A survey of community colleges finds, across five states, Pell Grant recipients have lower success rates compared to their peers.
Eduard Figueres/iStock/Getty Images
Low-income students can experience a variety of barriers to success in college, and new data from the Richmond Federal Reserve points to gaps in success and completion among Pell Grant recipients at community colleges, compared to their peers.
An analysis of a 2024 survey of two-year public institutions in Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia identified a 13-percentage-point gap in success rates between Pell Grant recipients and those who do not receive the Pell Grant. Forty percent of Pell Grant students achieved at least one metric of success, versus 53 percent of non-Pell recipients.
Methodology
The 2024 Survey of Community College Outcomes includes data from five states—Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia—and 121 colleges. Data includes all degree- or certificate-seeking students enrolled during the 2019–20 academic year, including dual-enrollment students.
Around 34 percent of students included in the study received a Pell Grant while enrolled at a community college, (compared to the national average of 32 percent). Dual-enrollment students are not eligible for the Pell Grant.
The background: Pell Grant recipients, who are low-income students enrolled in a college or university in the U.S., are more often to be enrolled at public institutions, and the greatest share are from families who earn less than $20,000 annually.
Success, as defined by the Richmond Fed, means a degree- or certificate-seeking student at a community college completed one of the following over a four-year period following enrollment:
Earned an associate degree
Earned a diploma or credit-bearing certificate
Earned an industry- or employer- recognized licensure or credential
Transferred to a four-year institution prior to degree or award attainment
Persisted by completing at least 30 credit hours
Over all, Pell and non-Pell students completed an associate degree at similar rates (19 percent), but Pell students were less likely to transfer (10 percent of Pell versus 20 percent of non-Pell) or complete a credential (6 percent versus 7 percent).
Digging into the data: Researchers qualify that while there is a correlation between receiving a Pell Grant and graduation, that does not imply causation, or that receiving Pell Grant funding leads to lower outcomes.
“Students who qualify for and receive Pell Grant funding may have substantively different characteristics than non-Pell students—differences that could be driving the differences in outcomes,” wrote Laura Dawson Ullrich, director of the Community College Initiative at the Richmond Fed, in a blog post.
North Carolina was the only state with higher associate degree completion rates among Pell students, but this could be due to how the state classifies dual-enrollment students as degree-seeking and their ineligibility for the Pell Grant.
South Carolina had the highest transfer rate among Pell (19.3 percent) and non-Pell recipients (27 percent), which could be a result of Clemson University and the University of South Carolina’s bridge programs with community colleges, Ullrich wrote.
Low-income students are more likely to experience basic needs insecurity, which can hinder persistence and completion. The Richmond Fed plans to conduct more surveys focusing on wraparound student supports and how the existence of these resources may contribute to Pell Grant recipients’ success.
New College of Florida fired a Chinese adjunct instructor after he asked why he wasn’t being paid and officials replied that they had overlooked regulations prohibiting his employment, according to a Suncoast Searchlight investigation.
Kevin Wang—whose area of concentration was listed as Chinese Language and Culture on his now-deleted college directory page—told the nonprofit news outlet that he previously lost his professorship in China over criticizing Chinese leader Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party. He’s seeking asylum and is allowed to work in the U.S., Searchlight reported.
But New College fired him March 12, citing a university regulation based on Florida’s “countries of concern” law, the outlet reported. This came two days after Wang inquired why he hadn’t been getting paychecks all semester, Searchlight wrote. New College didn’t return Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment Friday.
Florida’s Legislature has passed multiplelaws limiting public colleges’ and universities’ relationships with listed “countries of concern,” such as China. The Searchlight story pointed to 2023’s Senate Bill 846, which—with exceptions—bars institutions from participating “in any agreement” with a “foreign principal.” The law defined foreign principals as “any person who is domiciled in a foreign country of concern and is not a citizen or lawful permanent resident of the United States.” The Florida Board of Governors followed up the law by releasing guidance, Searchlight reported.
Wang told the outlet, “I truly hope that such interference undermining academic freedom will not occur again in a place that claims to be a ‘beacon of democracy.’”
More than 17,400 high school seniors last fall got the sweetest news any anxious student can get: Congratulations, because of your high school GPA, you’re automatically admitted to one of 10 California State University campuses of your choice — and they’re all relatively affordable.
Even with less than a week to go before the campuses wrap their final decisions about whom to admit, a pilot program focusing on Riverside County is already showing that more students have been admitted from the county than last year, about 10,600 so far in 2025 compared to last year’s roughly 9,800.
The pilot builds on Cal State’s efforts to enroll more students and works like this: High school seniors receive a notice in the mail that they’re automatically admitted as long as they maintain their grades, finish the 15 mandatory courses necessary for admission to a Cal State, and complete an admissions form to claim their spot at a campus. Cal State was able to mail the notices because it signed an agreement with the Riverside County Office of Education that gave the university eligible students’ addresses.
Now in the program’s first year, Cal State joins other public universities across the country in a growing national movement to automatically admit eligible students. From November through January, Cal State informed students they were accepted to the 10 campuses. To claim a spot, students needed to go online and pick at least one campus.
If past admissions and enrollment trends hold, Cal State as a system will educate hundreds of more students, all from Riverside, than they would have without the pilot. That’d be a boon for a system that prides itself on its affordability and motto that it’s the people’s university; Cal State admits a far higher percentage of students than the University of California. It also could serve as a much-needed budget boost from the extra tuition revenue those students bring, especially at campuses with sinking enrollment.
