Tag: News

  • Is DEI Dead or Changing?

    Is DEI Dead or Changing?

    Under repeated threats to their funding, higher ed institutions began to rebrand or shut down cultural centers, Black student resource centers and LGBTQ+ and women’s programs. Many campus diversity officers lost their jobs or were shuffled off to other offices, barred from doing much of the work they were hired for. Some institutions scrapped celebrated traditions such as affinity graduations and campus residential communities geared toward students of certain racial or ethnic backgrounds. Some student groups, like Esperanza, lost university funding because of their identity-based missions.

    In one recent example, the University of Alabama ended two student publications, one focused on women and the other on Black students, citing federal policy concerns. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga shuttered its Women’s and Gender Equity Center, an LGBTQ center, its Office of Multicultural Affairs, and the Office of Student & Family Engagement, replacing them with a Center for Student Leadership, Engagement and Community. The changes have affected faculty and staff as well as students; earlier this fall, the University of Illinois System banned consideration of race, sex or country of origin not only in financial aid decisions but in hiring, tenure and promotion as well.

    “It’s very sad to see a lot of universities fall to their knees,” Luna said. Higher ed institutions “are supposed to be the places where the exchange of ideas happen, where leaders are developed and where you’re just taught about how the world objectively is … It’s a very dangerous sign for the future.”

    A Double Attack

    State-level anti-DEI laws have proliferated for several years now, but diversity-related programs and services were dealt a double blow this year when Trump took office.

    On Feb. 14, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights issued a Dear Colleague letter declaring race-conscious student programming and resources illegal, based on an expansive interpretation of the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision against considering race in admissions in Students for Fair Admissions vs. Harvard. It gave colleges and universities 14 days to eliminate such offerings or risk losing their federal funding. A month later, ED launched investigations into 51 colleges for ongoing DEI activity. Federal judges struck down the department’s anti-DEI guidance in April, pausing enforcement, but colleges nonetheless scrambled to review and scrub DEI language from their programs and offices or shutter them altogether.

    Over the summer, the Department of Justice came out with a sweeping guidance memo declaring an even wider set of practices off-limits, including those that use “potentially unlawful proxies” for race, such as recruiting students from majority-minority geographic areas. In a series of contentious legal battles, the federal government pressured some universities to agree to settlements that included anti-DEI provisions, including bans on race-conscious programs and transgender athletes. For example, the University of Virginia, which the DOJ targeted for DEI practices, recently agreed to quash all DEI programming to maintain federal funding.

    I am a person who still believes, and I will forever believe, that it is important to call it diversity, equity, inclusion, anti-racism.”

    Shaun Harper, founder and chief research scientist at USC’s Race and Equity Center

    All the while, federal agencies have slashed, frozen and stalled billions of dollars in research grants to universities, often for perceived ties to DEI concepts. More than 120 TRIO programs, which support disadvantaged students, also lost their federal funds over alleged DEI connections. And in September, the Education Department abruptly ended grants for many minority-serving institutions, calling such programs—used to fund supports like extra peer mentoring or streamlined STEM programming at colleges with burgeoning minority student populations—“discriminatory” and “unconstitutional.”

    States, meanwhile, enacted an unprecedented number of new laws cracking down on DEI: 14 in 12 states, including Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, New Hampshire, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia and Wyoming. That’s double the number of states that passed anti-DEI laws last year.

    A higher education consultant and lawyer in the Washington D.C. area, who asked to remain anonymous, said campus leaders are increasingly asking, “How do we keep ourselves off the radar? How do we avoid scrutiny from the federal government?” At the same time, they face “increasingly disgruntled and disappointed communities within who are saying, ‘We thought you cared about this issue’,” the source said. University leaders have come under “very real pressure.”

    A ‘Loss of Momentum’

    Diversity officers and scholars fear that this year’s seismic policy shifts and campus crackdowns on DEI will have ripple effects across academe and beyond.

    Kaleb L. Briscoe, associate professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Oklahoma, is concerned that some institutions have responded to DEI bans by limiting what’s taught in the classroom.

    For example, Florida colleges removed hundreds of courses related to race, sex and gender from their general education requirement options. Classes at Texas A&M University that “advocate race or gender ideology, sexual orientation, or gender identity” now require approval from the university president. And other Texas universities have undertaken reviews of course syllabi and curricula for anything that runs afoul of state or federal DEI bans.

    Curriculum changes that would normally “take years’ worth of processes” are sometimes happening quickly and without appropriate faculty input, Briscoe said. While proponents of DEI bans often call for viewpoint diversity, “by implementing these bans, you are taking away voices and taking away knowledge … which really counters what they are hoping to do.”

    She also fears a “blue, red, purple divide of education,” where students have different levels of access to certain subject areas or perspectives depending on where they go to college.

    “We are now going to see different people in different states learning and getting access to different things,” she said. “That is horrible because, knowledge-wise, we should be preparing our students to be productive citizens across difference.”

    What we’re doing is reducing opportunities.”

    Paulette Granberry Russell, president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education

    Shaun Harper, founder and chief research scientist at the University of Southern California’s Race and Equity Center, said he’s mourning a “loss of momentum” in improving the experiences and outcomes of underrepresented students, a movement that stretches back to the 1960s.

    He recently visited a campus where “the Black cultural center still exists in name, but it has no staff. It has no programming. It’s just an empty room,” he said. Harper, who also serves as USC’s Clifford and Betty Allen Chair in Urban Leadership and Provost Professor of Education, Business and Public Policy, said he found a smattering of students still trying to use the space, sitting in the dark and talking. He remembers when the same center was “a light, bright, vibrant space that was rich with culture that had employees … who helped to make it a home away from home.”

    To him, the darkened space was a symbol of what’s been lost.

    DEI Professionals Under Fire

    Harper said he’s been especially disheartened to see DEI professionals lose their jobs.

    Institutions dismissed “good, innocent, hard-working people who were expert at bringing campus communities together across racial, religious, ideological and other important divides,” and who pushed for some widely-cared-about issues like pay equity for women and access for students with disabilities, he said. “The loss of those people has been catastrophic to higher education, to the students that they were serving and to those people’s careers.”

    A former diversity professional at a public higher ed institution in the South told Inside Higher Ed that DEI officers were wrestling with the “trauma,” “shame” and “humiliation” of suffering such a forceful, nationwide rejection.

    The ex-diversity officer, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of career repercussions, spent years working to make their institution a more welcoming place for students of color—and it worked, they said. Over their tenure, faculty diversity increased and the percentage of underrepresented students in the university’s entering class more than doubled.

    But you wouldn’t know it from looking at the institution’s website, the former diversity officer said. It makes no mention of the diversity office, which was dissolved. The university stripped any evidence of its work, including videos of events and educational programs, data reports and online community platforms. Unlike many of their co-workers, the former diversity officer retained an unrelated position at the institution, but their former role feels like a “scarlet letter” on campus and in the job market, they said.

    They worry not only for their colleagues but also for students and faculty members left unserved.

    “I can tell you that students of color who had community, don’t,” they said. “They’re spitting on Black kids, they’re calling them the N-word, and kids don’t know where to go. They don’t know what office is going to support them.”

    The former diversity professional believes DEI is officially “dead,” at least as a label.

    But “the underlying work of creating welcoming, diverse, inclusive, supportive cultures on campus and communities is not dead,” they said. The “benefits of diversity, of inclusion, those are still there. It just can’t be called that.”

    Students in Ann Arbor protested the University of Michigan’s decision last spring to close its DEI offices, putting up posters criticizing President Donald Trump and former UM President Santa Ono.

