Category: Trump administration

  • TRIO helps low-income students get to and through college. Trump wants to end it

    TRIO helps low-income students get to and through college. Trump wants to end it

    MOREHEAD, Ky. — The summer after ninth grade, Zoey Griffith found herself in an unfamiliar setting: a dorm on the Morehead State University campus.

    There, she’d spend the months before her sophomore year taking classes in core subjects including math and biology and electives like oil painting. 

    For Griffith, it was an opportunity, but a scary one. “It was a big deal for me to live on campus at the age of 14,” she said. Morehead State is about an hour from her hometown of Maysville. “I was nervous, and I remember that I cried the first time that my dad left me on move-in day.”

    Her mother became a parent as a teenager and urged her daughter to avoid the same experience. Griffith’s father works as a mechanic, and he frowns upon the idea of higher education, she said. 

    And so college back then seemed a distant and unlikely idea.

    But Griffith’s stepsister had introduced her to a federal program called Upward Bound. It places high school students in college dorms during the summer, where they can take classes and participate in workshops on preparing for the SAT and financial literacy. During the school year, students get tutoring and work on what are called individual success plans.

    Upward Bound students test the robots they built in their robotics class – evaluating for programming and mechanical issues. Credit: Photo courtesy of the Upward Bound Programs

    It’s part of a group of federal programs, known as TRIO, aimed at helping low-income and first-generation students earn a college degree, often becoming the first in their families to do so. 

    So, thanks to that advice from her stepsister, Kirsty Beckett, who’s now 27 and pursuing a doctorate in psychology, Griffith signed up and found herself in that summer program at Morehead State. Now, Griffith is enrolled at Maysville Community and Technical College, with plans to become an ultrasound technician.

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    TRIO, once a group of three programs — giving it a name that stuck — is now the umbrella over eight some dating back to 1965. Together, they serve roughly 870,000 students nationwide a year.

    It has worked with millions of students and has bipartisan support in Congress. Some in this part of the Appalachian region of Kentucky, and across the country, worry about students who won’t get the same assistance if President Donald Trump ends federal spending on the program. 

    Students Zoey Griffith, left, and Aniyah Caldwell, right, say the Upward Bound program has been life-changing for them. Upward Bound is one of eight federal programs under the TRIO umbrella. Credit: Michael Vasquez for The Hechinger Report

    A White House budget proposal would eliminate spending on TRIO. The document says “access to college is not the obstacle it was for students of limited means” and puts the onus on colleges to recruit and support students.

    Advocates note that the programs, which cost roughly $1.2 billion each year, have a proven track record. Students in Upward Bound, for example, are more than twice as likely to earn a bachelor’s degree by age 24 than other students from some of the nation’s poorest households, according to the Council for Opportunity in Education. COE is a nonprofit that represents TRIO programs nationwide and advocates for expanded opportunities for first-generation, low-income students.

    For the high school class of 2022, 74 percent of Upward Bound students enrolled immediately in college — compared with only 56 percent of high school graduates in the bottom income quartile. 

    Upward Bound is for high school students, like Griffith. Another TRIO program, Talent Search, helps middle and high school students, without the residential component. One called Student Support Services (SSS) provides tutoring, advising and other assistance to at-risk college students. Another program prepares students for graduate school and doctoral degrees, and yet another trains TRIO staff.

    A 2019 study found that after four years of college, students in SSS were 48 percent more likely to complete an associate’s degree or certificate, or transfer to a four-year institution, than a comparable group of students with similar backgrounds and similar levels of high school achievement who were not in the program. 

    “TRIO has been around for 60 years,” said Kimberly Jones, the president of COE. “We’ve produced millions of college graduates. We know it works.”

    Related: Tracking Trump: His actions to dismantle the Education Department, and more

    Yet Education Secretary Linda McMahon and the White House refer to the programs as a “relic of the past.” 

    Jones countered that census data shows that “students from the poorest families still earn college degrees at rates far below that of students from the highest-income families,” demonstrating continued need for TRIO.

    McMahon is challenging that and pushing for further study of those TRIO success rates. In 2020, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that even though the Education Department collects data on TRIO participants, “the agency has gaps in its evidence on program effectiveness.” The GAO criticized the Education Department for having “outdated” studies on some TRIO programs, and no studies at all for others. Since then, the department has expanded its evaluations of TRIO. 

    East Main Street in Morehead, Kentucky, just outside of Morehead State’s campus. Credit: Michael Vasquez for The Hechinger Report

    During a Senate subcommittee hearing in June, McMahon acknowledged “there is some effectiveness of the programs, in many circumstances.”

    Still, she said there is not enough research to justify TRIO’s total cost. “That’s a real drawback in these programs,” McMahon said. 

    Now, she is asking lawmakers to eliminate TRIO spending after this year and has already canceled some previously approved TRIO grants. 

    Related: A big reason rural students never go to college: No one recruits them 

    “What are we supposed to do, especially here in eastern Kentucky?” asked David Green, a former Upward Bound participant who is now marketing director for a pair of Kentucky hospitals.

    Green lives in a region that has some of the nation’s highest rates of unemployment, cancer and opioid addiction. “I mean, these people have big hearts, they want to grow,” he added. Cutting these programs amounts to “stifling us even more than we’re already stifled.”

    Green described his experience with TRIO at Morehead State in the mid-1980s as “one of the best things that ever happened to me.” 

    He grew up in a home without running water in Maysville, a city of about 8,000 people. It was on a TRIO trip to Washington, D.C., he recalled, that he stayed in a hotel for the first time. Green remembers bringing two suitcases so he could pack a pillow, sheets and comforter — unaware the hotel room would have its own.

    He met students from other towns and with different backgrounds. Some became lifelong friends. Green learned table manners, the kind of thing often required in business settings. After college, he was so grateful for TRIO that he became one of its tutors, working with the next generation of students. 

    TRIO’s all-encompassing nature makes it unique among college access programs, said Tom Stritikus, the president of Occidental College, a private liberal arts college in Los Angeles. He was previously president of Fort Lewis College, a public liberal arts school in Colorado with a large Native American student population. At both institutions, Stritikus said, he witnessed the effectiveness of TRIO’s methods, which he described as a “soup to nuts” menu of services for at-risk students trying to be the first in their families to earn degrees.

    After participating in the Upward Bound program, David Green has had a successful career, becoming a community leader in his hometown of Maysville, Kentucky. Credit: Michael Vasquez for The Hechinger Report

    Jones, of the Council for Opportunity in Education, said she is cautiously optimistic that Congress will continue funding TRIO, despite the Trump administration’s request. The programs serve students in all 50 states. According to the COE, about 34 percent are white, 32 percent are Black, 23 percent are Hispanic, 5 percent are Asian, and 3 percent are Native American. TRIO’s guidelines require that a majority of participants come from families making less than 150 percent of the federal poverty level. For a family of four living in the contiguous United States, that’s a max of $48,225 a year.

    Related: How Trump is changing higher education: The view from 4 campuses

    In May, Rep. Mike Simpson, an Idaho Republican, called TRIO “one of the most effective programs in the federal government,” which, he said, is supported by “many, many members of Congress.” 

    In June, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican from West Virginia and a former TRIO employee, spoke about its importance to her state. TRIO helps “a student that really needs the extra push, the camaraderie, the community,” she said. “I’ve gone to their graduations, and been their speaker, and it’s really quite delightful to see how far they’ve come, in a short period of time.”

    TRIO survived, with its funding intact, when the Senate appropriations committee approved its budget last month. The House is expected to take up its version of the annual appropriations bill for education in early September. Both chambers ultimately have to agree on federal spending, a process that could drag on until December, leaving TRIO’s fate in Congress uncertain. 

    While lawmakers debate its future, the Trump administration could also delay or halt TRIO funding on its own. Earlier this year, the administration took the unprecedented step of unilaterally canceling about 20 previously approved new and continuing TRIO grants.

    At Morehead State, leaders say the university — and the region it serves — need the boost it receives from TRIO: While roughly 38 percent of American adults have earned at least a bachelor’s degree, in Kentucky, that figure is only 16 percent. And, locally, it’s 7 percent, according to Summer Fawn Bryant, the director of TRIO’s Talent Search programs at the university. 

    Summer Fawn Bryant, center, is director of TRIO’s Talent Search programs at Morehead State University in Kentucky. She stands with former TRIO students Alexandria Daniel, left, and Blake Thayer, right. Credit: Photo courtesy of Summer Fawn Bryant

    TRIO works to counter the stigma of attending college that still exists in parts of eastern Kentucky, Bryant said. A student from a humble background who is considering college, she said, might be scolded with the phrase: Don’t get above your raisin’.

