As AI increasingly automates technical tasks across industries, students’ long-term career success will rely less on technical skills alone and more on durable skills or professional skills, often referred to as soft skills. These include empathy, resilience, collaboration, and ethical reasoning–skills that machines can’t replicate.
This critical need is outlined in Future-Proofing Students: Professional Skills in the Age of AI, a new report from Acuity Insights. Drawing on a broad body of academic and market research, the report provides an analysis of how institutions can better prepare students with the professional skills most critical in an AI-driven world.
Key findings from the report:
75 percent of long-term job success is attributed to professional skills, not technical expertise.
Over 25 percent of executives say they won’t hire recent graduates due to lack of durable skills.
COVID-19 disrupted professional skill development, leaving many students underprepared for collaboration, communication, and professional norms.
Eight essential durable skills must be intentionally developed for students to thrive in an AI-driven workplace.
“Technical skills may open the door, but it’s human skills like empathy and resilience that endure over time and lead to a fruitful and rewarding career,” says Matt Holland, CEO at Acuity Insights. “As AI reshapes the workforce, it has become critical for higher education to take the lead in preparing students with these skills that will define their long-term success.”
The eight critical durable skills include:
Empathy
Teamwork
Communication
Motivation
Resilience
Ethical reasoning
Problem solving
Self-awareness
These competencies don’t expire with technology–they grow stronger over time, helping graduates adapt, lead, and thrive in an AI-driven world.
The report also outlines practical strategies for institutions, including assessing non-academic skills at admissions using Situational Judgment Tests (SJTs), and shares recommendations on embedding professional skills development throughout curricula and forming partnerships that bridge AI literacy with interpersonal and ethical reasoning.
by Sharif El-Mekki and Heather Kirkpatrick, The Hechinger Report November 25, 2025
By dismantling the Department of Education, the Trump administration claims to be returning control of education to the states.
And while states and local school districts are doing their best to understand the new environments they are working in, they have an opportunity amidst the chaos to focus on what is most essential and prioritize how education dollars are spent.
That means recruiting and retaining more well-prepared teachers with their new budget autonomy. Myriad factors affect student learning, but research shows that theprimary variable within a school’s control is the teacher. Other than parents, teachers are the adults who spend the most time with our children. Good teachers have been shown tosingularly motivate students.
And that’s why, amidst the chaos of our current education politics, there is great opportunity.
Until recently, recruiting, preparing and retaining enough great teachers has not been a priority in policy or funding choices. That has been a mistake, because attracting additional teachers and preparing them to be truly excellent is arguably the single biggest lever policymakers can use to demonstrate their commitment to high-quality public schools.
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Great teachers, especially whole schools full of great teachers, do not just happen. We develop them through quality preparation and meaningful opportunities to practice the profession. When teachers are well-prepared, students thrive. Rigorous teacher preparation translates into stronger instruction, higher K-12 student achievement and a more resilient, equitable education system.
Teachers, like firefighters and police officers, are public servants. We rightly invest public dollars to train firefighters and police officers because their service is essential to the safety and well-being of our communities. Yet teachers — who shape our future through our kids — are too often asked to shoulder the costs of their own preparation.
Funding high-quality teacher preparation should be as nonnegotiable as funding other vital public service professions, especially because we face a teacher shortage — particularly in STEM fields, special education and rural and urban schools.
This is in no small part because many potential teaching candidates cannot afford the necessary education and credentialing.
Our current workforce systems were not built for today’s teaching candidates. They were not designed to support students who are financially vulnerable, part-time or first-generation, or those with caregiving responsibilities.
Yet the majority of tomorrow’s education workforce will likely come from these groups, all of whom have faced systemic barriers in accumulating the generational wealth needed to pursue degrees in higher education.
Some states have responded to this need by developing strong teacher development pathways. For example, California hascommitted hundreds of millions to growing the teacher pipeline through targeted residency programs and preparation initiatives, and its policies have enabled it to recruit and support more future teachers, including greater numbers of educators from historically underrepresented communities.
Pennsylvania hascreated more pathways into the education field with expedited credentialing and apprenticeships for high school students, and is investing millions of dollars in stipends for student teachers.
It has had success bringingmore Black candidates into the teaching profession, which will likely improve student outcomes: Black boys from low-income familieswho have a Black teacher in third through fifth grades are 18 percent more interested in pursuing college and 29 percent less likely to drop out of high school, researchshows. Pennsylvania also passed asenate billHYPERLINK “https://www.senatorhughes.com/big-win-in-harrisburg-creating-the-teacher-diversity-pipeline/”that paved the way for students who complete high school courses on education and teaching to be eligible for career and technical education credits.
At least half a dozen other states also provide various degrees of financial support for would-be teachers, includingstipends, tuition assistance and fee waivers for credentialing.
One example is aone-year teacher residency program model, which recruits and prepares people in historically underserved communities to earn a mster’s degree and teaching credential.
Opening new pathways to teaching by providing financial support has two dramatic effects. First, when teachers stay in education, these earnings compound over time as alumni become mentor teachers and administrators, earning more each year.
Second, these new pathways can also improve student achievement, thanks to policies that support new teachers in rigorous teacher educationprograms.
