Tag: Early

  • Why universities struggle to act on early warning data

    Why universities struggle to act on early warning data

    Dashboards light up with warning signals weeks into term, yet intervention often comes too late—if at all.

    Despite significant investment in learner analytics and regulatory pressure to meet an 80 per cent continuation threshold for full-time undergraduates, universities consistently struggle to act when their systems flag at-risk students.

    This implementation gap isn’t about technology or data quality. It’s an organisational challenge that exposes fundamental tensions between how universities are structured and what regulatory compliance now demands.

    The Office for Students has made its expectations clear: providers must demonstrate they are delivering positive outcomes, with thresholds of 80 per cent continuation and 75 per cent completion for full-time first degree students. Context can explain but not excuse performance below these levels. Universities are expected to identify struggling students early and intervene effectively.

    Yet most institutions remain organised around systems designed for retrospective quality assurance rather than proactive support, creating a gap between regulatory expectations and institutional capability.

    The organisational challenge of early intervention

    When analytics platforms flag students showing signs of disengagement—missed lectures, incomplete activities, limited platform interaction—institutions face an organisational challenge, not a technical one. The data arrives weeks into term, offering time for meaningful intervention. But this is precisely when universities struggle to act.

    The problem isn’t identifying risk. Modern analytics can detect concerning patterns within the first few weeks of term. The problem is organisational readiness: who has authority to act on probabilistic signals? What level of certainty justifies intervention? Which protocols govern the response? Most institutions lack clear answers, leaving staff paralysed between the imperative to support students and uncertainty about their authority to act.

    This paralysis has consequences. OfS data shows that 7.2 per cent of students are at providers where continuation rates fall below thresholds. While sector-level performance generally exceeds requirements, variation at provider and course level suggests some institutions manage early intervention better than others.

    Where regulatory pressure meets organisational resistance

    The clash between regulatory expectations and institutional reality runs deeper than resource constraints or technological limitations. Universities have developed (sometimes over centuries) around a model of academic authority that concentrates judgement at specific points: module boards, exam committees, graduation ceremonies. This architecture of late certainty served institutions well when their primary function was certifying achievement. But it’s poorly suited to an environment demanding early intervention and proactive support.

    Consider how quality assurance typically operates. Module evaluations happen after teaching concludes. External examiners review work after assessment. Progression boards meet after results are finalised. These retrospective processes align with traditional academic governance but clash with regulatory expectations for timely intervention. The Teaching Excellence Framework and B3 conditions assume institutions can support students before problems become irreversible, yet most university processes are designed to make judgements after outcomes are clear.

    The governance gap in managing uncertainty

    Early intervention operates in the realm of probability, not certainty. A student flagged by analytics might be struggling—or might be finding their feet. Acting means accepting false positives; not acting means accepting false negatives. Most institutions lack governance frameworks for managing this uncertainty.

    The regulatory environment compounds this challenge. When the OfS investigates providers with concerning outcomes, it examines what systems are in place for early identification and intervention. Universities must demonstrate they are using “all available data” to support students. But how can institutions evidence good faith efforts when their governance structures aren’t designed for decisions based on partial information?

    Some institutions have tried to force early intervention through existing structures—requiring personal tutors to act on analytics alerts or making engagement monitoring mandatory. But without addressing underlying governance issues, these initiatives often become compliance exercises rather than genuine support mechanisms. Staff comply with requirements to contact flagged students but lack clear protocols for escalation, resources for support, or authority for substantive intervention.

    Building institutional systems that bridge the gap

    Institutions successfully implementing early intervention share common organisational characteristics. They haven’t eliminated the tension between regulatory requirements and academic culture—they’ve built systems to manage it.

    Often they create explicit governance frameworks for uncertainty. Rather than pretending analytics provides certainty, they acknowledge probability and build appropriate decision-making structures. This might include intervention panels with delegated authority, clear escalation pathways, or risk-based protocols that match response to confidence levels. These frameworks document decision-making, providing audit trails that satisfy regulatory requirements while preserving professional judgement.

    They develop tiered response systems that distribute authority appropriately. Light-touch interventions (automated emails, text check-ins) require minimal authority. Structured support (study skills sessions, peer mentoring) operates through professional services. Academic interventions (module changes, assessment adjustments) involve academic staff. This graduated approach enables rapid response to early signals while reserving substantive decisions for appropriate authorities.

    And they invest in institutional infrastructure beyond technology. This includes training staff to interpret probabilistic data, developing shared vocabularies for discussing risk, and creating feedback loops to refine interventions. Successful institutions treat early intervention as an organisational capability requiring sustained development, not a technical project with an end date.

    The compliance imperative and cultural change

    As the OfS continues its assessment cycles, universities face increasing pressure to demonstrate effective early intervention. This regulatory scrutiny makes organisational readiness a compliance issue. Universities can no longer treat early intervention as optional innovation—it’s becoming core to demonstrating adequate quality assurance. Yet compliance-driven implementation rarely succeeds without cultural change. Institutions that view early intervention solely through a regulatory lens often create bureaucratic processes that satisfy auditors but don’t support students.

    More successful institutions frame early intervention as aligning with academic values: supporting student learning, enabling achievement, and promoting fairness. They engage academic staff not as compliance officers but as educators with enhanced tools for understanding student progress. This cultural work takes time but proves essential for moving beyond surface compliance to genuine organisational change.

    Implications for the sector

    The OfS shows no signs of relaxing numerical thresholds—if anything, regulatory expectations continue to strengthen. Financial pressures make student retention more critical. Public scrutiny of value for money increases pressure for demonstrable support. Universities must develop organisational capabilities for early intervention not as a temporary response to regulatory pressure but as a permanent feature of higher education.

    This requires more than purchasing analytics platforms or appointing retention officers. It demands fundamental questions about institutional organisation: How can governance frameworks accommodate uncertainty while maintaining rigour? How can universities distribute authority for intervention while preserving academic standards? How can institutions build cultures that value prevention as much as certification?

    The gap between early warning signals and institutional action is an organisational challenge requiring structural and cultural change. Universities investing only in analytics without addressing organisational readiness will continue to struggle, regardless of how sophisticated their systems become. These aren’t simple changes, but they’re necessary for institutions serious about supporting student success rather than merely measuring it.

    The question facing universities isn’t whether to act on early warning signals—regulatory pressure makes this increasingly mandatory. The question is whether institutions can develop the organisational capabilities to act effectively, bridging the gap between data and decision, between warning and intervention, between regulatory compliance and educational values.

    Those that cannot may find themselves not just failing their students but failing to meet the minimum expectations of a regulated sector.

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  • Early childhood educator apprenticeships offer an answer to child care shortages

    Early childhood educator apprenticeships offer an answer to child care shortages

    by Nirvi Shah, The Hechinger Report
    January 7, 2026

    About six years ago, an apprentice training to be a machinist in Washington state told her supervisor she would probably have to drop out of the training program after having her baby: She couldn’t find child care that accommodated her shift.

