Tag: College to careers

I earned my associate degree while still in high school, and it changed my life

by Maxwell Fjeld, The Hechinger Report
December 1, 2025

Earning an associate degree alongside my high school diploma was an ambitious goal that turned into a positive high school experience for me. By taking on the responsibilities of a college student, I further prepared myself for life after high school.

I needed to plan out my own days. I needed to keep myself on task. I needed to learn how to monitor and juggle due dates, lecture times and exams while ensuring that my extracurricular activities did not create conflicts.

All of this was life-changing for a rural Minnesota high school student. Dual enrollment through Minnesota’s PSEO program saved me time and money and helped me explore my interests and narrow my focus to business management. After three years of earning dual credits as a high school student, I graduated from community college and was the student speaker at the commencement earlier this year in May — one month before graduating from high school.

As a student earning college credits while still in high school, I gained exposure to different career fields and developed a passion for civic engagement. At the beginning of my senior year, while taking courses at the local community and technical college, I was elected to serve as that school’s first cross-campus student body president.

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

While most states have dual-enrollment programs, Minnesota’s support for its PSEO students stands out. As policymakers consider legislative and funding initiatives to strengthen dual enrollment in other states, I believe that three features of our program could provide a blueprint for states that want to do more.

First, the college credits I earned are transferable and meet degree requirements.

Second, the PSEO program permitted me to take enough credits each semester to earn my associate degree. While the number of dual-enrollment credits high school students can earn varies by state and program, when strict limitations are set on those numbers, the program can become a barrier to higher education instead of an alternate pathway.

Third, Minnesota’s PSEO program limits the cost burden placed on students. With rising costs and logistical challenges to pursuing higher education credentials, the head start that students can create for themselves via loosened restrictions on dual-enrollment credits can make a real financial impact, especially for students like me from small towns.

Dual-enrollment costs vary significantly from state to state, with some programs charging for tuition, fees, textbooks and other college costs. In Minnesota, those costs are covered by the Department of Education. In addition, if families meet income requirements, the expenses incurred by students for education-related transportation are also covered.

If I did not have state support, I would not have been able to participate in the program. Financial support is a crucial component to being a successful dual-enrollment student. When the barrier of cost is removed, American families benefit, especially students from low-income, rural and farming backgrounds.

Early exposure to college helped me choose my major by taking college classes to experiment — for free. When I first started, I was interested in computer science as a major. After taking a computer science class and then an economics class the following semester, I chose business as my major.

The ability to explore different fields of study was cost-saving and game-changing for me and is an opportunity that could be just as beneficial for other students.

Targeted investments in programs like this have benefited many students, including my father in the 1990s. His dual-enrollment experience allowed him to get a head start on his education and gain valuable life skills at a young age and is a great example of dual enrollment’s potential generational impact.

Related: STUDENT VOICE: I’m thriving in my dual-enrollment program, but it could be a whole lot better

When dual-enrollment students receive guidance and support, it can be transformational. Early exposure to college introduced me to college-level opportunities. As student government president, I went to Washington, D.C., to attend a national student summit. I was able to meet with congressional office staffers and advocate for today’s students and for federal investment in dual-enrollment programs, explaining my story and raising awareness.

The daily life of high school is draining for some and can be devastating for others. I had many friends who came to believe that the bullying, peer-pressure and culture they experienced in high school would continue in college, so they deemed higher education “not worth it.”

Through dual enrollment, I saw the difference in culture; students who face burnout from daily high school life can refocus and feel good about their futures again.

Congress can help state legislatures by establishing strong dual-enrollment programs nationwide. With adequate government support, dual-enrollment programs can help students from all walks of life and increase college graduation rates. If all states offer access to the same opportunities that I had in high school, our next generation will be better prepared for the workforce and more successful.

Maxwell Fjeld is pursuing his bachelor’s degree at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities’ Carlson School of Management after earning an associate degree upon high school graduation through dual enrollment. He is also a student ambassador fellow at Today’s Students Coalition.

Contact the opinion editor at [email protected].

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

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December 1, 2025
Funding high-quality teacher preparation programs should be the highest priority for policymakers

by Sharif El-Mekki and Heather Kirkpatrick, The Hechinger Report
November 25, 2025

By dismantling the Department of Education, the Trump administration claims to be returning control of education to the states.

And while states and local school districts are doing their best to understand the new environments they are working in, they have an opportunity amidst the chaos to focus on what is most essential and prioritize how education dollars are spent.

That means recruiting and retaining more well-prepared teachers with their new budget autonomy. Myriad factors affect student learning, but research shows that the primary variable within a school’s control is the teacher. Other than parents, teachers are the adults who spend the most time with our children. Good teachers have been shown to singularly motivate students.

And that’s why, amidst the chaos of our current education politics, there is great opportunity.

Until recently, recruiting, preparing and retaining enough great teachers has not been a priority in policy or funding choices. That has been a mistake, because attracting additional teachers and preparing them to be truly excellent is arguably the single biggest lever policymakers can use to demonstrate their commitment to high-quality public schools.

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Great teachers, especially whole schools full of great teachers, do not just happen. We develop them through quality preparation and meaningful opportunities to practice the profession. When teachers are well-prepared, students thrive. Rigorous teacher preparation translates into stronger instruction, higher K-12 student achievement and a more resilient, equitable education system.

Teachers, like firefighters and police officers, are public servants. We rightly invest public dollars to train firefighters and police officers because their service is essential to the safety and well-being of our communities. Yet teachers — who shape our future through our kids — are too often asked to shoulder the costs of their own preparation.

Funding high-quality teacher preparation should be as nonnegotiable as funding other vital public service professions, especially because we face a teacher shortage — particularly in STEM fields, special education and rural and urban schools.

This is in no small part because many potential teaching candidates cannot afford the necessary education and credentialing.

Our current workforce systems were not built for today’s teaching candidates. They were not designed to support students who are financially vulnerable, part-time or first-generation, or those with caregiving responsibilities.

Yet the majority of tomorrow’s education workforce will likely come from these groups, all of whom have faced systemic barriers in accumulating the generational wealth needed to pursue degrees in higher education.

Some states have responded to this need by developing strong teacher development pathways. For example, California has committed hundreds of millions to growing the teacher pipeline through targeted residency programs and preparation initiatives, and its policies have enabled it to recruit and support more future teachers, including greater numbers of educators from historically underrepresented communities.

Pennsylvania has created more pathways into the education field with expedited credentialing and apprenticeships for high school students, and is investing millions of dollars in stipends for student teachers.

It has had success bringing more Black candidates into the teaching profession, which will likely improve student outcomes: Black boys from low-income families who have a Black teacher in third through fifth grades are 18 percent more interested in pursuing college and 29 percent less likely to drop out of high school, research shows. Pennsylvania also passed a senate bill﷟HYPERLINK “https://www.senatorhughes.com/big-win-in-harrisburg-creating-the-teacher-diversity-pipeline/” that paved the way for students who complete high school courses on education and teaching to be eligible for career and technical education credits.

