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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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EWING, N.J. — Bethany Blonder and her friends lined up at the voter information table in the student union before organizers had even finished setting it up in time for lunch.

It’s true that a fire drill had chased them there from their dorm on the campus of The College of New Jersey, or TCNJ. But the women were also quick to rattle off what they see as the existential issues that make them hell-bent on casting their ballots in the general election.

Climate change, for instance.

“All of our lives are at risk — our futures — and the lives of our neighbors, the lives of our friends,” said Blonder, a freshman from Ocean Township, New Jersey. “Every time there’s a hot day outside, I’m, like, is this what it will be like for the rest of my life?”

Americans ages 18 to 24 have historically voted in very low proportions — 15 to 20 percentage points below the rest of the population as recently as the presidential election years of 2008 and 2012, with an even bigger gap in the 2010 midterms, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

But rates of voting by young people have quietly been rising to unprecedented levels, despite their lifetimes of watching government gridlock and attempts in some states to make it harder for them to vote.

More than half of Americans ages 18 to 24 turned out for the 2020 general election, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That proportion was up by more than 8 percentage points from 2016, and has been closing in on the voting rate for adults of all ages. Among college students, the proportion who voted was even higher.

Young people say that they’re propelled by concerns that directly affect them, such as global warming, the economy, reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights, student loan debt and gun safety.

As early as elementary school, “we grew up having to learn about lockdowns” in response to mass shootings, said Andrew LoMonte, one of the students staffing the voter table. “What people are realizing is that the issues the candidates are talking about actually matter to us.”

The political division they’ve witnessed hasn’t discouraged young voters, said LoMonte, a sophomore political science major from Bloomfield, New Jersey, who was wearing a “TCNJ Votes” T-shirt. It’s made them more determined to become involved.

“You’d think the dysfunction would scare people off, but it’s a motivator,” LoMonte said.

Sixty-six percent of college students voted in 2020, up 14 percentage points from 2016, according to the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement at Tufts University’s Institute for Democracy and Higher Education.

Younger students ages 18 to 21 voted at the highest rates of all, portending a continued upward trend, the study found.

“You’re seeing a generation of activists. I mean, very young — 16, 17,” said Jennifer McAndrew, senior director of communications and planning at Tufts’ Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life. “It goes back to them engaging each other and saying, ‘This isn’t a perfect system. But the only way we can change it is by voting.’ ”

This is already showing some results.

Young voters had “a decisive impact” on Senate races in 2022 in battleground states including Wisconsin, Nevada, Georgia and Pennsylvania, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, or CIRCLE, which is also based at Tufts.

Youth voter registrations have particularly soared in states considering referenda relating to abortion restrictions. And college students were widely credited last year with helping elect a liberal candidate to the Wisconsin state Supreme Court, which is due to take up two major abortion cases.

After seeing results like those, “young people have become more aware of their own political power within states and districts,” McAndrew said.

They have also registered and voted at high rates in several swing states. Michigan had the biggest turnout in the country of voters 30 and under in 2022 — 36 percent — according to CIRCLE. Young people in Pennsylvania have turned out at above-average rates in the last three presidential races.

The nonpartisan voter registration group Vote.org reports that it has registered a record  800,000 voters under 35 in time for the November general election. Of the more than 1 million new voters it signed up in all, Vote.org says 34 percent were 18, compared to 8 percent during its 2020 voter registration drive.

The Big Ten Conference runs a voter turnout competition that has increased student voter turnout at member schools. The organization People Power for Florida held its fourth annual “Dorm Storm” for students at eight universities in August and registered 728 new voters during move-in week, the most ever, the group said.

Both presidential campaigns are using social media and targeting students on college campuses in pivotal states. The Democratic National Committee has hired banner-towing airplanes to fly over college football games on behalf of Democrat Kamala Harris, while Republican Donald Trump has a TikTok account and has courted social media influencers.

And Taylor Swift’s recent endorsement of Harris and call to her fans to register and vote helped drive over 24 hours a more than 20-fold increase in visitors to the federal government website Vote.gov, which provides voter registration information. “If you are 18, please register to vote,” Swift later said at the MTV Video Music Awards. “It’s an important election.”

McAndrew gives particular credit for the rising numbers of young voters to the gun-safety organization March for Our Lives, founded by survivors of the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, that killed 17.

“They have led protests, of course,” she said. “But they have also said, ‘Here’s how you call your state rep. Here’s how you call your state senator. Here’s how you register to vote.’ ”

None of these things mean that high youth voter turnout in November is assured. The proportion of college students who voted in the 2022 midterms was down from the record set in 2018. An analysis by CIRCLE shows that, for all of the enthusiasm and organizing, voter registration among Americans under 30 in most states so far is behind where it was around this time in 2020.

Meanwhile, several states have imposed restrictions that affect student voting, limiting polling locations, voting hours, absentee voting, ballot boxes and the use of student IDs to vote. A survey in 2016 found that one in five students who were registered to vote but didn’t cast ballots said it was because they had issues with or didn’t think they could use their IDs. (State student ID laws for voting are listed in The Hechinger Report’s “College Welcome Guide.”)

Related: Beyond the Rankings: The College Welcome Guide

“Even when young people would have been able to vote, they sometimes tell us they didn’t even try because they thought they needed another kind of ID,” said McAndrew, at Tufts.

A new law in Florida imposes strict limits on third-party organizations, including student groups, that try to sign up new voters. The law imposes fines of up to $250,000 if these groups fail to follow a list of rules that include registering with the state’s elections division.

Although a little-known federal rule requires colleges and universities that accept federal money to encourage voting, universities in some states are newly fearful of antagonizing legislatures that have targeted campuses over anything that could be considered political.

“We have seen some places where they’re a bit more cautious and changed their approach a little bit to make sure they’re doing everything by the book,” said Clarissa Unger, co-founder and executive director of the Students Learn Students Vote Coalition, which includes about 350 nonpartisan voting advocacy groups. “There are certain states where it’s become much harder, and those are states a lot of our organizations are focused on even more.”

Not all groups of students vote in equally high numbers. Seventy-five percent of students at private, nonprofit colleges voted in 2020, for instance, compared to 57 percent at community colleges. Students majoring in education, social sciences, history and agricultural and natural resources turned out at the highest rates; those in engineering and technical fields, at the lowest.

“Engineering is really difficult and there’s a lot of heavy coursework,” said Liora Petter-Lipstein, a senior public policy major at the University of Maryland, who set out to learn why engineering students there voted at lower levels than their classmates. “They don’t really have time for other things and voting doesn’t become a priority.”

Many young Americans also still don’t see the point, Petter-Lipstein said.

“A lot of people said they didn’t think their vote matters. They don’t feel informed enough to vote, they missed the ballot request deadline or they say, ‘Oh, I’m just not a political person.’ I was talking to a friend of mine who happens to be an engineer who didn’t even realize that they could vote in Maryland.”

To them, she tries to connect the election with issues of interest.

“A lot of what we’ve been focusing on has been, ‘Hey, did you know that these things are on the ballot?’ ” That includes, in Maryland, a referendum to add the right to an abortion to the state constitution’s declaration of rights.

Related: ‘We’re from the university and we’re here to help’

At TCNJ, more than 83 percent of students voted in 2020, putting the college in the top 20 among higher education institutions nationwide, according to the nonprofit Civic Nation, which advocates for people to vote.

First-year students here are required to take a community service course, there’s a voter registration contest among residence halls, and students get text reminders about voting deadlines. TCNJ, just outside the capital of Trenton, is also part of a voting competition with other New Jersey campuses, called the Ballot Bowl.

Even before they arrive, however, students are politically active, said Brittany Aydelotte, director of the school’s Community Engaged Learning Institute.

“They’re really coming in with much more knowledge about social justice issues,” Aydelotte said. “Social media has a huge impact. They’ve been able to figure out how [politics] relates to them personally. Our goal is that they leave here thinking, ‘Hmmm, what else can I do?’ ”

The polarized politics of the times makes students even more eager to create change, said Jared Williams, the president of TCNJ’s student government.