For example, the Teaching Academy model, which operates in several states, including Pennsylvania, New York and Michigan, attracts, cultivates and supports high school students on the path to becoming educators, giving schools and districts an opportunity to build robust education programs that serve as strong foundations for meaningful and long-term careers in education, and providing aspiring educators a head start to becoming great teachers. Participants in the program are eligible forcollege scholarships, professional coaching and retention bonuses.
California, Pennsylvania and these other states have begun this work. We hope to encourage other state lawmakers to seize the opportunities arising from recent federal changes and use their power to invest in what matters most to student achievement —teachers and teacher preparation pathways.
Sharif El-Mekki is founder & CEO of the Center for Black Educator Development in Pennsylvania. Heather Kirkpatrick is president and CEO Alder Graduate School in California.
This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/opinion-funding-high-quality-teacher-preparation-programs-should-be-the-highest-priority-for-policymakers/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>
by Savannah Celeste Scott, The Hechinger Report November 17, 2025
Imagine clocking out of an eight-hour shift and your compensation is a pat on the back and experience for your resume.
This scenario is a disturbing reality for around one million college students, and it needs to stop. Students work countless hours on top of their academic pursuits only to be told they should be “grateful for the opportunity.”
The government must pass legislation mandating that all internships include monetary compensation; employers must stop exploiting students and recent graduates while they build necessary work experience.
The idea of an unpaid internship is odd considering that most of us grew up learning that work is rewarded. Some 71 percent of American households give children ages 5 to 17 an allowance for doing their chores, a Wells Fargo study found.
Practices like that have led many of us to believe that labor should be paid, and it should be no different when we enter the job market.
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There is a disturbing correlation between unpaid internships and exploitation, especially for people from marginalized communities. Historically, Black people have been the face of working without compensation — a phenomenon dating back to early American slave practices.
Unpaid work is not just exploitation — it is dehumanizing. No person can survive without money, so no one should be required to work with no compensation to help them live. The reality is that, unlike higher-income students, low-income students cannot afford to work for free. They need money to cover their tuition, afford groceries and pay for a place to live. This is why unpaid internships further the cycle of economic exploitation, the student-run Columbia Spectator noted.
Yet there are plenty of people who believe compensation does not always have to be monetary. Many students have heard employers extol the value of “experience” as they try to persuade them to work without pay.
Such was the case for me when I was hired for a legal internship as a freshman in college. I thoroughly enjoyed my internship, as it gave me both professional and social opportunities. But it was an extremely difficult time for me both mentally and financially.
I was taking 16 credit hours, regularly writing for a student publication and working another part-time job to save money for law school. The stress of going into the office every day to handle casework — often ranging from domestic violence to sexual assault cases — was mentally taxing when combined with schoolwork and extracurricular responsibilities.
While the experience that the internship provided was incredible, monetary compensation would have made it much less stressful, as I would not have needed the other job.
Unpaid internships can also hurt graduates’ prospects in the job market. Those who have had unpaid internships receive fewer job offers on average than those who completed paid internships, statistics from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) show.
The average student who completed an unpaid internship also saw $22,500 less in their starting salaries than those who completed paid internships. According to the DeltaInstitute, “employers offering compensation tend to invest more in mentoring, performance feedback, and skill-building”; that added investment provides students with more preparation for the job market and helps them look more impressive to an employer.
Unpaid interns have been fighting for compensation for decades. A lawsuit filed by twointernsagainst Fox Searchlight over their lack of compensation when working on the movie “Black Swan” resulted in a legal battle that lasted five years. The two interns werefinally compensateda total of $13,500 for their work — despite the film grossing more than $300 million.
The Fox Searchlight lawsuit sparked a wave of other impassioned interns to plead their cases as well, including a class-action lawsuit against NBCUniversal back in July 2013. That resulted in a$6.4 million settlementsplit among thousands of interns.
In both cases, the employers made millions of dollars in profits but still refused to pay their interns until they were legally forced to do so.
According to Shawn VanDerziel, the president and chief executive officer of NACE, paid internships are a “game changer” to employers and employees alike. The dilemma is this: Employers want labor, and students want internships. The most obvious solution would be to pay students for the work that they do.
Students do not work for fun. They work because they want to create better futures for themselves; their success will be less likely if they don’t receive monetary compensation. The government needs to make it illegal for employers to exploit students by having them work without pay.
College students should not be expected to work for free.
Savannah Celeste Scott is a senior at the University of Georgia in Athens, studying journalism, Spanish and law, jurisprudence and the state on a pre-law track.
This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/student-voice-college-students-are-tired-of-being-told-that-we-should-be-grateful-for-our-internships-we-also-want-to-get-paid/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>
A revolution quietly underway in American education: the rise of homeschooling. In the past decade, there’s been a 61 percent increase in homeschool students across the United States, making it the fastest growing form of education in the country. You might not have noticed (I didn’t, at first), because only about 6 percent of students are homeschooled nationally. But that number is nearly double what it was just two years ago.
Then I noticed something that made me take a closer look closer to home. At Starglow Media, the podcast company I founded in 2023, nearly 20 percent of our listenership comes from homeschool families. That substantially overindexes against the national population. In other words, podcasts were particularly popular in the homeschool community.
