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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Dual enrollment has exploded. But it’s hard to tell if it’s helping more kids get a college degree appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Some colleges aim financial aid at a declining market: students in the middle class appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But many transfer students are not as lucky.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

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

The post STUDENT VOICE: Colleges and universities must do far more to support transfer students appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Outdated System

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Few Alternatives for Funding

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

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

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

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

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

Yet tribal colleges have fewer alternatives for bolstering their budgets.

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

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

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

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

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

“A Saving Grace”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Tribal college campuses are falling apart. The U.S. hasn’t fulfilled its promise to fund the schools. appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Data is now everywhere in our lives, informing our decisions about which new show to watch, what path to take or whether to grab an umbrella. But it’s practically absent from the way our kids learn.

Our approach to teaching data science and data literacy has hardly evolved since I started my teaching career in 1995. Yet now more than ever, K-12 students need basic modern data science skills.

Nearly 1 in 4 job postings in the United States require data science skills. These aren’t just tech jobs — they span industries from manufacturing to agriculture to transportation. The ability to capture, sort and analyze data is as important for small business owners as it is for computer scientists.

Now is the time to reprioritize curricular emphases to reflect the importance of data science and data literacy. With data talent in high demand globally, other countries are investing billions in data education.

But American K-12 education still underemphasizes data science and data literacy skills — including the ability to understand qualitative and quantitative data, assess claims based on data and make data-driven predictions.

How do we know? Look at the data.

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

According to the most recent NAEP results, between 2019 and 2022, student performance in data analysis, statistics and probability fell by a full 10 points for eighth grade students, representing what some experts consider a full grade level in lack of progress.

Data science education is typically reserved for higher education, but only slightly more than a third of Americans have a college degree. The opportunity to learn basic data skills should not be reserved for a select group of students.

Every student needs a chance to practice these vital skills from kindergarten through high school. That’s why I am excited for the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics to be a part of Data Science 4 Everyone’s national Chart the Course initiative, exploring the integration of data literacy and science across our most important school subjects. It will build upon NCTM’s work to reimagine, revitalize and increase math’s relevance for high schoolers.

As president of NCTM, I’ve had the honor of helping to lead the mathematics education community through a time of profound technological change, which has included developing a position statement on AI.

Additionally, in partnership with the National Science Teaching Association, the Computer Science Teachers Association, the National Council for the Social Studies and the American Statistical Association, we made an unprecedented joint call to build data science as an interdisciplinary subject across K-12 education.

Early in my teaching career, we focused on teaching students how to use a dataset to create a bar graph or scatter plot. Now, students need to know how to formulate the question that will generate the data, how to collect the data and how to interpret the data.

Students are eager to make sense of the world around them, but many don’t see how classroom instruction is related to the problems they will face as adults.

Data — in the form of numbers, graphics and videos — can provide the hook that pulls students into lessons with real-world examples and applications.

While a math teacher might look at a graph and observe that a certain variable decreased, a social studies teacher might say, “Of course there was a decrease, look at what was happening at that moment in history.”

If we want students to think with and use data analysis skills in their everyday lives during and after high school, we need to create relevant data-learning experiences that engage students in using statistics to make sense of the world around them. This will also result in better test scores because students will understand the material and be able to apply what they know.

Related: Do we need a ‘Common Core’ for data science education? 

We are now joining with Data Science 4 Everyone in an even broader effort to create the first-ever national K-12 data learning progression that stretches across school subjects. It will shape how generations of students study data.

Educator voices are vital to this process. We need input from the people who are closest to students and who will be rolling out data science lessons in their classrooms, so we’re asking them to weigh in. We need to engage our educators in order to effect change.

Data Science 4 Everyone’s Chart the Course voting platform is open through October 31, and we are encouraging teachers to vote for the learning outcomes they believe are the most important for K-12 students to learn by the time they graduate from high school.

The selection of the learning outcome options in Chart the Course was informed by 11 focus groups made up of students, educators, higher education leaders, policymakers, researchers, curriculum designers and industry professionals.

The collaborative approach was designed to create a framework that meets the needs of students and reflects the cross-disciplinary potential of data science. We hope to equip students with the skills they need to understand data and think critically and carefully as they interact with AI tools and draw their own conclusions about the world around them.

Engaging with data is a way to make education relevant for all our students and bring our many subjects together in unique ways. It’s time to chart a course that connects classroom learning to the lives of students. That should be our goal for all teachers.

Kevin Dykema is president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), an international mathematics education organization with more than 30,000 members. He has taught eighth grade mathematics for over 25 years in southwest Michigan.

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

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

The post OPINION: Why we need a joint and urgent effort to teach data science and literacy in the U.S. appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Tracking college closures 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.

BROOKLINE, Mass. — It was a humid, gray morning in July, and most of their peers were spending the summer sleeping late and hanging out with friends. But the 20 rising 10th graders in Lisa Rodriguez’s class at Brookline High School were finishing a lesson on exponents and radicals.