Eight campuses — Channel Islands, Chico, East Bay, Humboldt, Maritime Academy, Monterey Bay, San Francisco, and Sonoma — are so under-enrolled that Cal State is pulling some of their state revenues to send to campuses that are still growing. Cal Maritime is soon merging with another campus because of its perilous finances. The pilot also includes the two closest campuses to the county, San Bernardino and San Marcos.
The system chose Riverside County because all of its public high school students were already loaded onto a state data platform that can directly transmit student grades to Cal State — a key step in creating automatic admissions. Riverside is also “ethnically and economically representative of the diversity of California — many of the students the CSU is so proud to serve,” a spokesperson for the system, Amy Bentley Smith, wrote in an email.
At Heritage High School, a public school in Riverside County, the pilot encouraged students who previously didn’t even consider attending a public four-year university to submit the automatic admission forms to a Cal State.
Silvia Morales, a 17-year-old senior at Heritage, got an automatic admissions letter. “I was pretty set on going to community college and then transferring, because I felt like I wasn’t ready for the four-year commitment to a college,” she said.
Even with a 3.0 GPA, higher than the 2.5 GPA Cal State requires for admission, she nearly didn’t submit the forms to secure her admission until early January. That’s well past the standard Nov. 30 admissions deadline.
It wasn’t until her counselor, Chris Tinajero, pulled her into a meeting that she decided to opt into the pilot. “I went through the sales pitch like, ‘Hey, you get this guaranteed admission, you’re an amazing student,’” he recounted.
The pitch worked. Though Cal State sent a physical pamphlet and her high school also emailed her about the pilot, “I wasn’t really paying attention,” Morales said. She needed an adult she trusted at the school to persuade her that the applications were worth the effort, she said.
Morales applied to three Cal State campuses in the pilot plus two outside the program that were still accepting late applications — Chico, Humboldt, Los Angeles, Northridge and San Bernardino. She got into each one, she said.
Her parents are “proud of me because I want to go to college,” Morales said. Neither went to college, she added.
Final enrollment figures won’t be tallied until August, including how many of the students admitted through the pilot attended one of the 10 campuses. But the system’s chancellor’s office is already planning to replicate the pilot program in a Northern California county, which will be named sometime in April, Cal State officials said.
A bill by Christopher Cabaldon, a state senator and Democrat from Napa, would make automatic enrollment to Cal State for eligible students a state law. The bill hasn’t been heard in a committee yet.
A boost in application numbers
Of the 17,000 students who received an invitation to secure their automatic admissions, about 13,200 submitted the necessary forms. That’s about 3,000 more students who applied from the county than last year.
Those who otherwise wouldn’t have applied to a Cal State include students who were eyeing private colleges, said Melina Gonzalez, a counselor at Heritage who typically advises students who are already college-bound.
Nearby private colleges offer all students application fee waivers; at Cal State, typically only low-income students receive fee waivers. But the pilot provided each Cal State student one fee waiver worth $70, which was a draw to students and their parents who don’t qualify for the fee waiver but might struggle to pay.
Last year, 10 of the 100 senior students Gonzalez counseled didn’t apply to a Cal State. This application season, all her students submitted at least one Cal State application, she said.
“It was big, it was really cool, their eyes, they were so excited,” she said of the automatically admitted students. “They would come in and show me their letters.”
Parents called her asking if the pamphlet from Cal State was authentic. With guaranteed admission, some parents ultimately decided to pay for additional applications to campuses in the pilot, knowing it wasn’t in vain.
At Heritage, high school counselors reviewed Cal State’s provisional list of students eligible for the pilot to add more seniors, such as those who hadn’t yet completed the mandatory courses but were on track to do so.
Tinajero was also able to persuade some students who hadn’t completed all the required courses for Cal State entry to take those, including online classes. Still, others with qualifying grades didn’t apply because they weren’t persuaded that a four-year university was for them. Tinajero sees program growth in the coming years, assuming Cal State continues with the pilot. Younger high school students who witnessed the fanfare of automatic admissions may take more seriously the need to pass the 15 required courses to be eligible for a Cal State or University of California campus, he said.
That’s part of Cal State’s vision for this pilot, said April Grommo, the system’s assistant vice chancellor of strategic enrollment management: Begin encouraging students to take the required courses in ninth grade so that by 11th and 12th grade they’re more receptive to applying to Cal State.
Pilot leads to more applications
The automatic admissions pilot is likely what explains the jump in overall applicants, said Grommo. “If you look at the historical numbers of Riverside County students that have applied to the CSU, it’s very consistent at 10,000, so there’s no other accelerator or explanation for the significant increase in the applications,” she said.
Some campuses in the pilot are probably going to see more students from Riverside County than others. The eight under-enrolled Cal State campuses each enrolled fewer than than 100 Riverside students as freshmen, a CalMatters review of 2024 admissions data show. Two enrolled fewer than 10 Riverside students as freshmen.
Cal State isn’t solely relying on past trends to enroll more students. Grommo cited research that suggests direct admissions programs are associated with increases in student enrollment, but not among low-income students, who are less familiar with the college-going process or have additional economic and family demands, like work and child care.
The quad at San Francisco State University in San Francisco on July 7, 2023. Photo by Semantha Norris, CalMatters
Even after students are admitted, some don’t complete key steps in the enrollment process, such as maintaining their grades in the second semester, completing registration forms to enroll, and paying deposits. Others, especially low-income students, have a change of heart over summer about attending college, which scholars call “summer melt.” Then there are the students who got into typically more selective campuses, such as at elite private schools and the University of California, and choose instead to go to those.