    It was one of the first challenges Shana Peschek was tasked with solving when she became executive director of the Machinists Institute, which trains workers for jobs in the aerospace, manufacturing and automotive industries all over the state. 

    Peschek knew it was essential to do something for workers with young children.

    “That worst shift, the new hires are going to get it. The new hires are generally younger people. They have little kids or they are going to want a little kid,” Peschek said.

    “It’s beyond the cost of child care,” she said. “If they can’t find anywhere, we’re going to lose them.” 

    As Peschek worked on a way to address the situation, she also wondered how she could include apprenticeship in the solution. The answer: incorporating early educator apprenticeships into a custom-built child care center tailored to the trade union’s needs. Last month, The Hechinger Report wrote about San Francisco’s child care apprenticeship program. 

    “Apprenticeship is my jam,” said Peschek, who emphasized that apprenticeship is a mode of education, not limited to any specific profession. While the word apprentice is often associated with roles like machinists, it is just the term for an educational path that includes paid, on-the-job training. Early educator apprenticeships do just that, providing classes and training alongside paid work experience to help hopeful teachers earn required credentials and get full-time jobs. “I want that pathway available for our teachers and assistant teachers,” she said.

    With a combination of institute money, grants and donations, the Machinists Institute bought land and is constructing Little Wings Early Learning Academy in Everett, Washington. Its name is inspired by the local economy, which is powered in part by a nearby Boeing factory. The center will serve workers in the trade union, who will be able to send their young children for care starting as early as 4 a.m. through as late as midnight. Care will also be available on weekends, to accommodate a range of shifts. It is scheduled to open this spring.

    Machinists, maritime industry workers and other local tradespeople and apprentices will pay a discounted rate for child care, which will also be available to area residents to enroll their kids. 

    Peschek’s hopes are high, for all of the apprentices the center will involve. 

    That’s in part because of the experience some early educator apprentices have had. Apprenticeships have been a part of the trades for centuries, but they are relatively novel in education. 

    The option changed the course of Carlota Hernández de Cruz’s life. For years, with only an elementary school education from when she grew up in Mexico, she was the primary caregiver for her three children while her husband was the breadwinner. When her youngest child was still in child care, at a California Head Start program run by an area YMCA, she began working a few hours a day as a parent intern at the center. 

    She eventually encountered Pamm Shaw, who created one of the first early educator apprenticeship programs in the country for the YMCA of the East Bay, in California’s Alameda County. Shaw encouraged Hernández de Cruz to take classes and work toward becoming an early childhood teacher. 

    “I’m originally from Mexico,” Hernández de Cruz said, remembering her apprehension. “I came with zero English.” But Shaw was convincing. 

    Hernández de Cruz took classes, one or two at a time, balancing them with motherhood and homekeeping duties. Then her husband got sick and could no longer work. It took years, but she completed the courses for her associate degree. Just a few months before graduation, her husband died. 

    Hernández de Cruz, now 53, knew that although what she had accomplished was monumental, it wasn’t enough. Thanks to her apprenticeship, however, her bachelor’s degree coursework was paid for, even though it was sometimes a struggle to keep up with the requirements of online courses and lectures in English, while solo parenting and working. 

    In 2019, Hernández de Cruz earned that bachelor’s degree but turned down a job running a child care center. She wasn’t ready. When she was approached again in 2021 about a director role, at the center where she was working, she agreed. There have been ups and downs: That center closed and she was back to teaching for a while. But now she runs the Vera Casey Center, a Head Start site for infants and toddlers in Berkeley that is part of the YMCA of the East Bay.

    “I feel I can say financially I’m stable,” Hernández de Cruz said, and she said she is proud of herself and her children. Her kids grew up watching their mother work and study hard and have had opportunities she didn’t when she was younger, even though she said they all faltered, and flunked a few classes, when their father died. Her younger daughter just graduated from a nursing program and her older daughter completed a bachelor’s degree in child development and is now pursuing a master’s degree. Both daughters live at home with her, as do her parents. (Her son, she said, is still taking classes and finding his way.) “I’m stable but he’s not here with us,” Hernández de Cruz said of her husband, but “being in the classroom with kids, it helped me to heal. That’s what I feel at work. I still feel happy every day.”

    Contact Executive Editor Nirvi Shah at 212-678-3445, on Signal at NirviShah.14 or [email protected]. 

    Reporting on this story was supported by the Higher Ed Media Fellowship.

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

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  • 3 Pressing Themes Shaping Early Care and Education – The 74

    3 Pressing Themes Shaping Early Care and Education – The 74


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    The early care and education field has experienced an eventful — sometimes tumultuous —  year, placing it repeatedly in the spotlight. While some states such as New Mexico forged bold solutions to child care’s rising unaffordability, others responded to federal budget pressures by cutting or freezing their child care programs, or walking back the very regulations meant to keep kids safe. When Head Start’s federal grant disbursements were slowed or frozen, the 60-year-old early education program for low-income families suffered a severe, existential threat. Meanwhile, as the sector continues to reel from the staffing shortages and high turnover rates that have haunted child care since the pandemic, heightened immigration enforcement activity is sending chills through the field’s workforce, which is nearly 20% foreign born. Through these challenges, some child care providers have found themselves becoming involved with advocacy efforts to bring about change, with some even running for office.

    Amid these developments — some amazing research and resources have emerged for the field. As the year comes to a close, zero2eight asked early care and education experts to share what they consider to be the sector’s must-read research of 2025. What emerged from their responses were a collection of reports, studies and data tools relevant to a number of urgent themes. These include the sector’s ability to respond to current events, new ways of thinking about preschool gains and economic analysis of some of the ongoing challenges facing the early care and education workforce. 

    Here are some of the themes, studies and resources identified by the field’s insiders as essential to moving the sector forward.

    1. Timely Research and Resources for Challenging Times

    Steeply rising costs, dwindling federal child care funds, and an aggressive federal immigration crackdown have all contributed to a challenging, fast-changing landscape for families and early educators, many of whom are immigrants and reliant on public benefits. The following new research and tools offer timely insights into how such pressures are reshaping families’ lives and the early care and education sector, with some offering inspiration for how to respond. 

    Working Paper: Recent Immigration Raids Increased Student Absences 

    Authors: Thomas S. Dee, economist and the Barnett Family Professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education

    Key Takeaway: Immigration raids coincided with a 22% increase in daily student absences, with especially large increases among the youngest students. 

    This study highlights the field’s “ability to innovate and be nimble to understand impacts of policy and policy enforcement,” said nominator Cristi Carman, director of the RAPID Survey Project at Stanford Center on Early Childhood who studies family well-being. It examines the collateral damage of unexpected immigration raids in California’s Central Valley, documenting a clear pattern in children’s school attendance, said second nominator Philip Fisher, director of the Stanford Center on Early Childhood, adding that “ICE raids are associated with increased school absenteeism.” According to the working paper, young children are expected to be the most likely to miss school, with students in kindergarten through fifth grade estimated to be far more likely to miss school as a result of immigration raids than high school students. 