    Bill Pugliano/Getty Images

    DEI’s Murky Future

    Harper argued that the work can’t really go on without using the term “DEI.” He believes replacement terms like “culture” and ”community” lack specificity in a way that makes them meaningless.

    “It’s giving weak sauce,” he said. “I am a person who still believes, and I will forever believe, that it is important to call it diversity, equity, inclusion, anti-racism.” The same goes for “antisemitism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia. It’s important to call those things by their names.”

    Whether DEI will continue in some form is an open question currently under debate by current and former DEI officers and researchers. Some retain their optimism; others argue it’s going to take years, even decades, for campus infrastructure to recover from the full extent of this year’s losses—if a comeback is even possible.

    The DEI rollbacks mark a retreat from “60-plus years of effort to broaden access and address inequities,” said Paulette Granberry Russell, who’s stepping down as president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education in January after five years at the helm. “So, do I see this work coming back? Bouncing back? No.”

    Regardless of who wins the next election, she believes federal funding cuts and stymied DEI-related research will cause long-lasting damage. She’s spoken with scholars studying issues related to race and gender who have been doxed and threatened, and who fear continuing the work they’ve done for years.

    “What we’re doing is reducing opportunities,” Granberry Russell said. “You’re not going to make that up in two, three, four years.”

    But she’s not without hope. She emphasized that a “systems approach” to improving academic outcomes for students—making such work the entire university’s responsibility—could be the next phase of these efforts as diversity offices fade. Doing so would require leaders to express “their commitment, which at least at this point, requires a certain amount of courage, given the very heavy-handed … taking away of resources to bring colleges and universities into line,” she said.

    A chief diversity officer who lost their job in a state with a DEI ban but now works in the same role at an east coast institution, said they’re doing a “post-mortem” on where DEI went wrong. They believe the DEI movement might have tried to accomplish too much too fast, without explaining the research behind the practices developed to boost student outcomes.

    Practitioners introduced concepts “really new to people” and sometimes “began to cancel people quickly” who didn’t get it, said the CDO, who asked to remain anonymous. But “you can’t run a marathon with people who are not fit. You have to bring them up to where you want them to be. And that requires teaching. It requires patience.”

    They noted that the field of DEI grew rapidly in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Scholarship on improving campus climate flourished, and diversity professionals enjoyed a wide berth to try new strategies to close equity gaps. But it was short-lived. Less than a year into the CDO’s role at their previous institution, the anti-DEI movement gained traction in the state. An anti-DEI law ultimately passed, and the diversity office later closed for good.

    “That great rebirth or Renaissance” was “like a star that just had its last final flash of wonder—and then the death began,” they said. “We didn’t know at the time that the star was shining brightly to die.”

    They believe DEI could be on the brink of a new era, one that rectifies some of its past mistakes and garners more support. “My fear is that we won’t be given the opportunity to do so,” they said. But they’re confident diversity professionals won’t give up on the programs, practices and strategies they believe students need.

    “Fear not. Rest up, my friends,” they said. “We will be back.”

    The D.C.-based higher education consultant and lawyer believes DEI isn’t dead; it’s just shifting. Campus DEI work has never been unlawful, they argued, so colleges and universities simply need to emphasize that fact, not scale back their work. They encourage campus leaders to state explicitly that cultural centers and programs are open to all, and to train everyone on campus, including student group leaders, how to frame their programming that way—even though the programs didn’t discriminate in the first place.

    “Many times, I’m just trying to remove language that I know is going to draw scrutiny and then trying to offer them a way to continue to live out their values,” they said. “There may be ways to thematically describe the intended purpose of a program without using an identity marker that really just is a lightning rod in this moment.”

    They acknowledged that “this transition has been really painful” for all invested in diversity, equity and inclusion work.

    “But I think people are resilient,” they said. “They’re evolving, and they’re trying to figure out a pathway to make the work of universal access and opportunity evergreen.”

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  • Hope Is Essential to Success of Any Job Search (opinion)

    Hope Is Essential to Success of Any Job Search (opinion)

    We live in uncertain and unstable times. The job market is contracting due to economic uncertainty, political instability and the increase of AI-driven automation. In my role as a career adviser, I talk to many students and recent graduates who have faced a long and difficult job search. The words and phrases I hear most often in these conversations are “dejected,” “soul-crushing,” or “I feel like I am screaming into the void.” International students face an added challenge, with H-1B visas seeming out of reach as they become more difficult and expensive for employers to process.

    All of this uncertainty can lead to feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. What I hear from students, and in particular our international community at Columbia University, is, “What is the point of applying to jobs if no one will hire me?” Such self-defeating thoughts can lead to inaction and feelings of despair. Yet hope is essential to the success of any job search. Having hope or optimism that something will work out is central to achieving one’s goals.

    It is likewise essential that a career coach or adviser have a hopeful, positive attitude. A recent article published by the IZA Institute of Labor Economics describes how when people who were unemployed for a long period of time worked with caseworkers who had “strong confidence in the potential of their clients to find employment,” the relationship led to an increase in the client’s motivation and resilience, and to improved earnings and employment outcomes over time. Thus, our outlook as advisers can impact the students we are working with, so we must manage our own feelings of hopelessness. I find myself returning to Jane Goodall’s The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times for inspiration.

    Another source of inspiration I return to is a framework called Career Flow: A Hope-Centered Approach to Career Development, developed in 2011 by Spencer G. Niles, Norman E. Amundson and Roberta A. Neault. In the remainder of this article, I plan to provide career development professionals with an overview of this hope-based career development model and suggestions on how they can implement it to assist their students and graduates.

    In the theory, “Career Flow” is an analogy that compares different types of experiences in one’s career to the flow of water. Anyone who has felt “underwater” at work can understand this metaphor. Finding “optimal” flow in a professional setting means that your skills and personality match the tasks and requirements of your role. Below, I outline suggested steps based on the model to help you implement a hope-based approach to career advising.

    Step 1: Assessing and Establishing Hope

    Start by letting the advisee tell their story and share the challenges that they face. Listen and reflect back what you are hearing. But also start to consider the person’s outlook and demeanor. Many of the people I talk to, including federal workers who were laid off or furloughed, exhibit signs of hope even though they understand the current challenges they are facing and express frustration and sometimes fear. I have been surprised and impressed by people’s resilience and willingness to pivot, which I make sure to point out. That helps them see the strength they are exhibiting even in a moment of crisis.

    However, some people will present as mostly frustrated, with little hope. If you are talking to someone who seems particularly hopeless about their situation, it could be helpful to reflect that back to them. You might say, “What you just described to me seems like a very tough situation. I wonder if you might feel a sense of hopelessness?” Sometimes it just takes awareness for someone to realize that they need to shift their mindset. Validate their struggle, then help them reframe their point of view toward one that is more hopeful. For example, you could mention the Career Flow model that shows the positive benefits of having hope in a career search. If a student seems unwilling to shift, you might want to suggest that they seek extra support through family, friends or counseling services.

    Step 2: Self-Reflection and Self-Clarity

    Self-reflection and self-clarity are essential to any job search, including when it comes to establishing a hopeful approach. If someone is not clear about their own needs and values or has a lack of understanding of their situation and challenges, that person can struggle to succeed in their goals. Therefore, help them gain a greater sense of self-clarity by reflecting any key interests, skills and values you hear them describe in your conversation. At the same time, it is important to ask about possible challenges or obstacles to fully understand their situation and address hurdles standing in the way of their goals.

    If a student seems hopeless about succeeding in their goals, advisers can bolster hope by asking about areas of strength or asking them to describe a time they felt they succeeded when faced with a difficult task. Reminding students of past successes and helping to celebrate these wins can increase their sense of agency and help them believe they can overcome future challenges.