To prompt more students to actually enroll, Cal State officials in early March hosted two college fairs in Riverside County for students admitted through the pilot. About 2,600 students signed up to be bussed from their high schools to large venues, including the Riverside Convention Center, where they met with staff, alumni and current students from all 10 Cal State campuses participating in the program. Those were followed by receptions with students and parents.
Grommo said they maxed out capacity at both venues for the student events. While it’s common for individual campuses to host events for admitted students, it was a first for Cal State’s central office.
The event costs, physical mailers to students about their admissions guarantee, invitation to the college fairs and another flyer about the relative affordability of a Cal State cost the system’s central office around $300,000, Grommo estimates. But if the event moves the needle on students agreeing to attend a Cal State, the tuition revenue at the largely under-enrolled campuses alone would be a huge return on investment.
The effort is a far more targeted approach than another admissions outreach effort Cal State rolled out last fall to inform students who started but didn’t finish their college applications that they’re provisionally accepted, as long as they complete and send their forms. The notification went to 106,000 students and was the result of a $750,000 grant Cal State won from the Lumina Foundation, a major higher education philanthropy. The system will know by fall if this notification resulted in more students attending a Cal State.
But that was aimed at students who already applied. The Riverside pilot brings in students, like Morales, who wouldn’t have applied without the mailers and entreaties from counselors. She’s leaning toward picking Cal State San Bernardino for next fall. It’s close to home and an older cousin recently graduated who had a good experience there, she said.
Her next task? Working with her parents to complete the federal application for financial aid by April 2, the deadline for guaranteed tuition waivers for low- and middle-income students.
It’s possible that Cal State may take the direct admissions pilot statewide. All counties are required by state law to join the state-funded data system that Riverside is already a part of to electronically transmit students’ high school grades to Cal States and UCs. Doing so removes the need for schools to send campuses paper transcripts. The deadline for all counties to join the state data system is summer of 2026.
Katrina Armstrong took on the top position at Columbia after her predecessor, Minouche Shafik, stepped down amid backlash for her response to campus protests.
Sirin Samman/Columbia University
After agreeing to the Trump administration’s sweeping demands and then appearing to backtrack to faculty, Columbia’s interim president stepped down Friday night—a move that federal officials praised, though it may add to the upheaval at the Ivy League institution that’s facing criticism on multiple fronts, from the federal government to faculty to students.
Katrina Armstrong, who has served as the interim president since last August, is returning to her previous post leading the institution’s Irving Medical Center, according to the Friday announcement.
In a brief statement, she said it had been a “singular honor to lead Columbia University in this important and challenging time … But my heart is with science, and my passion is with healing. That is where I can best serve this University and our community moving forward.” Claire Shipman, a former broadcast journalist and a co-chair of Columbia’s Board of Trustees, will take over as acting president while the university begins a nationwide search for a permanent leader.
The leadership shake-up comes after weeks of turmoil at Columbia as the Trump administration has waged war against the Ivy League institution, stripping it of $400 million in federal contracts for what it calls Columbia’s “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment” against Jewish students on campus. Trump’s antisemitism task force, which was formed by executive order in early February, then demanded the university implement a number of sweeping reforms, including restructuring its disciplinary process under the Office of the President, expanding the authority of its campus security force and placing its Middle East, South Asian and African Studies department into receivership.
The university announced a week ago that it would comply with the demands, to the frustration of critics who argued that the demands may be unlawful and that giving in to them undermines academic freedom and free speech. On CNN, Education Secretary Linda McMahon praised Armstrong, saying she had had productive conversations with the then-interim president and that Columbia was “on the right track” to having its funding restored.
But according to a transcript of a virtual meeting between Armstrong and faculty members obtained by Bari Weiss’s news outlet, The Free Press, Armstrong told faculty members that many of the changes the university had promised the antisemitism task force would not come to pass. She said there would be “no change” to masking and admissions policies, that the MESAAS department wouldn’t be placed into a receivership, and that the disciplinary process would not move under the Office of the President.
Armstrong seemingly denied those claims in a statement Tuesday, writing, “Let there be no confusion: I commit to seeing these changes implemented, with the full support of Columbia’s senior leadership team and the Board of Trustees … Any suggestion that these measures are illusory, or lack my personal support, is unequivocally false.”
Her sudden resignation was met with enthusiasm from the federal antisemitism task force, which appeared to imply in a statement released Friday night that her leadership would have impeded the task force’s ability to move toward a resolution with Columbia.
“The action taken by Columbia’s trustees today, especially in light of this week’s concerning revelation, is an important step toward advancing negotiations as set forth in the pre-conditional understanding reached last Friday between the University and the Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism,” the statement read.
While many faculty had strongly opposed Columbia’s choice to give in to the Trump administration’s demands, Armstrong appeared to be generally well-liked among the faculty; in a recent Inside Higher Ed article, Michael Thaddeus, vice president of the campus’s American Association of University Professors chapter, said she was one of the most open leaders he had worked with in his time at Columbia.
Shipman, now the acting president, also praised Armstrong’s leadership in that article, calling her an “exceptional leader” who “came in to help us heal and get our campus in order” and who is skilled at working under “crisis conditions.”