I was curious, for my business and in general. We make podcasts for kids (and their parents) without any specific content for homeschool families. Why was audio resonating so well with this audience? I did some digging, and the answers surprised me.
First, I wanted to find out why homeschooling was booming. According to the Washington Post, the explosive growth is consistent across “every measurable line of politics, geography, and demographics.” Experts have offered multiple explanations. Some families started homeschooling during COVID and never went back, others want greater say in what their children learn. Some families feel their kids are safer from violence and discrimination at home, others think it’s a better environment for children with disabilities. All these reasons collectively suggest a broader motivation: people are dissatisfied with the traditional education system and are taking it into their own hands.
None of these factors, however, explained why podcasts were popular among homeschool families. So I decided to ask the question myself. I reached out to some Starglow listeners in the Starglow community to hear what about the format was appealing to them. Three main themes emerged.
Many people told me that podcasts are uniquely well-suited to address educational hurdles facing homeschool families. When you’re a homeschool parent, it can be difficult to navigate all the resources that inform lesson planning while ensuring that the content is age- and subject-appropriate. Parents have found podcasts to be an intuitive way to elevate their curricula. They can search for subjects, filter by age group, and trust that the content is suitable for their kids. Ads on the network add another layer of value–because parents can trust the content, they tend to trust further educational materials promoted via the same channels. Simply put, the podcast ecosystem offers a reliable means to supplement lesson plans.
They also offer a clear financial benefit. Homeschooling can be expensive, especially in STEM, but the majority of states don’t offer government subsidies for homeschool education. Podcasts have proven to be a cost-effective way to supplement at-home learning modules. Parents appreciate that it’s free to listen.
Lastly–and this came up in nearly every conversation–they fit in well to homeschool life. Routine is a critical part of any educational context, and podcasts are useful anchors in the school day. Parents can easily pair podcasts with lessons at any point in their day, whether it’s a current events primer paired with a news podcast over breakfast or a specific episode of “Who Smarted” (our most popular educational podcast) about how snow forms worked into a science lesson. In this way, podcasts are becoming an integral part of family life in the homeschool community. Educational content like “Who Smarted” or an age-appropriate audiobook of “Moby Dick” may be the gateway, but families tend to co-listen throughout the day, whether it’s to KidsNuz over coffee or a Koala Moon story at night.
What does all this mean? Homeschooling is growing, and with it is the need for flexible, affordable, and trustworthy educational content. To meet that demand, families are turning to audio, which offers age-appropriate solutions that can be worked into family life through regular co-listening.
I expect that the homeschool movement will continue to grow, because new formats and strategies are offering families new opportunities. That’s good news, because we need innovation in education right now. Test scores are falling, literacy is in decline, and school absenteeism hasn’t fully bounced back from the pandemic. The homeschool surge is just one indicator of our increased dissatisfaction with the status quo. If we want to course correct, we all need to embrace new resources, podcasts or otherwise, to enhance education at home and in the classroom. New media has the potential to transform how people teach–we should embrace the opportunity.
Thirty states now limit or ban cellphone use in classrooms, and teachers are noticing children paying attention to their lessons again. But it’s not clear whether this policy — unpopular with students and a headache for teachers to enforce — makes an academic difference.
If student achievement goes up after a cellphone ban, it’s tough to know if the ban was the reason. Some other change in math or reading instruction might have caused the improvement. Or maybe the state assessment became easier to pass. Imagine if politicians required all students to wear striped shirts and test scores rose. Few would really think that stripes made kids smarter.
Two researchers from the University of Rochester and RAND, a nonprofit research organization, figured out a clever way to tackle this question by taking advantage of cellphone activity data in one large school district in Florida, which in 2023 became the first state to institute school cellphone restrictions. The researchers compared schools that had high cellphone activity before the ban with those that had low cellphone usage to see if the ban made a bigger difference for schools that had high usage.
Indeed, it did.
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Student test scores rose a bit more in high cellphone usage schools two years after the ban compared with schools that had lower cellphone usage to start. Students were also attending school more regularly.
The policy also came with a troubling side effect. The cellphone bans led to a significant increase in student suspensions in the first year, especially among Black students. But disciplinary actions declined during the second year.
“Cellphone bans are not a silver bullet,” said David Figlio, an economist at the University of Rochester and one of the study’s co-authors. “But they seem to be helping kids. They’re attending school more, and they’re performing a bit better on tests.”
Figlio said he was “worried” about the short-term 16 percent increase in suspensions for Black students. What’s unclear from this data analysis is whether Black students were more likely to violate the new cellphone rules, or whether teachers were more likely to single out Black students for punishment. It’s also unclear from these administrative behavior records if students were first given warnings or lighter punishments before they were suspended.
The data suggest that students adjusted to the new rules. A year later, student suspensions, including those of Black students, fell back to what they had been before the cellphone ban.
“What we observe is a rocky start,” Figlio added. “There was a lot of discipline.”
The study, “The Impact of Cellphone Bans in Schools on Student Outcomes: Evidence from Florida,” is a draft working paper and has not been peer-reviewed. It was slated to be circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research on Oct. 20 and the authors shared a draft with me in advance. Figlio and his co-author Umut Özek at RAND believe it is the first study to show a causal connection between cellphone bans and learning rather than just a correlation.