    “A parent may say it,” Bryant said. “A teacher may say it.” 

    She added that she’s seen time and again how these programs can turn around the lives of young students facing adversity. 

    Students like Beth Cockrell, an Upward Bound alum from Pineville, Ky., who said her mom struggled with parenting. “Upward Bound stepped in as that kind of co-parent and helped me decide what my major was going to be.” 

    Cockrell went on to earn three degrees at Morehead State and has worked as a teacher for the past 19 years. She now works with students at her alma mater and teaches third grade at Conkwright Elementary School, about an hour away.

    In a few years, 17-year-old Upward Bound student Isaac Bocook plans to join the teaching ranks too — as a middle school social studies teacher. Bocook said he was indecisive about what to study after high school, but he finally figured it out after attending a career fair at Morehead State’s historic Button Auditorium. 

    Upward Bound students visit the Great Lake Science Center in Cleveland for the end-of-summer educational trip. Credit: Photo courtesy of the Upward Bound Programs

    Bocook lives in Lewis County, with just under 13,000 residents and a single public high school. At Morehead State’s TRIO program, Bocook met teenagers from across the entire region, which he said improved his social skills. TRIO also helped him with all kinds of paperwork on the pathway to adulthood. Filling out financial aid forms. Writing scholarship applications. Crafting a resume.

    “I’m just truly grateful to have TRIO, as sort of like a hand to hold,” Bocook said.

    His need for guidance is similar to what students at Morgan County High School in West Liberty, Kentucky, experience, said Lori Keeton, the school guidance counselor. The challenge facing these first-generation students, she said, is that “you just simply don’t know what you don’t know.”

    As the sole counselor for 550 students, Keeton doesn’t have time to help each student navigate the complex college-application process and said she worries that some of her students will apply to fewer colleges, or no colleges at all, if TRIO disappears. 

    TRIO’s Talent Search program serves about 100 students at her high school, and roughly another dozen are part of Upward Bound. Each program has a dedicated counselor who visits regularly to guide and assist students.

    Related: From gangs to college

    Sherry Adkins, an eastern Kentucky native who attended TRIO more than 50 years ago and went on to become a registered nurse, said efforts to cut TRIO spending ignore the long-term benefits. “Do you want all of these people that are disadvantaged to continue like that? Where they’re taking money from society? Or do you want to help prepare us to become successful people who pay lots of taxes?”

    As Washington considers TRIO’s future, program directors like Bryant, at Morehead State, press forward. She has preserved a text message a former student sent her two years ago to remind her of what’s at stake.

    After finishing college, the student was attending a conference on child abuse when a presenter showed a slide that included the quote: “Every child who winds up doing well has had at least one stable and committed relationship with a supportive adult.”

    “Forever thankful,” the student texted Bryant, “that you were that supportive adult for me.”

    Contact editor Nirvi Shah at 212-678-3445, securely on Signal at NirviShah.14 or via email at [email protected]. 

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

    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.

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  • What Trump’s education cuts mean for literacy

    What Trump’s education cuts mean for literacy

    This podcast, Sold a Story, was produced by APM Reports and reprinted with permission.

    There’s an idea about how children learn to read that’s held sway in schools for more than a generation – even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read. In this new American Public Media podcast, host Emily Hanford investigates the influential authors who promote this idea and the company that sells their work. It’s an exposé of how educators came to believe in something that isn’t true and are now reckoning with the consequences – children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended.

    Episode 14: The Cuts

    Education research is at a turning point in the United States. The Trump administration is slashing government funding for science and dismantling the Department of Education. We look at what the cuts mean for the science of reading — and the effort to get that science into schools.

    This podcast, Sold a Story, was produced by  APM Reports and reprinted with permission.

    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.

    Join us today.

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  • What’s happened since Texas killed in-state tuition for undocumented students

    What’s happened since Texas killed in-state tuition for undocumented students

    SAN ANTONIO — Ximena had a plan. 

    The 18-year-old from Houston was going to start college in the fall at the University of Texas at Tyler, where she had been awarded $10,000 a year in scholarships. That, she hoped, would set her up for her dream: a Ph.D. in chemistry, followed by a career as a professor or researcher.

    “And then the change to in-state tuition happened, and that’s when I knew for sure that I had to pivot,” said Ximena, who was born in Mexico but attended schools stateside since kindergarten. (The Hechinger Report is referring to her by only her first name because she fears retaliation for her immigration status.) 

    In June, the Texas attorney general’s office and the Trump administration worked together to end the provisions in a state law that had offered thousands of undocumented students like her lower in-state tuition rates at Texas public colleges. State and federal officials successfully argued in court that the long-standing policy discriminated against U.S. citizens from other states who paid a higher rate. That rationale has now been replicated in similar lawsuits against Kentucky, Oklahoma and Minnesota — part of a broader offensive against immigrants’ access to public education. 

    At UT Tyler, in-state tuition and fees for the upcoming academic year total $9,736, compared to more than $25,000 for out-of-state students. Ximena and her family couldn’t afford the higher tuition bill, so she withdrew. Instead, she enrolled at Houston Community College, where out-of-state costs are $227 per semester hour, nearly three times the in-district rate. The school offers only basic college-level chemistry classes, so to set herself up for a doctorate or original research, Ximena will still need to find a way to pay for a four-year university down the line. 

    Her predicament is exactly what state lawmakers from both political parties had hoped to avoid when they passed the Texas Dream Act, 2001 legislation that not only opened doors to higher education for undocumented students but was also meant to bolster Texas’s economy and its workforce long-term. With that law, Texas became the first of more than two dozen states to implement in-state tuition for undocumented students, and for nearly 24 years, the landmark policy remained intact. Conservative lawmakers repeatedly proposed to repeal it, but despite years of single-party control in the state legislature, not enough Republicans embraced repeal even as recently as this spring, days before the Texas attorney general’s office and the federal Department of Justice moved to end it. 

    Now, as the fall semester approaches, immigrant students are weighing whether to disenroll from their courses or await clarity on how the consent agreement entered into by the state and DOJ affects them.

    Immigration advocates are worried that Texas colleges and universities are boxing out potential attendees who are lawfully present and still qualify for in-state tuition despite the court ruling — including recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, asylum applicants and Temporary Protected Status holders — because university personnel lack immigration expertise and haven’t been given clear guidelines on exactly who needs to pay the higher tuition rate. 

    At Austin Community College, which serves an area as large as Connecticut, members of the board of trustees are unsure how to accurately implement the ruling. As they await answers, they’ve so far decided against sending letters asking their students for sensitive information in order to determine tuition rates. 

    “This confusion will inevitably harm students because what we find is that in the absence of information and in the presence of fear and anxiety, students will opt to not continue higher education,” said Manuel Gonzalez, vice chair of the ACC board of trustees.

    A billboard promoting Austin Community College in Spanish sits on a highway that leads to Lockhart, Texas. Credit: Sergio Flores for The Hechinger Report

    Policy experts, meanwhile, warn that Texas’s workforce could suffer as talented young people, many of whom have spent their entire education in the state’s public school system, will no longer be able to afford the associate’s and bachelor’s degrees that would allow them to pursue careers that would help propel their local economies. Under the Texas Dream Act, beneficiaries were required to commit to applying for lawful permanent residence as soon as possible, giving them the opportunity to hold down jobs related to their degrees. Without resident status, it’s likely they’ll still work — just more in lower-paying, under-the-radar jobs.  

    “It’s so short-sighted in terms of the welfare of the state of Texas,” said Barbara Hines, a former law school professor who helped legislators craft the Texas Dream Act. 

    Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter featuring the most important stories in education. 

    By the turn of the century, almost two decades after undocumented children won the right to attend public school in the U.S., immigrant students and their champions remained frustrated that college remained out of reach. 

    For retired Army National Guard Maj. Gen. Rick Noriega, a Democrat who served in the Texas Legislature at the time, that reality hit close to home when he learned of a young yard worker in his district who wanted to enroll at the local community college for aviation mechanics but couldn’t afford out-of-state tuition. 

    Noriega called the school chancellor’s office, which was able to provide funding for the student to attend. But that experience led him to wonder: How many more kids in his district were running up against the same barriers to higher education? 

    So he worked with a sociologist to poll students at local high schools about the problem, which turned out to be widespread. And Noriega’s district wasn’t an outlier. In a state that has long had one of the nation’s largest unauthorized immigrant populations, politicians across the partisan divide knew affected constituents, friends or family members and wanted to help. Once Noriega decided to propose legislation, a Republican, Fred Hill, asked to serve as a joint author on the bill. 