But one AAUP leader noted in an email to Inside Higher Ed that, though he was personally surprised that Armstrong stepped down, it will do little to change the AAUP’s ongoing work to oppose Trump’s crusade against higher education.
“Katrina Armstrong’s resignation changes almost nothing,” wrote Marcel Agüeros, Columbia AAUP’s chapter secretary. “For the past two years, we have been advocating for a greater role for faculty in the decision-making processes of the university. That, and defending our university and all universities against unwanted and likely unlawful interference by the federal government, remains our North Star.”
The AAUP chapter at Columbia last week sued the Trump administration in an effort to restore the $400 million in funding. The lawsuit argues that the funding freeze was a “coercive tactic” that’s already caused irreparable damage.
Clare Shipman joined the Columbia board in 2013.
Shipman will be the third leader of Columbia in nine months; Armstrong took over the role when Minouche Shafik, who had led the New York institution for a little over a year, stepped down in August. Shafik resigned after backlash from both pro-Palestinian students and faculty and Republican lawmakers for how she handled pro-Palestinian encampments at Columbia. Shipman testified before Congress with Shafik last April at a hearing about antisemitism at Columbia.
“I assume this role with a clear understanding of the serious challenges before us and a steadfast commitment to act with urgency, integrity, and work with our faculty to advance our mission, implement needed reforms, protect our students, and uphold academic freedom and open inquiry,” Shipman said in a news release. “Columbia’s new permanent president, when that individual is selected, will conduct an appropriate review of the University’s leadership team and structure to ensure we are best positioned for the future.”
In a statement, Rep. Tim Walberg, the Michigan Republican who chairs the House Education and the Workforce Committee, warned, “Ms. Shipman, while we wish you all good success, we will be watching closely.”
The Department of Justice launched investigations into admissions practices at four California universities on Thursday night, accusing them of flouting the Supreme Court’s ruling banning affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The “compliance reviews,” as the department called them, will target Stanford University and three University of California campuses: Berkeley, Los Angeles and Irvine.
In a statement announcing the investigations, the Justice Department wrote that the investigations are “just the beginning” of their efforts to “eliminate DEI” in college admissions.
“President Trump and I are dedicated to ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity across the country,” U.S. attorney general Pam Bondi wrote in the statement.
It’s unclear what prompted the investigations or what evidence the department has to support its suspicions of illegal racial preferences in admissions at the targeted institutions. Some affirmative action opponents have suggested that institutions that enrolled higher numbers of minority students last fall, the first class admitted after the Supreme Court decision, may have done so illegally.
Berkeley, UCLA and Irvine all reported upticks in the number of Black and Hispanic students enrolled in the Class of 2028 last fall: 45 percent of students who enrolled at a UC system campus this fall were underrepresented students of color, a 1.2 percent increase from 2023 and a record for the system.
Just hours before the DOJ announced its probe, the Department of Health and Human Services launched its own investigation into admissions practices at UCLA’s medical school, accusing it of illegally considering applicants’ race.
The UC system has been banned from considering race in admissions since 1996, when the state passed a referendum making the practice illegal at public institutions. That hasn’t stopped anti–affirmative action watchdogs from accusing the system of doing so secretly.
Last month, the newly formed public interest group Students Against Racial Discrimination filed a lawsuit accusing the system of practicing affirmative action behind closed doors, citing increases in Black and Hispanic enrollment at its most selective campuses, namely UCLA and Berkeley, and labeling recent admissions policies—like the decision in 2020 not to consider standardized test scores—proxies for affirmative action.
“Since Proposition 209 banned California’s public institutions from considering race in admissions, UC has implemented admissions practices to comply with it,” a UC spokesperson wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “The UC undergraduate admissions application collects students’ race and ethnicity for statistical purposes only. This information is not shared with application reviewers and is not used for admissions.”
Stanford, unlike the UC schools, reported a marked decline in first-year underrepresented students last year, according to the university’s Common Data Set, released last month. Black enrollment at the university fell by nearly 50 percent, and Hispanic enrollment by 14.4 percent; meanwhile, white and Asian enrollment rose by 14.5 percent and 10 percent, respectively.
Luisa Rapport, Stanford’s director of media relations, said the university has not flouted the affirmative action ban, and that following the SFFA ruling, it “immediately engaged in a comprehensive and rigorous review to ensure compliance in our admissions processes.”
“We continue to be committed to fulfilling our obligations under the law, and we will respond to the department’s questions as it conducts this process,” she wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed.
‘Just the Beginning’
Angel Pérez, president of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, said he’s heard “extraordinary concern” from admissions officers and deans in recent weeks that investigations could spread to their institutions. They don’t know how to prepare because “we have no idea what these compliance reviews even entail.”
What they do know, he said, is that investigations could throw their offices into chaos during the height of admissions season.
“These kinds of reviews are extremely disruptive. They’re also extremely expensive,” Pérez said. “There are some institutions that, you know, may not survive a compliance review given the legal costs.”
In an interview with Inside Higher Ed last month, Edward Blum, president of SFFA and the architect of the nationwide affirmative action ban, said he expected schools that reported higher enrollment of racial minorities in the fall to invoke legal scrutiny, both from the courts and the Trump administration. He said he believed a number of institutions could be “cheating” the SFFA ruling, including some that were not included in this first round of investigations: Yale, Duke and Princeton.
“So many of us are befuddled and concerned that in the first admissions cycle post-SFFA, schools that said getting rid of affirmative action would cause their minority admissions to plummet didn’t see that happen,” he said.