    Step 3: Visioning

    An inherently hopeful exercise, visioning is the ability to brainstorm future possibilities and identify desired outcomes. Sometimes, I talk to a student who is so focused on one goal, such as finding an academic job or postdoc position, that they forget to consider other opportunities where they can apply their skills and expertise. When starting the visioning process, encourage advises to imagine multiple ways of reaching their desired goal. This is also known as “pathways thinking” and, in the Career Flow model, quantity is more important than quality. When an extensive list of possible career paths is identified, the advisee should use self-reflection and self-clarity to narrow their options by selecting a few paths that best align with their interests, skills and values. Pathways thinking also supports advisees in being both flexible and adaptable, traits that are incredibly important in any job search.

    However, people who feel hopeless can sometimes lack the capability to consider other options. Help connect them to resources, such as career assessments like ImaginePhD, myIDP or O*Net, where they can gather information to explore different types of employment. Also, help them consider ways they can gain skills or experience through online courses, volunteering, on-campus work or internships.

    Step 4: Goal Setting and Planning

    Once a student has selected a few possible paths, then focus on setting specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound (SMART) goals. Students often set lofty or poorly defined goals such as, “I want to find a job.” Help them identify small, realistic steps they can take to achieve their main goal of employment. For example, suggest that they find a job they want to apply to and create a tailored résumé and cover letter for the role and then schedule another career advising session in two weeks to review the documents. Again, consider possible barriers to their goals and how they can overcome them.

    Step 5: Implementing and Adapting

    As students start to reach their incremental goals they will encounter either positive feedback (e.g. a request for an interview) or a lack of success (silence or rejection emails). As they gather more data, help them revise or relinquish possible paths that are no longer relevant or serving them. Sometimes, you will need to help them accept the fact that a goal might not be achieved. This process is known as radical acceptance, or giving in to your current reality. Help them see that finding employment during a period of uncertainty is difficult and can cause pain, but life can still be hopeful and joyful.

    Another approach is to help students see what they have control over. We might not be able to control the economy, but we can control our actions and our outlook, and we can seek out help when we need it or find support in community with others. Overall, be there as a source of support, guidance and encouragement.

    In conclusion, it can take substantial effort to choose to be hopeful in periods of uncertainty, but we must maintain hope even in the darkest of times. To quote C. R. Snyder, who writes about the psychology of hope, “in studying hope …, I observed the spectrum of human strength. This reminds me of the rainbow that frequently is used as a symbol of hope. A rainbow is a prism that sends shards of multicolored light in various directions. It lifts our spirits and makes us think of what is possible. Hope is the same—a personal rainbow of the mind.”

    So, let us be a rainbow for those we work with and help them to let hope, rather than despair, lead the way.

    Francesca Fanelli has 10 years of experience working with graduate-level students and is a licensed mental health counselor in the state of New York. She currently serves as senior associate director of graduate career development at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where she specializes in career advising and event management.

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  • MacKenzie Scott Showers Colleges With More Gifts

    MacKenzie Scott Showers Colleges With More Gifts

    Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott gave more multimillion donations out to colleges.

    picture alliance/Getty Images

    Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott is at it again with another round of gifts.

    Robeson Community College in North Carolina announced a $24 million gift from Scott on Thursday, the single largest contribution in the rural college’s history.

    Robeson’s president, Melissa Singler, called the gift “a profound affirmation of our students, our faculty and staff, and the limitless potential of Robeson County.”

    “Never before have we been given a gift of this magnitude that affords our team the time, space and freedom to think, dream and plan boldly,” Singler said in a news release.

    Scott also gifted Carl Albert State College in Oklahoma $23 million. The college is working on a strategic plan for how to use the funds, focused on “sustainability, academic and career success, innovation, and community engagement,” according to an announcement last week. Connors State College, also in Oklahoma, celebrated a $15 million contribution from Scott, its largest gift ever.

    Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College also announced a “multi-million dollar gift” last week, the largest unrestricted gift in its history, but didn’t specify the amount. The tribal college plans to use Scott’s funding to support scholarships and grants for native and non-native students.

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  • Grad Programs Brace for Loan Caps

    Grad Programs Brace for Loan Caps

    Most of the colleges with the largest graduate programs in the country don’t have clear plans for how they’ll deal with new loan caps, set to kick in next July. And if they do, they aren’t taking publicly about it.

    For years, students could borrow essentially unlimited funds to pay for graduate education, thanks to a program known as Grad PLUS that capped loans at the cost of attendance. Republicans in Congress and other critics have argued that colleges took advantage of this program and raised their prices, fueling the student debt crisis. Loans for grad students make up nearly half of the federal loan portfolio.

    Along the way, colleges have begun to rely on graduate education to fund their university operations, higher ed experts say.

    But now that two-decade-old system is ending. Congress eliminated Grad PLUS over the summer and will cap how much students can borrow for graduate education. Lawmakers also limited Parent PLUS loans, which were also previously uncapped and offered families a way to make up the gap and pay for college. Both changes came out of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

    Beginning next summer, most graduate programs will have a federal loan cap of $100,000, with exceptions for a scaled-down number of professional programs with a limit set at $200,000. Those changes have created uncertainty for graduate schools and students who are navigating a changing landscape with fewer resources. Experts say graduate schools could face enrollment declines and some could shutter, thanks to the new limits.

    Even before the loan caps, graduate education was facing a reckoning, particularly after the Trump administration clamped down on federal research funding. Colleges paused graduate admissions for doctoral programs, and sometimes rescinded offers. Meanwhile, colleges are starting to rethink their approaches to humanities doctoral programs, among other shifts in this space.

    Planning for Change

    To better understand how universities are planning ahead, Inside Higher Ed reached out to 20 of the largest graduate programs in the nation. Most did not respond. Those that did emphasized a mix of increased corporate engagement and expanded loan options, among other measures.

    But for the most part, many appear to still be figuring it out.

    “We’re spending a lot of time this year looking at diversifying the streams of funding for graduate students,” said Bonnie Ferri, vice provost for graduate and postdoctoral education at Georgia Institute of Technology.

    Ferri noted that while Georgia Tech already has corporate partnerships that sponsor projects, which in turn help fund students, the university is doubling down on those efforts this year and “focusing on being more systematic” to spread those dollars across more graduate programs.

    At a recent University of Florida Board of Trustees meeting, Vice President and Chief Enrollment Strategist, Mary Parker, said UF will “have to figure out how to fill the gap for our students” as loan options diminish. She noted UF is rolling out Scholarship Universe, a tool to help students find internal and external scholarships. Parker said UF is also “looking at the expansion of our institution loan program” and the university will also help students identify private loan options.

    University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign spokesperson Patrick Wade told Inside Higher Ed by email that Illinois is still in the planning process and it is too early to share specific details. But Wade added that university officials “are directing units to begin developing contingency plans and to communicate proactively with current and prospective students, particularly in professionally oriented programs, where we expect recent changes to have the greatest impact.”

    Several other institutions said it was too early to share details about how they’ll fill loan gaps.

    Grad Enrollment Fallout

    Some experts believe the changes to federal loans will leave students scrambling.

    “I think when we get to July 1 next year, when these caps are scheduled to go into place, there will be a lot of students who are going to need to come up with another way of paying for graduate school than what’s been true in the past,” Jordan Matsudaira, director of the Postsecondary Education & Economics Research at American University, told Inside Higher Ed.

    Research led by Matsudaira projects that programs such as dentistry, osteopathy and medicine will be particularly squeezed by the changes.