At least half a dozen other states also provide various degrees of financial support for would-be teachers, including stipends, tuition assistance and fee waivers for credentialing.

One example is a one-year teacher residency program model, which recruits and prepares people in historically underserved communities to earn a mster’s degree and teaching credential.

Related: Federal policies risk worsening an already dire rural teacher shortage

Opening new pathways to teaching by providing financial support has two dramatic effects. First, when teachers stay in education, these earnings compound over time as alumni become mentor teachers and administrators, earning more each year.

Second, these new pathways can also improve student achievement, thanks to policies that support new teachers in rigorous teacher education programs.

For example, the Teaching Academy model, which operates in several states, including Pennsylvania, New York and Michigan, attracts, cultivates and supports high school students on the path to becoming educators, giving schools and districts an opportunity to build robust education programs that serve as strong foundations for meaningful and long-term careers in education, and providing aspiring educators a head start to becoming great teachers. Participants in the program are eligible for college scholarships, professional coaching and retention bonuses.

California, Pennsylvania and these other states have begun this work. We hope to encourage other state lawmakers to seize the opportunities arising from recent federal changes and use their power to invest in what matters most to student achievement —teachers and teacher preparation pathways.

Sharif El-Mekki is founder & CEO of the Center for Black Educator Development in Pennsylvania. Heather Kirkpatrick is president and CEO Alder Graduate School in California.

Contact the opinion editor at [email protected].

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

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November 25, 2025
Trump administration cuts canceled this college student’s career start in politics

This story was produced in partnership with Teen Vogue and reprinted with permission.

Christopher Cade wants to be president someday. His inspiration largely comes from family members, who have been involved in local politics and activism since long before he was born. But policies from the Trump administration and the Ohio Legislature are complicating his college experience — and his plans to become a politician.

Cade is a student at Ohio State University double-majoring in public policy analysis and political science with a focus on American political theory. He recalls his maternal grandmother, Maude Hill — who had a large hand in raising him — talking to him about her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. She also worked at Columbus, Ohio-based affordable housing development nonprofit, Homeport, and has gone to Capitol Hill to speak with the state delegation multiple times. His dad is the senior vice president of the housing choice voucher program at the Columbus Metropolitan Housing Authority, and his older brother has a degree in political science and is interested in social justice advocacy work, Cade said. Last fall, his first on campus, Cade began applying to opportunities to bolster his resume for a future career in politics.

The now 19-year-old secured an internship with the U.S. Department of Transportation and a work-study job on campus in the university’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion. But the federal opportunity was scrapped when the Trump administration imposed a hiring freeze and budget cuts. His campus job ended when the university announced it would “sunset” the diversity office in response to federal and state anti-diversity, equity and inclusion orders and actions, according to Cade.

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The work-study position was with the university’s Bell National Resource Center on the African American Male, which was founded to support Black men to stay in college. It’s a cause he was excited about.

“I would help order food or speak with students or do interviews,” said Cade. “I developed a good 20 different programs for the next year.”

In February, when the university announced it was closing the office, “I was like, ‘Well, so six months of work just for no reason,’” he said.

OSU President Ted Carter released a statement on Feb. 27 saying the closure of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion was a response to both state and federal actions regarding DEI in public education. The move eliminated 17 staff positions, not including student roles, the university said. Programming and services provided by the Office of Student Life’s Center for Belonging and Social Change were also scrapped.

The change came before the Trump administration’s initial deadline for complying with a memo that threatened to cut funding for public colleges and universities, as well as K-12 schools, that offer DEI programs and initiatives. In March, the administration announced that OSU was one of roughly 50 universities under federal investigation for allegedly discriminating against white and Asian students in graduate admissions. Additionally, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed legislation in March banning DEI programs in the state’s public colleges and universities. The legislation went into effect in June.

Before the DEI office closed, Cade said, “I felt so heard and seen.” He’d attended a private, predominantly white, Catholic high school, he said. “It was not a place that supported me culturally and helped me understand more about who I am and my Blackness,” he recalled. At the university, though, “the programming we had throughout the year [was] about how to change the narrative on who a Black man is and what it means when you go out here and interact with people.

“And then for them to close down all these programs, that essentially told me that I wasn’t cared about.”

After the February announcement, students pushed back, organizing protests and a sit-in at the student union. But eventually, those efforts quieted.

Cade says students felt like there was a “cloud of darkness” hanging over them. But he also thought of his Office of Diversity and Inclusion coworkers, some of whom had spent decades working there, helping students. In particular he thought of his former colleague Chila Thomas, who celebrated her fifth anniversary last year as the executive director of the Young Scholars Program. That program, which helps low-income aspiring first-generation college students get to and through college, was one of several of the office’s programs that will continue. The day after Carter’s announcement, she and others in the office spent time giving students space to talk through their feelings, despite the uncertainties surrounding their own employment, Cade said.

Related: A case study of what’s ahead with Trump DEI crackdowns: Utah has already cut public college DEI initiatives

Since the university crackdown on DEI, Cade said he’s experienced more discomfort on campus, even outright racism. He says he was approached by a white person who said, “I’m so glad they’re getting rid of DEI” and spit on his shoe and used a racial slur.

“I don’t know how that could ever be acceptable to anyone, but that was [when] a flip switched in my head,” Cade said. “I couldn’t sit down and be sad and silent. I had to stand up and make change.”

In March, he traveled with other students to Washington, D.C., as part of the Undergraduate Student Government’s Governmental Relations Committee. They met with Ohio Rep. Troy Balderson and an aide, along with staffers from the offices of fellow Ohio lawmakers Sen. Bernie Moreno and Rep. Joyce Beatty, to discuss college affordability, DEI policies and the federal hiring freeze. Cade says he described how he was affected by the U.S. Department of Transportation canceling his internship.

In Carter’s announcement, he stated that all student employees would be “offered alternative jobs at the university,” but Cade said during a meeting with Office of Diversity and Inclusion student employees, an OSU dean clarified that they would have to apply for new opportunities. With the policy changes meaning there were fewer work-study roles and more students in need of jobs, Cade saw the market as increasingly competitive, and he began to job hunt elsewhere. This summer he secured work with the Ohio Department of Transportation as a communications and policy intern. In October he began an intake assistant role in the Office of Civil Rights Compliance at the university. (Ohio State Director of Media and PR Chris Booker told Teen Vogue that the school could not comment on the experiences of individual students but that “all student employees and graduate associates impacted by these program changes were offered the opportunity to pursue transitioning into alternative positions at the university, as well as support in navigating that change.”)