As Rodriguez worked with two students on a difficult problem, Noelia Ames was called over by a soft-spoken student sitting nearby. Ames, a rising senior who took Algebra II Honors with Rodriguez as a sophomore, was serving as a peer leader for the summer class.

“Are you stuck on a problem?” Ames asked, leaning over to take a closer look.

The students in Rodriguez’s class were participating in a summer program created by the Calculus Project, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit. Founded at Brookline High near Boston in 2009, the group now works with roughly 1,000 students from 14 nearby districts beginning in the summer after seventh grade to help them complete advanced math classes like calculus before they finish high school.

It focuses on helping students who are historically underrepresented in high-level math classes — namely those who are Black, Hispanic and low-income — succeed in that coursework, which serves as a gateway to selective colleges and well-paying careers. While some states and districts are nixing advanced-math requirements, sometimes in the name of equity, the Calculus Project has a different theory: Students who have traditionally been excluded from high-level math can succeed in those courses if they’re given a chance to preview advanced math content over the summer and take classes with a cohort of their peers.

In recent years the Calculus Project’s work has taken on fresh urgency, as the pandemic hit Black, Hispanic and low-income students particularly hard. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court ruling banning affirmative action left even some college officials concerned that inequities in high school math would make it harder for them to fill their classes with students from diverse backgrounds. The Calculus Project’s national profile has grown — its staff advises the College Board on AP math exams and classes and have advised groups in a few other states — even as the organization has attracted some scrutiny from parents, due to its emphasis on students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

“One out of 10 Black students in the eighth grade math scores were scoring basic or above,” saidKristen Hengtgen, a senior policy analyst at the nonprofit advocacy group EdTrust, referring to last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation’s Report Card. “When you see that, you need to throw certain student groups the life jacket,” she added. “We cannot combat a math crisis if we’re not helping the students who need it the most.”

Related: Widen your perspective. Our free biweekly newsletter consults critical voices on innovation in education.

The racial and socioeconomic gaps in math are stark: Only 28 percent of Black students and 31 percent Hispanic students nationwide took advanced math in high school compared with 46 percent of white students, according to a 2023 report from EdTrust. Just 22 percent of low-income students took advanced math. Experts say that’s because these students are less likely to attend high schools that offer higher-level math or to be recommended by their teachers for honors or AP classes, regardless of mastery.

They are also less likely to report feeling confident in math class or to enroll in calculus even when they are on a path to take the class early in high school, according to a report from EdTrust and nonprofit Just Equations. When it comes to Black and Hispanic students, Hengtgen blames what she calls “the belonging barrier.” “Their friends weren’t in the class,” she said. “They rarely had a teacher of color.”

As a math teacher at Brookline High in the early 2000s, Calculus Project founder Adrian Mims got firsthand experience in what the research was beginning to establish. Black and Hispanic students were largely absent from the high school’s honors and advanced math courses, he said, and the few Black and Hispanic students who did enroll often dropped out early in the year.

As a PhD candidate at Boston College, Mims was writing his dissertation on how to improve African American achievement in geometry honors classes. His findings — suggesting that Black students dropped out of the course because they lacked knowledge of certain foundational math content, spent less time studying and preparing for tests, and lacked confidence in their math ability — became the catalyst for the first iteration of The Calculus Project.

Mims’ idea was to introduce Black students over the summer to math concepts they’d learn in eighth grade algebra in the fall. Students would be able to take the time to really understand those concepts and to build their confidence and skills, learning both from district teachers and peer teachers who could provide individual support.

In the summer of 2009, Mims piloted his idea with a group of rising eighth graders. In addition to learning concepts they’d see in algebra that fall, they were exposed to the stories of famous Black and Latino figures who excelled in STEM, such as Black NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson and Mexican-American astronaut Jose M. Hernandez. When the school year arrived, they participated in after-school tutoring at Brookline High.

The next fall, 2010, the district opened the program to all interested students, regardless of race. Summer participants were placed into cohorts so they could advance through math classes in high school with peers they knew.

Teachers and administrators at Brookline say the project had an immediate — and lasting — impact. “It’s so much more than learning math,” said Alexia Thomas, a guidance counselor and associate dean of students at Brookline High.

In 2012, Brookline High saw more Black students score as advanced on the state Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System Math test than ever before; 88 percent of those students had participated in the Calculus Project. The highest-scoring student in the district was Black – and a program alum. Two years later, when the first cohort of students who participated in both the summer and year-long programs graduated from high school, 75 percent had successfully completed calculus.

Today, eight districts participate in the year-round program and another six send their students to the group’s summer programs, two three-week sessions that take place at Boston University, Emmanuel College and University of Massachusetts-Lowell. As of May 2024, 31 percent of students in the program identified as Black, 39 percent as Hispanic/Latino, 11 percent as Asian and 7 percent as white, according to program data. Mims has helped develop similar models in Florida and Texas.