The academic gains from the cellphone ban were small, less than a percentile point, on average. That’s the equivalent of moving from the 50th percentile on math and reading tests (in the middle) to the 51st percentile (still close to the middle), and this small gain did not emerge until the second year for most students. The academic benefits were strongest for middle schoolers, white students, Hispanic students and male students. The academic gains for Black students and female students were not statistically significant.
I was surprised to learn that there is data on student cellphone use in school. The authors of this study used information from Advan Research Corp., which collects and analyzes data from mobile phones around the world for business purposes, such as figuring out how many people visit a particular retail store. The researchers were able to obtain this data for schools in one Florida school district and estimate how many students were on their cellphones before and after the ban went into effect between the hours of 9 a.m. and 1 p.m.
The data showed that more than 60 percent of middle schoolers, on average, were on their phones at least once during the school day before the 2023 ban in this particular Florida district, which was not named but described as one of the 10 largest districts in the country. (Five of the nation’s 10 largest school districts are in Florida.) After the ban, that fell in half to 30 percent of middle schoolers in the first year and down to 25 percent in the second year.
Elementary school students were less likely to be on cellphones to start with and their in-school usage fell from about 25 percent of students before the ban to 15 percent after the ban. More than 45 percent of high schoolers were on their phones before the ban and that fell to about 10 percent afterwards.
Average daily smartphone visits in schools, by year and grade level
Average daily smartphone visits during regular school days (relative to teacher workdays without students) between 9am and 1pm (per 100 enrolled students) in the two months before and then after the 2023 ban took effect in one large urban Florida school district. Source: Figlio and Özek, October 2025 draft paper, figure 2C, p. 23.
Florida did not enact a complete cellphone ban in 2023, but imposed severe restrictions. Those restrictions were tightened in 2025 and that additional tightening was not studied in this paper.
Anti-cellphone policies have become increasingly popular since the pandemic, largely based on our collective adult gut hunches that kids are not learning well when they are consumed by TikTok and SnapChat.
This is perhaps a rare case in public policy, Figlio said, where the “data back up the hunches.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Ever since I first stepped onto the debate stage, I have been passionate about speech and debate. For the last three of my high school years, I have competed and placed nationally at major tournaments in Dallas, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta and Las Vegas, among many others. Debate demands an incredible amount of research, preparation and practice, but those aren’t the biggest challenges for me.
I attend a public high school in California that lacks a formal debate program or coach, which has forced me to choose between quitting an activity I love and competing independently without any school support.
I chose the latter. And that means I prepare alone in the dark, navigate complex registration processes and, most importantly, pay hefty fees.
As many of us know, debate is an effective way to strengthen students’ comprehension, critical thinking and presentation skills. Debate allows students to explore ideas in a myriad of topics, from biotechnology to nuclear proliferation, and find their unique passions and interests.
Yet for many students, a lack of school support is a major entry barrier. It has turned debate into another private-school-dominated space, where private-school students receive access to higher quality research and on-the-spot coaching on argument structure and prose, like a football coach adjusting strategy on the sidelines. Additionally, most prestigious tournaments in the U.S. prohibit non-school-affiliated debaters like me from competing altogether.
These circumstances de facto prevent lower-income debaters from becoming successful in the activity. And that is why I believe that all schools should incorporate speech and debate classes into their core curriculums. Existing history and English teachers could act as debate coaches, as they do in many private schools. School districts could even combine programs across high schools to save resources while expanding access (Mountain View High School and Los Altos High School in California have pursued this strategy).
Over the past two decades, the debate community has engaged in efforts to democratize access to speech and debate through the creation of new formats (for example, public forum), local debate associations and urban debate leagues, among others.
However, many of these initiatives haven’t been successful. These newer formats, initially intended to lessen the research burden on debaters, have shifted toward emphasizing strict evidence standards and complex debate jargon. This shift has made debate less, not more, accessible, and led to more students from private schools — who were quickly able to out-prepare those from public schools — entering and dominating the competition.
Local debate associations and competitive leagues for neighboring schools have provided more students with opportunities to participate. Still, debate via these organizations is limited, as they don’t provide direct coaching to member schools or rigorous opportunities for students, and prohibit certain students and programs from competing.
Similarly, urban debate leagues (for example, the Los Angeles Metropolitan Debate League) have been incredibly successful in expanding debate access to lower-income and minority students; however, these programs are concentrated in major metropolitan cities, face opposition from some school districts and rely on donor funding, which can be uncertain.
In my debate rounds, I have analyzed pressing social problems such as global warming and economic inequality through a policymaking lens; in some rounds I defended increased wealth taxes, and in others I argued against bans on fossil fuels. Without debate, I wouldn’t be so conscious of the issues in my community. Now, as I enter college, I’m looking forward to continuing debate and leveraging my skills to fight for change.
Speaking of college, in the competition for admission to the most selective colleges, extracurricular involvement can be a deciding factor, and debate is an excellent way to stand out, at least for those students with proper support.
However, when students from rural and low-income communities lack access to the same opportunities as students from more metropolitan and higher-income communities, we risk exacerbating the educational achievement gap to our collective detriment.
In the meantime, debate tournaments should reduce entry barriers for nontraditional debaters and for students from public schools without coaches and extra support.