    To proponents of the Texas Dream Act, the best argument in support of in-state tuition for undocumented students was an economic one. After the state had already invested in these students during K-12 public schooling, it made sense to continue developing them so they could eventually help meet Texas’ workforce needs. 

    “We’d spent all this money on these kids, and they’d done everything that we asked them to do — in many instances superstars and valedictorians and the like — and then they hit this wall, which was higher education that was cost prohibitive,” said Noriega. 

    The legislation easily passed the Texas House of Representatives, which was Democratic-controlled at the time, but the Republican-led Senate was less accommodating. 

    “I couldn’t even get a hearing,’” said Leticia Van de Putte, the then-state senator who sponsored the legislation in her chamber. 

    To persuade her Republican colleagues, she added several restrictions, including requiring undocumented students to live in Texas for three years before finishing high school or receiving a GED. (Three years was estimated as the average time it would take a family to pay enough in state taxes to make up the difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition.) She also included the clause mandating that undocumented students who accessed in-state tuition sign an affidavit pledging to pursue green cards as soon as they were able.   

    Van de Putte also turned to Texas business groups to hammer home the economic case for the bill. And she convinced the business community to pay for buses to bring Latino evangelical conservative pastors from Dallas, San Antonio, Houston and other areas of the state to Austin, so they could knock on doors in support of the legislation and pray with Republican senators and their staff. 

    After that, the Texas Dream Act overwhelmingly passed the state Senate in May 2001, and then-Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, signed it into law the following month.

    Related: How Trump is changing higher education: The view from four campuses

    Yet by 2007, even as immigrant rights advocates, faith-based groups and business associations formed a coalition to defend immigrants against harmful state policies, the Texas legislature was starting to introduce a wave of generally anti-immigrant proposals. In 2010, polling suggested Texans overwhelmingly opposed allowing undocumented students to pay in-state tuition rates. 

    By 2012, a new slew of right-wing politicians was elected to office, many philosophically opposed to the law — and loud about it. Perry’s defense of the policy had come back to haunt him during the 2012 Republican presidential primary, when his campaign was dogged by criticism after he told opponents of tuition equity during a debate, “I don’t think you have a heart.” 

    Still, none of the many bills introduced over the years to repeal the Texas Dream Act were successful. And even Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican border hawk, at times equivocated on the policy, with his spokesperson saying in 2013 that Abbott believed “the objective” of in-state tuition regardless of immigration status was “noble.”

    Legislative observers say that some Republicans in the state continue to support the policy. “It’s a bipartisan issue. There are Republicans in support of in-state tuition,” said Luis Figueroa, senior director of legislative affairs at the public policy research and advocacy nonprofit Every Texan. “They cannot publicly state it.”

    Meanwhile, as the topic became more politically charged in Texas, the Texas Dream Act ended up amplifying a larger conversation that eventually led to the creation of DACA, the Obama-era program that has given some undocumented immigrants access to deportation protections and work permits. 

    Even before DACA, many immigrants worked, and those who remain undocumented often still do, either as independent contractors for employers that turn a blind eye to their immigration status or by starting their own businesses. A study from May 2020 found that unauthorized residents make up 8.2 percent of the state’s workforce, and for every dollar spent toward public services for them, the state of Texas recouped $1.21 in revenue. 

    But without the immediate legal permission to work, undocumented college graduates who had benefited from the Texas Dream Act found themselves limited despite their degrees. As the fight for tuition equity spread to other states, so did the fight for a legal solution to support the students it benefited. 

    When these young people — affectionately dubbed Dreamers — took center stage to more publicly advocate for themselves, their plight proved sympathetic. By 2017, the same year Trump began his first term, polling had flipped to show a plurality of Texans in support of in-state tuition for undocumented students. More recently, research has indicated time and time again that Americans support a pathway to legal status for undocumented residents brought to the U.S. as children. 

    But arguments against in-state tuition regardless of immigration status also grew in popularity: Critics contended that the policy is unfair to U.S. citizens from other states who have to pay higher rates, or that undocumented students are taking spots at competitive schools that could be filled by documented Americans. 

    The DOJ leaned on similar rhetoric in the lawsuit that killed tuition equity in Texas, saying the state law is superseded by 1996 federal legislation banning undocumented immigrants from getting in-state tuition based on residency. That argument has become a template as the Trump administration has sued to dismantle other states’ in-state tuition policies for undocumented residents.

    In Kentucky, state Attorney General Russell Coleman, a Republican, has followed in Texas’ footsteps, recommending that the state council overseeing higher education withdraw its regulation allowing for access to in-state tuition instead of fighting to defend it in court. 

    At the same time, the Trump administration has found other ways to cut back on higher education opportunities for undocumented students, rescinding a policy that had helped them participate in career, technical and adult education programs and investigating universities for offering them scholarships. 

    Related: Which schools and colleges are being investigated by the Trump administration? 

    Back in Texas, the sudden policy change regarding in-state tuition is causing chaos. Even the state’s two largest universities, Texas A&M and the University of Texas, are using different guidelines to decide which students must pay out-of-state rates. 

    Clouds fill the sky behind the tower at the University of Texas. Credit: Sergio Flores for The Washington Post via Getty Images

    “Universities, I think, are the ones that are put in this really difficult position,” Figueroa said. “They are not immigration experts. They’ve received very little guidance about how to interpret the consent decree.” 

    Amid so much confusion, Figueroa predicted, future lawsuits will likely crop up. Already, affected students and organizations have filed motions in court seeking to belatedly defend the Texas Dream Act against the DOJ.

    In the meantime, young scholars are facing difficult choices. One student, who asked to remain anonymous because of her undocumented immigration status, was scrolling through the news on her phone before bed when she saw a headline about the outcome of the DOJ court case. 

    “I burst in tears because, you know, as someone who’s been fighting to get ahead in their education, right now that I’m in higher education, it’s been a complete blessing,” she said. “So the first thing that I just thought of is ‘What am I going to do now? Where is my future heading?’ The plans that I have had going for me, are they going to have to come to a complete halt?’” 

    The young woman, who has lived in San Antonio since she was 9 months old, had enrolled in six courses for the fall at Texas A&M-San Antonio and wasn’t sure whether to drop them. It would be her final semester before earning her psychology and sociology degrees, but she couldn’t fathom paying for out-of-state tuition. 

    “I’m in the unknown,” she said, like “many students in this moment.”

    Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at [email protected].

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

    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.

    Join us today.

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  • A ‘Great Defection’ threatens to empty universities and colleges of top teaching talent

    A ‘Great Defection’ threatens to empty universities and colleges of top teaching talent

    Paulina Cossette spent six years getting a doctoral degree with the goal of becoming a university professor. But it wasn’t long before she gave up on that path.

    With higher education under political assault, and opportunities as well as job security diminished by enrollment declines, Cossette felt burnt out and disillusioned. So she quit her hard-won job as an assistant professor of American government at a small private college in Maryland and used the skills she’d learned to go into business for herself as a freelance copy editor.

    Now Cossette is hearing from other newly minted Ph.D.s and tenured faculty who want out — so many, she’s expanded her business to help them leave academia, as she did. 

    Seemingly relentless attacks and funding cuts since the start of Donald Trump’s second presidential term have been “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said Cossette, who left higher education on the eve of the pandemic, in 2019. “I’m hearing from a lot more people that it’s too much.”

    An exodus appears to be under way of Ph.D.s and faculty generally, who are leaving academia in the face of political, financial and enrollment crises. It’s a trend federal data and other sources show began even before Trump returned to the White House. 

    On top of everything else affecting higher education, this is likely to reduce the quality of education for undergraduates, experts say. 

    Nearly 70 percent of people receiving doctorates were already leaving higher education for industry, government and other sectors, not including those without job offers or who opted to continue their studies, according to the most recent available figures from the National Science Foundation — up from fewer than 50 percent decades ago.

    As for faculty, more than a third of provosts reported higher-than-usual turnover last year, in a survey by Hanover Research and the industry publication Inside Higher Ed. That was before the turmoil of this late winter and spring. 

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

    “People who can get out will get out,” said L. Maren Wood, director and CEO of the Center for Graduate Career Success, which works with doctoral and other graduate students at 69 colleges and universities to provide career help. 

    If the spree of general job-switching that followed Covid was dubbed “the Great Resignation,” Wood said, what she’s seeing now in higher education is “the Great Defection.”

    Getting a Ph.D. is a traditional pipeline to an academic career. Now some of the brightest candidates — who have spent years doing cutting-edge research in their fields to prepare for faculty jobs — are leaving higher education or signing on with universities abroad, Wood said. 