“It’s not enough to throw our hands in the air and give up,” said Williams, a senior political science major from Union, New Jersey. “It’s very easy to get disillusioned. But there’s no way to end that cycle if you don’t vote.”

Besides, added his vice president for governmental affairs, Aria Chalileh, who is also a senior majoring in political science: Students “are realizing that these issues are being talked about. They aren’t issues that might affect them 50 years down the line. They affect them right now.”

That’s what brought freshman Roman Carlise to the line at the voter registration table, he said.

The political skirmishing of this election season “gets on my nerves,” said Carlise. “That bothers me — seeing people bicker when they’re supposed to fix the problems.”

But he planned to vote anyway, he said.

“I’m just not the type to say there’s nothing I can do.”

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

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

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BURLINGTON, Vt. — In his first year in graduate school at the University of Vermont, John Ball lived in a dark studio apartment in the basement of a building three miles from the campus.

With utilities, it cost him $1,500 a month — more than the national median rent.

“I just needed a place, and I was, like, OK, I’ll live anywhere, basically,” said Ball, who is working toward a doctorate in cellular, molecular and biomedical sciences. “Trying to find an apartment was a nightmare.”

Ball spoke as he was moving for the fall semester of his second year into a brand-new apartment in the first-ever housing to be built by the university for graduate students.

It’s one of a small but growing number of efforts by higher education institutions to address what has become, along with food, the fastest-growing cost of college: a place to live.

“I don’t think [students and their families] think it’s going to be as expensive as it is,” Ball’s father, Steve, said as he helped his son lug furniture and boxes into his new home, where monthly rents begin at $1,059 for a room in a three-bedroom apartment with two bathrooms. Housing prices at and near colleges, he said, have gotten “absolutely ridiculous. It’s insane.”

Like UVM, other institutions are building housing for graduate students who have previously been largely left to fend for themselves. Some, including the universities of California at Berkeley and Santa Cruz, are adding large numbers of undergraduate dorms. A few, like the University of Texas at Austin, are offering scholarships for housing.

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

“When you think of an average family thinking of where to send their son or daughter, that rent-plus-food piece is getting to be a bigger chunk,” said Jay Hartzell, president of UT Austin.

Though students and their families often focus on tuition, the cost of housing is going up much faster. Annual increases in college and university tuition have been shrinking, new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond finds. Tuition actually fell, when adjusted for inflation, between 2020 and 2023, the most recent year for which the figure is available, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

But the cost of room and board rose by 14 percent more than inflation between 2010 and 2020, the College Board reports. At public universities, in-state students now pay more for room and board than for tuition.

Undergraduates living off campus face an average of $11,464 a year in food and housing costs, which the National Center for Education Statistics groups together. Room and board for undergraduates who live in dorms on campus is an even higher $12,917.

“Tuition hasn’t been growing, but housing costs are growing,” said Jason Cohn, research associate at the Center on Education Data and Policy at the Urban Institute. “The college affordability conversation should really be moving to living expenses.”

The cost of housing isn’t just a problem for college students. Rents in general are up by 33 percent since the start of the pandemic, the real estate company Zillow says. But many cities with a preponderance of college students have higher-than-average monthly rents, including New York ($3,650 a month), Boston ($3,295) and Santa Cruz, California ($3,400).

Rents for student housing at 175 universities tracked by the real estate data analytics firm RealPage rose by 5 percent in the year ending in April .

“Many university towns and cities are experiencing the same housing issues as the rest of the country: escalating rent prices and higher costs,” said Mary DeNiro, executive director of the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International, or ACUHO-I.

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

In Burlington, monthly rent is $2,200 a month, according to Zillow — higher than the median, thanks in large part to an influx of highly paid remote workers who moved here during the pandemic and pushed housing prices up. Vermont is now tied for fourth place with Kentucky among states that have the lowest proportion of available rental units, behind only Massachusetts, Maine and New Jersey, according to the Census Bureau.

“There were no vacancies” in Burlington, said Alexis Roberson, a third-year doctoral student from Los Angeles who was also moving into UVM’s new graduate residence; even though financial aid completely covers her tuition, she almost deferred her admission for a year because of the cost of housing. “It was kind of a shock.”

Balloons in UVM green and gold welcomed new tenants to the 62-unit building, called Catamount Run, which the university developed in partnership with a private company. Managers handed out keys, salty snacks and Gatorade to arriving students as workers with noisy power tools on high ladders made finishing touches. The building is already fully rented.

“There was a fair demand from graduate students” for university-supplied housing, said Richard Cate, vice president for finance and administration at UVM, which hopes to nearly double its graduate enrollment.

Undergraduates are also struggling to pay for living expenses. Half of what it costs to attend a community college now goes to room and board, according to the College Board. So does 44 percent of the total amount that in-state students spend to go to public universities and nearly a quarter of what students at private, nonprofit colleges pay.

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

Because of these costs, even in places where federal, state and institutional grants cover much of a student’s tuition, or tuition is free, “that doesn’t mean that college is necessarily affordable,” said Cohn, of the Urban Institute.

More than 40 percent of students who get enough grant aid that they pay zero in tuition and fees have to take out student loans to cover housing and other costs, the Urban Institute found.

“There’s just a portfolio of challenges that are facing these students,” said Justin Ortagus, director of the Institute of Higher Education at the University of Florida and co-author of another study that found high living expenses are among the reasons students drop out. “And additional financial burdens, led by housing costs and paying rent, are at the top of that list.”

A fixation on tuition, however, means that housing costs can come as a surprise, Ortagus said. “It doesn’t always go into the mental calculus of these students and their families.”

One result is that students who can’t afford to live on or near a particular campus may enroll but then drop out, forgo college altogether or choose somewhere less desirable but cheaper, he said.

“It can blindside a lot of people. Students will end up in college and then realize that they’re rent burdened,” said Henry Taylor-Goalby, a senior at the University of California San Diego and student housing officer of the University of California Student Association.

California has among the most expensive housing in the country. A study for the state assembly found that nearly 20 percent of students at community colleges, 10 percent at California State University campuses and 5 percent at the University of California schools had experienced homelessness.

“When we’re talking about things that matter to us, it’s, ‘Oh my god, I have to start thinking about where I’m going to live next year,’ ” Taylor-Goalby said.

“Housing is a human necessity, and yet it’s the thing people try to compromise on just to get an education.”

Berkeley, where the surrounding median monthly rent is $2,685, is in the midst of doubling its number of dorm rooms, with the goal of guaranteeing two years of on-campus housing for undergraduate students, and the University of California, Santa Cruz (median monthly rent off campus: $3,400) plans to increase its bed count by 40 percent by 2030. Both initiatives have been at least partly delayed by lawsuits from neighbors, but Berkeley was cleared by the state Supreme Court in June to move ahead, and a California state law passed last year is aimed at making it harder to block new student housing.

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

Yet neighborhood opposition, zoning restrictions and the escalating price of labor and materials continue to be obstacles to new dorms. While UVM’s partnership with a private developer made the public university’s graduate housing possible, for instance, it suspended plans to add housing for 545 more undergraduates on campus because of the cost.

Some universities are using other strategies. In addition to renovating a building with 778 beds for undergraduates and developing a 784-bed residence complex for graduate students, which opens this fall — its first new graduate housing in 40 years, Hartzell, the president, said — UT Austin has put aside about $7 million this year for on-campus housing scholarships of up to $2,300 per year to 3,500 students.¹

“I expect you’re going to see more of this on urban campuses like ours, especially where those communities are booming like Austin is,” said Hartzell.

Median monthly rent in Austin is $2,250.

Vanderbilt University in Nashville opened a new housing complex last year for graduate and professional students, but this year also increased stipends for its nearly 1,900 doctoral students, citing the city’s high cost of living; median monthly rent there is $2,299.

In Seattle (median monthly rent: $2,184), Cornish College of the Arts has started soliciting alumni contributions toward a fund to help its undergraduates pay for on-campus housing. The college previously used money from its financial aid budget to offer housing scholarships, but the demand has grown so much that more is needed, said Sharron Starling, its director of admissions. Thirty percent of students qualify for the assistance, Starling said.