Without these initiatives, too many rural and low-income students will be excluded from an amazing activity, one that is especially important in today’s polarizing and divisive climate.
Aayush Gandhi is a student at Dublin High School. He is an avid writer and nationally ranked Lincoln-Douglas debater.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Tanish Doshi was in high school when he pushed the Tucson Unified School District to take on an ambitious plan to reduce its climate footprint. In Oct. 2024, the availability of federal tax credits encouraged the district to adopt the $900 million plan, which involves goals of achieving net-zero emissions and zero waste by 2040, along with adding a climate curriculum to schools.
Now, access to those funds is disappearing, leaving Tucson and other school systems across the country scrambling to find ways to cover the costs of clean energy projects.
The Arizona school district, which did not want to impose an economic burden on its low-income population by increasing bonds or taxes, had expected to rely in part on federal dollars provided by the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act, Doshi said.
But under HR1, or the “one big, beautiful bill,” passed on July 4, Tucson schools will not be able to receive all of the expected federal funding in time for their upcoming clean energy projects. The law discontinues many clean energy tax credits, including those used by schools for solar power and electric vehicles, created under the IRA. When schools and other tax-exempt organizations receive these credits, they come in the form of a direct cash reimbursement.
At the same time, Tucson and thousands of districts across the country that were planning to develop solar and wind power projects are now forced to decide between accelerating them to try to meet HR1’s fast-approaching “commence construction” deadline of June 2026, finding other sources of funding or hitting pause on their plans. Tina Cook, energy project manager for Tucson schools, said the district might have to scale back some of its projects unless it could find local sources of funding.
“Phasing out the tax credits for wind and solar energy is going to make a huge, huge difference,” said Doshi, 18, now a first-year college student. “It ends a lot of investments in poor and minority communities. You really get rid of any notion of environmental justice that the IRA had advanced.”
Emma Weber leads a chant at a Colorado state capitol rally in support of “The Green New Deal for Colorado Schools.” Credit: Courtesy of Emma Weber
The tax credits in the IRA, the largest legislative investment in climate projects in U.S. history, had marked a major opportunity for schools and colleges to reduce their impact on the environment. Educational institutions are significant contributors to climate change: K-12 school infrastructure, for example, releases at least 41 million metric tons of emissions per year, according to a paper from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. The K-12 school system’s buses — some 480,000 — and meals also produce significant emissions and waste. Clean energy projects supported by the IRA were helping schools not only to limit their climate toll but also to save money on energy costs over the long term and improve student health, advocates said.
As a result, many students, consultants and sustainability leaders said, they have no plans to abandon clean energy projects. They said they want to keep working to cut emissions, even though that may be more difficult now.
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Sara Ross, cofounder of UndauntedK12, which helps school districts green their operations, divided HR1’s fallout on schools into three categories: the good, the bad and the ugly.
On the bright side, she said, schools can still get up to 50 percent off for installing ground source heat pumps — those credits will continue — to more efficiently heat and cool schools. The network of pipes in a ground source pump cycles heat from the shallow earth into buildings.
In the “bad” category, any electric vehicle acquired after Sept. 30 of this year will not be eligible for tax credits — drastically accelerating the IRA’s phase-out timeline by seven years. That applies to electric school buses as well as other district-owned vehicles. Electric vehicle charging stations must be installed by June 30, 2026 at an eligible location to claim a tax credit.*
The expiration of the federal tax credits could cost a district up to $40,000 more per vehicle, estimated Sue Gander, director of the Electric School Bus Initiative run by the nonprofit World Resources Institute.
Solar projects will see the most “ugly” effects of HR1, Ross said.
Los Angeles Unified School District is planning to build 21 solar projects on roofs, carports and other structures, plus 13 electric vehicle charging sites, as part of an effort to reduce energy costs and achieve 100 percent renewable energy by 2040. The district anticipated receiving around $25 million in federal tax credits to help pay for the $90 million contract, said Christos Chrysiliou, chief eco-sustainability officer for the district. With the tight deadlines imposed by HR1, the district can no longer count on receiving that money.
“It’s disappointing,” Chrysiliou said. “It’s nice to be able to have that funding in place to meet the goals and objectives that we have.”
Emma Weber, at left, trains student leaders at Sunrise Movement’s “summer intensive” in Illinois this year. Credit: Courtesy of Emma Weber
LAUSD is looking at a small portion of a $9 billion bond measure passed last year, as well as utility rebates, third-party financing and grants from the California Energy Commission, to help make up for some of the gaps in funding.
Many California State University campuses are in a similar position as they work to install solar to meet the system’s goal of carbon neutrality by 2045, said Lindsey Rowell, CSU’s chief energy, sustainability and transportation officer.
Tariffs on solar panel materials from overseas and the early sunsetting of tax credits mean that “the cost of these projects are becoming prohibitive for campuses,” Rowell said.
Sweeps of undocumented immigrants in California may also lead to labor shortages that could slow the pace of construction, Rowell added. “Limiting the labor force in any way is only going to result in an increased cost, so those changes are frightening as well,” she said.