    “It’s going to affect the quality of a student’s experience if they don’t get to study with those leading minds, who are going into private industry or to other countries,” she said.

    “What’s the joke about those who can’t do, teach? You don’t want to be in a situation where the only people left in your classrooms are the ones who can’t do anything else.”

    Related: So much for saving the planet. Climate careers, and many others, evaporate for class of 2025

    Parents sending children to college in the fall should know that they’ll be taking classes “with a faculty member who is worried about his or her research funding and who doesn’t have the help of graduate student teaching assistants. And that’s really going to impact the quality of your student’s experience,” said Julia Kent, a vice president at the Council of Graduate Schools, who conducts research about Ph.D. career pathways. 

    “The quality of undergraduate education is at stake here,” Kent said.

    Even Ph.D.s who want to work in academia are being thwarted. 

    During the Great Recession and the pandemic — two recent periods when there were few available faculty jobs — doctoral candidates could continue their studies until things got better, Wood said. This time, the Trump administration’s cuts to research funding have stripped many of that option.

    “This is way worse” than those earlier crises, she said. “Doctoral students are in panic mode.”

    Related: How Trump is changing higher education: The view from 4 campuses 

    The same deep federal cuts mean doctoral candidates in science, technology, engineering, math and other fields can’t complete the research they need to be eligible for what few academic jobs do become available.

    “You’re basically knee-capping that younger generation, which undermines the intergenerational dynamism that takes place in higher education. And that trickles down into the classroom,” said Isaac Kamola, an associate professor of political science at Trinity College and head of the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom at the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP.

    Doctoral candidates early in their programs are questioning whether they should stay, said Wood. That could reduce the supply of future faculty. So will the fact that some universities have reduced the number of new Ph.D. candidates they will accept or have rescinded admission offers, citing federal budget cuts. Fewer prospective candidates are likely to apply, said Timothy Burke, a professor of history at Swarthmore College who has written about this topic.

    “Our graduating students right now are thinking differently about what it means to start a doctorate,” Burke said.

    Meanwhile, he said, “all the things that were dismaying to many faculty of long standing just feel worse. People who would have been totally content to stay put, whose prospects were good, who had good positions, who were more or less happy — now they’re thinking hard about whether there’s a future in this.”

    That means undergraduates could experience fewer available classroom professors and teaching and graduate assistants or the “only tenuous presence of faculty who are thinking hard about going somewhere else,” he said. “There are going to be programs that are going to be shut. There are going to be departments running on fumes.”

    The route to a university faculty job has always been hard. Finishing a doctoral degree takes a median of nearly six years, according to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences — nearly seven in the arts and humanities. 

    Doctoral students who manage to finish their programs have always had to fight for faculty positions, even before institutions announced cutbacks and hiring freezes. 

    Universities enroll far more doctoral candidates, to provide cheap labor as teaching and research assistants, than they will ever hire. The number of doctoral degrees awarded rose from 163,827 in 2010 to an estimated 207,000 this year, the National Center for Education Statistics says — a 26 percent increase, during a period in which the number of full-time faculty positions went up at less than half that rate. 

    Related: These federal programs help low-income students get to an through college. Trump wants to pull the funding

    With colleges and universities under stress, still more doctoral candidates now face the prospect of spending years “training for a career that isn’t actually available,” said Ashley Ruba, a Ph.D. who left higher education to work at Meta, where she builds virtual reality systems. 

    “If you told someone going to law school that they couldn’t get a job as a lawyer, I don’t think they’d do it,” said Ruba, who is also the founder of a career-coaching service for fellow Ph.D.s called After Academia.

    People already in faculty jobs appear equally on edge. More than 1 in 3 said in a recent survey that they have less academic freedom than in the past; half said they worry about online harassment. And faculty salaries have been stagnant. Pay declined for the three years starting with the pandemic, when adjusted for inflation, the AAUP reports, and has still not recovered to pre-pandemic levels. 

    People with Ph.D.s can earn more outside academia — an average of 37 percent more, one study found. Employers value skills including active learning, critical thinking, problem-solving and resilience, which is “everything you learn in a doctoral program,” Ruba said.

    The proportion of faculty considering leaving their jobs who are looking for work outside of academia has spiked. Before the pandemic, it was between 1 and 8 percent each year. Since then, it has been between 11 and 16 percent, according to R. Todd Benson, executive director and principal investigator at the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, or COACHE. The figure comes from surveys conducted at 54 major universities and colleges.

    Related: More women are landing construction jobs. Trump’s war on DEI could change that

    A Facebook group of dissatisfied academics, called The Professor Is Out, has swelled to nearly 35,000 members. It was started by Karen Kelsky, a former anthropology professor who previously helped people get jobs in academia and now coaches them on how to leave it.

    “It’s difficult to overcome the stereotype of a university professor, which is that they’re coddled, they’re overprivileged, they’re arrogant and just enjoying total job security that nobody else has,” said Kelsky, who also wrote “The Professor Is In: The Essential Guide to Turning Your Ph.D. Into a Job,” a second edition of which is due out this fall. 

    Today, “they are overworked. They’re grossly underpaid. They are being called the enemy. And they’re bailing on academia,” she said.

    “Every time I talk to a tenured professor, they tell me how miserable they are and how desperate they are to get out,” said Kelsky. “And there’s no way this isn’t having real-life, tangible impacts on the quality of education students are getting.”

    Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, [email protected] or jpm.82 on Signal.

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

    The 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.

    Join us today.

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  • Experts knock new Trump plan to collect college admissions data

    Experts knock new Trump plan to collect college admissions data

    President Donald Trump wants to collect more admissions data from colleges and universities to make sure they’re complying with a 2023 Supreme Court decision that ended race-conscious affirmative action. And he wants that data now. 

    But data experts and higher education scholars warn that any new admissions data is likely to be inaccurate, impossible to interpret and ultimately misused by policymakers. That’s because Trump’s own policies have left the statistics agency inside the Education Department with a skeleton staff and not enough money, expertise or time to create this new dataset. 

    The department already collects data on enrollment from every institution of higher education that participates in the federal student loan program. The results are reported through the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). But in an Aug. 7 memorandum, Trump directed the Education Department, which he sought to close in March, to expand that task and provide “transparency” into how some 1,700 colleges that do not admit everyone are making their admissions decisions. And he gave Education Secretary Linda McMahon just 120 days to get it done. 

    Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.

    Expanding data collection on applicants is not a new idea. The Biden administration had already ordered colleges to start reporting race and ethnicity data to the department this fall in order to track changes in diversity in postsecondary education. But in a separate memorandum to the head of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), McMahon asked for even more information, including high school grades and college entrance exam scores, all broken down by race and gender.  

    Bryan Cook, director of higher education policy at the Urban Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C., called the 120-day timeline “preposterous” because of the enormous technical challenges. For example, IPEDS has never collected high school GPAs. Some schools use a weighted 5.0 scale, giving extra points for advanced classes, and others use an unweighted 4.0 scale, which makes comparisons messy. Other issues are equally thorny. Many schools no longer require applicants to report standardized test scores and some no longer ask them about race so the data that Trump wants doesn’t exist for those colleges. 

    “You’ve got this effort to add these elements without a mechanism with which to vet the new variables, as well as a system for ensuring their proper implementation,” said Cook. “You would almost think that whoever implemented this didn’t know what they were doing.” 

    Cook has helped advise the Education Department on the IPEDS data collection for 20 years and served on technical review panels, which are normally convened first to recommend changes to the data collection. Those panels were disbanded earlier this year, and there isn’t one set up to vet Trump’s new admissions data proposal.

    Cook and other data experts can’t figure out how a decimated education statistics agency could take on this task. All six NCES employees who were involved in IPEDS data collection were fired in March, and there are only three employees left out of 100 at NCES, which is run by an acting commissioner who also has several other jobs. 

    An Education Department official, who did not want to be named, denied that no one left inside the Education Department has IPEDS experience. The official said that staff inside the office of the chief data officer, which is separate from the statistics agency, have a “deep familiarity with IPEDS data, its collection and use.” Former Education Department employees told me that some of these employees have experience in analyzing the data, but not in collecting it.

    In the past, there were as many as a dozen employees who worked closely with RTI International, a scientific research institute, which handles most of the IPEDS data collection work. 

    Technical review eliminated

    Of particular concern is that RTI’s $10 million annual contract to conduct the data collection had been slashed approximately in half by the Department of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE, according to two former employees, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation. Those severe budget cuts eliminated the technical review panels that vet proposed changes to IPEDS, and ended training for colleges and universities to submit data properly, which helped with data quality. RTI did not respond to my request to confirm the cuts or answer questions about the challenges it will face in expanding its work on a reduced budget and staffing.

