology. Geography. Biology. Criminal justice. English. History. Philosophy. Political science. …

Kirk: Okay, we get it. We get it. And I know you’ve done a lot of reporting on this issue.

Jon: Yeah. And it’s not just programs and majors being cut. Entire colleges in rural America are disappearing. Sixteen of them have closed just since 2020.

Back at Henderson State in Arkansas, Megan Hickerson taught English for six years until the program was eliminated. There had been warning signs, so she wasn’t entirely surprised.

Megan Hickerson: And I knew the humanities, because the humanities are always under attack these days, right?

Jon: But she was surprised to see some other majors go, such as chemistry, biology and math, and alarmed that history and other subjects got cut.

Megan Hickerson: Not everybody has to study them, but the people who do study them are more likely to have the kind of thinking and critical skills that are really, really important to good citizenship in a free society, a democracy. These cuts are coming at a time when people, including young people, are being bombarded with nonsense. How do they get the skills to pass through that?

Jon: Hickerson still remembers the call from the university’s president telling her she was going to be laid off.

Megan Hickerson: And he just told me that my job was going to be terminated. And I asked him why, you know? And he said because, you know, the numbers don’t support the maintaining the program.

Kirk: A lot of this is being driven by big drops in enrollment made worse by the Covid pandemic. The number of students at Megan Dickerson’s former employer, Henderson State, fell by 28 percent during the pandemic. West Virginia’s enrollment is down by 10 percent since 2015.

Andrew Koricich at Appalachian State says part of the problem is that rural universities don’t have rich supporters to fall back on.

Andrew Koricich: There are a lot of rural institutions that have sort of been struggling for a while, and you drop the Covid pandemic in the middle of that, which, you know, I think we’ve seen documented so many ways that the rural impacts were just qualitatively different than they were in urban areas. On the rural side as well, whether it’s publics or private, nonprofits, you know, they’re not usually the places a lot of wealthy donors think of when they’re getting ready to write a $10 million check.

Kirk: And even though rural voters in swing states get a lot of love every four years from the presidential candidates, they often don’t have much clout with state lawmakers who set the budgets. That’s because there simply aren’t very many of them.

Andrew Koricich: I think some of that is you have so many state reps and senators for each of the major urban areas. But whenever you are a rural-serving public institution, you have one rep and you have one senator and they cover a large geographic area representing a lot of different interests. It is demeaning. It is creating a second class of people to say, ‘You pay your taxes just like everybody else does. You vote like everybody else does. But you just can’t have the same choices as everybody else because there aren’t enough of you here.’

Jon: That double standard is what makes this more than the usual higher education story. It’s contributing to anger and alienation. Rural voters are convinced that their communities get less government spending than they deserve. They don’t believe their kids will do as well as they did. They worry that rural ways of living are being lost and looked down upon. And they blame a lot of this on experts and elites in cities.

Kirk: And that’s not just anecdotal, Jon. That’s according to a survey of 10,000 rural voters. One of the people who conducted that survey was Nicholas Jacobs. He’s coauthor of the book “The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America.” Jacobs grew up in rural Virginia, and now he teaches in another rural state.

Nicholas Jacobs: I’m an assistant professor of government at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.

Jon: So, hey, Kirk — pop quiz. Do you know what the most rural state is, based on the percentage of people who live in rural places?

Kirk: Wyoming?

Jon: Nope.

Kirk: Montana?

Jon: Nope. It’s Maine. I know people might be surprised by that.

Kirk: You spent a lot of your life in Maine, right, Jon?

Jon: I have had the privilege of living in that beautiful state. And, by the way, you know, you lived and worked in the second most rural state — Vermont.

Kirk: Yup. All right. Shout out to Vermont Public.

Jon: So both of us have seen this up close. Smart kids graduate from good schools, but don’t go to college.

We all might have a different idea of what rural means. And that gets back to our earlier caution about being careful to not generalize about who or what is rural. Nick Jacobs makes the same disclaimer.

Nicholas Jacobs: Rural Maine is a lot different than rural Virginia, which is a whole lot different from the rural Southwest. I have a great friend and coauthor on some other work who is a third- or fourth-generation rural Montanan and laughs at my five-acre homestead, because he’s on a 5,000-acre ranch. Rural America, you’re right, is not one thing. It is beautiful. It is complex. And I think that’s why it’s so hard for us to reconcile to the fact that when it comes to politics, we actually can talk about this thing called rural America.

Jon: So Jacobs focuses on what rural people have in common, whatever state they live in.

Nicholas Jacobs: The reason we call the book “The Rural Voter” is because we believe that there are a set of core motivating behaviors or attitudes that do distinguish rural Americans from non-rural Americans.

Kirk: Now, not everyone in rural America is up in arms over cuts by universities to English and foreign language programs. Many schools are focusing on majors that lead directly to local jobs. And that’s okay with some people. At Delta State University, for example, one of the most popular majors is agricultural piloting. That’s a fancy name for a program that teaches students to fly crop dusting airplane.

Jon: Molly Minta is a reporter with Mississippi Today and the nonprofit news outlet Open Campus. She covers the Mississippi Delta and remembers a visit to the local county fair. It’s a Mississippi tradition where politicians come to make speeches.

(Sound of politician speaking) Well, good morning. Glad to be back at the Neshoba County Fair.

Jon: Away from the campaign speeches, Minta met a family that had come to show its prize goats.

Molly Minta: And I was talking to them about how they felt about higher education for their kids. And I had asked the mom of this group — they had three kids with them — if they felt there was any room for, like, character development in college. And she basically just said, ‘Not for my kids.’ She meant that college was career training. Basically college was, you go to get a job.

Jon: Other people Minta met looked at it from a completely different point of view.

Molly Minta: For Black Mississippians from rural areas, college is definitely about opportunity, about helping, you know, get jobs that only degrees can unlock. I want to make that point to kind of complicate a little bit the way we talk about how rural students are viewing college.

Kirk: Still, what’s been happening at rural universities means that the people who do want opportunity have to go farther away to get it.

Molly Minta: What I kind of found was that young people who want opportunities of certain kinds really want to leave. I think that there is a weariness being in a place that doesn’t feel like much is coming that way.

Kirk: And that inevitably affects politics. So let’s circle back to government professor Nick Jacobs.

Nicholas Jacobs: A politics of resentment or a rural politics of grievance is animated by this belief — a very widespread belief — that government resources are not distributed fairly, or that there’s certain biases against rural communities that keep rural communities from getting what they deserve. There are some people in some places that are getting a lot, and you’re not, and your community is not. And that, I think, is a part of the politics of resentment.

Jon: So if you’re a student in a rural high school or a parent in a rural community or just a citizen who cares about closing these divides, what do you do? One thing is to know that there are still opportunities for you, even if it means going a little farther away for college.

Nicholas Jacobs: To me, it’s less about the information that’s actually exchanged and more about the signal and the message you are sending — that when we, as a as an institution of higher education, as an elite college, when we talk about diversity, when we talk about being a welcoming environment and training the next generation of leaders, we mean you.

Kirk: And that’s the idea behind a new project called the STARS Network. It stands for Small Town and Rural Students. STARS was started when recruiters from a few elite universities finally started to visit rural high schools. A wealthy graduate of the University of Chicago gave them $20 million to do it. And he was originally from a small town himself.

Marjorie Betley: We had a trustee, an alum, come to us, and he had just been back to visit his hometown high school in rural Missouri. And he came to us in the admissions office at UChicago. And he said he had a question. And he was, like, ‘How many rural kids do you have on campus? Kids like me?’

Jon: That’s Marjorie Betley. She’s deputy director of admission at the University of Chicago and now the director of STARS.

Marjorie Betley: We couldn’t answer the question. So we worked on, how do we define this? How do we identify students? How do we support students? And we came back with a pretty embarrassing number. It was, like, 3 percent of the entire campus was coming from a rural or small-town high school. And he was, like, ‘You guys should be embarrassed.’ And we were, like, ‘We are. Thank you.’

Kirk: Just 3 percent.

Jon: Yeah. And about 20 percent of Americans live in rural places. But recruiters from selective universities hadn’t historically gone to those communities. A study found that college recruiters favor higher-income, public and private high schools in cities and suburbs. So Chicago and MIT, Columbia, Brown and Yale started to recruit from rural high schools. This year, they’re being joined by Dartmouth, Stanford, Berkeley and others.

Marjorie Betley: We started the conversation with a lot of these schools the same way we got started, which was, ‘How many rural students do you have on campus?’ And every single one was coming back with, honestly, pretty low numbers. So I think that is one of the reasons a lot of schools were, like, ‘We didn’t we didn’t even realize that.’ This was a population we had severely overlooked for a long time.

Kirk: In the STARS Network’s first year, Betley says, participating schools admitted 11,000 rural students, and just under half of them enrolled. If you live in a rural area and want to know more, you’ll find a link to the organization on our landing page.

Jon: But the goal isn’t just to steer rural kids to elite schools.

Marjorie Betley: The idea is kind of planting these seeds really early for students.

Jon: And that could help convince some rural kids to go to college anywhere.

Here’s Andrew Koricich.

Andrew Koricich: Not everybody needs a bachelor’s degree, but pretty much everybody needs something after high school. And I want that something after high school to let the folks who want to stay in their communities stay in their communities. And I don’t want it to be that to get the skills and training you need, it automatically means you have to leave this place you love and that needs you. We need those folks to stay in rural communities.

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. We just might answer your question on the show.

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 out of MIT.

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

College Uncovered is a production of GBH News and The Hechinger Report and distributed by PRX. It’s made possible by Lumina Foundation.

Thanks so much for listening.

The post College Uncovered: The Rural Higher Education Blues appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

More than 40 million Americans have student loan debt. But should the government forgive all or even or part of it?

That debate has become a surprising source of political division.

Opponents say student loan forgiveness is effectively a transfer of wealth from the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder to the top. Supporters say forgiveness gives some breathing room to graduates who are being crushed by the costs of repayment, in some cases without ever even having graduated.

Meanwhile, the cost of college is forcing people to put off getting married, starting families, buying houses and doing the other things that fuel the American economy.

We debate the pros and cons, hear from student loan holders and provide advice on how to avoid going into debt in the first place.

Scroll to the end of this transcript to find out more about these topics.

Listen to the whole series

TRANSCRIPT

(Voice of news host)

It’s Morning Edition from NPR News. I’m Leila Fadel. More than 40 million federal student loan borrowers had an eventful year. It began with a promise of forgiveness. Then they were unforgiven. And now some may be forgiven again. …

Jon: Yeah, it’s been way more than an eventful year for people who have student loans. The roller-coaster ride of student loan debt has been going on for decades.

Kirk: There have been promises of loan forgiveness, lawsuits, more promises of loan relief, more lawsuits.

Jon: Right. The idea of forgiving even part of those loans — it’s a political minefield. And there’s the crux of the matter. People who didn’t go to college or already paid back their loans, they don’t get why they should have to pay for other people who did borrow money and haven’t paid it back yet. That’s a kind of class divide that’s easy for politicians to exploit.

Virginia Foxx: There’s no such thing as forgiveness.

Jon: This is Virginia Foxx. She’s the Republican chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce and an outspoken opponent of forgiving student loan debt.