Although he was drawn to OSU for the John Glenn College of Public Affairs’ master’s program, Cade says he might have reconsidered schools had he known that the university would bend to lawmakers’ anti-DEI efforts. While he’s concerned about how education-related legislation and policies may continue to affect his college experience, he worries most about some of his peers. College is already so hard to navigate for so many young people, said Cade. “And this is just another thing that says, ‘Oh yeah, this isn’t for me.’”

This story was published in partnership with Teen Vogue.

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November 10, 2025
College students hedge their bets in a chaotic labor market by double-majoring

by Jon Marcus, The Hechinger Report
November 5, 2025

After he graduates from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Drew Wesson hopes to begin a career in strategic communication, a field with higher-than-average job growth and earnings.

One year into his time at the university, Wesson became more strategic about this goal. Like nearly 1 in 3 of his classmates, he declared a second major to better stand out in an unpredictable labor market.

It’s part of a trend that’s spreading nationwide, according to a Hechinger Report analysis of federal data, as students fret about getting jobs in an economy that some fear is shifting faster than a traditional college education can keep up.

“There’s kind of a fear of graduating and going out into the job market,” said Wesson, a sophomore from Minneapolis who is double-majoring in international security and journalism. “And having more skills and more knowledge and more majors gives you a competitive edge.”

The number of students at UW-Madison who double-major has grown by 25 percent over the last decade, the data show. But double-majoring is also on the rise at private, nonprofit colleges across the country, and at other public institutions, including the University of California, San Diego, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Nearly 5.4 million credentials — degrees or certificates — were earned by the 4.8 million college and university graduates in 2023-24, the most recent year for which the figure is available. That means about 12 percent left school with more than one, compared to 6 percent ten years earlier. Academic minors don’t count as a credential and aren’t tracked..

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“Students are feeling a sort of spiraling lack of control in a very dynamic labor market,” said Rachel Slama, associate director of Cornell University’s Future of Learning Lab, which studies how technology and other innovations are changing education. “They’re probably clinging to the one thing that’s in their control, which is the majors they choose. And they think that more is more.”

They may be right, according to one of the few studies of this topic, by scholars at St. Lawrence University and Vanderbilt Law School. Students who have one major in business and a second in science, technology, engineering or math, it found, earn more than if they majored in only one of those disciplines, the 2016 study found.

Graduates who double-major are also 56 percent less likely to be laid off, have their pay cut or suffer other negative effects in economic downturns, according to another study, released last year by researchers at Ohio State and four other universities. These outcomes show “the importance of diverse skill sets,” the researchers concluded. If there’s a drop in demand for the skills associated with one major, “a double major can pursue a job related to the unaffected major.”

At Wisconsin, nearly 6 in 10 students in computer science who pick a second major choose the lucrative discipline of data science; the number of jobs in data science is projected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to increase 34 percent over about the next 10 years, at salaries that are nearly twice the national average.

The unemployment rate among new bachelor’s degree recipients is now higher than for workers overall, and at its highest level since 2014, not including the pandemic years, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. That’s partly because artificial intelligence and other factors are transforming what employers need.

Nearly half of recent graduates feel underqualified to apply for even entry-level jobs, a survey by the education technology company Cengage Group finds. Only 30 percent say they have full-time jobs related to the fields that they studied.

Meanwhile, colleges and universities — traditionally slow to transform what and how they teach — are encouraging students to combine majors as a faster way to keep up with changes in the labor market, said Taylor Odle, an assistant professor at UW-Madison who studies the economics of education and the value of credentials in the workforce.

“Institutions are thinking strategically about how to align their degree programs with industry, and it might be by pairing two things they already have,” Odle said.

There are other reasons for the rising popularity of double majors. At UW-Madison, for example, one factor propelling the growth is that there are no minors, noted Taylor Odle, an assistant professor there who studies the economics of education and the value of credentials in the workforce..

Double-majoring isn’t easy. It typically means earning more than the usual minimum number of credits required to graduate, on top of extracurricular and other obligations. Wesson, at UW-Madison, for instance, is an officer of student government, a reporter and photographer for the campus newspaper and an honors student.

Some separate majors have overlapping requirements. Even if they don’t, most universities and colleges charge the same tuition per semester no matter how many courses undergraduates take. So unless a second major extends the number of semesters a student needs to complete required courses, or forces him or her to take additional classes in the summers, double-majoring doesn’t typically cost more or take longer.

Meanwhile, more students are arriving at college having already knocked off credits by taking dual-enrollment and Advanced Placement classes in high school.

About 2.5 million high school students participate in dual enrollment, according to an analysis of federal data by the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University. (The Hechinger Report, which produced this story, is an independent unit of Teachers College.)

This means they have room in their schedules in college for second majors, said Kelle Parsons, who focuses on higher education as a principal researcher at the American Institutes for Research.

Related: After years of quietly falling, college tuition is on the rise again

For some students, double-majoring makes more sense than changing majors altogether. About 30 percent of students change their majors at least once, and 10 percent two or more times, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Adding a second major is less drastic than dropping a first one and starting again from scratch, said Patrick Denice, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Western Ontario.

“If you add a [second] major, you hedge your bets against a changing labor market without losing those credits and that coursework you’ve already earned” toward the first one, said Denice, who has studied why students at U.S. universities pick and change their majors.

There’s yet another reason students are increasingly double-majoring. Even as they crowd into specialties associated with career opportunities, such as business and health-related disciplines — which together now account for nearly 1 in 3 undergraduate fields of study — some are adding second majors for which they simply have a passion.

Related: Students can’t get into basic college courses, dragging out their time in school

“They’re trying to satisfy their parents, who want them to be employed,” said J. Wesley Null, vice provost for undergraduate education and academic affairs at Baylor University, where there were more than twice as many double majors last year than there were in 2014. “But they’re also interested in a lot of interdisciplinary kinds of things. They’ll combine biology with Sanskrit or Chinese. These really bright students have a lot of diverse interests.”

At the University of Chicago, where the number of double majors has also more than doubled, “I see students committing to one career but wanting to have more breadth,” said Melina Hale, dean of the college. “They’re going and exploring all of these other majors and finding one they love.”

Double-majoring is also “a great way for students to demonstrate that they know how to think in different ways,” said Hale, herself a biologist who has collaborated with engineers. “If you’re going into a job in finance and have a deep background in history, you’re bringing different ways of approaching problems.”

Related: To fill seats, more colleges offer credit for life experience

This way of thinking is pushing still another trend: More students nationwide are earning certificates, which they can get in a matter of months and alongside their degrees, in subjects such as business management. Seventeen percent of bachelor’s degree recipients also finished college with at least one certificate in 2023-24, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reports.

Known as “stackable credentials,” these kinds of certificates “have been talked about for a long time,” said Ryan Lufkin, vice president of global academic strategy at the educational technology company Instructure. “And now there’s really demand for them.”