    Report: State Strategies for Sustained Investment in Kids: A Landscape of Dedicated Funding

    Authors: Children’s Funding Project staff, including Bruno Showers, state policy manager; Lisa Christensen Gee, director of tax policy; Olivia Allen, vice president of strategy and advocacy; Josh Weinstock, policy analyst (former); and Marina Mendoza, senior manager of early childhood impact

    Key Takeaway: Facing dwindling federal funds, several states have innovated ways to provide dedicated funding for early care and education and youth programs.

    With pandemic-era relief funds running out, states are in desperate need of models for how to continue supporting early care and education, said Erica Phillips, executive director of the National Association for Family Child Care (NAFCC), who nominated this recent report. The report — from Children’s Funding Project, a nonprofit that helps secure sustainable public funding for children’s services — offers exactly that by providing a crucial, “very comprehensive overview” of how some states are building long-term, dedicated revenue streams for child care, early education and youth programs as federal money runs dry. As the report’s authors explain, stable, dedicated funding is critical to thriving programs, letting states and providers to “budget more than one year at a time, allowing them to make longer-term investments in quality improvement, facilities, staff education, and other key elements of evidence-based programs and services.” 

    Data Tools: Mapping Diaper Need in the U.S. and The American Affordability Tracker

    Authors: The diaper need mapping tool was published as part of a research collaboration between the Urban Institute and the National Diaper Bank Network. The affordability tracker was published by the Urban Institute. 

    Key takeaway: Families are facing mounting economic insecurity 

    The Urban Institute recently released two innovative data tools for policymakers, advocates and researchers that illuminate the increasing economic precariousness facing too many families, said Carman of the RAPID Survey Project. The interactive tool Mapping Diaper Need in the U.S., produced in partnership with the National Diaper Bank Initiative, shows how many diapers each county across the nation needs to address diaper shortages facing homes with young children that are below 300% of the federal poverty level. The American Affordability Tracker illustrates the rising cost pressures facing families across various indicators, including how the price of groceries has changed in counties and congressional districts in recent years. “Being able to see and understand scale and drivers of economic insecurity nationally is very powerful,” wrote Carman. 

    2. New Research Reveals Preschool’s Overlooked Impacts

    The body of early education research about how preschool affects children often measures child outcomes such as kindergarten readiness, standardized test scores or later graduation rates. While those are all important, Christina Weiland, professor at the Marsal School of Education at the University of Michigan and the Ford School of Public Policy, wrote in an email, “we’ve long suspected they aren’t the full picture of preschool’s effects.” Weiland nominated the following working paper as part of what she considers to be a new wave of research that explores a broader set of outcomes than the field has typically examined, such as parent earnings, accelerated coursework and subsequent schooling environments. “Together, these studies suggest benefits of preschool programs that have been largely overlooked,” but that are key to fully understanding the potential benefits of early learning investments for children and families, noted Weiland.

    Working Paper: Parents’ Earnings and the Returns to Universal Pre-Kindergarten

    Authors: John Eric Humphries, faculty research fellow at Yale University’s Department of Economics; Christopher Neilson, research associate at Yale University; Xiaoyang Ye, Brown University; and Seth D. Zimmerman, research associate at Yale School of Management 

    Key Takeaway: New Haven’s universal pre-K (UPK) program raised parents’ earnings by nearly 22% during pre-kindergarten, with gains persisting for at least six years.

    Weiland said that this notable study, published in 2024 and updated in 2025, expands the preschool picture by looking at how UPK might impact parents’ earnings,” and uses that to estimate the program’s returns on investment. It found that New Haven’s UPK program raised parents’ earnings by nearly 22% during pre-kindergarten, with gains persisting for at least six years, concluding that the returns to UPK investment are “high.” As one of the first studies looking at “earnings data in modern-day pre-K studies,” noted Weiland, it offers more evidence that the field is “likely underestimating the return on investment early education programs have.” 

    3. Spotlight on the Early Child Care Workforce

    Back in the spring, child care economist Chris Herbst spoke with zero2eight about how the COVID pandemic demonstrated how the child care workforce is “like a leaf blowing in the wind” — “sensitive to all kinds of changes in the policy and economic environment because it is is inextricably linked to the larger labor market.” Because of this, a new surge of recent research by economists has focused on the workforce, with researchers seeking to understand how early care providers respond to policy and market changes. Nominators pointed toward two such studies. 

    Working Paper: The Effect of the Minimum Wage on Childcare Establishments

    Authors: Katharine C. Sadowski, assistant professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education

    Key Takeaway: An increase in minimum wage changes who provides child care

    Combining “rich data with sensible research designs,” this study examines how an increase in the minimum wage could impact child care quality and access, noted nominator Aaron Sojourner, senior economist at W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. 

    Author Katharine C. Sadowski’s findings suggest that an increase to the minimum wage doesn’t lead to a decrease in the number of child care programs or the number of people working in the sector. However, minimum wage policies can influence who provides child care: larger enterprises, such as child care centers, are more likely to open and remain in operation, while smaller, self-employed providers, such as home-based child care programs, are less likely to open or remain in business. Among the smaller establishments that do stay open, the owners are less likely to have advanced degrees, the study found, potentially impacting the quality of child care provided, according to the author. “Unfortunately, minimum wage policy is binding and too important for a lot of child care employers and employees due to chronic underinvestment in the sector,” wrote Sojourner, adding that this is the first paper he’s seen to leverage “restricted-use data available through the U.S. Census Research Data Center system to generate insights on the sector.”

    Study: The Declining Relative Quality of the Child Care Workforce

    Authors: Chris M. Herbst, foundation professor in Arizona State University’s School of Public Affairs 

    Key Takeaway: The education of the early education workforce has dropped over time, possibly due to the sector’s low wages 

    This study found that the education levels and cognitive test scores of the early education workforce have been declining over time, suggesting lower teacher quality, which could have implications for children’s development. The study links this dip in teacher skills to the proliferation of early education programs which might divert future child care workers away from four-year colleges. It also looks at how low wages — which have remained low even as wages for other jobs for similarly-skilled workers have increased — might lead highly qualified individuals to choose other occupations. 

    “This is analogous to what previous research has found in the K-12 workforce,” wrote Jessica Brown, assistant professor of economics at University of South Carolina, who nominated the study. It “underscores the importance of the discussion of compensation in early childhood education.” Brown notes that it’s a difficult topic for the field to discuss, because “no one wants to imply that the current workforce is not high quality. But the reality is that compensation challenges mean that child care is not a very attractive job, and that has implications for the quality of the workforce.”


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  • 5 early childhood education highlights of 2025

    5 early childhood education highlights of 2025

    by Jackie Mader, The Hechinger Report
    December 24, 2025

    In the nearly 13 years since I wrote my first early childhood story for The Hechinger Report, I have never experienced a year quite like 2025. From the gutting of federal early childhood offices to threats to Head Start and the deeply felt ramifications of aggressive federal immigration enforcement, news on the early ed beat felt constant — and especially urgent — this year.  