Virginia Foxx: This entire scheme is nothing more than a transfer of wealth from those who willingly took on debt to those who did not or had the grit to pay off their loans. It’s about sticking hardworking taxpayers with the tab and those who owe it walking away from it scot free.

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 of the Hechinger Report.

Kirk: Colleges don’t want you to know how they operate, so GBH News …

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

In this election season, we’ve been exploring how deeply politicized higher education has become. And one of those perhaps surprising flashpoints is student loans. So today, we’ll talk about how student loans work, and why there’s so much disagreement about them. More importantly, before we’re done, we’ll share some ways that you can avoid going into debt to pay for college in the first place.

Today on the podcast: “The Borrowers’ Lament.”

Arti Sharma is one of the 44 million Americans with student loan debt.

Arti Sharma: My family didn’t have the funds to send me to college and I also didn’t have enough scholarship money.

Jon: She remembers when she started to borrow for college. Sharma says that after borrowing and trying to pay off the loans, with interest, she’s lost track of the total she owes. But it’s in the tens of thousands of dollars.

Arti Sharma: I’m a first-generation child of immigrants, working-class immigrants. I just wanted to get my education and sign at the dotted line. And I wasn’t concerned about loans, because I thought I was going to get a job that would help me pay off the loans to begin with. And so those are kind of the things that, you know, I wish I would have had somebody who could have talked to me about this.

Jon: Sharma borrowed even more to go to law school. Now she works for a public service nonprofit in Texas. She loves her job, but she doesn’t make the kind of money she needs to repay what she owes.

Arti Sharma: I want to pay off my loans. I don’t want to sit here and, like, you know, somebody just lets me get by scot free, right? It would have been great if I would have had enough income to pay off my loans. But it’s just, you feel kind of like a hamster on a wheel, chasing after something that never really happens, you know, going nowhere. With this interest compounding.

Kirk: At least Sharma got a degree. Forty percent of the people who borrow for college never even graduate. That means they have to repay their loans without the bump in earnings they’d expected. More than seven million people in their 50s are still paying off their student loans.

Jon: Right. The average debt for people when they get their bachelor’s degree is about $26,000. But by the time they’ve finished paying it off, decades later, that comes to more than $43,000, with interest. And all of that debt means people are putting off getting married, having kids, buying houses, starting businesses and all the other things that keep the economy running.

Arti Sharma: My parents don’t have any loans, you know, and they came from nothing. And they came to this country and they were able to have a house and a family on, you know, working-class income. And I have all these degrees, yet I don’t have even a net worth comparable to them.

Jon: Wow. Listen to what she’s saying there. That’s one of the reasons so many Americans are questioning the value of college.

Kirk: Okay, so all of this seems a pretty compelling argument for forgiving loans like Arti Sharma’s, right?  

Jon: But there’s a surprising political divide. A poll by NPR found that only a narrow majority of Americans think that student loan holders should have their loans forgiven. Not surprisingly, people who don’t have student loan debt are much less likely to think it should be forgiven.

Kirk: Jon, when I was reporting in North Carolina for our episode about the backlash to DEI, I heard this sentiment again and again. Here’s Carollyn Lloyd. She’s a waitress at a diner in Pittsboro, North Carolina.

Carollyn Lloyd: I don’t think my tax dollars should pay for an education that’s not going to earn them enough to pay for their student loan when they get out.

Kirk: So in this election year, we’re going to have our own sort of mini debate about all of this. We’ll be taking a measure of the pros and cons of forgiving student loan debt.

Jon: As we heard, people like Congresswoman Virginia Foxx say it isn’t fair for taxpayers to have to repay the money other people took out in college loans.

Andrew Gillen: I would love for somebody to come and pay my mortgage, right? But that doesn’t mean there’s a good public policy reason to do that. I was the one who took on the debt. I’m the one responsible for repaying it.

Jon: That’s Andrew Gillen, a research fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute. Today in our mini debate, he’ll be arguing against the sort of blanket student loan forgiveness. President Joe Biden repeatedly proposed.

Andrew Gillen: There are, you know, for people who can’t pay their mortgages, there are consequences for that. Your house can get repossessed. You can get evicted. There’s actually less danger of that in the student loan area because nobody’s going to take your college degree away.

Kirk: On the other side of the issue is Persis Yu. She’s with the Student Borrower Protection Center, which advocates for student loan holders. And she says student loans have failed in helping students afford college.

Persis Yu: In some ways, we have broken the promise of the federal student loan system. And so I do think it is fair for the federal government at this point to then cancel those loans.

Kirk: Okay, we’re going to hear more from our debaters in a moment, Jon. But this is a good place to just pause and talk about how we even ended up with this system in the first place — using loans to pay for college.

The idea goes back to the 1960s. That’s when the federal government provided subsidies to banks for low-interest loans to students. But the amounts were very low, and so were the interest rates.

Jon: Then, in the 1990s, the government started giving out loans directly. This coincided with big increases in the cost of college.

Sameer Gadkaree: So, Jon, this is a story that spans decades.

Jon: That’s Sameer Gadkaree. He’s president of The Institute for College Access and Success. It’s a nonprofit that works to make college more affordable.

Sameer Gadkaree: The first piece of the puzzle is the growing use of student loans as far more and more and more people started going to college in order to improve their lives.

Jon: Back then, government grants for college still covered two thirds of the cost. So the loans were small. But as tuition kept rising, Pell Grants didn’t keep up, and the loans got bigger.

Sameer Gadkaree: The second piece of the puzzle I’ll offer you is something that played out over decades in state houses across the country, which is that whenever there was a recession, they would look at their budget and say, where can we meet our balanced budget requirement while also meeting these great needs that we have? And they would look at higher education and say, these public colleges and universities are really important, but they can raise some tuition.

Jon: Some colleges also have encouraged students to take out loans. Researchers at Cornell say for-profit colleges lead their students to borrow. There’s also evidence that the more money the government makes available to students, the more colleges of all kinds jack up their tuition. But in spite of calls from both Republicans and Democrats that colleges share some of the risk for students who default on their loans, that idea has gone nowhere.

Kirk: So students borrowed more and more. And now we’re closing in on $2 trillion of outstanding student loan debt.

Jon: Yeah, that’s more than Americans owe on their car loans or credit cards.

Okay, so let’s get back to our debate. Should some of those loans be forgiven? Persis Yu says yes.

Persis Yu: Right now, what we have is we have a system that is incredibly broken. The student loan system is in crisis. We have over 40 million student loan borrowers who are being crushed by $1.7 trillion of student loan debt. And this debt for many people is just not going away. It is a huge barrier, especially for young folks, to homeownership, to starting new businesses, to saving for retirement. It is also impacting older Americans as well. In fact, older Americans are the fastest-growing population of student debtors, and this is dramatically impeding their ability to save to retire and to, you know, live out their golden years.

Kirk: The golden years. Jon, most of my friends joke that we’ll never retire and enjoy our golden years.

Jon: Kirk, working with me, these are your golden years.

Kirk: I’m doomed.

But Andrew Gillen, like Virginia Foxx, says forgiving student loan debt is a regressive policy idea.

Andrew Gillen: College graduates tend to earn more than non-college graduates. And so if you’re giving college graduates a bunch of money, which is essentially what student loan forgiveness is, that’s going to be a regressive policy, that you’re benefiting the rich at the expense of the poor.

Persis Yu: Forty million people with student debt are also taxpayers, right? So it is not other people paying for their debt. Student loan borrowers are taxpayers, too. It is not an us-versus-them type of dynamic. It is a helping a subset of student of taxpayers relieve them of some of their burdens. Student loan borrowers don’t exist in a vacuum, right? Student loan borrowers exist in families and in communities. And it is good for communities when people in their community are doing financially well.

Jon: Persis Yu says it isn’t necessary to forgive all student loan debt.

Persis Yu: And, of course, you know, I do have the view that, you know, the more you cancel, the more good you will do for more people. But I do think it’s worth thinking about the different levels, right? Like, even at President Biden’s proposal to cancel, you know, up to $10,000 for everybody and, you know, $20,000 for folks who got Pell Grants, there was an income cap on that. But, you know, even that proposal would have canceled half of all student loan balances and would have disproportionately benefited borrowers who are in default and struggling on those student loans. So even debt cancellation at that level would have been hugely beneficial for millions and millions of people.

Kirk: But Andrew Gillen says that not all those millions need the help.

Andrew Gillen: There are people who struggle out there, but this is a very small minority of students. And the way a lot of student loan forgiveness advocates have approached the problem is to focus on these the small subset and act like that’s everybody and then try to forgive all of that. And so I think one of my fundamental problems is it’s just badly targeted.

Jon: Okay, back to you, Persis Yu: Are we overstating the problem?

Persis Yu: We’re not overstating the problem. The assertion that people are doing just fine with their debt is just not supported by the data. I mean, first of all, just look at the raw data. We have 40 million people holding this debt, $1.7 trillion of debt. Before the pandemic, we saw one in four student loan borrowers was behind on their loans. One in five had defaulted on their loans. And, you know, the statistics go on and on. A borrower defaulted every 26 seconds. More than one million people defaulted every single year on their student loans. So we see a lot more distress in the student loan market than we see necessarily in other markets. And the consequences are also just much more devastating as well.

Kirk: But Andrew Gillen says that there are also consequences to forgiving student loan debt.

Andrew Gillen: If I know as a borrower that I’m not going to have to repay it, I’m going to borrow as much as I can, right? And you can see this in any sector. Like, if we did mortgage forgiveness, everybody would just start buying bigger houses, right? Because they read about, yeah, the government’s going to going to pay my mortgage. So you would borrow as much as you possibly could, if you know that you don’t have to repay it. But it gets worse than that because then you have to consider, okay, what’s the school going to respond to in a situation where students completely don’t care about the price at all because somebody else is paying? The schools are going to start raising their tuition.

Jon: And Kirk, like we said before, there’s actually evidence of this — that the more money the government makes available to students, the faster colleges increase their prices.

On this point, Andrew Gillen and Persis Yu seem to agree: Colleges should be held more to account for this hugely expensive problem.

Andrew Gillen: I think you could fix the student loan problem, the overborrowing problem to the extent it exists, in a day, if you said, okay, if the student hasn’t repaid the loan, the school has to. And you’d weed out a lot of programs that shouldn’t be in existence. You’d clear the field. You’d free up those resources to grow programs that are serving their students well, that are serving the economy.

Persis Yu: There is no question. I mean, the cost of college has just grown so astronomically. And I think the question is, should students and borrowers be the ones to bear that responsibility? Right? So we absolutely need to ensure that colleges are not ripping off students. We need to ensure that colleges are charging fair prices. But we also need to make sure that we’re taking care of the borrowers and the folks who have been saddled by this out-of-control cost of college for the last several decades.

Jon: Both of our experts say there are already safety nets for student borrowers, though many people slip through. One is income-driven repayment, which ties your loan repayments to the amount you’re earning.

Andrew Gillen: So rather than a mortgage where you pay, you know, $1,000 a month for 30 years, if your income’s, you know, $30,000, you’re going to pay $200. If your income goes down to zero, you pay nothing.