Some colleges are withholding demographic information about their incoming classes altogether. On Thursday, hours after the Justice Department probes were launched, Harvard admitted its Class of 2029 but did not release any information—including demographics, acceptance and yield rates, and geographic data—for the first time in more than 70 years.
In response to multiple questions from Inside Higher Ed about what the compliance reviews would entail or how the department plans to pursue its investigations into admissions offices, a Justice Department spokesperson referred to the initial statement announcing the investigations.
“No further comment,” he wrote via email.
There are some hints, though, as to what form a federal admissions investigation could take. In a December op-ed in The Washington Examiner outlining a plan that has reflected the Trump administration’s higher education agenda so far with uncanny accuracy, American Enterprise Institute fellow Max Eden suggested Bondi initiate “a never-ending compliance review” targeting Harvard University and others to enforce the SFFA ruling.
“She should assign Office of Civil Rights employees to the Harvard admissions office and direct the university to hold no admissions meeting without their physical presence,” Eden wrote. “The Office of Civil Rights should be copied on every email correspondence, and Harvard should be forced to provide a written rationale for every admissions decision to ensure nondiscrimination.”
For the four universities at the center of the investigations, this disruption could be especially pronounced right now, as colleges begin sending out acceptance letters and enter the busiest season for building their incoming classes.
“This could not come at a worse time. It is April; this is enrollment management season,” Pérez said. “For institutions to take the time, energy and resources to [respond to compliance reviews] means that they’re going to have a harder time enrolling their classes.”
‘Absurd’ Accusations
The Department of Justice is alleging that in the year and a half since the SFFA ruling, colleges have skirted the law by continuing to consider race in the admissions process. Those grounds make its targets particularly confusing, given that the University of California system hasn’t used affirmative action in admissions for nearly three decades.
In 1996, California voters passed Proposition 209, banning the practice at public colleges. In the application cycles immediately after, Black and Hispanic enrollment fell precipitously. Pérez said it took many years of experimenting with race-neutral admissions, financial aid and recruitment policies for UC campuses to bring Black and Hispanic enrollment back to their prior rates.
In the months following the SFFA decision, Pérez said college admissions professionals turned to California for lessons in how to maintain diversity without running afoul of the new law.
“Officials and admission professionals [at UC] have been helping other institutions across the United States comply with the Supreme Court decision,” he said. “They have actually served as leaders in this space. To accuse them of violating any law is absurd.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is detaining a Harvard Medical School research associate who’s a Russian native. One of Kseniia Petrova’s lawyers says the government is trying to deport her to Russia, where she faces possible arrest due to her “prior political activism and outspoken opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
Gregory Romanovsky, the lawyer, said in a statement that Petrova was trying to re-enter the U.S. on Feb. 16 at Boston’s Logan International Airport when a Customs and Border Protection officer discovered she “had not completed the required customs paperwork for a non-hazardous scientific sample she was bringing from an affiliated laboratory in France.”
“CBP was authorized to seize the item and issue a fine,” Romanovsky wrote. “Instead, they chose to cancel Ms. Petrova’s visa and detain her.”
Petrova remains in ICE custody in Louisiana. The Boston Globereported earlier on her detention.
Romanovsky wrote that “CBP improperly invoked their extensive immigration authority to impose a punishment grossly disproportionate to the situation. This overreach reflects broader concerns about the treatment of international scholars by U.S. immigration authorities.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE, told Inside Higher Ed in an email that Petrova was “detained after lying to federal officers about carrying biological substances into the country. A subsequent K9 inspection uncovered undeclared petri dishes, containers of unknown substances, and loose vials of embryonic frog cells, all without proper permits. Messages found on her phone revealed she planned to smuggle the materials through customs without declaring them. She knowingly broke the law and took deliberate steps to evade it.”
Harvard spokespeople didn’t provide an interview Friday about the situation or answer multiple emailed questions. In a brief email, the medical school’s media relations arm said, “We are monitoring this situation.”
Romanovsky has sued to restore Petrova’s visa.
“Ms. Petrova’s 1.5-month-long detention has caused significant disruption to both her professional and personal life,” Romanovsky said in his statement. “As a dedicated and highly respected researcher, her work is critical to scientific progress. We strongly urge ICE to release Ms. Petrova while her legal proceedings are ongoing.”
English/language arts and science teachers were almost twice as likely to say they use AI tools compared to math teachers or elementary teachers of all subjects, according to a February 2025 survey from the RAND Corporation that delves into uneven AI adoption in schools.
“As AI tools and products for educational purposes become more prevalent, studies should track their use among educators. Researchers could identify the particular needs AI is addressing in schools and–potentially–guide the development of AI products that better meet those needs. In addition, data on educator use of AI could help policymakers and practitioners consider disparities in that use and implications for equitable, high-quality instruction across the United States,” note authors Julia H. Kaufman, Ashley Woo, Joshua Eagan, Sabrina Lee, and Emma B. Kassan.
One-quarter of ELA, math, and science teachers used AI tools for instructional planning or teaching in the 2023–2024 school year. Nearly 60 percent of surveyed principals also reported using AI tools for their work in 2023-2024.
Among the one-quarter of teachers nationally who reported using AI tools, 64 percent said that they used them for instructional planning only, whether for their ELA, math, or science instruction; only 11 percent said that they introduced them to students but did not do instructional planning with them; and 25 percent said that they did both.