That’s because — like double-majoring and minoring — they make applicants stand out to employers, said Odle, at UW-Madison.

Students, he said, “are trying to emphasize their attractiveness in the labor market. They’re trying to cover their bases.”

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

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

Data analysis by Marina Villeneuve.

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November 5, 2025
Colleges build environmental lessons into degrees

by Olivia Sanchez, The Hechinger Report
November 5, 2025

LA JOLLA, Calif. — On a Thursday this fall, hundreds of students at the University of California, San Diego, were heading to classes that, at least on paper, seemed to have very little to do with their majors.

Hannah Jenny, an economics and math major, was on their way to a class on sustainable development. Angelica Pulido, a history major who aspires to work in the museum world, was getting ready for a course on gender and climate justice. Later that evening, others would show up for a lecture on economics of the environment, where they would learn how to calculate the answer to questions such as: “How many cents extra per gallon of gas are people willing to pay to protect seals from oil spills?”

Although most of these students don’t aspire to careers in climate science or advocacy, the university is betting that it’s just as important for them to understand the science and societal implications of climate change as it is for them to understand literature and history, even if they’re not planning to become writers or historians. UCSD is perhaps the first major public university in the country to require all undergraduate students to take a class on climate change to earn their degree.

The requirement, which rolled out with first-year students last fall, came about because UCSD leaders believe students won’t be prepared for the workforce if they don’t understand climate change. Around the globe, global warming is already causing severe droughts, water scarcity, fires, rising sea levels, flooding, storms and declining biodiversity; leaders at UCSD argue every job will be affected.

And even as President Donald Trump dismisses climate change as a hoax and cancels funding for research on it, other colleges are also exploring how to ensure students are knowledgeable about the subject. Arizona State University began requiring that students take a class in sustainability last year, while San Francisco State University added a climate justice class requirement to begin this fall.

“You can’t avoid climate change,” said Amy Lerner, a professor in the urban planning department at UCSD. “You can’t escape it in the private sector. You can’t escape it in the public sector. It’s just everywhere.” Students, she said, must be made ready to engage with all of its likely consequences.

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UCSD, a public university that serves roughly 35,000 undergraduate students, is not demanding that everyone sign up for Climate Change 101. Instead, students can fulfill the requirement by taking any of more than 50 classes in at least 23 disciplines across the university, including sustainable development, the course Jenny is taking.

There’s also psychology of the climate crisis, religion and ecology, energy economics, and several classes in the environmental science and oceanography departments, among others. And leaders at the university are working to develop more classes that satisfy the requirement, including one on the life cycle of a computer.

Bryan Alexander, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and author of a book on higher education and the climate crisis, said that while colleges have long taught about climate change in classes related to ecology, climatology and environmental science, it’s only been in the last decade or so that he’s seen other disciplines tackle the topic.

Climate change, Alexander said, “is the new liberal arts” — and colleges should take it seriously.

K. Wayne Yang, a UCSD provost who served on the original group that advocated for the requirement, said every industry and career field will experience the effects of climate change in some way. Health care providers need to know how to treat people who have been exposed to extreme heat or wildfire smoke; psychologists need to understand climate anxiety; and café owners need to know how the price of coffee changes in response to droughts or other natural disasters in coffee-growing regions.

Jenny, the senior taking a class on sustainable development, is eager to get answers to a question that has, in their three years as an economics and mathematics major, become difficult not to ponder: How can economic growth be the silver bullet of societal change if it has so many negative consequences for the planet?

“It’s definitely my hope that this is a class that will teach me something new about how to consider humanity’s path forward without destroying this earth, without destroying each other, without sacrificing quality of life for any person on this planet,” Jenny said.

Jenny isn’t subject to the requirement because they entered college before it rolled out. But they said they like the idea of encouraging students to step outside their comfort zones and fields of study and, in many cases, consider their future career paths in the context of the changing climate.

Other students, like junior Pulido, don’t see a specific link between climate change and their future careers. Pulido, who has spent the last few years working in the visitors center at San Diego’s Balboa Park and aspires to work in museums, said she signed up for the gender and climate justice class simply because it sounded interesting to her. She believes climate change is important, and she’s hoping that taking this class will help give her a better idea of how its role in history and might play into her career.

Related: How colleges can become ‘living labs’ for combating climate change

Colleges are taking different approaches to teaching their students about climate change, with some requiring a course in sustainability, a broad discipline that goes beyond the specific scientific phenomenon of climate change.

At Arizona State, sustainability classes can cover anything about how human, social, economic, political and cultural choices affect human and environmental well-being generally, said Anne Jones, the university’s vice provost for undergraduate education.

Dickinson and Goucher colleges have had such requirements since 2015 and 2007, respectively.

At San Francisco State University, leaders said they instead chose to require climate justice for all students, beginning with the class of 2029, because of the urgency of understanding how climate change affects communities differently.

Students need to understand broader systems of oppression and privilege so that they can address the unequal effects of climate change for “communities of color, low-income communities, global south communities and other marginalized communities,” said Autumn Thoyre, co-director of Climate HQ, the university’s center for climate education, research and action.

Yang and other UCSD leaders believe that, despite the increased politicization of climate change under Trump, they’ve received little pushback on the new requirement because of the university’s reputation as a climate-concerned institution. (It descended from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, initially founded in 1903.) But this model may not work as well on other campuses.

In communities where people’s livelihoods depend on activities that contribute to climate change, like coal mining or oil production, educators may have to modify their approach so as to not come off as offensive or threatening, said Jo Tavares, director of the California Center for Climate Change Education at West Los Angeles College.

“Messaging is so important, and education cannot be done in a way that just forces facts upon people,” Tavares said.

Related: One state mandates teaching about climate change in almost all subjects — even PE

At UCSD, to meet the graduation requirement, a course must be at least 30 percent about climate change: For example, a class that meets twice a week for a 10-week term must have at least six of its 20 sessions be about climate change. And the course syllabus must address at least two of the following four categories: the scientific aspects; human and social dimensions; project-based learning; or solutions.

The first time Lerner, the urban studies professor, applied for her sustainable development course to count toward the requirement, in July 2024, the committee told her she needed to better explain how the class addressed climate change. It wasn’t enough to simply have “sustainable” in the course name, committee members told her; she had to better articulate the role of climate change in sustainable development, a course she’s been teaching some version of for nearly 20 years.

Her students helped her go through the syllabus and identify all the points where she was teaching about how development contributes to climate change, even if she wasn’t explicitly putting those words to paper. After Lerner revised the descriptions of the class topics and made a few additions, the class was approved, she said.