    Amid all this, there were some promising steps taken, especially at the state level, to elevate children’s issues and pay for programs that support the earliest years of life. Here are five highlights, including a few you may have missed: 

    New Mexico introduced universal child care. New Mexico was the first state in the country to roll out universal child care to every family, regardless of income. Experts are cautiously optimistic, and acknowledge the state likely has some kinks to work out. One New Mexico source I spoke to said she’s especially worried that wealthier families will snatch up spots if guardrails aren’t put in place to prioritize certain populations, including children with disabilities. Another advocate told me she is worried that the wages for early childhood educators are still too low. This is a story that will continue to play out over the next few years, and will be watched carefully. Still, in a country that has long underfunded early learning, experts are hopeful that other states will follow suit and invest more in the child care industry in ways that support the child care staff and families.

    New Jersey, which leads the nation in excluding young children with disabilities, committed to investigate how to improve inclusive practices: Earlier this year, a Hechinger Report investigation found New Jersey is the worst in the nation at making sure young students with disabilities are learning alongside their peers for at least 80 percent of the day, which is a federal metric for inclusion. After our series was published, a council that advises New Jersey education officials on special education issues announced it will investigate inclusion rates for young children and look at how state educators and administrators are trained.

    States and municipalities invested in early childhood: Cincinnati, Montana and California’s Alameda County increased their support for early learning this year, said Emmy Liss, a researcher and policy consultant for the think tank New America’s New Practice Lab. In San Antonio, the city’s pre-K program expanded this year to serve infants and toddlers. In Colorado, voters approved new “taxing districts” that will raise sales tax for early childhood programs. “We see this consistent pattern of mayors, would-be mayors, county officials, saying, ‘Our families can’t withstand this anymore, and we have the power and the mandate from our community to invest in early childhood,’” Liss said. “I feel optimistic because of that.”

    Some states expanded family-friendly policies: After reporting by Hechinger contributor Sarah Carr this year found few parents are made aware of their infant’s rights to early intervention services, Illinois passed a law requiring that families with infants who stay in the NICU are connected to those early therapies. In Colorado, state officials added NICU leave to the state’s paid family medical leave program. Minnesota policymakers are on the cusp of launching their state’s paid family leave program.

    Pittsburgh embraced a citywide play-based initiative: After decades of research that shows the importance of play for healthy development, a new initiative in Pittsburgh is putting research into action. After funding several years of play-based projects around the city, the Let’s Play, PGH program, funded by the nonprofit Remake Learning and the Grable and Henry L. Hillman foundations, rolled out permanent play-based experiences this year. Those include a “Clayground,” where families can try hands-on clay sculpting, and a “Discovery Tree,” an indoor structure with various play and learning features. “I think society, especially in education, we’re moving away from valuing play in a way that it’s often spoken of more in a pejorative sense, like there’s more serious things we have to do,” said Tyler Samstag, executive director of Remake Learning. “But there’s this rich research around the importance of play,” he added. And, “there’s a kind of reeling back from the pandemic era of always being in front of a screen.” 

    I also asked a few early childhood experts what they plan to watch for in 2026:

    • I’m watching the dual trends of state momentum for universal child care proposals against the budgetary headwinds states are facing as a result of economic policies and H.R. 1 [the “big, beautiful bill”]. 

    — Elliot Haspel, senior fellow at Capita

    • The early care and education community will have the opportunity to stake out bold policy positions, like those we saw in New Mexico, New York, Connecticut, Montana and Vermont this past year, while facing the challenge of protecting children, families and educators from federal policies that will wreak havoc on safety net programs and state budgets. 

    — Albert Wat, deputy director of advocacy and impact at the Alliance for Early Success

    • I am paying attention to whether there are signs of even a minor shift away from this dominant narrative — that something close to universal child care is the ‘true goal,’ which we now seem to be accepting without question. My concern is that the needs of young children will once again get blotted out by the needs of grown-ups, the needs of the economy, the needs of business. 

    — Katharine B. Stevens, founder and president of the Center on Child and Family Policy

    • Differences between the House and Senate funding bills, which will be settled in January, which could affect funding for various early childhood programs.

    — Sarah Gilliland, senior policy manager, New America’s New Practice Lab

    • With New York City’s cost of living driving families away in droves, the time is ripe for universal child care — and it can happen! We look forward to working with Mayor-elect Mamdani and his team as they develop plans that lift up home-based child care as a vital support. 

    — Jessica Sager, CEO, All Our Kin

    Thank you so much to all of you for your support and readership this year, and please don’t hesitate to reach out with any story ideas, questions or comments. Happy holidays!

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

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  • College Aid Previews Aim to Improve Early Decision

    College Aid Previews Aim to Improve Early Decision

    With the imminent arrival of early-decision results comes a new round of hand-wringing about the admissions practice, which affords students a better chance of getting accepted to their top institution but requires them to commit if admitted.

    Critics argue that the practice disadvantages low- and middle-income students, who fear being locked into attending a college before they know if they can afford it—although many colleges with an early-decision option allow students to back out over financial constraints. It also prevents applicants from comparing financial aid offers across multiple institutions.

    “Because there is so much uncertainty, families with high incomes are more likely to choose early decision and therefore benefit from its more favorable odds. It’s the perfect tool for maximizing revenues at schools positioned as luxury products, with price tags to match,” wrote Daniel Currell, a former deputy under secretary and senior adviser at the Department of Education from 2018 to 2021, in a New York Times op-ed published Wednesday that argued for the end of early decision. Indeed, Common App data about the fall 2021 freshman class showed that students from the wealthiest ZIP codes were twice as likely to apply early decision.

    But despite the criticisms, some institutions are aiming to make the practice more equitable. A handful of small liberal arts colleges have introduced initiatives in recent years to allow students to preview their financial aid offers before they decide whether or not to apply early, which admissions leaders say they hope will make lower-income students feel more comfortable taking the leap.

    Reed College, a selective liberal arts college in Oregon, began offering early-decision aid reviews this year, which allow early-decision applicants to request and view their full financial aid packages before they receive an actual decision from the university. Just like an official aid offer, the preview is calculated by financial aid staff using the College Scholarship Service profile.

    If they aren’t entirely comfortable with the amount of aid they’re set to receive—or they’d rather compare offers from other institutions—they can drop their application down into the early-action pool.

    “I just think that this anxiety that people have over not getting the best financial deal for their family has been a barrier for people saying, ‘This is my first-choice school and I want to do everything I can to increase my chances for admission,’” said Milyon Trulove, vice president and dean of admission and financial aid at Reed.

    Early financial aid offers are among the various steps institutions have taken in recent years to improve cost transparency and, in many cases, show students that their institutions are affordable. Others include improved cost estimators and campaigns offering free tuition for families under a particular income limit. Institutions hope that such innovations will help prevent students from writing off their institutions—particularly selective institutions that offer significant aid—due to their sticker prices.