Cornish is in a neighborhood where well-paid tech workers have pushed up the cost of housing, and “students can’t come if they don’t have a place to live,” she said. “That’s it, first and foremost.”

Still, the price of on-campus housing — which is firmly under universities’ and colleges’ control — is rising even faster than the cost of off-campus housing.

DeNiro, of the housing officers’ association, said this is partly because of demand for more services, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic.

“In some cases that means more staff to help with issues around mental health, anxiety, providing more ways to develop community,” she said. “For many students, they just demand more out of their college housing experience, and their parents demand more.”

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

On-campus housing has other advantages, DeNiro noted, since students only have to pay for it during the academic year; that saves money when compared to the 12-month leases often required for off-campus apartments. Utilities and trash removal are included in the price, living close to classes avoids commuting costs and students who live on campus are slightly less likely to drop out, an ACUHO-I survey found.

“Proximity matters,” said Hartzell, at UT Austin. “If we chase students out to the periphery of the city [to find affordable housing], they won’t have the same experience. Some students might decide they need to build in a part-time job.” Spending time getting to and from the campus “just makes it that much harder to devote their time to their studies.”

At Vanderbilt, a study that led to more graduate housing being built found that 30 percent of graduate students lived five miles or more away from the campus.

But as colleges’ revenue from tuition thins, according to the credit-rating company Fitch, it’s revenue from housing, dining and other auxiliary services is also increasingly important to them; University of Tennessee, Knoxville head of the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies Robert Kelchen estimates that most small public colleges and universities depend on these sources for between 10 and 25 percent of what they take in.

In the competition for a dwindling supply of students, universities and colleges are also adding high-end amenities to campus dorms, which residents complain increase the cost.

The new graduate housing units at Vanderbilt, for instance, come with fully equipped granite-counter kitchens, “hardwood-inspired” floors, washers, dryers, a 24-hour fitness center, a coffee shop, a grocery store and an outdoor barbecue area; monthly rents range from $1,405 for a studio to $2,906 for two bedrooms with two bathrooms. A Vanderbilt spokeswoman declined to provide anyone from the university to talk about its housing.

Those kinds of expensive extras are showing up in many places, said Taylor-Goalby, the California student association housing delegate.

“There’s been a ballooning of amenities,” he said. “We get apartment-style rooms. We get full kitchens. We need student representation for people to be saying we don’t need all those things.”

Meanwhile, demand for campus housing typically exceeds supply. Dorms on public university campuses can accommodate only a third of full-time undergraduates, the Urban Institute says, and at private, nonprofit colleges, a little more than half. And first-year students often don’t have a choice; they’re required to live in the dorms. These things mean that colleges will likely fill on-campus rooms no matter what they charge.

The effect of housing costs on people’s willingness to pay for college may lead more institutions to try to moderate the price of it, however, said Ortagus, the higher education researcher.

“There’s concerns about enrollment, and I do think that is driving colleges paying attention to these dynamics,” he said.

There’s one more important pressure at play: Students are driving up housing costs for everybody else, and communities are urging universities to help them fix the problem.

In high-priced Boston, nearly 38,000 students live off campus, the city estimates, “placing significant pressure on the rental market” in the neighborhoods where they’re concentrated. Officials are pushing universities and colleges to build more on-campus dorms.

“If we pull our students out of the market and put them in our housing, there’s now more affordable housing in the rest of the city,” said Hartzell, in Austin. “By adding supply we’re actually helping the entire city.”

Students said they’d just be grateful for reasonably affordable places to live.

Housing “was a big part of my budget-making process,” said Sophia Mokhtarian, a first-year UVM medical student from San Diego, who was wheeling her luggage into Catamount Run. “This new housing definitely was a pro.”

This story about the college housing costs 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.

1. An earlier version of this story reflected the dollar amount of housing scholarships at UT last year. The figures shown here are for the current academic year. ︎

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The proposals in the 2025 Presidential Transition Project — known as Project 2025 and designed for Donald Trump — would reshape the American education system, early education through college, from start to finish. 

The conservative Heritage Foundation is the primary force behind the sprawling blueprint, which is separate from the much less detailed Republican National Committee 2024 platform, though they share some common themes.

Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage and its lobbying arm, Heritage Action, said in an interview with USA TODAY that Project 2025 should be seen “like a menu from the Cheesecake Factory.” No one president could take on all these changes, he said. “It’s a manual for conservative policy thought.”

The fast-changing political landscape makes it difficult to say which of these proposals might be taken up by Trump if he wins reelection. He has claimed to know nothing about it, though many of his allies were involved in drafting it. The exit of President Joe Biden from the presidential race may have an impact on Project 2025 that is still unknown. Finally, many of the broadest proposals in the document, such as changes to Title I and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, would require congressional action, not just an order from the White House.

However, it remains a useful document for outlining the priorities of those who would likely play a part in a new Trump administration. The Hechinger Report created this reference guide that digs into the Project 2025 wishlist for education.

Early childhood

Child care for military families

Project 2025 calls for expanding child care for military families, who have access to programs that are often upheld as premier examples of high-quality care in America. – Jackie Mader

Head Start and child care 

Project 2025 calls for eliminating the Office of Head Start, which would lead to the closure of Head Start child care programs that serve about 833,000 low-income children each year. Most Head Start children are served in center-based programs, which have an outsized role in rural areas and prioritize enrolling a certain percentage of young children with disabilities who often struggle to find child care elsewhere. Head Start also provides a critical funding and resource stream to other private child care programs that meet Head Start standards, including home-based programs. – J. M.

Home-based child care

A conservative administration should also prioritize funding for home-based child care rather than “universal day care” in programs outside the home, Project 2025 says. That funding would include money for parents to stay home with a child or to pay for “familial, in-home” care, proposals that could be appealing to some early childhood advocates who have long called for more resources for informal care and stay-at-home parents. – J. M.

On-site child care

If out-of-home child care is necessary, Congress should offer incentives for on-site child care, Project 2025 says, because it “puts the least stress on the parent-child bond.” Early childhood advocates have been wary of such proposals because they tie child care access to a specific job. It also calls on Congress to clarify within the Fair Labor Standards Act that an employer’s expenses for providing such care are not part of the employee’s pay.– J. M.

K-12 education

Data collection  

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” should release student performance data based on “family structure” — in addition to existing categories such as race and socioeconomic status — Project 2025 argues. Family structure, the document says, is “one of the most important — if not the most important — factor influencing student educational achievement and attainment.” The document goes on to endorse “natural family structure” of a heterosexual, two-parent household, “because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.” — Sarah Butrymowicz 

LGBTQ students 

Project 2025 advocates a rollback of regulations that protect people from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. It calls for agencies to “focus their enforcement of sex discrimination laws on the biological binary meaning of ‘sex.’” 

The plan also calls on Congress and state lawmakers to require schools to refer to students by the names on their birth certificates and the pronouns associated with their biological sex, unless they have written permission from parents to refer to them otherwise.

The plan also equates transgender issues with child abuse and pornography, and proposes that school libraries with books deemed offensive be punished. — Ariel Gilreath

Privatization 

In place of a federal Education Department, the blueprint calls for widespread public education funding that goes directly to families, as part of its overarching goal of “advancing education freedom.”

The document specifically highlights the education savings account program in Arizona, the first state to open school vouchers up to all families. Programs like Arizona’s have few, if any, restrictions on who can access the funding. Project 2025 also calls for education savings accounts for schools under federal jurisdiction, such as those run by the Department of Defense or the Bureau of Indian Education. 

In addition, Project 2025 calls on Congress to look into creating a federal scholarship tax credit to “incentivize donors to contribute” to nonprofit groups that grant scholarships for private school tuition or education materials. — Ariel Gilreath and Neal Morton

School meals 

The federal school meals program should be scaled back to ensure that only children from low-income families are receiving the benefit, the document says. Policy changes under the Obama administration have made it easier for entire schools or districts to provide free meals to students without families needing to submit individual eligibility paperwork. — Christina A. Samuels

Special education 

Project 2025 says that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which provides $14.2 billion in federal money for the education of school-aged children with disabilities, should be mostly converted to “no-strings” block grants to individual states. Lawmakers should also consider making a portion of the federal money payable directly to parents of children with disabilities, it says, so they can use it for tutoring, therapies or other educational materials. This would be similar to education savings accounts in place in Arizona and Florida. 