Although one-quarter of teachers overall reported using AI tools, the report’s authors observed differences in AI use by subject taught and some school characteristics. For instance, close to 40 percent of ELA or science teachers said they use AI, compared to 20 percent of general elementary education or math teachers. Teachers and principals in higher-poverty schools were less likely to report using AI tools relative to those in lower-poverty schools.
Eighteen percent of principals reported that their schools or districts provided guidance on the use of AI by staff, teachers, or students. Yet, principals in the highest-poverty schools were about half as likely as principals in the lowest-poverty schools to report that guidance was provided (13 percent and 25 percent, respectively).
Principals cited a lack of professional development for using AI tools or products (72 percent), concerns about data privacy (70 percent) and uncertainty about how AI can be used for their jobs (70 percent) as factors having a major or minor influence on their AI use.
The report also offers recommendations for education stakeholders:
1. All districts and schools should craft intentional strategies to support teachers’ AI use in ways that will most improve the quality of instruction and student learning.
2. AI developers and decision-makers should consider what useful AI applications have the greatest potential to improve teaching and learning and how to make those applications available in high-poverty contexts.
3. Researchers should work hand-in-hand with AI developers to study use cases and develop a body of evidence on effective AI applications for school leadership, teaching, and learning.
Laura Ascione is the Editorial Director at eSchool Media. She is a graduate of the University of Maryland’s prestigious Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
Nearly a year after pro-Palestinian encampments sprang up on college campuses across the country—and with them, increased reports of antisemitism—Senate Republicans are saying university leaders need to crack down on campus conduct or be placed “on notice.”
Although the House Republicans have spent more than a year investigating campus antisemitism, the hearing, held Thursday on Capitol Hill, was the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee’s first strike at the issue since it became a top priority after Oct. 7, 2023.
The two-hour discussion didn’t break much new ground, aside from giving members of the GOP a chance to highlight the changes President Trump has made since taking office and to promote several related pieces of legislation. Democrats largely used their time to criticize the Trump administration and the plan to shut down the Education Department.
Last Congress, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce held multiplehearings, blaming diversity, equity and inclusion for what they saw as “the scourge of antisemitism on campus.” They grilled the presidents of elite institutions, subpoenaed universities for documents and lambasted higher ed over all for its handling of protests. Ultimately, they concluded that university leaders made “shocking concessions” to protesters; intentionally declined to support Jewish students, faculty and staff; and failed to impose meaningful discipline, among other findings.
But up until this year, Republicans had limited options to enact legislation that they say would address campus antisemitism. Up until the start of the year, Democrats controlled the Senate and the White House. That meant that no matter what acts of alleged discrimination the committee tried to highlight or what bills it tried to pass, their efforts were almost always dead in the water. But now, with Donald Trump as president and Republicans controlling the House and Senate, the HELP Committee chair, Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, and his fellow Republicans hold the power. And they were sure to make it known.
“With President Trump in office and a Republican majority in Congress, the time of failed leadership is over,” Cassidy said in his opening remarks. “Universities have been put on notice: Failing to protect a student’s civil rights will no longer be tolerated.”
Cassidy and multiple of his Republican counterparts promoted the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would require colleges to use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism when conducting civil rights investigations. He also pushed the Protecting Students on Campus Act, which would require institutions to provide students with information about how to file an antisemitism complaint. (Cassidy is lead sponsor of the Protecting Students on Campus Act.)
The witnesses who testified Thursday included rabbis, researchers and Jewish student advocates. As was the case with the hearing over all, they largely echoed comments about campus antisemitism made at previous hearings. The three speakers selected by Republicans believed that the protests were not driven by students but faculty members and outside forces who were trying to demonize the definition of Zionist. The two selected by Democrats said colleges must focus on maintaining free speech while responding to antisemitism and all forms of discrimination.
Meanwhile, lawmakers from both parties wanted to talk about the actions of President Trump since he took office in January.
Republicans praised his decision to strip Columbia University of $400 million in federal funding, saying it was high time to hold the Ivy League institution—an epicenter of campus protests—accountable. (Columbia said last week that it agreed to sweeping demands from the Trump administration, though the funds haven’t been restored.)
The Department of Education has also sent out letters warning more than 60 colleges and universities that they could be the next to face “potential enforcement actions” if they don’t comply with civil rights laws and crack down on antisemitism.
“The days of a tepid response or toothless resolution agreements are over,” said Sen. Ashley Moody, a Florida Republican. “Universities have now been put on notice, and I don’t think there’s any question that there’s been a change in the tenor on how we will protect the rights of Jewish students on our campus.”
The conservatives also used the hearing as a chance to tie allegedly antisemitic protests to concerns about foreign influence on higher education and promote legislation that increases federal oversight of foreign gifts and student visas. On Thursday, the House passed a bill that would increase disclosure requirements for foreign gifts and contracts.
Republicans embraced a report from the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, which found that American colleges and universities have received more than $3 billion in unreported gifts from Qatar. According to the report, colleges that received undocumented gifts saw a significant increase in incidents of antisemitism compared to those that did not. The report argues, essentially, that the gifts are a use of “soft power” to encourage antisemitic views on campus.
Charles Small, founding director and president of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, was one of the witnesses at the hearing, and he urged lawmakers to increase their oversight of what gifts are allowed.
“I don’t think it’s wrong to question foreign funding in universities and colleges and whether foreign nations are trying to persuade or influence or brainwash our children. Do you think that they want us to be more pro-American … is that why they’re giving hundreds of millions of dollars to our universities?” Moody said.