    So far, Reed’s reviews appear to be doing a good job of enticing applicants who otherwise might not have applied early; the number of early-decision applicants this year increased 60 percent compared to last admissions cycle. Only one student has opted to switch to early action, which is nonbinding, after receiving their estimated offer.

    Similar programs at other institutions have also proven successful. Whitman College in Washington began offering early financial aid guarantees in 2020 to any prospective student who had filled out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. The initiative wasn’t created specifically to promote early decision, said Adam Miller, vice president for admission and financial aid. But he said he hoped that making it clear to families that Whitman is affordable would also open doors for students interested in applying early decision but nervous about costs.

    Early-decision applications haven’t increased at Whitman like they did this year at Reed. But Miller noted that the college’s early-decision applicants are as socioeconomically diverse as the institution’s overall applicant pool, rather than skewing wealthier.

    “As we think about these nationwide conversations and the very valid criticism of early decision, we think that our approach allows us to have kind of a win-win,” he said. “We still get the benefit of students who are applying early, [so] that we can start to build our incoming class with some confidence,” while also eliminating financial uncertainty for families.

    Last year, the university’s four-person financial aid staff handled 546 requests for early aid guarantees. It’s an extra lift for the tiny office, but, Miller said, 410 of those students ended up applying—“so it’s not like we were doing a lot of extra work for students that we weren’t going to be doing it for anyway.”

    Macalester College also launched such a program in 2021. The institution, which typically admits between 35 and 40 percent of its incoming class from early decision, implemented aid previews in conjunction with a number of other steps aimed at improving access, including going test-optional and eliminating its application fee.

    “If we have an opportunity to do something that we think might be helpful to an individual student or family, I guess I feel as responsibility as an enrollment manager to try to initiate a new practice or new policy,” said Jeff Allen, vice president for admissions and financial aid at Macalester.

    Boosting Cost Transparency

    Financial aid experts said they see early financial aid calculations as a good option for institutions hoping to make the early-decision process—and college costs over all—more transparent.

    Students should be able to “apply early decision to a school where they know it’s the place for them and they don’t need to be saying, ‘But I need the financial aid so maybe this isn’t a good choice,’” said Jill Desjean, director of policy analysis at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. “That option should be available to anyone that finds the school where they really feel like they belong via early decision without having to factor in their finances, so any kind of early estimates, accurate early estimates—anything like that is a positive thing.”

    She noted that such programs might be too heavy of a lift for institutions receiving massive numbers of applications every year, but also that larger institutions have more resources and staffing to accommodate such requests.

    James Murphy, a senior fellow at Class Action, an advocacy organization focused on “reimagining elite higher education,” said that while he sees early aid previews as a positive step toward transparency, they don’t address some of his key concerns about early decision. At many expensive private high schools, he said, nearly every student applies early decision, whereas public high school students often aren’t even aware of the option.

    “There’s kind of a culture thing. If you go to Georgetown Prep … everybody’s applying early decision, or most students are applying early decision, unless they’re applying to Harvard or Stanford that don’t have it … When you look at public schools, that’s not nearly as common,” he said. “I think raising awareness of early decision as a viable option for more students is one step that higher education could take to make it a little bit more equitable.”

    He also noted that some institutions admit over half of their incoming classes from early-decision applicants, which dramatically lowers the chances for regular-admission applicants to be admitted.

    “The New York Times had that op-ed about banning it. That’s not going to happen. Colleges will fight so hard to make that not happen,” he said. But, he said, “what I would love to see is caps” on the percentage of students that can be admitted early decision.

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  • REF 2029 talks about people again but early career labour is still hard to see

    REF 2029 talks about people again but early career labour is still hard to see

    REF 2029 guidance now confirms that the previously proposed people, culture and environment (PCE) element has been renamed strategy, people and research environment (SPRE). Its weighting has been set at 20 per cent, while the main contributions to knowledge and understanding element will make up 55 per cent of the overall profile. Compared with REF 2021, outputs no longer carry the 60 per cent weighting they once did, and the environment component has increased from 15 to 20 per cent.

    Supporters of the change, including Wellcome’s John-Arne Røttingen, have been clear that this is not intended as a downgrading of research culture, instead describing the move as a rebrand designed to prevent “culture” becoming politicised, and as a way of preserving the momentum of efforts to improve research environments.

    For early-career academics at the most insecure end of the system, however, research labour still sits outside what is easiest to count. What resists straightforward counting is also what is least likely to be protected.

    Hidden research expectations

    I am one year out of my PhD, in which I explored the “care-full” and “careless” dimensions of academic work. I graduated expecting that the next few years would involve short-term teaching, fractional contracts or, if things went well, fixed-term research roles. I also entered this stage of my working life knowing that, whatever job I took, I would need to keep publishing to stand any real chance of staying in higher education.

    I write this with short-term teaching arrangements in mind. Within these roles, there is an unspoken contradiction. Many teaching contracts formally exclude research. At the same time, research remains a condition of future employability. It appears in shortlisting criteria, promotion thresholds and hiring decisions. The result is that research becomes an informal obligation. It is returned to between classes and tutorials, and carried into evenings, weekends and term breaks.

    This is where the reframing of “culture” now matters.

    Sustainability without supported labour

    In REF 2021, the environment element required institutions to demonstrate the “vitality and sustainability” of their research environments. Guidance defined this in terms of research strategy, doctoral pipelines, research income, mentoring structures for early-career researchers and the capacity to continue producing high-scoring outputs. In arts, humanities and social sciences units in particular, panels praised institutions that could demonstrate early-career development pathways, including reduced teaching loads, research leave and internal funding.

    SPRE retains the same two criteria of vitality and sustainability. In REF 2029, these will now be assessed through both an institution-level statement, weighted at 60 per cent of the SPRE score, and a unit-level statement at 40 per cent. The institution-level statement places explicit emphasis on strategy as the main way in which research environments and cultures are now explained.

    This version of sustainability rests on the assumption that research labour is formally recognised and resourced. It does not capture the volume of research produced under contracts where research does not appear in workload models or time allocation at all. In practice, sustainability comes to mean whether outputs keep appearing, rather than whether the people producing them can realistically go on working like this when their next job may depend on it.

    The limits of research expectation

    It is true that REF 2029 introduces a substantive-link rule and allows outputs from staff on part-time or non-standard contracts, so long as they meet the 0.2 FTE, 12-month employment and research-expectation threshold. This complicates any straightforward claim that REF excludes precarious researchers. It also places the power of recognition firmly at institutional level.

    REF 2029 requires that a contract include a “research expectation,” while the guidance does not require institutions to prove that time, funding or workload adjustment were provided to support the research. The term “research expectation” itself remains vague, and in practice it may amount to little more than a nominal clause. That ambiguity allows outputs to be counted even when the labour behind them was carried out under precarious, unsustainable conditions.

    Culture was never going to be a perfect remedy. As Lizzie Gadd has already argued in her “my culture is better than yours” critique of competitive approaches to research culture, the sector’s engagement with culture has been uneven and often reflects the priorities of research-intensive, or more accurately funding-intensive, institutions and STEM disciplines. Even so, culture was the one part of the framework with the reach to ask how research expectations attach themselves to people, workloads and contracts. Political? Maybe. But what about precarity isn’t political.