On that fall Thursday, Lerner walked around her large glass-walled classroom while discussing development and globalization with the 65 undergraduate students in her sustainable development class. They covered how to balance equity, economy and environment in development, as well as various ways to measure the well-being of societies, including gross national income, food security, birthrate and infant mortality, happiness, fertility, education and lifespan. Lerner peppered her lecture with jokes and relatable examples, asking, for example, how many siblings students had before explaining the role of fertility and birth rate in a healthy society. (One student had 12, but the average was closer to two.)

Lerner, who now chairs the committee that decides which classes meet the requirement, said most of her students come in with the understanding that climate change is caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere, and some have even used an online tool to calculate their own carbon footprints. Often, their education has been focused on the hard science aspect of climate change, but they haven’t learned about what society has experienced as a result of climate change, she said.

When she asks them what can be done about climate change, she said, “they’re deer in the headlights.”

Related: Changing education could change the climate

Across campus, economics professor Mark Jacobsen teaches a lecture class every Thursday night on the economics of the environment. It meets the climate change requirement, but it also covers a core economics idea, he said: achieving efficiency.

Jacobsen is teaching students the formulas and methods they’ll need to answer questions like whether it’s worth it to spend $1 billion now to build renewable energy sources to avoid $10 billion in natural disaster cleanup in 30 years.

Though Jenny hasn’t taken Jacobsen’s class, this is exactly the type of dilemma they’re worried about.

Jenny, a public transit enthusiast so dedicated that they got a commercial driver’s license just to drive for Triton Transit, the campus bus system, said the requirement encourages students to face the climate crisis rather than shy away from it.

“It can be easy to kind of put your head down and be like, ‘That is too big for me to think about, and too scary,’” Jenny said. But it’s imperative, they added, that students be “forced to reckon with it and think about it and talk about it, to have that knowledge kind of swirling around in your head.”

Contact staff writer Olivia Sanchez at 212-678-8402 or [email protected].

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

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November 5, 2025
A shuttered government was not the lesson I hoped my Texas students would learn on a trip to Washington D.C

After decades serving in the Marine Corps and in education, I know firsthand that servant leadership and diplomacy can and should be taught. That’s why I hoped to bring 32 high school seniors from Texas to Washington, D.C., this fall for a week of engagement and learning with top U.S. government and international leaders.

Instead of open doors, we faced a government shutdown and had to cancel our trip.

The shutdown impacts government employees, members of the military and their families who are serving overseas and all Americans who depend on government being open to serve us — in businesses, schools and national parks, and through air travel and the postal service.

Our trip was not going to be a typical rushed tour of monuments, but a highly selective, long-anticipated capstone experience. Our plans included intensive interaction with government leaders at the Naval Academy and the Pentagon, discussions at the State Department and a leadership panel with senators and congressmembers. Our students hoped to explore potential careers and even practice their Spanish and Mandarin skills at the Mexican and Chinese embassies.

The students not only missed out on the opportunity to connect with these leaders and make important connections for college and career, they learned what happens when leadership and diplomacy fail — a harsh reminder that we need to teach these skills, and the principles that support them, in our schools.

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

Senior members of the military know that the DIME framework — diplomatic, informational, military and economic — should guide and support strategic objectives, particularly on the international stage. My own time in the Corps taught me the essential role of honesty and trust in conversations, negotiations and diplomacy. In civic life, this approach preserves democracy, yet the government shutdown demonstrates what happens when the mission shifts from solving problems to scoring points.

Our elected leaders were tasked with a mission, and the continued shutdown shows a breakdown in key aspects of governance and public service. That’s the real teachable moment of this shutdown. Democracy works when leaders can disagree without disengaging; when they can argue, compromise and keep doors open. If our future leaders can’t practice those skills, shutdowns will become less an exception and more a way of governing.

Students from ILTexas, a charter network serving over 26,000 students across the state, got a lesson in failed diplomacy after the government shutdown forced cancellation of their long-planned trip to the nation’s capital. Credit: Courtesy International Leadership of Texas Charter Schools

With opposing points of view, communication is essential. Bridging language is invaluable. As the adage goes, talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. Speak in his own language, that goes to his heart. That is why, starting in kindergarten, we teach every student in our charter school network English, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese.

Some of our graduates will become teachers, lawyers, doctors and entrepreneurs. Others will pursue careers in public service or navigate our democracy on the international stage. All will enter a world more fractured than the one I stepped into as a Marine.

While our leaders struggle to find common ground, studies show that nationally, only 22 percent of eighth graders are proficient in civics, and fewer than 20 percent of American students study a foreign language. My students are exceptions, preparing to lead in three languages and through servant leadership, a philosophy that turns a position of power into a daily practice of responsibility and care for others.

Related: COLUMN: Students want more civics education, but far too few schools teach it

While my students represent our ILTexas schools, they also know they are carrying something larger: the hopes of their families, communities and even their teenage peers across the country. Some hope to utilize their multilingual skills, motivated by a desire to help the international community. Others want to be a part of the next generation of diplomats and policy thinkers who are ready to face modern challenges head-on.

To help them, we build good habits into the school day. Silent hallways instill respect for others. Language instruction builds empathy and an international perspective. Community service requirements (60 hours per high school student) and projects, as well as dedicated leadership courses and optional participation in our Marine Corps JROTC program give students regular chances to practice purpose over privilege.

Educators should prepare young people for the challenges they will inherit, whether in Washington, in our communities or on the world stage. But schools can’t carry this responsibility alone. Students are watching all of us. It’s our duty to show them a better way.

We owe our young people more than simply a good education. We owe them a society in which they can see these civic lessons modeled by their elected leaders, and a path to put them into practice.

Eddie Conger is the founder and superintendent of International Leadership of Texas, a public charter school network serving more than 26,000 students across the state, and a retired U.S. Marine Corps major.

Contact the opinion editor at [email protected].

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

The 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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October 21, 2025
As more question the value of a degree, colleges fight to prove their return on investment

This story was produced by the Associated Press and reprinted with permission.

WASHINGTON – For a generation of young Americans, choosing where to go to college — or whether to go at all — has become a complex calculation of costs and benefits that often revolves around a single question: Is the degree worth its price?

Public confidence in higher education has plummeted in recent years amid high tuition prices, skyrocketing student loans and a dismal job market — plus ideological concerns from conservatives. Now, colleges are scrambling to prove their value to students.

Borrowed from the business world, the term “return on investment” has been plastered on college advertisements across the U.S. A battery of new rankings grade campuses on the financial benefits they deliver. States such as Colorado have started publishing yearly reports on the monetary payoff of college, and Texas now factors it into calculations for how much taxpayer money goes to community colleges.

“Students are becoming more aware of the times when college doesn’t pay off,” said Preston Cooper, who has studied college ROI at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “It’s front of mind for universities today in a way that it was not necessarily 15, 20 years ago.”

Related: Interested in more news about colleges and universities? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter.