New Treasury Department guidance, issued Aug. 15, made it much harder for projects to meet the threshold needed to qualify for the tax credits. Renewable energy projects previously qualified for credits once a developer spent 5 percent of a project’s cost. But the guidelines have been tightened — now, larger projects must pass a “physical work test,” meaning “significant physical labor has begun on a site,” before they can qualify for credits. With the construction commencement deadline looming next June, these will likely leave many projects ineligible for credits.
“The rules are new, complex [and] not widely understood,” Ross said. “We’re really concerned about schools’ ability to continue to do solar projects and be able to effectively navigate these new rules.”
Schools without “fancy legal teams” may struggle to understand how the new tax credit changes in HR1 will affect their finances and future projects, she added.
Some universities were just starting to understand how the IRA tax credits could help them fund projects. Lily Strehlow, campus sustainability coordinator at the University of Wisconsin, Eau-Claire, said the planning cycle for clean energy projects at the school can take ten years. The university is in the process of adding solar to the roof of a large science building, and depending on the date of completion, the project “might or might not” qualify for the credits, she said.
“At this point, everybody’s holding their breath,” said Rick Brown, founder of California-based TerraVerde Energy, a clean energy consultant to schools and agencies.
Brown said that none of his company’s projects are in a position where they’re not going to get done, but the company may end up seeing fewer new projects due to a higher cost of equipment.
Tim Carter, president of Second Nature, which supports climate work in education, added that colleges and universities are in a broader period of uncertainty, due to larger attacks from the Trump administration, and are not likely to make additional investments at this time: “We’re definitely in a wait and see.”
For youth activists, the fallout from HR1 is “disheartening,” Doshi said.
Emma and Molly Weber, climate activists since eighth grade, said they are frustrated. The Colorado-based twins, who will start college this fall, helped secure the first “Green New Deal for Schools” resolution in the nation in the Boulder Valley School District. Its goals include working toward a goal of Zero Net Energy by 2050, making school buildings greener, creating pathways to green jobs and expanding climate change education.
Emma, far left, and Molly Weber, far right, work with climate leaders from the Boulder Valley School District’s Sunrise Movement to prepare for Colorado’s legislative session. Credit: Courtesy of Emma Weber
“It feels very demoralizing to see something you’ve been working so hard at get slashed back, especially since I’ve spoken to so many students from all over the country about these clean energy tax credits, being like, ‘These are the things that are available to you, and this is how you can help convince your school board to work on this,’” Emma Weber said.
The Webers started thinking about other creative ways to pay for the clean energy transition and have settled on advocating for state-level legislation in the form of a climate superfund, where major polluters in a community would be responsible for contributing dollars to sustainability initiatives.
Consultants and sustainability coordinators said that they don’t see the demand for renewable energy going away. “Solar is the cheapest form of energy. It makes sense to put it on every rooftop that we can. And that’s true with or without tax credits,” Strehlow said.
*Correction: This version of the story includes updated information on the timeline for the expiration of tax credits for electric vehicle charging stations.
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at [email protected].
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
As a college president, I see the promise of higher education fulfilled every day. Many students at my institution, Whittier College, are the first in their families to attend a university. Some are parents or military veterans who have already served in the workforce and are returning to school to gain new skills, widen their perspectives and improve their job prospects.
These students are the future of our communities. We will rely on them to fill critical roles in health care, education, science, entrepreneurship and public service. They are also the students who stand to lose the most under the proposed fiscal year 2026 federal budget, and those who were already bracing for impact from the “One Big Beautiful Bill” cuts, including to the health care coverage many of them count on.
The drive with which these extraordinary students — both traditionally college-aged and older — pursue their degrees, often while juggling caregiving commitments or other responsibilities, never fails to inspire me.
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We do not yet know the precise contours of the spending provisions Congress will consider once funding from a continuing resolution expires at the end of September. Yet we expect they will take their cues from the president’s proposed budget, which slashes support for students and parents and especially hammers those already struggling to improve their lives by earning a college degree, with cuts to education, health and housing that could take effect as early as October 1.
That budget would mean lowering the maximum Pell Grant award from $7,395 to $5,710, reversing a decade of progress. For the nearly half of Whittier students who received Pell Grants last year, this rollback would profoundly jeopardize their chances of finishing school.
So would the proposal to severely restrict Federal Work-Study, which supports a third of Whittier students according to our most recent internal analysis, and to eliminate the Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant, which more than 16 percent of our student body relies upon. In addition, this budget would impose a cap on Direct PLUS Loans for Parents, which would impact roughly 60 percent of our parent borrowers. It would also do away with the Direct PLUS Loans for Graduates program.
These programs are lifelines, not just for our students but for students all across the country. They fuel social mobility and prosperity by making education a force for advancement through personal work ethic rather than a way to rack up debt.
If enacted, these proposed cuts would gut the support system that has enabled millions of low-income students to earn a college degree.
Higher education is a bridge. To cross it and achieve their full potential, students from all walks of life must have access to the support and resources colleges provide, whether through partnerships with local high schools or with professional gateway programs in engineering, accounting, business, nursing, physical therapy and more. Yet, to access these invaluable programs, they must be enrolled. How will they reach such heights if they suddenly can’t afford to advance their studies?
The harm I’ve described doesn’t stop with cuts to financial aid, loans and services. Proposed reductions also target research funding for NASA, NIH and the National Science Foundation. One frozen NASA grant has already led to the loss of paid student research fellowships at Whittier, a setback not just in dollars but in momentum for students building real-world skills, networks and résumés.