    What still counts

    All of this is unfolding in the context of a wider financial crisis across higher education. Falling international recruitment, rising costs and long-term funding pressure have placed many providers under severe strain, with arts, humanities and social science provision often among the most exposed. In this environment, universities trade on the career aspirations of early-career academics to manage costs, relying on their, our, my hopes of progression to sustain teaching at lower pay and with fewer protections.

    We now have a sector full of strategies, including ever more detailed strategies for people and research environments, and very little shared vision of what a sustainable early-career academic life should look like. With REF 2029 restoring the dominance of outputs and re-casting culture as a subsidiary part of institutional strategy, a clear message is taking shape. Outputs still count. The conditions under which those outputs are produced count for far less.

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  • Immigration enforcement is driving away early childhood educators

    Immigration enforcement is driving away early childhood educators

    by Jackie Mader, The Hechinger Report
    December 10, 2025

    Close to 40,000 foreign-born child care workers have been driven out of the profession in the wake of the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation and detainment efforts, according to a new study by the Better Life Lab at the think tank New America. That represents about 12 percent of the foreign-born child care workforce.

    Child care workers with at least a two-year college degree are most likely to be leaving the workforce, as well as workers who are from Mexico, a demographic targeted by ICE, or those who work in center-based care, the left-leaning think tank found. The disruption has worsened an already deep shortage of child care staffers, threatening the stability of the industry and in turn is contributing to tens of thousands of U.S.-born mothers dropping out of the labor market because they don’t have reliable child care.

    In addition to workers facing detainment or deportation, many people are staying home to avoid situations where they may encounter Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the report found. Agents are detaining people who have not traditionally been the focus of ICE actions, including those following legal pathways like asylum seekers and green card applicants. Child care centers were once considered “sensitive locations” exempt from ICE enforcement, but the White House rescinded that in January. In at least one example, a child care worker was detained while arriving for work at a child care program. 

    “What’s different now is the ferocity of the enforcement,” said Chris Herbst, a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Public Affairs and one of the authors of the report, in an interview with The Hechinger Report. “ICE is arresting far more people, the number of deportations has risen dramatically,” he added. “People are scared out of their minds.”

    Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues. 

    America has long relied on immigrants to fill hard-to-staff caregiving positions and enable parents to work. Across the country, around 1 in 5 child care workers is an immigrant. In Florida and New York, immigrants account for nearly 40 percent of the child care workforce. One study that compared native-born and immigrant child care workers found that nearly 64 percent of immigrants had a two- or four-year college degree, compared to 53 percent of native-born workers. The study also noted that immigrant workers are more likely than native-born workers to have child development associate credentials and to invest in professional development activities.

    Overall, the child care industry supports more than $152 billion in economic activity.

    In Wisconsin, Elaine, the director of a child care center, said her program has benefited greatly from a Ukrainian immigrant who has been teaching there for two years, ever since arriving in the United States as part of a humanitarian parole program. (The Hechinger Report is not using Elaine’s last name or the city where her child care center is located because she fears action by immigration enforcement.) Elaine’s center has experienced a teacher shortage for the past 13 years, and the immigrant, who has a college degree and past experience in social services, has been a steady presence for the children there.

    “She’s their consistent person. She spends more time than a lot of the parents do with the children during their waking hours,” Elaine said. “She’s there for them, she’s loving, she provides that support, that connection, that security that young children need.”

    In January, the Trump administration suspended the Uniting for Ukraine program, which allowed Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion to live and work in the United States for two years. While the program later opened up a process to apply for an extension, Elaine’s employee has encountered delays, like many others.

    The teacher’s parole expired this month. Under the law, she is now supposed to return to Ukraine, where her home city in southeast Ukraine is still under attack by Russian forces. 

    Elaine fears what will happen if the center loses her. “As a business, we need her. We need a teacher we can count on,” Elaine said. “For our teachers’ mental health, to have her leave and knowing where she would go would be really difficult.” 

    Elaine has decided to allow the employee to keep working, and is appealing to state lawmakers to help extend her stay. Several parents have also joined in the effort, writing letters to Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin telling her how much their children love the teacher — and how important she is to the local economy. One factor in granting an extension is that the person offers a “significant public benefit” to the country. 

    The authors of the new report found immigrants are not the only caregivers affected by ICE enforcement this year. There has also been a drop in U.S.-born child care workers in the industry, especially among Hispanic and less-educated caregivers. This could be the result of a “climate of fear and confusion” surrounding enforcement activity, according to the report, as well as a “perceived pattern of profiling or discriminatory enforcement practices.”

    “These deportations have been sold under the theory that they are going to be a boon for U.S.-born workers once we sort of unclog the labor market by removing large numbers of undocumented immigrants,” Herbst said. “We’re finding at least in the child care industry, and at least in the short run, that appears not to be the case.” Some foreign-born and U.S.-born workers have different skills and do not seem to be competing for the same caregiving jobs, he added. 

    Not all workers are leaving the caregiving industry altogether. Some immigrants are shifting to work as nannies or au pairs, Herbst said, “finding refuge” in private homes where they are less likely to come into contact with state child care regulators or be part of formal wage systems. (Already, an estimated 142,000 undocumented immigrants work as nannies and personal care or home health aides nationwide.) That contact with regulators and other authorities may be a reason why center-based early childhood educators are leaving the field in greater proportions now, Herbst said. 

    These findings come at the end of a difficult year for the child care workforce, which has long been in crisis due to dismally low pay and challenging work conditions. More than half of child care providers surveyed this year by the RAPID Survey Project at Stanford University reported experiencing difficulty affording food, the highest rate since the survey started collecting data on provider hunger in 2021. Other recent reports have found child care providers are at a higher risk for clinical depression, and in some cities an increasing number are taking on part-time jobs to make ends meet.

    Across the country this year, early childhood providers have seen drops in enrollment as families pull their children out of schools and programs to avoid ICE. Child care centers are losing money and finding that some staff members are too scared to come to work or have lost work authorization after the administration ended certain refugee programs. Many child care workers have taken on additional roles driving children to and from care, collecting emergency numbers and plans for children in their care in case parents are detained and dropping off food for families too scared to leave their homes.

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

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  • International students missing out under US Early Decision system

    International students missing out under US Early Decision system

    Stakeholders are worried about the Early Decision (ED) system – where students apply early to their first-choice institution and, if admitted, are required to commit to attending. Although admission is not guaranteed, the common practice is that students must ‘lock in’ once accepted and withdraw all other applications, even in different countries.

    But with rising visa denials in Donald Trump’s United States, fears are rising that international students could be at an unfair disadvantage.

    Education consultant Elisabeth Marksteiner, pointed out that even if a student applies for a visa as soon as they have been accepted by an institution, they could be denied in late August, with the semester due to start in early September

    “Suddenly the student has no live applications anywhere in the entire world. There is no plan B – the whole point about ED is it takes out all insurance, effectively,” she told The PIE News.