    The Education Department did not deny that the IPEDS budget had been cut in half. “The RTI contract is focused on the most mission-critical IPEDS activities,” the Education Department official said. “The contract continues to include at least one task under which a technical review panel can be convened.”  

    Additional elements of the IPEDS data collection have also been reduced, including a contract to check data quality.

    Last week, the scope of the new task became more apparent. On Aug. 13, the administration released more details about the new admissions data it wants, describing how the Education Department is attempting to add a whole new survey to IPEDS, called the Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement (ACTS), which will disaggregate all admissions data and most student outcome and financial aid data by race and gender. College will have to report on both undergraduate and graduate school admissions. The public has 60 days to comment, and the administration wants colleges to start reporting this data this fall. 

    Complex collection

    Christine Keller, executive director of the Association for Institutional Research, a trade group of higher education officials who collect and analyze data, called the new survey “one of the most complex IPEDS collections ever attempted.” 

    Traditionally, it has taken years to make much smaller changes to IPEDS, and universities are given a year to start collecting the new data before they are required to submit it. (Roughly 6,000 colleges, universities and vocational schools are required to submit data to IPEDS as a condition for their students to take out federal student loans or receive federal Pell Grants. Failure to comply results in fines and the threat of losing access to federal student aid.)

    Normally, the Education Department would reveal screenshots of data fields, showing what colleges would need to enter into the IPEDS computer system. But the department has not done that, and several of the data descriptions are ambiguous. For example, colleges will have to report test scores and GPA by quintile, broken down by race and ethnicity and gender. One interpretation is that a college would have to say how many Black male applicants, for example, scored above the 80th percentile on the SAT or the ACT. Another interpretation is that colleges would need to report the average SAT or ACT score of the top 20 percent of Black male applicants. 

    The Association for Institutional Research used to train college administrators on how to collect and submit data correctly and sort through confusing details — until DOGE eliminated that training. “The absence of comprehensive, federally funded training will only increase institutional burden and risk to data quality,” Keller said. Keller’s organization is now dipping into its own budget to offer a small amount of free IPEDS training to universities. 

    The Education Department is also requiring colleges to report five years of historical admissions data, broken down into numerous subcategories. Institutions have never been asked to keep data on applicants who didn’t enroll. 

    “It’s incredible they’re asking for five years of prior data,” said Jordan Matsudaira, an economist at American University who worked on education policy in the Biden and Obama administrations. “That will be square in the pandemic years when no one was reporting test scores.”

    ‘Misleading results’

    Matsudaira explained that IPEDS had considered asking colleges for more academic data by race and ethnicity in the past and the Education Department ultimately rejected the proposal. One concern is that slicing and dicing the data into smaller and smaller buckets would mean that there would be too few students and the data would have to be suppressed to protect student privacy. For example, if there were two Native American men in the top 20 percent of SAT scores at one college, many people might be able to guess who they were. And a large amount of suppressed data would make the whole collection less useful.

    Also, small numbers can lead to wacky results. For example, a small college could have only two Hispanic male applicants with very high SAT scores. If both were accepted, that’s a 100 percent admittance rate. If only 200 white women out of 400 with the same test scores were accepted, that would be only a 50 percent admittance rate. On the surface, that can look like both racial and gender discrimination. But it could have been a fluke. Perhaps both of those Hispanic men were athletes and musicians. The following year, the school might reject two different Hispanic male applicants with high test scores but without such impressive extracurriculars. The admissions rate for Hispanic males with high test scores would drop to zero. “You end up with misleading results,” said Matsudaira. 

    Reporting average test scores by race is another big worry. “It feels like a trap to me,” said Matsudaira. “That is mechanically going to give the administration the pretense of claiming that there’s lower standards of admission for Black students relative to white students when you know that’s not at all a correct inference.”

    The statistical issue is that there are more Asian and white students at the very high end of the SAT score distribution, and all those perfect 1600s will pull the average up for these racial groups. (Just like a very tall person will skew the average height of a group.) Even if a college has a high test score threshold that it applies to all racial groups and no one below a 1400 is admitted, the average SAT score for Black students will still be lower than that of white students. (See graphic below.) The only way to avoid this is to purely admit by test score and take only the students with the highest scores. At some highly selective universities, there are enough applicants with a 1600 SAT to fill the entire class. But no institution fills its student body by test scores alone. That could mean overlooking applicants with the potential to be concert pianists, star soccer players or great writers.

    The Average Score Trap

    This graphic by Kirabo Jackson, an economist at Northwestern University, depicts the problem of measuring racial discrimination though average test scores. Even for a university that admits all students above a certain cut score, the average score of one racial group (red) will be higher than the average score of the other group (blue). Source: graphic posted on Bluesky Social by Josh Goodman

    Admissions data is a highly charged political issue. The Biden administration originally spearheaded the collection of college admissions data by race and ethnicity. Democrats wanted to collect this data to show how the nation’s colleges and universities were becoming less diverse with the end of affirmative action. This data is slated to start this fall, following a full technical and procedural review. 

    Now the Trump administration is demanding what was already in the works, and adding a host of new data requirements — without following normal processes. And instead of tracking the declining diversity in higher education, Trump wants to use admissions data to threaten colleges and universities. If the new directive produces bad data that is easy to misinterpret, he may get his wish.

    Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or [email protected].

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

    The 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.

    Join us today.

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  • US scraps $100m in study abroad programs

    US scraps $100m in study abroad programs

    • Stakeholders warn that the funding cuts will probably result in furloughs, redundancies or – in the worst cases – organisations being forced to close.
    • The move comes after months of policy turmoil in the US, as the Trump administration wages war on international education.
    • Experts question the legality of the move as a campaign is launched to save State Department international exchange programs.

    State Department regional bureaus were informed of the cuts on August 13, via internal communications stating that government officials would work with them to “pull down” the affected programs “with the least possible disruption”.  

    The directive explained that the programs “were lower funding priorities in the current fiscal environment, so they are being removed from FY25 Funding”, according to communications from the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affair (ECA).  

    “It’s an existential crisis for these programs and possibly for ECA,” said Mark Overmann, executive director of the Alliance for International Exchange – whose members make up 13 of the impacted programs, facing cuts of $85m.  

    According to Overmann, the 22 programs were all due to be renewed and were expecting to receive FY25 funds before September. Now, they will no longer be allowed to go through their awards process or renewal, and thus will be terminated.  

    “These organisations will now suddenly lose funding they’ve long anticipated and been promised, and this will likely result in furloughs, layoffs, and even organisational closures,” warned Overmann.  

    “Cancelling $100 million in programs which impact 10,000 students is devastating on many levels,” Bill Gertz, chairman of American Institute for Foreign Study (AIFS) told The PIE News.  

    “It means students’ plans and dreams are impacted… it means layoffs and financial disruption at the many fine cultural exchange organisations,” added Gertz, who sponsors the YES Abroad program which has been cancelled.

    “These folks have worked tirelessly to make the world a better place,” he said.  

    Typically, the State Department’s funding process would be in full swing in the spring and summer, though this year has been plagued by delays and uncertainty for program organisers and students alike.  

    Following the lifting of the State Department’s funding freeze this March, stakeholders have been concerned about the lack of movement on the ECA’s FY25 funding process, which has caused delays in the opening of applications and interfered with students’ plans.  

    According to a former staff member of the Republican Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “The variety of programs impacted are too broad to point to a single issue or justification – everything from community colleges to disability and education exchanges.” 

    They warned that the cuts would isolate the US in the long term, raising particular concerns about the discontinuation of the Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange and Study (YES) Program. 

    This initiative “was created after 9/11 specifically to bring young people from predominantly Muslim countries to the US to build long-standing relationships with communities and individuals who might not otherwise every get to see our nation in anything other than filtered news and anti-US social media,” they explained. 

    The value of study abroad for US soft power and public diplomacy was echoed by Gertz, who said the cuts came “at a time in our history when cultural understanding is needed the most”.  

    If OMB is allowed to cut these Congressionally appropriated FY25 awards, it will give them license to do it again and again, opening the door to effectively eliminate international exchange programs

    Mark Overmann, Alliance for International Exchange

    Beyond the programs, their participants, alumni and staff, the move raises alarm bells about the White House’s ability to cut congressionally appropriated grants. 

    Historically, Congress has approved ECA awards, but this year the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) inserted itself “irregularly” into the process to stop congressionally approved funds from being spent, said stakeholders.  

    According to Overmann, the move could be illegal, with Gertz also stating it was unconstitutional for OMB to override Congress in such a way.  