A wide body of research indicates a bachelor’s degree still pays off, at least on average and in the long run. Yet there’s growing recognition that not all degrees lead to a good salary, and even some that seem like a good bet are becoming riskier as graduates face one of the toughest job markets in years.

A new analysis released Thursday by the Strada Education Foundation finds 70 percent of recent public university graduates can expect a positive return within 10 years — meaning their earnings over a decade will exceed that of a typical high school graduate by an amount greater than the cost of their degree. Yet it varies by state, from 53 percent in North Dakota to 82 percent in Washington, D.C. States where college is more affordable have fared better, the report says.

It’s a critical issue for families who wonder how college tuition prices could ever pay off, said Emilia Mattucci, a high school counselor at East Allegheny schools, near Pittsburgh. More than two-thirds of her school’s students come from low-income families, and many aren’t willing to take on the level of debt that past generations accepted.

Instead, more are heading to technical schools or the trades and passing on four-year universities, she said.

“A lot of families are just saying they can’t afford it, or they don’t want to go into debt for years and years and years,” she said.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon has been among those questioning the need for a four-year degree. Speaking at the Reagan Institute think tank in September, McMahon praised programs that prepare students for careers right out of high school.

“I’m not saying kids shouldn’t go to college,” she said. “I’m just saying all kids don’t have to go in order to be successful.”

Related: OPINION: College is worth it for most students, but its benefits are not equitable

American higher education has been grappling with both sides of the ROI equation — tuition costs and graduate earnings. It’s becoming even more important as colleges compete for decreasing numbers of college-age students as a result of falling birth rates.

Tuition rates have stayed flat on many campuses in recent years to address affordability concerns, and many private colleges have lowered their sticker prices in an effort to better reflect the cost most students actually pay after factoring in financial aid.

The other part of the equation — making sure graduates land good jobs — is more complicated.

A group of college presidents recently met at Gallup’s Washington headquarters to study public polling on higher education. One of the chief reasons for flagging confidence is a perception that colleges aren’t giving graduates the skills employers need, said Kevin Guskiewicz, president of Michigan State University, one of the leaders at the meeting.

“We’re trying to get out in front of that,” he said.

The issue has been a priority for Guskiewicz since he arrived on campus last year. He gathered a council of Michigan business leaders to identify skills that graduates will need for jobs, from agriculture to banking. The goal is to mold degree programs to the job market’s needs and to get students internships and work experience that can lead to a job.

Related: What’s a college degree worth? States start to demand colleges share the data

Bridging the gap to the job market has been a persistent struggle for U.S. colleges, said Matt Sigelman, president of the Burning Glass Institute, a think tank that studies the workforce. Last year the institute, partnering with Strada researchers, found 52 percent of recent college graduates were in jobs that didn’t require a degree. Even higher-demand fields, such as education and nursing, had large numbers of graduates in that situation.

“No programs are immune, and no schools are immune,” Sigelman said.

The federal government has been trying to fix the problem for decades, going back to President Barack Obama’s administration. A federal rule first established in 2011 aimed to cut federal money to college programs that leave graduates with low earnings, though it primarily targeted for-profit colleges.

A Republican reconciliation bill passed this year takes a wider view, requiring most colleges to hit earnings standards to be eligible for federal funding. The goal is to make sure college graduates end up earning more than those without a degree.

Others see transparency as a key solution.

For decades, students had little way to know whether graduates of specific degree programs were landing good jobs after college. That started to change with the College Scorecard in 2015, a federal website that shares broad earnings outcomes for college programs. More recently, bipartisan legislation in Congress has sought to give the public even more detailed data.

Lawmakers in North Carolina ordered a 2023 study on the financial return for degrees across the state’s public universities. It found that 93 percent produced a positive return, meaning graduates were expected to earn more over their lives than someone without a similar degree.

The data is available to the public, showing, for example, that undergraduate degrees in applied math and business tend to have high returns at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, while graduate degrees in psychology and foreign languages often don’t.

Colleges are belatedly realizing how important that kind of data is to students and their families, said Lee Roberts, chancellor of UNC-Chapel Hill, in an interview.

“In uncertain times, students are even more focused — I would say rightly so — on what their job prospects are going to be,” he added. “So I think colleges and universities really owe students and their families this data.”

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

The Strada Education Foundation, whose research is mentioned in this story, is one of the many funders of The Hechinger Report.

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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October 16, 2025
Higher Education must help shape how students learn, lead and build the skills employers want most

For the first time in more than a decade, confidence in the nation’s colleges and universities is rising. Forty-two percent of Americans now say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, up from 36 percent last year.

It’s a welcome shift, but it’s certainly not time for institutions to take a victory lap.

For years, persistent concerns about rising tuition, student debt and an uncertain job market have led many to question whether college was still worth the cost. Headlines have routinely spotlighted graduates who are underemployed, overwhelmed or unsure how to translate their degrees into careers.

With the rapid rise of AI reshaping entry-level hiring, those doubts are only going to intensify. Politicians, pundits and anxious parents are already asking: Why aren’t students better prepared for the real world?

But the conversation is broken, and the framing is far too simplistic. The real question isn’t whether college prepares students for careers. It’s how. And the “how” is more complex, personal and misunderstood than most people realize.

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

What’s missing from this conversation is a clearer understanding of where career preparation actually happens. It’s not confined to the classroom or the career center. It unfolds in the everyday often overlooked experiences that shape how students learn, lead and build confidence.

While earning a degree is important, it’s not enough. Students need a better map for navigating college. They need to know from day one that half the value of their experience will come from what they do outside the classroom.

To rebuild America’s trust, colleges must point beyond course catalogs and job placement rates. They need to understand how students actually spend their time in college. And they need to understand what those experiences teach them.

Ask someone thriving in their career which part of college most shaped their success, and their answer might surprise you. (I had this experience recently at a dinner with a dozen impressive philanthropic, tech and advocacy leaders.) You might expect them to name a major, a key class or an internship. But they’re more likely to mention running the student newspaper, leading a sorority, conducting undergraduate research, serving in student government or joining the debate team.

Such activities aren’t extracurriculars. They are career-curriculars. They’re the proving grounds where students build real-world skills, grow professional networks and gain confidence to navigate complexity. But most people don’t discuss these experiences until they’re asked about them.

Over time, institutions have created a false divide. The classroom is seen as the domain of learning, and career services is seen as the domain of workforce preparation. But this overlooks an important part of the undergraduate experience: everything in between.

The vast middle of campus life — clubs, competitions, mentorship, leadership roles, part-time jobs and collaborative projects — is where learning becomes doing. It’s where students take risks, test ideas and develop the communication, teamwork and problem-solving skills that employers need.

This oversight has made career services a stand-in for something much bigger. Career services should serve as an essential safety net for students who didn’t or couldn’t fully engage in campus life, but not as the launchpad we often imagine it to be.