    And given the many other pressures on university budgets, such as federal research funding challenges, federal efforts to limit international enrollment, and the looming demographic cliff, Matsudaira doesn’t expect universities to lower graduate tuition or significantly increase aid.

    “I just think institution budgets are going to be under so much pressure from so many different things that it is just incredibly optimistic thinking, bordering on fantasy, to believe that they’re going to come up with substantial sources of funding to be able to either cut their graduate school prices or be able to fund their own loan program to enroll students,” he said.

    (Some experts have suggested that states should get involved by providing low or no-interest loans as the Grad Plus loan option goes away.)

    Matsudaira expects a “very rough transition period over this coming year” for students. He also expects graduate enrollment to decline.

    “The question is how much does it reduce the number of students pursuing graduate school,” Matsudaira said.

    Private loans are one option students are likely to turn to. He believes private loans will surge, with the market growing from around $3 billion a year currently to $10 billion in the near future.

    But even private loans may prove difficult to obtain for some students.

    “If I had to make predictions, I would guess that private student loan providers will make loans available to students attending programs with a good track record of earnings and loan repayment, but it is less certain whether students in programs that tend to lead to lower earnings and/or worse loan repayment outcomes will be able to access private student loans,” Lesley Turner, an associate professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, wrote by email.

    She added private loans will have “fewer protections and less flexibility in repayment terms.”

    Turner expects that the fallout of the changes to graduate school funding will not only decrease enrollment but may even prod some institutions to shutter such programs as headcount falls.

    Credit rating agencies have also taken a dim view of what the changes will mean.

    “Institutions with a greater proportion of graduate students will likely face more pronounced impacts from these policy changes, particularly if they serve disproportionately high levels of aid- and loan-dependent students,” Fitch Ratings concluded in its 2026 sector outlook, which it described as deteriorating. “While private loan providers can fill gaps created by federal limits, private offerings may nevertheless deter students, as private loans will likely be offered with less favorable rates and limited flexibility compared to what was available under federal programs.”

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  • A Tumultuous Tenure Leading the Nation’s Diversity Officers

    A Tumultuous Tenure Leading the Nation’s Diversity Officers

    Paulette Granberry Russell is stepping down as president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education (NADOHE) after a dramatic and unpredictable five years at the helm.

    She represented campus diversity professionals amid the national racial reckoning that accompanied the Black Lives Matter movement, and then through the dizzying years that followed as anti-DEI laws swept the country. She also spent 22 years as a diversity professional at Michigan State University.

    Granberry Russell told Inside Higher Ed she never planned to stay at NADOHE longer than five years, so she’s ready to move on and facilitate a “smooth transition and handoff.”

    But what a tenure it’s been.

    She spoke with Inside Higher Ed about how she navigated the headwinds facing diversity professionals and the future of diversity, equity and inclusion work on campuses. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

    Q: Over the course of your term, from 2020 to 2025, the landscape for diversity professionals in higher education radically shifted. What has it been like for you to represent DEI professionals then and now?

    A: When I came into the role, my goals were to do a few things, which, not only were intended to build on our past successes, but also [to] develop new initiatives that would enhance a few areas, [including] increasing our membership but also providing our support for them. It included, for example, enhancing our industry influence but also sustainability of the organization.

    I came into the role in March of 2020, and what happened in March of 2020? The pandemic, which altered much of what was going on in higher education and how we were doing our work, whether that was remotely, but also with threats in terms of both student experiences but also student support. And then, in May of 2020, the murder of George Floyd, and all of the ways in which our institutions were reacting and responding and certain commitments were made to enhance antiracism efforts on our campuses.

    When I think about my first few months, it was something very different than what I anticipated. And I’m certain that’s true for higher education as well. I lived in this state of shifting priorities, having to think about ways to best support members who were having to adjust to significant shifts on their campuses. We were also dealing with significant challenges around freedom of speech and disruption on our campuses prior to these more recent experiences.

    And the politics are very different. When you shift from an environment of enhanced commitment built on an understanding that our campuses had to deal with issues around race and expanding opportunities more broadly across identity to now pushback—it was causing quite a shift in equilibrium. And that’s true for our members as well as the organization. And because of the evolution of diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education historically, as painful as a lot of this was, I believe we were better prepared than we understood ourselves to be.

    Q: You touched on how you started at NADOHE in this moment in 2020, when campuses made commitments and investments in thinking about race and racial inequities, and now campuses are rolling back so much of those efforts in response to anti-DEI legislation. How did these policy shifts change NADOHE’s work and change your work as its leader? How did you have to pivot?

    A: Our successes, I think, resulted in some of the pushback. The pushback was evolving. Expanding on opportunities [created by diversity initiatives] beyond race, so that people understood that diversity was more inclusive than they initially understood it to be—we did not do as good a job as we could have and should have.

    But [we] are beginning to do [it] now, in broadening people’s understanding that diversity is and should be interpreted very broadly. I think that the narrative was hijacked, meaning it was easy to unfortunately define diversity narrowly on the basis of race, gender and sexuality. And others used that narrative to create fear and apprehension that somehow others were being advantaged, versus understanding that we all have benefited from the ways in which we were adjusting our efforts on campus to broaden access, to broaden opportunities, to increase equitable outcomes, understanding that [it’s] not one-size-fits-all, and we had to tailor and adjust our efforts to accommodate the broad range of interests and identities that presented on our campuses and have always presented on our campuses. What we failed to do well was messaging both the communities impacted by our work and the work that was being done to expand opportunities as well.

    Q: How did the backlash shift your priorities, if at all?

    A: When we think about the early challenges, some [opponents] would point to critical race theory. I don’t know that they necessarily understood it very well, and [they] were having a difficult time messaging it. But it was easier to talk about diversity, because for many people, that conjures up issues around race, it harkens back to earlier views of affirmative action and I think it became an easier message to divide higher ed both internally as well as externally.

    It was important for NADOHE to emphasize—whether it was around academic freedom, First Amendment rights and freedom of speech and freedom of expression—that diversity, equity and inclusion are embedded in those. Freedom of expression cannot be sanitized. Our research, for example, or our curriculum is going to touch on issues that may impact communities broadly—and diverse, marginalized, underserved communities. And the work that we do in higher education as diversity leaders requires evidence-based research that informs our work. In the absence of that, you’re guessing at strategies and interventions that will support all students.

    This work is not going to go away. We’re not going to go back to a time when opportunities were constrained, when fairness did not extend to certain communities. That’s unacceptable.”

    —Paulette Granberry Russell

    And so, I don’t know that it was as much a shift in our priorities as much as it was helping higher ed internally, as well as audiences outside of higher ed, to understand that access and opportunity are not limited to any one demographic or a few demographics. If there was a shift in priorities, it was hopefully helping broader audiences understand that there’s nothing to fear, especially in the ways that diversity, equity, inclusion was being demonized. This work is not intended to grant preferential treatment to some and deny others opportunities.

    Q: So, you found yourself having to do a lot of explaining about what’s actually meant when people say “DEI” in a higher ed context.

    A: That’s right. And it’s also saying to folks, don’t use the acronym. Because the acronym, unfortunately, supported a very narrow way of defining efforts.

    Diversity is not defined narrowly. Equity is intended to reduce barriers that may result in differential impact, and those differential impacts are not limited to any one category. Inclusion doesn’t happen just naturally. We know individuals feeling included allows them to be themselves but also allows them to be more successful. If I don’t feel like I belong, what do I do? I tend to retreat, or I don’t access the resources that are there, resources that may benefit me, resources that are accessible to all, with an understanding that, again, we’re not monolithic. It is helping people differently understand, and hopefully better understand, that there are no threats here. Diversity on our campuses is a reality, period. And it’s not going to change, certainly not as long as organizations like NADOHE are here to defend access and opportunities.