    “There are some countries where we know it can be 11 months to get a visa appointment… there is no way that you are going to make it.”

    Advice from the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) on ED was updated in August to make it more specific and transparent for parents and school counselors alike.

    “The updates aim to ensure applicants, parents/guardians, and counselors fully understand the implications of an ED commitment under various possible scenarios,” it said.

    The practice has become a popular way for institutions to gauge their enrolment numbers ahead of time. And according to Marksteiner, enforcing binding ED agreements is a low-stakes approach for elite institutions – even if it means some international students won’t be able to take up their place.

    “The people who are most using ED are the ones at the top of the pile. They will always be able to fill their class,” she said.

    The people who are most using ED are the ones at the top of the pile. They will always be able to fill their class
    Elisabeth Marksteiner, education consultant

    ED offers often use complicated wording and “legalese” that, according to Marksteiner, can leave parents and high schoolers feeling uneasy.

    “It seems to me that we have lost effectively our moral compass in holding ED agreements in the way that we do,” she explained.

    In September, Tulane made headlines after it slapped Colorado Academy with a one-year ban on ED applications after one of its students allegedly pulled out of an offer.

    However, some institutions are changing their policies to make sure than non-US applicants do not have to withdraw their applications from other parts of the world.

    Visa delays have been a persistent problem for US higher education institutions under the second Trump administration – part of an “escalating cascade” of attacks on international students, according to an address by Presidents’ Alliance CEO Miriam Feldblum at this week’s PIE Live North America conference in Chicago.

    Since taking office for the second time, President Trump has imposed a travel ban on 19 countries, enforced an immigration crackdown that has affected thousands of international students and suspended visa interviews across the world for several weeks – a move whose effects are still being felt.

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  • Why early STEAM education unlocks the future for all learners

    Why early STEAM education unlocks the future for all learners

    Key points:

    When we imagine the future of America’s workforce, we often picture engineers, coders, scientists, and innovators tackling the challenges of tomorrow. However, the truth is that a student’s future does not begin in a college classroom, or even in high school–it starts in the earliest years of a child’s education.

    Early exposure to science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) builds the foundation for critical thinking, collaboration, and creativity. Research indicates that children introduced to STEAM concepts before the age of eight are significantly more likely to pursue STEM-related fields later in life. Yet for too many children, especially neurodivergent learners and those in underserved communities, STEAM education comes too late or not at all. That gap represents a missed opportunity not only for those children, but also for the industries and communities that will rely on their talents in the future.

    The missed opportunity in early education

    In most school systems, STEAM instruction ramps up in middle school or high school, long after the formative years when children are naturally most curious and open to exploring. By waiting until later grades, we miss the chance to harness early curiosity, which is the spark that drives innovation.

    This late introduction disproportionately affects children with disabilities or learning differences. These learners often benefit from structured, hands-on exploration and thrive when provided with tools to connect abstract concepts to real-world applications. Without early access, they may struggle to build confidence or see themselves as capable contributors to fields like aerospace, technology, or engineering. If STEAM employers fail to cultivate neurodivergent learners, they miss out on theirunique problem-solving skills, specialized strengths, and diverse thinking that drives true innovation. Beyond shrinking the talent pipeline, this oversight risks stalling progress in fields like aerospace, energy, and technology while weakening their competitive edge.

    The result is a long-term underrepresentation of neurodivergent individuals in high-demand, high-paying fields. Without access to an early STEAM curriculum, both neurodivergent students and employers will miss opportunities for advancement.

    Why neurodivergent learners benefit most

    Neurodivergent learners, such as children with autism, ADHD, or dyslexia, often excel when lessons are tactile, visual, and inquiry-based. Early STEAM education naturally aligns with these learning styles. For example, building a simple bridge with blocks is more than play; it’s an exercise in engineering, problem-solving, and teamwork. Programming a toy robot introduces logic, sequencing, and cause-and-effect.

    These types of early STEAM experiences also support executive functioning, improve social-emotional development, and build persistence. These are crucial skills in STEM careers, where theories often fail, and continued experimentation is necessary. Additionally, building these skills helps children see themselves as creators and innovators rather than passive participants in their education.

    When neurodivergent children are given access to STEAM at an early age, they are not only better equipped academically but also more confident in their ability to belong in spaces that have traditionally excluded them.

    Houston as a case study

    Here in Houston, we recognize the importance of early STEAM education in shaping our collective future. As the world’s Energy Capital and a hub for aerospace innovation, Houston’s economy will continue to rely on the next generation of thinkers, builders and problem-solvers. That pipeline begins not in a university laboratory, but in preschool classrooms and afterschool programs.

    At Collaborative for Children, we’ve seen this firsthand through our Collab-Lab, a mobile classroom that brings hands-on STEAM experiences to underserved neighborhoods. In these spaces, children experiment with coding, explore engineering principles, and engage in collaborative problem-solving long before they reach middle school. For neurodivergent learners in particular, the Collab-Lab provides an environment where curiosity is encouraged, mistakes are celebrated as part of the learning process, and every child has the chance to succeed. Additionally, we are equipping the teachers in our 125 Centers of Excellence throughout the city in practical teaching modalities for neurodivergent learners. We are committed to creating equal opportunity for all students.

    Our approach demonstrates what is possible when early childhood education is viewed not just as childcare, but as workforce development. If we can prioritize early STEAM access in Houston, other cities across the country can also expand access for all students.

    A national priority

    To prepare America’s workforce for the challenges ahead, we must treat early STEAM education as a national priority. This requires policymakers, educators and industry leaders to collaborate in new and meaningful ways.

    Here are three critical steps we must take:

    1. Expand funding and resources for early STEAM curriculum. Every preschool and early elementary program should have access to inquiry-based materials that spark curiosity in young learners.
    2. Ensure inclusion of neurodivergent learners in program design. Curricula and classrooms must reflect diverse learning needs so that all children, regardless of ability, have the opportunity to engage fully.
    3. Forge stronger partnerships between early education and industry. Employers in aerospace, energy, and technology should see investment in early childhood STEAM as part of their long-term workforce strategy.

    The stakes are high. If we delay STEAM learning until later grades, we risk leaving behind countless children and narrowing the talent pipeline that will fuel our nation’s most critical industries. But if we act early, we unlock not just potential careers, but potential lives filled with confidence, creativity and contribution.

    Closing thoughts

    The innovators of tomorrow are sitting in preschool classrooms today. They are building with blocks, asking “why,” and imagining worlds we cannot yet see. Among them are children who are neurodivergent–who, with the proper support, may go on to design spacecrafts, engineer renewable energy solutions, or code the next groundbreaking technology.

    If we want a future that is diverse, inclusive, and innovative, the path is clear: We must start with STEAM education in the earliest years, for every child.