Related: OPINION: College is worth it for most students, but its benefits are not equitable

We also need to confront a harder truth: Many students enter college assuming success after college is a given. Students are often told that going to college leads to success. They are rarely told, however, what that journey actually requires. They believe knowledge will be poured into them and that jobs will magically appear once the diploma is in hand. And for good reason, we’ve told them as much.

But college isn’t a vending machine. You can’t insert tuition and expect a job to roll out. Instead, it’s a platform, a laboratory and a proving ground. It requires students to extract value through effort, initiative and exploration, especially outside the classroom.

The credential matters, but it’s not the whole story. A degree can open doors, but it won’t define a career. It’s the skills students build, the relationships they form and the challenges they take on along the way to graduation that shape their future.

As more college leaders rightfully focus on the college-to-career transition, colleges must broadcast that while career services plays a helpful role, students themselves are the primary drivers of their future. But to be clear, colleges bear a grave responsibility here. It’s on us to reinforce the idea that learning occurs everywhere on campus, that the most powerful career preparation comes from doing, not just studying. It’s also on us to address college affordability, so that students have the time to participate in campus life, and to ensure that on-campus jobs are meaningful learning experiences.

Higher education can’t afford public confidence to dip again. The value of college isn’t missing. We’re just not looking in the right place.

Bridget Burns is the founding CEO of the University Innovation Alliance (UIA), a nationally recognized consortium of 19 public research universities driving student success innovation for nearly 600,000 students.

Contact the opinion editor at [email protected].

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

The 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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October 6, 2025
Cosmetology schools and other certificate programs got exemption from rules on graduates’ earning levels

Remiah Ward’s shift at the SmartStyle salon inside Walmart was almost over, and she’d barely made $30 in tips from the haircuts she’d done that day. It wasn’t unusual — a year after her graduation from beauty school, tips plus minimum wage weren’t enough to cover her rent.

She scarcely had time to eat and sleep before she had to drive back to the same Walmart in central Florida to stock shelves on the night shift. That job paid $14 an hour, but it meant she sometimes spent 18 hours a day in the same building. She worked six days a week but still struggled to catch up on bills and sleep.

The admissions officer at the American Institute of Beauty, where she enrolled straight out of high school, had sold her on a different dream. She would easily earn enough to pay back the $10,000 she borrowed to attend, she said she was told. Ward had no way of knowing that stylists from her school earn $20,200 a year, on average, four years after graduating. Seven years later, her debt, plus interest, is still unpaid.

In July, Republicans in Congress pushed through policies aimed at ensuring that what happened to Ward wouldn’t happen to other Americans on the government’s dime; colleges whose graduates don’t earn at least as much as someone with a high school diploma will now risk losing access to federal student loans. But one group managed to slip through the cracks — thousands of schools like the American Institute of Beauty were exempt.

Remiah Ward worked two jobs while trying to make it as a hair stylist but never made enough to pay her all her bills and has had to put her dream career on hold. Credit: Courtesy Remiah Ward

Certificate schools succeeded in getting a carve-out. The industry breathed a collective sigh of relief, and with good reason. At least 1,280 certificate-granting programs, which enrolled more than 220,000 students, would have been at risk of losing federal student loan funding if they had been included in the bill, according to a Hechinger Report analysis of federal data. [See table.] About 80% of those are for-profit programs, and 45 percent are cosmetology schools.

“There is this very strange donut hole in accountability where workforce programs are held accountable, two-year degree programs are held accountable, but everything in between gets off without any accountability,” said Preston Cooper, a senior fellow at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute.

The schools spared are known as certificate programs and, with their promise of an affordable and relatively quick path to economic security, are the fastest growing part of higher education. They usually take about a year to complete and train people to be hair-stylists, welders, medical assistants and cooks, among other jobs.

As with traditional colleges, there are big differences in quality among certificate programs. Some hair stylists can make a middle-class living if they work in a busy salon. But for people who have to pay back hefty student loans, the low wages for stylists in the early years can be an insurmountable obstacle.

Ward found herself facing that dilemma. When she could no longer sustain the lack of sleep from her double shifts at Walmart, she pressed pause on her styling career and took a job with Amazon, loading and unloading planes. She wasn’t ready to give up her dream career, though, so in addition to her 10-hour days moving boxes, she took part-time gigs at local hair salons. She didn’t have family to help pay rent, not to mention loan payments, so she couldn’t afford to work fulltime at a salon, which is essential to build up a regular clientele — and bigger tips. Without that, she couldn’t get much beyond minimum wage.

A representative from the American Institute of Beauty denied that Ward was told she would easily repay her loan.

“No admissions representative, not at AIB or elsewhere, would ever make such a statement,” Denise Herman, general counsel and assistant vice president of AIB, said in an email.

The high cost of many for-profit cosmetology schools — tuition can be upward of $20,000, usually for a one-year program — can leave former students mired in debt. In May, the government released data showing 850 colleges where at least a third of borrowers haven’t made a loan payment for 90 days or more, putting them on track to default. About 42 percent of those were for-profit cosmetology and barbering schools (including AIB).

Brittany Mcnew says she loves working as a stylist but that her income takes a hit when traffic is slow in her salon in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Credit: Meredith Kolodner/The Hechinger Report

Herman blamed the Biden administration policy that after the pandemic let borrowers forgo payments without any penalty.

“Debtors became ‘comfortable’ not making payments,” said Herman. “AIB provides the graduate with the information graduates need to make their payments. What that graduate decides to pay, or not pay, is not influenced by AIB.”

Under the “big beautiful bill” passed in July, two- and four-year colleges must ensure that, after four years, graduates on average make at least as much as someone in their state who has only a high school diploma. The colleges must inform students if they fail that test, and if it happens for two out of three years, the college will be ineligible to receive federal loan funds.

Some for-profit certificate schools lobbied hard for an exemption. The American Association of Career Schools, which represents proprietary cosmetology schools, spent $120,000 lobbying the Education Department and Congress, including on the “big beautiful bill,” in the first six months of this year. At the group’s major lobbying event in April, Sen. Bill Cassidy, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, was the keynote speaker.

Cassidy declined to answer questions about why certificate programs were excluded, but a fact sheet from his committee noted that they are already covered by something else, the gainful employment rule, which is also being challenged by the for-profit cosmetology industry.

That federal gainful employment regulation, updated in 2023, requires in essence that graduates from career-oriented schools earn enough to be able to pay back their loans and earn more than a high school graduate. It also requires that consumers, like Ward, be given more information about how graduates from all colleges fare in the workplace.

The rule posed an existential threat to a huge swath of cosmetology schools.

In 2023, the American Association of Career Schools sued to block the gainful employment rule.

“AACS supports fair and reasonable accountability measures,” Cecil Kidd, the AACS’s executive director, said in an email. “However, we strongly object to arbitrary or discriminatory policies such as the US Department of Education’s Gainful Employment rule, which unfairly targets career schools while exempting many public and private non-profit institutions that fail to meet comparable outcomes.”