Kirk: And the government is trying to make it easier to use income-dependent repayment that at least keeps monthly bills a little smaller. And it’s one of the tips you can use to avoid crushing student loan payments.

Jon: Or if you work for the government or a nonprofit like Arti, Sharma does, you can get your loans forgiven after 10 years. That’s under the public service loan forgiveness program.

Kirk: And while this won’t apply to everyone, or even most students, if you went to a college that was proven to have misled its students, you definitely need to talk to the Department of Education. Because there’s a special loan forgiveness program for people just like you.

Jon: Look, all of these programs can be complicated and frustrating. We’ll link on our landing page to some guides that can help. But the best way to avoid student loan debt is to not borrow in the first place. And while that might sound obvious, so many families don’t take these basic steps. Here’s Sameer Gadkaree again, from The Institute for College Access and Success.

Sameer Gadkaree: It’s really crucial to think carefully at the moment of enrollment about what college program are you signing up for? What’s the college that you are signing up for? Unfortunately, one of the other facets of this higher education ecosystem is that oftentimes the programs that are least liable to leave you in a good place are the ones that do a lot of advertising and spend more money on advertising than instruction.

Kirk: So start in high school. Take Advanced Placement or dual enrollment courses to knock off some credits and then avoid having to pay for them in college.

Jon: Also, fill out the dreaded FAFSA. That’s the federal form that dictates how much financial aid you’ll get. And, yeah, the recent overhaul of the form has been a fiasco. But the payoff is getting the highest possible amount of aid, without needing to borrow.

Kirk: Next, find a college or university with the lowest price, that offers the best deal. That’s because research shows that your major matters more than the name of the college you go to. And you can save a lot of money this way and then avoid more debt.

Jon: Once you get in, remember that you can negotiate for more financial aid. It’s a buyer’s market out there right now. We covered that in Season 1. Go back to the college and ask for more help if you need to.

Kirk: It’s very important that you check and see how much money graduates from those majors make at those schools. This information is available on the government’s College Scorecard website. But a surprising number of prospective students never even check it out. Will you make enough to pay back your loans? In many cases, it isn’t even close. Here’s Sameer Gadkaree again.

Sameer Gadkaree: There’s lots of data available in the form of the College Scorecard and other publicly available data sets. And it’s important to look into those and figure out what have graduates from this program been getting? How does that compare to the amount of debt I’m taking on?

Jon: A few schools promise that you won’t have to take out any loans at all. These tend to be the colleges with big endowments that are also among the toughest to get into. Like Stanford, Princeton, Amherst and Williams. So for these, you’re going to need to study extra hard and a few are going to require you to work toward part of your tuition.

Kirk: Remember Arti Sharma, who we heard from earlier in the episode? Well, she’s carrying tens of thousands of dollars while working at a nonprofit. She has applied for public service loan forgiveness, but she’s still waiting to hear if she’ll get it. Her loans have become a years-long frustration.

Arti Sharma: I really saw it as just a means to an end and not this thing that would haunt me for all these years. So that’s kind of like I’m in a holding pattern right now.

Jon: And what does she think of the student loan system? It pretty much sums up what most Americans seem to say about it.

Arti Sharma: I think it’s a hot mess. I think it’s punitive. You end up feeling bamboozled at the end, which is kind of a yucky feeling. Like, you know, when somebody tells you you’re getting this great deal, but you trust the government, you know, when you’re young. Or at least I did.

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. We just might answer your question on the show.

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 out of MIT.

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

College Uncovered is a production of GBH News and The Hechinger Report and distributed by PRX. It’s made possible by Lumina Foundation.

Thanks so much for listening.

The post College Uncovered: The Borrowers’ Lament appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Following intense, sometimes violent protests on campuses, colleges and universities are taking steps to encourage better and more civil dialogue and debate among students who disagree.

Some schools are offering new guidance and coursework around how students should speak to one another in an effort to bridge deep differences. At the same time, they’re tightening restrictions on campus protests related to the war in Gaza, and cracking down on protest tactics with heightened enforcement.

We explore the new approaches and talk with experts about the efforts to help students speak across their differences. 

Scroll to the end of this transcript to find out more about these topics.

Listen to the whole series

TRANSCRIPT

(Sound of campus protest)

Kirk: After a year of intense and sometimes violent protest on college campuses … this fall’s orientation sounds different.

Orientation video: Colleges and universities tend to bring together people of different backgrounds, faiths and opinions. …

Kirk: Listen to this freshman orientation video some schools are using now, Jon.

Orientation video: Though it may not seem like it at first, making an effort to talk and listen to those who you disagree with can have a lasting impact on your campus culture.

Kirk: The video is produced by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which describes itself as a nonpartisan group that defends student and faculty free speech. It’s called “Talking Across Differences.”

Orientation video: We limit ourselves when we only engage with similar worldviews. In this setting, we become less curious, more hostile to perceived differences and less reflective.

Jon: This is where we are, Kirk. The political and social climate on some campuses has gotten so bad that colleges have to teach their students how to have a conversation.

Kirk: From the University of California to the University of Wisconsin, Rutgers to Harvard, colleges are amplifying or tightening their free speech and protest policies. The stated goal is to manage campus demonstrations, especially in light of the recent unrest over the Israel-Hamas conflict.

So some administrators and nonprofits say they’re stepping in to help improve civil discourse.

We’re going to dive into what’s really going on and then explain what it means for you.

Music:

Kirk: 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.

I’m Kirk Carapezza from GBH News. …

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

Today on the show: “The politics of protests.”

The divide on college campuses surrounding the war in Gaza runs deep. It’s changing the college experience for many students, starting with new guidance on student protests and how those rules are communicated and enforced.

Kirk: Yeah. Both the University of California and Cal State systems are cracking down on encampments and unauthorized structures on their campuses. Cal State’s new public assembly policy prohibits things like barriers, tents and even masks that conceal protesters’ identities. The University of California has issued similar directives urging campus leaders to reinforce existing bans on encampments and mass demonstrators.

Jon: These changes come after a rocky spring semester, when protests tied to the Israel-Hamas conflict swept across campuses.

Sound of campus protest:

Jon: And, Kirk, there could be financial consequences. California lawmakers say they’ll hold back $25 million in state funding for the University of California until it sets up a policy for free speech and protest.

Kirk: Rutgers and Columbia have unveiled their own new policies limiting access to campus to those with school IDs.

Jon: And over at Penn, administrators are limiting microphones, speakers and megaphones and banning chalk pictures or slogans on the walls and sidewalks.

Kirk: These schools say they’re aiming to balance the right to protest with the rights of other students looking to get an education or use a public space. But the new rules raise even more questions.

How will these policies be enforced, especially the bans on masks and encampments? And what does all this mean for student activism, which has long been a part of campus life? If you’re a student or a parent, it can be confusing. So we called up an expert to learn more and to provide some historical perspective.

Robert Cohen: My name is Robert Cohen. I’m a historian. I teach history and social studies at New York University.

Kirk: Cohen says student activism has always been controversial and unpopular with the public.

Robert Cohen: And that means that universities are under pressure to suppress student activism. You’d be surprised with the number of movements that have happened and also the fact that the public disapproved of them — when it was the sit-in movement against racial discrimination in lunch counters. The Freedom Rides, the free-speech movement, the antiwar movement of the ‘60s were all underwater. Politically, they were unpopular.

News commentator: They said they were there to protest the war, poverty, racism and other social ills. Some of them were also determined to provoke a confrontation.

Robert Cohen: And so there was pressure for various reasons to suppress them, as was true last semester.

Kirk: Yeah. In the spring, more than 3,100 students were arrested between mid April and mid June, and that’s higher than most of the 1960s. So it’s tempting, I think, to compare these nationwide campus protests to the anti-Vietnam War movement. But today’s protests have not been nearly as widespread or as violent.

Robert Cohen: That’s one of the reasons why I was so upset about all the arrest, because there’s so little provocation for it. In fact, that’s why the majority of the charges were dropped, because they didn’t really, you know, it wasn’t brazen lawlessness and certainly almost no violence. The largest student protests in American history were in May of 1970, following the Cambodian invasion and the tragic shootings of student protesters at Kent State and Jackson State. The number of students involved in protests there was almost half the student population in the United States — in the millions

Jon: Last semester, the total was in the thousands, not the millions. A new survey finds that two thirds of students say the protests didn’t have any effect at all on their educations. Yet many colleges spent the summer preparing and bracing for more protests. And they’re trying to keep what happened in the spring from escalating.

Kirk: One idea picking up steam is to promote civic dialog in and out of the classroom. Emerson College in Boston, where more than 100 activists were arrested, has launched Emerson together. The new initiative, administrators say, is aimed at creating unity on campus.

Jon: Hamilton College in New York started a program called “Civil Discourse in Local Politics “as part of its freshman orientation, connecting students with local politicians.

Kirk: In New Hampshire. Dartmouth has started “The Dialog Project” to prepare incoming students for tough conversations. And Ohio Wesleyan University is one of the first colleges to provide civil discourse training for all students, faculty and staff.

Is this really what it’s come to? Civil discourse training?

Raj Vannakota: You can’t make assumptions about where students and faculty and administrators are.

Kirk: That’s Raj Vannakota. He leads a program called College Presidents for Civic Preparedness to help those students, faculty and administrators.

Raj Vannakota: Some of them are well on their way, right? They understand this. They do this. They’ve had tons of experience. Others haven’t. And so you have to start with the basic building blocks.

Kirk: Especially for a generation of students that lived through the isolation of Covid-19 and has never seen a national government that wasn’t deeply divided.

Vannakota says these initiatives share a simple goal to promote healthy debate.

Raj Vannakota: We need to take an affirmative posture to ensure that there is free inquiry and debate on our campuses. And I want to make clear here, we’re using the term free inquiry rather than free expression. And the reason that we’re doing that is that free expression is, you know, saying whatever the heck you want. The First Amendment has rules around that. But students really need to experience university life not as this disorienting free for all, but a forum for structured dialog and debate and learning. And that is what needs to be at the center of this. So there’s still work to be done to get there.

Kirk: Jonathan Rauch, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, agrees that students need to learn how to be uncomfortable with some of what they hear. Rauch is author of the book ‘The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.’ And he says what’s needed on campus today is a genuine culture of free speech.

Jonathan Rauch: Students should understand from Day One, it should be written on the catalog, that this is a place where you will encounter ideas that will strike you as potentially offensive, potentially harmful. We call that education.

Kirk: Then, Rauch says, students should be encouraged to take up any disagreements with each other or their professors, and not complain to administrators.

Jonathan Rauch: And indeed, they should be taking positions that they themselves don’t disagree with. That’s very good training for life. And it’s also very good training for toleration.

Kirk: But, Jon, professors on campus tell me incorporating debate into the curriculum is much easier said than done because it’s increasingly tough to bring students together for a civil conversation. And as a result, some students are reporting that they feel less safe.

Take Talia Khan, for example. She told me she always felt safe studying engineering as an undergrad at MIT and performing in the university’s jazz band.

Music:

Kirk: Here she is singing the song “Lonely Moments.”

Khan is the daughter of an American Jewish mother and Afghan Muslim father. She told me that after Oct. 7, she feared for her safety.

Talia Khan: We had students immediately saying, you know, all of this violence is Israel’s fault.