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  • Collective Punishment, Early Decision Edition (opinion)

    Collective Punishment, Early Decision Edition (opinion)

    Tulane University’s admissions office has banned students from four high schools from applying to Tulane through early decision this fall, according to reporting from The New York Times. Though three of the schools have not been publicly identified, the one-year ban (or “suspension”) for Colorado Academy comes after a student from that school backed out of the early-decision agreement they signed when they applied to Tulane last year.

    For those who aren’t card-carrying college admission geeks like I am, early decision is an application option and enrollment management strategy in which students apply earlier and promise to enroll if admitted, in exchange for receiving an earlier decision offer. The binding nature of early decision means that a student can apply to only one college through early decision.

    In most cases students applying through early decision are asked, along with a parent and their school counselor, to sign an early-decision agreement attesting to their understanding of the commitment to enroll if admitted. Early decision is in no way legally binding, but colleges take the early-decision commitment seriously and are appalled and disgusted when students back out of the commitment. The one agreed-upon reason for backing out of an early-decision commitment is when an institution can’t meet a student’s financial need (as determined by the college’s financial aid formula, not what a family thinks it can pay).

    I have had admission deans tell me that they would hold it against a school whose students did not follow through on the early-decision commitment, but Tulane is the first college I’ve seen publicly penalize schools. The Tulane ban raises some interesting and thorny ethical questions.

    The most obvious is whether it is permissible to punish students in the Class of 2026 for offenses committed by students in the Class of 2025. Retribution may be fashionable these days, but punishing the innocent because you have no way to punish the guilty is not retribution, just wrong.

    But that may be just me. The National Association for College Admission Counseling has an “Ethical Dilemmas in College Admission” page on its website that includes a hypothetical case study in which a student wants to back out of an early-decision commitment. Among the suggested advice for counselors is to caution the student and parents that withdrawing could have negative consequences for future applicants from the school. Even if that might be the case, that’s terrible advice from NACAC, making it seem like colleges punishing future applicants is acceptable and normal.

    At least Tulane is being transparent with its early-decision ban for the schools. As bad as that is, there is a scenario that would be worse, if Tulane ostensibly welcomed early-decision applications from the four schools when it had no intention of admitting any of them.

    The Times article didn’t provide any details about the circumstances leading up to the ban for the four schools, but Tulane’s position seems to be, as the Times paraphrased it, that the schools “failed to uphold the expectations of the early decision agreement.” Let’s examine that claim a little more closely.

    What is a school’s responsibility in advising students wanting to apply early decision? As a counselor, I always advised students and parents that it was a binding commitment, not to be taken lightly. I don’t remember any of my students backing out of an early-decision commitment, but on several occasions I had students who told me on Friday they planned to apply early decision to one college and then a different college on Monday. My response was that they were not ready to apply early decision at all if their thinking was that fluid.

    It’s hard for me to imagine how the schools would have failed in their responsibilities. The counselor part of the early-decision agreement states, “I have advised the student to abide by the early decision commitment outlined above.” As long as they have done that, are they responsible for policing the student’s actions? The school could withhold sending transcripts to other colleges, but in today’s litigious environment, it could face legal action from parents for doing so. I have learned that parents who are lawyers are especially skeptical of the early-decision commitment. If the student wanted to renege on early decision, I would require the student to inform the college. An applicant owes the college that courtesy. Beyond that, schools can’t be expected to enforce early decision.

    There are several other issues that deserve scrutiny. One is Tulane’s claim in a statement to the Times that “A last-minute withdrawal without explanation unfairly impacts other applicants who may have missed opportunities due to the limited number of early-decision offers a university can make.” Excuse me, my BS detector is going off. Tulane has no restriction that I am aware of in the number of students it can admit through early decision, as suggested by the fact that, in recent years, it’s admitted more than 60 percent of its freshman class using early decision, and it has other opportunities to make up for any loss through early decision 2, early action and regular decision.

    There is also an interesting philosophical question about the nature of the early-decision binding commitment. At what point does the binding commitment kick in? Or, more to the point, when does Tulane believe that the commitment is binding?

    The common understanding across the world of college admission is that students take on the binding commitment either as soon as they sign the early-decision agreement, or at least as soon as they are accepted. Tulane’s application instructions state that early decision is binding and that students are expected to withdraw all other applications once accepted and issued a financial aid offer, but there are two other points in the same instructions that bring into question whether Tulane really believes that students are committed as soon as accepted.

    The first bullet point in Tulane’s instructions for early decision defines it as an “application timeline for students whose first choice is Tulane and who are prepared to enroll soon after (italics mine) being admitted and receiving a financial aid offer.” The use of the phrase “soon after” suggests that there is a period of time after acceptance when the student is not yet committed.

    In addition, Tulane expects accepted early-decision applicants to submit a $1,000 enrollment deposit by Jan. 15. Asking for a deposit is not unique to Tulane, but if the student is committed to attend Tulane as soon as they sign the early-decision agreement or upon acceptance, why require an enrollment deposit? If a student is accepted early decision but doesn’t then make the deposit, have they broken the commitment or does that commitment only kick in with the deposit? Am I the only one who sees a contradiction here? (The answer may well be yes, and it wouldn’t be the first time.)

    The broader issue here has to do with early decision itself. Early decision has been around since the 1950s, and it’s controversial. The early-decision “bargain” can be argued to benefit both colleges and students, but it is far more beneficial to institutions as a way to manage enrollment. It doesn’t work well for students for whom financial aid is essential or those who come from schools without savvy college counselors who understand the early-decision game.

    Tulane is the poster child for how colleges and universities use early decision to manage both enrollment and prestige. Its admit rate has declined precipitously in recent years largely through strategic use of early decision. According to its most recent Common Data Set, about 63 percent of the freshman class was admitted through early decision (that’s assuming a 100 percent yield rate for early-decision admits).

    That may actually understate the impact of early decision. Another 20 percent of the class was admitted off the wait list (the CDS shows the number of students admitted off the wait list but does not break it down in terms of enrollments, but there are universities that only admit students off the wait list if they know they will enroll, almost a form of “early decision 3”).

    The heavy use of early decision means that there is a huge variance in the admit rates for early decision and other admissions plans at Tulane (it also has nonbinding early action). According to the Common Data Set, the admit rate for early decision was 59 percent, compared with 11 percent for all other options. That’s not new. A 2022 Inside Higher Ed article reported that Tulane had admitted only 106 students in regular admission. In any case, the numbers suggest that not applying early decision is hugely disadvantageous at Tulane, which makes the ban even more punitive.

    I am trying to be sympathetic to Tulane’s hurt feelings over being dissed by students they admitted in early decision, but I would hope the university’s admissions office will take to heart the wisdom of Gilbert and Sullivan, as well as the Ramones, and let the punishment fit the crime.

    Jim Jump recently retired after 33 years as the academic dean and director of college counseling at St. Christopher’s School in Richmond, Va. He previously served as an admissions officer, philosophy instructor and women’s basketball coach at the college level and is a past president of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. He is the 2024 recipient of NACAC’s John B. Muir Excellence in Media Award.

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