He pointed to public comments in which AACS has argued that the rule imposes an unfair burden on cosmetology schools since stylists are predominantly women, who are more likely to have “personal commitments” that affect their earnings, and who rely on tips that are often pocketed as unreported income.

Cameron Vandenboom is a successful hair stylist but says the high cost of her private beauty school wasn’t worth thousands of dollars in student debt: “I absolutely should have gone to community college.” Credit: Courtesy Shanna Kaye Photo

In a twist that surprised advocates on both sides, the Education Department in May asked the court to effectively dismiss AACS’ lawsuit.

If the court rules in favor of the cosmetology schools, certificate programs will be free of all accountability requirements on their graduates’ earning levels, because they got the carveout in July.

Even if the court rules against cosmetology schools, advocates are pessimistic that the Trump administration will implement the gainful rules. The first Trump administration got rid of the original rules back in 2019 and Nicholas Kent, now the U.S. undersecretary of education, was previously the chief policy officer for Career Education Colleges and Universities, or CECU, the trade group that represents for-profit colleges, including certificate programs. He is a well-known critic of the rule.

“I would be very surprised, if the unlikely scenario plays out that the Biden rule is upheld, that this Department of Education would just say, OK, the court has spoken,” said Jason Altmire, CECU’s executive director. “We are not opposed to accountability for certificate programs, so long as it’s fair to everybody and we have a voice in how you’re measuring programs.”

Altmire said CECU didn’t lobby for certificate programs to be carved out of Congress’ bill, but did argue against the earnings formula that Congress landed on. Altmire said it doesn’t take into account part-time work and the gender gap in wages.

One objection from AACS, raised by CECU as well, is that the earnings measured don’t include tips, which are crucial to hair stylists’ income. Analyzed without including tips, 576 of 724 cosmetology schools in the Hechinger Report analysis would fail Congress’ earnings test. But even if tips were included and raised stylists’ income by 20 percent, 526 cosmetology schools would still fail.

Earlier this year, Remiah Ward made the difficult decision to leave Florida and move to Kentucky, where the cost of living was more forgiving. She’s working from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. at an aluminum factory for $19.50 an hour.

One day, she might go back to styling after her debt is paid off. Like many former beauty school students, she wishes she’d had more information when she decided to enroll.

“They really sugar-coated it. I was 18 years old, and I needed a trade that I was already pretty good at,” said Ward, who is now 26. “Everybody thinks they’re going to make a high return, and it’s just not the reality.”

Marina Villeneuve contributed data analysis to this story.

This story about cosmetology schools produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger higher-education 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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September 26, 2025
Explore the earnings for graduates of beauty schools, other certificate programs

Schools that train hairstylists, dental assistants and health aides will be able to keep getting federal student loan dollars even if the professionals they turn out don’t end up earning any more than a high school graduate.

That’s because programs like those, which don’t end in a college degree, were granted an exemption from new accountability measures under President Donald Trump’s ”big, beautiful bill.”

A Hechinger Report analysis of federal data found at least 1,280 such certificate programs could have been at risk of their students losing access to federal student loans — but a successful lobbying effort excluded them from the accountability measures.

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

Under the new law, most graduates of associate, bachelor’s and graduate degree programs must earn at least as much as someone who has only a high school diploma. If programs fail to hit that benchmark for two out of three years, their students will no longer be eligible for federal student loans. (And the schools must warn students of this possibility if they miss the mark for just one year). Without that borrowing power, many students could not afford to attend. And without those students, some of the schools might not survive.

Using the table below, see which certificate programs might have been flagged under the Trump law if not for the exemption. If graduates of a particular program ended up earning less than adults with only a high school diploma, that program could have faced losing eligibility for federal student loans under the Trump law.

Methodology

What exactly does the “big, beautiful bill” call for?

The legislation requires the Department of Education to compare earnings of working adults who have only a high school diploma to the earnings of adults four years after they complete a degree program or graduate certificate. If a postsecondary program’s graduates fail to outearn adults with only high school degrees for two out of three years, students can no longer obtain federal student loans to attend that program.

The law also sets up an appeals process and a way for programs to apply to regain eligibility for federal student loans.

What data was analyzed?

The law directs the education secretary to use census data to calculate median earnings for working adults with only a high school degree in the state where a program is located. The Department of Education will release regulations that spell out exactly how to do that math. For example, the law does not spell out whether it will look at census data averaged out over 12 months or a longer period of time.

For earnings data for high school graduates, The Hechinger Report relied on calculations from the Department of Education, which were derived from the 2022 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates Public Use Microdata Sample from the U.S. Census Bureau.

To calculate median earnings for graduates, the law directs the Education Department to put together earnings data for a cohort of at least 30 graduates who received federal student aid for postsecondary education — which typically includes grants, loans or work-study. Graduates are excluded if they’re currently enrolled in another higher education program. If there are fewer than 30 students in a cohort, the Education Department can lump together several years of data to get to 30 students.

To get earnings data for graduates of certificate programs, Hechinger used a federal database known as College Scorecard. We downloaded field of study data for the 2022-23 school year. From this data, The Hechinger Report extracted information about certificate programs, at their main campuses, and included only programs that had median earnings data. The federal database suppresses earnings data for small programs. That left 4,431 currently operating certificate programs.

How was a program determined to be at possible risk of failing the accountability measure?

For each program, The Hechinger Report compared median graduate earnings to the high school graduate earnings data of the state where the program was located. If the graduates earned less, the program was considered to be at risk.

Under the law, postsecondary programs that don’t meet the earnings benchmark for one year have to inform all current students that they are at risk of losing their eligibility for federal student loans.

Are there any limitations to the data?

The “big, beautiful bill” takes online programs into account by considering whether students live in the same state where their academic program is based. Under the law, student earnings are compared with national data rather than state data when fewer than half of enrolled students live in the state where the school is located, which may be the case for online programs.

The Hechinger Report’s analysis instead compares every program with state earnings. That’s because the College Scorecard field of study data set is limited and only includes information about graduates employed within the same state as the institution, not whether enrolled students live in the same state as the program. In addition, College Scorecard data provides earnings data for all graduates without a breakdown for whether they receive federal aid.

Also, the Hechinger database looks at the available median earnings of all students four years after graduation for the school year 2022-23, regardless of the number of graduates. Though College Scorecard suppresses data on smaller programs, median earnings data is available for programs with 16 or more working graduates. The “big, beautiful bill” directs the Department of Education to instead lump together years of data to create cohorts of at least 30 students.

Contact investigative reporter Marina Villeneuve at 212-678-3430 or [email protected] or on Signal at mvilleneuve.78

This story about beauty schools 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.

Source link

September 26, 2025

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