    “OMB found a way to use a small, previously arcane piece of administration process to stop ECA program awards from moving forward,” Overmann explained, leading to the defunding and termination of 22 cultural exchange programs. 

    “If OMB is allowed to cut these Congressionally appropriated FY25 awards, it will give them license to do it again and again, opening the door to effectively eliminate international exchange programs,” Overmann warned.  

    The cancellations have shocked the US study abroad community, which recently received a vote of confidence in Congress, which drastically reduced the planned cuts for study abroad in the FY2026 budget.  

    “We believe we have the support of the majority of Americans who have supported our efforts for decades,” said Gertz. ” We are actively engaged with Congress on the future of ECA programs. 

    Sector leaders have already kicked into action, warning that the elimination of funding would “greatly damage 75+ years of exchange activity and the legacy of Senator Fulbright. It would destroy many of our programs and much of our work,” said Overmann. 

    The Alliance today launched a campaign to save State Department international exchange programs, urging stakeholders to write to members of Congress.  

    The State Department has not issued a formal announcement or replied to The PIE’s requests for comment.  

    It appears that the following programs are impacted, though the list may not be exhaustive:  

    • Community College Administrator Program (CCAP) 
    • Community College Initiative Program (CCI) 
    • Community Engagement Exchange (CEE, Leahy Initiative on Civil Society) 
    • Council of American Overseas Research Centers 
    • English Access Scholarship Program 
    • English Language Fellow Program 
    • Global Undergraduate Exchange Program 
    • IDEAS Program 
    • International Center for Middle Eastern-Western Dialogue (Hollings Center) 
    • Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange and Study (YES) and YES Abroad Program 
    • Leaders Lead On-Demand 
    • Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders 
    • Mike Mansfield Fellowship Program 
    • National Clearinghouse for Disability and Exchange (NCDE) 
    • Professional Fellows Program 
    • Survey of International Educational Exchange Activity (IEEA) in the United States 
    • TechWomen 
    • The J. Christopher Stevens Virtual Exchange Initiative 
    • U.S. Congress-Korea National Assembly Exchange Program 
    • U.S.-South Pacific Scholarship Program (USSP) 
    • Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative (YSEALI) Academic Fellowship 
    • Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative (YSEALI) Professional Fellowship Program (PFP) 

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  • Student veterans, advisers say VA cuts are derailing their educations

    Student veterans, advisers say VA cuts are derailing their educations

    As the spring semester got under way in January at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, a dozen military veterans waited for their GI Bill student benefit checks to show up.

    Then they waited, and waited some more, until the money finally arrived — in April.

    By that time, three had left.

    Getting GI Bill benefits from the Veterans Administration, which student veterans use to pay for their tuition, textbooks and housing, already took weeks. Since federal government staffing cuts since President Donald Trump took office, it’s been taking at least three times longer, said Jeff Deickman, assistant director for veteran and military affairs at the student veteran center on that campus.

    Deickman’s counterparts at other colleges say the VA’s paperwork often has errors, causing further delays. They say some student veterans are dropping out.

    “I can spend, on bad days, three hours on the phone with the VA,” said Deickman, himself a 20-year Army veteran and a doctoral student. “They’ll only answer questions about one student at a time, so I have to hang up and start over again.”

    Nearly 600,000 veterans received a total of about $10 billion worth of GI Bill benefits last year, according to the VA.

    The start of the new administration brought big personnel cuts to both the VA and the U.S. Department of Education, which manages some student aid for veterans. Now, advocacy groups and universities and colleges that enroll large numbers of veterans are bracing for the planned layoffs and departures of nearly 30,000 VA employees and additional cuts at the Department of Education.

    Many are also concerned about the potential for reduced scrutiny of the for-profit college sector, which critics contend has taken advantage of veterans’ tuition payments without providing the promised educational benefits.

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

    Veterans who are just starting to feel the effects of federal cuts, and organizations that support them, worry things will only get worse, said Barmak Nassirian, vice president for higher education policy at the advocacy group Veterans Education Success. The nonprofit has been getting calls from students anxious about confusing information they’re receiving from federal agencies, he said, and it’s been hard to get answers from the government.

    “Part of the challenge of wrapping our arms around this is the opaqueness of the whole thing. We’re sort of feeling our way around the impact,” Nassirian said.

    “The whole process” has become a mess, said one 33-year-old Navy vet in Colorado, who used a more colorful term common in the military and asked that his name not be disclosed for fear of reprisal. “It’s making a lot of us anxious.”

    Social media lays bare that anxiety — and frustration. In posts, veterans complain about stalled benefits and mistakes.

    “I just wish I could speak to someone who could help but all of the reps seem to be unable to assist and simply tell me to reapply, which I have 4x, just for another denial,” wrote one on Reddit, about attempts to have a student loan forgiven.

    Related: How Trump is changing higher education: The view from 4 campuses

    “Complete nightmare,” another Reddit poster wrote about the same process. “Delays, errors, and employees that don’t know anything. No one knows anything right now.”

    Federal law guarantees that disabled vets’ student loans will be forgiven, for instance, but veterans with total permanent disabilities have reported that their applications for their loans to be discharged were denied. One said the Department of Education followed up with a letter saying the denial was a mistake, but the agency hasn’t explained how to correct it.

    The Education Department did not respond to an interview request. The VA declined to answer even general questions about benefit delays unless provided with the names of veterans and colleges that reported problems.

    A VA spokesman, Gary Kunich, said no one had been laid off from the agency, which in fact cut 1,000 probationary employees in January and another 1,400 workers in February, though some were temporarily reinstated by a judge. It has announced plans to lay off 30,000 more by the end of September.

    Such cuts threaten to “disrupt access to veterans’ education benefits, just as even more veterans and service members may be turning to higher education and career training,” top officials at the American Council on Education, or ACE — the nation’s largest association of colleges and universities — wrote in June.

    That’s on top of existing frustrations. Veterans already struggle to get the benefits they’ve earned, college administrators and students say.

    Related: Veterans are tangled in red tape trying to get their student loans canceled as promised

    Many colleges and even some prominent veterans’ advocacy groups didn’t want to talk about this. Student Veterans of America, one of the largest advocacy groups for veteran students, did not respond to repeated interview requests. Ten of the colleges and universities that boast large veteran enrollments — including San Diego State, Georgia State, Angelo State, Arizona State and Syracuse — also did not respond or declined to answer questions.

    Veterans and advocates are concerned that ongoing Education Department cuts will erode oversight of education institutions that take GI Bill benefits but leave veterans with little in return — primarily for-profit colleges that were found guilty of, and have been punished repeatedly for, defrauding students. In some cases, those colleges suddenly closed before students could finish their degrees, but kept their tuition while leaving them with useless credits or credentials.

    Veterans are already twice as likely as other students to attend for-profit colleges, according to the Postsecondary National Policy Institute.

    While it might take years until the effects of weakened scrutiny are fully visible, Nassirian said, it already appears that staffing cuts at the divisions within the Education Department that kept an eye on for-profit colleges have led those schools to start targeting veterans again.

    “Without a doubt it is now easier for schools that want to push the envelope to get away with it,” he said. “When you have fewer cops on the beat you’re going to see higher crime. And we’re still just a nanosecond into this new environment.”

    Veterans can lose their GI Bill benefits even when a college defrauds them.

    The risk is particularly high for low-income veterans and those from diverse backgrounds, said Lindsay Church, executive director of Minority Veterans of America. Those student veterans are less likely to have parents who have experience with higher education, Church said, making them more vulnerable to fraud.

    But the most immediate problems with staffing cuts are payment delays and paperwork errors, student veterans and their advisers said.

    At Pikes Peak State College, a community college in Colorado Springs, some veterans still hadn’t received their GI Bill benefits as the semester wound down in May, said Paul DeCecco, the college’s director of military and veteran programs. Because of trouble reaching counselors at the VA, others were never able to enroll in the first place, DeCecco said.

    “Counselors are just overwhelmed and not able to respond to students in a timely manner,” he said. “Students are missing semesters as a result.”

    Related: Behind the turmoil of federal attacks on colleges, some states are going after tenure

    In the military city of San Diego, where thousands of former and current service members go to college, student veterans at Miramar College this year waited months to hear about VA work-study contracts. Previously approved within days, those contracts allow students to get paid for veteran-related jobs while attending school, said LaChaune DuHart, the school’s director of veterans affairs and military education.

    Other veterans went weeks without textbooks because of delayed VA payments, DuHart said.

    “A lot of students can’t afford to lose those benefits,” she said, describing the “rage” many student veterans expressed over the long wait times this year. “A lot of times it’s that emotional reaction that causes these students not to come back to an institution,” she said.