Kirk: She disagreed and says she lost friendships and that her mental health suffered. As the campus climate grew more and more polarized.

Talia Khan: I personally had best friends who I had spent a lot of time studying with, and they told me that the people who were killed in the Nova massacre deserved to be killed because they were partying on stolen land. It took me so long to process that anybody could say that. There’s no excuse for, you know, killing, raping, kidnapping innocent people.

Jon: Since the war in Gaza broke out, students like Kahn have found their campuses deeply divided. Many pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli activists have just stopped talking to each other. Some have even transferred. With both anti-semitism and Islamophobia on the rise. Researchers at the University of Chicago found that more than half of Jewish and Muslim students feel unsafe on campus because of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Robert Pape: Campus fears are more intense and more widespread than we’ve previously known.

Kirk: Robert Pape studies political violence and is the author of the Chicago report.

Robert Pape: Oct. 7 caught us all by surprise, but especially caught college campuses and universities by surprise.

Kirk: Did your survey find that these students have reason to be afraid?

Robert Pape: Yes. They’re hearing protest chants they interpret as a call to genocide. And that’s scaring not just the target group that they hear, but it’s scaring everybody. They’re observing acts of violence and intimidation on campus.

Kirk: Part of the problem, Pape says, is that students sharply disagree even about the meanings of the words they use during protests.

Robert Pape: You have one group of students who are chanting ‘from the river to the sea’ that don’t think it is implying genocide of the Jews. But you’ve got four million college students hearing that phrase thinking that means genocide of the Jews.

Kirk: For many Muslim students like Harvard junior Jana Amin, the harm they experience is very real. That’s because a pro-Israeli group started publicly identifying Harvard students involved in pro-Palestinian causes. The group put a picture of Amin’s face on a truck that drove around just outside of campus and labeled her among Harvard’s leading anti-semites.

Jana Amin: I was devastated and really scared for my own personal safety on campus. Right? Like walking around, might someone recognize me from the truck and then choose to kind of take it a step further and turn to violence?

Kirk: Before Oct. 7, Amin says she felt comfortable on campus. But the doxing truck changed that.

Jana Amin: Just seeing the truck allowed to stay there with my face, that name on it forever altered how I was going to think about my time at Harvard.

Jon: Jewish students who support Israel are also losing trust in their colleges and civil discourse.

Becca Packer: A lot of people are not willing to have a conversation. It’s, you know, their way or the highway.

Jon: As a senior at Berklee College of Music, Becca Packer was a member of the college’s newly organized Hillel, a Jewish campus group. Sitting in the back of a campus café, she says after Oct. 7, she found what she considered anti-semitic posts all over social media.

Becca Packer: One of my first things that I knew I had to do following Oct. 7 was get on Instagram and try and be that opposing voice — that, you know, opposing perspective that people aren’t going to see. Because I knew exactly what was going to happen.

Kirk: The heated environment Packer describes on and offline has real, concrete consequences for the already battered reputation of American colleges.

Jon: Yeah, the protests on campuses in the spring have only deepened the erosion of public trust in colleges and universities. A survey by the research firm SimpsonScarborough finds trust in higher education has taken a big hit, especially among Republican parents.

Kirk: Nearly half of them said the protests made them trust colleges even less.

Jon: Now, Democrats and independents were less opinionated about the demonstrations. But still, 22 percent of Democratic parents and 30 percent of independents said their trust in higher education has declined. This is coming on the heels of public trust in colleges already hitting all-time lows. Confidence in colleges has dropped from around 60 percent to just 40 percent last year.

Kirk: Among the top reasons: concerns about political agendas and professors and administrators pushing what critics call woke culture. No matter your political views, this is a crisis for American higher education, and its leaders are definitely paying attention.

Lynn Pasquerella: We’re at a crucible moment in American higher education, and we must listen to the critics who are concerned. If we don’t, then we will be complicit in our own demise.

Kirk: That’s Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities.

If college leaders just kind of scoff at this, the institutions don’t just fail, right? I mean, there’s more at stake than just the colleges themselves.

Lynn Pasquerella: Democracy fails. Students who receive an American education, a liberal education, are much more likely to resist authoritarian tendencies because they are confident in their viewpoints, even when those viewpoints are challenged. They don’t feel threatened by that. We must return to basics, articulate the value of education not only for individuals but for our society.

Jon: That’s why campus leaders are trying to take action, rolling out these new policies and programs and orientation videos. They’re gearing up for more protests, not just about Gaza, but also with tensions rising around the upcoming presidential election.

Kirk: All of this is happening at a time when culture wars are escalating and the country is polarized and partizan.

Jon: This year, colleges are trying to get ahead of this. To start, Pasquerella says, they’re updating their campus speech and protest policies, focusing on when, where and how protests can happen and making sure those rules are consistently enforced.

Lynn Pasquerella: Campus leaders, I think, have learned that they must be transparent and communicate policies widely and frequently. They have to create and sustain a culture in which there’s respect for diversity points.

Music:

Kirk: So now we’re going to explore how and how quickly the politics of campus protests and even classroom discussions have changed — and what that means for you.

I recently sat down with John Tomasi. He’s the president of Heterodox Academy, a nonpartisan advocacy group of academics working to counteract what it sees as a lack of viewpoint diversity on college campuses, especially when it comes to political diversity.

Heterodox doesn’t fully disclose its funding sources, but Tomasi says its members come from across the political spectrum, and his board has directed him not to seek funding from groups that are active in politics.

Tomasi is a former professor at Brown University, where he taught political philosophy and where he met Jonathan Haidt, the founder of Heterodox, or, as they call it, HSA.

How do you explain Heterodox Academy? What is it?

John Tomasi: It started off in the very nerdy kind of techie kind of way. Lots of scientists tended to all have the same political orientation. And famously, in front of a large auditorium of 400 social scientists, John Haidt said, ‘How many of you are Republicans?’ No one raised their hands. ‘How many of you are libertarians?’ One or two kind of hesitantly did. ‘How many of you are Democrats?’ They all raised their hands. Maybe that’s a problem. Maybe we are in a bubble, group thinking. Maybe we’re not achieving that ideal of thinking for ourselves. And so that’s a reason why the social science might not be as robust as it might be. So it began as this techie little group of academics thinking about problems and research, but then it caught a wave of public interest.

I’ll give you one example that really crystallized it for me. There was a speaker invited to Brown. His name is Ray Kelly, former police commissioner of New York City. And Ray Kelly was giving his talk and some students didn’t want him to come. They were worried about stop-and-frisk, which was a policy that he was very well known for, a policy that had very strong racial overtones. And so the students said, please don’t invite Ray Kelly to come to campus. But they invited him anyway. He came to campus and the student shouted him down. That kind of thing had happened before. But what was different now — this was now 2015 — was that the students who shouted him down took responsibility for shouting him down. They gave interviews to the student paper the next day. They said we’d shout him down again. They weren’t afraid of what they had done. They weren’t worried about punishments for what they had done. They had a kind of almost a brazenness, sort of moral commitment, to believing that shouting someone down might be the right thing to do. And so there’s always been these currents on campus that controversial speakers should be protested. You should argue against them. You should do various things to make it difficult for them — banging pots and pans on the way on the way to the lecture hall. But the idea that shouting someone down might be the right thing to do — that was kind of a new creature on the the campus. And that same creature, that same set of ideas started enacting themselves all across the country in different ways.

Kirk: Around the same time, Tomasi recalls, Yale administrators sent an email to students essentially saying, ‘Please be mindful about cultural appropriation when you plan your Halloween costumes and parties.’ Another administrator sent a follow up message saying, ‘Sure, be careful, but it’s Halloween. Don’t be too worried about the details. Don’t walk on eggshells.’

John Tomasi: And students responded really strongly against that claim that they should be able to be transgressive sometimes and not take it too seriously.

Sound of campus protest:

John Tomasi: Something had changed in the temperature on campuses. Something had changed in the way students were thinking of things.

Kirk: Tomasi says political and social divisions have deepened to the point that they’re threatening academic freedom and changing the college experience, with many students afraid to speak up, adopting a new philosophy of silence is safer. A national survey from Heterodox shows that student self-censorship has been rising steadily. It’s up to around 70 percent now. That means 7 in 10 students report that they actively self-censor.

John Tomasi: The students consistently say that the reason they self-censor is not because they’re afraid of their professors grading them down or doing bad things with which they disagree. They self-censor because they’re afraid of social media and they’re afraid of what their fellow students are going to make them famous for an idea that they floated in class and therefore their social lives and personal lives will be ruined forever, perhaps.

Kirk: I heard one speaker say, you know, we’ve got this generation now who went through puberty on social media. They went through the pandemic on Zoom, and now they’re landing on these college campuses and they haven’t ever made eye contact with someone with whom they might disagree. Would you agree with that?

John Tomasi: I think there’s something to that. But I also think it’s really important to recognize that the problems we’re seeing in this generation of students isn’t solely a problem with this generation of students. In fact, the problems we’re seeing, the patterns of behavior that we’re watching on campus now in really vivid form, are very fixed patterns of human behavior. So people get their social cues, they get their ideas, they act the way they act because of the way the people around them are acting, and to a much greater degree than we like to admit.

Jon: We should point out here that organizations like Heterodox Academy and FIRE, which produced that orientation video we heard, are controversial. Critics say these groups don’t speak for them, that they tend to support and defend conservative, provocative speakers on campus.

But Tomasi says his group is growing. More than 50 colleges have established Heterodox communities led by faculty members, including at Harvard and MIT, Berkeley community colleges and large state universities.

Music:

Jon: Heterodox Academy and fire are coming at this from the outside. At the University of Wisconsin, faculty have launched their own new program called The Discussion Project. It’s a training model that’s now catching on at other colleges across the country.

Katherine Cramer: Students are afraid of each other.

Jon: Katherine Cramer teaches political science at Wisconsin.

Katherine Cramer, in class: So welcome, everybody. It’s so great to see so many faces I recognize from years past.

Jon: And since the pandemic, she’s been participating in the program.

Katherine Cramer: They’re afraid to talk about politics, but it’s bigger than that, right? They’re afraid of saying something that will be posted online and go viral and make them feel bad about themselves. They’re afraid of being publicly shamed.

Kirk: Like John Tomasi, Cramer says, the idea that silence is safer is now widespread. Even in her classroom, with the door closed.

How quickly has the college experience changed in this way?

Katherine Cramer: Fast, I think. I mean, the cohort of people that we’re seeing of traditional college age come through colleges now have this scar from the pandemic of not having the experience of like developing the social skills through in-person interaction in that age that they were in, I guess it would have been middle school now, right, for some of the college students. And that, layered on top of this very toxic political environment, I think, has just contributed to this sense that silence is safer. Like, the best approach is to not interact and not say anything.

Jon: As an educator expected to lead freewheeling discussion. Cramer says it’s increasingly hard to get students to talk and have civil conversation if they disagree. Instead, she says, they’re staring at their phones.

Katherine Cramer: Yes, and even to the point where I’ve said, ‘you know, I just want to point out to you all that when you’re done talking about that, like, using the discussion protocol and talking about the course content, you can talk about anything. Anything. I’m not going to like get mad at you for not talking about the course content. You can talk about anything.’ And still, they’re silent.