    Changes in nomenclature happen. How we define our work, how we label our work, how we tag our work has always changed. If we think historically, going back 20, 30 years, we talked about affirmative action. We talked about multiculturalism. We talked about diversity. We talked about equal opportunity. We talk about fairness. We talk about equity. We talk about belonging. We talk about inclusion. Terminology evolves over time, given how the work itself evolves.

    Q: As campuses close centers associated with DEI and get rid of diversity roles, what do you see as the next phase of the work? How do campus diversity professionals move forward from here? And what does the DEI movement look like now and into the future?

    A: At least for this moment in time, we need to more closely scrutinize the systems that have been designed that have resulted in barriers to success. And how do we redesign, or how do we begin to design systems that differently support our campuses?

    There’s no single office or individual that can do this work alone. Certainly, in my own career at an institution that was a large public land-grant with over 40,000 students at that time and 14,000 faculty and staff, there was no way that a person with two staff was going to be able to dramatically impact change. [Change comes from] working with others and understanding that it’s going to take what I would call a whole-institution approach, which means that our leadership, our policies, budget, people, culture have to be aligned. That also means that we have to take a look at the policies, practices, procedures that we have in place that may be having differential impacts, and how do we make adjustments in those? Not to grant preferential treatment, not to discriminate, but to say, can we design systems that work better?

    We’re talking about a systems approach for structural change. When I say a systems approach, this is going to be far more extensive than I think many of us are prepared to do, but I think that it’s the future. [In the past], unfortunately, we didn’t [always] look at connections between the needs of our students, the capacity of faculty to meet those needs, the capacity of staff to meet those needs and connecting our students to potential employers. Things were very siloed. Things are still very siloed. We have to think about the life cycle of a student. And we do that, but it’s not that we are always very deliberate in how we do it.

    When I grew up as a child, the expectation was that I would go to college, but my family, by all definitions, was very low income. [When] I got to my undergraduate experience, there were no tools in the way that there are now. There were no interventions. There were no programs that I could access that connected me to all of the resources that would allow me to be successful. I was a low-income Black female who arrived on a campus with no prior experience, not knowing how to navigate the space, not knowing where the resources were, not knowing how to fund my education. I was a person with a dream and a family that really wanted me to be successful, but they didn’t have the tools to provide that. It’s a very different world we live in today.

    [The goal is] helping that student understand where the resources are, and then helping faculty understand the differences of those students that come into your classroom, ways that you as faculty can support them, connecting those faculty with the advisory services that those students might need. We have to design [systems] in ways that reduce barriers, that acknowledge the differences that exist and with the goal of those individuals being successful [and] reducing the barriers for faculty to be successful.

    Q: After leaving NADOHE, what’s next for you?

    A: My entire trajectory, my entire life, I have always been this person who believed in fairness. I always believed in opportunities. I’m always that person who fought for not only myself, but for others to be treated fairly, because I grew up in a family where my history included ancestors who were formerly enslaved.

    At 16 years old, I decided I wanted to increase participation in voting. In 12th grade, I remember I had a speech class, and I was that person giving speeches on the slaughtering of baby seals. I was the person who was giving speeches on sexuality and treating people differently based on how they identified. I was that person who gave speeches on the Black Power movement, civil rights, Martin Luther King. And as I reflect now, as I transition, I’m not going to be any different than what I have always been. I will find new ways to [apply] my experiences and my advocacy. Because I have no choice. I realized that about myself.

    My time with NADOHE has been to build on the successes of my predecessors. I believe that I have done that. I achieved the goals that I set out to achieve, both for myself and for the organization, whether that is increasing our membership, our influence within higher ed [and] beyond higher ed. We’ve done that.

    This work is not going to go away. We’re not going to go back to a time when opportunities were constrained, when fairness did not extend to certain communities. We’re not going back to a time when discrimination on the basis of identity was lawful, certainly in the context of race, gender, sexuality, sexual orientation. That’s unacceptable. We’re not going back.

    My next move is, I’m going to breathe. I’m going to take a little bit of time for myself. But I know I will always find my way back to what I have always been committed to, that I want people to be treated fairly. I want people to have opportunities.

    Q: Whoever takes over your position is going to face significant headwinds. What would be your advice to them?

    A: Bring your passion. Bring your commitment. Coming into this role, it’s going to be exhausting, but you have to decide that there’s no other way forward. Too many lives depend on it. This country, our democracy, depends on it.

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  • Loan and Degree Insurance May Be Self-Defeating (opinion)

    Loan and Degree Insurance May Be Self-Defeating (opinion)

    Imagine you are the parent of an incoming college student who wants to study theology, ranked among the lowest-paid majors after graduation. You’re proud of their conviction, but also anxious because friends and family keep reminding you that theology is a major for which career prospects are uncertain at best. Then, in the thick of college decision season, you learn that the college your child is considering offers something called “degree insurance”: If your graduate doesn’t earn above a set threshold, the program will step in to cover part of the gap.

    The promise is meant to ease parents’ and students’ fears. Yet, it raises a deeper question: Why would a college degree, still the surest path to economic advancement and long-term financial stability, suddenly require insurance at all?

    Across the country, colleges and universities are rolling out a new suite of financial products targeting undergraduates, marketed as “loan” and “degree” insurance. Loan repayment assistant programs (LRAPs), sometimes also called loan repayment guarantees, are a form of loan insurance that protect students against default: If a graduate doesn’t earn above a certain threshold, their student loan payments are reimbursed to a certain amount. Degree insurance is a mechanism akin to public “wage insurance” programs, where if a graduate makes less than the average income in their field adjusted for regional differences, the insurance would “top up” the difference in wages for a period of time.

    These two tools have distinct origins and underlying rationales. Loan Repayment Assistance Programs (LRAPs) originated in Yale Law School in the 1980s, and spread to other law schools, as the rising cost of legal education began to deter graduates from pursuing lower-paying public interest careers. While they began as internal sources of funding, the privatization of LRAP offerings and search for profit have pushed the industry to expand into new markets, namely undergraduate education. Indeed, Ardeo Education Solutions, an early and prominent player in this sector, was founded by Yale Law graduate Peter Samuelson, who himself benefited from Yale’s loan assistance program. Ardeo positions itself as reassuring families about the risks of taking on debt in order to pay for undergraduate education, “increasing access to the life-changing impact of higher education,” and freeing students from having to choose “between their passions and a paycheck.”

    Degree insurance products take a different approach. Degree Insurance, which counts Augustana College in Illinois as a client, draws on the cultural cachet of the American dream to market itself as an income equalizer; its flagship product, “American Dream Insurance,” guarantees “equal pay for equal study,” where “no graduate will have to earn less than their peers, regardless of race or gender, because everyone will have the same safety net.” This is insurance against the uncertainties and inequalities of the labor market as well as against individual weaknesses of any particular candidate.

    While the current scope and reach of this sector is challenging to assess, Ardeo Education advertises that it’s provided LRAPs to more than 30,000 students at more than 200 American colleges and universities. Participating institutions range from a number of small, faith-based colleges like Lyon College and MidAmerica Nazarene University to a public research university like Eastern Michigan University. Eligibility for repayment assistance usually requires graduation from the offering institution, full-time work (30+ hours/week), and staying below the income cap.

    The extension of LRAPs and degree insurance into undergraduate programs represents a new dimension of risk management in higher education, which has gone through several phases since it began in earnest in the late 20th century when colleges and universities started responding to increased personal injury and campus safety litigation. These risk management programs, tailored to protect institutions, eventually expanded to include Title IX, Occupational Safety and Health Administration requirements, environmental regulations, reputation management, crisis communications, cybersecurity and, most relevantly for this topic, financial sustainability. Loan and degree insurance represent the latest iteration of such efforts.