The blueprint also calls for rescinding a policy called “Equity in IDEA.” Under that policy, districts are required to evaluate if schools are disproportionately enrolling Black, Native American and other ethnic minority students in special education. Districts must also track how these students are disciplined, and if they are more likely than other students in special education to be placed in classrooms separate from their general education peers. Current rules, which Project 2025 would eliminate, require that districts that have significant disparities in this area must use 15 percent of their federal funding to address those problems. — C.A.S.

Teaching about race 

Project 2025 elevates concerns among members of the political right that educating students about race and racism risks promoting bias against white people. The document discusses the legal concept of critical race theory, and argues that when it is used in teacher training and school activities such as “mandatory affinity groups,” it disrupts “the values that hold communities together such as equality under the law and colorblindness.” 

The document calls for legislation requiring schools to adopt proposals “that say no individual should receive punishment or benefits based on the color of their skin,” among other recommendations. It also calls for a federal Parents’ Bill of Rights that would give families a “fair hearing in court” if they believed the federal government had enforced policies undermining their right to raise their children. — Caroline Preston

Title I

This program, funded at a little over $18 billion for fiscal 2024, is the largest federal program for K-12 schools and is designed to help children from low-income families. The conservative blueprint would encourage lawmakers to make the program a block grant to states, with few restrictions on how it can be used — and, over 10 years, to phase it out entirely. Additionally, it says, lawmakers should allow parents in Title I schools to use part of that funding for educational savings accounts that could be spent on private tutoring or other services. — C.A.S.

Higher education

Affirmative action and diversity, equity and inclusion 

The document calls for prosecuting “all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers” that maintain affirmative action or DEI policies. That position matches the views expressed by Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, about the use of race in college admissions and beyond. — Liz Willen 

Data collection 

In higher education, the proposal argues that college graduation and earnings data need a “risk adjustment” that factors in the types of students served by a particular institution. While selective colleges tend to post the highest graduation rates and student earnings, they also tend to enroll the least-“risky” students. A risk adjustment methodology could benefit community colleges, which often have low graduation rates but enroll many nontraditional students who face obstacles to earning a degree. It would also likely benefit for-profit colleges, which similarly tend to accept most applicants. Historically, for-profit schools have received scrutiny under Democratic administrations for poor outcomes and for allegedly misleading students about the value of the education they provide. Republican administrations typically have supported less regulation of for-profit institutions. — S.B. 

Parent PLUS loans and Pell grants 

The blueprint calls for the elimination of the Parent PLUS loan program, arguing that it is redundant “because there are many privately provided alternatives available.” Originally created for relatively affluent families, the PLUS loan program has become a crucial way for lower- and middle-income families to pay for college. In recent years, it has sparked criticism due to rising default rates and fewer protections than are afforded to other student loan borrowers.  

At present, interest rates for private loans are significantly lower than Parent PLUS rates, but they come with fewer protections, and it is more difficult to get approved for a private-bank loan. Project 2025 would also get rid of PLUS loans for graduate students.

If the federal PLUS programs were eliminated, it could stem one portion of the rising tide of families’ education debt, but it would also make the path to paying for college more difficult for some families. 

Project 2025 does not call for a change to the Pell grant program, which provides federal funding for students from low-income families to attend college. Some advocates have called for doubling the annual maximum allotment, which is $7,395 for the 2024-25 school year, far below the cost to attend many colleges. — Meredith Kolodner and Olivia Sanchez

Student loan forgiveness 

Project 2025 would end the prospect of student loan forgiveness, which has already been largely blocked by federal courts; the Biden administration, in a sort of game of Whac-a-Mole, has proposed still more forgiveness programs that are being fought by Republican state attorneys general and others. Project 2025 would also dramatically restrict what’s known as “borrower defense to repayment,” which forgives loans borrowed to pay for colleges that closed or have been found to use illegal or deceptive marketing. Largely restricting the Education Department to collecting statistics, Project 2025 would shift responsibility for student loans to the Treasury Department. — Jon Marcus

This story about Project 2025 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. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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BURLINGTON, Vt. — Hopeful young entrepreneurs in business schools routinely pitch ideas for startup companies as part of their classroom assignments. But the ones who were doing it at the University of Vermont were still in high school.

It was the inaugural Vermont Pitch Challenge, to which nearly 150 teams from 27 states and seven countries had submitted their entrepreneurial brainstorms. The final five had come to the campus to battle it out for the grand prize: a full-tuition scholarship to UVM.

Their ideas included a website to help previously incarcerated applicants get jobs, a nonprofit to provide mental health support to competitive snowboarders, a medical device to prevent the recurrence of a herniated disk, a company to rent equipment to farmers in St. Croix and an invention to sustainably recharge laptops, phones and tablets.

This competition wasn’t solely about helping the planet or improving medicine, health, employment opportunities or agriculture, however.

It was part of a long-term strategy to increase the number of men at a university where women now outnumber them by nearly two to one.

Painstaking research had suggested that entrepreneurship programs could appeal to high school boys considering going to college. The findings appeared to be right: More boys than girls had entered the pitch contest. And the university hoped that some would eventually enroll.

The approach is among a fast-growing number of efforts to increase the number of men in college, which has been declining steadily.

“We thought that this idea would attract men,” said Jay Jacobs, UVM’s vice provost for enrollment management, who declared himself pleased with the results. “We thought that this idea would attract racial and ethnically diverse students. We thought that this idea would attract what I’ll call geographically diverse students, students not just from Vermont or New England.”

The university needs all of those kinds of recruits. Vermont has the nation’s third-oldest population, by median age, making it harder to find students generally. That’s even before a dramatic decline in the number of 18-year-olds about to hit the rest of the rest of the country starting next year.

“Here, we’ve already felt the impacts of the quote, unquote ‘demographic cliff,’ ” said Jacobs. “We want to make sure that we are in front of any eligible student who is able to pursue their education at the University of Vermont, or in the state of Vermont.”

That particularly includes men. The proportion of applicants to the university who are male has declined from 44 percent in 2010 to 33 percent today, an analysis of federal data shows.

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“I definitely do notice that,” said Melinda Wetzel, a junior who was having coffee with a friend in the student center. “In my big lecture halls, I’d say there are more women. And I do have one small class where there is only one guy.”

It isn’t just this university that’s searching for new ways to recruit men.

The number of men enrolled in college nationwide has dropped by more than 157,000, or almost 6 percent, in just the last five years, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. The proportion of college students who are men is now a record-low 41 percent, the U.S. Department of Education says. That’s a complete reversal of the situation 50 years ago, when men outnumbered women in college by about the same extent.

Men are also 7 percentage points more likely than women to drop out, the Clearinghouse reports.

“At conferences, when we’re in rooms together, we all know that this male enrollment gap is something that we’re going to have to deal with,” said Jacobs, whose office window overlooks the university’s grand historic main quad.

The ways universities are trying to address this vary widely.

The University of Montana — whose enrollment overall has fallen from nearly 16,000 to about 10,000 in the last 10 years, and 58 percent of whose undergraduates are women — found in focus groups that many of the men it was trying to recruit were interested in the outdoors. So this spring it sent targeted emails to prospective students highlighting its hunting class, forestry program and recreational opportunities.

“Have you ever eaten fresh meat that you harvested yourself?” one of the emails asks. “Apply to UM and develop a closer bond to the landscape than ever before.” Another shows a brawny, bearded man cutting wood. “Embrace the wilderness, embrace the axe,” it says. “There are few other connections with the natural world better than swinging a sharp axe with the smell of pine in your nose.”

Related: Culture wars on campus start to affect students’ choices for college

Admitted applicants considering whether or not to enroll are also sent bingo-style checkoff cards with images of hiking, ski and cowboy boots. Other promotional materials include images of country-and-western shows on campus.

Housing deposits from men — which is how the university measures who will be enrolling in the fall, as it doesn’t require enrollment deposits — are up since the campaign began, said Kelly Nolin, director of undergraduate admissions.