Jon: As a political scientist, Cramer notes that her students are part of a broader political environment in which Americans are being encouraged by their leaders to be suspicious of each other.

Katherine Cramer: There’s an us and there’s a them, and you don’t want to engage with the other side, because not only are they the other side, they’re evil. And if they get control, if they get a hold of you, the world is coming to an end. Like, that’s the environment we all are in, including these college students.

Jon: So what does The Discussion Project suggest that people do to change this? First, it says that everyone should get a turn leading the discussion.

Katherine Cramer: It makes it like very egalitarian in who’s who gets control and who gets to speak. But also helps us understand how to ask questions about the course content that allows people to bring in who they are as human beings.

Jon: With a presidential election looming. Kramer says figuring out how to hold civil, constructive conversations in a classroom matters far beyond the campus.

Katherine Cramer: You know, it’s a big deal, because what goes on in college is an indicator of what’s going on in other parts of American life. But also because generally we’re talking about young people, and they are the future of this country. And many of these people, for better or for worse, are going to go on and be leaders in our political system. And so, if the skills that they’re developing in college right now are silence is safer, do not engage with people of different opinions or you’re going to be harmed — that doesn’t bode well for the future of our political system.

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. We just might answer your question on the show.

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 out of MIT.

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

College Uncovered is a production of GBH News and The Hechinger Report and distributed by PRX. It’s made possible by Lumina Foundation.

Thanks so much for listening.

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

College has become a new battleground in the culture wars, and it’s affecting where students enroll and what they’re learning. 

Divisive protests, police crackdowns, and a chilling backlash against free speech are among the reasons that a growing number of students say they don’t feel welcome on some college campuses. 

In this election year, we talk about the politics of higher education, how it affects you and how to pick a college where you’ll feel welcome.

Conflicts over abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, and DEI, as well as what can and can’t be taught in classrooms, are stirring up campus life. 

A majority of students say abortion laws and restrictions around the discussion of race and gender would have at least some effect on where they go to college, according to a Gallup survey. 

It and other polls also find that some students at four-year universities feel as if they don’t belong or disrespected.

Students on the left and right alike say they’re increasingly reluctant to express controversial opinions, but that it’s okay to report on classmates or faculty who do. 

Hear more about this, against the backdrop of a contentious presidential election.

Listen to the whole series

TRANSCRIPT

Scroll to the end of this transcript to find out more about these topics.

Sound of promotional video: Congrats. Congrats. Congrats on getting into UC Davis! … Welcome to the friendliest. college campus!

Jon: This is a promotional video welcoming students to the University of California, Davis. 

Sound of violent protest

Kirk: And this is how welcoming the campus actually sounded when a conservative student group hosted a speaker who opposed abortion and disputed that there’s systemic racism in America. 

Jon: Protesters on one side said the speaker shouldn’t have been allowed to share his views at all. People on the other side wanted to hear him out. The event was canceled. 

Kirk: Welcome to college in America right now. 

Jon: More precisely, this is how unwelcoming college has become. Students and their parents say the breakdown of civility is affecting how they choose a school. And it’s gotten worse with the crackdowns on LGBTQ and reproductive rights and the conflict in Gaza. And we haven’t even discussed the looming presidential election. 

David Strauss is a partner in a consulting firm that conducted a survey about this. 

David Strauss: One out of four students told us that they had actually ruled out specific schools exclusively because of political considerations, and that proportion was basically equal whether a liberal student, a moderate student, or a conservative one. 

Kirk: So how do students and their families choose a college where they’ll feel they belong, where their views will be respected even by people who might disagree with them. Where they’ll hear both sides of an argument without someone trying to shut it down?

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 how they operate. So GBH …

Kirk: … in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, is here to show you. In this election season, we’ll be exploring how deeply politicized higher education has become and what students and their parents can do to navigate these increasingly treacherous waters. 

Today on the show: “Unwelcome to College.”

Jon: So, Kirk, students used to pick a college based on its academic reputation and its social life. 

Kirk: Yeah, but the campus quad has become a battlefield in the culture war. 

Jon: There are assaults on speech and speakers from the left and the right, messy protests, new restrictions on abortion and LGBTQ rights, attacks on diversity and complaints about excessive wokeness. 

Kirk: Yeah. And for us as journalists, these conflicts have been hard to watch. But on a more human level, they’re affecting how welcome students from all backgrounds and points of view feel at many colleges and universities.

Jon: And how they pick a school. 

Lee Dunn: I want my child to be in a place that’s safe, that has a diversity of viewpoints and opinions, but doesn’t have, a situation that could feel unsafe, or where someone’s not open to my child being able to have an open debate. 

Kirk: That’s Lee Dunn. She’s the mother of a college-bound student, and I spoke with her at a Republican political rally. But she’s expressing a concern that extends pretty much across the political spectrum right now. 

Jon: That’s right, Kirk. Several national surveys show that a growing proportion of students and their families are picking colleges based on whether they’ll feel they belong. 

David Strauss: The liberal-leaning students tended to cite an array of issues that were mentioned by most respondents who had ruled out schools — reproductive rights, racial equality, LGBTQ+ restrictions, gun laws. Among the conservative students, it was more general: too Democratic, too liberal in terms of LGBTQ laws, conservative voices not welcome, and then too liberal on abortion and reproductive rights. 

Jon: That’s David Strauss again. He’s a partner in an education consulting group called Art & Science Group. And it did a poll that found a quarter of prospective students ruled out a college because of the political environment in the surrounding state. 

Strauss says abortion in particular has become a really polarizing issue for students since the Supreme Court decision two years ago allowing broad new state restrictions. 

David Strauss: Within a week, I received a call from a president of a client institution who told me that her state had moved very quickly to restrict reproductive rights. She heard from a mother asking, ‘How will you take care of my daughter when she returns to school?” She heard from several students — ‘I’m concerned about coming back.’ And she heard from a couple of prospective students saying, ‘I’m no longer coming.’ That phenomenon is probably playing out on the right as well. 

Kirk: And that’s just one issue, Jon. There are so many others. 

For example, since policies around diversity and equity started coming under attack, Black students are increasingly choosing to go to historically Black colleges where enrollments are up. And a national gay advocacy organization says young LGBTQ students who have been harassed are twice as likely to say they don’t plan to go to college at all. Lawmakers in several states have proposed more than 500 anti LGBTQ laws in recent years. 

Jon: Alyse Levine is a private college counselor in North Carolina, where she owns a company called Premium Prep. And she’s been seeing this a lot. 

Alyse Levine: We definitely have had students consider these policy changes, as well as just, like, the vibe of what they hear about on these campuses and who feels welcome and who feels like they can speak and who can’t speak. So I can think of a few LGBTQ students in particular, some transgender students who were feeling really uneasy and eliminating some schools because of their elimination of DEI policies. I would say we have an outspoken parent body, too. So it’s not just the students, it’s also parents drawing some lines of where they feel comfortable sending their students and where they feel comfortable sending their money. 

Jon: All kinds of students are experiencing this. Gallup finds that more than one in 10 students feel as if they don’t belong on campus. Even more than that reported feeling disrespected or unsafe, or they don’t think they can express their opinions freely. 

That’s one of the reasons Angela Amankwaah chose to enroll in an historically Black college, or HBCU — North Carolina Central University — where she’s a sophomore this fall. She’s a Black student from Denver. 

Angela Amankwaah: The political landscape really emphasized for me the importance of going to an HBCU, because I knew that I would be in a community of safe, welcoming both professors [and] peers, and just an institution that actually wanted me there. 

Jon: She says she’s felt welcome at the school compared to what she would expect to experience these days at a predominantly white institution. 

Angela Amankwaah: There’s not a single class where I’m the only Black student, or I’m the only Black woman. Like, there’s just Black students all around me. There’s nothing that I can do in terms of, like, my speech, the way I dress, or even things that happen on or off campus that are strange to other students. 

Jon: Javier Gomez left his home state of Florida after it restricted discussion in schools about sexual orientation. He went to college in New York instead. 

Javier Gomez: With the Don’t-Say-Gay bill that happened in 2022 and then expanded into higher education — I mean, some of those things make me feel unsafe as a student in the South. These policies are making it harder for us to speak our minds and also feel safe in our communities and in our schools. And I definitely felt unsafe because of the Florida policies have been implemented. It’s not easy, especially specifically being a queer and Latino and first-generation student. So it’s definitely been a hassle. 

Kirk: And now, since the conflict in Gaza, Jewish and Muslim students are reporting that they feel more uncomfortable on campus. Here’s college counselor Alyse Levine again. 

Alyse Levine: The biggest issue amongst our population this year was the rise in anti-semitism. And there was lots of hesitation among our students based on what was happening on particular campuses. 

Kirk: Maya Makarovskisays she heard chants she characterized as anti-semitic at MIT, where she’s a senior this year. She says fellow Jewish students are dropping out. 

Maya Makarovski: I know so many people that have taken semesters off or that are leaving MIT. And they’re, you know, grad students or postdocs, so they’re not going to go to another place. They’re just going to leave. It’s really heartbreaking. And I’ve seen it myself. You know, this semester and last semester, my academic performance and focus has just been completely shifted. It’s so difficult to maintain. 

Kirk: Surveys find conservative students feel especially unwelcome, and it’s liberal students who are much more likely to believe it’s okay to shut down a speaker who has opinions they don’t like, or report a professor or a fellow student for saying something they think is offensive. 

Here are a few more of the people I met at that Republican political rally: student Hayley Ebert and parents John DeMeritt and Jennifer Piacentini. 

Hayley Ebert: I didn’t want to take classes that I inherently disagreed with politically. 

John DeMeritt: It’s really something, as a parent, that you have to be mindful of. The people who claim to be the most tolerant are the least tolerant of anyone who doesn’t agree with their political views. If you’re not the right skin color or the right gender, all of this stuff plays into even admissions. 

Jennifer Piacentini: I don’t want them going to a small liberal school where it’s going to be all picketing and riots. 

Jon: Now, let’s put all this into context. Like a lot of political discussions these days, there’s a lot of heat. But part of what we do on this podcast is try to also bring some light. 

Colleges are really easy targets. They’re often accused of indoctrinating students into being woke leftists. But 18-year-olds already hold very liberal views. You remember being 18, right, Kirk? 

Kirk: It’s like it was yesterday. 

Jon: There’s a national survey from UCLA of incoming freshmen, and it finds that twice as many identify with the left as with the right. That’s before they ever set foot in a classroom. And even that Art & Science survey found that while politics might be affecting where students go to college, it’s not actually stopping them from going to college in the first place. 

David Strauss: It’s a striking observation you’re making, Jon. Given the volume of the discourse and the volume of concern we’re hearing from the right that colleges have become places of indoctrinating students, it was striking to us that only 2 percent of students who had told us they had been seriously considering going to a four-year institution, but had now decided not to do so — only 2 percent of those students told us that political considerations like those I’ve just described were even one of several factors. 

Jon: The proportion of conservative high school seniors who said they decided to not go to college for political reasons is a little higher. It’s around 5 percent. But that’s still lower than we might be led to assume. 

Kirk: So, okay, with that helpful context, how do you pick a college? How do you know where you’re going to feel like you belong? 