    For now, colleges typically pay for these programs, though it is unclear how much of the cost is passed on to students through tuition. How students are selected for inclusion in these programs is also opaque. Institutions are free to determine which students and majors are offered the program. Augustana College’s website, for example, says that it offers degree insurance at no direct cost to the student, but participation is on an invitation-only basis.

    There are, of course, reasons to defend these programs. Scrutiny of the student loan system, which has resulted in a student debt crisis, has intensified across the political spectrum, as policymakers from both parties recognize the harm it has caused (even as they disagree on the solutions). LRAPs and degree insurance may decrease the rate of loan default and reassure low-income families who were unable to save for college and are averse to taking on loans to pay for college.

    In an environment marked by increasing competition for students, admissions professionals see offering LRAPs and degree insurance as a competitive advantage. Loan repayment and degree insurance plans also encourage students not only to enroll in college in general but to pursue degrees with more challenging career prospects, which are also often the ones at risk of being cut due to low enrollment. This is increasingly relevant given the almost daily news of program closures.

    The arrival of these financial instruments is perhaps an understandable response to the rising cost of a college education, increased competition for students, overall wage stagnation and shifting public views about the purpose, value and outcomes of higher education. The adoption of these tools, however, is not simply driven by the current circulation of the idea of college education as a risk; it also further reinforces that view.

    These programs are not simply a new and neutral financial option for students. By extending the logics of institutional risk management to the economic futures of students, these tools cement the troubling, and potentially self-defeating, idea that a college degree itself is a financial risk requiring protection rather than the most reliable path to upward mobility and a critical component of our continued economic and cultural prosperity. Their adoption by colleges and universities is a reflection of the “short-termism” that has increasingly marked higher education strategy. As more institutions inevitably adopt these programs, it is unclear how long they will remain a competitive advantage. Furthermore, as the trend spreads, we may see the labor market respond, with employers lowering entry-level salaries even further as they take into account insurance payouts. Indeed, like many aspects of higher education today, it feels like a race to the bottom.

    Comparisons between insurance products and other forms of income or employment assurances are difficult to make. Should families prioritize colleges with strong outcomes (e.g., graduation rates upward of 70 percent and reassuring post-graduation employment statistics), robust alumni networks, or loan and insurance programs? It is also too early to tell what the consequences of transferring the risk to third parties, a common higher education risk management strategy, might be for students and institutions in the long term. And, it further financializes education, such that in the process of character formation, managing risk, rather than other values or logics, becomes central to identity.

    Colleges and universities might want to ask themselves whether treating college degrees as a risk serves their long-term interests. Loan and degree insurance products may deliver short-term enrollment gains, ease families’ anxieties, and even encourage students to pursue majors often viewed as less “marketable.” In the long-term, however, these strategies relieve the pressure to address underlying structural challenges such as rising costs, stagnant wages and a flawed loan system. Ultimately, they undermine our ability to make the case for higher education as a public good, thus putting the future of the entire endeavor at risk.

    Margarita Rayzberg is an assistant professor of sociology and criminology at Valparaiso University.

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  • Brown University Reels After Deadly Shooting

    Brown University Reels After Deadly Shooting

    Two students were killed and nine were injured in a mass shooting at Brown University on Saturday. The university’s president Christina H. Paxson described the incident as “a tragedy that no university community is ever ready for.”

    “The past 24 hours really have been unimaginable,” she said in a letter to the Ivy League university’s greater community Sunday morning, adding that most of the injured students remain hospitalized in stable condition.

    The shooting began just after 4 p.m. at the Barus and Holley engineering and physics building. The Providence, Rhode Island, campus was locked down until Sunday morning when local law enforcement officials ended the order, sharing that they had identified and detained a male in his 20s as a person of interest. That person was later released. State police and agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation remain on campus.

    Brown University President Christina Paxson leaving a press conference Sunday.

    Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe/Getty Images

    According to The Brown Daily Herald, the student newspaper, many of the students affected were in a review session for a Principles of Economics exam. One freshman, Spencer Yang, told The Herald that he was shot in the leg but others near him were “seriously injured.” He said he tried to help them and keep them conscious.

    “While we always prepare for major crises, we also pray such a day never comes,” Paxson said in her letter. “We know there is a long road ahead as students and families deal with the after effects of the events of the past day and the emergency that is still unfolding.”

    Joseph Oduro, a senior from New Jersey and teaching assistant for the economics class, told The Boston Globe that the review session had just wrapped up when the shooter entered carrying “the longest gun I’ve ever seen in my life.” Oduro crouched behind the podium at the front of the auditorium and huddled with a first-year student who had been shot twice in the leg. He stayed with her until she reached the hospital, The Globe reported.

    Oduro didn’t want to describe what he saw as first responders evacuated the classroom, but said it hurt to see his students “all in a state of panic and desperate pain.”

    University Provost Francis J. Doyle III announced Sunday morning, that “out of profound concern for all students, faculty and staff,” all undergraduate, graduate and medical classes, exams and final projects for the semester would not take place as scheduled. Students are free to leave campus if they are able, but if not, access to on-campus services will remain available, Doyle said. More guidance about the status of unfinished courses will be released in the days ahead, he added.

    Saturday’s events sparked anger and frustration among gun control advocates and affected students as the number of mass school shootings on record continues to climb. One student, Zoe Weissman, a college sophomore, survived the Brown shooting Saturday nearly eight years after she had been affected by a similar event in her hometown—Parkland, Florida.

    Weissman, now 20, was a student at Parkland Middle School when 17 people were killed and 18 injured at the nearby Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

    “Mentally, I feel like I’m 12 again. This just feels exactly how I felt in 2018. But honestly, I’m really angry,” Weissman said in an interview with MS NOW, formerly MSNBC. “This isn’t a new phenomenon, and we’re going to get to a point where there’s [more] people like myself who survived two of these.”

    Another Brown student, Mia Tretta, was shot in a 2019 school shooting in Santa Clarita that left two people dead, the New York Times reported.

    “People always think, well, it’ll never be me,” Tretta told the Times. “And until I was shot in my school, I also thought the same thing.”

    President Donald Trump addressed the shooting during a holiday reception at the White House Sunday, but did not speak directly to public concerns about gun control or the number of incidents on college or K-12 campuses.

    “Things can happen,” he said. “So to the nine injured, get well fast and the families of those two who are no longer with us, I pay my deepest regards and respects.”

    The campus shooting also gained attention from fans of the reality TV show Survivor. Season 48 runner-up, Eva Erickson, is a Brown doctoral candidate, and she shared on social media how she had left the engineering building minutes before the shooting began.

    “I am so, so extremely lucky that I was very unproductive at work today,” she said in a video eight hours after the lockdown began. “I was in my office in Barus and Holley in that area until 4 p.m. and I was like, man I’m just not getting nothing done on my code and randomly decided I would go to the gym … I left and about 20 minutes later, we get the warning.”

    Erickson added that while she appreciated all the thoughts and prayers she had received, it wasn’t enough.

    “We need more than thoughts and prayers,” she said. “This is ridiculous that as college students in America we have to worry about someone shooting up our classrooms.”



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  • A Place Where Kids With the Toughest Behaviors Are Welcome and Can Heal – The 74

    A Place Where Kids With the Toughest Behaviors Are Welcome and Can Heal – The 74


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    Ann’s three young boys had been through a lot already. Her marriage to their father was marked by violence, and a divorce was followed by multiple violations of a protective order, she said. While their father sat in prison in North Dakota, she moved the family to the Twin Cities.