These research opportunities often enable talented first-generation students to connect their classroom learning to career pathways, opening the door to graduate school, lab technician roles and futures in STEM fields. We’ve seen how federal funding has supported student projects in everything from climate data analysis to environmental health.
Stripping away support for hands-on research undermines the federal government’s own calls for colleges like ours to better prepare students for the workforce by dismantling the very mechanisms that make such preparation possible.
It’s particularly disheartening that these changes will disproportionately hurt those students who are working the hardest to achieve their objectives, who have done everything right and have the most to lose from this lack of investment in the future.
The preservation and strengthening of Pell, Work-Study, Supplemental Educational Opportunity grants and federal loan programs is not a partisan issue. It is a moral and economic imperative for a nation that has long been proud to be a land of opportunity.
Let’s build a system for strivers that opens doors instead of slamming them shut.
Let’s recommit to higher education as a public good. Today’s students are willing to work hard to deserve our continuing belief in them.
Kristine E. Dillon is the president of Whittier College in California.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Rigorous research rarely shows that any teaching approach produces large and consistent benefits for students. But tutoring seemed to be a rare exception. Before the pandemic, almost 100 studies pointed to impressive math or reading gains for students who were paired with a tutor at least three times a week and used a proven curriculum or set of lesson plans.
Some students gained an extra year’s worth of learning — far greater than the benefit of smaller classes, summer school or a fantastic teacher. These were rigorous randomized controlled trials, akin to the way that drugs or vaccines are tested, comparing test scores of tutored students against those who weren’t. The expense, sometimes surpassing $4,000 a year per student, seemed worth it for what researchers called high-dosage tutoring.
On the strength of that evidence, the Biden administration urged schools to invest their pandemic recovery funds in intensive tutoring to help students catch up academically. Forty-six percent of public schools heeded that call, according to a 2024 federal survey, though it’s unclear exactly how much of the $190 billion in pandemic recovery funds have been spent on high-dosage tutoring and how many students received it.
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Even with ample money, schools immediately reported problems in ramping up high-quality tutoring for so many students. In 2024, researchers documented either tiny or no academic benefits from large-scale tutoring efforts in Nashville, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C.
New evidence from the 2023-24 school year reinforces those results.Researchers are rigorously studying large-scale tutoring efforts around the nation and testing whether effective tutoring can be done more cheaply. A dozen researchers studied more than 20,000 students in Miami; Chicago; Atlanta; Winston-Salem and Greensboro, North Carolina; Greenville, South Carolina; schools throughout New Mexico, and a California charter school network. This was also a randomized controlled study in which 9,000 students were randomly assigned to get tutoring and compared with 11,000 students who didn’t get that extra help.
Their preliminary results were “sobering,” according to a June report by the University of Chicago Education Lab and MDRC, a research organization.
The researchers found that tutoring during the 2023-24 school year produced only one or two months’ worth of extra learning in reading or math — a tiny fraction of what the pre-pandemic research had produced. Each minute of tutoring that students received appeared to be as effective as in the pre-pandemic research, but students weren’t getting enough minutes of tutoring altogether. “Overall we still see that the dosage students are getting falls far short of what would be needed to fully realize the promise of high-dosage tutoring,” the report said.
Monica Bhatt, a researcher at the University of Chicago Education Lab and one of the report’s authors, said schools struggled to set up large tutoring programs. “The problem is the logistics of getting it delivered,” said Bhatt. Effective high-dosage tutoring involves big changes to bell schedules and classroom space, along with the challenge of hiring and training tutors. Educators need to make it a priority for it to happen, Bhatt said.
Some of the earlier, pre-pandemic tutoring studies involved large numbers of students, too, but those tutoring programs were carefully designed and implemented, often with researchers involved. In most cases, they were ideal setups. There was much greater variability in the quality of post-pandemic programs.
“For those of us that run experiments, one of the deep sources of frustration is that what you end up with is not what you tested and wanted to see,” said Philip Oreopoulos, an economist at the University of Toronto, whose 2020 review of tutoring evidence influenced policymakers. Oreopoulos was also an author of the June report.
“After you spend lots of people’s money and lots of time and effort, things don’t always go the way you hope. There’s a lot of fires to put out at the beginning or throughout because teachers or tutors aren’t doing what you want, or the hiring isn’t going well,” Oreopoulos said.
Another reason for the lackluster results could be that schools offered a lot of extra help to everyone after the pandemic, even to students who didn’t receive tutoring. In the pre-pandemic research, students in the “business as usual” control group often received no extra help at all, making the difference between tutoring and no tutoring far more stark. After the pandemic, students — tutored and non-tutored alike — had extra math and reading periods, sometimes called “labs” for review and practice work. More than three-quarters of the 20,000 students in this June analysis had access to computer-assisted instruction in math or reading, possibly muting the effects of tutoring.
The report did find that cheaper tutoring programs appeared to be just as effective (or ineffective) as the more expensive ones, an indication that the cheaper models are worth further testing. The cheaper models averaged $1,200 per student and had tutors working with eight students at a time, similar to small group instruction, often combining online practice work with human attention. The more expensive models averaged $2,000 per student and had tutors working with three to four students at once. By contrast, many of the pre-pandemic tutoring programs involved smaller 1-to-1 or 2-to-1 student-to-tutor ratios.