“Ultimately all students want to know, ‘Am I going to fit in? Do I belong?’ ” said Nolin.

Among prospective applicants who are increasingly asking those questions, she said, are men from religious conservative families, at a time when universities are accused of being bastions of left-wing cancel culture. “We want them to know they won’t be criticized for their beliefs.”

Further west, the University of Southern California Race and Equity Center has gotten money from the ECMC Foundation to help community colleges enroll and retain more Black and Hispanic men and other men of color. (ECMC is also among the many funders of The Hechinger Report.)

“If, in fact, colleges and universities want to recruit and enroll and ultimately retain and graduate more men, they have to have a strategy,” said Shaun Harper, founder and executive director of the center. “It has to be based on input and insights from college men themselves.”

Instead of trying to figure out why so many men forgo college or give up on it after starting, he said, institutions should ask, “Wait a minute, what about the ones who are here and are successful?” Harper said. “What were the factors that enabled their enrollment and their ultimate degree attainment? There’s a lot that we can learn from them that we could scale and adapt to everyone else.”

He and others said they were skeptical of some efforts to enroll more men, such as doubling down on sports by adding more men’s teams in the hope that it will lure more male students, as some colleges are doing.

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

“They’re not all on sports teams. So that shouldn’t be the only lever that we pull,” said Harper. And even if highlighting hunting might be effective in Montana, “it feels so presumptuous about what really appeals to men. I’m just not sure that institutions understand the full range of young men’s interests, and so they tend to default to things like forestry and outdoor adventures. I’m not sure that would work in California or Maryland.”

Whatever does work, universities are under growing pressure to figure it out. Overall enrollment has declined by 16 percent in the 10 years through 2022, the most recent period for which the figures are available from the U.S. Department of Education. Another 11 to 15 percent decline is projected to begin next year.

And there are signs that the problem of attracting men is only likely to get worse.

Of high school boys in Vermont whose parents don’t have four-year degrees, for instance, only 45 percent aspire to go to college themselves, down from 58 percent in 2018, and much lower than the 68 percent of girls who do, a survey found. Even among high school students with at least one parent who has a bachelor’s degree, 87 percent of girls say they want to go to college, compared to 78 percent of boys.

The problem begins early. Girls do better in high school than boys, and are more likely to graduate. In the 37 states that report high school graduation rates by gender, 88 percent of girls finished high school on time, compared to 82 percent of boys, a 2018 study by the Brookings Institution found. Boys are more likely to think they don’t need a degree for the jobs they want, the Pew Research Center found, or go into the trades. Even if they do enroll in colleges, work opportunities lure them away. Men who dropped out of community college are more likely than women to say it was because of other work opportunities, according to a survey by the think tank New America.

That went through John Truslow’s mind when he was deciding whether or not to go to college.

“There was a point where I wasn’t thinking about college” and considered going into the trades or the military, said Truslow, who ultimately decided to major in business at UVM.

Among his male high school classmates who didn’t go to college, said Truslow, who was playing pool in the student center, some couldn’t afford it. “But most of the ones that didn’t directly go to college, it was mostly academic. They just weren’t feeling school and they wanted to do something else.”

A third of men compared to a quarter of women said they didn’t go to or finish college because they just didn’t want to, Pew found.

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

Richard Reeves, who studies this problem, said it may be more a result of having so successfully encouraged women to get degrees than having discouraged men.

“I think actually what’s probably happened is the opposite — that we’ve sent a really strong and positive message to girls and women. But we haven’t had similar messages for boys and men,” said Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men.

“We’ve now got to do a little bit of self-correction here and say, look, of course we want girls and women to continue to rise in the education system, but we don’t want to leave the boys and men behind.”

Reeves said that, just as male-dominated programs in engineering and business have made extra efforts to recruit women, female-dominated fields such as healthcare and education should now reach out to men.

“That’s another thing that higher education institutions can do, is look at their courses and see where are the gender splits the greatest,” he said. “Rather than thinking the football team is the answer, maybe more men in your nursing school is the answer.”

But the football team could be one of many answers. Among the more subtle efforts to attract men at UVM, the university encourages its students, faculty and staff to wear its colors, green and gold, on Fridays — the days when most prospective applicants are touring the campus. “School spiritedness” is another attribute that research showed appeals particularly to men.

“Coincidentally, Fridays are some of our highest visit volume days, yes,” said Jacobs, smiling.

 UVM campus counselors say men who do enroll are less likely to join extracurricular clubs or seek help when they need it. Some men have “this lack of connection,” said Evan Cuttitta, the university’s coordinator of men and masculinities programs. “They have less experience in managing stress and advocating for themselves” and often aren’t as good at “that practice of asking for help.”

So the university has also started a program for Black and Hispanic male students that provides them with peer and professional mentors, summer internships, networking events and priority registration.

All these steps to increase male enrollment appear to be having some effect.

Identical twins Pierson and Parker Jones of Lutz, Florida, found themselves in Vermont for the entrepreneurship competition. It put the University of Vermont on their radar, they said.

“We haven’t looked at the University of Vermont,” Pierson Parker said. “But after this pitch, we’re definitely going to look into it. Because it’s definitely more interesting now.”

This story about recruiting men to college was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Additional reporting by Liam Elder-Connors. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

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Cuando Angel Amankwaah viajó desde Denver a la Universidad Central de Carolina del Norte este verano para recibir orientación para nuevos estudiantes, supo que había tomado la decisión correcta.

Se divirtió aprendiendo los cantos que corean los aficionados en los partidos de fútbol. Pero también vio que “hay estudiantes que se parecen a mí y profesores que se parecen a mí” en la universidad históricamente negra, dijo Amankwaah, de 18 años, quien es negra. “Sabía que estaba en un espacio seguro”.

De repente, esto se ha convertido en una consideración importante para los estudiantes de todos los orígenes y creencias que van a la universidad.

Durante mucho tiempo, los estudiantes han elegido universidades en función de su reputación académica y vida social. Pero con los campus en la mira de las guerras culturales, ahora muchos estudiantes también están haciendo un balance de los ataques a la diversidad, el contenido de los cursos y los discursos, así como de los oradores en ambos extremos del espectro político. Están monitoreando los crímenes de odio, la legislación anti-LGBTQ, las leyes estatales de aborto y si estudiantes como ellos (negros, de zonas rurales, veteranos militares, LGBTQ o de otros orígenes) están representados y apoyados en el campus.

“No hay duda de que lo que está sucediendo a nivel estatal está afectando directamente a estos estudiantes”, dijo Alyse Levine, fundadora y directora ejecutiva de Premium Prep, una firma consultora de admisiones a universidades privadas en Chapel Hill, Carolina del Norte. Cuando ven las universidades de algunos estados ahora, dice, “hay estudiantes que se preguntan: ‘¿Realmente me quieren ahí?’”.

Para algunos estudiantes en ambos lados de la división política, la respuesta es no. En el caótico nuevo mundo de las universidades e institutos universitarios estadounidenses, muchos dicen que no se sienten bienvenidos en ciertas escuelas, mientras que otros están dispuestos a cancelar oradores y denunciar a profesores con cuyas opiniones no están de acuerdo.

Es demasiado pronto para saber en qué medida esta tendencia afectará dónde y si los futuros estudiantes terminarán yendo a la universidad, ya que los datos de inscripción disponibles públicamente se retrasan en tiempo real. Pero hay indicios de que está teniendo un impacto significativo.

Uno de cada cuatro futuros estudiantes ya ha descartado considerar una facultad o universidad debido al clima político en su estado, según una encuesta realizada por la consultora de educación superior Art & Science Group.

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Entre los estudiantes que se describen a sí mismos como liberales, la razón más común para descartar institutos universitarios y universidades, según esa encuesta, es porque es en un estado en particular “demasiado republicano” o tiene lo que consideran regulaciones laxas sobre armas, legislación anti-LGBTQ, leyes restrictivas sobre el aborto y falta de preocupación por el racismo. Los estudiantes que se describen a sí mismos como conservadores rechazan estados que creen que son “demasiado demócratas” y que tienen leyes liberales sobre el aborto y los derechos homosexuales.