But Sen. Roger Marshall, a Kansas Republican, defended the gifts, saying Qatar played a critical role in the release of Americans held hostage by Hamas.
Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington State, said OCR is America’s front line of defense against discrimination. So if the goal is to combat antisemitism, there should be more support and resources distributed to the OCR, not less, she added.
“It’s like saying if you want to fight fires, you should support the fire department. Well, I hate to tell you all, Trump is axing the fire department,” she said. “It’s as straightforward as it gets.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has detained a University of Alabama doctoral student and Iranian native. A spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed in an email that the student “posed significant national security concerns” but didn’t clarify what those concerns were.
The Crimson White student newspaper and other media previously identified the student as Alireza Doroudi. As of Thursday evening, the ICE website listed Doroudi as in ICE custody but didn’t note where he was.
“ICE HSI [Homeland Security Investigations] made this arrest in accordance with the State Department’s revocation of Doroudi’s student visa,” a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said in an email to Inside Higher Ed Thursday. The department, which includes ICE, didn’t provide an interview.
It’s unclear whether the detention is part of the Trump administration’s targeting of international students for alleged participation in pro-Palestinian protests, with immigration officers raiding their dorm rooms and revoking their visas.
The Crimson White said Doroudi was “reportedly arrested by ICE officers” at his home around 5 a.m. Tuesday. A statement from the university said the student, whom the university didn’t name, was detained off campus. The Crimson White also reported that—according to a message in a group chat including Iranian students—Doroudi’s visa was revoked six months after he came to the U.S., but the university’s International Student and Scholar Services arm said he could stay in the country as long as he maintained his student status.
The university didn’t provide Inside Higher Ed an interview Thursday or answer multiple written questions. Its emailed statement said, “Federal privacy laws limit what can be shared about an individual student.”
“International students studying at the University are valued members of the campus community, and International Student and Scholar Services is available to assist international students who have questions,” the statement said. “UA has and will continue to follow all immigration laws and cooperate with federal authorities.”
After months of uncertainty about the future of federally funded research, the National Institutes of Health this month started canceling grants it deemed “nonscientific.”
So far, that includes research into preventing HIV/AIDS; managing depressive symptoms in transgender, nonbinary and gender-diverse patients; intimate partner violence during pregnancy; and how cancer affects impoverished Americans.
In letters canceling the grants, the NIH said those and other research projects “no longer [effectuate] agency priorities.”
But the world’s largest funder of biomedical research didn’t stop there. The agency went on to tell researchers that “research programs based primarily on artificial and nonscientific categories, including amorphous equity objectives, are antithetical to the scientific inquiry, do nothing to expand our knowledge of living systems, provide low returns on investment, and ultimately do not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness,” according to a March 18 letter sent to the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
Katie Bogen, a Ph.D. student in the clinical psychology program at UNL, found out via the letter that NIH was canceling the $171,000 grant supporting her dissertation research. She was planning to explore the links between bisexual women’s disclosure of past sexual violence experience to a current romantic partner and subsequent symptoms, including traumatic stress, alcohol use and risk for violence revictimization within their current relationship. She started work on the project last May and was set to start data collection at the end of this month.
The NIH told Bogen and other researchers that “so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion studies are often used to support unlawful discrimination on the basis of race and other protected characteristics, which harms the health of Americans,” and that NIH policy moving forward won’t support such research programs.
“No corrective action is possible” for Bogen’s project, because “the premise of this award is incompatible with agency priorities, and no modification of the project could align the project with agency priorities.”
Last week, Bogen, who told Inside Higher Ed that she was inspired to pursue this topic because she herself is a bisexual woman with a trauma history, posted on TikTok about the termination letter.
Man this is actually very sad. Thinking about all the scientists today who are being told their scholarship isn’t important. It is. Your work matters. Let’s figure out how to move forward as a community of inquiry together.
She received thousands of comments and messages lamenting the loss of her work, with some characterizing the letter’s language as “appalling” and “horrifying.” Another commenter, who identified “as a bi femme who has survived the specific harm you’ve been studying,” told Bogen their “heart is broken” for her and other researchers “and all the folks who could be helped by the studies being defunded.”
Inside Higher Ed interviewed Bogen for more insight into her research and what the NIH’s abrupt cancellation of her and other projects means for public health and the future of scientific discovery.
(This interview has been edited for clarity and style.)
Q: What got you interested in researching intimate partner violence prevention for bisexual women? Why do you believe it’s an important line of scientific inquiry?
A: We know that bisexual women are at an elevated risk of experiencing intimate partner violence and sexual harm. We also know they have higher rates of post-traumatic stress disorder after these experiences compared to other people, and that they have greater and more problematic high-risk alcohol use afterwards. A key part of the process of meaning-making after the experience of violence is disclosure because of ambient bi-negativity. Bisexual people’s disclosure processes are often burdened by anti-bisexual prejudice.
For example, if you’re a bisexual woman who’s experienced violence at the hands of a woman partner, and you disclose that to a man partner that you’re seeing now, that man partner might say, “How much did she really hurt you?” If you’re a bisexual woman who’s now with a woman and you disclose violence perpetrated by a man, your woman partner might say something like, “This is what you get for dating men. We all know better than to date men.”