Jon: Colleges are all very different. Take it from Stephanie Marken, whose job is to study that as a senior partner at Gallup responsible for its work in higher education. 

Stephanie Marken: Some schools do a much better job of actually embracing the diversity of their student body and really making it a productive dialog between students, as opposed to a highly contentious and challenging culture, which is often where those experiences of disrespect set in. When a student actually reports that they went to an institution in which they were exposed to diversity, they’re more likely to say their degree is worth the cost. And that’s diversity in political ideology, party affiliation, religiosity, race, ethnicity — all types of diversity. 

Kirk: Of course, every college says it encourages intellectual diversity. But experts say you shouldn’t just rely on what they say or on the website or the campus tour. 

Carolyn Pippen: The thing about campus visits is that you really are just getting one perspective a lot of times. 

Jon: That’s Carolyn Pippen. She’s a private college counselor with the college counseling company IvyWise. 

Carolyn Pippen: So I also encourage students to do some more generalized research. So is there a multicultural center on campus? Is there an LGBTQ resource center on campus? And not just does it exist, but is it any good? Are they really doing things to support those students? Or reaching out to those offices, asking to connect with students who use those resources and getting information that way. There are also, I mean, you can Google college rankings and get a million useless websites, but there are also some really valid, reputable websites that will rank students based on friendliness towards LGBT students or, you know, how welcome do Black students feel on this campus? 

Jon: You can find a lot of those sources in The Hechinger Report’s “College Welcome Guide,” which tells you about laws and policies at universities and colleges in every state. We’ll post a link to it on this episode’s landing page, and to other resources. 

But to really get a sense of what it’s like on campus, Pippen says, you need to invest some time. 

Carolyn Pippen: Attend a class. If there’s an opportunity to stay overnight, stay in a dorm with another student. As much on-campus interaction as you can get, the better. Of course, that’s much more feasible further along in the process, when the schools that you’re looking at are more limited in number. You can’t do that with 30 different colleges. 

Jon: North Carolina college counselor Alyse Levine has another piece of advice: Don’t believe everything you read or see on TikTok. 

Alyse Levine: I think it is so important not to make sweeping generalizations about schools based on how a particular issue was mishandled. Going deeper means reaching out to a particular department. If it’s a larger university, you can reach out to a faculty member. Ask to sit in on a class and see what the dialog is like. Is there open discussion? Do conservatives feel like in these liberal bubbles they can’t speak their minds?

Kirk: Wherever students end up, Carolyn Pippen says they can usually find their own niche. 

Carolyn Pippen: Even if there is sort of an overarching feel, so to speak, to a campus or, you know, there’s one political stance or viewpoint or ideology that’s predominant, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a community within that campus for them. I always tell students, like, there are theater nerds at MIT. There is a group of students like you on just about every campus. It’s just a matter of finding them. 

Jon: The alternative is more polarization and more division, if students only interact with other students just like them. That’s the fear of everyone we talk to, regardless of politics. 

John Bitzan directs the right-leaning Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth at North Dakota State University. 

John Bitzan: You know, as a parent, I mean, I have sent four kids to universities myself. And I think about, well, what do I want students to get out of the experience? Well, one thing I want them to get is I want them to be exposed to different points of view and learn from people that are different from them and learn that not everybody sees the world the same way. And I think those are really an important parts of the college experience for students. I think that we want to teach students how to deal with people who have different points of view than them in the real world. And, again, if we put them in an echo chamber, that’s not going to happen. 

Jon: Alyse Levine worries about this, too. 

Alyse Levine: I love that college campuses can still be places where there can be discussion and disagreement, and that it’s a safe place to kind of have that, and to learn. I hope our institutions don’t become so polarized like our society has become. It’s scary to think we might be moving in that direction. 

Jon: And here’s another twist. Remember Javier Gomez, the student who left Florida after Florida passed the Don’t-Say-Gay Bill? He ended up going back to finish his associate degree. 

Javier Gomez: If I’m not there, then that’s one less voice who’s fighting the fight to dismantle these discriminatory policies. So, yes, it may feel unsafe. It may feel uncomfortable. But, as well, your voice is so important. And so that’s why it was important for me to be in Miami and be in the spaces where I was not welcome. Because if I’m not in those spaces, who else is going to be in them? 

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 Carapazza 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 out of MIT. 

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

College Uncovered is a production of GBH News and The Hechinger Report and distributed by PRX. It’s made possible by Lumina Foundation.

Thanks so much for listening. 

The post College Uncovered: Un-welcome to College appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Students say the most important factor in choosing a college is academic quality. But the reality is, it’s really hard to tell how much college students actually learn.

While there are a lot of tests to get into college, there are no exit exams to get out. Despite the soaring price of tuition and the fact that most Americans strive to go to college, undergrads often spend little time studying compared to other activities. Instead, they’re working, socializing or partying and, as a result, show limited gains in critical thinking — the hallmark of American higher education.

At the same time, to address mental health concerns, colleges are creating more courses in fields like “the environmental humanities,” Hamilton and Taylor Swift studies and offering more and more wellness days.

So what’s really happening inside classrooms?

“College Uncovered” is made possible by Lumina Foundation.

Listen to the whole series

TRANSCRIPT

Kirk: Hey, Jon, do you remember that New York University professor who was fired after he was accused of being a little too tough on his students?

Jon: Right. His firing raised all kinds of questions about academic quality and safe spaces and snowflakes.

Kirk: Yeah. His name is Maitland Jones, and he taught organic chemistry for nearly 60 years, 43 at Princeton and then another 15 at NYU, before he was fired. Jones says he was very popular with many of his students, and he says he loved being in the classroom.

What were your students learning?

Maitland Jones: Well, nominally, they were learning organic chemistry, how to interpret the interplay of structure and reactivity. It’s been quite properly noted that many of these students will go on to medical school.

Kirk: Jon, you know the famous saying, write: ‘Save a life.’

Jon: Right: ‘Fail a pre-med.’

Kirk: Yeah. So we asked Jones, do pre-med students really need to know organic chemistry to become doctors?

Maitland Jones: Most doctors don’t really need to know the details of organic chemistry. And that’s right. But what they do need to know how to do is to problem-solve.

Kirk: Over his decades in the classroom, Jones noticed his students’ ability to problem-solve was declining, and as a result, more of his students were struggling. Jones found himself handing out more and more Fs. Then, during the pandemic, his students started a petition. But it didn’t stop there. The students’ parents called the dean to complain that Jones was being too tough on their kids. I mean, that makes sense, right? The families are doling out $50,000, $60,000 for their kids to go to NYU. They want to make sure they get a return on their investment. Right?

Maitland Jones: Well, I don’t think it’s supposed to be that transactional. At least I would hope it isn’t. You know, I’m an old timer, and I believe that there is value in, well, humanities, and a humanistic approach to teaching science.

Kirk: Ultimately, as the parental complaints piled up, NYU let him go.

Maitland Jones: I was fired.

Kirk: Because you were trying to maintain standards?

Maitland Jones: I think I’ve got to avoid that question.

Kirk: Welcome to College Uncovered, a podcast pulling back the ivy to reveal how colleges really work. I’m Kirk Carapezza with GBH.

Jon: And I’m Jon Marcus with The Hechinger Report. Between us, we’ve been covering higher education for years.

Kirk: And in the process, we’ve learned that higher education is a huge, multibillion-dollar-a-year industry. With colleges treating tuition-paying students like customers, and schools increasingly operating like giant corporations.

Jon: So we’re here to tell you some of their most closely held secrets about quality, and what you get for your hard-earned bucks.

Kirk: Today on the show: ‘What Do You Learn and What Will You Earn?’

Okay, so students say one of the most important factors in choosing a college is academic quality or rigor.

Jon: Sure, just behind getting a job. But the reality is that it’s really hard to tell how much students actually learn in college, and whether what they learn will lead to a career. There are a lot of tests to get into college, but there are few exit exams, you know, to demonstrate that you’ve actually learned anything.

Kirk: Perhaps that’s why a declining percentage of Americans see practical value in college degrees. A report from Gallup and Strada Education Network finds that the top reason students attend college is to get a good job. Yet only a quarter of working Americans with college experience strongly agreed that their education was relevant to their work and daily life.

Despite the soaring price of tuition and the fact that most Americans strive to go to college and then get a good job, research shows undergrads often spend a little time studying compared to other activities. Instead, they’re working, socializing or partying, and research finds — get this, Jon — college students show limited gains in critical thinking, the hallmark of American higher education.

Josipa Roksa: Students are not spending adequate time on academics and academic pursuits. And that has consequences for how much they learn in higher education.

Kirk: That’s Josipa Roksa. She’s a sociology professor at the University of Virginia and coauthor of the book Academically Adrift.

Josipa Roksa: And so the data shows that, you know, many students are not making much progress on the critical-thinking skills over the first two years. And it’s not surprising, if you think about the limited number of time spent in class, limited number of time spent studying, then limited gains in critical-thinking skills makes logical sense. Because you have to actually work and develop those skills. And if you’re not investing the time to do it, you’re not going to develop them.

Kirk: If you’ve listened to our other episodes from the season, and you’ve managed to pay for college, and now you’re hoping to develop critical-thinking skills and trying to figure out what you’re going to learn in college, where do you think, Jon, would be the natural place to start?

Jon: Hmm. The course catalog?

Kik: Yes. The menu, Jon. That’s why I took a long look at how course catalogs have changed and expanded over time.

A few years ago, I went out to Amherst College in western Massachusetts, where Catherine Epstein took me down to the school’s archives.

Catherine Epstein: We have the papers of some relatively famous alums, and then we have lots of information just on the history of the college.

Kirk: Epstein is dean of the faculty at the small liberal arts college. Amherst enrolls about 1,900 students and offers more than 850 courses, many of them small seminars.

Catherine Epstein: So these guys are interested in catalogs.

Archivist: Great. Yeah. We pulled the three that you requested.

Kirk: Sitting around a big oak table, Epstein and I dust off the 1966 leather-bound course catalog and compare it to the 2016 paperback.

Kirk: My catalog only has 223 pages, and that includes the index.

Catherine Epstein: This is the 2015-16 catalog. It has 591 pages.

Kirk: More pages means a lot more choices. In the late 1960s, Amherst and other liberal arts colleges responded to faculty demands and switched from a core curriculum, where students all took the same courses, like English, math, and the history of western civilization, to an open curriculum, giving students many options with very few requirements outside their majors.

Catherine Epstein: You can do anything that you want. If you never want to take a science class, you don’t have to take a science class.

Kirk: As we flip through the 2016 catalog. Epstein gives me a sampling of some of the history department’s offerings, like ‘Birth of the Avant-Garde: Modern Poetry and Culture in France and Russia, 1870 to 1930.’

Kirk: That’s not obscure?

Catherine Epstein: That is not obscure. No.

Kirk: Epstein defends every single course in the catalog.

Catherine Epstein: It’s all good stuff, as long as it’s taught in a rigorous way where students are challenged, where students can express their thoughts.

Kirk: With a $2 billion endowment and a $60,000 sticker price, Amherst can afford to pay faculty to teach all these courses. But as the cost of college continues to soar, critics are raising questions.