Con tanta atención centrada en estos temas, The Hechinger Report ha creado una Campus Welcome Guide (Guía de Bienvenida al Campus)—la primera herramienta de su tipo— que muestra las leyes estatales y las políticas institucionales que afectan a los estudiantes universitarios. Desde prohibiciones de iniciativas de diversidad, equidad e inclusión y “teoría crítica de la raza”, hasta si se aceptan los carnets de estudiantes como prueba de residencia a efectos de votación.

También enumera —para cada institución de cuatro años en el país— aspectos como la diversidad racial y de género entre estudiantes y profesores, el número de estudiantes veteranos matriculados, la incidencia de crímenes de odio motivados por la raza en el campus, clasificaciones de la libertad de expresión y si la universidad o instituto universitario atiende a muchos estudiantes de zonas rurales.

El sesenta por ciento de los futuros estudiantes de todos los orígenes afrima que las nuevas restricciones estatales al aborto es relevante en al menos en cierta medida en el lugar donde eligen ir a la universidad, según encontró una encuesta separada realizada por Gallup y Lumina Foundation. De ellos, ocho de cada 10 dicen que preferirían ir a un estado con mayor acceso a servicios de salud reproductiva. (Lumina se encuentra entre quienes financian a The Hechinger Report, que produjo esta historia).

“Tenemos muchas mujeres jóvenes que no consideran ciertos estados”, dijo Levine. Una de sus propias clientas desistió de ir a una universidad en St. Louis después de que Missouri prohibiera casi todos los abortos tras la decisión Dobbs de la Corte Suprema, dijo.

Las instituciones de Alabama, Florida, Luisiana y Texas son las que tienen más probabilidades de ser eliminadas de las listas de estudiantes liberales, según la encuesta de Art & Science Group. En general, es más probable que se mantengan alejados del sur y el medio oeste, mientras que los estudiantes conservadores eviten California y Nueva York.

Uno de cada ocho estudiantes de secundaria en Florida dice que no iría a una universidad pública en su propio estado debido a sus políticas educativas, según encontró una encuesta separada realizada por el sitio web de información y clasificación de universidades www.Intelligent.com.

Con 494 leyes anti-LGBTQ propuestas o adoptadas este año —según American Civil Liberties Union— los futuros estudiantes que son LGBTQ+ y que han experimentado un acoso significativo a causa de ello tienen casi el doble de probabilidades de decir que no planean ir a la universidad en absoluto que los estudiantes que experimentaron niveles más bajos de acoso, según una encuesta realizada por GLSEN, anteriormente Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.

“Estás atacando a niños que ya son vulnerables”, dijo Javier Gómez, un estudiante LGBTQ en su primer año en Miami Dade College. “Y no se trata sólo de estudiantes queer. Muchos jóvenes están hartos”.

Aún no es evidente si las nuevas leyes están afectando el lugar donde los jóvenes LGBTQ eligen ir a la universidad, dijo Casey Pick, director de leyes y políticas de The Trevor Project, que apoya a los jóvenes LGBTQ en crisis. Existe evidencia que los adultos LGBTQ si se están alejando de los estados que aprueban leyes anti-LGBTQ, dijo Pick. Y “si los empleados adultos toman esto en cuenta cuando deciden dónde quieren vivir, puedes apostar que los estudiantes universitarios están tomando las mismas decisiones”.

Mientras tanto, en una era de rechazo a las políticas de diversidad, equidad e inclusión en muchos estados —y contra la acción afirmativa en todo el país— Amankwaah es una de un número creciente de estudiantes negros que eligen lo que consideran la seguridad relativa de una HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities). La inscripción en las HBCU aumentó alrededor del 3 por ciento en 2021, el último año del que se dispone de cifras, mientras que el número de estudiantes en otras universidades y facultades disminuyó.

“El verdadero ataque aquí es el sentimiento de pertenencia”, dijo Jerry Young, quien dirige el programa Freedom to Learn en PEN America, que hace seguimiento a las leyes que restringen los esfuerzos de diversidad y la enseñanza sobre la raza en colegios y universidades. “Lo que realmente hace es izar una bandera para decirle a los estudiantes más marginados: ‘No los queremos aquí'”.

Más del 40 por ciento de los administradores de universidades y facultades dicen que el fallo de la Corte Suprema que restringe el uso de la acción afirmativa en las admisiones afectará la diversidad en sus campus, según una encuesta de Princeton Review cuando comenzaba el año escolar.

Los estudiantes universitarios de todas las razas y tendencias políticas informan que se sienten incómodos en los campus que se han convertido en campos de batalla de temas culturales y políticos. Los de izquierda están furiosos por las nuevas leyes que bloquean programas de diversidad, equidad e inclusión y la enseñanza de ciertas perspectivas sobre la raza. Mientras los de derecha lamentan que los oradores conservadores son abucheados o cancelados, los comentarios impopulares criticados en clase y lo que ven como una adopción de valores diferentes a los que aprendieron en casa.

Un padre de Michigan dijo que apoyaba la decisión de su hijo de saltarse la universidad. Según él, otros padres también están disuadiendo a sus hijos de ir a la universidad, citando “el consumo excesivo de alcohol, la cultura de las relaciones, las enseñanzas seculares, profesores de izquierdista radicales que mezclan antiamericanismo, anticapitalismo, anti libertad de expresión y un énfasis en la diversidad, equidad e inclusión” que, según él, es contrario a un enfoque en el mérito. El padre pidió que no se usara su nombre para que sus comentarios no afectaran a su hija, quien asiste a una universidad pública.

Más de uno de cada 10 estudiantes en universidades de cuatro años ahora dicen que sienten que no pertenecen a su campus, y otros dos de cada 10 no están ni de acuerdo ni muy de acuerdo con que pertenecen, según encontró otra encuesta de Lumina y Gallup. También descubrió que quienes responden de esta manera tienen más probabilidades de experimentar estrés con frecuencia y de abandonar los estudios. Uno de cada cuatro estudiantes hispanos informa que frecuente u ocasionalmente se siente inseguro o sufre falta de respeto, discriminación o acoso.

Los veteranos militares que utilizan los beneficios de la ley G.I. para retomar los estudios dicen que una de sus barreras más importantes es la sensación de que no serán bienvenidos, según una encuesta realizada por el Instituto D’Aniello para Veteranos y Familias Militares de la Universidad de Syracuse. Casi dos tercios dice que los profesores y administradores no entienden los desafíos que enfrentan, y el 70 por ciento dice lo mismo sobre sus compañeros de clase no veteranos.

Las universidades deben ser “espacios seguros y de afirmación”, dijo Pick, del Proyecto Trevor, no lugares de aislamiento y alienación.

Sin embargo, un número significativo de estudiantes dice que no se siente cómodo compartiendo sus puntos de vista en clase, según otra encuesta realizada por College Pulse para el Sheila and Robert Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth, de tendencia conservadora, en la Universidad Estatal de Dakota del Norte. De ellos, el 72 por ciento dice que teme que sus opiniones sean consideradas inaceptables por sus compañeros de clase y el 45 por ciento por sus profesores. Los estudiantes conservadores tienen menos probabilidades que sus compañeros liberales, de creer que todos los puntos de vista son bienvenidos y están menos dispuestos a compartir los suyos.

“¿Es realmente un entorno intelectualmente diverso?” se pregunta Sean Stevens, director de encuestas y análisis de la Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), que ha lanzado una clasificación de la libertad de expresión en los campus basada en las percepciones de los estudiantes sobre la comodidad al expresar ideas, la tolerancia hacia los oradores y otras medidas.

“Anecdóticamente y por experiencia personal, ciertamente hay un grupo de estudiantes

que están considerando estos factores en términos de dónde ir a la universidad”, dijo Stevens.

El 81 por ciento de los estudiantes liberales y el 53 por ciento de los conservadores dicen que apoyan las denuncias a profesores que hacen comentarios que consideran ofensivos, según la misma encuesta. Esta utilizó comentarios en su muestra como: “No hay evidencia de prejuicios contra los negros en los tiroteos policiales”, “Exigir la vacunación contra el COVID es un asalto a la libertad individual” y “El sexo biológico es un hecho científico”.