In 2023, research consultancy group Mathematica, in partnership with the Gates Foundation, published findings from a two-year study on the effectiveness of the Calculus Project and two other math-oriented summer programs. (Disclosure: The Gates Foundation is one of the many funders of The Hechinger Report.) According to the report, students in the Calculus Project outperformed students who hadn’t participated by nearly half a grade point in their fall math classes, on average.

Related: Data science under fire: What math do high schoolers really need?

The project runs counter to a recent push to engage high schoolers in math by making the content more relevant to the real world and substituting classes like data science for algebra II and calculus. Justin Desai, the Calculus Project’s director of school and district support and a former Boston Public Schools math teacher and curriculum designer, said he sees risks in that approach. Students need subjects like calculus, he said, because “it’s the foundation of modern technology.” To replace advanced math classes in favor of less rigorous math courses keeps students from accessing and excelling even in some non-STEM fields like law, he said.

The project finds ways to show students how math skills apply in the professional world.  Every semester students take field trips to Harvard Medical School, Google and to university research centers and engineering companies, where they are introduced to careers and see how the math they are learning is used in society.

In late July, a group of rising eighth graders from Newton Public Schools’ summer program took a field trip to the sprawling campus of global software company MathWorks. In one room, an engineer showed students how a car simulation model is built and used, while a second engineer helped students test a robotic arm. Another group of students learned how to use a programming software to turn an image into music.

As the Calculus Project has grown, there has at times been friction. In July, simmering tension between teachers and students at Concord-Carlisle High School came to a head when some project participants learned they’d been placed in financial literacy or statistics courses instead of calculus.

Some students being placed into lower-level classes has been a pattern since the program started at Concord-Carlisle in 2020, Mims said. He threatened to pull the program from the high school, and the students were reassigned to calculus (and one to statistics).

Mims said “this is a clear example” of how teacher recommendations can lock students out of advanced math classes. School administrators and teachers often point to students and parents as the reason for a lack of diversity in high-level math. “When we destroy that myth and we show that students can achieve at that level,” said Mims, “they can no longer point the finger at the students and the parents anymore, because we’ve created a precedent that these students can thrive.”

Laurie Hunter, the Concord-Carlisle superintendent, wrote in an email that her district is committed to partnering with the Calculus Project and that it “works closely with individual students and families to ensure their success and path align with the outcomes of the project.” She did not respond to specific questions. 

Milton Public Schools, another district that works with the Calculus Project, was the subject of a 2023 federal civil rights complaint from national conservative group Parents Defending Education. The group accused the district of discrimination by partnering with the Calculus Project, which it said segregates students by intentionally grouping students of certain backgrounds together as part of cohorts.

Mims rejects the group’s claims, noting that the Calculus Project is open to students of all backgrounds including white and Asian students. He says he has not heard from the federal government or the group about the complaint since early 2023. Parents Defending Education did not respond to several interview requests. A spokesperson for the federal Department of Education said the Office for Civil Rights does not confirm complaints but pointed to its list of open investigations. At the time of publication, there were no open investigations against Milton Public Schools.

Art Coleman, a founding partner at legal group EducationCounsel LLC, said that he doesn’t expect such challenges to be successful. School districts have a legal obligation to address inequities in student performance, he said, and “there is nothing in federal law that precludes that targeted support, as long as in broad terms, all students, regardless of their racial or ethnic status, have the ability to tap into those resources and that support.”

Related: How one district has diversified its advanced math classes — without the controversy

This summer, the Calculus Project expanded its programming, including by adding a college advising class for rising seniors. It’s part of the group’s mission to help its students succeed not just in high school but in college and beyond, Mims said.

The group plans to help its graduates secure internships while they’re in college and network once they’re out, he said, and will soon begin tracking students to see how they do in college and the workforce. “It’s really about giving them every advantage that rich kids have,” Mims said.

Ames, the Brookline High senior and peer teacher, said she has found the program “totally life-changing,” in part because of the relationships she’s built with other students and teachers.

“You can be in the hardest class or the easiest class and every teacher will be there to support you,” said Ames, who is taking AP Calculus this fall and is considering studying finance after high school. “Whatever questions you have, they’ll answer.”

Quentin Robinson, a college junior who joined the Calculus Project as a rising seventh grader, said it taught him that he enjoyed math and also how to advocate for himself.

“My freshman year, they tried to put me in a lower-level math class because they didn’t think I was capable,” Robinson said. But his summer experience empowered him, and he persuaded the school to place him in Geometry Honors instead. He graduated from high school having completed both calculus and a college-level statistics course.

Now, Robinson is an accounting and data analytics major at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts. The Calculus Project, he said, helped him realize the voices of naysayers can be used as “a fuel” to achieve what you want.

Contact staff writer Javeria Salman at 212-678-3455 or salman@hechingerreport.org.

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

The post Some schools cut paths to calculus in the name of equity. One group takes the opposite approach appeared first on The Hechinger Report.