Michael Poliakoff is president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which finds most of the country’s leading colleges don’t have rigorous general education requirements. Poliakoff keeps tabs on those courses that he thinks are foolish.

Michael Poliakoff: ‘Video Games and the Boundaries of Narrative.’ ‘Knowing Television.’ ‘Disney for Grown-ups.’

Kirk: Poliakoff has spent a lot of time studying the evolution of course catalogs.

Michael Poliakoff: What we’ve seen is the multiplication of course options, often without any real respect for the kind of intellectual nutrition that students need.

Kirk: He thinks too many colleges treat their students like customers. And he points to recent studies that found many college students finish their four years without learning much more than what they came in with.

Professors at Amherst reject that criticism. While some of their courses may sound soft, they say students are in fact learning hard skills.

Nicola Courtright: How to analyze a text. How to understand an argument.

Kirk: Nicola Courtright teaches art history at Amherst. She says the college’s open curriculum creates an ideal learning environment.

Nicola Courtright: Students know that they’re not just taking classes because they should, or they might get a job afterwards. They really have to take it out of fundamental interest.

Kirk: But, Jon, now sticker prices at some colleges like Amherst, Wellesley, Boston University and NYU are breaking the $90,000-a-year barrier. That includes tuition, fees, room and board and a meal plan, and maybe a fancy computer. Other schools aren’t far behind. So as college sticker prices have soared, more and more students and families have a justifiable interest in getting a return on their investment.

Jon: Ah, yes. The ROI. It makes sense. I mean, you can’t blame them. If you’re going to pay a steep price tag and take out loans and take on debt, you probably want to know what you’re actually getting for your money, and whether it will lead to a job where you can pay off those loans.

Kirk: New data show that how much you earn over a lifetime largely depends on your choice of major internships and getting a well-paying first job after graduation.

Jon: Yeah, but five and even 10 years after graduation, about half of college-educated workers remain underemployed, meaning they’re ending up in jobs where the degrees they earned aren’t needed. The research organization Burning Glass Institute recently tracked the career paths of 10 million people who entered the job market over the past decade. It found even 10 years out, the number of grads in jobs that don’t make use of their skills or credentials is 52 percent. Advocates want colleges to be more open about what students and their families get for their investment.

Jane Swift: Just like the college admissions process, it is not transparent. It needs to be more transparent.

Kirk: Jane Swift is president of Education at Work, a nonprofit that helps match students with Fortune 500 companies that have workforce shortages.

Jane Swift: Both the people who pay — students — as well as people who hire you have a hard time qualifying exactly what it is that you gain. And I think that there needs to be better efforts to articulate that.

Kirk: Swift is also the former governor of Massachusetts, a state — you might have noticed — with a few colleges and universities. And she says while some of these schools are doing better than others, she’d like to see the federal government hold them all accountable under the so-called Gainful Employment Rule.

Jon: Right, the Gainful Employment Rule that sounds very wonky.

Kirk: Yeah, this long-delayed regulation from the U.S. Education Department is finally set to go into effect in 2026. And, basically, here’s how it works: Students who enroll in an academic program that leaves graduates with debt they can’t afford will have to sign a disclosure agreement. The agreement says that they understand their education might not lead to a well-paying job. The Education Department says the goal is to provide families with more information about the costs and risks, but it only applies to for profit colleges and non-degree programs. Jane Swift points out that colleges and the higher ed lobby strongly oppose it.

Jane Swift: I think they believe it’s a veiled attempt to regulate out for-profit education. And it’s, you know, all students need jobs no matter where you go to college. If it’s good policy, it should be good policy for everyone.

Kirk: By everyone, she means not just for-profit and non-degree programs, but all degree programs.

Jane Swift: I think there’s good players and value in degrees in both nonprofit and for-profit. I think what we really need to understand is what are the outcomes and how can you improve your ability to achieve a positive outcome? You know, I have a liberal arts degree. Two of my three daughters received a liberal arts degree and one received a math degree. But my aspirations for all three of them with that investment were the same. It was a j-o-b at the end of that investment.

Kirk: Swift says more college students need to have work-based learning opportunities, working both before they go to college and then during their college careers, so they can get a job. She says these experiences can give them skills that aren’t taught in the classroom.

Since his days as an engineering professor at Iowa State, Richard Miller has long advocated for more transparency about what students learn and earn.

Richard Miller:  I’m the former president of Olin College of Engineering, where I spent 21 years, and since leaving there, I’ve begun working with others to develop a coalition aimed at changing higher education more broadly.

Most students attend college with the objective of finding their first career. Something like half of all of them, if you interview them, will tell you, ‘The reason I’m here is for my first career.’ But faculty don’t normally think that way. Faculty think about, it’s deeper than that. It’s about changing your life. And that’s kind of a disconnect here in who’s hearing what message.

Kirk: That disconnect appears to be widening. Some students just aren’t going to college straight out of high school. And those who do enroll are increasingly selecting career-focused majors. Fewer college students are majoring in liberal arts subjects like philosophy or English and political science, like you did, Jon.

Jon: Yeah, or history, like you did, Kirk. Over the past 50 years, the percentage of students graduating with a degree in the humanities has fallen by half.

Skepticism about the value of a liberal arts degree is now pretty widespread. In his Netflix special, Kid Gorgeous, comedian John Mulaney riffs about the cost of his English degree from Georgetown.

John Mulaney: Yes, you heard me. An English major. I paid $120,000. How dare you clap? How dare you clap for the worst financial decision I ever made in my life? I paid $120,000 for someone to tell me to go read Jane Austen. And then I didn’t.

Kirk: Despite this growing skepticism, college humanities programs have been found to still offer value. A 2023 report by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences concluded humanities majors’ incomes are 40 percent higher than those with a high school degree. At the same time, humanities professors defend new emerging courses or fields, like ‘Taylor Swift and her World’ or the Environmental humanities. They say both are directly relevant to students’ lives and, of course, boost enrollment in their struggling departments.

Richard Miller, an engineer by training, is deeply skeptical of this approach.

Richard Miller: As the country and I think as the world is moving towards addressing sustainability, you can see lots of investments in this area. There’s going to be a lot of careers built on this, but most of those careers are going to require more than having read something about it. It’s going to require some science background and will require understanding how to use what we’ve learned to make an impact.

We’ve got a whole video, by the way, about the rise of the environmental humanities and what it says about the state of higher education, on the GBH News YouTube channel. So check it out. Okay, for now, Miller says too many students are being led to a buffet of college courses and then wondering, hmm, what’s on the menu?

Richard Miller: So they flip through the catalog and they say, ‘Oh, here’s a course in environmental science. It’s taught by the, you know, the Geology Department. But look, they have all these courses in chemistry that are required in mathematics. And I didn’t take a lot of that in high school. Be really hard to do that. Oh, but here’s a course in environmental humanities. Okay. It doesn’t have those science course backgrounds. What’s the difference? This is accessible to me. So I’m going to study this,’ which is great. But you have to realize that when they get to the end of the road, somebody needs to help them understand what career opportunities are with these different labels on them. And I think, personally, higher education could do a much better job of informing kids what the outcome is with these different fields.

Kirk: At the end of the day, these students will become graduates who are facing a job market, right? And they don’t all have the same market value.

Jon: Another way you can learn about the market value of certain degrees and programs is from the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution. This nonprofit does a detailed study about incomes and jobs for people with different academic backgrounds. We’ll also post a link to that on our landing page.

Kirk: Okay, let’s be clear here, because in many ways, Jon, colleges and universities are operating like large corporations that resist transparency. Corporations with bosses who need to make budget decisions based on customer demand. So if there’s a sudden student interest in, let’s say, Taylor Swift studies or sports management or climate change literature, they ditch those low-enrollment courses in 18^th-century literature or modern poetry and culture, and France and Russia, 1870 to 1930, after the old professor retires. Then they reallocate that faculty position to another department, like computer science or data analytics, which has growing enrollment.

Jon: Yeah, and this is happening everywhere, as colleges try to balance their budgets and make their courses more relevant and more marketable.

Kirk: Sure. But more old-school faculty think students and families are too focused on their return on investment. And higher education should take this opportunity, when it’s under so much public scrutiny, to reimagine general education. They say academic programs should broaden students’ understanding of the world and strengthen their critical-thinking skills, write clearly, speak with confidence and consider differing viewpoints.

Andrew Delbanco: We really want to be careful about losing the broader purpose of college, which in this country has always been an institution that gives young people an opportunity. And that kind of gray space between adolescence and adulthood gives them an opportunity to think about who they are, and more particularly, who they want to be.

Kirk: That’s Andrew Delbanco. He teaches American studies at Columbia, and he’s president of the Teagle Foundation, which is helping dozens of colleges reimagine their curriculum.

Andrew Delbanco: Our country, after all, claims to be different from all other countries because we tell our citizens, you have freedom. What it means to be an American is that you can decide for yourself by what means you wish to pursue happiness. That phrase that is enshrined in our Declaration of Independence. And so college has been a very important institution for hundreds of years, by which we try to make good on that promise.

Kirk: That promise to pursue happiness sounds amazing, right? But what specifically are college students learning, and how do we know it will lead to a career?

Andrew Delbanco: We know, frankly, way too little about what students are learning. We give our diplomas out on the basis of earned credits. But we have very little idea what those credits really represent, in the sense of what what’s actually happened to the student’s mind in the course of earning those credits. I mean, every teacher likes to think that they’ve got some reasonable evaluation system in place, which is called grading. But we all know that we have rampant grade inflation. So even the grading system tells us very little about whether students are learning a lot or a little or nothing much at all. So this is a big problem.

Kirk: It’s a huge problem for the higher ed industry. I think it’s safe to say everyone agrees on that. But Delbanco and other academics worry that colleges are cheating young people and the country if they focus too much on job training and gainful employment and don’t give them the chance to pause, learn and then think deeply.

Andrew Delbanco: We want to have democratic-informed citizens in our country, people who are thoughtful about history, have some idea of what the big issues of the day are about and what our democratic institutions are about, why we have checks and balances [in] government, where all the power is not concentrated in one branch or another. We want young people to reflect on their responsibilities as citizens, not just their opportunities as consumers.

Kirk: Delbanco says colleges shouldn’t tell students what to think or believe, but challenge them and ask them hard questions.

Andrew Delbanco: That’s what a college should be, and we need colleges to continue to be that for the sake of the students and for the sake of our democracy.

Kirk: And, Jon, for the record, Delbanco defends the incredible growing course catalog at Amherst and other colleges.

Andrew Delbanco: One reason has gotten so much larger than it used to be is because there’s more knowledge, right? I mean, especially in the sciences, the proliferation of specialized knowledge is mind boggling.

Kirk: To stay relevant. Delbanco says more and more schools are placing a special, renewed emphasis on the importance of general education.

Andrew Delbanco: Which is the term we use to describe that moment at the beginning of college, before the student has decided which specialty is right for him or her. The college has to put up in front of incoming students a serious general education experience so that they’re not plunged immediately into this bewildering, overwhelming, you know, endless menu of choices.

Jon: One of the schools tweaking its gen ed courses is Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where the sticker price is now approaching $100,000 a year. Remember, Kirk, the Chivas Regal effect?