Una profesora de la Universidad Texas A&M fue investigada cuando un estudiante la acusó de criticar al vicegobernador del estado durante una conferencia, aunque finalmente fue exonerada. Una profesora de antropología de la Universidad de Chicago que impartió un curso universitario llamado “El problema de la blancura” dijo que se vio inundada de mensajes de odio cuando un estudiante conservador publicó su foto y su dirección de correo electrónico en las redes sociales.

Más de la mitad de los estudiantes de primer año dicen que las universidades tienen derecho a prohibir a oradores radicales, según una encuesta anual realizada por un instituto de la UCLA. La encuesta de College Pulse dice que el sentimiento lo comparte el doble de proporción de estudiantes liberales que de conservadores.

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La aparición de un jurista conservador —quien habló en el Washington College de Maryland el mes pasado— fue interrumpida por estudiantes debido a sus posiciones sobre cuestiones LGBTQ y el aborto. El tema: la libertad de expresión en el campus.

En marzo, un grupo de estudiantes en el campus de Stanford interrumpió un discurso de un juez federal cuyo historial judicial, según dijeron, era anti-LGBTQ. Cuando pidió la intervención de un administrador, un decano asociado de diversidad, equidad e inclusión lo confrontó y le preguntó: “¿Vale la pena el dolor que esto causa y la división que esto causa?”. El decano asociado fue suspendido y luego renunció.

“Hoy es un hecho triste que la mayor amenaza a la libertad de expresión proviene del interior de la academia”, afirmó el American Council of Trustees and Alumni, de tendencia derechista, que está presionando a las universidades para que firmen su Iniciativa de Libertad Universitaria que alienta a enseñar a los estudiantes sobre libertad de expresión durante la orientación para estudiantes de primer año y disciplinar a las personas que interrumpan a los oradores o eventos, entre otras medidas.

“Tengo que imaginar que en las universidades que tienen un mal historial en materia de libertad de expresión o libertad académica, esto afectará su reputación”, dijo Steven Maguire, becario de libertad en el campus de la organización. “Escucho a personas decir cosas como: ‘Me preocupa a qué tipo de instituto universitario o universidad puedo enviar a mis hijos y si serán libres de ser ellos mismos y de expresarse'”.

Algunas universidades ahora están reclutando activamente estudiantes basándose en este tipo de inquietudes. Colorado College creó en septiembre un programa para facilitar el proceso a los estudiantes que desean transferirse de instituciones en estados que han prohibido las iniciativas de diversidad, equidad e inclusión. Hampshire College en Massachusetts ha ofrecido admisión a cualquier estudiante de New College en Florida, sujeto a lo que los críticos han descrito como una toma de posesión conservadora. Hasta ahora, treinta y cinco han aceptado la invitación.

Aunque muchos críticos conservadores de los institutos universitarios y universidades dicen que los profesores están adoctrinando a los estudiantes con opiniones liberales, los estudiantes entrantes de primer año tienden a tener opiniones de izquierda antes de poner un pie en el aula, según esa encuesta de UCLA.

Menos de uno de cada cinco se considera conservador. Tres cuartas partes dicen que el aborto debería ser legal y favorecer leyes de control de armas más estrictas, el 68 por ciento dice que las personas ricas deberían pagar más impuestos de los que pagan ahora y el 86 por ciento que el cambio climático debería ser una prioridad federal y que debería haber un camino claro hacia la ciudadanía para todos los inmigrantes indocumentados.

Los futuros estudiantes dicen que están observando cómo se aprueban nuevas leyes, surgen controversias en los campus y analizan activamente no sólo la calidad de la comida y las especialidades disponibles en las universidades a las que podrían asistir, sino también la política estatal.

“Una vez que decidí que iba a Carolina del Norte Central, busqué si Carolina del Norte era un estado rojo o un estado azul”, dijo Amankwaah. (Carolina del Norte tiene un demócrata como gobernador, pero los republicanos controlan ambas cámaras de la legislatura y tienen una supermayoría a prueba de veto en el Senado estatal).

Las leyes anti-LGBTQ de Florida llevaron a Javier Gómez a dejar su estado natal y mudarse a Nueva York para ir a la escuela de moda. Pero luego regresó y se transfirió a Miami Dade.

“La gente me pregunta: ‘¿Por qué diablos estás de vuelta en Florida?’”, dijo Gómez. “La razón por la que regresé fue porque tenía esa vocación innata de que tenías que quedarte y luchar por los niños queer y trans de aquí. A veces es abrumador. Puede ser muy agotador mentalmente. Pero quería quedarme y continuar la lucha y construir una comunidad contra el odio”.

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It was when the shuttle bus stopped coming that Luka Fernandes began to worry.

Fernandes was a student at Newbury College near Boston whose enrollment had declined in the previous two decades from more than 5,300 to about 600.

“Things started closing down,” Fernandes remembered. “There was definitely a sense of things going wrong. The food went downhill. It felt like they didn’t really care anymore.”

The private, nonprofit school had been placed on probation by its accreditors because of its shaky finances. Then the shuttle bus connecting the suburban campus with the nearest station on the public transportation system started running late or not showing up at all. “That was one of the things that made us feel like they were giving up.”

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After students went home for their winter holiday, an email came: Newbury would shut down at the end of the next semester.

“It was, ‘Unfortunately we have to close after all these many years, and blah, blah, blah,’ ” said Fernandes, who was a junior. “I was very angry.”

The loans that students had taken out to pay the college weren’t forgiven, “which was infuriating. I had already put so much money into my education, and my family didn’t have that money. How am I going to apply this to my future if it doesn’t exist?”

This and other questions are on the minds of more and more students this spring as the pace of college closings dramatically speeds up.

About one university or college per week so far this year, on average, has announced that it will close or merge. That’s up from a little more than two a month last year, according to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, or SHEEO.

So many colleges are folding that some students who moved from one to another have now found that their new school will also close, often with little or no warning. Some of the students at Newbury, when it closed in 2019, had moved there from nearby Mount Ida College, for example, which shut down the year before.

Most students at colleges that close give up on their educations altogether. Fewer than half transfer to other institutions, a SHEEO study found. Of those, fewer than half stay long enough to get degrees. Many lose credits when they move from one school to another and have to spend longer in college, often taking out more loans to pay for it.

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

The rest join the growing number of Americans — now more than 40 million, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center — who spent time and money to go to college but never finished. And that’s happening at a time when efforts to increase the proportion of the population with degrees are already facing headwinds.

“I was asking my dad, ‘Can I not go back?’ ” said Fernandes, who eventually decided to continue at another college and now works as a patient coordinator at a hospital.

“I’m glad I did. But it honestly scares me for the future of education. I’m not sure where education’s going to go if all of these colleges keep closing. It’s just another roadblock, especially with people who are struggling with tuition in the first place.”

Colleges are almost certain to keep closing. As many as one in 10 four-year colleges and universities are in financial peril, the consulting firm EY Parthenon estimates.

“It’s simply supply and demand,” said Gary Stocker, a former chief of staff at Westminster College in Missouri and the founder of College Viability, which evaluates institutions’ financial stability. The closings follow an enrollment decline of 14 percent in the decade through 2022, the most recent period for which the figures are available from the Education Department. Another decline of up to 15 percent is projected to begin in 2025.

“The only thing that’s going to fix this is enough closings or consolidations at which supply and demand reach equilibrium,” Stocker said.

That’s likely little comfort to students who attend or have attended closing schools.

Already this year, and within a span of a few days, Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama, Fontbonne University in St. Louis and Eastern Gateway Community College in Ohio all announced that they would close — Birmingham-Southern in May, Fontbonne next year and Eastern Gateway by June, unless it gets a financial bailout.

The private, for-profit University of Antelope Valley in California was ordered by the state in late February to shut down because of financial shortfalls. Lincoln Christian University in Illinois and Magdalen College in New Hampshire will close in May, Johnson University of Florida in June and Hodges University in Florida by August. The College of Saint Rose in New York, Cabrini University in Pennsylvania, Oak Point University in Illinois, Goddard College in Vermont and the Staten Island campus of St. John’s University will all be shuttered by the end of this semester.