Despite the disappointing results, researchers said that educators shouldn’t give up. “High-dosage tutoring is still a district or state’s best bet to improve student learning, given that the learning impact per minute of tutoring is largely robust,” the report concludes. The task now is to figure out how to improve implementation and increase the hours that students are receiving. “Our recommendation for the field is to focus on increasing dosage — and, thereby learning gains,” Bhatt said.
That doesn’t mean that schools need to invest more in tutoring and saturate schools with effective tutors. That’s not realistic with the end of federal pandemic recovery funds.
Instead of tutoring for the masses, Bhatt said researchers are turning their attention to targeting a limited amount of tutoring to the right students. “We are focused on understanding which tutoring models work for which kinds of students.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
After a three-year pause prompted by the pandemic, the clock on student loan repayments suddenly started ticking again in September 2023, and forbearance ended last September. For millions of borrowers like Shauntee Russell, the resumption of payments marked a harsh return to financial reality.
Russell, a single mother of three from Chicago, had received $127,000 in student loan forgiveness through the SAVE program, and had experienced profound relief at having that $632 monthly payment lifted from her shoulders. SAVE exemplified both the transformative power of debt relief and the urgent need to continue this fight — but now SAVE has been suspended.
Such setbacks cannot be the end of our story, as I document in my forthcoming book. The resumption of loan payments, while painful, must serve as a rallying cry rather than a surrender. We stand at a critical juncture. The Supreme Court’s devastating blow to former President Biden’s initial forgiveness plan and the ongoing legal challenges to programs like SAVE have left 45 million borrowers in a state of financial limbo. The fundamental inequities of our higher education system have never been more apparent.
Black students graduate with nearly 50 percent more debt than their white counterparts, while women hold roughly two-thirds of all outstanding student debt — a staggering $1.5 trillion that continues to grow. These aren’t just statistics; they represent systemic barriers that prevent entire communities from achieving economic mobility.
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The students I interviewed while reporting on this crisis reveal the human cost of inaction. They include Maria Sanchez, a nursing student in St. Louis who skips meals to save money and can only access textbooks through library loans.
Then there is Robert Carroll, who gave up his dorm room in Cleveland and now alternates between friends’ couches just to stay in school.
These students represent the millions who are working multiple jobs, sacrificing basic needs and seeing their dreams deferred under the weight of financial pressure.
Yet what strikes me most is their resilience and determination. Despite these overwhelming obstacles, these students persist, driven by the same belief that motivated civil rights leaders like Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. — that education is the pathway to economic empowerment and social justice.
The current political landscape, with Donald J. Trump’s return to the presidency and a Republican-controlled Congress, presents unprecedented challenges. Plans to dismantle key borrower protections and efforts to eliminate the Department of Education signal a dark period ahead for student debt relief.
But history teaches us that progress often comes through sustained grassroots organizing and innovative policy solutions at multiple levels of government and society.
Universities must step up with institutional relief programs, as my own institution, Trinity Washington University, did when it settled $1.8 million in student balances during the pandemic.
The Black church, which has long understood the connection between education and liberation, continues to provide crucial support through scholarship programs. Organizations like the United Negro College Fund, the Thurgood Marshall College Fund and the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education remain vital pillars in making higher education accessible.
Still, individual, institutional and state efforts, while necessary, are not sufficient. We need comprehensive federal action that treats student debt as what it truly is: a civil rights issue and a moral imperative. The magnitude of the crisis — it affects Americans across every congressional district — creates unique opportunities for bipartisan coalition building.
Smart advocates are already reframing the narrative by replacing partisan talking points with economic arguments that resonate across ideological lines: workforce development, entrepreneurship and American competitiveness on the world stage.
When student debt prevents nurses from serving rural communities, teachers from working in underserved schools and young entrepreneurs from starting businesses, it becomes an economic drag that affects everyone.
The path to federal action may require creative approaches — perhaps through tax policy, regulatory changes or targeted relief for specific professions — but the political mathematics of 45 million impacted voters ultimately makes comprehensive action not just morally necessary, but politically inevitable.
Student debt relief is not about handouts — it’s about honoring the promise that education should be a ladder up, not an anchor weighing down entire generations; it’s about ensuring that Shauntee Russell’s relief becomes the norm, not the exception. The fight is far from over.
The young activists I met at the March on Washington 60th anniversary understood something profound: Their debt is not their fault, but their fight is their responsibility. They carry forward the legacy of those who came before them who believed that access to education should not depend on one’s family wealth, and that crushing debt should not be the price of pursuing knowledge.
The arc of history still bends toward justice — but in this era of political resistance, we must be prepared to bend it ourselves through sustained organizing, innovative policy solutions and an unwavering commitment to the principle that education is a right, not a privilege reserved for the wealthy.
The resumption of payments is not the end of this story. It’s the beginning of the next chapter in our fight for educational equity and economic justice. And this chapter, like those before it, will be written by the voices of the millions who refuse to let debt define their destiny.
Jamal Watson is a professor and associate dean of graduate studies at Trinity Washington University and an editor at Diverse Issues In Higher Education.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