    But while the move gave them distance, it didn’t solve their problems, said Ann, who asked to be identified by her middle name to protect her children’s privacy. Her sons, especially the two youngest, suffered mental health issues including PTSD, ADHD and anxiety. Her middle son was diagnosed with disruptive mood dysregulation disorder, characterized by angry and sometimes violent outbursts.

    “I had 13 police calls within a nine-month period to my house,” Ann said. When a police officer handed her a domestic violence information card, she knew things had to change.

    Ann’s middle son had been enrolled in public school in a suburb of St. Paul, but after being removed from his mainstream classroom due to his behaviors, he wasn’t receiving the support he needed academically or emotionally.

    A social worker told her about Catholic Charities Children’s Day Treatment, located in Minneapolis Public Schools’ Wilder Complex and offering intensive supports to children in grades K-8 struggling with mental illness. Despite her nerves, Ann scheduled a visit. In one of her first interactions, an intake person said, “‘Because you’re here looking for help, you’re more advanced than most adults,’” Ann recalled. “I knew at that moment we were in the right place.”

    A trauma-informed approach for kids

    Jessica Dreischmeier, Catholic Charities Children’s Day Treatment Program director, said that her program is a good match for children like Ann’s sons. Staff not only understand the impact that early childhood trauma can have on mental health, but the program’s trauma-informed approach helps them make progress with kids deemed unfixable by other schools.

    “I would say a majority of the youth that come here for treatment have experienced some type of trauma,” Dreischmeier said. “We know that those symptoms can manifest themselves in a number of ways, including depression, aggression, anxiety, ADHD — and we have deep experience working with those kinds of kids.”

    With the right approach, she said, most kids can recover from mental illness.

    “One day might be hard, but over time we get there with pretty much everybody — which is awesome.”

    A long and loyal legacy

    Catholic Charities Children’s Day Treatment was founded in 1968 as an extension of St. Joseph’s Home for Children, founded in 1869 as a residential shelter for orphans. The day treatment program was created to provide an alternative option for children at St. Joseph’s who needed extra mental health support.

    St. Joseph’s Home closed in 2020, but the day treatment program continued. Enrollment is capped at 40 students who work with 17 full-time staff members. Students come from around the metro area but enroll in Minneapolis Public Schools through a partnership with the district. Mental health services are billed through health insurance.

    Many staff members have worked at the center for decades. Karen Johnson, a mental health practitioner who has been employed by the program for 24 years, said she feels a deep connection to the children in her care.

    “I should have retired five years ago,” Johnson said. “Each time I have that thought, another kid comes through the door, and  I’m like, ‘Now I have to stay until they finish the program.’ Then another kid comes.”

    A focus on parent connection and long-term success for kids

    According to the Minnesota Department of Human Services, there are 37 licensed mental health day treatment programs for children in the state. Still, Dreischmeier said that Catholic Charities’ program remains in high demand.

    “The need for mental health services for youth and children in Minnesota has been going up for a while,” she said, “but especially after Covid, it’s particularly evident.”

    A typical day for students includes two three-hour blocks – one for academics and the other for mental health therapy and treatment.

    Mental health support is delivered in individual and group settings with a focus on parent and guardian involvement, Dreischmeier said. Families are taught how to build strong connections with their child and to reinforce strategies they’re practicing at school.

    The kids work on setting goals for their life beyond the program. While students’ individual goals look different, the overall aim is a return to home life and a less restrictive school setting. “We’re hoping our intervention helps kids stay in their home and with their family and not have an out-of-home placement,” Dreischmeier said.

    ‘We’re not going to leave anybody behind.’

    For parents like Ann, the transition to day treatment often comes amid deep distrust of past educational settings. Families arrive feeling guarded, Dreischmeier said. They wonder: “‘Are you going to perceive my child as a problem?’ ‘Will you only see them for the behaviors they are having when they are having a hard time, or will you see my whole child?’”

    The kids often wonder the same thing, Johnson said. “A lot of these kids come here with no hope. They think, ‘People say I’m bad so I’m never going to be nothing.’ I try to change that narrative.”

    Dreischmeier said that her staff remains undaunted even by the students’ most challenging behaviors.

    “If something is hard, we’re going to all come together and work on it and talk about it,” she said. We’re going to move forward all together. We’re not going to leave anybody behind.”

    Academically, the aim is not just to keep students on track, but to move them ahead. In traditional school settings with larger class sizes and fewer supports, children with serious mental health issues are often separated from their peers and fall behind.

    Dreischmeier said things are run differently at Children’s Day Treatment, where the ratio of adults to students is much higher – often three adults to every six or seven students. “Students are really able to focus in and learn,” she said.

    On average, students participate in the program for a year to a year and a half, Dreischmeier said. Most then move back to their local community school. Some are recommended for further services, including residential and outpatient mental health programs.

    Surprised by hope

    After two years at Children’s Day Treatment, Ann’s middle son graduated  last year. Though he struggled in the beginning, she said, he eventually settled in and found success.

    “His graduation was the most incredible thing,” Ann recalled. “Staff said he’d emerged as a leader. We did not know that about my son. To hear his peers get up and give their testimonies about him – there was not a dry eye in the room.”

    Today, he’s enrolled at a school in her home district – something she never thought possible – where he continues to receive special education support. Ann’s youngest son enrolled at Children’s Day Treatment in the fall. She’s optimistic: “I’m just grateful for people like them who want to help children like mine.”

    This article first appeared on MinnPost and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.


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  • Hunger Is Squeezing California Students — and it Could Get Worse – The 74

    Hunger Is Squeezing California Students — and it Could Get Worse – The 74


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    This has been an especially challenging year for Rosalba Ortega’s family. 

    It’s been a cold, soggy winter in Bakersfield, and Ortega said her two granddaughters, ages 4 and 7, don’t have warm coats for their walk to school. Rent and food prices have been climbing, and as a farmworker, she’s struggled to find work in the fields. Last month’s delays to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — known in California as CalFresh — hit her grandkids at a time when her family is already struggling to put food on the table.

    “There’s not much food for them,” said Ortega, in Spanish. “We have to look for low prices to buy for them. Sometimes the shelters give us food and that helps us a lot.”

    Ortega said her family never had to rely on shelters and churches for food in the past, but this year has been different.

    She isn’t alone. Disruptions to SNAP amid the government shutdown last month came at a time when California families say they are increasingly struggling to meet basic needs, including putting food on the table. 

    Three in 10 Californians — and half of lower-income residents — say they or someone in their household has reduced meals or cut back on food to save money, according to a survey conducted in October by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.

    Experts say that hunger and economic distress can affect students’ academic performance and determine whether they decide to attend — or finish — college.

    “What’s happening out of school can have a huge impact on their ability to learn while they’re in school,” said Natalie Wheatfall-Lum, director of TK-12 policy for EdTrust-West, a nonprofit that advocates for justice in education.

    Research shows children struggle to pay attention at school when SNAP benefits run out mid-month, and families turn to ultra-processed foods, according to Martin Caraher, a food policy expert at City University London who has worked with the World Health Organization.

    “You see it in behavior and performance at school,” Caraher said.

    Federal cuts reduce food aid 

    President Donald Trump’s budget and tax bill, passed by Congress in July, made cuts to SNAP and Medicaid, called Medi-Cal in California. California’s low-income students and their families will likely see federally funded food support and health care shrink or vanish under the law.

    This is coming at the same time that the Trump administration says it wants to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education to “break up the federal education bureaucracy and return education to the states,” a move that conservatives have long advocated since the creation of the Cabinet-level department in 1979.