Kirk: Oh, yeah. Well, if you’re charging that much for your whiskey or your degrees, you’ve got to do some quality control from time to time, right?

Well, so colleges and universities now reimagine their curriculum every 20, 25 years. It’s like, I don’t know, the cicadas or something like that.

Jon: Sarah Igo chairs the American History Department at Vanderbilt and is an intellectual historian.

Kirk: Intellectual historian? What does that mean?

Sarah Igo: What that means is I study the history of ideas rather than, say, public policy or economic development or wars or that kind of thing. I study the stuff of culture and ideas and how those change.

Kirk: When it comes to ideas, what kind of ideas are students learning in college and why don’t we know?

Sarah Igo: It’s a great question. A hard question to answer. Students are learning all kinds of things, of course, in college. And we don’t know because we probably haven’t been as attentive as we should be about evaluating and assessing what they know and how they know and how they learn, as I would argue, what is more important than either of the things: how to ask questions to get them further along the path toward either of those objectives.

Jon: As an intellectual historian, Igo says, historically, what students learn can’t be captured in a single answer or data point.

Sarah Igo: Because universities and colleges offer such an incredible wealth of options — electives, majors, minors, small credential programs. It’s the wealth of what is offered. And then the number of pathways through is really quite astonishing and would have astonished someone looking at college, or who went to college 100 years ago, or honestly even 75 years ago. The big explosion in electives and kind of choose your own adventure really happened after the mid century, mid 20th century.

Kirk: Okay, Vanderbilt has been around for 150 years. Why is the university reimagining its general education now? What’s the goal?

Sarah Igo: We are, I would say, part of a kind of movement. I won’t say back because it’s not back. It’s definitely forward. But a kind of move toward a more common understanding of what students need from their college education, and particularly what they need to understand is the value of a liberal arts education, which, you know, has gotten kind of battered in public culture in recent decades, and maybe especially in the last year or so.

Jon: Kirk, I went to a conference recently of higher education people, and they had a panel about this. And they concluded that two of the most unpopular words in the English language right now in America are ‘liberal’ and ‘arts.’ That’s why Vanderbilt a few years ago committed to taking a hard look at what students and graduates really need to succeed today. But Igo says the committee charged with reimagining gen ed quickly ran into a brick wall.

Sarah Igo: We didn’t actually have an idea of what general education was or what it should be. We actually didn’t even have a vocabulary for it. And so, our first effort was to kind of figure out, you know, for students in the 21st century, what is a meaningful liberal arts education? How do we help them, see that value? How do we help our own faculty articulate what that is? And what does it mean? We need to reform about how we’re doing things.

Jon: Igo says she and other university leaders decided students needed some common intellectual experience.

Sarah Igo: It doesn’t need to be a canon. Doesn’t need to be western civ. Doesn’t need to be a kind of older model of a foundation or a core. But students actually would really benefit from faculty designing a program, especially in the first year, that all students take in common, to get a chance to understand the richness and breadth of a liberal arts education. Right? Read something from philosophy, read something from economics, read something from neuroscience, that are circling around the same question perhaps. That’s how our new curriculum is designed. And mentor them in small groups where the idea is to think about big questions, but also to learn how to read and write in ways that will serve them well for the rest of their college career and beyond.

Kirk: Chemist Renã Robinson is one of the Vanderbilt faculty mentors.

Renã Robinson: I teach the science, technology and values core course for undergraduate freshman students. But I also teach upper-level chemistry courses and graduate-level chemistry courses and things like mass spectrometry.

Kirk: Do you teach organic chemistry?

Renã Robinson: Absolutely not.

Kirk: Okay, so what do students get out of this new program? Like, if I’m a chemist or chemistry student, what why do I need general education?

Renã Robinson: I think what general education does is it causes you to question the history behind some of the things that you’re learning. It gives you an opportunity to ask questions about how does the way that I’m being taught and the material that I’m being taught provide value to me or provide value to society? And, I think, for our students to learn how to think critically. General education is a great space to do that because when they get into courses like chemistry and upper-level chemistry courses, we want them to be critical thinkers, especially around data that they’re generating or data that we’re providing them in classes and these hard, sometimes abstract phenomena. And so if they have the skill set to already think critically, then they can do well when they get to these classes.

Kirk: Robinson says reimagining gen ed helps, but what’s really important is a good evaluation mechanism, something to understand what students are learning.

Renã Robinson: So in this core pilot course, there is an assessment of what students know and what they’re thinking about, the topic, generally before they come into the course, and then there are surveys that are given to the students throughout the course and at the end of it. And there are also surveys that are given to faculty who work piloting and teaching these different types of courses throughout, as well as some of the faculty that are helping to coordinate the courses across different sections.

Chloe Whalen: My name is Chloe Whalen, and I am a communication of science and technology major. It’s the new kind of arts and science program at Vanderbilt.

Jon: Whalen is from a small town in Illinois. The daughter of a teacher and a firefighter, she received generous financial aid to attend Vanderbilt, and her parents are helping her pay the rest. She and her parents want a return on that investment — a j-o-b at the end. So Whalen says academic quality in choosing a college was extremely important to her.

Chloe Whalen: Like, at the end of the day, you know, you go to college for the academics. Yes, you know, you want there to be good sports teams, if you’re into that. You hope that the dining food isn’t too bad. But at the end of the day, like, if the college doesn’t have good academics, what are you spending your money on? It’s basically just a summer camp where you go to a few classes.

Kirk: In her first semester on campus, the new gen ed class she enrolled in was called ‘Being Human: Encountering Others.’

Chloe Whalen: When I signed up for it, I was, like, this sounds like I’m just going to be sitting around, like, thinking, just like an old, like, Greek philosopher. And I was kind of, like, I feel, like that’s going to get a little boring. Like, am I really paying to go to college just to sit and talk about, like, the meaning of life? You know, I don’t really know how I really felt about that. I came in thinking it was going to be my least favorite class that semester, and it ended up actually being my favorite.

Kirk: Why was it your favorite?

Chloe Whalen: The level of discussion we had in that class was really good, and I felt like every time we were all very engaged in it. We all had thoughts and opinions to share, and it really did make me think a lot about kind of why I was here. Like, not just on earth, like, at college and, like. what that says about my future and what I want for it. And also, just, like, human nature, what sets us apart? Why are we the species that, you know, wears clothes and has, like, different languages and also, you know, does things like go to college —what makes us do that?

Kirk: That’s a great question.

Kirk: That’s a great question. And it’s one that I had to spend a lot of time thinking about last semester.

Kirk: So why did you go?

Chloe Whalen: I kind of felt like it’d be a missed opportunity to not go to college, just because I’d always done well in school. You know academics always came easy to me. So I was, like, well, I got to go to college, and I guess I just decided, like, once I got past that sense of, like, obligation that I had felt and really thought about what makes me want to do this and not just the feeling that I have to.

Jon: It’s easy to say kids today don’t learn as well or as much as they used to. Sarah Igo, the intellectual historian, says she does think we’re in a moment where a whole lot of things are conspiring to make traditional learning more difficult.

Sarah Igo: Beyond Covid, beyond mental health crises, which are, of course, related, I think I would put first the war for attention on students’ brains. It’s really clear. And students are quite frank about this. You ask them, you know, about the reading for a class. They’ll say that they don’t read, they can’t read uninterrupted, that they can’t sit and read for a chunk of time. And that chunk of time, I think, is getting smaller and smaller. Too many things whistling, buzzing, etc. And there are some steps we can take to deal with that. I mean, one of the things we’re experimenting with, which I’m most excited about, is devoting some of our classes in the first-year class sessions to reading. I mean, this whole period for an hour in 15 minutes, all we’re going to do is read together.

Jon: And that brings us back to Maitland Jones, the organic chemist we heard at the top of this episode, who reportedly was fired for being too tough on his students. Jones says reducing digital distractions and increasing in-person attendance really matter.

Maitland Jones: Absolutely. Here’s an experiment: Give an exam on Friday. It’s graded that night. The students get their grades either late Friday night or Saturday morning. So they all know. The first lecture, Monday or Tuesday, you pass around a yellow pad and ask the students to just write their score. No names, nothing like that. Just the number, right? So you can get the average score of the people in class. And since you know the overall average, you can back out the average score for those who are not in class. And there’s a 20-point difference. So yes, it really matters whether you have your body in that classroom.

Kirk: Jones says it’s increasingly tempting to say, oh, you know, students are just struggling with the effects of Covid and mental health. But he says that’s not right.

Maitland Jones: The decline in student attendance and students’ ability to read and answer the right question was happening well before that. Covid was important because the sort of gentle decline and how things were going fell off a cliff. But it was happening before. And for 10 or 12 years, many of us noticed that not only were student grades going down and student attendance was going down, but their ability to read a question and to answer the right question was going down. There was an epidemic in answering the wrong question.

Kirk: So what was happening 10 years ago? Jones says the decline coincided with the widespread adoption of the iPhone.

Maitland Jones: It’s unbelievably seductive, and like social media in general, it’s so seductive that it seems to have dragged students away from certainly the classroom and, in a way, from the notion that learning requires pretty serious effort.

Kirk: Today, at 86 years old, Jones is retired and living in rural new Jersey in a renovated barn.

Maitland Jones: It’s got a great big room and a very good piano.

Kirk: With his newfound free time, he organizes jazz concerts, and he recently co-produced a six TV set of the complete works of Thelonius Monk.

Maitland Jones: Which, by the way, is absolutely great, thanks to the musicians.

Kirk: Do you miss the classroom and the lab? Would you still like to be teaching?

Maitland Jones: I would. On the other hand, how many years was it? Forty-three and 15? That’s a lot of years.

Kirk: A pretty good run.

Maitland Jones: I wouldn’t say that I didn’t have a good time doing.

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

Jon: … and I’m Jon Marcus. We’d love to hear from you. Send us an email to GBHNewsconnect@wgbh.org, 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.

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

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

The post College Uncovered: What Do You Learn and What Will You Earn? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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

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

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

“College Uncovered” is made possible by Lumina Foundation.

Listen to the whole series

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

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

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

Kirk: Why is it just as bad?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today on the show: “Nickel and Dimed.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jon: Of course, that’s right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lucas Nocker: I’m terrible about parking fees.

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

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

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

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

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

Kirk: It’s going to work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kirk: And how much was that one?

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

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

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

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

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

Kirk: Undisclosed fees like what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kirk: Sounds on the level. Right, Jon?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This episode was produced and written by Kirk Carapezza …

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

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

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

It’s made possible by Lumina Foundation.

Thanks so much for listening.

The post College Uncovered: Nickel and Dimed appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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

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

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

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

“College Uncovered” is made possible by Lumina Foundation.

Listen to the whole series

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

Jon: So, Kirk, how’s the food?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today on the show: “Red Ink.”

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

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

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

Greg O’Connor: No, I was not.

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

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

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

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

Kirk: Why is it disgusting?

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

Jon: Is it one of these new dorms?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kirk: Favorite band?

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

Kirk: All right,that’s a good choice.

Brendan Sheehan: Definitely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jon: So most of this is for dorms.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This episode was produced and written by Kirk …

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

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

Kirk: We had production assistance from Diane Adame.

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

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

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

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

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

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