Katie Bogen is a fifth-year clinical psychology Ph.D. student at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln
So much of the disclosure research on sexual violence victims has been done with formal support providers like police or campus security or therapists, and then informal support providers like friends or parents or siblings. But very little research has documented the exposure process with intimate partners, which seems like a gap, given that intimate partners can then choose to sort of wield that insight or knowledge for good—or for harm.
I want to study how to intervene so that they don’t develop severe post-traumatic stress and problematic drinking. And this is particularly important because problem drinking is a risk factor for revictimization, and so bisexual women have all of these factors working against them that contribute to the cycle of revictimization and chronic victimization over their life span.
Q: Can you describe the process of applying for this NIH grant?
A: In 2022, I had just finished my second year of graduate school when a colleague of mine sent me a funding opportunity from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism that had a notice of special interest on the health of bisexual and bisexual-plus people.
We haven’t even been able to recruit our participants and I have none of the data.”
I worked very hard for a year on my application. It was the first grant I wrote as a [principal investigator]. I submitted to NIH, and a kind of miracle happened—I scored a 20 on this grant, which means my very first grant being written up as a PI got funded on the first round of peer review, which is almost unheard-of.
Q: How much of the project had you finished before receiving the termination notice?
A: I started work last May. I’ve hired and trained an entire lab of undergrads.
I’ve already done the literature reviews with the help of my undergraduate team and put together and tested the Qualtrics surveys. We set up backup safety measures in case the online surveys were infiltrated by bots or false respondents. The amount of literature I’ve read and the foundational conference presentations and analysis that I’ve run using other available data sets has been an immense labor.
It has been a productive 10 months. The things that this research has made possible for me—not only as a student and trainee, but as a scientist and as now a mentor helping to train the next generation of scholars—cannot be understated.
But we haven’t even been able to recruit our participants and I have none of the data. We were slated to begin data collection on March 31, and it’s a shame that will no longer happen.
Q: The NIH’s termination letter said your project is “antithetical to scientific inquiry” and “harms the health of Americans.” What was your reaction to that characterization of your work?
A: It hurts to hear that your work isn’t scientific. But it almost made me laugh because it’s so revelatory of the ignorance of folks in positions of power to claim that the work that I’m doing—that my colleagues are doing, that my mentors have taught me to do, that other folks in a field of doing—is ascientific and itself violence.
To me, the language in the letter is an example of DARVO, which is a rhetorical abuse tactic that stands for deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. They’re saying that what I’m doing isn’t scientific, and that they’re actually trying to uphold the standards of science, and by me focusing on these marginalized groups, I’m harming, quote unquote, real or regular Americans.
[The termination letter] almost made me laugh because it’s so revelatory of the ignorance of folks in positions of power to claim that the work that I’m doing … is ascientific and itself violence.”
Q: How does your work benefit society broadly?
A: Even if we take queerness out of the equation in this model, we are still garnering insight and understanding of the mechanism of post-traumatic stress, alcohol use and intimate partner violence for people in general. We’re getting a deeper understanding of how discussing sexual violence with a partner fundamentally changes that relationship, what is perceived as potentially acceptable in that relationship, norms of conflict within that relationship and sexual norms within that relationship.
Being able to investigate questions like this and enact scholarship like this could be a balm to some of the self-blame and shame that survivors are experiencing. And when research like this is able to reach health-care providers, public health improves, people become safer and we’re better able to protect folks from things like intimate partner violence, revictimization and sexual revictimization, which is endemic in our society.
Q: Given that this research grant was a central piece of your plan to complete your dissertation, how does its abrupt cancellation complicate your path toward degree completion?
A: I now have to work with my mentors to generate a new dissertation proposal and send it to my committee and get it reapproved, which means I have to access data sets at my institution that have either already been collected or that are safe from future rounds of cuts like this.
I believe I’m being intimidated [by the NIH] into taking the data that are already available, rather than collecting data with more specificity, which means the accurate data answering these research questions is tampered. I don’t necessarily want to go to a data set that was collected on, for example, masculinity and violence perpetration, and try and string together a similar enough model to pass the proxy of what I wanted. That’s poor scholarship.
It’s something a lot of scholars who are dealing with this crisis are facing now. How does that further marginalize the populations we’re aiming to serve if we’re trying to presume or assume that data on different populations? It creates this ethical and academic quandary.
Q: How might this termination affect your career in the long term?
A: I have a demonstrated record of receiving grant funding on my own, which is a difficult thing to demonstrate when you’re still a trainee or you’re still a student. It makes folks more competitive for postdocs, research-oriented internships or research jobs at bigger research institutions down the line. If I wanted to work at an academic hospital, it shows that I’ll be able to bring in grant funding.
But now I have this really sad line on my CV. I had to write several asterisks that the grant closed early, and I just have to hope that people who are reviewing my CV later know what that means—that the grant closed early, not because of my failure to complete the research, but because we have the infiltration of antiscientific thought in the federal government that forced a number of grants to close early.
It doesn’t stop at political science, psychology or even economics. It has legs and encroaches and creeps into biophysiological sciences and neuropsychology. It leaves no science safe.”
Q: How does your situation speak to any concerns you might have about the broader environment for science in this country right now?
A: We’re in this identity war moment, and it’s not based on anything but people’s own prejudice and bias and a sense of being victimized because they no longer have access to the power they used to. This is an attempt to recollect and to narrow who has that power, which has frightening implications across the board.
It doesn’t stop at political science, psychology or even economics. It has legs and encroaches and creeps into biophysiological sciences and neuropsychology. It leaves no science safe.