    Colleges routinely see student veterans quit because of benefit delays, numerous experts and administrators said, something that has gotten worse this year. Several recounted stories of veterans without degrees choosing to look for work rather than continue their education because of frustration with the VA — even though studies show that graduating from college can dramatically increase future earnings.

    Those who stayed have faced the added stress of waiting for their benefits, or not being able to get their questions answered.

    “We always tell them to be prepared for delays,” said Phillip Morris, an associate professor of education research and leadership at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs who studies student veterans. “But if you can’t pay your rent because your benefits are not flowing the way you’re expecting them to, that’s increasing anxiety and stress that translates to the classroom.”

    Contact editor Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556 or [email protected].

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

    The 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.

    Join us today.

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  • Will Trump Try to Ban Immigrants from Public Schools? – The 74

    Will Trump Try to Ban Immigrants from Public Schools? – The 74


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    This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

    Funding cuts. Raids near campuses. Exclusion from programs like Head Start and career training. For months, the Trump administration has been chipping away at the rights of students without legal status in public schools.

    Could the administration take away those students’ right to free public school entirely? Experts say that may be the next step.

    “People have worried about this for a couple decades, but this is different,” said Patricia Gándara, education professor and co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. “Right now we have to be extremely vigilant. These people will stop at nothing.”

    A 1982 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Plyler v. Doe, guarantees all students, regardless of immigration status, the right to a free public education in K-12 schools. But last year the conservative Heritage Foundation called for the Supreme Court to overturn the ruling and for states to charge tuition to immigrant families, even if their children are U.S. citizens. The rationale is that schools spend billions of dollars educating those students — money that instead should be spent on students who, along with their parents, are native-born U.S. citizens.

    Project 2025, also published by the Heritage Foundation, echoes that vision.

    Such a policy would have an outsized impact in California, where nearly half of the state’s children have at least one immigrant parent, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

    “This would have tremendous negative impacts,” said Megan Hopkins, chair of the education department at UC San Diego. “For starters, we’d have a less educated, less literate populace, which would affect the economy and nearly every other aspect of life in California.”

    Tuition for noncitizens

    Plyler v. Doe stemmed from a case in Texas in the early 1980s. The state had passed a law allowing schools to charge tuition to students who weren’t citizens. The Tyler Independent School District in Tyler, Texas, a small city about 100 miles southeast of Dallas, was among the districts that tried, triggering a lawsuit that eventually brought the case to the Supreme Court.

    The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, arguing that children who aren’t citizens are entitled to equal protection under the law. Still, the ruling was close — 5 to 4 — even though the court was more liberal than it is today.

    Since then, the ruling has been mostly forgotten. But there have been occasional attempts to restrict immigrants in schools, in California and elsewhere. In 1994 California voters passed Proposition 187, which banned immigrants living illegally in the U.S. from receiving public benefits, including access to public schools. A federal court blocked it before it went into effect.

    In 2011, Alabama passed a law requiring schools to collect students’ immigration status. That law was later blocked by a federal court. In 2022, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said he’d favor revisiting Plyler v. Doe and that states should not have to pay to educate students without legal status.

    Since the Heritage Foundation published its report, about a half-dozen states have attempted to pass laws that would allow schools to charge tuition to noncitizens. None passed last year, but advocates said they plan to keep trying.

    Route to Supreme Court

    They’re likely to have a sympathetic supporter in President Donald Trump, who’s so far followed many of the policies put forward by Project 2025. In the past few months, his administration has amped up immigration arrests and said it would no longer honor schools as safe havens from enforcement. It also cut (although later reinstated after states sued) funding for migrant students and barred students without legal status from Head Start, adult education and career and technical education.

    The issue could land before the Supreme Court in at least two ways. A state could pass a law allowing public schools to charge tuition, leading to a lawsuit which could end up before the Supreme Court. Or Trump could issue an executive order that could also trigger a lawsuit.

    Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley Law School, said some of Trump’s actions, such as barring children without legal status from Head Start, is already a violation of Plyler.

    “There’s no doubt that the Trump administration has increased pressure on Plyler,” Chemerinsky said. “Certainly, what Trump is doing could lead to cases that would get to the Supreme Court. Could this court overturn Plyler? Of course they could. … all it would take is five justices wanting to overrule it.”

    Even if it’s not overturned, the current policy shifts have had a chilling effect on schools and immigrant families, said Hopkins, at UC San Diego. School attendance has dropped in communities experiencing immigration crackdowns, which has caused academic repercussions for some students and widened the achievement gap between Latino students and other groups. A recent report by Policy Analysis for California Education found that Latino students and English learners fared worse in math and English in the wake of immigration arrests in their communities, and reported a significant increase in bullying at school.

    Hopkins also said the policies aren’t especially effective. If the goal is to encourage immigrants to return to their home countries voluntarily, research has shown that doesn’t often happen. After Alabama passed its anti-immigrant law in 2011, many families simply moved to Mississippi.

    ‘Our biggest fear’

    In Monterey County, the new policies have led to widespread fear and confusion among immigrant families, said Monterey County Office of Education Superintendent Deneen Guss. Attendance has dropped not only in schools, but at community events as well.

    To support families, schools have been hosting “Know Your Rights” information nights (in-person and virtually), encouraged parents to submit child care plans to schools in case a parent is arrested, given out booklets in Spanish on how to help children experiencing anxiety, and provided a wide array of legal and other resources.

    But when the Trump administration announced it was barring students without legal status from Head Start, “that gave me pause,” Guss said. “That made me think they really were going after Plyler. That’s our biggest fear.”

    She worries about the impact that would have on families, as well as school staff who would suddenly be responsible for checking students’ citizenship paperwork. Currently, schools don’t ask for students’ immigration status.

    “Educators’ jobs are hard enough,” Guss said. “Our job is to give children the best possible education. Don’t make us become immigration officers. It’s a position we do not want.”

    She’s been urging parents, and the public, to stay informed and speak out. Regardless of whether the Supreme Court overturns Plyler, anti-immigrant policies are almost certain to continue, with devastating consequences for students.

    “You can’t sit back and pretend everything is going to be OK,” Guss said. “People need to ensure their voices are heard. And we have to fight for our kids.”

    This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.


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  • Rubio sued over international student deportations

    Rubio sued over international student deportations

    The legal challenge takes aim at Rubio’s use of statutes to deport legal noncitizens, namely international students Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, for their speech alone. It was filed by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) on August 6.  

    “In the United States of America, no one should fear a midnight knock on the door for voicing the wrong opinion,” said FIRE attorney Conor Fitzpatrick: “Free speech isn’t a privilege the government hands out. Under our constitution it is the inalienable right of every man, woman and child.” 

    FIRE, a non-partisan advocacy group, is seeking a landmark ruling that the first amendment trumps the statutes that the government used to deport international students and other lawfully present noncitizens for protected speech earlier this year. 

    It cites the case of Mahmoud Khalil, an international student targeted by the Trump administration for his pro-Palestinian activism, who was held in detention for three months after being arrested by plain clothed immigration officers in a Columbia University building.  

    The complaint also highlights the targeting of Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk, detained on the street and held for nearly seven weeks for co-authoring an op-ed calling for Tufts to acknowledge Israel’s attacks on Palestine and divest from companies with ties to Israel.  

    FIRE has said that that Rubio and Trump’s targeting of international students is “casting a pall of fear over millions of noncitizens, who now worry that voicing the ‘wrong’ opinion about America or Israel will result in deportation”.  

    This spring, thousands of students saw their visas revoked by the administration, after a speech from Rubio warning them: “We give you a visa to come and study to get a degree, not to become a social activist that tears up our university campuses”. 

    Free speech isn’t a privilege the government hands out

    Conor Fitzpatrick, FIRE

    Though the students’ statuses have since been restored following a court hearing deeming the mass terminations to be illegal, some students opted to leave the US amid fears of being detained or deported.  

    This summer, international student interest in the US fell to its lowest level since mid-pandemic, with new estimates forecasting a potential 30-40% decline in new international enrolments this fall following the state department’s suspension of new visa interviews.  

    Plaintiffs in the lawsuit include The Stanford Daily – the independent, student newspaper at Stanford University – and two legal noncitizens with no criminal record who fear deportation and visa revocation for engaging in pro-Palestinian speech.  

    “There’s real fear on campus and it reaches into the newsroom,” said Greta Reich, editor-in-chief of The Stanford Daily.  

    “I’ve had reporters turn down assignments, request the removal of some of their articles, and even quit the paper because they fear deportation for being associated with speaking on political topics, even in a journalistic capacity.  