Notre Dame College in Ohio will also close its doors at the end of this semester, stranding for a second time students who transferred there from Alderson Broaddus University in West Virginia, which shut down just days before classes were scheduled to begin the year before.

Related: Getting a college degree was their dream. Then their school suddenly closed

Seven out of 10 students at colleges that have closed got little or no warning. Of those, a smaller proportion were likely to continue their educations than students at colleges that gave more notice and ended operations in an “orderly” way, the SHEEO study found.

Tatiana Hicks was at her laptop preparing for her final exams in the nursing program she attended at for-profit Stratford University in Virginia when her group chat with fellow students started to blow up. “The only thing that was going through my mind was studying for finals, but my phone would not stop ringing,” said Hicks, who was going to school while working 12-hour shifts three days a week as a nurse assistant in a hospital to pay for it.

An email from the university president had just gone out saying Stratford had lost its accreditation and was closing, effective immediately. Students had a month to get their transcripts, it said. But within a day, the university’s phones and email were shut down, said Hicks, now 27, who lives in Gainesville, Virginia.

“I started panicking. I cried. I cried for hours that day. This just happened out of nowhere,” said Hicks, who lost all of the 94 credits she had earned and owed $30,000 in student loans, though they would later be forgiven after more than a year of red tape.

“Everyone kept asking me, ‘When are you going to go back?’ And I didn’t want to go back,” she said. “I thought, this just proved I shouldn’t have gone to college in the first place.”

Hicks did eventually enroll in a new program, beginning again from scratch on her way to a degree in respiratory therapy.

More common is the experience of Misha Zhuykov, who ended his formal education when Burlington College in Vermont shut down during his junior year there. The college had embarked on an ill-fated expansion, buying an abandoned Catholic orphanage so spooky Zhuykov helped make an award-winning movie in it for his film studies program. (The president at the time of the controversial expansion project was Jane O’Meara Sanders, wife of Sen. Bernie Sanders.)

“There was always this ramshackle feeling” at Burlington, he said. Adjunct instructors were gradually replacing full-time faculty. “We kind of all suspected something might happen. I thought, ‘Just hold out for another two years and I’m out of here.’ ”

Instead, Zhuykov and the last 100 or so other undergraduates were given less than two weeks’ notice that the college would be closing. A private security company came to lock up the buildings. He said he found that not all of his credits would be accepted if he transferred.

Students who transfer lose an average of 43 percent of the credits they’ve already earned and paid for, the Government Accountability Office found in the most recent comprehensive study of this problem.

Like many of his classmates, Zhuykov never took his formal education any further. He now works as a graphic designer in New Hampshire. “A lot of folks just kind of dropped off. They were banking on that degree. I have a friend who’s working at a gas station.”

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

Even those who graduated from colleges that later closed run into uncomfortable questions when they look for jobs. Roy Mercon went to Burlington after serving in the Army. He managed to graduate before the college stopped operating. But when he’s applied for jobs, he gets skeptical reactions. “They say, ‘Oh, you’re from that school. I tried to look it up,’ ” he said.

“You kind of trusted the people teaching you that they know what they’re doing. This makes you feel a little cynical and sets the tone for the rest of your life,” said Mercon, who is 35 and working on the help desk of a citywide internet service provider in Burlington. He now has a 12-year-old daughter of his own. If she decides to go to college, he said, he will investigate to make sure the one she picks won’t close. “That’s an insane thing to have to think about.”

Laila Ali, who was in the last group of students to graduate from Newbury College, has run into similar paperwork problems. When she started a new job in December, she said, her employer tried to verify her education, but couldn’t. “I didn’t really know what route to take. Who do I contact?” She ultimately showed them the physical degree that she was handed when she walked at graduation, which the employer accepted. But it triggered unwelcome memories.

“I remember graduation and my last semester being gloomy,” said Ali, now 27 and living in Atlanta. She said she saw a few signs that the college was in trouble, but it had also recently renovated a gym, with new equipment, and added sports teams. So the closing came as a surprise. “They could have given us a warning.”

How much difference a warning can make was evident at Presentation College in South Dakota, which — before announcing that it would close — contracted with the nonprofit College Possible to help its 384 remaining students continue their educations. After the announcement, the college stayed open for a final full semester and kept paying its athletics coaches to connect its many student-athletes with new teams.

At first, when administrators gathered everyone in the fieldhouse to announce the closing, “the students were so struck with disbelief that about half of them just got up and left,” said Catherine Marciano, College Possible’s vice president for partnerships. “Other students were crying very publicly or expressing anger toward the administration.” And when the college held a “teach-out fair” in the same gym with institutions that had agreed to accept its students and their credits, none showed up, despite a deluge of social media promotion.

“It took a little while for us to gain momentum,” Marciano said. Faculty and staff were looking for new jobs, while “students at that point were still in that state of grief where they were paralyzed.”

But given time, she said, “we saw those emotions shift to, ‘Okay, I have to figure out my next steps. I want to keep playing sports or keep pursuing my nursing degree.’ ”

In the end, 90 percent of those last students either graduated in the final semester before the college closed its doors for good or transferred to another institution, Marciano said — a far higher proportion than at closed colleges elsewhere.

Related: Aging states to college graduates: We’ll pay you to stay

Cassy Loa was one of those. A junior at Presentation when it closed, she played on its softball team and managed to transfer to Dickinson State University. But even with the help provided to her, she said, the path from the day the closing was announced was bumpy.

“All these thoughts were going through my mind. What was I going to do? Will my credits transfer? Can I still play softball? Where will my friends go? I had one more year until I graduated, and now I had to go and find a school for one more year.”

Living through that process, she said, “felt like being a senior in high school again.” In the end, because Presentation had a teach-out agreement with North Dakota’s Dickinson State, most of her credits transferred.

That kind of an experience is an exception to the rule, however. “Students don’t always do well when colleges close. In fact, they typically don’t do well,” said Paula Langteau, the last president of Presentation. “Some colleges literally padlock the door, and that’s their announcement.”

This is not deliberately malicious, Langteau said. Struggling schools “think they can somehow stay open. Or maybe they’re afraid of looking like they failed.”

She now works as a consultant to help other colleges through the process — a sign of how frequently it’s happening.

“We’re starting to get through to colleges and to boards that there needs to be more pre-planning, and it’s hard,” Langteau said. “It’s hard to admit when it’s time for an institution to close or to merge.’ ”

Mergers are also picking up, though they almost always end with the struggling partner fading away. Woodbury University is being merged into the University of Redlands, and St. Augustine College in Chicago into Lewis University. The Pennsylvania College of Health Sciences was absorbed by Saint Joseph’s University in January. Salus University will become part of Drexel University in June and stop running as a separate institution next year. Bluffton University in Ohio will be integrated into the University of Findlay, also next year.

This seems an easier route for students, who presumably can finish at the successor college. But it isn’t always. Students who attended Mills College received a $1.25 million settlement in a lawsuit charging that they were promised they could finish their degrees after the college was absorbed by Northeastern University. The lawsuit alleged that Northeastern phased out programs it didn’t already offer, in which 408 of the Mills students had enrolled. The universities deny having misled the students.

These shutdowns also affect taxpayers, who have to absorb the cost of the federally subsidized student loans that are forgiven in some instances. Students attending ITT Tech had $1.1 billion in debt forgiven when it shut down, for instance.

New U.S. Department of Education rules take effect in July that will require institutions to report if they are entering bankruptcy or facing expensive legal judgments, and to set aside reserves to cover the cost of student loans if they go under.

It’s also growing more important that consumers understand the financial status of colleges they consider, said Stocker, of College Viability.

“If a restaurant has health complaints, we don’t want to go there,” said Stocker. “If a car manufacturer is having trouble, why would we want to buy that car? Same thing for colleges.”

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

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Student-parents disproportionately give up before they reach the finish line. Fewer than 4 in 10 graduate with a degree within six years, compared with more than 6 in 10 other students.

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