    Wheatfall-Lum said that the federal government has been making cuts and laying off staff at programs aimed at those who are already hardest hit by hunger and economic distress, such as migrant students, multilingual students, homeless students, and students of color.

    In its upcoming budget cycle, California should address the needs of families — both in and outside of education, she said. 

    “What the state can do is make sure not to back away from programming in place to support these same students,” Wheatfall-Lum said.

    EdTrust-West is advocating for the state to continue its commitment to a school funding formula that offers extra support to schools to help low-income and vulnerable students. Continuing to fund the community schools model is especially important, she said, because it is more responsive to families’ needs.

    Families with young children hit hard

    The number of struggling California parents with young children is especially alarming, researchers say. Nearly 3 in 4 families in California with children under age 6 report struggling with one or more basic needs, such as utilities, housing, food, health care and child care, according to the RAPID California Voices survey conducted in July.

    The project, conducted by Stanford University, has been surveying parents and caregivers with young children since November 2022. During that time, more than half of families surveyed said they struggled with basic needs, but over the last year, struggles with health care, food and utilities reached 73% — one of the highest levels since the survey began.

    “It’s pretty stark data,” said Philip Fisher, director of the Stanford Center on Early Childhood. “Our research shows consistently that economic hardship translates subsequently into parent stress and distress, which then gets passed along to child distress. So if you want to know how kids are doing, these are not great trends.”

    Fisher noted that supports rolled out during the pandemic, such as the expanded Child Tax Credit, increased SNAP and WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) benefits, and stimulus checks, resulted in fewer parents of young children experiencing material hardship and emotional distress. As those benefits expired, that trend reversed, he said.

    Researchers at Stanford asked caregivers to explain the biggest current challenges for their family in their own words. They shared those anonymized answers with EdSource.

    “We’re working hard, but it’s not enough anymore,” wrote one caregiver in San Joaquin County. “We need our leaders to understand that even full-time workers can’t afford rent, health care, and food in this state. Wages haven’t kept up.”

    One caregiver in San Bernardino County said they are worried about how the cuts from Trump’s budget will affect their Medi-Cal and CalFresh benefits.

    “They might get cut because the [Big Beautiful Bill] passed,” the caregiver wrote.

    College students struggle with basic needs

    College students are also struggling — and unlike K-12 students who receive breakfast and lunch at school, they don’t have guaranteed meals.

    Typically, students come into Long Beach State’s Basic Needs center because of a specific crisis, such as losing their job, said the center’s director, Danielle Muñoz-Channel. But now, students tend to come in just because they’re getting squeezed all around by rent, utilities and food prices.

    “They can’t pinpoint any one factor,” she said. “We ask what changed, and they say, ‘Nothing, I just can’t afford it anymore.’”

    Muñoz-Channel said she’s monitoring whether federal cuts to CalFresh and Medi-Cal benefits, such as tightened work requirements, could affect students and the future workforce. She said students need to have their basic needs met so that they can focus on school — otherwise they risk not graduating on time or not finishing their degree at all.

    “I’m worried about how it will affect our most needy students who use college to break generational cycles of poverty,” she said.


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  • As Feds Crack Down on Huge Ed Tech Data Breach, Parents and Students Left Out – The 74

    As Feds Crack Down on Huge Ed Tech Data Breach, Parents and Students Left Out – The 74

    School (in)Security is our biweekly briefing on the latest school safety news, vetted by Mark Keierleber. Subscribe here.

    The Federal Trade Commission announced this month plans to crack down on technology company Illuminate Education over a massive 2021 data breach. The move added to a long list of government actions against the firm since hackers broke into its systems and made off with the sensitive information of more than 10 million students.

    Three state attorneys general have also now imposed fines and security mandates on the company following allegations it misled customers about its cybersecurity safeguards and waited nearly two years to notify some school districts of the widespread data breach.

    The ones that haven’t made progress in their efforts to hold Illuminate accountable are parents and students.

    Their pursuit hit a wall in September when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed a federal lawsuit filed by the breach victims. The court, ruling on a case filed in California, found that the theft of their personal data — including grades, special education information and medical records — didn’t constitute a concrete harm.

    In the news

    Students walkout of East Mecklenburg High School in protest of U.S.Border Patrol operations targeting undocumented immigrants on Nov. 18 in Charlotte, North Carolina. (Getty Images)

    The latest in President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown: In many cities across the country, from New Orleans to Minneapolis, resisting federal immigration enforcement means keeping kids in school. | The 74

    • Trump’s mass deportation effort has had a particularly damaging effect on the child care industry, which is heavily reliant on immigrant preschool teachers — most of them working in the U.S. legally — who have found themselves “wracked by anxiety over possible encounters with ICE.” | The Associated Press
    • ‘Culture of fear’: Immigrant students across the country have increasingly found themselves targets of bullying since the beginning of Trump’s second term, according to a new survey of high school principals. | The Guardian

    A Kansas middle school will no longer assign Chromebooks to each student: Computers have had “a wonderful place in education,” the school’s principal said. But schools have “simply immersed students too much in technology.” | KWCH

    A Florida middle school went into lockdown after an automated threat detection system was triggered by a clarinet. A student was walking in the hallway “holding a musical instrument as if it were a weapon.” | News6

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    ‘Got what he deserved’: A California teacher has filed a federal First Amendment lawsuit against her school after she was suspended for a Facebook post calling right-wing political activist and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk a “propaganda-spewing racist misogynist” a day after he was murdered. | NBC News

    • In Florida, two teachers have filed separate First Amendment lawsuits after they were punished for social media posts critical of Kirk after his death. | First Coast News
    • Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott announced a partnership with Turning Point USA to create local chapters of the group at every high school campus in the state, vowing “meaningful disciplinary action” against any educators who stand in the way. | The Texas Tribune
    • Kirk’s wife, Erika Kirk, will field questions from “young evangelicals, prominent religious leaders and figures across the political spectrum” during a live town hall Saturday on CBS News moderated by its new editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss. | CBS News
    • ICYMI: The Trump administration’s First Amendment crackdown in the wake of the activist’s violent death has left student free speech on even shakier ground. | The 74
    Vice chair Robert Malone during a meeting of the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices on Dec. 5 (Getty Images)

    Following a shakeup in its ranks by vaccine skeptic and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee voted to overturn a decades-long recommendation that newborn babies be immunized for hepatitis B — a policy credited with decimating the highly contagious virus in infants. | The 74

    • A measles outbreak in South Carolina schools is accelerating, with some unvaccinated students in a second 21-day quarantine since the beginning of the academic year. | NBC News  

    A photo that circulated online depicted California high school students lying in the shape of a swastika on the grass of a football field. Chaos ensued. | The Guardian

    ‘It feels nasty. It’s gross.’: Controversy has come to a head at a California high school after an adult film producer rented out the campus gym for a raunchy livestream. “The first thing I see is a full-grown adult, an adult man wearing a baby costume and being fed milk from a baby bottle,” one student observer noted. | NBC San Diego

    Two Texas teenagers allegedly conspired to carry out a school shooting at their high school but the plot was thwarted after classmates reported text messages with their plans to school police. “Don’t come to school on Monday,” one of the messages warned. | KHOU

    ICYMI @The74

    To Ease Civil Rights Backlog, McMahon Orders Back Staff She Tried to Fire

    A GOP push to limit public borrowing by graduate students could exclude many nursing students, as well as those training for several other professions. (Glenn Beil/Getty Images)

    Nurses, Social Workers Face ‘Bad Situation’ Under Proposed Loan Limits

    In New Mexico, Grandparents Caring for Grandkids Can Also Get Free Child Care Now(Co-published with The 19th)

    Emotional Support


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