    “The Daily is losing the voices of a significant portion of our student population,” said Reich.  

    The complaint argues that Rubio’s wielding of two provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act is unconstitutional when used to revoke a visa or deport someone for the first amendment right of free speech. 

    “The first allows the secretary of state to render a noncitizen deportable if he ‘personally determines’ their lawful ‘beliefs, statements, or associations’ ‘compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest’”, explains the document.  

    “The second allows the secretary ‘at any time, in his discretion, revoke’ a ‘visa or other documentation’”.  

    The complaint argues that both provisions are unconstitutional as applied to protected speech, based on the first amendment promise “that the government may not subject a speaker to disfavoured treatment because those in power do not like his or her message”. 

    In our free country, you shouldn’t have to show your papers to speak your mind

    Will Creeley, FIRE

    According to the claimants, Trump and Rubio’s targeting of international students is evidence of noncitizens not being afforded the same free speech protections as US nationals, which, they say, runs against America’s founding principles.  

    “Every person – whether they’re a US citizen, are visiting for the week, or are here on a student visa – has free speech rights in this country,” said FIRE. 

    “Two lawful residents of the United States holding the same sign at the same protest shouldn’t be treated differently just because one’s here on a visa,” said FIRE legal director Will Creeley.  

    “The First Amendment bars the government from punishing protected speech – period. In our free country, you shouldn’t have to show your papers to speak your mind.” 

    The lawsuit comes amid heightened scrutiny of international students in the US, with the state department ordering consular officers to ramp up social media screening procedures. 

    As of June 2025, US missions abroad will now vet students for instances of “advocacy for, aid, or support of foreign terrorists and other threats to US national security,” as well as any signs of “anti-Semitic harassment and violence” among applicants.  

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  • The details behind the first national school voucher program

    The details behind the first national school voucher program

    After decades of trying, conservatives this year succeeded in creating the first national school voucher program.

    The Republican megabill that President Donald Trump signed into law in July will establish new tax credit scholarships for families to use at private schools, including religious ones — a long-held goal of school privatization advocates who argue parents should get taxpayer support if they want to opt out of their neighborhood school.

    Under the “big, beautiful bill,” donors can receive dollar-for-dollar tax credits of up to $1,700 for contributions to scholarship-granting nonprofits. Those groups then distribute the money to families seeking help paying for private school, tutoring and other educational expenses. 

    The program, while significant, is less expansive than in earlier drafts of the legislation. Previous versions gave donors larger tax credits — a match up to $5,000 or 10 percent of their income, whichever is greater — and mandated that all states participate rather than allowing them to opt in. 

    Related: A lot goes on in classrooms from kindergarten to high school. Keep up with our free weekly newsletter on K-12 education.

    Here are 10 things to know about the program. If you have other questions or there’s more you’d like to know, write to us: [email protected].

    When does it start?

    Jan. 1, 2027. Families have until then to research where they might want to spend a scholarship — and if the school in mind even plans to accept one. Taxpayers who want to contribute to support the scholarships can do so beginning in late 2026.  

    How will the scholarships work?

    The law opens the door to churches, universities, education nonprofits, rotary clubs and potentially even public schools (more on that below) to accept and distribute donations for the program. These “scholarship-granting organizations,” or SGOs, can keep up to 10 percent of the donations for administrative costs.

    In some states with existing scholarship programs, families apply with a third-party contractor that works with eligible schools and selects students for awards. Other states allow religious groups and other nonprofits to create and manage their own scholarship funds. The federal bill gives states wide flexibility to make those sorts of decisions about how the program is administered, experts say.

    Who’s eligible for the scholarships?

    To qualify, students need to check these boxes: They must be eligible to attend a public school, their state must opt in to the program, and their families must earn no more than three times the area median income — a threshold that would include households with incomes nearing $500,000 in some parts of the United States.

    Students who already attend private school qualify, since they are eligible for public school, even if they don’t attend one. The scholarships also may cover home-schoolers. (Keep reading for more on that.)

    How much money will families receive? 

    While the bill set a $1,700 cap on how much individual donors can contribute through their taxes, it’s unclear whether it limits how much an individual student could collect in scholarships.

    In theory, a student could apply for several scholarships. An SGO might also offer a scholarship that reimburses a family for all costs associated with attending their preferred school. In states that already offer similar school choice programs, a student might be able to collect scholarships from both the new program and the existing state program. Still, the average cost of private school tuition is roughly $13,000, so even students who combine several scholarships may not receive enough to cover the full cost of attending.

    The Treasury Department is expected to issue regulations on the program, and we may not know these kinds of details until it does. 

    Related: Arizona gave families public money for private schools. Then private schools raised tuition

    What can the scholarship money be used for?

    Quite a lot. The legislation suggests that families could use the money not only to help pay for private school tuition, but also for room and board, services for students with disabilities, transportation, tutoring, and school supplies like books, computers and uniforms. 

    The rules may depend on the individual state and its definition of an “eligible school.” In some states, home schooling might qualify students for the scholarships, but in other states it might not, said Robert Enlow, president of EdChoice, a pro-school choice group.  

    It’s also possible that public schools could charge scholarship students — as some do with home-schoolers — for services like tutoring, special education or advanced courses. 

    So students can use the money at public schools? How would that work? 

    Yes, potentially. In some states, schools already charge activity or participation fees for non-enrolled students who want to join clubs and sports. Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, said some states may write their own rules that allow schools to extend the menu of services they could charge for.

    Meanwhile, most school districts — roughly 4 in 5 — already partner with foundations that raise money to help students with transportation, school supplies and basic needs. Both Enlow and Roza said they expected nonprofits and districts to partner on finding ways to tap the federal scholarship dollars as well.

    “Imagine you could have a public school foundation going out and helping with transportation and books and computers and tutors and all sorts of stuff, right?” Enlow said. “The potential is huge.”

    Will all private schools accept the scholarships? 

    No, private schools are not required to accept the scholarships, and many states that offer school choice don’t require private schools to participate. Private schools generally can accept or reject a student for any reason, whether they have a scholarship or not.

    In Arizona, for example, the tax credit program provided scholarships to students at 348 schools last year. More than 400 private schools operated in the state as of 2022.

    Related: Tracking Trump: His actions to dismantle the Education Department, and more 

    Which states will participate?

    Roughly 21 states — including Arizona, Georgia and Montana — offer their own tax credit scholarships, according to the group EdChoice, so it’s expected they would opt into the federal program. Conservative lawmakers in North Carolina already introduced a bill to allow families there to take part in the federal scholarships. 

    If public schools can benefit too, even Democratic governors may consider joining the program, said Roza.

    “Ultimately if the state can open this to summer camp and tutoring, obviously there would be a lot of pressure to unlock so much money with this,” she said.

    How much will the scholarships cost the government?

    It depends on how many taxpayers claim the credit. 

    While an earlier version of the bill would have capped the tax credits at $10 billion a year, the final legislation contains no such limit — so the exact amount in lost revenue won’t be known until much later. That said, an analysis by the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation found that the legislation would cost the Treasury up to $4 billion per year.

    Others think the cost will be higher. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a left-leaning research group, placed its projection closer to $51 billion, while Roza estimated the cost at $28 billion per year. Still, she hesitated to count that as a direct loss to K-12 funding. “It’s new money in the sense that it doesn’t go into or out of the federal pie,” Roza said.

    What’s been the reaction to the plan? 

    Critics, including teachers unions and many education experts, have been quick to raise alarms about the voucher program, arguing that it’s a handout for wealthy families and will harm public schools by reducing funding for them.

    “It’s the centerpiece of the Great American Heist — a privatization scheme wrapped in tax policy,” Denise Forte, president of the left-leaning nonprofit EdTrust, said at a hearing before the Senate Democratic Caucus in July. 

    Advocates for the separation of church and state worry about the program channeling money from government coffers to religious schools, while disability advocates note that private schools are not required to serve students with disabilities.

    Some supporters of school vouchers, meanwhile, wish the legislation had gone further.

    “This is a very positive program for taxpayers in America. You can help families get better education and claim a tax credit for it,” said EdChoice’s Enlow. “It’s going to benefit middle- and low-income families.” But he added, “It’s not as generous as we would like, which is universal.”

    Others are focused now on encouraging states to participate in the program. “The fight doesn’t end with the passing of the bill,” said Sydney Altfield, national director of Teach Coalition, which advocates for Jewish schools to get access to government funding. “States must opt into the program.”

    Contact staff writer Neal Morton at 212-678-8247, on Signal at nealmorton.99, or via email at [email protected].

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

    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.

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